Word: companion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...following day, at the nearby University of California campus in Berkeley, Physicist Richard Muller, like a seer divining entrails, scrutinizes the new batch of video recordings from Lafayette. He seeks a sign of a dim star that many scientists think does not exist: Nemesis, the death star, a possible companion...
Galvanized by this radical proposal, researchers are hunting for an agent that could explain the apparent clockwork regularity of the celestial barrages. Some suggest that a companion star to the sun periodically comes close enough to nudge comets gravitationally out of their natural habitat--a cloud of comets that circles the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto--sending them hurtling toward earth. Others assign that role to Planet X, while some insist that the slow, bobbing ride of the sun and its planets around the Milky Way galaxy is responsible. Whatever the details, declares Paleontologist J. John Sepkoski...
...Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center of gravity). Suppose the sun has a companion, he mused, and that companion was somehow disrupting the solar system's asteroid belt. Trouble was, he conceded, he could not come up with a convincing orbit for the companion. Suddenly the Dutch-born Hut interrupted him with an alternative suggestion: Why not make the companion star travel through the thickest...
...three realized that the sun's counterpart, if it existed, would have to be like no other companion star ever identified; it would travel in an enormous elliptical orbit three light-years across that would periodically take it farther from the sun than the distance between any known binary stars. Because it has not been identified in the four centuries since astronomers began using telescopes, it must be very small and dim, perhaps a red dwarf with one-third the mass and only one one-thousandth the brilliance of the sun. When it passed through the Oort cloud, it would...
...commands much respect Meredith's Candide is amazingly native up until the very end; his magnificant tenor voice as beautiful during his melancholy solo. "It Must Be So," and it harmonizes wonderfully with Hughes Cunegonde as well. Other wonderful performances include Valerie Gilbert's spunky role as Cunegonde's companion. Ty Warren's lecherous governor, and Carol Emert and Lisa Zeidenberg's sheep...