Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
02-11-2016
Medieval Painting Shows A UFO Over Count Dracula’s Homeland
Medieval Painting Shows A UFO Over Count Dracula’s Homeland
A work of art in the Monastery Church in Sighisoara, Transylvania could show evidence of alien UFO visitationhundreds of years ago. The medieval painting shows a large flying saucer with a beam of light above of what looks like a church building.
According to the book “UFOs over Romania,” by Dan D. Farcas (Amazon link), the work could be done before 1534, but experts have yet to determine when it was exactly done and who created it.
Mr. Farcas, 76, who has a doctorate in computers and maths, said there are possibilities that images in these paintings do depict a UFO.
Images in paintings depicting something that would be described today as a UFO have been found in centuries-old paintings. Some researchers suspect they may be evidence aliens have visited Earth throughout history.
The UFO sighting near Dracula’s castle is also featured in the book. It involves a couple who claimed to have seen a large flying disc out of a lake when they toured the ruins of Poenari or popularly known as Dracula’s Castle. The pair said the mysterious object then flew north over mountains towards Transylvania.
The book also notes the case of police sergeant Marian Mancu and voluntary guard Maricel Rusu. They reportedly saw strange flashing lights in the village of Certesti, Romania at around 12:30 a.m. on July 8, 1996.
Mr. Mancu said they saw a flashing red and blue lights from an object that hovered half a meter from the ground. Allegedly, the object eventually landed, and they saw three aliens got out. He described them as white-faced aliens with big heads, pointed ears, and covered in gray scales.
THE CHRONOVISOR - THE VATICAN HAS A SECRET DEVICE TO LOOK INTO THE FUTURE AND PAST
THE CHRONOVISOR - THE VATICAN HAS A SECRET DEVICE TO LOOK INTO THE FUTURE AND PAST
Several paranormal writers and researchers have spoken out about the extraordinary technological capabilities of the Vatican. It has been sensationally alleged that there is an incredible device kept at the heart of the Catholic Church which allows senior members to see future events and events from the past. It has been said that this device is the secret to explaining the continued influence and power of the Church.
THE VATICAN’S ATTEMPTS TO LOOK INTO THE FUTURE
It has been said that the device was constructed in the 1950s by a team of twelve scientists led by Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti. Father Ernetti had worked as a physicist before moving into the papacy. The team was also supported by a number of renowned scientists from outside of the Church including Enrico Fermi and the rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun .
The machine, which is referred to as the Chronovisor, apparently looks like an oversized cupboard covered with antennas, cathode ray tubes, dials, and levers. While Father Ernetti has refused to reveal a great deal of information about the functioning of the machine he has admitted that it works by processing residual electromagnetic radiations. Using the machine, it has been said that Ernetti viewed one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s speeches, a Greek tragedy called Thyestes and even the crucifixion of Christ.
However, the Chronovisor has not only been used for historical investigation. In the 1970s, the Vatican decided to use the extraordinary technology to create a rudimentary form of time travel. In the 1970s, it is alleged that people from within the Vatican successfully traveled forward in time to 2013 and where they claim that they saw the Supreme Court building submerged underneath 100 feet of water and significant damage to Washington DC. When this event did not transpire, scientists from within the Vatican suggested that the Chronovisor was not an accurate instrument for predicting the future. It has been suggested that it is only capable of showing one potential outcome of current geopolitical events. Alternatively, it may show realities from alternate universes.
Whether this explanation is correct is now impossible to discern as officials within the Vatican have elected to destroy the device, fearing the potential consequences such advanced technology could have for the world. Now it appears that all traces of the machine have been purged from the Vatican archives. Even Father Ernetti made a deathbed recantation of his claims about the capabilities of the machines. However, according to François Brune, it seems likely that he was pressurized into making this retraction by powerful forces within the Catholic Church.
Russische wetenschapper: “De nieuwe Kleine IJstijd is al begonnen”
Russische wetenschapper: “De nieuwe Kleine IJstijd is al begonnen”
Een Russische wetenschapper claimt dat eind vorig jaar een nieuwe Kleine IJstijd is begonnen. De komende decennia zal het flink afkoelen, zo zegt hij.
De nieuwe Kleine IJstijd begon eind 2015, na de piek van zonnecyclus 24, schrijft dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov van de Russische Academie van Wetenschappen in zijn nieuwe studie.
Hij verwacht dat het vanaf 2060 sterk gaat afkoelen op aarde. Zijn werk, dat tegenwicht moet bieden aan het beeld dat CO2 de belangrijkste oorzaak is van global warming, is vertaald in het Engels door geoloog Don Easterbrook.
Stuk kouder
Als gevolg van afnemende zonneactiviteit zal de temperatuur boven Noord-Amerika en Europa dalen.
De afzwakking van de Golfstroom maakt West-Europa en oostelijke delen van de Verenigde Staten en Canada een stuk kouder, aldus Abdussamatov.
Hij voorspelde eerder al dat afnemende zonneactiviteit de komende 30 jaar zou leiden tot een nieuwe Kleine IJstijd.
Lagere temperaturen
Britse oceanografen schreven enkele jaren geleden in vakblad Nature dat Europa vier tot acht graden kouder zal worden door het afzwakken van de Golfstroom.
Al enige tijd waarschuwen wetenschappers dat de afnemende zonneactiviteit de komende jaren zorgt voor lagere temperaturen.
Dat beeld wordt tegengesproken door veel wetenschappers die broeikasgassen zoals CO2 zien als de oorzaak van de opwarming.
Supermoon November 2016: When, Where & How to See It
Supermoon November 2016: When, Where & How to See It
By Samantha Mathewson, Space.com Contributor
This year, the full moons of October, November and December all take place when the moon is at its closest point of approach in its orbit around Earth — a so-called supermoon.
October's supermoon occurred on Oct. 16. The next supermoon will be November's full Beaver Moon, which is expected to reach the peak of its full phase on the morning of Nov. 14, at 8:52 a.m. EST (1352 GMT).
This full moon will be not only the closest and brightest supermoon of 2016 but also the largest since 1948, Bob Berman, an astronomer at the Slooh Community Observatory, told Space.com. What's more, the full moon won't come this close to Earth again until Nov. 25, 2034, according to a statement from NASA. [Full Moon: Why Does It Happen? (Video)]
A full moon occurs each month when the sun, Earth and moon line up, with the moon on the side of the Earth opposite to the sun. The term "supermoon" is used to describe a full moon at its perigee — the point in the moon's orbit when it is closest to Earth, causing it to appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter in the sky, NASA officials said in the statement.
