Today.Az » Weird / Interesting » Happy anniversary, Neptune! After 165 years, the most distant planet is back where we found It
13 July 2011 [13:23] - Today.Az
It’s been a long year for Neptune. A full 165 Earth years ago, German
astronomer Johann Galle first spied the icy blue giant giving wide berth
to the sun some 2.8 billion miles from the solar system’s center.
Today, it’s right back where we found it again, marking one full Neptune
year since the planet’s discovery.
Neptune, of course, has a somewhat tumultuous and storied history. It
was the most distant planet in our solar system before Pluto was
discovered in 1930, pushing Neptune to 8th and second-most-distant. When
Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet it was again elevated to
superlative status.
Neptune is also the first planet that was discovered via mathematical
prediction rather than by telescopic observation. It wasn’t actually
Galle who first found Neptune, but a Frenchman named Urbain Le Verrier, a
mathematician puzzled by Uranus’ refusal to act the way gravity said it
should. In 1846, Le Verrier predicted the existence of Neptune, a more
distant body that was affecting Uranus’ swagger.
Le Verrier mailed his prediction to Galle at Berlin Observatory along
with the coordinates where he expected Neptune to be found. Sure
enough, there it was, 57 times bigger than Earth and icy blue
(temperatures dip well below -300 degrees Fahrenheit on Neptune). And
today, there it is again, right back where it was when human eyes first
saw it--a birthday of sorts, from a human perspective. Cheers to you,
Big Blue It’s been a long journey.
/Popular Science/
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