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Astronomers find the most distant stars in our galaxy halfway to Andromeda
Astronomers have discovered more than 200 distant variable stars known as RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way’s stellar halo. The most distant of these stars is more than a million light years from Earth, almost half the distance to our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light years away.
The characteristic pulsations and brightness of RR Lyrae stars make them excellent “standard candles” for measuring galactic distances. These new observations have allowed the researchers to trace the outer limits of the Milky Way’s halo.
“This study is redefining what constitutes the outer limits of our galaxy,” said Raja GuhaThakurta, professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Our galaxy and Andromeda are both so big, there’s hardly any space between the two galaxies.”
GuhaThakurta explained that the stellar halo component of our galaxy is much bigger than the disk, which is about 100,000 light years across. Our solar system resides in one of the spiral arms of the disk. In the middle of the disk is a central bulge, and surrounding it is the halo, which contains the oldest stars in the galaxy and extends for hundreds of thousands of light years in every direction.
“The halo is the hardest part to study because the outer limits are so far away,” GuhaThakurta said. “The stars are very sparse compared to the high stellar densities of the disk and the bulge, but the halo is dominated by dark matter and actually contains most of the mass of the galaxy.”
Yuting Feng, a doctoral student working with GuhaThakurta at UCSC, led the new study and is presenting their findings in two talks at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on January 9 and 11.
According to Feng, previous modeling studies had calculated that the stellar halo should extend out to around 300 kiloparsecs or 1 million light years from the galactic center. (Astronomers measure galactic distances in kiloparsecs; one kiloparsec is equal to 3,260 light years.) The 208 RR Lyrae stars detected by Feng and his colleagues ranged in distance from about 20 to 320 kiloparsecs.
“We were able to use these variable stars as reliable tracers to pin down the distances,” Feng said. “Our observations confirm the theoretical estimates of the size of the halo, so that’s an important result.”
The findings are based on data from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a program using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to study a cluster of galaxies well beyond the Milky Way. The survey was not designed to detect RR Lyrae stars, so the researchers had to dig them out of the dataset. The Virgo Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies that includes the giant elliptical galaxy M87.
“To get a deep exposure of M87 and the galaxies around it, the telescope also captured the foreground stars in the same field, so the data we used are sort of a by-product of that survey,” Feng explained.
According to GuhaThakurta, the excellent quality of the NGVS data enabled the team to obtain the most reliable and precise characterization of RR Lyrae at these distances. RR Lyrae are old stars with very specific physical properties that cause them to expand and contract in a regularly repeating cycle.
“The way their brightness varies looks like an EKG—they’re like the heartbeats of the galaxy—so the brightness goes up quickly and comes down slowly, and the cycle repeats perfectly with this very characteristic shape,” GuhaThakurta said. “In addition, if you measure their average brightness, it is the same from star to star. This combination is fantastic for studying the structure of the galaxy.”
The sky is full of stars, some brighter than others, but a star may look bright because it is very luminous or because it is very close, and it can be hard to tell the difference. Astronomers can identify an RR Lyrae star from its characteristic pulsations, then use its observed brightness to calculate how far away it is. The procedures are not simple, however. More distant objects, such as quasars, can masquerade as RR Lyrae stars.
“Only astronomers know how painful it is to get reliable tracers of these distances,” Feng said. “This robust sample of distant RR Lyrae stars gives us a very powerful tool for studying the halo and testing our current models of the size and mass of our galaxy.”
This study is based on observations obtained with MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of CFHT and CEA/IRFU, at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France, and the University of Hawaii.
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At its halfway point, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission breaks a record
On Monday, NASA’s Orion spacecraft reached its farthest distance from Earth, clocking in at 268,563 miles away from our planet. This marks the halfway point of the 25.5-day Artemis I mission, and the spacecraft will now continue its orbit around the Moon before heading back toward Earth.
“Artemis I has had extraordinary success and has completed a series of history-making events,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference, pointing out that Orion was the first spacecraft designed to carry humans to enter a distant retrograde lunar orbit and that it has surpassed the record for the furthest distance traveled away from Earth by a human-rated spacecraft.
