Word: asteroidal
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...Last month, the news was filled with headlines about a large asteroid which might hit the Earth in 2036. Apophis, as it is called, is 390 meters wide. If it strikes the planet, it would release more than 100,000 times the energy than that of the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. The asteroid was a big story, but buried deep in the press reports about it was the fact that the odds of a collision are 1 in 5,500 based on current information...
Reading Barthelme, you'd think he crawled from the steaming wreckage of an asteroid that originated in the outer solar system. In fact, he grew up in Houston. Born in 1931, the son of an influential architect, he was a good-looking, headstrong kid with ironic eyebrows like circumflex marks. He was restless and rebarbative, full of jittery, sarcastic energy and the kind of confidence that forms only around a tiny seed of insecurity. After experimenting with college, journalism and marriage in Houston, he got sick of the provinces and lit out for New York City...
...what other objects look like. So we look at the family photo of the solar system, and in it, you have the sun, which obviously is its own thing. Then you have the terrestrials - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, all small, all rocky, all dense. Then you have the asteroid belt - craggy chunks of rock and metal - orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Tens of thousands of them, likely hundreds of thousands of them. Then you have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They're all big, all bulbous, all gaseous; they have rings; they all have many moons. That...
...Before that bulletin came out, the latest joint threat assessment report by the DHS and several security agencies urges law-enforcement officers to watch out for almost everything short of an asteroid strike. (The assessment is not classified but is marked "for official use only." It was posted on Cryptome.org, the controversial site that posts government documents not released to the public...
...inner ring appears identical in composition and mass to the asteroid belt in our solar system located between Mars and Jupiter, and the outer one is 20 astronomical units from Epsilon Eridani—about the distance from Uranus to the Sun. The outer ring of icy mini-planets surrounding Epsilon Eridani is similar to the Kuiper Belt that is located just beyond Pluto...