Word: hydrogenating
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...folks in Rawhide Village, a subdivision near Gillette, Wyo., figured something was amiss back in February when they found they could set fire to cracks in the street. Methane, it developed, was surfacing from coal deposits below. So was stinking -- and sickening -- hydrogen sulfide. By this month, with the hydrogen sulfide causing illnesses and the methane turning into a serious fire hazard, the Campbell County commission ordered some 180 families to evacuate by July 31. "Unlike a disaster such as a flood, you can't see it," says County Commissioner Tom Ostlund, who is seeking federal disaster funds...
Quinta seems, from terrestrial observations, a promising target, and getting there is half of Lem's fun. The Eurydice is constructed in orbit around a moon of Saturn; its thermonuclear flowstream engines use hydrogen intake as fuel and can achieve a velocity of 99% the speed of light. While the scout ship Hermes, weighing a mere 180,000 tons, is sent off to reconnoiter Quinta, the Eurydice lingers in the vicinity of a black hole. When Hermes returns, the mother ship will execute an "incomprehensible maneuver called 'passage through a retrochronal toroid,' thanks to which she would reappear...
These are the theoretical scenarios. And at first 1987A seemed to be following the rules: it jumped from near invisibility to respectable brightness literally overnight, and while its wave-front speed was high, its spectrum revealed the unmistakable hydrogen-bearing signature of a Type II. But when the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite reported a rapid drop in ultraviolet light, scientists began to wonder. Says Robert Kirshner, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "The spectrum we're seeing in the ultraviolet resembles the spectrum of a Type I. That's a puzzle." Admits Texas' Wheeler: "There are some funny features...
...real trouble will begin as the sun nears the 10 billion-year mark, when the thermonuclear fires that have been burning since its birth have fused all the hydrogen fuel in the solar core into helium. As the fuel runs out, the nuclear fire will die down, and the now largely helium core -- which has been kept distended by the heat -- will begin to contract under its own gravitational pull...
...core contracts, however, its internal pressures will rise, forcing the temperature rapidly back up again until the intense heat ignites the unfused hydrogen gas surrounding the core. The interior of the sun will now be hotter than ever, a dense core of incandescent helium surrounded by a thin shell of hot, fusing hydrogen. Over the next few hundred million years, heat from the core will drive surface layers of the sun so far outward that they will cool to about two-thirds of the current 6,000 degrees C surface temperature, and redden. The sun will have become...