By Matt Blitz

The U.S. government has finally admitted that UFOs are real..sort of.

This past week, the U.S. Navy confirmed that several videos—two of which were first released by The New York Times in 2017 depicting so-called “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" (UAP)—are authentic. The three videos, (another was later published by The Washington Post), each depicting quick-moving oblong-shaped objects, were shot by Navy pilots during training exercises in 2004 and 2015. The Navy has yet to identify the objects in the video, and along with the Department of Defense, said the videos should have never been made public.

While a “UAP” may be an unfamiliar term, that’s sort of the point. UAPs are essentially the new UFO—but with a lot less historical baggage. A Navy spokesman told The Washington Post that the acronym “UFO” carries so much stigma that it discourages someone from reporting a sighting.

“That term is so loaded at this point, that you are never going to change people’s understanding of what it means,” journalist Leslie Kean, who co-wrote the 2017 New York Times investigation into the Pentagon’s UFO (or UAP) program, tells Popular Mechanics. “All you can do is adopt a new one.”

But humans didn’t just start seeing UFOs darting around above our heads in just the past few weeks...or in 2015, 2004, 1947, or even 1639. Humans have seen and encountered unidentified flying objects for millennia.

BIBLICAL BEGINNINGS

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Gustave Doré, 1885.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Unidentified flying objects have been recorded throughout human history. The only thing that’s changed is how people—stretched across thousands of years—have interpreted these unexplainable events.

“Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all the major religions actually have pictures and anecdotes of ariel phenomenon,” Diana Walsh Pasulka, author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and a professor of philosophy and religion at UNC Wilmington tells Popular Mechanics.

Some of them were comets, asteroids, meteors, and other atmospheric optical phenomena that were scientifically unknown to our ancient ancestors, but others still defy modern explanations.

Pasulka explains in nearly every religion, there are “contact events” where an important figure makes contact with a heavenly figure. Moses and the burning bush, Mohammad and the angel Gabriel, and the Virgin Mary’s own angelic visitation.

WHEN RELIGION IS A LENS TO EXPLAIN THE UNIVERSE, UNEXPLAINABLE PHENOMENA CAN BECOME RELIGION.

“These are human’s first contact with something they interpret to not be human or of this planet. And, if they are [not of this planet], they are de facto extraterrestrial.”

Pasulka says the Torah’s tale of Jacob’s fight with an angel is a good example of an encounter with aerial phenomenon that was turned into a religious narrative. “When you go back to the original source and read it in its original language... it wouldn’t look like what the artists’ rendition of it are in Western history,” says Pasulka, “It would look like he's fighting some kind of being from outer space.”

Pasulka isn’t saying that a biblical figure fought an alien and it turned into a religious text, but that vision of a figure descending from the sky could have come from a shared, human experience or observation. When religion is a lens to explain the universe, unexplainable phenomena can become religion.

THE ERA OF AIRSHIPS

PRINT COLLECTORGETTY IMAGES

In his 2010 book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, French engineer and astronomer Jacques Vallee analyzes 500 historical reports of aerial phenomenon sightings.

The book’s earliest sighting, dating back nearly 3,500 years in modern-day Sudan, is from a stela (granite slab) of Gebel Barkal that tells the tale of how a falling star “the like had not happened before” struck down the Nubians in defeat. For the Egyptian victors, it was looked upon as a miracle and spiritual intervention.

Mystery airship illustrated in the San Francisco Call in 1896.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

These mysterious sightings dot human history through out Vallee’s book, culminating in a phenomena in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1879. It’s a “large, unexplained airship” that was visible for an hour across the city before it “disappeared on the horizon.”

Pasulka says by the late 19th century humans began to shift their interpretation of the unknown from a religious framework to a technological one. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, what was happening on Earth was seeping into how we interpret what we saw in the sky. In 1896 and 1897, mysterious “airships” were again supposedly seen all over the U.S, with many witnesses even signing affidavits.

Even Thomas Edison weighed in by saying “you can take it from me that it is a pure fake...I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future but...it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret.”

By the late 19th century, hydrogen-filled airships were in development, and a few years later, in 1900, the first Zeppelin would make its maiden voyage. Whatever aerial phenomenon people in 1897 were seeing, it looked enough like a modern technological marvel of the day so that is what it became.

THE DAWN OF THE UFO

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In November 1944, late into World War II, American fighter pilots started observing orange, glowing lights. A few weeks later, one pilot saw a red-ish, wingless cigar-shape object. The pilots named these “foo fighters” after a nonsense phrase used in a popular cartoon about firefighters (and, yes, the band is named after this incident). The media got ahold of the story, and theories weren’t far behind.

Could they be optical illusions? Or a hallucination from battle fatigue? Or could these aerial phenomena be super-secret Nazi weapons? The last theory was what captured the public’s attention. After all, the pilots were flying in Axis territory and plenty of rumors surrounded the German’s taste for outlandish science projects, like a Nazi lunar base for example. In the end, it was never established exactly what these foo fighters were (and a 1953 panel would eventually conclude that it was likely an electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena).

Kenneth Arnold, middle, and two other pilots examine a UFO photo.

BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES

But June 24, 1947, would change everything.

While searching for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane, experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold diverted from his original flight path to help search the southwest slope of Mount Rainier. During the search, Arnold observed nine “peculiar-looking” and possibly “completely round” objects flying in a formation that reminded him of geese. It was later estimated they were flying in excess of 1,000 miles per hour. When he reported it (and assuming they were a new type of jet or experimental military aircraft), the Army Air Corps dismissed it as a mirage or hallucination.

Within days, others came out in support of Arnold saying they saw a similar aerial phenomenon. Arnold, perturbed that the military dismissed his account, did interviews with local press. When he described to reporter Bill Bequette from the East Oregonian newspaper what he saw looked “saucer-like,” Bequette termed them “flying saucers,” the first time the term was ever used.

A few years later, the term “U.F.O” was coined by the Air Force. Prominently used in the 1953 Robertson Panel report, the same panel that dismissed “foo fighters,” the acronym proved purposeful in its lack of clarity.

“IT WAS UNIMAGINABLE THAT THE RUSSIANS COULD HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THIS.”

“It was supposed to mean something unidentified. Period. Full stop,” says Kean. “And it’s a pretty reasonable term to use. It could mean anything.”

The first assumption of what Arnold and others had seen from both the U.S. military and the public was that it was the Soviets. The Cold War was quickly warming up in 1953 and atomic bomb testings, secret military exercises, and build-up of arms were all possibilities.

“There was a whole question about if they were Russian, but they wrote that off pretty early on because of the extreme sophistication of the technology,” says Kean, who along with reporting for the New York Times is the author of the book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record. “It was unimaginable that the Russians could have something like this.”

AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL THREAT?

The Lubbock Lights were an aerial phenomenon above Lubbock, Texas. One episode of the UFO mania that gripped the U.S. in the early 50s.

BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES

In response to these late 1940s sightings, the Air Force set up a secret project with the code name “Sign” to investigate these incidents. But the more the Air Force researched, the more stumped they became. “There are so many documents that show at the highest levels [the U.S. military] didn’t know what they were,” says Kean.

According to her book, there was a divide between those who thought there was a more conventional answer—like a mirage, natural phenomena, inaccuracy, or secret military technology—to those who believed these aerial phenomena were not from this planet.

A host of sightings in July 1952, including over Washington D.C., led to the broadest admission that the U.S. government and military would make that there was indeed some sort of aerial phenomena soaring over U.S. airspace. With the project now being called “Blue Book,” the FBI was briefed by Major General John Samford’s office, the director of intelligence for the Air Force.

“SOME MILITARY OFFICIALS ARE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING THE POSSIBILITY OF PLANETARY SHIPS.”

As Kean’s book depicts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was told by a branch of the U.S. military that “it was not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars.” Other FBI memos stated that “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of planetary ships.”

The real worry—no matter if they were Russians or extraterrestrials—was if it was a threat to national security. On July 29, 1952, Major General Samford held a press conference where he said that they looked into nearly two thousand reports and have been able to adequately account for most of them. But they were still looking into the few “relatively incredible things” that they could not explain.

