Word: marcye
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Yet inhospitable as both these worlds seem, their discovery, announced two weeks ago by San Francisco State University astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler, has thrown an almost wholly speculative area of study solidly into the realm of tangible fact. Despite years of searching with the most powerful telescopes, despite...
The race to discover planets around sunlike stars proved similarly fruitless until about 18 months ago. At the time, Marcy and Butler were sure they had the inside track on finding them. The telescope they use, at Lick Observatory in the mountains above California's Silicon Valley, has an excellent...
In principle, maybe, but in practice there are dozens of factors that can confuse matters. For example, stars, including the sun, pulse rhythmically with waves generated deep in their interiors, making the surface bulge toward and sink away from the Earth just as though the whole star were wobbling. Stars...
More than one astronomical discovery has disappeared on a closer look, though, so Marcy and Butler headed for the telescope, determined either to debunk or verify the Swiss team's claims. Sure enough, says Marcy, after four nights at Lick and many hours of computer time, "everything they'd said...
The object turned out to be peculiar. It's half as massive as Jupiter, but orbiting closer to 51 Pegasi than Mercury is to the sun. That means its surface temperature is 1300ūC, hotter than a blast furnace. Still, it is a planet. "I was a little schizophrenic about...