Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lives in Princeton, N.J., has made a hobby of stargazing for the past two years. "I usually set up the telescope in my backyard, but Princeton is just too far north to see 1987A. If you travel all the way to Chile, you can see it high in the sky -- I'm hoping that in Central America, I can catch a glimmer...
...roamed the savanna, upright creatures known today as archaic Homo sapiens, who could fashion crude axes, picks and cleavers out of stone. On a clear night 170,000 years ago, one of these ancestors of man may have looked up at a milky band of stars stretching across the sky, his eyes pausing briefly on a patch of light that seemed to have broken away from the band...
Still, it was the big diamond in the sky, 1987A, that was getting most of the attention last week. While the supernova shines in southern hemisphere skies, most of the world's astronomers are in the northern half of the world, and they are scrambling to find ways of viewing 1987A directly rather than vicariously through the reports of others. Says Laurence Peterson, of NASA's astrophysics division, host of the brainstorming meeting at Goddard: "Hundreds of scientists are working on ideas." One proposal: temporarily base NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which is aboard a customized Lockheed C-141 StarLifter...
...visible spectrum. Also surprising was 1987A's low luminosity. "If it had lived up to its initial expectations," says Williams, "it should have increased its brightness to a magnitude of around 1 to 0." (A lower number means a brighter star; Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a magnitude of -1.5.) That would have made it look nearly as bright as the brightest stars in the night sky. Instead, the supernova rose only to a magnitude of 4.5 -- equivalent to that of a medium-bright star -- but then stopped and hovered around that figure...
Fascination with supernovas is hardly confined to modern science. Like today's astrologers, ancient civilizations believed the stars had a direct influence on earthly affairs, and the Chinese, who carefully recorded any changes in the sky, were especially impressed by "guest stars." They regarded such astronomical visitors as omens of important events on earth. What may be the earliest Chinese record of a supernova is an inscription on a bit of bone, dating from about 1300 B.C., that describes a bright star appearing near the star now known as Antares...