However, they’ve been able to reach one conclusion about these sightings and that was “it does not contain any pattern of purpose or of consistency that we can relate to any conceivable threat to the United States.”

“I don’t think they ever believed it wasn’t a national security threat. They just didn’t know what else to do at that point,” says Kean. “What are they going to tell people? They’re just not going to say ‘Well, there’s things flying around in our sky that demonstrate technology that we can’t explain.’ That’s not something you want to announce to the public.”

THE MYSTERY REMAINS

JOSHUA ROBERTSGETTY IMAGES

When Robertson Panel filed its report in early 1953, it came to two conclusions about how to best deal with these sightings as it related to the public: training them to properly identify natural phenomenon (meteors, mirages, noctilucent clouds) and human-made objects (weather balloons, reflective aircraft) and debunking.

And that’s exactly what federal authorities did for more than six decades. Through every sighting, incident, report, unexplained occurrence—from Roswell to Area 51 to 2006’s O’Hare sighting—the U.S. government and military has debunked or, just as often, remained silent, but recent events suggest a new strategy in the works.

What made the December 16th, 2017, New York Times article so shocking wasn’t that it had on record several very credible sources saying that the government had looked into UFOs recently. That much could probably be assumed based on the military’s 1940s and 1950s history with them. It’s what they’ve potentially discovered and found since that time.

The $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program officially ran for about five years, from 2007 to 2012. This much was acknowledged by the Pentagon, but Luis Elizondo, who headed the program until his 2017 resignation, told the Times that it continued to run beyond 2012.

In that time, Elizondo said that the program had investigated a number of UAPs, including the ones that the U.S. Navy confirmed were authentic. The program also studied physical effects from encounters with the objects, the technology that could in theory do what those said they observed, and the possible threat it posed to national security.

But the most jaw-dropping detail is one that’s a bit buried: the program recovered materials from these UAPs.

Kean says she believes there’s a lot going on behind-the-scenes. She thinks research is being done on these recovered materials to understand what they are. Alluding to the fact that the U.S. may not be the only country in possession of these materials—that there is a secretive global race associated with them.

“From what I’ve been told, it’s a competitive thing. Whoever understands the technology first has a real advantage,” says Kean. “My sense of it is that there’s an undercurrent of competition among Russia, China, and the U.S.”

Sources have also told her that the physics of how these objects move has already, theoretically, been cracked.

“What they’ve figured out is very futuristic. It would be a very difficult thing to [replicate], but they can understand how it’s done.” Scientists and medical experts are also attempting to understand the biological effects on those humans who’ve come close to these phenomenons.

I WANT TO BELIEVE

• The Real Story Behind the Myth of Area 51

• What We Know About The Navy’s UFOs

• All Our UFO Covers from Over the Years

Kean thinks the government is changing on how they deal with these reports of aerial phenomena. In this era of Youtube and cell phone cameras, it’s becoming more common to see these types of videos. After all, more than two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than they are telling the public.

Kean is convinced that there are unexplained aerial phenomena, but not convinced its extraterrestrials. “It’s a valid hypothesis, but I don’t think for a moment that we know what it is [yet].”

Other hypotheses and speculations out there include interdimensions, time travelers, or a super-secret weapons or aircraft developed by another nation on this planet. Even after decades of research, it’s still an unknown. What was once a mystery in ancient times, remains a mystery today.

In the end, Kean can only be certain of one thing: “You are just stuck with something that you can’t explain.”

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 14:29 geschreven door peter  

Ex Air Force Officer Describes Four Types of Extraterrestrial Beings The Government Knows About

Richard Doty is a retired Air Force Special investigations officer (AFSIO), and his job was to spread disinformation about the UFO subject during his time with the Air Force. Spreading disinformation about the reality of UFOs is no secret, and in Doty’s case, he admitted to infiltrating UFO circles along with his colleagues to feed ufologists and journalists lies and half truths so that they would never understand any real truth. This is something I believe is still occurring within the UFO community–multiple disinformation campaigns that are now perhaps more sophisticated as well as a number of frauds who are sharing their ‘experiences’ when they’ve really had done. In fact, it was decades ago when the very first Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Roscoe  Hillenkoetter, stated to The New York Times:

It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings. Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. To hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.

 Several astronauts have been quite outspoken about UFOs, like Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell and high ranking military/government personnel from around the world as well. On top of all of this, the simple fact that many people have had their own experiences has also sparked interest in the subject. There are also multiple videos that’ve been released by governments around the world, as a couple came from the Pentagon over the past few years via the To The Stars Academy. Here’s a picture that the Canadian Air Force released in the 60s. It’s no secret that UFOs have been a topic of concern, as academic publications, radar trackings, and millions of pages of documents have been released from multiple governments detailing numerous interesting encounters with these objects.

So where does the extraterrestrial question come into play? It comes from hundreds, if not thousands, of people like the ones mentioned above. Credible sources with verified backgrounds have alluded to the fact that these objects are indeed extraterrestrial, and that this can be verified.

Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered.

– Dr. Edgar Mitchell (source)

Not long ago, a leaked document exposed notes taken by legendary scientist Dr. Eric Davis during a meeting he had with Admiral Thomas Ray Wilson, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, regarding extraterrestrial space crafts. You can read more about that document and access it here.

This is why it’s always interesting to hear such people talk about actual extraterrestrial entities rather than ‘UFOs.’ UFOs are no longer taboo within the mainstream, but the idea that some of them are extraterrestrial still seems to be a touchy subject.

According to Richard Doty, in the interview below with Dr. Steven Greer, maker of the hit documentary that’s currently on Netflix called “Unacknowledged,” the US government is aware of at least four different extraterrestrial species that’ve visited this planet.

Dr. Greer is well-known for interviewing multiple people with interesting, verified backgrounds, especially from the military and intelligence agencies. He’s a major reason as to why the topic of UFOs has garnered so much attention.

According to Doty:

There were four types of crafts that they showed us, four types of extraterrestrials, and they never explained to us where they got the pictures of these extraterrestrials but there were actually pictures of these weird looking creatures that showed on the film that were extraterrestrials from some other location different from where the EBENs came from.

One was looking like an insect, had huge eyes, very large head, a small body. They had two different appendages on their arms, they had basically two hands on each arm. They had several joints in their legs, and they had a bubble type appendage in the front and a lump or something in the back, that was one of them. They were about the size of an average human.

The second one was a very tall thing, very very thin humanoid that had long arms. Arms reached down probably to its knees, they had regular hands. Their faces were very very thin. They were almost human looking, unless you really really study them and got real close to them. They didn’t have any hair, they had cat like eyes.

And then there was a third creature… It looked something like the EBEN but it was bigger, it had a bigger body. I found out later in a briefing that I had, in 1995, that that was a genetically engineered creature that the EBENs made… They knew it was genetically engineered, and I don’t know how, they didn’t ever tell us how.

The “EBENs,” which stands for extraterrestrial biological entities, Doty describes as “about four feet tall” and that they “didn’t appear to have any ears, they had an indentation for the nose. They had very big eyes. They had a very tight fitting suit, almost looked like they were nude, but they actually had a very thin but tight fitting suit on. No thumbs just four fingers, suction devices on their tips of their fingers. One of them had a head apparatus on it, maybe a helmet or some kind of an ear phone, or some type of device that they were communicating with the craft or with something else, and they found a number of different objects in the craft. They had a piece of what they thought was plexiglass that they kept for years before they figured out it was an energy device for the craft.”

Doty goes on to explain that multiple crafts have been shown to use zero-point energy–meaning they’ve found a way to extract energy from the vacuum of space.

Jack Kasher, Ph.D, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Nebraska, once expressed “there is another way, whether it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that they’re here shows us that they found a way.” (source)

You can watch the full interview below.

Doty is not the only one to claim that the global elite is aware of extraterrestrial beings. Paul Hellyer, who was the Canadian Minister of National Defense in the 1960s during the Cold War, claimed that “At least four known alien species have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.”

