Word: planetful
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...Solanka, leaves him in the dirt, engendering some of the fury that now makes Solanka fear what he might do to his own son. His reaction is to create his own WWWeb borne world, in which he casts the characters of his life as cyborg dolls on a drowning planet. The science fiction element is mystifying at times, and its crossover into real life is a leap of imaginative faith that only Rushdie would dare to make...
DIED. JOHN CHAMBERS, 78, makeup artist who created the pointy ears for Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock on Star Trek; of diabetes complications; in Los Angeles. Chambers' makeup jobs included the 1968 Planet of the Apes, for which he won an honorary Oscar, and the television shows Lost in Space and The Munsters...
This scenario, reported in the journal Nature last week, is drawn from a new computer simulation that goes far toward resolving puzzling inconsistencies in earlier studies of the moon's formation. That event was, of course, of overwhelming importance in our planet's history, since it reduced Earth's rotational wobble and set the stage for ocean tides and ultimately life, not to mention untold moon-June poesy. Earlier simulations required a much larger object crashing into an Earth only partly formed and spinning too fast to explain Earth's current rotational rate--our 24-hour day. One study needed...
...finer level of detail than earlier efforts. Finally, after a number of tries, they arrived at a scenario in which an object, the size of Mars but with only one-tenth the Earth's mass, striking at a highly oblique angle, ejected enough debris from itself and our planet's iron-deficient outer layers to form the moon, which contains very little iron. Left behind was an Earth roughly the size it is today...
Apart from satisfying our curiosity about how the moon formed, the new work has broader implications. Explains Asphaug: "It's now known that giant collisions are a common aspect of planet formation, and these big impacts might go a long way toward explaining the puzzling diversity observed among planets." That diversity was emphasized last week when astronomers using the University of California's Lick telescope reported the discovery of two planets in orbit around a distant star. Unlike all previously discovered extra-solar planets, which have highly elliptical orbits, these two were moving in nearly circular paths. Alas, even...