Submitted by John Hughes III, Bellmore, NY
This is a picture of my grandfather, John Thomas Hughes, born January 1891 in Dundalk, Co. Louth. He died in May of 1954, so I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I have garnered information through stories from my father, my visits with relatives in Ireland, and from my own genealogical research.
My dad and I spent a very poignant day in October 2003 at Calvary Cemetery in Long Island City, paying respect to this man. We said our prayers and talked of his life, in hushed tones. John Thomas Hughes married Mary Halpin in October of 1919 at the Church of Jonesboro in Co. Armagh. Ironically, on their marriage certificate, my grandmother was listed as a ‘spinster’ at ‘full age’ because she was 26 years old at the time!
Ideas, Inventions And Innovations
New View of Nature’s Oldest Light Suggest Universe Is 13.77 Billion Years Old
From an observatory high above Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe.
Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – give or take 40 million years. A Cornell researcher co-authored one of two papers about the findings, which add a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community.
The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to ’13.