“They have different agendas… Nearly all are benign and benevolent, they want to help us, [but] there may be one or two species which do not… They come from various places. For a long while, I only knew about ones that came from different star systems… There are some in our star system, there are actually extraterrestrials who live on a planet called Andromedia, which is one of the moons of Saturn, and that there are others on Venus, and some on Mars, and that they may be interacting between themselves… because there is what is called a federation of these people, and they have rules.”

– Paul Hellyer (source)

These people have nothing to gain but ridicule for speaking up about these things. And it’s not just witness testimony, it’s testimony that corroborates with many others in similar positions.

Lyn Buchanan, one of the STARGATE army remote viewers, claims, as multiple others within the program have, that he was tasked to find out information on extraterrestrial groups that were/are visiting the planet.

There are multiple other examples!

Confirming Doty’s Identity

As far as Doty’s identity, UFO researcher Alejandro Rojas wrote a piece for Huffington Post in 2014 linking some very interesting documents regarding one of Doty’s misinformation missions, one of which he also speaks about in the interview below. The Guardian has confirmed his identity, as do these videos. But what really did it for me was Hal Puthoff’s response to this well-known UFO researcher.

Hal Puthoff is an American physicist who earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. His research includes theoretical and experimental projects in electrodynamics, quantum physics, gravitation, cosmology, energy research and more. His professional background includes engineering work at General Electric and Sperry as well as three and a half years spent at the U.S. Department of Defence. He served various government agencies, the Executive Branch, and Congress as a consultant on leading-edge technologies and future technology trends. He has been awarded the DoD Certificate of Commendation for Outstanding Performance, post-doc appointments at Stanford University as Research Associate, and more.

He is currently part of the team at the To The Stars Academy and was also the co-founder of the US Government’s STARGATE program, which examined parapsychology.

You can view a number of his publications here.

Doty claimed that he worked with Puthoff on multiple occasions and also mentioned him in the interview below. I came across a tweet from well-known UFO researcher Grant Cameron who tweeted that Hal Puthoff confirmed Doty’s identity. Furthermore, another popular and well-known UFO researcher, James Iandoli, also asked Puthoff to comment on Doty’s claims, and he did.

Dr. Steven Greer does not interview anybody whose credentials he cannot verify, which is also a noteworthy point. Doty’s identify has been confirmed by many, something which is hard to do when you’ve held these types of positions within intelligence agencies.

It’s safe to say that Doty is who he claims to be. Whether or not he is telling the truth is up to you to decide.

The Takeaway

Again, the reality of UFOs performing maneuverers that defy our known laws of aerodynamics and travelling at speeds no known aircraft made by humans can travel at is firmly established thanks to whistleblower testimony, radar tracking data, videos, and photographs. The evidence is overwhelming. The extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation behind the UFO phenomenon seems to be the most plausible explanation, and in my opinion the most obvious. There are many questions to still be asked and answered, and many things still remain uncovered. This is a topic that leaves no aspect of humanity untouched.

{ https://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 12:47 geschreven door peter  

25-09-2019 om 12:38 geschreven door peter  

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s …”

It’s yet another mysterious object spotted on the International Space Station’s live video feed which some people seem to be able to scrutinize 24/7 and pick up far more anomalies than NASA does – or at least is willing to admit to seeing before the feed gets mysteriously shut down for various and sundry reasons that seem puzzling and provocative to those looking for UFOs and conspiracies. Those people include someone named “Scott M,” who sent a segment of the live feed to “Your Earth Watchman,” — MrMBB333 – who posted it on his YouTube channel and expanded/expounded on it. (FYI — MrMBB333 hosts an interesting site and is a great source for unusual world weather and seismic phenomena in addition to the interesting videos he receives of UFOs, etc.)

“Huge craft spotted hovering about Earth on ISS Live feed. The real McCoy!”

The real McCoy? Really? That well-used axiom most likely originated in Scotland (where an ad referred to the real “McKay”) but the more popular explanation ties it to a Canadian-born African-American inventor and engineer named Elijah McCoy. That McCoy, who became a U.S. citizen and died in Detroit in 1929, held 57 U.S. patents, mostly for lubrication systems in steam engines, but also a couple of interesting ones for a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler. However, his lubrication inventions were said to be so good, engineers supposedly made sure they weren’t getting some cheapo knock-off by asking for “the real McCoy.”

Elijah McCoy – the ‘real McCoy’

“This is not a reflection, in fact, this object over here as you’ll see reflects light itself […] It seems to be some sort of large triangular craft.”

MrMBB333 magnifies the video of a video (you can watch it here) until the tiny blob looks like … a bigger blob. (It’s almost impossible to size objects seen outside the ISS.) To him, it’s triangular, which always leads to suppositions that this is a TR-3B or perhaps some next generation of the craft whose first generation we’re still not quite certain is the explanation for various triangular UFOs seen around the world. MrMBB333 (or perhaps Scott M – it’s not always clear when he’s quoting the person who sent him the video a week ago) identifies three points on the UFO which he’s convinced are not reflections, making them lights on the corners of whatever it is that was recorded on the ISS feed.

Was this what the ISS camera picked up?

As those who have seen videos of ISS feeds before pointed out in the comments, this one did not cut out but had the UFO in its field until it appeared to fly off, leaving just the NASA logo. Other commenters point out correctly that this comes at about the same time as the US Navy confirmed that those three famous “tic-tac” UFOs spotted by pilots and radar operators were real and they should not have been released. And of course, it’s just a few weeks after President Trump officially christened the Space Force.

Those are all interesting dots and fun to connect, but would inventor Elijah McCoy or ‘Scotty’ McKay, given just this video, call the first dot — the blob in the video — “the real McCoy”?

Would you?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-09-2019 om 12:27 geschreven door peter  

This artist's impression shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4921 based on observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Credit: ICRAR, NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

“In the most extreme regions of the Universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why.”

It sounds like a great opening to a science fiction thriller … but it’s real. A team of Canadian astronomers is concerned enough about this phenomenon (maybe they realized that WE live in a galaxy?) and has launched a project to study a nearby galaxy in hopes of determining what mysterious force is destroying massive galaxy clusters in a way that sounds pretty painful on a galactic level.

“This process leads to a slow, inexorable shut down in star formation known, somewhat morbidly, as starvation or strangulation.”

Toby Brown, Post Doctorate Fellow in Astrophysics at McMaster University, describes in The Conversation what he and other astronomers have observed happening to galaxy clusters – groups of thousands of galaxies exerting massive gravitational forces on each other that propel them to travel at high speeds (thousands of km-per-second) and heat the plasma between them until it glows ultravioletly. It’s the makings of a film industry CGI developer’s wildest dreams. In reality, it’s not the place you want to be.

“It is these interactions that can kill off — or quench — their star formation.”

Brown is leading 30 colleagues in a new program called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO). They’ll be using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) – a cluster of connected radio dishes in Chile’s Atacama desert — to map molecular hydrogen gas in 51 galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the galaxy cluster closet to the Milky Way.

Milky Way

Did they chose the Virgo Cluster because it’s the closest or because it’s about to strangle itself to death in a blaze of cosmic glory that could impact the Milky Way?

I can see you’re getting a little worried. According to Brown, Virgo is an ideal cluster to study because it’s in the process of forming stars. That sounds contradictory to stars dying, but that happens during formation as new galaxies travel (or fall) through the cluster.

“As galaxies fall through clusters, the intergalactic plasma can rapidly remove their gas in a violent process called ram pressure stripping. When you remove the fuel for star formation, you effectively kill the galaxy, turning it into a dead object in which no new stars are formed. In addition, the high temperature of clusters can stop hot gas cooling and condensing onto galaxies. In this case, the gas in the galaxy isn’t actively removed by the environment but is consumed as it forms stars.”

While “ram pressure stripping” sounds like something that requires a heavy-duty stripper pole, Brown says it and “starvation” are the two big ways to kill a galaxy in a cluster, and the Virgo Cluster looks like the perfect location for VERTICO to use ALM to look for and map hydrogen molecules, which will guide the team in the direction of possibly solving the mystery of what’s killing galaxies at the edge of the universe.

