Word: outer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...social chronicler (Looking for America), has a firm hold on the fundamentals of nuclear physics. He describes the first millisecond of the atomic age in New Mexico with eerie precision: "The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at 32 detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper...
...diamonds, Anders suggests, came from red supergiant stars that threw off their outer coats, forming a gas shell. As the star's shell expanded outward and cooled, the carbon in it condensed and crystallized, forming diamonds. Later, when the star exploded, it created xenon that shot from the star's outer layers and caught up with the diamonds. "It's like the tortoise and hare," says Anders. "The xenon atoms overtake the diamonds and shoot right through them, becoming very securely locked...
...long. The instant the remaining silicon in the core is fused into iron, the thermonuclear reactions stop. Without enough radiation pressure to sustain it, the now all-iron core, hidden under the star's outer layers, begins its final, catastrophic collapse. In the incredibly short time of just 1 second, according to University of Arizona Astrophysicist Adam Burrows, the core is compressed to more than the density of an atomic nucleus. "It's as if the earth had suddenly collapsed to the size of New York City," says Burrows. "At this point the rest of the star is oblivious...
...repel one another, are squeezed into the nuclei, which ordinarily contain just protons and neutrons. In about a thousandth of a second, the negatively charged electrons combine with positively charged protons to form additional neutrons; the process also produces the ethereal neutrinos, which effortlessly zip through the star's outer layers and into space. Under these circumstances, there is a limit to how much the neutrons can be compressed. As gravity tightens its grip further, the neutrons, in what Hans Bethe, Cornell University's Nobel laureate physicist, has called the "moment of maximum scrunch," recoil ferociously...
Someone, or a group of people, came to the basement offices of the peer counseling group late last night and banged on the outer door without identifying themselves, said a police spokesman...