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WalterSobchak | 10 months ago

That's a really interesting name. How would you pronounce it?

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AStonesThrow|10 months ago

The Kuiper Belt is a big mess of space debris in the outer Solar System. It's where many comets and asteroids may originate before we spot them coming towards the Sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

It's a rather apropros name for a project which likewise plans to pollute Earth orbit with a bunch of space junk in order to compete with other junk providers. Hopefully their junk does not often touch.

In related news, I also learned recently that the Oort Cloud may not exist at all. I've often seen objects referred to as "originating in the Oort Cloud" but Oort himself had simply developed a hypothesis, and the "Cloud" has not progressed beyond "hypothesis" status since that time. It's amazing how imaginary structures enter our consciousness as if they are real, if enough scientists talk about it that way!

jpm_sd|10 months ago

eminence32|10 months ago

> /ˈkaɪpər/

Wikipedia has long included IPA pronunciation info for pages about people and other things, which is hyperlinked to a handy guide. But I recently discovered something useful and not entirely obvious:

If you over your mouse over each letter in the IPA pronunciation, you'll get a tooltip describing the sound of that specific letter.