If Earth Had Saturn's Rings, This is What it Would Look Like

By Nancy Atkinson - January 20, 2015 at 2:25 PM UTC | Planetary Science
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We Earthlings love to dream, conjure and extrapolate. If you pose a question such as, "What if Earth had Saturn's rings?" with all the resources available these days someone will not only answer the question but create some beautiful graphics to depict it! Yesterday, we saw this

amazing graphic

posted on reddit of a to-scale depiction of how Earth would look like with Saturn's rings, and thanks to those who helped find the original source, the original image was created by

John Brady

at

Astronomy Central.

(We apologize... we originally credited the wrong person).

Of course, "What if Earth had Saturn's rings?" is not a new question. In fact we've discussed it previously

on Universe Today

, and in 2013, illustrator and author Ron Miller put together some incredible visualizations of

what Earth's skies would look like with Saturn's rings

.

Also, last year someone on imgur put together a wonderful set of images of Earth with Saturn's rings, as it would look from Earth's Moon:

This video depicts rings around Earth, but the scale of the rings are not the size of Saturn's:

Phil Plait discussed the problems that might arise for us if there were Earthrings

, such as the rings would change the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth, and our view of the night sky would be hampered. And then Earth could potentially be shredded by ring debris.

Oh well, we can dream, can't we?

See more great size comparisons of things in our Solar System and Universe at J

ohn Brady's post on Astronomy Central,

including a look at how many Earth's would span across Saturn's rings.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com