How scientists found Earth's new minimoon and why it won't stay here forever

03-03-2020 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

Earth was a 'waterworld' covered by a global ocean without any continents 3.2 billion years ago, study claims

• Earth's first microbial life inhabited a world with hardly any dry land, study says
• Discovery is based on study of rocks in Northwestern Australia's outback
• Scientists compare the ancient Earth with the future in 1995 film Waterworld 

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

Earth was once a 'waterworld' just like the one depicted by Hollywood in the Kevin Costner blockbuster, according to new research.

A global ocean covered the planet 3.2 billion years ago, when the first primitive microbes were emerging.

There would have been hardly any dry land – mirroring the way it looked in Waterworld, the 1995 post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

US scientists studied the ancient rocky Australian outback for traces of oxygen to form a picture of the ocean water from billions of years ago.  

The finding could shed light on the evolution of life on Earth and explain how single-cell organisms first emerged.

This pillow basalt in Australia lined the seafloor roughly 3.2 billion years ago when Earth was a 'waterworld'

'Kevin Costner, eat your heart out – you may want to start planning the prequel,' said the research team.  

'Early Earth, home to some of our planet's first lifeforms, may have been a real-life "waterworld" – without a continent in sight. 

'It may even have looked a bit like the post-apocalyptic, and land-free, future imagined in Costner's infamous film Waterworld.'

In the film, humanity struggles to survive after the ice caps melt and inundate the planet with water.

But, unlike in the movie, there were no fish – only tiny aquatic organisms called cyanobacteria. 

A vista of the Panorama district looking down from the top of the ancient ocean crust to its base

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, is based on an analysis of rocks from Northwestern Australia's outback.

They date back to a period known geologically as the 'Paleoarchean' – spanning a period 3,600 million to 3,200 million years ago – when life consisted of nothing more complex than bacteria.

'The history of life on Earth tracks available niches,' said co-author Professor Boswell Wing, of the University of Colorado Boulder. 

'If you've got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available.'

It was identified from the chemical signatures of an ocean in a chunk of crust that's been turned on its side in the Panorama desert in the Aussie outback. 

It is possible to walk across what used to be the hard, outer shell of the planet in the space of a day.

Benjamin Johnson inspects an outcrop in the Panorama district by what was once an ancient hydrothermal vent

It will take you from the base to spots where water once bubbled up through the seafloor via hydrothermal vents.

The researchers described it as a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity' to pick up clues about the ocean water from billions of years ago. 

'Today, there are these really scrubby and rolling hills that are cut through by dry river beds,' said lead author Dr Benjamin Johnson, now at at Iowa State University. 

'It's a crazy place. There are no samples of really ancient ocean water lying around, but we do have rocks that interacted with that seawater and remembered that interaction.'

He likened it to looking at coffee grounds to gather information about the water that poured through it.

US post-apocalyptic action film Waterworld depicts a future in 2500 where every continent on Earth is now underwater, due to a rise sea levels. This projected future could resemble an early Earth

The researchers analysed data from more than 100 rock samples from across the dry terrain.

They were looking, in particular, for two different flavours, or 'isotopes', of oxygen trapped in stone – Oxygen-18 and the slightly less heavy Oxygen-16. 

The ratio may have been a bit off in seawater 3.2 billion years ago – with just a tiny bit more Oxygen-18 than you'd see today.

Professor Wing said these are 'super sensitive' to the presence of continents.

Today's land masses are covered by clay-rich soils that disproportionately take up heavier oxygen isotopes from the water – like mineral vacuums for Oxygen-18, he explained.

Nostoc, a genus of cyanobacteria, under microscopic view. Cyanobacteria would have inhabited the early 'waterworld' of Earth 3.2 billion years ago

There simply weren't any soil-rich continents around to suck the isotopes up, but there could have been tiny spots of land dotted about.

'There's nothing in what we've done that says you can't have teeny, micro-continents sticking out of the oceans,' Professor Wing said. 

'We just don't think there were global-scale formation of continental soils like we have today.'

The researchers are now planning to scour other, younger rock formations at sites from Arizona to South Africa to see if they can find when the land masses we know today first roared onto the scene.

'Trying to fill that gap is really important,' said Dr Johnson said. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

03-03-2020 om 01:02 geschreven door peter  

The red dot in the center represents the red dwarf star K2-18. The curved white lines represents the orbits of planet K2-18b and and another candidate planet, K2-18c. The broad green band is the system’s habitable zone.

Image via NASA’s Exoplanet Catalog.

Can giant exoplanets such as super-Earths or even mini-Neptunes be habitable? There’s currently a lot of debate about that question, but new findings about one such world suggest that some of them might indeed be able to support life. A research team from the University of Cambridge has announced that K2-18b, a planet a bit more than twice the size of Earth, could have liquid water and habitable conditions, even though it’s been classified as a mini-Neptune.

• The peer-reviewed findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 27, 2020.

Water vapor had previously been detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b, as announced last September, but because the planet was classified by most scientists as a mini-Neptune, it was regarded to be very unlikely to be habitable. Planets like Neptune have deep hydrogen atmospheres and no real solid surface. Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the research team, said in a statement:

Water vapor has been detected in the atmospheres of a number of exoplanets but, even if the planet is in the habitable zone, that doesn’t necessarily mean there are habitable conditions on the surface. To establish the prospects for habitability, it is important to obtain a unified understanding of the interior and atmospheric conditions on the planet, in particular, whether liquid water can exist beneath the atmosphere.

Artist’s concept of the mini-Neptune exoplanet K2-18b.

Image via Amanda Smith/ University of Cambridge.

