Astronomers Find Three Supermassive Black Holes in NGC 6240

NGC 6240, a well-studied nearby galaxy system in the process of merging, contains three supermassive black holes at its core, two of which are active and each with a mass of about 90 million solar masses, according to a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

NGC 6240 is a system of merging galaxies approximately 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.

It spans 300,000 light-years and has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails.

Until now, astronomers have assumed that it was formed by the collision of two galaxies and therefore contains two black holes in its core.

“Through our observations with extremely high spatial resolution we were able to show that NGC 6240 hosts not two but three supermassive black holes in its center,” said Professor Wolfram Kollatschny, an astronomer at the University of Göttingen.

“Each of the three heavyweights has a mass of more than 90 million Suns.”

“They are located in a region of space less than 3,000 light-years across, i.e. in less than one hundredth of the total size of the galaxy.”

Professor Kollatschny and colleagues observed NGC 6240 using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

“Up until now, such a concentration of three supermassive black holes had never been discovered in the Universe,” said Dr. Peter Weilbacher, a researcher in the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.

“The present case provides evidence of a simultaneous merging process of three galaxies along with their central black holes.”

According to the team, the discovery of the triple supermassive black hole system is of fundamental importance for understanding the evolution of galaxies over time.

“Until now it has not been possible to explain how the largest and most massive galaxies, which we know from our cosmic environment in the ‘present time,’ were formed just by normal galaxy interaction and merging processes over the course of the previous 14 billion years,” the scientists said.

“If, however, simultaneous merging processes of several galaxies took place, then the largest galaxies with their central supermassive black holes were able to evolve much faster. Our observations provide the first indication of this scenario,” Dr. Weilbacher said.

• W. Kollatschny et al. 2019. NGC 6240: A triple nucleus system in the advanced or final state of merging. A&A, in press; doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936540

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 18:03 geschreven door peter  

by Matthew Hart

 

Usually it’s possible to find both the good and bad in things. When it comes to the Phallaceae family of fungi, a.k.a. the stinkhorn mushrooms, however, there is only side to the story, and it is maximally disgusting. Everything from their name to their taste to the way they look is 100% grade-A barf-o-rama. Keep reading for proof of that statement, if you can stomach it.

We first learned of the stinky, bloomin’ mushroom from YouTuber zefrank1’s latest “true facts” video on the Phallacea fungi, which is featured above. The hilarious video, which is also quite disgusting, of course, outlines most of what that stanky stinkhorn life is about, but let’s rehash it real quick because just how repulsive the stinkhorn is as a life form needs to be appreciated on every level.

Phallus impudicus covered in gleba, which is, in turn, covered in flies.

Birger Fricke 

First of all, there’s that name. Not the colloquial name, stinkhorn, which sounds like a deranged Pokémon or something Elon Musk would put on a Tesla, but that scientific name. The name of the family, Phallacea, sounds kind of off in its own right, but that’s nothing compared to the moniker of the common stinkhorn (pictured above), Phallus impudicus, which translates literally to “immodest phallus.” By the by, botanist John Gerard referred to Phallus impudicus as the “pricke mushroom” or “fungus virilis penis effigie,” when he discovered it in the late 16th century.

The physiology of the stinkhorn mushrooms is where things get really interesting. And when we say interesting, we mean gut-wrenchingly gross. The fruiting body of Phallus impudicus (that’s the part of the fungus that’s ejected from out of the ground) is produced from a squishy, bizarre egg, which looks from a cross-sectional view like a slimy piece of sushi. After it bursts its way through the ground, the fruiting body also oozes out a gelatinous goop known as gleba, which contains the stinkhorn’s spores. According to the stinkhorn wiki, the gleba smells like the dead, rotting flesh of animals or dung, which is unsurprising considering the fact that the stinkhorn uses flies to spread its spores. Also, there’s that name.

The fruiting body of Aseroë rubra, a member of the stinkhorn family, in action. 

zefrank1

Perhaps the only non-disgusting quality of the stinkhorn is the fact that it stands as an emblem of the lengths life will go to keep on keepin’ on. That, and the fact that it is indeed edible and has a taste that lies somewhere between radish and nothing at all. Although make sure not to eat it at the wrong time in its life cycle, ’cause it’s definitely possible to get some gleba on your hands and mouth if you’re not careful.

What do you think of these stinkhorn mushrooms? Are you immensely happy that you’ll probably never get a whiff of one, or have they somehow carved out a little stinky, oozing home in your heart? Discuss all this disgustingness in the comments!

• Feature image: Bernard Spragg. NZ

{ https://nerdist.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 17:50 geschreven door peter  

New observations appear to confirm the existence of water vapor geysers on Europa. The findings are tantalizing, but some scientists are not convinced yet.

Artist’s concept of a water vapor plume on Jupiter’s large moon Europa. It’s thought that this moon has a liquid ocean of water beneath its icy crust.

Image via NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SwRI/SYFY.

Jupiter’s large moon Europa is one of the most intriguing places in the solar system, an ocean world that might support life of some kind. As well as a subsurface ocean, it might also share another characteristic of Saturn’s moon Enceladus: geyser-like water vapor plumes bursting through its icy surface. The evidence for geysers on Europa has been tentative up to now, but this month (November 18, 2019) scientists said they’ve found what might be new confirmation: they reported the direct detection of water vapor above the moon’s surface.

The peer-reviewed findings, from scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, were published in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18, 2019.

Like Enceladus, Europa has a deep ocean below the outer ice crust. On Enceladus, water percolates up to the surface from the ocean below, erupting into space through cracks in the ice as water vapor. It has long been thought that the same thing could be happening on Europa, but the evidence hasn’t been as solid yet, with hints of activity seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

According to NASA scientist Lucas Paganini:

Essential chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur) and sources of energy, two of three requirements for life, are found all over the solar system. But the third — liquid water — is somewhat hard to find beyond Earth. While scientists have not yet detected liquid water directly, we’ve found the next best thing: water in vapor form.

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

Composite photos from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo spacecraft, showing a suspected plume erupting on Europa in 2014 and 2016.

Image via NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center/JPL.

Another composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo spacecraft, showing a “finger-like” plume in the lower left in 2016.

Image via NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

Europa’s cracked icy surface as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Yellowish regions on the moon’s surface have now been confirmed to be irradiated sodium chloride, aka table salt.

Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.

So how much water vapor was detected?

