On March 13, 1781, William Herschel was looking at the sky through one of his telescopes that he had built himself, looking for anything interesting, when he noticed something that wasn’t a star and he thought it was a comet. A year later astronomer A.J. Lexell calculated its path and discovered that it was actually a planet. Herschel wanted to name it after the king, but other astronomers wanted to name it after Herschel, which it was for a time until they changed it to Uranus after the sky-god of Greek mythology. Astronomers made predictions about the movement of Uranus, but after a few years, they saw that it wasn’t moving in the exact way that they thought it would. The way planets move is affected by the pull of other planets. Uranus was
