Word: cosmic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rich in iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting to earth from a nearby supernova (exploding star). The core material seemed too deep to come to the surface, and further analysis ruled out a supernova as the source, so father and son concluded that the iridium had been left by a giant asteroid hitting the earth...
...surface. The most recent naysayers are Dartmouth Geologists Charles Officer and Charles Drake, who reported in Science on their studies of two other telltale elements in the clay boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. They found that the levels of arsenic and antimony correspond to decidedly terrestrial, not cosmic, concentrations...
Among the various astronomers who considered and promptly rejected the galactic carrousel notion was California's Muller, a scientist obsessed by periodicity. If a familiar cosmic mechanism could not account for the cyclic nature of extinctions, he decided, something completely different would have to do. During Christmas break in 1983, Muller and fellow Astronomers Marc Davis of Berkeley and Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center...
...search in the north. And at JPL, Astrophysicist Thomas Chester, chief of the I.R.A.S. data team, is sifting through recorded I.R.A.S. transmissions looking for Nemesis and other unusual objects. Although I.R.A.S. operated for only ten months in 1983 before dying, it managed to chug out data on 250,000 cosmic objects, which scientists have just begun to analyze. Chester is hunting for cool stars that may have suspiciously shifted. To date he has identified 5,000 likely objects and narrowed the list to 15, which he plans to photograph half a year apart to check further if they are candidates...
Every 15 or 20 years someone with a note pad and pencil arrives in Sauk Centre, Minn., and asks cosmic questions: How's it goin'? What's the mood? Whither America? These visitations have been going on since 1920, when a native son named Sinclair Lewis published a best-selling satire called Main Street about a town he dubbed Gopher Prairie, which no one ever seriously doubted was inspired by Sauk Centre. Gopher Prairie was drawn as smug, suspicious and stuck in its ways, and that was a liberating vision for a newly urban America about to plunge into...