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Technical Data:-

Diameter 49,528 km
Average Distance from Sun 4,501 million km
Size compared to Earth 3.8x
Gravity compared to Earth

1.2

Cloud-Top Temperature -220°C (33.2 K)
Length of Day 16.11 hours
Length of Year 164.8 days
Eccentricity of Orbit 0.009
Moons 8
Density

1.76 gm/cm3

Atmosphere Hydrogen - 85%
Helium - 13%
Methane - 2%


 

Neptune is the Roman God of the Sea and certainly, from space, the colours remind you (or at least me) of the sea.   In fact, underneath Neptune's atmosphere, there is thought to be an ocean of liquid methane and ice slush, surrounding a rocky core.  Not much was known about Neptune before it was visited by the Voyager space probe, which found many wonderful discoveries.   One of its main discoveries was its clearing up of the Neptune arc problem.   It found that Neptune has in fact 3 rings which vary in thickness.  The reason Netune is blue is because the Methane in it's atmosphere absorbs red light.  Neptune is quite similar to Jupiter in that it has several oval hurricanes.  It also has one 'Great Dark Spot' which, like Jupiter's Red Spot is a massive hurricane/storm.   Unlike the Red Spot though, it seems to occasionally 'vanish'.

Neptune's eight moons are: Naiad, Thalassa, Depoina, Galatea, Larissa, Proteus, Triton and Nereid.  The most interesting is Triton which has many geyser-like eruptions, spewing invisible Nitrogen gas and dust particles many kilometres into the atmosphere.  It's an icy world of frozen methane just 2720 km wide - smaller than Earth's moon!

Neptune was predicted in 1845 by British mathematician John Adams and French mathematician Jean Leverrier by clever observations of Uranus' orbit.  One year later, in 1846, German astronomer Johann Galle confirmed what the mathematicians thought by finding it using John and Jean's predictions.  In the same year, Trition was discovered by British astronomer William Lassell. I ts rings were discoverd nearly a century and a half later, in 1985 and Voyager 2 discovered six more satellites in 1989.



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