Afterglow

In the late 1940s, George Gamow, a Russian-American physicist, conceived of the Big Bang theory as we know it today. He and his colleagues proposed that if a big bang had occurred, it would have left an afterglow, traces of background radiation that would still be present.

When she had gone Mr. Harrison watched her from the window . . . a lithe, girlish shape, tripping lightheartedly across the fields in the sunset afterglow.

That the sunset in Egypt is gorgeous, every body knows; but I, for one, was not aware that there is a renewal of beauty, some time after the sun has departed and left all grey. […] everything begins to brighten again in twenty minutes;—the hills are again purple or golden,—the sands orange,—the palms verdant,—the moonlight on the water, a pale green ripple on a lilac surface: and this after-glow continues for ten minutes, when it slowly fades away.

Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.

Why did dusk and fir-scent and the afterglow of autumnal sunsets make people say absurd things?

At Stirling, we obtained a wonderful silhouette view of the Wallace Monument, and the dark line of the Ochil Hills, and the castle stood out clearly against the afterglow of the sunset.

The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards.

1984, Paul Auster (as Paul Benjamin), Squeeze Play, London: Faber & Faber, 1991, Chapter 19, p. 176, Nothing will matter to you more than that [base]ball. It will hold you so completely that when you at last file out and return to the normal world, it will stay with you like the afterglow of a flashbulb that’s gone off in your eyes.

[…] he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence […]

She herself had grown old as people should grow old—steadily and firmly. No interruptions, no belated after-glows and spasmodic returns.