Word: oaks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When first erected, Oak Ridge was the fourth largest telescope in the world, with a mirror five feet in diameter. Today, most telescope mirrors have grown to more than 30 feet in diameter...
However, Senior Lecturer on Astronomy David Latham, who lives across the street from the observatory and has worked there for almost 43 years, said the Oak Ridge telescope was still a valuable asset because its location on a hill in central Massachusetts gets more clear nights than most...
Most of the research that was ongoing at Oak Ridge involved gathering data over long periods of time to measure the velocity of stars. Latham said more than half of the measurements in most of his projects have been gathered at Oak Ridge...
...Oak Ridge was so precise that in 1988 a team of astronomers, including Latham, used the telescope to observe, for the first time, a wobble in a star’s movement indicative of an orbiting planet. Although other telescopes were pointed at the same stars at the same time, Oak Ridge was the first telescope to detect a wobble...
...Oak Ridge discovery surprised the astrophysics community because few thought that a massive gas giant planet could orbit a star close enough to create visible fluctuations in star velocity. But, since the discovery, about 110 more candidate stars have been found...