November's full moon is also called the Beaver Moon because it arrives at the time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere) when hunters would set traps before the waters froze over, to ensure they had enough warm furs for the winter.
The Beaver Moon follows the full Hunter's Moon of October and the full Harvest Moon of September — both of which are also named for seasonal changes that marked times when people would begin to prepare for the colder months ahead. November's full moon also has been referred to as the full Frost Moon, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac.
The Slooh Community Observatory will offer a live broadcast for November's full moon on Nov. 13 at 7:00 p.m. EST (0000 GMT on Nov. 14). You can also watch it live on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.
Back-to-back supermoons
To round out the trifecta of supermoons for 2016, December will see its full Cold Moon peak on Dec. 13 at 7:05 p.m. EST (0005 GMT on Dec. 14).
"The supermoon of December 14 is remarkable for a different reason: It's going to wipe out the view of the Geminid meteor shower," NASA officials said in the statement. "Bright moonlight will reduce the visibility of faint meteors five- to ten-fold, transforming the usually fantastic Geminids into an astronomical footnote. Sky watchers will be lucky to see a dozen Geminids per hour when the shower peaks."
Editor's note: If you snap an awesome photo of the moon that you'd like to share with Space.com and our news partners for a potential story or gallery, send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.
Mis ‘m niet: Grootste supermaan van de eeuw in november
Mis ‘m niet: Grootste supermaan van de eeuw in november
De volle maan op 14 november 2016 wordt niet alleen de grootste en helderste supermaan van het jaar, maar ook de grootste van de eeuw.
De maan komt pas op 25 november 2034 weer zo dicht bij de aarde, weet de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA.
Als de volle maan op het dichtstbijzijnde punt van onze planeet staat in de ellipsvormige baan die de maan rond de aarde maakt, dan spreken we van een supermaan.
Drie supermanen op rij
Het jaar 2016 eindigt met drie van zulke verschijningen achter elkaar. De supermaan is tot 14 procent groter en tot 30 procent helderder dan een gewone volle maan.
Het ene punt in de baan van de maan om de aarde, het perigeum, staat op 14 november ongeveer 48.000 kilometer dichter bij de aarde dan het andere punt, het apogeum.
Meteorenzwerm
Op 14 december gebeurt er ook iets speciaals. Het licht van de supermaan zal dan het zicht op het anders fantastische natuurfenomeen van de Geminiden-meteorenzwerm verstoren. Maar we krijgen er wel een supermaan voor in de plaats.
Wie de bijzondere maan wil zien, kan het beste een plek met weinig licht opzoeken en hopen op niet al te veel wolken.
*In een eerdere versie van dit artikel stond de afstand tot de maan onjuist vermeld.
Nog steeds is voor veel mensen de klassieke vliegende schotel vorm, ook wel retro UFO genoemd, de mooiste die er bestaan.
Ook nu is weer een dergelijk exemplaar vastgelegd boven een afgelegen berg op Hawaii.
De waarneming van de getuige vond plaats op 23 oktober 2016 in Waikane op Hawaii. De zaak is in onderzoek bij Mufon onder nummer 79999.
De getuige vertelt hoe tijdens de lunchpauze foto’s nam van Kaneoha Bay. Hij had zijn camera ingesteld op “meerdere opnames”, wat betekent dat wanneer hij zijn vinger op de opnameknop houdt de camera achter elkaar door een aantal foto’s neemt, zonder dat er zelfs een seconde tussen zit.
Met deze optie ingesteld nam hij foto’s van de bergen. Toen hij ze later bekeek, viel hem op dat er één bij was die anders was dan de andere.
De getuige verklaarde verder:
Eerst dacht ik dat het misschien een vuiltje op de lens was, maar toen ik goed keek, zag ik een UFO! Nu geloof ik niet in die stereotype UFO’s, maar hier schrok ik zo van dat ik het toch maar meldt, voor het geval dat.
Het niet geïdentificeerde object dat ik zag was een schijf, een soort rugbybal met een geel/oranje kleur. Wanneer ik inzoom met mijn camera lijkt er zelfs een soort koepel op te zitten.
Toen ik in de gaten kreeg dat hier geen sprake was van een vuiltje op de lens, begon ik een vreemd gevoel te krijgen.
Volgens de bij ons inmiddels bekende ufoloog Scott Waring zie je dit soort UFO2016-11-01’s vaak in de buurt van bergen in afgelegen gebieden omdat er dan weinig kans is dat ze daar worden gezien en omdat ze vaak in de buurt van bergen hun ondergrondse basis hebben.
Op de laatste van de twee volgende afbeeldingen is door Scott wat contrast toegevoegd om het object wat beter zichtbaar te maken.
A New Zealand witness at Coromandel reported watching and videotaping a large, disc-shaped UFO emitting smaller objects, and reports someone “hacked” the video after it was emailed to multiple locations, according to testimony in Case 78924 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.
Witness illustration 1.
(Credit: MUFON)
The witness stepped outside on a bright, windless night about 9:10 p.m. on September 1, 2016.
“I noticed this very big bright, glowing ball,” the witness stated. “Huge compared with stars. Ran and got my camcorder. Filmed it for approximately 17 minutes. The mother ship was opening a platform and smaller craft were taking off at all angles, plus also exiting from below. There were definitely six smaller craft, maybe seven. There also was a red orb beneath, some distance of which one of the smaller ships attached itself to – approximately two miles.”
Witness illustration 2. (Credit: MUFON)
Witness illustration 3.
(Credit: MUFON)
The witness states there was some “amazing footage” collected.
“However, I downloaded this to my laptop in four different places in case I lost some and sent the vid to family and friends. However, nobody received it. Yesterday approximately four days later I checked the video. Some bastard had hacked it. The video was now 5-6 mins long. It got a quick showing of one smaller craft, of which they missed. The sounds are of the city with cars trucks etc. going past. Also,later on, it has sounds of gale force winds. The cam recorder also had been hacked. I will send to you what’s left of it. Now I tried to send, but the file is too big, plus what’s to say these bastards aren’t going to steal it again. What’s not to say you guys aren’t one of them. So if you want the movie, you will have to find someway of getting it. I do not trust Drop Box. I’ve drawn some pictures for you.”
Witness illustration 4.
(Credit: MUFON)
Witness illustration 5.
(Credit: MUFON)
The Coromandel Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand extends 85 kilometres north from the western end of the Bay of Plenty, forming a natural barrier to protect the Hauraki Gulf and the Firth of Thames in the west from the Pacific Ocean to the east. At its broadest point, it is 40 kilometres wide. Almost the entire population lies on the narrow strips along the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty coasts. In fine weather the peninsula is clearly visible from Auckland, the country’s biggest city, which lies on the far shore of the Hauraki Gulf, 55 kilometres to the west. The peninsula is part of the local government areas of Thames-Coromandel District and the Waikato Region.
