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...
17-04-2017
A Photographer Claims To Have Recorded A Video Of Multiple UFOs Appearing In Arizona Skies
A Photographer Claims To Have Recorded A Video Of Multiple UFOs Appearing In Arizona Skies
Photographer Mauricio Morales's post is going viral over the internet as he is claiming that he has shot Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) appearing in the skies of Arizona. In his Facebook post, Mauricio said that while he was driving back from Arizona to Phoenix, he came across a small orange light which was neither a meteor nor an aeroplane.
As I was driving back to Phoenix this evening, I was a few miles past Parker, AZ when I saw a shooting star with a green hue in the corner of my eye. I kept driving for a few miles and noticed a small orange light far in the distance to my right. At first I thought that maybe a meteor had hit nearby and set a fire in the desert or possibly a distant antenna light.
I didn't quite think much of it and continued to drive for another three miles. I noticed that the light was gone. I drove another half of a mile and I saw the light appear again. This is when I realized that whatever this was, wasn’t normal.
I was about a quarter of a mile from the crossing between Highway 72 and Highway 95 between Parker and Quartzsite, Arizona.
I immediately pulled over and attached my camera to my tripod. To my SW direction, there were six orange-red lights floating around in the horizon. Some of them would dim out and then brighten back up, others just seemed to float and hover away slowly. They seemed to travel in a parallel pattern with a very bright fiery glisten. I took photos and videos and in less than 15 minutes, the mysterious objects vanished without a trace.
MAURICIO MORALES
All of the photographs are timestamped and are not edited whatsoever. The video is slightly cropped for better viewing.
Whatever this was, I have never seen anything like this in my life before. Super cool experience.
*UPDATE* 4/11/17 11:22pm
MAURICIO MORALES
I have noticed that my cameras clock is set 8 minutes ahead. Which means that the time stamps are all 8 minutes ahead. I also saw a video of the same exact thing but from the opposite end in El Centro, CA. That means that whatever this was, it was visible for at least 100 miles.
ABC15 is reporting that the photos were part of the meteor. They were not. The meteor struck about 10 minutes before I pulled over on HWY 95 and got footage of these lights. The difference in lighting you see in the photos is because I was using different settings to get a more visible photo of what they were.
UFO sightings have reached an all-time high in 2010 with about 45,000 yearly sightings. According to AOL, sightings between 1990 and 2000 rose dramatically by nearly 30 thousand yearly sightings and that USA has the most sighting by far at almost 300 times greater than the global median. We're now curious whether Morales' claims prove to be true.
Columnist Cheryl Costa looks at a theory of late ufologist John Keel.
IMAGES PROVIDED BY ISTOCK
This week, several ufologists, while examining UFO seasonal pattern charts I had posted, brought up the writings of the late John Keel.
Keel, a widely read professional journalist, was influential with his writings about ufology. One of his profound theories was the trend he called the “Wednesday Phenomena.”
In his book Mothman Prophecies, Keel wrote, “I had collected some 700 UFO reports from 1966 and discovered that the greatest number of sightings, 20 percent, took place on Wednesdays.”
The thing we must keep in mind is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, UFO reports were mostly collected from newspaper clippings. At the time, having access to several hundred reports was a big deal. The flaw I saw when presented with Keel’s Wednesday Phenomena was the problem with sample size. In addition, the question of where these sightings were reported was troubling. Did these sighting reports all come from one state or was his collection of data a mix for sightings from all over the country?
While I respect John Keel’s early work as ground breaking, I must point out that from a 21st century big data perspective, Keel’s sample size was rather small.
I decided to test the Wednesday Phenomena against my database of over 120,000 sightings from 2001-2015. I selected three states: Connecticut, 1,478 Sightings; New York, 5,141 sightings; and California, 15,836 sightings.
The results were interesting and somewhat consistent. Monday through Friday was relatively flat and each day averaged about 13 percent of the state’s total sightings. Saturday jumped up about 7 percent in sightings and was approximately 20 percent of the state’s sightings. While the day of the week was not Wednesday, the percentage of the week’s high sightings day was is consistent with Keel’s findings of 20 percent. Sundays were also elevated above the weekday baseline to an average of 15.5 percent of the state’s total UFO sightings.
Of course the common reasoning for the Saturday and Sunday uptick in sightings is perhaps because most people have the weekend off, therefore more time outside for sky watching.
In my opinion, Keel was certainly on to something; his work was simply hampered by a small sample size of UFO sightings. John Keel passed away on July 3, 2009 at age 79.
If you are interested in joining a monthly UFO discussion group in the Onondaga County area, drop Cheryl an email at Blogger@CherylCosta.com. If you have a UFO sighting to report, you can use either one of the two national database services:nuforc.org or mufon.com. Both services respect confidentiality.
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Four UFO sightings reported in Barrie in 2016
Four UFO sightings reported in Barrie in 2016
A report that came out two weeks ago has UFO report details from cities and towns across Canada
by: Jeff Klassen
Stock image
Multiple reports of UFOs came in from across Northern Ontario in 2016.
On March 29, 2017, Manitoba-based UFOlogy released the 2016 Canadian UFO Survey, a compilation of UFO sightings from UFO researchers across Canada and the United States.
Out of the 1,131 filed reports last year, several were from Northern Ontario.
There were four reported sightings each in Sudbury, Barrie, and Thunder Bay, three from Sault Ste. Marie, two from North Bay, and one sighting each in Manitoulin Island, Elliot Lake, and Kenora.
In an essay accompanying the report, UFOlogy highlighted a trend of increased UFO sightings in Canada since 1989.
2016 was the fifth year in a row that there were over 1,000 reported sightings.
The group sourced their data from cases directly reported to them, Canadian government agencies, Canadian civilian UFO organizations, and U.S. groups like Mutual UFO Network and the National UFO Reporting Center.
The Mystery of How Black Holes Collide and Merge Is Beginning to Unravel
The Mystery of How Black Holes Collide and Merge Is Beginning to Unravel
By Nancy Atkinson, Seeker
Colliding black holes create space-time ripples that can be seen by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
Credit: SXS/LIGO
Last year, scientists announced that they had finally observed gravitational waves, the elusive and long sought-after ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first posited by Albert Einstein. The waves came from a catastrophic event — the collision of two black holes located about 1.3 billion light years away from Earth — and the released energy undulated across the universe, much like ripples in a pond.
The detection by the upgraded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO), along with two subsequent gravitational wave discoveries, confirmed a major prediction of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and heralded a new era in physics, allowing scientists to study the universe in a new way by using gravity instead of light.
But a fundamental question remains unanswered: How and why do black holes collide and merge?
