Word: kuiper
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...star -dubbed MWC 349-since the 1930s. But it was not until this past year that researchers studying the star through the 2.3-meter (90 in.) infra-red telescope at Arizona's Steward Observatory and the 91-cm. (36 in.) infra-red scope in Ames' Kuiper Airborne Observatory, realized how unusual it was. In simultaneous observations, the scientists discovered that the star, already ten times the size and 30 times the mass of the sun, was surrounded by a great glowing disc some 224 million km. (approximately 140 million miles) in diameter...
...Sagan wrote Intelligent Life in the Universe, a recent book that presents the classic argument for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. As the current director of planetary studies at Cornell, Sagan happily creates scientific scenarios in terms of possibility, rather than strict probability. (The late Gerard Kuiper [TIME, Jan. 7], for years director of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, once remarked: "Carl doesn't want to be confused by the facts...
Died. Gerard Peter Kuiper, 68, astronomer and director of the unmanned Ranger lunar photographic missions that helped pinpoint landing sites for the Apollo moon shots; of a heart attack; in Mexico City. As a director of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, he made a number of important discoveries, including satellites of both Uranus (1948) and Neptune (1949). When, in the early 1960s, other scientists were concerned that a spacecraft landing on the moon would sink in an ocean of dust, Kuiper correctly described the lunar surface as resembling "crunchy snow...
...late as the 1950s, many astronomers still thought that conditions on cloud-shrouded Venus might favor life, but by now they know otherwise. Rotating once every 243 days in a direction opposite to that of the other planets, Venus has a surface that University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper says might resemble a fresh volcanic field, with boiling sulfur springs and red-hot pools of molten metals. The planet's atmosphere is no less forbidding-mostly carbon dioxide plus thick yellow clouds that may be a poisonous brew of such substances as hydrochloric acid, ammonium chloride or salts...