Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
13-10-2019
Alien Structures On Venus Seen Close Up, UFO Sighting News.
Alien Structures On Venus Seen Close Up, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Oct 12, 2019 Location of discovery: Venus Source photo:
I was looking for decent photos of Venus and found this incredible full planet view. The photo is on the Wikipeadia and has detail that is of the surface structures. Normally the clouds over Venus prevent us from seeing its surface, but now I'm going to show you the alien structures that NASA doesn't want you to see. Watch my video and tell me your thoughts. Some of these structures are bigger than the US state of Texas! This is 100% proof that aliens exist on our neighboring planet. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Sky-watcher captures two odd flashes next to the Orion Constellation
Sky-watcher captures two odd flashes next to the Orion Constellation
On October 9, 2019 a sky-watcher captured two unknown and odd split second flashes next to the Orion Nebula.
DiversityJ - Ohio Skywatching: It's been a long time coming -- Orion and Orion's Nebula in the early morning Ohio sky. Also, there were 2 separate split second flashes out by the constellation. 4:36am to 5:23am, Wednesday Oct 9th 2019, NE Ohio (USA) 42°F (5°C), Southern Sky.
Photos & Video from the Canon 90D & F/2.8 17-55mm Lens & F/2.8 70-200mm L III. Lens Photos Processed in Lightroom Classic. Everything put together in Final Cut Pro X
It is unknown whether these flashes or signals came from alien spacecraft or not but it is known that huge cigar-shaped UFO flying through space next to the Orion Constellation.
SEARCHING FOR ARTIFACTS OF ANCIENT TECHNOLOGICAL SPECIES IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM
SEARCHING FOR ARTIFACTS OF ANCIENT TECHNOLOGICAL SPECIES IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM
Since its birth around a half century ago, SETI has largely focused on looking for alien civilisations beyond our own solar system, searching for radio signals from prominent or nearby stars. But what if there were earlier technological civilisations in our own solar system, or even here on Earth?
SETI typically focuses on interstellar radio signals or other studies of objects beyond the Solar System, however an alternative search avenue has been appreciated for nearly as long: the search for alien artifacts within the Solar System. This has not only been a topic for science fiction (e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey) but in the SETI literature. Indeed, the apparent lack of such artifacts has been used as evidence that humanity must be the only spacefaring civilization in the Galaxy (Hart, 1975). Despite Hart’s claim, we can hardly rule out such artifacts in the Solar System, as demonstrated by Freitas (1983a) and Haqq-Misra & Kopparapu (2012).
In these discussions it is assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the origin of such artifacts would be not just extraterrestrial (Haqq-Misra & Kopparapu, 2012, refer to them as “Non-Terrestrial Artifacts” (NTAs)) but extrasolar. But if such technology were to be discovered, we should consider the possibility that its origin lies within the Solar System, and potentially on Earth.
After all, given that the bodies in the Solar System are at least five orders of magnitude closer than the nearest star system, and given that we know that not only are the ingredients of and conditions for life common in the Solar System, but that one of its planets is known to host complex life, it is perhaps more likely that their origin be local, than that an extraterrestrial species crossed interstellar space and deposited it here. At the very least, the relative probabilities of the two options is unclear.
In this paper, I discuss the possibility for such prior indigenous technological species; by this I mean species that are indigenous to the Solar System, produce technosignatures and/or were spacefaring, and are currently extinct or otherwise absent.
Wright notes that one of the great difficulties in finding evidence for previous technological civilisations in our solar system is simply the passage of time – old stuff disappears. “The Earth is quite efficient, on cosmic timescales, at destroying evidence of technology on its surface,” he notes. “Biodegredation can destroy organic material in a matter of weeks, and weathering and other forms of erosion will destroy most exposed rock and metals on a timescale of centuries to millennia, if human activity does not erase it faster.
Wright points out that, at the very longest, some “large and durable structures, in the right environments” – such as the Giza pyramids – might last for ‘just’ tens of thousands of years. Given complex life has existed on Earth for over 400 million years (40,000 sequential periods of 10,000 years), you see the problem in searching for ‘ancient aliens’. Not least, because, on timescales of hundreds of millions of years “plate tectonics will subduct almost all evidence for technology with the crust it sits upon, erasing it from the surface entirely.
Regardless of those difficulties, where should we look? Wright suggests that Venus – with a thinner atmosphere in the past – and Mars, once covered in water, would be good candidates. And he reminds us that search should also include Earth (though he disavows the topic of ‘ancient aliens’ on his blog). Furthermore, he notes, “while all geological records of prior indigenous technological species might be long destroyed, if the species were spacefaring there may be technological artifacts to be found throughout the Solar system.”
It’s a fascinating hypothetical topic, though it is worth pointing out that Jason Wright is not particularly happy about “all the wrong kind of attention” the paper has received “from the yellow press and the ufologists….it is mortifying…Now excuse me while I answer all these emails from Coast to Coast and ufologists sending me pictures of clouds.”
No doubt his frustration has arisen from the “astronomer says ancient aliens existed in our own solar system” headlines that the paper has generated, with many mis-judging what the words “may” and “is possible” mean, in terms of likelihood of ancient alien civilisations. As Wright says on his blog, he put his paper together…
…not because I think they exist, but because we’re at the point where it should be possible to say for sure that certain types of them didn’t. The end of the paper is all about the things we can do to start drawing some conclusions.
I recommend – as I have to SETI people before – that it might be worth engaging with the ufologists and Forteans, rather than dissing them, as they could be some of your staunchest advocates, even if there is some disagreement over assumptions and conclusions.
The Cassini mission to Saturn is over, but scientists still pore over its data. The newest discovery is of organic compounds – the ingredients of amino acids, the building blocks of life – in water vapor plumes from Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
The geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These great plumes of water vapor erupt through fractures in the ice crust at this moon’s south pole. The Cassini spacecraft analyzed the plumes and found water vapor, ice particles, salts, methane and a variety of complex and simple organic molecules. Scientists think they originate from the ocean below the moon’s icy surface.
Is the subsurface ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladushabitable? Could it be home to existing life forms? While we still don’t know the answer to the second question, evidence continues to build that this small moon’s ocean is habitable by earthly standards. On October 2, 2019, scientists announced another piece of the puzzle: the discovery of additional kinds of organic compounds that originate from Enceladus’ ocean, and were found by the Cassini spacecraft to be gushing out through geysers at the moon’s south pole. These compounds are the ingredients for amino acids, the building blocks of life on Earth.
The intriguing new peer-reviewed findings were published October 2, 2019, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The findings come from continued analysis of data from the Cassini mission at Saturn, which ended in 2017. The spacecraft had sampled water vapor in the huge geyser-like plumes that erupt from fractures called Tiger Stripes at the south pole of the moon. The results showed water vapor, ice grains, salts, methane and organic molecules of various sizes existing in the plumes.
