Word: interstellar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dense, dark and dusty hodgepodges of galactic gas and dust where, quite literally, there is nothing to see were examined by means of the invisible radiation they emit. Radio and infrared techniques now enable us to "listen" to huge interstellar clouds slowly contracting to form stars. Thus, we are now learning a great deal about the embryonic stages of stars, a subject about which the oldest science--astronomy--had been experimentally ignorant until the dawn of the 1970s...
...same radio techniques produced repeatedly surprising discoveries of rather complex molecules in the murky recesses of interstellar space. Now totaling more than 50 in number, many of these modecules are complex enough to be of some interest to biochemists. Theorists remain mystified about the severely non-terrestrial conditions that give rise to such a pharmaceutical array of chemicals, yet it does not seem inconceivable that they could be mere fragments of even larger molecules thus far undiscovered. If so, then the most startling revelation of all may be that what was once though to be a galactic wasteland is really...