An English astronomer and mathematician, who was the first individual to predict the position of a planet beyond Uranus. Already in 1820 it was known by astronomers that the motion of the planet Uranus could not be explained exclusively by Newton's law of gravitation and the perturbations of the then-known planets on Uranus. Adams analysed the irregularities in the motion of Uranus' orbit and came to the conclusion that they were due to an undiscovered planet. He reported his discovery to the Astronomer Royal, G.B. Airy (1801–1892), who ignored Adams' results. Only when the French astronomer V.J.J. Leverrier (1811–1877) made the same prediction almost 1 year later, did astronomers start searching for the planet. Neptune was finally discovered in 1846 by the German astronomer J. Galle, who directly received from Leverrier a request to search for the planet. The discovery of the new planet Neptune was one of the biggest triumphs of celestial mechanics in...
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Bibliography
Berry, A. (1898) A Short History of Astronomy. London: J. Murray [Dover Publications, Inc., 1961]
Grosser, M. (1962) The Discovery of Neptune. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Grosser, M. (1970) Adams, John Couch, Dict. Sci. Biogr., Vol. 1, pp. 53–4.
Spencer Jones, A. (1947) John Couch Adams and the Discovery of Neptune. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Haubold, H.J. (1997). Adams, john couch (1819–1892). In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_4
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