Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 84, Greencastle, Putnam County, 15 December 1981 — Page 2

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, December 15,1981

Astronomers report massive cosmic hole 360 million light-years distant

c. 1981 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON Four astronomers think they have found a great cosmic hole largely devoid of galaxies in a place so far from Earth that light takes more than 360 million years to bridge the gulf. The gap itself isn’t what has surprised their fellow scientists. It's the size that has astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists puzzled. “Since we see large clusters of galaxies, one would expect to see gaps." says David Schramm of the University of Chicago. The area is some 300 million light-years roughly 18 quadrillion miles in diameter and 180 million light-years deep. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 5.9 trillion miles.) A gap that big doesn’t fit easily into current thinking. “Existing theories of the distribution of matter in the universe can’t quite explain the discovery," says John Huckra of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. “There is still some doubt whether it is real.”

Sporadic protests continue More striking Polish workers jailed

By The Associated Press The new martial-law regime tightened its grip on Poland Monday as the shaken Solidarity movement claimed widespread strikes and sit-ins across the country. But the arrest of most of the union’s top leaders and activists apparently prevented the organization of the general strike urged by militants. v PAP, the official news agency, said Poland was quiet and work in most factories was not disrupted Monday. But it admitted there were some exceptions. The independent labor union and witnesses said striking workers were staging sit-ins in many parts of the nation, including coal mines in Silesia,

Begin wins 63-21 knessetvote

Israel ignores protests to annex

c. 1981 N.Y. Times JERUSALEM - The contested Golan Heights became part of Israel Monday night as Prime Minister Menachem Begin mobilized his political forces without warning to push a measure through the cabinet and the parliament to annex the Strategically sensitive zone along the Syrian border. The area had been held under military occupation since Israel captured it from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967. Monday night’s legislation, passed 63 to 21 by the knesset, of parliament, brings about the first change in Israel’s official f Con tiers since 1967, when East Jerusalem was annexed, including part of the West Bank incorporated into extended city lines. Most of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai were never annexed, but

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several major industries in Warsaw, the big Huta steel mill at Katowice and most major factories in Poznan and Wroclaw. Witnesses in Warsaw confirmed sitdown strikes or worker occupations in the capital at Huta Warszawa, the FSO car plant, the Swierczewski precision tool and military equipment plant and the Ursus tractor factory. Diplomatic sources confirmed a job action at the Huta Lenin steel works in Krakow. The government ordered steel plants put under military control, threatening striking workers in them with jail terms or even the death sentence, and police and troops were reported to have surrounded the Warsaw

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ISRAEL'S BEGIN Acts swiftly

remained under military government, which implied temporary Israeli control. Monday’s move appealed to foreclose any prospect of relinquishing the Golan Heights

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But if the gap is real and new work suggests it is it should provide a deeper understanding of how galaxies formed some 1.5 billion years after the birth of the universe. It may even shed some new light on the Big Bang itself, that gigantic explosion believed to have begun the universe we know some 10 billion to 20 billion years ago. The universe is populated by galaxies, which tend to cluster together. These galaxy clusters also tend to be grouped into what are called superclusters. In between are vast regions of space containing little matter. “We would like to know how galaxies and galaxy clusters formed,” says Robert Kirshner of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the team that discovered the gap. “At the beginning, we think, everything was homogeneous with matter evenly distributed. Somehow we have to account for how the structure of the universe formed. If we understand how this structure grew from early times to present, we could infer what happened at the beginning.” Until now, the largest known gap was about 60 million lightyears across. The new gap appears five times larger, and it takes up far more space than the largest known supercluster

world

and Krakow steel mills and the Ursus tractor factory. Warsaw Television, monitored in West Germany, claimed security forces broke up a strike led by “an irresponsible group of Solidarity extremists” at the Katowice steel mill, and Warsaw Radio repor-

