Word: meteorically
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Sontag doesn't own a TV, though she did rent one last month to please a houseguest. (Regarding it with the look of a bird that has found a meteor plunked in her nest, she shrugs, "I haven't turned it on yet.") She also has no phone-answering machine, no word processor and, in most of her two-bedroom New York City duplex, no air conditioning. The coolest spot in the place is likely to be the sun-room that opens onto a small terrace. That was where she spent much of the past summer, with its Egyptian heat...
...many as 120 are believed to be performing military missions. For hours each day, say intelligence analysts, Soviet Cosmos military satellites drift over the U.S., photographing missile silos and naval deployments. Other Soviet spacecraft lurk with sensitive electronic ears that can pick up telephone conversations in Washington, while Meteor weather satellites monitor conditions over key U.S. targets. Soviet infrared satellites watch for the telltale heat signaling a launch of U.S. ICBMs. At the military launch site in Plesetsk, 500 miles northeast of Moscow, crews stand ready to launch additional intelligence satellites at a moment's notice...
...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...
...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...