Word: nebula
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...almost ready. It is housed in a softly revolving dome 137 feet in diameter. The telescope weighs 500 tons, but is so exquisitely mounted that an electric motor not much bigger than an orange turns it on its bearings. Its 200-inch parabolic mirror gathers four times as much nebula light as Mount Wilson's 100-inch mirror. Palomar will see twice as far, and it may tell Hubble whether the universe is really exploding-or whether even stranger things are happening...
...general method (in practice, enormously difficult) was to determine the intrinsic brightness of objects in a nebula and then gauge its distance (the fainter it is, the farther away). Variable stars called Cepheids, discovered at Harvard, told him that the bright nebula called Messier 31 is 680,000 light-years away. Messier 31 was therefore no mere part of the Milky Way galaxy (the star-congregation in which our sun is a fourth-rate star), but an isolated star-system far out in space and as big as our entire galaxy. Other, longer-ranged measuring sticks carried him farther...
Pavements were rippling like thin ice on a pond. Steel and stone buildings trembled in a portentous wind. The sky sizzled as though tons of bacon were frying in an apocalyptic pan. "Obviously, men," gasped the Professor, "the Katz-Alpha-Ogallala nebula is approaching the earth at terrific speed, just as I predicted. We have not a moment to lose." The atom-powered space ship was ready and waiting in Joe's Parkview Garage, and off they zoomed to safety on the planet Mars, where there are marvels enough to fill a year's issues of Flabbergasting Stories...
Ceiling of Zeros. With their heads in a spiral nebula of billions, Congressmen were treated to a floor show which brought the question of budgets down to its simplest terms. Into the House chamber walked California's Helen Gahagan Douglas with a shopping basket which she toted right up to the microphone. She had used the same shopping list last June, when the items in the basket totaled $10. Now, in a horrifying crescendo, she rattled off the post-OPA increases: butter, from 65? to 82?; eggs, 53? to 69?; two pounds of pork chops ("the poor...
...galaxy is full of such "globules" or unborn stars, which look like black patches against the starry background. Professor Bart J. Bok of Harvard found 23 of them silhouetted against a single glowing nebula. They probably weigh much less than the sun, but are several thousand billion miles in diameter...