Word: planetful
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...PLANET EARTH...
Ashley Turnage, a third-generation Hokie, nods as her husband Neal, sports editor of the student-run website Planet Blacksburg, says, "We don't want to change. We like it the way it always has been...
...Tuesday, a team of European astronomers announced that they had not only found a new planet circling a comparatively nearby star in the constellation Libra, but that that planet is unexpectedly Earth-like. Like Earth, it orbits a comfortable distance from its sun; like Earth, it maintains a surface temperature somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Most importantly, like Earth, it could easily harbor surface water. In the biological arithmetic we know best, warmth and water often equal life...
...terrestrial feel, the new planet - unpoetically dubbed Gliese 581c - has a decidedly extraterrestrial look. It is probably more than 1.5 times the diameter of Earth and five times heavier. But unlike our world, which orbits a comfortable 92.9 million miles from the flames of the sun, 581c hovers just 7 million miles from its home star. What prevents it from being incinerated like a match head is that its star is a red dwarf, only about one one-hundredth as bright as the sun. The dim light coupled with the planet's close proximity places it in what astronomers call...
...Even if we could visit 581c, there would be reasons to wait a bit before we light the rockets. For one thing, just because the planet could have liquid water doesn't mean it does. The body was detected like all extrasolar planets initially are, not by direct observation, but by measuring the infinitesimal gravitational wobble it causes in its home star. We won't get a clearer sense of its makeup until its orbit carries it in front of the star and the brief interference in the wavelength and intensity of the incoming light allows us to make some...