REGIONAL: Friday fire burns along Highway 20

NORTH COAST, Calif. – Firefighters worked for several hours on Friday afternoon to contain and mop up after a fire that burned along Highway 20 in Mendocino County.

Julie Cooley, a spokesperson for Cal Fire's Mendocino Unit, said the incident – called the Potter Fire because it was located in the Potter Valley area – started at 3:38 p.m.

Northshore Fire Protection District was dispatched to a smoke check Friday afternoon after smoke from the fire traveled into Lake County, according to radio reports.

Cooley said Cal Fire, Potter Valley Fire, Redwood Valley Fire and Ukiah Valley Fire responded with a total of five engines, four crews and a Cal Fire copter. After the copter was released the crews continued working on mop up into Friday evening.

The Potter Fire was contained at 13 acres, Cooley said.

Cooley said the fire's cause is under investigation.

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REGIONAL: Lake Mendocino campground murder trial yields guilty verdicts

A Mendocino County jury returned guilty verdicts on Friday afternoon against two men for their involvement in a July 2011 murder and attempted murder at Bu Shay Campground at Lake Mendocino.

Marvin Douglas Johnson, Jr., 33, and Simon Thornton, 23, have been on trial since May 21, with the jury being sent out to commence deliberations Thursday afternoon, according to the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office.

The two men were charged for the fatal shooting on July 20 of 40-year-old Joseph Litteral of Willits. They also shot and wounded Litteral's friend, Brandon Richard Haggett, 20, also of Willits.

Johnson was found guilty of first degree murder and attempted first degree murder, while a special allegation that he was armed with a firearm was found true. He was found not guilty of attempted kidnapping, officials reported.

The jury also found Thornton guilty of first degree murder and attempted first degree murder, and found true two special allegations of being armed with a firearm and use of a deadly weapon, a bat. Like Johnson, he was found not guilty of attempted kidnapping.

As required by law, both defendants were referred by Judge Ann Moorman to Mendocino County Adult Probation Officer Jim Brown’s office for a social study and sentencing recommendation.  

A sentencing hearing was calendared for June 29 at 9 a.m.

Based on the verdicts, Johnson is facing a state prison sentence of up to 33 years to life with the possibility of parole, while Thornton is facing up to 34 year to life with the possibility of parole.

The prosecutor was Assistant District Attorney Paul Sequeira. Defendant Johnson was represented by attorney Jan Cole-Wilson, and defendant Thornton was represented by Deputy Public Defender Farris Purviance III.

Two other crime-related defendants, William Hale Crocker, 31, and Arone Joseph Schnebly, 36, are awaiting trial for their involvement in the same August 2011 incident at Lake Mendocino, the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office said.

Space News: Astronomers predict titanic collision – Milky Way vs. Andromeda

NASA astronomers say they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

"After nearly a century of speculation about the future destiny of Andromeda and our Milky Way, we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold over the coming billions of years," said Sangmo Tony Sohn of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

"Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy," adds Roeland van der Marel of the STScI.

The solution came through painstaking NASA Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31.

The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.

The scenario is like a baseball batter watching an oncoming fastball. Although Andromeda is approaching us more than 2,000 times faster than a fastball, it will take 4 billion years before the strike.

Computer simulations derived from Hubble's data show that it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.

Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter.

However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today.

To make matters more complicated, M31's small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first.

A century ago astronomers did not realize that M31 was a separate galaxy far beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble measured its vast distance by uncovering a variable star that served as a "milepost marker."

Hubble went on to discover the expanding universe where galaxies are rushing away from us, but it has long been known that M31 is moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to travel from here to the moon in one hour.

The measurement was made using the Doppler effect, which is a change in frequency and wavelength of waves produced by a moving source relative to an observer, to measure how starlight in the galaxy has been compressed by Andromeda's motion toward us.

Previously, it was unknown whether the far-future encounter will be a miss, glancing blow, or head-on smashup. This depends on M31’s tangential motion.

Until now, astronomers had not been able to measure M31's sideways motion in the sky, despite attempts dating back more than a century.

The Hubble Space Telescope team, led by van der Marel, conducted extraordinarily precise observations of the sideways motion of M31 that remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way.

"This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period," said Jay Anderson of STScI.

"In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits," added Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York, N.Y. "The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits. The galaxies' cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy."

The space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble upgraded it with ever more-powerful cameras, which have given astronomers a long-enough time baseline to make the critical measurements needed to nail down M31's motion.

The Hubble observations and the consequences of the merger are reported in three papers that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.