Name: Christina W.
ProgramYear: 2008
Submit Date: May 28, 2008
Review Date: May 29, 2008

NEPTUNE

I have always had a strangely strong connection to the planet Neptune so I decided to finish my stent with the High School Aerospace Scholar program by doing a report on my favorite planet, Neptune. Neptune in my opinion it is the most interesting planet of all eight of the known planets. Neptune is the most intriguing planet of them all because since it is so far away, about 2.8 billion miles from the sun and so far away from Earth that it would take about 12 years to reach its surface. It is difficult to answer any questions but not too hard to generate questions.

The very discovery of Neptune was birth of intrigue toward the planet. Neptune was not discovered the way the planets before it were discovered. Neptune was discovered using math. We would never have been able to find Neptune without first finding Uranus. It was only when , John Couch Adams of Britain and Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier of France, noticed that something was pulling Uranus from its normal orbit that began calculations that led to the realization that there was a planet beyond Uranus. They were also able to determine the mass using math. Adams and Leverrier discovered all of this without ever being able to view Neptune in anyway. It was not until 1846, about 65 years later, that another astronomer, Johann Gottfried Galle, first saw Neptune. Neptune’s atmosphere is made up of 80 percent hydrogen, 19 percent helium, and 1.5 percent methane. Neptune appears light blue from Earth because the hydrogen, helium, and methane that make up the planet’s atmosphere absorbs red light but reflects blue light. There is an area on Neptune that appears darker. This once mysterious spot was discovered in 1989 by the Voyager 2. It was believed to be a huge spinning storm like a tornado in the southern hemisphere large enough to swallow the Earth whole. With winds spinning about 1,500 miles per hour, the winds in that storm were the fastest ever recorded on any planet. When the Hubble Space Telescope looked upon Neptune five years later in 1994, the large spot in the southern hemisphere of Neptune had disappeared, but the violent winds of Neptune had not disappeared. The large spot in the south was merely replaced with a large spot in the North believed to be the same type of storm.

Neptune is much larger than Earth. It is the fourth largest planet in our entire solar system, but it is the smallest of the gas planets. The diameter of Neptune is 34,503 miles. More impressively Neptune was a volume of 6,254 which is 57.7 times larger than Earth’s meaning if Neptune were hollow you could fit 57 Earths inside its surface. To sum up all this information, Neptune is four times the size of Earth.

As I said before, Neptune’s distance has helped to keep the planet cloaked in mystery for the people of Earth. A good example of something that remained hidden from scientist’s eyes because of distance is the rings of Neptune. It was not until the 1980s, over two hundred years after the original discovery and over a hundred years after the first viewing of the planet, that the rings of Neptune were found. Although most pictures show only one ring around this mesmerizing, blue planet, it is actually four rings twisted together to appear as only one.

Neptune had a total of 13 moons that are known to us at this point in time, only 8 of the 13 are actually named. The named moons of Neptune are Triton, Nereid, Proteus, Larissa, Despina, Galatea, Thalassa, and Naiad. All of the moons of Neptune are quite small except for Triton which is the largest by far. As a result of the moons size and distance once again all but Triton and Nereid were not discovered until the Voyager mission in 1989. Triton may be the largest moon of Neptune, but it is still slightly smaller than Earth’s solitary moon. Even if our moon has Triton beat on size, it shrivels to Triton in intrigue. There has been strong evidence found that it is not an original member of Neptune’s family, but a captured object. Another fascinating and shocking fact about the moon Triton is that scientists believe that there might have been life once on the surface of this distant land. It is suspected that this means that at one point in prehistoric time the mass that is now known as Triton, a moon of Neptune, was close enough to the sun where it could support life.

Triton is not Neptune’s only prisoner, at least not all of the time. Every 248 years Pluto is captured in Neptune’s orbit and goes in front of Neptune and stays for about 20 years and there for at that time Neptune is even further away from the sun the former planet Pluto.

Neptune has winds up to 1500 miles per hour, but on average they are between zero to two hundred. Although the planet’s winds move quickly, Neptune is considerably slower than the Earth in rotation around this sun. The amount of time it takes for a planet to complete a rotation around the sun is a year for that planet. It takes Neptune a little more than 165 Earth years to travel around the sun once, so just like the fact that the actually planet Neptune is larger than Earth so is Neptune’s year. One year on Neptune is 165 years here on Earth. There has been no man or woman live long enough on Earth to even claim that they were a year old on Neptune. There we would all die young.

Sadly due to distance of Neptune from our planet, Earth, we can only see it through a very powerful telescope such as the Hubble Space Telescope. It is the same size as Uranus, but it is covered by so many clouds that most of Neptune remains a mystery. It is Neptune’s mysteries that pull me towards this planet. Neptune has many firsts and onlys that no other planet can claim. The planet is also very different from the planet we live on making it even more curious.

Sources: http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_kids/AskKids/neptune.shtml

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/neptunefact.html

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Life/Triton_environment.html

Graphic:

I am so sorry. My Graphic was orginally a very awesome powerpoint where the moons all actually orbited Neptune but the document was too big. =(