This composite image shows a supernova within the galaxy M100 that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood. Photo credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/D.Patnaude et al, Optical: ESO/VLT, Infrared: NASA/JPL/Caltech.

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood.

The 30-year-old object provides a unique opportunity to watch a black hole develop from infancy.

The black hole is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.

Data from Chandra, NASA's Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007. This suggests the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or a binary companion.

“If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed,” said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. who led the study.

Scientists think SN 1979C, first discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979, formed when a star about 20 times more massive than the sun collapsed.

Many new black holes in the distant universe previously have been detected in the form of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). However, SN 1979C is different. Not only is it closer, but also it belongs a class of supernovas unlikely to produce gamma-ray bursts.

According to theory, most new black holes are not announced by a bright GRB.

“This may be the first time the common way of making a black hole has been observed,” said co-author Abraham Loeb, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “However, it is very difficult to detect this type of black hole birth because decades of X-ray observations are needed to make the case.”

The idea of a black hole with an observed age of only about 30 years is consistent with recent theoretical work.

In 2005, a theory was presented that the bright optical light of this supernova was powered by a jet from a black hole that was unable to penetrate the hydrogen envelope of the star to form a GRB. X-ray data from Chandra and the other observatories fit this theory very well.

Although the evidence points to a newly formed black hole in SN 1979C, another intriguing possibility exists: A young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission.

This would make the object in SN 1979C the youngest and brightest example of such a “pulsar wind nebula” and the youngest known neutron star.

The Crab pulsar, the best-known example of a bright pulsar wind nebula, is about 950 years old. More observations will either confirm or rule out this alternate explanation; for now, however, the black hole hypothesis appears to be more compelling.

For more information and images, visit the Chandra home page: http://chandra.nasa.gov .

Click here to see an animation of a supernova producing a black hole: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=29520021 .

Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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California Highway Patrol and Lakeport Fire Protection District firefighters responded to a single-vehicle crash just after 4 p.m. Wednesday, November 24, 2010, along Highway 29 outside of Lakeport, Calif. Despite the fact that his vehicle flipped over, the male driver was uninjured. Photo by Elizabeth Larson.

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The National Weather Service issued a hazardous weather outlook for Lake County that predicted a 20-percent chance of rain and snow showers overnight Saturday, with a Sunday high of about 41 degrees expected.

The agency also forecast a northwest wind between 9 and 13 miles per hour on Sunday, with gusts as high as 20 miles per hour, and temperatures dropping as low as 28 degrees Sunday night.

Light winds are expected Monday, with the daytime high expected to be around 46 degrees and the nighttime low about 33 degrees.

The National Weather Service predicted a partly sunny Tuesday with a high of 43 degrees, and a chance of rain Tuesday night is forecast to raise the nighttime high to around 37 degrees.

There is also a chance of rain on Wednesday through Friday, with daytime highs ranging from as high as 48 degrees and down to 40 degrees over the three-day period, and nighttime lows as high as 38 degrees on Wednesday to 34 degrees on Thursday and 32 degrees on Friday, according to the forecast.

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E-mail Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow Lake County News on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LakeCoNews , on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lake-County-News/143156775604?ref=mf and on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/LakeCoNews .

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A cluster of stars forming in the Orion nebula. According to Hal Levison's research, these stars could be swapping comets. Image courtesy of NASA.

The next time you thrill at the sight of a comet blazing across the night sky, consider this: It's a stolen pleasure. You're enjoying the spectacle at the expense of a distant star.

Sophisticated computer simulations run by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) have exposed the crime.

“If the results are right, our Sun snatched comets from neighboring stars' back yards,” said SWRI scientist Hal Levison. And he believes this kind of thievery accounts for most of the comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of our solar system.

“We know that stars form in clusters,” Levison said. “The Sun was born within a huge community of other stars that formed in the same gas cloud. In that birth cluster, the stars were close enough together to pull comets away from each other via gravity. It's like neighborhood children playing in each others' back yards. It's hard to imagine it not happening.”

According to this “thief” model, comets accompanied the nearest star when the birth cluster blew apart.

The Sun made off with quite a treasure – the Oort Cloud, which was swarming with comets from all over the “neighborhood.”

The Oort cloud is an immense cloud of comets orbiting the Sun far beyond Pluto. It is named after mid-20th century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who first proposed such a cloud to explain the origin of comets sometimes seen falling into the inner solar system.

Although no confirmed direct observations of the Oort cloud have been made, most astronomers believe that it is the source of all long-period and Halley-type comets.

The standard model of comet production asserts that our Sun came by these comets honestly.

An artist's concept of the Oort cloud. Note that the distance scale is logarithmic. Compared to the size of planetary orbits, the Oort cloud is very far away. Indeed, the estimated size of the Oort cloud, 10^5 AU, is approximately 1 light year. If the Sun passed within 2 light years of another sun-like star, the stars' Oort clouds would overlap and their comets would intermingle. Image credit: ESO.

“That model says the comets are dregs of our own solar system's planetary formation and that our planets gravitationally booted them to huge distances, populating the cloud,” said Levison. “But we believe this kind of scenario happened in all the solar systems before the birth cluster dispersed.”

