Word: messier
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Great was the joy of the throng when one of their own, George Messier, a practicing weightlifter, muscled past 17 other contestants to cop the crown and the handsome gold-plated statuette that went with...
...left him. But Charlie is being blackmailed by his bosses. A while back he had run over and killed a child, and he had been saved from prison by the studio's wiliest finagling. Now, when he balks, the studio threatens jail. Later, when things get messier, the studio doesn't blink at plotting the murder of a blabbing witness. Charlie finally feels driven to suicide...
...general method (in practice, enormously difficult) was to determine the intrinsic brightness of objects in a nebula and then gauge its distance (the fainter it is, the farther away). Variable stars called Cepheids, discovered at Harvard, told him that the bright nebula called Messier 31 is 680,000 light-years away. Messier 31 was therefore no mere part of the Milky Way galaxy (the star-congregation in which our sun is a fourth-rate star), but an isolated star-system far out in space and as big as our entire galaxy. Other, longer-ranged measuring sticks carried him farther...
Rotation of stars has also puzzled astronomers. Otto Struve of the University of Chicago weeded hypotheses down to this one : that stellar rotation too is caused by interstellar dust, colliding like hail stones with the stars. While the sun rotates with a velocity at its equator of only* Messier 51 in Canes Venatici (The Hounds) twelve miles per second, the stars of Aquila whirl at 9,360 miles per second. At such speeds, stars become unstable and shed rings of hot gas. Thus, as some stars are born of dust, others are destroyed...
Leggy Jessie Matthews used to sing and high kick reel after reel. In Climbing High she sings little, dances less, takes on her unobtrusive chin a custard pie and a messier plot. Britain reports that Jessie intends quitting cinema for good, sticking to the musicomedy stage...