Word: comets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...light-years from the sun, halfway to Alpha Centauri, the next nearest star. Occasionally one of the icy lumps in these outer regions is nudged toward the sun by a passing star or gas cloud. As it falls toward our world, it flares into view as a streaking comet...
...comet or an asteroid strike about 65 million years ago is the favored explanation for why dinosaurs vanished from the earth so abruptly after having dominated the planet for the preceding 70 million years. The tremendous plume of smoke and dust thrown into the atmosphere by the space intruder's impact, equivalent to perhaps a million hydrogen bombs, would have blocked out sunlight for months. The globe would have gone into a dark, deep freeze, killing first the plants and then the giant lizards that fed on them, directly or indirectly -- paving the way for mammals, and eventually humans...
...report in Science suggests that 370 million years ago, during the Late Devonian period, a comet or asteroid caused an even greater catastrophe, one that wiped out fully 70% of all marine species on earth. American and Belgian scientists have found tiny glass beads just .3 mm (.004 in.) across, embedded in underground sediments in Belgium. The beads, called microtektites, are thought to be caused when silicon and other minerals melt and then cool following either a volcanic eruption or a high-speed impact. The chemical composition of these beads seems to point much more convincingly to an impact...
Numerically, I think that this is a good year for the Red Sox. It's been seven years since the Haley's Comet," Shyam Vijay said...
...label since Charley Pride in the '60s, is a 46-year-old cardiologist from the suburbs of Washington. Mary-Chapin Carpenter has a degree in American civilization from Brown University; she drew the idea for her highly successful When Halley Came to Jackson, about the appearance of Halley's comet in Mississippi, from a line in the memoirs of Eudora Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus girl, and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing about such nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with younger men. Even the down...