Word: cloudly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Others tried to outrun the deadly cloud, overturning tables, chairs and cooking pots as they fled their mudbrick huts. Some desperately stripped off their dresses and shirts to escape the burning caused by the gas. Later they were found only yards from their crumpled clothes, overcome by asphyxiation. "I saw people dying, people dead all around," recalled Ephrem Ngong Kum, 24, of Su-Bum, a village some 200 miles northwest of Yaounde, Cameroon's capital. "They died in the houses, in streets, outside the forest, in the stream." Fellow Villager Chia David Wambong remembered a warm feeling...
Astronomers for decades have offered a persuasive argument to explain how stars are born: one of the huge, tenuous clouds of gas and dust that pervade the galaxy collapses under its own weight, heats up dramatically and bursts into nuclear flame. Until now though, this has been only a model. But in a report to be published in the Oct. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of astronomers will announce that they finally have supporting evidence. Says Charles Lada, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona: "We've detected what we believe to be the actual collapse...
...been difficult to find a newborn star because outer regions of the collapsing cloud hide the new star within. Ordinary light cannot penetrate the haze. The long-wavelength infrared and radio waves produced by a warming embryonic star can pierce it, however, just as a radar signal can cut through the densest...
...astronomers then switched from infrared to radio observations, using the twelve-meter radio telescope atop Kitt Peak, Ariz. Reason: infrared radiation gives information on the cloud's overall temperature, but radio waves carry more detailed data on the motion within. Interstellar clouds are made up of dozens of different types of molecules, and each emits radio waves of a specific frequency when heated or otherwise "excited." By tuning their telescope to the right frequency, astronomers monitor the behavior of different molecules and consequently learn more about conditions within the cloud...
According to Arizona Astronomer Erick Young, "We chose carbon monosulfide because it is a probe of the densest parts of these clouds." The molecule is most excited when it is most compressed. In the center of the cloud, says Lada, "we found that we were seeing carbon monosulfide in a very excited state." In the outer reaches, though, the molecules were much calmer. There was a dense core at the center of the cloud. It was also clear that there was systematic motion inside. Just as a train whistle is higher in pitch as it approaches than when it recedes...