Why do the rings of Saturn look so thin from Earth?

Saturn’s rings span hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, but they are astonishingly thin compared with their width. In many regions, the ring material is only tens of meters thick, so from Earth they can look like a razor-thin band. The rings are made mostly of water ice with smaller amounts of rocky debris. Their thinness is partly because the particles orbit in a very flat disk shaped by Saturn’s gravity. Spacecraft such as Cassini, which studied Saturn from 2004 to 2017, showed just how intricate the ring system really is.