Word: astrophysicist
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NCSA, one of five regional supercomputer centers established since 1985 by the National Science Foundation, is rapidly emerging as a leader in scientific graphics. Last year, for instance, Artist Donna Cox and Computer Scientist Ray Idaszak helped Caltech Astrophysicist Charles Ross Evans produce a short videotape depicting what in theory would occur in the collision of two neutron stars. To the untrained eye, the colliding stars look more like exotic flowers than a cosmic catastrophe. But the colors all have a quantitative meaning: areas colored red are ten times as dense as yellow ones, and yellow represents 100 times...
...leading journalist who was stripped of Communist Party membership in January for questioning its authority, remains a vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association. Liu has further confounded the hard-liners by retaining his post as a reporter for the People's Daily, the official Communist Party paper. Astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, dismissed as a university vice president in January, was promptly reassigned to a research job. Such moves have helped reassure China watchers that there is no second Cultural Revolution in the making...
...powerful gravity can draw gaseous matter away from its companion. In some cases, as the dwarf becomes bloated with its companion's substance, gravitational pressure triggers a fusion reaction in the captured gases, which are blown off in the explosion, resulting in a garden-variety (nonsuper) nova. According to Astrophysicist Branch, about 50 novas are observed flaring up each year in the Milky...
...core is fused into iron, the thermonuclear reactions stop. Without enough radiation pressure to sustain it, the now all-iron core, hidden under the star's outer layers, begins its final, catastrophic collapse. In the incredibly short time of just 1 second, according to University of Arizona Astrophysicist Adam Burrows, the core is compressed to more than the density of an atomic nucleus. "It's as if the earth had suddenly collapsed to the size of New York City," says Burrows. "At this point the rest of the star is oblivious. It doesn't know the core has collapsed...
Still, the theoreticians could crow that in at least one way 1987A had performed according to the script. Minutes after hearing about the supernova but before they learned of any neutrino data, Astrophysicist Bahcall and two Israeli colleagues began working on a paper predicting the number of supernova neutrinos that should have been recorded by various detectors on earth; their paper was published in last week's Nature. If the neutrinos had been recorded -- and especially if they arrived before the supernova was seen -- it would be a dramatic confirmation of current supernova theory...