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Showing posts with the label Bode

Planet George

The seventh planet in the Solar System is named... George? Ancient astronomers discovered the first five planets.  (Six, if you count Earth, which I don't, since Earth was "discovered" well before there ever was such a thing as an astronomer.)  The word planet  comes from the ancient Greek planan (πλαναν)  meaning to wander .  The word moved from Greek to Latin to French and finally to English, through a bit of wandering itself.  These special stars got this wanderer name because they seemed to wander around the sky, while the other stars remained fixed, more or less, only moving when the rest of the sky did. There were two more planets wandering around in the sky, of course, that were not really known on Earth.  They were harder to see, since they were so far out, despite their being gas giants.  These other two planets aren't as big as the two known gas giants.  Saturn is about 9.5 times the size of Earth, and Jupiter is about 11 tim...