During Orion’s orbit around the Moon, which will last about a week, it is collecting data on the conditions human astronauts can expect to experience on future Artemis missions. Of particular concern is space radiation, which astronauts will be exposed to once they leave Earth’s protective magnetosphere.
Orion is carrying one mannequin and two torsos that are filled with sensors to detect the levels of radiation they are exposed to. The mannequin (or, if we must, the “Moonikin”) is named after Arturo Campos, the NASA engineer who was instrumental in getting the Apollo 13 crew home following the explosion in the spacecraft in 1970. The mannequin is occupying the commander’s seat in the spacecraft and is weighted to simulate a human being. It is also wearing the same spacesuit that future Artemis astronauts will wear, and the seat has sensors to detect acceleration and vibration to give an idea of what the ride will be like during launch and reentry.
The two torsos on the flight are part of an experiment into radiation protection measures called the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE). Named Helga and Zohar, they are designed to mimic the body composition of an adult man and woman. Embedded with the materials are radiation detectors to see which particular organs and areas of the body will be exposed to the most radiation. One of the torsos, Zohar, will be wearing a radiation shielding vest called the AstroRad, which is designed to protect the most critical organs but still enable astronauts to move freely as they perform their duties. Results from both torsos will be compared to see how effective the vest is at protecting against radiation.
The data from all of these sensors won’t be available until the spacecraft returns to Earth. “We look forward to learning what all those sensors will have told us in order to be able to put four human beings on top of Artemis II,” Nelson said.
The two riskiest parts of a space mission are the launch and the landing. With the Artemis hardware having launched successfully, the focus is now on the reentry process. Ahead of splashdown, scheduled for December 11th, the Orion spacecraft will be traveling at 24,500mph. It will dip into the upper atmosphere before pulling up again to reduce its speed. It will then enter the atmosphere for descent, traveling at 17,000mph. Orion will be slowed by parachutes before splashing down into the Pacific Ocean, where it will be recovered by US Navy ships.
Nelson emphasized the importance of this mission as a test ahead of putting human astronauts into the spacecraft. “It is a test,” Nelson said. “And that’s what we do. We stress it, and we test it.”
Nasa’s Orion spacecraft enters lunar orbit as test flight nears halfway mark | Nasa
Nasa’s Orion capsule has entered an orbit stretching tens of thousands of miles around the moon, as it neared the halfway mark of its test flight.
The capsule and its three test dummies entered lunar orbit more than a week after launching on the $4bn demo that’s meant to pave the way for astronauts. It will remain in this broad but stable orbit for nearly a week, completing just half a lap before heading home.
As of an engine firing on Friday, the capsule was 238,000 miles (380,000km) from Earth. It’s expected to reach a maximum distance of almost 270,000 miles (432,000km) in a few days. That will set a new distance record for a capsule designed to carry people one day.
“It is a statistic, but it’s symbolic for what it represents,” Jim Geffre, an Orion manager, said in a Nasa interview earlier in the week. “It’s about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we’ve previously explored.”
Nasa considers this a dress rehearsal for the next moon flyby in 2024, with astronauts. A lunar landing by astronauts could follow as soon as 2025. Astronauts last visited the moon 50 years ago during Apollo 17.
Earlier in the week, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with the capsule for nearly an hour. At the time, controllers were adjusting the communication link between Orion and the Deep Space Network. Officials said the spacecraft remained healthy.
Tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid had mile-high waves and reached halfway across the world
The dinosaur-killing asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago also triggered a jumbo-size tsunami with mile-high waves in the Gulf of Mexico whose waters traveled halfway around the world, a new study finds.
Researchers discovered evidence of this monumental tsunami after analyzing cores from more than 100 sites worldwide and creating digital models of the monstrous waves after the asteroid’s impact in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
“This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe,” study lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master’s thesis in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.
