Neptune, the big blue planet, has a way more tilted axis making the planet have extreme seasons. Neptune is the eight planet of our solar system. Neptune has a color of blue. It has five rings and eight moons. This paper will be telling you the numerical facts about Neptune, what the atmosphere is like, the storms it has, the rings and moons Neptune has, and the finding of it.
Neptune has a ton of factors. The orbital distance is 30.1 astronomical units and it takes 164.8 years to go this distance. Neptune's rotational period is 16.1 hours. The axial tilt is 30 degrees. The diameter is 49,528 kilometers, the mass is 1.02x10 26 kilograms, and the radius is 1,350 kilometers. The atmosphere is also very important to why it looks the way it does.
Neptune's atmosphere mostly contains three gases. The three gases are methane, hydrogen, and helium. The percent of methane in Neptune's atmosphere is 2%, the percent of helium is 15%, and the percent of hydrogen is 83%. The methane in Neptune's atmosphere makes it blue. The wind speeds in the atmosphere get up to 1,500 miles per hour at the max. The temperatures that the top of Neptune's atmosphere gets up to is -218 degrees Celsius. Storms lie in the atmosphere.
There have been two major storms on Neptune so far. The first storm was called the Great Dark Spot. The second one was called the Great Dark Spot 2. The first storm was found in 1989. It disappeared after awhile, it was noticed gone when the Hubble Telescope was looking for the Great Dark Spot and found a different one instead. This second storm is a hurricane. It hasn't died off yet but it is much smaller then the first Great Dark Spot.
There are rings and moons on Neptune, too. There are eight moons and five rings. The moons' names are Triton, Nereid, Naiad, Proteus, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, and Thalassa. Triton is the biggest moon out of the rest of Neptune's moons. Triton is the only moon that doesn't follow the way the rest of the moons in our solar system. It doesn't rotate the same way as its parent planet, Neptune. The rings are dark and thin. They are made up of dust and rocks.
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846. It was found at the Berlin Observatory by Urbain Jean, Joseph Leverrier, and his friend Johann Galle. Before than, people thought that Neptune was Uranus since they were basically twins, they were about the same size, the same color, and has rings. But then they discovered that Neptune and Uranus were not the same planets. Since then we have sent out a space craft “The Voyager 2” to take a close up and see what it was all about. Neptune is supposed to be 4.5 billion years old.
Neptune has a lot of factors, a blue atmosphere, two major storms, moons and rings, and was discovered on September 23, 1846. Neptune is the eighth planet of our solar system. Neptune is the coolest looking planet out there.
