Word: dwarf
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...packed ball of neutrons. Incredible as it seems, that ball, which is more massive than the sun, is only ten miles or so in diameter and is so dense that a cubic inch would weigh 100 billion tons on earth. Its partner in the celestial dance is a white dwarf, a dying star once comparable in size and mass to the sun that has burned up its fuel and shrunk to about three times the size of the earth. But the dwarf still glows like an ember as it slowly radiates away the last of its heat, and, while nowhere...
...close together, and the fireworks begin. The monumental gravity of the neutron star raises such high tides on its companion that gases are torn wholesale from the white dwarf's surface and pulled into orbit around the neutron star, forming a so-called accretion disk. Some of that material continuously spirals down to smash into the surface of the neutron star -- at a rate of a trillion tons a second -- striking so violently that it literally explodes. Says Co-Discoverer William Priedhorsky of Los Alamos National Laboratory: "A neutron star can convert about 10% of the mass that falls...
...quake, El Salvador received $52 million in aid from the U.S. ($350 million more has been recommended by the U.S. embassy) and was promised $130 million from Italy and $50 million from West Germany. Many other countries and private agencies chipped in immediately, but the costs of full reconstruction dwarf their contributions...
...said, is the maximum estimate by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of those who have used cocaine within the previous month, among them many who take the drug only occasionally or are trying it for the first, and perhaps last, time. Said Weisman: "The figures for alcohol abuse dwarf those of all illicit drugs." Taking a swipe at his own employer, he added, "Nor are drugs, as U.S. News & World Report puts it, 'the nation's No. 1 menace.' Not while we still have poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, malnutrition, murder, and the Soviet Union...
...grew 150 ft. high and lived 1,000 years. "You can read the rings -- they look modern, like a lush forest area logged fairly recently," says Paleobotanist James Basinger of the University of Saskatchewan. "But then ) you look around, and you're in a desert. The only trees are dwarf willows one and two inches high." The sparse growth surrounding the half square mile of fallen trees is not surprising: the location is Axel Heiberg Island, less than 700 miles from the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, an arid, frigid region hardly conducive to the growth of any vegetation...