Study of the solar system: which planet is closer to the sun. The farthest planet from the sun

Until recently, it was safe to say that the planet farthest from the Sun is Pluto. When scientists suddenly decided that Pluto was not a planet at all, it turned out that the planet Neptune was at the farthest distance from the star.

The Sun and Neptune are separated by 4.5 billion kilometers. This eighth planet solar system 17 times heavier than the Earth, and the diameter is almost 4 times wider than ours. But Neptune cannot boast of density - this gas giant. In other words, the surface of the planet is a viscous mass.

Neptune completes a full circle around the Sun in 164.8 earth years. The orbital speed is 5.43 km/s. A day on the planet lasts 16 hours and 6 Earth minutes.

Discovery of the planet Neptune

The official discovery date of the planet is September 23, 1846. And before that, scientists were puzzled why the planet Uranus, discovered by Herschel, constantly goes astray and is not at all where it should be according to calculations. John Adams, a 22-year-old student at Cambridge College, was the first to suggest that there is another planet beyond Uranus, as yet unknown to anyone.

Despite the lack of computers and the lack of mathematical tables, man did not succumb to difficulties. Enlisting his own perseverance, the astronomer began to calculate the orbit of an unknown planet. From the materials at hand, he had Newton's law and the foundations of higher mathematics.

It took 1 year and 4 months to point to the constellation Aquarius on October 1, 1845, the point where, according to preliminary calculations, the mysterious farthest planet from the Sun should appear. Unfortunately, work young talent put in a long box. Scientists had doubts about Adams's calculations, although he was only two degrees wrong.

A month later, the search for an unknown planet was officially announced. But there was not a word about John Adams in this message. It was about Urbain Le Verrier, a mathematician living in Paris. By coincidence, it turned out that both young people simultaneously began to search for the planet.

Le Verrier wrote a letter addressed to Johann Gelle to the Berlin Observatory, asking him to start searching as soon as possible. mysterious planet. On that distant night, half an hour after the start of observation, Galle saw the faint brilliance of a star, which, judging by the maps, should not have been in that part of the sky. next night showed that the small disk has shifted noticeably relative to other stars.

For the greenish-blue color, so reminiscent of the sea surface, the planet was named Neptune.

Neptune - our days

Years have passed, and now the Voyager 2 spacecraft is arriving to the planet Neptune. Thanks to the device, which visited the vicinity of the most distant planet from the Sun, we received pictures of the surface of a celestial body so remote from us.

The photographs taken by Voyager clearly show five rings. They resemble the rings of Uranus, but are inferior to them in size by about a hundred times. It was possible to establish that Neptune has complex system satellites, there are 14 in total, it is possible that some of them were formed in the vastness of the solar system and subsequently fell into the orbit of a giant planet.

In the images, we see that the surface of the planet resembles the World Ocean of our Earth. The giant owes its color to methane, hydrogen and helium. White spots on the surface are clouds. Winds on the planet reach 2200 km / h, nowhere else on the planets of the solar system there are such hurricanes.

The study of Neptune is not completed, it will continue - we will still learn a lot of interesting things about its winds, atmosphere and the behavior of satellites.

In addition to the Earth, there is another one in the solar system blue planet- Neptune. In 1846, it was discovered thanks to mathematical calculations, not observations.

What is the farthest planet in the solar system from the sun?

Pluto was discovered in 1930. Until 2006, it was considered the last ninth planet in the solar system. Whereas Neptune is only the eighth. However, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union gave a new meaning to the term "planet", under which Pluto did not fall. There are even versions that it does not belong to the solar system, but is part of the Kuiper belt.

He also lost this title from 1979 to 1999, at which time Pluto was inside the orbit of the planet Neptune.

In this regard, answering the question: "Name the most distant planet in the solar system" - you can hear both names as an answer.

Neptune in Roman mythology is

Opening

The most distant planet in the solar system, Neptune, was officially discovered in 1846. However, back in 1612 it was described by Galileo. But then he considered it a fixed star, which is why he was not recognized as its discoverer.

About existence new planet thought in 1821, when data were published with a change in the orbit of Uranus, which differed from the values ​​​​in the tables.

But only on September 23, 1846, after two months of searching, thanks to mathematical calculations, the orbit of Neptune was discovered.

It got its name thanks to the mathematician who discovered it (U. Liverier), who initially wanted to name the planet after himself.

What is the farthest planet in the solar system? Description

Neptune is constantly immersed in twilight. Its illumination is 900 times less than our planet. From orbit, the sun appears to be just a bright star.

The giant is located at a distance of 4.55 billion km, which is about 30 AU. e. It has a mass of 17.15 times more than the planet Earth, and a diameter of 4 times more. Its average density is only one and a half times higher than water (1.6 g / cubic cm). Thus, Neptune belongs to the group of giant planets, which also includes Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus.