in exchange for a peace agreement with Syria, if the Damascus regime should ever show interest in such an accord. It was Syrian intransigence that Begin cited as an immediate reason for his action. He quoted a report in Sunday’s Kuwaiti newspaper Ar-rai Alaam that President Hafez Assad of Syria had expressed the determination to refuse to recognize Israel “even if the Palestinians deign to do so.” According to Begin, the paper said of the Syrian leader: “He called upon the Arab states to persist in their rejectionist stand until they attained the power necessary to impose peace conditions on Israel in the spirit of the Arab demands.” The accuracy of the quotation could not be confirmed. But the annexation, which provoked objections from

ted between 20 and 50 strikers arrested. Witnesses also reported a number of arrests at the Ursus tractor plant. Solidarity’s Information Service reported the big Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, where the union was born in the 1980 strike

Syria, Egypt, the Soviet Union and the United States, grew out of deeper Israeli concerns, a complex of domestical and international developments that have created a rising sense of insecurity and a testy mood in Jerusalem. These include a pronounced shift to the right in Israeli politics and a frustration over futile American diplomatic efforts to curb Syrian influence in Lebanon, across Israel’s northern border. Israeli apprehensions have also been heightened by the Reagan administration’s apparent shift toward treating Saudi Arabia as a key to Middle Eastern peace, with uncertain consequences for the Camp David accords, which the Saudis adamantly reject. The assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is also seen as a factor, and the annexation as an attempt to test the new Egytpian

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of galaxies. The new hole was discovered by Kirshner, Augustus Oemler Jr. of Yale University, Paul L. Schechter of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and Stephen A. Sheetman of the Mt. Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. The four, using telescopes at Kitt Peak, the Smithsonian’s Whipple Observatory in Arizona and Mt. Palomar in California, were conducting a survey to determine the distance of galaxies far from Earth. They were able to observe galaxies up to 40,000 times fainter than the naked eye can see. The hole was inferred from three samples of galaxies that formed a triangle in the area of the constellation Bootes. In each sample, the gap began about 360 million light-years away and continued outward to 540 million light-years. Preliminary results from more than 100 areas studied within that triangle has since supported the gap’s existence. Viewed from Earth, the patch of sky appears small. “If you hold a garbage can lid up at arm’s length, it’s that big a piece of the sky,” Kirshner says. But because the region is so far away, the hole actually

wave, was on strike. This was confirmed by two Swedish businessmen who visited the Baltic port city Monday. They said they found the shipyard gates closed and were told the workers were occupying the yard. The union’s information ser-

Golan Heights

regime of President Hhosni Mubarak on its commitment to peace. Egypt’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, Saad Mortada, objected to the move, but said the peace process would continue. The proposal by Begin took most of his cabinet ministers by surprise, and the haste with which it was pressed on an unprepared knesset was denounced by some opposition members as representing a suspension of the democratic process. In protest, most of the opposition labor party boycotted Begin’s speech, the debate and the votes. Begin initiated the move immediately upon his release Monday from Hadassah Hospital, where he had been recuperating from a broken thigh suffered in a fall Nov. 26. He convened an extraordinary Cabinet meeting in his Jerusalem residence, where his ministers reportedly followed his lead without substantial

SSO million asked in fatal crane collapse

CHICAGO (AP) - A SSO million damage suit has been filed by the widow of one of five workers killed in an accident on the construction site of the State of Illinois Center. The suit seeks $lO million from each of five firms named as defendants in the suit. Diane Houseknecht, of

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vice also reported troops removed strikers from the National Library and said there were 1,300 people on strike in a Warsaw building housing the literary section of the Polish Academy and several institutes. Western diplomats said they were turned back when they tried to reach Gdansk from Warsaw Monday. They said they saw many tanks along the highway, but fewer armed patrols were seen on the streets Monday. People on Warsaw’s frozen streets were grim rather than anxious, and panic buying of food cleaned out the shops. Private markets were stripped by 10 a.m. There were lines for bread.

dissent. The knesset, with Begin attending in a wheelchair, was then asked to compress the three separate readings, votes and committee hearings required of all legislation into one hectic evening, although these are usually spread out over several days. “We must have some sort of decent respite,” protested Amnon Rubinstein of the moderateliberal Shinui Party, “between the presentation of the law and voting on it. There’s party machinery, you have to consult your friends, you have to allow the Israeli press to comment, you have to allow a dialogue between the people who send this to Knesset and the members. To propose a law like that without any prior notice, and to carry it through, to push it through, to ram it through parliament, is to me the essence of an undemocratic procedure.”

