Restoring Balance – Reconstructing Indigenous Strategies in King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War (1675 – 1678) was one of several Indian Wars in 17th-century colonial America. It was also referred to as “the first Indian war. However, there had been a previous conflict known as The Pequot War (1636 – 1638). Unlike the previous war and unrelated skirmishes over the years, King Philip’s War was a regional conflict that quickly spread throughout coastal and interior Native homelands in what is now called New England. While issues that caused the war built up over decades, the war formally began on the 25th of June,1675, when a band of Pauquunaukit Wampanoag (anglicized as Pokanoket, literally, land at the clearing )attacked several isolated homesteads in the small Plymouth colony settlement of Swansea.Their leader, or Sachem, was a man named Metacom, known as Philip to the English. Metacom was the son of 8sâmeeqan (Ousamequin), more commonly known as Massasoit.He was the same Massasoit who assisted the first English settlers at Plymouth in 1620. While the war ended in Southern New England with Philip\u27s death on the 12th of August, 1676, the war continued in Northern New England until the Treaty of Casco in April of 1678. King Philip’s War was therefore not a localized event like the earlier Pequot War (1636 – 1638). The Pequot War served as an example of what the Indigenous nations faced at the hand of the English. In that war, the English made no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, as evidenced by the Connecticut and Massachusetts Colonies\u27 attack on the Pequot fortified village at Mystic on the 26th of May, 1637. The Pequot defeat may well have provided food for thought among Indigenous nations in the area, and may have catalyzed their commitment towards procuring firearms

A General Formula for Black Hole Gravitational Wave Kicks

Although the gravitational wave kick velocity in the orbital plane of coalescing black holes has been understood for some time, apparently conflicting formulae have been proposed for the dominant out-of-plane kick, each a good fit to different data sets. This is important to resolve because it is only the out-of-plane kicks that can reach more than 500 km/s and can thus eject merged remnants from galaxies. Using a different ansatz for the out-of-plane kick, we show that we can fit almost all existing data to better than 5 %. This is good enough for any astrophysical calculation, and shows that the previous apparent conflict was only because the two data sets explored different aspects of the kick parameter space.Comment: 14 pages

Simulating X-ray Supercavities and Their Impact on Galaxy Clusters

Recent X-ray observations of hot gas in the galaxy cluster MS 0735.6+7421 reveal huge radio-bright, quasi-bipolar X-ray cavities having a total energy ~10^{62} ergs, the most energetic AGN outburst currently known. We investigate the evolution of this outburst with two-dimensional axisymmetric gasdynamical calculations in which the cavities are inflated by relativistic cosmic rays. Many key observational features of the cavities and associated shocks are successfully reproduced. The radial elongation of the cavities indicates that cosmic rays were injected into the cluster gas by a (jet) source moving out from the central AGN. AGN jets of this magnitude must be almost perfectly identically bipolar. The relativistic momentum of a single jet would cause a central AGN black hole of mass 10^9 M_{sun} to recoil at ~6000 km s^{-1}, exceeding kick velocities during black hole mergers, and be ejected from the cluster-center galaxy. When the cavity inflation is complete, 4PV underestimates the total energy received by the cluster gas. Deviations of the cluster gas from hydrostatic equilibrium are most pronounced during the early cavity evolution when the integrated cluster mass found from the observed gas pressure gradient can have systematic errors near the cavities of ~10-30%. The creation of the cavity with cosmic rays generates a long-lasting global cluster expansion that reduces the total gas thermal energy below that received from the cavity shock. One Gyr after this single outburst, a gas mass of ~ 6 \times 10^{11} M_{sun} is transported out beyond a cluster radius of 500 kpc. Such post-cavity outflows can naturally produce the discrepancy observed between the cluster gas mass fraction and the universal baryon fraction inferred from WMAP observations. (Abridged)Comment: Slightly revised version, accepted for publication in ApJ. 11 pages, 6 figure

3C236: Radio Source, Interrupted?

We present new HST STIS/MAMA near-UV images and archival WFPC2 V and R band images which reveal the presence of four star forming regions in an arc along the edge of the dust lane in the giant (4 Mpc) radio galaxy 3C236. Two of the star forming regions are relatively young with ages of order 1E7 yr, while the other two are older with ages of order 1E8 - 1E9 yr which is comparable to the estimated age of the giant radio source. Based on dynamical and spectral aging arguments, we suggest that the fuel supply to the AGN was interrupted for 1E7 yr and has now been restored, resulting in the formation of the inner 2 kpc scale radio source. This time scale is similar to that of the age of the youngest of the star forming regions. We suggest that the transport of gas in the disk is non-steady and that this produces both the multiple episodes of star formation in the disk as well as the multiple epochs of radio source activity. If the inner radio source and the youngest star forming region are related by the same event of gas transport, the gas must be transported from the hundreds of pc scale to the sub-parsec scale on a time scale of 1E7 yr, which is similar to the dynamical time scale of the gas on the hundreds of pc scales

Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the OPAL Detector at LEP

This paper summarises the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in e+e- collisions at centre-of-mass energies up to 209 GeV performed by the OPAL Collaboration at LEP. The consistency of the data with the background hypothesis and various Higgs boson mass hypotheses is examined. No indication of a signal is found in the data and a lower bound of 112.7GeV/C^2 is obtained on the mass of the Standard Model Higgs boson at the 95% CL.Comment: 51 pages, 21 figure

Colour reconnection in e+e- -> W+W- at sqrt(s) = 189 - 209 GeV

The effects of the final state interaction phenomenon known as colour reconnection are investigated at centre-of-mass energies in the range sqrt(s) ~ 189-209 GeV using the OPAL detector at LEP. Colour reconnection is expected to affect observables based on charged particles in hadronic decays of W+W-. Measurements of inclusive charged particle multiplicities, and of their angular distribution with respect to the four jet axes of the events, are used to test models of colour reconnection. The data are found to exclude extreme scenarios of the Sjostrand-Khoze Type I (SK-I) model and are compatible with other models, both with and without colour reconnection effects. In the context of the SK-I model, the best agreement with data is obtained for a reconnection probability of 37%. Assuming no colour reconnection, the charged particle multiplicity in hadronically decaying W bosons is measured to be (nqqch) = 19.38+-0.05(stat.)+-0.08 (syst.).Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to Euro. Phys. J.

Search for R-Parity Violating Decays of Scalar Fermions at LEP

A search for pair-produced scalar fermions under the assumption that R-parity is not conserved has been performed using data collected with the OPAL detector at LEP. The data samples analysed correspond to an integrated luminosity of about 610 pb-1 collected at centre-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) 189-209 GeV. An important consequence of R-parity violation is that the lightest supersymmetric particle is expected to be unstable. Searches of R-parity violating decays of charged sleptons, sneutrinos and squarks have been performed under the assumptions that the lightest supersymmetric particle decays promptly and that only one of the R-parity violating couplings is dominant for each of the decay modes considered. Such processes would yield final states consisting of leptons, jets, or both with or without missing energy. No significant single-like excess of events has been observed with respect to the Standard Model expectations. Limits on the production cross- section of scalar fermions in R-parity violating scenarios are obtained. Constraints on the supersymmetric particle masses are also presented in an R-parity violating framework analogous to the Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.Comment: 51 pages, 24 figures, Submitted to Eur. Phys. J.