The research on the mile-high tsunami, which was previously presented at the 2019 American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, was published online Tuesday (Oct. 4) in the journal AGU Advances (opens in new tab).
Related: Could an asteroid destroy Earth?
Range dove into the tsunami’s journey immediately following the asteroid’s collision. Based on earlier findings, her team modeled an asteroid that measured 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) across and was zooming 27,000 mph (43,500 km/h), or 35 times the speed of sound when it struck Earth. After the asteroid hit, many lifeforms died; the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct (only birds, which are living dinosaurs, survive today) and about three-quarters of all plants and animal species were wiped out.
Researchers are aware of many of the asteroid’s pernicious effects, such as sparking raging fires that cooked animals alive and pulverizing sulfur-rich rocks that led to lethal acid rain and extended global cooling. To learn more about the resulting tsunami, Range and her colleagues analyzed the Earth’s geology, successfully analyzing 120 “boundary sections,” or marine sediments laid down just before or after the mass extinction event, which marked the end of the Cretaceous period.
These boundary sections matched the predictions of their model of wave height and travel, Range said.
The initial energy from the impact tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy released by the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, the researchers found.
Once the asteroid struck Earth, it created a 62-mile-wide (100 km) crater and kicked up a dense cloud of dust and soot into the atmosphere. Just 2.5 minutes after the strike, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward, briefly making a 2.8-mile-tall (4.5 km) wave that crashed down as the ejecta plummeted back to Earth, according to the simulation.
At the 10 minute mark, a 0.93-mile-high (1.5 km) tsunami wave about 137 miles (220 km) away from the impact site swept through the gulf in all directions. An hour after the impact, the tsunami had left the Gulf of Mexico and rushed into the North Atlantic. Four hours following the impact, the tsunami passed through the Central American Seaway — a passage that separated North from South America at the time — and into the Pacific.
A full day after the asteroid’s collision, the waves had traveled through most of the Pacific and the Atlantic, entering the Indian Ocean from both sides, and touching most of the globe’s coastlines 48 hours after the strike.
Related: 52-foot-tall ‘megaripples’ from dinosaur-killing asteroid are hiding under Louisiana
Tsunami’s power
After the impact, the tsunami radiated mostly to the east and northeast, gushing into the North Atlantic Ocean, as well as to the southwest via the Central American Seaway flowing into the South Pacific Ocean. Water traveled so quickly in these areas that it likely exceeded 0.4 mph (0.6 km/h), a velocity that can erode the seafloor’s fine-grained sediments.
Other regions largely escaped the tsunami’s power, including the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Indian Ocean and what is now the Mediterranean sea, according to the team’s models. Their simulations showed that the water speeds in these areas were less than the 0.4 mph threshold.
The team even found outcrops — or exposed rocky deposits — from the impact event on eastern New Zealand’s north and south islands, a distance of more than 7,500 miles (12,000 km) from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico. Originally, scientists thought that these outcrops were from local tectonic activity. But due to their age and location in the tsunami’s modeled route, the study’s researchers pinned it to the asteroid’s massive waves.
“We feel these deposits are recording the effects of the impact tsunami, and this is perhaps the most telling confirmation of the global significance of this event,” Range said.
While the models didn’t assess coastal flooding, they did reveal that open-ocean waves in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 328 feet (100 m), and waves would have reached heights of more than 32.8 feet (10 m) as the tsunami approached the North Atlantic’s coastal regions and parts of the South America’s Pacific coast, according to the statement.
As the water became shallow near the coast, wave heights would have risen dramatically.
“Depending on the geometries of the coast and the advancing waves, most coastal regions would be inundated and eroded to some extent,” the authors wrote in the study. “Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact.”
James Webb Space Telescope is about halfway through its instrument checks
The James Webb Space Telescope is halfway through getting its instrument modes checked out for science operations, which are expected to begin in mid-July.
The James Webb Space Telescope is fitted with four cutting-edge instruments, which will enable the $10 billion observatory to see the most distant, oldest galaxies, which formed in the early universe only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and study their chemical composition. These instruments have 17 science modes between them, and each science mode needs to be tested before the telescope can commence science operations in mid-July.