According to Paganini, about 5,202 pounds (2,360 kilograms) per second, enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes.

But like earlier observations have suggested, the outbursts of water vapor appear to be infrequent, unlike those on Enceladus, which erupt on a regular basis. Paganini said:

For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.

The signal of water vapor is distinct but faint, and was only seen once in 17 nights of observations in 2016 and 2017. That suggests that Europa’s plumes are much more sporadic than those on Enceladus. The science team detected the water molecules on Europa’s leading hemisphere, the side of the moon that’s always facing in the direction of the moon’s orbit around Jupiter. Like Earth’s moon, Europa is gravitationally locked to its planet, so the leading hemisphere always faces the direction of the orbit, while the trailing hemisphere always faces in the opposite direction. The detection was made using a spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The spectrograph measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. From the paper:

Previous investigations proved the existence of local density enhancements in Europa’s atmosphere, advancing the idea of a possible origination from water plumes. These measurement strategies, however, were sensitive either to total absorption or atomic emissions, which limited the ability to assess the water content. Here we present direct searches for water vapor on Europa spanning dates from February 2016 to May 2017 with the Keck Observatory. Our global survey at infrared wavelengths resulted in non-detections on 16 out of 17 dates, with upper limits below the water abundances inferred from previous estimates. On one date (26 April 2016) we measured 2,095 ± 658 tonnes of water vapor at Europa’s leading hemisphere. We suggest that the outgassing of water vapor on Europa occurs at lower levels than previously estimated, with only rare localized events of stronger activity.

Some of the tentative evidence for Europa’s plumes came from studying data sent back by the Galileo spacecraft. The disturbances in Jupiter’s magnetic field that provided clues about the subsurface ocean also hinted at possible plumes, according to researchers in 2018. In 2013, the HST had detected the chemical elements hydrogen and oxygen in plume-like configurations in Europa’s extremely tenuous atmosphere. Then, in 2016, Hubble imaged “finger-like projections” in silhouette while Europa passed in front of Jupiter. All of these findings were tantalizing, but still tentative. But now the first detection of water vapor itself is additional evidence for the plumes. As Lorenz Roth, an astronomer and physicist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, said:

This first direct identification of water vapor on Europa is a critical confirmation of our original detections of atomic species, and it highlights the apparent sparsity of large plumes on this icy world.

One problem that Paganini and his team needed to address, however, was that water in Earth’s atmosphere can distort the readings of water vapor on distant worlds taken by ground-based telescopes like Keck. To compensate, complex mathematical and computer modeling was used to simulate the conditions of Earth’s atmosphere so they could differentiate Earth’s atmospheric water from Europa’s in the data. According to Avi Mandell, a Goddard planetary scientist:

We performed diligent safety checks to remove possible contaminants in ground-based observations. But, eventually, we’ll have to get closer to Europa to see what’s really going on.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus was confirmed to have water vapor plumes by the Cassini spacecraft. This stunning photo shows then erupting through cracks in the ice crust at the moon’s south pole.

Image via NASA Science.

Not all researchers, however, are convinced that the new findings prove the existence of the plumes, and emphasize how they show that the geyser activity is probably lower than had been anticipated. Astronomer Phil Plait wrote about this in an addendum to his Nov. 19, 2019, article on SYFY about the news:

Correction, and it’s a big one: When I wrote this, I thought the conclusions based on the observations were much more solid than they were reported in a NASA press release. But after being alerted by a couple of astronomers, and looking things over again, I see that the idea that a plume of water from a geyser is not “confirmed” as I originally wrote, but more like “maybe.” The detection by itself was marginally statistically significant, but was part of 16 other observations that showed nothing. I was thinking about the single observation taken alone, but when placed in context of the other observations the statistical significance drops. That means the likelihood of this observation being real – that is, that the light from a plume of water was definitely seen – is lower than I originally stated.

So at this point, it may be safer to say that the new observations add to the evidence for water vapor geysers on Europa, but are still not 100% conclusive. This does not take away from the abundant evidence for the subsurface ocean, it only addresses how much of that water may actually make it to the surface and erupt as vapor into space. Hopefully NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission – due to launch in the mid-2020s – will be able to finally settle the question of whether the geysers are real or not, and how frequent they are, if other observations don’t beforehand. It could even sample them directly, just like Cassini did at Enceladus.

• Bottom line: Scientists have found new evidence for water vapor geysers on Europa, although whether they have actually been proven now is a matter of debate.
• Source: A measurement of water vapour amid a largely quiescent environment on Europa
• Via NASA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 17:21 geschreven door peter  

25-11-2019 om 15:27 geschreven door peter  

Scientists 'have found a FIFTH force of nature': Researchers claim to have observed energy that 'connects the visible world to dark matter'

• Hungarian Academy of Sciences researchers' results could show fifth force work
• They saw an excited, decaying helium atom emit light when the particles split
• This came at a strange angle that could not be explained by current physics logic
• Is second time Attila Krasznahorkay and his team seen new particle dubbed X17

By JAMES GANT FOR MAILONLINE

Scientists claim they have observed a fifth force of nature that could transform our understanding of how the universe works.

Researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have revealed results that could show it in action.

They saw an excited, decaying helium atom emit light when the particles split in a strange way that could not be explained by the current understanding of physics.

Hints of a fifth fundamental force have set the physics world abuzz. Researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have revealed results that could show it in action. The discovery could completely upend our understanding of the universe. Pictured is an image of the cosmic web

It was the second time lead scientist Attila Krasznahorkay and his team had seen the new particle they called X17.

They found its mass to be 17 megaelectronvolts.

Mr Krasznahorkay told CNN: 'X17 could be a particle, which connects our visible world with the dark matter.'

STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS AND WHY THE FIND IS SO EXCITING

The Standard Model says everything in the universe is made from the most basic building blocks called fundamental particles, that are governed by four forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. 

The Higgs boson, named after professor Higgs (pictured), was discovered in 2012 and is an essential component of the Standard Model

The forces work over different ranges and have different strengths. 

This new particle, if it exists, would not fit into the description given by the Standard Model and so would lead to a whole new area of particle physics. Some have suggested it might even lead to the discovery of a fifth fundamental force.

 This development is exciting because the Standard Model has left some questions unanswered for years, so scientists are keen to break free of it and find new theories.

It can't explain gravity, for example, because it is incompatible with our best explanation of how gravity works - general relativity, nor does it explain dark matter particles.

