Word: powers
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...visible-light pictures of a burst first spotted by the Compton Gamma Ray Observer satellite--and sure enough, it came from billions of light-years away. To date, the best explanation theorists have come up with is that the bursts come from "hypernovas," massive stars exploding with hitherto unsuspected power. "I feel really fortunate," says Djorgovski. "This was a world-class mystery, and the Keck allowed us to help solve...
Armed with the combination of the Keck's power and the detector's sensitivity, Ghez has been able to measure the motions of stars that lie 100 times as close to the core as the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, lies to the sun, and he finds that they're whipping around the galactic center at 1,600 miles per second, nearly 100 times as fast as Earth orbits the sun. It only takes high school physics to calculate that the object they're orbiting is as massive as 3 million suns yet packed into an area no bigger than...
Adaptive-optics systems may sound complicated, but they pale beside another technological trick that will ultimately boost telescopes' power even more. Called interferometry, it achieves the precise focus of a truly huge telescope without actually having the thing built. Instead, light is combined from widely separated telescopes--the two Kecks, say, whose observatory building was designed with a basement-level chamber for that purpose, or two or more of the four VLT telescopes in Chile. The system is dauntingly tricky and complex, but its astonishing precision will let astronomers tease out the details of galactic structures and distant solar systems...
...staggering 100 m, or 330 ft.--a telescope mirror wider than the length of a football field. These will probably be scaled-up versions of the Kecks, using hundreds of individual mirrors aligned to make a single giant that could have up to 100 times the Kecks' light-gathering power...
...Madison Square Garden in New York City, which starts Nov. 13 and could very well include a face-off between the two classmates. It's conceivable that despite Davenport and that pesky No. 1 ranked Martina Hingis, Venus, with her superior court coverage, and Serena, with her greater power, could spend the next few years swapping the two top spots the way they would sweaters...