Word: biesbroeck
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...after a University of Arizona team announced the first sighting of a planet outside the solar system. It appeared to be the long-awaited breakthrough hi the search for planetary systems other than our own: a warm ball of gas about the size of Jupiter seen orbiting around Van Biesbroeck 8, a star some 21 light-years from the earth. Since a light-year is the distance light travels in one year at the rate of 186,000 miles per sec., that would put the planet about 123 trillion miles from the earth. Said a confident Donald McCarthy...
...final figure, checked over & over, was almost too pat to believe. Einstein's theory predicts that a star whose light just grazes the sun should appear to shift its position by 1.75 seconds of arc.* The figure computed from Van Biesbroeck's photographs showed a shift of 1.70 seconds of arc. The Supreme Court of Observation had by unanimous decision confirmed Einstein...
...when an eclipse was due at Khartoum in the Sudan last winter, Dr. van Biesbroeck laid plans to do the job for good & all. He took to Khartoum a special telescope, 20 ft. long, and set it up in a fenced and guarded patch of desert belonging to the Sudanese Geodetic Service...
Greatest threat to his enterprise was a "maboob" (sandstorm) which blasted Khartoum three days before the eclipse. But the maboob subsided well before E-day, and Dr. van Biesbroeck got two good pictures of the starfield beyond the blacked-out sun. Then he wrapped his telescope in tarpaulin and flew back to Wisconsin. His precious plates, 17 inches square, never left his side for a moment...
Last August Dr. van Biesbroeck returned to the Sudan. Khartoum had not changed; the same caravans of groaning camels kicked up dust from the desert. But the brilliant stars in the desert sky had, he was sure, changed slightly. He unwrapped his telescope, chasing a dozen lizards out of the tarpaulin. Waiting five days for a night of good "seeing," he photographed the starfield in Aquarius where the sun had been six months before. Then back he flew to Wisconsin to start his long computations...