Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
17-03-2020
The universe may have been filled with supermassive black holes at the dawn of time
The universe may have been filled with supermassive black holes at the dawn of time
It existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang.
This radio image shows two jets shooting out of the center of Cygnus A, a galaxy not too far from our own. A new paper reports discovering a similar object in a much more distant, ancient galaxy. That galaxy has a bright, relatavistic jet emanating from its central supermassive black hole pointed at Earth, making it a blazar.
Nine hundred million years after theBig Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine — known as a blazar — that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later.
Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are galaxies with cores that look extra-bright to radio telescopes, which is considered evidence that they contain supermassive black holes. Blazars are a unique type of RL AGN that spit out two narrow jets of "relativistic" (near-light-speed) matter in opposite directions. Those jets emit narrow beams of light at many different wavelengths and have to be pointed right at Earth for us to detect them across such vast distances. This new blazar discovery moves the date of the oldest confirmed supermassive black hole to within the first billion years of the universe's history and suggests there were other, similar black holes in that era that we haven't detected.
"Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets," Silvia Belladitta, a doctoral student at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan and co-author of a new paper on the blazar, said in a statement.
The discovery by Belladitta and her co-authors confirms that blazars existed during an epoch of our universe's history known as "reionization" — a period after a long, post-Big Bang dark age when the first stars and galaxies began to form.
And discovering one blazar strongly suggests there were many others, the authors wrote. If only one blazar existed in this early phase of the universe, it would be an extraordinarily lucky break for it to have pointed its narrow, visible beam at Earth. It's much more likely that there were many such blazars pointing in all sorts of directions, and that one of them happened to throw its light our way.
"Observing a blazar is extremely important. For every discovered source of this type, we know that there must be 100 similar, but most are oriented differently, and are therefore too weak to be seen directly," Belladitta said.
That information helps astrophysicists reconstruct the story of how and when these monster black holes formed.
It has become a bit of a cottage industry to rail against the current state of UFOlogy. The phenomenon seems beset with talking heads, poseurs and outright charlatans. So much so, it occasionally brings even the best of us to the brink of despair. But just when I thought there were no good men left to fight for answers to the UFO conundrum, I met up with Ted Phillips.
Ted Phillips is part of a rare breed. He is a UFO investigator – not a writer, not a theorist – a hard-core, old-school investigator. For the past forty-five years, he has traversed the United States, doing the arduous work of turning UFO testimony into hard, quantifiable evidence. He’s sifted through dirt, climbed trees, measured, photographed and measured again. The fruits of his efforts, some almost totally unknown to modern audiences, are nothing short of startling.
Phillips grew up in the great American Midwest, his radio tuned to the likes of Frank Edwards and Long John Nebel. A fascination grew within the man that, in 1964, finally prompted him to take action.
He packed up his Chevy and headed southwest for his very first UFO investigation – a trip that put him smack in the middle of the Lonnie Zamora sighting in Socorro, New Mexico. The then 22-year-old Phillips was one of the first serious researchers to talk with Zamora and the numerous other people who witnessed the now classic egg-shaped UFO. Phillips retains what must be considered the definitive collection of analysis and evidence from that case – one he still considers among the most compelling of all time.
While in Socorro, Phillips crossed paths with an astronomer from Northwestern University who was investigating UFOs for the U.S. Air Force. That man, of course, was Dr. J. Allen Hynek. This meeting proved to be the start of a professional relationship and close friendship that would last until Hynek’s death in 1986.
In the years that followed, Phillips honed his skills as a painstaking investigator. “My approach is the same one you now see on television shows like CSI,” he told Department 47. “You must always handle a UFO scene with care, as though it were a crime scene.”
He would need all of those skills in 1966 when he examined a harrowing close encounter at Roaring River State Park in Missouri. Three hunters observed a daylight object in the park and, upon returning to their camp site, found all of their camping equipment incinerated. Whatever caused the fire was hot enough to melt aluminum tent poles but selective enough not to ignite the dry trees overhead. As the hunters surveyed the damage, they heard a humming noise. To their amazement, a bizarre disk-shaped object came into view a mere 300 feet away. As the men watched, a tree near the object burst into flame. The UFO finally made a quick exit but not before one of the hunters snapped two photographs.
Phillips called in his friend Dr. Hynek to help interview the witnesses and analyze the Roaring River evidence. Despite their combined efforts, no prosaic explanation for the event has ever been determined.
“Afterwards, Dr. Hynek admitted to me that the UFO phenomenon was bigger than he thought and that people were needed who were willing to specialize,” Phillips explained. “It was he who encouraged me to focus on physical trace cases.”
Phillips took that advice to heart and, over the years, he’s been directly or indirectly involved with over 3000 UFO incidents that produced physical trace evidence. He has personally investigated hundreds of these, including the famous 1971 Delphos, Kansas incident and a 1979 case in which a UFO collided with a Minnesota sheriff’s patrol car.
All that careful analysis and attention to detail has paid dividends. Patterns and connections emerged in the evidence Phillips collected. For example, he learned from repeated compression tests on various landing marks that these alleged vehicles weighed from seven to fourteen tons. Similar tests of footprints found at UFO sites indicated that the entities who made them weighed about sixty pounds. All of this pointed to physical creatures with nuts-n-bolts technology – a hypothesis that, even in 2008, still strikes Phillips as the most logical answer.
The 1970s proved to be a hectic decade with so many cases that the tireless Phillips barely kept up. However, his investigations came to an abrupt halt with Dr. Hynek’s death in 1986. “It just wasn’t any fun without my friend,” he recalled.
Phillip’s self-imposed retirement continued until 1998 when he had a conversation with another icon of UFOlogy, Jacques Vallee. Vallee had known Phillips for years since he had included him as a member of the Invisible College, a blue-ribbon panel of UFO researchers. Vallee expressed concerns about the direction of UFOlogy and ultimately convinced Phillips to resume his important work.
So, that year, Ted Phillips founded The Center for Physical Trace Research (www.ufophysical.com). To his profound surprise, however, he discovered that, during his years of retirement, the phenomenon had undergone a radical change.
“Sometime during the late 1980s, the number of incidents involving large flying objects dropped considerably.” Phillips states. “At the same time, reports involving very small UFOs increased dramatically.”