Illustration depicting how the organic compounds, originating from ocean bottom hydrothermal vents, are condensed onto ice grains in cracks in Enceladus’ crust. The ice grains and organics then get ejected into space by the water vapor plumes.
Cassini also found evidence for active hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, similar to ones seen on the ocean bottoms of Earth. The new organic compounds were found to be nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing, condensed onto the ice grains. On Earth, those same compounds are produced by hydrothermal vents, and are part of the chemical reactions that produce amino acids. Is the same thing happening on Enceladus? As Nozair Khawaja, at the Free University of Berlin, explained:
If the conditions are right, these molecules coming from the deep ocean of Enceladus could be on the same reaction pathway as we see here on Earth. We don’t yet know if amino acids are needed for life beyond Earth, but finding the molecules that form amino acids is an important piece of the puzzle.
The ice grains from Enceladus’ plumes also get injected into Saturn’s E ring. The new compounds were found on these ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA). The composition of the organic material was determined by the CDA’s mass spectrometer.
Enceladus as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. This small, icy moon has a global subsurface ocean that could possibly support life.
So how did these and other organics get into space? First, they were dissolved in the subsurface ocean itself. They were then evaporated out of the water, condensing and freezing onto ice grains inside the fractures in the moon’s crust. As the plumes of water vapor from the ocean move upward through the fractures to the surface, they transport the ice grains and organics with them. After being injected into space, these grains can then be sampled and analyzed by spacecraft such as Cassini.
Cassini had already found found larger organic molecules in the plumes. These new compounds, however, although smaller, are tied directly to the hydrothermal processes that would create amino acids. According to co-author Jon Hillier:
Here we are finding smaller and soluble organic building blocks – potential precursors for amino acids and other ingredients required for life on Earth.
This work shows that Enceladus’ ocean has reactive building blocks in abundance, and it’s another green light in the investigation of the habitability of Enceladus.
Another recent study showed that Enceladus’ ocean is also apparently just the right age to support life.
Diagram of the amino acid lysine, which has carbon atoms attached and is used in the biosynthesis of proteins. Amino acids are the building blocks of life as we know it, and now they have been discovered in Enceladus’ plumes.
A “black smoker” hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor on Earth. Similar vents are thought to exist on the ocean floor of Enceladus as well, where the organic compounds most likely originate from.
The discovery of these smaller – but vital – organic compounds is another significant piece of the puzzle in understanding Enceladus’ possible habitability. Although completely frozen on the outside surface, on the inside, Enceladus is a most remarkable little world. Beneath the outer ice crust lies a global warm salty ocean, that, it appears, is not too different from oceans on Earth. The rocky bottom, including the hydrothermal vents, provides chemical nutrients just as it does on our planet. The environment is similar to that around hydrothermal vents – or “smokers” – on Earth’s ocean bottoms. The vents provide heat and nutrients, and at least on Earth, serve as an oasis for a multitude of life forms despite the surrounding colder waters and complete lack of sunlight.
These new findings make Enceladus and other ocean moons in the solar system, such as Europa and Titan, even more enticing targets in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system. Not that long ago, it was thought that Earth was the only world in our solar system with liquid water. Now we know of several moons in the outer solar system that do as well (and maybe even Pluto!), it’s just that the water is hidden below an outer layer of ice. We don’t know yet if any of those water worlds actually host any kind of life, but being able to study some of these alien oceans both now and with more advanced future missions is certainly one of the most exciting developments in planetary exploration.
Bottom line: Further analysis of material in Enceladus’ water vapor plumes has revealed the existence of additional organic compounds, the kind that are the ingredients of amino acids, the building blocks of life on Earth.
Elon Musk, founder of private space-faring company SpaceX, recently unveiled his new Starship craft. Amazingly, it is designed to carry up to 100 crew members on interplanetary journeys throughout the solar system, starting with Mars in 2024.
The announcement is exciting, invoking deep emotions of hope and adventure. But I can't help having a number of moral reservations about it.
Musk has declared a fascinatingly short time line to achieve orbit with this rocket. He wants to build four or five versions of the vehicle in the next six months. The first rocket will do a test launch to 20km within a month, and the final version will orbit the Earth.
Whether this is possible remains to be seen. Bear in mind that in the early 1960s when the then US president, John F Kennedy, announced the race to the moon, it took nearly a decade to achieve and several crew members died during the testing phases.
Despite this, it has been an important goal since the beginning of the space age for people to travel between planets — helping us to explore, mine and colonize the solar system.
There are many reasons to believe SpaceX will succeed. The company has been extremely impressive in its contribution to space, filling a gap when government agencies such as NASA could not justify the spending. It's not the rocket technology that I doubt, my concern is mainly astrobiological.
If life exists elsewhere in our universe, the solar system is a good place to start looking — enabling us to touch, collect and analyse samples in a reasonably short time. Along with some of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, Mars is one of the top contenders for hosting some sort of microbial life, or for having done so in the past.
However, there is a risk that microbe-ridden humans walking on the red planet could contaminate it with bugs from Earth. And contamination may threaten alien organisms, if they exist. It may also make it impossible to figure out whether any microbes found on Mars later on are martian or terrestrial in origin.
A mission to return samples from Mars to Earth is expected to be completed by the early 2030s, with all the collection work completed by sterilised robots. While such missions pose a certain risk of contamination too, there are rigorous protocols to help minimise the chance. These were initiated by the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and must be followed by anyone in the space industry, governmental or non-governmental entities alike.
Can we be confident that, while pushing the boundaries of human exploration in such a short time frame, corners won't be cut or standards won't be allowed to slip? It will be considerably harder to follow these protocols once humans are actually on the planet.
If SpaceX was serious about planetary protection, I would expect to see a policy on its website, or easily found by searching "SpaceX planetary protection". But that isn't the case. So while it is possible that it has a rigorous planetary protection plan in place behind the scenes, its public-facing content seems to suggest that pushing the boundaries of human exploration is more important than the consequences of that exploration.
Other moral issues
Another issue is the health of the humans are being sent out to Mars. Deep space is not without its dangers, but at least working in low Earth orbit, on the moon and the International Space Station, the Earth's magnetic field offers some protection from harmful space radiation.
Mars doesn't have its own magnetic field and its atmosphere provides little shelter from cosmic radiation. Astronauts would also be exposed to deep space radiation for the minimum six-month journey between planets.
Though plenty of work is being conducted, radiation protection technology is a long way behind other aspects of rocketry. I'm not sure that it is fair or ethical to expect astronauts to be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation that could leave them with considerable health problems — or worse, imminent death.
So while there is obviously a lot to gain from sending humans to Mars, the risks of contaminating Mars, injuring astronauts and damaging the environment are very real. I would argue that it is our moral obligation to prevent such damage. I hope SpaceX is putting as much thought into this as it has into its launch vehicles, and I would like to see this become a priority for the company.