An earlier artist’s conception of K2-18b.

Image via mage via ESA/ Hubble, M. Kornmesser/ UCL News.

K2-18b is about 2.6 times the radius and 8.6 times the mass of Earth. It is 124 light-years away, orbiting within the habitable zone – the region where liquid water could exist – of a red dwarf star. There is also a second candidate planet closer to the star, K2-18c, but it has not been confirmed yet.

On mini-Neptunes, a thick hydrogen atmosphere is thought to surround a watery layer that then surrounds a rocky iron core. But under such conditions, the temperatures would be too high, and the water would be under too much pressure, for life to survive. This is similar to why Neptune or Uranus type worlds are uninhabitable, at least by earthly life standards, having deep atmospheres with crushing pressures, no solid rocky surface and no liquid water.

Given K2-18b’s large size, it has been assumed that it is more like a mini-Neptune than a super-Earth, which typically are a bit smaller, but still at least twice as large as Earth.

But that assessment might be changing a bit, if the researchers are right.

They found that K2-18b’s hydrogen atmosphere might not be too thick after all, and the water layer might actually be habitable, perhaps more like oceans on Earth. The researchers used the mass and radius of the planet, as well as previous observations of the atmosphere, to make a better determination of the composition and structure of both the atmosphere and deep interior. Detailed numerical models and statistical methods were used to help explain what conditions are actually like on this distant world.

There has been a lot of debate over whether K2-18b is a super-Earth or mini-Neptune. Most scientists now agree that it is a mini-Neptune.

Image via Patterson Clark/ Washington Post/ Quora.

The computer models showed that a range of conditions are possible in the planet’s interior. Those models used known atmospheric properties as constraints on which conditions are the most plausible. The potential habitability rests on just how extensive the hydrogen atmosphere is. According to study co-author Matthew Nixon at the Institute of Astronomy:

We wanted to know the thickness of the hydrogen envelope, how deep the hydrogen goes. While this is a question with multiple solutions, we’ve shown that you don’t need much hydrogen to explain all the observations together.

So what did the researchers find? According to their results, the maximum extent of the hydrogen atmosphere, or envelope, is only 6% of K2-18b’s mass. Some computer models showed it to be even less. The minimum amount of hydrogen is about one-millionth by mass, which is similar to that of Earth’s atmosphere. Under those conditions, the atmosphere would be more like that of a super-Earth, rather than a mini-Neptune.

Moreover, a number of the calculated models would allow for a world with a true ocean, not just a layer of water that is under extreme, unearthly pressure and temperature. In this scenario, the temperature and pressure would actually be similar to those in Earth’s oceans.

There’s another intriguing twist to this, as well. While the researchers did confirm the atmosphere to be composed mostly of hydrogen, with quite a bit of water vapor, as already known, they also found something puzzling. The levels of methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3) were less than expected. According to the paper, this is evidence of chemical disequilibrium – or non-equilibrium thermodynamics – in the atmosphere, and, maybe, could even point to biological activity as a cause:

Furthermore, our constraints on CH4 and NH3 suggest chemical disequilibrium. Among other possibilities for chemical disequilibrium, e.g., photochemistry, the potential influence of biochemical processes may not be entirely ruled out. Future observations, e.g., with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will have the potential to refine our findings. We argue that planets such as K2-18b can indeed have the potential to approach habitable conditions and searches for biosignatures should not necessarily be restricted to smaller rocky planets.

On Earth, disequilibrium in the atmosphere – larger than normal amounts of oxygen and small amounts of methane – is caused by biological processes, and is a biosignature. For K2-18b however, it should be emphasized that this is just one of several possibilities, given that the planet is still much different from Earth in significant ways. As the paper stated, one other possibility is photochemistry; in this case, the chemical reactions in a planetary atmosphere caused by light or radiation from its star.

If these findings turn out to be accurate, that would greatly increase the number of potentially habitable planets out there, since worlds of this size are rather common.

Nikku Madhusudhan at Cambridge University, who led the new study.

Image via Cambridge University.

This new paper is sure to cause some intense debate, much like last September when the water vapor detection was first reported, and most media outlets described K2-18b as a habitable super-Earth, which was misleading and premature.

Upcoming new space telescopes such as JWST and others will be able to analyze the atmospheres of planets like K2-18b and search for possible biosignatures, chemical signatures of life. That will help to determine whether any exoplanets like this, including super-Earths, could actually be habitable.

• Bottom line: A new study suggests that the giant exoplanet K2-18b may be more potentially habitable than previously thought.
• Source: The Interior and Atmosphere of the Habitable-zone Exoplanet K2-18b
• Via University of Cambridge

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

03-03-2020 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Just Uncovered Wild Details About How Our Modern Galaxy Formed

GAIA MAP OF THE MILKY WAY. IMAGE: ESA/GAIA/DPAC

Some 10 billion years ago, the primitive Milky Way scarfed down a galaxy one-quarter of its own size, according to a new study.

The cannibalized galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, helped to create the Milky Way (our home galaxy) and its digested remains contain clues about the origins and evolution of our cosmic surroundings.

Astronomers frequently observe mergers between distant galaxies, but it’s trickier to reconstruct the interactions that defined the modern Milky Way in part because we lack an outside perspective of our own galaxy. The Gaia spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, has helped fill in some of these gaps by building the most precise star map ever produced.

The Gaia mission has made it easier to distinguish between stars that originated in the Milky Way, and those that were introduced by Gaia-Enceladus, which is named after the ESA mission. (It is also popularly known as the “Gaia Sausage” because of the sausage-shaped orbit some of its remnants follow around the galaxy’s core.)