Phillips also noticed that these miniature UFOs tended to appear repeatedly in a given area. This was a new facet of the phenomenon – one that may yet yield long-awaited answers. He knew only so much can be done with isolated, one-time UFO encounters. However, if an area of recurring activity could be identified, scientific methods and instruments might be brought to bear to measure and analyze the objects as never before.
To respond to this new opportunity, Phillips formed a Special Investigations Unit (SIU) within the CPTR. This small group of dedicated researchers functions like the Navy SEALS in that they are inserted into UFO hotspots armed with electronic and imaging equipment. In recent months, the SIU has been actively involved with an on-going investigation of a place that goes by the pseudonym of Marley Woods. Marley Woods has been visited on numerous occasions over the years by small, inexplicable lights. The lights vary in size, color, behavior and performance characteristics. More often than not, however, they appear to be the size of a beach ball. The objects have been seen by multiple, independent witnesses at close range. They have exhibited electromagnetic effects well known to most students of the phenomenon, including interfering with car ignitions, video cameras and even cell phones.
On several occasions in 2007, the SIU spent time in the Marley Woods. They are hoping to conduct additional research at the site later this year. Members of the SIU team include: Tom Ferrario, Adam Johnson, Debbie Ziegelmeyer and Chuck Zukowski. Ferrario and Ziegelmeyer are both certified divers, a skill that will be put to the test during the team’s next visit. Phillips explains that anomalous objects have, on more than one occasion, been seen to enter large farm ponds in the vicinity. The SIU divers will search those ponds to see if traces of the objects’ activity can be found.
Phillips admits he’s particularly intrigued by this component of the case. He cites a recent Michigan encounter where a small UFO purportedly bounced off the top of a woman’s car. That object left a strange, yellow residue, which the witness had the foresight to preserve. The substance was then subjected to chemical and bacteriological analysis indicating that, strangely enough, this object may also have spent time in a farm pond.
Funding for such projects is always scarce but the group is working to bankroll the purchase of new, more sophisticated imaging equipment. They also look to add an electromagnetic field generator to their arsenal – one that just might attract one of the Marley Woods’ objects. Phillips is somewhat philosophical about the funding challenges faced by his organization. “After all, Dr. Hynek only managed one, $4000 grant during his entire career,” he mused.
To that end, the Center is accepting monetary donations on its website. Just this month, the group began marketing a DVD of its first investigation at Marley Woods, the proceeds of which will go toward future expeditions.
You’d think that, after forty-five years, Ted Phillips might want to slow down a bit. However, one conversation with this man reveals an energy and enthusiasm equal to that of his much younger colleagues. The veteran investigator says he’s holding leads on three new sites, much like Marley Woods, that are just begging to be investigated. Somehow, I can’t help but think Ted Phillips is still the man to get the job done.
If you’re one of those who still believes or hopes that the strange cigar-shaped interstellar comet/asteroid/hybrid ‘Oumuamua is actually a spaceship … or if you wish we could have gotten a closer look at a visitor from another star while it was near Earth – you may be in luck. A scientific group that formed just two weeks after ‘Oumuamua was discovered in 2017 says it’s not too late. Project Lyra has issued a detailed paper describing how ‘Oumuamua can be caught and analyzed with existing technology and when the best time for a launch will be. Can it be done? Will the robotic crew on ‘Oumuamua see it fast approaching and hit the gas – or whatever might be powering it?
“We now know such a mission, at least in principle, is achievable. The possible scientific return would be tremendous and might fundamentally alter our understanding of our place in the universe.”
Software developer Adam Hibberd, a volunteer with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies who designed the software to determine the optimal dates and trajectory for the mission and is the lead author on the paper to be published in Acta Astronautica, described in Wired how this will be a “this changes everything” project. ‘Oumuamua is currently moving away from Earth at a speed of 26.33±0.01 km/s (16.36 miles/sec) or 500 million miles per year, which will have it crossing the boundary into interstellar space in the late 2030s.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
The Project Lyra model determined that a launched by the most powerful rocket — either SpaceX’sFalcon Heavyor NASA’s soon-to-be-available Space Launch System– would start the process. The spacecraft would have to be equipped with a booster rocket that would be fired as it makes its turn around the Sun – giving an extra boost to the Sun’s gravitational assist. It would then swing around Jupiter, getting another gravitational boost. That would give it enough speed to catch up to ‘Oumuamua. Since Falcon Heavy is ready, what are we waiting for?
“Unfortunately we can’t just launch any year we like. To make missions feasible using current technology, we are reliant on Jupiter taking up a certain point in its 12-year orbit around the sun, and so the opportunities follow approximately a 12-year cycle.”
Ah, yes. The limits of current technology – the bane of those raised on Star Trek. Because a conventional spacecraft needs a gravitational acceleration boost, the optimal launch date for the Project Lyra craft would be in 2033, putting its catch-‘Oumuamua date sometime in 2048. The good news is, that gives the Project Lyra team some time to find ‘Oumuamua in interstellar space – not a trivial task either.
Current technology
If existing technology can catch ‘Oumuamua, why not use it to catch the next interstellar object that comes past Earth instead? Again, that requires finding them early enough – a task space scientists have not yet mastered with existing telescopes. This highlights the importance of space research and development that’s not tied to government budgets or private space company profit margins. If we’re serious about space exploration, learning more about the universe, searching for other life forms, chasing interstellar objects and the like, we need to see them and their costs as an investment in the future of humanity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, the first bundles of which were discovered in 1946 in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, date back to the 3rd century BCE and are believed to be some of the oldest known surviving manuscripts of books in the Hebrew Bible. Are they? Sixteen fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, currently in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, were recently studied by art forgery experts and … get ready to be disappointed … were identified as excellent fakes. What does this mean for the Hebrew Bible?
“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible. We’re victims. We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”
If this story sounds familiar, it was just last year that of the Museum of the Bible – a non-sectarian museum in theory – was informed that six of its Dead Sea Scrolls fragments were forgeries. The collection was donated to the museum by founder and CEO Of Hobby Lobby Steve Green, who refuses to say where he obtained them nor how much he paid, but it’s estimated to be millions. Now it seems that even if Green kept the receipts, he admitted to the National Geographic that he was duped by unscrupulous sellers on his entire collection of scroll pieces.
