There’s a time when silence is no longer an option. It is not out of rage but out of one’s conscience. Across the streets and the squares, in the sun and under surveillance, people have begun to march and not with weapons but with their will and voices. When the people say “Enough is enough,” […]
Half of the universe’s ordinary matter was missing — until now.
Astronomers have used mysterious but powerful explosions of energy called fast radio bursts (FRBs) to detect the universe’s missing “normal” matter for the first time.
This previously missing stuff isn’t dark matter, the mysterious substance that accounts for around 85% of the material universe but remains invisible because it doesn’t interact with light. Instead, it is ordinary matter made out of atoms (composed of baryons) that does interact with light but has until now just been too dark to see.
Though this puzzle might not quite get as much attention as the dark matter conundrum — at least we knew what this missing matter is, while the nature of dark matter is unknown — but its AWOL status has been a frustrating problem in cosmology nonetheless. The missing baryonic matter problem has persisted because it is spread incredibly thinly through halos that surround galaxies and in diffuse clouds that drift in the space between galaxies.
Now, a team of astronomers discovered and accounted for this missing everyday matter by using FRBs to illuminate wispy structures lying between us and the distant sources of these brief but powerful bursts of radio waves.
“The FRBs shine through the fog of the intergalactic medium, and by precisely measuring how the light slows down, we can weigh that fog, even when it’s too faint to see,” study team leader Liam Connor, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), said in a statement.
How FRBs Illuminate Missing Matter
FRBs are pulses of radio waves that often last for mere milliseconds, but in this brief time they can emit as much energy as the sun radiates in 30 years. Their origins remain something of a mystery. That’s because the short duration of these flashes and the fact that most occur only once make them notoriously hard to trace back to their source.
Yet for some time, their potential to help “weigh” the matter between galaxies has been evident to astronomers. Though thousands of FRBs have been discovered, not all were suitable for this purpose. That’s because, to act as a gauge of the matter between the FRB and Earth, the energy burst has to have a localized point of origin with a known distance from our planet. Thus far, astronomers have only managed to perform this localization for about 100 FRBs.
Connor and colleagues, including California Institute of Technology (Caltech) assistant professor Vikram Ravi, utilized 69 FRBs from sources at distances of between 11.7 million to about 9.1 billion light-years away. The FRB from this maximum distance, FRB 20230521B, is the most distant FRB source ever discovered.
Of the 69 FRBs used by the team, 39 were discovered by a network of 110 radio telescopes located at Caltech’s Owen Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) called the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA). The DSA was built with the specific mission of spotting and localizing FRBs to their home galaxies.
Once this had been done, instruments at Hawaii’s W. M. Keck Observatory and at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego were used the measure the distance between Earth and these FRB-source galaxies.
Many of the remaining FRBs were discovered by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a network of radio telescopes in Western Australia that has excelled in the detection and localization of FRBs since it began operations.
As FRBs pass through matter, the light that comprises them is split into different wavelengths. This is just like what happens when sunlight passes through a prism and creates a rainbow diffraction pattern.
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Astronomers have long struggled to see and study the dilute, dark gas and dust between galaxies, depicted in this artist’s concept as blue and purple filaments in a vast ‘cosmic web.’ Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
In 2016, Lauren Sánchez, then 46, was flying high. The daughter of an aviation specialist, she had a helicopter pilots’ license but had found herself wanting more. She wasn’t tight on cash — she was married to Patrick Whitesell, a Hollywood superagent known for helping launch the careers of such talent as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — and she purchased an Astar chopper, a famously tricky aircraft, nicknamed the Squirrel because of how dodgy it feels to land. Then she sought out Steve Stafford, an Astar expert, for advanced training. Stafford had never before encountered a woman who wanted to fly the Squirrel. Learning the proper techniques was grueling work, but Sánchez was unfazed. “I really couldn’t believe her energy level,” he said. “She just never ran out of gas. I mean, if she could take a helicopter and fly it to the surface of the moon, she’d do that.”
Back on land, Sánchez would soon prove similarly unshakeable. Sometime in the coming months, she would began an extramarital relationship with Jeff Bezos. By the summer of 2018, when Bezos had become the richest man on earth, Sánchez’s estranged brother, Michael, was in conversations with the Enquirer, arranging to publish private text messages between the illicit couple. When the lid finally blew off, that January, Sánchez appeared steady and smiling. She and Bezos leaned headfirst into the attention, and this is the way the pair has lived since: publicly, proudly, and with pomp, as though to get ahead of their own tailwind.
When the affair first came to light, Bezos was still married to MacKenzie Scott, the brainy and discreet Princeton alum with whom he shared four children, who’d helped him get Amazon off the ground back in 1994. Sánchez, who had three children of her own — two with Whitesell and one with her ex-boyfriend, the former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez — was a sharp pivot. A broadcaster and a glitzed-up woman about town in Hollywood, she was an easy target for anyone prone to slinging gold-digger accusations. Amazon shareholders were spooked by news of the scandal, and the company’s stock price fell 5 percent. The whole thing seemed likely to be a short-lived, tawdry incident.
In 2016, Lauren Sánchez, then 46, was flying high. The daughter of an aviation specialist, she had a helicopter pilots’ license but had found herself wanting more. She wasn’t tight on cash — she was married to Patrick Whitesell, a Hollywood superagent known for helping launch the careers of such talent as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — and she purchased an Astar chopper, a famously tricky aircraft, nicknamed the Squirrel because of how dodgy it feels to land. Then she sought out Steve Stafford, an Astar expert, for advanced training. Stafford had never before encountered a woman who wanted to fly the Squirrel. Learning the proper techniques was grueling work, but Sánchez was unfazed. “I really couldn’t believe her energy level,” he said. “She just never ran out of gas. I mean, if she could take a helicopter and fly it to the surface of the moon, she’d do that.”