The most distant planet in the solar system is also called icy, since the mass of helium and hydrogen in its composition is no more than 15-20%.

Like other giants, Neptune rotates on its axis with great speed. Its day is only 16.11 hours. It completes a revolution around the Sun in an almost circular orbit in 164.8 years. In 2011, it completed its first full rotation since opening.

The surface of Neptune is dominated by strong winds, which - 400 m / s.

Interestingly, the temperature of the planet is -214 C, when it should be much lower. It is known that the most distant planet in the solar system has its own heat source inside, since it radiates 2.7 times more energy into space than it absorbs from the Sun.

The planet is constantly happening One season lasts about 40 years.

satellites

The most distant planet in the solar system has 14 satellites. They are usually divided into three groups:

Domestic: Talas, Naiad, Galatea, Despina, Larisa, Proteus;

Separately, Nereid and Triton are distinguished;

The five outer satellites are unnamed.

The first group includes dark blocks reaching 100-200 km and having irregular shape. They rotate in a circular orbit almost in the plane of the equator. They circle the planet in just a few hours.

The second group includes Triton. This is a fairly large satellite. Its diameter is about 2700 km, it makes a complete revolution around Neptune in 6 days. Moves in a spiral, slowly approaching the planet. Someday it will fall on Neptune and under the influence of tidal forces will turn into another ring. Its surface is cold, there is an opinion that the ocean is raging under the crust of ice.

Nereid flies around the giant in 360 days. It has an irregular shape.

The outer satellites are at a great distance (tens of millions of kilometers) from Neptune. The most distant one orbits the planet in 25 years. Taking into account their orbit, inclination to the plane of the equator and reverse movement, it was decided that they are objects captured by Neptune from the Kuiper belt.

In July 2013, the last satellite was discovered.

Neptune has five rings of ice particles. Some of them have carbon in their composition, due to which they emit a red color. They are considered relatively young and short-lived. The rings of Neptune are unstable and differ significantly from each other.

Answering the question of which distant planet in the solar system the famous Voyager 2 spacecraft was launched to, we can say that it was originally sent to explore Saturn and Jupiter, but the trajectory also made it possible to reach Uranus and Neptune. It was launched in 1977.

On August 24, 1989, he flew 48 thousand km from Neptune. At this time, photographs of the planet and its satellite Triton were sent to Earth.

In 2016, it was planned to send another spacecraft to the planet. However, on this moment There are no exact launch dates.

In space beyond Neptune, the solar system resembles deep ocean: dark, remote and largely unexplored. Therefore, it is possible that undiscovered planets can easily go unnoticed there. But, at the moment, even the largest telescopes are working to the limit of their technical capabilities to find at least some faint spot of light. Usually, the search for something in such distant corners of the system ends in failure, due to the huge number of ice blocks in distant orbits.

However, some are still lucky, as evidenced by last year's discovery of a dwarf planet. Astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard in March last year announced the discovery of a small celestial body (450 kilometers in diameter) outside the Kuiper Belt - an ice debris near the orbit of Neptune.

Their find was then called 2012 VP. As it turned out, she has thousands of neighbors, but only Sedna shares her strange trajectory with her - another dwarf planet discovered back in 2003.

The discovery of 2012 VP provided confirmation that Sedna is not an accident, as previously thought, although it is possible that this is the first of a large population. ice bodies, different from others, in the rest of the solar system. So Trujillo and Sheppard continued to study the Kuiper belt, and only got more questions. They noticed that 150 astronomical units (150 distances from the Sun to the Earth), where Sedna and then 2012 VP were previously discovered, other orbits follow, which are very strange and heaped together.

"It piqued our interest immediately," Sheppard says. Could an invisible planet, a possible Planet X, be the explanation for all of this? "The idea is not crazy," says David Jewitt, a cosmologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I think the past research is enough to get some data on a possible ninth (or tenth, depending on your relationship to Pluto) planet," he adds.

"The most amazing thing for me is that 2012 VP actually exists," says Megan Schwamb, a professor at the Academy of Sciences in Taipei, Taiwan. Also, both are too far away from Neptune to be affected by it. But due to the influence of gravity Milky Way, and as a consequence, a constant change in trajectories, up to today these objects were not known to scientists.

The case took on a broader dimension when Trujillo and Sheppard realized that Sedna and 2012 VP had something in common with 10 other properties. All objects are within 150 astronomical units of the Sun at a point known as perihelion, at almost the same time that they cross the plane of the solar system. But billions of years of evolution should have left the perihelia scattered like everything else in the Kuiper belt, unless something held them in place. According to Trujillo and Sheppard, the planet is about 2 times more massive than Earth, and is located at a distance of 250 astronomical units (about 8 times farther from the Sun than Neptune).

