11. The moon spills so much light across the sky that it erases more than half the visible stars. 12. They are struggling with how to stanch a public relations wound and how to deal with perhaps their most visible star and an important asset. 13. Rebolo and his colleagues analyzed the spectrum of the visible star to try to decipher its chemical composition. 14. The faintest of the white dwarfs are less than one-billionth the apparent brightness of the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye. 15. They found an overabundance of oxygen, magnesium, silicon and sulfur -- elements that could not have been produced by the visible star. |