Otherwise, said Levison, the numbers just don't add up.

“The standard model can't produce anywhere near the number of comets we see [falling in from the Oort Cloud]. The Sun's sibling stars had to have contributed some comets to the mix,” Levison said.

Comets in the Oort Cloud are typically one or two miles across, and they're so far away that estimating their numbers is no easy task. But Levison and his team said that, based on observations, that there should be something like 400 billion comets there. The “domestic” model of comet formation can account for a population of only about 6 billion.

“That's a pretty anemic Oort Cloud, and a huge discrepancy – too huge to be explained by mistakes in the estimates. There's no way we could be that far off, so there has to be something wrong with the model itself,” Levison said.

He pointed to the cometary orbits as evidence.

“These comets are in very odd orbits – highly eccentric long-period orbits that take them far from our Sun, into remote regions of space,” he said. “So they couldn't have been born in orbit around the Sun. They had to have formed close to other stars and then been hijacked here.”

This means comets can tell us not only about the early history of the Sun – but also about the history of other stars.

“We can study the orbits of comets and put their chemistry into the context of where and around which star they formed,” Levison said. “It's intriguing to think we got some of our 'stuff' from distant stars. We're kin.”

Dauna Coulter works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Could this comet rock-star have been stolen from another stellar system? No one knows. Image courtesy of NASA.

Military personnel and federal civilian workers would see pay levels frozen for three years and their out-of-pocket medical costs rise under a proposed plan to cut federal budget deficits by $200 billion a year by 2015.

The 58-part “illustrative” plan was unveiled Nov. 10 by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson (Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to President Clinton, who serve as co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

That 18-member blue-ribbon panel is to deliver a final report to the president by December on ways to tackle a U.S. debt crisis that grows continually, with annual federal deficits nearing 10 percent of the gross domestic product, a rate higher than any year since World War II.

Yet the political minefield ahead for the co-chairmen’s proposal, at least in trying to squeeze savings out of the military community, became apparent in a phone interview Monday with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).

Wilson is expected to become chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel in the new Congress. He deems himself a member of the Tea Party. Many of them were elected this month on promises to reduce budget deficits.

But Wilson, whose districts includes Fort Jackson, Parris Island and several other bases, told me he is committed to protecting TRICARE beneficiaries from fee increases.

In fact, his priorities as panel chairman included expanding entitlements: ending a Survivor Benefit Plan offset for widows, lowering the age 60 start of reserve retirement and providing some military retired pay atop disability compensation for members forced to retire before reaching 20 years due to disability or injury.

The debt commission has a far different course in mind, to persuade the Obama administration and a more conservative Congress that a new era of fiscal restraint is needed to protect America.

The co-chairmen propose dramatic cuts across government including to Social Security, Medicare and federal retirement, presumably for future service members and civil servants.

They also call for a variety of higher taxes including on gasoline. Income taxes would be lowered and simplified, but popular deductions, including for home mortgages, would be cut.

“America cannot be great if we go broke,” Simpson and Bowles said. “We must stabilize then reduce the national debt,” which stands at nearly $14 trillion, “or we could spend $1 trillion a year on interest alone by 2020.”

Here are highlights that, if adopted, would impact the military:

“MODERNIZE” TRICARE – TRICARE premiums and fees would climb for working-age military retirees, except more modestly than proposed earlier by the Bush and Obama administrations. Employers, however, would have to reimburse the government their normal share of health costs if a military retiree on the payroll opts to use TRICARE rather than employer health insurance. The aim is to end a $3 billion a year government “subsidy” of what should be “a normal business expense” for civilian employers.
All TRICARE beneficiaries including active duty family members would face a co-payment for office visits, to reduce their “higher than average usage of health care.” Also, a “modest enrollment fee” would be set for all three TRICARE options, including fee-for-service coverage under TRICARE Standard and the preferred provider network using TRICARE Extra.

Finally, TRICARE would be subject to PAYGO or “pay-as-you-go” budget deficit rules so that any future increases in military health benefits are paid for through higher premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

FEDERAL PAY FREEZE – Military and federal civilian employees would see pay charts frozen for three years “to reflect the current economic and fiscal crisis” that has hit most private sector employees. Only combat pay would be exempt. The freeze would affect basic pay and housing allowances saving $7.6 billion in compensation and tax breaks in 2015. Holding down basic pay also would dampen accrual retirement costs by $1.6 billion a year.

PERSONNEL OVERSEAS – The number of military members assigned to bases in Europe and Asia would fall by a third, from 150,000 down to 100,000, to save $8.5 billion.

STATESIDE SCHOOLS – The Department of Defense would close 58 primary and secondary schools that it still operates for more than 19,000 dependent children in Alabama, Georgia, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Begun on base when schools in the South were racially segregated, “it is no longer clear why the system is still necessary” at a cost per student of $51,000 in fiscal 2011, rising to $81,000 by 2015.

COLA “REFORM” – A new, more efficient formula would be used to set cost-of-living adjustments [COLAs] for Social Security and veterans benefits, military and federal annuities and survivor benefits. The co-chairmen said the current COLA formula fails to take into account new consumer choices made for their market basket when other products become too pricey.

