Word: marsden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mount Palomar. A microscopic examination of photographic plates exposed on successive nights revealed a short, faint trail of light between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus; the object that made it appeared to be moving in relation to the stars that formed the background. Kowal promptly called Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., for help in verifying his discovery. Marsden, who serves as a clearinghouse for reports of astronomical discoveries, passed the news to Tom Gehrels of the University of Arizona. Checking plates made a week before Kowal's shots, Gehrels spotted...
...Brian G. Marsden, professor of Astronomy and researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said a reference in yesterday's New York Times to "Object-Kowal" as a possible tenth planet was "nonsense...
...Marsden said, however, "It could be a peculiar kind of comet." He added he could not reject the possibility that it is a comet, because of a theory postulated in the '50s that comets could originate in the vicinity of Uranus and Neptune...
...Marsden said he tends to think that Object-Kowal is a type of asteroid...
...Marsden explained that it may not have been seen earlier because astronomers were not looking for such slowly moving objects. Object-Kowal moves three times more slowly than asteroids around Jupiter, he said...