The quantum theory used to describe the small particles in the world, and the general theory of relativity used to describe the larger objects world, are also difficult to reconcile. 

Nobody has managed to make the two mathematically compatible in the context of the Standard Model.

According to the Big Bang theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the start of the universe and so they should have annihilated each other totally in the first second or so of the universe's existence.

This means the cosmos should be full of light and little else. 

But because it isn't there must have been a subtle difference in the physics of matter and anti-matter that has left the universe with a surplus of matter and that makes up the stars we see, the planet we live on and ourselves.

But the observations seen so far are not enough to confirm the existence of a particle.

Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, Jonathan Feng, who has closely watched the Mr Krasznahorkay's team's efforts, said it could be a 'game changer', adding if it could be replicated, 'this would be a no-brainer Nobel Prize'.

It comes three years after the Hungarian team spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay, suggesting the existence of a new particle.

If their tests prove accurate, the discovery could completely upend our understanding of how the universe works.

The current working model of physics states that there are four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong forces between atoms.

The 2016 experiment by Mr Krasznahorkay and his team of physicists suggested there was another force.

The team said at the time that they had found a bizarre radioactive decay irregularity, according to a report by Nature News.

They published their results in late 2015 in the prestigious Physical Review Letters.

Despite the radical claim, their paper received very little attention, according to a report in Gizmodo.

That is, until physicists at the University of California checked their method and results – and found the study to be accurate.

'What it's telling us if it is correct is that there is something going on in the way that one particle talks to another particle that we haven't got inside our mathematics at the moment,' Geraint Lewis, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney told ABC News at the time.

Scientists have theorised that a fifth force exists for decades.

They claim it could help explain the inability of the standard model of particle physics to explain dark matter.

Dark matter is invisible substance thought to make up more than 80 per cent of the universe's mass.

Theorists have proposed a number of exotic-matter particles, including 'dark photons', that carry the electromagnetic force.

The Hungarian scientists were looking for dark photons by blasting protons at a thin strip of lithium.

As the lithium absorbed the protons, it transformed into an unstable version of beryllium, which decayed even further, creating electrons and positrons.

When the protons hit against the lithium at 140 degrees, more electrons and positrons were created than were expected.

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Krasznahorkay suggested this extra material was being created by a particle that was 34 times heavier than the electron.

'We are very confident about our experimental results,' said Krasznahorkay at the time, adding that the team had repeated its test several times.

But many scientists were sceptical of the claim.

Physicists at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, said this apparatus — an electron-positron spectrometer — found evidence for a new particle

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

25-11-2019 om 15:26 geschreven door peter  

Throughout history there have been scientific theories and hypotheses pushed forward that have either driven us forward as a species or have served to become historical oddities that make us ask “What were we thinking?” It is all part of our stumbling, bumbling quest to feel our way through this morass of mysteries that is the natural world and our universe, and there is not always a clear beacon of light to pave the way forward. While some hypotheses have fallen by the wayside and others have pushed us forward into new realms of knowledge, others have sort of swirled about in a limbo, mere curiosities that cannot be proven or disproven, and one of these is certainly the notion that at some point in human history we were amphibious beings.

The bizarre notion known as the “Aquatic Ape Hypothesis” was first seriously proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, as a way to try and explain what he thought were a great many quirks in our physiology and evolutionary path when compared to other great apes. Hardy proposed that at one point in our evolutionary history human beings had increasingly turned to aquatic food resources such as fish and shellfish in response to fierce competition from other terrestrial animals. He speculated that this had caused our species to take a different path than the other apes, as we began to swim and wade out into the sea to pursue this semi-aquatic lifestyle rather than life on the savanna, with our bodies adapting to this new way of living in myriad intriguing ways.

In Hardy’s opinion, human bodies show a great many adaptations that he was convinced had come about through this amphibious way of life, including functional hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, regression of our olfactory organ, hooded nose and large sinuses, webbed fingers, big brains, greasy skin with an abundance of sebaceous glands perhaps as waterproofing, as well as our distended larynx, all of which are features common for aquatic animals but not apes, as well as our almost innate ability to swim. Bipedalism was thought to have come about to help us wade about in the water and keep our hands free to forage on the bottom or break open shellfish, and even our predilection for eating seafood, our ability to hold our breath for long periods compared to other apes, and our expressive faces, which could help with visual communication underwater, as well as our our ability to produce speech have gone on to be put forward as evidence.This was all seen as not consistent with the paradigm that we had evolved on the African savanna as long thought, and therefore suggested an aquatic stage of our evolution.

Hardy was not the first to suggest this, as the German pathologist Max Westenhöfer had also played with this hypothesis, but it was Hardy who truly ran with it and brought the whole concept to the public consciousness. It was an idea he had actually been percolating for decades, and only first officially came forward with it after he had become a respected academic and scientist, when in 1960 he presented it all to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton. Although it was met with quite a few raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders, there would be quite a few who would support the theory and go on to further bolster it, such as famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough, and one proponent of the hypothesis who would catapult it into greater awareness was writer Elaine Morgan. Like Hardy, Morgan believed that humans had gone through a stage in our natural history in which we had turned to the vast food resources of aquatic environments and had gone on to demonstrate convergent evolution of mammals living in these sorts of environments. She would write about the theory in her book The Descent of Women, which would go on to become an international bestseller and really increase the prominence of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and she would go on to pen other books on the matter such as The Aquatic Ape (1982), The Scars of Evolution (1990), The Descent of the Child (1994) and The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997). She has said of the notion:

Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.

There have been many other researchers who have followed up on this hypothesis, such as researchers Michael Crawford and David Marsh, who wrote of this in their book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future. They are a big fan of the idea that out large brains could not have possibly evolved in a savanna lifestyle, and that they would only have come about through a diet rich in protein and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid that is found in in seafood, that would only be available with an aquatic lifestyle. Crawford would say of this:

A branch of the line of primitive ancestral apes was forced by competition to leave the trees and feed on the seashore. Searching for oysters, mussels, crabs, crayfish and so on they would have spent much of their time in the water and an upright position would have come naturally. The evolution of a large brain on the savannas of Africa was impossible. The only way it could have happened was with the resources of the marine food-web which initiated the growth and development of the brain in the first place.

