Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wispy Hydrogen. Tugged by the gravity of a passing star, chunks of the Oort debris are occasionally pulled into orbits closer to the sun. Then perturbed further by the gravity of a massive planet, probably Saturn or Jupiter, they often enter a highly elliptical orbit that swings them close to the sun and then so far out again that they do not return to the vicinity of the sun for years. Some, like Encke's comet, which makes a pass around the sun every 3.3 years, have relatively small orbits. Others loop out billions of miles from...
...Such clouds may become Jovian in proportions, with a diameter of more than 100,000 miles, though they are very thinly dispersed. In 1969 and 1970, NASA'S Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-2) discovered that the coma of comets is surrounded by a still larger ball of wispy hydrogen that may far exceed the sun's diameter of 860,000 miles...
...port in Nature that the black hole's passage through the atmosphere would have left a deep blue trail of ionized particles like the streak seen by witnesses near the 1908 blast. Finally, the energy released by the black hole (comparable to that of a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb) could easily have caused the observed damage without leaving material residue or a crater...
...winds build and the tropical storm edges away from its birthplace, it releases enormous stores of heat. In a full-fledged hurricane, which has winds of 75 m.p.h. or more, as much energy may be released in a single day as by the detonation of 400 20-megaton hydrogen bombs...
...though the discovery of human-like artifacts encoded as 3-D blueprints in crystal columns suggests that Rama is some sort of vast ark in search of a new home. But in fact its only interest in the solar system is to tank up on the sun's hydrogen before rounding the next cosmic bend without so much as thank you. The probability that a vastly superior intelligence would be totally indifferent to man and his doings is indeed what Clarke is writing about. But the theme is a bit too thinly spread between those two familiar...