Word: kuiper
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Whirling Discs. But Kant's hypothesis was not entirely discarded by astronomers. Recently, armed with a vast amount of detailed knowledge that Kant did not possess, modern astronomers have busied themselves reconsidering his theory and plugging holes in it. Last week, in a Chicago lecture, Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of the University of Chicago presented bis own neo-Kantian hypothesis. Basing his reasoning on hydrodynamic data, Kuiper concluded that the cloud around the nascent sun passed through a stage with about one-third of the system's matter forming a thin, pancake-shaped disc like the rings...
...proto-planets" (as Kuiper calls the eddies) condensed into planets, each with a disc of loose material around it. Then the planets' discs turned into satellites. One planet, Saturn, retains part of its disc as the famous rings...
Cousins in Space? Kuiper does not think that the earth's satellite, the moon, was formed in this way. The earth-moon pair, he thinks, is a double planet, formed when the planets were formed. The pockmarks on the moon's face were made by material raining down from the double planet's common disc. The earth must have had similar marks, originally, he thinks, but since it was big enough to hold an atmosphere, the marks were erased long ago by wind-and-water erosion...
...this happened, Kuiper believes, about three billion years ago. It was over in a few thousand years-a mere jiffy on the astronomical timescale...
...Kuiper is a serious astronomer who holds himself loftily above the little vanities of man. But his theory, which requires no rare catastrophe for the formation of planets, makes it much less likely that man is alone in the universe. The sun is an ordinary star, of very common size, temperature and chemical composition. If it has acquired planets in the normal course of its development, many millions of similar stars may have planets too. If so, there is a chance that high forms of life, perhaps higher than man, have developed on some of them...