Word: astrophysicist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sneakers. Freshly groomed and shod, Foale was nothing if not upbeat when he talked to NASA boss Daniel Goldin, himself under heat for allowing Americans to continue working aboard the 11-year-old Mir. "The safety concerns, I think, are well met," said the 40-year-old British-born astrophysicist, "and I'm not worried...
...Astrophysicist William Purcell knew that if he looked at the center of the Milky Way, he would see what is known as antimatter: bizarre subatomic particles that resemble ordinary protons and electrons but carry an opposite charge. But when NASA controllers trained the orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory on this core region and beamed the data back, Purcell saw something on his computer screen at Northwestern University that nobody could have predicted: a veritable colossus of antimatter, a vast fountain spewing out from the center of our galaxy and reaching trillions of miles into space...
...real mystery, scientists say, is not that the positrons were created. It's that they were lobbed so many thousands of light-years above the galactic plane, like water droplets scattered by a giant geyser. Scientists offered several competing explanations last week. Rice University astrophysicist Edison Liang thinks black holes may be the key. While most of the stuff that falls into a black hole stays there, he observes, some of it gets blasted out in the form of a hot wind. Liang's hypothesis draws strength from the fact that there appear to be a good half a dozen...
...universe? What is it made of? How did the galaxies come to exist? Do other Earth-like planets orbit other sunlike stars? "We made Congress a lot of bold promises about how much we'd learn from the Hubble," says John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and an early champion of the idea of a space telescope. "I'm quite relieved to be able to say we were right...
Others had even more at stake. Bahcall's friend and colleague Lyman Spitzer, an astrophysicist at nearby Princeton University, first began thinking about space telescopes nearly half a century ago. In 1945, just after World War II, a friend approached the young Spitzer asking for help. The Air Force had commissioned a study to look into how Earth-orbiting satellites--still a purely theoretical concept at that point--might be scientifically useful. Would Spitzer be interested in giving an astronomer's perspective? He instantly saw the potential of turning the satellites' gaze away from Earth toward deep space. "I wrote...