This coming Tuesday, the 14th, Neptune reaches its closest approach to us for the year. It’s an enormous blue ball big enough to let 58 planet Earths fit inside. The only planet that cannot be seen with the naked eye, it’s now in dim Aquarius as it circles the sun every 165 years. But we really should start this story in 1845 when French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier realized that Uranus was not moving in a normal way. Something was tugging at it. He calculated where this mysterious object should be located and tried to get any astronomer to aim a telescope there. No one in France was interested. Finally Le Verrier convinced the Berlin observatory to point their small nine-inch telescope at his calculated position. In just one hour, Neptune was found within a single degree of the predicted spot, on September 23, 1846.
Seventeen days later, an enormous satellite was seen orbiting it and later named Triton, after the three-pointed spear carried by the god of the sea. Right from the start, however, screwy things unfolded. Triton is the solar system’s only major moon that orbits its planet in the wrong direction. Backward, meaning clockwise as seen from the north. Nor does it circle Neptune’s equator. These oddities prove it was a traveling vagabond captured by Neptune’s gravity. Yet, all other captured satellites have highly elliptical orbits, not the kind of nice, near-circular one exhibited by Triton.
It took another century to find a tiny second moon, and then more in the 80s, and another a few years ago, bringing the total to 14. Two orbit at the astonishing distance of 30 million miles, the farthest moons from any planet by far. Those are farther from Neptune than the planet Venus is from Earth!
Neptune has fierce winds blowing five times faster than tornadoes. And its deep blue color is a mystery. Neptune has lots of methane gas that should make it greenish like Uranus, so something unknown must lurk in its atmosphere. Although Neptune is the third largest planet, it’s so far away it only looks as big as a quarter dollar coin a mile away. We’re lucky the Voyager spacecraft whizzed past it in 1989, giving us our only decent look at blue Neptune and Triton, which turned out to look dappled, very much resembling a cantaloupe and possessing the coldest surface in the whole solar system.
Nothing about that place is normal.
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