The Milky Way’s ancient encounter with Gaia-Enceladus was first described in 2018, but new details about the smaller galaxy’s size, as well as the merger’s date, were published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

Scientists led by Carme Gallart, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, found that some stars observed by Gaia are lower in metal content than others. Smaller galaxies are typically not as enriched with metals as larger ones, which suggests that the metal-poor stars may have originated in the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy.

The Milky Way dates back at least 13 billion years, almost to the beginnings of the known universe. Back in those early days, the galaxy was smaller and had a different structure, so Gallart and her colleagues refer to this version as the “Milky Way progenitor,” or the “primitive Milky Way,” which was distinct from its modern incarnation.

The team’s simulations predicted that once the merger occurred, many of this progenitor’s stars—which were relatively metal-rich—became heated by the influx of new galactic material. Some of the stars were thrown from the galaxy’s disk into the halo, which is a spherical structure that surrounds the entire galaxy.

Gaia’s observations confirm that these metal-rich stars are strewn through the halo, and that they had an upper age limit of about 10 billion years, suggesting that this was when the merger took place.

“A primitive Milky Way had been forming stars over a period of some [three billion years] when a smaller galaxy, which had been forming stars on a similar timescale but was less chemically enriched owing to its lower mass, was accreted into it,” Gallart’s team said in the study.

“Our age determination reveals that the stars heated to halo-like kinematics were among the first formed in the Milky Way,” they added, “just before the merger with Gaia-Enceladus took place.”

It took another two-to-four billion years for the Milky Way to absorb the smaller galaxy, the team said, and the fallout of this collision continues to spur star formation to this day.

The modern version of the galaxy we live in contains multitudes, much of which has been consumed from outside the borders of its earliest form.

{ https://www.vice.com/en_us }

02-03-2020 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

Our Galaxy Is Mysteriously Distorting and Nobody Knows Why

The Milky Way's edges are warping and distorting in strange ways. A new study suggests the latest possible answer: another galaxy is messing with us.

By Becky Ferreira

IMAGE: NASA VIA GETTY IMAGES

Something mysterious is tugging at the hem of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is causing a “galactic warp” at its outer edges, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

The Milky Way contains an estimated 250 billion stars, which cluster in spiral arms that swirl around a central supermassive black hole. But astronomers have caught glimpses of a different dynamic occurring out in the far reaches of the Milky Way, where the galactic disk appears to become flared, wobbly, or otherwise distorted by a variety of potential phenomena.

To figure out what might be causing the Milky Way’s outer warping, a team led by Eloisa Poggio, an astrophysicist at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Turin, measured the motions of 12 million giant stars observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.

“Our Milky Way presents a unique case study for galactic warps, thanks to detailed knowledge of its stellar distribution and kinematics,” Poggio’s team said in the study. “However, the cause and dynamic nature of the warp of our Galaxy have remained unclear due to a lack of kinematic constraints.”

In other words, scientists only began to model the Milky Way’s outer warping in detail within the past few years, due to advances in observational techniques. In 2019, for instance, a team created a captivating 3D map of the galactic warp based on measurements of 2,300 Cepheids variables, which are a special type of ultra-radiant stars (their results were published in Science )

Poggio and her colleagues have now built on these models thanks to the second major data dump from the Gaia satellite, which was released in 2018. Gaia has been constructing the most comprehensive catalog of the observable universe ever made since it was launched in 2013.

The sheer volume of observations enabled Poggio and her colleagues to measure the motions of millions of giant stars to trace out the kinematic signature of the galaxy’s warp. “We measured the speed of the warp by comparing the data with our models,” Poggio said in an ESA statement.

“Based on the obtained velocity, the warp would complete one rotation around the centre of the Milky Way in 600 to 700 million years,” she added. “That’s much faster than what we expected based on predictions from other models.”

While other teams have also used Gaia’s 2018 data to probe our galaxy’s edges, the new study aims to constrain “the possible mechanisms responsible for the warp of the Milky Way,” the team said. Suggested explanations for the warp have included longstanding torques emerging from mismatched axial motions of the disk and the galactic halo, or perhaps tidal forces from satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, which could gravitationally yank at the disk.

By modeling the motions of giant Gaia stars over time, Poggio’s team showed that the pull of a satellite galaxy is the most likely cause of the warp.

“The direction and magnitude of the warp’s precession rate favor the scenario that the warp is the result of a recent or ongoing encounter with a satellite galaxy, rather than the relic of the ancient assembly history of the galaxy,” the study says.

This finding might corroborate other recent studies that reconstruct the Milky Way’s turbulent past with nearby galaxies, which can skim material from the galaxies edges or cause disturbances by colliding with it.

It will take more observations and research to confirm that the warp is mostly caused by satellite galaxies. “Nevertheless,” the team said, “our results suggest that external forces from interacting satellite galaxies are playing an important and ongoing role in shaping the outer disk of the Milky Way.”

{ https://www.vice.com/en_us }

02-03-2020 om 23:24 geschreven door peter  

Skinwalker Ranch & Cattle Mutilations, it's Scarier Than You Think, Christopher O'Brien

Christopher O’Brien investigated over one thousand paranormal events reported in the San Luis Valley—located in south-central Colorado/north-central New Mexico. Working with law enforcement officials, ex-military, ranchers and an extensive network of skywatchers, he documented what may have been the most intense wave of unexplained activity ever seen in a single region of North America. His ten-year investigation resulted in the three books of his “mysterious valley” trilogy: The Mysterious Valley, Enter the Valley, and Secrets of the Mysterious Valley.

