Also on today’s menu:
French Rower Crosses The Atlantic
Huge Comet Is Heading Our Way
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Administrative Services, and New Hampshire Hospital officials will hold a virtual information session on Thursday, Oct. 7, at 6 p.m. to discuss a proposed 24-bed secure psychiatric unit adjacent to New Hampshire Hospital. The unit is billed as allowing “start-to-finish” treatment for civilly committed individuals.
Currently, forensic patients with acute mental illness who are civilly committed are treated at the Men’s Prison in Concord. Having a forensic psychiatric hospital adjacent to New Hampshire Hospital will allow for skilled psychiatric treatment in a safe, secure, and therapeutic environment, according to state officials. Those in leadership positions will discuss the plan, the steps taken to date, and a timeline for completion of the project.
The information session will take place on Zoom, accessed at Proposed Forensic Psychiatric Hospital Virtual Information Session. Members of the public will be able to submit questions and comments at this and subsequent sessions as the project advances.
French Rower Crosses The Atlantic
French solo rower Guirec Soudée, who set out from Chatham, Massachusetts, on June 15, arrived in Brest, France, on Oct. 1, completing a 107-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean, according to his Facebook page.
Facebook videos showed Soudée being towed into the harbor in Brest, surrounded by boats of all kinds. “Incroyable! [Incredible!]” said a commentator. Hundreds of well-wishers greeted the 29-year-old rower as he arrived at a pier, and Soudée climbed atop Romane, his 26-foot vessel, to address the crowd and assembled media.
Woody Metzger, of First Light Boatworks, towed Soudée out into the open ocean through the tricky and dangerous bars off Chatham on June 15.
Huge Comet Is Heading Our Way
During the predawn hours of October 20, 2014, a telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert snapped a picture of the southern night sky, capturing hints of something huge, old, and icy plummeting toward our home star. It would take nearly seven years for researchers to determine that the strange dot of light is a huge primordial comet —possibly the largest ever studied with modern telescopes.
Called Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the comet is described in a discovery paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Pedro Bernardinelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, who co-discovered the comet during the final weeks of his Ph.D. research at the University of Pennsylvania with his then-adviser Gary Bernstein, estimates the comet’s nucleus to be about 93 miles wide.
Over the next decade, Bernardinelli-Bernstein will become brighter as it approaches the inner solar system, making its closest approach on January 21, 2031, when the comet is expected to come within about a billion miles of the sun — slightly farther away than Saturn’s average distance. It will then begin its long retreat back into the solar system’s outer realms, remaining visible into at least the 2040s, if not decades longer.
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