In order for the black holes to merge, they must start out very close together by astronomical standards, no more than about a fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But only stars with very large masses can become black holes, and during the course of their lives, these stars expand to become even larger.
A new study published in Nature Communications uses a model called COMPAS (Compact Object Mergers: Population Astrophysics and Statistics) in an attempt to answer how large binary stars that would eventually become black holes fit within a very small orbit. COMPAS allows the researchers to pursue a kind of "paleontology" for gravitational waves.
"A paleontologist, who has never seen a living dinosaur, can figure out how the dinosaur looked and lived from its skeletal remains," said Ilya Mandel from the University of Birmingham in the UK, the paper's senior author, in a statement. "In a similar way, we can analyze the mergers of black holes, and use these observations to figure out how those stars interacted during their brief but intense lives."
What they found was that even two widely separated "progenitor" stars can interact when they expand, engaging in several episodes of mass transfer.
The researchers started by analyzing the three gravitational wave events that were detected by LIGO and attempted to see if all three black hole collisions evolved in the same way, which they call "classical isolated binary evolution via a common-envelope phase."
It starts with two massive progenitor stars at quite wide separations. As the stars expand, once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they begin to interact and engage in several episodes of mass transfer. This results in a very rapid, dynamically unstable event that envelops both stellar cores in a dense cloud of hydrogen gas.
"Ejecting this gas from the system takes energy away from the orbit," the team said. "This brings the two stars sufficiently close together for gravitational-wave emission to be efficient, right at the time when they are small enough that such closeness will no longer put them into contact."
It actually takes few million years to form two black holes, with a possible subsequent delay of billions of years before the black holes merge and form a single, larger black hole. But that merger event itself can be quick and violent.
The researchers said the simulations with COMPAS have also helped the team to understand the typical properties of the binary stars that can go on to form such pairs of merging black holes and the environments where this can happen.
For example, the team found that a merger of two black holes with significantly unequal masses would be a strong indication that the stars formed almost entirely from hydrogen and helium — called low-metallicity stars — with other elements contributing fewer than 0.1 percent of stellar matter (for comparison, this fraction is about 2 percent in our Sun). They were able to determine that all three events detected by LIGO could have formed in low-metallicity environments.
"The beauty of COMPAS is that it allows us to combine all of our observations and start piecing together the puzzle of how these black holes merge, sending these ripples in spacetime that we were able to observe at LIGO," said Simon Stevenson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham and the paper's lead author.
The team will continue to use COMPAS to gain a greater understanding how the binary black holes discovered by LIGO could have formed, and how future observations could tell us even more about the most catastrophic events in the universe.
The hoverboard flight was just under 7 minutes long and flew about 164 feet (50 meters) above the Atlantic Ocean.
Credit: Breitling
In a stunt straight out of a science-fiction film, a real-life, jet-powered hoverboard cruised over the Atlantic Ocean.
Franky Zapata, a hoverboard, took to the skies in a promotional video for the watch company Breitling. The Swiss watchmaker announced its partnership with the Flyboard Air project in December with an incredible video that shows Zapata flying on his hoverboard, reported The Telegraph. Zapata flew about 164 feet (50 meters) over the Atlantic Ocean for almost 7 minutes, The Telegraph said.
Breitling used the video to announce that it will be the main sponsor of Flyboard Air, with the partnership marking "a new chapter in conquering the skies." [Up She Goes! 8 of the Wackiest Early Flying Machines]
"By supporting the FlyboardAir project, Breitling's intention is once again to foster the spirit of daring and invention that has always characterized aviation since the time of the very first 'magnificent men in their flying machines' — that taste for adventure [and] that combination of daring and discipline, which consistently drive aeronautics to push the boundaries of feasibility," Breitling officials said in a statement.
Essentially a flying skateboard — like Marty McFly's famous ride in the 1989 classic movie "Back to the Future Part II" — several hoverboard prototypes have been developed in recent years. The Flyboard Air was invented by Zapata Racing and took four years of development, the company said. The Flyboard Air hoverboard is still a prototype and is not commercially available, the company said.
However, Zapata and his hoverboard have already set numerous world records. In April 2016, Zapata flew the Flyboard Air almost7,400 feet (over 2,200 meters) from a height of about 160 feet (50 m), setting a new world record for the longest hoverboard flight.
Unlike the company's original Flyboard, which connects to a watercraft turbine via a long hose, the Flyboard Air is hose-free. The system's "independent propulsion unit" allows the hoverboard to fly for up to 10 minutes, according to Zapata Racing, reaching a maximum speed of 93 mph (150 km/h) and an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,000 m).
"This has really been a life's work," Zapata said, according to The Telegraph. "Who has never dreamt of leaping out of the water and soaring through the air, free of all constraints? This is the dream that is at the origin of the products we create."
The beings have repeated their efforts in the US and have been active since 1948, the men said, and accused the respective governments of trying to keep the information secret.
The unlikely claims were compiled by six former US airmen and another member of the military who interviewed or researched the evidence of 120 ex-military personnel.
The information they have collected suggests that aliens could have landed on Earth as recently as seven years ago.
One of the men, Capt Robert Salas, said: "The US Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it."
He said said he witnessed such an event first-hand on March 16, 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana which housed Minuteman nuclear missiles.
Capt Salas continued: "I was on duty when an object came over and hovered directly over the site.
"The missiles shut down - 10 Minuteman missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later. There's a strong interest in our missiles by these objects, wherever they come from. I personally think they're not from planet Earth."
Others claim to have seen similar activity in the UK.
Col Charles Halt said he saw a UFO at the former military base RAF Bentwaters, near Ipswich, 30 years ago, during which he saw beams of light fired into the base then heard on the military radio that aliens had landed inside the nuclear storage area.
He said: "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted - both then and now - to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation."
The site was then the base of the US 81st Tactical Fighter Wing.
Capt Bruce Fenstermacher, a former US Air Force officer, also claims he saw a cigar-shaped UFO hovering above a nuclear base in Wyoming in 1976.
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Jean-Claude Bourret : “Il existe un autre univers à côté du nôtre”
Jean-Claude Bourret : “Il existe un autre univers à côté du nôtre”
À la faveur d’un nouveau livre, Jean-Claude Bourret fait le point sur quarante années de découvertes et d’hypothèses scientifiques pour faire émerger la vérité sur le phénomène ovni.
Le journaliste Jean-Claude Bourret associé à un ancien directeur de recherche au CNRS, Jean-Pierre Petit, relancent la question des univers parallèles…
Quelle est cette «extraordinaire» découverte que vous annoncez dans votre livre ?
