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. In 1655, Christiaan Huygens was the first person to say that Saturn was surrounded by rings. Using a much more powerful telescope than Galilei's, he said that Saturn "is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching...". 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 Cassini Division. In 1859, James Clerk Maxwell showed that the rings cannot be solid, but are made of small particles, each orbiting Saturn on their own. Otherwise, it would become unstable or break apart. James Keeler studied the rings using a spectroscope in 1895 which proved Maxwell's theory.
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