*gasp*

Emmy Winner Nell Carter Dies at Age 54

Nell Carter, who played the stout, sassy housekeeper on the 1980s sitcom "Gimme a Break!" and won a Tony Award in 1978 for her sultry turn in the Broadway musical "Ain't Misbehavin'," died Thursday at 54.

The singer-actress collapsed in her Beverly Hills home and was found by one of her 13-year-old sons, spokesman Roger Lane said. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Carter had suffered from diabetes for years, Lane said, and she underwent two brain operations in 1992 to fix aneurysms. She recovered and continued to perform, mostly on stage.

At the time of her death, Carter was in rehearsals at a Long Beach theater for "Raisin," a musical version of "Raisin in the Sun."

[...] Carter garnered two more Emmy nominations in 1982 and 1983 for "Gimme a Break!," playing a housekeeper to a family headed by a widower who was the town police chief. The show ran from 1981 to 1987. In 1985, an episode was broadcast live--the first for a situation comedy in nearly 30 years.

Carter also played the cruel orphanage operator Miss Hannigan in the 1997 revival of "Annie" and appeared in the movies "The Grass Harp" (1995), "Modern Problems" (1981) and "Hair" (1979).

Carter grew up in Birmingham, Ala., singing in her church choir. She sang on the gospel circuit before moving on to coffeehouses and nightclubs. She longed to sing opera, then aspired to be a belter.

From early in her career until the mid-1980s, Carter struggled with alcohol and drugs, eventually shaking her addictions through a 12-step program.

Carter was married and divorced twice. She is survived by her two sons and a daughter.

Dark Matter = Big Bang?

Mystery Matter Helped Build First Galaxies, Study Suggests

Possible direct evidence has been provided illustrating the theory that the earliest galaxies developed quickly -- and to surprisingly massive proportions -- with the help of mysterious and invisible dark matter. The evidence supports a growing understanding among astronomers about galactic origins.

The results come from a new and inventive computer model crunching data from recent observations of the farthest known light sources.

In the past few years, astronomers have glimpsed compact but brilliant objects, called quasars, populating the early universe. Most experts agree that the brightest quasars detected so far are powered by central black holes with masses equal to a billion suns or more. But the mass-estimation techniques are not well developed because quasars have proved difficult to decipher.

Bright quasar emissions drown out what's going on within and nearby, so researchers have also struggled to take a measure of any surrounding galaxy they think should feed the central black hole with gas. Sorting out how the whole setup is structured has resulted in little more than speculation.

The new model explains curious a feature seen in light from two quasars determined in other studies to be roughly 13 billion light-years away, or within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. When a quasar's central black hole swallows gas, it converts some of it to energy, creating vivid emissions of radio waves, x-rays and other forms of light.

The new analysis shows that hydrogen gas falling into a quasar's host galaxy absorbs some of the quasar's light, and that this infall can be used to measure the host galaxy's mass.

The two quasar galaxies are about the same size as our Milky Way, the study found.

"This is the first time that the mass of an early galaxy has been directly measured," said Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University. The results will be detailed in the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Nature.

[...] The galaxy pulls in gas from its vicinity, Loeb said. A small fraction of neutral hydrogen atoms in the gas absorb the quasar's light. Because the gas falls toward the quasar and away from us, its light waves are stretched by a noticeable amount toward the red end of the spectrum, a phenomenon called redshift. This redshift shows up in addition to the cosmological redshift of the entire quasar.

"The speed of the infalling gas can be, in principle, inferred from this additional redshift," Loeb said. It is moving at about 1.1 million mph (500 kilometers per second).

The analysis supports the widely held assumption that the brightest quasars known are super-sized black holes containing the mass of a billion or more suns, Loeb told SPACE.com. It also supports the increasingly solid case that black hole mass and its galaxy's rotational velocity are intimately connected.

The observations point to another, even more intriguing idea.

Scientists have long puzzled over the fact that such massive light engines formed in the first 5 to 10 percent of the universe's age. One contributing factor seems to be a halo of dark matter surrounding the host galaxy of the black hole, which allows it to draw large quantities of gas from its environment, Loeb said. Dark matter can not be seen directly, but astronomers infer its existence from the gravitational effects it has on the internal dynamics of galaxies.

The amount of information gathered from the most distant objects has never allowed a firm determination of dark matter's presence in galaxies of the early universe. Loeb and Barkana say more observations are needed to confirm their results.

"If this signature is confirmed, it would provide the first observational evidence that quasars are embedded in great haloes of dark matter," said Laura Ferrarese, a Rutgers University physicist who was not involved in the research.