Word: dust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quiet for the next half-minute or so. Huddled on rooftops and in the doorways of nearby row houses, flak-jacketed police officers put their hands over their ears. Then there was an orange flash and a powerful explosion that sent wood, metal and a cloud of dust flying into the air. Said a resident of adjacent Pine Street: "The blast didn't just shake the windows, it shook our entire house...
...South Vietnamese army, though rumored to have ties with the Viet Cong Communist insurgents. Under the new regime he enjoys a token position, but no power. Now he ruminated about shortages--food and gasoline and electricity--in a grand old house that was half empty, thick with dust, and stifling under a broken...
...Cantabs, however, won't be seeing any boats seeded higher than number-five Penn the same Quakers who were left in the dust of the Harvard-Navy competition) until Sunday's afternoon finals...
...that so gigantic an orbit had never been recorded for two companion stars, and with good reason. If the sun and its presumed partner were actually three light-years (18 trillion miles) apart, they said, the gravitational attraction between them would be so feeble that a passing star or dust cloud would have bumped Nemesis out of orbit long ago, certainly before it could come back through the Oort cloud a dozen times. Says Shoemaker, who has been something of an impartial judge in the periodicity controversy: "I give this idea less than a 1% chance of being correct...
Most experts agree with Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple, who characterized comets as "dirty snowballs" consisting largely of ice and mineral-rich dust. Comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud, a distant shell of icy debris believed to surround the solar system and extend out some 10 trillion miles from the sun. Passing stars sometimes dislodge snowballs from the cloud, which can sprout the classic luminous tails of gas and dust as they plunge toward the sun. Most comets whip around the sun and head back out of the solar system. Some, like Halley's, periodically return. But others...