per atmosphercyjt can easil^be doing 

 Mach 50. This intrusion preciWtc 

 compresses and heatsShe surrour 

 gases as well as the meteor 

 ing both of them glow. As it" 

 through the air, the little vagabond- 

 commonly called a shooting star — 

 forms shock waves. Slightly bigger me- 

 teors can explode violently, creating a 

 fireball visible for hundreds of miles. 

 Almost always, though, the meteor va- 

 porizes at much too high an altitude 

 for its sonic boom to be heard at Earth's 

 surface, which is why meteor showers 

 remain peaceable family outings rather 

 than calamities that require military 

 intervention. 



Another solar-system specialty is the 

 coronal mass ejection, which can be far 

 less tranquil than a meteor shower. 

 Every moment of every day, charged 

 particles stream from the Sun at more 

 than a million miles an hour. That's just 

 the ordinary solar wind. But the Sun 

 also undergoes an eleven-year cycle of 

 activity that runs from the merely vi- 

 olent to the positively frenetic and then 

 back again to violent. Several times a 

 day during the peak of the cycle's fre- 

 netic stage, besides venting a steady so- 

 lar wind, the Sun ejects several billion 

 tons of plasma — tempestuous, deadly, 

 multimillion-degree blobs of gaseous 

 matter seething with charged particles, 

 electric currents, and magnetic fields. 

 Each of those blobs races outward even 

 faster than the solar wind. 



Occasionally a coronal mass ejection 

 heads straight for Earth. Colliding su- 

 personically with our planet's magnet- 

 ic zone in space and with our atmo- 

 sphere, it gives rise to a "bow shock," 

 shaped like a huge sickle. The charged 

 particles trigger lovely auroras near the 

 magnetic poles. But once in a while the 

 particle assault also disrupts power 

 plants as well as navigation and com- 

 munications satellites. On March 9, 

 1989, a large area of the Sun's surface 

 suddenly broke out in sunspots, the tell- 

 tale sign of a coronal mass ejection. Four 

 days later the blob hit northeastern 

 North America. Almost half the pow- 

 er of the 2 1 ,000-megawatt Hydro 

 Quebec grid vanished; the rest of the 



system collapsed in less than a minute. 

 A niire-hour \lackout ensued, sus- 

 ding power to 6 million people in 

 and the United States, 

 ly, the Sun's surface temperature 

 about 1 1 ,000 degrees F. Yet 

 the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere, 

 which you might expect to be cooler, 

 is more than 2 million degrees. That's 

 because the Sun is like a gurgling, 

 gaseous organism. Waves of magnetic 

 energy move outward from deep with- 

 in it and shoot supersonically across its 

 surface and into the corona, destroying 

 molecular bonds and forcing atoms 

 to give up their electrons. So over- 

 whelming is the heat that it can denude 

 an iron atom of half its twenty-six 

 electrons. In the late nineteenth cen- 

 tury, astrophysicists observed this exot- 

 ic state of iron in the Sun's corona. 

 When they didn't recognize it from 

 any known laboratory data, they 

 thought they'd discovered a new, ex- 

 traterrestrial element — which, no sur- 

 prise, they dubbed coronium. 



Out there beyond the solar system 

 and between the stars, atoms and 

 molecules are typically few and far 

 between. But you don't have to look 

 hard to find gas clouds actively engaged 

 in the birth, life, and death of stars. The 

 most extreme action, along with the 

 most spectacular shock waves, comes 

 from stellar death. 



Take a star with at least eight times 

 the Sun's mass. Any star that massive is 

 born fast, shines bright, dies young, and 

 leaves a beautiful corpse. It spends its 

 entire life in the fast lane. Eventually, 

 though, its fuel runs low and the fusion 

 furnace at its core, which has kept the 

 star from collapsing under its own 

 weight, starts to shut down. At death, 

 with no fuel left to fuse, the star swift- 

 ly implodes. The heat created by the 

 precipitous collapse is so great that the 

 entire wreck detonates in a titanic, mul- 

 timillion-degree explosion that sends 

 the star's outer layers bulldozing at hy- 

 personic speeds into every gas cloud in 

 the neighborhood. The star's guts spew 



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