Word: neutron
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Died. Sir James Chadwick, 82, British Nobel laureate physicist who in 1932 discovered the neutron, the atomic particle devoid of any electrical charge, later did work in nuclear fission and led the team of British scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project; of a heart attack; in Cambridge, England...
...have located a black hole. Its presence was hinted at in 1971 by the first earth-orbiting X-ray satellite Uhuru, which detected a strong and widely fluctuating flow of X rays from Cygnus. Scientists suspected that the radiation source, which they named Cygnus Xl, was a pulsar, or neutron star, the result of a different form of stellar collapse. But the uneven fluctuations bore no resemblance to the steady bursts of radiation from other pulsars...
...Milky Way galaxy. When one occurs, it gives off more light than all of the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined. It is thought to leave behind a glowing, expanding cloud of gases at the center of which is a small, rapidly spinning, incredibly dense neutron star (or pulsar) that gives off regularly spaced radio signals. Only four supernovas have been recorded in the Milky Way galaxy since the year 1000. The best-known one was witnessed by Chinese astronomers in 1054 and has since expanded into the famed Crab nebula; the last two took place within...
...Schmitt will also perform several new "traverse" experiments. They will take on-the-spot measurements to determine local fluctuations in the moon's gravitational field in hopes of learning something about the density and structure of the material under the site. With data from a device called a "neutron probe," scientists will be able to calculate how long a particular sample has been lying on or near the lunar surface. The astronauts will also send penetrating microwaves into the lunar surface with a new radio transmitting-receiving system. The pattern of the reflected signals could indicate, among other things...
...collapse toward its center of gravity, crush together and reheat to incredible temperatures of 100 billion degrees, and then explode in a fiery outburst as bright as a billion suns. Left at the center of the supernova is a tiny (about ten miles across) star consisting of tightly packed neutrons, or a smaller "black hole"-a star so dense that its tremendous gravity prevents even light from escaping. The 1967 discovery of pulsars, since identified as neutron stars, seemed to support this explanation of how stars die. Now, observations of Kowal's supernova may help to confirm...