Word: planeteers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...abroad. With so many countries hungry for capital, say these experts, the demand will drive interest rates up. The increases in turn could choke off investments for new homes, plants and machinery. "This is the first time since the outbreak of World War I that every nation on this planet has a capitalist economic system or a market- oriented economy either in place or about to happen," says David Hale, a senior economist for Kemper Financial Services. "But because of that we'll probably have much higher interest rates over the next two or three years...
...amateur astronomers are still peering intently through their backyard telescopes to get a glimpse of the bruises that Shoemaker-Levy 9 left on Jupiter -- the most prominent features ever seen on the giant planet -- and others are thronging to observatories and planetariums to see what all the fuss was about. Scientists who last week barely had time to sleep, let alone think, are finally turning their attention away from spectacular pictures and starting the long, difficult process of seeing what they can learn from the great comet crash of 1994. Says Keith Noll, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science...
...understands why the points of impact are so dark -- a mystery that may take months to solve -- but it's clear that they are very high up in Jupiter's atmosphere, since the planet's familiar stripes can be seen through them. Astronomer Heidi Hammel of M.I.T. says the collisions will provide an opportunity to study the winds above Jupiter's cloud tops. "The mark left by the first impact is already starting to be spread around," she observes. There are also hints of seismic waves -- ripples thatmay have traveled all the way to a dense layer of liquid hydrogen...
...that debris -- including boulders several hundred feet across -- has lagged behind the original 21 major fragments. These stragglers, they predict, will keep hitting Jupiter through September. Unlike the participants in last week's show, however, some of the later pieces may smash into the near side of the planet, giving astronomers a chance to watch some strikes directly. Is the theory plausible? Says Weaver: "These are the same guys who said the pieces were big and that the impacts would be huge. They were right, and lots of others were wrong. We've had so many surprises from Shoemaker-Levy...
...week of visual superlatives, of images both awesome and horrifying. Astronomers said they had never seen anything like the fireworks produced when comet chunks, one of them roughly as big as an alp, crashed into the planet Jupiter. International relief workers said the same thing, only they were referring to the tide of refugees streaming out of Rwanda and into overnight cities of misery, disease and death. Certainly the millions of people who watched these two cataclysms unfold through news photographs and televised images had never seen anything like them either...