“As of today, 7 out of Webb’s 17 instrument modes are ready for science,” NASA said on Twitter (opens in new tab) Friday (June 17).
“Each mode has a set of observations and analysis that need to be verified,” Jonathan Gardner, the James Webb Space Telescope deputy senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in a blog post on May 12. “Some of the modes won’t be verified until the very end of commissioning,”
A detailed instrument mode “check-off” list is also available on the “Where is Webb” agency webpage.
Live updates: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission
Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures
Webb has four major instruments, each of which can observe the universe in several modes ranging from time series observations to observing multiple stars and galaxies at the same time.
Gardner said that for each of the 17 modes, the team selected a “representative example science target” that will be observed during the first year of Webb’s science operations, called Cycle 1.
“These are just examples,” Gardner added. “Each mode will be used for many targets, and most of Webb’s science targets will be observed with more than one instrument and/or mode.”
The full list of Cycle 1 observations is available at this website (opens in new tab) from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which runs Webb operations. The investigations span Webb’s major science objectives, which include everything from looking at very early galaxies, to examining planets, moons, asteroids and other objects in our solar system.
The telescope is in the homestretch of its commissioning period ahead of an expected July 12 release of the first operational images. (Webb officials are still keeping those first imaging targets secret.)
James Webb Space Telescope Instruments
The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCAM):
NIRCam will be crucial for accomplishing Webb’s flagship goal: detecting the light from the earliest stars and galaxies. It’s not just a simple infrared camera, but is fitted with some extra implements called coronographs. The coronographs will enable astronomers to block out the light of a star and look at what’s happening around it, which makes it great for discovering orbiting exoplanets.
The Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec):
NIRSpec is the main tool for cracking the chemistry of the universe. It will split the light coming from the distant universe into spectra, revealing the properties of the observed objects, including their temperature, mass and chemical composition.
Because some of these objects are extremely distant and the light coming from them will be extremely faint, the James Webb Space Telescope, despite its giant mirror, will have to stare at them for hundreds of hours. To make those observations more efficient, NIRSPec will be able to observe 100 such distant galaxies at the same time.
“It basically lets you open little doors and let the light through from one galaxy, but then block off all the light from everything else,” said McCaughrean. “But you can open 100 doors at once, for example. So that’s very sophisticated and that’s never been flown in space.”
The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI):
MIRI is a combination of a camera and a spectrograph, but unlike the previous two, it observes in the longer wavelengths of the mid-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which will make it a go-to instrument for everyone looking to study everything from comets and asteroids at the outskirts of the solar system to newly born stars and distant galaxies. The images of MIRI will be the most akin to those that turned the Hubble Space Telescope into a legend.
The Fine Guidance Sensor/Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS/NIRISS):
FGS/NIRISS will also contribute to the detection of the first light, spot exoplanets and analyze their chemistry.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
Solar Orbiter Is Now Halfway Between the Sun and Earth
The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA, is officially halfway between our planet and the Sun. According to an ESA release, the spacecraft is currently 46.6 million miles from our host star.
Solar Orbiter began its scientific observations in November 2021 and will continue them on its way closer and closer to the Sun. The spacecraft is taking measurements of the solar winds and volatile corona.
Being situated so neatly between Earth and the Sun, the probe is giving researchers a unique opportunity to study space weather. Space weather is a feature of the solar wind, a steady stream of charged particles from the Sun that generates aurorae and occasionally disrupts electronics on Earth.
Solar Orbiter is taking a circuitous route to the Sun, but it’s (counterintuitively) saving energy by doing so. The orbiter is capitalizing on the gravitational pulls of Earth and Venus to slingshot itself inward. Besides providing great photo opportunities, these gravity assist maneuvers reduce the amount of fuel necessary to propel spacecraft, saving precious payload space.
Nearly 50 million miles on the space odometer doesn’t sound like much, until you remember that the Webb telescope only had to trek 1 million miles to its observation point in deep space.
