Word: astrophysicists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...deflated NASA's universe. "I don't believe a word of it," snapped Caltech's Maarten Schmidt, who in 1963 identified quasars as the most distant objects ever seen by man. "A bunch of nonsense," said Mount Palomar Astronomer Allan Sandage. "It's pure chauvinism." Astrophysicist A. G. W. Cameron of NASA's own Goddard Institute for Space Studies was equally blunt: "This strikes me as a complete misunderstanding...
Some scientists are hoping that unexpected clues in Apollo's samples will lead to new and more satisfying theories about the moon's origin. Complains Astrophysicist Ralph Baldwin: "There is no existing theory that gives a satisfactory explanation of the earth-moon system as we know it." Nobel Laureate Chemist Harold Urey wryly notes that it would be easier to prove that the moon did not exist than to get agreement on how it came...
...discoveries made a prophet in his own time of Cornell Astrophysicist Thomas Gold, who last spring predicted that pulsars with faster rates would soon be discovered and that some might well be detected in the process of slowing down. The findings also supported the contention that pulsars are actually neutron stars, strange celestial bodies that were mathematically postulated by scientists in the 1930s but have not yet been proved to exist...
According to theory, neutron stars are formed during the cataclysmic processes that occur in a supernova. They consist entirely of neutrons densely packed into dim spheres that are about ten miles in diameter and weigh more than 10 billion lbs. per cubic inch. Astrophysicist Gold believes that a neutron star has an in credibly intense magnetic field that traps ionized gases expelled from the supernova. As the star and its magnetic field spin, the outmost of the trapped gases are whirled at almost the speed of light until they break away, producing an intense beam of radio waves-the regularly...
...notion that they may be neutron stars: tiny bodies of densely packed neutrons, which are atomic particles having no electrical charge. The only thing that seems reasonably certain is that the pulsars are not much larger than Earth and are 50 to 400 light-years away. Says Astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron of Yeshiva University, the conference chairman: "It's going to be a damn hard job to make any theory fill the bill...