This week’s on Mornings with Carmen, we discussed an exploding star that will be visible this summer, the Southern Baptist Convention’s position on IVF, and the heat dome that is sitting over California, Oregon, and Washington.
We could see an exploding star
As if being in the path of totality for a solar eclipse wasn’t cool enough, it turns out, if you can go someplace away from the big city lights, you can see a nova in the T corona borealis star system. Corona borealis is a constellation in the Milky Way about 3,000 light years away, which is actually close enough that we can see it with the naked eye.
This should happen sometime this summer, between June and September. NASA and several other places around the world plan to study it. The James Webb Telescope and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope are poised to study the nova when it happens.
Why Southern Baptists said NO to IVF
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant Denomination in the U.S. and at their latest convention, they came out in opposition of the use of IVF as a way to deal with infertility. Albert Mohler and Andrew Walker had an op-ed in the WSJ about the reasoning while also showing compassion and sympathy for those with infertility.
The bottom line for them: The way IVF is practiced today poses several problems from a pro-life perspective: creation of frozen embryos (>600,000 in cold storage), which is done because so many embryos are discarded for reasons that have to do with the IVF technique. Additionally, nowadays, embryos are selected based on genetic testing.
Heat dome triggers record-breaking temperatures
The west coast is having some record high heat because of a heat dome. A heat dome does the same thing that putting a lid on a pot of boiling water does. It locks the heat within a small area. It occurs when cool air and hot air interact, causing the hot air to sink. We get things like this in north Texas every year; it’s unusual to have this happen over the west coast.