Word: attractors
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...open for business after Deng launched his economic reforms in 1979, and its vibrant populace threw itself headlong into the pursuit of cold cash. Taking advice and investment from Hong Kong, Guangzhou hustled to become China's third biggest consumer market, second most important transport hub, third best attractor of foreign investment. Today Guangzhou's tycoons worry about competition from Hong Kong, and Beijing worries about the example Guangzhou sets for China...
...times as much--which would be enough eventually to halt and reverse the universe's headlong expansion. Even at the low end, dark matter's dominant gravity largely accounts for the existence of galaxies and their assemblage into huge structures known as the Great Wall and the Great Attractor. Give neutrinos as little as a few ten-thousandths of the mass of electrons, the lightest known particles, and they could account for all this dark matter. Indeed, physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory announced last year that neutrinos do have a tiny mass. But that result still isn't considered...
...Postman, Freedman and company are only the latest in a barrage of bafflements that stargazers have had to absorb lately. Over the past few years, astronomers have uncovered the existence of the Great Wall, a huge conglomeration of galaxies stretching across 500 million light-years of space; the Great Attractor, a mysterious concentration of mass hauling much of the local universe off in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus; Great Voids, where few galaxies can be found; and galaxies caught in the throes of formation a mere billion years after the Big Bang, when they should...
...holds up, though, the theorists will have to rethink their position in a hurry. One explanation for the observation would be that galaxies are being pulled toward a concentration of mass so huge that it would make the Great Attractor look like a joke. Another might be that the Big Bang may have been lopsided, so that the universe has more energy and mass in some sectors than in others. In that case, the anomalous motion is an illusion...
Among other arcana, much less susceptible to understanding than the B.C.C.I. scandal, is the question that plagues cosmologists: How did the universe grow into its present form? Did it all start with the Big Bang, or the Great Void? The Great Attractor, or the Great Wall? Science writer Michael D. Lemonick follows this adventure of discovery in The Light at the Edge of the Universe (Villard), which will be published next month. While the answers still elude cosmologists, Lemonick's chronicle draws us compellingly into these mysteries. Together with his colleagues, he demonstrates how responsible journalism can create...