{"id":41593,"date":"2011-07-14T15:30:13","date_gmt":"2011-07-14T19:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=41593"},"modified":"2011-07-14T17:06:14","modified_gmt":"2011-07-14T21:06:14","slug":"happy-belated-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/astronomy\/happy-belated-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Belated Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note:<\/strong> Intrepid story-gatherer Carol Van Strum sent this article along to me on Tuesday, but in true Neptunian fashion, it still slipped beneath my radar that day. Eric has often mentioned that Neptune tends to “hide” from him in charts for events. Even scientists had trouble finding it, despite knowing something was there. Luckily, any day is a good day for cake. I’ll be sure to mark Neptune’s next birthday on my calendar. – amanda<\/em><\/p>\n

By Alex Hudson for BBC News<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

About 4.4 billion kilometres away from Earth lies Neptune, the first planet in the solar system to be discovered deliberately.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Neptune, the most distant thing technically classified as a planet, as photographed by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1989.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After the classification of the planet Uranus in the 1780s, astronomers had been perplexed by its strange orbit. Scientists came to the conclusion that either Isaac Newton’s laws were fundamentally flawed or that something else – another planet – was pulling Uranus from its expected orbit.<\/p>\n

And so the search for the eighth planet began.<\/p>\n

“It was such an incredible mathematical business, it makes searching for a needle in a haystack look like a 10-minute job for a child,” says Dr Alan Chapman, author of the Victorian Amateur Astronomer.<\/p>\n

While mathematical predictions had been made over the previous decades, it was not until French mathematician Urbain le Verrier’s theories were tested at the Berlin observatory by Johann Gottfried Galle that the planet was first seen.<\/p>\n

After only an hour or so of searching, Neptune was observed for the first time on the night of 23 September 1846. It was found almost exactly where le Verrier had predicted it to be.<\/p>\n

Independently, British scientist John Couch Adams also produced similar results, and now he and Verrier are given joint credit for the discovery. <\/p>\n

But many claim it was not Galle who documented the planet first, but the famous astronomer and mathematician Galileo. In his famous work The Starry Messenger, some evidence points to his discovery.<\/p>\n

“If you look at the drawings for January 1613, you can see a fantastic drawing of Jupiter and its moons,” says Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.<\/p>\n

“It even includes an object labelled as ‘fixed star’ which is the first telescopic drawing of the planet Neptune.”<\/p>\n

Continue reading here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Intrepid story-gatherer Carol Van Strum sent this article along to me on Tuesday, but in true Neptunian fashion, it still slipped beneath my radar that day. Eric has often mentioned that Neptune tends to “hide” from him in charts for events. Even scientists had trouble finding it, despite knowing something was there. Luckily, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}