Word: dust
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trying to escape the Watergate scandal-the bungled burglary at Democratic headquarters, and then the coverup, the lies, the hush money, the demands upon subordinates to "stonewall"-Nixon finally invoked the language of Theodore Roosevelt to describe himself as "the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs. . ." Next day, the official day of resignation, he was near tears as he bade his staff farewell. He talked about his mother, "a saint," and urged his followers to be charitable. "Others may hate you," he said, "but those who hate...
Astronomers have identified fiery quasars and the wispy shadows of supernova explosions at the very edges of the known universe. Yet the core of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been an elusive stranger. Thick clouds of interstellar dust and gas absorb most of the light from the galaxy's central bulge long before it reaches planet earth, a small and distant suburb 30,000 light-years away from the Milky Way's midsection...
Astronomers have long been trying to study the center of the galaxy, using the feeble and sporadic X rays, gamma rays and other invisible electromagnetic energy that manages to seep through the celestial dust in the Milky Way. But the resulting computer-derived pictures have been too small and too blurry to provide details...
...first glance the arc looked ordinary, like colliding clouds of galactic dust or a swatch of newborn, fuzzy stars. Calculations soon ruled out both possibilities. The astronomers then wondered if the threadlike arc might be the tattered remnant of interstellar material that had been sucked into a black hole at the galaxy's center; that notion too was discarded. Explains Frank Kerr, provost of the sciences at the University of Maryland, who has studied the structure of the Milky Way since 1951: "You'd expect a black hole to be pulling in all directions, not in an isolated...
...sole force shaping the large scale of the galaxy. Now it has lost some more of its supremacy to whatever molded the giant ribbon of gas. Listening to the radio waves crackling noisily from the center of the galaxy, astronomers were sure that the bulge of dust was a maternity ward for new stars. Now the strange arc has revealed itself as one mighty source of those waves, raising the startling possibility that the middle of the Milky Way is a barren womb. Seeking to solve the mysteries, astronomers will return to the Very Large Array again and again, tracking...