Word: clouding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time it took to type this out, mankind had its first radioactive mushroom cloud, and nothing would ever be the same. Project Director Oppenheimer realized this immediately, and his reach into Hindu scripture has become famous: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Even before the test blast, Danish Physicist Niels Bohr foresaw a fundamental change in the relationships among nation-states. Both Hitler and Churchill, on the other hand, failed to grasp the political consequences of the new energy. "After all," said the Prime Minister, "this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present...
...that moment, in the distant patch -- actually a small galaxy now known as the Large Magellanic Cloud -- a supergiant star glowed fiercely, showing no outward signs of its impending doom. Suddenly, in a cataclysmic blast, it exploded, brightening until it outshone a hundred million stars the size of the sun. In every direction the intense light, traveling at 186,282 miles per second, radiated out into the universe, some of it heading toward a minor planet orbiting an average star in the neighboring and much larger Milky Way galaxy...
...telescope at Las Campanas Observatory on a windblown 8,000- ft. mountaintop in northern Chile and was reflected into a camera set up by Ian Shelton, a Canadian astronomer. Shelton, 29, assigned to the observatory by the University of Toronto, had been taking long exposures of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a task that occupied him until 2:40 a.m. on Feb. 24. Recalls Shelton: "I decided enough was enough. It was time to go to bed." But before turning in, he made up his mind to develop the last photographic plate. Lifting the plate from the developing tank...
...sure that there was some plate flaw on it," Shelton says, "but it was no flaw." He walked outside, looked up at the Large Magellanic Cloud and, without a telescope or binoculars, clearly saw the exploding star, or supernova. While hundreds of supernovas occurring in incredibly distant galaxies have been spotted by powerful telescopes, this was the first one visible to the naked eye since 1885. More important, at a distance of only 170,000 light-years, it was the brightest one to appear in terrestrial skies since...
...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 target, the sun, to measure the gamma...