Word: centaurus
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Potter sees science as a matter of measurements. Accordingly, he utilizes distance, time, and size as our tour guides. First, we travel outwards from Earth, flying by the planets, over the Kuiper belt, through the Oort cloud (what names!), and past the Orion Nebula, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster and beyond. Then we venture downward in magnitude - atoms and quarks and gluons and strings and Higgs bosons. There are also journeys forward from the big bang and the creation of Earth. In between, he stuffs his pages with musings on scientific history, philosophy, and personalities...
...without rap sheets and, in many cases, with their novel thinking. Lynda Clemmons, who at Enron pioneered weather derivatives (financial products used to hedge climate-related risk like energy consumption) did the same for XL Weather & Energy. Top Enron trader John Arnold now runs an energy hedge fund, Centaurus, and a group of those pioneering risk specialists started Mobius Risk Group. Enron's top talent might have had a reputation for arrogance, but in the stodgy world of utilities, Enron was full of ideas--many of them perfectly legal...
...make up for lost time, the crew crammed even more work into their already difficult round-the-clock schedule. An X-ray telescope zoomed in on the distant stellar clusters of Virgo and Centaurus, recording the precise contours of their massive radiation fields. Toward the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum, another telescope, an infrared instrument, mapped the invisible heat of the Milky Way. A small satellite called the plasma diagnostics package was suspended from the ship's giant remote arm to measure "ripples," or the wake that the shuttle causes in the earth's ionosphere. At several points...
...past few years, astronomers have uncovered the existence of the Great Wall, a huge conglomeration of galaxies stretching across 500 million light-years of space; the Great Attractor, a mysterious concentration of mass hauling much of the local universe off in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus; Great Voids, where few galaxies can be found; and galaxies caught in the throes of formation a mere billion years after the Big Bang, when they should not yet exist. "If we really trust the data," exclaims Stanford astrophysicist Andrei Linde, "then we are in disaster, and we must do something...
When Caltech Astronomer Charles Kowal first examined the photographic plate that he had exposed atop Mount Palomar last month, he was openly skeptical. At the edge of the small, irregular galaxy that he was studying in the constellation Centaurus, he saw a large burst of light brighter than the entire galaxy itself that had not been there before. Had a stray asteroid wandered into the telescope's field of view? Closer inspection quickly revealed that the light came not from a nearby asteroid, but from a far more awesome heavenly phenomenon: a supernova, the explosive death of a giant...
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