Word: meteorically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...1987A, provided further insight into Type II supernovas. A group led by Chemist Edward Anders and Physicist Roy Lewis, both of the University of Chicago, revealed that they had discovered an abundance of submicroscopic diamonds in a meteorite that fell in Mexico in 1969. While the impact of a meteor slamming into the earth creates enough pressure to crystallize carbon into diamonds, the tiny samples found by the Chicago team apparently resulted from an ancient supernova. The evidence: they contained atomic forms of the gas xenon different from the kind found on earth or detected...
...blast: India has launched a nuclear attack. They immediately order their bombers, armed with atomic bombs, to strike back at India, which responds in kind. Only later do the surviving officials learn of their mistake. The object that exploded over Karachi was not a nuclear weapon but a large meteor hurtling in from outer space...
...like the plot for a made-for-TV movie, Eugene Shoemaker, a respected U.S. Geological Survey scientist, is concerned that just such an event--and an unwarranted reaction--could occur. Shoemaker expressed his fears at a recent Baltimore meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU): "The effect of a meteor blast appears the same as a high- altitude nuclear explosion," he said. "If this happens in the wrong place, people will think they've been nuked...
...meteor were to burst in the atmosphere tomorrow, Shoemaker says, "the Soviets and the U.S. would know what it was" and not react militarily. Their detectors could distinguish between a nuclear explosion, which generates million-degree temperatures, X rays and gamma rays, and an exploding meteor, which would produce considerably lower temperatures and no deadly radiation. But smaller nations, unaware of the nature of the blast, might react violently. Says Shoemaker: "Suppose it happens over Syria or Pakistan?" He proposes that the U.S. immediately try to determine whether the explosion was of cosmic origin and notify the affected nation...
...recently concluded Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had as a highlight Wilson's theater piece The Golden Windows, an elusive love story with a Beckett-like nonsense text and some startling stage pictures, including an earthquake that sunders the stage and a dazzling meteor shower. Just as the West German city of Darmstadt nurtured the post-Webern twelve-tone composers after World War II, so has the Brooklyn Academy offered a safe haven for the minimalists from SoHo...