L’ouvrage est constitué de deux parties. La première s’adresse au grand public, elle est accessible à tous. La seconde est plutôt réservée aux scientifiques de haut niveau. Jean-Pierre Petit nous expose le résultat de ses 40 années de recherches. Il a trouvé une formule mathématique révolutionnaire qui, si elle est avérée, devrait lui valoir un prix Nobel. Cette formule prouve qu’il existe un autre univers à côté du nôtre. Tandis que nous sommes dans un univers « positif », il existerait un univers « négatif » dans lequel la vitesse de la lumière est différente, c’est-à-dire plus de 300.000 kilomètres par seconde. Ainsi, des civilisations extraterrestres utiliseraient les lois physiques de leur univers pour rejoindre le nôtre et nous observer depuis des millénaires. Les calculs et hypothèses de Jean-Pierre Petit ont été publiés dans des revues scientifiques de haut niveau.
On a toutefois du mal à le suivre lorsqu’il dit que ses recherches ont été inspirées par de mystérieuses lettres émanant de gens qui prétendent être des extraterrestres !
Ça paraît fou parce qu’on ne connaît pas le dossier, donc on a tendance à prendre Petit pour un illuminé. Il m’a montré certaines de ces lettres «anonymes» qui lui ont permis de progresser et de transcender la formule de la relativité d’Einstein. Au début, il croyait à un canular. Mais quand il a vérifié ces formules et il a constaté que ça marchait parfaitement. Il a fait des simulations sur ordinateur qui permettent de faire un bond en avant considérable sur la compréhension de la constitution des galaxies. Il faut ajouter qu’aucun scientifique n’a contesté le travail de Jean-Pierre.
À votre avis, d’où viennent ces lettres ?
Personnellement, j’ai toujours considéré que Jean-Pierre Petit avait eu accès à une connaissance initiatique qui lui avait été transmise. Un polytechnicien de haut niveau, qui travaillait pour le Premier ministre, m’avait dit être au courant et que, même si ça paraît invraisemblable, les résultats annoncés par Petit étaient scientifiquement recevables. Selon lui, ça pouvait venir des services secrets soviétiques qui, faute de temps et de budget, les transmettaient à des scientifiques très pointus pour faire avancer les recherches. Jean-Pierre ne cache pas que son obstination à travailler sur les ovnis lui a coûté sa carrière !
“Prétendre que nous sommes seuls dans l’univers est une absurdité totale”
Jean-Claude Bourret
Pourquoi le phénomène ovni dérange-t-il autant ?
J’ai mis longtemps à le comprendre. En fait, les scientifiques sont très hostiles parce que, face aux ovnis, ils perdent leur statut de personnalité la plus cultivée et la plus intelligente de la planète terre. Quand le «professeur Duchemoll» est confronté à la vie extraterrestre, il se rend compte qu’il est comme un singe par rapport à un prix Nobel. Prétendre que nous sommes seuls dans l’univers est une absurdité totale.
À votre avis, quelles seraient les conséquences si on révélait l’existence d’extraterrestres ?
Elles seraient immenses car ça remettrait tout en cause. Nos connaissances, les maladies et tout notre système seraient détruits par les avances technologiques et philosophiques d’une civilisation extraterrestre qui serait forcément bien supérieure à la nôtre. Sans parler de la remise en cause de toutes les religions. C’est une supposition, mais imaginez qu’ils nous disent « Sur la planète Terre, vous vous tuez entre musulmans, juifs, chrétiens, protestants et hindous, en disant «C’est mon Dieu qui est le meilleur !» Maintenant, je vais vous dire que Dieu n’existe pas, et voilà comment l’univers a été créé ! » À ce moment-là, toutes les religions s’effondreraient. À ce propos, l’Italien Mauro Biglino, traducteur officiel pour le Vatican, va très loin puisqu’il remet en cause les fondements même de la religion en affirmant que la Bible évoque les véritables créateurs de l’espèce humaine, c’est-à-dire une race extraterrestre.
Dans votre livre, vous donnez tous les détails pour fabriquer un détecteur d’ovnis (« Ufo-catch »)…
C’est l’autre point important du livre. On en a assez de voir que les États nous cachent les observations d’ovnis depuis 40 ans. Donc, on va se prendre en main en construisant ce système qui ne coûte pas cher (entre 100 et 160 euros). Avec les bénéfices du livre, qui sont intégralement reversés à l’association de Jean-Pierre Petit, nous ferons fabriquer une série qu’on vendra au prix coûtant, pour que chacun puisse mettre une caméra sur son toit ou son balcon. Chacun pourra dialoguer à travers un forum et échanger ses données. Vous savez, je dis aux gens « Apprenez à vos enfants à regarder les étoiles. On ne peut pas continuer à vivre sur cette petite planète terre comme si on était seuls dans l’univers ». Il faut apprendre à nos enfants qu’il y a des milliards de civilisations et qu’elles sont beaucoup plus avancées que la nôtre.
Diriez-vous comme Fox Muller, dans la série « X-Files », que « la vérité est ailleurs » ?
Non, la vérité est universelle. Mais il faut ouvrir la bonne porte pour avoir sa lumière !
US defense contractors are busy developing laser weapons to use to defend against enemy drones and mortar rounds. Future developments will also bring us lasers powerful enough to take out incoming missiles.
*PEW-PEW*
One of the hallmarks of our favorite science-fiction are the epic space battles where bolts of red and green light zip across the screen in opposing directions, connecting with spacecraft traveling at lightning speeds and causing glorious explosions in the vacuum of space. Of course, none of this is possible in reality thanks to the natural laws that govern such things.
Even so, modern innovation is bringing us closer to a similar future —at least one where laser weapons are a viable technology. In fact, some of the world’s biggest military contractors are currently developing prototypes for laser weaponry. The Navy has already been testing a 30 kW laser from the deck of the USS Ponce. Other more powerful lasers are being developed by Lockheed Martin to sit on trucks, prepared to defend against mortars and small drones.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys just by looking at the color of their lasers; these real-life beams are colorless. Also — and perhaps most devastating of all — there won’t be a satisfying “pew-pew” with every shot.
The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce
U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams
MISSILE HUNTING
The lasers would work by heating the target’s insides, causing it to explode prematurely. The weapon needs to be locked onto its target of a few seconds in order to achieve this feat; an impressive feat considering the target can be traveling at great speeds, and up to 457 meters (500 yards) away.
The more powerful lasers may be coming within the next few years. Lasers powered at 150 kW could take out an incoming missile if hit from the side, and a 300 kW laser could even take out a missile head-on. Developing these technologies will allow for a much cheaper missile defense system: instead of firing off a multimillion-dollar missile to combat an incoming attack, these lasers can take their place.
Right now, the most restrictive aspect of this technology is the size of the equipment it takes to operate them. They require a lot of power and the systems to generate and store that power are cumbersome. Further research is hoping to address that issue to make these weapons more viable.
