Word: peak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coal-black night in March, the kind astronomers like best. At Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory, Princeton Astrophysicist Edwin Turner pointed the 158-in. reflecting telescope first at one distant pinpoint of light in the sky, then at a neighboring one. A few hours later, studying the results of his night's labors, Turner could hardly believe his eyes. "It was a big surprise," he says. "But a big surprise is always a clue you might be on the track of something...
...Kitt Peak telescope had been aimed at what appeared to be two quasars, mysterious, intensely bright bodies so far away that the light they emit travels for billions of years before reaching the earth. Gathered by the telescope's parabolic mirror, the light from each of the quasars was converted into a spectrum, from which a quasar's characteristics and even its distance can be determined. Most scientists believe that each of the some 3,000 known quasars, and thus the spectrum of each, is unique. Says Charles Lawrence, a Caltech astronomer and a co-author of the Nature paper...
...Turner confirmed, the two spectra recorded at Kitt Peak were virtually identical. This meant that if each were from a different quasar, the two objects would not only have identical chemical properties and temperatures but also would be the same distance (about 5 billion light-years, in this case) away--a highly unlikely coincidence. "If you get matching fingerprints," Turner says, "you could have images from the same quasar...
...business activity increases and worker shortages grow more troublesome, the number of Americans on the jobless rolls remains high by historical standards. The unemployment rate stands at 7.2%, which is less than the 9.7% registered in 1982 but still well above the 5.6% reached in 1979, near the peak of the last economic expansion...
That is a heavy burden for even so rich a country as Saudi Arabia, especially since its great wealth has begun to shrink. From a peak of $113 billion in 1981, Saudi oil earnings dropped to $28 billion last year. Uncertainty over petroleum prices and revenues prompted Fahd last month to take the unprecedented step of postponing approval of the country's new budget until summer. To the Saudis, accustomed to decision making by royal decree, the delay was a sign of indecision and uncertainty at the country's highest political level...