Who discovered the Rings of Saturn?
The first person to see and document the Rings of Saturn was Galileo Galilei in 1610. Using the newly-invented telescope, he could see that there were strange objects or extensions to the sides of Saturn. Unfortunately his telescopes weren't powerful enough to show the rings clearly. Galileo thought that the rings were separate objects like moons, and even referred to them as "Saturn's ears".
in 1656 Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch physicist, was the first to propose that Saturn is surrounded by a ring system.
In 1675, Italian mathematician Giovanni Cassini concluded that the ring system is actually made of multiple smaller rings. The biggest gap between rings is now called the Cassini Division.
In 1787, French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace showed that the rings could not be solid, and must be made of a large number of smaller rings.
In 1859, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell showed that, in fact, the rings must be made of millions of individual objects all orbiting in the same plane. This was the final piece of the puzzle, and it describes the rings well.
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