“After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic. Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the twentieth century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments.”
Trust me.
At a recent conference in Washington, Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, released a 200-page report on an investigation of the Green family’s scrolls. The report shows that the museum’s fragments were leather hide parchment, which may have come from ancient Roman shoes of the era. They were coated with a shiny substance, possibly glue, that came from one source, indicating all of these forgeries were handled by the same forger – even though the Green family says they came from four different sellers. This was one slick forger … the fragments were coated with minerals from the Dead Sea caves area.
While these scroll fragments fooled a number of so-called experts, CNN reports that the real ones used 3D microscopes, infrared spectroscopy and “energy dispersive X-ray analysis” and found some pretty glaring errors. Perhaps the biggest was discovered by labs in Germany which determined that the ink was recent and lettering was applied after the fake creases and tears were made to the leather.
Does this mean all of the estimated 100,000 Dead Sea scroll fragments may be fakes? Fortunately, most of those are in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and those have undergone intense scrutiny for years to authenticate them. It’s the fragments showing up in black markets and on eBay that should be questioned.
Hey, you … look at this.
It’s too bad these forgers don’t actually read the documents they’re copying … especially the parts about stealing and bearing false witness. And those who try to own these antiquities for themselves should remember the part about coveting their neighbor’s goods. When it comes to ancient historical artifacts, religious or otherwise, we’re ALL neighbors.
I was looking at some footage of the sun and decided to take a closer look at the black triangle I discovered many months ago. The object is still there. Some people try to say its not a craft, but a dark spot on the sun...which is not possible...since the sun is rotating below the UFO, but the UFO only moves slightly to left and sometimes to the right. So clearly its in orbit. The dark triangle may have been there for a long time. I went back as far as 9 months and its still there! Perhaps its been there all along and NASA was just hoping that none would notice a moon size space ship in our suns orbit. Check out the video below I made. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
What Caused This Enormous Discharge in Deep Space?
What Caused This Enormous Discharge in Deep Space?
Last February, NASA's satellite Stereo A HI1 captured something strange in space for several days.
What we see is an immense force field coming in from the right, surrounded by some sort of energy ring. What follows is an enormous outburst or 'discharge' turning it into a giant bubble, even it is spinning, though it's almost imperceptible but watch it carefully.
While it is possible that this huge bubble is a lens flare from the huge planet moving from left to the right. due to its brightness it doesn't explain the outburst or 'discharge.'
My ques is that it has been caused by Nibiru due to an alignment. Since Venus rotates backwards to the other planets, like the Nibiru does; they both rotate clockwise, there may be a resonance between the Nibiru and Venus, and Venus would be affected more by the Nibiru than the other planets which rotate anticlockwise, e.g. Earth.
The Unexplained Deactivated Nukes Incident by UFOs at Malmstrom Air Force Base 1967
The Unexplained Deactivated Nukes Incident by UFOs at Malmstrom Air Force Base 1967
On March 24, 1967, men see an unidentified object hovering over Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to nuclear weapons, which are all disabled simultaneously. Former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, who was at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967 when 10 ICMs he was overseeing suddenly became inoperative – at the same time base security informed him of a mysterious red glowing object in the sky. The incidents were never officially explained.
All 4 of the gas giant planets in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are known to have rings. Could many of the so-called super-puff or cotton candy exoplanets have rings instead of super low densities?
Artist’s concept of a “super-puff” exoplanet with rings transiting in front of its star.
Among the strangest exoplanets discovered so far are the so-called super-pufforcotton candy planets. They appear to have extremely low densities, lower even than our solar system’s planet Saturn, which has long been said to be so “light” it could float on water, if you could find an ocean big enough to hold it. Researchers at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., have developed a new line of thought about these exotic worlds. They announced on March 2, 2020, that some super-puff planets aren’t as puffy as first thought.
What if there’s another explanation? Lead researcher Anthony Piro at Carnegie explained in a statement:
We started thinking, what if these planets aren’t airy like cotton candy at all? What if the super-puffs seem so large because they are actually surrounded by rings?
The associated peer-reviewed paper was published in The Astronomical Journal on February 28.
Super-puff or cotton candy planets are characterized by their large radii in contrast to their not-so-large masses. Their densities are very low. Their apparent differences from any planets in our solar system made them a surprising discovery when they were first began to be found, a few years ago.
Artist’s concept of the most extreme examples of super-puff planets known – the 3 giant planets orbiting the star Kepler-51 – discovered in 2012 and identified as super-puffs in 2014. They lie about 2,600 light-years from Earth.
Image via NASA/ ESA/ L. Hustak/ J. Olmsted/ D. Player/ F. Summers (STScI)/ Hubblesite.
It’s an interesting idea, that the super-puffs – at least some of them – might be more like Saturn and the other giant planets in our solar system than first thought. All four of the gas giant planets in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are known to have rings. Could many of the super-puffs have rings instead of super low densities?
Exoplanets are difficult to detect; it’s hard to see them in the glare of distant stars. Rings around exoplanets would be even more difficult. The researchers wondered if alien astronomers on distant exoplanets could look back at our solar system and see Saturn’s rings. Or, from a great distance away, would they mistake Saturn for a super-puff? According to Shreyas Vissapragada at Caltech:
We started to wonder, if you were to look back at us from a distant world, would you recognize Saturn as a ringed planet, or would it appear to be a puffy planet to an alien astronomer?
An ethereal view of Saturn’s rings as seen by Cassini on February 3, 2017. Do some cotton candy exoplanets have similar ring systems?
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute/ NASA Science.
In thinking through this question, the researchers took into consideration how a large ringed planet would appear as it transited in front of its star, and the kind of ring material that might exist around super-puffs. Their conclusion is that rings might explain some of the super-puffs discovered, but probably not all of them. According to Piro:
These planets tend to orbit in close proximity to their host stars, meaning that the rings would have to be rocky, rather than icy. But rocky ring radii can only be so big, unless the rock is very porous, so not every super-puff would fit these constraints.
Three of these planets were studied recently by the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting the sunlike star Kepler-51, about 2,600 light-years away. They are almost the size of Jupiter, but only 1/100th as massive. They have atmospheres composed of the lightweight gases hydrogen and helium, covered by a thick layer of methane haze.
