Word: space
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...very funny place inside the remnant," Kirshner says he noticed that chemicals released during the star's explosion which should have mixed together over the last four millenia were in fact still separated in space--as if they didn't have the time to mix yet. They discoved this by using several different filters when photographing the supernova, which bring out the separate bands of the elements, Kirshner says. "It still bears the imprint of" a more recent explosion than most data from Puppis A reveals...
...multiple explosion, though, it could be a "quite different physical situation," Kirshner says. If the explosions happen "together in space and time, the net effect could be larger," he says...
Kirshner says another use for supernovae data is as a "yardstick for measuring the geometry of space." As they explode, supernovae are the brightest stars in the universe. By measuring its chemical and physical characteristics from its emitted light spectra, one can check to see if the universe is still expanding and at what rate, he says...
...strange ideas in physics, perhaps the strangest is the wormhole. It comes perilously close to science fiction: a wormhole is a hole in the fabric of space and time, a tunnel to a distant part of the universe. While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave. Last fall, for example, three researchers from Caltech floated the notion that in theory at least, wormholes could be time machines...
...idea of wormholes comes directly from the accepted concepts of general relativity. In that theory, Einstein argued that very massive or dense objects distort space and time around them. One possible distortion is in the form of a tube that can lead anywhere in the universe -- even to a spot billions of light-years away. The name wormhole comes about by analogy: imagine a fly on an apple. The only way the fly can reach the apple's other side is the long way, over the fruit's surface. But a worm could bore a tunnel through the apple, shortening...