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Abstract Low‐cost instrumentation combined with volunteering and citizen science educational initiatives allowed the deployment of L‐band scintillation monitors to remote sense areas that are geomagnetically conjugated and located at low‐to‐mid latitudes in the American sector (Quebradillas in Puerto Rico and Santa Maria in Brazil). On 10 and 11 October, 2023, both monitors detected severe scintillations, some reaching dip latitudes beyond 26°N. The observations show conjugacy in the spatio‐temporal evolution of the scintillation‐causing irregularities. With the aid of collocated all‐sky airglow imager observations, it was shown that the observed scintillation event was caused by extreme equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) reaching geomagnetic apex altitudes exceeding 2,200 km. The observations suggest that geomagnetic conjugate large‐scale structures produced conditions for the development of intermediate scale (few 100 s of meters) in both hemispheres, leading to scintillation at conjugate locations. Finally, unlike previous reports, it is shown that the extreme EPBs‐driven scintillation reported here developed under geomagnetically quiet conditions. 

Abstract We present cosmological results from the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in galaxy, quasar and Lyman-αforest tracers from the first year of observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), to be released in the DESI Data Release 1. DESI BAO provide robust measurements of the transverse comoving distance and Hubble rate, or their combination, relative to the sound horizon, in seven redshift bins from over 6 million extragalactic objects in the redshift range 0.1 <z< 4.2. To mitigate confirmation bias, a blind analysis was implemented to measure the BAO scales. DESI BAO data alone are consistent with the standard flat ΛCDM cosmological model with a matter density Ω_m=0.295±0.015. Paired with a baryon density prior from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the robustly measured acoustic angular scale from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), DESI requiresH₀=(68.52±0.62) km s^-1Mpc^-1. In conjunction with CMB anisotropies fromPlanckand CMB lensing data fromPlanckand ACT, we find Ω_m=0.307± 0.005 andH₀=(67.97±0.38) km s^-1Mpc^-1. Extending the baseline model with a constant dark energy equation of state parameterw, DESI BAO alone requirew=-0.99^+0.15_-0.13. In models with a time-varying dark energy equation of state parametrised byw₀andw_a, combinations of DESI with CMB or with type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) individually preferw₀> -1 andw_a< 0. This preference is 2.6σfor the DESI+CMB combination, and persists or grows when SN Ia are added in, giving results discrepant with the ΛCDM model at the 2.5σ, 3.5σor 3.9σlevels for the addition of the Pantheon+, Union3, or DES-SN5YR supernova datasets respectively. For the flat ΛCDM model with the sum of neutrino mass ∑m_νfree, combining the DESI and CMB data yields an upper limit ∑m_ν< 0.072 (0.113) eV at 95% confidence for a ∑m_ν> 0 (∑m_ν> 0.059) eV prior. These neutrino-mass constraints are substantially relaxed if the background dynamics are allowed to deviate from flat ΛCDM.