Esther is described in the Book of Esther as a Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus. In the narrative, Ahasuerus seeks a new wife after his queen, refuses to obey him, Esther is chosen for her beauty; the king's chief advisor, Haman, is offended by Esther's cousin and guardian and gets permission from the king to have all the Jews in the kingdom killed. Esther foils the plan, wins permission from the king for the Jews to kill their enemies, they do so, her story is the traditional basis for Purim, celebrated on the date given in the story for when Haman's order was to go into effect, the same day that the Jews killed their enemies after the plan was reversed. According to most scholars, the name Esther is derived from the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar and/or the Persian word stara, "star"; the Book of Daniel provides accounts of Jews in exile being assigned names relating to Babylonian gods and "Mordecai" is understood to mean servant of Marduk, a Babylonian god. "Esther" may have been a different Hebrew interpretation from the Proto-Semitic root "star/'morning/evening star'", which descended with the /th/ into the Ugaritic Athtiratu and Arabian Athtar.

The derivation must have been secondary for the initial ayin to be confused with an aleph, the second consonant descended as a /s/, rather than a /sh/ as in Hebrew and most in Akkadian. In Talmudic times it was realized that the name Esther was of foreign origin. According to one opinion mentioned in the Talmud and Yalkut Shimoni as well as Targum Sheni the name Esther comes from אסתהר, the morning star Venus. Modern scholars starting with Assyriologist Peter Jensen added on to this by connecting Esther with Ishtar Babylonian goddess of the planet Venus, this view came to be adopted by all commentators. A. S. Yahuda conjectured that the name Esther is derived from a reconstructed Median word astra meaning myrtle; this would match her Hebrew name as recorded in the Bible, Hadassah meaning "myrtle". In the narrative, King Ahasuerus is drunk at a festival and orders his queen, Vashti, to appear before him and his guests to display her beauty; when she refuses to appear, he seeks a new queen. Beautiful maidens gather together at the harem in the citadel of Susa under the authority of the eunuch Hegai.

Esther was the cousin of Mordecai, a member of the Jewish community in the Exilic Period who claimed as an ancestor Kish, a Benjamite, taken from Jerusalem into captivity. She was the orphaned daughter of Mordecai's uncle, another Benjamite named Abihail. Upon the king's orders Esther was taken to palace; as she advanced to the highest position of the harem, perfumed with myrrh and allocated certain foods and servants, she was under strict instructions from Mordecai, who met with her each day, to conceal her Jewish origins. The king makes her Queen. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman the Agagite, made Ahasuerus' highest advisor, Haman requests and is given permission to order all the Jews in Persia to be killed; when Esther learns of this, Mordecai tells her to reveal to the king that she is Jewish and to ask him to repeal the order. Esther hesitates, saying that she could be put to death if she goes to the king without being summoned and the king does not want to see her, she goes to the king, the king welcomes her, says he will give her anything she wants.

Instead of asking directly about the order, she invites the king and Haman to a banquet the next day. During the banquet, the king again asked Esther if there is anything she wants, this time she asks the king to spare her life and that of all of the Jews; the king asks, threatening them, she names Haman. Haman throws himself at her feet. Esther tells the king about Mordecai's role in her life, the king makes Mordecai his highest advisor. Esther asks the king to revoke the order, king allows Esther and Mordecai to do so, however they wish, they send out an order in the king's name that Jews can assemble and defend themselves, can kill anyone who threatens them, their families, take their goods. On the thirteenth day of Adar, the same day that Haman had set for them to be killed, the Jews do so in one city, killing 500 people but not taking plunder, they kill around 75,000 the next day again not taking plunder, they feast; the Jews established the feast of Purim, in memory of their deliverance.

Haman set the date of Adar 13 to commence his campaign against the Jews. This determined the date of the festival of Purim. Dianne Tidball argues. Abraham Kuyper notes some "disagreeable aspects" to her character: that she should not have agreed to take Vashti's place, that she refrained from saving her nation until her own life was threatened, that she carries out bloodthirsty vengeance; the tale opens with Esther as beautiful and obedient, but a passive figure. During the course of the story, she evolves into someone who takes a decisive role in her own future and that of her people. According to Sidnie White Crawford, "Esther's position in a male court mirrors that of the Jews in a Gentile world, with the threat of danger present below the calm surface." Esther is related to Daniel in that both represent a "type" for Jews living in Diaspora, hoping to live a successful l

Long Bennington is a linear village and civil parish in South Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, just off the A1 road, 7 miles north of Grantham and 5 miles south of Newark-on-Trent. It had a population of 2,100 in 2014. Long Bennington Priory was an Alien house granted in 1462 to the priory of Mount Grace; the village has connections with the Younghusband family, whose members include the first western man to enter Lhasa. Long Bennington is supposed to be the last place where King Harold of Wessex camped before the Battle of Hastings. On the morning of Friday 14 January 1966, coming back from a concert at the University of Hull, the group Manfred Mann were injured when their Ford Zodiac, driven by Anthony Hales, skidded on ice in the village, they were taken to Grantham Hospital. The Viking Way has passed to the south-east since 1997 to avoid a direct crossing of the A1; the River Witham runs to the east. Lying beside the A1 road, the village main street was once the part of the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh.

