![]() The most interesting is called the Adams ring, which is named in honor of John Couch Adams. Several rings of rocky material that is darker than chimney soot encircle Neptune. One theory says that a "rain" of liquid hydrogen falls onto the planet's core, releasing heat as it falls. ![]() Voyager also found that Neptune produces more heat than it receives from the Sun. But when Hubble Space Telescope looked at Neptune five years later, the Great Dark Spot had disappeared. When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune in August 1989, for example, it discovered the Great Dark Spot - a dark, oval-shaped storm system as big as Earth. We can't see a lot of features in Neptune's atmosphere, but the features that astronomers can detect appear to come and go in a hurry. Neptune's rotation stretches the clouds into bands that completely encircle the planet. Traces of other elements form clouds at the top of its thick atmosphere. The core is fairly large, so Neptune is actually the third most massive planet in the solar system. Neptune probably has a rocky core wrapped in a layer of frozen water and other ices. Its color is the result of methane in its upper atmosphere, which absorbs red light, allowing us to see only the blue end of the spectrum. It is a soothing blue-green orb that looks like a giant marble spinning through space. Galle had discovered the solar system's fourth-largest planet. When Galle aimed his telescope at that position, he quickly detected the new world. Working independently, Leverrier and Adams calculated the position of such a planet and passed it on to astronomers. Uranus seemed to be pulled by the gravity of an unseen planet. After the discovery of Uranus in 1781, astronomers had a difficult time accurately describing the planet's orbit.
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