Word: sirius
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more deeply into the red end of the visible spectrum. Also surprising was 1987A's low luminosity. "If it had lived up to its initial expectations," says Williams, "it should have increased its brightness to a magnitude of around 1 to 0." (A lower number means a brighter star; Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a magnitude of -1.5.) That would have made it look nearly as bright as the brightest stars in the night sky. Instead, the supernova rose only to a magnitude of 4.5 -- equivalent to that of a medium-bright star -- but then stopped...
...year to take overall editorial responsibility for the Science, Medicine, Space, Environment and Computers sections. In the ensuing months he has found time to write several stories, including articles on the medical ramifications of President Reagan's colon surgery last summer and on the strange behavior of the star Sirius last November...
Similar complaints are voiced by others in the booming new software business. Says Jerry Jewell, president of Sacramento's Sirius Software, which makes computer games: "We have to introduce three or four new products per month just to stay ahead of the pirates...
...fraud." What irritates professional stargazers is that the self-styled registry, which began in 1979 and "sold" more than 30,000 stars last year, is invading turf that has long been their special preserve. By astronomical tradition, only a few dozen of the brightest stars, such as Sirius, Vega, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, are called by proper names, many of which derive from early Arab astronomy. The remainder are listed in various catalogues, drily and unromantically, by initials and numbers that tell astronomers such no-nonsense things as their position, type and magnitude (brightness...
While keeping tabs on Rohanda, Ambien II begins to believe that Canopus is far more advanced than Sirius. The Sirians are technological wizards, but every millennium or so they discover that their ever more sophisticated machines have rendered more people useless and unhappy. Ambien suspects that the Canopeans have achieved a wisdom that transcends this problem, and she initiates a friendship with Klorathy, a senior Canopean administrator, in the hope of prying his secrets away. The job is not easy. He has the habit of answering a question with another question. He is also given to interstellar bromides: "Everything...