Off to Death Valley

8:01 am

For the next five days I expect to be completely out of touch with the internet universe. I and a bunch of friends are heading to Death Valley to do some canyoneering. We intend to explore a number of the slot canyons there that are rarely visited.

It might be possible to get internet access, but I am not betting on it. We will be camping in some remote areas. And despite this, we also plan on Thursday to put together a potluck turkey dinner for everyone to eat. Should make for the most interesting Thanksgiving I have ever had.

Thus, I wish now to extend to all my readers the happiest and most grateful Thanksgiving. May the coming year bring you joy and celebration, as well as many good surprises that make your lives better.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

New Defense directive permits concealed carry on bases

9:52 pm

Change: A new Department of Defense directive, issued last Friday, now permits soldiers and recruiters to carry concealed weapons while at work.

U.S. military personnel can now request to carry concealed handguns for protection at government facilities, according to new Defense Department directive issued last week in response to a series of deadly shootings over the last seven years. While service members already were authorized to carry weapons as part of specific job responsibilities, the new policy allows them to apply to carry their privately owned firearms “for personal protection not associated with the performance of official duties,” the directive says.

It is interesting that this directive was issued while Obama was still president. Apparently, the Trump victory gave those in charge in the Pentagon the courage to make it happen, knowing that Obama would have no power over them stop it, and knowing that Trump was likely to endorse it.

I remain unsure what kind of president Donald Trump will be. What does seem to be happening is that his victory is empowering a lot of people to defy and push back against the leftwing political culture that has ruled the U.S. since the 1960s in ways I have never seen. Should be an interesting four years.

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A lawsuit that could end all federal gun regulations

7:54 pm

Link here. The case is new, and involves the manufacture of guns by a private citizen wholly within a single state. He was convicted of violating federal laws, even though the state itself, Kansas, had recently passed a law that specifically outlawed federal prosecution for anyone “owning firearms made, sold and kept in the state.”

The only federal challenge to the constitutionality of National Firearms Act to date was U.S. vs Miller in 1939, which was uncontested when neither the defendant nor his attorney showed before the federal court. As a result, we’ve never had these federal gun laws challenged on the fundamental level.

If Cox and Kettler’s attorneys see this challenge through the courts, we can expect it to arrive before a U.S. Supreme Court in several years time. It will be a high court shaped by the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the organization that spent more money than any other to help him win the Presidency, the National Rifle Association.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Donor pulls funds from Hawaii college for Trump protest

7:48 pm

Pushback: A donor to arts department of the University of Hawaii has pulled more than $40,000 of funding after the department chairwoman organized an anti-Trump rally.

It is pretty clear from the article that the chairwoman was doing the protest on her own time and was not violating any rules of the university. The donor simply felt that if she could express her political opinions to which he disagreed, so could he.

Link fixed!

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SpaceX wins NASA satellite launch contract

6:28 pm

The competition heats up: NASA has awarded SpaceX the contract to launch its Earth science satellite, Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT).

This sentence from the press release is puzzling:

The total cost for NASA to launch SWOT is approximately $112 million, which includes the launch service; spacecraft processing; payload integration; and tracking, data and telemetry support.

Since SpaceX touts a launch price for its Falcon 9 rocket as $62 million, I wonder why this launch will cost NASA almost twice as much. Was there so little competition in the bidding that SpaceX could bid higher and thus get more money? Or is NASA so disinterested in saving money that it left itself open to overpaying for something that everyone else gets for far else?

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Judge blocks illegal Obama overtime rule

5:39 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal judge today blocked an Obama administration rule that tried to unilaterally extend overtime to millions of workers, without any legal basis.

U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman, Texas, agreed with 21 states and a coalition of business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that the rule is unlawful and granted their motion for a nationwide injunction. It was to take effect Dec. 1. The rule would have doubled to $47,500 the maximum salary a worker can earn and still be eligible for mandatory overtime pay.

