Groovy Science
Cassini gets the skinny on Saturn's rings
By Ron Cowen
By July 1610, Galileo Galilei had already viewed Jupiter and its large moons, watched mysterious dark spots march across the sun, and studied craters on the moon. But when he turned his small, homemade telescope toward Saturn, Galileo was flummoxed. Unlike any other known planet, Saturn appeared to be a bright body closely flanked by two dimmer ones.
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“I discovered another very strange wonder, which I should like to make known to their Highnesses,” he wrote on July 30 to his patrons in the royal family of Medici. “[T]he star of Saturn is not a single star but is a composite of three, which almost touch each other.”