Sebuah planet gas alien yang mengorbit bintang berjarak 300 tahun cahaya dari Bumi berhasil diungkap keberadaannya dan dipotret secara langsung.

Saco-Indonesia.com — Sebuah planet gas alien yang mengorbit bintang berjarak 300 tahun cahaya dari Bumi berhasil diungkap keberadaannya dan dipotret secara langsung. Pemotretan planet secara langsung selama ini sulit dilakukan, apalagi planet yang baru ditemukan ini tergolong kecil.

Potret dari planet yang bernama HD 95086b ini dirilis European Southern Observatory pada Senin (3/6/2013). Potret planet yang mengelilingi bintang bernama HD 95086 ini dipotret dengan cahaya inframerah.

Pada gambar di atas, planet terlihat dengan warna biru terang, ada di bagian kiri bawah. Citra bintang telah dihilangkan sehingga publik bisa menyadari dan melihat keberadaan planet yang dimaksud dengan lebih jelas.

HD 95086 teramati lewat pengamatan secara langsung dengan very large telescope milik ESO. Berdasarkan kecerlangan cahayanya, ilmuwan menduga bahwa planet ini cuma punya massa empat hingga lima kali lebih besar dari Yupiter.

Astronom mengungkapkan, sangat jarang planet alien yang berjarak jauh bisa teramati secara langsung. Kebanyakan planet ditemukan secara tidak langsung dengan mengamati peredupan cahaya bintang saat planet melewati mukanya atau goyangan bintang akibat pengaruh gravitasi planet itu.

"Pengamatan secara langsung adalah teknik yang sangat menantang dan membutuhkan instrumen yang maju, baik yang berbasis di darat maupun antariksa," kata Julian Rameau, astronom di Institute of Astrophysics and Planetology di Perancis.

"Hanya beberapa planet bisa ditemukan secara langsung, membuat setiap penemuan merupakan lompatan penting dalam memahami planet raksasa dan pembentukannya," sambung Rameau seperti dikutip Space.com, Senin kemarin.

Foto lain yang diambil ESO menunjukkan bahwa planet dan bintang yang diorbitnya terletak di konstelasi Carina. HD 95086b mengorbit bintangnya pada jarak dua kali jarak Matahari-Neptunus atau 56 kali jarak Bumi-Matahari.

Penemuan planet ini akan dipublikasikan di Astrophysical Journal. HD 95086 yang menjadi bintang induk diduga masih berusia muda, baru 10-17 juta tahun. Hal ini membuat pembentukan planet dan piringan debu di sekitarnya menarik.

Anne Marie Langrange, peneliti yang juga terlibat penemuan, mengungkapkan, "Posisi planet saat ini memunculkan pertanyaan." Ia mengatakan bahwa planet mungkin telah berpindah dari tempat penemuannya ke tempat "tinggal" saat ini.

Tentang pembentukannya, Langrange mengatakan, "Mungkin planet tumbuh menyatukan batu yang membentuk inti padat dan secara perlahan mengakumulasi gas dari sekitarnya, atau bisa jadi terbentuk dari gumpalan gas yang akibat ketidakstabilan gravitasi di piringannya."

saco-indonesia.com, Pebalap tim Mercedes Nico Rosberg berharap dapat mengulangi kemenangan yang diperoleh di Monako pada F1 seri Kanada akhir pekan ini.

LONDON, Saco-Indonesia.com — Pebalap tim Mercedes Nico Rosberg berharap dapat mengulangi kemenangan yang diperoleh di Monako pada F1 seri Kanada akhir pekan ini. Terlebih lagi, motivasi tim Mercedes sedang meningkat untuk memburu posisi tiga besar di kategori konstruktor.                

"Saya berharap momentum kemenangan di Monako terbawa ke Kanada agar kami dapat kembali merebut podium tertinggi. Seluruh tim termotivasi untuk berjuang keras dan kembali merebut kemenangan," kata Rosberg, Selasa (4/6/2013) di London.                

Dalam tiga seri terakhir, Rosberg selalu merebut posisi start terdepan di babak kualifikasi. Namun, baru di Monako Rosberg merebut kemenangan. Menurut Rosberg, dirinya akan kembali berusaha keras untuk mendapatkan posisi start terdepan. Posisi start yang baik akan memberikan keuntungan di awal lomba dan memungkinkannya memperlebar jarak dari pebalap di belakangnya.

Selain itu, kata Rosberg, setelan mobil yang tepat dan strategi balap yang jitu akan sangat berpengaruh dalam lomba. Rosberg berharap timnya memberikan setelan yang menambah downforce atau tekanan ke bawah bagi mobil agar tetap stabil di lintasan lurus panjang dan di tikungan cepat.

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

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Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger.

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

GREENWICH, Conn. — Mago is in the bedroom. You can go in.

The big man lies on a hospital bed with his bare feet scraping its bottom rail. His head is propped on a scarlet pillow, the left temple dented, the right side paralyzed. His dark hair is kept just long enough to conceal the scars.

The occasional sounds he makes are understood only by his wife, but he still has that punctuating left hand. In slow motion, the fingers curl and close. A thumbs-up greeting.

Hello, Mago.

