Word: gas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. What happened during the Dark Ages set the stage for the cosmos we see today, with its billions of magnificent galaxies and everything that they contain--the shimmering gas clouds, the fiery stars, the tiny planets, the mammoth black holes...
...start of the dark ages, there were no galaxies, no stars, no planets. Even if there had been, we wouldn't be able to spot them. That's because hydrogen-gas clouds are nearly opaque to visible light; no ordinary telescope will ever be able to see what happened afterward. Yet somehow the matter that started as a sea of individual atoms managed to transform itself into something more. So back in the early 1990s, Loeb began lobbying theorists to make a major push to deduce through computer simulations how the first stars formed. The plan was to re-create...
...other fusion reaction, the fires that powered these short-lived stars worked by forcing simple hydrogen and helium atoms to meld into heavier, more complex elements. The stars that died explosively spiked the surrounding gas clouds with elements like oxygen and carbon, which had never existed before. Billions of years later, the elements forged in stars like these would be assembled into planets, organic molecules and, ultimately, human beings. At the time, though, they served simply to change the chemistry of the clouds, allowing them to collapse into far smaller objects than they could before. The second generation of stars...
...million years after the Big Bangbefore the first stars had a chance to formthen at 100 million, 200 million or half a billion years later, you get a series of snapshots. Combine them, says Loeb, and "you'll be able to make a 3-D picture of hydrogen gas as the universe evolves. At some point, you'll start to see holes, like Swiss cheese," as the gas clouds become ionized and transparent. Precisely how the holes grow and merge over time will help determine whether the clearing out is being done by small galaxies, big black holes or something...
...Ford Motor Co. likes to boast has been that it led the way in sales of pickup trucks for 30 consecutive years now. But with pickup truck sales sagging under a combination of rising gas prices and higher interest rates, Ford's success is looking very rather brittle these days."It looks as if they rode the pickup wave too long. It's looks as if they should have gotten off before the wave crested,"says Jeff Schuster, an analyst with J.D. Power & Associates office in Troy, Mich...