The orbiter’s current proximity to Earth and the Sun lets it gather useful data on how the solar wind blows through our solar system. Combining Solar Orbiter observations with data from spacecraft like IRIS (in Earth orbit) and the ESA’s SOHO (nearly a million miles from Earth) will give a more complete picture of the wind; like buoys in a sea of solar particles, the dispersed spacecraft will provide a dynamic look at space weather.
Daniel Müller, a Solar Orbiter project scientist with the ESA, said in a release that, “From this point onwards, we are ‘entering the unknown’ as far as Solar Orbiter’s observations of the Sun are concerned.”
The orbiter will make its closest approach—26 million miles from the Sun—on March 26. From March 14 to April 6, it will be within the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. While there (as before) the orbiter will collect data on the Sun’s surface and what it spews into space, but ESA researchers are hopeful that the spacecraft’s proximity to the Sun will offer some unique data on the solar campfires it discovered in 2020. Last year, scientists proposed that the campfires may be the convergence of magnetic fields on the Sun’s surface, but the situation remains unresolved.
“What I’m most looking forward to is finding out whether all these dynamical features we see in the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (coined campfires) can make their way into the solar wind or not. There are so many of them!” said Louise Harra, a physicist at the Physical Meteorological Observatory in Davos, Switzerland and co-principal investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.
Shortly after the spacecraft arrives at its closest approach later this month, we should receive some of the closest-ever images taken of the Sun.
More: Scientists May Know What’s Causing ‘Campfires’ on the Sun
James Webb Space Telescope is nearly halfway through its mirror alignment stages
Stars are getting sharper in the James Webb Space Telescope’s field of view.
The team recently completed the third of seven planned steps to align the 18 hexagonal segments of Webb’s mirror, marking nearly the halfway point in a complex, weeks-long process.
The second and third stages were respectively called segment alignment and image stacking, representing larger movements of the main mirror. Subsequent stages will make more minute adjustments to take an image of a distant star and gradually bring it to a single, precise point, NASA said in a statement Friday (Feb. 25).
Live updates: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission
Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures
“We still have work to do, but we are increasingly pleased with the results we’re seeing,” Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the same statement. “Years of planning and testing are paying dividends, and the team could not be more excited to see what the next few weeks and months bring.”
During the segment alignment stage, Webb engineers refined an initial image of a star rendered 18 times. Engineers made minor adjustments to the main mirror and changed the alignment of Webb’s secondary mirror. These repositionings were key to “overlapping the light from all the mirrors so that they can work in unison,” Webb officials said in the update.
Then the third stage, image stacking, saw the focused dots reflected by each mirror stacked on top of one another. Photons of light from the individual segments were each rendered to the same location of a sensor on the telescope’s near-infrared mirror (NIRCam).
“The team activated sets of six mirrors at a time and commanded them to repoint their light to overlap, until all dots of starlight overlapped with each other,” Webb officials said of image stacking.
Next will come the fourth phase of mirror alignment, called coarse phasing. That phase is already underway. NIRCam will be used to receive the light spectra (or wavelengths) from 20 pairings of the mirror segments. The process, Webb officials said, will allow engineers to correct small differences in heights between mirror segments.
“This will make the single dot of starlight progressively sharper and more focused in the coming weeks,” NASA officials said, noting that the segments will gradually align to achieve an accuracy smaller than a single wavelength of light.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
We’re Only At ‘Halfway Mark’ Of Pandemic: WHO Official
The top COVID-19 envoy at the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday claimed that we’re only at the “halfway mark” of the pandemic.
The worldwide scourge of COVID-19 last week entered its third year in the U.S., which means David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy for COVID-19, is predicting it won’t be until 2024 that we see an end.
“What people are seeing from around the world and reporting to the WHO is this is still a very, very dangerous virus, especially for people who have not been vaccinated and who’ve not been exposed to it before,” Nabarro told Sky News, according to The Daily Mail.