Researchers have found traces of organic materials in samples of mineral-rich mud from a mud volcano near the Mariana Trench. If these samples prove to be evidence of life, it would be the deepest form of life ever found on our planet.
EARLY LIFE SURVIVING BELOW
While the average depth of the ocean is just 2.2 miles, you’d have to travel another four or so to reach the bottom of the massive underwater canyon known as the Mariana Trench. This underwater world is the deepest known place on Earth today, and now, scientists are reporting that the mysterious canyon may also tell the story of how some of the earliest lifeforms on our planet survived in the past.
The Mariana Trench is part of a subduction zone where the sea floor is cluttered with mud volcanoes and hydrothermal vents — evidence of our planet’s molten core. The entire region is located directly over the friction point between the Philippine Sea and Pacific tectonic plates.
A remotely-operated vehicle prepares to take a sample from deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
Approximately four billion years ago, nascent life on a much younger Earth was hard-pressed to survive the hostile surroundings. The planet endured frequent asteroid strikes and was pock-marked with craters and molten rock. Livable spaces and food were scarce, even for microbes, so researchers think some early lifeforms managed to survive despite these challenges by going deep and calling the Mariana Trench home.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that researchers found traces of organic materials in samples of mineral-rich mud from a mud volcano near the Mariana Trench. Although they did not find actual microbes intact, the organic material could indicate that even the most extreme environments may be able to support life. If these samples do prove to be evidence of life, it would be the deepest form of life ever found on our planet.
“This is another hint at a great, deep biosphere on our planet,” study leader Oliver Plümpertold National Geographic. “It could be huge or very small, but there is definitely something going on that we don’t understand yet.”
OTHER LIFE, OTHER WORLDS
Subduction zones like the one in which the samples were discovered are relatively cool — what we understand to be the temperature limit for life, 121 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Fahrenheit), wouldn’t be reached until six or more miles below the floor of the ocean. Furthermore, the minerals in which the organic materials were found are formed through a process known as serpentinization, which produces both methane and hydrogen gases that microbes can then consume as food.
Via Oliver Plümper
Since they started to look for it in the 1960s, scientists have found serpentinization all over the planet: where continents meet and form, inside mountain ranges that were once at the bottom of the ocean, and near hydrothermal vents.
Because serpentinization is fairly common and can support life in extreme conditions, scientists think it might be the key to finding life on other worlds. Both Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa likely have deep liquid oceans underneath their icy exteriors, and Enceladus appears to have some tectonic activity, the source of subduction zones like those of the Mariana Trench.
However, scientists in search of microbial life deep within the trenches of other worlds would need to conquer the same challenges as scientists studying the Mariana Trench here on Earth. Reaching deep enough for direct study isn’t possible, so you’re limited to interpreting evidence spewed from geysers and extracted from rock. “I think of it kind of like a message in the bottle,” explained Plümper. “We have this container coming up, and we are opening it up and trying to figure out what’s going on.”
You don't need to be a professional astronomer to find new worlds orbiting distant stars. Darwin mechanic and amateur astronomer Andrew Grey this week helped to discover a new exoplanet system with at least four orbiting planets.
But Andrew did have professional help and support.
The discovery was a highlight moment of this week's three-evening special ABC Stargazing Live, featuring British physicist Brian Cox, presenter Julia Zemiro and others.
Viewers were encouraged to join in the search for exoplanets – planets orbiting distant stars – using the Exoplanet Explorers website. After a quick tutorial they were then asked to trawl through data on thousands of stars recently observed with NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.
Grey checked out more than 1,000 stars on the website before discovering the characteristic dips in brightness of the star in the data that signify an exoplanet.
Together with other co-discoverers, Grey's name will appear on a scientific paper reporting the very significant discovery of a star with four planets, orbiting closer to the star than Mercury is to our Sun.
GIF: Animation of the solar system found by citizen scientists
A breakthrough for citizen science
So just what does this discovery signify? First, let’s be clear: this is no publicity stunt, or a bit of fake news dressed up to make a good story.
This is a real scientific discovery, to be reported in the scientific literature like other discoveries made by astronomers.
It will help us understand the formation of our own Earth. It's also a step towards establishing whether we are alone in the universe, or whether there are other planets populated by other civilisations.
On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that this discovery joins the list of more than 2,300 known exoplanets discovered by Kepler so far. There are thousands more candidate planets to be examined.
If Grey and his colleagues hadn't discovered this new planetary system, then somebody else would have eventually discovered it. But that can be said of all discoveries. The fact remains that this particular discovery was made by Grey and his fellow citizen scientists.
Amateurs and professionals working together
I think that the greatest significance of this discovery is that it heralds a change in the way we do science.
As I said earlier, Grey didn't make this discovery alone. He used data from the Kepler spacecraft with a mission cost of US$600 million.
Although we can build stunning telescopes that produce vast amounts of valuable data, we can't yet build an algorithm that approaches the extraordinary abilities of the human brain to examine that data.
A human brain can detect patterns in the data far more effectively than any machine-learning algorithm yet devised. Because of the large volume of data generated by Kepler and other scientific instruments, we need large teams of human brains – larger than any research lab.
But the brains don't need to be trained astrophysicists, they just need to have the amazing cognitive abilities of the human brain.
This results in a partnership where big science produces data, and citizen scientists inspect the data to help make discoveries. It means that anyone can be involved in cutting-edge science, accelerating the growth of human knowledge.
None of these projects would be possible without widespread access to the internet, and readily-available tools to build citizen science projects, such as the Zooniverse project.
Will machines ever make citizen scientists redundant? I have argued before that we need to build algorithms called "machine scientists" to make future discoveries from the vast volumes of data we are generating.
But these algorithms still need to be trained by humans. The larger our human-generated training set, the better our machine scientists will work.
So rather than making citizen scientists redundant, the machine scientists multiply the power of citizen scientists, so that a discovery made by a future Andrew Grey may result in hundreds of discoveries by machines trained using his discovery.
I see the power of citizen scientists continuing to grow. I suspect this is only the start. We can do much more. We can increase the "fun" of doing citizen science by introducing "gaming" elements into citizen science programs, or by taking advantage of new technologies such as augmented reality and immersive virtual reality.
Perhaps we can tap into other human qualities such as imagination and creativity to achieve goals that still frustrate machines.
I look forward to the day when a Nobel prize is won by someone in a developing country without access to a traditional university education, but who uses the power of their mind, the wealth of information on the web and the tools of citizen science to transcend the dreams of traditional science.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.
Jupiter is famous for its Great Red Spot, a storm twice the diameter of Earth that rages on the gas giant's surface. Now, researchers have found that it has a second great spot, almost as large — this one, a Great Cold Spot caused by the planet's vibrant auroras.
