Editing Saturn (section)

=== History ===
The rings were first found by [[Galileo Galilei]] in 1610, using his telescope. They did not look like rings to Galileo. He called them "handles". He thought that Saturn was three different planets that were right next to each other. In 1612, when the rings were facing edge on with the Earth, the rings disappeared, then reappeared again in 1613, further confusing Galileo.<ref name="history_of_the_rings">{{cite web |url=http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/saturn/back.html |title=Historical background of Saturn's rings |first=Ron |last=Baalke |work=www2.jpl.nasa.gov |publisher=National Aeronautics and Space Administration |year=2005 |access-date=July 6, 2011 |archive-date=March 21, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090321071339/http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/saturn/back.html |url-status=dead }}</ref> In 1655, [[Christiaan Huygens]] was the first person to say that Saturn was surrounded by rings. Using a much more powerful telescope than Galileo's, he said that Saturn "is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching...".<ref name="history_of_the_rings" /> In 1675, [[Giovanni Domenico Cassini]] found that the planet's rings were in fact made of smaller rings with gaps. The largest ring gap was later named the [[Rings of Saturn|Cassini Division]]. In 1859, [[James Clerk Maxwell]] showed that the rings are made of small bits or particles, each orbiting Saturn on their own. He found that if the rings were solid, they would become unstable or break apart.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Extras/Maxwell_Saturn.html |title=James Clerk Maxwell on the nature of Saturn's rings |first=James Clerk |last=Maxwell |work=www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk |year=1859 |access-date=June 19, 2011}}</ref> [[James Keeler]] studied the rings using a [[spectrometer|spectroscope]] in 1895, which proved Maxwell right.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/HST/Huygens/huygens-introduction.htm |title=Christiaan Huygens and his Systema Saturnium |author=Brashear, Ronald |date=May 1999 |publisher= [[Smithsonian Institution]] Libraries|access-date=April 19, 2011}}</ref>