It is all a very intriguing notion, and on the surface it seems that the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis could explain a lot about our many unique attributes that seem to separate us from terrestrial apes, but there are of course a lot of skeptics, and indeed the hypothesis is mostly treated as pseudoscience today and mostly ignored by the mainstream scientific community. Some of the main arguments are that is absolutely no fossil evidence of such a thing ever happening, and many of the adaptations credited to an aquatic lifestyle can be explained in other ways that fit more into the current evolutionary paradigm of the human species. For instance, hairlessness would be more likely due to sexual selection and adaptations to heat loss, whereas bipedalism would allow us to peer out over tall grass and keep our hands free for tool use, and breath control would be related to our development of speech. It has also been pointed out that we have a similar distribution of body fat to other land animals, and also that we are in reality really not that particularly good at swimming after all. There are plenty of explanations for our various quirks that can be fit into the current savanna mold of evolution that do not require some radical shift away. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is also criticized for being basically an umbrella theory for a wide variety of adaptations that would have gradually evolved over a very long period of time rather than all at once, meaning they cannot really be lumped together into a single explanation. One professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London has said of this:

I think that wading in a watery environment is as good an explanation, at the moment, for our upright gait as any other theory for human bipedalism. But the whole aquatic ape package includes attributes that appeared at very different times in our evolution. If they were all the result of our lives in watery environments, we would have to have spent millions of years there and there is no evidence for this.

Also rather a strike against the hypothesis is that if we evolved to an aquatic environment, then why did we go back out to a terrestrial one and then keep those features? This has not really been adequately explained, and remains a sticking point for those who see this all as wishful thinking and fringe science. While some scientists have sort of just ignored the hypothesis, others have soundly dismissed it and even gone as far as to lump it together with creationism as an untenable and absurd idea. Despite the criticism, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has remained very tenacious, and still is discussed and has its staunch supporters to this day. In the realm of cryptozoology it has importance as a possible explanation for sightings of a wide range of entities, such as mermaids or other aquatic mystery beasts such as the Kappa of Japan and many others which could be some offshoot of this amphibious evolutionary history. Is there anything to the Aquatic Ape Theory or is it all a bunch of bunk? Whatever the case may be, as long as it is being discussed it will be out there swirling about in the periphery, and it is probably important to at least understand what it is all about.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:44 geschreven door peter  

Often when visiting historic places there is a feeling or a “presence” that one may begin to sense. For some, this might represent a literal connection to the people who visited there long ago; others may liken it to simple reverence for the amount of time that has passed, and the number of individuals that might have come and gone there.

Whether one literally ascribes to the idea of “ghosts” or not, this feeling is hard to ignore, particularly at early human habitation sites, or looking even further back, at locations where earlier forms of life on earth once existed, which predates the arrival of humans.

However, new technologies may soon also play a role in shedding light on these “ghosts” of the ancient past.

“Sometimes paleontologists uncover ghosts,” wrote Riley Black, in a recent article at Scientific American. What he referred to specifically had been trace fossils, among which are the “ghost tracks” of ancient life forms that are indiscernible to the naked eye, but with the help of modern science, are beginning to give up their long-held secrets.

Ichnofossils can be defined as “an expression of the alteration of the depositional fabric of in sedimentary rocks by living organisms.” In other words, these are the footprints or other alterations to an environment that become fossilized and are thus preserved, even in the absence of any actual fossilized organisms.

Fossil footprints on display at the Natural History Museum, Bonn University

(Wikimedia Commons).

Black refers to a set of tracks that made news in months past, located at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico which tell a very unique story of ancient American hunters in pursuit of a giant sloth, which they stealthily followed leading up to a presumed Pleistocene-era ambush.

A recent study published in the journal Nature expounds on the White Sands discovery, where the authors  note that data has now been recovered from various locations which presents “evidence for the successful detection and 3-D imaging of such footprints via ground-penetrating radar (GPR), including co-associated mammoth and human prints.”

In other words, ground-penetrating radar technology can now successfully uncover trace fossil footprints, even when they are not exposed at ground level.

Motorized Ground-Penetrating Radar System

(Wikimedia Commons).

According to the study’s extract:

“Using GPR we have found that track density and faunal diversity may be much greater than realized by the unaided human eye. Our data further suggests that detectable subsurface consolidation below mammoth tracks correlates with typical plantar pressure patterns from extant elephants. This opens future potential for more sophisticated biomechanical studies on the footprints of other extinct land vertebrates. Our approach allows rapid detection and documentation of footprints while enhancing the data available from these fossil archives.”

This is exciting, in part due to the fact that the ability to discover trace fossils below ground, or in areas that are otherwise inaccessible, may be useful not only in the discovery of unrecognized archaeological sites, but also in their preservation. Excavation is an intrusive process, and despite what it helps us to learn about the past, it requires the removal of layers of earth that may once have coincided with early human living spaces or other historically significant areas. Ground-penetrating radar, on the other hand, reveals these features of the past without ever having to dig.

Short of having a time machine, such technologies are the next best thing to being able to open a window in time, through which these “ghosts” of the past become available to the modern eye.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:32 geschreven door peter  

“Your vision only sees a sliver, a tiny range of the electromagnetic spectrum. You are unaware of most of it If you had to interact with the world in the full range of what’s going on, you would be frozen. So biology has developed a user interface that ultra simplifies what you are interacting with. It is constantly updating your model of reality and interacting with it. It is your matrix. You interact without knowing there is anything else out there.”

“It is your matrix.” That sounds like an opening line in a sci-fi movie or a New Age homily, not business plan, but it may be a little of all three as it was uttered an unusual two-day festival exploring “the intersection between creativity, technology, and humanity.” The festival is the annual Cucalorus Connect, held this past week in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the speaker was University of North Carolina at Wilmington Julian Keith, Ph.D. He and fellow professor Curry Guinn, Ph.D, addressed a popular movie plot as a potential real-life scenario – that we’re living in a matrix or computer simulation created by an advanced society and the ghosts we see are actually glitches in said matrix.

“We may be actually living in a computer simulation. I’m not the only one who says this. Elon Musk of Telsa and Space X has said there is a billion to one chance we are not living in a computer simulation.”

Musk again! This guy is everywhere these days — with or without that breakable truck he probably wishes was a simulation. Professor Julian Keith opened his half of the joint presentation, “You’re in The Matrix, You Just Don’t Know It,” by pointing out that Musk believes we could be living in a simulation and points out to rapid advances in technology – like the ones Musk himself is making – as a sign of it … especially computer games.

