Word: paczynski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Still, they were worth looking for, if only to prove they weren't there, and Princeton astronomer Bohdan Paczynski had proposed an ingenious way to conduct the search. Albert Einstein showed in his general theory of relativity that the gravity from a star will bend rays of light that pass nearby. In principle, he said, a star could act as a lens, focusing and brightening the light of another star directly behind it. If a cloud of small stars or big planets really is orbiting the Milky Way, some of them should occasionally pass in front of stars...
That was the strategy used by the American and the French groups, as well as by Paczynski and several Polish astronomers. Scanning the stars was only the beginning; the astronomers then had to put thousands of megabytes of data from their telescopes through a computer. The computer's job was to identify the unusual flickers of light caused by MACHOs amid the flashes from thousands of naturally pulsating stars that regularly switch from dim to bright and back again. After nearly 2 million individual observations that yielded just one dubious MACHO, Griest's group was ready to give up. Then...
None of this means the Big Bang is the ultimate truth. Someone could come along tomorrow with a better explanation for the known facts, and that would delight astronomers. Says Princeton astrophysicist Bohdan Paczynski, a Big Bang supporter: "I'd love to disprove the Big Bang myself. It would make me instantly famous. But the evidence is just not there...
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