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Why we study Neptune. Neptune, along with its cousin Uranus, is the least-explored planet in our solar system, having been visited by a spacecraft only once. Yet we’ve found more Neptune-sized worlds orbiting other stars than any other type of planet. In order to understand other solar systems and figure out whether our own is unique, we need ...
Dec 20, 2022 · On Sep. 21, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) turned its golden mirrors toward the ice giant Neptune. This planet, like its fraternal twin Uranus, is one of the least explored planets in our Solar System, only briefly visited by Voyager 2 in 1989.
May 3, 2023 · The NASA Image and Video Library website consolidates imagery spread across more than 60 collections of over 140,000 NASA images, videos and audio files. These multimedia files come from across the agency’s many missions in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science and human spaceflight.
- Structure and Surface
- Time on Neptune
- Neptune's Neighbors
- Quick History
- What Does Neptune Look like?
Neptune is encircled by six rings.Neptune, like Uranus, is an ice giant. It’s similar to a gas giant. It is made of a thick soup of water, ammonia, and methane flowing over a solid core about the size of Earth.Neptune has a thick, windy atmosphere.One day on Neptune goes by in 16 hours.Neptune has such a long journey around the Sun it takes 165 Earth years to go around once. That’s a long year!Neptune has 16 moons.Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet from the Sun. That means Uranus is Neptune’s only neighboring planet.Neptune was discovered in 1846 by Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams, and Johann Galle.Only Voyager 2 has visited Neptune.Voyager 2 took this picture of Neptune in 1989. Clouds streak across Neptune. Neptune is a very cold, windy world.
More than 200 years later, the ice giant Neptune became the first planet located through mathematical predictions rather than through regular observations of the sky. Because Uranus didn’t travel exactly as astronomers expected it to, French mathematician Urbain […]
Dark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system. More than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth, Neptune is the only planet in our solar system not visible to the naked eye. In 2011 Neptune completed its first 165-year orbit since its discovery in 1846.
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Uranus and Neptune are composed of rock, water, methane, and ammonia, but their outer atmospheres are comprised of hydrogen, which is similar to Jupiter and Saturn. More than 100 moons in total orbit these planets of the outer solar system.
