Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Large spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen nearly edge-on in this cosmic galaxy close-up. It's almost the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 4945's own dusty disk, young blue star clusters, and pink star forming regions stand out in the colorful telescopic frame. About 13 million light-years distant toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus, NGC 4945 is only about six times farther away than Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Though this galaxy's central region is largely hidden from view for optical telescopes, X-ray and infrared observations indicate significant high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. Its obscured but active nucleus qualifies the gorgeous island universe as a Seyfert galaxy and home to a central supermassive black hole.

Photo by Dietmar Hager

A congressional effort to fix the nation’s deteriorating mail service may come at the expense of an even bigger and more complicated problem: Medicare solvency.

The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 would help shore up post office finances by ending the unusual and onerous legal requirement to fund 75 years of retirement health benefits in advance. In return, it would require future Postal Service retirees to enroll in Medicare.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the move could save the postal retirement and health programs about $5.6 billion through 2031 while adding $5.5 billion in costs to Medicare during that span, and probably much more in later years.

Considering the massive size of Medicare — it spent $926 billion in 2020 — the costs don’t amount to much. That small financial impact, and the ongoing immediate crises with mail delivery, probably account for the strong bipartisan support the postal bill has received in Congress, with 120 Republicans joining Democrats to pass the bill in the House on Feb. 8.

But late in the process, some lawmakers are raising alarms over the move, arguing that maybe Congress should look more carefully at the financial impact to Medicare’s trust fund, which is expected to run dry in 2026.

“This bill simply shifts risk to Medicare recipients by adding billions of new costs to Medicare,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Feb. 14 in blocking requests on the Senate floor to expedite passage of the bill. Scott’s objection delayed consideration of the bill until early March, after the Senate returns from its Presidents Day break.

Currently, Postal Service employees are covered by plans offered in the Federal Employees Health Benefits program. When they retire they have several choices for health care, including staying in their original plan or switching to Medicare as their primary coverage and having an FEHB plan serve as supplementary coverage. About 20% of postal retirees do not sign up for Medicare, preferring their current federal plan. Under this legislation, they would have to switch to Medicare, but they would keep a new Postal Service version of the FEHB plan as secondary coverage.

Since the change wouldn’t fully take effect until 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate doesn’t capture a full decade, Scott wants to know the price tag for the next 10- and 20-year periods, as well as the specific impacts on the various components of Medicare, such as premiums for Medicare’s Part D drug plan and the Part B program, which covers a variety of outpatient services.

The overall cost is likely to be much more significant than the shorter-term analysis found, said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who has also raised concerns.

“There is a total cost that’s being ignored,” Moffit said. “You basically have a situation where you have unfunded liabilities in the Postal Service Health Benefits Program, retiree benefits, that amount to about $75 billion.”

That projected cost doesn’t vanish. It falls on Medicare, though the exact impact is unclear. Moffit agreed with Scott that Congress should be looking at longer-term implications, including effects on premiums and the costs borne by taxpayers and beneficiaries.

“We ought to step back, take a deep breath, and look at what we’re doing here,” Moffit said.

Postal Service unions are not worried about the change, however, with all of them supporting the switch, noted Democrats who responded to Scott earlier this month.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that the bill would save the government money overall, and that moving postal retirees into Medicare would ensure that they receive benefits they’ve paid for but were not using.

For Schumer and most other lawmakers, the comparatively small impact on Medicare is simply not as pressing as getting the mail delivered on time.

“We will pass this bill because America needs it. Rural people need it. Senior citizens need it. Veterans need it — 80% of the veterans’ prescriptions are sent through the mail,” Schumer said. “Nobody should be standing in the way of this bill.”

Scott is now among a minority objecting to the latest effort and pointing to Medicare.

Others who remain concerned about Medicare’s poor finances also thought fixing the problems with postal delivery was worth the cost to Medicare.

“I would let Congress have a small win here and, really, this is not just a small win,” said Mary Johnson, a Social Security and Medicare policy analyst at the Senior Citizens League advocacy group.

She said the failures of the mail system also have health consequences, with payments for insurance and shipments of prescriptions going missing, which has happened to her.

The shift to Medicare envisioned in the legislation could add to the sense of urgency — all those retired postal workers would be joining Medicare just in time for a solvency crisis if Congress drags its feet. “It’s inaction in Congress that would cause that,” Johnson said.