Back on land, Sánchez would soon prove similarly unshakeable. Sometime in the coming months, she would began an extramarital relationship with Jeff Bezos. By the summer of 2018, when Bezos had become the richest man on earth, Sánchez’s estranged brother, Michael, was in conversations with the Enquirer, arranging to publish private text messages between the illicit couple. When the lid finally blew off, that January, Sánchez appeared steady and smiling. She and Bezos leaned headfirst into the attention, and this is the way the pair has lived since: publicly, proudly, and with pomp, as though to get ahead of their own tailwind.
When the affair first came to light, Bezos was still married to MacKenzie Scott, the brainy and discreet Princeton alum with whom he shared four children, who’d helped him get Amazon off the ground back in 1994. Sánchez, who had three children of her own — two with Whitesell and one with her ex-boyfriend, the former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez — was a sharp pivot. A broadcaster and a glitzed-up woman about town in Hollywood, she was an easy target for anyone prone to slinging gold-digger accusations. Amazon shareholders were spooked by news of the scandal, and the company’s stock price fell 5 percent. The whole thing seemed likely to be a short-lived, tawdry incident.
The couple, however, doubled down, announcing their respective divorces and setting out on a world tour of PDA and aggressively good times. There they were, enjoying burgers and pizza together in the West Village. There they were, canoodling behind the royals at Wimbledon. There they were, in
the prime-center orchestra seats of Hadestown on Broadway. The couple became so ubiquitous that by 2020, they could go to happy hour at Tribeca watering hole Weather Up and enjoy drinks without attracting much of a fuss.
Next week, the Sánchez-Bezos scandal will finally be reborn as a blessed union. The exact location of the ceremony has yet to be confirmed, but it will reportedly take place in the vicinity of the San Giorgio Maggiore Island in Venice — where, according to local news, the two have booked dozens of the city’s water taxis, as well as its most lavish hotels, including the Gritti Palace and Aman.
Some see it all as a coup for Sánchez. “This seems, to me, to be the pinnacle of a long career of social climbing,” said Matt Belloni, the Hollywood reporter behind the podcast The Town and the entertainment newsletter “What I’m Hearing,” from Puck. “She did it. She made it.”
But Sánchez is not just any arriviste. She is, by many accounts, an untamable force: her drive met by equal charm, sociability, and intelligence. One Hollywood producer I spoke with compared her and her ex-husband, Whitesell: He was “charming … but as vapid as you can get.” Sánchez, on the other hand, well, “I would go to basketball games with her, and think … Okay, she can hang out. She could talk.”
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Photo-Illustration: Joe Darrow/Source Photographs: Getty Images
In Southport, North Carolina, the realities of a historic storm played out in real time during AccuWeather’s live broadcast when veteran storm chaser Aaron Jayjack witnessed a man’s SUV sinking into the bridge
Though the tropical rainstorm that rolled through North Carolina on Monday won’t be named, residents across the state, particularly along the coast, will remember this storm for a long time. Coastal counties like Brunswick and New Hanover received more than 20 inches of rain, with some locations receiving 4-5 inches of rain per hour.
In Southport, North Carolina, which received some 23 inches in 48 hours, the realities of the storm played out in real-time. During AccuWeather’s live broadcast, veteran storm chaser Aaron Jayjack was reporting from a bridge above a creek when a portion of the bridge collapsed, taking a man’s SUV with it.
Jayjack told AccuWeather broadcasters Bernie Rayno and Bree Guy that he needed to help that man, a good example of how storm chasers can also serve as vital first responders. When he was able to return to live reporting, Jayjack delivered good news: with the help of other bystanders, he was able to rescue the motorist, who only had minor injuries.
Videos shot by AccuWeather reporters on the scene show cars and roads underwater in Southport and Carolina Beach. And just after noon, the town of Oak Island, 25 miles southwest of Wilmington, North Carolina, declared a state of emergency.
On the ground, Jayjack, who has been studying, chasing and tracking severe weather since the 1990s, put the historic storm in perspective.
“I feel like this is the most intense rain band I’ve ever experienced,” Jayjack said. “It was pure chaos for 30-45 minutes as that band came through.”
He added that some parking lots looked like lakes.
The incident also serves as an important lesson. Jayjack said he saw a dozen or even two dozen cars go through the same spot within the previous half hour before the bridge eventually gave way.
“That’s why it’s important not to drive through floodwaters because you never know what’s going on underneath,” he emphasized.
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Storm chaser Aaron Jayjack was live on the AccuWeather Network when a bridge collapsed beneath a vehicle trying to cross a flooded bridge. Fortunately, the driver was able to be pulled out.
Just to see those who wear masks and why… And there is… And don’t forget… And we cannot forget these… And now we also have (supposed) ICE agents in the US who terrorise the population… ICE claims they need to wear civilian clothes, wear masks and refuse to identify themselves to the public to avoid […]
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Photo-Illustration: Joe Darrow/Source Photographs: Getty Images
Storm chaser Aaron Jayjack was live on the AccuWeather Network when a bridge collapsed beneath a vehicle trying to cross a flooded bridge. Fortunately, the driver was able to be pulled out.
James' World 2 