The states and business groups claimed in lawsuits filed in September that were later consolidated that the drastic increase in the salary threshold was arbitrary. Mazzant, who was appointed by President Obama, held that the rule runs counter to the federal law that governs who is eligible for overtime. The law does not allow the Labor Department to determine eligibility based only on salary levels, Mazzant said.

This behavior by the Obama administration is pretty par for the course. What do they care what the law says? They are wise and educated Ivy-League liberals who know better. They have the right to impose their will on everyone else, without any restrictions.

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The worst fake news stories in the past few decades

11:34 am

And these faked stories are all from the mainstream leftwing press, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, New Republic, and MSNBC.

The NBC corporation is an especially bad player here. Worse, their behavior has been specifically aimed at fueling a race war. In one case, they claimed that the Tea Party movement was made up of white racists and thus dangerous to blacks, and to prove it they showed an image of the rifle slung over the back of a Tea Party protester. The trouble was that they specifically framed the image to hide the fact that the protester was black. Then NBC deliberately edited the recording of George Zimmerman’s conversation with 911 to make him sound racist. It was a lie, as were all these stories.

What makes NBC the worst is that they have made no effort to fix the problem. They not only haven’t punished or fired anyone, they keep doing it again and again.

For this network or any of these mainstream leftist outlets to now complain about “fake news” is the height of absurdity. What they are really doing is trying to discredit alternative news sources that have actually been reporting the news better than them. They don’t like the competition, both financially and politically.

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Massachusetts college bans American flag

9:41 am

Madness: Hampshire College in Massachusetts has decided to ban the flying of all flags, including the United States flag, in order to avoid offending anyone.

Their problems began when they lowered their American flags to half mast to protest the election results. Then they let someone remove a flag and burn it. Faced with a storm of criticism they have decided to punt, which I think will do them even more harm. I would not be surprised it alumni donations dry up, as well as student applications.

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Democrats look in all the wrong places to explain their losses

9:35 am

The Democratic Party is attempting to analyze the recent election to try to find out what has been causing their significant losses in order to prevent further election defeats and bring about a recovery.

Not surprisingly, they are blaming everything and everybody but their own policies.

Party insiders are reluctant to blame the popular Obama but cite plenty of reasons for the decline. These include a muddled economic message; an overemphasis on emerging demographic groups such as minorities and millennial at the expense of white voters; a perception the party is elitist and aligned with Wall Street; a reluctance to embrace the progressive populism of Senator Bernie Sanders, the former presidential hopeful; and failure to field strong candidates in key states.

There is an emerging consensus, they add, that the party has been too focused on winning national races and has not invested enough in local campaigns, along with a grudging admission that Republicans have done a better job of competing on the ground. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted text above shows how completely divorced from reality this Democratic Party continues to be. Most of the country rejects socialism, and it was the Democratic Party’s increasing tilt towards socialism that is hurting it badly and caused it lose control of almost all the state legislatures nationwide.. Do they recognize this? Absolutely not. Instead they want to become more socialist.

Moreover, most of the other reasons they cite for their losses either blame outside forces (such as Republican efforts to require an ID to vote) or poor messaging. It is never anything they did, such as impose Obamacare and run the government badly.

Moreover, that the Democrats continue to increase their dominance in the big urban areas should not be used by them as a sign that their policies are right. The big urban areas are also generally places with the worst quality of life, the most crime, the worst poverty, and biggest government deficits. Even if the citizens in those places can’t see how badly they are being ruled by Democrats, the rest of the country does. Moreover, it will be impossible for the Democratic Party to recover significantly as long as it relies solely on the voters in these concentrated urban areas. To get the rest of the country to consider them worth voting for again they are going to have to face their own policy failures and change direction. Sadly, I see no evidence that they are going to do this.

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An update on the Bigelow inflatable module on ISS

9:12 am

NASA has released an update on the privately built inflatable BEAM module that is presently attached to ISS and is under-going two years of testing.

NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are pleased to report that, overall, BEAM is operating as expected and continues to produce valuable data. Structural engineers at NASA JSC confirmed that BEAM deployment loads upon the space station were very small, and continue to analyze the module’s structural data for comparison with ground tests and models. Researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have found no evidence of large debris impacts in the DIDS data to date—good news for any spacecraft. And radiation researchers at JSC have found that the dosage due to Galactic Cosmic Rays in BEAM is similar to other space station modules, and continue to analyze local “trapped” radiation particles, particularly from the South Atlantic Anomaly, to help determine additional shielding requirements for long-duration exploration missions.

None of this is a surprise. It seems to me that this testing program is a bit overdone, since NASA never did anything like this in orbit for its own modules. What I think is really happening is that the two-year test of Bigelow’s module was required politically within NASA because there were too many people there opposed to using a privately-built module. I also suspect that NASA got further pressure from the contractors, such as Boeing, who had previously owned this business, and did not want the competition from Bigelow. Thus, despite the fact that Bigelow has already launched two test modules of its own and proved the viability of its designs, it was forced by NASA to do an additional test under NASA’s supervision in order to squelch this opposition.

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Russia postpones Proton launch again

9:03 am

Originally scheduled for October, International Launch Services (ILS), the Russian company that manages its commercial launches, has once again postponed the next Proton rocket launch.

“The new launch date is December 2016,” the website says. The reasons for the postponement have not yet been announced.

As reported earlier, Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos had rescheduled the launch from October 10 to November 23. It was initially scheduled for late June, then postponed to August 29 and then to October 10.

More significantly, there have been no Proton launches since a June 9 launch were the second stage of the rocket inexplicably shut down prematurely. The Russians have been conducting an investigation, but have released absolutely no information about what they have found

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Atlas 5 launches NOAA weather satellite

10:53 pm

Successfully completing its second launch in 8 days, ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket put a new NOAA weather satellite in orbit on Saturday.

NOAA is giving this new satellite a big PR push, claiming it will revolutionize weather monitoring and forecasting. While the satellite might be state of the art, it is also was very expensive, costing $1 billion. I strongly suspect that the same thing could have been built far cheaper, and quicker, if left to the private sector.

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UAE sheikh okays next phase in Mars mission

10:48 pm

The competition heats up: The Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has approved the start of construction of the prototypes for the UAE’s Mars Mission, dubbed Hope.

Sheikh Mohammed gave the greenlight to start manufacturing the probe’s prototypes, the Arab world’s first Mars probe. The project places the UAE with the nine countries that aim to explore Mars. His Highness said: “UAE ambitions is to explore the outer space. We are investing in our national cadres to lead this project and contribute in expanding our knowledge about Mars. Hope Probe is a qualitative leap for UAE’s scientific efforts, it the first contribution for the Arab world in this regard”.

Sheikh Mohammed’s remarks came while visiting the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) to open the second phase of the UAE satellite manufacturing and assembly complex, a multitasking facility capable of handling several space projects at a time.

It will be very interesting to see how this top-down mission proceeds, as it is being pushed heavily by the sheikh in a country with almost no experience in building such things.

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Obamacare Medicaid expansion to overwhelm state budgets

11:34 am

Finding out what’s in it: The 24 states that have accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion are about to have their budgets overwhelmed by the much larger numbers of enrollments in that program than was expected.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion makes working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities eligible for a welfare program that was costly and ineffective long before Obamacare. The 24 states with a year or more of data available expected no more than 5.5 million would ever sign up, but their expansion enrollment is already 11.5 million – more than double its projected all-time maximum.

Alaska, Indiana, Louisiana, and Montana have not yet released a year of enrollment data, but have all reported Obamacare expansion enrollment higher than their expected maximums, FGA vice president of research Jonathan Ingram and FGA senior research fellow Nicholas Horton noted. “Medicaid expansion already makes welfare for able-bodied adults a higher priority than services for the nearly 600,000 seniors, children with developmental disabilities, individuals with brain injuries, and other vulnerable individuals currently languishing on waiting lists for needed Medicaid services,” Ingram and Horton wrote. “Mounting overruns will soon exacerbate pressure on policymakers to shift even more money away from the truly needy and towards ObamaCare’s able-bodied adults.”

