Word: nebula
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Potter sees science as a matter of measurements. Accordingly, he utilizes distance, time, and size as our tour guides. First, we travel outwards from Earth, flying by the planets, over the Kuiper belt, through the Oort cloud (what names!), and past the Orion Nebula, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster and beyond. Then we venture downward in magnitude - atoms and quarks and gluons and strings and Higgs bosons. There are also journeys forward from the big bang and the creation of Earth. In between, he stuffs his pages with musings on scientific history, philosophy, and personalities...
...Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. could entail an intercontinental blitzkrieg: thousands of missiles launched from enemy territory, letting loose tens of thousands of deadly warheads surrounded by a nebula of hurtling decoys and debris. In half an hour, this lethal ''threat cloud'' would be over the U.S., raining destruction on cities and military targets alike. Trying to stop this deluge would require enormous technological breakthroughs in at least four areas: sensors, lasers, particle beams and computer programming. Should such advances occur, SDI proponents argue, a reasonably effective Star Wars defense would reduce to virtually zero the number of Soviet...
...Cameron was an active member of the Harvard faculty for 26 years. He started as an associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and served as Department of Astronomy chair from 1976-1982. Cameron’s primary research interests were the structure and evolution of solar nebula and the formation and sequence evolution of low-mass stars, as well as their nucleosynthesis. He also studied planet formation and the physics of planets and their atmospheres. In 1976, Cameron challenged contemporary beliefs with his new theory for the origin of the moon. He argued that an object...
Harvard astronomers have developed a new technique to map the structure of nebulae, the cosmic clouds of gas and dust from which stars are born. By combining near-infrared wavelengths with unusually deep exposures, Professor of Astronomy Alyssa A. Goodman and graduate student Jonathan B. Foster produced scientifically valuable images of cosmic clouds in far higher detail than ever before. Their “cloudshine” technique has yielded images of nebulae with resolutions that are 50 times higher than previous photographs, according to Goodman. Fellow astronomers hailed the “cloudshine” finding...
...other night I saw the comet. It was spectacular. I also observed Jupiter and its moons, the nebula stars in Orion's saber, the Pleiades and the Andromeda nebula. I was entranced and mystified. Lee Anne Miles Martinsville...