Note to VERTICO:  it will make a better movie if you can find some aliens fleeing the ram pressure stripping or maybe sending a ship with a baby on it to Earth.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-09-2019 om 12:06 geschreven door peter  

Croc-like Creature Terrorized Triassic Dinosaurs 210 Million Years Ago

Source: 

• http://www.ineffableisland.com/2019/09/croc-like-creature-terrorized-triassic.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 11:41 geschreven door peter  

Possible Alien Abduction In Gulfport Mississippi

JULY 1966 …… GULFPORT MISSISSIPPI

We shall call our experiencer Eve. Eve was only 12 years old when she had an eerie encounter with the unknown. She was living with her Aunt and her cousins in Gulfport, Mississippi during the summer (July) of 1966. Gulfport is only a short distance down the coast from Pascagoula, which would be host to the landmark 1973 abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker.

At the bewitching age between childhood and adulthood, Eve would portray both roles this particular day. Playing in the back yard with her cousins, she began to feel a strange sensation… like something or someone was calling her, or watching her.

She turned to look behind her, and was stunned by the sight of a craft in the distance. The craft had an array of colored lights, a pretty and alluring sight to a twelve-year-old girl. The lights were blinking on and off. They encircled the strange craft, and these lights seemed to be of a color she had not seen before, and were extremely bright and clear. In her own words, “The more I looked, the more I wanted to keep looking.”

Though the onset of the sighting had been unnerving, she now felt a strange sense of contentment. The sight of the beautifully colored lights made her happy. She could not take her eyes off the craft and its twinkling lights.

The sighting had interrupted the children’s game of “hide and seek.” Eve was “it,” and since she was taking too long to find anyone, the others began to call for her. Eve could hear their cries, but she could not respond to their pleas. She was so strongly drawn to the craft, it was if she was glued to its presence… its charm.

The importance of her game was now insignificant compared to the strange object that had her mesmerized. Finally one of the impatient children found her and tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention. This jolted her back to reality, and she was then able to move. Eve was asked, “Why weren’t you trying to find us?” She responded, “I don’t know, but isn’t it pretty?” still drawn to the object.

She had not even turned toward her playmate, the craft still holding her attention. Eve pointed to the hovering, distant object. She said, “Look at that!” Her friend asked, “What is it?” The rest of the “hide and seek” gang was now on the scene, staring at the UFO. Mostly frightened, they wanted to leave, afraid it would “get them.”

One of the kids told Eve to come inside, but Eve refused, wanting to continue her watch.

Being warned that she might get into trouble by being outside after dark, Eve had watched her friends run to the back door, and then as she turned back to get one more look at the craft, she noticed it was much closer now. She could see two beings inside through a window! She could make out part of one of their bodies, and another being seemed to be controlling the UFO. The two appeared to be conversing with each other.

Eve felt as if they were talking about her, the lone person drawn to their presence. Both of the beings had long, slender arms, and the pilot of the object seemed to be focusing on Eve now.

Her happiness was beginning to turn into fright and she began running. She fled not in the direction of her house, but toward some bushes near the house. She was trying to lure the object’s attention away from her family inside the house. The UFO moved even closer to the ground now. Eve could hear no sound, but felt she was being targeted.

In her frantic run for safety, she looked back to see where the house-sized object was. A white beam was now projected from the bottom of the object, obviously searching for Eve.

She made it to the bushes before the beam could find her. She was now kneeling, shaking, and crying to herself. She prayed for God to help her, as the craft edged even closer to her hiding place.

“Had the craft found her?” she asked herself. The beam was moving…scanning the ground close to her. The object was totally motionless as the beam angled toward the ground. Soon the light disappeared up into the craft, not turned off, but drawn into the craft in one motion. Within a moment, the craft was gone.

She could barely make it out and it rose further into the sky. There were now three other craft just like the first one she saw. Eve could sense they were working in unison. The four craft were now moving slowly. Should she make a run for the house? No, not yet. Oh no!

Another craft now filled the place of the first one, and began searching the ground around the house and the bushes. After a few short moments, the beam was drawn back into the craft just like the first one had been. The second search craft now reunited with the remaining three. After what Eve estimated as some 20 seconds, the objects made a type of jerking motion, and in flash, they were gone. This was her chance. She ran for the house, and tried to open the screen door.

It was locked. She couldn’t believe she was locked out of her own house, and she began banging on the door, shaking the screen door, making all the noise she could.

“Where was everybody?” she thought. She called to her Aunt, who eventually came to the back door in her bed clothes. She asked Eve, “Who are you?” Eve said, “It’s me.” Her Aunt asked her what she was doing out so late. Eve told her that her cousins had just came in a few minutes before. Her Aunt’s reply shocked her, “Everyone has been in bed for a while.”

In Eve’s mind, she had only been outside about five minutes after her cousins had ran into the house. She wondered, “What had happened?”

Her Aunt explained that she remembered Eve was in the house when she locked the doors. Eve went to her and her cousin’s bedroom, and woke her cousin to ask her what had happened.

Her cousin also stated that she thought Eve was safe inside the house with the others before the doors were locked. The strange UFO and its occupants are gone now, but Eve’s haunting memories are not. She, to this day, does not understand what exactly occurred or why.

She turned her story in to one UFO investigative group, but no follow-up was done, and she was basically ignored. The case was not recent enough, she was told. The significance of what happened to Eve is not diminished by the passing of time. It is as important today as it was then.

Did Eve go into the house as the others claimed? Was she then abducted by the occupants of the UFO? Eve was too afraid and traumatized at the time to tell anyone what happened that summer night in Mississippi. Eve now wants to tell her story. Who will listen?

NOTE: The above image is CGI.

KEN PFEIFER WORLD UFO PHOTOS AND NEWS

HTTP://WWW.WORLDUFOPHOTOS.ORG

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THANKS TO HTTP://WWW.UFOCASEBOOK.COM

Source:

•  http://worldufophotosandnews.org/?p=24934

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 11:12 geschreven door peter  

Cigar Shaped UFO Shoots Into Cloud Over Costa Rica, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: May 7, 2019 but reported this week

Location of sighting: Costa Rica

 

The eyewitness caught a UFO shooting across the sky and into some clouds over a mountain. The UFO is very long and cigar shaped. The speed is incredibly fast and the object can only be seen clearly when the video is stopped and viewed one frame at a time. Costa Rica is an island and actually has a high frequency of UFO sightings compared to the norm. Its probably because a lot of alien bases exist below the ocean floors. 100% proof that aliens have an extreme interest in Costa Rica. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 10:47 geschreven door peter  

UFO Over Freeway Causes Car Crash In Australia, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 2019
Location of sighting: Austrailia
Source: Terrys Theories, Youtube

Hey here is a great sighting recorded by a car cam. As the cam recorded a crash...a octopus like UFO appears in the upper right of the screen for a few seconds. As the UFO appears...it actually changes shape! I believe the UFO is rotating slowly so the object appears to change shape, yet its edges to seem to change. Its my personal belief that someone driving noticed this UFO and accidentally lost control of his car...causing a crash on the freeway. Bad place for a UFO to appear...so aliens do make mistakes...this video is proof of that. 
Scott C. Waring

In the below original video jump to 35 seconds in...to see the UFO.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 10:43 geschreven door peter  

The ISS live feed from about a week ago shows what appears to be a huge triangle craft hovering above Earth.

According to Mrmb333 who uploaded the live footage, it is not a reflection since the object has three distinct points of light on. A t a certain moment the triangle craft speeds up and disappears.

Some people wonder whether it is a craft of the new branch of military, Space Force, because of what they already know is hovering around our planet.

The first video starts with the triangle craft and continues with the announcement that the Californian company The Gateway Foundation has released plans for the Von Braun Station, a cruise ship-style hotel floating among the stars. The aim is to get the hotel off the ground by 2025 and make it fully operational for travel by 2027.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 10:36 geschreven door peter  

Video: Michio Kaku On UFOs. “The Evidence Is Overwhelming.”

JAZZ SHAW

This is another intriguing interview I wanted to share with those of you who may have missed it. It deals with those three videos of UFOs (they want us to say Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon these days but I don’t care for it) captured on film by the military. As you may have seen already, the Navy has finally come forward and confirmed that not only are the videos real with a full chain of custody, but they also consider them “unidentified” objects.