Waikawau Bay on Coromandel Peninsula.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
New Zealand National Director Roger Stankovic is investigating. Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made. The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.
Guy Asks UFOs To Come Closer...And They Did, Nov 1, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Guy Asks UFOs To Come Closer...And They Did, Nov 1, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: November 1, 2016 Location of sighting: Unknown ( I asked and location will be updated soon). Here is an interesting video of a man using meditation and focus to call the orbs over to his area. It works...watch them come when he asks them too. Its really rare to see this many UFOs come when a person summons them. Usually just one will appear. This person...DWC Coffman of Youtube, must be a very focused and pure hearted person at this moment in time. Does summoning work, yes, I have done it myself, but only a single UFO came. This is spectacular. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Forgive my speaking I talked to them while I meditate and they always show up, I have many photos.
Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims
Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
A study published in October 2016 reported the detection of odd light pulses coming from 234 of 2.5 million stars observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico (pictured here). These pulses are consistent with signals that intelligent aliens might produce, the study authors claimed.
Credit: SDSS/Fermilab Visual Media Services/NASA
Strange pulses of cosmic light might be signals from hundreds of different alien civilizations — or just the latest false alarm in the tortuous search for ET.
This month, astrophysicists Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, both from Laval University in Quebec, announced that they had spotted mysterious light signals coming from 234 different stars in our Milky Way galaxy. These pulses match the profile of signals that Borra, in a 2012 paper, predicted intelligent aliens might use to get our attention, the authors wrote.
"We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis," the duo wrote in the paper, which was published online Oct. 14 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
"The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis," the researchers added in the study. (Borra and Trottier looked at the spectra of 2.5 million stars studied by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which uses a telescope in New Mexico.)
But don't get too excited: Borra and Trottier said that additional observations are needed to confirm this hypothesis, and outside astronomers are even more emphatic on this point. Indeed, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.
For example, it seems unlikely that 234 separate alien societies would be sending out such similar signals more or less simultaneously, Shostak said.
"It would be like expecting us to send the same signals as the Abyssinians — it doesn't make a whole lot of sense," he told Space.com. "If I were a betting guy, I'd bet this is an artifact of the way they processed their data."
Shostak also said that he knew of six different reviewers who had recommended against publishing the paper, at least without significant revision. However, he did stress that Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is a reputable journal.
The astronomers behind Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that's scanning the heavens for SETI signals over the next 10 years, also urged skepticism.
"The international SETI community has established a 0-to-10 scale for quantifying detections of phenomena that may indicate the existence of advanced life beyond the Earth called the 'Rio Scale,'" team members of Breakthrough Listen, whose science program is headquartered at the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "The BSRC team assesses the Borra-Trottier result to currently be a 0 or 1 (None/Insignificant) on this scale."
But skepticism is not the same thing as dismissal. Shostak thinks the stars singled out by Borra and Trottier are worthy of follow-up investigation, as does Breakthrough Listen. Indeed, the latter organization plans to study several of these stars using the 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) Automated Planet Finder optical telescope at Lick Observatory in California, team members said in the same statement.
The long history of SETI false alarms — including a detection that generated buzz this past August, but was soon traced to a Russian satellite — shouldn't deter scientists from checking out intriguing candidates, Shostak stressed.
"You can't get too cynical," he said. "You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."
Our Galactic Arm May Have a Longer Reach Than We Thought
Our Galactic Arm May Have a Longer Reach Than We Thought
By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor
An artist's impression of the Milky Way as seen from the outside. New research suggests that the Orion Spur, or Arm, is almost twice as long as scientists had previously thought.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt
The sun's galactic neighborhood just became a bit more significant. New research reveals that the sun's branch of the Milky Way may be several times longer than previously measured, which would make it a significant contender in the structure of the galaxy.
Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way contain several massive structures known as arms, which unwind from the galaxy's center. The sun's neighborhood is called the Orion Arm, though scientists often refer to it as the Local Arm. Despite its name, it is classified as a spur — a collection of dust and gas that lies between the more massive arms.
"Our study reveals that the Local Arm is not only a tiny spur of the Milky Way. In includes a prominent major arm nearly extending to the Perseus Arm and a long spur branching between the Local and Sagittarius Arms," astronomer Ye Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Space.com by email. Xu led a team that identified eight new features in the Orion Arm and determined that it is much longer than scientists have previously estimated, Xu said. [Our Milky Way Galaxy: A Traveler's Guide (Infographic)]
Mapping from within
With their gently unfurling arms and ongoing star formation, spiral galaxies are some of the most beautiful star collections in the universe. But it is far easier to calculate the characteristics of distant galaxies than it is to understand the features of our own Milky Way.
"Determining the structure of the Milky Way has been a long-standing problem for astronomers because we are inside of it," Xu said. "While astronomers agree that our galaxy has a spiral structure, there are disagreements on how many arms it has and on their specific location."
Mark Reid, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts who was not involved in the study, compares the Milky Way to a dinner plate with an interesting design on its face. While the pattern is easy to spot from above, it can be difficult to interpret when the plate is edge-on.
"All of the structures are projected on top of each other, and without accurate distances to these structures, it is impossible to infer the design," Reid told Space.com by email.
To measure how far parts of the arm sit from the sun, scientists search for telltale signals in star-forming regions. As gas enters galactic arms, gravitational forces squeeze the gas to produce newborn stars. In other galaxies, blobs of bluish light that are produced by the birth of stars trace out spiral arms.
In the Milky Way, star-forming regions are more challenging to map. As part of the new research, the scientists identified bright spots of radio emission known as masers, whose shift in light researchers can measure to identify their movement and distance from Earth. Masers can be made up of clouds of gas that contain trace amounts of molecules such as water and methyl alcohol.
Reid compared the microwave emissions produced by masers to the spots of red light streaming from a hand-held laser.
"All they need is a source of energy — analogous to the battery in a laser pointer — and long path-lengths to amplify the emission," Reid said. "In star-forming regions, the more massive and very young stars provide the energy."
Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a suite of 10 telescopes operating in Socorro, New Mexico, the scientists identified and measured eight new masers in the Orion Arm, setting its new length at about 25,000 light-years long. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year.) Although measurements of the arm vary, Xu’s team set the distance as being just over 16,000 light-years in 2013.
"This characterization of the Local Arm will change the image of the Milky Way," Xu said.
