A new planet was captured with just pen and paper without any binoculars or telescopes. This feat was accomplished by a French astronomer and surprised the entire scientific community 175 years ago today. But how?
The story begins with an apple that fell from a tree in front of the famous Scientist Newton and fell to the ground. Seeing this scene, he fell into deep thought as to why apple finally broke down and fell down. Based on this phenomenon, he established the " Universal Gravitational Law " that any two bodies in space attract each other. The one with more mass will have more gravity and will attract the smaller mass towards itself. This attraction is called Gravity.
This Universal Gravitational law is not only limited to our world but also applies to the complete Solar system and Universe. The biggest and simplest example of this is that all the planets orbiting the Sun, are smaller than the sun, so they are attracted to it. And a certain orbit goes around it.
Our moon also revolves around the earth according to the Universal Gravitational law. The Earth, which is much larger than the Moon, attracts the Moon. On the other hand, the moon is smaller than the earth, but it also has some gravity. The moon's gravity is not strong enough to pull the earth towards itself, but it pulls the ocean water towards it, causing waves to form in the ocean.
If you think for a minute that the moon is not rotating around our earth but is just standing still. So it is known what will be the result? Within a few minutes, the moon will hit the Earth.
While the Earth's gravity pulls the Moon toward it, the Moon's orbit around the Earth creates a force, which, pushes him out. This force is called Centrifugal force.
The Moon rotates in its fixed orbit due to the Moon's centrifugal force equaling the Earth's gravity. Similarly, all the planets also revolve around the Sun.
Newton's law was experimented on and investigated and proved that our universe's whole system is dependent on this law.
This is the 1840s when Uranus used to be the last planet in our solar system. This planet, which is four times larger than our Earth, was discovered in 1781 with the help of a telescope.
But a strange mess was made in the orbit of this planet. The problem was that it wasn't obeying Newton's law perfectly.
It came to a certain point in its orbit and started moving around automatically.
Newton's Universal Gravity law, with the help of which the entire system is running, how only one planet can work against it? For sixty years, astronomers around the world were puzzled by this unique behavior of Uranus. One of them was French astronomer " Urban le verier ", He would study Uranus all night long, but its anti-Newtonian motion and departure from its orbit were beyond his understanding. He said that this is possible only in the case where Uranus moves up and down from its orbit, there must be a massive body or planet near it. But the problem was that no one could see any massive body or planet near it.
Some astronomers started saying that Newton's law was wrong or lack of it. But Urban le verier, who had spent most of his life researching the planets and stars, was not ready to accept this.
He stood his ground and said that Newton's law is absolutely correct and that Uranus is attracted by another planet. On the night of 23rd September 1846, he was deep in thought as usual looking at the sky through the telescope.
He picked up a paper and a pen and started long wide mathematical calculations. As a result, he identified a location near Uranus. He was not just found the position, he also calculate the mass of that planet and concluded that the area of this planet is equal to the area of Uranus.
He sent all these details to the largest Berlin observatory and requested them to look at that part with a powerful telescope.
Due to the hard work of the observatory Dr. Johann Gottfried, a blue planet was actually seen at that exact spot, whose mass was equal to the mass of Uranus.
Urban le verier's predictions and calculations were absolutely correct. The 8th planet of the Solar system was discovered, today which we know as Neptune. It was the first planet to be discovered not with a telescope, but with the help of math formulas, paper, and pen. The astronomer Galileo also saw this planet, but he considered it a star.
During this period, planets were named after gods, so the planet was named after the Roman god Neptune. In 1982, NASA passed the Voyager-2 spacecraft flying by Neptune and took several pictures. From this, we got a lot of information about this planet.
If the distance from Earth to Sun is 1 AU then the distance from Neptune to Sun will be 30 AU. Being so far from the Sun, this planet has a -190 degree Celsius temperature. According to NASA, this planet has a huge amount of ice, where there are storms every time, whose speed is 2000Km per hour. Urbain le Verrier who discovered Neptune is not alive today, But this model of Neptune on his grave will always be a reminder of his achievement.
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