Word: halley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even now it is hurtling closer, racing toward a year-end rendezvous with the sun. By December it will be the brightest object in the predawn sky, providing early risers with an unusual celestial display. The newly discovered comet may eventually be 50 times as brilliant as Halley's comet, which last dazzled the world in 1910; its tail could arc across some 30°-or one-sixth-of the evening sky. With no effort at hyperbole, Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple says the onrushing giant "may well be the comet of the century...
...Wheels. Halley...
...Pacific, Joseph L. Brady of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory gave a description of the long-sought tenth planet, complete with its distance from the sun and its current position in the heavens. His "discovery" was made, not by scanning photographic plates, but by analyzing the erratic behavior of Halley's Comet, which comes into view every 76 years (next appearance: 1986), as it nears the sun in its elliptical and far-ranging orbit...
Checking historical observations dating back nearly 1,700 years, Brady found a peculiar irregularity: on each approach to the sun, Halley's Comet shows up as many as four days earlier or later than its predicted arrival date. That variation seemed to indicate that some unknown force must be influencing the comet's motion. Could it be the gravitational tug of a planet beyond Pluto...