Once we have better radiation shielding and have proven that Mars is entirely inhospitable, albeit a very difficult thing to do, it will most likely be an adventure worth embarking on. But at the very least, the company should hold off sending people to Mars until we have the results of the upcoming life detection missions, such as the Mars Sample Return and ExoMars rover.
Until then the moon is a great target for human exploration, resource mining and colonisation. As it is nearby and we can be reasonably confident that it does not harbour life, why not start there?
Regardless of the thrill and feelings of hope this kind of adventure brings, just because we can do something, doesn't mean we necessarily should, now or in the future.
A bizarre YouTube video claims the 14th and 15th century painter and inventor hid proof of aliens in his artwork, most notably the Mona Lisa.
In the video Paranormal Crucible claim one can make out facial features, headdress, cloak and the hands of an ‘Alien High Priest’ if the colours are manipulated to make it clearer.
A computer generated voice which narrates the video says: "Many theologians believe that Leonardo Da Vinci deliberately concealed secret codes and subliminal messages in most of his work.
"If this is true then it's reasonable to assume that the Mona Lisa was in fact painted in order to conceal important historical and religious facts possibly regarding the extraterrestrial presence and its surreptitious involvement within the Roman Catholic Church.”
Leonardo da Vinci 'hid PROOF of aliens' in the Mona Lisa and St John the Baptist
Another Paranormal Crucible video claims there is an alien hidden in da Vinci’s St John The Baptist masterpiece.
The video claims if the painting, which is believed to be da Vinci’s last work, is mirrored, an alien’s face appears in the centre.
It says: “If we mirror and join the image, we can begin to see that the master painter has indeed hidden a mysterious figure within the brush strokes of his iconic painting.
By enhancing the image, the viewer can “clearly” see “possible evidence of an extraterrestrial life form”.
YOUTUBE
Aliens hidden in the Mona Lisa
Others, however, go one step further and claim da Vinci was an alien himself.
UFO blogger Scott C Waring wrote on his UFO Sightings Daily website: "The likelihood of Leonardo Da Vinci being an alien or half-breed is very high.
YOUTUBE
An alien is also 'hidden' in St John The Baptist
"He shows all the signs.
"He had very high intellectual ability, extraordinary creative range, and used them to accomplish quite a bit.
"Leonardo is somebody who is able to operate across all these various fields, which is very unusual.
GETTY
The Mona Lisa was finished in 1503
"Geniuses rarely are great in all areas like Leonardo.
"He was known for hiding secret messages and codes in his artwork, so this new discovery gives us the key we have been missing about him his extraordinary abilities came from or were those of aliens."
Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, have discovered that powerful winds driven by supermassive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation.
Credit: SDSS
Dwarf galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei that have spatially extended outflows.
Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies that contain between 100 million to a few billion stars. In contrast, the Milky Way has 200-400 billion stars. Dwarf galaxies are the most abundant galaxy type in the universe and often orbit larger galaxies.
The team of three astronomers was surprised by the strength of the detected winds.
“We expected we would need observations with much higher resolution and sensitivity, and we had planned on obtaining these as a follow-up to our initial observations,” said Gabriela Canalizo, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, who led the research team. “But we could see the signs strongly and clearly in the initial observations. The winds were stronger than we had anticipated.”
Canalizo explained that astronomers have suspected for the past couple of decades that supermassive black holes at the centers of large galaxies can have a profound influence on the way large galaxies grow and age.
“Our findings now indicate that their effect can be just as dramatic, if not more dramatic, in dwarf galaxies in the universe,” she said.
The researchers, who also include Laura V. Sales, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy; and Christina M. Manzano-King, a doctoral student in Canalizo’s lab, used a portion of the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which maps more than 35% of the sky, to identify 50 dwarf galaxies, 29 of which showed signs of being associated with black holes in their centers. Six of these 29 galaxies showed evidence of winds — specifically, high-velocity ionized gas outflows — emanating from their active black holes.
“Using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, we were able to not only detect, but also measure specific properties of these winds, such as their kinematics, distribution, and power source — the first time this has been done,” Canalizo said. “We found some evidence that these winds may be changing the rate at which the galaxies are able to form stars.”
Credit: UCR/Stan Lim
From left to right: Laura Sales, Christina Manzano-King, and Gabriela Canalizo.
Manzano-King, the first author of the research paper, explained that many unanswered questions about galaxy evolution can be understood by studying dwarf galaxies.
“Larger galaxies often form when dwarf galaxies merge together,” she said. “Dwarf galaxies are, therefore, useful in understanding how galaxies evolve. Dwarf galaxies are small because after they formed, they somehow avoided merging with other galaxies. Thus, they serve as fossils by revealing what the environment of the early universe was like. Dwarf galaxies are the smallest galaxies in which we are directly seeing winds — gas flows up to 1,000 kilometers per second — for the first time.”
Manzano-King explained that as material falls into a black hole, it heats up due to friction and strong gravitational fields and releases radiative energy. This energy pushes ambient gas outward from the center of the galaxy into intergalactic space.
“What’s interesting is that these winds are being pushed out by active black holes in the six dwarf galaxies rather than by stellar processes such as supernovae,” she said. “Typically, winds driven by stellar processes are common in dwarf galaxies and constitute the dominant process for regulating the amount of gas available in dwarf galaxies for forming stars.”UC Riverside astronomers find large-scale winds associated with active black holes in small galaxies suppress star formation
Credit: UCR
Astronomers suspect that when wind emanating from a black hole is pushed out, it compresses the gas ahead of the wind, which can increase star formation. But if all the wind gets expelled from the galaxy’s center, gas becomes unavailable and star formation could decrease. The latter appears to be what is occurring in the six dwarf galaxies the researchers identified.
“In these six cases, the wind has a negative impact on star formation,” Sales said. “Theoretical models for the formation and evolution of galaxies have not included the impact of black holes in dwarf galaxies. We are seeing evidence, however, of a suppression of star formation in these galaxies. Our findings show that galaxy formation models must include black holes as important, if not dominant, regulators of star formation in dwarf galaxies.”
Next, the researchers plan to study the mass and momentum of gas outflows in dwarf galaxies.
“This would better inform theorists who rely on such data to build models,” Manzano-King said. “These models, in turn, teach observational astronomers just how the winds affect dwarf galaxies. We also plan to do a systematic search in a larger sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to identify dwarf galaxies with outflows originating in active black holes.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Hellman Foundation. Data was obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, and made possible by financial support from the W. M. Keck Foundation.
Contacts and sources:
Iqbal Pittalwala University of California – Riverside
How Do the Strongest Magnets in the Universe Form?
How Do the Strongest Magnets in the Universe Form?
How do some neutron stars become the strongest magnets in the Universe? A German-British team of astrophysicists has found a possible answer to the question of how these so-called magnetars form. The researchers used large computer simulations to demonstrate how the merger of two stars creates strong magnetic fields. If such stars explode in supernovae, magnetars could result.
