Word: outer
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...weather in outer space? No doubt about it. Experts think a spark shorted out the connections between the satellite's solar-power panels and several dozen of its radio relays. The spark, in turn, was caused by an electromagnetic storm triggered when a blast of solar gas slammed into the earth's magnetic field at supersonic speed...
What drives space weather is the solar wind, a never-ending gush of magnetized gas spewed out by the corona, the sun's glowing outer shell. This gas is so hot (two million degrees Fahrenheit) that atoms of hydrogen and helium are homogenized into a dilute plasma, composed mainly of negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. Yet the solar wind is a gossamer thing, far less substantial than a whisper. "What you have," marvels Gurman, "is a million tons of matter moving at a million miles per hour. But its density is so low that essentially you're dealing...
...John Kennedy promised that by the end of the 1960s we would put a man on the moon," he says, "everybody, including the scientists, shook their heads in dismay. But we did it. We can cure spinal-cord injuries too, if there's the will. What was possible in outer space is possible in inner space...
...life emerge spontaneously on earth, or did it come from outer space? The scientific community is sharply split on the question, and the evidence from Mars not only heats up the debate but also adds a tantalizing third possibility: life-forms may have arisen on Mars first and then hitched a ride on a meteorite to Earth--or vice versa. As Stanford University chemist Richard Zare puts it, "Who is to say that we are not all Martians...
Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory last week reported strong evidence that the Earth's inner core--a sphere about the size of the Moon--is spinning freely within the molten outer core...