Latest news with #Sirius
Time of India
11 hours ago
- General
- Time of India
Lion's Gate Portal 2025: What to do when it opens on 8-8
Every year between July 26 and August 12, the Lion's Gate Portal opens. During this time, your spiritual energy is heightened with greater possibilities to transform and manifest. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Its energy peaks on August 8 (8-8). In 2025, this portal is expected to be especially powerful as it aligns with a strong Leo sun and a high-vibration Sirius energy. So, what should you actually do on 8/8 to benefit from this cosmic awakening? Let's find out. What Is the Lion's Gate Portal? The Lion's Gate Portal is activated when the Sun in Leo, the Earth, and Sirius (the brightest star in our sky) move into an alignment with the Orion's Belt. In numerology, 8-8 is a divinely auspicious number that represents infinity, abundance, and karmic balance. It's a rare energetic opening in the universe that invites you to connect with your higher self. What to do on Lion's Gate Portal 8-8 2025? 1. Set Clear Intentions Write down what you want to manifest. Be as specific as possible regarding whatever you desire - whether it's career, relationships, health, inner peace, or spiritual development. Visualize it as already yours. 2. Meditate with the Sun or Sirius Energy Take 10 minutes to meditate outdoors, especially at sunrise or sunset. Visualize a golden light surrounding you that is filling you with courage and clarity. 3. Journal or Create a Vision Board The 8-8 energy is the best time in the year to manifest via creative expression. Use this portal to create a vision board or journal entry that moves you closer to your goals. 4. Movement and Creativity Engage in activities like yoga, dancing, or art to release stagnant energy and invite inspiration. 5. Gratitude Practice Express gratitude for what you have and what you wish to receive to create a mindset of abundance. What Not to Do The portal amplifies both positive and negative energy. It depends on what you are focusing on. Hence, avoid pessimism, distractions, and conflicts. Protect your aura from things that drain you. Way to go! The Lion's Gate Portal isn't merely about wishful thinking, but also about conscious co-creation. Show up with courage and clarity, and the universe might just roar back in your favor.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Prediction: SiriusXM Will Beat the Market. Here's Why.
SiriusXM hasn't exactly been a strong performer in recent years, but that could change. The satellite radio company has done an excellent job of cost management. If Sirius can return to growth, it could be a home run for patient investors. 10 stocks we like better than Sirius XM › SiriusXM Holdings (NASDAQ: SIRI) isn't exactly an investor favorite right now, and it's easy to see why. The satellite radio leader's subscriber base peaked in 2019 and isn't heading in the right direction, with a decrease of about 303,000 self-pay subscribers in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Plus, revenue has been falling recently, down by about 3% year over year in 2024. Profitability is also heading in the wrong direction, with free cash slow down by about 33% over the past two full years. With the stock down by more than 60% since the beginning of last year, it doesn't seem investors have much faith in the company, either. However, I have a bit of a contrarian take here. SiriusXM is a highly profitable business right now, and management isn't exactly sitting around doing nothing. With an extremely low valuation, now could be a smart time to take a closer look. In fact, I predict that over the next five years, SiriusXM will beat the S&P 500's total returns. The first phase of SiriusXM's turnaround plan was mainly focused on cost reduction, and after a couple of years, the company has done a great job in this area. In the first quarter, Sirius reported a year-over-year 19% decline in sales and marketing expenses, and a 15% decline in product and technology costs. Between 2023 and 2024, SiriusXM achieved about $350 million in gross savings, and aims to reach $200 million in run rate savings by the end of 2025, and to continue to lower expenses in subsequent years. For example, satellite capital expenditures are estimated to be about $220 million this year, but less than half of that in 2026, which should greatly boost free cash flow generation. The cost-cutting initiatives have been impressive, but that's only one side of the turnaround efforts. In simple terms, it doesn't matter how efficient the company gets if it can't return to growth. SiriusXM sees the ability to grow free cash flow to about $1.5 billion annually in the near term, which would be about 50% more than the current level. And there are several different initiatives that could help it get there. For one thing, the company is getting a little more creative about the ways it sells subscriptions. Historically, SiriusXM would simply give new vehicle buyers a short trial, and hope they'd subscribe when it expires. This is certainly still part of it, but SiriusXM is trying several other ways to jump-start subscriber growth. As an example, the company recently launched a three-year dealer-sold subscription as a new vehicle option and is seeing strong interest so far. Although the automotive subscriber segment is the focus of the business, SiriusXM is also putting effort into boosting non-vehicle subscriptions, especially through bundles. It recently announced a new bundle of SiriusXM's All Access and the Fox Nation streaming service in app-only form for just $11.99 per month. Advertising is another major opportunity that is starting to gain some serious traction. For example, SiriusXM recently rolled out a free ad-supported version of its service in certain new vehicles. Although Pandora, owned by SiriusXM, mainly uses an advertising revenue model, SiriusXM