Word: solarized
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...Stothers, among others, proposed an ingenious way that the oscillating journey might trigger bombardments on earth. Whenever the sun passes through the Milky Way plane, they suggested, the swirls of dust it encounters would gravitationally disrupt the Oort cloud, a vast bubble of comets that scientists believe surrounds the solar system at a distance of up to 10 trillion miles from the sun. Like a lazy fruit picker shaking plums from a tree, the dust would send showers of comets falling toward the sun. Some comets would collide with the planets, including the earth. Almost immediately, other scientists began tearing...
...Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center of gravity). Suppose the sun has a companion, he mused, and that companion was somehow disrupting the solar system's asteroid belt. Trouble was, he conceded, he could not come up with a convincing orbit for the companion. Suddenly the Dutch-born Hut interrupted him with an alternative suggestion: Why not make the companion star travel through the thickest part of the comet-filled Oort cloud, rather than...
...from pebbles to a mammoth named Ceres that astronomers estimate to be as much as 600 miles across. Most of them orbit the sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter and are thought to be either remnants of a planet that disintegrated early in the life of the solar system or celestial building blocks that never quite coalesced into a planet. Occasionally an asteroid is slowed in its travels, probably by the gravity of nearby Jupiter, and tugged into an orbit that sends it closer to the sun and the inner planets, including earth. And sometimes collisions occur. About...
...gone so far as to paint a description of the suspect, and it is no pedestrian planet. It is three to five times the mass of the earth, is gaseous like Jupiter, has an orbit that is elliptical rather than circular and inclines to the plane of the solar system at an angle of perhaps 30 degrees or more; its year (the time it takes to orbit the sun once) is 800 to 1,000 earth years long. To have been influential in shaping the current orbit of Uranus, he thinks, it made its closest approach to that planet...
Most experts agree with Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple, who characterized comets as "dirty snowballs" consisting largely of ice and mineral-rich dust. Comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud, a distant shell of icy debris believed to surround the solar system and extend out some 10 trillion miles from the sun. Passing stars sometimes dislodge snowballs from the cloud, which can sprout the classic luminous tails of gas and dust as they plunge toward the sun. Most comets whip around the sun and head back out of the solar system. Some, like Halley's, periodically return. But others...