Neptune

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** Neptune **
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 * Neptune is the last planet in our solar system, besides Pluto. This planet takes about 165 earth years to orbit the sun; this is due to the fact that it is 30 times farther than earth. Last year, Neptune completed its first orbit since the discovery in 1846. This gas giant is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Larger amounts of Methane gasses surround Neptune; this gives it that bluish color everyone knows. Neptune has a small solid core, which is thought to be made up of iron, silicon, and other materials. With winds blowing up to 1200 miles per hour, the temperatures are usually around -350 degrees Fahrenheit. A day on Neptune is 16 hours and 6.7 minutes long. That is 3 hours and 54.3 minutes less than one complete earth day.**


 * Neptune** **has several large, dark spots similar to Jupiter’s hurricane like storms. When //Voyager 2// was launched, it revealed a small off shaped cloud about the size of earth on Neptune’s surface.**


 * Neptune has 13 known moons. The main moon we all know is called Triton. This moon is then followed by Nereid and proteus. There are more moons but they are less known. Neptune got its name from two men who independently named it after the roman god of the sea.**
 * All together you can see that Neptune is very interesting planet.**

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 * [[image:http://i.space.com/images/i/10893/i02/neptune-anniversary-portraits.jpg width="154" height="163" caption="Neptune&apos;s Anniversary Portraits"]] || [[image:http://i.space.com/images/i/10895/i02/inner-moons-neptune.jpg width="401" height="419" caption="Inner Moons of Neptune"]] ||  ||
 * [[image:http://i.space.com/images/i/10882/i02/neptune-great-spot-photo.jpg width="147" height="164" caption="Great Spot on Neptune"]] || media type="custom" key="12932578" align="center" ||  ||

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Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is the last of the hydrogen and helium gas giants in our solar system. More than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth, the planet takes almost 165 Earth years to orbit our sun. In 2011 Neptune completed its first orbit since its discovery in 1846. The ice giant Neptune was the first planet located through mathematical predictions rather than through regular observations of the sky. (Galileo had recorded it as a fixed star during observations with his small telescope in 1612 and 1613.) When Uranus didn't travel exactly as astronomers expected it to, a French mathematician, Urbain Joseph Le Verrier, proposed the position and mass of another as yet unknown planet that could cause the observed changes to Uranus' orbit. After being ignored by French astronomers, Le Verrier sent his predictions to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Galle found Neptune on his first night of searching in 1846. Seventeen days later, its largest moon, [|Triton], was also discovered. Nearly 4.5 billion km (2.8 billion miles) from the [|sun], Neptune orbits the sun once every 165 years. It is invisible to the naked eye because of its extreme distance from Earth. Interestingly, the unusual elliptical orbit of the dwarf planet [|Pluto] brings Pluto inside Neptune's orbit for a 20-year period out of every 248 Earth years. Pluto can never crash into Neptune, though, because for every three laps Neptune takes around the sun, Pluto makes two. This repeating pattern prevents close approaches of the two bodies. The main axis of Neptune's magnetic field is tipped over by about 47 degrees compared with the planet's rotation axis. Like Uranus, whose magnetic axis is tilted about 60 degrees from the axis of rotation, Neptune's magnetosphere undergoes wild variations during each rotation because of this misalignment. The magnetic field of Neptune is about 27 times more powerful than that of Earth. Neptune's atmosphere extends to great depths, gradually merging into water and other melted ices over a heavier, approximately Earth-size solid core. Neptune's blue color is the result of methane in the atmosphere. Uranus' blue-green color is also the result of atmospheric methane, but Neptune is a more vivid, brighter blue, so there must be an unknown component that causes the more intense color. Despite its great distance and low energy input from the sun, Neptune's winds can be three times stronger than [|Jupiter]'s and nine times stronger than [|Earth]'s. In 1989, Voyager 2 tracked a large, oval-shaped, dark storm in Neptune's southern hemisphere. This "Great Dark Spot," which was large enough to contain the entire Earth, spun counterclockwise, and moved westward at almost 1,200 km (750 miles) per hour. Subsequent images taken by the [|Hubble] Space Telescope showed no sign of this Great Dark Spot, but did reveal the appearance and then fading of two other Great Dark Spots over the last decade. [|Voyager 2] also imaged clouds casting shadows on a lower cloud deck, enabling scientists to visually measure the altitude differences between the upper and lower cloud decks. Neptune has six known rings. Voyager 2's observations confirmed that these unusual rings are not uniform, but have four thick regions (clumps of dust) called arcs. The rings are thought to be relatively young and short-lived. Neptune has 13 known moons, six of which were discovered by Voyager 2. Triton, Neptune's largest moon, orbits the planet in the opposite direction compared with the rest of the moons, suggesting that it may have been captured by Neptune in the distant past. Triton is extremely cold -- temperatures on its surface are about -391degrees Fahrenheit (-235 degrees Celsius). Despite this deep freeze at Triton, Voyager 2 discovered geysers spewing icy material upward more than 8 km (5 miles). Triton's thin atmosphere, also discovered by Voyager, has been detected from Earth several times since, and is growing warmer -- although scientists do not yet know why.

