Word: uranus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Interstellar Escape. Full escape from the gravitational pull of the sun would be tougher. Starting from the earth's surface, a ship would need 36,800 m.p.h. Soaring past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, it would reach the outer limits of the solar system with almost no speed left. Then, like a chip on a glassy lake, it could drift for millions of years before it approached the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 25 trillion miles away from the sun. Man's spaceships can probably reach interstellar escape velocity in a generation, but there will...
...that time, the distinguished University astronomer predicted a trans-Neptunian planet from perturbations he had noted in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Working from Lowell's reckonings, Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930 discovered Pluto...
...billion years ago, the sun became dense and hot enough to support nuclear reactions that made it glow brightly. Its light and heat blew gases away from the nearer protoplanets (proto-earth, proto-Mars, etc.), leaving little more than rocky cores. The more distant protoplanets, which became Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, retained a good deal of their gases, as they do today. They did grow smaller, however, and as their gravitation decreased, their satellites tended to escape like dogs that have slipped their leashes...
Professor Ramsey believes that Saturn has a similar structure. Uranus and Neptune are mostly ammonia and methane. Recent studies by M.J.M. Bernal and H.S.W. Massey at University College in London have shown that ammonia joins with hydrogen at 250,000 atmospheres to form metallic "ammonium": NH4. So the interiors of Neptune and Uranus probably contain another metal made out of a gas by pressure...
...moon would be a poor, dismal place to start a colony. It has no detectable atmosphere, certainly no water. Other planets are not much better. Mercury is fiercely hot on the side that it keeps toward the sun and fiercely cold on its sunless side. Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are cold worlds with hostile atmospheres of methane and ammonia...