Word: stellar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...years, as radio telescopes continued to supply increasingly precise data, the California astronomers discovered three more faint, mysterious objects. Though they were undistinguished in appearance, they stood out like powerful beacons in the radio sky. For want of a more descriptive term, the objects came to be called "quasi-stellar sources," a name that was quickly contracted to "quasars," and reluctantly adopted by astronomers...
...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...