When was Neptune discovered, and by whom?
The planet Uranus was discovered by the noted British astronomer, Sir William Herschel, on March 13, 1781. Actually, the planet had been observed numerous times by other astronomers as early as 1690, but it was thought to be another star. The planet was discovered accidentally while Herschel was surveying all stars down to magnitude eight — those that are about ten times dimmer than can be seen by the naked eye. One “star” seemed different and within a year was shown to have a planetary orbit 18 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The new planet was named Uranus after the father of Saturn in Roman mythology. http://www.nasm.si.edu/etp/discovery/disc_planets.html Much like the discovery of Pluto, the search for a planet beyond Uranus began when mathematical calculations indicated that the orbit of Uranus did not behave in the way according to Newton’s laws. Thus, astronomers concluded that there had to be a planet beyond Uranus because of a distortion in the planet’s orbit. They wer
