Word: orbits
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William was crowned that Christmas morning. Had he merely conquered, England would still have been pulled from its semi-Scandinavian orbit and into the ferment of Western Europe, and English would still have been transformed into a different language, one with words that came by way of France, words like different and language...
...ready for Part II of the space race. China moved closer to playing in the manned space flight game Sunday following a successful unmanned test flight of a spacecraft designed to carry passengers into Earth orbit. The Shenzhou, China's answer to the Apollo capsule, is based on the design of the Russian Soyuz, and the Russians are also helping to construct the life support system and to train the Chinese "taikonauts." China may be able to conduct a manned flight as early as next fall, and officials have even speculated about possibly sending someone to the moon within...
...this for the structure of the universe: it does tend to repeat itself. Stars orbit the pivot point at the center of galaxies, planets in turn orbit stars, and moons in turn orbit planets. Last week astronomers writing in the journal Nature announced that this cosmic reductionism goes even further. For the first time, ground-based telescopes spotted a tiny moonlet orbiting a mere asteroid in Earth's own solar system...
...left corner of the fuzzy-looking image was another smear of light they couldn't identify. "These blobs are often artifacts of the optics," says astronomer William Merline, head of the team, "but this blob hung around. Once we saw it was moving in a pattern consistent with an orbit, we knew it was a satellite...
Already the discovery of the moonlet is paying scientific dividends. By analyzing the orbit of the satellite, astronomers are drawing surprising inferences about the composition of Eugenia itself. Most asteroids are thought to be about three times as dense as water, but Eugenia is barely 20% denser, suggesting it either is made of loosely packed rubble or is rich in ordinary ice. Further analysis could help settle the question, and more discoveries of more moonlets could shed similar light on Eugenia's asteroid-belt sisters...