Obamacare expansion benefits are 100 percent federally funded through the end of the calendar year, which has shielded states from billions of dollars in cost overruns since expansion took effect in January 2014. That will soon change. If Obamacare remains in place, states will be on the hook for five percent of their rapidly rising Medicaid expansion costs starting in January. And if President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress fulfill campaign promises to repeal Obamacare, federal funding for Medicaid expansion could be cut off in a matter of months.

On this issue, at least, there is precedent for congressional Republicans sticking to their word. Last January, President Obama vetoed an Obamacare repeal bill that would have ended Medicaid expansion.

Even if Obamacare is not repealed, these states still face serious budget problems because the cost of this program is, like everything else in Obamacare, far higher than predicted. If Obamacare is repealed, then these states face bankruptcy.

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Ceres’ cratered surface

10:27 am

Ceres' crated surface

Cool image time! The picture on the right, reduced to show here, was taken on October 17 and was the tenth image taken by Dawn in its new extended mission in orbit around Ceres.

This image of the limb of dwarf planet Ceres shows a section of the northern hemisphere. A shadowy portion of Occator Crater can be seen at the lower right — its bright “spot” areas are outside of the frame of view. Part of Kaikara Crater (45 miles, 72 kilometers in diameter) is visible at top left.

The image was taken from 920 miles away and has a resolution of about 460 feet per pixel.

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Drilling at the Chicxulub impact site has unveiled the crater’s shape

10:19 am

The new rock core drilled at the crater impact site that is thought to have help cause the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has helped reveal the crater’s formation and shape, including the existence of an inner ring of mountains which scientists call a peak-ring.

After a decade of planning, the project penetrated 1,335 metres into the sea floor off the coast of Progreso, Mexico, in April and May. Drillers hit the first peak-ring rocks at a depth of 618 metres, and a pinkish granite at 748 metres. Geologists know that the granite must have come from relatively deep in the crust — perhaps 8–10 kilometres down — because it contains big crystals. The size of these crystals suggests that they formed by the slow cooling of deep, molten rock; in contrast, rapid cooling at shallow depth tends to form small crystals. Finding the granite relatively high in the drill core means that something must have lifted it up and then thrown down it on top of other rocks.

That rules out one idea of how craters form, in which the pulverized rock stays mostly in place like hot soup in a bowl. Instead, the core confirms the ‘dynamic collapse’ model of cosmic impacts, in which the asteroid punches a deep hole in the crust, causing the rock to flow like a liquid and spurt skyward. That rock then falls back to Earth, splattering around in a peak ring.

To put it another way, the impact moved the earth like a pebble dropped into a pond of water, causing at least two big circular ripples that flowed just like water but then quickly froze in place to form the two concentric peak-ring mountain ranges.

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Boeing files FCC application for 3,000 satellite constellation

10:10 am

The competition heats up: Boeing this week submitted its second application to the FCC for its own 3,000 satellite constellation to provide “a wide range of advanced communications and Internet-based services.”

The second application this week specifically requested permission to launch the first 60 satellites. The whole plan is comparable to the one that SpaceX submitted earlier this week, and puts these two companies in direct competition. If both plans are launched, it will mean that more than 6,000 satellites will need launch services to gain orbit, which also means the launch business could get very busy in the coming years.

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NASA global warming advocate Gavin Schmidt fights back

10:05 am

The head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), Gavin Schmidt, declared in a newspaper interview on Thursday that “Global warming doesn’t care about the election.”

The science community and environmental campaigners in the US have already begun efforts to persuade Mr Trump that climate change is actually real before he takes office next year. Dr Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, signalled they would have allies among the federal science agencies. He tweeted a graph including new data from Nasa showing that last month was the second warmest October on record, putting 2016 firmly on course to be the warmest year. “No surprise here, planetary warming does not care about the election,” he wrote.