• SEE ALSO: Has Pelosi’s impeachment dam been breached by freshman Democrats?

Since that time, noted astrophysicist Michio Kaku has been wading into that discussion, originally bringing it up during a conference in Spain. This caught the attention of the mainstream media and he’s since been doing some interviews where he expounds on the subject. This weekend he was on Fox News talking to Tucker Carlson, and he’s definitely seen enough evidence at this point to draw at least some scientific conclusions.

I just wanted to highlight a couple of points from this interview before we get to the video. First of all, having previously said that the onus was now “on the government” to prove that these UAPs are not extraterrestrial in origin, this weekend Kaku declared the videos to be “a gamechanger.” His reason is that reviews of the videos and reports of the pilots have given us some hard, testable science to work with. This includes velocities and acceleration rates. He calls the evidence “overwhelming.”

But having said all of that, when Tucker hits him with the hard question (twice) Professor Kaku seems to step back just a bit. Tucker asks him if, based on what we know of physics, the craft could have been built by humans. The first time, he responds by talking about all of the millions of planets orbiting other stars and the exciting possibility that someone up there “might be watching us.” The second time he comes a bit closer, but still won’t call it impossible that people made these machines.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain how humans can make a machine that can hover in place over the ocean with no visible means of propulsion and then take off at Mach 5. But hey… I won’t argue with Professor Kaku here. Let’s get to the interview. After it concludes, the website that published this clip includes the three Navy videos with full tech explainers from To The Stars Academy in case you’ve never seen them.

{ https://hotair.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 01:03 geschreven door peter  

Video: Netizen Claims NASA's Live Feed Captured 'Large Triangular' UFO Hovering Over Earth

The user claimed that the UFO sped up before "disappearing" in the live feed. "You'll see when I zoom in and put it in slow motion, you're going to see light reflecting off it and it glistens", they add.

The intriguing video instantly attracted the attention of UFO pundits and other conspirators who have suggested - apart from being an alien space ship - that this particular clip could reveal evidence of the existence of the US Space Force.

In August, US President Donald Trump proposed the establishment of a United States Space Command (SPACECOM), declaring that US military assets must have the freedom to operate in space in order to detect and destroy missiles launched against the United States. 

Trump is pressing for the Department of Defence to create an independent Space Force. The existing Space Command - or SPACECOM - is not that force, but integrates existing space fighting units and capabilities under its direction from the five branches of the US armed forces.

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

25-09-2019 om 00:53 geschreven door peter  

It’s a huge bipolar gas structure, hundreds of light-years across, centered on our galaxy’s center and near the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. Astronomers found it with the new, supersensitive MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.

The complex radio emission from the galactic center, as imaged by the South African MeerKAT radio telescope. The newly-discovered giant radio bubbles are the structures running top to bottom in this image.

Image via SARAO/Oxford.

Our Milky Way is considered to be a relatively quiescent galaxy, and yet – at its heart – it’s known to have a 4-million-solar-mass black hole: the source of many fascinating and dynamic processes. Yesterday – September 11, 2019 – astronomers announced the discovery in that region of what they’re calling “one of the largest features ever observed” in the center of the Milky Way. This feature is a pair of enormous radio-emitting bubbles, towering above and below the central region of our galaxy. Scientists described it as hourglass-shaped. The entire structure stretches some 1,400 light-years, or about 5% of the distance between our sun and the galaxy’s center.

This new discovery was announced today in the journal Nature, which also published the initial study of the feature. They said in a statement that it:

… dwarfs all other radio structures in the galactic center [and] is likely the result of a phenomenally energetic burst that erupted near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole a few million years ago.

In other words, said these scientists, they believe features have formed from a violent eruption, presumably emanating from the vicinity of the galactic center and its supermassive black hole, which – over a short period of time – punched through the interstellar medium in opposite directions. As explained in Nature:

The bubbles are gas structures that can be observed because electrons stirring inside them produce radio waves as they are accelerated by magnetic fields.

Image via SARAO/Oxford.

The team of astronomers that made the discovery was led by Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford in England. They used the new and supersensitive South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) MeerKAT radio telescope to map out broad regions in the center of the galaxy. They conducted their radio observations at wavelengths near 23 centimeters (about 9 inches), which, they said:

… indicates energy generated in a process known as synchrotron radiation, in which free-floating electrons are accelerated as they interact with powerful magnetic fields. This produces a characteristic radio signal that can be used to trace energetic regions in space. The radio light seen by MeerKAT penetrates the dense clouds of dust that block visible light from the center of our galaxy.

Heywood, who processed the large amount of observational data leading to this result, said:

The center of our galaxy is relatively calm when compared to other galaxies with very active central black holes. Even so, the Milky Way’s central black hole can become uncharacteristically active, flaring up as it periodically devours massive clumps of dust and gas. It’s possible that one such feeding frenzy triggered powerful outbursts that inflated this previously unseen feature.

Previously unseen? Yes, in the radio part of the spectrum. But there’s another hourglass-shaped structure previously known by astronomers that might (or might not) be related to the MeerKAT bubbles. And that is the so-called Fermi Bubbles, confirmed by high-energy gamma ray observations in 2010.

Hints of the Fermi Bubbles’ edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a joint German, U.S. and British X-ray observatory, which operated in space throughout the 1990s. Later, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope – launched in 2008 – confirmed the outlines of 2 vast bubbles extending for tens of thousands of light-years on either side of our galaxy’s core. Those observations are marked in magenta in this illustration.

Image via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

I asked one of the authors on this new paper – Fernando Camilo, SARAO Chief Scientist in Cape Town, South Africa – how the new discovery relates to the Fermi Bubbles. He replied by email:

That’s a very good question.

The Fermi bubbles are much larger than the MeerKAT radio bubbles (about 50 times larger: some 75,000 light years in size for Fermi, 1,400 light years for MeerKAT). They are also much more energetic: the amount of energy involved in the event that inflated the MeerKAT bubbles is no more than 1% of the energy content of the Fermi bubbles.

However, they are both huge bi-polar structures, symmetric about the galactic center, near the central supermassive black hole, and so your question does arise.

Our view is that the MeerKAT bubbles may well represent a less energetic version of a process similar to that which created the Fermi Bubbles (the origin of the Fermi bubbles themselves continues to be greatly debated, and I expect that the origin of the MeerKAT bubbles will likewise elicit a range of views).

If that’s the case, the MeerKAT bubbles may well be an example of a series of such intermittent events that occasionally take place near the center of the Milky Way, governed by the black hole, the cumulative effect of which is responsible for other large scale structures seen at higher galactic latitudes (that is, away from the plane of the Milky Way), including structures seen in X-rays and, indeed, the Fermi gamma-ray Bubbles.

Camilo added:

These enormous bubbles have until now been hidden by the glare of extremely bright radio emission from the center of the galaxy. Teasing out the bubbles from the background ‘noise’ was a technical tour de force, only made possible by MeerKAT’s unique characteristics and propitious location in the Southern Hemisphere. With this unexpected discovery we’re witnessing in the Milky Way a novel manifestation of galaxy-scale outflows of matter and energy, ultimately governed by the central black hole.

A composite of the radio bubbles and the MeerKAT telescope. A radio image of the center of the Milky Way with a portion of the MeerKAT telescope array in the foreground. The plane of the galaxy is marked by a series of bright features, exploded stars and regions where new stars are being born, and runs diagonally across the image from lower right to top center. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is hidden in the brightest of these extended regions. The radio bubbles extend from between the two nearest antennas to the upper right corner. Many magnetized filaments can be seen running parallel to the bubbles. In this composite view, the sky to the left of the second nearest antenna is the night sky visible to the unaided eye, and the radio image to the right has been enlarged to highlight its fine features. 

Image via SARAO/Oxford.

• Bottom line: Radio astronomers have spied a pair of enormous radio-emitting bubbles that tower hundreds of light-years above and below the central region of our galaxy.
• Source: Inflation of 430-parsec bipolar radio bubbles in the Galactic Centre by an energetic event
• Via University of Oxford

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

25-09-2019 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

25-09-2019 om 00:29 geschreven door peter  

Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible?

By Paul Sutter 

Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.

