Word: kuiper
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...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...
...last week the part of Mars that Saeki had observed was visible from the U.S. Mars Authority Dr. Gerard Peter Kuiper of McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas, took a good look and saw nothing unusual. He thinks Saeki saw a cloud of ice crystals, not uncommon when Mars is far away from the sun. The "terrific explosion" could not have been volcanic, he said, for Mars is "a played out planet with no volcanic activity." That talk about a bomb? "Irresponsible," said Dr. Kuiper...
...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...