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northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus and Vega. Always above the horizon for observers north of 44°N, the Capella system is only 42.9 light-years from the Sun. Its two largest stars are Capella Aa and Capella Ab, bright yellow giant stars in a binary pair, both around 2.5 times as massive as the Sun. They are in a very tight circular 104-day orbit, some 0.76 astronomical units (au) apart. Capella Aa is the cooler and more luminous of the two, with around 79 times the Sun's luminosity. An ageing red clump star, it is fusing helium to carbon and oxygen in its core. Ab is slightly less massive, smaller and hotter, about 73 times as luminous as the Sun. The Capella system is one of the brightest sources of X-rays in the sky, thought to come primarily from the corona of the more massive giant. The other two stars, a binary pair around 10,000 au from the first two, are faint, small and relatively cool red dwarfs. (Full article...

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Wallachian peasant soldiers

... that the first Romanian-language references to "patriotism" are traced back to documents issued by both sides of an armed uprising in 1821
(peasant soldiers pictured)?

... that Doreen Simmons was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun for her sumo television commentaries?

... that a large lake formerly covered California's Death Valley, and occasionally reappears?

... that Allanah Harper was responsible for introducing W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to the French people?

... that the founders of Smashburger sampled 300 kinds of beef before settling on Angus for their restaurant's burgers?

... that during the Second World War, General aptitude tests
for new recruits to the British Army?

... that to compose the entire score for the video game Heavy Rain, Normand Corbeil was given two months, producing nearly 300 cues?

... that the 1900 English beer poisoning, in which more than 6,000 drinkers were poisoned by arsenic, was misdiagnosed for months as alcoholic neuritis?

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In the news

Vladimir Putin

re-elected President of Russia
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Brazilian politician and human rights activist Marielle Franco is killed in a shooting in Rio de Janeiro.
In response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent, the United Kingdom expels 23 Russian diplomats.
British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking dies at the age of 76.

On this day...

March 21

Battle of Karameh aftermath

1556 – Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, one of the founders of Anglicanism, was burnt at the stake in Oxford, England, for heresy.
1918 – First World War: The German Army opened the Spring Offensive with Operation Michael, attempting to break through the Allied lines and to seize ports on the English Channel.
1952 – The first major rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, was held at the Cleveland Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
1968 – War of Attrition: The Israel Defense Forces clashed with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Jordanian Armed Forces during the Battle of Karameh (aftermath pictured).
2006 – A man using a hammer smashed the statue of Phra Phrom in the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, and was subsequently beaten to death by bystanders.

Absalon (d. 1201) · Alice Henry (b. 1857) · Emily Infeld (b. 1990)

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The Virgin Mary Triumphing over Heresy and Fall of the Rebel Angels is the ceiling

Virgin Mary. Completed in 1620, it is the only structure designed and completed by the early Baroque architect Carlo Maderno. The fresco was executed by Giovanni Domenico Cerrini in 1675. The church is also known for Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a masterpiece by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

in the Cornaro Chapel, completed in 1652.

Photograph: LivioAndronico

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