Word: vb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...object discovered by McCarthy and his colleagues-Frank Low of the University of Arizona and Ronald Probst of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson-has been dubbed VB 8B and is some 600 million miles from the star it orbits. It is visible only through powerful telescopes. Although it is nine-tenths the size of Jupiter, its mass is ten to 50 times greater. It is also a good deal warmer: 2,000° F, in contrast to Jupiter's -240°, or as Gatewood put it, "as hot as a Pittsburgh blast furnace...
...sighting of VB 8B was made using a technique known as speckle interferometry, which eliminates most of the distortion that the earth's atmosphere causes to the faint emissions of light from so distant a body. Instead of taking one infrared exposure, the astronomers snapped 10,000 quick shots. A computer then blended all these shots into a composite image...