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Soon, Neptune became the internationally accepted name. In Roman mythology, Neptune was the god of the sea, identified with the Greek Poseidon. The demand for a mythological name seemed to be in keeping with the nomenclature of the other planets, all of which were named for deities in Greek and Roman mythology. [f] [54] Most languages today use ...
Neptune (Latin: Neptūnus [nɛpˈtuːnʊs]) is the god of freshwater and the sea in the Roman religion. [1] He is the counterpart of the Greek god Poseidon. [2] In the Greek-inspired tradition, he is a brother of Jupiter and Pluto, with whom he presides over the realms of heaven, the earthly world (including the underworld), and the seas. [3]
The new planet, at first called "Le Verrier" by François Arago, received by consensus the neutral name of Neptune. Its mathematical prediction was a great intellectual feat, but it showed also that Newton's law of gravitation, which Airy had almost called in question, prevailed even at the limits of the Solar System .
Several symbols were proposed for Neptune to accompany the suggested names for the planet. Claiming the right to name his discovery, Urbain Le Verrier originally proposed to name the planet for the Roman god Neptune [25] and the symbol of a trident, [26] while falsely stating that this had been officially approved by the French Bureau des ...
In order of distance from Neptune, the regular moons are Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, Hippocamp, and Proteus. All but the outer two are within Neptune-synchronous orbit (Neptune's rotational period is 0.6713 day or 16 hours [20]) and thus are being tidally decelerated. Naiad, the closest regular moon, is also the second smallest ...
In a letter to Herschel, Lalande described it as "un globe surmonté par la première lettre de votre nom" ("a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name"). [9] After Neptune was discovered, the Bureau des Longitudes proposed the name Neptune and the familiar trident for the planet's symbol, though at bottom may be either a cross or an ...
The ice giants Uranus and Neptune live up to their name. Although humans have only ever sent one spacecraft (Voyager 2) toward these far-flung worlds, scientists have a pretty good idea that these ...
The largest moon of the planet Neptune has been given the name Triton, as Neptune is the Roman equivalent of Poseidon. A family of large sea snails, the shells of some of which have been used as trumpets since antiquity, are commonly known as "tritons", see Triton (gastropod) .