JCONLINE.COM FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024 3A To every nurse, we applaud and thank you for your commitment to healing the mind, body and spirit of each patient you encounter. Join us in celebrating NATIONAL NURSES WEEK! WE VE OUR NURSES! FranciscanHealth.org PONTIAC, Ill. A little bit of what had been forgotten history is now carved in stone. Charlie Robbins and his sisters knew that they had a great-grandfather named William Clark, but until Robbins delved into genealogical research about his family, knowledge of Clark was limited. Robbins found out his great-grand- father was a Civil War veteran whose gravesite was not marked.
With the help of Pontiac Township High School environmental science teacher Paul Ritter and his students, a headstone was obtained and a ceremony held on April 25 to commemorate life and service. veteran is entitled to a head- Ritter said after the ceremony. is a day that has been coming for a long time. For us to be able to help his family. For whatever reason, we know why he get a tomb- stone.
But we were able to that to- Ritter told the audience that his stu- dents had worked on the project for about a year and a half after the family had discovered there was no tomb- stone marking the grave. Kyah Brogan-Shawback, a student in the environmental science class and master of ceremonies, read the obitu- ary of Clark that appeared in the Pon- tiac Daily Leader in 1919. She also recognized three of great-grandchildren who were in atten- dance Robbins, of Champaign, Illi- nois; Pam Lewis, of Bloomington-Nor- mal, Illinois; and Lynn Ingold, of Pax- ton, Illinois who were presented with a wreath. Pontiac Mayor Bill Alvey thanked Ritter and his class, noting this is a well-deserved acknowledgment for Clark. would like to thank Mr.
Clark for his service, not only to the Union and to the country, but for all his dedication to this community over the Alvey said. honored in this way is just a small tribute for all the years he put into his job and his work here. Veterans deserve our thanks from here and be- yond. We really appreciate all the work that they put in. The city and the entire community thank you for your atten- dance and his The family members received a a military honor guard provided a 21- gun salute and was performed by students Lauren Russow and Sam Murphy.
hurts to know we visited grave- sites here, never knowing our great- grandfather lied Lewis said in her address at the ceremony. She noted that with her passing 50 years ago, and with none of his siblings still alive, the family lost a bit of history un- til her brother, Robbins, started his ge- nealogical research. In his closing remarks, Ritter said, want to personally say thank you to William Clark and his family for en- trusting us to get a job done and to take this on. I know my students will never forget Civil War vet memorialized Astronomers detect rocky with new grave marker Erich Murphy Pontiac Daily Leader USA TODAY NETWORK A wreath and a permanent headstone mark the resting place of Pvt. William Clark, a Civil War veteran whose grave had been unmarked.
ERICH DAILY LEADER veteran is entitled to a Paul Ritter Pontiac Township High School environmental science teacher WASHINGTON Astronomers have searched for years for rocky planets be- yond our solar system with an atmos- phere, a trait considered essential for any possibility of harboring life. Well, they seem to have located one. But this hellish planet apparently with a surface of molten rock no hope for habitability. Researchers said Wednesday the planet is a a rocky world much larger than our planet but smaller than Neptune, and it orbits perilously close to a star dimmer and slightly less massive than our sun, rapidly complet- ing an orbit every 18 hours or so. Infrared observations using two in- struments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope indicated the pres- ence of a substantial if inhospitable atmosphere, perhaps continuously re- plenished by gases released from a vast ocean of magma.
atmosphere is likely rich in car- bon dioxide or carbon monoxide, but can also have other gases such as water vapor and sulfur dioxide. The current observations cannot pinpoint the exact atmospheric said plane- tary scientist Renyu Hu of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. The Webb data also did not make clear the thickness of the atmosphere. Hu said it could be as thick as or even thicker than that of Venus, whose toxic atmosphere is the densest in our solar system. The planet, called 55 Cancri or Janssen, is about 8.8 times more mas- sive than Earth.
It orbits its star at one-25th the distance between our so- lar innermost planet Mercury and the sun. As a result, its surface temperature is about 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit. this is one of the hottest-known rocky said astrophysicist and study co-author Brice-Olivier Demory of the University of Center for Space and Habit- ability in Switzerland, using the term for planets beyond our solar system. are likely better places for a va- cation spot in our The planet is probably tidally locked, meaning it perpetually has the same side facing its star, much like the moon does toward Earth. The planet is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 41 light-years from Earth, in the con- stellation Cancer.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 tril- lion miles. Four other planets, all gas gi- ants, are known to orbit its host star. That star is gravitationally bound to another star in a binary system. The other one is a red dwarf, the smallest kind of ordinary star. The distance be- tween these companions is 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the sun, and light takes six days to get from one to the other.
After all their searching, the rocky exoplanet for which scientists found evidence of an atmosphere turned out to be one that probably should not even have one. Being so close to its star, any atmosphere should be stripped away by stellar irradiation and winds. But gases dissolved in the vast lava ocean thought to cover the planet may keep bubbling up to replen- ish the atmosphere, Hu said. ll of the previous exoplanets found to have atmospheres were gaseous planets, not rocky ones. As Webb push- es the frontiers of exoplanet explora- tion, the discovery of a rocky one with an atmosphere represents progress.
planet with atmosphere Will Dunham REUTERS An concept shows the exoplanet 55 Cancri also called Janssen, a so-called super-Earth, along with the star it orbits. NASA, ESA, CSA, RALF CRAWFORD VIA REUTERS.
