Harold C. Urey summary

Nobel Prize, any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual

Solar system, assemblage consisting of the Sun—an average star in the Milky Way Galaxy—and those bodies orbiting around it: 8 (formerly 9) planets with more than 400 known planetary satellites (moons); many asteroids, some with their own satellites; comets and other icy bodies; and vast reaches of

Manhattan Project, U.S. government research project (1942–45) that produced the first atomic bombs. See Britannica’s interactive timeline of the Manhattan Project. American scientists, many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe, took steps in 1939 to organize a project to exploit the

Chemistry, the science that deals with the properties, composition, and structure of substances (defined as elements and compounds), the transformations they undergo, and the energy that is released or absorbed during these processes. Every substance, whether naturally occurring or artificially