 By 1847, the planet Uranus had completed nearly one full orbit since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781, and astronomers had detected a series of irregularities in its path that could not be entirely explained by Newton's law of universal gravitation.These irregularities could, however, be resolved if the gravity of a farther, unknown planet were disturbing its path around the Sun.In 1845, astronomers Urbain Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge separately began calculations to determine the nature and position of such a planet.