Word: starlight
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seen close up at the Waldorf in the wake of these events, Shostakovich scarcely looked fit for his assigned role as Stalin's propagandist. He cut a surprisingly frail figure on the dais at the Starlight Roof, where he was seen to light cigarette after cigarette with trembling hands. His face was at the mercy of twitches and tics, his lips were drawn in an unconvincing smile. A translator read his speech for him; it attacked both U.S. warmongers and Igor Stravinsky, and praised the "unheard-of scope and level of development reached by musical culture in the U.S.S.R...
...this possible? More than half a century ago, scientists realized a bizarre consequence of Einstein's general relativity theory: if a very massive object were located almost directly between the earth and a distant star, its tremendous gravity would act as a "gravitational lens" that could bend the starlight into two different paths. To produce the effect observed at Kitt Peak, the astronomers calculated, a huge galaxy or a black hole at least 10 trillion times as massive as the sun would be required...
...Shum Chun River as Captain David Thomas, 27, and his squad begin their daily rounds. Floodlights soon snap on and illuminate the terraces of barbed wire and cyclone fencing that lead down to the river. Thomas, a veteran of British service in Northern Ireland, suddenly spots movement through his "starlight scope...
...scientists discovered the dense atmosphere of Venus; at such times the inner planet is higher in the sky, letting astronomers see it through less of the earth's atmosphere. Helium was found in the sun during an 1868 eclipse. And in 1919, British scientists measured the bending of starlight by solar gravity, thus providing dramatic proof of Einstein's general theory of relativity...
...astronomers photograph a star nearly in line with the sun when it would certainly be obscured by sunlight? Answer: during a total eclipse. On May 29, 1919, during an eclipse expedition to the island of Principe off the West African coast, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington found deflections in starlight that almost matched Einstein's prediction. Later, when Einstein was asked what he would have concluded if no bending had been detected, he replied: "Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord?the theory is correct...