Right, this is Neptune 101, guys. If you're looking for Mars, it's down the hall. (It's not every day one gets to say that!)



That's right, Professor Manglewitz is dealing with the red planet this semester, while your humble servant (the honorable Chester P. Counterweight III, at your service) is dealing with the blue one.



Let's get right down to brass planets here, shall we? Why is Neptune blue?



No, wise guys, it's not because its friend and neighbor Pluto is no longer considered a planet -- though, admittedly, I myself am sad about the IAU's 2006 decision on that head.



No, it seems that the planet is blue on account of the blue frozen methane clouds that surround it. Aha! (Methane, of course is the main ingredient in natural gas.) That's the good news on the environmental front.



The bad news is that Neptune (at least now that the superlatively distant Pluto is "out of the picture," planetarily speaking) is the farthest planet from the Sun, making it very unlikely, indeed, that we'll ever be able to lasso the heavenly body in question and, as it were, sump-pump the living daylights out of it in order to heat our homes and cook our food here on planet Earth. Nor would that hypothetical resource be rapidly depleted by such a scheme, considering that our friend Neptune is 4 times the diameter of our Earth, not to mention 17 times its weight (though, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that this Neptune of ours is less dense than our home planet, notwithstanding the fact that Neptune is the densest of the so-called Gas Giants -- which, as you supposedly learned last year in Planets 101, are comprised of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.



These Gas Giants, or "Jovian" Planets as they're sometimes called, are notable, of course, for their absence of terra firma, consisting as they do mainly of their own atmospheres of ice and gas. That is to say that a spaceship wouldn't so much land ON these four planets as it would land IN them. In any case, a human visitor will need a real doozy of a winter coat considering that the temperature of the gaseous atmosphere (mostly hydrogen and helium, as it happens) is in the decidedly inhospitable range of -200 celsius-plus -- or 328 Fahrenheit. Well, now, you've got to remember that Neptune receives only 1/1,000 the amount of sunlight that we enjoy here on Earth: It IS the farthest planet from the Sun, after all (at least now that the former distance title holder, Pluto, has been disqualified from competing for that honor). Notwithstanding the frigidity of the atmosphere, the core of Neptune (like the cores of the other three "Gas Giants" mentioned above) is almost ridiculously hot due to the molecular effects of the intense gravity forces present in that innermost region. In fact, MSN Encarta reports that Neptune's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, reaching temperatures over 9,000 Fahrenheit (over 5,000 celsius).



It's the heat from these gravity-heated cores that generates Neptune's notorious winds (the highest in the solar system, up to 1,500 mph), as well as those trademark "dark spots" for which the planet is justifiably famous. Which is odd, because until Voyager 2 flew over our distant friend (Neptune, I mean) in 1989, astronomers assumed that the planet was, basically, dark, dormant, and (quite frankly) dull. But not a bit of it. For the spacecraft's images revealed a stormy and wind-swept planet. Indeed, one of the storms was so large (the diameter of our Earth, in fact) that our men of science called it the "Great Dark Spot," in the proud tradition of the comparably sized "Great Red Spot" for which Jupiter was then already famous. Unfortunately, when the Hubble Telescope took a follow-up peek at the planet in 1994, behold! the spot was gone! On the bright side, however, there were apparently "more dark spots where that one came from," because subsequent photographs revealed that a new similarly sized storm was now raging on the opposite side of the planet.



Uh-oh, look at the time. In fact, it looks like Manglewitz over there has already let his class go! (He thinks I'm jealous, by the way, because he got to teach the Mars class this year, but I don't know what the big deal is. I think Neptune is every bit as interesting when you get to know it. Anyway, last I checked, there were no big dark spots on Mars.... Though come to think of it, I did see a supposedly authentic photograph several years ago showing what looked like a human face that had been sculpted out of a windswept mesa near the Martian region called Cydonia. To be sure, that phenomenon was never adequately explained to my scientific satisfaction. So, yes, that is interesting in itself -- newsworthy, even, considering the fact that NASA has been doing everything in its power since then to debunk the so-called "myth of the Martian Face." Still, I'm not jealous of Manglewitz on that score, simply because he shouldn't be talking about such advanced topics in Mars 101 in the first place! That's clearly a subject for an advanced course, one of those 329 or 411 jobbies in the course catalog, with some shamelessly student-attracting title such as: "NASA: A culture of denial?" or, "MARS: What the government doesn't want you to know about the Martian 'Face'.")



Er, but where was I?



Oh, yes: A few final facts about our blue friend (Neptune, I mean) and then we are SO out of here.



Well, what can I say: Neptune was the first planet to be discovered mathematically.

Basically, it was like this:

A couple astronomers of the 1840s (a certain Adams from England and a no doubt equally certain Leverrier from France) had a problem -- what's more it was the same problem: For the life of them, they couldn't figure out why Uranus was not traveling through space in the precise way that it should according to the mathematical models of the time. I mean, it was just nuts! (or so they must have thought -- are you kidding, they must have been beside themselves on this particular subject!). Anyway, they both determined that the discrepancies must be caused by the existence of a sister planet to Uranus that had yet to be discovered. Naturally, they both passed the info on to their local neighborhood astronomers. Unfortunately for Adams, the astronomer to which he confided his "heads-up" (one Sir George Airy, the so-called "astronomer royal of England" at the time) couldn't be bothered to investigate the claims! (I can hear him now: "Another planet near Uranus? Poppycock!") The lucky Leverrier, however, passed his "hot tip" along to a dutiful colleague named Galle, who, with his apparently steadfast assistant d'Arrest, promptly revved up their telescopes, so to speak, and pointed them in the suggested direction, resulting in their expeditious discovery of the until-then hypothetical new planet in September 1846.



Rats! Times up. And I wanted to talk about those crazy moons of Neptune. Particularly Triton, with its 5-mile-high erupting geyser.



But that's enough for Day One. If I didn't call your name on the roll, see me after class. Again, remember, Mars 101 is next-door with old man Manglewitz. This is Neptune 101 with Chester P. The planets are different enough (the former terrestrial, the latter gaseous) that you'd think they couldn't possibly be confounded. But it never fails: Each year at least one student takes a whole week worth of the wrong classes before finding out that they've been studying the wrong heavenly body all along!