Artist’s illustration of a Breakthrough Starshot probe arriving at the potentially Earth-like planet Proxima Centauri b. A representation of laser beams is visible emanating from the corners of the craft’s lightsail.

(Image: © Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo)

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

Interstellar space travel. Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?

The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There's no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn't mean we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck. 

• Related: Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

Voyage outward

If you're sufficiently patient, then we've already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they're leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA's Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions, and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.

So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they're going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They're not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't think NASA budgets for those kinds of timelines. Also, by the time these probes reach anywhere halfway interesting, their nuclear batteries will be long dead, and just be useless hunks of metal hurtling through the void. Which is a sort of success, if you think about it: It's not like our ancestors were able to accomplish such feats as tossing random junk between the stars, but it's probably also not exactly what you imagined interstellar space travel to be like.

• Related: Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)

Speed racer

To make interstellar spaceflight more reasonable, a probe has to go really fast. On the order of at least one-tenth the speed of light. At that speed, spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri in a handful of decades, and send back pictures a few years later, well within a human lifetime. Is it really so unreasonable to ask that the same person who starts the mission gets to finish it?

Going these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to contain that energy onboard the spacecraft as fuel. But if that's the case, the extra fuel adds mass, which makes it even harder to propel it up to those speeds. There are designs and sketches for nuclear-powered spacecraft that try to accomplish just this, but unless we want to start building thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs just to put inside a rocket, we need to come up with other ideas.

Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the energy source of the spacecraft fixed and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation is good at transporting energy from one place to another, especially over the vast distances of space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and propel itself forward.

This is the basic idea behind the Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to design a spacecraft capable of reaching the nearest stars in a matter of decades. In the simplest outline of this project, a giant laser on the order of 100 gigawatts shoots at an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. That spacecraft has a large solar sail that is incredibly reflective. The laser bounces off of that sail, giving momentum to the spacecraft. The thing is, a 100-gigawatt laser only has the force of a heavy backpack. You didn't read that incorrectly. If we were to shoot this laser at the spacecraft for about 10 minutes, in order to reach one-tenth the speed of light, the spacecraft can weigh no more than a gram.

That's the mass of a paper clip.

• Related: Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets

A spaceship for ants

This is where the rubber meets the interstellar road when it comes to making spacecraft travel the required speeds. The laser itself, at 100 gigawatts, is more powerful than any laser we've ever designed by many orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, 100 gigawatts is the entire capacity of every single nuclear power plant operating in the United States combined.

And the spacecraft, which has to have a mass no more than a paper clip, must include a camera, computer, power source, circuitry, a shell, an antenna for communicating back home and the entire lightsail itself.  

That lightsail must be almost perfectly reflective. If it absorbs even a tiny fraction of that incoming laser radiation it will convert that energy to heat instead of momentum. At 100 gigawatts, that means straight-up melting, which is generally considered not good for spacecraft. 

Once accelerated to one-tenth the speed of light, the real journey begins. For 40 years, this little spacecraft will have to withstand the trials and travails of interstellar space. It will be impacted by dust grains at that enormous velocity.

And while the dust is very tiny, at those speeds motes can do incredible damage. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles emitted by everything from the sun to distant supernova, can mess with the delicate circuitry inside. The spacecraft will be bombarded by these cosmic rays non-stop as soon as the journey begins.

Is Breakthrough Starshot possible? In principle, yes. Like I said above, there's no law of physics that prevents any of this from becoming reality. But that doesn't make it easy or even probable or plausible or even feasible using our current levels of technology (or reasonable projections into the near future of our technology). Can we really make a spacecraft that small and light? Can we really make a laser that powerful? Can a mission like this actually survive the challenges of deep space?

The answer isn't yes or no. The real question is this: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if it's possible?

• Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough — But Not Impossible
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos

Learn more by listening to the episode "Is interstellar travel possible?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to @infirmus, Amber D., neo, and Alex V. for the questions that led to this piece!

Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

24-09-2019 om 23:47 geschreven door peter  

Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io May Not Have a Magma Ocean After All

By Nola Taylor Redd 

The volcanic atmosphere may be all the moon needs.

An active volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io, captured by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in false color. White and orange areas are newly erupted hot lava, while the two small, bright spots are exposed molten rock. The orange and yellow ribbon is a cooling lava flow more than 37 miles (60 km) long.

(Image: © NASA/JPL)

The most volcanic body in the solar system may not boast a magma ocean beneath its surface after all. 

Scientists had thought that magnetic field variations around Jupiter's moon Io, as measured years ago by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, resulted from interactions between Io's magma ocean and the gas giant's magnetic field.

But recent research suggests that the same variations could be caused by interactions between Jupiter's magnetic field and Io's volcano-fed atmosphere. A magma ocean on Io, while not ruled out, is therefore not required, the study reports.

• Related: Amazing Photos: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io 

As king of the planets, Jupiter boasts the solar system's largest magnetosphere, the envelope of charged plasma around an object where its magnetic field dominates. Most of Jupiter's moons, including Io, are embedded in the magnetosphere, and their atmospheres and magnetic fields can interact with the larger structure.

Galileo made six flybys of Io between 1999 and 2002 while exploring the Jovian system. Those flybys revealed the moon's interaction with the planet's magnetic field and, along with its extensive volcanism, led researchers to conclude that Io concealed a magma ocean beneath its surface.

But ongoing studies of the moon's atmosphere have allowed a separate team of scientists to take new stock of  Galileo's data. The recent research suggests that the volcanically modified atmosphere alone could be responsible for the changes seen by Galileo.

The original research, published in 2011, assumed a much thinner atmosphere than subsequent observations by a variety of instruments revealed.

"We considered a thicker atmosphere with asymmetries and find that a magnetic field from a magma ocean is not needed to explain the same data," Aljona Blocker, a researcher at Germany's University of Cologne and the lead author on the study, told Space.com by email.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Patchy magnetic fields

With more than 150 known volcanic hotspots, Io easily qualifies as the most volcanic body in the solar system. Gas and dust plumes from 16 different volcanic centers have been observed climbing up to an altitude of 250 miles (400 kilometers), creating a patchy, sulfur-rich atmosphere. When Io travels through Jupiter's shadow, the atmosphere collapses into frost, evaporating back into gas once the moon emerges.

Since the conclusion of the Galileo mission, researchers have used Earth- and space-based instruments to probe Io's atmosphere. These observations revealed how the density of the atmosphere changes based on its location over the moon, with the atmosphere thinner over the poles than at the equator.

Unlike Earth, whose spinning iron core generates a planet-wide magnetic field, Io has no magnetic field of its own. Instead, it is shrouded beneath Jupiter's massive magnetosphere.

"Io would not have any magnetic fields if it was taken out of the magnetosphere of Jupiter and put in empty space," Blocker said.

Blocker and her colleagues modeled interactions between Io's atmosphere to determine how the air affects the surrounding Jovian magnetosphere. They primarily probed how the plumes created by the volcanoes Tvashtar and Pele affect the plasma environment of the moon. Tvashtar is located near the northern pole of Io, while Pele lies closer to the equator. The two lie on nearly opposite sides of the moon, so that when one sits in daylight, the other is in darkness.

The researchers found that the changes generated by the atmosphere's interaction with the plasma are sufficient to explain the measurements made by Galileo. Polar plumes had a stronger effect on the magnetic field surrounding the moon, while plumes near the equator caused much weaker changes. They also determined that Io's ionosphere — the upper atmosphere where charged particles tend to live — changes, due to volcanic activity. Such changes alone are sufficient to explain Galileo's observations, the team concluded

This result matches with the team's 2017 discovery that Io's auroral spots are inconsistent with a magma ocean.

It's still possible that a magma ocean flows beneath Io's surface; the new findings simply rule it out as a necessity. Further geophysical observations that do not rely on measurements of the charge environment could help reveal the presence of a magma ocean, if one exists, Blocker said.

"We require more measurements from Io's environment from future spacecraft missions to constrain Io's interior structure and … atmosphere," she said.

