12 Facts About Gerard Kuiper

Gerard Kuiper studied at Leiden University in 1924, where at the time a very large number of astronomers had congregated.

Gerard Kuiper received his candidate degree in Astronomy in 1927 and continued straight on with his graduate studies.

Gerard Kuiper received his PhD degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands on his thesis on binary stars with Hertzsprung in 1933.

Gerard Kuiper traveled to California to become a fellow under Robert Grant Aitken at the Lick Observatory.

From 1947 to 1949, Gerard Kuiper served as the director of the McDonald Observatory in west Texas.

In 1960 Gerard Kuiper moved to Tucson, Arizona, to found the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, serving as the laboratory's director for the rest of his life, until his death in 1973.

Gerard Kuiper discovered two natural satellites of planets in the Solar System, namely Uranus's satellite Miranda and Neptune's satellite Nereid.

Gerard Kuiper pioneered airborne infrared observing using a Convair 990 aircraft in the 1960s.

In 1951, in a paper in Astrophysics: A Topical Symposium, Gerard Kuiper speculated that a large disc of small astronomical bodies formed early in the Solar System's evolution.

The name "Gerard Kuiper belt" was given to the region in the 1980s; it was first used in print by Scott Tremaine in 1988.

However Gerard Kuiper himself believed that such objects would have been swept clear by planetary gravitational perturbations, so that none or few would exist there today.

The Gerard Kuiper Prize, named in his honor, is the most distinguished award given by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, an international society of professional planetary scientists.