Word: objects
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...first experiment, begun last fall, the satellites provided some indication that the magnetosphere presents a more solid barrier to the solar wind than had previously been believed. Soaring beyond the magnetosphere, the Christmas comet will enable scientists to study the effects of the solar wind on an object without a magnetic field. The West German satellite will release the barium, while the British craft records the progress of the comet, measuring the tail and noting how long it takes for the solar wind to disperse it. The U.S. satellite will track how much barium is able to penetrate the magnetosphere...
Swinging within about 55 million miles of the sun every 76 years, Halley's comet has been an object of awe since what may have been the first reported sighting, by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. But when this cosmic snowball of ice and dust-with a nucleus between 3 and 6 miles across and a tail millions of miles long-streaks across the sky in 1986, it will be greeted for the first time by five spacecraft. In the vanguard of an international effort to study the comet, the Soviet Union recently launched two 4.5-ton unmanned space...
...hear people say that we must not let our party be dominated by the narrow agendas of special-interest groups ... But when the critics get around to naming the groups whose agendas they object to, they usually name blacks, teachers, women and unions. And never mention oil interests, the banks, the right-wing PACs or the apostles of religious intolerance. And then in the next breath the reappraisers tell us to appeal to whites, to the middle class and to men. In other words, the objection to our party is not that we speak to special groups, but that...
...long suspected that the universe is teeming with distant planets, some of which might support life. Some astronomers have inferred the presence of planet-like bodies by measuring the wobble in the path of certain stars as they travel across the sky; they suggest that the tug of another object's gravity might cause a disturbance in the star's movement. The Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983 detected around a few stars great disks of dust and debris that are thought to be spawning grounds for new planets. The fact that astronomers have been unable to see extrasolar...
...object discovered by McCarthy and his colleagues-Frank Low of the University of Arizona and Ronald Probst of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson-has been dubbed VB 8B and is some 600 million miles from the star it orbits. It is visible only through powerful telescopes. Although it is nine-tenths the size of Jupiter, its mass is ten to 50 times greater. It is also a good deal warmer: 2,000° F, in contrast to Jupiter's -240°, or as Gatewood put it, "as hot as a Pittsburgh blast furnace...