Word: interstellar
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Kohoutek probably originated far beyond the outermost planet, where billions of comets are believed to orbit the sun. They were apparently born out of the same cloud of interstellar dust and gas that created the sun and the planets some 4.6 billion years ago, and have remained largely unchanged since. Occasionally, the tug of a nearby star pulls a comet into a far more elongated orbit, bringing it closer to the sun and making it visible from earth. Thus, as Kohoutek approaches, astronomers will have a rare opportunity to learn more about the primordial stuff out of which the solar...
...also contains small amounts of other isotopes−oxygen 17 and 18, which were apparently formed later in the sun's history. To the Chicago researchers, the implications are very exciting: the grains may well predate the formation of the solar system and trace back to interstellar dust out of which stars and planets are born...
...Astronomer Ronald Bracewell of Stanford University offered a tantalizing hint. Speculating about the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy, he wrote in Nature that an advanced civilization might not necessarily use long-range radio signals to communicate with other intelligent beings. Such signals would be considerably weakened over interstellar distances. Instead, Bracewell said, those far-off beings might employ robot space probes as their message bearers. Sent to a promising nearby star, such a vehicle could swing into an orbit around it at approximately the right distance to encounter a planet with life-supporting temperatures. If it picked...
Astronomers have long believed that the universe is teeming with planetary systems, some of which may contain worlds inhabited by intelligent life. Yet they have been hard-pressed to prove their case. Interstellar distances are so vast that even the most powerful telescopes on earth could not spot a planet orbiting the sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is a relatively scant 4.3 light-years (or about 26 trillion miles) away...
Field researches the origin of the solar system, the dynamics of interstellar matter, intergalactic matter, and the instability of dilute gases...