Word: solarized
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...scientists aren't likely to be embarrassed by C/1996 B2, better known as Comet Hyakutake. By last week the recently discovered visitor from the edge of the solar system was already being spotted without telescopes or binoculars by stargazers from the Azores to Australia, and many of them rushed to the Internet to report their observations. "This thing is starting to look amazing," wrote Marcus Featherston of Panama City, Florida, in a Usenet newsgroup called sci.astro.amateur. "I could see it through my car window!" And that was while Hyakutake was still brightening. When it reaches maximum intensity this week...
...particularly handsome, yet he gets Valentine's Day and get-well cards--and poems--from women of all ages. His breeding is nice though hardly impeccable--Mama was Solar Slew, a daughter of Seattle Slew, but Papa was a rolling stone named Palace Music. Only 18 months ago, Cigar was a nondescript bay five-year-old with two victories in 13 starts. Today he is the nicest thing to happen to horse racing since Secretariat...
...orbit it has traced for billions of years. It is an asteroid known as 433 Eros, and it is just one of thousands that have been discovered since the first was spotted in 1801. Astronomers believe these mysterious objects are rubble left over from the formation of the solar system and that they've occasionally smashed into Earth; it may well have been a wayward asteroid, for example, that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But nobody has ever got a close enough look to say anything definitive about what the asteroids are or where they came from...
With so many instruments, NEAR is almost certain to transform scientists' understanding of the asteroids. According to prevailing theory, asteroids are remnants of the very earliest days of the solar system, when chunks of rock clumped together to form hundreds of small planets known as planetesimals. These objects--hundreds but not thousands of miles across--would frequently smash into one another; then the fragments would reassemble under gravity only to smash again. Eventually, a few grew large enough to resist breaking up, and they swallowed up the smaller pieces and became the planets. The asteroids are believed...
...planetesimal, iron and other metals sink to the core under gravity, while lighter rock stays closer to the surface. A very dense or a relatively light Eros would suggest that it was once part of a larger body that was later destroyed, a well-preserved relic of the solar system's violent youth. Says Zuber: "An asteroid is essentially a snapshot of the planetary-formation process...