Word: belt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shaped orbit, the eighth planet has been outermost since 1979 and will be through 1998. But astronomers suspect that the sun's family actually extends far beyond either of these two planets. Out there in the frigid darkness beyond any known planet, they believe, lies the Kuiper belt, a ring of dusty ice chunks that surrounds the solar system. Beyond that, astronomers say, is the similarly composed Oort cloud, which forms a vast sphere around our planetary system. The cloud stretches two light-years from the sun, halfway to Alpha Centauri, the next nearest star. Occasionally...
...comet nurseries were first proposed four decades ago, the only evidence for them has been indirect and theoretical. At last there is something concrete. A tiny reddish spot of light recorded on a sensitive electronic detector in Hawaii last month appears to be the first component of the Kuiper belt ever observed. The body, known for now as 1992 QB1, is about 200 km (120 miles) across, and a preliminary calculation puts it at more than 5.1 billion km (3.2 billion miles) away. That doesn't necessarily make it the most remote object in the solar system, since Pluto retreats...
There were already several reasons to think the latter is true. For one thing, the existence of the belt and cloud are natural consequences of established theories about the birth of the solar system. According to such theories, the early sun, formed from a cloud of gas and dust, was surrounded by a disk-shaped nimbus made up of the leftovers. The newborn star's heat drove smaller particles and gases, including water vapor, out from the center. The heavier, metal-rich rock left behind condensed into asteroids and the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Much...
...BEST OF jobs. Chopping and cooking chicken parts for Imperial Food Products was monotonous, relentless work, but , the company's largely black and female employees in Hamlet, North Carolina, were grateful for it -- until that awful day last year when a hydraulic line that ran the conveyor belt ruptured and sprayed flammable fluid that ignited, incinerating 25 employees. Horror swiftly turned to outrage when it was learned that the high death count was the result of illegally locked plant doors and the absence of a sprinkler system...
...strangers appeared at her window, forced her out of the car and sped off. Basu, her left arm still helplessly tangled in the harness strap of her seat belt, was dragged facedown across the coarse pavement until there was nothing left of her clothes but the bloodstained blouse on her back...