Saturn's rings span hundreds of thousands of kilometers but are often less than a kilometer thick.

Saturn’s ring system spans hundreds of thousands of kilometers, wide enough to fit the distance between Earth and the Moon several times over. Yet in most places the rings are astonishingly thin — commonly estimated at around ten meters to a few hundred meters thick, with some regions reaching perhaps a kilometer at most.

The rings are made almost entirely of chunks of water ice, ranging from dust-sized grains to boulders, held in Saturn’s orbital plane by the planet’s gravity and continually reshaped by small moons that shepherd their edges. Their thinness relative to their width is often compared to a sheet of paper spread across a football field — a scale that’s hard to grasp until you see the ratio spelled out.