only gets 2.5% of its revenue from ads. In-car advertising is a largely untapped opportunity for SiriusXM at this point, but could potentially grow into a billion-dollar revenue stream. Advertising is a major focus for SiriusXM right now, and if it can become a significant revenue driver, it would likely be a big win for shareholders. The company is doing a great job of investing in ad technology and recently partnered with AI company Narrativ to allow brands to produce high-quality ads in a cost-effective and scalable way. As I mentioned, the market isn't showing much faith in SiriusXM's turnaround plan. In fact, the stock trades for just over seven times forward earnings, despite excellent profitability and expected free cash flow growth in 2025. Not only that, but the company pays a generous dividend, with a yield of about 5% as of this writing, which is well covered by the company's earnings. Plus, the company started buying back stock in late 2024 and continues to do so, which could also help drive total returns. To sum it up, while there's quite a bit of execution risk, SiriusXM has a solid plan, and is making all the right moves to capitalize on its opportunities. I recently added shares to my portfolio and believe this will be a market-beating stock over the next five years. Before you buy stock in Sirius XM, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Sirius XM wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $658,297!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $883,386!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 992% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Matt Frankel has positions in Sirius XM. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Prediction: SiriusXM Will Beat the Market. Here's Why. was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
Scientific American
13-06-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
This New Map of Nearby Stars May Solve a Cosmic Mystery
I don't think it's overly poetic to say that stars are how we know the universe. When we look out at the night sky, stars are overwhelmingly what we see—thousands of them, ranging from Sirius, the brightest in the night sky, to ones so dim they are known by mere catalog designations instead of names. And for every star we can see by eye in our sky, telescopes can see millions more. Astronomers study them to understand the shape, size, structure, history, and fate of our galaxy and use them to gauge the distances and behavior of other galaxies. Even when studying exoplanets, we need to understand their host stars to make sense of these alien worlds. The heavier elements making up our planet and even our body were forged in stars long ago, and our own sun is a star, of course—so in a very real sense, to study stars is to study ourselves. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Yet for all that, some basic questions about stars remain unanswered. While we have a pretty decent grasp of how individual stars are born, there are still gaps in our knowledge of their statistics en masse. One of my favorite unanswered questions concerns the most fundamental properties of stars as a group, which is how different kinds are born out of a gas cloud. Say you have a giant gas cloud that is busily manufacturing stars. As a percentage, how many of them will be like the sun? How many will be feeble red dwarfs, how many will be massive blue beasts, and how many will be so low in mass that they will straddle the line between a true star and a planet? The mass of a star—how much matter is in it—determines most of its properties, including its temperature, color, brightness, evolution and even its destiny, so this is something astronomers are very keen to understand. Understanding stars' distribution in our galaxy tells us about the galaxy itself, much like poring over the contents of a construction kit offers insights about the finished product and the way it's assembled. The 'initial mass function' is the technical term for this unresolved question of stellar demographics. And in theory, it's not too hard to answer: just observe a bunch of stars, determine their masses and then figuratively put them into the proper box. In practice, though, it's very difficult indeed. Massive stars are bright and easy to spot. We can't, however, see small, dim ones if they are very far away—which means our cosmic census of low-mass stars is largely limited to whatever happens to be relatively near our solar system. Still, given time, these stars mix pretty well throughout the galaxy, so we can assume such fainter stellar next-door neighbors are representative of the galaxy at large. Still, to give you an idea of just how hard this undertaking is, after millennia of astronomical observations, the first nearly complete tally of all stars out to a distance of about 65 light-years only appeared—in 2024! Published by a huge team of astronomers, the paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal, is a sprawling description of the Herculean effort involved. Performing the survey in the first place required using several space- and ground-based astronomical observatories. The European Space Agency's Milky Way–mapping Gaia mission was chief among them, and it pinned down key data for most of the bright stars within the requisite 65 light-years. For lower-mass stars, which shine brightest in infrared, Gaia's observations were augmented by data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Such stellar dim bulbs are critical for determining the lowest-mass end of the initial mass function. Brown dwarfs, which are objects of intermediate mass between planets and stars, give off essentially no visible light and can only be detected in the infrared. The first brown dwarfs were only found in the 1990s. And in general, these objects are so dim that even nearby ones can elude detection. Luhman 16 is a binary brown dwarf system