Saturn

Saturn’s brief appearance marks the first major loss in the dark body’s passage through the planetary system: a few years after Neptune escapes collision, Saturn is engulfed with all its rings and satellites. The resulting sudden incandescence is only a prelude to the larger upheaval to come.

Saturn’s Encounter

The account places Saturn’s engulfment within a sequence of near misses and collisions. A few centuries after Neptune has been settled, a vast dark stranger from space narrowly misses that planet. Uranus and Jupiter are well outside its path, but Saturn is not: a few years after Neptune’s escape, the intruder engulfs the planet along with its rings and satellites. Saturn’s fate is thus sharply contrasted with Neptune’s temporary reprieve.

Role in the Catastrophe

Saturn’s incandescence announces the danger without containing it. The narrative calls this collision minor in comparison with what follows: the foreign body continues onward, tangles the planetary orbits, passes through the asteroids, misses Mars, catches Earth and Venus in its blazing hair, and leaps at the Sun. Saturn’s destruction functions as the opening shock in a much wider transformation, turning a distant celestial body into the visible harbinger of systemic ruin.