Word: astrophysicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...while McCarthy's fellow scientists were clearly excited by the find, many had doubts about exactly what to call it. Astrophysicist David Black, who heads NASA'S project to search for other planetary systems, theorized that what McCarthy's team had found was actually a pair of diminutive stars, one of which failed to develop fully and became a celestial relic known as a brown dwarf. Benjamin Zuckerman, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the discovery "not quite a planet and not quite a star." George Gatewood, director of the University...
DIED. Martin Ryle, 66, British astrophysicist who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics for his development of radio astronomy techniques that extended mankind's reach 6 billion miles into the universe and led to the discovery of such intense, distant radio sources as pulsars and quasars; of pneumonia; in Cambridge, England. His major discovery, aperture synthesis, provided a method of focusing many small, separate radio antennas to fill in the gaps in broad-band radio waves, allowing astronomers to record tiny details, equivalent in terms of optical telescopes to reading a postage stamp on the moon...
...scientists' tentative answers have ranged from warfare between extragalactic civilizations to the total annihilation that occurs when ordinary matter meets antimatter. Now they have settled on a simpler explanation. At a gathering of more than 100 astronomers and astrophysicists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, most of the experts agreed that the starbursts, at least those emitting X rays, are distant thermonuclear explosions. In effect, nature is setting off its own H-bombs. University of California Astrophysicist Stanford Woosley, the conference chairman, said: "It is as if an object 100,000 times brighter than the sun were...
Nevertheless, some theoretical chinks remain. According to "Parker's Limit," a theory developed by University of Chicago Astrophysicist Eugene Parker, monopoles would draw energy from nearby magnetic fields as they traveled through the galaxy. Cabrera's one event in only 185 days is a very high rate of detection. It suggests that there are many more monopoles zipping around than our galaxy's magnetic field can properly support...
...English astrophysicist Steven Hawking, who spent the last two weeks at Harvard lecturing and meeting with researchers, has devoted most of his life to studying these gashes in the fabric of space and time. I've always wanted to understand why the world is what it is and how it works," says Hawking, now a successor to Sir Isaac Newton as Lucastan Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Since, according to Hawking, "we already know completely the laws that govern normal matter," his goal is to extend such knowledge to extreme conditions. Nothing is more extreme than a black hole...