The real amount of airtime Taylor Swift gets over NFL games will delight critics.
This season, a common complaint among NFL fans is the length of time pop star Taylor Swift was given at Kansas City Chiefs games.
Were the complaints true? Did she appear on TV as often as her fans think she did? Jason Pauley, a data analyst, did the math after watching the AFC championship game on Sunday.
It turned out that Swift was on the show seven times, for an aggregate of 44 seconds. That air time was only 0.39% of the three hours as well as nine minutes that the AFC championship game was shown on TV.
Pauley additionally broke down other important parts of the game, such as scenes of people “making, serving, and eating crab cakes” after the commercial.
These scenes took up 27 seconds of air time, which is more than half of the total amount of time that Swift appeared during the game.
That sounds good, right? It looks like NFL fans don’t have too many problems after all. In Super Bowl LVIII, which takes place on Sunday, Feb. 11, the Chiefs play the 49ers.
These winds, which can go as fast as 2,000 kilometers every second, were initially identified in 2019 and are still a mystery.
The game will start at 6:30 p.m. ET from Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium. Swift will be there to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce as he tries to win his second straight Super Bowl.
But now a group of American astrophysicists thinks the circular ripples are shells made by galactic winds that are blowing away, possibly from supernovae, which are very large stars that explode.
The radio circles that have stumped scientists up to now can be explained by computer simulations that show galactic winds blowing for over 750 million years.
The Australian Square Mile Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, which was just finished in 2019, saw something that no one had witnessed before radio wave circles that were so big that they held whole galaxies in their centers.
A group of researchers at the University of California San Diego who were studying “starburst” galaxies saw these radio rings and thought they might help them figure out where they came from.
The researchers looked into huge starburst galaxies which can cause these very fast winds to flow outward in a study that was published in the journal Nature.
A very large number of stars are being formed in starburst galaxies. As stars die or explode, they send gas from around them back into space between the stars.
Gas can be pushed out of the galaxy by explosions that happen close together and around the same time. These explosions can send winds up to 2,000 kilometers each second.
Dr. Alison Coil, an astrophysicist and lead author of the study, said, “These galaxies are really interesting.” They happen when both big galaxies crash into each other.
All the gas is pushed into a very small area by the merger, which leads to a very fast burst for star formation.
“Massive stars burn out swiftly and when they die, they release their gas in outflowing winds.”
As technology improved, ASKAP was able to scan large parts of the sky at very low levels. This was the first time that strange radio circles (ORCs) were seen in 2019.