Researchers first detected the ever-changing Great Cold Spot in data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and went back to track its existence over a 15-year period in observations from another telescope. The cool patch stretches up to 15,000 by 7,500 miles (24,000 by 12,000 km) across at its largest, and it's about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) cooler than the surrounding area in the planet's upper atmosphere. Although it disappears from time to time it seems to always re-form, just offset from the planet's bright aurora.
"The Great Cold Spot is much more volatile than the slowly changing Great Red Spot, changing dramatically in shape and size over only a few days and weeks, but it has reappeared for as long as we have data to search for it, for over 15 years," Tom Stallard, a planetary astronomer at the University of Leicester in the U.K. and lead author on the new work, said in a statement. [2nd 'Great Spot' on Jupiter Discovered by Astronomers (Video)]
The spot is likely formed as a byproduct of the planet's spectacular auroras, researchers said in the statement, and that because of the way the spot always re-forms it might be as old as the auroras themselves — up to many thousands of years in age.
Jupiter's newfound Great Cold Spot appears as a dark patch in this map of emissions from the hydrogen ion H3+, which is present in Jupiter's atmosphere, as measured by NASA's IRTF telescope in Hawaii. The cool spot moves over time and changes shape, but always re-forms.
Credit: Tom Stallard
Like on Earth, the bright light of Jupiter's auroras comes from electrically charged particles colliding with the planet's atmosphere near its north and south poles, guided by the planet's magnetic field. But Jupiter's auroras are much more constant and intense, and they're powered from particles coming from the planet's moons as well as the sun.
According to the new research, the aurora deposits energy into Jupiter's atmosphere, heating it up so there's a large disparity in heat between the top of the atmosphere and farther below. This seems to whip up a vortex in the atmosphere, creating a patch that is cooler than the surroundings and offset from the aurora.
Stallard said that a similar effect can be found near Earth's aurora, but that it's less of a permanent fixture because the Earth auroras vary so much more, and because Jupiter's spin acts to trap some of its heat in place.
Researchers tracked the Great Cold Spot over time, noting dramatic changes in shape and size from day to day. Here, it is seen in July of 1995 and continues to reappear until 15 years later, in December of 2000.
Credit: Tom Stallard
"The atmospheric flows generated by Earth's aurora can drive heat quickly across the whole planet, making the upper atmosphere ring like a bell, while Jupiter's fast spin traps this energy nearer the poles," Stallard said.
The researchers were surprised to find the Great Cold Spot, Stallard added, and they will continue to investigate it while looking for evidence of other atmospheric features. Combining their Earth-based observations with those from the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter should provide much more insight into the giant planet's weather.
Distant Object 'DeeDee' Makes the Dwarf Planet Grade
Distant Object 'DeeDee' Makes the Dwarf Planet Grade
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist’s illustration of 2014 UZ224, informally known as DeeDee. The ALMA radio telescope array was able to observe the faint millimeter-wavelength "glow" emitted by DeeDee, confirming the object is roughly 395 miles (635 kilometers across). At this size, DeeDee should have enough mass to be spherical, the criteria necessary for astronomers to consider it a dwarf planet, though it has yet to receive that official designation.
Credit: Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
The solar system's dwarf-planet population is about to increase by one.
The far-flung object 2014 UZ224 — informally known as DeeDee, for "Distant Dwarf" — is about 395 miles wide (635 kilometers), new observations reveal. That means the frigid object probably harbors enough mass to be shaped into a sphere by its own gravity, entitling it to "dwarf planet" status, researchers said.
Astronomers first spotted DeeDee in 2014 using the optical Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (though they didn't announce the discovery until 2016). [Meet the Solar System's Dwarf Planets]
Orbits of some objects in our solar system, showing the current location of the planetary body “DeeDee.”
Credit: Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
The initial Blanco observations allowed the discovery team to nail down DeeDee's orbit. The object loops around the sun on a highly elliptical path that takes more than 1,100 Earth years to complete; it's currently about 92 astronomical units (AU) from the sun but comes as close as 38 AU and gets as far away as 180 AU. (One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)
DeeDee is therefore the second most distant "trans-Neptunian object" with a confirmed orbit at the moment, researchers said. The dwarf planet Eris is more far-flung, though that's not always the case; Eris is currently about 96.5 AU from the sun, but it never gets more than 98 AU from Earth's star.
For perspective, Pluto orbits the sun at an average distance of 40 AU, with a maximum orbital distance of 49 AU.
Size comparisons of objects in our solar system, including the recently discovered planetary body “DeeDee.”
Credit: Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
But the Blanco data did not allow the discovery team — which was led by David Gerdes, an astronomer at the University of Michigan — to pinpoint DeeDee's size. While the researchers suspected that the object is a dwarf planet, they couldn't definitively determine from the optical observations whether DeeDee is relatively small and bright, or big and dark.
So Gerdes and his colleagues studied DeeDee with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a system of powerful radio telescopes in Chile. ALMA picked up the faraway object's heat signature, which is directly proportional to its size.
"We calculated that this object would be incredibly cold, only about 30 degrees Kelvin, just a little above absolute zero," Gerdes said in a statement.
ALMA image of the faint millimeter-wavelength "glow" from the planetary body 2014 UZ224, informally known as DeeDee. At three times the distance of Pluto from the sun, DeeDee is the second-most distant known trans-Neptunian object with a confirmed orbit in our solar system.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
ALMA also measured DeeDee's brightness in millimeter-wavelength light, finding that the object reflects just 13 percent of the sunlight that hits it. That means DeeDee is about as dark as the dirt on a baseball infield, astronomers said.
Combining the ALMA data with the earlier Blanco observations allowed the team to figure out how big DeeDee is, a result they just published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. (Some more perspective: DeeDee is larger than Saturn's spherical, geyser-spouting moon Enceladus, which has a diameter of 313 miles, or 504 km.)
The discovery and study of DeeDee (which has not yet officially been anointed a dwarf planet) shows that astronomers can probe the deep outer solar system and that similar techniques could potentially spot Planet Nine, the big world hypothesized to lurk out there undetected, researchers said.
"There are still new worlds to discover in our own cosmic backyard," Gerdes said. "The solar system is a rich and complicated place."
NASA heeft fantastische foto’s vrijgegeven waarop de complete planeet in het duister schittert.
De beelden zijn gemaakt met behulp van observaties van de NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership-satelliet. Deze satelliet werd in 2011 gelanceerd en heeft tal van foto’s van onze aarde gemaakt, ook wanneer deze in het donker gehuld was.