The new research, which was published in the journal Science Advances in September, reveals the Milky Way as more complex than scientists have previously estimated. The galaxy is typically classified as a grand-design spiral, which Reid said is often very symmetrical, often boasting only two arms.
"The Milky Way, while probably a 'pretty galaxy,' has significant irregularities," Reid said. "Based on our observations, it is clear that there are four major spiral arms and some non-symmetric structures like the Local Arm."
Further studies are needed to determine how irregular the Milky Way might be: "Without a complete map of the Milky Way, however, it is not clear how symmetric the four arms are," Reid said.
Instruments like the VLBA, located in the northern hemisphere, are limited in their ability to study the Milky Way. According to Reid, they can only map a bit more than half of the galaxy.
"We need more observations, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere, so that we can map the entire Milky Way," Reid said.
Amajor lunar mystery may have just been solved. Orientale basin — a 580-mile-wide crater — is one of the moon’s most striking features and resembles a large bull’s-eye. After pondering its origins for decades, scientists now think they’ve discovered how the crater’s concentric rings formed, and it’s more complicated than just a giant meteor pummeling into the surface.
A pair of articles published in the new issue of Science, explains how researchers used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft to examine the lunar subsurface in order to piece together the giant crater’s history.
“Big impacts like the one that formed Orientale were the most important drivers of change on planetary crusts in the early solar system,” says Brandon Johnson, lead author of one of the papers and a co-author of the other. “Thanks to the tremendous data supplied by GRAIL, we have a much better idea of how these basins form, and we can apply that knowledge to big basins on other planets and moons.”
Maria Zuber, a a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead on the gravity field study, explained that they used GRAIL much like an X-ray machine. The spacecraft mapped the interior of the planet by using its own gravity. The lunar interior is made up of a myriad of materials, each with their own temperature, density, and composition. The surface also has a variety of features, and GRAIL measures the gravitational differences around all of these objects to map out what’s underneath.
“In the past, our view of Orientale basin was largely related to its surface features, but we didn’t know what the subsurface structure looked like in detail,” Jim Head, a geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, a GRAIL scientist and a co-author of the new research, said in a statement. “The beauty of the GRAIL data is that it is like putting Orientale in an X-ray machine, and learning in great detail what the surface features correspond to in the subsurface.”
A color-coded map that shows the strength of surface gravity around the Orientale basin.
By analyzing the GRAIL data, the researchers concluded that an object about 40 miles (64 km) across, struck the Moon while traveling at roughly 9 miles per second. The data also indicated that the three concentric rings surrounding the crater were not caused by the initial impact. Instead, they were formed by processes happening below the surface in response to the impact.
As the crust rebounded following the impact, molten rocks below the surface flowed toward the point of impact, causing the crust above to rise up, forming the jagged cliffs that make up the outer two rings.
The innermost ring, however, was formed by a different process. When the crust rebounds, it can form a central peak. But in Orientale’s case, that central peak was so massive that it was unstable, eventually collapsing into a ring-like structure.
Multi-ring craters exist all over the solar system, and future missions modeled after GRAIL could be sent to other planetary bodies to better understand their inner-workings. When similar craters formed on the Earth, the first single-celled organisms were emerging. By studying craters similar to Orientale, on places like Mars, it could give us a better understanding of whether or not life existed.
Paleontologists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur brain tissue — ever. It’s a small fossil, and a huge deal.
The rock, just a few inches long, was picked up in 2004 by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks on a beach in the south of England after a storm. Since then, paleontologists have been working on making a solid case that it is what they think it is: exquisitely preserved tissue from the outer layer of the brain of an iguanodon, or similar dinosaur that lived 133 million years ago.
Fossils that wash up on shore have already lost a lot of important information about their origin, often changing shape, and making it difficult to figure out what it originally was. But the evidence — at least for this piece of detritus — is all pointing in one direction.
The rock fits neatly into the brain cavity of an iguanodon, based on known fossils, and it likely came from the Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation, which is 133- million-years-old, and coincides with when iguanodons would have been hanging out in the area.
The brain might have belonged to an animal that looked something like this.
The soft tissues on the outer layer of the fossil are exquisitely preserved — you can even see the blood vessels running through it. The patterns match what we see today in the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs: crocodiles and birds.
Soft tissue fossils from the dinosaur era are rare finds and require very special circumstances for preservation. Although fossilized stomachs, skin, feathers, and even blood vessels have been found, many scientists would have said we’d never find a brain — until we did.
Cambridge paleontologist David Norman, who announced the discovery at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Utah this week, theorizes that the animal died and sank to the bottom of a shallow, stagnant pond. It flipped over on its head, which became buried in the muck. The conditions in the pond would have had to be inhospitable to bacteria in order for the tissue to stay intact long enough to become mineralized.
Scanning electron microscopy images show what appear to be meningeal blood vessels on the surface of the fossilized brain.
In Norman’s telling, the main mass of the brain ultimately eroded, and was replaced with sediment. The fossil, as it exists today, is mostly made up of debris, preserved in the shape of the brain casing, and enveloped by a very thin layer of fossilized brain material.
This last point was one Norman debated for years with Oxford paleobiologist Martin Brasier, who was involved with the find at an earlier point, and theorized that perhaps the brain had been fossilized in its entirety. Brasier died suddenly in a car crash in 2014, although he left behind notes later found by a former student that indicated he had come around entirely to Norman’s point of view.
The discovery of the fossil will be published in a special edition of Earth System Evolution and Early Life, honoring Brasier’s life and contributions to science.
This brain will certainly be the focus of intense research and debate among paleontologists for years, and decades, to come. Assuming the findings hold up to the scrutiny, this fossil will open up new possibilities into the study of the physical structure of dinosaur brains, and what they might have been thinking.
These Scary Things in Space Will Haunt Your Dreams
These Scary Things in Space Will Haunt Your Dreams
By Hanneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer
1. Ghost Hand of God
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill
Witches, ghosts and ghouls don't just haunt the Earth on Halloween night — such spooky figures exist throughout the universe, too. Here are some of the most spine-chilling space photos to scare your pants off this Halloween. HERE: This glowing, green zombie-like hand reaches through the depths of space to grab a bright-red cloud of light. Is this a giant space zombie grabbing some dinner? Not quite — NASA calls this nebula the "Hand of God." It is actually a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova.
2. Screaming Skull
Credit: A. Fabian (IoA Cambridge) et al., NASA
Yikes! This ghastly face in space appears to be screaming while suffering through a miserable, fiery death. But no real skulls were harmed in the making of this photo. It's actually an X-ray image of cluster of galaxies known as the Perseus Cluster
3. Space Ghosts
Credit: Adam Block, NOAO, AURA, NSF
Ghastly figures appear to be fighting to escape from this cloud of interstellar gas and dust called SH2-136. The illuminated dark nebula is about 1,200 light-years away, towards the constellation Cepheus.
