Word: gaseously
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Like most gaseous chemicals, man-made or natural, that reach the stratosphere, nitrous oxide tends to stay there. Indeed, a recent National Academy of Sciences report likened the upper atmosphere "to a city whose garbage is picked up every few years instead of daily." As long as five years after it leaves the ground, N2O may finally reach altitudes of 15 miles and above, where it is broken apart by the same ultraviolet radiation that creates ozone. The resulting fragments -- called radicals -- attack and destroy more ozone molecules. Another ozone killer is methane, a carbon-hydrogen compound produced by microbes...
...been frozen out earlier. But if the temperature gets low enough, you start freezing out the rest." Indeed, ice may prove to be a central cause of the ozone hole, since it provides surfaces for a kind of chemistry only recently associated with reactions in the atmosphere. In a gaseous state, molecules bounce around and eventually some hit one another. But adding a surface for the molecules to collect on speeds up the reactions considerably...
...would Sanduleak, a blue supergiant, a star presumably in mid-life, collapse so violently? According to theory, only aging red supergiants, whose outer gaseous layers had turned from blue to red as they expanded and cooled, spawned this type of supernova. One hypothesis: SK-69 202, like other stars in the LMC, contained relatively little metal, which theorists now think may keep the outer shell of even older stars from expanding fully, thus making it glow blue rather than red as it plunged toward its thermonuclear crisis. Said University of Chicago Astrophysicist David Schramm: "It's clear that while...
Degenerate matter is so resistant to further compression that nothing much can happen to a white dwarf unless, as is common in the Milky Way, it is part of a binary star system. If it is, the white dwarf's powerful gravity can draw gaseous matter away from its companion. In some cases, as the dwarf becomes bloated with its companion's substance, gravitational pressure triggers a fusion reaction in the captured gases, which are blown off in the explosion, resulting in a garden-variety (nonsuper) nova. According to Astrophysicist Branch, about 50 novas are observed flaring up each year...
...recording truth, Klein used a wide angle to collect as much incident as possible within the frame. He favored a flash at long exposure, for its jittery harshness. He also went in for blurred images: smudged bodies in motion, heads so close to the lens that they dissolve into gaseous globes. The archetypal Klein photo is Minigang, Amsterdam Avenue, 1954. A boy with his face screwed into a fury pokes a blurry gun straight at the camera, while a young friend at his arm questions the act with his eyes. In the brief catalog that accompanies the San Diego show...