Word: ophiuchus
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...descriptor for the discovery reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature: an international team led by Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau has spotted a "super-Earth," a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. "It's spectacular," says Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who is the world's most prolific planet hunter and is credited with discovering 70 of the first 100 exoplanets. "It's a top-of-the-top discovery in the quest for Earth-size planets...
...next supernova to be seen by the naked eye happened only 32 years later, in 1604, in the constellation Ophiuchus, and its best-remembered witness was Brahe's former assistant Johannes Kepler. Unlike most supernovas, this one was seen before it reached maximum brightness, so Kepler's descriptions of the blazing star are of particular interest to astronomers. His observations would have been even more detailed and valuable had they been made with a telescope. Unfortunately, the star's timing was off. The supernova lighted the night skies just a scant five years before Galileo made the first documented telescopic...
...immense catalog of data gathered by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) was an ideal place to start. Although the satellite operated for only ten months in 1983, it sent back information on more than a quarter-million cosmic sources of infrared radiation. One of them was in the constellation Ophiuchus, some 520 light-years away. "What the IRAS survey indicated," says Team Astronomer Bruce Wilking of the University of Missouri, "was that this source was 40 degrees above absolute zero (-233 degreesC), extremely cold by our standards but warm enough by interstellar | standards that it led us to think this...
...even dozen, of course, is convenient for reckoning points of the compass or months of the year. Fourteen is a bother. Hence the two additional constellations, Cetus (the whale) and Ophiuchus (the serpent slayer), have been ignored. Not by Schmidt, who assigns each constellation 26 days instead of 30, making room for Cetus between Aries and Taurus, and for Ophiuchus between Sagittarius and Scorpio. Let the horoscopes fall where they may; his way, Schmidt argues, gives "a better guide to analyzing character...
...bookstore, complain that Schmidt doesn't ascribe any "elements" (air, water, fire, etc.) to his new signs or enhance them "for esoteric value" with much mythology. Actually, Schmidt borrows some myths from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, both on Cetus (a monster sent by Neptune to devour Andromeda) and on Ophiuchus (either a king killing a dragon, Heracles killing a serpent, or a physician curing snakebites). "Anyway," Stillman insists, "according to Schmidt, I'm an Aquarius. But I don't feel it or act it. Therefore...