I would not be surprised if Schmidt ends up getting fired by Trump. His monthly graphs showing each month to be the hottest on record, such as the one he tweeted in the quote above, have been absurd campaigning, not science. For one thing, the differences from month to month have been in the hundredths of a degrees, well within the margins of error and essentially insignificant in value. To claim that his data has determined the “hottest” month on record from this is demonstrating that he is not a scientist, but a political activist.

Gavin Schmidt vs the satellite data

Secondly, his data is not trustworthy to begin with. Schmidt has been in charge of all of the data tampering at NASA that has consistently altered the decades-old surface temperature record — without any clear scientific justification — to cool the past and warm the present so that the amount of warming is emphasized. While his graphs show the climate to be warming, based on surface data that he has been adjusting, the satellite data that NASA gathers that he (a NASA scientist) generally ignores, does not. The image to the right illustrates this, and shows that the divergence between his adjusted surface data and the satellite data has been increasing steadily over the years.

I fully expect Schmidt and the other global warming scientists in NASA and NOAA to team up with the press, as Schmidt does here, to defy Trump. Whether Trump will have the courage to fight back, something no Republican has been willing to do for decades, will be the key question.

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“You are still crying wolf.”

9:38 pm

Link here. This essay sums up the bankrupt intellectual American community — so partisan Democratic that they have lost all sense of honor or dignity — probably better than anything I have read in decades. And it was written by a person who dislikes Donald Trump strongly, but for very thoughtful and reasonable reasons. As he pleads in conclusion,

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and how he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an “openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe”, because we already wasted all those terms this year.

Read it all. He illustrates the unwillingness of the modern left (that dominates the academic community, the mainstream press, and the urban cities) to deal in actual facts. Instead, they scream vicious lies against every Republican candidate and thus make it impossible to have a sane conversation.

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Boeing and Russia to partner on building lunar space station?

5:22 pm

As part of a settlement with Boeing in the Sea Launch lawsuit, the Russians are proposing a partnership with the American company for building a lunar orbiting space station.

A preliminary dispute settlement deal was reached in August. “We are preparing a document which, apart from finalizing the court case, also creates a program for long-term cooperation on a wide range of issues. We are working on projects to cooperate in low earth orbit, create moon infrastructure and explore deep space,” Solntsev told the Russian Izvestia newspaper. The two companies now plan to create nodes and units capable of synchronizing space technologies, including a docking station for a proposed lunar orbiting station. Meanwhile, Sea Launch settlement documents are set to be signed before the end of November, according to Solntsev.

It will be very interesting to see the actual agreement. I also wonder how much Boeing can really do with Russia without U.S. government approval.

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Scientists puzzle over possible connection between a fast radio burst and a gamma ray burst

9:31 am

The uncertainty of science: In trying to explain the relatively new mystery of fast radio bursts (FRB), of which only about 20 have been detected and of which very little is known, scientists are intrigued by a gamma ray burst (GRB) that apparently occurred at the same time and place of one FRB.

Seeing the FRB event in a different wavelength would normally help astronomers better understand the FRB The problem is that this particular GRB only makes the mystery of FRBs more baffling.

One puzzle is that the two signals portray different pictures of the underlying source, which seems to be as much as 10 billion light years (3.2 gigaparsecs) away. Whereas the radio burst lasted just a few milliseconds, the γ-ray signal lasted between two and six minutes, and it released much more energy in total than the radio burst. “We’ve pumped up the energy budget more than a billion times,” says study co-author Derek Fox, an astrophysicist at Penn State.

This has big implications for the FRB’s origin. One leading theory suggests that FRBs are flares from distant magnetars — neutron stars with enormous magnetic fields that could generate short, energetic blasts of energy, and do so repeatedly, as at least one FRB is known to do. Although magnetars are thought to produce γ-rays, they would not emit such high energy and over such a long time, says Fox. “This is a severe challenge for magnetar models,” he says.

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