Word: star
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thomas and Rick Moranis. The McKenzie brothers hosted The Great White North, a commentary show with topics ranging from Canada's geography to tutorials on how to trick beer companies into giving you a free case by stuffing a mouse in a bottle. The McKenzie brothers went on to star in commercials for Pizza Hut and, not surprisingly, Molson, North America's oldest brewery. (See SCTV in the 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME...
...extraordinary may be too understated a descriptor for the discovery reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature: an international team led by Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau has spotted a "super-Earth," a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. "It's spectacular," says Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who is the world's most prolific planet hunter and is credited with discovering 70 of the first 100 exoplanets. "It's a top-of-the-top discovery in the quest for Earth...
...looking for a world where life might thrive, a planet must be at the right temperature for water to exist in liquid form. So it needs to orbit its star in the so-called habitable zone, a "Goldilocks" location that allows a planet to be neither too hot nor too cold. In that respect, GJ 1214b is again a near miss. Its surface temperature hovers at a sweltering 190°C (374°F), which is well above the boiling point of water, at least in Earth's atmospheric pressure. Fortunately, GJ 1214b's atmosphere makes the pressure...
Astronomers were further able to estimate the planet's makeup by calculating its size, based on the amount of light that GJ 1214b blocked when it passed in front of its star, as well as its mass (6.6 times Earth's mass), based on the wobble in the wavelength of starlight caused by GJ 1214b's gravitational pull on its star. That analysis revealed the new planet's density: about one-third of Earth's. Because water has a much lower density than rock, astronomers figured that the "most plausible scenario is a planet made mostly of water, with...
...Harvard, according to the article, Bernanke was an "academic star," graduating summa cum laude after discovering "that he could no longer get straight A's without studying." (maybe we should try that...