The simulation marks the birth of a magnetic star such as Tau Scorpii. The image is a cut through the orbital plane where the colouring indicates the strength of the magnetic field and the light hatching reflects the direction of the magnetic field line.
Scientists from Heidelberg University, the Max Planck Society, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, and the University of Oxford were involved in the research. The results were published in “Nature”.
Our Universe is threaded by magnetic fields. The Sun, for example, has an envelope in which convection continuously generates magnetic fields. “Even though massive stars have no such envelopes, we still observe a strong, large-scale magnetic field at the surface of about ten percent of them,” explains Dr Fabian Schneider from the Centre for Astronomy of Heidelberg University, who is the first author of the study in “Nature”. Although such fields were already discovered in 1947, their origin has remained elusive so far.
Over a decade ago, scientists suggested that strong magnetic fields are produced when two stars collide. “But until now, we weren’t able to test this hypothesis because we didn’t have the necessary computational tools,” says Dr Sebastian Ohlmann from the computing centre of the Max Planck Society in Garching near Munich. This time, the researchers used the AREPO code, a highly dynamic simulation code running on compute clusters of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), to explain the properties of Tau Scorpii (τ Sco), a magnetic star located 500 light years from Earth.
Already in 2016, Fabian Schneider and Philipp Podsiadlowski from the University of Oxford realised that τ Sco is a so-called blue straggler. Blue stragglers are the product of merged stars. “We assume that Tau Scorpii obtained its strong magnetic field during the merger process,” explains Prof. Dr Philipp Podsiadlowski. Through its computer simulations of τ Sco, the German-British research team has now demonstrated that strong turbulence during the merger of two stars can create such a field.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Artists impression of a magnetar
Stellar mergers are relatively frequent: Scientists assume that about ten percent of all massive stars in the Milky Way are the products of such processes. This is in good agreement with the occurrence rate of magnetic massive stars, according to Dr Schneider. Astronomers think that these very stars could form magnetars when they explode in supernovae.
This may also happen to τ Sco when it explodes at the end of its life. The computer simulations suggest that the magnetic field generated would be sufficient to explain the exceptionally strong magnetic fields in magnetars. “Magnetars are thought to have the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe – up to one hundred million times stronger than the strongest magnetic field ever produced by humans,” says Prof. Dr Friedrich Röpke from HITS.
The research was funded by the Oxford Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys and the Klaus Tschira Foundation (Heidelberg).
Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute for Physics have turned to plasmas in a proposal that could revolutionize the search for the elusive dark matter.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. Originally introduced to explain why the Strong Force (which holds together protons and neutrons) is the same backwards and forwards in time, the so called axion would provide a natural explanation for dark matter. Rather than discrete particles, axion dark matter would form a pervasive wave flowing throughout space.
The researchers propose a new instrument for searching dark matter axions using tunable plasmas.
Illustration: Alexander Millar/Stockholm University
The axion is one of the best explanations for dark matter but has only recently been the focus of large scale experimental effort. Due to this renaissance there has been a rush to come up with new ideas for how to look for the axion in all the areas where it could be hiding.
“Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: you have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency. Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with ‘hearing’ the dark matter that the Earth is travelling through. Despite being well motivated, axions have been experimentally neglected during the three decades since they were named by coauthor Frank Wilczek,” says Dr. Alexander Millar, Postdoctor at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University, and author of the study.
The key insight of the research team’s new study is that inside a magnetic field axions would generate a small electric field that could be used to drive oscillations in the plasma. A plasma is a material where charged particles, such as electrons, can flow freely as a fluid. These oscillations amplify the signal, leading to a better “axion radio”. Unlike traditional experiments based on resonant cavities, there is almost no limit on how large these plasmas can be, thus giving a larger signal. The difference is somewhat like the difference between a walkie talkie and a radio broadcast tower.
The researchers propose a new instrument for searching dark matter axions using tunable plasmas. / Illustration: Alexander Millar/Stockholm University
EurekAlert | STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY
“Without the cold plasma, axions cannot efficiently convert into light. The plasma plays a dual role, both creating an environment which allows for efficient conversion, and providing a resonant plasmon to collect the energy of the converted dark matter”, says Dr. Matthew Lawson, Postdoctor at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University, also author of the study.
“This is totally a new way to look for dark matter, and will help us search for one of the strongest dark matter candidates in areas that are just completely unexplored. Building a tuneable plasma would allow us to make much larger experiments than traditional techniques, giving much stronger signals at high frequencies”, says Dr. Alexander Millar.
To tune this “axion radio” the authors propose using something called a “wire metamaterial”, a system of wires thinner than hair that can be moved to change the characteristic frequency of the plasma. Inside a large, powerful magnet, similar to those used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines in hospitals, a wire metamaterial turns into a very sensitive axion radio.
Searching for dark matter with plasmas will not remain just an interesting idea. In close collaboration with the researchers, an experimental group at Berkeley has been doing research and development on the concept with the intent of building such an experiment in the near future.
“Plasma haloscopes are one of the few ideas that could search for axions in this parameter space. The fact that the experimental community has latched onto this idea so quickly is very exciting and promising for building a full scale experiment”, says Dr. Alexander Millar.
Contacts and sources:
Matthew Lawson, Postdoctor at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University
Alexander Millar, Postdoctor at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University
The Milky Way Kidnapped Several Tiny Galaxies from Its Neighbor
The Milky Way Kidnapped Several Tiny Galaxies from Its Neighbor
Just like the moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth orbits the sun, galaxies orbit each other according to the predictions of cosmology.
For example, more than 50 discovered satellite galaxies orbit our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The largest of these is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, a large dwarf galaxy that resembles a faint cloud in the Southern Hemisphere night sky.
UC Riverside-led research shows our galaxy is undergoing a massive merger with its largest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud
Visualization of the simulations used in the study. Top left shows dark matter in white. Bottom right shows a simulated Large Magellanic Cloud-like galaxy with stars and gas, and several smaller companion galaxies
UC Riverside-led research shows our galaxy is undergoing a massive merger with its largest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud
Credit: UCR/Ethan Jahn
A team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has discovered that several of the small — or “dwarf” — galaxies orbiting the Milky Way were likely stolen from the LMC, including several ultrafaint dwarfs, but also relatively bright and well-known satellite galaxies, such as Carina and Fornax.
The researchers made the discovery by using new data gathered by the Gaia space telescope on the motions of several nearby galaxies and contrasting this with state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. The UC Riverside team used the positions in the sky and the predicted velocities of material, such as dark matter, accompanying the LMC, finding that at least four ultrafaint dwarfs and two classical dwarfs, Carina and Fornax, used to be satellites of the LMC. Through the ongoing merger process, however, the more massive Milky Way used its powerful gravitational field to tear apart the LMC and steal these satellites, the researchers report.
Laura Sales (right), an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, is seen here with Ethan Jahn, her graduate student.
