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
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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!!!
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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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
13-06-2018
The Truth About Who is Making All the Crop Circles in the UK and How They Do It
The Truth About Who is Making All the Crop Circles in the UK and How They Do It
Summer is a very exciting time for those interested in Crop Circles. A lot of mystery and controversy has surrounded the phenomena...Until now. Kryon explains how Crop Circles are made in detail and reveals exactly who is responsible for creating them. The answer will surprise you. Kryon also discusses why so many of these formations are found in the UK more often than other parts of the planet.
Mysterieuze microgolfstraling in de Melkweg wordt veroorzaakt door...nano-diamanten
Mysterieuze microgolfstraling in de Melkweg wordt veroorzaakt door...nano-diamanten
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De piepkleine edelstenen zweven rond jonge sterren.
Al enkele decennia nemen onderzoekers in onze Melkweg een vrij mysterieuze microgolfstraling waar die ook wel wordt aangeduid als AME. Dat staat voor Anomalous Microwave Emission. De microgolfstraling is vrij mysterieus, omdat onderzoekers lang maar niet konden ontdekken hoe deze straling precies ontstond. “We wisten dat een bepaald type deeltje verantwoordelijk was voor de microgolfstraling, maar de exacte bron is een raadsel sinds de AME bijna 20 jaar geleden voor het eerst gedetecteerd werd,” stelt onderzoeker Jane Greaves.
Nano-diamanten Een nieuwe studie lost het hele raadsel echter op. In het blad Nature Astronomy tonen onderzoekers aan dat de microgolfstraling zeer waarschijnlijk afkomstig is van heel kleine koolstofkristallen – oftewel nano-diamanten – die zich in het stof en gas rond piepjonge sterren bevinden. “Met behulp van een Sherlock Holmes-achtige aanpak waarbij we alle andere oorzaken hebben uitgesloten, kunnen we nu met vrij veel zekerheid zeggen dat de aanwezigheid van nano-diamanten rond pasgevormde sterren de beste en waarschijnlijk de enige manier is om deze microgolfstraling te produceren,” aldus Greaves.
Protoplanetaire schijven Greaves en collega’s trekken die conclusie nadat ze met behulp van twee telescopen inzoomden op drie duidelijke bronnen van AME: de protoplanetaire schijven rond de jonge sterren V892 Tau, HD97048 en MWC 297. “Dit is de eerste duidelijke detectie van Anomalous Microwave Emission afkomstig van protoplanetaire schijven,” stelt onderzoeker David Frayer. Een analyse van het infrarode licht afkomstig van deze protoplanetaire schijven wijst erop dat de waargenomen microgolfstraling ontstaat door snel roterende nano-diamanten met waterstof bevattende moleculen op hun oppervlak.
Paks Lang werd gedacht dat de AME ontstond door paks: polycyclische aromatische koolwaterstoffen. Maar de onderzoekers vegen die hypothese vrij resoluut van tafel. In hun studie keken ze namelijk ook naar protoplanetaire schijven die deze paks duidelijk herbergen. Maar deze protoplanetaire schijven produceerden niet de microgolfstraling waar ze naar op zoek waren. Een duidelijk signaal dat paks deze straling niet veroorzaken.
De nano-diamanten waarover de onderzoekers spreken, zijn honderdduizenden keren kleiner dan een zandkorrel en kunnen heel gemakkelijk ontstaan in de extreem hete protoplanetaire schijven. Volgens de onderzoekers zou zo’n 1 tot 2 procent van het aanwezige koolstof in de protoplanetaire schijven omgetoverd worden tot nano-diamanten.
In special reports, Brian O´Leary PhD Apollo Astronaut There Is Life Out There, Secrets of the Saucer Scientists, Life on Mars, 1976 Life Found on Mars, Tubes or Canals on Mars, Possible Reconnaissance of Earth by Asteroid? and Increasing Military Importance of Space.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Major George Filer Editor of The National UFO Center, would like to invite join him in Mt Shasta this summer July 27-29th 2018. He will present a wonderful program at the “From Venus with Love” conference.
Brian O´Leary PhD Apollo Astronaut There Is Life Out There
Brian O´Leary PhD former Apollo Astronaut states, “The technological implication of UFOs is one reason for the secrecy that surrounds them. The way they can stop on point and move any direction they choose brings up a big question; what type of propulsion systems and operating characteristics are involved? If we know UFOs are real, one of the questions to ask is how they operate and how they get to where they need to be.
Given all of the official documentation and credible witness testimonies, we are able to question further and make reasonable connections. With the amount of effort and time spent to cover up the reality of UFOs, it is logical to assume that the ones responsible for the cover up have the same questions that we do. How do they operate? Maybe more exists beyond the secrecy, maybe some questions have been answered and seized by those who control the money supply. Anti-Gravity, clean energy, the list goes on and on. Even without UFOs, human beings have the scientific and technological capability to change our planet. It’s time to start asking more questions, if we have alternative and more efficient ways of operating on planet Earth that could benefit everybody, why are they not being implemented and who is responsible?”Former Apollo Astronaut Leaks Info on Mars NASA Leaking
William F. Hamilton III writes, “In all probability the first saucer scientists were rocket scientists. Without a doubt one of these great men was the pioneering rocket scientist, Professor Hermann Oberth was a writer, scientist, and visionary from Austria-Hungary whose paper.”The Rocket into Interplanetary Spacewas published in 1923 and served as an inspiration to the rocket designers that followed. Influenced by Verne’s books and ideas, Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student at the age of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multistage rocket. By 1917, he showed how far his studies had reached by firing a rocket with liquid propellant in a demonstration to Hermann von Stein, the Prussian Minister of War.
Werner von Braun read Oberth’s work in 1925, and joined him in rocket experiments in 1930. Oberth is considered the Father of Rocketry.
In letters to Major Donald Keyhoe, Oberth mentions his belief that saucers are spaceships manned by superior beings. He says that the marvelous aerodynamics of the saucers is accomplished by generating an artificial gravity field. This is the famous G-field theory. The saucers create their own gravitational fields which enables them to hover motionless above the earth, accelerate at tremendous speeds, or execute violent turns that would cause ordinary aircraft to disintegrate. Even with swift changes of speed and direction, the passengers would feel no effect. It would also explain the silence of UFOs in flight as the artificial G-field would drag the surrounding air along with it. And, because the air is not flowing pass the hull, it would eliminate heating caused by friction.
Statements have been made that saucer behavior defies the laws of physics. It seemed impossible that a manned craft could execute such tremendous accelerations from a hovering position to a high-speed linear velocity or in high-speed acute-angled turns. Inertial forces caused by such accelerations would tear apart an aircraft frame. And, often, the picture came to mind of a human pilot ending up flat as a pancake against the cabin wall. Gerald Heard, in his book, “Is Another World Watching?” hypothesized that the saucers were being flown by insects because only insects could survive those wrenching turns. All of these concerns evaporate when one considers the physics of G-field propulsion. Our science appears to have missing explanations for the advanced technology.
In a revealing document published in Status Report VII by the late pioneering researcher Leonard Stringfield, a preliminary report refers to a recovered flying disc. The report does not specifically mention Roswell, but states that the data in the report was provided by the engineering staff of T-2 at the Air Material Command at Wright Field. One of the scientists examining the evidence is Dr. Theodore von Karmen, founder of Aerojet, and then head of the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group. Dr. von Karmen was a leading authority on aerodynamics and had authored papers, both in English and German on the subject. Another renowned scientist mentioned in the report is Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Manhattan Project and a leading physicist of his day.
In the opinion of these two famous scientists the interior of the craft contained a compartment with an atomic engine. The device was a donut-shaped tube approximately thirty-five feet in diameter, made of what appeared to be plastic material around a central core. A large rod centered inside the tube was wrapped in a coil and the investigators believed it to be the source of electrical potential which ionized the surrounding air around the craft. www.Amazon.com/books diagram.
PAPERCLIP
After World War II key German scientists were brought to the United States in a project called PAPERCLIP. According to the Cantwheel documents it seems that the Germans (Von Braun’s group) were in a position to identify whatever they found whether they were a V weapon or advanced disc craft. About 100 of them were assigned to PAPERCLIP projects at Fort Bliss, White Sands during this period. Ordway stated that they were issued special War Department ID cards that specifically stated that they were not to be held or questioned by authorities and had permission to leave the Fort Bliss test range sometime in early July 1947 for unspecified reasons.
It has been my belief for a long time that the Germans were brought into the classified UFO Program since they had a 25-year head start in advanced disc aircraft and rocket research. General Donald Putt was responsible for their employment at Wright Field (Putt is mentioned in Top Secret Project SIGN files as head of Air Force R&D in 1947-48 and was a student of Theodore von Karman).
The CIA’s PAPERCLIP files contained biographies of Germany’s top scientists (some were declassified for me in 1994) for possible recruitment in the U.S. PAPERCLIP was a illegal project to prevent Von Braun and approximately 200 other Germans from standing trial at Nuremberg for war crimes. Army and Air Force CIC deleted any information of their Nazi affiliation and SS positions (Von Braun was a SS Major) and the CIA misled the White House about their pasts. The U.S. considered their knowledge as vital to National Security and defense for the Russians had captured and recruited some of Von Braun’s people to work on their missile and jet aircraft development projects. The Germans were also instrumental in creating the Russian’s atomic bomb program and ICBM projects. The Germans essentially ran NASA and missile research for the US for at least 20 years.
As far as I know from reading Linda Hunt’s book on the German’s PAPERCLIP was a going concern as late as 1990.
Life on Mars
Curiosty Rover and Jen Eigenbrode,
On June 7, 2018, NASA announced Mars the Red Planet could have building blocks of life, Curiosity rover has revealed the latest results from its Curiosity rover gathering samples from the surface of Mars. NASA the US space agency announced Mars has the building blocks of life, in a discovery that could suggest the planet was once inhabited – or even still is today. During a press conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Goddard, Md., and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., scientists noted that the molecules provide fresh insight into Mars. “We found organic molecules in rocks from an ancient lake bed,” explained Jen Eigenbrode, research scientist at Goddard. A variety of molecules were identified in rocks billions years old, she added.