His meticulous field investigation of UFO reports, unexplained livestock deaths, haunted sites, Native American legends, cryptozoology, secret military activity and the folklore, found in the world’s largest alpine valley, has produced one of the largest databases of unusual occurrences gathered from a single geographic region. He is currently working with a team of specialists installing a high-tech video surveillance and hard-data monitoring system in and around the San Luis Valley. His latest book, Stalking the Herd, is being called the most important book ever written examining our relationship with cattle and how this has manifested into the modern “cattle mutilation” mystery.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

02-03-2020 om 23:05 geschreven door peter  

Secrets of Ancient Cosmology, the Mysteries of the Dogon Tribe of Mali

COAST TO COAST AM – Laird Scranton is the author of a series of books and other writings on ancient cosmology and language. He shared compelling perspectives on how our universe and the dimensions of time and space are believed to emerge from a non-material place, and how seemingly scientific archaic concepts formed an enduring foundation for ancient and modern religion.

The Dogon, a priestly tribe from Mali, Africa, has a culture that combines elements from at least three different ancient traditions– rituals of Judaism, practices of ancient Egypt, and a symbolic cosmology that is a close match for Buddhism, he detailed. One of the intriguing things about the Dogon is that though they were non-technological, they knew about the binary Sirius star system, which would seemingly be impossible to individuate the second star without a telescope.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

02-03-2020 om 21:47 geschreven door peter  

Sphere UFO During Sunset Over Porterville, CA Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: February 1, 2020

Location of sighting: Porterville, California, USA

 

Here are two amazing videos of a black sphere UFO hovering over some homes in Porterville, CA a few weeks ago. The person recorded a sphere from 22 minutes away. Later he walked towards that area and realized it was hovering over some neighborhood homes, but no string, rope or advertising was noticeable. I made a screenshot (below) and enlarged it so that we could see its detail. The objects surface is not smooth, but sun like with ripples and waves to it. It reminds me of the UFO seen over Holy of holys, Dome of Rock Temple in Jerusalem. I will put that video below for you to compare shapes. It looks like this UFO is deeply interested in someone in one of those houses...they must be very important in some way for aliens to take notice. 

Scott C. Waring 

 

Eyewitness states: 

22 minutes after the first video I walked closer to the suburbs to see if I could get a closer video of whatever it was. The object floated over the homes of my neighbors and moved a few times but stayed floating over a few houses. I thought it was a weather balloon at first but no strings were visible and it didn't move with the wind, as a balloon on a string would. Also, why would a weather balloon or advertisement float over suburban homes? I have no idea what it is.

Compare with shape of UFO seen over Jerusalem in 2011 by thousands of tourists.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

02-03-2020 om 21:06 geschreven door peter  

Ancient Alien Face Seen From Space Station Camera! March 1, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 1, 2020 
Location of sighting: Earths orbit, from ISS 
Source: NASA Live cams 

I was watching the live NASA cams again, but instead of a UFO, I noticed two giant faces on the far left of the screen. The first fat look human like, the second looks bird like. They look like they were made by Van Gogh using powerful swirls of clouds to form them. NASA is using the infrared filter over the camera, making it purple in color. Infrared is known for cutting out reflections and revealing any cloaked objects in the area. That first face...just amazing guys. I believe it was made by an alien whose thoughts were so powerful that his telepathy accidentally created the form he was thinking about. Clouds and smoke is the most easy to move for telepathic people so this does make sense. And since many alien species out there are highly evolved, they will use pictures in their head...not word to communicate with others. Telepathic communication is the transmitting of pictures more...and not words. Just something amazing I wanted to share with you. Watch the video for more detail and to see the other bird face behind the first face. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

02-03-2020 om 20:55 geschreven door peter  

Again huge formations of UFOs appeared on the ISS live feed on February 27 and March 1, 2020.

Using the ISS live feed they recorded a new group of these huge formations of UFOs flying on the bright side of the Earth.

Besides these large groups of UFOs, the greenish/yellow anomalies/crafts also still keep coming and they all coming from the same direction.

We may wonder where they come from and what could be the purpose of their arrival, maybe it has something to do with the Coronavirus outbreak?

As Scott Waring wrote in his his latest article "NASA...Earth Has New Moon, I Say Its A Alien Probe Watching Humanity With Coronavirus"

"To record, watch and research how humanity copes and tries to deal with Coronavirus. Aliens may know than we do about its capabilities. They may be here not just to witness humanity fight the virus, but to see if we can avoid a possible ELE (extinction level event)."

See first video of the huge amount of UFOs captured on February 27, 2020 HERE.
Below the second video recorded on March 1, 2020.

  

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

02-03-2020 om 18:59 geschreven door peter  

Top 10 Best Alien/UFO Documentaries

If you’re still watching the stars, these are the alien docs to watch. We’ll be looking at the most popular and provocative alien documentaries ever made. We’re not saying it’s aliens but . . . you should check these out. Youtube’s WatchMojo ranks the best alien docs to watch. What do you think is the best alien doc? Let us know in the comments!

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

02-03-2020 om 18:03 geschreven door peter  

Onder de loep: de Belgische UFO-golf

Carl Bries

Carl Bries (1983) is een sociaal werker uit de Kempen met een passie voor mysteries over heel de wereld. Hij neemt in zijn vrije tijd allerhande mysteries, waar (bewust) weinig over gesproken wordt, onder de loep. Het is aan jou om samen met hem deze mysteries te ontrafelen of ze te laten voor wat ze zijn.