Credit: UCR/Sales group
“These results are an important confirmation of our cosmological models, which predict that small dwarf galaxies in the universe should also be surrounded by a population of smaller fainter galaxy companions,” said Laura Sales, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, who led the research team. “This is the first time that we are able to map the hierarchy of structure formation to such faint and ultrafaint dwarfs.”
The findings have important implications for the total mass of the LMC and also on the formation of the Milky Way.
“If so many dwarfs came along with the LMC only recently, that means the properties of the Milky Way satellite population just 1 billion years ago were radically different, impacting our understanding of how the faintest galaxies form and evolve,” Sales said.
Study results appear in the November 2019 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies that contain anywhere from a few thousand to a few billion stars. The researchers used computer simulations from the Feedback In Realistic Environments project to show the LMC and galaxies similar to it host numerous tiny dwarf galaxies, many of which contain no stars at all — only dark matter, a type of matter scientists think constitutes the bulk of the universe’s mass.
“The high number of tiny dwarf galaxies seems to suggest the dark matter content of the LMC is quite large, meaning the Milky Way is undergoing the most massive merger in its history, with the LMC, its partner, bringing in as much as one third of the mass in the Milky Way’s dark matter halo — the halo of invisible material that surrounds our galaxy,” said Ethan Jahn, the first author of the paper and a graduate student in Sales’ research group.
Jahn explained that the number of tiny dwarf galaxies the LMC hosts may be higher than astronomers previously estimated, and that many of these tiny satellites have no stars.
“Small galaxies are hard to measure, and it’s possible that some already-known ultrafaint dwarf galaxies are in fact associated with the LMC,” he said. “It’s also possible that we will discover new ultrafaints that are associated with the LMC.”
Dwarf galaxies can either be satellites of larger galaxies, or they can be “isolated,” existing on their own and independent of any larger object. The LMC used to be isolated, Jahn explained, but it was captured by the gravity of the Milky Way and is now its satellite.
“The LMC hosted at least seven satellite galaxies of its own, including the Small Magellanic Cloud in the Southern Sky, prior to them being captured by the Milky Way,” he said.
Next, the team will study how the satellites of LMC-sized galaxies form their stars and how that relates to how much dark matter mass they have.
“It will be interesting to see if they form differently than satellites of Milky Way-like galaxies,” Jahn said.
Sales and Jahn were joined in the study Andrew Wetzel of UC Davis; Michael Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas at Austin; T. K. Chan of UC San Diego; Kareem El-Badry of UC Berkeley; and Alexandres Lazar and James S. Bullock of UC Irvine.
The research was supported by grants to Sales from NASA and the Hellman Foundation.
Contacts and sources:
Iqbal Pittalwala University of California – Riverside
Citation:
Dark and luminous satellites of LMC-mass galaxies in the FIRE simulations. Ethan D Jahn, Laura V Sales, Andrew Wetzel, Michael Boylan-Kolchin, T K Chan, Kareem El-Badry, Alexandres Lazar, James S Bullock. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019; 489 (4): 5348 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz245
Ice on Lunar South Pole May Have More than One Source, Sugests Study
Ice on Lunar South Pole May Have More than One Source, Suggests Study
New research sheds light on the ages of ice deposits reported in the area of the Moon’s south pole — information that could help identify the sources of the deposits and help in planning future human exploration.
Shackleton Crater, the floor of which is permanently shadowed from the sun, appears to be home to deposits of water ice. A new study sheds light on how old these and other deposits on the Moon’s south pole might be.
A new study sheds light on how old these and other deposits on the Moon’s south pole might be. Shackleton crater is nearly coincident with the Moon’s south pole. Its interior receives almost no direct sunlight and is a perennial cold trap, making Shackleton a promising candidate location in which to seek sequestered volatiles.
Credit: NASA
The discovery of ice deposits in craters scattered across the Moon’s south pole has helped to renew interest in exploring the lunar surface, but no one is sure exactly when or how that ice got there. A new study published in the journal Icarus suggests that while a majority of those deposits are likely billions of years old, some may be much more recent.
Ariel Deutsch, a graduate student in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and the study’s lead author, says that constraining the ages of the deposits is important both for basic science and for future lunar explorers who might make use of that ice for fuel and other purposes.
“The ages of these deposits can potentially tell us something about the origin of the ice, which helps us understand the sources and distribution of water in the inner solar system,” Deutsch said. “For exploration purposes, we need to understand the lateral and vertical distributions of these deposits to figure out how best to access them. These distributions evolve with time, so having an idea of the age is important.”
For the study, Deutsch worked with Jim Head, a professor at Brown, and Gregory Neumann from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the Moon since 2009, the researchers looked at the ages of the large craters in which evidence for south pole ice deposits was found. To date the craters, researchers count the number of smaller craters that have accrued inside the larger ones. Scientists have an approximate idea of the pace of impacts over time, so counting craters can help establish the ages of terrains.
The majority of the reported ice deposits are found within large craters formed about 3.1 billion years or longer ago, the study found. Since the ice can’t be any older than the crater, that puts an upper bound on the age of the ice. Just because the crater is old doesn’t mean that the ice within it is also that old too, the researchers say, but in this case there’s reason to believe the ice is indeed old. The deposits have a patchy distribution across crater floors, which suggests that the ice has been battered by micrometeorite impacts and other debris over a long period of time.
If those reported ice deposits are indeed ancient, that could have significant implications in terms of exploration and potential resource utilization, the researchers say.
Credit: NASA
“There have been models of bombardment through time showing that ice starts to concentrate with depth,” Deutsch said. “So if you have a surface layer that’s old, you’d expect more underneath.”
While the majority of ice was in the ancient craters, the researchers also found evidence for ice in smaller craters that, judging by their sharp, well-defined features, appear to be quite fresh. That suggests that some of the deposits on the south pole got there relatively recently.
“That was a surprise,” Deutsch said. “There hadn’t really been any observations of ice in younger cold traps before.”
If there are indeed deposits of different ages, the researchers say, that suggests they may also have different sources. Older ice could have been sourced from water-bearing comets and asteroids impacting the surface, or through volcanic activity that drew water from deep within the Moon. But there aren’t many big water-bearing impactors around in recent times, and volcanism is thought to have ceased on the Moon over a billion years ago. So more recent ice deposits would require different sources — perhaps bombardment from pea-sized micrometeorites or implantation by solar wind.
The best way to find out for sure, the researchers say, is to send spacecraft there to get some samples. And that appears to be on the horizon. NASA’s Artemis program aims to put humans on the Moon by 2024, and plans to fly numerous precursor missions with robotic spacecraft in the meantime. Head, a study co-author and Deutsch’s Ph.D. advisor, says studies like this one will help to shape those future missions.
“When we think about sending humans back to the Moon for long-term exploration, we need to know what resources are there that we can count on, and we currently don’t know,” Head said. “Studies like this one help us make predictions about where we need to go to answer those questions.”
