Neptune is another very distant member of our solar family. He roams away out in the hinterland some z,8oo millions of miles from the Sun, 3o times as far as Earth. He is entirely invisible to the unaided eye, and we have known of his existence only since 1846. His discovery was a triumph of human intellect. After Uranus had been discovered by Herschel, its orbit was calculated, but these calculations did not coincide with the observed orbit.
After some years of speculation, trying to account for the erratic motion of Uranus, two mathematicians, Adams in England and Leverrier in Francer Quite independently and unknown to each other, set themselves the task of calculating just where an unknown planet would have to be to cause the perturbations in Uranus' orbit. They finished their complicated computations about the same time and announced them publicly. Soon thereafter Gerre in Ger- many picked up a moving object where the calculations indicated, and we had what we have thought for many years was the outermost and last planet of the solar sys- tem. It was named Neptune.
Neptune is unbelievably cold, probably around 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. He receives one nine- hundredth as much warmth from the Sun as Earth receives. He has one lone moon, of fairly good size. The length of his day is unknown because we have not been able to locate any mark on his surface from which to judge his rate of rotation. His year is no less than 164 of our years. He is about four times larger in diameter than Earth, and he must weigh about 17 times as much. His orbit must be something like 5,55o million miles, and his speed about rz,3oo miles per hour. We cannot imagine life existing on Neptune, although, again, whether or not it did exist during the period that the surface of the planet was cooling from r5o degrees above to r5o degrees below zero Fahrenheit we cannot know. If life ever did exist on Neptune, it knew a Sun which was not much more than a very bright star, instead of the great, dazzling orb that we know from a distance of 9z million miles. Sunshine such as we conceive it never has existed on lonely, far-away Neptune.
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