Happy Birthday Neptune!

I was thrilled to discover that the planet Neptune was discovered a year ago tomorrow.

Yes you heard it right. Neptune was discovered only a year ago. And July 12, 2011 celebrates this great occasion.

Not an earth year mind you.

A neptunian year.

A mere 164.79 earth years.

The last time Neptune was where it is tomorrow in its spin around the sun - astronomers from our dear planet spotted it. The planet had been discovered!

The trusty BBC website breathlessly reports that Neptune was the first planet to be discovered intentionally. The planet Uranus' orbit (found in the late 1790s) didn't fit with Newtonian calculations... prompting a bright spark to postulate that there was another as-yet-undiscovered heavenly body that was the case for Uranus' strange orbit.

Right on the money!

The boffins calculated - and predicted it would be found in a certain part of the sky. Armed with the coordinates the astronomers looked - and after only an hour of searching on the 24th of September 1846 - they saw the new planet!

Happy Birthday Neptune! I am so glad mathematics works! Here's to the deductive approach!

Hooray for the wonders of space! But please do shed a tear as the space shuttle glides into history - after spending billions and twice providing terrible disasters... (the flip side of our confidence in deduction).

We have so much more to discover...