“A few members from other communities have approached me about our project,” said Edwin Collins, economic development manager with Fort William First Nation. “SkyPower graciously allowed us to enter inside the solar site. They shut some of the power down so we could walk in safely and we were able to get almost a couple of inches away from the solar panels.”

The 10 MW SkyPower solar park, which contains about 45,000 solar panels, has been in operation on about 88 acres of Fort William commercial land since this past May.

Collins said the solar park provided about 50 job opportunities for community members during construction.

“We are looking into another solar project,” Collins said. “Right from the ground up, we were involved in this project. It was a learning curve for both SkyPower and Fort William First Nation.”

The conference also featured a workshop on the Musselwhite Mine Environmental Working Committee.

“It doesn’t come easy,” said Eleazor McKay, Musselwhite coordinator for Shibogama First Nations Council and a MMEWC committee member. “The important part is understanding each other, where the industry is coming from and the industry in turn listens to the First Nation concerns.”


McKay said the committee’s results have been satisfactory to date even though there are ongoing concerns.

“In a way, it has been a success story because we had many challenges,” McKay said. “For our side, it’s the lack of understanding of the scientific terminology being used and (being) able to translate it to our language.”

Although a number of workshop participants raised concerns about potential pollution, McKay said no problems have been identified in two nearby communities on the same river system as the Musselwhite Mine.


“We are waiting for results from our sturgeon study,” McKay said. “Everything looks fine and I am sure that people will catch anything unusual in species that we consume on a daily basis.”

McKay said there are concerns about the mine closure, which is currently estimated for 2029.

“Our First Nations are going to be there for thousands of years to come after the mine closes,” McKay said. “So what happens then. We are not there yet, but we are slowly getting the understanding of it.”

The conference was held Oct. 1-4 at the Fort William Historical Park and the Victoria Inn in Thunder Bay, with a wide variety of workshops on community development and protection, energy usage, environmental studies, fuel management, land use planning, mining, waste management and water/wastewater.

Wawakapwewin’s Simon Frogg would like to see more background information and discussion time at future conferences.

“We are affected by a lot of the things that are under discussion,” Frogg said.

The conference was hosted by Bimose Tribal Council, Independent First Nations Alliance, Matawa First Nations Management Inc., Nokiiwin Tribal Council, North Shore Tribal Council, Ontario First Nations Technical Services Corporation, Shibogama First Nations Council and Windigo First Nations Council in partnership with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines.
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Read About Northern Ontario First Nations Environment Conference

Astronomers report that they have discovered the most gigantic black holes ever found in the universe, an abyss 10 times the size of our solar system, encompassing regions or "event horizons" about five times the distance from the sun to Pluto or about 2,500 times as massive as the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

The biggest of of these monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped galaxy known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster of thousands of galaxies about 335 million light-years away. The image at bottom of page shows the central region of the Coma cluster, with giant elliptical galaxies NGC 4889 and NGC 4874.

The other newly discovered beast, the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, is in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another swirl of stars known as Abell 1367, 331 million light-years away in Leo.

"These two black holes are significantly more massive than predicted," the astronomers wrote.
They said their calculations suggest that different evolutionary processes influence the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes than in smaller galaxies. Astronomers have long suspected that since the universe began it has harboured black holes with a mass the size of the two newly found giants.

Chung-Pei Ma, led a team of University of California, Berkeley astronomers who used the Gemini and Keck observatories in Hawaii and the McDonald Observatory in Texas and outer space to weigh the black holes in the centers of galaxies by clocking the speeds of stars orbiting around them; the faster the stars are going, the more gravity — and thus mass — is needed to keep the stars from flying away. They report their work in the journal Nature, which will be published online on Wednesday.

These cosmic gluttons grow in tandem with their galaxies, slurping up gases, planets and stars.
"There is a symbiotic relationship between black holes and their galaxies that has existed since the dawn of time," Kevin Schawinski, a Yale astronomer said in a June study.

Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.

One question astronomers would like answered is how these black holes got so big, billions of times bigger than a typical dead star. Dr. Ma described it as a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument, explaining that black holes could grow by merging with other black holes as galaxies merge to get bigger — “nature” — or by swallowing gas around them — “nurture.”

“Our discovery of extremely massive black holes in the largest present-day galaxies suggests that these galaxies could be the ancient remains of voracious ancestors," said McConnell. Astronomers think the supermassive black holes in galaxies could be the missing link between the quasars of early universe that were powered by giant black holes in gargantuan feeding frenzies, spewing massive amounts of energy into space.

Image credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook

Via: http://www.dailygalaxy.com