Sloan Digital Sky Survey wrote:
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the Universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in our possible exploration of its history.

“We know both the ancient history of the Universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there’s a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years,” says cosmologist Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who leads the team announcing today’s results. “For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade.”

The new results come from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), an international collaboration of more than 100 astrophysicists that is one of the SDSS’s component surveys. At the heart of the new results are detailed measurements of more than two million galaxies and quasars covering 11 billion years of cosmic time.

We know what the Universe looked like in its infancy, thanks to the thousands of scientists from around the world who have measured the relative amounts of elements created soon after the Big Bang, and who have studied the Cosmic Microwave Background. We also know its expansion history over the last few billion years from galaxy maps and distance measurements, including those from previous phases of the SDSS.

“Taken together, detailed analyses of the eBOSS map and the earlier SDSS experiments have now provided the most accurate expansion history measurements over the widest-ever range of cosmic time,” says Will Percival of the University of Waterloo, eBOSS’s Survey Scientist. “These studies allow us to connect all these measurements into a complete story of the expansion of the Universe.”

tomrgray wrote:Thanks for your suggestions. No joy on Serial 2, but have reconfigured serial 1 as you suggest and this appears to be working OK without usb cameras attached - I’ll test it tonight as clear skies. Does that mean there is a problem with Serial 2, dirty connection?

The laptop is an old Dell Latitude with Pentium M if you can still remember these. During lockdown I restored by original DEC Digital 386 25SL 2 Mb RAM and 40MB HDD and VGA display! I can still run my original Distant Suns from floppy disks...

Allen Grundmeier wrote:My name is Allen Grundmeier.

I just received my Argo Navis yesterday.
I'm taking it slow to make sure I don't assume that I know where I'm at in the set up process.

This is my question:

I've got a Win 10 computer. I'm trying to find the correct COM port as descriibed on pg (Com & LPT) ports as described on pg 169.

Allen Grundmeier
Robbinsdale, Minnesota

erick wrote:Just catching up with the posts on this site. Wow Gary! What an experience. Congratulations. Eric

Suraiya Farukhi, Ph.D., Universities Space Research Association wrote:
A Steaming Cauldron Follows the Dinosaurs’ Demise

Houston, TX and Columbia, MD—May 29, 2020. A new study reveals the Chicxulub impact crater may have harbored a vast and long-lived hydrothermal system after the catastrophic impact event linked to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The Chicxulub impact crater, roughly 180 kilometers in diameter, is the best preserved large impact structure on Earth and a target for exploration of several impact-related phenomena. In 2016, a research team supported by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program drilled into the crater, reaching a depth of 1,335 meters (> 1 kilometer) below the modern-day sea floor. The team recovered rock core samples which can be used to study the thermal and chemical modification of Earth’s crust caused by the impact. The core samples show the crater hosted an extensive hydrothermal system that chemically and mineralogically modified more than 100,000 cubic kilometers of Earth’s crust.

The lead author, Universities Space Research Association’s David Kring at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), explains,“Imagine an undersea Yellowstone Caldera, but one that is several times larger and produced by the staggering impact event that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

The team found evidence that subsurface rivers of water were heated and driven upwards towards the boundary between the floor of the impact crater and the bottom of the Yucatán sea. The hot water streamed around the edges of an approximate 3-kilometer thick pool of impact-generated magma, percolated through fractured rock, and rose to the seafloor where it vented into the sea. The hot water system was particularly intense in an uplifted range of mountains on the seafloor that form a 90 kilometer-diameter ring around the center of the crater. The rock core recovered from that peak ring is cross-cut by fossil hydrothermal conduits that are lined with multi-colored minerals, some, appropriately enough, a fiery red-orange color. Nearly two dozen minerals precipitated from the fluids as they coursed through the rock, replacing the rock’s original minerals.

