Word: lyra
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Helma was an offish, disdainful girl, daughter of a lawyer in Byzantium, Ohio. She went to the local college where a freshwater esthete named Winfield Gaines (but called "Phoebe") was her friend until he was expelled. She studied singing with a local teacher who had a book called Lyra Operatica, full of stilted engravings of old singers in the pinched and flowing costumes of classic roles. She herself had a big rich voice. It was for church-singing, perhaps someday teaching. Certainly not for the sinful ways of opera. But when her father and mother died, Helma went...
Fresh from the astronomers comes the news that a stupendous collision of many suns has taken place in the Constellation Lyra. In the telescope, they say, great clouds of nebular smoke and ashes are visible. And although our own sun and all its planets are headed in a straight line for this very crossroads of the universe, nobody seems much concerned. Partly through disbelief in the science of astronomy itself and partly through the urgency of things like the shortage of coal; the inclement weather, or diplomatic tussles with Turkey, people look askance, saying: "No matter, the scientists are always...
...Mount Wilson by the interferometer method familiar to the physicist, and found to be 22,000,000 miles or about two and a half times the diameter of our own sun. Its distance is known to be about twelve light years. To the east of Arcturus and Bootes is Lyra, a small constellation marked by the bright star Vega, from which the light emitted is a hundred and thirty years reaching the earth. It is toward the region of the sky marked by this bright star that the spectroscope shows the sun and the solar system to be travelling...