Anthony Piro at Carnegie Institution for Science, lead author of the new study.
Those planets also appear to be rapidly shrinking, losing billions of tons of material into space every second, suggesting that the cotton candy characteristics may just be a transitory phase in their evolution. They may end up looking more like mini-Neptunes.
Determining whether any of these planets actually do have rings will require follow-up observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021. If they do, that would help scientists learn more about how such worlds form and how they compare to actual super-puffs and other giant exoplanets, as well as the giant planets in our own solar system.
Bottom line: A new study suggests that some cotton candy exoplanets may not be as puffy as first thought, but instead have rings, like Saturn.
Mars Express Sees Intriguing Geological Features in Moreux Crater
Mars Express Sees Intriguing Geological Features in Moreux Crater
The High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning images of Moreux crater, a huge impact crater in the Terra Sabaea region of the Red Planet.
This image of Moreux crater comprises data gathered on October 30, 2019.
Known for its wide swathes of rippling, textured, gently sloping dunes, Mars’ Terra Sabaea region is home to many fascinating geological features — including the prominent Moreux crater, the star of a new image from ESA’s Mars Express.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
When compared to other impact craters on both Mars and Earth, Moreux crater appears a little misshapen and messy — the result of ongoing erosion over Martian history.
The crater is roughly 3 km deep, and spans 135 km from edge to edge.
Its central peak, created as material from the crater floor rebounded and rose upwards following the initial impact, is around 2 km in height.
Its egg-shaped rim is broken up, its dark walls are ridged, rippled and mottled.
Perspective view of the Moreux crater.
This image shows a feature on Mars’ surface named Moreux crater. It comprises data gathered on 30 October 2019 during orbit 20014. The ground resolution is approximately 16 m/pixel and the images are centered at about 44°E/42°N.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
The range of colors featured in the new images from Mars Express reveals much about the composition of a particular region, material or feature.
While the surrounding material is visible in hues of butterscotch and caramel, the crater’s walls are dark, resembling a smudged ring of ash or charcoal.
Dark brown and black dunes cover the crater floor, while the peak remains a pale yellow-orange.
Dark, prominent ejecta, comprising material flung outwards during the crater-forming collision, spread outwards from the crater rim, discoloring and encroaching upon the lighter surrounding terrain.
This varied color palette reflects an equally varied geological composition.
The dunes within and around the crater are thought to contain sandy material rich in pyroxene and olivine: rock-forming minerals that are mafic (containing magnesium and iron) and characterized by their typically dark appearance.
Perspective view of the Moreux crater.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
Martian winds are also thought to have swept and gathered fine, basaltic, volcanic sand and ash into and around the crater.
Basaltic rock is commonplace on both Mars and other celestial bodies. It is a key component of the maria, or seas, on the Moon, for instance, and causes them to appear visibly and notably darker than the lunar highlands.
Many of the features, such as dunes and flows, surrounding the central peak and southern region of Moreux crater (to the left of the first image) appear to have been formed by ice.
This is thought to have occurred in the form of substantial episodes of glacial activity over the past few million years.
Many other features show signs of wind erosion, or having been formed via wind-related processes — most notably, the dunes covering the crater floor.
These dunes are largely sickle-shaped (barchanoid), and reveal much about wind direction within and across the crater.
From the orientation of the dunes, scientists inferred a complex system of prevailing winds, likely influenced by the topography of the crater itself.
Dunes to the north and east of the central peak are largely influenced by winds coming from the northeast, while dunes sitting west of the park are controlled by winds from the northwest.
These cross-cutting winds create an interesting and unique dune morphology within Moreux crater, adding to the feature’s intrigue.
The moon and Earth may be more different than previously thought, challenging existing models for how the moon formed, a new study finds.
Earth originated about 4.5 billion years ago, and previous research suggested that the moon arose a short time after that. For the past three decades, the prevailing explanation for the moon's origin was that it resulted from the collision of two protoplanets, or embryonic worlds. One of those was the newborn Earth, and the other was a Mars-size rock nicknamed Theia, after the mother of the moon in Greek myth. "Once the dust settled, two bodies were left — Earth and the moon," new study co-author Zachary Sharp, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Space.com.
This "giant impact hypothesis" seemed to explain many details about Earth and the moon, such as the large size of the moon compared with Earth and the rates of rotation of the two bodies. However, in the past 20 or so years, evidence has emerged to challenge that hypothesis and suggest a multitude of alternatives.
Computer models of the giant-impact scenario often say that 70% to 90% of the moon should be made of material from Theia. The problem is that most bodies in the solar system have unique chemical makeups, and so the Earth, Theia — and therefore the moon — should too. However, rock samples that the Apollo missions returned from the moon show that the natural satellite's composition is uncannily similar to Earth's, much more similar than such models would predict for versions of elements called isotopes. (Isotopes of an element each have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei.)
This extreme similarity in isotopes of elements such as oxygen has raised great challenges for the giant-impact scenario. One possibility is that the proto-Earth and Theia were nearly identical to start with when it came to oxygen isotopes, which seems unlikely. Another is that the proto-Earth and Theia's oxygen isotopes were fully mixed in the aftermath of the collision, perhaps due to an impact so violent that it vaporized a large portion of the early Earth, with the moon emerging from the resulting, doughnut-shaped mass called a synestia. But this and other scenarios may require unlikely impact conditions, scientists have said.
In the new study, researchers conducted new high-precision measurements of oxygen isotope levels in a range of lunar samples. The researchers expanded on previous work by focusing on a wide variety of types of moon rock.
The scientists found that there were subtle but regular differences in oxygen isotopic composition depending on the kind of lunar rock tested, Sharp said. This suggested that prior work that averaged together lunar isotope data while ignoring differences in rock type might not have given an accurate picture of the differences between Earth and the moon.
"Going into this project, it was expected that our results would likely mirror that of previous studies," study lead author Erick Cano, a stable-isotope geochemist at the University of New Mexico, told Space.com. "The most surprising part of our results was finding the amount of variation that we did between the individual lunar samples."
To explain these findings, the researchers suggested that the giant collision between proto-Earth and Theia did indeed lead to mixing between the bodies. Still, the resulting moon and Earth had distinct compositions, albeit very similar ones, Sharp said.
