Word: nearing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most dramatic manifestation of the solar flare was the two-night, spectacular display of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, that awed Paul Avellar and millions of others. Arriving high-energy electrons, deflected by the earth's magnetic field, spilled into the upper atmosphere near the north and south polar regions, which are unprotected by magnetic-field lines. Acting much as does the electrical current in a neon sign, the electrons banged into oxygen atoms, causing them to emit red and green light...
...that, like the earth's, tend to be oriented in a north-south direction. But because the sun, unlike the earth, is gaseous, it does not rotate uniformly: bands of gases around the equator circle the solar axis once every 27 days, compared with a 34-day rotation rate near the poles...
...appearing progressively closer to the solar equator and the switch of magnetic polarities after each cycle. But ingenious as it seems, the dynamo model of the sun may need some serious revision. Astronomer Richard Altrock, at Sacramento Peak, has observed a brightening of the sun's corona that begins near the poles -- just when the first sunspots of a cycle break out around 35 degrees latitude -- then slowly progresses toward the equator. The brightening, he suspects, marks the beginning of still another cycle, long before the current one has expired. With that much overlap, he says, "our feeling is that...
...waves cause the gases there to move up and down" -- oscillations that astronomers can measure. To date, they have discovered millions of different oscillations, up- and-down motions with cycles ranging from 2 1/2 to 13 minutes. Some are caused by seismic waves confined to a zigzag path near the surface, others by waves that plunge as far as four-fifths the distance to the solar center before being deflected back...
...more than a week, the 576 passengers aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim % Gorky had been sailing through the North Atlantic near Iceland, marveling at the dramatic Arctic scenery. Just after midnight on their ninth day out -- it was foggy, yet still light in the land of the midnight sun -- the 25,000-ton ship struck a partly submerged ice floe. Three gashes opened in the starboard forward hull below the waterline, one of them 18 ft. long...