Word: arcturus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun was merely one of billions of stars in a disc-shaped galaxy, or island of stars, then believed by many to constitute the entire universe. In 1920 Harlow Shapley calculated that the galaxy, called the Milky Way, was some 300,000 light years* in diameter, a distance too stupendous for most people...
...parent star. In fact, says Lunan, "the logical sequence" of one diagram is "so clear it can be represented in standard, even colloquial English." Unsatisfied with a simple translation, Lunan went on to more daring conclusions. He claims, for instance, that the constellation's brightest star, Arcturus, was slightly off to the side in roughly the place it occupied 13,000 years ago. For this too Lunan had a theory: that was the time when the probe arrived in the earth's vicinity and instructed its onboard equipment to scan the skies and draw up the star...