The peak ring of the crater is composed of fractured granite-like rocks that were uplifted from a depth of approximately 10 kilometers by the impact. Those rocks are covered by porous and permeable impact debris. Both rock units are affected by the hydrothermal system. “Hot-fluid alteration was most vigorous in the permeable impact debris, but garnet crystals, indicating high temperatures, were found at different levels throughout the core,” explains former LPI Postdoctoral Researcher Martin Schmieder who recently assumed a new post at Neu-Ulm University in Germany.

Minerals identified in the new rock core indicate the hydrothermal system was initially very hot with temperatures of 300 to 400 °C. Such high temperatures indicate the system would have taken a long time to cool. The team determined the cooling time using a geomagnetic polarity clock. "Our results indicate that tiny magnetic minerals were created in the Chicxulub crater due to chemical reactions produced by a long-lived hydrothermal system. These minerals appear to have recorded changes in the Earth's magnetic field as they formed. Their magnetic memories suggest that hydrothermal activity within the crater persisted for at least 150,000 years," says co-author Sonia Tikoo from Stanford University.

Further evidence for the hydrothermal system’s longevity comes from an anomalously high concentration of manganese in seafloor sediments, the result of seafloor venting. Co-author Axel Wittmann from Arizona State University explains, “Similar to mid-ocean ridges, venting from marine impact craters generates hydrothermal plumes that contain dissolved and slowly oxidizing manganese, which compared to background concentrations produced enrichments up to ten-fold in post-impact sediments over 2.1 million years at Chicxulub.”

Although the expedition only tapped the hydrothermal system in one location, Kring says,“The results suggest there was an approximately 300 kilometer-long string of hot water vents on the peak ring and additional vents scattered across the crater floor as impact melt cooled. Importantly, such hydrothermal systems may have provided habitats for microbial life.” Yellowstone’s volcanic hydrothermal systems are rich with microbial organisms and imply impact-generated hot water systems have the same biologic potential. Kring concludes, “Our study of the expedition’s rock core from a potential deep Earth habitat provides additional evidence for the impact-origin of life hypothesis. Life may have evolved in an impact crater.”

The extent and longevity of the Chicxulub hydrothermal system suggest that impact-generated systems early in Earth history may have provided niches for life. Thousands of these types of systems were produced during a period of impact bombardment more than 3.8 billion years ago. As each system cooled, it would have provided an environment rich in materials suitable for thermophilic and hyperthermophilic organisms.

Abstract, Kring et. al. wrote:

The ~180-km-diameter Chicxulub peak-ring crater and ~240-km multiring basin, produced by the impact that terminated the Cretaceous, is the largest remaining intact impact basin on Earth. International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Expedition 364 drilled to a depth of 1335 m below the sea floor into the peak ring, providing a unique opportunity to study the thermal and chemical modification of Earth’s crust caused by the impact. The recovered core shows the crater hosted a spatially extensive hydrothermal system that chemically and mineralogically modified ~1.4 × 10**5 km**3 of Earth’s crust, a volume more than nine times that of the Yellowstone Caldera system. Initially, high temperatures of 300° to 400°C and an independent geomagnetic polarity clock indicate the hydrothermal system was long lived, in excess of 10**6 years.

Chandra X-ray Observatory wrote:
Astronomers have caught a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. This flare-up was captured in a new movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The black hole and its companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our Galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth. The black hole in MAXI J1820+070 has a mass about eight times that of the Sun, identifying it as a so-called stellar-mass black hole, formed by the destruction of a massive star. (This is in contrast to supermassive black holes that contain millions or billions of times the Sun's mass.)

The companion star orbiting the black hole has about half the mass of the Sun. The black hole's strong gravity pulls material away from the companion star into an X-ray emitting disk surrounding the black hole.

While some of the hot gas in the disk will cross the "event horizon" (the point of no return) and fall into the black hole, some of it is instead blasted away from the black hole in a pair of short beams of material, or jets. These jets are pointed in opposite directions, launched from outside the event horizon along magnetic field lines. The new footage of this black hole's behavior is based on four observations obtained with Chandra in November 2018 and February, May, and June of 2019, and reported in a paper led by Mathilde Espinasse of the Université de Paris.