Word: centauris
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...added measure of time. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second, the light that long ago left distant stars and galaxies is only now reaching the earth. Thus man sees the nearby sun as it was little more than eight minutes ago; the nearest star to the sun. Proxima Centauri, as it was about four years ago; and some of the farther galaxies as they looked billions of years ago. Peering into the heavens then is like looking back into time, and some of the stars that astronomers see may no longer exist. Truly, as André Schwarz-Bart wrote...
...rare in this generally amiable book. Collins has a gift for clearly describing complicated machinery, and he also has an amusing imagination. He concludes that bras will not be necessary in space: "Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally." ·Robert Sherrod
There is less debate about where comets originate. The most widely accepted explanation is that of Dutch Astronomer Jan Oort, who says that comets exist by the billions in a vast swarm of debris beyond Pluto that stretches halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The debris, called Oort's Cloud, coalesced from the swirling dust and gases in the original solar nebula, from which the sun, earth and other planets and moons were formed. Thus comets are primordial matter, largely unchanged since the solar system's birth. (Lyttleton ascribes a different origin to the comets: he thinks...
...planetary systems, some of which may contain worlds inhabited by intelligent life. Yet they have been hard-pressed to prove their case. Interstellar distances are so vast that even the most powerful telescopes on earth could not spot a planet orbiting the sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is a relatively scant 4.3 light-years (or about 26 trillion miles) away...
...first astronaut on Mars took that one giant step and then brained his partner with a big red rock, what court could try him? Who could prosecute the hijacker of a spaceship bound for Alpha Centauri? Under current laws of jurisdiction, earthbound courts might be forced to ignore such crimes of the future. Still, new ground is being broken. The case most often cited by jurists trying the first extraterrestrial crime may well be a murder that occurred this summer on a remote Arctic ice island now floating 310 miles from the North Pole...