Word: kuiper
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Reason: Pluto, astronomers have learned, is no oddball. It's one of thousands of icy bodies in a diskshape swarm known as the Kuiper Belt that orbits the sun in the dark, frigid realm beyond Neptune. Since the discovery last summer of an object called 2003 UB313, Pluto is not even the biggest. And because those little worlds have been in deep freeze since the solar system was formed more than 4 billion years ago, they represent a frozen record of what conditions were like back then...
...Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, triggered an international furor when he decreed that in his prestigious establishment Pluto would no longer be listed as a planet. Henceforth, it would be considered just another ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of debris orbiting the sun out beyond Neptune. He was on firm scientific ground: many professional astronomers have been leaning that way for years. But people evidently had a soft spot for the runt of the planetary litter. Almost overnight, Tyson became the Grinch Who Stole Pluto...
...astronomers started thinking about where comets actually came from, they realized that there was an enormous cloud of icy chunks, named the Oort Cloud (after the Dutch astronomer who proposed it), orbiting invisibly tens of trillions of miles from the sun. A second group of comets, according to Gerard Kuiper (a Dutch American), must come from closer in, falling sunward from the disk-shaped cloud of icy chunks just beyond Neptune that bears his name. Sure enough, when astronomers trained their telescopes on the Kuiper Belt 15 years ago, they started finding all sorts of objects. In the past...
...favor. Two years ago Pluto was almost reduced to a mere "minor planet" by the International Astronomers Union, and last February New York's Rose Center for Earth and Space left Pluto off the list entirely, relegating him instead to a disk of icy comets known as the Kuiper Belt. One year later, passions still rage in the astronomical community over this manifest injustice to an honest planet...
Without Pluto, the minds of a generation of schoolchildren raised on a steady diet of nine planets would go hungry. What will happen to the familiar "My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine..." Nine what? Kuiper Belt objects? No good mother would serve her children those...