Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...space-time warp" to a mysterious world where the good people are androids, the bad people have ray guns, and no one is allowed to venture into the "forbidden zone." The family seems terribly blase about all this, but no more so than the series' creators: folks on this planet wear cardigan sweaters and three-piece suits remarkably like our own. Still, the show moves quickly, has sparks of humor and just might catch on. The final lesson, after all, is that TV "breakthroughs" often occur where you least expect them...
...what McCarthy's team had found was actually a pair of diminutive stars, one of which failed to develop fully and became a celestial relic known as a brown dwarf. Benjamin Zuckerman, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the discovery "not quite a planet and not quite a star." George Gatewood, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory, agreed: "Planet is the wrong word. Call it what you like. It just doesn't seem like a planet." But he added, "If you took a layman by it, it would look...
...issue is more than a matter of semantics. Scientists have 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...
After considering its evidence, McCarthy's team decided to call its find a planet, or "more accurately a brown dwarf." This kind of quasi-star, whose existence was first theorized by Shiv Sharan Kumar, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, has never been observed directly before. Said Kumar of the Arizona sighting: "People wish for planets, but these are not them." - By Philip Elmer-DeWitt...
Miss Manners would approve of this creature from outer space: before invading earth, he waited to be invited. He is the first extraterrestrial to visit our planet in response to a summons from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which since 1977 has careered through the heavens carrying recorded greetings in 55 languages and a few alltime Top 40 tunes by such as Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. Problem is, this Starman (Jeff Bridges) didn't R.S.V.P. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he has crash-landed in Wisconsin and now has three days to get to Arizona, where...