Word: peak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...closing on their own. A surge of flare-induced current was blamed by Hydro- Quebec officials for shutting down the power company's system and blacking out parts of Montreal and the province of Quebec for as long as nine hours. These startling phenomena were shrugged off by Sacramento Peak's Neidig. "A really big flare," he says, "can produce enough energy to supply a major city with electricity for 200 million years...
...magnetic-field lines is also believed to be responsible for the spots' appearing progressively closer to the solar equator and the switch of magnetic polarities after each cycle. But ingenious as it seems, the dynamo model of the sun may need some serious revision. Astronomer Richard Altrock, at Sacramento Peak, has observed a brightening of the sun's corona that begins near the poles -- just when the first sunspots of a cycle break out around 35 degrees latitude -- then slowly progresses toward the equator. The brightening, he suspects, marks the beginning of still another cycle, long before the current...
...helioseismology, which, simply stated, involves "listening" to the interior of the sun as it bubbles, gurgles and swirls. The entire outer third of the sun is a seething ocean of gas, constantly churned by thermal convection. And convection, says astronomer John Harvey of the National Solar Observatory at Kitt Peak, "is a very noisy process. So the sun makes noise, just as a pot of water does as it boils...
...eager to report a story from that intriguing dateline since she learned of its existence at a gathering of astronomers last year. For this week's cover, Nash finally got her wish. "Sunspot isn't properly a town," she says, but a "singularly beautiful place, high on a mountain peak, that is one of the world's most important centers of solar research." The day after her arrival, Nash looked through a telescope "longer than a football field" to view the rising sun. She glimpsed a stunning, white-hot world swept by turbulence that made it look "grainy...
COVER: The sun is becoming more violent as it nears the peak of its eleven- year cycle of activity...