Word: lighting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recoup its lavish costs, taking in $95 million in North America on a $150 million budget. The period boxing epic Cinderella Man, reuniting Crowe with Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard, made its expected impact neither at the box office nor with the Academy. Attempting to show his sweet, light side, he teamed with with Gladiator auteur Ridley Scott for the romantic comedy A Good Year; that sad misfire earned just $7.5 million in its entire domestic run - less than 17 Again did on its first...
...Anyone who has gazed at the bright sliver of a crescent Moon in clear skies has probably also noticed that the dark side is not entirely dark. The faint glow rounding out the Moon is earthshine: light from the bright day side of Earth shining on the night side of the Moon. Scientists have studied earthshine for decades - but Langford, along with her colleagues at Melbourne and Princeton Universities, decided it would make a perfect test case for detecting oceans and landmasses on a faraway alien world...
...Unfortunately, to even the most ambitious of NASA's future telescopes, a distant exoplanet would be visible only as a tiny speck of light. We could never hope to see an alien landscape in detail - but perhaps we could see the speck brighten and dim as it rotated, the light of its sun reflecting off water and land...
...course of each evening, Langford watched the earthshine brighten dramatically when sunlight bounced off the Indian Ocean and dim as the African continent rotated into view. The implications for the exoplanet search are profound: If we can see the effect in earthshine, we might also see it in the light of distant world...
...Hopeful astronomers are looking toward a NASA mission called the Terrestrial Planet Finder, or TPF - a space-based planet-imaging telescope capable of picking out the faint light of small exoplanets that would otherwise be lost in the glare of their own suns (almost all the exoplanets found so far have been detected indirectly). "Obviously," says astronomer Eric Ford, of the University of Florida, "we're anxious for TPF to be launched...