Word: kuiper
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...even after the "Einstein correction" has been allowed for, Mercury does not keep appointments accurately. This year Mercury crossed the sun about 20 seconds too soon, and the experts are now trying to figure out why. Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of the University of Chicago believes that the chief reason is the inaccuracy of man's fundamental timepiece, the revolution of the earth on its axis. For many reasons, including the drag of the tides and the little-understood motions of fluids in its interior, the turns of the earth vary slightly. This makes the earth a capricious clock...
Such planets cannot be rare, said Urey last week in a lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine. According to a star census taken by Astronomer Gerald P. Kuiper of the University of Chicago, there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and one star in each thousand is believed to have planets circling around it. So there must be 100 million "solar systems" in the earth's galaxy alone...
...Gerard P. Kuiper's closeup of Pluto with the 200-in. Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain, which revealed the planet to be 3,550 miles in diameter (a previous estimate: about twice this size) and the second smallest planet in the solar system (TIME, June...
...point of light like a star, have had to estimate its size by calculating the apparent effect of its gravitation upon the motion of Neptune. Measured in this indirect way, Pluto was thought by some to be almost as big as the earth. Last week Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of Yerkes Observatory, having measured Pluto's diameter with the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, announced that those estimates were probably wrong...
Using the great telescope visually (it is normally used as a camera), Dr. Kuiper caught Pluto on a night of unusually good "seeing." The disc was clear enough and steady enough to be measured with a special instrument. It proved to be only 3,600 miles in diameter. So Pluto has less than half the earth's diameter (7,920 miles) and is about one-tenth its mass. It is slightly larger than Mercury and considerably smaller than Mars, less than one five-hundredth the size of its neighbor Neptune (over 30,000 miles in diameter...