Word: star
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...production. It's Complicated had a hefty $85 million budget; Leap Year cost just $19 million to make; Youth in Revolt, $18 million. All three will have to scramble to break even. In the bang-for-a-buck category, the phenomenon remains The Blind Side, the sports-inspirational drama starring Sandra Bullock. Still in the top seven after eight weeks of release, the movie has now earned $219.2 million on a $29 million budget. It's now the all-time top grosser in the based-on-a-true-story genre (unless you count The Passion of the Christ...
...standard, that is, but Avatar's. Records have fallen, and will continue to topple. Currently seventh on the all-time list of domestic moneymakers, Avatar should pass Star Wars: Phantom Menace ($431.1 million), E.T. ($435.1 million) and Shrek 2 ($441.1 million) in a few days, and by next weekend it will overtake the original Star Wars ($461 million) for third place. That leaves only The Dark Knight ($533.3 million) and the all-time champ, Cameron's own Titanic ($600.7 million). In worldwide gross, Avatar is just as impressive: it made another $300 million or so this past week...
When astronomers began spotting planets around distant stars in the mid-1990s, they were baffled. Many of these early discoveries involved worlds as big as Jupiter or even bigger - but they orbited their stars so tightly that their "years" were just days long. Nobody could imagine how a Jupiter or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas - which makes up most of such a planet's mass - out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it could ever coalesce...
...sense, except for one tiny problem: this same model also suggested that a little world like Earth shouldn't exist at all; it (or more precisely, the moon-size proto-planets that eventually assembled into Earth) should have spiraled into the sun more than 4 billion years ago. A star might not gobble a Jupiter whole when it moves close enough, but it could surely swallow a canapé like proto-Earth...
...orbits. Exactly where those orbits lie depends on all sorts of factors peculiar to a given planetary system - how much material there is in the original proto-planetary disk, how much of that is dust and how much is gas, how big the dust grains are, how hot the star is and more. That's one reason we should expect each solar system to look a little bit different. Which, as it turns out, they...