4. Halloween Skull in Space
Credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF
How did this skull wind up in space? A radar image of asteroid 2015 TB145, which NASA says is likely a dead comet, was captured using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on Oct. 30, 2015. The skull-shaped asteroid flew by Earth last Halloween (Oct. 31).
5. Zombie Pac-Man Nebula
Credit: Gemini South GMOS/Travis Rector/U. of Alaska Anchorage
An ominous-looking nebula named NGC 246 lurks in the constellation Cetus about 1,600 light-years away from Earth. It is nicknamed the "Skull Nebula," but some astronomers call it the "Pac-Man Nebula." It appears to be taking a bite out of space.
6. Witch Head Nebula
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A witch appears to be cackling out into space in this eerie image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch.
7. Eye of Sauron is Watching You
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
This evil eye-shaped nebula, formally named Fomalhaut, strikes an eerie resemblance to the fearful Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings series. In the books, Tolkien described the eye as being "rimmed with fire... watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened up on a pit, a window into nothing."
8. The Face on Mars
Credit: NASA
Though we have yet to find any aliens on Mars, NASA did discover this creepy human face on the Red Planet. The original "Face on Mars" image was taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter, in grey scale, on July, 25 1976. NASA assures that the face is simply a peculiar pile of rocks — but that doesn't make it any less spooky!
9. Ghost Head Nebula
Credit: Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris) et al., ESA, NASA
The Ghost Head Nebula's two flaming-hot eyes peer at us all the way from the Magellanic cloud, located about 170,000 light-years away from Earth. Its glowing eyes are star-forming regions with hot blobs of hydrogen and oxygen
10. Black Widow Nebula
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
This giant, red space spider is the biggest black widow we've ever seen! But don't worry — it won't bite. It's actually just a nebula, or a cloud of interstellar gas and dust.
11. Zombie Star Explodes Back to Life
Credit: NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu et al
This zombie star named Tycho was once a white dwarf, or the remnants of an exploding supernova. The dead star gobbled up too much mass from another nearby star and exploded again in what's called a Type Ia supernova.
12. Extreme Pumpkin Stars
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA has discovered 18 strange stars that spin so fast that their spherical shape is squashed into the shape of a pumpkin. These rapidly-spinning stars blast X-rays into space at rates of up to thousands of times as much as our sun.
This Is the Best View Yet of Europe's Mars Lander Crash Site
This Is the Best View Yet of Europe's Mars Lander Crash Site
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Europe's ExoMars lander gauged out a crater 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) deep and nearly 8 feet (2.4 m) wide when it crashed into the Red Planet's surface last week, a new photo by a NASA Mars orbiter reveals.
The lander, known as Schiaparelli, apparently deployed its parachute prematurely and didn't fire its thrusters nearly long enough to pull off a soft landing as planned on Oct. 19, European Space Agency (ESA) officials have said.
The new image, which was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Tuesday (Oct. 25), shows the aftermath of Schiaparelli's violent impact. [In Photos: Europe's Schiaparelli Mars Landing Day]
This Oct. 25, 2016, image from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the area where Europe's Schiaparelli lander struck Mars. The inset at center shows where the main lander hit; at bottom is Schiaparelli’s parachute and back heat shield, while the inset at upper right shows the front heat shield.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
First of all, there's the main crater, which the lander blasted out when it hit the surface at a speed of about 180 mph (300 km/h). The fuzzy dark smudges around the central crater are difficult to interpret at the moment, ESA officials said: These markings are asymmetrical, which suggests that the impactor was traveling at a low angle to the ground, but Schiaparelli should have been descending pretty much perpendicular to the surface when it hit.
"It is possible the hydrazine propellant tanks in the module exploded preferentially in one direction upon impact, throwing debris from the planet’s surface in the direction of the blast, but more analysis is needed to explore this idea further," ESA officials wrote in an update today (Oct. 27).
"An additional long, dark arc is seen to the upper right of the dark patch but is currently unexplained," they added. "It may also be linked to the impact and possible explosion."
About 0.9 miles (1.4 kilometers) south of this crater is a bright feature above a smaller gray disk, which are almost certainly Schiaparelli's 39-foot-wide (12 m) parachute and its attached rear heat shield, respectively, ESA officials said.
Another bright feature 0.9 miles (1.4 km) east of the Schiaparelli crater is probably the lander's front heat shield, they added.
"The mottled bright and dark appearance of this feature is interpreted as reflections from the multilayered thermal insulation that covers the inside of the front heatshield. Further imaging from different angles should be able to confirm this interpretation," ESA officials wrote in the update. "The dark features around the front heatshield are likely from surface dust disturbed during impact."
Schiaparelli launched in March 2016 along with the Trace Gas Orbiter. Together, the two spacecraft make up the ExoMars 2016 mission — the first part of the two-phase ExoMars program, which ESA leads with assistance from its chief partner, the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos.
The second phase of ExoMars aims to land a life-hunting rover on the Red Planet's surface in 2021. Schiaparelli's main goal was to test out the technologies needed to get this rover down safely, and the data gathered during the lander's Oct. 19 descent should be helpful in this regard, ESA officials have said.
The ExoMars team expects to wrap up its investigation into what exactly happened during Schiaparelli's descent by mid-November, ESA officials added.
The landing site of ExoMars’ Schiaparelli lander within the predicted landing ellipse (top), along with zoomed-in, before-and-after views (bottom left and bottom right, respectively) showing evidence of the lander’s crash on Oct. 19, 2016.
Credit: Main image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, Arizona State University; inserts: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
TGO, for its part, aced a crucial orbit-insertion burn on Oct. 19 and is in good shape as it loops around Mars on a highly elliptical, four-day-long orbit, mission team members said. Early next year, the spacecraft will begin moving into its final science orbit, a circular path with an altitude of 250 miles (400 km).
TGO should reach that orbit by March 2018, at which point the spacecraft will begin hunting for buried water ice and sniffing the Martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could be signs of life. This science mission will last for about two years. TGO will also serve as a communications relay for the ExoMars rover and other surface craft before ending operations in 2022.
MRO took the new photo with its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The Schiaparelli crash site was first identified last week in images captured by MRO's lower-resolution CTX camera.
Outer space is terrifying — not just on the body, but also on the mind. Extreme environments and situations can stretch people’s minds to the brink of sanity, and outer space is no exception. Sure, astronauts are protected inside their multimillion-dollar spacecraft, but those confined little metallic boxes can make one feel isolated and trapped. And we’re also making strides to put humans on other planets.
