33-inch-tall actor Mihaly “Michu” Meszaros, who donned the furry suit of the title character in the late ’80s sci-fi spoof Alf, dies at the age of 76. In any instances where the character was shown from head to toe, Meszaros wore a full-body suit, though in many cases the character was a puppet shown only from the chest up, operated and voiced by show (and character) creator Paul Fusco. To maintain the illusion, Meszaros was credited as a “personal assitant” to Alf for his appearances. A circus performer since the early 1970s, Meszaros also appeared in Big Top Pee-Wee, Waxwork, Warlock: The Armageddon, and the TV series Dear John.
Pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose research led to the discovery of dark matter, dies at the age of 88. In the 1960s and ’70s, Rubin found that the rate of galaxies’ rotation could not be accounted for unless galaxies contained, on average, ten times more mass than could be distributed among the visible stars in that galaxy. This research led her to propose the theory of dark matter in the 1970s, though she tried for many years to find – or at least rule out – any other possible explanations to the galaxy rotation problem.