FUTURE MILITARY RETIREMENT – The current 20-year system would be replaced, presumably for new entrants with a plan that vests some benefits after only 10 years and delays immediate, full annuities until age 60.

To critics who complain often that the first budget items cut should be U.S. foreign aid and support for the UN, well, those are targeted here too. The full proposal can be read at: www.fiscalcommission.gov .

Steve Strobridge with Military Officers Association of America, who testified at the commission’s June public forum, said most of these cost-cutting ideas for the military have been seen before.

But an era is at hand of “increasingly severe budget constraints,” he said. “It is different when the deficit is as large as it is.”

These ideas will make many lawmakers nervous, he predicted, and early on they only will be “dabbling at the edges.” But many newly elected Republicans did campaign on cutting budgets, Strobridge noted. “So I think there’s going to be some serious efforts to do some of these things.”

To comment, send e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120-1111.

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The popular rebate program administered by the California Energy Commission will close in

phases, beginning with the home appliances, which ends Dec. 6, 2010.

Applications for water heaters and heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems must be postmarked by Dec. 31, 2010.

Since April, more than 160,000 applications have been received with approximately $4.5 million still available. Consumers can choose from a variety of eligible models, which can be viewed at

www.cash4appliances.org/products/ .

New and corrected applications must be postmarked by Dec. 6, 2010, for consumers who purchase home appliances including, refrigerators, clothes washers, room air conditions, freezers, and dishwashers. Rebates are awarded on a first-come, first-serve basis for complete applications with the required supporting documents.

With less than $4.5 million remaining in the program, this gives consumer's additional time to take advantage of the sales offered by retailers during one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year.

The California Energy Commission has partnered with more than 80 Platinum Retail Partners and more than 50 Official Partners to assist consumers with appliance purchases, recycling their old appliances and completing their application.

A list of partners is available at www.cash4appliances.org/partners/list.html .

Consumers will need to work with a licensed California contractor for the installations of water heaters and heating and cooling units.

Consumers should check with PG&E and the State of California Contractor's State License Board (CSLB) for lists of contractors in their area and How to Hire a Contractor:

www.cslb.ca.gov/Consumers/HireAContractor/ .

Consumers are eligible for a rebate when they purchase a qualified high energy efficient appliance, water heater, or heating and cooling units, properly recycle their old appliance or system, and submit a complete application package. Instructions on how to complete an application for the California Cash for Appliances rebate is available at www.cash4appliances.org/consumers/Rebate-Form.pdf .

A consumer will need to enter their unique tracking number or their last name, phone number, and type of appliance that was purchased. Consumers who need to correct their rebate application can contact their retailer or contractor, call the toll-free number at 1-888-390-4034, or e-mail the Energy Commission at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Eligible energy efficient home appliances and rebate amounts available are: refrigerators $200, clothes washers $100, dishwashers $100, freezers $50, and room air conditioners up to $50. Rebates for eligible water heaters are $300-$750, and eligible HVAC systems qualify for $500 to $1000.

Consumer tips to speed rebate processing:

1. Read the steps. Read the steps on rebate application and include all of the required supporting documentation.

2. Fill out form completely and correctly. Do not leave any items blank on the application. Check the appropriate boxes and sign the application. For HVAC and Water Heaters a California licensed contractor will assist the consumer with the application.

3. Be consistent. Make sure that the applicant's first and last name matches the name on the certificate of recycling and the name on the utility bill. Only one first and last name is required on the application. The Certificate of Recycling and Utility Bill are only required for Clothes Washers, Refrigerators, Room Air Conditioners, Freezers, and Dishwashers. HVAC and Water Heater applications must list

the Certified Appliance Recyclers (CAR) name and CAR number.

4. Recycle. Consumers must recycle their old appliance to receive a rebate. The Certificate of Recycling document must be included with the application. If a consumer is participating in their utility rebate program, the utility will provide the consumer with the required Cash for Appliances Certificate of Recycling. Lake County residents must recycle their old appliances at South Lake Refuse and Recycling, who will issue a Recycling Form. Recycling Forms can only be issued at South Lake Refuse and Recycling to be eligible for the Cash for Appliances Rebate program. For more information on how to properly recycle an old appliance, visit: www.cash4appliances.org/consumers/recycle.html .

5. Correct postage. Affix proper postage before mailing your rebate application.

Lake County residents who wish to participate in the Cash for Appliances must bring their old appliances to the only certified recycler in Lake County, South Lake Refuse and Recycling, who will issue a Recycling Form. South Lake Refuse and Recycling is located at the entrance of the Eastlake Landfill, 16015 Davis Street, Clearlake, and open 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily.

Residents in the unincorporated areas who wish to recycle appliances any time without participating in the Cash for Appliances program may call their hauler to schedule a “Bulky Item Pick-Up” for a $10 fee.

All county residents may drop-off appliances at Lake County Waste Solutions, 230 Soda Bay Road, Lakeport in addition to South Lake Refuse and Recycling also for a $10 fee.

Additional information also is available through retailer locations throughout the county and consumers can call the toll-free number for questions at 888-390-4034.

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