All that time in the deep dark void — probably not good for the noggin, right?
Thankfully, NASA’s on it. Welcome to the world alternately called aerospace psychiatry and psychology — a field of medicine where one provides mental health support to aviation professionals.
Astronauts, in particular, have been the focus group for decades now. They’re people who we typically think of as the best of the best, “who are otherwise quite healthy, but operate in an abnormal environment,” says Gary Beven, NASA Flight Surgeon and Chief of Aerospace Psychiatry at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Although the U.S. beat Russia to the moon, it was the Russians who started aerospace psychology. Beven explains that during missions onboard the Salyut 6 (1977 - 1982) and Salyut 7 (1982 - 1991) space stations, Soviet cosmonauts began to experience noticeable signs of psychological distress (or physical problems with an underlying psychological cause) while in space.
Taylor Swift would do poorly in space.
This most likely had to do with the longer durations of these missions. Salyut 6 had the first six-month space mission, while Salyut 7 upped the ante with the first-ever eight-month mission. Each mission put two or three cosmonauts in a fairly tight quarters with one another. Several crew stints had to be terminated before completion.
The Russians were spurred into establishing their own space psychology program. “They brought in experts within the field of psychology to work full-time with the Russian space program,” says Beven. “They were involved not only with cosmonaut selection, but also providing support and monitoring the psychological well-being of astronauts while they were in space.”
Until fairly recently, NASA wasn’t interested in long duration missions, so they had no need for psychologists or psychiatrists beyond the initial medical and mental health evaluation during the candidate selection process.
That changed in the mid 1990s, when the U.S. and Russia established the Shuttle-Mir Program to allow NASA to learn about Russia’s experiences with long-duration space habitation. At that point, NASA brought in a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to develop a behavioral health and support group for the NASA astronauts that were staying aboard Russia’s Mir space station.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docking to Mir.
“Life aboard Mir was very arduous and very difficult,” says Beven. “Some of the (U.S.) astronauts even admitted they felt they had not been psychologically prepared for that type of a mission.” Some did exceptionally well, like Shannon Lucid (who stayed on Mir for seven months in 1996), but others publicly acknowledged the difficulty of living in an orbital spacecraft for months at a time. Part of the feelings of psychological anxiety and depression that crept up were simply the result of isolation, difficulty communicating with Russian counterparts on the station, the lack of leisure activities on Mir.
With all that qualitative data and feedback, NASA refined the aerospace psychiatry system as it and the rest of the world began moving forward with the International Space Station. Today’s aerospace psychiatry group supports astronauts from the time of training all the way through the end of the mission — and even beyond to assist with post-mission acclimation to life on the ground. “In some ways, we may be involved with astronauts all the way to the end of their career,” says Beven. “We get to know them very well, and we also get to know their families very well.”
Beven says the candidate selection process is probably the most important way to prepare astronauts for the mental rigors of space travel and life. The goal is to pick candidates who possess sound, sturdy minds. Beven and his team grade candidates on nine different “suitability proficiencies”:
ability to perform under stressful conditions
group living skills
teamwork skills
self-regulation of one’s emotions and mood
motivation
judgement and decision making
conscientiousness
communication skills
leadership skills
They also screen for any history of major mental disorders or disqualifying problems. For the most part, candidates come from occupations where good mental health and the aforementioned traits are already a necessity, sometimes in already extreme or stressful environments — such as fighter pilot living aboard an aircraft carrier, or a scientist who has done stints at research stations in Antarctica. When you’re talking about picking 10 astronauts to train out of a final list of 60 people, you’re really getting the most mentally and behaviorally qualified group, says Beven.
The vast majority of the aerospace psychiatry group’s work, however, revolves around proactively working with active astronauts. Beven says there are a little over 40 active astronauts currently working at NASA, and each one is notified they’ll be going up into space about two years prior to the mission launch.
Beven and his team start to work directly with the astronaut (and their spouse), and their work can be categorized into two parts. The first is behavioral medicine: evaluating astronauts’ mental health at regular intervals before launch (the last meeting happening 60 days before launch) and training them to identify and deal with instances of psychological detriment in other crew members.
Up in space, Beven or his colleagues will do a private video conference with each astronaut about every two weeks to go over everything pertaining to sleep, crew morale, if that astronaut is dealing well with the workload or experiencing fatigue (or even feeling underworked), their relationship with the ground team, concerns with family, and anything else. If they need immediate help, they can call Beven’s cell phone or send him an email in an instant, at any given moment. If any major concerns arise out of these avenues of communication, Beven and his team will confer with the flight surgeon to decide on a course of action.
What kinds of problems are we talking about? For the most part, the typical psychological problems you’d find in space are no different from what you’d find in a high-stress environment here on the surface. They include:
difficulty sleeping
irritability
mood lability
feelings of discouragement
heightened nervousness or anxiety
A nurse working in the E.R. or a long distance runner training for a marathon might experience these kinds of symptoms pretty regularly. But when an astronaut — who is trained more rigorously to withstand stressors — starts to experience these kinds of symptoms, there’s a much larger cause for concern, since they’re essentially trapped up there in space.
Beven says these problems are not unlike what you might find for someone who is unfamiliar to a long winter in a northern country, or a prisoner who is placed in solitary confinement. “There’s nothing unique about the symptoms themselves. What’s unique is that, given the spaceflight environment, there’s no analogue for them here on Earth, because of the microgravity.”
After getting back to Earth, the astronaut undergoes three more psychological assessments — at 3 days, 14 days, and 30 to 45 days after getting back — to go over lessons learned in hindsight and help the astronaut adjust to their new role on the ground.
“Many astronauts, when they land, might not fly again for several years, so they need to determine if they will stay with NASA, or do something else,” Beven says — which can be a very difficult, debilitating decision, even among the least neurotic among humans.
The other facet is what Beven calls behavioral support: it’s essentially the way he and his team make sure an astronaut has access to hobbies or forms of entertainment that they can indulge in in their leisure time to unwind and de-stress. It could range from music, to watching sporting events or television, having access to games — whatever. Even astronauts love to watch Game of Thrones, and it’s critical to keeping their sanity.
“Our belief is that if you’re forced for six months or more to live and work in your office, the downtime really needs to be rejuvenating,” says Beven.
So far NASA’s aerospace psychiatry program has been very successful. Beven says that every astronaut performs “exceptionally well,” for 95 percent or more of their mission duration. “Occasionally, they dip down to more mundane frustrations or frictions,” he concedes. Yet, for the entire time he and his team have been working with the ISS, “we’ve not noticed anything that would be of clinical significance,” nor anything that would terminate any mission or procedural activity due to psychological detriment.