Later, in the first 1,000 or so years after the impact, vaporized rock from the disk of debris left behind by the impact likely led "to lava raining down on the moon for hundreds of years," Sharp said. Complex physical and chemical interactions between this lava rain and the ocean of magma that covered the newborn moon could then have led to an oxygen isotopic composition in the uppermost lunar rocks that was more similar to Earth's. In contrast, samples that came from the deep lunar mantle had the most different oxygen isotopic composition of the lunar rocks tested when compared to Earth.
The most important implication from these findings is that giant-impact models no longer have to account for virtually indistinguishable oxygen isotopic compositions between Earth and the moon, Cano said. "I think this will open the door for an entirely new range of impact scenarios," he added.
Future research can expand on this new study by analyzing other lunar samples, Cano said. "The obstacles for this future research may be the limited quantities of material that we have from the Apollo missions," he said. "Some of these lunar rock types were only brought back in very small quantities and can be very difficult to obtain for study."
Cano, Sharp and study co-author Chip Shearer, a lunar scientist also based at the University of New Mexico, detailed their findings online Monday (March 9) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
BLUE ORIGIN'S JEFF BEZOS DETAILS HIS RADICAL VISION FOR COLONIES IN SPACE
BLUE ORIGIN'S JEFF BEZOS DETAILS HIS RADICAL VISION FOR COLONIES IN SPACE
These colonies would support all manner of ecosystems.
Blue Origin wants to build the tools to help humanity explore the solar system, ultimately expanding life out to take advantage of more resources and support over one trillion people.
Jeff Bezos, founder of both the space-faring firm and internet retailer Amazon, explained at a Thursday event why Blue Origin is working to reduce the cost of rocket launches. It’s all part of his long-term vision to enable humans to continue growing, exploring the stars instead of staying on Earth and gradually rationing its use of energy and resources. During the event, he unveiled the Blue Moon lander capable of sending humans to the moon by 2024.
Bezos, who forms part of a new commercially-driven space race, has a slightly different vision to his contemporary Elon Musk. While the SpaceX founder wants a city on Mars by 2050, Bezos is more interested in staying close to humanity’s home — echoed in the name of the company, “Blue Origin.” The company’s long-term goal is to build the tools so humans can create giant floating colonies around the Earth, supporting all manner of ecosystems.
A future space city in a colony.
Blue Origin
BLUE ORIGIN: WHY DOES JEFF BEZOS WANT TO BUILD A SPACE COLONY?
Bezos highlighted immediate problems on Earth like hunger, homelessness and climate change. However, he also noted long-range problems, like the fact that humans will run out of energy on Earth. Humans use 97 watts of power per person in their metabolic rate, but as humans in the developed world people use 10,500 watts per person.
The abundance of energy has enabled generations to live a better life than their predecessors, but it’s an unsustainable trend. Human energy use is compounding at three percent, essentially doubling energy use every 25 years. Global energy use today could be met by covering Nevada in solar cells, but in around 200 years at current trends, humanity would need to cover the entire Earth’s surface in solar cells to meet energy needs.
Humanity has focused on efficiency to meet energy demands. In the year 1800 a human had to work 84 hours to earn enough for one hour of artificial light, but in 2019 a human only has to work 1.5 seconds for the same amount of light. Similarly, air transport has seen a fourfold efficiency gain: the amount of fuel needed to fly one person from Los Angeles to New York City has dropped from 109 gallons to 24 gallons. Computers have grown one trillion times more efficient, completing more calculations per kilowatt-second than ever before. These efficiencies, however, mean humans simply use more of these products.
“So, we get to choose,” Bezos said. “Do we want stasis and rationing, or do we want dynamism and growth?”
BLUE ORIGIN: WHAT WILL JEFF BEZOS’ SPACE COLONIES LOOK LIKE?
Bezos envisions a trillion humans in the solar system, with “a thousand Mozarts, or a thousand Einsteins.” In his vision, they would be living in colonies similar to the ones developed by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.
O’Neill explained that humans are unlikely to live on planetary surfaces, as they’re small, far away, and essentially unable to support real-time communication. They also lack Earth-like gravity. Instead, they would live on something like this:
O'Neill's vision of a space colony.Blue Origin
These colonies are vast, with the International Space Station a tiny dot in comparison. Centrifugal force would be used to create artificial gravity, similar to the structures in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each colony would hold one million people. These colonies could create “pleasant” places to live, similar to Earth-based cities.
An interior view of the colony.Blue Origin
Humans could create recreational colonies, with zero gravity for flying around for fun.
The high-speed transit system inside a colony, with a drone taking care of a farm.Blue Origin
They could replicate the most tropical regions of Earth, which Bezos described as “Maui on its best day.”
A more nature-themed colony.Blue Origin
“What does the architecture look like when it no longer has a primary purpose of shelter?” Bezos said. “We’ll find out.”
A future city.Blue Origin
The colonies can be stationed close to Earth, so people can travel to and from with ease. Earth would become zoned residential and light industry, a “beautiful” place to visit. Heavy, damaging industry can be done off-Earth.
The amount of energy required to go between these colonies would be very low and fast, described by Bezos as a “day trip.”
A future space colony city.Blue Origin
It’s a bold idea that goes beyond even many science fiction authors’ imaginations. In an interview with O’Neill played at the Blue Origin event, legendary writer Isaac Asimov said that science fiction basically never touched on ideas like these because many authors were “planet chauvinists,” adding that the closest he came was through asteroid mining.
To create these colonies, humans will depend on two factors: radically reducing the cost of space launches, and utilizing in-space resources. Lifting all resources from Earth would be too difficult.
Bezos admitted that he would not be the one to make the colonies. The children in the front row of the audience may, as will their children. Bezos described “entrepreneurial activity,” future companies expanding into this new market.
Unfortunately, the lack of infrastructure means society cannot currently support these future industries. Bezos compared it to Amazon, which could use existing postal services to support its initial company. It didn’t need to invent a new infrastructure, nor did they have to create computers, or payment systems, or telecom networks. These networks enabled Amazon to benefit from this existing work. Similarly, Bezos explained that his generation will create the infrastructure to colonize space, paving the way for future generations to create the space version of Amazon and the like.
