Massive Triple Star System Detected

Artist’s interpretation of HD 98800, a quadruple-star system located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae. Bin Liu and Alejandro Vigna-Gomez suggest that the more massive 

tertiary-star system TIC 470710327 could have started in a similar configuration – two binary 

systems with one of them eventually merging into one, bigger star. TIC 470710327 is located 

very close to “Cassiopeia”. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Compact, massive triple star system detected by University of Copenhagen researchers.

Earlier this year, researchers revealed the discovery of an extraordinarily compact “one-of-a-kind” system of three stars. A partnership between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is currently focusing on how this unusual combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving larger star can form.

Tertiary star formation on a massive scale
The star system is made up of a binary set of stars, two stars that orbit each other, and one more massive star that orbits the binary.

“As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever detected”, Alejandro Vigna-Gomez says. “We know of many tertiary star systems (three star systems), but they are typically significantly less massive. 

The massive stars in this triple are very close together – it is a compact system. The orbital period of the binary (~1 d) is the same as that of the rotation of Earth (1 day). The combined mass of the two of them is twelve times the mass of our Sun – so rather big stars. 

The tertiary star is approximately 16 times the mass of our Sun, so even bigger! The inner orbit is circular in shape with close to six revolutions of the tertiary star around the binary per year. 

Pretty fast, when you consider the size of them – unsurprisingly, the system is very luminous, so at first they were detected as a stellar binary”.  READ MORE...

Ocean Waves

 

OPEN BORDERS FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Whatzzzup?

Gasoline prices have reduced but still twice as high as they were before Biden became President.

• Grocery prices are up
• Untilities prices are up
• Clothes prices are up

But...  Biden is not responsible...  Former President Trump is responsible for all this shit.

Gasoline stations owners are responsible for all this shit.

Putin's war in Ukraine is responsible for all this shit.

COVID is responsible for all this shit.

Biden, the uniter, is not reponsible for any of this shit because he is a Democrat...

Illegal Immigration is UP...

• as is illegal drugs from Mexico
• no covid tests for illegal immigrants
• no disease tests for illegal immigrants
• no skills testing for illegal immigrants
• no English language speaking requirement for illegal immigrants

Where are they going to work?

Where are they going to live?

Who is going to pay for their healthcare?

Who is going to pay for their education?

Who is going to pay for their food?

Who is going to pay for their clothes?

I don't want these illegal immigrants living near me...  and, I don't want them camping on our streets or selling drugs to our children....   how much do you want to give these people without giving anything back?

 

The Bunker Boys

The Bunker Boys Letter to Britney Griner!



Ms Griner is a famous female basketball player who, in the past, has disrespected our anthem, flag and country. She is now behind bars in Russia, charged with drug smuggling, for which she pleaded guilty. She is now screaming that America’s umbrella of goodness should intercede on her behalf by begging the USA embassy in Moscow to use any method of pressure to gain her release. It’s funny that woke liberals who get into trouble overseas never cry out to the countries that they admire to help them with their problems! The letter below should also be sent to NBA , NFL, MLB, and others that make their living playing a game and also disrespect our nation, its symbols, traditions, and our venerable veterans.

Dear Ms. Griner,

We hope that this letter finds you in good health, and we understand you are having some rough times in your life. We are a group of old Vietnam Combat Veterans from North Carolina. Our average age is around seventy years old. We call ourselves "The Bunker Boys." We spent a lot of time living in rat and snake-infested holes in the ground known as bunkers. When we were not in the bunkers, we were crawling through the jungle being shot at and shooting back at little people wearing black pajamas. We must be honest and tell you that the only thing we may have in common with you, is that we, too, were drafted.

We noticed you were drafted number one in the WNBA draft a few years ago. Since we were all drafted, we thought we might let you know what it was like when we were drafted. Unlike you, most of us had no college. The people of the United States drafted us. We consisted of all colors, religions and personal beliefs. We had no choice of which team we played for: Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. We were sent halfway around the world to fight and kill people we didn’t know in a place we had never heard of. We were paid (we know you can relate to this) $3.00 a day and required to work 24 hours a day if needed. When we returned home, many or most of us were treated very badly by our fellow Americans We were spit on and hit by bottles and rocks as the police stood by and watched. We did not complain, we just continued on in life and made the best of it. We fought for God, family, country and, of course, the Flag and the National Anthem . . . a poem that was written by, of all people, a lawyer. He wrote the poem as he watched bombs fall on and kill fellow Americans. Ever since that night, our nation has played that little poem before millions of social functions. For some people it’s just a little song. For a Veteran it is a reminder of how many men and women of all colors have given their lives, so the rest can have the right to be free.