While NASA was at pains to explain that it has not discovered life on Mars, the organic molecules could provide vital clues. “Organic compounds are fundamental to our search for life,” said Paul Mahaffy, director of the Solar System Exploration Division at Goddard.
Described as the most technologically advanced rover ever built, Curiosity launched on Nov. 6 2011. The rover landed on Mars’ Gale Crate on Aug. 6 2012 with the goal of determining whether Mars was ever able to support microbial life. Thanks to NASA
1976 Life Found on Mars
Similar Landers reached Mars in 1976, with Labeled Release (LR) experiments developed for NASA’s Viking Landers 1 & 2, by Dr. Gilbert Levin who states, “The scientific process forces me to my conclusion, the Viking LR experiment detected living microorganisms in the soil on Mars”.
Mold or lichen on Mars Rock 1976 Green added
1976 Mars Viking Lander’s Labeled release microbial life signs detectors … the two devices which BOTH gave positive signs for Martian Life, back in 1976.
The LR test was one of three performed by the lander. JPL used the results of another test, the gas chroma/to/graph which was designed to test for the presence of organic chemicals. The LR test was designed to look for life.NASA has claimed these experiments approved by them were in error when they actually found life.
All of the multiple rationales attempting to explain the Mars LR results as chemical or physical in origin have now been effectively refuted, but their impact remains. A tried and true scientific axiom says: once a method to probe the unknown demonstrates utility, the exploratory tool should be refined to investigate the causes of the phenomenon discovered Mars exploration might greatly benefit by elaborating on the demonstrated LR technique.
I spoke with Dr. Levin he is convinced life exists on Mars and his experiments and Mars Photographs of Moss or lichen of many of the rocks are proof. The color film coming back from Mars showed blue skies and only some red soil and grey rocks. The red color was increased to delete the blue sky and mold on rocks.
Argument is made that each of the vital links in the chain of life connecting Earth and Mars has a probability of one. Today’s knowledge makes it very difficult to conceive of a sterile Mars. Indeed, it now seems that Earth and Mars form one biosphere. This sheds new light on the results of the Viking LR experiment on Mars. Together with growing acceptance[32] of the fact that no chemical or physical experiment or theory has satisfactorily explained the extensive and consistent LR data, significant support is found for the conclusion8 that it detected microbial life in the soil of Mars.
While the case for life on Mars has strengthened in recent years, many will require additional proof before accepting such a major change in paradigm. It has been proposed8,[33] that this important confirmation can be obtained by a simple modification of a miniaturized version of the original LR experiment[.
ALL LINKS IN THE VITAL CHAIN CONNECTING MARS AND EARTH ARE NOW ESTABLISHED
Microorganisms are widely distributed on Earth.
Meteorites impacting Earth eject soil and rocks into space.
Microorganisms in the ejecta can survive the shock and temperature of impact.
Microorganisms in ejecta can survive heating through Earth’s atmosphere.
Microbes can survive the temperature and vacuum of the space environment.
Microorganisms can survive the ionizing radiation of space.
Mars-infecting ejectus can approach Mars and be captured in its gravity well.
Microbes can survive the temperature of entering the Martian atmosphere.
Microbes can survive the shock and temperature of impact on Mars.
Terrestrial microorganisms can grow under Martian conditions.
Microorganisms are capable of adapting to or evolving to spread over wide regions of Mars.
Earth and Mars were hospitable over epochs that would have permitted infection of Mars by Earth microorganisms—and from other sources.
It is now more difficult to propose a sterile Mars than a live one.
Tubes or Canals on Mars
Face on Mars in Cydonia
Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 reported the appearance of certain long, thin lines he called canali, meaning channels in Italian. He was followed by Percival Lowell an American the wealthy astronomer who ‘discovered civilization’ on Mars. Lowell built his own observatory and studied in detail Mars and what he called canals. In his day, Lowell was far and away the most influential popularizer of planetary science in America. His widely read books included “Mars” (1895), “Mars and Its Canals” (1906), and “Mars As the Abode of Life” (1908).’
To pursue his misguided obsession, Lowell founded and funded one of the world’s great observatories on a 7,200-foot (2,195-meter) mountain peak he named Mars Hill, near Flagstaff, Arizona. There he scrutinized the heavens, and particularly Mars, with, his own custom-built 24-inch refracting telescope, built in 1894, which became a marvel of the age.
Lowell carried the matter much further. Captivated by these sketchily observed tubes or dark areas Lowell spent many years attempting to elucidate and theorize about them. The lines, he thought, must “run for thousands of miles as far actually as from Boston to San Francisco.” What Lowell was likely seeing were a series of tubes or tunnels perhaps under construction a hundred years ago.
Giant Mars Tubes that can hold Manhattan, NY
On Mars there are a series of tubes several miles wide that show up within several craters and natural low valleys. They are similar in size to Manhattan, New York and could actually contain skyscrapers as shown. According to the MSSS supplied statistics, the strip above is 2.98 km wide or 1.85 miles wide. Remember that the tubes extend from one side edge of the crater to the other and off the strip with no signs of diminishment in size.. These tubes within the craters are 8.92 km or 5.54 miles of tube length. However, we can also reasonably assume that there is still plenty of tube system unseen off the left or west edge of the E12-03186 strip and off the right or east edge of the E11-03408 strip that appear to go underground. Note that the dark area spread on the crater floor that is mostly the tube mass tends to confirm a much greater mass size beyond the limitations of the strip views and therefore probably substantial more tube length. So, we’re talking about a colossal tube system substantially longer than 5.5 miles and in fact many kilometers or miles longer than that. Much smaller tubes are found in valleys and places where the soil has been blown away.
Besides the giant tubes that have been found in the Mars crater photographs, there are much smaller “tubes” often referred as glass or Plexiglas tubes because they are translucent or even transparent. There are miles and miles of them … some mostly buried … a few completely exposed as in these photos. The diameter of the smaller tube is 20-50 meters (66 to 164 feet) in general. That’s about big enough to put two interstate highways through. Supposedly, they are exposed through the mechanism of geological weathering of the surface soil. It does not appear that these tunnels or tubes are geologic or natural construction. This leaves us with the awesome conclusion that they have another origin of which there are only two possibilities … they are organic … or … they are artificial.
I should point out NASA claims these tubes are actually sand dunes. While the European Space Agency feels many of the tubes are lava flows. Prevailing winds form sand dunes from one direction, while the tubes run in many directions making sand dunes unlikely.
We can speculate a Mars civilization may have decided to go underground due to being hit repeatedly by meteorites or radiation from space. The tubing appears somewhat transparent and likely allows some light to penetrate while stopping the radiation. Underground water appears to seep in on the sides of the craters and dams collect the water. There is oxygen, water, and the building blocks of life found on Mars indicating life likely exists. There’s no magnetic field on Mars so the ceaseless hazard of ionizing radiation could result in shortened lifespan for Martians, Using absorber materials such as Plexiglas for beta particles and lead for X-rays and gamma rays is an effective way to reduce radiation exposure
I have seen too much evidence of tampering on such a fine level and small scale to convince me that this could have been done only with much larger closer in views. That implies that the MOC cameras are capable of much higher resolutions than are being publicly reported and that someone is artificially pulling back to lesser resolution distances for our benefit to hide small evidence and to hide the tampering that now shrinks down to appear a more natural part of the terrain.
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Filer’s Files #23 -2018 Life on Mars - PART II
Filer’s Files #23 -2018 Life on Mars - PART II
Possible Reconnaissance of Earth by Asteroid?
Scientists were surprised to detect — for the first time — an interstellar asteroid passing through our solar system. That is unlike any asteroid or comet observed in our solar system to date, and may provide new clues into how other solar systems formed. Asteroid 1I/2017 U1 was discovered October 19, 2017 by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii. Additional observations brought more surprises: the object is cigar-shaped with a somewhat reddish hue. The asteroid, named Oumuamua by its discoverers, is up to one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated-perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide. Some scientist thought it had the shape and size of a spaceship cleverly disguised as an asteroid. From its trajectory and speed, scientists determined it came from outside our solar system. It was a special day when this object was first discovered. We had been waiting for the discovery of an interstellar object for decades basically. This object is simply a piece of another solar system that was expelled and it has been traveling through interstellar space for – hundreds of millions of years, billions of years? We don’t know. A number of our survey projects and other observatories immediately turned their telescopes to take observations of this object.
NASA basically missed seeing a huge asteroid that passed unnervingly close to Earth on 17 April 2018.
While the world was busy doing its thing on Saturday, a giant asteroid the size of a football field whizzed by our planet.
We only had a few hours of warning. NASA scientists noticed the massive asteroid at an observatory in Arizona just a few hours before it gave Earth a surprise flyby.
As shown asteroids will pass Earth several times this month. A small one crashed into Asteroid 2018 LA entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 9:44 a.m. PDT (12:44 p.m. EDT, 16:44 UTC), and June 3, 2018 later disintegrated in the upper atmosphere near Botswana, Africa last week.
Increasing Military Importance of Space
Photo: Sunrise by Arek Socha/Quimono
The increasing military importance of space permeated the 34th Space Symposium in April. Speakers from Vice President Michael R. Pence down through a range of military and Air Force officials underscoring the need to focus on space as a war fighting domain, as the Trump administration has declared it to be.
The emphasis on the national security space enterprise has been an increasing focus in Washington in recent months. It has been prominent in, for example, the administration’s December National Security Strategy and in continuing calls from some in Congress for establishment of a space force or space corps as a military service separate from the Air Force.
Pence’s remarks, pointed to Trump’s statements that “space is a war fighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea” and calls for the Pentagon to strengthen the resilience of US space systems in the face of Russian and Chinese pursuit of anti-satellite capabilities.
