Word: earthness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...contrast, nearly everything surrounding America's astronauts has been handcrafted to fit not only their dimensions but their shortcomings in the hostile environment of space. Earth-bound man is also surrounded by a hostile and ill-fitting mechanical environment, and Tichauer sees no reason why the ordinary tool user and factory hand should not rate the kind of consideration shown to men in space...
...orbit around other stars in the Milky Way and other galaxies? Many scientists believe that stars with planetary systems are more the rule than the exception in the universe, but they have yet to prove it. Inter stellar distances are so great that the most powerful telescopes on earth are hopelessly inadequate for sighting small, dark planets that might be in orbit around other stars...
...effort has been well rewarded. Last week the Dutch-born, 67-year-old astronomer an nounced the first "solid evidence" that there is a system of planets other than the solar system. He has detected two planets circling Barnard's star, some 35 trillion miles away from the earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus...
...celestial body, a wobble that might be caused by the gravitational pull of a dark, unseen companion. As early as 1844, for example, astronomers concluded from wobbles in the path of Sirius that the bright star was accompanied through space by a star too faint to be seen from earth. The same technique has been used to establish that several other apparently single stars are actually members of a binary sys tem; they have stellar companions that are invisible from the earth...
...when Van de Kamp started a concentrated search for these unseen companions, he and his assistants began to photograph at regular intervals some 40 of the stars closest to the earth, plotting their paths and looking for wobbles. They devoted most of their attention to Barnard's star because it is the closest star visible in the Northern Hemisphere and moves across the sky ; rapidly in relation to the distant "fixed" stars, making it relatively easy for astronomers to trace its path. "We concentrated and gambled on one object," i says Van de Kamp. "It was one of those...