Word: orbiter
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...Carolyn, an asteroid astronomer, scurry around the unheated dome of the 18- in. Schmidt telescope. They photograph the sky in four-minute exposures, hunting for fast-moving objects against the background of the fixed stars. So far their Palomar study has identified 25 asteroids that cross the earth's orbit, bringing the known total to 60. Asteroids like this, they think, have occasionally crashed into the earth with catastrophic consequences, and they strive to calculate how frequently these inopportune meetings occur...
...meet all the other requirements imposed on it by the Louisiana scientists, Planet X would have an orbit that is elongated and highly inclined and a mass one to five times that of the earth. In other words, their Planet X is remarkably similar to the one that could account for the irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. The beauty of the theory, in Whitmire's view, is that it relies on a planet originally proposed for reasons that have nothing to do with mass extinctions. Still, he admits, the proof of the pudding "is going to come...
...hunting for an agent that could explain the apparent clockwork regularity of the celestial barrages. Some suggest that a companion star to the sun periodically comes close enough to nudge comets gravitationally out of their natural habitat--a cloud of comets that circles the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto--sending them hurtling toward earth. Others assign that role to Planet X, while some insist that the slow, bobbing ride of the sun and its planets around the Milky Way galaxy is responsible. Whatever the details, declares Paleontologist J. John Sepkoski Jr. of the University of Chicago, the evidence...
...break in 1983, Muller and fellow Astronomers Marc Davis of Berkeley and Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center of gravity). Suppose the sun has a companion, he mused, and that companion was somehow disrupting the solar system's asteroid belt. Trouble was, he conceded, he could not come up with a convincing orbit for the companion. Suddenly the Dutch-born Hut interrupted him with...
...conspicuous title can have a number of meanings, all socially redeemed because the line is Shakespeare's ("The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon," Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 4). But there are no star-crossed lovers, only heavenly bodies tumbling from orbit to bounce in the bed of Eddie Teeters, a producer and sometime actor in pornographic videocassettes piously merchandised as sex-education films...