It was Defense Department officials at the conference, who really hammered the point home.
General Raymond Photo: David Grim/USAF
Gen. John W. Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base and the Joint Force Space Component under US Strategic Command, pointedly predicted that future historians will look back on 2017 and 2018 as “one of the most critical times in our national security space history.”
It will be seen, he suggested, “as a strategic inflection point for national security space and a bold shift toward war fighting and space superiority.”
. Also high on the agenda was the recurring theme that the defense and security elements of the US government are increasingly focused on dealing with national security issues raised by the changing space environment. Gen. John Raymond, head of Air Force Space Command, speaks at the 34th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April.
General John E. Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command and former commander of Air Force Space Command, told reporters there was “no doubt in my mind we’re going to have to deploy defensive counter space systems because our adversaries are building offensive counter space systems.”“The nation’s going to have to make a decision on what we do in order to challenge somebody else’s space capabilities. I think we have to go down that path,” Hyten said.
He said understanding of the threat in space has grown in Washington policy circles in recent years. He praised the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee for defining in legislation—including the National Defense Authorization Act—what needs to be done in space.
“But the real benefit, the real strength of that law was the identification of the problem. That will allow us now to engage with the broader members of Congress to further educate them on what the threat is. And we’ve also shared a very detailed tabletop exercise with the members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees so they can see the full implication of all the things that we’re worried about,” he said.
He pointed to a number of steps already taken, including the administration’s 2019 budget request that includes almost $7 billion more for space, growing partnerships with the National Reconnaissance Office and with industry, establishment of a four-star Space Component Command in US Strategic Command, and the planned conversion of the Joint Space Operations Center into a Combined Space Operations Center.
However, even as the government has already taken steps to focus more on national security space, “it is time to go further,”
Air Force Secretary Heather A. Wilson said, and she announced a series of steps at the symposium to do just that. SBIRS-4 is ready for encapsulation in January 2018 at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla.
Wilson said now is the time to expand national security space relations with allies and partners because the US faces “a more competitive and dangerous international security environment than we have seen in decades.” As America’s great power rivals, “Russia and China are developing capabilities to disable our satellites,” she added.
She announced the Air Force would, starting next year, increase the availability of Air Force space training for allies and partners by adding two more courses to the National Security Space Institute, including one on space situational awareness. USAF would also open more of the existing advanced national security space courses to members of allied nation militaries, including those of France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and possibly others—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom were already in. “Countries with allies thrive and those without allies” do not, she told reporters before her speech.
Wilson said US satellites are to become more resilient and defendable and must be developed more quickly. She said the time for replacing the canceled seventh and eighth Space-Based Infrared System missile warning satellites would be cut from nine to five years for the new satellites. Altogether, the Air Force is working to make its space capabilities more flexible so it can respond faster, winning wars in ways enemies can’t predict. Thanks to AFA
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Filer’s Files #23 -2018 Life on Mars - PART III
Filer’s Files #23 -2018 Life on Mars - PART III
UFO Sightings in the United States
Arizona Light
Casa Grande — My dad texted me and told me there are some strange lights in the sky on the west side of Gila Bend. He knows that I’m into this stuff. So I looked in that direction. I saw a fireball like light flashing. I thought it was a plane at first but it didn’t move, it was flashing different colors it was hovering. I started recording on my phone. I notice two little red lights on the bottom creating a triangle. Then after that they disappeared. I was excited because I had experienced a dark grey triangle in Gila Bend on December 14, 2017.Thanks to MUFON CMS
California Object
Redding — A friend of mine took me up in his plane out of the Redding Municipal Airport. I brought my camera to do some aerial photography. We were off the ground and I took a photo of the runway as we ascended. I didn’t notice any object and I first noticed the object when I downloaded my photos to process them in Photoshop.
It had a distinct shape and flight angle, but I don’t know which direction it was traveling.
I was only observing our forward take off through my camera’s viewfinder. I don’t know how fast a propeller turns, but the object came out more distinct than the propeller. I applied the burn tool on Photoshop to the object to bring out a bit more detail. In doing so, I realize that may have rendered the object as something that it is not. But the object intrigued me enough to consider that maybe I unintentionally captured an image of an UFO. I sent the image to my friend who piloted the plane and he sent it on to MUFON. I used a Sony a77, Sony 16-50 f:2.8 lens. Settings were: f/6.3, 1/1000th second, ISO 160 and taken at 24mm focal length. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Colorado Light
Denver — I was just watching tv after a 12 hour shift on May 31, 2018. The light shining off of the object was bright enough for me to look out the window. I seriously thought it was the moon, except the moon is not in that quadrant at 12:30 am. The light from it was shining so brightly, that the outline of a cross surrounded it. I was honestly in shock. I’ve always wanted to see a UFO, so it was a thrilling moment for me. Hopefully the pics show some of what I saw. The object slowly flew away towards a weird object far away that looked like some sort of gate. It was a really thrilling experience. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Florida Alien
Tampa — I was told the following story by the witness who was asleep in bed in the middle of the night with his wife when something woke him up. He looked over and he saw his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her back to him. She would not answer to her name when he tried to get her attention. He leaned over so he could see her face and saw her holding a small grey figure in her hands. It had a head and big eyes, almond eyes. The grey figure and the wife were looking at each other but smoke was being exchanged between their two mouths. The husband slapped the grey figure out of his wife’s hands and it tumbled to the floor. He got up and tried to grab it but it screamed, using his wife’s voice! The grey dove out the window and was gone. When he woke his wife up, she didn’t remember anything. Thanks to John Guerra
Georgia Object
On October 17, 2016, I was outside at my residence sky watching when I saw and photographed numerous UFO objects. I had just started sky watching as a pastime hobby. So I did not think anything of it at the time. Being a newbie to sky watching I thought maybe I had been shaking the camera a little, which could have caused light of a star to blur and be all over the place. This past week I was going over a lot of my photo’s and recording’s from the past couple of years and I came across these pictures of UFO’s. I have poured over them all and after two years of observing. I now know what I photographed was some sort of craft. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Illinois Cylinders
Salem — I was traveling on my way to work on Saturday June 2nd,2018, in the evening around 5:30pm. watching a storm close in over the area. something out of place caught my eye and I slowed my vehicle, took a couple of pictures and continued on my way to work. I reviewed the pictures yesterday afternoon and found the objects in question then. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Galesburg — I go outside everyday at 5-5:30 and I face away from sun at its brightest.
I sit the sun on my head, and take a picture. Everyday a blue sphere appears in my pictures during this.
In pictures from June 4 2018, I noticed a cigar shaped object in the sky above me.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Indiana Disk
Palmyra –I was taking a picture of our willow tree for a website. I did not see or hear the object while taking the pic. I saw it after I looked at the pic. I took 2 other pics just before this one. I also noticed about 30 minutes later an Air Force prop plane flew over the house at a low altitude. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Minnesota Boomerang
Farmington Hills — I was leaving the bowling alley with my husband on June 2, 2018. I observed an extremely large “V” shaped UFO traveling southwest at an alarming rate of speed. From my viewpoint and the altitude of the object, I estimate it to be 50-100 times larger than a modern sized airplane. The object had seven lights-three on each line of the “V” and one light where the lines intersect. The lights were white and dim and in sync.
The object was moving at a rapid rate of speed (I only observed it for 8-10 seconds before I lost sight of it). The object was completely silent. I observed the underside of the object that was black except for the seven lights. I observed this object on June 2, 2018 at 11:55 PM. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Missouri Object
While flying in American Airlines flight 3996 IAH -Houston to ORD -Chicago, on June 1, 2018 about halfway through flight (Missouri ?) was photographing storm anvils for use as desktop wallpaper. Our flight was at about 38,000 feet. Immediately after taking 3 pictures in about 10 seconds, craft appeared suddenly to the east of flight path at about 50,000 feet like Star Trek “de-cloaking” scene. Immediately took another photo including the craft. 3 seconds later craft went ballistic to the south and ascending very fast. From stationary to like light speed disappearance up and reverse of our flight path which would be south. Craft had a triangular shape to it and must have been very large.
After shooting it I lowered the camera phone to observe and it suddenly went light speed ballistic up and reverse of our path. I was a small craft pilot in my youth and worked at NASA for many years at JSC in Houston so have a fairly good experience base with things that fly.
New York Lights
Large light flies to left and reverses course increasing then decreasing brightness of light.
If this video cannot be viewed on mufons site Youtube search shawbrosfan. It will take you to ufos over ny the video is there also
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Ohio Light
Cincinnati — Walked outside of house looked up ‘and saw a light case move in and out.
In the same spot I have seen other strange lights before.
Picture was taken on May 29, 2018
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Washington Orb
Woodland — Tic-tac, glowing orb, black hole, (wormhole.) something coming out of wormhole, orb materializing off to the left of junipers on April 2, 2018 and then moving past the trees. Some jets were flying so fast that I grabbed my phone and started taking pictures. I personally didn’t see anything but the military planes until I looked at the photos and blew them up. These pics are not doctored in any way. You are most welcomed to verify. my Facebook page Tom Julian photos are @ bottom of page. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Australia Object
All I have to do is go outside and start snapping pictures on February 26, 2018. I’ve had other things happen to me that are unexplainable as well. Being able to get footage is the best I could do. I’m upgrading from a ph camera to Cannon mk 4 with plenty of extras.. That way I can get some epic footage.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Canada Lights
While filming the same object again that I had reported (case #92331), a light caught my eye so I started filming it. It changed shape multiple times and upon review of video at the 5:56 mark, I noticed it had changed direction and seemed to be heading back toward me. At one point during this sighting, I felt a buzzing and weightlessness for about 10 seconds. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Japan UFO Teenager
A teenager in Japan has become something of a sensation on the country’s social media sites due to his purported ability to communicate with UFOs. Haruya Ido has been dubbed ‘UFO Boy’ by the researcher, Toshitaro Yamaguchi, who discovered the young man and his alleged psychic skills. To that end, Yamaguchi told Japanese media that Ido can sense, via telepathy, where a UFO will be and, in turn, photograph the object.