{ https://www.seniorennet.be/ }

02-03-2020 om 17:38 geschreven door peter  

The forestry worker's account of an alleged alien attack has fascinated people for decades. Folk still stand by his version of events.

The BBC's One Show has recreated an infamous UFO encounter reported in West Lothian more than 40 years ago.

Forestry worker Robert Taylor claimed he was attacked by strange extra-terrestrial objects in Dechmont Woods on November 9, 1979.

The "Robert Taylor incident" led to that part of West Lothian being known as the "twilight zone."

Robert died in 2007, but the One Show spoke to several people who were involved in the investigation of the unusual incident.

Author Malcolm Robinson even produced the pair of trousers Robert wore on the day, showing rips which he claimed were from the alien attackers.

He told the One Show's Matt Allwright Robert first saw a large dome-shaped object when he was out for a walk with his dog.

Two balls with prongs protruding from them then lowered from the dome and approached him.

Malcolm said: "[The balls] projected these spike towards his person - his hips. Pulled him very, very forcibly, slightly upwards and towards this larger object.

"Bob said at this point he smelled a horrible burning smell.

"Then he heard a swishing sound and then bang, he lost consciousness."

An actor was used to recreate Robert's version of events. The forestry worker had tried to radio for help when he regained consciousness, but found he could not speak.

The One Show also spoke to a former Lothian and Borders police detective Ian Wark, who investigated the case. He said strange marks were found on the ground at the place Robert had pointed out.

The former detective constable said: "I've no doubt something landed there. What it was, I have no idea."

Obviously, many are skeptical of Robert's UFO story.

But it has proved an enduring story and West Lothian Council event marked out the spot on an information board.

Matt concludes by saying: "Something happened in those woods 40 years ago.

"But what, we'll never know."

{ https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/ }

01-03-2020 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

The farside of the moon is a lunar layer cake. New data from China’s Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover reveal alternating layers of coarse rock and fine soil down to a depth of 40 meters, suggesting a history of violent impacts, scientists report February 26 in Science Advances.

“We know much of the moon’s nearside” from the Soviet Lunokhod and American Apollo programs, but little about the farside, says lunar scientist Yan Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “The Chang’e-4 mission revealed the first ‘ground-truth’ detailed subsurface stratigraphy … on the farside of the moon.”

Chang’e-4 and Yutu-2 became the first spacecraft to land on the farside in January 2019, touching down inside the 186-kilometer-wide Von Kármán crater (SN: 1/3/19). As Yutu-2 explored the crater, which lies within the 2,500-kilometer-wide South Pole–Aitken basin, the rover sent radar pulses into the ground to probe the material beneath its wheels.

Lunar scientist Chunlai Li, also of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues analyzed the 106-meter path that the rover took in its first two lunar days (about two Earth months) of collecting data. The team discovered a layer about 12 meters thick of fine soil, or regolith, closest to the surface.

“It’s like being on very clean sand,” says study coauthor Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University in Italy.
“It’s like you’re on the beach.”

Below that fine soil, the rover found another layer of about 12 meters containing coarser material embedded with larger rocks, like cherries in a fruitcake. And lower still was a series of alternating coarse and fine materials, spanning depths of about 24 meters down to roughly 40 meters — the limit of the rover’s radar.

Those layers were probably created by material ejected by successive impacts, the researchers say. The floor of Von Kármán crater is a smooth sheet of cooled lava from long-ago volcanic activity. But that lava has been pummeled repeatedly and covered up by material, called ejecta, that is scattered when objects like meteorites slam into the lunar surface and leave craters behind.

“That’s a really violent process,” says lunar geologist Daniel Moriarty of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the study. Some of the ejecta could have come from as deep as the moon’s mantle (SN: 5/15/19).

The top layer of smooth sand is probably the result of the surface being pulverized by micrometeorites and cracked by extreme temperature shifts over time.

Chang’e-4’s view of the moon’s subsurface is different from its predecessors’. Chang’e-3 and its Yutu rover landed in Mare Imbrium on the nearside of the moon in 2013, and that rover’s radar was blocked by dense volcanic rock at a depth of just 10 meters or so (SN: 12/16/13). That’s probably because the nearside’s volcanic floodplains are closer to the surface than those on the farside.

“The subsurface structure at Chang’e-4’s landing site is more complex … and suggests a totally different geological context,” Su says. In fact, the lava basement of the Von Kármán crater may be too deep for Yutu-2 to sense at all, the researchers speculate.

Future work could help figure out why the moon’s nearside is awash in smooth plains of volcanic rock called mare, while the farside is more rugged and cratered.

“One of the biggest driving questions in lunar science for a while has been, why does the nearside look so different from the farside?” Moriarty says. “If people can use what they found to unravel some of the volcanic history of the farside, that would be helpful.”

{ https://thepatriotsreport.com/ }

01-03-2020 om 23:34 geschreven door peter  

In 1908, a sudden explosion flattened 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, destroying 80 million trees. One hundred and twelve years later the exact cause remains a mystery. The Tunguska event is one of the most speculated-about anomalous events of all-time and, while scientists firmly believe that a meteor exploding some 5 to 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface is to blame, they don’t have any direct evidence. This has led to the usual sort of wild and baseless (although extremely fun) speculation involving everything from aliens to secret weapons tests.

Scientists from four major Russian scientific institutes—the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Tunguska Nature Reserve, and Krasnoyarsk Biophysics Institute—are now hoping to solve the Tunguska mystery once and for all. Dr. Arthur Meidus, deputy director of the Tunguska Nature Reserve,  says:

“The mystery of the Tunguska Catastrophe worries both the scientists and the public. The meteorite is not here as a physical body, but the traces of the extremely powerful explosion are, which is what is currently studied by researchers.  Many of us still hope to unravel the scenario of 1908 disaster.”

