Who discovered Saturn? Did the ancients know this planet or is modern science its first analyst? The truth is that in the antiquity people had a far better knowledge of the sky map than we have today, and it is possible that they were familiar with Saturn by means of primitive telescopes. In fact, Galileo is widely known as the scientist who discovered Saturn in 1610, since in his descriptions he even wrote a theory about the rings. According to his words, there were some little ears on each side of the planet, and he presumed they were globes. Yet, later on, the white rings were discovered and have remained the most spectacular solar system formation ever since.
The analysis of the globes made by Galileo started from a confusion he didn’t know how to understand. He was the person who discovered Saturn, but the thing is that he considered to have seen three planets instead of one. The clarification of the rings’ presence was provided in 1655 when Christiaan Huygens made the discovery that what Galileo referred to as globes were actually rings, butnobody could tell what they were made of until some twenty years later Domenico Cassini had a revelation. He was the one to initiate the theory that Saturn’s rings were broken or discontinuous, consisting of small individual parts.
Nowadays we know that the rings are made of ice, rocks and other interplanetary remains, which only proves that the early theories were right. Who discovered Saturn then? A fair conclusion is that this part of our solar system gradually revealed itself to our eyes, but the discovery is not by far complete. Every year seems to bring something new for us to explore: thus, more than forty of Saturn’s moons have become known, some of them with potential conditions to sustain life. Thus the question is not about who discovered Saturn, but what is there more to discover?
The tribute paid to Galileo as the person who discovered Saturn is obvious, but he was not the only one. The spacecraft which sent the the close image of Saturn for the first time was called Cassini after the astronomer who revealed and analyzed the structure of the rings around this planet. Even so, there are many other people who are currently taking part to space exploration projects; maybe their names are not known to history, but their effort is just as great and important. With every space conquest, there is one other step in the direction of learning more about the universe.
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