“Look at where computer games are now compared to where they were 40 years ago in the era of Pong.”

Pong

Curry points out that we’re already approaching games similar to the Star Trek Holodeck where players can lose the sense that they’re in a simulation. If we’re on our way to creating a matrix, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that a more advanced society has already created it … and it is us. The question is: how can we tell?

“Glitches in the system. Deja Vu, such as in the Matrix movie when a character sees a cat crossing a doorway repeatedly, may be one glitch. Ghosts, ESP, coincidences may be others. The laws of physics in our universe seem peculiarly designed with a set of constants that make carbon-based life possible. Where are the edges?”

“Where are the edges?” There’s some ready-made movie plot point dialogue for you budding screenwriters. Here’s another one: “Spooky action at a distance.” Curry references Einstein’s comment about quantum entanglement—the ability of separated objects like atoms and electrons to share a condition or state across a vast distance. Einstein didn’t buy quantum entanglement but he has since been proven wrong … at least on a particle scale. What if it exists on a human scale? What if there’s a connection between the beings in simulations and those in our perceived realities … us?

“We run a ton of them all the time. Supercomputers run simulations for weather predictions. We use them to better understand our environment and make changes. We use them to study human activity and ask questions such as how does population grow? What things work best? It is us running these simulations.”

Are our own simulations already influencing our actions? Curry’s example of weather simulations is a perfect example of exactly that. Based on hurricane simulations, we make decisions on where to run for safety. However, a few people may see a ghost or have a premonition that following those directions could be dangerous and they take a different path. Those who follow the simulation end up in a place where they drown, while the others survive. Could the ghostly warning have been a ‘glitch in the matrix’?

The Cucalorus Festival began 25 years ago as an underground film festival, but presentations like those of Keith and Curry show it has evolved into so much more. Or … are THEY just another glitch in the matrix.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:19 geschreven door peter  

3D RADAR IMAGING UNCOVERS 3 CLOAKED UFO'S HOVERING OVER FLORIDA RIVER! Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: November 2019

Location of sighting: Florida, USA

Google Earth Web Based Chrome Version with 3D Imaging  

Craft 1: 29°47'8.00"N 81°16'40.00"W 
Craft 2: 29°46'59.41"N 81°16'37.61"W 
Craft 3: 29°46'55.86"N 81°16'35.99"W

Here is an intersting discovery made by Youtube user Florida Maquis. He shows us three unique and flying objects above the coastal area of Florida. When I added contrast to the screenshots, they really came into focus. Each of the three objects are flying and all have an intelligent design to them. They do appear to be three large UFOs. At the time of sighting, they were probably cloaked in a cloud or using some other cloaking device, but google earth radar caught them and included them into the map. Just mindblowing! Absolute proof that aliens are visiting coastal regions of Florida. 

 

If you have trouble finding it...open Chrome browser and click on Google earth web version. It will take you there if you drop the coordinates into it. 

Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 13:52 geschreven door peter  

75km Mothership Seen On Weather Radar Map Over Philippines, Nov 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Nov 23, 2019
Location of sighting: Philippines 
Source: Weather map

I was looking at my weather map radar and noticed that there was a huge mothership red disk over the Philippines. I recorded it and thought that this UFO was similar to the red UFOs seen on weather radar over Australia back in 2010. Sadly the weather radar map I use doesn't give me such high detail. This is about 2,000 km from Australia so it may be one of those motherships returning to an underwater base. Google rule says the UFO was approximately 75km across. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 13:45 geschreven door peter  

Bizarre ‘pyramid in the sky’ appears at night above Philadelphia in baffling clip

A 'sky pyramid' has appeared above Philadelphia surrounded by an eery orange glow, with truth-seekers claiming the object could be an alien black triangle UFO, also known as a TR-3B

By Sofie Jackson - News Reporter

A mysterious pyramid in the sky has been captured hovering over the US city of Philadelphia in a photo, according to a stunned witness.

Youtuber researcher MrMBB333 said the "simply amazing" phenomenon – which was photographed by a woman called Venetia – appeared to show the triangle shape in the night sky.

There seems to be an orange-red tint behind the shape – giving the impression of the "object" on fire.

"It looks like a pyramid in the sky", MrMBB333 said, adding that there "is definitely something there".

He continued: “Look behind this thing, it looks like there is a tint behind it.

“Maybe it’s a cloud behind it that has a weird colour to it.

"This is simply amazing, it definitely looks like a pyramid in the sky."

The footage was seen more than 20,000 times since it was posted to YouTube yesterday.

Some dubbed the object a "flaming pyramid" while others suggested it "looks like an erupting volcano".

But several viewers likened the object to the infamous TR-3B spy plane.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

25-11-2019 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

Space-based observatories detected a violent explosion in a galaxy billions of light-years away. It became the brightest source of high-energy cosmic gamma rays seen so far. Specialized Earth-based telescopes detected it via faster-than-light particles cascading through Earth’s atmosphere.

Specialized telescopes – like H.E.S.S. in Namibia and MAGIC in the Canary Islands – detect the bluish Cherenkov light in Earth’s atmosphere, generated by faster-than-light particles, caused by cosmic gamma rays.

Image via DESY Science Communication Lab.

On January 14, 2019, two NASA space observatories – Swift and Fermi – detected a burst of gamma rays from a source billions of light-years away. That’s not unusual in and of itself; these space telescopes detect gamma ray bursts about once daily, routinely sending automatic alerts to other gamma-ray observatories around the world. But this burst – labeled GRB 190114C – was different. It became the most powerful yet detected by a specialized telescope on Earth’s surface, where scientists registered the highest energy gamma rays ever measured from a gamma ray burst, reaching about 100 billion times as much energy as visible light. The MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands was able to point to the region of origin so quickly that it began observing the event within only 57 seconds of the space-based observations. Its scientists presented their observations last week (November 20, 2019) in two independent studies in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

In the same issue of Nature, scientists presented a study of an earlier gamma ray burst – labeled GRB 180720B – not as strong but also detected on the ground via the H.E.S.S. telescope in Namibia on July 20, 2018. Read an overview of the three Nature studies here.

These two ground-based detections – from January 2019 and July 2018 – are the first detections of gamma-ray bursts with ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. They come after many years of trying to catch such events.

