Starship Asterisk*

The story of Neptune’s discovery is a fascinating topic in itself. Galileo actually recorded Neptune in his notebooks but didn’t follow up the observation. British astronomer William Herschel would later note that the orbit of Uranus did not behave as expected according to Newton’s laws, leading to speculations (like those of French astronomer Alexis Bouvard in 1821) that another planet was tugging at Uranus. Both Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams predicted the location of the putative planet in the 1840s, but it was Le Verrier who described his prediction to Galle at the Berlin Observatory. After that, it was a matter of two nights of observation before Galle was able to identify the planet. Although the Royal Society would award Le Verrier the Copley Medal for his work, supporters of Adams defended his right to be considered a co-discoverer. Recent work has cast doubt on the idea.

orin stepanek wrote:
71/165= .4545+ of a year oldX10254= 4660 Neptunium [sic] months old or there abouts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptunium wrote:
<<Neptunium (named for the planet Neptune, the next planet out from Uranus, after which uranium was named) was discovered by Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson in 1940 at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. The team produced the neptunium isotope 239Np (2.4 day half-life) by bombarding uranium with slow moving neutrons. It was the first transuranium element produced synthetically and the first actinide series transuranium element discovered.

The periodic table of Dmitri Mendeleev published in the 1870s showed a — in place after uranium similar to several other places for at that point undiscovered elements. At least three times, discoveries of the element 93 were falsely reported, as bohemium, ausonium in 1934 and then sequanium in 1939.

The search for element 93 in minerals was encumbered by the fact that the predictions on the chemical properties of element 93 were based on a periodic table which lacked the actinides series and therefore placed thorium below hafnium, protactinium below tantalum and uranium below tungsten. This periodic table suggested that element 93, at that point often named eka-rhenium, should be similar to manganese or rhenium. With this misconception it was impossible to isolate element 93 from minerals although later neptunium was found in uranium ore in 1952.

Enrico Fermi believed that bombarding uranium with neutrons and subsequent beta decay would lead to the formation of element 93. Chemical separation of the new formed elements from the uranium yielded material with low half-life and therefore Fermi announced the discovery of a new element in 1934, though this was soon found to be mistaken. Soon it was speculated and later proven that most of the material is created by nuclear fission of uranium by neutrons. Small quantities of neptunium had to be produced in Otto Hahn's experiments in late 1930s as a result of decay of 239U. Hahn and his colleagues experimentally confirmed production and chemical properties of 239U, but were unsuccessful at isolating and detecting neptunium.>>

neufer wrote: No..no
A month isn't 1/12 of a year; a month is the synodic period of the main moon
~ 5.877 earth days. ~ 0.0161 earth years.

T

neufer wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:"east" on a planet is defined as the direction from which that planet rotates,

. :?:

Beyond wrote:
Gee,i woke up this morning feeling pretty good.
Then i saw today's APOD. Now i'm feeling a little blue.

Chris Peterson wrote:
"east" on a planet is defined as the direction from which that planet rotates,

orin stepanek wrote:

neufer wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:
Geez! on Neptune; I'd be less than 1/2 year old!

How many months would that be?

(Triton orbital period: 5.877 earth days)

I come up with a bit over 5 months based on a 12 mo. year! I didn't do the day thing! but I came up with around 7528 Neptunium days in a Neptunium Month based on 12 months. ? is that pretty close?

neufer wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:
Geez! on Neptune; I'd be less than 1/2 year old!

How many months would that be?

(Triton orbital period: 5.877 earth days)

Steve D wrote:The East arrow can be confusing. It's east on the sky, not on the planet.

orin stepanek wrote:
Geez! on Neptune; I'd be less than 1/2 year old!

Neil Stahl wrote:
One image from each quarter of the day "covers" it as far as I'm concerned.

Neil Stahl wrote:
I'm looking forward to what the solons here have to say about Neptune.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon wrote:
<<Solon (Σόλων, c. 638 BC – 558 BC) was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and poet. He is remembered particularly for his [failed] efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic Athens. He wrote poetry for pleasure, as patriotic propaganda. His works only survive in fragments and it is possible that fragments have been wrongly attributed to him.

Solon met with Croesus and gave the Lydian king advice. Croesus had considered himself to be the happiest man alive and Solon had advised him, "Count no man happy until he be dead", because at any minute, fortune might turn on even the happiest man and make his life miserable. It was only after he had lost his kingdom to the Persian king Cyrus, while awaiting execution, that Croesus acknowledged the wisdom of Solon's advice.>>

Brem2 wrote:I'm confused by the N/E indicators in the lower right corner. Do the mean north and east, and is the east to the left?