just 6.5 light-years from the sun— the third closest system to us —yet was only discovered in 2013. After carefully teasing out the details of objects confirmed to be within the 65 light-year region, the study team found a total of approximately 3,000 stars and 600 brown dwarfs. Right away this is a remarkable finding. I'm used to thinking on much larger spatial scales, so finding 3,600 objects within a mere 65 light-years of the sun is more than I'd have guessed. Mind you, our Milky Way galaxy is a flat disk 120,000 light-across, which is roomy enough for hundreds of billions of stars and other celestial citizenry. The astronomers were careful to note that their survey wasn't complete at the low-mass end, either. Brown dwarfs cooler than about 325 degrees Celsius are so faint that our current technology can't directly see them beyond about 50 light-years. Also, some brighter brown dwarfs may still be hiding in crowded parts of the sky, such as the star-rich disk of the galaxy. There could also be smaller binary companions to some stars that have gone undiscovered. What that means is that some brown dwarfs have likely been undercounted, which is actually pretty problematic for trying to determine the full range of object masses spawned in galactic gas clouds. Think of it this way: if you smash a rock with a hammer, you're likely to get one or two big pieces, a dozen or two midsize ones, hundreds of small chunks and thousands or tens of thousands of tiny grains. If you don't count all the grains, you can't really know how the size of the debris is distributed. Still, this new, best-yet census of our interstellar neighborhood does extend our understanding of the initial mass function. Before, it wasn't clear if objects had a mass cutoff at the lower end. We know that gas clouds in stellar nurseries have to form clumps that collapse under their own gravity and that these clumps become stars. Is there a limit to how small a clump can be to collapse? Possibly, but until brown dwarfs were discovered and counted, we weren't sure they could even form like stars do. What the census finds is that the number of objects formed generally increases as mass decreases, as expected, much like the debris distribution from a hammer-struck rock. But the census does reveal some quirks: the tally of objects flattens out a bit as mass descends from the stellar regime to brown dwarfs but then starts rising again at lower, more planetary-scale masses. Does it flatten out again at some lower mass, such as around a few times that of Jupiter? That's for future telescopes to determine. Still, this survey is a big step forward. Extrapolating it to the Milky Way and other galaxies will help us understand how galaxies behave—and how they change their behavior over time, churning out different mixes of stars as they age. The confidence we have in our scientific knowledge depends on each link in the chain, so the better we determine the initial mass function, the better we will comprehend the universe.
Western Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Business
- Western Telegraph
Proposed wind turbines could tower over Bluestone resort
In an application to Pembrokeshire County Council, High Wycombe-based Slebech Investments Limited seeks permission for three wind turbines of up to 100 metres height on land at Newhouse Farm, Canaston Bridge, close to the two parks, and close to the border with Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. The proposed site on agricultural land across three fields is some 3.5 kilometres from Narberth, and would be accessed from the A4075 via an existing track opposite Bluestone Resort's service entrance, some 350m south of the main roundabout entrance to Bluestone. The formal application follows an earlier screening request submitted to the council in February, and details of the proposal being sent to local county councillors, community councils and residents. The three 1MW turbines, if granted, would generate electricity equivalent to powering 1,900 homes, the applicants say; power connected to the grid, but explorations are underway for its potential use by local businesses. A supporting statement through agent Sirius Planning said: 'The footprint of the proposed development is modest in scale, with the wider fields and landholding able to continue to operate with minimal impact from the proposal. ' In addition, ecological enhancements implemented in recent years within the landholding will not be impacted by the proposed wind turbine development. The overcall context of the site is rural with the site surrounded to the south and east by agricultural fields and woodland areas. 'To the north is PBE Fuels, Bluestone Resort head office (The Grange) and Newhouse Farm. To the west are agricultural fields and the A4075, beyond which is Bluestone Resort, comprising holiday lodges and leisure amenities, and Oakwood Theme Park. A ground-mounted solar scheme is located to the south-west of the site beyond the A4075.' If granted, the scheme would take some four months in construction, the statement says, with approximately 354 deliveries to the site. It is anticipated that a public consultation event will be held during the planning process, the applicants have said. In the initial screening application, Sirius said the turbines could be used to provide power for Bluestone Holiday Park Resort and/or Oakwood Theme Park. Since the initial application Oakwood has closed, but proposals for a revival have recently been mooted. On that screening application, Sirius said: 'There are no designated or non-designated features within the application site which are protected for their landscape and scenic value. The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park lies to the north and west beyond the Bluestone Resort and Oakwood Theme Park. 'The landscape character already incorporates existing wind turbines and other large vertical structures, such as Oaklands [sic] Theme Park rollercoasters which are existing detractors within the landscape.' On Companies House, Slebech Investments Limited, of West Wycombe Park Office, West Wycombe Park, lists two directors: Sir Edward John Francis Dashwood and Lady Lucinda Nell Dashwood. The proposals will be considered by county planners at a later date.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Oil and Gas Investment in Colombia Sees Uptick Despite Hurdles