The general consensus is that a meteor caused the Tunguska explosion, but scientists have yet to find hard evidence.

To do this, the scientists are looking at the bottom of a lake. The sediments at the bottom of Lake Zapovednoye, approximately 40km away from the assumed epicenter of the blast, may contain evidence of a meteor explosion—if, in fact, one occurred. Dr. Meidus says:

“Although this lake is outside the territory that was affected in 1908, it is of great interest. It is deep, and silty sediments that have accumulated here, do not mix, or subside.

Spring-autumn waste waters and the Lakura River brought traces of the Tunguska catastrophe to this lake, because the event was accompanied by massive wildfires and emissions of both planet and space origin.”

Trees leveled by the Tunguska explosion.

Using fun science words like X-ray fluorescence and synchrotron radiation, the scientists hope to be able to detect particles of extraterrestrial origin in the layers of sediment that date to the Tunguska event. Dr. Meidus says they have already been able to determine which layers come from the year of the blast. They are looking specifically at the layers from 1908 through 1910, as meteor particles may have washed into the lake in the two years following the explosion. Dr. Meidus says:

“We discovered a distinguishing light-coloured layer in sediments of Lake Zapovednoye the content of which – an increased content of potassium, titanium, rubidium, yttrium, and zirconium – allows to tie it to the consequences of the Tunguska bolide explosion. This way we know which layer of sediments might contain particles of extraterrestrial origin.

‘The next stage implies search for micro-particles with unusual composition with the use of synchrotron radiation. Now we know where to look for them.

‘If there is extraterrestrial substance, it will be in the 1908-1910 layer.”

It will be interesting to see if they find what they’re looking for. If they do discover particles from some extraterrestrial object in the lake, it would put a damper on all the fun speculation. But they haven’t found it yet and mysteries like the Tunguska event seem to enjoy remaining mysteries.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

01-03-2020 om 18:39 geschreven door peter  

On February 28, 1959, a Private First Class Gerry Irwin was on his way back to his duties as Nike missile technician at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after having just enjoyed a one-month leave in Nampa, Idaho. On this evening he was passing through a portion of southern Utah, near Cedar City, Utah, when there was a bright flash in the sky and he could make out a brilliant white light traveling across the night sky. It was apparently so bright that it lit up the desolate landscape around him, and Irwin actually stopped his car and got out to track its progress across the star-filled sky until it disappeared behind a ridge. At this point he was sure it had to be an aircraft going down, and it had been so alarmingly low that he was convinced he had witnessed a plane crash. He got in his car and scrawled out a note reading “Have gone to investigate possible plane crash, please call law enforcement officers,” which he left on his steering wheel, and he then wrote “STOP” across the side of his car with shoe polish before venturing out over the scrub-filled area towards that ridge and the unknown. And so would begin one of the earliest and weirdest alien abduction cases on record.

Thirty minutes passed before any other car came along on this remote stretch of road, and it happened to be a fish and game inspector, who found the note and quickly informed the Cedar City Sheriff’s Office. When authorities arrived that carried out a search of the area, and while there was no trace of a crashed plane they did find an unconscious Irwin sprawled out of the ground. He was totally unresponsive, unable to be revived, and was rushed to the nearest hospital, where it was found that there seemed to be nothing physically wrong with him other than the fact that nothing could seem to raise him from his stupor, remaining completely unable to be woken up.

Concerned medical staff did what they could and allowed the man to sleep, during which time we was allegedly heard by nurses to talk in his sleep and mumble what sounded like “jacket on bush.” The next morning he came to, and the first thing he wanted to know was if there were any survivors of the airplane crash. Doctors informed Irwin that there had been no plane crash, which seemed to surprise the young man, and he also seemed to really want to know where his jacket was, which he had not been wearing when he was brought in and had not been found by the search party. Although he was physically uninjured, Irwin claimed to remember absolutely nothing from the time he had left his car, and could not in any way explain how he had come to be passed out in the wilderness. He would be kept for a few days for observation, after which he was told that he was suffering hysteria of some sort and sent on his way. This would be just beginning of the strangeness.

In the days after his release, Irwin experienced several episodes in which he would just faint and fall to the ground. The first incident of this was as he was on duty on base, which he snapped out of quickly, and then it happened again as he was walking down a street in El Paso, this time putting him in the same deep state of sleep as before. This caused him to be brought in for another round of medical check-ups and psychiatric evaluations. Interestingly, after this second fainting he seems to have been reset somehow, waking up to ask about any survivors of the plane crash and thinking it was still February 28, as well as not recognizing the same medical staff who had tended to him before or remembering the past two weeks, and this was enough to have him kept for observation for a full month, during which time his memory of the preceding two weeks came trickling back to him. He would eventually be released again with a bill of good health.

Although he seemed normal, his thoughts were constantly invaded by the urge to return to the site where he had originally left his car in this strange odyssey, and so one day he was overcome by such a compulsion and left the base to go out to that lonely road to have a look around, apparently finding his jacket perched upon a bush untouched. Oddly there was a pencil with a noted wrapped around it jammed into one of the button holes, but he never did read it, instead overcome with the urge to burn the note instead. He then apparently snapped out of his daze and realized that he had not left the base in a legal fashion, and was basically AWOL.

