British Neptune-Disaster File Recovered, Safe & Sounded
Abstract
Due to the inverse perturbational mathematics of Paris Observatory's Urbain Leverrier, Neptune was discovered by J.Galle at the Berlin Observatory on 1846/9/23 within a degree of his predicted celestial longitude. Britain immediately lodged a claim that Cambridge University mathematical genius John Couch Adams had induced an elliptical orbit in 1845 putting a predicted planet in a similar position, though he had not published his results. Despite this omission, the Neptune's capture was often called the Adams-Leverrier discovery throughout the 1 1/2 centuries since. Though the Royal Greenwich Observatory file on the discovery was still unavailable, removed for 3 decades by Astronomer Royal R.Wooley's closest confidante, O.Eggen. In 1998, Eggen died in Chile. At the instigation of DIO, AAAS, and the N.Y.Times, and with the crucial assistance of NOAO, Elaine MacAuliffe, and Nick Suntzeff, the file was preserved and was transmitted to DIO's Myles Standish and Dennis Rawlins in 1999. DIO was 1st to report on its contents, the most important document, Astronomer Royal Geo.Airy's 1846/12/8 letter privately condemning Adams, was physically rescued by Nick Kollerstrom in 1999 July, with RGO's Adams Perkins' cooperation. Rawlins in 1992 had argued in DIO 2.3 that Adams' claimed 1845 elliptical-orbit primacy was negated by [a] Adams' 1846 June calculation of a circular-orbit ephemeris (very close to Leverrier's 1846/6/1 provisional 1st predicted orbit) to guide James Challis' vast secret Cambridge Observatory Summer search for the planet (the 1999 article's Table 1 establishes the ephemeris-orbit's circularity), and [b] Adams' non-completion of his work until his final 1846/9/2 prediction (a 14:11 extrapolation which missed the actual planet by 12°), 2 days after Leverrier's 1846/8/31 final prediction, which hit within 1° of the truth, [c] there is no firm date for Adams' "discovery", which played no part in Galle's capture of Neptune. In 1992, DIO 2.3 predicted that Astronomer Royal Geo.Airy's then-twice-disappeared 1846/12/8 letter had rightly condemned Adams' non-publication as his fault not (as Adams had complained) Airy's. Prediction verified when this sardonic letter doubly surfaced in 1999. British Neptune disaster's traditional fall-guy Challis is shown to be less the cause of Britain's miss of Neptune than Adams' uncertainty as to the reliability of his mathematical results.
- Publication:
-
DIO
- Pub Date:
- June 1999
- Bibcode:
- 1999DIO.....9....3R
- Keywords:
-
- Urbain Leverrier;
- scientific prediction;
- John Couch Adams;
- George Airy;
- James Challis;
- Nick Kollerstrom;
- Elaine MacAuliffe;
- Nick Suntzeff;
- Adam Perkins;
- Olin Eggen;
- Richard Wooley;
- Berlin Sternkarten;
- Berlin Observatory;
- J.Galle;
- Carl Bremiker;
- Cambridge Observatory;
- David Dewhirst