2016 En nu heeft NASA beelden vrijgegeven die laten zien hoe de aarde er in 2016 in het duister uitzag. De onderzoekers hebben daartoe gegevens die in verschillende maanden van het jaar zijn verzameld, gecombineerd.
De foto’s En zo ontstonden samengestelde foto’s zoals deze. Je ziet hier de VS en Latijns-Amerika. De wolken en de glinstering van de zon in het water heeft NASA ‘om esthetische redenen’ toegevoegd.
Afbeelding: NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, m.b.v. Suomi NPP VIIRS data van Miguel Román / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
En wat dacht je van deze foto waarop Europa en Afrika schitteren?
NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, m.b.v. Suomi NPP VIIRS data van Miguel Román / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Of deze close-up foto van ons continent?
NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, m.b.v. Suomi NPP VIIRS data van Miguel Román / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Vergelijkingen De beelden laten zien hoe mensen zich de planeet eigen maken en de duisternis verjagen. En door de beelden die in 2016 zijn gemaakt te vergelijken met vergelijkbare beelden uit 2012 kunnen we bovendien zien hoe de invloed van de mens op de aarde verandert. Grote veranderingen zien we dan bijvoorbeeld in India (zie hieronder).
NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, m.b.v. Suomi NPP VIIRS data van Miguel Román / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Maar ook kleine veranderingen worden zichtbaar. Bijvoorbeeld op onderstaande foto van Chicago en omgeving. Recent is een snelweg in dit gebied verlengd. Deze verbindt Chicago met Rockford (in het noordwesten).
NASA Earth Observatory / Joshua Stevens, m.b.v. Suomi NPP VIIRS data van Miguel Román / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
De ‘Black Marble’-beelden zijn van grote waarde. Zo kunnen de beelden bijvoorbeeld gebruikt worden om elektriciteitsstoringen of illegale visserij te monitoren. Ook kunnen de datasets gebruikt worden om lichtvervuiling te beperken.
In welke Martiaanse regio moeten de eerste Marskolonisten landen?
In welke Martiaanse regio moeten de eerste Marskolonisten landen?
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het lijkt een kwestie van tijd voor we naar Mars gaan. Maar Mars is groot. En dus rijst de vraag: waar moet die eerste bemande missie precies landen?
Dat is nog niet zo’n eenvoudige vraag. Want je moet met een hoop factoren rekening houden:
Allereerst moet de landingsplek veilig zijn. Dat wil zeggen dat het landingsgebied geen gevaarlijke obstakels mag bezitten zoals bergen – waar een ruimtevaartuig op te pletter kan slaan – of kliffen – waar een ruimtevaartuig heel ongelukkig in kan komen te hangen (vraag maar aan komeetlander Philae).
Daarnaast is het ook wel handig als het landingsgebied de grondstoffen bezit die nodig zijn om mensen in leven te houden. Je moet dan met name denken aan water. Maar – bij een langdurig verblijf op Mars – ook aan bouwmaterialen om een onderkomen te bouwen.
De landingsplek moet natuurlijk wetenschappelijk gezien interessant zijn. Dat betekent heel concreet dat de landingsplek toegang moet bieden tot landschappen die het onderzoeken waard zijn en niet al te ver van de landingsplek verwijderd zijn.
Daarnaast lijkt het raadzaam om te kiezen voor een landingsplek nabij de evenaar, omdat men daar het meeste directe zonlicht opvangt en dat komt van pas voor de zonnepanelen waar de eerste Marskolonisten waarschijnlijk van afhankelijk zijn.
En dan zijn we er nog niet. Want ook de hoogte van de landingsplek is belangrijk. Zo kan men het beste kiezen voor een wat lager gelegen landingsplek, omdat men aldaar wat beter beschermd is tegen straling uit de ruimte.
Flinke waslijst Het is nogal een wensenlijstje. Je zou je bijna afvragen of er op Mars wel plekken zijn die aan (bijna) alle eisen voldoen. Het goede nieuws is dat er – aldus onderzoek uit 2015 – zo’n zeventig plekken zijn op Mars die aan (bijna) alle eisen voldoen. We zullen dus een keuze moeten maken. Maar tussen welke landingsplekken gaat het dan? Een greep uit de zeventig opties.
Deze foto maakte Viking Lander 1 in 1978 van zijn omgeving.
– Chryse Planitia Een mooie plek om voet op Mars te zetten, deze vlakte nabij de evenaar. Zo is er genoeg te ontdekken: er is vulkanisch gesteente dat Marskolonisten kunnen bestuderen, maar zij kunnen zich ook buigen over landschappen die ooit door stromend water vorm zijn gegeven en materialen die tijdens een inslag zijn weggeslingerd. Ook zijn er genoeg grondstoffen te vinden die mensen kunnen gebruiken om van Mars hun thuis te maken (waaronder waarschijnlijk waterijs). Wat ook fijn is, is dat we al een beetje vertrouwd zijn met deze landingsplek. Chryse Planitia is namelijk de plek waar de Viking Lander 1 in 1976 voet op Mars zette. Wanneer we deze plek tijdens de eerste bemande missie naar de rode planeet bezoeken, kunnen we dus direct bekijken hoe de lander er vandaag de dag uitziet (en dus vaststellen welk effect het Martiaanse milieu op door mensen gemaakte spullen heeft).
– Ten oosten van Valles Marineris Ten zuiden van Chryse Planitia vinden we nog een andere mooie landingsplek: een vlakte ten oosten van Valles Marineris en ten noordoosten van Aurorae Chaos. De landingsplek in kwestie is wat lagergelegen (-3,9 km) en is zeer geschikt om te landen en te wonen. In de omgeving zijn veel kiezels en kleinere rotsblokken te vinden die dienst kunnen doen als bouwmaterialen. De landingsplek bevindt zich bovendien nabij een 50 tot 75 kilometer breed kanaal: de enige uitgang van het uitgebreide klovensysteem die uitkomt op de noordelijke laaglanden van Mars. Onderzoekers vermoeden dan ook dat oostwaartse waterstromingen hier gesteenten en sedimenten hebben afgezet. Die sedimenten kunnen meer vertellen over de omstandigheden waar Mars in verschillende tijdperken mee te maken had. Bovendien sluiten onderzoekers niet uit dat in die gesteentelagen sporen van oude levensvormen te vinden zijn (als Mars die ooit herbergde, natuurlijk).
Op dit kaartje zie je het klovensysteem Valles Marineris. Ook Aurorae Chaos is aangeduid. De voorgestelde landingsplaats bevindt zich ten noordoosten van dit punt (zie ook de inzet).
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL / GSFC / Arizona State University / Google.