The power of these cosmic explosions is mind-boggling. But their detection is fascinating as well. The ground-based H.E.S.S. and MAGIC telescopes didn’t detect the gamma rays directly. They detected their effect on Earth’s atmosphere, via faster-than-light particles known as Cherenkov radiation. The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) – a national research center in Germany that operates particle accelerators and that also plays a role in operating both H.E.S.S. and MAGIC – explained in a statement:

When an energetic cosmic gamma ray hits Earth’s atmosphere, it shatters molecules and atoms. This process creates an avalanche of particles called an air shower. The shower particles are so energetic that they move faster through the air than light – although not faster than light in a vacuum, which according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is the absolute upper speed limit. The result is a bluish glow, a kind of optical counterpart to the supersonic bang. This Cherenkov light, named after its discoverer, can be observed by Cherenkov telescopes such as those of the H.E.S.S. and MAGIC observatories …

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

The Hubble Space Telescope caught the fading afterglow of GRB 190114C and its home galaxy on February 11 and March 12, 2019. The difference between these images reveals a faint, short-lived glow (center of the green circle) located about 800 light-years from the galaxy’s core. Blue colors beyond the core signal the presence of hot, young stars, indicating that this is a spiral galaxy somewhat similar to our own. The source of the burst is located about 4.5 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellation Fornax.

Image via NASA/ESA/V. Acciari et al./ICRAR.

Gamma-ray bursts – called GRBs by scientists – are sudden, short bursts of gamma radiation from the cosmos. They were discovered by chance at the end of the 1960s by satellites used to monitor compliance with the nuclear test ban on Earth. These bursts are thought to originate from colliding neutron stars or supernova explosions. David Berge, head of gamma-ray astronomy at DESY, said:

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe and typically release more energy in just a few seconds than our sun during its entire lifetime – they can shine through almost the entire visible universe.

Since the 1960s, astronomers have been studying gamma-ray bursts with satellites. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs gamma rays; Earth-based telescopes can’t detect cosmic gamma rays directly. Telescopes like H.E.S.S. and MAGIC are designed to detect a faint blue glow in the atmosphere – Cherenkov light – induced by cosmic gamma rays.

The detection of these two recent gamma ray bursts by these ground-based observatories was a culmination of years of effort by astronomers.

View larger. |

What are gamma ray bursts? They are cosmic explosions, with radiation up to a trillion times the energy of visible light. This illustration shows the set-up for the most common type of gamma ray burst. The core of a massive star (left) has collapsed and formed a black hole. This “engine” drives a jet of particles that moves through the collapsing star and out into space at nearly the speed of light. The prompt emission, which typically lasts a minute or less, may arise from the jet’s interaction with gas near the newborn black hole and from collisions between shells of fast-moving gas within the jet (internal shock waves). The afterglow emission occurs as the leading edge of the jet sweeps up its surroundings (creating an external shock wave) and emits radiation across the spectrum for some time — months to years, in the case of radio and visible light, and many hours at the highest gamma-ray energies yet observed. These far exceed 100 billion electron volts (GeV) for two recent GRBs.

Image via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ICRAR.

One reason the result could be achieved was that – when space-based observatories detect a gamma ray burst – they quickly alert the entire observational community. In the case of the January 2019 gamma ray bust, more than 20 different telescopes were able to obtain a deeper look at the burst’s source. DESY said:

This allowed [them] to pinpoint the details of the physical mechanism responsible for the highest-energy emission, as described in the second paper led by the MAGIC collaboration. Follow-up observations placed GRB 190114C at a distance of more than four billion light-years. This means, its light travelled more than four billion years to us, or about a third of the current age of the universe.

GRB 180720B, at a distance of six billion light years even further away, could still be detected in gamma rays at energies between 100 and 440 billion electron volts long after the initial blast.

DESY theorist Andrew Taylor, who contributed to the H.E.S.S. analysis, commented:

The detection came quite unexpected, as gamma-ray bursts are fading fast, leaving behind an afterglow which can be seen for hours to days across many wavelengths from radio to X-rays, but had never been detected in very-high-energy gamma rays before.

This success is also due to an improved follow-up strategy in which we also concentrate on observations at later times after the actual star collapse.

• Read more about these recent gamma ray bursts via DESY
• Read more about these recent gamma ray bursts via ICRAR

Artist’s concept of the January 14, 2019, gamma ray burst, caught by the MAGIC observatory in the Canary Islands.

Image via Superbossa.com/C. Righi/ICRAR.

• Bottom line: On January 14, 2019, space-based observatories detected a violent explosion in a galaxy billions of light-years away. GRB 190114C became the brightest source of high-energy cosmic gamma rays seen so far. The MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands was able to detect it via faster-than-light Cherenkov radiation cascading through Earth’s atmosphere. This observation – combined with a similar observation of another gamma ray burst, GRB 180720B, from July 2018 – were the successful culmination of years of effort by astronomers.
• Source: Extreme emission seen from gamma-ray bursts
• Via DESY
• Via ICRAR

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

NASA's Undersea Robot Crawls Beneath Antarctic Ice in Test for Icy Moons

A prototype undersea rover called BRUIE being tested in Alaska in 2015.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The tests will take place at Australia's Casey research station along the coast of Antarctica far south of Australia, where BRUIE will spend a month exploring both the ocean and inland lakes. The rover focuses on where the top of the water meets the bottom of the ice.

"We've found that life often lives at interfaces, both the sea bottom and the ice-water interface at the top," Andy Klesh, lead engineer on the BRUIE project, said in the same statement. "Most submersibles have a challenging time investigating this area, as ocean currents might cause them to crash, or they would waste too much power maintaining position."

BRUIE is designed to manage these challenges via buoyancy; it crawls along the bottom of the ice, held up by the denser water below. The rover itself is a bar about 3 feet (1 meter) long, with a large wheel on each end.

NASA's robot is also designed to turn itself on and off as needed between gathering measurements scientists are most interested in, which will let it stay locked below the ice for longer periods of time without recharging. With all these features, the team behind the project is hoping to eventually develop BRUIE into a flight model that can spend months at a time exploring below ice sheets that are from 6 to 12 miles (10 to 19 kilometers) thick, the sort of scenario a rover would need to survive on the distant moons NASA is targeting.

For early tests, BRUIE will explore on its own, tied to the ice to keep from getting lost. But in the long run, the rover is designed to do more than just rove; it will also carry instruments, including two cameras and probes measuring factors like salinity, water temperature and pressure, and oxygen levels, according to the statement. As data from BRUIE's first excursions come back, scientists will determine when to begin adding instruments to the tests.

