Word: solarized
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What's frightening is that these discoveries make it clear how little astronomers know about planets, and they add to the dawning realization that our solar system--and by implication Planet Earth--may be a cosmic oddball. For years theorists figured that other stars would have planets more or less like the ones going around the sun. But starting with the 1995 discovery of the first extrasolar planet--a gassy monster like Jupiter but orbiting seven times as close to its star as Mercury orbits around our sun--each new find has seemed stranger than the last. Searchers have found...
...second discovery is far stranger--a solar system 123 light-years away, in the constellation Serpens, that harbors one "ordinary" planet and another so huge--17 times as massive as Jupiter--that nobody can quite figure out what it can be. It is, says Marcy, "a bit frightening...
...astronauts took occupancy of the new space station, and astronomers (armed with a new generation of smart telescopes and a fleet of clever space-going robots) snapped brilliantly sharp pictures of fire storms on the sun and watermarks on Mars, and brought the number of planets discovered outside our solar system to nearly 50. Closer to home, this was the year they cloned a pig, approved an abortion pill and took saccharin off the list of known carcinogens. It was also the year that gene therapy, having shown promise in treating a pair of French "bubble boys," suffered its first...
...poor college student and then being the only one to show up at his Harvard graduation. And he wants his four children to know their aunt. "It places them in the world," he says. "They're not comets flying through space randomly; they're part of a solar system...
...take a look skyward and judge for yourself. The station was little more than three school-bus-size pods linked together like sausages. Last Thursday, however, the space shuttle Endeavor blasted off with the station's latest--and most dramatic--component, a 240-ft.-long set of solar wings that will gather light from the sun and provide juice to the energy-hungry hardware onboard...