Urbain Le Verrier
French astronomer (1811-1877) · France · Scientists · Died at 66
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Something wrong?He never looked through a telescope to find it. Le Verrier calculated Neptune's position on paper - solving for an unseen planet by the tug it left on Uranus - then mailed the coordinates to Berlin. They found it that night, within a degree.
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About this person
Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was a French astronomer and mathematician who built his career in celestial mechanics, the physics of orbits and gravity. By the 1840s, Uranus wasn't behaving: its path disagreed with what Kepler and Newton predicted. Le Verrier worked backward from the discrepancies, using only math to infer an unseen eighth planet's mass and location. On 23 September 1846, he sent the coordinates to Johann Gottfried Galle in Berlin and asked him to check. Galle found Neptune the same night he opened the letter, within one degree of where Le Verrier said it would be. The event became one of the most dramatic confirmations of celestial mechanics in nineteenth-century science. Le Verrier died in Paris in 1877.
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