As his firm continues work on space rockets like New Glenn and lunar landers like Blue Moon, Bezos is focusing on building this infrastructure to help support colonies he probably won’t live to experience.
HD 74423 bulges toward its companion star.Gabriel Pérez Díaz (IAC)
If any beings live in the solar system HD 74423, their young ones would sketch daytime scenes quite differently than human children do. Where we draw one sun, they’d draw two. And where we draw our star as a round orb, they’d likely draw one of their suns as a bulging teardrop. Gifted animators might even capture the bump’s motion as it stretches toward and recedes from its companion over a matter of hours.
This star’s outlandish shape and behavior are prominent enough to be detected from Earth, 1,600 light years away, astronomers announced on Monday with a publication appearing in Nature Astronomy. Theorists have long suspected such a system was possible, but HD 74423 is the first confirmed binary containing one star whose pulses reach out toward its partner. And because it represents a new way for two stars to interact, it could also help astrophysicists better understand what makes some stars ripple and contort while others stay largely motionless.
“Wow,” wrote Gerald Handler, an astronomer at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Poland in an email to a colleague upon first seeing data containing the flickers of the bulging star. “I have never seen something like that before.”
Our sun appears pretty unchanging day after day, but that’s because we’re looking at it from so far away. Up close, boiling blisters on its surface reveal the star’s more variable, liquid side. Other stars experience internal churning and bubbling too, and under the right circumstances they can positively pulse with activity. (The field of asteroseismology uses these reverberations to infer what’s going on deep beneath a star’s surface.)
One dramatic case of stellar throbbing is the type of star known as a “heartbeat star.” They occur in pairs with elliptical orbits that bring the two stars alternatively nearer together and farther apart. When the partners draw close, they give each other an extra gravitational squeeze that then relaxes as they pull away. Overtime these regular squeezes cause one or both stars to undulate—stretching out like an egg and then collapsing back into a squat orange-like shape.
HD 74423, the new discovery, is a pair of stars that whip around each other in a roughly circular orbit once every 38 hours. They keep a pretty constant distance from each other, Handler says, which means they don’t fit the definition of heartbeat stars. Their behavior is even weirder.
Since the partners orbit each other so closely, one partner’s gravitational pull drags the surface of the other toward it, stretching the star out into a persistent teardrop shape. And the teardrop pulsates inward and outward toward the companion. In an upcoming publication, the astronomers will propose that this pulsation takes place because the tapered part of the star is “fluffier,” Handler says, and this fluffiness amplifies natural ripples from deeper in the sun in the direction of the partner.
Astrophysicist Donald Kurtz of the University of Central Lancashire in the UK first predicted that such a setup might be possible decades ago, but no astronomer had located one until now. "I've been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years and now we have finally found one," Kurtz said in a press release.
And they almost didn’t find it. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which focuses on looking for exoplanets, made the discovery possible. In HD 74423, the companion star blocks light from the teardrop star much as an exoplanet might, but not similarly enough to get picked up automatically by NASA’s planet-hunting algorithms.
Instead, two volunteer citizen scientists—Robert Gagliano and Tom Jacobs—independently noticed anomalous flickers in the light coming from HD 74423 as the teardrop grew, shrunk, and turned. They flagged the system as a potentially interesting target, and Handler confirmed the details by observing it more closely with the South African Astronomical Observatory. “Without those guys we probably would never have found it,” he says.
And now that they have it, the next step is to look for more. While this case is largely an astronomical curiosity, finding other pulsating teardrop stars could help answer a larger question in the study of stellar vibrations: why do some stars quake while others remain still? Even in the twin stars of HD 74423, only one appears to be quivering. Astronomers would also like to figure out more about how much oomph is required to orient the pulsations in a given direction, and what the system will look like in billions of years—all questions that require deeper insight into the structure and behavior of the balls of plasma that dot our universe.
“We just need to keep looking,” Handler says. “We have more questions right now than answers.”
Hundreds of mysterious mini-planets found lurking in far reaches of the solar system
Hundreds of mysterious mini-planets found lurking in far reaches of the solar system
Jasper Hamill
This is Neptune, a large and very cold gas giant which is almost three billion miles away from Earth
(Image: Nasa)
A vast swarm of micro-worlds has been found in a mysterious area of our solar system beyond the chilly ice giant Neptune’s orbit.
Astronomers spotted more than 300 ‘trans-Neptunian’ objects in the far reaches of humanity’s home star system.
These are minor planets and are part of a large population of objects orbiting in a region past Neptune.
The most famous trans- Neptunian object is Pluto, although this classification is controversial because some stargazers think it’s a proper planet even though it was downgraded to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006.
Researchers from Penn University were looking for dark matter when they observed the new micro-worlds.
It’s hoped that studying these new objects will help to solve the mystery of Planet 9 – a hypothetical huge world believed to exist way out towards the edge of our solar system.
Pluto is regarded as a trans-Neptunian object
(Image: Nasa)
Professors Gary Bernstein said: ‘There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet.
‘Making the catalogue is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.’
Last year scientists offered a new theory to explain why they haven’t been able to see Planet 9, suggesting it was a ‘primordial black hole’ the size of a bowling ball with enough gravitational pull to affect the chunks of ice and rock way out in the reaches of space.
Primordial black holes haven’t been proven to exist yet – but it’s believed they are much smaller black holes that formed during the big bang.
Planet 9 has also not yet been officially discovered, but its presence was inferred by analysis of trans-Neptunian objects.
Observations of these objects revealed ‘gravitational anomalies’ which may have been caused by the push and pull of a large planet.
Astronomers have also glimpsed a number of ‘microlensing events’, which is a phenomenon caused when passing light ‘bends’ under the influence of a large object’s gravitational pull.
The Planet 9 object could be one rogue hole that was ‘captured’ by the sun and steered into orbit around it or part of a larger population.
In an early version of a study published on Arxiv, scientists wrote: ‘We highlight that the anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects and an excess in microlensing events… can be simultaneously explained by a new population of astrophysical bodies with mass several times that of Earth.’
Primordial black holes haven’t actually been proven to exist yet
(Getty Images/iStockphoto)
‘We take these objects to be primordial black holes and point out the orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects would be altered if one of these holes was captured by the Solar System, in line with the Planet 9 hypothesis.
