Word: pluto
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When NASA first considered a mission to Pluto more than 15 years ago, the idea was to visit the last and most distant of the nine planets, an oddball whose icy composition, tilted orbit and tiny size made it unlike anything else in the solar system. But when the New Horizons probe finally takes off from Cape Canaveral?as early as next week, if all goes well?it will be heading for something else entirely. "This little misfit is now central to our understanding of the origin of our solar system," says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute...
...Reason: Pluto, astronomers have learned, is no oddball. It's one of thousands of icy bodies in a diskshape swarm known as the Kuiper Belt that orbits the sun in the dark, frigid realm beyond Neptune. Since the discovery last summer of an object called 2003 UB313, Pluto is not even the biggest. And because those little worlds have been in deep freeze since the solar system was formed more than 4 billion years ago, they represent a frozen record of what conditions were like back then...
Those primordial conditions are what Stern and his colleagues will be trying to understand when New Horizons reaches Pluto and its three moons (two were found just this past fall) in 2015. As the probe zips by, cameras will snap pictures of surface features about the size of a football field, analyze Pluto's thin atmosphere and measure its temperature...
...Oscar-baiting performances in which straight actors play gay, transvestite or transgender characters.” Think about it—Philip Seymour Hoffman is the mincing Truman in “Capote,” Cillian Murphy is a pretty cross-dresser in “Breakfast on Pluto,” and Felicity Huffman is a midlife-crisis pre-op in “Transamerica.” And all that’s in addition to the Jake Gyllenhaal/Heath Ledger vehicle, “Brokeback Mountain,” which is almost universally known...
Stewart has an inherently likable role, our bemused Virgil in the Inferno of media clichs. Colbert plays the devil himself: the millionaire pundit pretending to stand up for the little guy. He can even demagogue astronomy. When astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson told him Pluto should not be considered a planet, Colbert debated him thusly: "Isn't that just East Coast liberal intellectual ... did you go to an Ivy League school?" "Yes, I did." "... Ivy League-- educated people telling us what is or isn't a planet...