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| "Another blue gas giant. Only this one has crazy moons- Titan, the largest of 8, has super 1,500 mile-per-hour winds and volcanoes that create Auroras!"
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle, of the Berlin Observatory, and Louis d'Arrest, an astronomy student, through mathematical predictions made by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. It is the outermost planet of the gas giants. If Neptune were hollow, it would contain almost 60 Earths. It has eight moons, six of which were found by the Voyager space probe. The first two thirds of Neptune is composed of a mixture of molten rock, water, liquid ammonia and methane. The outer third is a mixture of heated gases comprised of hydrogen, helium, water and methane. Methane in the outer atmosphere gives Neptune its blue cloud color. Neptune has several large, dark spots like those of Jupiter's hurricane-like storms. The largest spot, known as the Great Dark Spot, is about the size of the earth. Neptune has the strongest winds of any place in the entire solar system. Most of the winds there blow westward, opposite to the rotation of the planet. Near the Great Dark Spot, winds blow up to 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) an hour. Neptune has a set of four rings which are narrow and very faint. The rings are made up of dust particles thought to have been made by tiny meteorites smashing into Neptune's moons. From ground based telescopes the rings appear to be arcs but from Voyager 2 the arcs turned out to be bright spots or clumps in the ring system. The exact cause of the bright clumps is unknown. |