– In de Gale-krater Een andere veelgenoemde landingsplek voor de eerste bemande Marsmissie is de Gale-krater. Opnieuw een krater waar we al enigszins vertrouwd mee zijn: Marsrover Curiosity rijdt er al een paar jaar rond. Het is een vrij vlak terrein, waar astronauten zich relatief gemakkelijk kunnen verplaatsen. Bovendien bevindt het gebied zich dicht bij de evenaar en is er – zo weten we dankzij Curiosity – water te vinden. Aangezien in de krater ooit een meer te vinden was zou het produceren van voedsel in dit gebied ook gemakkelijker zijn dan elders. Wetenschappelijk gezien is de Gale-krater ook heel interessant: zo is het een zeer geschikte plek om de leefbaarheid van Mars te onderzoeken. Dat Curiosity er al een tijdje rondrijdt, is natuurlijk een voordeel: de bevindingen van de rover kunnen ons helpen om de missie tot in de puntjes voor te bereiden en (onaangename) verrassingen voorkomen.
– Meridiani Planum Deze uitgestrekte vlakte nabij de evenaar zou eveneens zeer geschikt zijn als landingsplek, vinden onderzoekers. De vlakte is relatief veilig, biedt toegang tot water en delen ervan zijn reeds uitgebreid in kaart gebracht door Marsrover Opportunity. Marskolonisten hoeven zich er ook zeker niet te vervelen. Zo herbergt de vlakte niet alleen enkele van de oudste gesteenten op Mars, maar ook sporen van rivieren, bewijs van hydrothermale activiteit en kraters die in verschillende tijdperken zijn ontstaan. Daarnaast kunnen de astronauten natuurlijk ook Opportunity en mogelijk zelfs de gecrashte Schiaparelli-lander met een bezoekje vereren.
– Gusev-krater Deze 166 kilometer brede krater is met een leeftijd van zo’n 3,8 tot 4 miljard jaar bijzonder oud. Men kan er vulkanisch gesteente bestuderen, maar ook permafrost dat als er ooit microben op Mars te vinden waren wellicht sporen van deze levensvormen herbergt. Daarnaast kunnen de Marskolonisten ook een bezoekje brengen aan Marsrover Spirit die in 2011 in deze krater het loodje legde. Wellicht kunnen de astronauten zelfs proberen om de rover weer aan de praat te krijgen.
Een panoramafoto die Marsrover Spirit in 2006 in de Gusev-krater maakte.
– Apollinaris Sulci Dicht bij de Gusev-krater vinden we Apollinaris Sulci. Het gebied ligt eigenlijk op de grenzen van verschillende typen landschappen. Ten noorden ervan ligt de vier kilometer hoge berg Apollinaris Mons. Ten zuiden vinden we de Gusev-krater en – iets ten oosten daarvan – de hooglanden. Genoeg te zien en verkennen dus. Maar wat deze landingsplek misschien wel met name interessant maakt, is het feit dat er yardangs te vinden zijn. In deze bergruggen zouden de Marskolonisten wellicht grotten kunnen uithakken waarin ze beschermd zijn tegen de schadelijke straling die het oppervlak van Mars bombardeert.
– Hellas Basin Landen op het randje van de grootste en diepste inslagkrater die in ons zonnestelsel te vinden is: dat klinkt als een mooi avontuur. En als het aan sommige onderzoekers ligt, wordt dat avontuur snel werkelijkheid. Ze willen namelijk een bemande missie naar de oostelijke rand van het Hellas Basin sturen. Het basin is zo’n 2300 kilometer breed en tot wel 9 kilometer diep. De astronauten zouden gesteentelagen die door de inslag bloot zijn komen te liggen, kunnen bestuderen. Net als het ejecta (tijdens de inslag weggeslingerde materiaal) dat nu de rand van het basin vormt. Die gesteenten kunnen meer inzicht geven in de kinderjaren van Mars (de inslag zou zo’n 3,9 tot 4,3 miljard jaar geleden hebben plaatsgevonden) en in de astrobiologische, geologische en klimatologische omstandigheden van die tijd. Ook zouden astronauten die naar het Hellas Basin afreizen onderzoek kunnen doen naar zogenoemde Lobate Debris Aprons. Waarschijnlijk zijn dit ijsafzettingen die bedekt zijn met een laagje regoliet.
Het Hellas Basin.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL / GSFC / Arizona State University / Google.
Je ziet: mogelijkheden genoeg. Welke het gaat worden? Dat is lastig te voorspellen. De kans is echter groot dat men tijdens de eerste bemande missie op ‘safe’ speelt. Een landing op een plek waar eerder al een rover of lander voet op Mars zette, kan dan een aantrekkelijke optie zijn. En misschien staat de plek waar mensen uiteindelijk voor het eerst voet op Mars gaan zetten nog niet eens in dit rijtje. Want wie weet wat we in de tussentijd nog op Mars gaan ontdekken…
In the last decade, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, has spent hours staring at the night sky in search of exoplanets and accumulating huge amounts of data about potential new worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way.
But maybe, Nate Tellis wondered, Keck might have picked up something else along the way. Somewhere in all that data, could there be a signal from an intelligent civilization trying to reach Earth?
Tellis is a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, where, as his LinkedIn biography puts it, he spends his days “trawling” astronomy datasets for statistical deviations, trying to figure out whether they’re actually extraterrestrial pings. He searches particularly for laser light, powerful pulses of photons that could be as short as a nanosecond. Tellis, along with astronomer Geoff Marcy, recently dug into the Keck archives for data from 5,600 stars, observed between 2004 and 2016. Tellis and Marcy built a laser-detecting computer algorithm to comb through all that recorded starlight—and he result, detailed in a recent study in the Astronomical Journal, is the largest survey of its kind in the field of optical-based searches for extraterrestrial life.
It didn’t find anything. So far, this has been par for the course when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life, better known by the shorthand SETI. Astronomers first began using telescopes to look for potential alien communication in 1960, and they have been met with silence ever since.
“I think when you’re doing a SETI project, it’s very important not to get discouraged by a null detection,” Tellis said. “SETI has been in process for about 60 years, and it’s been non-detection after non-detection after non-detection.”
Astronomers and engineers have spent that time developing more powerful technology to conduct SETI surveys. The majority of SETI searches have relied on radio telescopes, which scour the skies for signals in the radio and microwave parts of the light spectrum. In the 1960s, “lasers were new, tricky, low-power devices; by contrast, radio technology had been developing for decades and was relatively mature,” according to a history from the SETI group at Harvard.
These days, lasers can outshine the sun, albeit in tiny pulses. But a tiny pulse—preferably more than one, to prove it’s not a fluke—is all it would take for a distant, advanced civilization to tell Earth “hey, we’re here!” If humans can get really good at sending radio and laser signals, the reasoning goes, maybe intelligent civilizations beyond Earth can, too—and then send them our way.
