Page 309 - 89 history of astronomy_opt

For a long time people could not com-
pute a satisfactory orbit for the supposed
comet, because it seemed to be near the
perihelion, and no comet had ever been ob-
served with a perihelion distance from the
sun greater than four times the earth’s dis-
tance. Lexell was the first to suspect that
this was a new planet eighteen times as far
from the sun as the earth is. In January,
309