Wiktionary
n. 1 The act or process of falling in. 2 An incursion; an inroad. 3 (context countable English) The area where water, storm runoff, etc., enters a storm drain. 4 (context astronomy uncountable English) Movement towards a massive astronomical body under the influence of gravity; especially the process whereby gas falls towards a neutron star or black hole at high speed, forming a plasma vb. 1 (context intransitive English) To fall in. 2 (context intransitive astronomy English) To undergo infall.
Usage examples of "infall".
A long way below the suited man, at the center of whatever convoluted orbital path his body was now following, Avalon still rolled on about its business, gobbling megatons of infalling dust and gas, not in the least perturbed by whatever nearby antics some microscopic beings and machines might be up to.
In the final few picoseconds, the mass will be multiplied by a factor of about an octillion, and with a spin to bring the rotation parameter up to point ninety-nine, that will hold the static limit far enough above the event horizon to allow the finishing touches of hydrogen and antihydrogen infall.
The seedship buried itself in a heating protostar, raising shields against the infalling ice and stone.
One spot of ebony, backlighted with a flickering glow, plainly symbolized the black hole Ixpuztec, and a metallic-looking sphere, fringed with infalling radiance, was standing in for Avalon, the neutron star.
His heart sank when his lamp revealed ahead that the diaclase through which they had been moving came to an abrupt end at an infall of boulders, under which the river gurgled and disappeared.
They measured the flow of matter between pairs of close binaries, and they metered the flux of radiation from the infall of gas around black holes.
The recentness of the infalls and the absence of weather erosion that so quickly tames features on the surface combined to produce an insane jumble of precariously balanced slabs and boulders, the crazy canting of which seemed to refute gravity and create a carnival fun house effect in which water appears to run up hill, and what looks level is dangerously slanted.
Infalling matter adds to their mass, until a family of protostars is formed.
The Moon's gray rocks, churned by eons of infalling micrometeors and whipped into a frozen froth, had an unfinished look about them, as if somebody had been blacktopping the place but stopped before he could apply the final smoothing touches.
And now, when they had drawn close, their pulls coacted to redouble that infall.
And slowly it had eaten at the edges of the water pipe until it had undermined its structure and caused infalls, which nibble it patiently eroded by absorptions and scrubbing.
They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence.
The devoted lunatics of the radical fringe were convinced the station’s slow infall was no accident of physics, but a carefully calculated approach, perhaps in the hands of humans secretly left aboard, or instructions secretly relayed from Mospheira, now that they knew about computer controls, which would end with the station descending in a blazing course across the skies, ‘disturbing the ethers to disharmony and violence,’ and creating hurricanes and tidal waves, as its weapons rained fire down on atevi civilization and placed atevi forever under human domination.
The Laspe packstead they did visit, but nothing remained there save vaguely regular lines on the earth and cellar infalls where loghouses had stood.
A curving dome of honeycomb lunar aluminum protected the factory from the constant infall of micrometeoroids and the hard radiation from the Sun and deep space.