The results were published last fall in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

• More Photos of Io: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon
• Volcanoes on Jupiter's Moon Io Are All Wrong, NASA Says
• Volcanic Plume on Jupiter's Moon Io Spied by Juno Spacecraft

Follow Nola on Facebook and on Twitter at @NolaTRedd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

24-09-2019 om 23:27 geschreven door peter  

24-09-2019 om 23:08 geschreven door peter  

Carl Franzen

Illustration: Molly Dyson

If you’re a nerd like me, the image of a half-constructed, almost skeletal second Death Star from Return of the Jedi is permanently lodged in your brain as one of the most majestically ominous creations in all of cinema.

George Lucas’ vision of building massive superstructures directly in outer space is iconic, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. The idea of manufacturing whole spacecraft or space stations that never touch Earth, that are fabricated and assembled directly out in the void where they will be operating, is one of humanity’s oldest science fiction dreams, dating back to antiquity, before the genre of sci-fi as we know it was even invented.

But now, outer space manufacturing is about to become a reality, albeit at a much smaller scale than the Death Star. The real-life Florida startup Made in Space recently won a $73.7 million contract from NASA to use, over the next three years, what’s essentially an advanced space-grade 3D printer to print out wings for a spacecraft while it orbits Earth.

Made in Space is pursuing something altogether more ambitious: producing whole new pieces of working equipment from raw materials in outer space — and doing so in a matter of days.

“We’re focused on the industrialization of space and moving the means of production into space,” said Justin Kugler, vice president of advanced programs and concepts at Made in Space, in a phone interview with OneZero.

To be clear, humanity has already gotten fairly good at assembling stuff in space — connecting one craft or piece of equipment to another using specialized tools, computers, physics, and robotics. That’s how the International Space Station and orbital laboratories from China and Russia were all put together over the years. But Made in Space is pursuing something altogether more ambitious and trickier: actually producing whole new pieces of working equipment from raw materials in outer space—and doing so in a matter of days.

Made in Space was founded nearly a decade ago in Silicon Valley by a quartet of entrepreneurial dudes: Aaron Kemmer, Jason Dunn, Mike Chen, and Michael Snyder. They were all part of some of the first graduate studies programs offered by Singularity University, a “benefit corporation” focused on nurturing advanced technologies that will move humanity toward the technology singularity, started by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Fittingly, given its lofty origins, Made in Space’s ultimate goal is that its 3D-printing-like technology will eventually be used to construct entire space settlements, cities even, at relatively lower cost than would be possible if those same structures were built on the ground first and then launched into space. (You’re paying a lot more for rocket fuel in those cases.)

The way Kugler describes it, using Made in Space’s technology, you’ll be able to launch small spacecraft and satellites that, once in orbit, could autonomously create the kinds of equipment normally restricted to larger, heavier satellites, at least when limited to traditional, Earth-bound production processes.

“You’re talking tens of millions [of dollars] compared to hundreds of millions,” said Kugler, referring to the cost savings Made in Space is envisioning.

NASA, whose funding yo-yos quite dramatically year over year, obviously sees the appeal of the cost-savings aspect of Made in Space’s approach.

“The benefit to the taxpayer is more efficient and affordable spacecraft and space vehicle designs that are not overdesigned (for launch) and that do not require the hardware needed to deploy the spacecraft into a usable configuration,” said Dayna Ise, a program executive at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate division, in an emailed statement.

That same Made in Space tech could and likely will be used to build space weaponry and battle stations — though hopefully not on the mass-destruction scale of the Death Star. Northrop Grumman — the aerospace and defense contractor that makes the Global Hawk military drone, among other weaponry — is one of Made in Space’s key business partners.

First, though, there needs to be a working proof-of-concept of the idea, which is coming soon.

In 2022 or shortly thereafter, a rocket made by the aptly named company Rocket Lab Electron will launch from New Zealand and release Made in Space’s smaller spacecraft, the Archinaut One, which is about the size of a small refrigerator that you’d see in a college student’s dorm room.

It’s a cylindrical craft with some complicated-looking equipment strapped to the side and two tiny solar arrays sprouting on opposite sides like square robotic bat wings. But the relatively benign appearance hides some groundbreaking technology onboard. Archinaut One will carry its own additive manufacturing facility.

Additive manufacturing refers to a wide range of technologies and building processes, among them 3D printing, that all share in common the ability to fabricate objects with relatively high precision by applying layers of material on top of one another, adding them together to form a more complex object.

Desktop 3D printers have been around for years, sold by the likes of MakerBot (a subsidiary of Stratasys) and XYZprinting.

Made in Space has already built a printer slightly larger than these desktop models. In 2014, the company launched it aboard a SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo vessel, which it sent, along with some mice, to the International Space Station.

That printer, which Made in Space called a zero-gravity printer, printed more than a dozen items and ended up serving as the basis for all of its subsequent technology. It was succeeded by Made in Space’s more advanced additive manufacturing facility printer (AMF printer), launched to the space station in 2016 and since used to print more than 100 different tools, including everything from specialized wrenches to finger splints for astronauts. (They’re prone to injuring their fingers on all the finicky equipment aboard the space station.)

Now Made in Space plans to take the success of that very same technology and run a variation of it outside of the space station—in the even more inhospitable vacuum of space, on the side of the free-flying Archinaut One spacecraft. After decoupling from the Rocket Lab rocket, the Archinaut One will enter low-earth orbit (LEO to space industry folks, defined by NASA as the first 100 to 200 miles of space above Earth’s surface) and begin circling our home planet more than 11 times per day.

A few days later, the Archinaut One will conduct the historic, first-ever free-flying additive manufacturing demonstration in space, using a spool of polymer filament to print two 32-foot-long (64 feet total) semirigid beams extending from either side of the spacecraft.

The beams will be much larger than those the Archinaut One could otherwise support if it were relying on traditional space assembly methods, such as bringing them folded up into space from Earth, and will be used to act as a kind of scaffolding for long solar arrays that extend outward. “Like Venetian blinds,” according to Kugler.

Robotic arms will weave the electrical junctions through the solar arrays and connect them back into the spacecraft, providing working power. And all of this will happen automatically, controlled by software algorithms, with humans overseeing it back on the ground in Texas and Florida.

“Space being a difficult and unusual medium is 90% of the challenge we face,” Kugler told OneZero.

Although Made in Space likes to brag that it doesn’t have any competition when it comes to its specific space-grade additive manufacturing systems, the commercial space industry at large is broadly focused on developing technologies to reduce the weight, cost, and time it takes to put craft into orbit and beyond.

SpaceX has its impressively successful Falcon reusable rockets, while other companies, including Virgin Galactic and Sierra Nevada, are working on private reusable space shuttle–type craft. Bigelow Aerospace, the company founded by billionaire hotel magnate and UFO aficionado Robert Bigelow, has launched an inflatable human habitat to the space station and proven that the concept — using fabric lighter than traditional spacecraft materials to construct tentlike rooms in orbit — is viable for reducing weight at launch and, therefore, rocket fuel and cost.

These companies all face the same challenges humanity has encountered since we first started shooting rockets up into the sky—namely, that beyond Earth’s atmosphere is an inhospitable environment for pretty much everything, even strong materials like metal and plastic.

There’s the strong force of gravity exerted on the payload of a rocket launch, then all the speed and motion to get objects into space, and once they get there, they typically move at thousands of miles per hour. The atmosphere also helps protect objects on Earth from a number of damaging space forces, like debris, cosmic radiation, and the more unfiltered radiation and heat of the sun. So, designing systems that work in space requires solving for problems in physics, math, chemistry, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, computation, and materials science, among other disciplines.

In many ways, space is fundamentally opposed to the kinds of finicky and delicate 3D-printing processes that companies have developed for Earth, with extremely precise and even fragile moving parts.

Fortunately for Made in Space, its employees have already managed to solve some of the fundamentals. The company says it prudently designed its zero-gravity additive manufacturing to work in a wide range of differing gravity environments, from “more than one G to negative G,” according to Kugler — that is, gravity both stronger and weaker than what’s felt on Earth’s surface.

“For the future of building deep-space transit vehicles that will take people to far-off destinations and land, this is vital technology.”

