Page 4 May 22, 2014 Hawthorne Finishes Second after Win Over Beverly Hills By Joe Snyder Hawthorne High’s softball team ended the Ocean League in second place by downing Beverly Hills 12-7 last Thursday at Hawthorne. It was a game that took nearly three hours and all but two total runs were scored in the first two innings with the Cougars taking a 10-7 lead. The Normans started out with five unearned runs in the top of the first, but Hawthorne bounced back with 10 runs in the bottom of the inning to take a quick 10-5 advantage. Beverly Hills, which placed fourth in league, added two runs in the top of the second. The score stayed the same until Hawthorne cushioned its lead with two more runs in the bottom of the sixth. Natalie Rocha sparked the Cougars, who are 18-8 overall and ended league at 8-2, with two triples and two runs scored. Espie Villafan added two hits and scored once. She drove in two runs. “We continue to be strong every season,” Hawthorne coach Jerry Contreras said. The Cougars finished second behind league power Santa Monica, which went unbeaten in Ocean play at 10-0. Hawthorne began the CIF-Southern Section Division IV playoffs at La Canada High, the Rio Hondo League runner-up, last Tuesday. If the Cougars win, they will visit top seed Loara High in Fullerton today at 3:15 p.m. COUGAR BASEBALLERS TAKE THIRD Hawthorne baserunner Espie Villafan reaches second base in last Thursday’s Ocean League softball game against Beverly Hills. The Cougars won 12-7 and placed second in league. Photo by Joe Snyder. Hawthorne High’s baseball team placed third in the Ocean League after a pair of forfeit wins over Inglewood Morningside last week. The Monarchs were shorthanded to a variety of injuries, players quitting and academic ineligibilities. The Cougars finished Ocean play with a 6-4 record to take third behind champion Santa Monica and runner-up Culver City. However, according to Hawthorne assistant coach J.C. Randolph, Santa Monica has been investigated for a possible ineligible player that could force the Vikings to forfeit all of the games he played in. The CIF-Southern Section Division III playoff pairings were due to be released last Monday in which that decision was expected to be made. If Santa Monica does forfeit the league title, that will move the Cougars up to second place in league bringing them a better seeding in the playoffs. Randolph feels that Hawthorne has the potential to make noise in the playoffs. The Cougars got help with El Segundo High transfers Chares and Chris Phelps, and also have been led by seniors Javier Martinez and Andrew Banuelos. Banuelos already has a Hawthorne's Carrie Ludman makes contact with the ball during last Thursday's Ocean League softball finale against Beverly Hills. The Cougars finished second in the Ocean League with a 12-7 victory over the Normans. The Cougars opened the CIF-Southern Section Division IV playoffs at La Canada last Tuesday. no-hitter against Inglewood from two weeks ago. Another senior, outfielder Steve Leyva, has also been a spark for the Cougars. “We’re hoping that we can get past the first round,” Randolph said. Charles Phelps is a promising freshman pitcher-outfielder. Interestingly, the Ocean League will be in with two other South Bay studded leagues in the Bay and Del Rey. The Bay League was won by West Torrance, which enjoyed two routs over Lawndale Leuzinger last week, with the help from Redondo, which stunned favored Rolling Hills Estates Peninsula with a two-game sweep. Both of those squads tied for second but the Sea Hawks will get the second place seed over the Panthers due to the sweep. Peninsula entered last week ranked third in the CIF-Southern Section Division III. The Del Rey League was led by co-champion Gardena Serra, last year’s Southern Section Division III champion. The younger Cavaliers, along with all-American players Denz’l Chapman and Marcus Wilson, tied for the league title with La Puente Bishop Amat. Top ranked is Gahr High from Cerritos, while La Verne Bonita is second. LAWNDALE SWEEPS CENTENNIAL Lawndale High’s baseball team ended the Pioneer League with a 3-7 record after sweeping Centennial High from Compton last week. The Cardinals began last week with an 8-1 victory over the Apaches on May 13 at Lawndale. Last Thursday, the Cardinals outlasted host Centennial 15-11. Lawndale ended its season at 8-15 overall. WEST OVERWHELMS LEUZINGER Leuzinger High’s baseball team ended its final Bay League season with lopsided losses to league champion West Torrance. At Leuzinger on May 13, the Olympians fell to the Warriors 15-2. West ended up pulling out the Bay crown, with help of Redondo’s sweep of league favorite Peninsula, with a 22-0 shutout. Edgar Gutierrez played well despite the losses for Leuzinger, which ended its season at 3-23 overall and 0-10 