Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, was named after ‘Neptune’, the Roman god of the sea. The official name did not come from Romans or people from the ancient times since Neptune was discovered during the modern times, several decades after Uranus’ discovery.

It was included in Galileo’s drawings which he made when he first observed the planet on December 28, 1612 and January 27, 1613. However, Galileo regarded the planet as a stationary star and he was not credited for its discovery. The detection of Neptune as a planet is different from those of the other planets in the solar system. Neptune was first discovered not by the use of a telescope but by a prediction made by John Couch Adams. His study started when scientists noticed that Uranus, the (the 7th planet and neighbor of Neptune), is not always orbiting in the path that they’ve predicted. Thus, they have thought that another celestial body could be affecting its movement by means of gravitation pull. Adams calculated and proposed the possible orbit of another still to be found planet that causes the change in Uranus’ movement. The result was forwarded to Sir George Airy who asked Adams to give further clarification. Adams tried to formulate a reply but failed to send it to Airy. Another study was separately conducted by Urbain Joseph Le Verrier and he predicted the mass and position of the unknown planet. There was difficulty in getting support and belief from fellow astronomers but in June 1846, George Airy discovered the similarities in the calculations made by Adams and Le Verrier. The search for the planet was initiated by James Challis of the Cambridge observatory but his initial efforts were futile. Le Verrier requested Johann Gottfried Galle to research the planet using the Berlin Observatory’s refractor. It was on the same day of the receipt of the request that Neptune was officially sighted, fairly close from the position where Le Verrier thought it would be. Le Verrier received the credit for the discovery since historians suggested that Adams theory didn’t predict the exact location of the planet.

“The planet exterior to Uranus” and “Le Verrier’s planet” were the names first associated with Neptune. Galle was the first to suggest an official name and he proposed that the planet be called Janus, after the Roman god of gates. Challis also made a suggestion for the name Oceanus. But since Le Verrier had rights to his discovery, he immediately proposed the name Neptune. He afterward tried to name it after himself, to be called Le Verrier, and he received support from the observatory director, Francois Arago. Contrarily, the proposal of naming it after Le Verrier was strongly discarded by authorities outside France since Uranus should have been named Herschel after its French discoverer William Herschel. Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, a Baltic-German astronomer worded out his favor for the name ‘Neptune’ on December 29, 1846 to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The name ‘Neptune’ was considered more appropriate and in line with the nomenclature of the other discovered planets.

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