Famous astronomers- Urbain le Verrier

Urbain le Verrier

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was born on the 11th March 1811 and died 23rd September 1877 aged 66. He was also a mathematician studying celestial mechanics.

His first work in astronomy was presented in Academie de Sciences in September 1839, but his major work was discovering Neptune. He used mathematics and observations to predict that there was another planet. He spent months doing complex calculations and study Uranus's orbit. He used Newtons law of grvity to aid his result.

Urbain le Verrier 's
grave

• He did not know it, but an English astronomer John Couch Adams was doing something similar. Urbain announced his results two days before John Adams sent a letter to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. On September 18th, Urbain sent a letter to the Berlin observatory and the planet was found by the Berlin Fraunhofer refractor five days later. 

Urbain had a wife and children.

He died in Paris in 1877. His tomb has a globe on top. A phrase was engraved in French which translate into "the man who discovered a planet with the point of his pen"