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There can be no doubt about it, a giant asteroid will hit the Earth someday. Its simply a question of when and where. Luckily for humans, these events are rare. The sequences prepared by the SVL were featured on Dateline, The Today Show, and in the York Films production "Three Minutes to Impact" which aired on The Discovery Channel in February, '97.

Stellar birth is poorly understood, but there is a rough consensus among scientists over the various stages of that process. First, a giant molecular cloud of gas collapses, forming a disk. At the center of the disk, the gas and dust streams into a central clumpwhich grows and heats up. Once the clump reaches a critical mass, nuclear fusion starts and a new solar wind sweeps the remaining leftover material away from the nascent star.

Artist's conception of the creation of our solar system.

Artist conception of what it might be like to cross the event horizon of a black hole.

Following the dramatic deployment of a probe in Jupiter's atmosphere, the Galileo spacecraft entered the second phase of the mission, a grand tour of the Jovian system. Here we see the "main bus" flying past the moon, Io.