in league. ST. MARY’S SHINES I N DIVISION IV PRELIMS The St. Mary’s Academy girls’ track and field team from Inglewood is in very good condition for its second consecutive CIFSouthern Section Division IV crown with several top performances in last Saturday’s Prelims at Carpinteria High in South Santa Barbara County. The Belles had top performances from seniors Allanah Hughes and Sierra Peterson. Hughes had the meet’s top long jump with a leap of 17 feet, nine inches and was second in the triple jump at 36-8. Peterson had a pair of fourth place finishes in the 100- and 200-meter dashes with times of 12.34 and 25.22, in order. Both, along with Alijah Hale and Brianna Shufford, were on St. Mary’s winning 4x100-meter relay team which was clocked in 46.99. Shufford and Peterson also led the Belles’ 4x400 relay squad to a third place overall finish in 3:58.37. Shufford advanced in the 100 and 200. The Southern Section divisional championships are Saturday at 11 a.m. (Running events begin at 1 p.m.) at Cerritos College. • Looking Up Astronomers Find Sun’s ‘Long-Lost Brother’ By Bob Eklund A team of researchers led by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Ivan Ramirez has identified the first “sibling” of the Sun—a star that was almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas and dust as our star. Ramirez’s methods will help other astronomers find other “solar siblings,” work that could lead to an understanding of how and where our Sun formed, and how our solar system became hospitable for life. The work will be published in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. “We want to know where we were born,” Ramirez said. “If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the Sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here.” Additionally, there is a chance, “small, but not zero,” Ramirez said, that these solar sibling stars could host planets that harbor life. In their earliest days within their birth cluster, he explains, collisions could have knocked chunks off of planets, and these fragments could have travelled between solar systems, and perhaps even may have been responsible for bringing primitive life to Earth. Or, fragments from Earth could have transported life to planets orbiting solar siblings. “So it could be argued that solar siblings are key candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life,” Ramirez said. The solar sibling his team identified is a star called HD 162826, a star 15 percent more massive than the Sun, located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. The star is not visible to the unaided eye, but easily can be seen with low-power binoculars, not far from the bright star Vega. The team identified HD 162826 as the Sun’s sibling by following up on 30 possible candidates found by several groups around the world looking for solar siblings. Ramirez’s team studied 23 of these stars in depth with the Harlan J. Smith Telescope at McDonald Observatory, and the remaining stars (visible only from the southern hemisphere) with the Clay Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. All of these observations used high-resolution spectroscopy to get a deep understanding of the stars’ chemical make-up. But several factors are needed to really pin down a solar sibling, Ramirez said. In addition to chemical analysis, his team also included information about the stars’ orbits—where they had been and where they are going in their paths around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The team’s experts in this field, which is called “dynamics,” are A. T. Bajkova of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, and V. V. Bobylev of St. Petersburg State University. Combining information on both chemical make-up and dynamics of the candidates narrowed the field down to one star: HD 162826. While the finding of a single solar sibling is intriguing, Ramirez points out that the project has a larger purpose: to create a road map for how to identify solar siblings, in preparation for the flood of data expected from future surveys. “The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars. This cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has since broken up,” he says. “A lot of things can happen in that amount of time.” The member stars have broken off into their own orbits around the galactic center, taking them to different parts of the Milky Way today. A few, like HD 162826, are still nearby. Others are much farther afield. • Born from the same gas cloud as our own sun, HD162826 is a star located 110 light-years away, but scientists have identified it as a solar ‘sibling’ to our own sun. Photo credit: Ivan Ramirez/Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory
Lawndale 05_22_14
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