Backing up the UFO researcher’s bold assertion are four images of anomalous objects which were taken by Ido from different locations in Japan over the course of the last year. While the oddities in the photos are not particularly spectacular, if they were truly all captured by the same witness, it does make one wonder if there is a connection between the boy and the phenomenon. For his part, Yamachuchi likened Ido’s ability to “shamanism” and the teen’s story have gone viral on Japanese social media.
Remarkably, the veteran UFO researcher said that such ‘UFO boys’ are not altogether rare phenomenon as, in the past, other youngsters have been said to boast the same ability to communicate with craft. However, Ido is the first to appear on the scene in quite some time, which Yamaguchi hopes is a promising sign for the future, since, at 70 years old, he’s uncertain how much longer he can chase the phenomenon. Perhaps the teen can alleviate those concerns by conjuring a craft in the sky for him.
Netherlands Triangle
Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel – I noticed a bright white flash in the sky near the star Arcturus. I don’t know if this event is related to my sighting, but when I looked in the direction of the star to see if another flash would appear I suddenly noticed a very big triangular shaped flying object traveling at high speed across the sky. It looked to be flying quite low, at the height of a small passenger plane. The triangle was black with orange-red lights at each corner at the bottom. The lights were not very bright and the shape of the object was faintly visible. the object did block the light of the stars above the triangle that was traveling south at 00:30 pm on May 21, 2018. after seeing it for a few seconds it disappeared from sight behind some houses. There really are unidentified flying objects in the sky.” Thanks to MUFON CMS
UK/England Object
Leamington Spa, Warwicksh — I was in the sunshine next to my touring caravan at Harbury Fields Caravan Park, on June 2, 2018. I was observing and photographing local aircraft passing overhead. I noticed what looked like a bright star in a northerly direction, in a clear blue sky. Pointed my Nikon D7200 with a 150-600mm lens at the object and saw more than one bright light, plus a shape. Took several Photo’s over the next 15 minutes and then the object was gone. The object appeared to be rotating but not moving in any direction with no trail so I discounted it to be a meteor or space debris. The object did look to get brighter, with the naked eye and then dimmer before it disappeared. I had never seen anything like it before so checked the internet for space debris. NASA said space debris was not expected that day. During my observation, the object did appear to change shape. Thanks to MUFON CMS
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Big galaxies suck — and no, I’m not being rude. I just mean that they absorb other, smaller galaxies when they run into each other, like a cannibalistic version of bumper cars. It’s how they survive. But some galaxies manage to avoid collisions, and one in a thousand keep all their properties from formation intact. Now, researchers have found one of those oldies, also called a relic galaxy, in our cosmic neighborhood.
Its name is NGC 1277. It has a “million million” stars. It’s at the center of the Perseus cluster, the biggest concentration of galaxies near the Milky Way, which is about 225 million lightyears away from us. In other words, it would take the Millennium Falcon 27 years to get there, if Han Solo was piloting. That seems really far — especially since we can’t travel in hyperspace yet — but it’s actually relatively close.
Best of all, we can affectionately refer to NGC 1277 as a “red nugget” galaxy,thanks to its un-evolved, high-redshift color distribution. NGC 1277 looks the same as it did 12 billion years ago (for context, the universe has only been around for about 13.8 billion years). It’s the fully intact Tyrannosaurus skeleton of the universe.
See that lil' pancake? That's our girl.
Researchers Michael Beasley and Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna were able to confirm the relic status of NGC 1277 by studying its globular clusters with the Hubble Space Telescope. What they saw was a massive expanse of — you guessed it — red.
Globular clusters are groups of stars formed at the birth of a galaxy that orbit its outskirts. Red clusters are composed of more heavy elements than helium and orbit closer to the galaxy’s center. Blue clusters have fewer metals and are seen only as a result of galactic collisions. NGC 1277 only has red clusters, the largest galaxy of its size to have been observed without them.
That means every star formed in NGC 1277 was formed within 100 million years of its birth, within the first billion years of the universe’s existence. The Milky Way’s rate of one star a year pales in comparison to NGC 1277’s 1,000 stars a year. This makes for a perfect opportunity to study a vast galaxy that remains basically unchanged since the dawn of everything.
So, how did NGC 1277 last all these billions of years without accumulating blue clusters? Beasley and Trujillo think that NGC 1277 formed as a satellite to the central galaxy of the Perseus cluster, which absorbed any material that could have impacted its satellite. Now, NGC 1277 still orbits that central galaxy, at 1,000 kilometers a second. Beasley and Trujillo are hoping to observe more global clusters with the Hubble to find even more relic galaxies.
According to previous calculations by astronomers, one in every thousand massive galaxies is a relic of the early universe. It’s an almost esoteric term that describes a galaxy whose properties are still largely the same as when it formed billions of years ago. Now, scientists say they’ve finally identified one for the first time.
Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) used ground-based telescopes to study NGC 1277, a galaxy located 225 million light-years away, in the heart of the Perseus Cluster — the largest concentration of galaxies close to the Milky Way.
Their initial observations suggested something odd about the globular clusters surrounding NGC 1277. Globular clusters are spherical collections of ancient stars, formed at the same time as the galaxy, that orbit the galactic core as a satellite. Scientists class globular clusters in two distinct groups: red globular clusters, which are formed in massive galaxies nearer to their centers, and blue ones, which are found more toward the outskirts of the galaxy. Red globular clusters have a higher concentration of heavier elements (hence the color), while blue ones have a lower fraction of metals.
When the researchers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope towards the globular clusters surrounding NGC 1277, they struck gold. The observation revealed that the galaxy only has only red globular clusters, which have remained unchanged since they were formed many millions of years ago along with the galaxy.
“Globular cluster systems are very sensitive to the history of galaxy formation” explained Michael Beasley, the first author of the article and a researcher at Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), who said that “this is the first time a galaxy so massive has been observed with so few blue globular clusters.”
NGC 1277 is composed of a thousand billion stars, and its relatively close proximity to Earth provided an excellent opportunity to find a rare wonder of the cosmos. “The galaxy NGC 1277 gives us a unique opportunity to study a “primitive” galaxy in the “local” universe” adds Ignacio Trujillo, another of the article’s authors.
NGC 1300, a barred spiral galaxy, similar in many ways to the Milky Way. For obvious reasons, we don’t have any real images of our own galaxy.
Image credits: Hubble Space Telescope / NASA.
According to the researchers, when the galaxy formed, it used to birth stars at a rate of 1,000 per year, whilst the Milky Way is currently forming only one star per year. The team believes that the reason why the galaxy has remained unchanged during all this time, retaining its original form and composition, is because it formed as a satellite to the central galaxy of the Perseus cluster. Since the cluster absorbed most of the material that could have fallen into NGC 1277, this dynamic has caused the relic galaxy to evolve differently.
“We argue that the colour distribution of the cluster system of NGC 1277 indicates that the galaxy has undergone little (if any) mass accretion after its initial collapse, and use simulations of possible merger histories to show that the stellar mass due to accretion is probably at most ten percent of the total stellar mass of the galaxy. These results confirm that NGC 1277 is a genuine relic galaxy and demonstrate that blue clusters constitute an accreted population in present-day massive galaxies,” the authors wrote in the journal Nature.
The authors hope to find more relic galaxies in the future using the Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Scientific reference:
BEASLEY, Michael A. et al. “A single population of red globular clusters around the massive compact galaxy NGC 1277”, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature25756
Researchers have discovered an enormous body of interstellar dust that predates the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. The findings might revolutionize our understanding of how the solar system came to be, as well as all other planetary bodies.
Artist impression of an early solar system.
Credit: NASA.
It sounds unbelievable, but some of the original interstellar dust that went to form the sun, Earth, and all the other planets in the solar system can be still be found floating around in our neighborhood, even hitting our atmosphere from time to time. Presolar dust particles can no longer be found in the inner solar system, as it was long ago destroyed, reformed, and reaggregated in multiple phases. However, presolar dust can still be found in the outer solar system, specifically in some comets.
When these comets pass close enough to the sun, they release presolar dust that can reach Earth’s orbit and settle through the atmosphere, where it can be collected and later studied. Dr. Hope Ishii of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and her colleagues used electron microscopy to study such dust particles, as well as data gathered from the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) aboard the Cassini Saturn orbiter during its two-decade mission.
The presolar dust particles in question are actually called GEMS – or ‘glass embedded with metal and sulfide’. They’re less than one hundredth the width of a human hair in diameter and contain a variety of carbon known to decompose when exposed to even relatively gentle heating.
An electron micrograph of an interplanetary dust particle of likely cometary origin.
Credit: Hope Ishii
Ishii and colleagues write that the GEMS likely formed in the interstellar medium due to grain shattering, amorphization, and erosion from supernovae shocks, then later went through subsequent periods of aggregation. Irradiation likely provided enough energy for the amorphous silicates which comprise the dust to absorb small amounts of metal atoms, the authors reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“With repeated cycling in and out of cold molecular clouds, mantled dust and any aggregates were repeatedly and progressively partially destroyed and reformed. Cassini mission data suggest the presence of iron metal in contemporary interstellar dust,” the researchers wrote in their study.
This first generation of GEMS aggregated with crystalline grains that were likely transported from the hot inner-solar nebula, creating second-generation aggregates. Later this 2nd generation of aggregates was likely incorporated into small, icy cometary bodies.
The researchers concluded that the grains they studied represent surviving pre-solar interstellar dust that formed the very building blocks of planets and stars. As such, they provide unique insight into a pre-solar system environment, ultimately telling us how our planet and others like it came to be. We only have a rough picture of how our solar system formed from a huge disk of dust and gas, and these little grains could be the missing pieces that complete the puzzle. In the future, the researchers plan on collecting more comet dust, particularly that sourced from more well-protected comets that pass by the sun.
