Which planet is famous for its rings?

Saturn, though all four giant planets have rings - Jupiter's, Uranus's and Neptune's are simply thin and dark. Saturn's are bright because they are made almost entirely of water ice, and they are enormous in one dimension and absurd in the other: nearly 300,000 kilometres across and, in most places, only about ten metres thick. Scaled to a sheet of paper, they would be several kilometres wide.

Galileo saw them in 1610 and could not resolve what he was looking at, describing Saturn as having ears or companions. Two years later they had vanished, because the ring plane had turned edge-on to Earth, and he wondered whether the planet had eaten its own children. Huygens worked out the answer in the 1650s.

They are also young and temporary. Analysis of Cassini's data suggests the rings formed perhaps 100 million years ago - the dinosaurs predate them - probably from a shattered moon. Material is steadily raining down onto the planet, and the current estimate gives them a few hundred million years at most. We are looking at a feature that will not be there for long, and was not there for most of Saturn's life.