Word: dwarf
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Except for varying brilliance, all sources of stellar light look much the same to the naked eye. But seen through the subtle, prying instruments of modern astronomy, those distant points of light expand into a bewildering variety of stars. Among the strangest are the dwarf novas, described by Astronomer Robert P. Kraft of Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories in the Astrophysical Journal...
...Dwarf novas are dim stars that have the strange habit of flaring up at irregular intervals-increasing their brightness almost 100-fold. Astronomers have often speculated about these periodic changes, but until Dr. Kraft used the great 200-inch Palomar telescope to follow 20 dwarf novas through many bright and dim cycles, no one was sure what caused them. Using telescope and spectrograph, Dr. Kraft kept track of the novas' changing temperature, light and motion. After 30 months he was able to prove that at least seven of them are double stars. The two bodies whirl around each other...
...each pair of stars, Dr. Kraft thinks, is probably a white dwarf: a star that has burned so thoroughly that it now consists chiefly of "degenerate" matter, denser than anything known on earth. This remarkable stuff weighs thousands of pounds per cubic inch. The nova's degenerate core is extremely hot, but its surface is covered with a thin, rather cool layer of normal matter. The other star of each pair is all normal matter, mostly hydrogen, and just about the same weight and size as the sun. In many cases, Dr. Kraft is sure the two stars...
...startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous [cubical] structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. . . . The Ministry . . . contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level and corresponding ramifications below. Completely did [it] dwarf the surrounding architecture. . . . The Ministry of [Health] was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. It was a place impossible to enter except through a maze of barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barrlers...
...York Yankees, a laconic onetime carpenter named Delbert Eugene Webb, 62, has made most of his millions as a builder of shopping plazas and housing projects, hotels and office skyscrapers from Tampa to San Francisco. Last week Phoenix-based Del Webb took on a job that should dwarf all his others...