But all the testing in the world can't prepare BRUIE for the biggest challenge of extraterrestrial exploration: recognizing potential signs of life that could look nothing like Earth's.

"We only really know how to detect life similar to that on Earth," Dan Berisford, a mechanical engineer on the project, said in the NASA statement. "So it's possible that very different microbes might be difficult to recognize."

• Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter 
• An Algorithm May Be the 1st Thing to See Europa Clipper's Coolest Discoveries from Jupiter Moon 
• On Icy Moons, Alien Life May Go with the Flow of Ocean Currents 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

NASA tests alien-hunting submarine in Antarctica to prepare for oceans in space

The Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration will travel to Australia's Casey research station, to test whether it can withstand the icy conditions of oceans on off-world moons

By Anthony Blair Overnight News Editor

NASA is testing a special submarine designed to find extraterrestrial life in the freezing oceans around Antarctica.

On Monday, the space agency released a statement revealing that its Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration (BRUIE) will head to Australia's Casey research station close to the South Pole.

There, researchers will drill holes in the ice before submerging the sub in water.

A number of tests will be carried out on the rover and its instruments, designed to see whether it could survive the icy conditions for months on end.

BRUIE is designed to crawl along the bottom of the ice covering the oceans, held up by the denser water below.

A simple design, it is made up of a bar about one metre long with a large wheel at each end.

It is designed to turn itself off and on as needed between gathering measurements, meaning it can stay locked below the ice for longer periods of time without recharging.

The team behind the project hope that eventually it will be developed into a flight model which can spend months at a time exploring below ice sheets up to 6 to 12 miles (10 to 19km) thick.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

24-11-2019 om 23:50 geschreven door peter  

The Next Goal in AI: Robots Who Fear Death

by Matthew Hart

In his 1942 short story “Runaround,” legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov clearly outlined his “Three Laws of Robotics,” which could, at least in fictional worlds, fundamentally underpin autonomous robots’ behavior. The last of the three laws states, in part, that, “A robot must protect its own existence…” This may turn out to be quite necessary for the development of real-life autonomous robots as well, especially when it comes to their ability to feel. At least that’s the argument being made in a recently published white paper outlining the significance of self-preservation in robots.

The paper, which comes via Futurism, was recently published in the journal Nature Machine Inteligence by Antonio Damasio and Kingson Man of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI); Damasio is one of the institute’s directors, and Man is one of its research scientists. In the paper, available in full here for free, Damasio and Man argue that in order to develop “feeling machines,” they must be programmed with the task of maintaining homeostasis. So if engineers want to build machines that feel and empathize with what people feel, the machines are going to have to care about their own health.

The paper is about seven pages long and is rich with the logical sequence of steps that comes to the conclusion that machines need to worry about their own state of “mind” and “body” in order to interact effectively with we meat bags (a term borrowed from the greatest fictional robot of all time). In essence, Damasio and Man are saying that just as biological life needs to be concerned with its own well-being to have meaningful interactions with its environment, so too will genuinely autonomous robots.

That is to say, caring about one’s own self—one’s own temperature, level of hunger, amount of sleep, etc.—is a critical part of what gives life any meaning at all. The researchers say as much, in regards to robots, when they note, “This elementary concern would infuse meaning into [a machine’s] particular information processing” capabilities.

This intuitively makes sense because maintaining homeostasis is a significant impetus for—perhaps the only impetus for—biological organisms having any goals whatsoever. If you’re cold, your goal is to find some way to get warm; if you’re hungry, your goal is to find food; if you’re tired, your goal is to find somewhere to sleep; if you’re bored, your goal is to use any one of the bazillion streaming services currently available until you’re hungry or sleepy, at which point you circle back to goal two or three. (We’re kidding to some extent with that last one, of course, but you get the point.)

The paper describes the concept succinctly when it notes that “machines capable of implementing a process resembling homeostasis might… acquire a source of motivation and a new means to evaluate behaviour, akin to that of feelings in living organisms.”

In terms of how robots could develop their own intuitive sense of homeostasis, Damasio and Man write that sensors, in a very real sense just like our own biological ones (eyeballs, ears, taste buds, etc.), are the answer to that problem. They specifically discuss human skin as an example of a biological sensor, or more specifically, an amalgam of biological sensors, that could be duplicated in robotic builds by utilizing “soft robotic” materials. They note that “a soft electronic ‘skin'” made with an “elastomer base with droplets of liquid metal that, on rupture, cause changes in electrical conductivity across the damaged surface,” have already been developed by researchers and could be deployed on robots as one way of monitoring homeostasis.

But even though a robot covered in “skin” that senses tears or leaks may be able to develop a sense of homeostasis, and thusly some kind of “feeling,” it seems that this evolution would inevitably lead to what can only be described as vulnerability. This is exactly what Damasio and Man are aiming for, however, and it seems they believe that vulnerability necessarily goes hand-in-hand with sensing homeostasis. This would mean vulnerability, for both robots and people, necessarily goes hand-in-hand with having feelings. “Rather than up-armouring or adding raw processing power to achieve resilience,” the authors write, “we begin the design of these [feeling] robots by, paradoxically, introducing vulnerability.”

A video demonstrating a soft robotic sensor skin developed by researchers at UC San Diego. 

“Homeostatic robots might reap behavioural benefits by acting as if they have feeling,” Damasio and Man write in their conclusion, adding that “Even if they would never achieve full-blown inner experience in the human sense, their properly motivated behaviour would result in expanded intelligence and better-behaved autonomy.” And even if robots never understand why something feels good, or whether they experience a feeling of “goodness” at all, creating better-behaved autonomous robots seems like a worthwhile goal: It could potentially work to help preserve the homeostasis of our entire species, after all.

What do you think of Damasio and Man’s paper on “feeling machines”? Do you think robots need to have a sense of homeostasis in order to develop empathy, or do they just need to do what they’re told? Give us your thoughts in the comments if that action will help you maintain homeostasis!

• Feature image: Dick Thomas Johnson

{ https://nerdist.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 23:09 geschreven door peter  

A New Exhibit at the National Archives Explores Government UFO Documents

WRITTEN BY ANDREW BEAUJON 

Photo from UFO sighting in Riverside, California, November 23, 1951. Photograph via National Archives, Records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force (Air Staff).