He did the right thing, turning himself in, and was subsequently extensively questioned, strangely with large holes in his memory still missing and unable to explain what had possessed him to do what he had done. He was not jailed or disciplined severely, but it was enough to get his security clearance revoked and to be reassigned. Things take a turn for the odder when not long after this he one day just failed to report for duty, and indeed no one had heard from him. Nothing was found missing at his residence and he seemed to have just stepped off the face of the earth. A month later Irwin was still nowhere to be seen, and the lore goes that indeed he has not been seen since. The case would go on to become highly investigated by UFO researchers, and speculation swirled as to what actually happened to him. The main idea was that he was abducted by aliens and then slowly lost his mind, perhaps even be abducted one final time, this time for good. Other ideas included that he was part of some sort of government mind control program or that he simply wandered out into the wilderness to die.

Yet things got really interesting when researcher David Booher investigated the case for his book No Return – the Gerry Irwin story – UFO Abduction or Covert Operation? which has all sorts of interesting information contained within its pages and is one of the most comprehensive write-ups on the case there is. Booher apparently was able to actually track the “vanished” Irwin down, only to find that the man did not seem to remember much of anything of what had happened in 1959, but he was able to manage to shed some light on it all. He claimed that he did disappear for while to live out in the woods, but that he had finally been tracked down and disciplined, after which he was reassigned and sent to Germany, never at any point actually being discharged from the military. He also said that he was long beset by strange blackouts and behavioral issues, and that he had been involved in some top-secret assignment in Austria, although details remain vague. It is interesting to see that while in a lot of literature Gerry Irwin is reported as having vanished into thin air to never be seen again, he was very much alive and not vanished when Booher found him. What significance does this have on the whole strange case as a whole?

In the end it is all very perplexing. We have this military man who was suddenly found unconscious in the wilds after seeing a UFO, the missing time and lost memory, the sudden urge to just go AWOL, the disappearance that never seems to have been properly followed up on, the sending away of Irwin to Germany, almost as if to get him out of the way, and the strange blackouts and disrupted behavior. Is this someone who just lost his mind, an alien abduction, a strange government experiment, or what? Whatever the answers may be, the Gerry Irwin case has managed to gain a reputation as being one of the very first publicized “alien abduction” accounts, and has remained much talked about to this day.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

01-03-2020 om 18:26 geschreven door peter  

NASA...Earth Has New Moon, I Say Its A Alien Probe Watching Humanity With Coronavirus. UFO Sighting News.

Scientists are announcing a mini moon now in earths orbit. The objects was noticed on Feb 15th. The object is said to have come from deep space, and settled into an orbit around earth. Well, I call that perfect timing. It came just in time to witness humanity fight the coronavirus. Coincidence...I think not. 

The object is said to be only 1.9-3.5 meters across but the accuracy of this is in question. I personally have seen many NEO (near earth objects) on the nasa site and they say the size...lets say 10 meters and when it comes closest to earth then leaves...the size is announced to be something closer to 25-35 meters. So we know this object in space is not 3.5 meters, but more likely closer to 10 meters across or more! NASA always downplays the size of objects out there. 

Whey now? Why did a UFO go into orbit around earth now? To record, watch and research how humanity copes and tries to deal with Coronavirus. Aliens may know than we do about its capabilities. They may be here not just to witness humanity fight the virus, but to see if we can avoid a possible ELE (extinction level event). You see, we don't really know the truth about the virus, its death rates are incredibly higher than the low estimate the US gov is give us. Its also possible that at the peak of the virus...when 20% of the worlds population has it...it could mutate, making itself immune to medicines that are being tested to work against it. Each virus creates a 1% mutation on each patient...if it finds a way to carry this mutation to the next person...then it could be a 100% death sentence. No one knows what will happen at its peak, everyone has been wrong so far...so, we need to consider other possibilities. An ELE is one of those we ethically need to consider. 
Scott Waring - Taiwan 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

01-03-2020 om 18:00 geschreven door peter  

But is there any connection to all this? What do we need to learn - scientifically - to gain a greater understanding of the links between these sites, and the great changes that happened on our planet 12,800 years ago.

Fascinated by the mysteries of our ancient human past, and the many unanswered questions. Our scientific toolkit lets us push back the unknown to gain a clearer understanding of where we came from, who we are, and in turn - where we might be going.

Follow the adventures of a science writer and skeptic as he explores extraordinary coincidences, connections, and the evidence linking our modern world to our mysterious past.

  

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

01-03-2020 om 17:37 geschreven door peter  

The Roswell Flying Saucer Crash Incident and Government UFO Cover Up

On July 8, 1947 the Roswell Daily Record newspaper published a front page article with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region”, and the legend of America’s most famous brush with aliens was born. On the summer of 1947, a rancher discovered unidentifiable debris in his sheep pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico. Although officials from the local Air Force base asserted that it was a crashed weather balloon, many people believed it was the remains of an extraterrestrial flying saucer; a series of secret “dummy drops” in New Mexico during the 1950s heightened their suspicions. Nearly 50 years after the story of the mysterious debris broke, the U.S. military issued a report linking the incident to a top-secret atomic espionage project called Project Mogul. Still, many people continue to embrace the UFO theory, and hundreds of curiosity seekers visit Roswell and the crash site every year.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

01-03-2020 om 17:15 geschreven door peter  

Are the aliens us? UFOs may be piloted by time-traveling humans, book argues

By Leonard David

The great distances covered by visiting "aliens" may be ones of time rather than space, a recent book argues.

Close encounters with our future selves?

(Image: © thortful.com)

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public's attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies by taking an interstellar off-ramp to Earth?

On the other hand, could those piloting UFOs be us — our future progeny that have mastered the landscape of time and space? Perhaps those reports of people coming into contact with strange beings represent our distant human descendants, returning from the future to study us in their own evolutionary past. 

