What is the name of the planet discovered in 1781 by William Herschel?
William Herschel telescopes revealed that the nebulae in the Messier catalogue were clusters of stars. Herschel published catalogues of nebulae in 1802 (2,500 objects) and in 1820 (5,000 objects). On 13 March 1781 while making observations he made note of a new object in the constellation of Gemini. This would, after several weeks of verification and consultation with other astronomers, be confirmed to be a new planet, eventually given the name of Uranus. This was the first planet to be discovered since antiquity and Herschel became famous overnight. As a result of this discovery, George III appointed him Court Astronomer. He was
Definition of planet assumed the motions which I ascribe to the Earth later on in the volume, by long and intense study I finally found that if the motions of the other planets are correlated with the orbiting of the earth..." Galileo also asserts that Earth is a planet in the "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems": "[T]he Earth, no less than the moon or any other planet, is to be numbered among the natural bodies that move circularly." In 1781, the astronomer William Herschel was searching the sky for elusive stellar parallaxes, when he observed what he termed a comet in