Word: brightly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...number of people were actually seen leaving Bright. "Midterms," explained one. "Party," said another. They walked away from Bright knowing full well what the outcome would be, knowing full well that for the third time in five years the Harvard hockey team would be advancing to the Final Four...
...before turning in, he made up his mind to develop the last photographic plate. Lifting the plate from the developing tank, he scrutinized it, then stopped short. There, near a feature within the LMC known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula nebula, was an unfamiliar bright spot...
...problem, explains Princeton Physics Professor Joseph Taylor, is not that a neutron star emits no light but that it is only ten miles across. "If you were close enough," he says, "you'd see a very bright light. But over interstellar distances, it wouldn't be visible." The solution is suggested by the name astronomers gave to known neutron stars: pulsars. The spinning neutron stars have intense magnetic fields generating precisely spaced electromagnetic pulses that can be picked up by radio telescopes. Some 440 pulsars have been discovered so far, all of them thought to be remnants of Type...
...within hours of 1987A's discovery, an extraordinary array of scientific brainpower and hardware was brought to bear on the celestial phenomenon. Throughout the southern hemisphere (the supernova is not visible in northern skies), in South America, Australia and South Africa, telescopes of every size were focused on the bright newcomer in the Large Magellanic Cloud. NASA promptly ordered some of its satellites to do the same. On its way to a rendezvous with Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft pointed its two ultraviolet-light detectors at the supernova. The Solar Max satellite turned its attention from its primary...
...shell is causing it to cool, thus shifting the wavelength of the emitted light more deeply into the red end of the visible spectrum. Also surprising was 1987A's low luminosity. "If it had lived up to its initial expectations," says Williams, "it should have increased its brightness to a magnitude of around 1 to 0." (A lower number means a brighter star; Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a magnitude of -1.5.) That would have made it look nearly as bright as the brightest stars in the night sky. Instead, the supernova rose only to a magnitude...