Contacts and sources:
Kevin Stacey Brown University
Citation:
Analyzing the ages of south polar craters on the Moon: Implications for the sources and evolution of surface water ice.. Ariel N. Deutsch, James W. Head, Gregory A. Neumann. Icarus, 2019; 113455 DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2019.113455
UFO Caught In Three Photo Traveling Through Storm Clouds! Oct 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught In Three Photo Traveling Through Storm Clouds! Oct 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 11, 2019
Location of sighting: Iberia, Louisiana, USA
Source: MUFON #103948
I had to crop the photos, they were just too big. So here is the main parts of each of the three. This white long craft was recorded in three photos as it shot through the clouds. It seems to be following the direction of a jet contrail, perhaps its interested in pollution caused by planes or the technology of the plane itself. This is clearly not a jet, because a jet would not be caught in only 3 photos, thats just moving many times faster than a jet. Storms often have UFOs nearby. The UFOs seem to charge up the storms causing the storms to grow and create thunder and lightning.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
I was taking photos of storm clouds shortly after 8AM, and through a break in them I observed an odd looking "doughnuts on a rope" contrail above the cloud cover...I did not see its formation or what made it but whatever did appeared to have been moving in a roughly east to west direction based on how the trail was dispersing. I snapped three photos of the contrail; the first two were maybe a second apart and the the third was maybe 4 seconds later...the delay and color difference in pic #3 was the result of changing the phone camera setting back to normal when I realized it still had a "film" filter applied. I was completely unaware that the seemingly rod shaped object in the photos was there when I was shooting these photos, and only saw it upon reviewing the pictures zoomed in.
Alien Disk Passing Moon Caught By Astronomer Club, Oct 11, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Alien Disk Passing Moon Caught By Astronomer Club, Oct 11, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 11, 2019
Location of sighting: Earths moon
Source: MUFON #103950
This UFO was caught passing the moon yesterday and the object has no wings, no visible engines and no contrail. There is nothing about it to indicate that its man made or animal. This looks like the side view of a perfect disk. They do travel fast at times and when they do, a single photo is a lucky catch for sure. Its a shame they didn't take video, I would have loved to see how this thing moves. I do notice there is a blur around the UFO. Often UFOs do have a blur area around them due to the alien propulsion systems.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
On October 11th, 2019 we attended an astronomy night.. we took some photos of the moon through a telescope and found an anomaly on the last photo. We took 3 photos and it only appears on the last.
Joe Scarbrow was working near his home in Cesar NC when he found some bigfoot tracks. Bigfoot is said to be a creature of earth and maybe so, but I believe its alien in origin and lives below ground in an alien base. But every so often a few have to come to the surface for rituals that are of cultural significance. We cant find them because they do have alien technology and they do have bases below ground. Bigfoot is not an individual, but a species of alien. And really, is it alien if its born on earth in an underground base?
China Shows Off UFO At Airshow, UFO Sighting News.
China Shows Off UFO At Airshow, UFO Sighting News.
Date of display: Oct 10, 2019 Location of display: Tianjin, China
China has unveiled a new stealth helicopter that is in the shape of a UFO disk. The disk look very similar to a lot of UFOs seen around the world for decades, so it seems that China is taking its info for design directly from UFO reports. China is working hard at this airshow to reveal its newest aircraft in order to show off its military muscle. The disk is probably the generation 1 of its type, so China probably has a ten 10 or higher of this craft now...which means no more helicopter rotor, which was probably replaced by three actual alien craft anti propulsion generators. China is showing off its aircraft...but we all know its top secret craft are still being hidden from the public. Much like Americas TR3B secret military craft with alien propulsion systems installed...this kind of tech is capable of space travel at partial light speed. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
You know all those other abundantly credible reports we’ve shared in the past about aliens and UFO sightings? Like the one earlier this week about a red triangular craft that was recorded hovering in the Texas sky in perhaps the “clearest ufo footage” ever? Or that one about a Top Gun Navy pilot who described his incredible UFO encounter? Or that one last week about a strange “fleet” of 14 glowing UFOs that was spotted and caught on camera off the coast of North Carolina?
Yeah, well, those are all old news. The new UFO slash alien hotness right now comes to us from UFO and extraterrestrial hunter Scott Waring who has gone to painstaking lengths to prove that there is an “alien city” in an archived NASA photo of the Moon’s poles. Or as he puts it in his article’s headline: “100% Proof That Aliens Currently Live On Our Moon.”
100 PERCENT, PEOPLE. That’s VERY definitive. Pay attention.
“These alien structures are almost impossible to see, yet they are there,” says Waring, who goes on to prove his discovery by adding “a bit of shadows and the building’s shape and surface became visible.”
PIXABAY
After adding the shadows, Waring points out something that is “like a giant alien air vent, leading to an alien base below the ground. It is not an air vent, of course, but is more likely a doorway.”
Of course. Duh.
“Or it could be an entrance to some sort of space port,” he adds.
Definitely.
“When we imagine an alien city, we see structures like our own, but in 1 million or even 1 billion years are humans really going to make such structures or are we going to change everything about them?” Waring asked on his website. “Well, thats [how] technology evolves with a species. I mean it wasn’t long ago that the world once thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.”
Needless to say, many of Waring’s YouTube followers were very impressed.
“You RULE Dude!!! Our Space Force has barracks “somewhere”?!! Seriously tho’…the aliens mine H3 for fusion reactors. I think,” wrote Petro Phishhed.
Viewer George Mair concurred, “An amazing find Scott it looks like a giant city of some sort? Definitely intelligently made structures?”
Don’t believe him? Take a look for yourself and always remember…
The back gate is seen at the top-secret military installation at the Nevada Test and Training Range known as Area 51 on July 22, 2019 near Rachel, Nevada.
It’s an absurd (and incredibly dangerous) idea — the Air Force has warned that it will defend the facility vigorously — but the impulse behind it is perhaps understandable. For decades, the American imagination has run wild conjuring up all sorts of conspiracy theories about what is really going on at the site.
Is it a place where the US government is hiding UFOs and aliens? Or is it just a boring military base? And if it’s just a boring military base, why is the US government so obsessed with keeping everything about it a secret?
To write the book, Jacobsen interviewed over 70 people who had first-hand knowledge of the secret facility, including 32 who lived and worked at Area 51. The result is basically the most comprehensive account of the history of Area 51 you can get without a super-high-level security clearance.
If anyone had answers for me, it was her. And boy did she. But she also left me with new mysteries I hadn’t even known to ask about.
Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Alex Ward
Okay, let’s get right to it: What is Area 51, really?
Annie Jacobsen
Area 51 was the birthplace of overhead espionage for the CIA. It’s where the U-2 spy plane was first built back in the 1950s, and it’s where the intelligence community has worked with its military partners and others to work on espionage platforms.
It’s also a place where all elements of the Defense Department work on some of their most classified programs along with members of the intelligence community, of which there are many.
