Four generations visit old prairie home

All four generations of the Malone family stand in front of John Malone's old house on the Fermilab site. Pictured from left: Robin Simmons, Kathy Elstrom, Kelly Pedersen, Payton Pederson, John Malone and Teri Schramer.

From Kirk Road, John Malone can spot a blue spruce tree his mother planted decades ago.

"I was just a little shaver then," Malone said.

Last week Malone, 68, brought four generations of his family to the laboratory to visit the home where he grew up. Fermilab Roads and Grounds employee Bob Lootens, whose family also owned land on the property, even treated the Malone family to a trek through shoulder-high prairie grass to the house's original site.

"This is where grandpa was born and raised," Malone said to his great-granddaughter, Payton, 5, as he looked across the field. "Sure looks different. This was all nicely mowed and beautiful. We had a big fence with thick boards and posts painted a different color every year."

Every year, Malone travels to Fermilab from Missouri for the Farmers' Picnic, where he reunites with former neighbors. But this was the first time in more than 20 years he had visited the original site of his old house, which has been relocated to 6 Sauk Road and now serves as temporary housing.

John Malone and his great-granddaughter, Payton. The Malone family visited Fermilab earlier this month to see their former family home.

Malone's three daughters remember visiting their grandmother at the house when they were young.

"I remember more outside than I do inside, but it was really weird when I walked in," said Malone's daughter Robin Simmons, 44. "I was extremely emotional for a second."

Malone's daughter Kathy Elstrom, 48, filmed as she walked through the house with her father, sisters, daughter and granddaughter to document the family's history.

Malone said he remembers watching movers transport the house across the fields. Today, only the blue spruce, a patch of lilacs and the old frames of a swing set and a seesaw remain to mark the spot where Malone grew up.

"It's just nice of (Fermilab) to bring us back here," Malone said.

-- Kathryn Grim

Ultramassive: as big as it gets

From Science News, Oct. 25, 2008

A black hole can consume anything in its path. These monsters can become huge - but perhaps only so huge.

If asked to name stupendously amazing things in space, most people would probably pick black holes. These evil-tinged clowns of the universe are definite wows. Insatiable is their middle name.

Grand and merciless, voracious and monstrous, pure appetite and deep mystery. The biggest fatten themselves in galaxy cores mainly via a seemingly limitless hunger for a main source of sustenance: fat, circular wads of gas that gather around the black holes and are sometimes given a name to delight any glutton, Polish doughnuts. Black holes cloak their innards behind an "event horizon," from inside which no message can be sent (which explains the one-liner physics joke: "Two protons walk into a black hole").

What a parade of jaw-droppers that is. Well listen up, this just in: It looks like there is a limit to the superlatives. Black holes can't eat everything. If a new analysis from a Yale astronomer is correct, even black holes run out of steam, and at a fairly precise point. The biggest black holes may reach only a few tens of billions of times the mass of the sun.

To be sure, that's huge. Most galaxies harbor central black holes of a few million solar masses (about 4 million for the Milky Way). Fifty million light-years away in Virgo, the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is believed to harbor one having about 3 billion solar masses. The record heft for a suspected black hole, 3.5 billion light-years away and part of a double-black-hole system with a partner's orbit that reveals its mass with some precision, is 18 billion solar masses.

Any possible cap on the size of these monsters occupying galactic centers shouldn't diminish the place of black holes in popular imagination. And for astronomers, the newly proposed mass limit illustrates how the status of black holes, as both scientific challenge and principal player in the universe's appearance, is on the rise.

Astrophysicists and cosmologists thought they had black holes pretty well pegged about 10 years ago. Black holes eat, they grow and they can sure produce a bright light from X-ray to radio wavelengths while on a binge. Their quasar-pumping conversion of matter to outward-beamed energy as they consume gas, dust and the occasional unlucky star is believed to reach about 40 percent efficiency. It's not only E=mc2 at which black holes excel. They also provide wonderful playgrounds for a panoply of other Einsteinian gymnastics. They bend time, warp space and, along their borders, they spawn a fizz of evanescent virtual particles popping in and out of space's fabric.

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