One last thing, if you think Pynchon is long winded and convoluted, don't ever read anything by James Joyce. Good lord. That man might actually have been crazy.
Also, one of the main themes in GR is paranoia;a symptom of mental illnesses like schizophrenia. A lot of the stream writing is suppose to induce the sense that you are going crazy. So he uses "pressured speech" and word salad techniques to get you there.
Pynchon intentionally uses stream of consciousness in various parts of his writing. It is utilized quite often in GR. He also has an immense vocabulary and an almost encyclopedic understanding of historical events. When you put all of that together, you get some extremely difficult literature. I...
Dark matter is simply an interim identifier for some form of matter that is giving mass to certain parts of space where there is no direct observational evidence other than the gravitational effects.
Dark matter is essentially necessary to explain the orbital characteristics within the Milky Way. This is demonstrated by running calculations on the known orbits of astronomical bodies around another body.
Read it first over the summer last year. Doing it again with a 400 page companion reader to point out all of the allusions.
The amount of information contained in this book is mind boggling. I could probably read it 10 times and only retain a fraction of what Pynchon recorded.
We would need to know the length of time of exposure, the location of the source from the measurement point and any potential medium that the sourced energy must travel through.
News reports have it at 4.9 magnitude and a depth of 1 kilometer
The USGS appears to have it at 5.1 and the depth is not currently known accurately.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc000f5t0.php#details...
First post ruined my fun. It is in fact the moon with a contrail through the middle. I took it on a camera phone late at night.
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/151001_10151197815778640_1332176058_n.jpg
Brown dwarfs, as previously stated, are not on the main sequence. They are small and relatively cool and fall in the lower right hand corner of the HR diagram.