In recent years, Colombia's oil production and reserves have been in decline and interest in investing in the country's crude seemed limited in the post-pandemic landscape. In addition, President Petro has been vocal about supporting a green transition and restricting investment in new fossil fuel projects. However, in recent months, there has been a renewed interest in developing exploration and production. Colombia has long relied on its fossil fuel revenues to support the national economy, with oil and gas contributing around 10 percent of the GDP and 20 percent of exports. State-owned Ecopetrol is responsible for around 64 percent of Colombia's oil and gas production and owns 100 percent of its refining capacity. In 2021, Colombia produced an average of 736,400 bpd of crude, a figure which grew to 753,750 bpd in 2022, with crude reserves of 1.8 billion barrels as of January 2022. In 2021, Colombia was South America's second-largest petroleum and other liquids producer after Brazil. In 2025, Colombia has plans to develop both its onshore and offshore oil and gas resources, as well as invest in green energy. Ecopetrol and Brazil's Petrobras are expected to continue exploration and appraisal drilling at the offshore Sirius prospect this year. The companies estimate that the area contains potential gas reserves of 6.1 trillion cubic feet (Tf3), with the first production expected by 2030. Investment in the area is expected to reach up to $5 billion. Ecopetrol is also developing the Papayuela area, which the company says could provide up to 80 percent of Colombia's gas needs. It is expected to take between five and seven years to develop and could produce up to 800 million f3/d. Onshore, Canada's NG Energy expects gas output to increase to 130 million f3/d by the end of 2025 in Colombia's Sinu-9 area in Cordoba. The company plans to construct two additional pipelines during the second phase of the project, as well as drill three exploration wells. It also hopes to increase output from its Maria Conchita block in the La Guajira region. Plans to improve Colombia's pipelines are also underway, with a two-way pipeline between Barranquilla and the Ballena gas field being developed. The developer, Promigas, is expected to invest around $75 million in the pipeline, which will transport up to 170 million f3/d from August 2027. The government's IPAT gas infrastructure expansion programme is also expected to support improvements to the Mariquita-Gualanday, Jamundí-Valle del Cauca and Barrancabermeja-Ballena pipelines. In late May, Colombia's leading industry group, the Colombian Oil and Gas Association (ACP), said that investment in fossil fuel exploration and production could increase by around 8 percent this year, to reach $4.68 billion, compared to $4.33 billion in 2024. This is expected to maintain Colombia's current crude output, although it is not expected to prevent a fall in gas production. The ACP expects around $740 million to be invested in exploration activities this year, and a further $3.94 billion to go towards production, to keep output at around 760,000 to 770,000 bpd. However, it expects gas output to fall to around 905 million f3/d, compared to 959 million f3/d in 2024. ACP President Frank Pearl stated, 'Today more investment is required to produce the same amount of oil, due to the natural depletion of the fields and the complexity of the operating environment.' Meanwhile, 'For gas, we are not managing to either increase production or replenish reserves, which is double the challenge when it comes to energy self-sufficiency.' While it strives to maintain a steady oil and gas output, Ecopetrol has faced widespread criticism for its failure to manage pollution levels effectively. In March, it was widely reported that Ecopetrol had polluted hundreds of sites with oil, including water sources and biodiverse wetlands. A former employee of the oil firm leaked data including over 800 records of polluted sites from 1989 to 2018, which suggested that the company failed to report around a fifth of the sites. The BBC also found that Ecopetrol has spilt oil hundreds of times since these instances. While Ecopetrol says it complies with national standards and follows sustainability practices, fishermen and rural communities have criticised the company for causing widespread pollution in fossil fuel production areas. Colombia is also investing heavily in a green transition, which could help it to leave its dirty fossil fuel record in the past. In October, the government launched a new $40-million investment plan for an energy transition, aimed at shifting away from a reliance on fossil fuels. The plan included funding for nature conservation, as well as clean energy projects and plans for the electrification of transport. Colombia continues to rely heavily on its oil and gas revenues. However, keeping production levels up has become more challenging in recent years, due to low levels of foreign investment and rapidly depleting oil fields. While Ecopetrol plans to invest heavily in exploration and production in 2025, oil production is expected to remain flat while gas production is likely to fall. Meanwhile, greater investment in green energy projects could help Colombia gradually shift away from a reliance on fossil fuels to shift to renewable alternatives. By Felicity Bradstock for More Top Reads From this article on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
