The astronomer Johann G. Galle (1812-1910) discovered the planet Neptune on September 23, 1846 from the Berlin astronomical observatory thanks to the previous observations of the French mathematician Le Verrier (1811-1877).
Le Verrier ran the Paris observatory and sent his predictions to Galle by letter; In it he asked him to observe a certain region of the sky in which, according to his calculations, a new planet should be found that would explain the disturbances observed in the orbit of Uranus.
Galle used a refractor built by the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) and located the planet very close to the position predicted by Le Verrier's calculations.
A parallel discovery
Simultaneously, in Cambridge, the mathematician John Couch Adams (1819-1892) had been working on the same problem for some time and had already calculated a position for the unknown planet. In the following weeks a bitter controversy broke out between France and England over the paternity of the find.
Today it is considered that both Adams and Le Verrier and, naturally, Galle are equally deserving of the success of the discovery of Neptune.
