Picture of Giovanni Cassini
Corbis-Bettmann
Giovanni Cassini
Giovanni Cassini was Italian-French astronomer who lived between 1625-1712. He discovered that Saturn's Rings are split into two parts, and today the gap between them is called the "Cassini Division". He also discovered four more moons of Saturn, in addition to those found by Huygens twenty years earlier.
Cassini studied hydrology at the Pope's request, and how to avoid the damaging floods that plaqued Europe. Unfortunately, his greatest mistakes were rejecting the Copernican model of the solar system and Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
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