Unlike radio SETI, optical SETI looks for signals in the visible portion of the light spectrum. Lasers travel well over galactic distances. The light, concentrated into a narrow beam that can be 10 times as bright as the sun, would experience less interference from interstellar dust and gas than radio waves might. Laser emissions are also capable of carrying massive amounts of information. The network of cables at the bottom of the ocean is a collection of pulses of light, firing at high frequencies to transmit digital data and bring us the internet.
The dataset Tellis used for his study contained thousands of observations of stars as young as 200 million years and stars as old as nearly 10 billion years. Keck’s instruments collected millions of photons of light from these stars. What Tellis and his algorithm looked for were brief surges in photons. The first run of the data reported 5,000 potential candidates for mysterious laser beams, but they were eventually ruled out, explained away as emissions from stars’ outer layers, cosmic rays from our sun, or internal reflections from telescope instruments. Tellis got some firsthand Keck time to observe at least one target, KIC 8462852, a star about 1,500 light-years from Earth. In 2015, astronomers announced the Kepler space telescope had observed an unusual dimming of its light, which some believe could be caused by structures built by an advanced civilization around the star. The light emission observed from KIC 8462852 was the best candidate for an alien laser beam in the survey before it was ruled out.
The results may not have been surprising, but the method is noteworthy, says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University who contributed to some of the software code Tellis and Marcy used in the study. Recycling astronomical datasets that were produced for another purpose is pretty unusual, but it makes sense. There is strong competition among astronomers for observation time on the world’s best telescopes, and SETI proposals are usually low on the priority list.
“If you proposed to do a laser SETI study on Keck with thousands of hours, there’s nobody that will let you do it,” Wright said. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of astronomical datasets sitting around, waiting for a second look. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, even in the search for life in the universe. Tellis, Wright said, “was digging through all the trash in case someone threw out a diamond.”
Tellis’s survey, like all SETI surveys, has its limitations. The data examined only some types of stars, in a specific wavelength range, and in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood. The telescope may not have been able to detect signals that were too faint or too bright, and too far away.
Optical SETI also depends on something beyond our control: a laser beam must first be aimed at Earth for it to be detected. Imagine another life-form on a distant world conducting the same kind of search, Tellis said. “If we had pointed our telescope at Earth at sort of the distance that we’ve been doing here, we wouldn’t have seen us,” he said, because Earth is not firing a laser beam into the universe as a beacon of its existence. Other worlds may not be, either.
“Every single one of those stars could have a New York City, a Paris, a London, and we would have no idea,” Tellis said.
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Some 'Tatooine' Alien Planets May Be Able to Support Life
Some 'Tatooine' Alien Planets May Be Able to Support Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
This artist's illustration shows a hypothetical planet covered in water around the binary star system of Kepler-35A and B.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Life on an alien planet with two suns in its sky, like Luke Skywalker's home world Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films, may indeed be possible, a new study suggests.
A Tatooine world could be habitable despite its inevitably complicated orbit, as long as the planet stays within a particular range of distances from its two host stars, researchers said.
"This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive," Max Popp, an associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, said in a statement. [10 Real Alien Worlds That Resemble 'Star Wars' Planets]
Popp and Siegfried Eggl, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, investigated the "habitable zone" for Tatooine worlds — that just-right range of orbital distances at which liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, could exist on a planet's surface.
Nailing down the habitable zone for single-star planets isn't simple or straightforward; details of the zone depend heavily on the nature of a world's atmosphere, for example. But habitable zones get even trickier when the planet in question has two suns.
Tatooine planets' habitable zones, after all, depend on the distance from the two host stars' center of mass, not just the distance from any particular star. And Tatooine worlds don't orbit in a circular path; their paths wobble considerably due to the gravitational influences of their parent stars, researchers said.
To better understand such factors, Popp and Eggl modeled conditions on a hypothetical Earth-size, water-covered world in Kepler-35, a real two-star system more than 5,000 light-years from Earth that's known to host a planet eight times more massive than our own. (Popp and Eggl ignored the gravitational influence of this actual planet, which is known as Kepler-35b, for simplicity's sake.)
"Our research is motivated by the fact that searching for potentially habitable planets requires a lot of effort, so it is good to know in advance where to look," Eggl said in the same statement. "We show that it's worth targeting double-star systems."
The duo's simulations investigated what this imaginary Tatooine world's climate would be like if it orbited with periods between 341 and 380 Earth days.
They found that, near the outer edge of Kepler-35's presumed habitable zone, the planet would be relatively cold and dry. The dearth of atmospheric water vapor would also make the climate quite variable; global average surface temperatures would swing by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), the researchers said.
"This is analogous to how, on Earth, in arid climates like deserts, we experience huge temperature variations from day to night," Eggl said. "The amount of water in the air makes a big difference."
But conditions would be quite hospitable, and much more stable, near the habitable zone's inner edge, thanks to the water vapor's stabilizing influence, the researchers said. (Just as with single-star systems, a planet beyond the outer edge of the habitable zone would become a "snowball" world, while one too close in would experience a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus did and end up a sweltering hothouse, they found.)
Interestingly, the duo's models suggest that Tatooine worlds have less cloud cover than their single-star counterparts, providing any hypothetical inhabitants with great views of their double suns.
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ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER 2,400-YEAR-OLD SOLID GOLD ‘BONGS’ USED BY ARYAN KINGS TO SMOKE CANNABIS
ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER 2,400-YEAR-OLD SOLID GOLD ‘BONGS’ USED BY ARYAN KINGS TO SMOKE CANNABIS
Archaeologists have discovered two 2400 years of pure gold 'bongs' that were used by Aryan tribal chiefs to smoke cannabis during ceremonies. The history of drug use was found next to 7lbs of other golden elements when an area of land was dug up to Russia to make way for power lines. They had been buried in a stone chamber before being hidden by a thick layer of clay.
Since criminologists have carried out tests that indicate that the thick black residue found inside the vessels comes from cannabis and opium which the tribal royal smoked. Experts believe that the elements belong to the nomadic Scythians, a warrior race that ruled over vast expanses of Europe and Asia between the 9th century BC and the 4th century AD.
This means that the so-called bongs could be one of the oldest of existence. Several historians say that the Scythians, smoked and sometimes brewed, a mixture of cannabis and opium in order to change their state of mind before leaving to battle.
The famous Greek historian Herodotus, who died in 425 BC, wrote: "Cythians used a factory to produce smoke that no Greek-bath steam can exceed what shouts them." The dig has also led to the discovery of gold cuts, rings and necklaces, all of which have since been cleaned and put on display in a Russian museum. "Antonn Gass of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin said: "These are some of the most beautiful things we know about the area."
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
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