Word: asteroids
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nearer to earth, IRAS identified at least five new comets and spotted a "miniplanet" only 1.2 miles in diameter, possibly the cadaver of a comet, circling within the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury. IRAS also uncovered some bands of fine dust spread over 100 million miles in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The dust may be the debris of collisions between asteroids...
...mysterious extinction: radiation from an exploding star, a reversal of the earth's magnetic field, a global epidemic, even the destruction of eggs by small mammals. Colbert, skeptical of all the theories, is especially critical of the latest and most popular explanation: the earth, struck by a giant asteroid, kicked up a huge volume of dust, reducing sunlight and killing off the plants that dinosaurs ate. Colbert points out that new finds in Montana show that the animals were dying well before the asteroid hit. Says he: "We probably shall never know why these fabulous reptiles, so long...
Professional astronomers are not above sentiment. Caltech's Charles Kowal, who has found scores of heavenly bodies, from supernovas to moonlets, christened one asteroid Napolitania, after Naples, Italy, his wife's home town. Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics called another Nancy, for his wife. Lowell Observatory's Edward Bowell, in what is admittedly a minority view, sees nothing wrong with someone seeking immortality by hitching his moniker to a star. After all, he says, "nobody owns the stars, do they...
...better washing machine; as veteran readers of science fiction might suspect, the devices become complex enough to experience mental illness, hire their own laundresses and attempt a takeover of the world. Even outer space is being ruined by man's ability to visit it. Graffiti flourish in the asteroid belt: IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT ON THIS HERE METEORITE...
...invisible hand that prompted Skylab to scatter its debris over Western Australia, not rush-hour Manhattan. Even transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs-an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself-the lightning...