The other day, the redOrbit team was sitting around and it suddenly dawned on us: We didn’t know how to pronounce the Kuiper part of the Kuiper Belt! How embarrassing. As New Horizons propels on towards the Kuiper Belt, we read it all the time, but just never say it out loud.
So we Googled it of course, and here’s how it’s pronounced:
In case you didn’t hear that, it’s pronounced a lot like the word “viper”. Now why on earth would it be pronounced this way, you ask? Good question!
The Kuiper Belt was named after the Dutch-American Gerard Kuiper, who many consider to be the father of modern planetary science. In 1951, he predicted the existence of a belt of icy objects located beyond Neptune’s orbit. Pluto is located in this icy belt, and so are hundreds of thousands of other icy objects bigger than 62 miles across.
The Dutch vowels of “ui” are actually pronounced like “œy”, which sounds more like “Koyper” to us. According to a Wikipedia page on the pronunciation, Kuiper probably changed the way he said his name when he came to the states just to make it a little easier on us all.
For now, the correct pronunciation is “Ky-per”, and we’re sticking to it!
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Feature Image: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI
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