Word: clouding
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...strength of the American soil which she loved so much and understood so well." Thus Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 57, remembers Cornhusker Willa Cather, who died in 1947. In 1930 Menuhin, then a 14-year-old New York-born musical prodigy, first met the middle-aged novelist from Red Cloud, Neb., in Paris, and a fast friendship was formed. Last week Menuhin flew from his London home to Lincoln, Neb., to highlight the University of Nebraska's celebrations on the centennial of Gather's birth. His contribution: a family concert. His two sisters, Pianists Hephzibah, 53, and Yaltah...
...less debate about where comets originate. The most widely accepted explanation is that of Dutch Astronomer Jan Oort, who says that comets exist by the billions in a vast swarm of debris beyond Pluto that stretches halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The debris, called Oort's Cloud, coalesced from the swirling dust and gases in the original solar nebula, from which the sun, earth and other planets and moons were formed. Thus comets are primordial matter, largely unchanged since the solar system's birth. (Lyttleton ascribes a different origin to the comets: he thinks that they...
...comet enters the inner part of the solar system, the sun's heat begins to liberate dust and gases from the nucleus, forming a large cloud called the coma. Such clouds may become Jovian in proportions, with a diameter of more than 100,000 miles, though they are very thinly dispersed. In 1969 and 1970, NASA'S Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-2) discovered that the coma of comets is surrounded by a still larger ball of wispy hydrogen that may far exceed the sun's diameter of 860,000 miles...
...hydrogen cloud is believed to be formed from the dissociation of water molecules in the nucleus. As the comet nears the sun, it acquires its most characteristic feature. Bombarded steadily by the charged particles of the solar wind and by the slight but measurable pressure of sunlight itself, the cometary gases and dust are swept back to form one or more glowing tails. These may reach lengths of 60 million miles or more, roughly two-thirds the distance between earth and sun. Regardless of the direction of the comet's travels, its tail is always directed away from...
...astronauts. From the data gathered by Russia's Venera 7 and 8 landers, America's Mariner 2 and 5 flybys, and radar observations by the Mojave telescope, astronomers can now describe in some detail the hellish surface temperature (900°F.), cratered topography and atmospheric conditions of cloud-shrouded Venus. Using the startlingly good pictures transmitted by Mariner 9, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have just completed a huge model of Mars that shows craters, plains and valleys more clearly than lunar features can be seen through earth-bound telescopes...