In December 1968 a bypass was opened. It was made of concrete and excessively noisy until it was resurfaced with tarmac in 2003, at a cost of £4.4 million. West Kesteven Rural District Council did not like the ideas for the £942,000 Long Bennington bypass, calling it an absolute waste of money, good food-producing land; the British Frozen Food Federation is based in the village. Leonardo DRS have a facility in the north of the village on the Long Bennington Business Park, where they have their Air Systems EW Test business. Further south near Three Shire Oak, is the Roseland Business Park. Bennington Carriages, west of the village and the bypass at Authorpe Farm, have a Royal warrant. Long Bennington has a parish council consisting of 11 councillors; the village is twinned with the Normandy village of Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse. It contains a Methodist chapel, St Swithin's Anglican church, a primary school, its public houses are the Royal Oak and Whittakers. The village has a bowls team. Media related to Long Bennington at Wikimedia Commons Local history New link road to Foston "A1".

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In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst is a transient radio pulse of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood. While energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon; the first FRB was discovered by Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, it is therefore referred to as the Lorimer Burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected to repeat in irregular ways. Nonetheless, one FRB, as of February 2020, has been detected to repeat in a regular way: FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days. Although the exact origin and cause is uncertain, they are definitely extragalactic; when the FRBs are polarized, it indicates that they are emitted from a source contained within an powerful magnetic field. The origin of the FRBs has yet to be identified.

The localization and characterization in 2012 of FRB 121102, one of the three repeating sources, has improved the understanding of the source class. FRB 121102 is identified with a galaxy at a distance of 3 billion light-years, well outside the Milky Way, is embedded in an extreme environment; the first host galaxy identified for a non-repeating burst, FRB 180924, was identified in 2019 and is a much larger and more ordinary galaxy, nearly the size of the Milky Way. In August 2019, astronomers reported the detection of eight more repeating FRB signals. In January 2020, astronomers reported the precise location of a second repeating burst, FRB 180916; the first fast radio burst to be described, the Lorimer Burst FRB 010724, was detected in 2007 in archived data recorded by the Parkes Observatory on 24 July 2001. Since most known FRBs have been found in recorded data. On 19 January 2015, astronomers at Australia's national science agency reported that a fast radio burst had been observed for the first time live, by the Parkes Observatory.

Fast radio bursts are bright, broadband, millisecond flashes found in parts of the sky outside the Milky Way. Unlike many radio sources, the signal from a burst is detected in a short period of time with enough strength to stand out from the noise floor; the burst appears as a single spike of energy without any change in its strength over time. The bursts last for several milliseconds; the bursts come from all over the sky, are not concentrated on the plane of the Milky Way. Known FRB locations are biased by the parts of the sky. Many have radio frequencies detected around 1400 MHz; the component frequencies of each burst are delayed by different amounts of time depending on the wavelength. This delay is described by a value referred to as a dispersion measure; this results in a received signal that sweeps down in frequency, as longer wavelengths are delayed more. The interferometer UTMOST has put a lower limit of 10,000 kilometers for the distance to the FRBs it has detected, supporting the case for an astronomical, rather than terrestrial, origin.

This limit can be determined from the fact that closer sources would have a curved wave front that could be detected by the multiple antennas of the interferometer. Fast radio bursts have pulse dispersion measurements > 100 pc cm−3, much larger than expected for a source inside the Milky Way galaxy and consistent with propagation through an ionized plasma. Furthermore, their distribution is isotropic. Fast radio bursts are named by the date the signal was recorded, as "FRB YYMMDD"; the first FRB detected, the Lorimer Burst FRB 010724, was discovered in 2007 when Duncan Lorimer assigned his student David Narkevic to look through archival data taken in 2001 by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. Analysis of the survey data found a 30-jansky dispersed burst which occurred on 24 July 2001, less than 5 milliseconds in duration, located 3° from the Small Magellanic Cloud; the reported burst properties argue against a physical association with the Milky Way galaxy or the Small Magellanic Cloud. The burst became known as the Lorimer Burst.

The discoverers argue that current models for the free electron content in the Universe imply that the burst is less than 1 gigaparsec distant. The fact that no further bursts were seen in 90 hours of additional observations implies that it was a singular event such as a supernova or merger of relativistic objects, it is suggested that hundreds of similar events could occur every day and, if detected, could serve as cosmological probes. In 2010 there was a report of 16 similar pulses of terrestrial origin, detected by the Parkes radio telescope and given the name perytons. In 2015 perytons were shown to be generated when microwave oven doors were opened during a heating cycle, with detected emission being generated by the microwave oven's magnetron tube as it was being powered off. In 2015, FRB 110523 was discovered in archival data collected in 2011 from the Green Bank Telescope, it was the first FRB. Measurement of the signal's dispersion delay suggested that this burst was of extragalactic origin, pos