Gerard Peter Kuiper - a Famous Dutch-American Professor

Student Name Professor Name Course Date Gerard Peter Kuiper Born in December 1905, Gerard Peter Kuiper was a famous Dutch-American professor, author, and astronomer. He is widely considered the father of modern planetary science. Gerard Peter has various achievements to his name; one of them is the proposal of the Kuiper Belt (Sears 12). In addition, he predicted and discovered numerous aspects of the Solar System that later on changed the way astronomers or scientists came up with the information about planets, stars, and galaxies. He was born in Holland, to a tailor. Since his childhood, Gerard Peter Kuiper was interested in knowing more and more about distant stars that used to shine the whole night, making him feel excited and relaxed. He possessed extraordinarily sharp eyesight, which allowed him to view magnitude 7.5 stars with the naked eyes. In 1924, Gerard Peter Kuiper got admission at Leiden University. By 1927, he finished his graduation and then wrote a doctoral thesis on binary stars in 1933. It proved to be fruitful for his career, as Gerard Peter Kuiper gained enough experience and got to know everything about the planetary science. Eventually, he formulated a number of theories about the Solar System and made predictions regarding the existence of Uranus’ moon Miranda. Soon his prediction that CO2 (carbon dioxide) is one of the core components of Mars’ atmosphere proved to be correct. He had also predicted that Saturn’s rings are made up of ice and that Neptune had an irregular moon of its own. In 1949, this moon was discovered and named as Nereid. He proposed a theory about the origin of certain planets after suspecting a cloud of gases around the Sun. Gerard Peter Kuiper was of the view that this cloud of gases was condensing day by day. Gerard Kuiper gained tremendous success in 1951, when he proposed that Neptune is a disk-like region filled with a large number of tiny planets that were constantly wandering into the inner part of the Solar System in order to create comets. Later on, this region was named as the Kuiper Belt; however, by 1992, no one could prove when the first Kuiper Belt Object came into being. Gerard Peter Kuiper went on to sugges...