IV

I had learned a second very important thing: that its original planet was scarcely larger than a house!

It could not surprise me much. I knew that besides the big planets like the Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, which have been given names, there are hundreds of others that are sometimes so small that it is very hard for them To see the telescope. When an astronomer discovers one of them, he names it as a number. He calls it, for example, "the asteroid 325".

I have serious reasons to believe that the planet from which the little prince came is the asteroid B 612. This asteroid was seen only once in 1909 by a Turkish astronomer in the telescope.

He had then made a great demonstration of his discovery at an International Astronomy Congress. But nobody believed him because of his costume. Big people are like that.