Greater Idaho: Rural conservatives in Oregon look to join Idaho

This map, courtesy of the group Greater Idaho, details the proposed
 boundary adjustment, adding counties from Oregon and California.

Washington, DC (CNN) - Some residents in Oregon are fed up with living under Democratic control of their state government and have launched a ballot initiative campaign to join Republican-led Idaho.

The movement, known as "Move Oregon's Border for a Greater Idaho," is hoping to expand the borders of the Gem State through the inclusion of more than a dozen bordering rural counties now in Oregon.

Mike McCarter, chief petitioner of the secession effort, has noted though that the movement is in its infancy and would take years to accomplish, even if successful. The process for counties to leave Oregon include passing a ballot initiative, getting approval from the state legislature -- currently controlled by Democrats -- and then also getting Idaho to pass legislation approving new counties into the state. McCarter said the movement ultimately is about signaling the unhappiness rural conservatives in Oregon have with the state legislature.

McCarter has gotten the "green light" in at least three Oregon counties -- Josephine, Douglas and Umatilla -- that would start the first step in the secession process, which would be collecting signatures to eventually end up on the November 2 ballot.

"Rural counties have become increasingly outraged by laws coming out of the Oregon Legislature that threaten our livelihoods, our industries, our wallet, our gun rights, and our values," Mike McCarter, one of the chief petitioners of the movement, wrote on the website for the Greater Idaho movement.

"We tried voting those legislators out, but rural Oregon is outnumbered and our voices are now ignored. This is our last resort," McCarter added.

Oregon's state government is under Democratic control, led by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown. Idaho's two-chamber state legislature are both controlled by Republicans and Gov. Brad Little is also a Republican. The growing tide of disgruntled conservative Oregonians is underscored by the recent power struggle Brown faced when House Republicans tried to remove her from office in 2019 following an acrimonious legislative session. Last year's legislative session included a standoff over a contentious cap and trade climate bill aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emission in a state known for its timber industry.

Brown's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The movement has support from some Republican lawmakers in Oregon's legislature.

"Oregon is largely controlled by one party that does not represent the entire state effectively, making the urban and rural divide striking," said Sen. Herman Baertschiger, the Republican leader in the state Senate who represents Josephine County, in an email to CNN.

"Democrats should be paying attention to how unhappy these Oregonians are with the current regime to seek secession from Oregon. I would welcome the idea to serve on the Greater Idaho legislature!"

Rep. Gary Leif, a Republican who represents Douglas County in the Oregon House of Representatives, supports residents leaving the state. Leif even has a poster of the "Greater Idaho" map in his office, which "people are loving," he said in an email to CNN.

"The Greater Idaho would then be the only West Coast state that is a conservative red coastal state. We would then truly be representing conservative values with rural constituents," Leif added. "I believe that Oregonians will support this to leave Oregon for Idaho. That is what happens when you get a super majority of either party in control."

In total, the Greater Idaho movement is looking to add roughly 20 conservative Oregon counties to Idaho, according to the campaign's website. The group cites economic advantages, religious liberty and infringements on residents Second Amendment rights as reasons behind their push.

The grand plan for the movement also includes six northern counties in California, according to the Greater Idaho website.

A similar effort for conservative residents in Virginia counties to leave for West Virginia was recently supported by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice. West Virginia lawmakers have already started advancing legislation to allow Virginia counties to join their state.

Astronomers to sweep entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life

"Ever since human beings have looked up at the night sky and wondered 'is there anyone out there?' We now have the capacity to answer that question, and perhaps to make a discovery that would rank as the most profound scientific discoveries in the history of humanity".

The head of one of the US's national observatories says the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe needs to be taken more seriously.

Dr Anthony Beasley told the BBC that there should be greater government support for a field that has been shunned by government research funders for decades.

His backing for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti) marks a sea change in attitudes to a field regarded until recently as fringe science.

Dr Beasley made his comments at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

The director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville in Virginia said that it was now "time for Seti to come in from the cold and be properly integrated to all other areas of astronomy".

Dr Beasley's comments come as one of the private sector funders of Seti research announced that the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory in New Mexico would be joining the effort to detect signs of intelligent life on other worlds.

The VLA is a multi-antenna observatory and home to what is regarded as one of the best-equipped telescopes in the world.

According to Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley's Seti Research Centre, the incorporation of the VLA would increase the chances of finding intelligent life by "10- or even 100-fold".

"We are now set for the most comprehensive all-sky survey [for extra-terrestrial intelligence] that has ever been accomplished," he told the BBC.

