Word: van
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years, CBS has been trying to find a worthy contender for NBC's Today show. Veterans and beginners were thrown into the 7-9 a.m. time slot: Walter Cronkite, Dick Van Dyke, Mike Wallace, Will Rogers Jr., Jimmy Dean. The only stayer was a kiddie show, Captain Kangaroo. Finally, CBS limited itself to a half-hour Morning News, which concentrated on national and foreign affairs...
Undaunted by so formidable an obstacle, Astronomer Peter van de Kamp, the director of the Sproul Observatory at Swarthmore (Pa.) College, set out 31 years ago to search for dark companions of nearby stars. His long effort has been well rewarded. Last week the Dutch-born, 67-year-old astronomer an nounced the first "solid evidence" that there is a system of planets other than the solar system. He has detected two planets circling Barnard's star, some 35 trillion miles away from the earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus...
Stubborn Search. Van de Kamp and his assistants found the Barnard plan ets by using a classical astronomical technique: searching for irregularities in the path of a celestial body, a wobble that might be caused by the gravitational pull of a dark, unseen companion. As early as 1844, for example, astronomers concluded from wobbles in the path of Sirius that the bright star was accompanied through space by a star too faint to be seen from earth. The same technique has been used to establish that several other apparently single stars are actually members of a binary sys tem; they...
...when Van de Kamp started a concentrated search for these unseen companions, he and his assistants began to photograph at regular intervals some 40 of the stars closest to the earth, plotting their paths and looking for wobbles. They devoted most of their attention to Barnard's star because it is the closest star visible in the Northern Hemisphere and moves across the sky ; rapidly in relation to the distant "fixed" stars, making it relatively easy for astronomers to trace its path. "We concentrated and gambled on one object," i says Van de Kamp. "It was one of those...
Stubborn indeed. It was not until 1956 and thousands of photographic plates later that Van de Kamp was able to distinguish a significant disturbance in the path of Barnard's star. And it was not until 1963 that he had analyzed his results carefully enough to announce that a planet-sized object rather than a dim star was orbiting Barnard. "I wanted to tread slowly," he explains. "The Zeitgeist-the spirit of the time-had to be just right...