The seventh planet in our solar system was originally mistaken for a comet
When William Herschel first spotted Uranus in 1781, he initially identified the distant, slow-moving object as a comet rather than the seventh planet in our solar system.
In March 1781, amateur astronomer William Herschel used a homemade telescope to discover what he thought was a new comet. It took months of observations and complex orbital calculations by other scientists to realize the object was actually a planet orbiting 1.8 billion miles from the sun.
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