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Planet Neptune Overview. Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant major planet orbiting our Sun. More than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth, Neptune is not visible to the naked eye. In 2011, Neptune completed its first 165-year orbit since its discovery.
Orbit and Rotation. One day on Neptune takes about 16 hours (the time it takes for Neptune to rotate or spin once). And Neptune makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Neptunian time) in about 165 Earth years (60,190 Earth days). Sometimes Neptune is even farther from the Sun than dwarf planet Pluto.
- History
- Structure
- Neptune's Rings
- Neptune's Moons
- Observation
- Exploration
- References
- Other Websites
Discovery
Galileo Galilei was the first person to see Neptune. He saw it on 28 December 1612 and 27 January 1613. His drawings showed the points where Neptune is placed, it is near Jupiter. But Galileo was not credited for the discovery. He thought Neptune was a "fixed star" instead of a planet. Because Neptune moved slowly across the sky, Galileo's small telescope was not strong enough to see that Neptune was a planet. In 1821, Alexis Bouvard published the astronomical tables of the orbit of Uranus. L...
Crediting and naming
When Neptune was discovered, the French and the British could not agree on who would get credit for the discovery. Later, an international agreement decided that both Le Verrier and Adams deserved credit. However, historians reviewed the topic after the rediscovery in 1998 of the "Neptune papers" (historical documents from the Royal Greenwich Observatory). It had seemingly been stolen by astronomer Olin Eggen for almost 30 years. It was only found again (in his ownership) shortly after his de...
Mass and composition
Neptune's mass is between that of the Earth and the largest gas giants. Neptune is the fourth largest planet in the Solar System and the third most massive. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth, but just 1⁄18 the mass of Jupiter. Neptune is a little bit more massive than Uranus, though Neptune is denser and smaller in size than Uranus. Neptune and Uranus are often considered a part of "ice giants" (a sub-class of gas giants). They are smaller in size than Jupiter and Saturn, and have differ...
Weather and magnetic field
One difference between Neptune and Uranus is the level of its meteorological activity. When the Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, the winds on that planet were observed not so strong as on Neptune. When Voyager flew by Neptune in 1989, powerful weather events were observed. The weather of Neptune has very active storms. Its atmosphere has the highest wind speeds in the Solar System. It may be powered by internal heat flow. Regular winds in the equatorial region have speeds of around...
There are five rings around the planet. They are not as well known as the rings of Saturn. The rings were discovered by a team led by an American scientist Edward Guinan in 1968. Then, in the mid-1980s astronomers thought that the rings might not be complete. Stellar occultations were found that rarely showed an extra "blink" just before or after t...
Neptune has 16 known moons.As Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, the planet's moons were named after lesser sea gods or goddesses. The largest moon of Neptune is Triton. Triton was discovered on 10 October 1846 by British astronomer William Lassell. Unlike all other large planetary moons, Triton orbits in the other direction to the other moons. ...
Neptune cannot be seen by just looking at the sky with the naked eye. To see it, a telescope or binoculars is needed. This is because Neptune has a normal brightness between magnitudes +7.7 and +8.0. It can be outshined by Jupiter's Galilean moons, the dwarf planet Ceres, and the asteroids 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, 7 Iris, 3 Juno and 6 Hebe. A telescope o...
Currently, only one spacecraft has visited Neptune. NASA's Voyager 2probe made a quick fly-by of the planet with its closest encounter on 25 August 1989. One of Voyager 2's important discoveries was its very close fly-by of Triton, where it took pictures of several parts of the moon. The pictures were sent back to Earth from Voyager 2 in 1989. The ...
Based on Irwin, Patrick G J; Dobinson, Jack; James, Arjuna; Teanby, Nicholas A; Simon, Amy A; Fletcher, Leigh N; Roman, Michael T; Orton, Glenn S; Wong, Michael H; Toledo, Daniel; Pérez-Hoyos, Sa...Orbital elements refer to the Neptune barycentre and Solar System barycentre. These are the instantaneous osculating values at the precise J2000epoch. Barycentre quantities are given because, in...Refers to the level of 1 bar (100 kPa) atmospheric pressureNeptune Profile Archived 2006-12-13 at the Wayback Machine by NASA's Solar System ExplorationIntroduction. Dark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is more than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth. Neptune is the only planet in our solar system not visible to the naked eye. In 2011 Neptune completed its first 165-year orbit since its discovery in 1846.
2 days ago · Neptune, third most massive planet of the solar system and the eighth and outermost planet from the Sun. Because of its great distance from Earth, it cannot be seen with the unaided eye. With a small telescope, it appears as a tiny, faint blue-green disk.
- Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846. It is the second planet to be found using a telescope. Although Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich L...
- Neptune has 14 moons (natural satellites). Before Voyager 2's flyby of the planet, Neptune's only known moons were Triton and Nereid. Neptune's moo...
- Neptune’s outer atmosphere is composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium, contributing to 98 percent of the atmospheric molecules. Most of the r...
- Neptune is the only giant planet that is not visible without a telescope. It has an apparent magnitude of 7.8 and is approximately one-fifth as bri...
- Neptune’s color is a very vivid, bright blue, presumably an effect of the presence of methane and an unidentified atmospheric gas. With a small tel...
Mar 28, 2019 · Learn about the blue planet's orbit, weather, moons, rings, and history in this article. Find out how Neptune was discovered, what makes it so windy and cold, and why it's the only planet that can't be seen without a telescope.
Apr 17, 2023 · Neptune is the eighth and farthest planet from the sun but it is not the coldest. Our solar system 's blue gas giant is far larger than Earth, at more than 17 times Earth's mass and nearly 58 ...
