Word: stellar
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...Festival, and the players, members of a music society that Casals founded in 1919, had made the long journey as a tribute to their countryman, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on December 29. In honor of the anniversary, this year's festival has one of the most stellar lineups in its history. Violinists Alexander Schneider and David Oistrakh returned after several years' absence; Pianists Rudolf Serkin, Wilhelm Kempff and Julius Katchen took leave from crowded schedules to perform. It was a sentimental journey tinged with apprehension. "When a musician is almost 90," explained Katchen, "one may legitimately...
Nature's most catastrophic events are supernovae-rare stars that burst with a brilliance 100 million times more luminous than the sun, releasing the equivalent of 200 trillion trillion 100-megaton hydrogen bombs. Swiss Astronomer Paul Wild has just added a new one to the stellar log-the first supernova seen from the earth in the unnamed galaxy N.G.C. 4189 in the constellation Virgo...
...supernova's own gigantic size is its undoing. Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a star whose mass is greater than 1.44 times the sun's mass cannot follow normal stellar evolution. Over a few million years, burning hydrogen on the outer layers of such a star produces more and more helium at its core. The doomed star's interior shrinks rapidly; and the density of its core increases. As temperatures rise in the contracting core, the collected helium is converted into successively heavier elements, such as iron and gold, which crowd the lighter elements outward...
...Your story on quasi-stellar sources is well researched. It may not be amiss to note that while Schmidt has concentrated on the spectra of QSS, others have contributed more importantly to their identification and photometry...
...that contained no color, only shadings of black and white, and were one-third of an inch long and a thousandth of an inch thick. Under the microscope, however, Sandage and Greenstein were barely able to discern strange patterns and spectral lines that had never before been observed in stellar spectra. Genuinely puzzled, Greenstein began to work out an elaborate hypothesis suggesting that the quasars were extremely dense and hot nearby objects, probably the remnants of supernovas containing highly excited or unfamiliar elements...