Word: gamma
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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...
Over the next two months, 20 junkyard workers were exposed to various levels of radiation. According to doctors, at least four of these men received very high doses. Two of the four absorbed 100 times the maximum amount of gamma rays that U.S. nuclear workers are allowed to receive in an entire year. One of the pair has sore gums; the other suffered nosebleeds. Says one investigating doctor: "Their chances of developing cancer are probably pretty good." The junkyard laborers are not the only ones at risk. The heavily contaminated truck that Sotelo had driven sat idle for two months...
DIED. John Hoagland, 36, photographer for the Gamma-Liaison agency on assignment for Newsweek; of a gunshot wound suffered during a skirmish between government and guerrilla forces; near Suchitoto, El Salvador. Hoagland, a Central American specialist who had just been reassigned after a month's stint in Lebanon, was noted for his military knowledge and striking action photographs. He is the tenth foreign journalist killed in El Salvador in the past four years...
What makes the views from IRAS so unusual is that they provide the first look at a hitherto invisible world. Before IRAS, telescopes placed aboard spacecraft gathered either conventional "visible" light, in the range of the human eye, or higher-frequency ultraviolet radiation, X rays and gamma rays. IRAS, by contrast, operates at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum: it "sees" in the dark by detecting the long waves of infrared radiation, or heat. Since water vapor in the earth's atmosphere soaks up most infrared radiation from space, such observations until now could only be made...
...been vigilantly circling the earth, using their electronic sensors to detect radiation from surreptitious nuclear explosions outside the U.S. Though these orbital watchdogs have identified only a few suspicious events, they have accidentally uncovered a major astronomical mystery: violent outbursts of energy, in the form of X rays and gamma rays, that are observable only above the earth's atmospheric shield. Such puzzling "highenergy transients," as scientists call them, rarely last more than ten seconds, yet they pack a wallop as great as a billion billion one-megaton H-bombs.* What could possibly cause such implausibly powerful explosions...