We don't know with what beverage William Lassell may have celebrated his discovery of [|Neptune]'s moon, [|Triton], but beer made it possible. Lassell was one of 19th century England's grand amateur astronomers, using the fortune he made in the brewery business to finance his telescopes. He spotted Triton on 10 October 1846 -- just 17 days after a Berlin observatory discovered Neptune. Curiously, a week before he found the satellite, Lassell thought he saw a ring around the planet. That turned out to be a distortion caused by his telescope. But when NASA's [|Voyager 2] visited Neptune in 1989, it revealed that the gas giant does have [|rings], though they're far too faint for Lassell to have seen them. Since Neptune was named for the Roman god of the sea, its moons were named for various lesser sea gods and nymphs in Greek mythology. Triton (not to be confused with [|Saturn]'s moon, [|Titan]), is far and away the largest of Neptune's satellites. Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper (for whom the [|Kuiper Belt] was named) found Neptune's third-largest moon, [|Nereid], in 1949. He missed [|Proteus], the second-largest, because it's too dark and too close to Neptune for telescopes of that era. Proteus is a slightly non-spherical moon, and it is thought to be right at the limit of how massive an object can be before its gravity pulls it into a sphere. Proteus and five other moons had to wait for Voyager 2 to make themselves known. All six are among the darker objects found in the solar system. Astronomers using improved ground-based telescopes found more satellites in 2002 and 2003, bringing the known total to 13. Voyager 2 revealed fascinating details about Triton. Part of its surface resembles the rind of a cantaloupe. Ice volcanoes spout what is probably a mixture of liquid nitrogen, methane and dust, which instantly freezes and then snows back down to the surface. One Voyager 2 image shows a frosty plume shooting 8 km (5 miles) into the sky and drifting 140 km (87 miles) downwind. Triton's icy surface reflects so much of what little sunlight reaches it that the moon is one of the coldest objects in the solar system, about -400 degrees Fahrenheit (-240 degrees Celsius). Triton is the only large moon in the solar system that circles its planet in a direction opposite to the planet's rotation (a retrograde orbit), which suggests that it may once have been an independent object that Neptune captured. The disruptive effect this would have had on other satellites could help to explain why Nereid has the most eccentric orbit of any known moon -- it's almost seven times as far from Neptune at one end of its orbit as at the other end. Neptune's gravity acts as a drag on the counter-orbiting Triton, slowing it down and making it drop closer and closer to the planet. Millions of years from now, Triton will come close enough for gravitational forces to break it apart -- possibly forming a ring around Neptune bright enough for Lassell to have seen with his telescope.
 * How Neptune Got its Name**Neptune was predicted by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier. The men independently accounted for the irregularities in the motion of Uranus by correctly predicting the orbital elements of a trans-Uranian planet. Using the predicted parameters of Le Verrier (Adams never published his predictions), Johann Galle discovered the planet in 1846. Galle wanted to name the planet for Le Verrier, but that was not acceptable to the international astronomical community. Instead, this planet is named for the Roman god of the sea.

Evidence for incomplete arcs around Neptune first arose in the mid-1980s, when stellar occultation experiments were found to occasionally show an extra "blink" just before or after the planet occulted the star. Images by Voyager 2 in 1989 settled the issue, when the ring system was found to contain several faint rings, the outermost of which, named Adams, contains three prominent arcs now named Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The existence of arcs is very difficult to understand because the laws of motion would predict that arcs spread out into a uniform ring over very short timescales. The gravitational effects of Galatea, a moon just inward from the ring, are now believed to confine the arcs. Several other rings were detected by the Voyager cameras. In addition to the narrow Adams Ring 63,000 km from the center of Neptune, the Leverrier Ring is at 53,000 km and the broader, fainter Galle Ring is at 42,000 km. A faint outward extension to the Leverrier Ring has been named Lassell; it is bounded at its outer edge by the Arago Ring at 57,000 km The planet having the second greatest average distance from the Sun. It was discovered by Adams and Le Verrier in 1846. It is bluish green and has an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, an icy mantle, and a rocky core. Neptune emits more energy than it receives from the [|Sun]. It was be visited by Voyager 2 in Aug. 1989, which discovered six new [|satellites] and a set of ring arcs. Neptune is the windiest planet in the solar system, with wind speeds of 600 m s-1 (Mach 1 at 59 K). The rings of Neptune are designated 1989N3R, 1989N2R, 1989N4R, and 1989N1R. Although the //average// orbital distance of Neptune is less than that of [|Pluto], during certain periods, it is actually farther from the [|Sun] than Pluto.