Word: interstellar
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...Interstellar Clouds...
...Ball's team discovered the compounds in a cloud near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. "We are slowly getting hints of the chemistry of interstellar space clouds," he said...
...earth's and 100,000 gauss for the strongest fields detected around ordinary stars). Indeed, if a spaceship ever came within 1,000,000 miles of the star, it would be hopelessly stalled by its magnetic field. Still unconvinced, Kemp and Swedlund considered other factors-stray molecules in interstellar space, for example -that might have distorted the dwarf's light. But repeated observations produced the same results. Finally, Columbia University Astronomers Roger Angel and John Landstreet, told of the strange readings atop Pine Mountain, quickly verified them with more powerful telescopes and slightly different techniques at Arizona...
Nebular Dust. Actually, that business has a promising future. Besides illuminating the complex mechanisms of stellar evolution and the building of elements, it could yield important clues to the origin of the universe. By measuring the effect on interstellar molecules of the so-called background radiation* (believed to be the faint remnant of the "big bang" that, according to one theory, created the universe), astronomers may learn more about the primordial explosion. Most intriguing of all, the molecules could provide tantalizing evidence of lifebuilding far from earth...
Until the discovery of complex interstellar molecules, astronomers were convinced that ultraviolet radiation and cosmic rays would quickly disintegrate any stray organic molecules that might form in deep space. Now they know that such molecules-which are essential to terrestrial life-can survive between the stars, apparently shielded by nebular dust. Indeed, Radio Astronomer David Buhl, one of those who found formaldehyde last year, thinks that organic molecules exist in considerable abundance in interstellar space. If so, he says, "life similar to ours" may well have evolved elsewhere among the 100 billion stars of the Milky...