1825 - Pierre Laplace completes his study of gravitation, the stability of the solar system, tides, the precession of the equinoxes, the libration of the Moon, and Saturn's rings in Mecanique Celeste
1843 - John Adams predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
1846 - Urbain Le Verrier predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
1849 - Edouard Roche finds the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its self gravity, called the Roche limit, and uses it to explain why Saturn's rings do not condense into a satellite
1856 - James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that a solid ring around Saturn would be torn apart by gravitational forces and argues that Saturn's rings consist of a multitude of tiny satellites
1866 - Giovanni Schiaparelli realizes that meteor streams occur when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet that has left debris along its path
1978 - Peter Goldreich and Scott Tremaine present a Boltzmann equation model of planetary-ring dynamics for indestructible spherical ring particles that do not self-gravitate and find a stability requirement relation between ring optical depth and particle normal restitution coefficient
1988 - Martin Duncan, Thomas Quinn, and Scott Tremaine demonstrate that short-period comets come primarily from the Kuiper Belt and not the Oort cloud