This global map of Mars shows a growing dust storm as of June 6, 2018. The map was produced by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. The blue dot indicates the approximate location of Opportunity. Image and caption credits NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
On Sunday morning, NASA received a transmission from the Opportunity rover. Usually, that’s not really out of its character — but the bot is currently braving a massive sandstorm on the Red Planet. The rover hailed home to let ground control know it still has enough juice in its battery to maintain communications, according to NASA. Science operations, however, remain suspended in a bid to conserve energy.
Oppy phone home
The transmission was a welcome break for NASA engineers, as the dust storm has been steadily picking up steam in the past few days. The rover is weathering it out in Perseverance Valley, shrouded in perpetual night. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter first detected the storm on Friday, June 1. The rover team began preparing contingency plans soon afterward.
It’s not the first such storm Opportunity had to face — it braved another in 2007. This event, however, is much worse than the last one. The storm’s atmospheric opacity (how much light it blocks) has been estimated at 10.8 tau as of Sunday morning — the 2007 storm only reached about 5.5 tau. This is roughly equivalent to the incredible smogs we’ve seen in China. Because of this, the bot cannot use its solar panels to recharge.
The storm has grown to over 18 million square kilometers (7 million square miles) since its detection. Such storms aren’t extreme for Mars, but they are infrequent. NASA doesn’t yet fully understand how they form or build in strength, but they seem to be self-reinforcing — a feedback loop that amplifies itself as it grows. Such storms can last up to several months at a time.
This dust blanket could be what makes or breaks Opportunity’s resolve.
Dusty but not yet dead
You could say it’s an Opportunity to show what you’re made of, little rover! Image credits NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.
I say that because the dust is both a boon and a curse for Opportunity as of now. The rover’s main problems are that it cannot recharge (its solar panels are dusted over, and there’s not enough sunlight) and that communication with ground control is spotty at best (radio signals can’t pierce through the storm).
But the dust also hides a silver lining. Data beamed back by the rover shows its internal temperature is roughly stable at about minus 29 degrees Celsius (minus 20 Fahrenheit). The dust storm — which retains heat — seems to be insulating Opportunity from the extreme temperature swings on Mars’ surface. It’s not an ideal temperature by any means, but it’s still not as bad as it could get.
The team’s worst fears right now is that if the rover experiences cold temperatures for too long, it might damage its batteries. This fate befell Spirit, Opportunity’s twin craft in the Mars Exploration Rover mission, in 2010. Engineers plan to use the network to monitor and administer the rover’s energy levels in the following weeks — they need to somehow save as much battery charge as possible while keeping the rover from getting too cold. It has onboard heaters for this purpose, but they drain a lot of energy. One idea the team is considering is activating other equipment to expel energy, which would heat up the bot.
Science operations have been temporarily put on hold for sunnier days. Mission control has requested additional coverage from NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global system of antennas that talks to all the agency’s deep space probes, in an effort to maintain contact with Opportunity.
But I wouldn’t count Opportunity out just yet. It has proved its mettle aplenty in the past. Not only has it gone through dust storms before, but it made it with surprising gusto — the rover has accrued 15 years in the line of duty despite only being intended to last 90 days.
So hang in there little buddy, and don’t let the cold bite your batteries.
If we were to travel back in time to a much earlier time in Earth’s history—let’s say one million years before the present day—we might be surprised to see how different things were long ago. Of course, our planet looked very different, as did the varieties of life that lived on it in ancient times. However, there were other things we would notice if we traveled back to this world of the distant past, such as the length of each day on our planet: one million years ago, a typical day lasted only 18 hours.
What would have caused the days of long ago to have been so much shorter? It actually had to do with a phenomenon that is still occurring today, and one that is causing days over the slow passage of time to get longer and longer.
According to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fact that the moon has slowly been moving further away from the Earth has caused our planet’s rotation to slow down gradually over time. The result of Earth’s spin slowing down, of course, has been lengthier days.
All objects in space exert gravitational influence over one another, in relation to their proximity. The same can be said of all the objects in our solar system, ranging from our sun to the constituent planets each of their moons.
For the study, researchers relied on the science of astrochronology, a process that gauges the age of soil deposits and other sedimentary features astronomically, often in relation to precession—a key factor in what are called Milankovitch cycles—or other astronomical data. With the help of this process, researchers aimed to learn valuable geological about the ancient past, which would produce data nearly as reliable as that which can be studied in the present day.
In the early 20th century, Serbian Mathematician Milutin Milankovitch calculated the periodicity of glacial periods on Earth using information from geological proxies. He determined that the likely governing factors included variations in the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (eccentricity), as well as its precession, and the Earth’s axial tilt.
Milutin Milankovitch
According to the researchers, “beyond about 1.5 billion years ago, the moon would have been close enough that its gravitational interactions with the Earth would have ripped the moon apart.” Earth possess only one natural satellite, while other planets, such as Mars or Jupiter, have numerous satellites in orbit around them, which are often visible from Earth with the visual aid of a telescope. However, Earth’s moon has played a key role in many of the natural forces at play on our planet over the course of the 4.53 billion years since it was formed.
Combining geological data collected via astrochronological processes with statistical data, the study’s authors were able to gauge periods of “maximum volatility” in the ancient past, partially by focusing on what were known as grapoloids, an extinct form of marine invertebrate once a major zooplankton species during the Early Paleozoic.
“We infer that these cycles influenced graptolite speciation and extinction through climate-driven changes to oceanic circulation and structure,” the study’s authors note. “Our results confirm the existence of Milankovitch grand cycles in the Early Paleozoic Era and show that known processes related to the mechanics of the Solar System were shaping marine macroevolutionary rates comparatively early in the history of complex life.”
Another key focus of the study was a 1.4 billion-year-old area in Northern China known as the Xiamaling Formation, as well as 55 million-year-old proxy samples from Walvis Ridge, a deep ocean feature located in the southern Atlantic. Results of the study revealed variations in the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation (precession), as well as changes in rotational features over time. This data was used to reliably determine that days on Earth during these earlier periods were much shorter when compared with today, since the distance between Earth and the moon is greater now than it was during the Paleozoic Era.
There are times where the remarkable unity between separate scientific disciplines, and their complementary nature to one another, becomes simply fascinating. Here, we learn about ancient astronomy from the study of geology, though it can be said to some degree that the same applies in reverse as well, ever-broadening our overall understanding of geological deep time. The study, titled “Pacing of Paleozoic macroevolutionary rates by Milankovitch grand cycles,” was co-authored by James S. Crampton, Stephen R. Meyers, Roger A. Cooper, Peter M. Sadler, Michael Foote, and David Harte.
As a final note, for more on Milankovitch cycles and their use in determining climate changes on Earth throughout prehistory, see here; and for more on the concept of geological “deep time,” see here.
Is anyone even paying attention to the skies anymore? Think about it: when is the last time you stared at the stars or spent a few idle minutes just watching the clouds roll by? Maybe that’s one of the reasons social media and smartphones exist – to keep us staring down at our hands as opposed to noticing the many mysterious phenomena occurring above our heads lately. UFO sightings are one thing, but between the many unexplained mystery booms being heard and felt nationwide, all manners of secretive satellite activity, and unmarked aircraft circling American cities, there’s enough man-made weirdness in the skies to suggest some sort of shadowy activity is afoot overheard.
Space War 2020: coming soon to a low Earth orbit near you.
The latest unexplained aerospace mystery comes out of Oak Harbor, Washington where high-definition weather cameras captured a true-to-life unidentified flying object on camera. This one, however, clearly has a terrestrial origin – although nobody seems to want to claim responsibility.
The weather cameras captured two images of what appears to be a missile or rocket launching from the northern end of the Kitsap Peninsula near Hansville, not far from the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. You might remember that air station from last year when fighter pilots created a skydrawing of a giant phallus in the skies above Washington The footage was captured by Greg Johnson, who runs the Skunk Bay Weather website. Johnson quickly posted the footage to Facebook, writing that neither the nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island nor the Department of Defense claimed responsibility for the launch.
Naval Air Station Whidbey Island
Local news outlets in the Pacific Northwest have reached out for comment, but so far nobody is offering any answers. Is this merely a classified military launch, or is something far more secretive going on here? These so-called “black” rocket launches seem to be becoming more common over the last year, with everyone from SpaceX to the good ol’ fashion Soviet Union Russia joining in on the clandestine-but-quite-visible fun without offering any explanations. Don’t we have a right to know what’s going on above our heads?
THE ERIDANUS VOID: A MEGAMASSIVE BLACK HOLE ONE-BILLION LIGHT YEARSACROSS
THE ERIDANUS VOID: A MEGAMASSIVE BLACK HOLE ONE-BILLION LIGHT YEARSACROSS
The apparent development of a large void of some billion light-years in diameter in the Constellation Eridanus appears to be improbable given current cosmological models. A radical and controversial theory proposes that it is a “universe-in-mass black hole” rather than hypothetical dark matter responsible for the phenomenon described as the expanding-accelerating universe. This radical theory of cosmology suggests that stars at the edge of the Hubble length universe are being consumed by a universe-in-mass black hole.
In August of 2007, astronomers at the University of Minnesota located a gigantic hole in the universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion light-years across, is devoid of any matter such as galaxies, stars, and gas, and neither does it contain the strange and mysterious dark matter, which can be detected but not seen.
Empty places in the universe are not uncommon. It is already known that matter tends to clump and form stars and galaxies, clusters and superclusters, due to the pulling force of gravity. So astronomers have already seen places in the universe where there are groups of matter and places where matter is more scarce. But this new discovery is much larger than any previously known “hole”.
“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” explains Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick was one of the researchers to find the hole.
