Word: saturns
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...knows where comets originate. One respected theory is that they are loose aggregations of matter distantly associated with the solar system. They may have been left over from the dust cloud that went to form the sun, or they may have originated in a Saturn-like ring that once surrounded the sun. Most of them are believed to stay far beyond the outermost planets, moving on orbits so distant that they are invisible. A few have been affected by some passing star and deflected into lopsided orbits that carry them periodically down toward the sun. These are the comets that...
Wide & Fast. Most laymen assume that the moon is the earth's only satellite, but astronomers make no such easy assumption. One of the planets, Saturn, is surrounded by millions of small objects that form its decorative rings, and the earth may have at least a few such followers. The solar system is littered with such homeless rubbish as asteroids, meteors and comets, and some of these may have settled into permanent orbits around the steady earth...
Shooting Planets. Scholars have long disputed the year of Christ's birth. Some astronomers argue that the star of Bethlehem was actually an uncommon conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. By calculating the position of the planets backwards for centuries, they place the conjunction in 7 B.C. More recently, climatologists have also disputed the convention of accepting Dec. 25 as the date of Christ's birth. One reason: St. Luke's mention of cattle in the fields. Since the climate of Israel has not changed very much in the past 2,000 years, meteorologists know that...
...billion years ago, the sun became dense and hot enough to support nuclear reactions that made it glow brightly. Its light and heat blew gases away from the nearer protoplanets (proto-earth, proto-Mars, etc.), leaving little more than rocky cores. The more distant protoplanets, which became Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, retained a good deal of their gases, as they do today. They did grow smaller, however, and as their gravitation decreased, their satellites tended to escape like dogs that have slipped their leashes...
Professor Ramsey believes that Saturn has a similar structure. Uranus and Neptune are mostly ammonia and methane. Recent studies by M.J.M. Bernal and H.S.W. Massey at University College in London have shown that ammonia joins with hydrogen at 250,000 atmospheres to form metallic "ammonium": NH4. So the interiors of Neptune and Uranus probably contain another metal made out of a gas by pressure...