The US Air Force ended the two-decade-plus-long UFO investigation known as Project Blue Book 50 years ago this week, deciding that, among other things, that no sighting or evidence had managed to “represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge.”

If you believe that, you may not be the target audience for the National Archives’ new exhibit, which will place some of Project Blue Book’s documents on display in the Archives’ East Rotunda Gallery.

Project Blue Book has maintained a spot in some parts of the American psyche, including a History Channel series named for it,  and another, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, executive produced by former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. DeLonge has emerged as a somewhat unexpected expert on ufology. The Air Force still considers 701 of the sightings reported to it during the investigation as “unidentified.”

• The documents will be on display from December 5, 2019, through January 8, 2020. The National Archives Museum, 701 Constitution Avenue, NW. 
• Correction: This post originally incorrectly stated DeLonge was an executive producer on Project Blue Book.

{ https://www.washingtonian.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 21:00 geschreven door peter  

What Were the Egyptian Pyramids Used for?

The ancient Egyptians built pyramids as tombs for their Pharaohs, or kings. A Pharaoh would begin planning his tomb, or "house of eternity," as soon as he took the throne. This was because the Egyptian pyramids held many items in preparation for the afterlife. It was believed that the Pharaohs would need many of his belongings, as well as slaves, for the afterlife.

There are more than 100 Egyptian pyramids, each built for a different person. Most pyramids were actually pyramid complexes including a main pyramid surrounded by a courtyard, a nearby mortuary temple, and a small cult pyramid that was to house the king's soul. Some pyramids had nearby small pyramids or other kinds of tombs set aside for family members.

In ancient Egypt, it was believed that death began a journey that brought the person to the next world of the afterlife. The king was mummified and the mummy kept inside the pyramid both for protection and for easier travel to the afterlife. His belongings were kept with him in the pyramid so that he might have access to them in the afterlife.

There was a specific reason for the shapes of the ancient Egyptian Pyramids. They believed that the Pharaoh ascended to heaven on the rays of the sun. The sun's rays, which a Pharaoh would use to climb to the afterlife, were symbolized by the shape of the pyramid. The pyramid shape could also have been a monument to Ra, the Sun God, who was believed to have created all life.

The location of the pyramids were also important, since the pyramids needed to be located under the stars which were considered the most important. Most pyramids were built on the west bank of the Nile because the sun was thought to "die" in the west each night.

The first of the Egyptian pyramids of ancient Egypt was built in 2611 B.C. for Pharaoh Djoser. This pyramid did not have smooth sides, but instead was comprised of six step-like levels. The "Bent Pyramid," the first pyramid without steps, was built approximately thirty years later. The angle of its sides were changed about halfway through construction, making the sides appear bent. This pyramid was not very tall.

About fifty years later, the largest of the pyramids at Giza was built. This pyramid was a true feat of engineering, built of about two million stone blocks, with each block weighing as much as fifteen tons. It took over 80 years to build all three pyramids located at Giza.

{ https://www.wisegeek.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 20:42 geschreven door peter  

Huge Asteroid Capable of 'Continental-Scale Devastation' on Track to Zoom Past Earth

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 16:36 geschreven door peter  

Did Nazi Germany Boast First Ever Stealth Jet Fighter?

Although stealth fighters, like for instance the B-2 Spirit or its soon-to-be-manufactured successor B-21 Raider, are commonly perceived as a 21st century US-led breakthrough, it appears the very first jet-powered aircraft was actually devised by two German brothers in Nazi Germany, National Interest reported.

Walter and Reimar Hortens’ idea was to marry the new turbojet engine Germany started manufacturing in the 1940s with a flying wing design - a tail-less plane that is sufficiently aerodynamically clean not to generate any drag whatsoever.

The design came from their practical know-how, as Walter, an ace fighter pilot in the German Luftwaffe, and Reimar, an airplane designer lacking formal aeronautical qualifications, had constructed a number of tail-less manned gliders in their youth.

The Hortens were given a green light to start their venture in August 1943, around the time American Northrop XB-35 flying wing bomber failed to enjoy mass production due to certain design setbacks, as the lack of a tail rendered the vehicle prone to uncontrolled stalls and swings.

CC0

Horten Ho 229 being unloaded after making it into the hands of the US military.

The Horten brothers’ first unpowered glider known as the H.IX V1 was assembled soon afterwards, featuring thin long wings made of plywood so as to save weight, the bell-like shape of which ruled out yawing.

The planes were designated as Ho 229s or Go 229s and were to be used as military gliders. However, due to their capacity for a breakneck speed of about 975 kilometres per hour, they were repurposed to serve as fighters with two heavy Mark 103 thirty-millimetre cannons. The speed was truly exceptional, as it could have exceeded the maximum speed of the best Allied fighters of the time by at least 33 percent.

War-Time Projects Go Awry
The plan, however, was never fulfilled, because when American troops from the VIII Corps rolled into the factory at Friedrichroda, Germany in April 1945, they found just the cockpit parts of the manta-like jet’s prototypes in various stages of construction.

The most complete one, the V3 prototype, was shipped to the United States for study along with the wings, and can today be seen at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the United States Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.

CC BY 3.0 / MICHAEL.KATZMANN

The last surviving Horten Ho 229 airframe, pictured here at the Smithsonian museum's storage facility.

Capable of Breaking Radar Waves?

Although it was never explicitly intended to be a stealth jet, the Hortens reportedly viewed the Ho-229’s design as one that lends itself to a diminished radar cross-section, ideal for a stealth vehicle.
Reimar Horten, who spent the post-war years in Argentina, wrote an article in 1950 for the Revista Nacional de Aeronautica arguing that wooden aircraft would absorb radar waves.

Thirty years later, as the theory behind stealth aircraft became more widely known, Reimar wrote that he had actually intended to make the Horten flying wing into a stealth plane, claiming that he had even constructed the airframe using a special radar absorbent mixture of carbon, sawdust and wood glue with his bosses being unaware of it.

One of two tests conducted to determine if carbon dust had indeed been used, proved his claim, while the other didn’t, adding to the overall skepticism of whether stealth was the German brothers’ design goal.

videos, selected by Peter2011

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 15:57 geschreven door peter  

Alleged Footage of Mysterious Aircraft at US Top Secret Facility Near Area 51 Emerges Online

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

24-11-2019 om 15:35 geschreven door peter