Rudnick and his team studied data from a survey of the entire sky imaged by the Very Large Array radio telescope. A map of this area of the sky was already known to be an anomaly. It had been called a “cold spot” after a satellite that charts the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered it was less warm than its surroundings. (Overall the cosmic microwave background radiation is exceptionally cold, and the difference seen was only in millionths of a degree.)
The area of sky in which the hole exists lies in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. Eridanus is the constellation of the River, and can be found winding below Taurus and Cetus.
But the hole is not a part of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which is a remnant of the Big Bang. The hole lies between six to 10 billion light-years away. The cold spot is a result of the CMB radition passing through this blank area on its way to Earth. Supporters of the standard model Big Bang theory say the region is colder because of dark energy.
“The Eridanus black hole sits like a giant black spider in an ocean of nothingness, having swallowed up all surrounding galaxies, gas, and light, ...
Dark energy, which has yet to be verified, can be seen as the opposite of gravity. While gravity pulls matter together, dark energy is what is causing the universe to expand, and at an ever-increasing rate. When the radiation from the Big Bang passed through this void in the universe, it had less energy than the radiation that passed through normal regions of space. In a simplistic explanation, the radiation is given a boost when it nears the pull of matter such as galaxies, and dark energy allows the radiation to propel away from these areas without losing the boost when gravity would pull it back. The radiation passing through the empty space does not get the boost and the energy, therefore it is slightly colder.
A contrary theory proposed in The Journal of Cosmology suggests that our observable universe orbits a super-supermassive hole just as the stars of entire galaxies orbit and eventually are swallowed by the supermassive black holes at their center. Like the stars closest to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy which have a greater velocity than stars on the outer arms (where the Earth is located), stars at the edge of our known, Hubble-length universe, orbit one of these “universe-in-mass holes” at a greater velocity than those stars further away thus effecting the red shift and dimness of light and creating the illusion the universe is accelerating and exanding.
The illusion of an “accelerating universe” is due to the gravitational effects of a universe-in-mass black hole at the edge of our Hubble length universe. Stars closest to the hole accelerate to their doom.
Galaxies, stars, planets, moons, molecules, atoms, and so on, are continually recreated and destroyed, and matter and energy, including hydrogen atoms, are continually recycled and reassembled via activities associated with “black holes” also known as graviton-holes, gravity holes, super massive black holes, galaxy-in-mass gravity holes, and universe-in-mass gravity holes, depending on their size and gravity-mass.
In an infinite universe, these galaxy-in-mass black holes become more massive yet and eventually consume all the galaxies which have been caught up by its increasing gravitational grip . Once all surrounding galaxies have been consumed, all that is left is a void, a galaxy-in-mass gravity-hole in the fabric of space-time surrounded by eternal night and empty space.
The billion-light-years across “Eridanus black hole” is typical of black holes which have the gravity-mass of millions of entire galaxies. The Eridanus black hole sits like a giant black spider in an ocean of nothingness, having swallowed up all surrounding galaxies, gas, and light, including radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Based on an analysis of the NRAO VLA Sky Survey data, Rudnick and his team in fact discovered that there was a significant and rather remarkable absence of galaxies even in the distant space surrounding this hole, in the constellation of Eridanus. Thus, the billion-light-years across “Eridnus black hole” must have consumed the gravity-mass of millions of entire galaxies all of which have been collapsed and concentrated into the singularity of this super-galactic hole.
The billion-light-years across “Eridanus black hole” should not be considered unique or as something abnormally large. There appears to be a gravity-hole which may contain the collective mass of all the galaxies which populate a Hubble length universe and which sits just outside our known Hubble length universe; that is, just beyond that region of space which can be observed.
Elsewhere, Is the he VIRGOHI21 black hole an example of what happens when the gravitional mass of an entire galaxy comes to be bound up in the singularity of a single black hole which becomes a galactic orphan devoid of any stars but which would then begin to draw distant galaxies toward it? Stars and entire galaxies are recycled. Stars grow old and die, becoming white dwarfs, brown dwarfs and black holes (Hawking 1990), all of which eventually, in an infinite universe, are swallowed by the supermassive black hole at the galactic center which becomes even more massive in size until all stars, young and old, within its galaxy, disappear inside.
VIRGOHI21 has swallowed all the stars of its galaxy and has the gravity of an entire galaxy, an estimated total mass of about 1/10th the Milky Way, ten times more dark matter than ordinary matter, and is surrounded by vast clouds of hydrogen. Because of its galaxy-in-mass gravity, VIRGOHI21 has pulled up to 2000 galaxies toward it, creating the Virgo Cluster.
More recently, in March 2009, astronomers using the the 1.2-metre UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia published a paper which revealed the discovery of an even larger, 3.5- billion-year-wide void while undertaking the Six Degree Field Galaxy Survey in the southern hemisphere. Enormous cosmic voids and giant concentrations of matter have been observed in a new galaxy survey, one of the biggest completed so far. One of the voids is so large that it is difficult to explain where it came from.
Scientists are still analysing the new map, but a few features stand out immediately. The biggest concentration of matter seen by the survey is a previously known giant pileup of galaxies called the Shapley supercluster, which lies about 600 million light years from Earth.
The survey also found some enormous voids – regions of space that are relatively empty, including one that is about 3.5 billion light years across.
“This is as big as I’ve ever seen,” survey team member John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told New Scientist.
ET hasn’t been in touch. Enduring silence may be the real message from distant and ancient galaxies, if advanced civilisations destroy the conditions for their own survival.
LONDON, 11 June, 2018– US scientists have calculated the conditions for the survival of a civilisation – all advanced civilisations across the vast universe. Their calculations may explain why, so far, extraterrestrial beings have failed to get in touch.
They may also help explain why climate change driven by global warming could be both inevitable and potentially calamitous.
Entirely theoretical research of this kind is the basis of astrobiology: the attempt to understand why life exists in a seemingly hostile universe, and why, if it exists on Earth, it is not visible everywhere. For practical data, astrobiologists have only one instance of life, and one of intelligent advanced civilisation to work with: planet Earth.
Adam Frank, of the University of Rochester, New York, and colleagues report in the journal Astrobiology that they considered the evidence of a vanished civilisation on Earth – the mysterious culture that flourished on Easter Island in the Pacific and then vanished by about 1500AD.
Better insight
“If we’re not the universe’s first civilisation, that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilisation like our own progresses,” said Professor Frank.
“The point is to recognise that driving climate change may be something generic. The laws of physics demand that any young population, building an energy-intensive civilisation like ours, is going to have feedback on its planet. Seeing climate change in this cosmic context may give us better insight into what’s happening to us now and how to deal with it.”
The principle is that any civilisation must change its planet, and the most obvious way would be by exploiting resources in ways that might affect average planetary temperatures.
Under such circumstances the population could reach a peak – and then die off, leaving a few survivors. Or it could foresee the problems and go for sustainability rather than ever more growth. Or population and temperature could reach a peak, at which point the civilisation would collapse. Or – disconcertingly – the threatened civilisation could identify the looming disaster but fail to act in time.
Fatal delay
“The last scenario is the most frightening,” said Professor Frank. “Even if you did the right thing, if you waited too long, you could still have your population collapse.”
Professor Frank himself has explored these questions in earlier studies. In 2014, he and colleagues asked themselves how long an alien civilisation that had discovered fossil fuels, and therefore changed the conditions in which it evolved, could sustain itself.
“If we’re not the universe’s first civilisation, that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilisation like our own progresses”
Archaeological evidence suggests that a culture emerged perhaps 1600 years ago, population grew to a peak, resources were over-exploited, population collapsed and, with it, all memory of what once had been. If an isolated island had a maximum carrying capacity, then so ultimately would an isolated planet. Professor Frank sees global climate change as a planet’s response to civilisation.
“If you go through really strong climate change, then your carrying capacity may drop, because, for example, large-scale agriculture might be strongly disrupted. Imagine if climate change caused rain to stop falling in the Midwest. We wouldn’t be able to grow food, and our population would diminish,” he said.
“If you change the Earth’s climate enough, you might not be able to change it back. Even if you backed off and started to use solar or other less impactful resources, it could be too late, because the planet has already been changing.
“These models show we can’t just think about a population evolving on its own. We have to think about our planets and civilisations co-evolving.” – Climate News Network
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SCIENTISTS DISCOVER CLOUDS OF DIAMONDS SHIMMERING AROUND DISTANT STARS
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER CLOUDS OF DIAMONDS SHIMMERING AROUND DISTANT STARS
A mysterious “glow” from space has been traced to tiny spinning diamonds found around stars.
For decades, scientists have been able to see a faint signal of microwave light coming from parts of the night sky.
Known as the anomalous microwave emission (AME), the glow was an unexpected discovery that first emerged when astronomers took measurements of microwave radiation in space at the turn of the 21st century.
Now, after years of speculation about this unusual glow, a team led by Dr Jane Greaves at Cardiff University has finally pinpointed its source.
“In a Sherlock Holmes-like method of eliminating all other causes, we can confidently say the best candidate capable of producing this microwave glow is the presence of nanodiamonds around these newly formed stars,” said Dr Greaves.
While nanodiamonds are best known as components of meteorites that fall to Earth, these structures were found inside rings of dust and gas surrounding newly formed stars known as protoplanetary discs.
These discs contain the ingredients that ultimately go on to form new planets, and the scorching hot temperatures found inside them provide the perfect conditions for these tiny carbon crystals to form.
Due to a unique arrangement of atoms, nanodiamonds emit radiation as they spin, leading to the glow detected by astronomers on Earth.
As they spin so exceptionally fast, the waves of radiation they emit are small – microwave sized – rather than larger wavelengths that would likely be drowned out by other sources of radiation from space.
To arrive at these conclusions, Dr Greaves and her team zoomed in on three young stars emitting AME light using incredibly powerful telescopes in West Virginia and Australia.
