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POPSVenetia Phair dies at 90; as a girl, she named Pluto Her grandfather was Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He relayed the suggestion to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, who on that day was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where possible names for the planet were being discussed. Turner then passed on the suggestion to Clyde W. Tombaugh, who made the discovery at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. When the name was publicly announced May 1, 1930, Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note. (The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.) "This was unheard of then. As a grandfather, he liked to have an excuse for generosity," she told the BBC in 2006.
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POPSYoungest Exploded Star In The Milky Way Is Discovered
It turns out, Green and his team came across the remnants, now called G1.9+0.3, more than 20 years ago using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in Socorro, NM, and estimated the object’s age to be 400-1,000 years old. It is near the center of the Milky Way, some 25,000 light-years from Earth. By comparing notes, the astronomers learned the images taken more than two decades apart documented the expansion of debris from the star's explosion. The images taken in 2007 were about 16 percent larger than the ones taken in 1985. "This is a huge difference," said Reynolds. "It means the explosion debris is expanding very quickly, which in turn means the object is much younger than we originally thought." Reynolds also observed the object with the VLA radio telescope to confirm the supernova remnant's rapid expansion. Unlike visible-light telescopes, radio and X-ray telescopes can penetrate the thick clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy.
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POPSWinston Churchill: First Man on the Moon. Gavin Quirk, of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, which commissioned the survey in conjunction with the Royal Astronomical Society, said: "It's a bit of a worry to find that children don't know who the first man on the moon is, let alone that they don't know who led the country to victory in the Second World War. "And I think it is definitely time to get back to the classroom if our school children think of Mars firstly as a chocolate bar."
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POPSEclipse Leaves Sky Gazers Over The Moon The colour of the Moon during an eclipse is not always the same, however. "It depends on the dust content of the Earth's atmosphere and perhaps the level of cloud," says Massey. "The red colour was certainly very intense and perhaps a little darker than I was expecting." Providing the local skies were clear, the deepest part of the eclipse was visible from all of Europe and Africa, and in Asia westward of central China. It was also visible in central and eastern North America and all of South America. Up to three lunar eclipses, including partial eclipses, can happen each year. The next total one will occur on 28 August 2007
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