Old Astronomy Book Predicts the Kuiper Belt

[Mikestone]

As a boy (probably about 1959/60) I read a book on astronomy which among other things briefly discussed Pluto . The author noted that it had been discovered as a result of discrepancies in the orbital motions of Uranus and Neptune, but was far too small to be the cause of these. Among other possibilities, he suggested that Pluto might be "the brightest of a ring of outer asteroids" - not a bad guess at the Kuiper belt.

I can't date the book with any precision, but it was obviously written post 1930. Does it ring a bell with anyone?

 

[256bits]

Doesn't ring a bell, but I have noticed the same thing about some other "discoveries" that were proposed years earlier. The "verification" received more track, with the proposals being neglected. Makes some sense. Maybe not fair though.

As an example,
Just look at the Cosmic Background Radiation - the discovery, really an accident, led to a Nobel prize I believe.
Does anyone remember the names Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman

See History section
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

 

[Astronuc]

Just look at the Cosmic Background Radiation - the discovery, really an accident, led to a Nobel prize I believe.

Robert Woodrow Wilson, an American astronomer, and Arno Allan Penzias, an American physicist, radio astronomer, are credited with the discovery cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery.

 

[Astronuc]

As a boy (probably about 1959/60) I read a book on astronomy which among other things briefly discussed Pluto . The author noted that it had been discovered as a result of discrepancies in the orbital motions of Uranus and Neptune, but was far too small to be the cause of these. Among other possibilities, he suggested that Pluto might be "the brightest of a ring of outer asteroids" - not a bad guess at the Kuiper belt.

I can't date the book with any precision, but it was obviously written post 1930. Does it ring a bell with anyone?

Could the author have been Gerard Kuiper? Was the book about astronomy in general, or about the solar system or planets, or about Lowell/Tombaugh and/or Kuiper?

1951: He proposed the existence of what is now called the Kuiper Belt, a disk-shaped region of icy objects outside the orbit of Neptune, a region that produces many comets.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/720/gerard-kuiper-1905-1973/

Percival Lowell postulated the existence of a planet beyond Neptune and began in earnest in 1905 to search for it. He spent his remaining 11 years in a lengthy mathematical and observational search for the elusive “trans-Neptunian” planet.

Clyde Tombaugh used a new telescope starting in 1929. Tombaugh photographed "the same part of sky several days apart using a Zeiss Blink Comparator to detect the motion of a nearby planet against the more distant “fixed” stars. Once Tombaugh got going toward the end of 1929, the discovery came remarkably rapidly: on February 18, 1930, he found the distant planet on plates taken on the 23rd and 29th of January. The discovery was announced March 13, 1930 — Percival Lowell’s birthday."
https://lowell.edu/the-discovery-of-pluto/

Incidentally, Neptune apparently completed a full period in its orbit about the sun in 2011, since the discovery of the planet in 1846.
https://www.universetoday.com/72088/clearing-the-confusion-on-neptunes-orbit/