"A few years ago, everyone thought that this region was not populated by anything other than comets and asteroids," says Spanish physicist Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. "Now the observational data show that we were probably wrong," he adds. The scientist conducts research in a team with his brother Raul, in national university Madrid.

Around the same time, physicist Lorenzo Lorio at the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research in Bari, Italy, offered a different view. He says that the planet proposed by Trujillo and Sheppard, if it exists, should be much further from the Sun, at least twice as far from the original predictions. Looking at the gradual changes in the orbits of the few known planets, Loriot calculated that a planet twice as massive as the Earth must be at least 500 astronomical units from the Sun.

As David Jewitt says, recent proposals for additional research planets are not new. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, astronomers also relied on apparent deviations in the motions of Neptune and a few comets to start looking for other celestial bodies, which eventually led to the discovery of Pluto. "Not much has changed since then," he adds. In fact, speculation that there is a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune appeared much earlier how people learned about the existence of Neptune itself.

Pluto and planet X.

In 1834, the German astronomer Peter Andreas Hansen allegedly suggested to a colleague that two planets were needed to explain the oddities in the motion of the third. The explanation of Uranus' strange movement in its orbit led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846, and two years later, the French astronomer Jacques Babinet claimed that Neptune, like Uranus, moves in its orbit, hinting at the existence of a ninth planet.

In the early 1900s, the polymath Percival Lowell took up calculations to find new planets. It is not yet clear if Lowell was the first person to use the phrase "Planet X" but he certainly popularized it. Lowell calculated the approximate location of Planet X based on observations of Uranus and Neptune. Then, in 1916, after Lowell's death, the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh took over and, using Lowell's calculations as a guide, followed through. Tombaugh's systematic observations led him to Pluto in 1930, near which Percival Lowell predicted Planet X.

Further searches were already carried out using technical means. Voyager 2 - NASA's spacecraft solved the Planet X issue for a while. When the probe flew past Uranus and Neptune in 1980, it gave astronomers more accurate data to revise the masses of the planets. New data showed that they were not affected by external forces other than Pluto, and therefore the calculations and assumptions about another Tombo and Lowell's recording turned out to be just a coincidence. If something exists, then it cannot be more massive than Jupiter or Saturn. Kevin Luhmann, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, looked at Jupiter's twins in photographs from a NASA satellite that spent 10 months scanning interstellar space and using an infrared telescope. Massive planets are best seen in infrared light, due to their strong heat emission. Jupiter, for example, radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun.

As the researchers say, there is no sign of anything massive in those areas. But Luhmann says he can't rule out the existence of a small, rocky planet that is simply too cold to detect in infrared.

Best to look for reflected sunlight, with which, for example, scientists discovered Pluto and the Kuiper belt. But even very large objects at such vast distances glow very dimly.

"We wouldn't want to find another Earth if it was more than 600 astronomical units from the Sun. It will give you a very deep insight into the darkness of the outer solar system," says Jewitt.

In addition to the Earth, there is another blue planet in the solar system - Neptune. In 1846, it was discovered thanks to mathematical calculations, not observations.

Pluto was discovered in 1930. Until 2006, it was considered the last ninth planet in the solar system. Whereas Neptune is only the eighth. However, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union gave a new meaning to the term "planet", under which Pluto did not fall. There are even versions that it does not belong to the solar system, but is part of the Kuiper belt.

He also lost this title from 1979 to 1999, at which time Pluto was inside the orbit of the planet Neptune.

In this regard, answering the question: "Name the most distant planet in the solar system" - you can hear both names as an answer.

Neptune in Roman mythology is the god of the sea.

Opening

The most distant planet in the solar system, Neptune, was officially discovered in 1846. However, back in 1612 it was described by Galileo. But then he considered it a fixed star, which is why he was not recognized as its discoverer.

The existence of a new planet was thought about in 1821, when data were published with the configuration of the orbit of Uranus, which differed from the values ​​​​in the tables.

But only on September 23, 1846, after 2 months of searching, thanks to mathematical calculations, the orbit of Neptune was discovered.

It got its name thanks to the mathematician who discovered it (W. Liverier), who at first wanted to name the planet by his name.

What is the most distant planet in the solar system? Description

Neptune is constantly immersed in twilight. Its illumination is 900 times less than our planet. From orbit, the sun appears to be just a bright star.

The giant is located at a distance of 4.55 billion km, which is about 30 AU. e. It has a mass of 17.15 times more than the planet Earth, and a diameter of 4 times more. Its average density is only one and a half times higher than water (1.6 g / cubic cm). Thus, Neptune belongs to the group of giant planets, which also includes Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus.

