Word: planetsized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Now, suddenly, everything has changed. Not only do these still unnamed planets triple the number of worlds known to orbit stars like the sun--the only other example having been found just four months ago--but they have an even more profound significance. Both of them are temperate enough to...
It isn't that life necessarily exists on either of the new planets. The question is impossible to settle with today's technology, and if organisms do inhabit these distant worlds they would be a bizarre sort of life, proceeding from birth to death, generation after generation, without ever touching...
Even if the new planets are sterile, though, their very existence is a powerful piece of astronomical news. If our solar system is any indication, giant, unpleasant planets are likely to be accompanied by small, friendly ones. Giant planets also tend to be attended by giant moons, small worlds in...
If so, it may not be long before we find out. Energized by the latest discoveries, astronomers are racing back to their telescopes for more observations and to their computers to analyze years' worth of data still sitting in their disk drives. Everyone wants to be the next to find...
It shouldn't be. Man's fascination with other worlds is as old as Western civilization. Galileo's discovery that they actually existed--that at least some of the pinpoints of light that wandered throughout the night sky had mountains and moons--set off a centuries-long quest to discover...