CHAPTER ONE THE POWER OF MATHEMATICS In 1781 a brother and sister in England found something amazing William and Caroline Herschel discovered a new planet It was the first planet found with a telescope William and Caroline had built the telescope themselves Until then there were only six known planets They were Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter and The Herschels discovery launched a race to find more planets Math was a key tool in this race 5
Saturn Suddenly the solar system was bigger People realized it might contain more than they knew Expanding the Solar System Scholars named the seventh planet after the Greek god Uranus Soon many scientists were studying the new planet They recorded its movements They used math to figure out its orbit This is the path a planet takes around the sun Astronomers could predict where Uranus would appear in the future But the numbers were not lining up Scientists kept finding Uranus not quite where they expected it to be It had a bit of a wobble in its orbit They knew the gravity of the sun and planets was not causing this Gravity Every object pulls on every other object This force is called gravity The amount of pull an object has depends on its mass The more mass it has the harder it pulls And the closer two objects are the stronger the pull Gravity weakens quickly as the distance between objects grows In the late 1600s English scientist Isaac Newton described gravity using math 6
The movement of Uranus suggested yet another planet lay beyond it 7