‘Capture of a free-floating planet is a leading explanation for the origin of Planet 9 and we show that the probability of capturing a PBH instead is comparable.’
It’s hard enough to spot a planet at the fringes of our solar system, let alone a mini black hole. But these ancient holes may give off ‘annihilation signals’.
This doesn’t mean they sound an alarm before they decide to attack but is the name for a process predicted to take place within ‘dark matter halos’ believed to surround the holes.
While many sports use inflated balls that trace back to kicking or throwing inflated animal bladders, a game involving a hard rubber ball predates them all because rubber was only grown in Mexico and central America. That game carries the generic name “ballgame” and most people know about it because artwork shows the games were played in the nude and the losers may have been sacrificed – depictions used by European invaders to depict Mesoamericans ad brutal savages to be conquered and educated. As always, the uncovering of new evidence changes things and newly-discovered archeological finds show that Mesoamericans were playing their ballgames as early as 1443 BCE and the game itself was more ‘hip’ that once thought.
“We challenge the lowland paradigm by providing evidence that the earliest highland ballcourt dates to the Early Formative, nearly a millennium earlier than any previous highland architectural data and just over two centuries after the Paso de la Amada court. We contribute two types of ballgame data recently excavated at Etlatongo: remains of two formal superimposed architectural ballcourts and associated ballplayer ceramic figurines.”
A new study published in the journal Science Advances challenges the idea that organized ballgames with rubber balls were developed and played almost exclusively in coastal and lowland areas of Mexico and Central America. Excavations done from 2015 to 2017 by the Formative Etlatongo Project (FEP) in the Nochixtlán Valley of the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, Mexico, uncovered a ballcourt dating to 1374 BCE – just 200 years after the oldest known coastal court and centuries before other highland courts.
Athletes hit a rubber ball with their hips in a version of Mesoamerica’s ballgame.
(WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CHRISTOPH WEIDITZ, GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM NÜRNBERG)
Even more interesting, figurines of players showed them wearing thick protective belts around their hips, which means they were playing a rare form of ballgame where competitors moved the ball forward and around by bouncing it off of their hips, with walls around the court allowing for bounces and rebounds similar to today’s hockey. The courts were long and narrow, which might make the game resemble a ‘hip’ version of handball.
Finally, there were none of the famous rings or hoops attached to the wall as targets or goals, which indicates this ballgame may have resembled volleyball, with players trying to get their opponents to miss in order to score. This indicates to the researchers that this was an early game in the process of transformation, just like the Mesoamerican society at the time, when warring leaders switched to trade and cooperation between regions and saw the sport as a great way to show power as well as teamwork and friendly competition.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … what about the human sacrifices?
Ah, yes … the part we all remember from history class. Figurines discovered at lowland game sites show players standing over captive opponents, leading to speculation that some sort of victory torture was involved in ballgame. With the known propensity for human sacrifice in other aspects Mesoamerican life, it was probably easy to connect the dots and imply this was an act of beheading and perhaps some games were continued with human heads for balls. No evidence has been found of ballgame-related human sacrifice or blood-spilling at Etlatongo, so it appears the practice evolved later as the game became more symbolic of war, fertility, religion and struggles with the underworld.
As a result of this discovery, archeologists expect to find more ballcourts in the Mexican highlands, which give more insight into life in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, just like sports reflects real life today.
Daytime disc-shaped UFO VIDEO: Brooklyn, NY – March 2020
Daytime disc-shaped UFO VIDEO: Brooklyn, NY – March 2020
New footage of a solid black oval disc-shaped object flying in the sky above Brooklyn, New York on Saturday, 14th March 2020.
Witness report:
Very flat donut shaped disc, black in color, no noise, very quiet neighborhood other than birds and occasional cars passing by. I walk my dog every morning at 7am. Today i stepped out for no more than 60 seconds when the brightness of the moon caught my attention.As I glared at the moon for a bit, I saw this flat,black, disc shaped donut appear from over the houses across the street so I immediately took out my phone and started to record it. Got about 2mins on film and went online seeking disc shaped drones… Nothing resembled what I saw and what youre seeing in my video. Then I tried searching flat donut shaped UFOs and found a bunch of these objects like the one in my video. I cant say for sure what it is, but it’s definitely unidentifiable. I hope the public can help me figure out what I saw. Oh and excuse my language, it’s a NYC thing.
Paleontologists have found an exceptionally well-preserved and diminutive skull of a previously unknown bird-like dinosaur species in a piece of Cretaceous-period amber from northern Myanmar.
Photograph, computed tomography scans and interpretive drawings of the Oculudentavis khaungraaea specimen: (a) photograph of the amber piece with skull ventrolaterally exposed; scan (b) and drawing (c), left lateral view; scan (d) and drawing (e), rostral view; scan (f) and drawing (g), occipital view; scan (h) and drawing (i), dorsal view. Abbreviations: de – dentary, fr – frontal, hy – hyoid bone (or bones), jg – jugal, la – lacrimal, mx – maxilla, pa – parietal, pm – premaxilla, po – postorbital, qd – quadrate, sc – scleral ossicle, so – supraoccipital, sq – squamosal, th – teeth. Scale bars – 5 mm; longer scale bar below (b) applies to (b-i).
Image credit: Xing et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2068-4.
The newly-identified species, named Oculudentavis khaungraae, could represent the smallest known Mesozoic dinosaur in the fossil record.
“Amber preservation of vertebrates is rare, and this provides us a window into the world of dinosaurs at the lowest end of the body-size spectrum,” said Dr. Lars Schmitz, a researcher in the W. M. Keck Science Department at Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer Colleges.
“Its unique anatomical features point to one of the smallest and most ancient birds ever found.”
The piece of amber, just 31 x 20 x 8.5 mm, containing the skull of Oculudentavis khaungraae came from the Angbamo site near Tanai in the Hukawng valley of Myanmar’s Kachin province.
Dr. Schmitz and colleagues studied the specimen’s distinct features with high-resolution synchrotron scans to determine how the skull differs from those of other bird-like dinosaur specimens.
They found that the shape and size of the eye bones suggested a diurnal lifestyle, but also revealed surprising similarities to the eyes of modern lizards.
The skull also shows a unique pattern of fusion between different bone elements, as well as the presence of teeth.
