Word: dwarfed
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...planet or is it a star? Or might it be a brown dwarf? Those questions were being debated throughout the rarefied world of astronomy last week 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...
...call it. Astrophysicist David Black, who heads NASA'S project to search for other planetary systems, theorized that what McCarthy's team had found was actually a pair of diminutive stars, one of which failed to develop fully and became a celestial relic known as a brown dwarf. Benjamin Zuckerman, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the discovery "not quite a planet and not quite a star." George Gatewood, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory, agreed: "Planet is the wrong word. Call it what you like. It just doesn...
After considering its evidence, McCarthy's team decided to call its find a planet, or "more accurately a brown dwarf." This kind of quasi-star, whose existence was first theorized by Shiv Sharan Kumar, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, has never been observed directly before. Said Kumar of the Arizona sighting: "People wish for planets, but these are not them." - By Philip Elmer-DeWitt...
They'll also dwarf senior twins John and Jim Haufler both 6ft 1in guards. Jimmy starts while John and junior Steve Klemick alternate at sixth man our scout has divined...
Sure, other plants live in the Oval Office-palms on the floor, half a dozen dwarf spathiphyllum, sometimes pots of ornamental peppers. The Swedish ivy, however, is above the rest, literally and figuratively. As the most important houseplant on earth, it gets, one imagines, special attention, the perquisites of position. Perhaps the leaves are individually daubed and polished each evening, watered with Maryland spring water specially sluiced in through titanium pipes, pruned by Kyoto-trained specialists. Maybe an occasional Marine Band rendition of Hail to the Schefflera...