Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...assumed that this unevenness resulted from irregularities in the big bang that began the universe between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago. But that greatest of all explosions was almost perfectly uniform, as evidenced by its leftover radiation, which radio telescopes can detect in every part of the sky. Then how did such a smooth start result in a chunky cosmos...
...theory on the formation of new galaxies, which are huge islands of billions of stars. Aware that entire galaxies can erupt in explosive bursts of energy, Ostriker had suggested that the force of such mighty blasts would drive away surrounding dust and gases, leaving vast regions of the sky virtually empty and compressing the expelled gases and dust into shells around the voids. It was from this compressed matter, he said, that new galaxies might form...
...problem remained. While Ostriker's calculations showed that the forces released by an exploding galaxy could condense gas and dust enough to begin the formation of new galaxies, they were not powerful enough to sweep clean any regions as large as the largest observed in the sky. Then what mysterious agent had created the giant voids...
...passage from Joseph Conrad: "One after the other, we heard what sounded like shots from a cannon. I counted: there were six of them. It was the vertical suspensions snapping: they snapped neatly, at the level of the track, and the stumps, in the backlash, flew up toward the sky...
...with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary pitch of imaginative precision in which mere fantasy had no role...