Artist's rendering of Mars Semi-Direct/DRA 1.0: The Manned Habitat Unit is "docked" alongside a pre placed habitat that was sent ahead of the Earth Return Vehicle.
This is all thanks to the constant communication and support the team can provide astronauts while they’re up there in space. But as space travel begins to expand — both in allowing more people access to space travel, and in sending more people out to greater distances beyond Earth’s orbit — aerospace psychology will need to change. “In the next 10, 20, or even 50 years, how are we going to provide the system to allow the first Mars crew the same opportunities for psychological support that the ISS crew has — even if there is a 45-minute delay in communications?” asks Beven.
One idea: using A.I. programs to that can provide instant cognitive behavioral therapy to astronauts onboard a spacecraft or working on a Martian or lunar colony. A future astronaut may be having bi-weekly meetings with an artificial robot on their iPad, instead of chatting so frequently with a human being here on Earth. “I don’t think anything on Earth right now has been proven to work in that realm, but that’s something we need to make certain is working,” says Beven.
And as spaceflight becomes commercialized and low-Earth orbit operations are turned over to private companies, it’s unlikely commercial astronauts will be as rigorously screened as NASA’s astronauts are right now. Beven predicts “there will be someone who does have the first psychotic episode in space,” or the first manic episode, or someone who develops a drug or alcohol problem in space.
But he’s optimistic: “The way in which those things are dealt with will spread into the psychiatric and psychological community.” He thinks, for example, an asteroid mining community will likely contract with a healthcare provider or institution, and work with them to provide on-call psychiatrist and psychologists who are available 24/7. Or, making sure a general physician who is there can detect signs of psychological problems and provide some sort of solution.
At some point, we’ll see the first marriage in space, the first child born in space, and more — especially once we see a colony in space or somewhere on another world. “Space travel is becoming normal,” says Beven. It’s only natural that mental health services acclimate to those changes as well.
The fact that science fiction is becoming real excites many, annoys some, and absolutely terrifies an unfortunate few suffering from spacephobia or astrophobia, which is characterized by a fear of outer space or celestial objects. For those people, the idea of colonizing Mars is pants-wettingly horrifying. That’s fine, they don’t have to go. But psychologically similar spacephobes may truly suffer several generations down the line if humanity does become a multiplanetary species.
For people with spacephobia, the very concept of space creates feelings of anxiety and distress. As with other phobias, this fear is irrational. Humans can only survive for 15 seconds exposed in space, but no one has — contrary to Gravity — floated off into orbit. The perils of both cis-lunar and extra-lunar space are also eminently avoidable for people who don’t work as professional astronauts.
Phobias usually manifest themselves when you’re a child or a teenager — sometimes because of a specific event or experience, or sometimes because of an acute anxiety that may slowly progress into a full-blown fear. Genetic factors and brain chemistry may also play a role. Exposure to specific media could as well. It’s the golden age of science fiction right now and, yes, that could lead to the proliferation of fear.
In a sense, spacephobia is an amped up version of agoraphobia, the unfortunately common fear of going outside. Agoraphobes suffer privately or overcome their terror to lead normal lives; regardless, it’s a rough time. And it could — at some point in the distant future — be a similarly hard go for spacephobics born to asteroid miners or deep space explorers. Eventually, spacephobia could become to natural-born Martians what aquaphobia currently is to those born on islands.
For now, spacephobia is not debilitating, but like other phobias — which are treated variously with medications like beta blockers and antidepressants or exposure therapy, relying on acclimation to a phobia — it’s also nearly impossible to treat. If someone has ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), exposure therapy would probably first involve getting someone comfortable with first talking about snakes, then looking at pictures of snakes, then watching videos, and at last being comfortable with seeing snakes in real life and perhaps even holding one and interacting with it. Spacephobia is trickier because you can show pictures and video, but you can’t just send people into orbit (though virtual reality might help psychologists get around this limitation until rocket scientists eliminate it).
For now, spacephobia and astrophobia are minor conditions. They do, however, permanently ground some peoples’ imaginations. And there is harm in that even if we’re all not headed to Mars tomorrow.
The sun will blow up one day. And when that happens, the warm yellow orb at the center of our solar system will transform into a cooler — but still broiling — red giant. It will consume Mercury, Venus, and Earth. It’ll probably make Mars into a dessert. And yes, this will happen quickly. One day Earth will be there, and the next it will be gone. But don’t worry, there will be enough time for some suffering.
There’s a few things you ought to remember about the sun. Light that’s emitted from our host star takes eight minutes and 20 seconds to hit our planet. If the sun suddenly blew up, we actually wouldn’t know it happened for — you guessed it — eight minutes, 20 seconds — since even that explosive light show would only be traveling, at maximum, the speed of light. The death and destruction would follow very, very shortly after that.
But when the sun does blow up, it’s not simply going to extinguish like a small flame in a candle. It’s going to shoot out some really gnarly, very powerful stuff. All that energy — about as much as you would observe if you blew up a few octillion nuclear warheads — will almost instantly kill all life on Earth. Chances of survival will near zero.
Even if the Earth miraculously survived, and life found a way to go on without the energy from the sun, the resulting radiation would decimate the planet. A supernova 30 light years away would probably result in a destruction of the ozone layer and mass extinctions. A supernova 8.3 light-minutes away? Annihilation. Explosions would vaporize the surface of the planet facing the sun. The other side would hit temperatures 15 times hotter than the surface of the sun right now. The entire planet would probably disintegrate in a few days.
So, yeah, we’re not going to be able to walk it off.
Now, it’s also important to remember that perhaps we might actually feel the effects of the sun’s departure, even during those eight minutes of impending doom. If the sun exploded, Earth would no longer have a celestial body to rotate around. And when the center ceased to hold, the gyre would widen. There are more nuanced ways of considering how this would actually work from a math and physics perspective, but the general notion is that Earth would go from planet to spaceship to nothingness over the course of relatively little time.
Of course, you’re not supposed to worry about any of this. Our sun has only made it about halfway through its expected 10 billion-year lifespan. The sun is not going supernova tomorrow.
The notion that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate is taken as fact by the physics community. The three scientists who made that discovery won the Nobel Prize five years ago. And yet, new research by Oxford University physicists suggests that it may not be that simple. There may not be any acceleration at all. If they’re right our understanding of dark energy is up for debate and so is our standard model of cosmology.
It just got more confusing to living in this particular universe.
Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the findings incorporate an analysis of an expanded data set and instead suggests the supporting evidence for accelerated expansion is not as airtight as previously suggested. The new data set, which the researchers say is 10 times bigger than than the Nobel-winning data set was, includes a catalogue of 740 Type Ia supernovae, which occur in binary star systems. Type Ia supernovae are important to research into dark energy — which is hypothesized to make up 68.3 percent of all energy in the universe and essentially drive forward the acceleration of universal expansion. Type la supernovae flare up with the same brightness as the stars they burst out from, and therefore glow for large distances across space. Measuring the distance of this brightness is key to researching the changing dynamics of the expansion of the universe.
According to Subir Sarkar, lead author of the Oxford team who wrote the new paper, the new data is more consistent with a constant rate of expansion for the universe. He and his team found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, “at most, what physicists call ‘3 sigma’,” he said in a news release. “This is far short of the ‘5 sigma’ standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.”
For context, Sarkar recalled the example of the new particle the Large Hardon Collider at CERN found last December, which had a significance between 3.9 and 3.4 sigma. An analogous example in this context would be the recent suggestion for a new particle weighing 750 GeV based on data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In August, however, that confidence dropped after new data showed the significance plummet to less than 1 sigma — indicating the initial data was almost certainly a statistical fluctuation.
The new findings, if true, would also put doubts behind current estimates of how much of our universe is made of “dark energy.” If it turns out the universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, it upends the entire standard model of cosmology and raises big questions about whether dark energy is real, whether it plays a role in universal expansion, or whether it does something else entirely.
Sarkar and his team, however, are only poking holes in one of the many pieces of supporting evidence the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, and not a constant one — such as the cosmic microwave background of the universe. But Sarkar thinks those tests were conducted on an assumption of an assumed model of accelerated expansion — and he also says “cosmic microwave background is not directly affected by dark energy.”
Sarkar may be onto something, but he’s going to need a lot more evidence to bolster this hypothesis, and a lot more time to persuade his fellow scientists to take this seriously.
“Naturally, a lot of work will be necessary to convince the physics community of this, but our work serves to demonstrate that a key pillar of the standard cosmological model is rather shaky,” he said. “Hopefully this will motivate better analyses of cosmological data, as well as inspiring theorists to investigate more nuanced cosmological models.”
NASA’s Scout Space Monitoring System Gave 5 Days Warning of Passing Asteroid
NASA’s Scout Space Monitoring System Gave 5 Days Warning of Passing Asteroid
P.Carril/ESA
IN BRIEF
Thanks to NASA's Scout, we received warning of an incoming asteroid five days ahead of it (completely missing the planet).
With the ever-lengthening list of near-Earth objects, it is a comfort to know that there are currently systems in place to monitor threats, and they are only getting better.
FIVE DAYS NOTICE
Did you notice anything strange Sunday night? Perhaps a giant asteroid passing by the Earth?
Scout did. Five days early.
NASA JPL’s new space-monitoring system, Scout, detected an asteroid making its way toward our planet last week. In just ten minutes, the software displayed all potential routes the asteroid might take. Some of these paths did intersect our planet, but luckily, we had ample time to assess the possibility.
Scout alerted three other telescopes that would help to narrow down the asteroid’s path. “When a telescope first finds a moving object, all you know is it’s just a dot, moving on the sky,” astronomer Paul Chodas from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NPR.
“You have no information about how far away it is. The more telescopes you get pointed at an object, the more data you get, and the more you’re sure you are how big it is and which way it’s headed. But sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to make those observations.”
The asteroid, 2016 UR36, passed by us at a distance of 498,000 km (310,000 miles). Sound close? It was 1.3 times further away than the Moon.
A telescope in Hawaii first spotted the asteroid. Rob Ratkowski/Courtesy of Pan-STARRS
BETTER PROTECTION
Five days might not seem like much, but it’s better than what we used to get. The first time researchers detected an asteroid hurdling toward Earth, they had just 19 hours to formulate a plan. Remember the dash cam footage of the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russiaback in 2013? NASA didn’t have any notice at all for that encounter. Thanks to Scout, the confirmation process for asteroids can be expedited.
Currently, NASA has more than 15,000 near-Earth objects on file that could potentially be heading toward Earth. “The NASA surveys are finding something like at least five asteroids every night,” says Chodas.
Don’t start digging your underground bunker just yet, though. Scout’s job is to narrow down that list and assess which of those are a real threat. Scout is still relatively new – this was actually its first case study – but it is expected to be fully operational by the end of this year.
It Took 15 Months, But All of New Horizons’ Data Has Finally Been Downloaded
It Took 15 Months, But All of New Horizons’ Data Has Finally Been Downloaded
NASA/New Horizons
IN BRIEF
Over a year after its closest approach to Pluto, all of the data from New Horizon has finally been safely transmitted to Earth.
The spacecraft made 400-plus scientific observations, which will give astronomers research opportunities for years to come.
Finally, the New Horizons team has their entire “pot of gold.” 15 months after the mission’s flyby of the Pluto system, the final bits of science data from the historic July 2015 event has been safely transmitted to Earth.
“The New Horizons mission has required patience for many years, but we knew the results would be well worth the wait,” New Horizons project scientists Hal Weaver told me earlier this year.
Because of New Horizons’ great distance from Earth and the spacecraft’s low power output (the spacecraft runs on just 2-10 watts of electricity), it has a relatively low ‘downlink’ rate at which data can be transmitted to Earth, just 1-4 kilobits per second. That’s why it has taken so long to get all the science data back to Earth.
“This is what we came for – these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said a few months ago during an interview. “We’re seeing that Pluto is a scientific wonderland. The images have been just magical. It’s breathtaking.”
Because it was a flyby, and the spacecraft had just one chance at gathering data from Pluto, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could – taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015.
New Horizons is now over 3.1 billion miles (5 billion km) away from Earth as it continues its journey through the Kuiper Belt. That translates to a current radio signal delay time of five hours, eight minutes at light speed.
The science team created special software to keep track of all the data sets and schedule when they would be returned to Earth.
New Horizons was about 3.7 million mi (6 million km) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait on July 8, 2015. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI
The final item that was received was a portion of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager. It arrived at New Horizons’ mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.
“We have our pot of gold,” said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL.
Bowman also said the team will conduct a final data-verification review of New Horizons two onboard recorders before sending commands to erase all the data on the spacecraft. New Horizons has more work to do, so erasing the “old” data will clear space for new data to be taken during its Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM). The spacecraft will do a series of distant Kuiper Belt object observations as well as perform a close encounter flyby with with a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on Jan. 1, 2019.
“There’s a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth,” said Stern. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?”
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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