We found in our research that you requested the National Anthem not to be played at sporting events. We find it odd that now you are requesting the citizens of the United States to pay for your release from a jail in Russia. Yes, we the taxpayers are paying for all of those diplomats working on your release. Our government told you, and all fellow Americans in Russia, to leave Russia after the invasion of the Ukraine. You play basketball in a country that is known to treat Americans badly. You fly a great deal and must know, by now, all of the rules about what one can bring into a country. All of us that travel know the rules for entering a foreign country. You are a guest and must go by the rules of the land. By your own admission, you were attempting to bring an illegal substance into a country that is known for its long prison sentences. You had to know this because you are making a million dollars a year to play a game and hold a college degree. At six feet nine inches tall, you know that security officers are going to focus on you from the moment you stand in the boarding pass line.

We also noticed that you are now saying you placed the drugs in your luggage by accident. Please! That is something that an 18 year old would say. We also found out that your net worth is somewhere around $5 million bucks for playing a game. For old guys like us, living on a fixed income, that’s a lot of money for just playing a game. Don’t get us wrong; we are not against you. We all went and fought, so all Americans can have the freedom to make their own choices. We just hope that the next time you have to endure the playing of that little poem, that you will pay close attention to the “land of the free” part.

Wishing you the very best,

The Bunker Boys

A New Class of ExoPlanet

Artist's illustration of a half-rock, half-water world orbiting a red dwarf star. 

(Image credit: Pilar Montañés (@pilar.monro))

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say.


Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up more than 70% of the universe's stellar population. These stars are small and cold, typically about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer.

The fact that red dwarfs are so very common has made scientists wonder if they might be the best chance for discovering planets that can possess life as we know it on Earth. For example, in 2020, astronomers that discovered Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky at visible wavelengths of light, may host a planet within its habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water.

However, whether the worlds orbiting red dwarfs are potentially habitable remains unclear, in part because of the lack of understanding that researchers have about these worlds' composition. Previous research suggested that small exoplanets — ones less than four times Earth's diameter — orbiting sun-like stars are generally either rocky or gassy, possessing either a thin or thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.


In the new study, astrophysicists sought to examine the compositions of exoplanets around red dwarfs. 

They focused on small worlds found around closer — and thus brighter and easier to inspect — red dwarfs observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  READ MORE...

Slow Movement

Oldest Bottle of Wine in the World

A rare piece of history that would be priced at astronomical price points but with an unappetizing scent is stored in a German historical museum that states that this is the world’s oldest unopened bottle of wine. The bottle is estimated to be from the year 325 and produced by the Romans, which would explain why it was found in Germany.

It is absolutely astonishing how many wars this wine has survived, and what is even more interesting is the bottle that it comes in, which sort of justifies its age as well as origin. But the better question is, how did it manage to go so many years without being opened?

Can it still be consumed?
As it can clearly be seen, the wine has transformed into a more solid form, scientists presume that this is a possible manifestation of ethanol within the wine or maybe a strange ingredient used by the Romans to give flavor to the wine which is now having a bad reaction. 

Besides its terrible appearance, scientists assume that the wine is drinkable ( in other words it won’t kill you) but don’t expect a fruitful taste.

I said an assumption, as the museum won’t allow researchers to open the bottle to analyze the content inside. 

In many cases, most of the wine would have evaporated many years ago, but due to the hermetic seal created by the wax cap as well as the olive oil on top, the wine has managed to “survive” or at least take a very different form.  READ MORE...

Balloons Away

Hanging On By Its Fingernails

Thwaites Glacier — otherwise known as the “Doomsday glacier,” due to the fact it could raise the sea level by several feet — is allegedly hanging on “by its fingernails.”

Scientists discovered that the glacier’s underwater base has been eroding due to the increase in the Earth’s temperature, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience.

“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails,” said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist who co-authored the study.

“And we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future — even from one year to the next — once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed.”

West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is roughly the size of Florida and could potentially raise the sea level should it fall into the ocean, which scientists predicted could happen within the next three years. NASA said the Amundsen Sea region, which is “only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” would “raise global sea level by about 16 feet (5 meters).”

Researchers have monitored the glacier’s recession since “as recently as the mid-20th century,” according to lead author Alastair Graham, and have recorded a disintegration rate of nearly double since the last decade.

Earlier this year, an international group of scientists attempted to study the glacier in an effort to help stop the erosion, however, the group was thwarted by a chunk of ice from the doomed glacier.  READ MORE...

Rain Down Steps

 

Feeling Good

 

Coldest Matter in The Universe

An illustration shows trapped ytterbium atoms cooled to temperatures about 3 billion times 

colder than deep space (Image credit: Ella Maru Studio/Courtesy of K. Hazzard/Rice University)

A team of researchers has cooled matter to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, colder than even the deepest depths of space ,  far away from any stars.


Interstellar space never gets this cold due to the fact that it is evenly filled with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a form of radiation left over from an event that occurred shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was in its infancy. 

The chilled matter is even colder than the coldest known region of space, the Boomerang Nebula, located 3,000 light-years from Earth, which has a temperature of just one degree above absolute zero.

The experiment, run at the University of Kyoto in Japan and used fermions, which is what particle physicists call any particle that makes up matter, including electrons, protons and neutrons. 

The team cooled their fermions — atoms of the element ytterbium — to around a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the hypothetical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease.

"Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe," Rice University researcher Kaden Hazzard, who took part in the study, said in a statement(opens in new tab).  READ MORE...

Angel's Egg

 

At The Center of Everything

Vega, the fifth-brightest nighttime star, beams almost straight overhead early this month and may be the most important luminary in the sky after the Sun. But how exactly do you say its name? Is it VEE-guh or VAY-guh?

In July 2006, Sky & Telescope's Tony Flanders addressed the question:

"In 1941 the American Astronomical Society (AAS) formed a committee of Samuel G. Barton, George A. Davis, Jr., and Daniel J. McHugh to consult with astronomers, educators, Arabic scholars, and planetarium lecturers and come up with a list of preferred pronunciations for common star names and constellations. 

Their final report, adopted by the AAS, appeared in Sky & Telescope for June 1943, page 12." They decided that Vega should be pronounced VEE-guh. This made sense because for centuries it had been known as Wega and spoken as WE-guh, which means descending eagle in Arabic. 

Later, the W evolved into a V, but the pronunciation remained the same: VEE-guh. As a budding amateur astronomer in 1966, I owned an Edmund planisphere that included an instruction manual with a pronunciation guide in line with AAS standards.

Yet somewhere along the way Vega became (mostly) VAY-guh, leaving me and my ilk in the minority. Nowadays, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary gives both pronunciations, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists VEE-guh. Recognizing that language evolves, I tell newcomers to the hobby that either is correct.  READ MORE...

Golden Sun

Predicting A Stroke

Research could lead to potential new ways to predict and prevent strokes in young adults.

A person’s blood type may be linked to their risk of having an early stroke, according to a new meta-analysis of research. The meta-analysis included all available data from genetic studies focusing on ischemic strokes, which are caused by a blockage of blood flow to the brain, occurring in younger adults under age 60. 

The study was led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers, and the findings were published on August 31, 2022, in the journal Neurology.

“The number of people with early strokes is rising. These people are more likely to die from the life-threatening event, and survivors potentially face decades with disability. 

 Despite this, there is little research on the causes of early strokes,” said study co-principal investigator Steven J. Kittner, MD, MPH. He is a Professor of Neurology at UMSOM and a neurologist with the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Kittner and his colleagues conducted the study by performing a meta-analysis of 48 studies on genetics and ischemic stroke that included 17,000 stroke patients and nearly 600,000 healthy controls who never had experienced a stroke. 

They then scrutinized all collected chromosomes to identify genetic variants associated with a stroke. They discovered a link between early-onset stroke – occurring before age 60 – and the area of the chromosome that includes the gene that determines whether a blood type is A, AB, B, or O.  READ MORE...

Windy Day

 

The Truth is Still The Truth

Sunset & Waves

 

Wars Are Hard to Stop

Ukrainian gunners prepare to fire with a self-propelled rocket launcher near a front line in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Aug. 27. ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUGUST 29, 2022, 12:00 PM



I’ve written several columns on important foreign-policy ideas that national leaders forget at their peril, such as the balance of power, nationalism, and the security dilemma. This week, I’m offering up another one, a simple observation that every world leader or foreign-policy advisor ought to have prominently displayed on their desk, on their office wall, or maybe just tattooed on the inside of their eyelids so they don’t ever, ever forget it: “It’s much easier to start a war than to end it.”

Illustrations of this phenomenon are ubiquitous. As Geoffrey Blainey described in his classic book The Causes of War, many past conflicts were fueled by “dreams and delusions of a coming war,” and especially the belief that it would be quick, it would be cheap, and it would yield a decisive victory. 

In 1792, for example, the armies of Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and France all rushed to the battlefield believing the war would be resolved after a battle or two. The French radicals thought their recent revolution would quickly spread to others, and the opposing monarchies believed the revolutionary armies were an incompetent rabble that their professional soldiers would easily sweep aside. What they got instead was nearly a quarter-century of recurring warfare that dragged in all the major powers and spread around the globe.

Similarly, in August 1914, the nations of Europe marched off to war saying the soldiers would be home by Christmas, blissfully unaware that the anticipated Christmas homecoming wouldn’t take place until 1918. 

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein succumbed to much the same illusion in 1980, believing that the 1979 revolution had left Iran vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. The resulting war lasted eight years, and the two states suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and vast economic damage before calling it quits.

Even highly successful military campaigns often lead not to quick victories but to interminable quagmires. The 1967 Six-Day War lasted less than a week, but it resolved none of the underlying political issues between Israel and its neighbors and merely set the stage for the more costly War of Attrition (1969-1970) and the October War in 1973. 

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a near-total success militarily, but the resulting occupation of southern Lebanon lasted 18 years, cost hundreds of lives, led to the creation of Hezbollah, and laid the groundwork for several even more costly clashes. 

One would be hard-pressed to find a more successful military operation than Operation Desert Storm in 1991, but Saddam managed to cling to power after his army was ousted from Kuwait, and the United States ended up patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq and conducting occasional aerial attacks for another decade.  READ MORE...