How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
News
LAKEPORT, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control's special adoption event wraps up on Saturday, just as a large new group of dogs has arrived.
Animal Care and Control holds the special events up to four times a year.
The savings this week total $50 for dogs and $40 for cats. The event waives the $30 adoption fee for dogs and the $20 adoption fee for cats, and dropped the $20 microchip fee.
The agency had reported it was having a good week with adoptions, but on Friday Director Bill Davidson said they were swamped with an influx of 15 dogs, many of them owner surrenders.
With an already full shelter, community members thinking about adoption are urged to come in and take home a new family member.
The shelter on Friday had three adult cats available, along with several litters of puppies, and many adult dogs – from small Chihuahuas up to large hound and American Bulldog mixes, as well as mixes of boxer, cattle dog, Doberman, Labrador Retriever, mastiff, pit bull, Rottweiler and shepherd.
Adoption costs this week are as follows:
– Dogs: $111 to $126 for females, depending on weight, and $101 for males.
– Cats: $56 for males and $66 for females.
Those costs include spay/neuter, vaccinations, microchipping, licensing and a heartworm test (if age-appropriate).
Visit Lake County Animal Care and Control online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm , call 707-263-0278 or drop by the shelter at 4949 Helbush Drive in Lakeport during kennel hours, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The U.S. Forest Service Mendocino National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management Ukiah Field Office will hold two open houses to provide the public with information on the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument and monument planning process.
The open houses will run from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at:
· Lakeport, April 28, Clear Lake High School Gymnasium, 350 Lange St.
· Winters, May 4, Winters Community Center, 201 Railroad Ave.
These open house sessions will offer a forum to learn and ask questions about the monument’s resources and recreation opportunities.
The Forest Service and BLM will discuss plans for the near future with the monument.
There will be a short introductory presentation at the beginning of the meeting, followed by information station breakouts where Forest Service and BLM staff members will be available to share their knowledge of the area and answer questions.
Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument was designated on July 10, 2015, by President Obama.
The monument extends from nearly sea level on BLM lands around Lake Berryessa in the south, up to 7,000 feet through the northern Snow Mountain Wilderness and the eastern boundary of the Yuki Wilderness in the MNF.
The monument offers a wealth of natural, historical and cultural resources, as well as exciting recreation opportunities for visitors.
For requests for reasonable accommodation access to the facility or proceedings, contact Uylanda Weathers at 530-934-1103 or email
For more information on the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, visit http://www.fs.fed.us/visit/berryessa-snow-mountain-national-monument .
Astronomers have uncovered a near-record breaking supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in an unlikely place: in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe.
The observations, made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, may indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought.
Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes – those roughly 10 billion times the mass of our sun – have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions of the universe packed with other large galaxies. In fact, the current record holder tips the scale at 21 billion suns and resides in the crowded Coma galaxy cluster that consists of over 1,000 galaxies.
"The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies," said lead discoverer Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe.
While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the universe is to be expected – like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan – it seemed less likely they could be found in the universe's small towns.
"There are quite a few galaxies the size of NGC 1600 that reside in average-size galaxy groups," Ma said. "We estimate that these smaller groups are about 50 times more abundant than spectacular galaxy clusters like the Coma cluster. So the question now is, 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?' Maybe there are more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains."
The researchers also were surprised to discover that the black hole is 10 times more massive than they had predicted for a galaxy of this mass.
Based on previous Hubble surveys of black holes, astronomers had developed a correlation between a black hole's mass and the mass of its host galaxy's central bulge of stars – the larger the galaxy bulge, the proportionally more massive the black hole.
But for galaxy NGC 1600, the giant black hole's mass far overshadows the mass of its relatively sparse bulge.
"It appears that that relation does not work very well with extremely massive black holes; they are a larger fraction of the host galaxy's mass," Ma said.
Ma and her colleagues are reporting the discovery of the black hole, which is located about 200 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Eridanus, in the April 6 issue of the journal Nature. Jens Thomas of the Max Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany is the paper's lead author.
One idea to explain the black hole's monster size is that it merged with another black hole long ago when galaxy interactions were more frequent.