Equally important, according to Dr Siemion, is the credibility that the VLA's involvement brings to the field.

"We would like to see Seti transformed from a small cabal of scientists and engineers in California, isolated from academia to one that is as much an integral part of astronomy and astrophysics as any other field of inquiry."

Breakthrough Listen is a privately funded project to search for intelligent extra-terrestrial communications throughout the universe. The 10-year project began in 2016, funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner to the tune of $100m (£77m).

The UK's Astronomer Royal, Professor Lord Rees, is the chair of the organisation's international advisory group. He told the BBC that, given that the multi-billion pound Large Hadron Collider had not yet achieved its aim of finding sub-atomic particles beyond the current theory of physics, governments should consider modest funding of a few million pounds for Seti.

"I'd feel far more confident arguing the case for Seti than for a particle accelerator," he said.

"Seti searches are surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high".

Nasa once funded the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence to the tune of $10m a year. But the funding was scrapped in 1993 following the introduction of legislation by Senator Richard Bryan, who believed it to be a waste of money.

"This hopefully will be the end to the Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense," he said at the time.

There has been no significant public funding for Seti in the US or anywhere else in the world since, although so-called astrobiology searches for evidence of simple organisms from the chemical signatures in the atmosphere's of other worlds receives increasing backing.

At the time, the first few planets orbiting distant stars were discovered, but it was not known if this was the norm. We now know that it is - nearly 4,000 have been discovered to date.

It is this development, according to Dr Siemion, that has persuaded many respected scientists that the search for intelligent life on other worlds should be taken more seriously.

"Ever since human beings have looked up at the night sky and wondered 'is there anyone out there?' We now have the capacity to answer that question, and perhaps to make a discovery that would rank as the most profound scientific discoveries in the history of humanity".

Most Distant Solar System Object Ever Visited By Mankind Reveals How Planetary Building Blocks Were Formed

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a city-sized object just over a year ago. The most distant object ever explored, since named Arrokoth Ultima Thule, was a “planetesimal” lurking quietly in the outer solar system a billion miles past Pluto. The spacecraft beamed back images of what looked like two lumpy, reddish snowballs, one larger than the other, gently pressed together to form an extraterrestrial snowperson.

• There are complex organic molecules on the surface (though we know now this is common for many objects in the solar system). 

On Thursday the New Horizons scientists published their full analysis and high-resolution images of Arrokoth in three voluminous reports in the journal Science. They contend this quirky object provides compelling evidence for how planets in our solar system, including Earth, formed four and a half billion years ago from a primordial cloud of dust. The reports suggest planet formation is not as violent and chaotic a process as once assumed.

Arrokoth is a fossil. It has not changed for billions of years. It has been immaculately preserved, like an insect trapped in amber, in a cold, dim, stupendously serene realm of the solar system where nothing much happens, ever.

“This is the best archaeological dig we’ve ever found into the history of the solar system,” enthused Alan Stern, the scientific leader of the New Horizons team.

We have a lot of thoughts about how the solar system formed, but we really need a lot more actual data and direct evidence in order to see which of those models are correct. We just could not have gotten this information any other way,” said Kelsi Singer, deputy project scientist for the mission.

The striking feature of Arrokoth is the two lobes. Originally they were separate, but mutually attracted by gravity. They slowly spiraled together and gently merged like two spaceships docking in low Earth orbit. They became a “contact binary.”

“Sometimes we call it the head and the body,” said Singer, noting the snowperson-like shape of the object. “And it’s got a neck,” she added.

The New Horizon team ran computer simulations that suggest the “collision” of the so-called head and body occurred at a brisk walking pace. There are no signs of compression fractures, no snowball-smushing.

That suggests the two lobes formed close to one another in individual clouds of dust and gas that coalesced due to gravity. The new papers suggest this “local” cloud collapse was the norm in the embryonic solar system. The result of the process was the creation of Arrokoth-like objects that served as fundamental building blocks for larger planetesimals, dwarf planets, full-blown planets like Earth and eventually giant planets — with a couple of them, Jupiter and Saturn, so big they became gas giants.

This model for planet formation rejects an older theory of “hierarchical accretion” in which there is no gentle building-block stage but rather a wild and woolly process in which particles, pebbles and boulders of all sizes gradually come together amid many violent collisions to form a planet.

“To build planets, you don’t just start with small grains and gradually they build up to larger and larger objects progressively, but instead you have local gravitational collapse of clusters of material in the solar nebula, that come together to form medium-size objects,” said John Spencer, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the new papers.