There’s also an element of Area 51 where the CIA trains its foreign paramilitary partners in counterterrorism tactics. They do this out on the wilds of Area 51 because they can bring some foreign fighters there who would otherwise not be welcomed into the country.
So the US can fly them in a plane with the windows drawn, drop them off, train them, and neither the fighters nor the American public have any idea where they were or what was going on.
Alex Ward
How important has Area 51 been to developing America’s spying capabilities?
Annie Jacobsen
We would not have the kinds of incredible overhead espionage technology that we have today without the existence of Area 51. It allowed the different wings of the federal government to pursue technologies in a very large open area that they could otherwise not pursue.
The U-2 spy plane flew at 70,000 feet and 500 miles an hour. Think about how much work you would have to do to make something like that — it was this incredibly delicate plane. Pilots died out there testing it.
But it taught the powers that be that with this incredible effort of testing, you could achieve radical technologies.
Alex Ward
Why did this place become such a hotbed for spying technology and training? Is it just because it’s so remote and so big?
Annie Jacobsen
When the base was founded back in the early 1950s, President Eisenhower tasked a guy named Richard Bissell from the CIA to find the most remote, most secretive place in the United States where they could work on the U-2 spy plane away from any prying eyes — Soviet or otherwise.
So Bissell smartly flew around with another CIA fellow and found the perfect fulfillment of that presidential request: a secret base centered around a dry lakebed in the middle of Nevada, located inside an already classified facility where the government was exploding nuclear weapons.
There was no way, Bissell realized, that anyone was going to try to get into this facility. Why would they want to? There were bombs going off!
Alex Ward
Everything about Area 51 screams secrecy — not just the location, but those who work there are brought into a very secretive culture in which it’s extremely taboo to divulge anything. So how did the UFOs and aliens narrative come about?
Annie Jacobsen
Well, it remained obscured to the outside world until the late 1980s, when an engineer named Bob Lazar went on a local Nevada news program and stated that he had worked at Area 51 on a flying saucer that he believed had come from outer space. Bob Lazar also told the public he thought he saw an alien.
That was the moment Area 51 became a public fascination. It had been completely cloaked in secrecy before that.
And in all the decades since, interest in the site has gained momentum around two ideas: the theory that the US military has been reverse-engineering UFOs and alien technology at the site, and the truth about the base that some of the most remarkably advanced technology platforms have been created and tested out there.
Alex Ward
Why haven’t any real secrets come out, though?
Annie Jacobsen
Bits and pieces of rumors would emerge over the decades, but the CIA had a very hefty disinformation and misinformation campaign going on out of Area 51.
The best example is in the 1950s when the U-2 spy plane was occasionally spotted. It basically looked like a flying cross way, way, way up high in the sky. And people would write to their Congressman and say, “I saw a UFO. Nothing flies this high.” They were right in that regard. Nothing did fly that high, as far as anyone knew.
And so the CIA, as we know from declassified documents now, used that misidentification to their advantage. It let the UFO mythology evolve because it served as a useful cover for the secret base.
Alex Ward
Did the CIA propagate the aliens story, too?
Annie Jacobsen
I don’t know of the CIA using the alien myth. I’ve never heard of it. But that’s a great question; no one’s actually ever asked me that.
Alex Ward
Okay, so we have this secretive testing site for overhead spy aircraft. What does this mysterious place actually look like?
Annie Jacobsen
Area 51 is part of the Nevada Test and Training Range, which is a large federal piece of property; it’s roughly the size of Connecticut. Area 51 is a tiny parcel of land in that area that surrounds this dry lakebed. The exact dimensions obviously have never been reported, but you can hazard a guess based on looking at the map.
Area 51Courtesy of Annie Jacobsen
We know what happened from the 1950s through the 1970s, which was basically work on advanced aircraft for spying. But what gets very mysterious is what was going on in the 1990s and the 2000s, and certainly ever since the War on Terror.
I have absolutely no information about that. It’s a jealously guarded secret, but you can be sure that whatever is being built and tested out there has evolved from the technology systems that were worked on before. We know the base is still flourishing despite people saying it’s not.
The first president to state the word or phrase “Area 51” publicly was President Obama during an awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center. And when he did that, in essence, the words “Area 51” became declassified.
Alex Ward
The secrecy around Area 51 is surely what is making thousands say they want to storm that region. What will they see on the very off chance they try and succeed?
Annie Jacobsen
I couldn’t even begin to speculate on whether or not anyone could get into Area 51 to see what’s going on because it’s fundamentally impossible. To think that the government isn’t uniquely aware of everyone who goes anywhere near that facility is naive. A group of people massing anywhere near that facility is not going to happen. Local law enforcement would step in in a preemptive manner far before that happened.
Alex Ward
When people ask you to divulge some of the secrets you learned from Area 51, what do you tell them?
Annie Jacobsen
Well, first I send them to my book, of course.
Separate from that, I have interviewed scores of very smart, very highly placed government personnel who visited the base and believe the technology they saw is so advanced that they question whether or not it’s manmade. That’s intriguing to me. I don’t report on that because there is no documentation to support that claim, but that is the opinion of many people that I know.
Alex Ward
To be clear, these are people who worked on these programs?
Annie Jacobsen
No, these are individuals who have visited the base and have been asked their expert opinion and analysis on classified programs.
Alex Ward
Just based on that, if someone were to ask you — and I guess that someone would be me — would you say with 100 percent confidence that there is no out-of-this-world technology being worked on at Area 51?
Annie Jacobsen
I report my books based on what qualified, competent, multi-sourced individuals tell me, and then I strive to back up information based on declassified documents that exist on the record. So I steer clear of reporting things that are observed but can’t be verified.
Alex Ward
Fair enough, though that’s fascinating to me.
What also intrigued me about what I learned from your book is that Area 51 seems like the quintessential Cold War location. Almost movie-like. It seems to have maintained that ethos, especially the drive to have the best technology and the guarded secrecy around such efforts.
Annie Jacobsen
That’s a great observation on your part, and I believe speaks to the broader secrecy campaign at work in Area 51’s favor. One could argue that all this business of captured UFOs from outer space and aliens is terrific chatter, right? “Look over here!” And people get to think, “Oh, Area 51 is just a Cold War relic.”
My suspicion, though, is that some of the most cutting-edge science and technology programs are being tested at Area 51 today. We won’t know about them for decades. But years from now the future technology that was being built there during the War on Terror will look quaint. Anachronistic. Outdated.
Alex Ward
That is my real fascination with Area 51. Yes, there’s the UFOs and alien stuff, but it’s possibly a very important epicenter for the future of American defense, of technological progress.
The life-or-death moments in America’s future are, if not being seeded at Area 51, they’re in a sense being decided there. To me, that’s a great story in and of itself.
Annie Jacobsen
That was beautifully said. There’s your closing paragraph. You don’t need me. That was perfect.
