Neptune Discovered On This Date – Dale’s Daily Data

Can you name the planets in our solar system?  First how may are there?   With Pluto it used to be nine….but Pluto is now called a dwarf planet.  Not big enough to be a planet.  So that leaves eight.  Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and….Neptune discovered on this date in 1846.

German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle confirmed it was a planet after tracking its movement against the background stars over a 24 hour period at the Berlin Observatory.

Neptune is named for the Roman god of the sea and has a diameter four times the size of Earth.  It’s basically a big blue ball of gas with eight moons.  The distance between Neptune and the sun is 30 times greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun.  It takes Neptune 165 years to complete an orbit around the sun.

In 1989, the spacecraft Voyager 2 was the first and only human spacecraft to visit Neptune.  It took
12 years to get there.