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one photo of Matthew Henson

one map of Henson's North Pole expeditions

one map of Henson's Greenland expeditions

\"Matthew Henson was born on August 8, 1866, in Maryland.\" (Biography for Beginners--World Explorers) He traveled to the North Pole with Robert E. Peary. Learn more about Henson's life, his discoveries and his home and family. Resources for more information are included.

 \"Captain Childs taught [Matthew Henson] any things, including how to tie sailors' knots and navigate by the stars. This was only the beginning. When Matt grew up, he realized his dream of becoming an explorer. On April 6, 1909, Admiral Robert Peary and Matt Henson discovered the North Pole.\" (Los Angeles Times) Read about Henson's early dreams of exploring the world.

Robert Peary and Matthew Henson were two very different men with a common dream--to be the first men to reach the Arctic's North Pole. Their expedition and the controversy surrounding it are discussed.

Massive galaxies in the early Universe host supermassive black holes at their centers. When material falls toward the black hole, it releases energy and is observed as a quasar. Astronomers found a population of powerful distant quasars that are obscured by dust, but it has been unclear how they are formed. Díaz-Santos et al. observed the dust-obscured quasar WISE J224607.56-052634.9 at submillimeter wavelengths, finding three small companion galaxies connected to the quasar by bridges of gas and dust. They inferred that galaxy mergers can provide both the raw material to power a quasar and large quantities of dust to obscure it. Science , this issue p. 1034 Galaxy mergers can provide the raw materials to drive powerful dust-observed quasars in the early Universe. Galaxy mergers and gas accretion from the cosmic web drove the growth of galaxies and their central black holes at early epochs. We report spectroscopic imaging of a multiple merger event in the most luminous known galaxy, WISE J224607.56−052634.9 (W2246−0526), a dust-obscured quasar at redshift 4.6, 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Far-infrared dust continuum observations show three galaxy companions around W2246−0526 with disturbed morphologies, connected by streams of dust likely produced by the dynamical interaction. The detection of tidal dusty bridges shows that W2246−0526 is accreting its neighbors, suggesting that merger activity may be a dominant mechanism through which the most luminous galaxies simultaneously obscure and feed their central supermassive black holes.

In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era of fierce rivalry between great powers, voyages of fantastic discovery, and brutal conquest of new lands, people throughout the Mediterranean saw the signs of an impending apocalypse and envisioned a coming war that would end with a decisive Christian or Islamic victory. With his army of hardy desert warriors from lost Israelite tribes, Reubeni pledged to deliver the Jews to the Holy Land by force and restore their pride and autonomy. He would spend a decade shuttling between European rulers in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and France, seeking weaponry in exchange for the support of his hitherto unknown but mighty Jewish kingdom. Many, however, believed him to favor the relatively tolerant Ottomans over the persecutorial Christian regimes. Reubeni was hailed as a messiah by many wealthy Jews and Iberia's oppressed conversos, but his grand ambitions were halted in Regensburg when the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, turned him over to the Inquisition and, in 1538, he was likely burned at the stake. Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah is the first English translation of Reubeni's Hebrew-language diary, detailing his travels and personal travails. Written in a Hebrew drawn from everyday speech, entirely unlike other literary works of the period, Reubeni's diary reveals both the dramatic desperation of Renaissance Jewish communities and the struggles of the diplomat, trickster, and dreamer who wanted to save them.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the relic afterglow of the Big Bang, has become one of the most useful and precise tools in modern precision cosmology. In this article, we employ Tsallis non-extensive statistical framework to calculate the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and its probability distribution by utilising a recently proposed blackbody radiation inversion (BRI) technique and the cosmic background explorer/ far infrared absolute spectrophotometer (COBE/FIRAS) dataset. Here, we have used the best-fit values of q = 0.99888 ± 0.00016 and q = 1.00012 ± 0.00001, obtained by fitting COBE/FIRAS data with two different versions of non-extensive models. We compare the results with the more conventional extensive statistical analysis i.e. for q = 1.

Recent discovery of J1342+0928 using data from the WISE telescope and ground based surveys indicate presence of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) having a mass of 800 million solar mass at a redshift of about 7.6. This imply that the black hole grew to this mass only 690 million years after the universe started expanding. Here we suggest that formation of such SMBH’s so early in the universe is consistent with our present understanding of the phenomena involved by invoking dark matter (DM).