Rolling Prairie, Ind., filed the suit Monday. Her husband, Charles, 41, was one of five men killed Friday when an elevator cage broke away from a crane cable and fell 100 feet into an excavation pit on the site in the downtown area. Circuit Judge Thomas J. O’Brien issued, at Mrs.

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represents about 1 percent of the observable universe. Thousands of galaxies should be found there. Yet the four astronomers find 10 times fewer than expected. “To have found a population density of less than three times average would have been a rare find,” Schechter says. “But finding that the density is about 10 times less than the average is exceedingly hard to understand.” The gap intrigues scientists trying to fathom the birth and evolution of the universe, for it goes to some basic issues in cosmology. Although matter does clump in galaxies and galaxy clusters, overall the material of the universe is evenly distributed. “Two of the most fundamental questions in cosmology today are: Why, on the large scale, is the universe so smooth; and why, on the small scale, is it so bumpy,” Schramm says. Kirshner and his colleagues continue to investigate whether matter might exist in the gap in some form other than normal galaxies. Two unlikely possibilities are as great ■ clouds of gas or as unusually tiny, faint galaxies, making the gap a “place where all the galaxies are pygmies.” “That in itself would be surprising,” Kirshner says.

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Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) displays an enlarged copy, of a controversial "Used Car Buyers Guide" proposed by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is trying to implement written regulations governing used car sales, but Pressler and others in the Congress are opposing it. A vote in the Senate has been delayed until next year. (AP Laserphoto) -' Vote on used-car guidelines delayed WASHINGTON (AP) A vote on whether Congress should veto a federal regulation over used-car dealers has been put off until next year, a spokesman for one of the leaders of the move said today. Steve Sprague, spokesman for Rep. Gary A. Lee, R-N.Y., said, “They dodged the bullet,” referring to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC regulation, which will not take effect until Congress has an opportunity to veto it under a new procedure, says dealers must tell customers about known defects. Sprague said a Senate vote in the closing days of the congessional session was avoided by a move by Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore. The veto, which would be the first under an authority Congress gave itself last year, is supported by nearly half the members of the House and Senate. It also easily won committee > approval in both houses. '

Houseknecht’s request, a temporary order barring the defendants from removing accident evidence from the county or having any “destructive testing” done on it until her investigators can inspect it. Phillip Rios, 28, of suburban Cicero also was in the cage but survived. He was in fair condition late Monday in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The suit charges that a number of federal safety regulations and the Illinois Structural Work Act were violated at the construction site and that those alleged violations contributed to the accident. The suit contends that the defendants: —Failed to provide a hazardfree workplace. —Provided no body belts or lanyards that each rider in the open cage could attach to the

Hudkins Pershing Accountants, Inc. Certified Public Accountants Announces the relocation of their offices to 239 Hillsdale Avenue (stone building«outh of old Putnam County Hospital)

crane boom as an extra measure of safety. . < —Did not inspect the cage at regular intervals. —Failed to provide safety nets for people working more than 25 feet above ground. The cage was about 100 feet up when it broke loose. —Did not provide a secure, backup lifeline for the cage capable of supporting a dead weight of at least 5,400 pounds, and allowed the cage to become overloaded. Defendants in the litigation include Lester B. Knight and Associates Inc. and C.F. Murphy Associates, the building’s architects and engineers; Gust K. Newberg Construction Co. and Paschen Contractors Inc., the general contractors, and some subcontractors. O’Brien scheduled a hearing Friday.