Word: proxima
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...added measure of time. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second, the light that long ago left distant stars and galaxies is only now reaching the earth. Thus man sees the nearby sun as it was little more than eight minutes ago; the nearest star to the sun. Proxima Centauri, as it was about four years ago; and some of the farther galaxies as they looked billions of years ago. Peering into the heavens then is like looking back into time, and some of the stars that astronomers see may no longer exist. Truly, as André Schwarz-Bart wrote...
There is less debate about where comets originate. The most widely accepted explanation is that of Dutch Astronomer Jan Oort, who says that comets exist by the billions in a vast swarm of debris beyond Pluto that stretches halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The debris, called Oort's Cloud, coalesced from the swirling dust and gases in the original solar nebula, from which the sun, earth and other planets and moons were formed. Thus comets are primordial matter, largely unchanged since the solar system's birth. (Lyttleton ascribes a different origin to the comets: he thinks...
...with planetary systems, some of which may contain worlds inhabited by intelligent life. Yet they have been hard-pressed to prove their case. Interstellar distances are so vast that even the most powerful telescopes on earth could not spot a planet orbiting the sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is a relatively scant 4.3 light-years (or about 26 trillion miles) away...