# Transit of Uranus from Neptune

I would like to help find sources or calculations for the following dates found in Wikipedia (in French). The next Uranus transit from Neptune will happen :

1. October   38172
2. August   111551
3. November 124067


Would you please help me find sources or calculations stating these three dates?

• What wikipedia page are you using? Are you sure that Wiki does not give the reference? Jun 27 '20 at 21:29
• The more information you can add to your question, the more likely you can receive a helpful answer!
– uhoh
Jun 27 '20 at 23:37
• The wiki is here fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/…. Note that for some reasons not directly linked to the topic, the en wikipage has been deleted. Jun 29 '20 at 5:24

## 2 Answers

The only one who seems legit is the first date, October 38172. It appears somewhere in Transits, by Jean Meeus (1989), and some say that also in the SOLET webpage, but I can't find it either. Taking into account that, if true, it comes from a book from 1989 and probably is not very accurate, I wouldn't take that date as an exact thing.

The other dates I can't find anything.

Partial answer:

Machine translation of the Wikipedia article https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_d%27Uranus_depuis_Neptune to English by Google:

Imaging of a transit of Uranus from Neptune. (There will a priori be no transit on the date indicated, Stellarium , the software used, not being able to carry out calculations so distant in time.

The transit of Uranus from Neptune occurs when Uranus is directly between the Sun and Neptune . It then has, since Neptune, the shape of a small black disc moving slowly above the disc of the sun. This transit lasts approximately 42 hours.

This is the rarest transit among the eight planets in the solar system , given the long orbital period of 172 years (Uranus from Neptune), the tiny apparent diameter of the Sun (1.07 arc minutes, close to of the limit of human visual acuity ) as observed from Neptune, and the inclination of the two orbits relative to themselves, 1.5 degrees, which is smaller than that of the other groups of two planets.

Uranus' next transit from Neptune will take place in October 38172.

The transits observed from Pluto and other objects in the Kuiper belt and disc of scattered objects are even rarer, due to the inclination of its orbit, compared to that of other planets.

Notes and references

(en) This article is partially or entirely from the English Wikipedia article entitled "Transit of Uranus from Neptune" (see the list of authors). (en) Jean Meeus , Transits , Willmann-Bell,1989 "SOLEX 9.1" [ archive ofApril 29, 2009], at http://chemistry.unina.it/ (accessed August 14, 2014)

Note that this French Wikipedia article says that it is "partially or entirely from the English Wikipedia article" and that page no longer exists!

I think the origin of this prediction is in question. Of course this transit can happen some time, but solar system modeling predictions this far into the future are extremely sensitive to even tiny errors in the present.

UPDATE: There is an entry in the Wikipedia article List of future astronomical events

• October, 38,172 AD A transit of Uranus from Neptune, the rarest of all planetary transits32

32Aldo Vitagliano (2011). "The Solex page". Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Archived from the original on 29 April 2009. Retrieved 20 July 2012.

The archived page does not seem to contain a mention of this event, and the link to the original is dead.

• Here is a Dec 2015 snapshot of the article in English. Editors decided to delete it for notability and original research reasons. Jul 29 '20 at 15:08
• @MikeG thanks! please feel free to edit that back into this post if so inclined.
– uhoh
Jul 29 '20 at 16:12