A planet’s year is the measure of time it takes for it to complete a single orbital rotation around the sun. Each planet has a different orbit and therefore, a different length for its year. Earth’s year is 365.25 Earth days long and is a handy measuring stick to use against other planet’s years. How long is a year on Saturn?
A year on Saturn takes 10,759 Earth days to complete. That factors out to 29.457 Earth years. For the sake of posterity, most people consider a Saturn year to be 29.5 Earth years.
That is a long time! That means a person who just turned 30 on Earth would have just had their first birthday on Saturn. That would create a supremely young population.
The average lifespan of a human is 79 years which only translates to 2.7 years on Saturn. In order to reach the age of 18 and become an adult on Saturn, a human would have to wait 522 Earth years to get there.
One of the reasons why Saturn’s year is longer is that it actually orbits around the sun much slower than the Earth. Everything in space, in addition to having their own orbital paths, also have independent orbital speed. We are not all rotating around the sun at the same rate of speed and in space, there are no speed limits.
The Earth rotates the sun at 29.78 km/s while Saturn only orbits at a speed of 9.68 km/s. That means that the Earth is traveling through space three times faster than Saturn is.
In addition to that, the years become longer because it has a much more distant orbit than Earth. Generally, the farther a body is away from the sun, the longer it takes to orbit around it. This occurs because the farther distances create longer orbital paths. Also, the farther something is away from the sun, the weaker the gravitational pull on the planet is.
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and its year lasts a mere 88 days. That is super fast compared to Saturn. It also is being swung around much faster than Saturn. Mercury’s orbital speed is 47.36 km/s, five times faster than that of Saturn.
Taken all together, you get a very large planet orbiting around the sun at relatively slow speeds which results in a long year for Saturn.
So now we know How Long Is a Year on Saturn and if you want to know How Long Is a Day On Saturn we have a post for that.
We have found out many facts about Saturn like How Far Is Saturn From Earth. Down to something silly like Can Saturn Float On Water. All with an aim to help you be more knowledgeable you are Viewing Saturn With a Telescope. I believe that Telescopes For Viewing Planets are excellent and make our view of Saturn much greater and help us with many discoveries.