This is Magomed Abdusalamov, 34, also known as the Russian Tyson, also known as Mago. He is a former heavyweight boxer who scored four knockouts and 14 technical knockouts in his first 18 professional fights. He preferred to stand between rounds. Sitting conveyed weakness.

But Mago lost his 19th fight, his big chance, at the packed Theater at Madison Square Garden in November 2013. His 19th decision, and his last.

Now here he is, in a small bedroom in a working-class neighborhood in Greenwich, in a modest house his family rents cheap from a devoted friend. The air-pressure machine for his mattress hums like an expectant crowd.

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Today is like any other day, except for those days when he is hurried in crisis to the hospital. Every three hours during the night, his slight wife, Bakanay, 28, has risen to turn his 6-foot-3 body — 210 pounds of dead weight. It has to be done. Infections of the gaping bedsore above his tailbone have nearly killed him.

Then, with the help of a young caretaker, Baka has gotten two of their daughters off to elementary school and settled down the toddler. Yes, Mago and Baka are blessed with all girls, but they had also hoped for a son someday.

They feed Mago as they clean him; it’s easier that way. For breakfast, which comes with a side of crushed antiseizure pills, he likes oatmeal with a squirt of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. But even oatmeal must be puréed and fed to him by spoon.

He opens his mouth to indicate more, the way a baby does. But his paralysis has made everything a choking hazard. His water needs a stirring of powdered food thickener, and still he chokes — eh-eh-eh — as he tries to cough up what will not go down.

Mago used to drink only water. No alcohol. Not even soda. A sip of juice would be as far as he dared. Now even water betrays him.

With the caretaker’s help, Baka uses a washcloth and soap to clean his body and shampoo his hair. How handsome still, she has thought. Sometimes, in the night, she leaves the bedroom to watch old videos, just to hear again his voice in the fullness of life. She cries, wipes her eyes and returns, feigning happiness. Mago must never see her sad.

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When Baka finishes, Mago is cleanshaven and fresh down to his trimmed and filed toenails. “I want him to look good,” she says.

Theirs was an arranged Muslim marriage in Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan. He was 23, she was 18 and their future hinged on boxing. Sometimes they would shadowbox in love, her David to his Goliath. You are so strong, he would tell her.

His father once told him he could either be a bandit or an athlete, but if he chose banditry, “I will kill you.” This paternal advice, Mago later told The Ventura County Reporter, “made it a very easy decision for me.”

Mago won against mediocre competition, in Moscow and Hollywood, Fla., in Las Vegas and Johnstown, Pa. He was knocked down only once, and even then, it surprised more than hurt. He scored a technical knockout in the next round.

It all led up to this: the undercard at the Garden, Mike Perez vs. Magomed Abdusalamov, 10 rounds, on HBO. A win, he believed, would improve his chances of taking on the heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, who sat in the crowd of 4,600 with his fiancée, the actress Hayden Panettiere, watching.

Wearing black-and-red trunks and a green mouth guard, Mago went to work. But in the first round, a hard forearm to his left cheek rocked him. At the bell, he returned to his corner, and this time, he sat down. “I think it’s broken,” he repeatedly said in Russian.

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Maybe at that point, somebody — the referee, the ringside doctors, his handlers — should have stopped the fight, under a guiding principle: better one punch too early than one punch too late. But the bloody trade of blows continued into the seventh, eighth, ninth, a hand and orbital bone broken, his face transforming.

Meanwhile, in the family’s apartment in Miami, Baka forced herself to watch the broadcast. She could see it in his swollen eyes. Something was off.

After the final round, Perez raised his tattooed arms in victory, and Mago wandered off in a fog. He had taken 312 punches in about 40 minutes, for a purse of $40,000.

In the locker room, doctors sutured a cut above Mago’s left eye and tested his cognitive abilities. He did not do well. The ambulance that waits in expectation at every fight was not summoned by boxing officials.

Blood was pooling in Mago’s cranial cavity as he left the Garden. He vomited on the pavement while his handlers flagged a taxi to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. There, doctors induced a coma and removed part of his skull to drain fluids and ease the swelling.

Then came the stroke.

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It is lunchtime now, and the aroma of puréed beef and potatoes lingers. So do the questions.

How will Mago and Baka pay the $2 million in medical bills they owe? What if their friend can no longer offer them this home? Will they win their lawsuits against the five ringside doctors, the referee, and a New York State boxing inspector? What about Mago’s future care?

Most of all: Is this it?

A napkin rests on Mago’s chest. As another spoonful of mush approaches, he opens his mouth, half-swallows, chokes, and coughs until it clears. Eh-eh-eh. Sometimes he turns bluish, but Baka never shows fear. Always happy for Mago.

Some days he is wheeled out for physical therapy or speech therapy. Today, two massage therapists come to knead his half-limp body like a pair of skilled corner men.

Soon, Mago will doze. Then his three daughters, ages 2, 6 and 9, will descend upon him to talk of their day. Not long ago, the oldest lugged his championship belt to school for a proud show-and-tell moment. Her classmates were amazed at the weight of it.

Then, tonight, there will be more puréed food and pulverized medication, more coughing, and more tender care from his wife, before sleep comes.

Goodbye, Mago.

He half-smiles, raises his one good hand, and forms a fist.