One scientist outside of the New Horizons team, Anders Johansen of Lund University in Sweden, applauded the Arrokoth findings, having spent many years developing the local cloud collapse model for planet formation.

“There was a previous picture that planetesimals formed ‘bottom-up’ as larger and larger chunks of rock would collide to form increasingly massive bodies. But this picture does not agree with Arrokoth, since that body has very few craters and since the collision of the two components must have been very slow,” he said Thursday. “This then also implies that the Solar System planets formed by gentle pebble accretion and not by violent collisions.”

Arrokoth is one of billions of small bodies orbiting the sun at a distance of several billion miles, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a chilly region known as the Kuiper belt. To be more precise, Arrokoth is part of the “Cold Classical” Kuiper belt, which is distinguished by how remarkably well-preserved everything is.

The objects do not get disturbed gravitationally by nearby planets. They never make a dash toward the sun and turn into a comet, as do many Kuiper belt objects with orbits that wander outside the Cold Classical region. They do nothing, for eons, bathed in a dim light of the distant sun, a bright point of light with just enough candlepower to read a book if such a thing could be located.

Only two interesting things appear to have happened to Arrokoth in four and a half billion years. The first was the merger of the larger lobe with the smaller lobe. The second was the visit by a spaceship from Earth.

Arrokoth happened to be roughly in the path of New Horizons after it made its historic flyby of Pluto in 2015. It was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in a search for something New Horizons could visit as it exited the more familiar realms of the solar system. The spacecraft burned some fuel to adjust its trajectory, and on Jan. 1, 2019, passed by the planetesimal at a distance of 2,198 miles.

During the flyby the spacecraft had to be oriented precisely, via remote-control instructions sent far in advance, lest the cameras miss the shot. They did not miss.

“It’s kind of amazing that we can target this tiny thing, 43 times farther from the sun than Earth is, and actually go there and see what it’s like,” Singer said. “Pluto was obviously hard to top, but this was pretty darn cool too.”

Arrokoth was briefly dubbed “Ultima Thule” before the New Horizons team learned the term was used by White supremacists patriots to refer to a mythological Ayran homeland. Instead, with the endorsement of Powhatan elders, scientists gave it a name meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

The trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.

New Horizons is not dead yet. The spacecraft is continuing on its journey into what is clearly not quite a void.

Later this year, Stern said, telescopes on Earth will examine that part of the sky to see if there is another target for observation somewhere in the path of the spacecraft. The spacecraft has enough power to operate for another 15 to 20 years, he said.

The trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.

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More here, here, here.

New Zealand scientists shed fresh light on universe's origins

It was called the "primordial dark age" – a mysterious period that lasted just a trillionth of a second, but saw the universe balloon by 100 trillion times.

Now University of Auckland researchers have taken a leap forward in understanding this epoch, which took place immediately after the Big Bang Seed in which our universe was born, 13.8 billion years ago.

At this point in the cosmos, there was no light, nor were they any of the subatomic particles that we know today.

As the primordial dark age began, the Universe was filled with a mirror-smooth, cold, ultra-dense, exotic state of matter called quantum condensate.

This condensate could survive for much of this time, but eventually had to fragment into particles and radiation due to the force of gravity.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, University of Auckland researchers PhD student Nathan Musoke, Research Fellow Shaun Hotchkiss and Professor Richard Easther have shown that interactions between this condensate and its own gravitational field were captured by the so-called Schrodinger-Poisson equation.

This equation described the gravitational interactions of quantum matter.

Using this insight, the researchers performed the first numerical simulations of the gravitational collapse of the condensate, showing that the peak density would quickly grow to be hundreds of times larger than the average density once gravitationally-driven collapse begins.

It marked a key step forward in our understanding of the very early universe.

The work could ultimately allow cosmologists to better predict the properties of the "ripples" in the early universe that eventually grow into galaxies and improve our ability to test theories of the Big Bang Seed.

In particular, it offered fresh insight into the hypothetical inflationary phase which would precede the primordial dark age and generate the quantum condensate - a key part of most theories of the evolving universe for close to 40 years.

The research could also tell scientists more about the production of enigmatic dark matter - and the origin of the mismatch between matter and anti-matter in the early universe, which ensured that our present-day cosmos was built from regular matter alone.

"This is an exciting result, and provides a pathway to understanding the predictions according to our theories about the first moments after the Big Bang Seed, and to testing new ideas in ultra-high energy particle physics," Easther said.