Johnson noted it will be difficult to reach a bipartisan consensus on something as momentous as Medicare reform. “You’re going to have to pass something, and it depends on who’s the majority. It may not be very pretty when it happens.”

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This Navcam mosaic from Perseverance looks out over the car-sized rover's deck, across the floor of Jezero crater on Mars. Frames used to construct the mosaic view were captured on mission sol 354. That corresponds to Earth calendar date February 17, 2022, nearly one Earth year after the rover's landing. With a mass of over 1,000 kilograms, six-wheeled Perseverance is the heaviest rover to touch down on Mars. During its first year of exploration the rover has collected six (so far) rock core samples for later return to planet Earth, served as the base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), converting some of the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Beta Cygni is a single bright star to the naked eye. About 420 light-years away it marks the foot of the Northern Cross, famous asterism in the constellation Cygnus. But a view through the eyepiece of a small telescope will transform it into a beautiful double star, a treasure of the night sky in blue and gold. Beta Cygni is also known as Albireo, designated Albireo AB to indicate its two bright component stars. Their visually striking color difference is illustrated in this telescopic snapshot, along with their associated visible spectrum of starlight shown in insets to the right. Albireo A, top inset, shows the spectrum of a K-type giant star, cooler than the Sun and emitting most of its energy at yellow and red wavelengths. Below, Albireo B has the spectrum of a main sequence star much hotter than the Sun, emitting more energy in blue and violet. Albireo A is known to be a binary star, two stars together orbiting a common center of mass, though the two stars are too close together to be seen separately with a small telescope. Well-separated Albireo A and B most likely represent an optical double star and not a physical binary system because the two components have clearly different measured motions through space.

Photo by Robert Eder

Where is the love,
where is the joy,
of a relationship
between a girl and boy?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What will the huge Green Bank Telescope discover tonight? Pictured, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) on the lower right is the largest fully-pointable single-dish radio telescope in the world. With a central dish larger than a football field, the GBT is nestled in the hills of West Virginia, USA in a radio quiet zone where the use of cell phones, WiFi emitters, and even microwave ovens are limited. The GBT explores our universe not only during the night -- but during the day, too, since the daytime sky is typically dark in radio waves. Taken in late January, the featured image was planned for months to get the setting location of Orion just right. The image is a composite of a foreground shot taken over a kilometer away from the GBT, and a background shot built up of long exposures during the previous night. The deep background image of Orion is fitting because the GBT is famous for, among many discoveries, mapping the unusual magnetic field in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.

Photo by Dave Green

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to involve supermassive black holes in the centers of active galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though. Featured, recent data has enabled an artist's impression of an early-universe quasar as it might have been: centered on a massive black hole, surrounded by sheets of gas and an accretion disk, and expelling a powerful jet. Quasars are among the most distant objects we see and give humanity unique information about the early and intervening universe. The oldest quasars currently known are seen at just short of redshift 8 -- only 700 million years after the Big Bang -- when the universe was only a few percent of its current age.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in this image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 6217, which spans about 30,000 light years across and can be found toward the constellation of the Little Bear (Ursa Minor). APOD in world languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Beijing), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, French (Canada), German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Montenegrin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Turkish, Turkish, and Ukrainian

John Herschel Glenn (1921 - 2016)) United States Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. third American in space and fifth person in history to be in space. He received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1962, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012..... Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes both heaven and Earth erupt. Colorful auroras erupted unexpectedly a few years ago, with green aurora appearing near the horizon and brilliant bands of red aurora blooming high overhead. A bright Moon lit the foreground of this picturesque scene, while familiar stars could be seen far in the distance. With planning, the careful astrophotographer shot this image mosaic in the field of White Dome Geyser in Yellowstone National Park in the western USA. Sure enough, just after midnight, White Dome erupted -- spraying a stream of water and vapor many meters into the air. Geyser water is heated to steam by scalding magma several kilometers below, and rises through rock cracks to the surface. About half of all known geysers occur in Yellowstone National Park. Although the geomagnetic storm that caused the auroras subsided within a day, eruptions of White Dome Geyser continue about every 30 minutes.

Photo by Robert Howell