Word: supernovas
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...some 1,500 light-years away from earth, they have discovered a pulsar -a neutron star that emits regularly spaced radio signals. What possible information could archaeologists offer? Quite a bit, the astronomers explain. Both the Gum Nebula and pulsar are remnants of a relatively rare heavenly event: a supernova, the cataclysmic explosion of a massive dying star. The astronomers point out that another supernova, the one that created the familiar Crab Nebula and its pulsar, was witnessed by the Chinese in A.D. 1054 and was well documented in their records. The same event was seen in North America...
...Nebula supernova occurred much earlier-about 9000 B.C., according to estimates based on the current signal rate of Gum's pulsar. The sudden and brief appearance at that time of what seemed to be a new and brightly glowing star-probably as luminous as a quarter moon and visible even during full daylight-may have sufficiently moved a primitive sky-gazer to scrawl or carve his impressions on a cave wall. And if an archaeologist should ever find such a drawing, its age could be determined by using radioactive "clocks" and other dating methods on other objects...
...STAR, after burning brightly for 15 years, finally burst like a supernova in the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. As events began to heat up in mid 1966, Lin Piao called T'ao to Peking. There, as Lin's trusted comrade from the Fourth Field Army, T'ao became the number four man in China...
...more experienced astronomers who were certain that the strange objects would be too small and distant to be seen through terrestrial telescopes. Undaunted, they pointed the 36-in. telescope at Arizona's Steward Observatory toward a small star in the Crab nebula, the glowing, cloudlike remnant of a supernova (stellar explosion) that was first witnessed from earth...
According to theory, neutron stars are formed during the cataclysmic processes that occur in a supernova. They consist entirely of neutrons densely packed into dim spheres that are about ten miles in diameter and weigh more than 10 billion lbs. per cubic inch. Astrophysicist Gold believes that a neutron star has an in credibly intense magnetic field that traps ionized gases expelled from the supernova. As the star and its magnetic field spin, the outmost of the trapped gases are whirled at almost the speed of light until they break away, producing an intense beam of radio waves-the regularly...