Page 4 November 10, 2016 Trojans, Bruins Headed in Opposite Directions By Adam Serrao Both the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins headed into this year’s regular season highly regarded. The Bruins, more specifically, were even projected to win the Pac-12 South outright. Now that a few games have been played, the rightful standings of the teams are beginning to shake themselves out. The Trojans may have started the year off slowly, but they are quickly putting all of their talent together to help score victories. The Bruins, on the other hand, have taken preseason projections and greatly disappointed, heading in the complete “The Trojans will look to continue doing special things but will truly be tested coming up.” opposite direction of the Trojans. With last week’s victory over the Oregon Ducks, the USC Trojans brought their winning streak to five games in a row, clearly hitting the highest gear that they have been at all season on offense. Over their last five games, the Trojans, behind starting quarterback Sam Darnold, have averaged 40 points per game while completely annihilating opponents in the process. The way that the team looks now is in stark contrast to how they started off the year. USC lost three of its first four games, bringing grim feelings to all those who root for the Cardinal and Gold in Southern California. Darnold had 309 yards passing and two touchdowns against Oregon, leading his team to victory. As good as the quarterback has been playing recently though, he may not even be the MVP on the team. After rushing for a careerhigh 223 yards against Cal two weeks ago, USC running back Ronald Jones broke loose with four rushing touchdowns against Oregon. The mark tied a school single-game record. “I hold my breath every time he touches it because I know there is a chance he can go all the way,” Trojans head coach Clay Helton said. “Between himself and a very effecting offensive line, they are doing some special things right now.” The Trojans will look to continue doing special things but will truly be tested coming up. A matchup against No. 5 in the nation, Washington, looms this week before they finish the year off with rivalry matchups against UCLA and Notre Dame, respectively. UCLA has had the exact opposite season that USC has had. After beginning the year winning two of their first three games and three of their first five, the Bruins have run into a wall. Four straight losses while giving up an average of 30.5 points per game has seen UCLA slip into fifth place in Pac-12 South standings, above only Arizona. A season that began with such high hopes has now taken a turn for the worse as the Bruins will look to finish the season off on a positive note against Oregon State, USC and Cal. The Bruins latest loss was last Thursday night against Colorado. It was an extremely sloppy game mired with penalties and turnovers and at the end of things, there was a UCLA loss. Thirteen penalties for a total of 96 yards and a total of just 210 yards on offense for the night capped off the disappointing loss for the Bruins. To add insult to injury, it was announced before the game that UCLA starting quarterback Josh Rosen would miss the rest of the season due to a shoulder injury. With their recently slumping record and a four game losing streak, the 3-6 Bruins will have to win out in their final three games of the season to even qualify for a bowl game. While the Trojans certainly still have much to play for, the Bruins may be best served to focus their attention on their Week 11 rivalry matchup with the Trojans. In a season that has been lost and filled with discontent, a win against your biggest rival can certainly do a lot to sooth some pains. Naturally, without Rosen, the task of taking out the Trojans may be even more difficult than originally planned. Dating back to last season, the Trojans still lead in the all-time series between the two teams with a 45-31-7 record. While the Trojans hold the advantage, though, the Bruins have won three of the last four matchups. USC won last year by a final score of 40-21. Two teams that began the season with such high expectations have clearly failed to live up to what everyone thought they would be. While USC began the season on the wrong foot and fell victim to a hard schedule, the Bruins came out of the gates looking good. Recently, things have turned themselves completely upside down. Neither the Trojans nor the Bruins have any hopes of a National Championship, but with all of the momentum that USC has been gaining lately, they may just find themselves in a big bowl game at the end of the year. UCLA, on the other hand, has only one big game remaining on their schedule and that’s against the Trojans next week. While neither team may be taking home a trophy this year, there will still be much intrigue surrounding the coming three weeks. • Looking Up NASA Missions Harvest a Passel of ‘Pumpkin’ Stars This artist’s concept illustrates how the most extreme “pumpkin star” found by Kepler and Swift compares with the sun. Both stars are shown to scale. KSw 71 is larger, cooler and redder than the sun and rotates four times faster. Photo courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy By Bob Eklund Astronomers using observations from NASA’s Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the Sun. The stars, which spin so fast they’ve been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes, are thought to be the result of close binary systems where two Sun-like stars merge. “These 18 stars rotate in just a few days on average, while the Sun takes nearly a month,” said Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and leader of the team. “The rapid rotation amplifies the same kind of activity we see on the Sun, such as sunspots and solar flares, and essentially sends it into overdrive.” The most extreme member of the group, a K-type orange giant dubbed KSw 71, is more than 10 times larger than the Sun, rotates in just 5.5 days, and produces X-ray emission 4,000 times greater than the Sun does at solar maximum. These rare stars were found as part of an X-ray survey of the original Kepler field of view, a patch of the sky comprising parts of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. From May 2009 to May 2013, Kepler measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars in this region to detect the regular dimming from planets passing in front of their host stars. The mission was immensely successful, netting more than 2,300 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 5,000 candidates to date. An ongoing extended mission, called K2, continues this work in areas of the sky located along the ecliptic, the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. “A side benefit of the Kepler mission is that its initial field of view is now one of the best-studied parts of the sky,” said team member Padi Boyd, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who designed the Swift survey. For example, the entire area was observed in infrared light by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer observed many parts of it in the ultraviolet. “Our group was looking for variable X-ray sources with optical counterparts seen by Kepler, especially active galaxies, where a central black hole drives the emissions,” she explained. Using the X-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes aboard Swift, the researchers conducted the Kepler-Swift Active Galaxies and Stars Survey (KSwAGS), imaging about six square degrees, or 12 times the apparent size of a full Moon, in the Kepler field. “With KSwAGS we found 93 new X-ray sources, about evenly split between active galaxies and various types of X-ray stars,” said team member Krista Lynne Smith, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, who led the analysis of Swift data. “Many of these sources have never been observed before in X-rays or ultraviolet light.” For the brightest sources, the team obtained spectra using the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. These spectra provide detailed chemical portraits of the stars and show clear evidence of enhanced stellar activity, particularly strong diagnostic lines of calcium and hydrogen. The researchers used Kepler measurements to determine the rotation periods and sizes for 10 of the stars, which range from 2.9 to 10.5 times larger than the Sun. Their surface temperatures range from somewhat hotter to slightly cooler than the Sun. • Every Visit our Website www.heraldpublications.com issue always available online! New Issues/Old Issues • Out-of-town? Read the Herald newspapers online • Interested in an article from a prior date? See it online • Excited about an ad, photo, or article? Refer your friends, family and associates to the website, so they can see it too • Want to read the Torrance Tribune or other Herald newspapers not in your area? All available on our website! Check it out! www.heraldpublications.com
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