These ring systems are not nearly as extensive as the rings of Saturn and are practically invisible to ground-based telescopes. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also possess thin rings of icy and rocky material. The American Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft have revealed the rings of Saturn to be composed of icy particles ranging in size from a fraction of a millimeter to twenty or thirty meters across. Maxwell's theory was confirmed in 1895, when spectroscopic analysis revealed that the inner edge of the Saturn ring system revolved faster than the outer edge, which would be impossible if the rings were a single, solid object. The nineteenth-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell argued that the rings of Saturn are not solid, but consist of uncountable millions of smaller particles orbiting Saturn in much the same way as our 16, 1980 four days after closest approach to Saturn, from a distance of 5,300, 000 km (3,300,000 miles)) (Voyager 1 image of Saturn and its rings taken Nov. This in turn suggests that the rings of Saturn are very thin relative to their diameter in fact, if you were to build a scale model of Saturn, making the rings only as thick as a piece of typing paper, about 0.1 millimeters, the diameter of the ring system would be about forty meters. The occasional disappearance of the rings was explained by the fact that every fifteen years or so the rings are tilted 'edge on' toward the Earth, making it impossible to see them even in large telescopes, the most recent 'ring plane crossing' occurred in August 1996. In 1659, Christian Huygens announced that he was able to resolve the 'bumps' observed by Galileo into a flat disk structure ringing the entire planet.

As telescopes improved, they provided sharper views of the planets. A few years later Galileo noted that these 'bumps' had disappeared. In Galileo's relatively crude instrument, Saturn's rings looked like a pair of ears or bumps on either side of a larger disk. Galileo, the first person to point a telescope at the planet in the year 1610. Saturn are the brightest and best known planetary ring systems. All of the jovian planets in our solar system have rings.

Planetary ring astro empires