James Clerk Maxwell suggested that a special case of these configurations with one circle, a massive central body, and much lighter bodies at equally spaced points on the circle could be used to understand the motion of the rings of Saturn. Saari (2015) used stable orbits generated from spiderweb central configurations with known mass distribution to test the accuracy of classical estimation methods for the mass distribution of galaxies. His results showed that these methods could be quite inaccurate, potentially showing that less dark matter is needed to predict galactic motion than standard theories predict.