In fact, even though the Archinaut One demo will be the first of its kind, it may be easier in some ways to accomplish than Made in Space’s previous feat of putting a printer aboard the space station, where it was more prone to jostling and other interference (“perturbations,” as Kugler calls them) from the astronauts going about their tasks, such as running on the space station treadmill.

If the company can pull off this demo, what’s next?

“In the near term, we can directly apply the tech from the Archinaut One to making small satellites that have larger, more efficient solar arrays or larger, more efficient active arrays, like antennas, reflectors, laser arrays,” Kugler said.

Made in Space thinks that within a few years after that, it will be able to build solar collection stations that can beam power to other spacecraft or customers down on Earth.

NASA, for one, is bullish on using Made in Space’s technology to create human-crewed spacecraft. “The timeline depends on a variety of factors, but the in-space robotic manufacturing and assembly capability could be matured to this level within the next decade,” Ise said.

“For the future of building cities in space and deep-space transit vehicles that will take people to far-off destinations and land, this is vital technology,” Kugler went on. “We will need a couple of miracles between now and then, but it’s possible.”

Made in Space isn’t talking up the potential for its technology to be used in Death Star–like superweapons—or any smaller weapons, for that matter. But it is open to developing craft and technology that can be used by the U.S. military.

Asked about the possibility of using the technology for defense purposes, Made in Space spokesperson Austin Jordan provided the following statement via email: “Our vision is that Made in Space will continue to be a close partner to the U.S. government across both defense and civil organizations. As it relates to national security and defense, in-space assembly and manufacturing capabilities could address key national security space priorities, including improving asset resilience, enhancing satellite capabilities, and providing rapid-response equipment. I think innovative technology platforms like Archinaut One will open up the playbook for us to engage with various agencies within the defense community to incorporate these capabilities into future missions.”

It may take a while, but if Made in Space’s visions pan out at all close to how the company hopes, future generations may look at the Death Star scenes in Star Wars as more realistic — perhaps worryingly so — than George Lucas could have ever anticipated.

{ https://onezero.medium.com/ }

24-09-2019 om 22:08 geschreven door peter  

India's Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft (illustrated) searched for the Vikram lander from orbit. Chandrayaan 2 will continue observing the moon for about a year.

ISRO

By Lisa Grossman

The sun is setting on India’s first attempted lunar landing. As night fell over the lunar south pole on September 20, scientists’ hopes that the solar-powered Vikram lander would contact Earth before the end of one lunar day have been dashed.

Officials at the Indian space agency ISRO reportedly believe that the Vikram lander died on impact with the lunar surface on September 6. The probe lost contact shortly before it was meant to touch down near the moon’s south pole (SN: 9/6/19), according to the Times of India.

Still, there was hope that Vikram or its onboard rover would perk up and reestablish contact. ISRO spent two weeks — the equivalent of one lunar day — trying to communicate with Vikram. The lander and its rover, Pragyan, were designed to last one lunar day before the lack of sunlight and cold temperatures shut them down.

ISRO said that its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter took pictures on September 10 showing the lander lying flat or tilted on its side. Those images, however, were not publicly released.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also flew over the landing site on September 17. But “lunar local time was near dusk; large shadows covered much of the area,” the space agency said in an e-mail. “The exact location of the lander was not known, so the lander may not be in the camera field of view.” NASA said that it would search again on October 14, when the sun is higher in the lunar sky.

After the sun completely sets on Vikram’s landing site, temperatures there will drop to about –180° Celsius for another two weeks. The solar-powered lander’s electronics are not expected to survive the frigid night.

ISRO has yet to put out an official statement. But the Times of India reported on September 20 that the team analyzing the mission’s failure believes that it was caused by an error in the spacecraft’s automatic landing program. The newspaper quoted an unnamed scientist as saying that the lander may have started spinning on its way to the lunar surface so that thrusters meant to slow the descent instead accelerated it.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

24-09-2019 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

Dust devils are common are common on Earth, but ubiquitous on Mars, a desert world. Scientists are using drones carrying cameras and other instruments to gain new insights.

The video above shows scientists’ encounter with a dust devil in May 2019, in the Alvord Desert in southeastern Oregon. These scientists – members of the Boise State Dust Devil Collaboration – have been flying drones through active dust devils, in part to understand earthly dust devils better, and also to understand dust devils on Earth’s neighbor planet, Mars.

Physicist Brian Jackson of Boise State University said in a statement:

Dust devils, while common in arid climates on Earth, are ubiquitous on Mars, where they may be responsible for much of the planet’s haze that helps heat its atmosphere. Dust devils have been observed from landers the ground and from orbiting spacecraft all over the surface of Mars. A better understanding of dust devils on Earth will help scientists understand their influence on Mars’ climate.

In the video above, acquired with a drone, you can see how the drone tilts and drops once inside the dust devil. It’s also fun to see the drone chase the dust devil as it moves away. Jackson reported on these May 2019 observations via drone on September 19, 2019, at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences in Geneva, Switzerland. He said the drone struggled as air pressure dropped inside the dust devil. Camille M. Carlisle of SkyandTelescope.com, who apparently heard Jackson speak at the meeting, explained:

The pressure drop matches what’s expected for the wind speed twirling round the dust devil’s funnel.

Yet, Jackson said, despite the fact that dust devils have been studied for decades, scientists still aren’t entirely clear on the physics of how dust devils lift dust into the atmosphere. He said:

When we compare theoretical predictions of how much dust a devil should lift to how much it does lift, the numbers just don’t add up.

That’s why Jackson’s team thought of the drones to study dust devils. The drones carry not just cameras, but also other lightweight instruments, including pressure and temperature loggers. They measure the structures of the dust devil while taking particle samples to determine how much material the dust devil is carrying.

Dust devil research in the Alvord desert of Eastern Oregon.

Image via J. Kelly/B. Jackson/Europlanet.

In summer 2017, Jackson and his team were awarded a grant from the NASA Idaho Space Grant Consortium to launch drones into dust devils. In 2018, they also received a three-year, $217,000 grant from NASA’s Solar System Workings Program. Why is NASA interested in dust devils? These scientists explained:

NASA currently has three active rovers on Mars, two of which are powered by solar panels. Martian dust has been a concern, falling on the panels and reducing the amount of energy generated, and the static charges that can build up in the dust devils may pose a hazard to electrical equipment deployed on Mars.

And why drones? The scientists said:

Previous studies of Martian dust devils have relied on passive sampling of the profiles via meteorology packages on landed spacecraft. Past studies of terrestrial devils have employed more active sampling (instrumented vehicles or manned aircraft) but have been limited to near-surface or relatively high-altitude sampling.

Drones promise a new and powerful platform from which to sample dust devils at a variety of altitudes. Measurements made aloft are more directly relevant for evaluating the dust that is injected into the atmosphere.

NASA may have dust on its mind since the official demise of its Mars Opportunity rover earlier this year. Opportunity – fondly nicknamed Oppy – was built to last 90 days, but spent 15 years exploring Mars, until a Mars-wide dust storm hit in June 2018. The rover relied on solar power. Its solar panels are now thought to be blanketed with dust. Engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent more than a thousand commands to Mars throughout this past fall and early winter, in an attempt to restore contact with the rover. It didn’t work. The rover sits silent on Mars’ surface now, in Mars’ Perseverance Valley.

The tweet below, from 2016, offers a particularly beautiful and poignant view of the Opportunity rover in relationship to a Mars dust devil.

NASA

✔@NASA

Twisting through the valley is a Martian dust devil, seen by @MarsRovers Opportunity: http://go.nasa.gov/1RLAhDN 

• 2,722

4:44 PM - Apr 5, 2016

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• 1,449 people are talking about this

If you want more about Mars’ dust devils, check out the video below. The navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured images of a few of them moving dust across Gale Crater in 2017. Dust devils result from sunshine warming the ground, prompting convective rising of air. All the dust devils in the video below were seen in a southward direction from the rover. Timing is accelerated and contrast has been modified to make frame-to-frame changes easier to see.

• Read more about Mars dust devils, from NASA

• Bottom line: Scientists are using drones to study dust devils on Earth, with an eye to future studies of dust devils on Mars.
• Via Europlanet

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

24-09-2019 om 21:15 geschreven door peter