Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020
7 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 HISTORY In theory, the orbit of the unknown planet could be cal- culated with rela- tive precision ex- actly on the basis of the observed dis- crepancies. Some of the greatest experts in celestial mechan- ics took up the chal- lenge and immersed themselves in very complex calcula- tions which, as a re- sult, should have provided the posi- tion in the sky of the hypothetical eighth planet. In the 1840s, one of the most exciting chapters of astron- omy was about to be written, with the achievement of the greatest success of celestial mechanics. Between 1843 and 1845, a young Eng- lish mathematician, John Couch Adams, had developed the possible solution to the problem, man- aging to calculate the celestial coordi- nates that the un- known planet would have had on Septem- ber 30, 1845. Adams informed the Astronomer Royal and director of the Greenwich Observatory, George Biddell Airy, of this possibility and unsuccessfully asked him to perform a telescopic check. In October 1845 and also in the following months, a series of unlucky circumstances, worthy of a thriller plot, left Adams’ fore- cast checks still pending, until finally they were openly hindered by Airy himself. Meanwhile, in France, another great per- sonality in celestial mechanics, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, had also set to work to identify the location of the unknown planet. His calculations yielded results very similar to those of Adams, and when, in O n the right, the Astron- omer Royal George Biddell Airy, who missed the opportunity to discover Nep- tune because of his arrogance, thus damaging Adams. Below, Johann Gottfried Galle, the official discoverer of Nep- tune. Actually, he had only the merit of pointing a tele- scope towards the point indicated by Le Verrier.
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