Word: pluto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mentor, Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, but liked it so much that he set it to music himself. The story is a salty, zany rewrite of the Persephone legend. The young goddess is hoping for a man to come along before she gets "broad in the beam and saggy"; first Pluto catches her, then is talked out of his catch by a fast-singing stranger who turns out to be Apollo, who is himself caught. The music is neat and attractive, tonal but shifty in the English folksong-arrangement tradition...
Last week Astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper (rhymes with piper) of the University of Chicago made another move toward demoting Pluto. Recent observations have proved that its period of rotation on its own axis is more than six days (TIME, Feb. 6). For a planet, says Scientist Kuiper, this is too slow...
Astronomers have always felt uncertain about Pluto, the outermost planet in the solar system. It is suspiciously small, with less than half of the earth's diameter, and its orbit is peculiar. Instead of revolving in a near-circle around the sun as the other planets do, Pluto follows an eccentric ellipse, cutting across the orbit of Neptune, its sunward neighbor (which is 39 times the size of the earth). These deviations suggest that Pluto may not be a real planet...
...Kuiper thinks that Pluto is an escaped satellite that once revolved around Neptune. The other satellites of Neptune, Triton and Nereid, may have escaped too, but eventually were recaptured. They tangled with the gaseous envelope that still surrounded the mother planet and were reduced again to the satellite status. Pluto, however, managed to keep its freedom until the sun had dissipated most of Neptune's gaseous envelope. Now it is probably safe for the life of the solar system...
Servile Birth. If Pluto were a real planet, says Dr. Kuiper, its orbit could not be so eccentric. Best proof, however, of Pluto's humble origin is its slow rotation. Planetary satellites turn only fast enough to present the same face to their planet. The earth's moon does this, rotating once for each turn around its orbit. Dr. Kuiper believes that Pluto used to revolve around Neptune once in about 6½ days, rotating on its own axis in the same period. Now, on its lonely orbit around the sun, it rotates just as fast as when...