Word of the Day
Oort cloud
noun
a region of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in which billions of comets move in nearly circular orbits unless one is pulled into a highly eccentric elliptical orbit by a passing star.
Why the Museum of Science chose Oort cloud
Earlier this year, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph one of the largest comets ever observed. Thought to have originated from the Oort cloud, this comet was twice the size of Rhode Island, measuring 80 miles across with a nucleus 50 times larger than other known comets! Watch the video below to learn more about the Oort cloud from award-winning science communicator Maynard Okereke, better known as the Hip Hop M.D.
More about Oort cloud
The Oort cloud is the namesake of Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who first proposed the cloud’s existence. The surname Oort comes from Middle Dutch ort or oort, meaning “edge, corner, outermost point,” which makes the name Oort cloud serendipitously perfect for an area at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. Oort cloud was coined in the 1970s.
EXAMPLE OF OORT CLOUD USED IN A SENTENCE
Because the Oort cloud is so far away and contains such dim objects, we may never know just how many comets are secretly lurking out there.
FUN FACT ABOUT OORT CLOUD
While the Kuiper belt is 30–50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and contains dwarf planets, the Oort cloud is a whopping 2,000–200,000 AU from the Sun and contains only asteroid-like objects. Learn more fun facts at the Museum of Science.
pantoum
noun
a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following one.
More about pantoum
Pantoum, “a Malay verse featuring repeated lines,” is a borrowing from French of Malay origin. Malay has two widely used standardized forms: Standard Malay, which is an official language in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian, spoken by about 300 million people in Indonesia. Because Malay is a member of the Austronesian language family, it is distantly related to Hawaiian, Malagasy (in Madagascar), Maori (in New Zealand), and Tagalog (in the Philippines). The Malay source of pantoum is pantun, with the change from n to m because of a printer’s error in 19th-century France. Pantoum was first recorded in English in the early 1880s.
EXAMPLE OF PANTOUM USED IN A SENTENCE
The regular repetition of lines in pantoums means that poets have to be clever about context and meaning, or readers may find the verses rather stale.
democracy
noun
government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
More about democracy
Democracy, “government by the people,” comes from the Middle French noun démocratie, which comes via Latin from Greek dēmokratía, “popular government.” Democracy was first recorded in English in the early 1500s.