The retired Navy Commander who spotted the infamous Tic Tac-shaped UFO relayed another strange story from a Navy helicopter pilot on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Back in the '90s, the pilot was retrieving BQM drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean when he saw an unexplained "dark mass coming up from the depths."
The pilot said the torpedo "just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths."
You might not know the name David Fravor, but you probably know what he saw … even if he’s still not sure what that was. Fravor is the retired U.S. Navy Commander who in 2017 told the New York Times that he spotted a Tic Tac-shaped UFO from the cockpit of his F/A-18F Super Hornet—“around 40 feet long and oval in shape”—100 miles off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
There’s video, of course, of Fravor’s now-legendary encounter, originally released for public viewing by The New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a UFO research group from former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge:
Last month, that UFO video made headlines once more when the Navy confirmed it was real. The clip indeed showed “unexplained aerial phenomena,” but the service said it and two other videos should have never been released to the public in the first place.
So Fravor has begun the requisite publicity tour. In an interview with the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, Fravor recounted his sighting from 15 years ago, but also revealed a new story from a Navy helicopter pilot who reached out with his own strange, creepy tale while on the job.
Back in the ‘90s, this pilot’s job was to fetch BQM aerial target drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean. At the time, the pilot was flying a CH-53—“a big, heavy-lifter the Marine Corps uses for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “Off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico.”
“The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up and they fly back,” Fravor said. “The first time they were out and they were going to pick up a BQM, he’s sitting in the front—in the CH-53 you can see down by your feet—and as he’s looking down, they’re 50 feet (15 metres) above the water, he sees this kind of dark mass coming up from the depths.”
As the pilot picked up the BQM, he was apparently at a loss for words. “He’s looking at this thing going, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it just goes back down underwater. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”
One dark mass coming up from the depths is weird enough. Two is officially cause for concern. A few months later, the helicopter pilot saw the exact same thing.
“He’s out picking up a torpedo, they hook the diver up on the winch, and as they’re lowering him down, he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else. This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water.
“They reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths. They never recovered it.”
The helicopter pilot swears the torpedo didn’t sink, per Fravor—and that pilot even told the Times about the incident back in 2017, but the paper never reported it. We’re guessing the editors would reconsider today.
So … what was the dark mass if it wasn’t a submarine? A whale? The Loch Ness Monster? For now we can only speculate, at least until the next video leaks.
Hot liquid that churns around Earth's outer core powers a gigantic magnetic field that's been hugging our planet since its infancy, protecting it from harmful solar radiation. But this magnetic field is known to get restless — and a couple of times every million years or so, the poles flip, and magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa.
Now, a new study suggests that the magnetic poles can flip much more frequently than scientists thought. That's what seems to have happened around 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period, when Earth's creatures were undergoing evolutionary growth spurts, transforming into more complex life-forms.
To understand the workings of the magnetic field during this time, a group of researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris and the Russian Academy of Sciences collected sediment samples from an outcrop in northeastern Siberia.
In the lab, they determined the orientation of magnetic particles trapped in the sediments by slowly heating them to extreme temperatures to demagnetize them. The orientation of the particles corresponded to the magnetic field direction (which way magnetic north pointed, for instance) at the time and place the sediment was deposited. The researchers fine-tuned the age of the sediments by dating trilobite fossils found in the same layers, and were thus able to approximate when the magnetic fields flipped.
The team found that around 500 million years ago, the planet's magnetic field flipped about 26 times every million years or so — the highest frequency ever suggested. That's "extreme," considering that until recently, five flips per million years was considered very high, said lead author Yves Gallet, research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research at the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris.
But perhaps "just as interesting" is that shortly after this time, within a few million years, the frequency of flipping dropped off extremely quickly, Gallet said. Between 495 million and 500 million years ago, the magnetic field started flipping at a rate of about one to two times every million years.
The "dominant idea for many years" was that the frequency of magnetic field reversals would only evolve gradually across tens of millions of years, he said. But "here we show a sudden change in reversal frequency occurring on a million-year timescale."
It's clear that the process that generated the magnetic field in the outer core 500 million years ago was very different from that observed today, he added. But what, exactly pushed Earth's magnetic field to flip so frequently, is unclear, he said. One possibility is that the frequent reversals could have been caused by changes in thermal conditions at the boundary between the liquid-iron outer core and the mantle driven by mantle dynamics, he said. Recent studies have also suggested that the inner core may have begun to cool and solidify around 600 or 700 million years ago. This process could have also played a role in the functioning of the magnetic field, he said.
The last magnetic field reversal happened around 780,000 years ago, but although there are concerns that it might happen again soon — which might temporarily weaken the field, causing harmful solar radiation to reach us — it's likely not "soon" in terms of human years.
"It is important to remember that the timescale we are considering for the evolution in magnetic reversal frequency is at least a few millions of years," Gallet said. At this scale, the magnetic field reversals could evolve to be more or less rapid. But "a magnetic polarity reversal is not for tomorrow," he added.
Editor's Note: This article was updated on Oct. 11 at 9:50 a.m. to clarify that the frequent reversals could have been caused by changes in the thermal conditions at the boundary between the liquid-iron core and the mantle, rather than in the liquid-iron core. Originally published on Live Science.
This illustration shows gas rising and falling in and out of the Milky Way galaxy using Hubble's COS instrument. With 10 years of data from COS, astronomers have found that there is more gas coming into our galaxy than leaving it.
Astronomers have discovered a strange surplus of gas in the Milky Way galaxy.
Using 10 years of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the team of astronomers concluded that there is more gas coming into our galaxy than leaving it. Rather than an equilibrium of gas entering and escaping, there is a significant imbalance, though the team behind this finding has not yet found the source for this gaseous disparity.
The researchers used data from Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), which allows the space telescope to study objects that absorb or emit light and determine aspects such as their temperature, chemical makeup, velocity and density. With COS, the team could observe and track the movement of gases in the galaxy: the gases appear redder as they move away from our galaxy, and bluer as they get closer through the phenomena known as redshift and blueshift.
This allowed the researchers to see that there was more "blue" (entering) gas than "red" (exiting) gas. Although the researchers have not pinpointed the source of this imbalance, they think that it could possibly be caused by one of three things.
First, the astronomers think that this excess gas could be coming from the interstellar medium. Second, they suggest that the Milky Way is using its impressive gravitational pull to swipe gas from smaller, nearby galaxies, according to a statement.
Additionally, seeing as this study considered only cool gases, researchers think that hotter gases might also contribute to this finding.
Gases leave our galaxy when events like supernovae and stellar winds push them out of the Milky Way's galactic disk. When gases fall back into our galaxy, they contribute to the formation of new stars and planets. So the balance between the inflow and outflow of gases is important to regulating how objects such as stars form in galaxies like ours.
"Studying our own galaxy in detail provides the basis for understanding galaxies across the universe, and we have realized that our galaxy is more complicated than we imagined," co-author Philipp Richter of the University of Potsdam in Germany said in the statement.
This research will be published in a study in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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