Breast Milk Ice Creammy English blog

After demoting Pluto from its planet rank back in 2006, Neptune became officially the furthest planet from the Sun. But it’s not nearly the smallest. In fact, it is the 4^th larger in diameter and 3^rd in mass (around 17 times the mass of Earth). And it is the first one discovered not by empirical observation but by mathematical predictions.

Its twin brother Uranus had been discovered since 1781 by William Herschell. During the observation of Uranus, scientists realized that the actual position of the planet was not corresponding with the one they had calculated. This led  Alexis Bouvard to deduce that Uranus’ orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. After 50 years, John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier calculated the position that the new planet would had to have, but no one was interested in actually looking for it in the sky.

Eventually, on 23^rd of September (I didn’t choose to write this article randomlyJ) 1846, the German Johann Gottfried Galle (who worked at the Observatory from Berlin) finds the new planet in less than an hour at only 1 degree from the previously calculated place. Galle was not the first to see Neptune, though he was the first one who realized that the little sphere he saw with the telescope was in fact a new planet and not an ordinary star. Almost 250 years before Galle, with his primitive lens, Galileo Galilei saw the planet by chance (twice), but mistook it for a fix star. Due to this, Galilei is not credited with the blue Ice Giant’s discovery and Galle is.

In July this year, Neptune completed his first orbit around the sun since its discovery. One full orbit lasts almost 165 Earth years (roughly 90 Neptunian days).