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- MILESTONES, Page 23
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- DIED. Jan Oort, 92, Dutch astronomer; of complications from a
- broken hip; in Leiden, the Netherlands. One of the century's
- most eminent scientists, Oort established that the Milky Way
- galaxy rotates and that Earth's solar system lies on its
- outskirts. He did pioneering work on the "dark matter" that
- pervades the universe, and in the 1950s proposed the existence
- of the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of ice chunks lying far
- beyond Pluto, now thought to be the birthplace of comets.
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