Urbain Jean Le Verrier | Biography

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was born in 1811 to a poor family in a rural region of northwest France, near the English Channel. Despite his humble origins, it soon became evident that he was an extremely bright boy, and at great expense his parents sent him to the University of Paris. There he excelled and emerged with a promising future in chemistry, but he soon lost interest in the field and turned to astronomy.

Le Verrier did not take long to become embroiled in one of the high-profile astronomical pursuits of the day--the search for new planets. Sir William Herschel had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, but by the time Le Verrier entered professional astronomy, it was evident that the motion of Uranus was not following predictions, and that some unknown body must be perturbing it. The obvious supposition was another, undiscovered planet beyond Uranus, and astronomers on both sides of the English Channel were in hot pursuit of it.

By 1845, the brilliant English astronomer John Couch Adams had calculated the unknown planet's location, and unbeknownst to him, his calculations were very nearly correct. Sadly, the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, was an arrogant and self-important man who discounted young Adams's work (Adams was only 26 at the time). Airy's ignoring of Adams's claims started a chain of events that ultimately placed Le Verrier in one of the biggest intellectual squabbles of the nineteenth century.

Independently of Adams, Le Verrier had completed analogous calculations regarding the position of the unseen planet, and published a paper describing his work in 1846. The numbers agreed almost exactly with Adams's, in a stunning mutual confirmation of the two astronomers' work. Since neither of them knew of the other's efforts, their results were completely independent--and completely in agreement.

We cannot know George Airy's thoughts when he read Le Verrier's paper, but there must have been one of those notorious "sinking feelings" as he read the confirmation of Adams's work, which he alone had seen and then snubbed. It was bad enough that Adams was right. Even worse, a Frenchman, representing a rival country, was on the right track. Keven worse than that, Airy's mistake in rejecting Adams's work could easily be laid bare once the young man's friends pointed out that his work predated Le Verrier's. Sensing disaster, Airy authorized an immediate search for the planet.

He was too late. Le Verrier had contacted Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory, asking him to search for the planet (Le Verrier's own colleagues being themselves curiously reluctant to aggressively pursue his findings). Within two nights Galle has found the new planet, in agreement with Le Verrier's predictions. Newspapers around the world trumpeted the French and German discovery.

Airy now tried to do some damage control, acknowledging Le Verrier as the discoverer of the new planet in a sugary display of international friendliness. The modest Adams merely bit his lip, but Sir William Herschel rose to his defense, publishing an article that pointed out Adams's work, and stating that he was the true discoverer of the planet.

General bickering now began to ricochet back and forth across the Channel. The English and the French both claimed that they were the rightful discoverers, while the Germans felt compelled to point out that they had done the actual observing. Adams distanced himself from all this, drawing attention to his work but graciously acknowledging Le Verrier as the one who was, after all, the first in print.

It took a year for the dust to settle, and in the end the new planet was called Neptune (although Le Verrier, less modest than Adams, had made some sly attempts to have it named after himself). Adams emerged a well-liked figure, and Airy was left, we may note with grim satisfaction, to wipe copious amounts of proverbial egg from his face. Adams met Le Verrier in 1847 in England, and the two men became close and lasting friends.

This controversy dispensed with, Le Verrier continued his work at the University of Paris in the area of celestial mechanics. With his fame securely in place, he spent the rest of his career there, making significant contributions to the study of occultations, events in which one planet passes in front of another or in front of a star, and computing their circumstances. He also produced a wealth of detailed and accurate tables of the motions of the Sun, Moon, and other bodies in the solar system. His primary credit, however, remains what is now considered his co-discovery of Neptune, an achievement that in one swoop doubled the size of the solar system.