Word: eridani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...circling Barnard's Star, which is 5.9 light-years from earth. Now van de Kamp has announced a discovery that may be still more significant. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Las Cruces, N. Mex., he reported finding another unseen body orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, 10.7 light-years away. The mysterious object does not fit any conventional category. Too large to be considered an ordinary planet, it is also too small to be regarded as a true star...
...study he headed while working at Long Island's Kollsman Instrument Corp., Moskowitz and his co-workers plotted a hypothetical space flight to the star 45 Eridani, barely visible to the naked eye from earth and some 466 light-years away. Picking well-known stars in 45 Eridani's region of the sky, he fed data about their positions, distance and absolute brightness into a computer programmed to generate the appropriate star map for any point along the route of the flight...
...familiar constellations, eventually disappearing from forward view as the spacecraft passed them. More distant stars remained in relatively fixed positions. In the view from the rear, the sun faded from sight as the craft flew beyond a distance of 30 light-years from the solar system, while 45 Eridani loomed ever larger ahead...
...celestial navigator on the flight had not already become lost in space, there was a more puzzling effect to confound him: relativistic aberration, the apparent shift of visible stars toward the direction of the spacecraft's motion. Thus, the computer showed, as the craft approached 45 Eridani at ever increasing velocities, other stars in the sky began to converge toward the target star. At 90% of the speed of light, only a few stars remained visible through the rear window. In a nightmarish finale to Moskowitz's flight, the remainder of the visible universe-stars, galaxies, nebulas-seemed...
...predict with certainty what will occur when 40 Eridani-A moves in front of X, but the distant event will give scientists a rare opportunity to test an equally far-out and still unproven deduction from Albert Einstein's theories of relativity. Instead of simply blocking the light from a distant star that it is eclipsing, Einstein predicted, the nearer star would create a lens-like effect that would actually intensify the image of the eclipsed star, increasing its brightness perhaps more than 1,000 times. The phenomenon would be caused by the closer star's strong gravitational...