Prior to this it was assumed that some kind of cosmic particle was responsible for the AME effect, but the most likely candidates were dust grains made from molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
However, the scientists were able to take measurements from the stars’ protoplanetary discs and match them with the known infrared signatures of nanodiamonds – confirming them as the source.
They found that the signal specifically matched that given off by nanodiamonds, with layers of hydrogen-bearing molecules on their surfaces.
“This is the first clear detection of anomalous microwave emission coming from protoplanetary disks,” said Dr David Frayer, a co-author of the paper and astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
“This is a cool and unexpected resolution of the puzzle of anomalous microwaves radiation,” said Dr Greaves.
“It’s even more interesting that it was obtained by looking at protoplanetary disks, shedding light on the chemical features of early solar systems, including our own.”
The scientists also suggest their findings could have implications for those investigating the early days of the universe following the Big Bang.
If the universe expanded very rapidly – faster than the speed of light – a trace of this phenomenon could be found in the background microwave levels in space.
“This is good news for those who study polarisation of the cosmic microwave background, since the signal from spinning nanodiamonds would be weakly polarised at best,” said Dr Brian Mason, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who co-authored on the paper.
“This means that astronomers can now make better models of the foreground microwave light from our galaxy, which must be removed to study the distant afterglow of the Big Bang.”
Co-author Dr Anna Scaife from the University of Manchester agreed their discovery was “an exciting result”.
“It’s not often you find yourself putting new words to famous tunes, but ‘AME in the Sky with Diamonds’ seems a thoughtful way of summarising our research,” she said.
1 Million Habitable Planets Could (Theoretically) Orbit a Black Hole. Here's How
1 Million Habitable Planets Could (Theoretically) Orbit a Black Hole. Here's How
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor
Huge numbers of potentially habitable planets could theoretically exist in stable orbits around a supermassive black hole, such as the fictional Gargantua from the 2014 film "Interstellar."
Credit: Paramount Pictures
A black hole could have 1 million planets orbiting near it that are potentially capable of supporting life as we know it, an astrophysicist suggests.
Since there is life virtually everywhere liquid water exists on Earth, astronomers often judge a world as potentially habitable if it orbits within a zone where liquid water could survive on its surface. Our sun's "habitable zone" hosts just one planet (Earth), but the story could be different for other stars. For example, the TRAPPIST-1 system has three Earth-size planets within its habitable zone.
Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the Observatory of Bordeaux in France, researches how planetary systems form and evolve. As part of a column Raymond writes called "Building the Ultimate Solar System," he set out to see how many planets could orbit a black hole. [The Strangest Black Holes in Space]
"I think we can learn from the extremes ... they are basically the boundaries of the box in which we are searching," Raymond told Space.com. "This system is one extreme — the most packed imaginable. It's a fun blend of imagination and science."
There are currently two kinds of black holes that scientists know best, Raymond said. Stellar-mass black holes are equal in mass to a few suns, and form when giant stars die and collapse in on themselves. Supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, and are thought to exist in the hearts of most, if not all, large galaxies. (A third class, intermediate-mass black holes, is poorly understood.)
Black holes are extremely compact. A black hole with the mass of the sunwould be about only 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) wide. In comparison, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole thought to lurk at the heart of the Milky Way, has a mass of about 4 million suns and a diameter of about 14.7 million miles (23.6 million km), or a little more than 40 percent the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
Diagram of a hypothetical sun-black hole solar system.
Credit: Sean Raymond
What if the sun had a black hole companion?
A common question in physics classes is to imagine what would change if the sun were replaced with a black hole of the same mass, Raymond said. The answer is that nothing would change regarding the planets' orbits — if the black hole had the same mass as the sun, the orbits would remain the same. (Life on Earth would obviously suffer from the lack of light and heat in such a scenario, Raymond added.)
If the sun had an equal-mass black hole companion orbiting near it — at, say, one-tenth of an astronomical unit (AU) — the orbits of the solar system's planets would not change much, Raymond noted. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)
Still, assuming these planets kept the same distance from the sun as they do now, the gravitational pull of the sun and its black hole partner would lead these worlds to complete their orbits a bit more quickly, with Earth's year decreasing from 365 days to 258 days, he said.
In the above scenario, the sun and the black hole would complete an orbit with one another every 2.9 days. This means the amount of energy that Earth would receive from the sun would fluctuate between 90 percent and 110 percent of its average as the sun moved farther from or closer to Earth.
More than 500 Earth-like planets could circle a million-solar-mass black hole, given some fortuitous star placement, according to astrophysicist Sean Raymond.
Credit: Sean Raymond
What if a supermassive black hole had a ring of planets?
In addition to imagining life around a stellar-mass black hole, Raymond also calculated how many potentially habitable planets might fit around a supermassive black hole 1 million times the mass of the sun. "That's almost as massive as the one in the center of the Milky Way," he said. It would only be about the diameter of the sun, he added.
Around the sun, the orbits that planets travel can come only so close together before the effects of their gravitational pulls overwhelm those of the sun, leading to unstable orbits. Raymond noted that about six Earth-mass planets can fit in stable concentric orbits within the sun's habitable zone.
In contrast, a supermassive black hole's gravitational pull is extraordinarily strong, enough to easily overwhelm those of planets. If the sun were replaced with a million-solar-mass black hole, 550 Earth-mass planets could fit in stable concentric orbits in the habitable zone, Raymond calculated.
The supermassive black hole's gravity would pull more strongly on the side of each planet closer to the black hole. This would stretch the habitable-zone planets out, although they would not be close enough to get ripped apart, Raymond said.
One way to create a habitable zone around this supermassive black hole is to place stars between it and the planets. A ring of nine sun-like stars 0.5 AU from a million-sun black hole would make each of the 550 Earth-mass planets in the above scenario potentially habitable, Raymond said.
"It would be pretty interesting to live on a planet in this system," Raymond noted. "It would take just a few days to complete an orbit around the black hole — about 1.6 days at the inner edge of the habitable zone and 4.6 days at the outer edge." [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]
At the closest approach, or conjunction, between two such planets, the distance between these worlds would be "about twice the Earth-moon distance," Raymond noted. "At conjunction, each planet's closest neighbor appears about twice the size of the full moon in the sky."
In addition, the next-nearest neighbors would be only twice as far away, and so would appear as big as the full moon during conjunction, Raymond said. Four more planets would be at least half the size of the full moon during conjunction, he added. "Conjunctions happen a little less than once per orbit, so every few days there is a gaggle of giant objects passing across the sky," he said.
The nine suns "would also be a sight to behold," Raymond said. Each would complete its orbit around the black hole every 3 hours.
"That means that every 20 minutes, one of the suns would pass behind the black hole," Raymond said. "When a sun passes behind the black hole, the black hole's gravity bends its light and can act like a lens. It focuses the sun's light toward the planet. This distorts the shape of the sun into a ring ... a pretty sweet light show."
Furthermore, starlight would be stretched by the black hole's gravity. "Stars closer to the black hole would appear redder, and those farther from the black hole would appear bluer," Raymond said.
Given a million-sun black hole with an orbiting ring of nine sun-like stars, 1 million Earth-mass planets could orbit within the habitable zone, in 400 rings of 2,500 planets apiece, astrophysicist Sean Raymond has calculated that.
Credit: Sean Raymond
A million planets around a black hole
In the prior scenario, each planet was alone in its orbit around the supermassive black hole. Raymond also modeled what would happen if multiple planets shared an orbit around a million-sun black hole. Previously, Raymond calculated that 42 Earth-mass planets could orbit in a ring 1 AU from the sun.
To have a stable ring of planets, Raymond noted that planets in that ring must all have roughly the same mass. There must also be at least seven planets in such a ring, and they must be evenly spaced along a circular orbit.
Given a million-sun black hole with an orbiting ring of nine sun-like stars, Raymond calculated that a million Earth-mass planets could orbit within the habitable zone in 400 rings, each holding 2,500 planets spaced apart by about the same distance as that between Earth and the moon. In this scenario, planets would again take anywhere from 1.6 to 4.6 days to complete an orbit. [The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]
Instead of placing nine sun-like stars between the black hole and the planets, Raymond also suggested one could place 36 sun-like stars in a ring 6 AU wide. In this scenario, "each planet is bathed in sunlight from all sides — the planets have no night side," Raymond said. "It's like Asimov's permanent-daytime planet Kalgash."
"You would never feel alone in these systems — the other planets would loom huge in the sky," Raymond added. Neighboring planets would be about 10 times closer than the moon is to Earth, meaning they would appear "about 40 times larger in the sky than the full moon," Raymond said. "That's about the size of a laptop computer held at arm's reach, only up in the sky."
In this latter scenario, the planets would be much closer to the black hole, each completing an orbit in just about 9 hours. This means they would orbit at extraordinary speeds — about 10 percent of the speed of light. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, time would appear to move noticeably more slowly the closer one gets to the speed of light, so "two babies born at the same instant on different rings would age at slightly different rates," Raymond said. "The baby on the inner ring would age slightly more slowly."
The differences in speed between the rings would be great enough to likely make it impossible for a spaceship to travel from one ring to another with any current technology, Raymond said. However, each world would share its ring with thousands of others, and the relative speed between neighboring planets would be almost zero. "A space elevator could connect planets," Raymond said.
If each pair of neighboring planets along a given ring were connected, it would resemble a "Ringworld," a gigantic alien megastructure in Larry Niven's science-fiction epic of the same name. "The difference between this setup and the 'Ringworld' from Larry Niven's book is that, in this case, there is no livable surface area in between the planets," Raymond said.
Where might such million-planet systems come from? "I can imagine super-advanced aliens creating a system like the million-Earth solar system as a cosmic work of art, kind of like the art of skyscrapers or painted icebergs," Raymond said. "A way to say, 'Look how fancy we are,' on the grandest scale."