The idea of us being them has been advanced before. But a recent book, "Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon" (Masters Creative LLC, 2019), takes a fresh look at this prospect, offering some thought-provoking proposals.

• Related: UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers

Multidisciplinary approach

The book was written by Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte. Masters thinks that – given the accelerating pace of change in science, technology, and engineering –  it is likely that humans of the distant future could develop the knowledge and machinery necessary to return to the past. 

The objective of the book, Masters said, is to spur a new and more informed discussion among believers and skeptics alike. 

"I took a multidisciplinary approach in order to try and understand the oddities of this phenomenon," Masters told Space.com. "Our job as scientists is to be asking big questions and try to find answers to unknown questions. There's something going on here, and we should be having a conversation about this. We should be at the forefront of trying to find out what it is."

Human evolution

Dubbing these purported visitors "extratempestrials," Masters notes that close-encounter accounts typically describe UFO tenants as bipedal, hairless, human-like beings with large brains, large eyes, small noses and small mouths. Further, the creatures are often said to have the ability to communicate with us in our own languages and possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, today's technological prowess. 

Masters believes that through a comprehensive analysis of consistent patterns of long-term biocultural change throughout human evolution — as well as recent advances in our understanding of time and time travel — we may begin to consider this future possibility in the context of a currently unexplained phenomenon. 

"The book ties together those known aspects of our evolutionary history with what is still an unproven, unverified aspect of UFOs and aliens," he said.

But why not argue that ET is actually a traveler from across the vastness of space, from a distant planet? Wouldn't that be a simpler answer?

"I would argue it's the opposite," Masters responded. "We know we're here. We know humans exist. We know that we've had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I'm just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation."

• Related: 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life

Archaeological tourism

As an anthropologist who has worked on and directed numerous archaeological digs in Africa, France and throughout the United States, Masters observes that it is easy to conceptualize just how much more could be learned about our own evolutionary history if we currently possessed the technology to visit past periods of time. 

"The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature. It's probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can't without access to that technology," Masters said. 

"That said, I do think that some component of it is also tourism," he added. "Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history. Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru … old and prehistoric sites."

Masters calls his UFO research "an evolving project."

"There's certainly still missing pieces of the puzzle," he said. "There are aspects of time that we don't yet understand. Wanted is a theory of quantum gravity, and we can meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. I'm just trying to put forth the best model I can based on current scientific knowledge. Hopefully, over time, we can continue to build on this." 

Solve this mystery

"Masters postulates that using a multidisciplinary scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon will be what it takes to solve this mystery once and for all, and I couldn't agree more," said Jan Harzan, executive director of the nonprofit Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

"The premise that UFOs are us from the future is one of many possibilities that MUFON is exploring to explain the UFO phenomenon. All we know for sure is that we are not alone," Harzan added. "Now the question becomes, 'Who are they?' And Masters makes a great case for the time-traveler hypothesis." 

'Highly dubious claim'

But not everybody is on board with the idea, as you might imagine.

"There is nothing in this book to take seriously, as it depends on the belief that 'time travel' is not only possible, but real," said Robert Sheaffer, a noted UFO skeptic.

Supposedly our distant descendants have mastered time travel, Sheaffer said, and have traveled back in time to visit us. "So, according to Masters, you just spin something fast enough and it will begin to warp space, and even send stuff backwards in time. This is a highly dubious claim," he said.

Moreover, Sheaffer said that Masters tries to deduce aliens' evolutionary history from witness descriptions, "suggesting that he takes such accounts far too literally."

• Related: 7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs

The problem of 'if'

David Darling is a British astronomer and science writer who has authored books on a sweeping array of topics – from gravity, Zen physics and astrobiology to teleportation and extraterrestrial life.

"I've often thought that if some UFOs are 'alien' craft, it's just as reasonable to suppose that they might be time machines from our own future than that they're spacecraft from other stars," Darling told Space.com. "The problem is the 'if.'

Darling said that, while some aerial phenomena have eluded easy identification, one of the least likely explanations, it seems to him, is that they're artificial and not of this world.

"Outside of the popular mythos of flying saucers and archetypal, big-brained aliens, there's precious little credible evidence that they exist," Darling said. "So, my issue with the book is not the ingenuity of its thesis, but the fact that there's really no need for such a thesis in the first place."

Exotic physics?

Larry Lemke, a retired NASA aerospace engineer with an interest in the UFO phenomenon, finds the prospect of time-travelling visitors from the future intriguing.

"The one thing that has become clear over the decades of sightings, if you believe the reports, is that these objects don't seem to be obeying the usual laws of aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics," Lemke said, referring to the relationship, in the natural world, between force, mass and motion. 

Toss in for good measure Einstein's theory of general relativity and its consequences, like wormholes and black holes, along with other exotic physics ideas such as the Alcubierre warp-drive bubble. 

"There's a group of thinkers in the field of UFOs that point out that phenomena reported around some UFOs do, in fact, look exactly like general relativity effects," Lemke said. Missing time is a very common one."

Lemke said that the idea that somebody has figured out how to manipulate space-time, on a local scale with a low-energy approach, would explain a lot of things across the UFO phenomenon, including those baffling Tic-Tac-shaped objects recently reported by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators. 

"No matter how much knowledge we have, how much we think we know, there's always some frontier beyond," he said. "And to understand that frontier is getting more and more esoteric."

• Where Does the Concept of Time Travel Come From?
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• 13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

Leonard David is the author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

01-03-2020 om 00:56 geschreven door peter