When two galaxies merge, their central black holes settle into the core of the new galaxy and orbit each other.
Stars falling near the binary black hole, depending on their speed and trajectory, can actually rob momentum from the whirling pair and pick up enough velocity to escape from the galaxy's core.
This gravitational interaction causes the black holes to slowly move closer together, eventually merging to form an even larger black hole.
The supermassive black hole then continues to grow by gobbling up gas funneled to the core by galaxy collisions.
"To become this massive, the black hole would have had a very voracious phase during which it devoured lots of gas," Ma said.
The frequent meals consumed by NGC 1600 may also be the reason why the galaxy resides in a small town, with few galactic neighbors. NGC 1600 is the most dominant galaxy in its galactic group, at least three times brighter than its neighbors.
"Other groups like this rarely have such a large luminosity gap between the brightest and the second brightest galaxies," Ma said.
Most of the galaxy's gas was consumed long ago when the black hole blazed as a brilliant quasar from material streaming into it that was heated into a glowing plasma.
"Now, the black hole is a sleeping giant," Ma said. "The only way we found it was by measuring the velocities of stars near it, which are strongly influenced by the gravity of the black hole. The velocity measurements give us an estimate of the black hole's mass."
The velocity measurements were made by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North 8-meter telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. GMOS spectroscopically dissected the light from the galaxy's center, revealing stars within 3,000 light-years of the core. Some of these stars are circling around the black hole and avoiding close encounters.
However, stars moving on a straighter path away from the core suggest that they had ventured closer to the center and had been slung away, most likely by the twin black holes.
Archival Hubble images, taken by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), supports the idea of twin black holes pushing stars away.
The NICMOS images revealed that the galaxy's core was unusually faint, indicating a lack of stars close to the galactic center.
A star-depleted core distinguishes massive galaxies from standard elliptical galaxies, which are much brighter in their centers.
Ma and her colleagues estimated that the amount of stars tossed out of the central region equals 40 billion suns, comparable to ejecting the entire disk of our Milky Way galaxy.
COBB, Calif. – A magnitude 3.5 earthquake rattled parts of the south county on Friday morning.
The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred at 5:58 a.m.
It was centered five miles northwest of The Geysers steamfield and 14 miles southwest of Clearlake, at a depth of just under one mile, the survey reported.
The survey received shake reports from seven zip codes, including Kelseyville and Middletown within Lake County, Calistoga and St. Helena in Napa County, and Cloverdale, Geyserville and Santa Rosa in Sonoma County.
Friday's quake is the largest reported in the Cobb area since a 3.4-magnitude temblor that occurred on Jan. 15, according to US Geological Survey records.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LUCERNE, Calif. – The final installment of the “Distinguished Speaker Series” sponsored by the Lake County Land Trust and the Friends of Marymount California University Lakeside Campus presented a discussion on Lake County's native grasslands.
The event, held at the Lucerne campus Thursday evening, featured a talk by local ecologist Catherine Koehler, director of the University of California’s McLaughlin Reserve in eastern Lake County and the executive director for the Lake County Land Trust.
Koehler's presentation can be seen in the video above.
Her talk was the last of three in the series.
Previous speakers included:
– Biology professor Dr. Harry Lyons in February – www.bit.ly/1SOrdkT ; and
– Archaeologist Dr. John Parker in March – www.bit.ly/1U19nvL .
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The National Weather Service is predicting a break in the sunny weather, as rain returns to the forecast until late into next week.
The specific Lake County forecast calls for a 30-percent chance of rain after 11 a.m. Friday, rising to 50-percent Friday night, with light winds. Friday rainfall is expected to total up to a quarter of an inch.
Showers also are likely on Saturday, with a 70-percent chance in the morning tapering off to a 40-percent chance on Saturday night, also accompanied by light winds. Rainfall totals are predicted to be between a tenth and a quarter of an inch.
There is a 30-percent chance of rains on Sunday and slighter chances Monday through Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service.
Temperatures through Thursday are predicted to be in the mid 40s at night and the high 60s during the daytime, forecasters said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at