“The end is in sight, but how long is it going to take to get there? What sort of difficulties will we face on the way? Those are the questions that none of us can answer because this virus continues to give us challenges and surprises,” Nabarro said.
“It’s as though we’re just passing the halfway mark in a marathon and we can see that yes, there is an end and fast runners are getting through ahead of us. But we’ve still got a long, long way to trudge and it’s going to be tough,” he said.
The envoy also warned officials not to compare COVID-19 to the flu — following Britain’s decision to do just that — saying it is irresponsible because it implies the virus, and its now-dominant strain “has suddenly got incredibly weak.”
He told Sky News the virus “can also mutate and form variants and we’ve seen several but we know there are more not far away. So quite honestly, we are not saying that this should be considered to be like flu or indeed like anything else — it’s a new virus, and we must go on treating it as though it is full of surprises, very nasty and rather cunning.”
U.K. Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said falling case numbers and relatively low hospitalization rates mean “we need to learn to live with Covid in the same way we have to live with flu.”
Nabarro told Sky News of the comparisons: “I keep wondering what the people who make these amazing predictions know that I and my colleagues in the WHO don’t know.”
“Governments have got to set the direction and not shy away from that. All governments everywhere should not suggest to people that the data have suddenly changed, or the viruses suddenly got incredibly weak,” he said.
“So all I’m asking every leader in the world to do is to help everybody stay focused on the job which is keeping this virus at bay, preventing people from getting infected if at all possible, and making certain that we are well prepared to deal with further surges as they come,” Nabarro said.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to josephcurl@dailywire.com.
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NBA Finals: Giannis Antetokounmpo says he’s ‘not Michael Jordan’ — but Bucks star is halfway to M.J.’s record
We’re a long way from the fear that Giannis Antetokounmpo’s season might be over. It is, in fact, very much alive after the Milwaukee Bucks defeated the Phoenix Suns 120-100 in a must-win Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Sunday, trimming Phoenix’s series lead to 2-1 entering Game 4 on Wednesday.
I say “must-win” because no team in NBA history has recovered from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game series. The Bucks had to have this one, and Antetokounmpo, for the second straight game, matched the urgency of the situation with a masterful showing, finishing with 41 points, 13 rebounds and six assists. He shot 14-for-23 from the field. Most impressively, he shot 13-for-17 from the free-throw line.
Coupled with his 42-point effort in Game 2, Giannis’s performance on Sunday landed him in super elite company as the sixth player ever to record back-to-back 40-point games in the Finals. The other five are LeBron James (who was the last to do it in 2016, when he put up 41 in Games 5 and 6 against the Warriors), Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry West and Rick Barry.
Factor in the double-digit rebounds, and every name but Shaq and Giannis gets crossed off that list.
In the 1993 Finals against the Suns, Jordan — are you ready for this? — actually put up four straight 40-point games. Even Giannis can’t fathom that level of GOAT madness:
Giannis is right. He’s not Michael Jordan. But he’s halfway to MJ’s record with these two straight Finals 40-pieces, and he might have to come awful close to matching it if Milwaukee is going to win at least one of the next two. The Bucks don’t have as many weapons as Phoenix, and their second-and third-best players — Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday — have been hit and miss all postseason.
Holiday, who has had some big games but mostly struggled through his first postseason with Milwaukee, showed up in Game 3 with 21 points. Middleton chipped in 18. Together Holiday and Middleton shot 8-for-17 from beyond the arc.
Middleton still has to get it going as a go-to scorer if the Bucks are actually going to come back and win this series, but when Giannis is playing like this, he and Holiday simply shooting it well from 3 is a major boost. Another thing I loved from Game 3: Giannis wasn’t defaulting to head-down crash-dummy drives into a wall.
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When he did get the ball at the top of the key, he more often moved into a dribble-handoff or faked a DHO and continued his dribble into the post when he liked his matchup, attacking the middle of the paint before help could arrive. He was assertive, but not out of control. He only took two 3-pointers, which is still two too many. He made his free throws. It was an almost perfect Giannis game, and the Bucks are back in the series because of it.
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