The most distant planet in the solar system is also called icy, since the mass of helium and hydrogen in its composition is no more than 15-20%.

Like other giants, Neptune spins on its axis with great speed. Its day is only 16.11 hours. It completes a revolution around the Sun in an almost circular orbit in 164.8 years. In 2011, it completed its first full rotation since its discovery.

Strong winds dominate the surface of Neptune, average speed which - 400 m / s.

Curiously, the temperature of the planet is -214 C, when it should be much lower. It is clear that the most distant planet in the solar system has its own source of heat inside, since it emits 2.7 times more energy into space than it absorbs from the Sun.

The planet is constantly changing seasons. One season lasts about 40 years.

satellites

The most distant planet in the solar system has 14 satellites. They are usually divided into three groups:

• internal: Talas, Naiad, Galatea, Despina, Larisa, Proteus;
• separately allocate Nereid and Triton;
• the five outer satellites are unnamed.

The first group includes dark blocks reaching 100-200 km and having an irregular shape. They spin in a circular orbit almost in the plane of the equator. They circle the planet in just a few hours.

Triton enters the second group. This is a fairly large satellite. Its diameter is about 2700 km, it makes a complete revolution around Neptune in 6 days. Moves in a spiral, slowly approaching the planet. Someday it will fall on Neptune and under the influence of tidal forces will turn into another ring. Its surface is cold, it is believed that under the crust of ice the ocean rages.

Nereid flies around the giant in 360 days. It has an irregular shape.

Outer satellites are located at a greater distance (10 million km) from Neptune. The most distant one orbits the planet in 25 years. Taking into account their orbit, tilt to the plane of the equator and backward movement, it was decided that they are objects captured by Neptune from the Kuiper belt.

In July 2013, the last satellite was discovered.

Neptune has five rings of ice particles. Some of them contain carbon, which is why they exude a red color. They are considered relatively young and short-lived. The rings of Neptune are unstable and differ significantly from each other.

Noteworthy Facts

Answering the question of which distant planet in the solar system the eminent Voyager 2 spacecraft was launched to, we can say that at first it was sent to explore Saturn and Jupiter, but the trajectory also made it possible to reach Uranus and Neptune. It was launched in 1977.

On August 24, 1989, he flew 48 thousand km from Neptune. At this time, photographs of the planet and its satellite Triton were sent to Earth.

In 2016, it was planned to send another spacecraft to the planet. However, at the moment there are no exact launch dates.

Despite the fact that Neptune cannot be distinguished by its gigantic size among the planets, its mass exceeds the mass of Uranus. It is not easy to observe this planet - you can hardly see anything other than a small disk. For such an observation, a telescope is not necessary - you can simply examine this planet through binoculars. The ring of this planet from our Earth cannot be seen at all. And in general, only one space satellite called "Voyager 2" was honored to reach such a distant land. The success of this device has not yet been repeated by anyone.

general information

Neptune is located at a distance of 30 astronomical units from the Sun, and its diameter is almost 50 thousand kilometers. In other words, this object weighs as much as 17 of our Earths! The period of rotation around the Sun is almost 165 years, and average temperature- 55 Kelvin.

There are legends that Neptune got its name because of the color - blue. It is generally accepted that blue is associated with water in the seas and oceans. And since Neptune is the god of the sea, the planet was named after him.

Discovery of Neptune

When scientists discovered the seventh planet Uranus, they thought something was wrong on it. Its orbit did not comply with Newton's laws and was somewhat strange in its behavior. Scientists thought that the reason for this could be another, new planet, which is located behind Uranus and changes the route of its movement in orbit. Given all the information that astronomers had in their hands at that time, they calculated the approximate location of the new planet. The assumptions turned out to be correct, although no one really hoped for it, and the world saw Neptune. Computational astronomy has never reached such heights.

Composition and conditions

The chemical elements that make up the planet are very similar to chemical elements uranium. Both planets are covered in ice and solidified gases with small percentages of hydrogen and helium. The estimated core of Neptune is about the same mass as the Earth.

Neptune belongs to the gas planets, which means that various tornadoes, storms, wind stripes are frequent phenomena for him. The wind can reach speeds of 650 m/s! In addition to the Sun, Neptune also warms up from the inside. Moreover, this energy is more than twice the solar energy.

There are two spots on the surface of Neptune. One of them was called the Great Dark Spot, which was discovered in southern hemisphere. The second was slightly smaller and remained unnamed.

Now nothing is known about the existence of the first, it has either evaporated, or at the moment it is at such an angle to us that we cannot see it. Researchers recently announced that a new spot has formed on Neptune. This tells us that the planet's atmosphere changes frequently and the exact reason for this is not yet known.

Non-fiction film about the outer planets