"Or maybe aliens would create this kind of system as a zoo," Raymond said. "They could have a gradient in climates from the hottest to coldest, and stock the planets with all sorts of creatures they collect across the universe. Of course, they'd have to be careful not to put the wrong combinations of space creatures on the same ring of planets, because that wouldn't end well."
All in all, "it's helpful to try to come up with all the possible planetary systems that might be out there," Raymond said. "Some discoveries could have been anticipated by 'going there' and imagining possibilities that are far outside the norm. These systems are a combination of science fiction and 'going there' in that sense."
"The main thing I go for is simply to try to push the limits of what we think is possible," Raymond concluded.
A bewildered motorist spotted what appears to be a UFO soaring over the road in front of her while she was driving close to a military naval base.
Junelyn Bitalac, 22, was on her way home from taking her mother to work in Hasting, Victoria in late May when she observed the object in the air.
She pulled over to take a closer look and was shocked to see a circular object, five metres in diameter, flying smoothly through clear skies.
Ms Bitalac managed to capture the unbelievable object on film, following it on its flight path before it disappeared behind trees.
After reviewing the video and having no idea what it could be, she posted it online in order to get some answers.
'I really do believe in aliens and extra-terrestrial life so I was quite amazed to spot what I saw – that's why I pulled out my phone straight away,' Ms Bitalac said.
The strange object pictured appears to be 5m in diameter and was spotted only 6km from a military naval base in Victoria
Once the video was re-posted on conspiracy page secureteam10, it managed to gain over 100,000 views in just a matter of hours.
Some online users observed the fact that Hastings is only 6km away from a naval military based - HMAS Cerberus on the Mornington Peninsula, with one user commenting 'Right next to military base - must be a drone'.
Junelyn Bitalac was on her way home from taking her mother to work in Hasting, Victoria when she observed the object in the air
Ms Bitalac said that most people who watched the video found the object quite unusual.
'I have never seen anything like it and have no clue what it was. But it is very interesting that I spotted it so close to a military base.'
More about the mind-boggling new studies suggesting that there could be many parallel universes beyond our own, where life is able to flourish.
Our galaxy, and the universe in general, formed in a way that is ideal to support life. Could other universes also be home to life of some kind? Image via Yuri Beletsky Nightscapes.
When it comes to searching for life elsewhere in the universe, we think of the rovers on Mars, or of sending probes to Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Or we think of looking for habitable exoplanets or exomoons. The universe we’re in feels infinite with possibilities, but – in contemplating alien life – could we go beyond even our own universe? Writing at NBC News Mach on May 28, 2018, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, ponders this very theoretical, yet exciting idea of the possibility of life in parallel universes.
Shostak’s article is based on two related papers, published in May, in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He focuses on explanations related to a hypothetical substance in our universe known as dark energy. The effect of dark energy appears to be a faster expansion of our universe over time.
The idea of parallel universes isn’t new. You find it in many fields of thought. But, in the physics community, the debate about this concept – which is sometimes called the multiverse hypothesis – has heated up in recent years. As Shostak explained in his Mach article:
The idea that other universes might exist arises from the realization that the Big Bang might not have been a unique event but a common one. How common? Stanford University physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have estimated that the number of unique parallel universes – ones that are independent of the cosmos you know and adore – could be written as a one followed by 10 thousand trillion zeroes. That’s not a number that has a name, and certainly not one you will ever encounter in the real world. I figure it would require 10 billion notebooks just to write this number down.
So, to paraphrase Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, if our cosmos is the only one with life, then that’s an awful waste of universes.
How does dark energy relate to these possible parallel universes?
In their previous studies, physicists have concluded that our universe might have less dark energy than other universes, if those universes do exist. Parallel universes might have so much dark energy that stars and planets cannot form. In other words, in most universes, it might be the case that more dark energy leads to even faster expansion of the universe, preventing star- and planet-formation, making life unlikely.
The new studies, from scientists in the U.K., Australia and Holland, suggests dark energy doesn’t play a such a crucial role in whether parallel universes can support life, or not. As Shostak said:
Using computer models, the research team found they could vary the strength of dark energy from zero to several hundred times its value in our universe, and everything remained copacetic. Dark energy didn’t need to be any particular strength for galaxies and stars to form.
From the vantage point of life in other universes, that might be good news.
Is our universe just one of many?
There are still other factors to consider however, such as differences in nuclear or gravitational forces. Some other universes may still be completely sterile, unlike ours which has formed in ways that are ideal for life to exist. Shostak explained:
[Our universe’s] physical properties are remarkably suitable for the existence of life. If the forces that hold atoms together were even a bit different, the atomic reactions that power the stars wouldn’t work, and our cosmos would consist of nothing but hydrogen. Tweak those constants another way, and stars would burn themselves out so quickly that there would have been no time for the evolution of microbes, dinosaurs, or you. If the strength of gravity were just slightly altered, our universe would have either expanded too rapidly after the Big Bang for stars and galaxies to form – or would have collapsed in a Big Crunch.
It was also thought that dark matter was essential for galaxies to form, but, recently, the 10-billion-year-old galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, 65 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, contains 400 times less dark matter than had been expected. That finding was published on March 28, 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. As Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University commented:
You don’t expect a galaxy to have no dark matter because dark matter is not something a galaxy can just opt out of.
All of this is conjecture, informed by the tools of modern physics and by high-powered computer modeling. It is speculative, but interesting food for thought. Parallel universes, dark energy and dark matter are the kinds of subjects which have long been relegated to science fiction, but today’s science is shedding new light on just how incredible the cosmos really is.
Thus, while we’re still searching for evidence of alien life in our own universe, the possibility of an almost infinite number of such universes – some inhabited – is truly mind-blowing.
Scanning electron microscope image of a purported bacteria-like fossil in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001. We are searching for evidence of alien life in our solar system and beyond. What about other universes?
Image via NASA.
Bottom line: As discussed previously at EarthSky, new research has suggested that the Big Bang may have been only one of countless others, that parallel universes might exist, but that life might not be possible in those other universes. Writing at NBC News Mach, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute provides some insights on new studies, suggesting that might not be so.
WETENSCHAP Er zit een heuse nieuwe ‘gold rush’ aan te komen, maar deze keer in de ruimte. NASA en tal van andere bedrijven maken jacht op zeldzame grondstoffen op asteroïden die in totaal tot wel 700 triljoen dollar waard zouden zijn. 700 triljoen, dat is 700 miljard miljard, ofwel 700.000.000.000.000.000.000 dollar…
Bankiers van Goldman Sachs zeiden het al: de eerste biljonair (iemand die 1.000 miljard bezit) zal geen cryptobelegger of uitvinder zijn, maar wel een ontmijner van ruimtegrondstoffen. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA schat de totale waarde van de asteroïden binnen bereik op niet minder dan 700 triljoen dollar. Mocht je dat bedrag verdelen onder de wereldbevolking, dan zou elke mens op aarde 100 miljard dollar toegestopt krijgen. Volgens verschillende experten kan een dergelijke kapitaalsinjectie de wereldeconomie zelfs vernietigen.
Verschillende bedrijven ontwikkelen al technologieën om ruimtegesteente te ontginnen. Deep Space Industries ontwikkelt momenteel een speciale stoomschroef en het Britse AMC (Asteroid Mining Corporation) wil straks kleine ruimtetuigen uitsturen om platina te ontginnen op asteroïden. Het Amerikaanse bedrijf Planetary Resources, dat gesteund wordt door de beroemde Titanic-regisseur James Cameron, is momenteel druk in de weer met het ontwikkelen van robotvoertuigen die zeldzame grondstoffen van asteroïden kunnen halen.
NASA hoopt tegen 2022 de eerste missie de ruimte in te sturen om asteroïden te ontginnnen. De organisatie schat de totale opbrengst van die missie op zo’n 9.000 biljard euro, dat is 9.000 miljoen miljard, een haast onvatbaar bedrag.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution
Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution
by Marlowe Hood
For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same," Mark Stoeckle from the Rockefeller University in New York told AFP
Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge?
And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots—called "DNA barcodes"—collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?
That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.
It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.
But is that true?
"The answer is no," said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.
For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same," he told AFP.
The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
"This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," Thaler told AFP.
That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?
Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?
Simpler, cheaper
To understand the answer, one has to understand DNA barcoding. Animals have two kinds of DNA.
The one we are most familiar with, nuclear DNA, is passed down in most animals by male and female parents and contains the genetic blueprint for each individual.
In analysing DNA barcodes across 100,000 species, researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans
The genome—made up of DNA—is constructed with four types of molecules arranged in pairs. In humans, there are three billion of these pairs, grouped into about 20,000 genes.
But all animals also have DNA in their mitochondria, which are the tiny structures inside each cell that convert energy from food into a form that cells can use.
Mitochondria contain 37 genes, and one of them, known as COI, is used to do DNA barcoding.
Unlike the genes in nuclear DNA, which can differ greatly from species to species, all animals have the same set of mitochondrial DNA, providing a common basis for comparison.
Mitochondrial DNA is also a lot simpler, and cheaper, to isolate.
Around 2002, Canadian molecular biologist Paul Hebert—who coined the term "DNA barcode"—figured out a way to identify species by analysing the COI gene.
"The mitochondrial sequence has proved perfect for this all-animal approach because it has just the right balance of two conflicting properties," said Thaler.
'Neutral' mutations
On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.
On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.
"It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain," Thaler said.
In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.
What they saw was a lack of variation in so-called "neutral" mutations, which are the slight changes in DNA across generations that neither help nor hurt an individual's chances of survival.
In other words, they were irrelevant in terms of the natural and sexual drivers of evolution.
A new DNA study found that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago
How similar or not these "neutral" mutations are to each other is like tree rings—they reveal the approximate age of a species.
Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?
Darwin perplexed
Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.
"Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey—all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply," he told AFP, commenting on the study.
"In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species."
But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population "bottleneck" is only a partial explanation at best.
"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.
"It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."
In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.
And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between.
"If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."
The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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