Word: dwarfed
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...Dwarfs & Princelings. In Madrid his colors gradually brightened, but the lyric realism remained. While Rubens, who spent nine months at the Spanish court, tried to puff up his noble and royal subjects by surrounding them with allegorical figures, Velásquez painted them exactly as they were. His figures stand out against subdued or neutral backgrounds, but whether dwarf or princeling or court jester, they are full-fledged individuals, painted without adornment and without malice...
...stellar mortician" because of his passionate interest in dying stars. Luyten does not mind the ribbing; the faint pinpoints of light that he studies are the end products of stellar evolution and hold many secrets of the universe. Recently, Astronomer Luyten found the dimmest star yet: a minuscule "white dwarf that emits 50,000 times less light than the sun, yet probably contains an equal or greater mass. "This one," he says, "looks to be at the end of the line...
...Companion. The first white dwarf was found when mid-19th century astronomers noticed that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, wobbles slightly, and theorized that it revolves around another star too close and dim to be seen separately. Later astronomers, using more sophisticated telescopes to eliminate the glare, finally picked out the other star nestling close to Sirius, and gradually accumulated some surprising information about...
...Luyten does not know definitely the size or mass of his latest white dwarf, but he believes that it weighs at least ten tons, or 20,000 lbs., per cubic inch. It could conceivably weigh as much as 1,000 tons per cubic inch, in which case a chunk of star no bigger than a grapefruit would weigh more than the 84,000-ton Queen Elizabeth...
...ultimate fate of a white dwarf, says Dr. Luyten, is to grow slowly dimmer and smaller. After billions of years, its light will change from white to yellow, then to red. Eventually it will die, and the product will be a black dwarf: a cold sphere of degenerate matter weighing as much as the sun, but smaller than most planets and giving no light...