French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Le Verrier is celebrated for his groundbreaking work in predicting the existence of Neptune through mathematical calculations, a feat that changed the course of astronomical science.
Born in 1811, Le Verrier was an astronomer and specialist in celestial mechanics. He also had a brief political career and played an important role in the reforming of the Paris Observatory in the 19th century.
“Le Verrier was able to find out that the motion of Uranus, a planet discovered about 60 years before by William Herschel, could not be explained by Newtonian laws. So, he had to make a hypothesis about an object that was not yet seen to explain the strange motion of Uranus,” Matthieu Husson, CNRS researcher at the Paris Observatory told RFI.
“He made the computation in order to find out where this object was, what kind of object it was, and it turned out to be the planet Neptune,” he said.
Le Verrier took a similar approach to explain the strange motion of the planet Mercury, a problem which was eventually resolved by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
According to Husson, Le Verrier’s technique of computation was used until the beginning of the 20th century.
His other significant achievement was his contribution to the creation of the French meteorology administration and publishing some of the first meteorological forecasts in Europe.
Le Verrier died in 1877 at the age of 66.