Oculudentavis khaungraaea.
Image credit: Han Zhixin.
“The specimen’s tiny size and unusual form suggests a never-before-seen combination of features,” the scientists said.
“The discovery represents a specimen previously missing from the fossil record and provides new implications for understanding the evolution of birds, demonstrating the extreme miniaturization of avian body sizes early in the evolutionary process.”
The specimen’s preservation also highlights amber deposits’ potential to reveal the lowest limits of vertebrate body size.
“No other group of living birds features species with similarly small crania in adults,” Dr. Schmitz said.
“This discovery shows us that we have only a small glimpse of what tiny vertebrates looked like in the age of the dinosaurs.”
Archaeologists Unearth Long-Lost Capital of Ancient Maya Kingdom
Archaeologists Unearth Long-Lost Capital of Ancient Maya Kingdom
Archaeologists excavating the site of Lacanja Tzeltal in Mexico have discovered the ruins of the capital of a kingdom....known as Sak Tz’i’ or “white dog”...
Map of architectural groups and stream channels at the site of Lacanja Tzeltal, Mexico.
Image credit: Golden et al, doi: 10.1080/00934690.2019.1684748.
The archaeological site of Lacanja Tzeltal is located in what is today the state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. It was likely first settled by 750 BCE and then occupied for over 1,000 years.
Sak Tz’i’ was by no means the most powerful of the Maya kingdoms, and its remnants are modest compared to the more well-known sites of Chichen Itza and nearby Palenque.
“Finding Sak Tz’i’ is still a major advance in our understanding of ancient Maya politics and culture,” said Dr. Charles Golden, an anthropological archaeologist at Brandeis University.
The residents of Sak Tz’i’ lived in the countryside harvesting a wide variety of crops and making pottery and stone tools.
The archaeologists found the remnants of what was likely the city’s marketplace where these goods were brought to be sold.
The kingdom’s residents also came to the city to attend ceremonial ball games in which players kept a solid rubber ball, sometimes as heavy as twenty pounds, bouncing back and forth across a narrow playing field using their hips and shoulders.
On the northeastern end of the city are the ruins of a 45-foot (13.7 m) high pyramid and several surrounding structures that served as elite residences and sites for religious rituals.
The center of religious and political activity was the Plaza Muk’ul Ton (Monuments Plaza), a 1.5-acre (0.6 ha) courtyard where the people gathered for ceremonies. A staircase leads from the plaza to a towering platform, where temples and reception halls were arrayed and members of the royal family once held court and might have been buried.
Sak Tz’i’ had the misfortune of being surrounded on all sides by more powerful states. For the inhabitants of the capital and countryside, this meant the perpetual threat of warfare and violent interruptions of daily life.
The researchers found evidence that the capital was surrounded on one side by steep-walled streams. On the other side, masonry walls were built to keep out invaders.
These fortifications weren’t always effective. Inscriptions on one monument tell of a time when at least a portion of the city was set ablaze during a conflict with neighboring kingdoms.
Ultimately, the survival of Sak Tz’i’ may have depended as much on its ability to make peace with its neighbors — and even play them off of each other — as its military strength.
“This is one of the reasons Sak Tz’i’ holds so much interest for researchers,” Dr. Golden said.
“Little is known about how mid-size Maya realms maneuvered and managed to persist in the face of constant hostilities from more powerful kingdoms.”
Drawing (left) and 3D model (right) of Panel 1 from the site of Lacanja Tzeltal, Mexico.
Image credit: Golden et al, doi: 10.1080/00934690.2019.1684748.
So far, dozens of sculptures have been found among the ruins at the Sak Tz’i’ site, though many have been damaged by looters or degraded over the millennia by rain, forest fires and lush tropical vegetation.
The best-preserved sculpture is a 2- by 4-foot (0.6 x 1.2 m) tablet. Its inscriptions tell stories about a mythical water serpent, described in poetic couplets as ‘shiny sky, shiny earth,’ and several elderly, stony gods whose names aren’t given. There are also accounts of the lives of dynastic rulers.
Another inscription tells of a mythic flood, while others list what are probably historic dates for the births and battles of various rulers, including a king named K’ab Kante’.
This intertwining of myth and reality is typical of Maya inscriptions and had special meaning for ancient scribes and readers.
At the bottom of the tablet is a dancing royal figure. The Maya believed royalty could become one with or even transform into a god. In this case, the ruler is dressed as the rain god connected to violent tropical storms, Yopaat.
In his right hand, he carries an axe that is the lightning bolt of the storm, which has a deified aspect named K’awiil. In his left hand, the figure carries a ‘manopla,’ a stone gauntlet or bludgeon used in ritual combat.
The team’s paper was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.
Something Strange Police Dash Cam Footages in Texas and Georgia
Something Strange Police Dash Cam Footages in Texas and Georgia
Today we’re doing the top five mysterious and unexplained dashcam videos. Let us know what you think of these clips in the comments below! Some of them sure are creepy.
If NASA astronauts land on the moon as planned in 2024, they'll have an advantage their Apollo predecessors lacked: insights gathered by tiny robotic spacecraft that visit the moon before them.
NASA has announced the first two such projects selected to fly as part of the Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon: Lunar Flashlight and the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE). The missions represent the next step for the small spacecraft, known as cubesats, which became available for Earth orbit in the 1990s as electronics and sensors shrank to allow bread-box-sized (or slightly larger) satellites to perform scientific work. Since then, cubesats have become so powerful that they are used regularly for Earth observations. And the first interplanetary cubesats successfully flew to Mars in 2018 with the NASA InSight mission, so the spacecraft are becoming hardy enough for deep-space missions.
Thanks to their diminutive size, cubesats are both easy to pack on a rocket and cheap to launch. They often ride along with larger satellites. As NASA's Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the moon in 2024, NASA is planning to launch the first lunar cubesats in 2021.
"In the case of lunar exploration, cubesats are proving themselves to be increasingly capable platforms to precede human explorers on the moon and Mars," Christopher Baker, small spacecraft technology program executive within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a NASA statement.
The agency has said that a total of 13 cubesats will fly on the first flight in the program, Artemis I, which is currently scheduled for the second half of 2021 after timeline slips. That mission will send an Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed loop around the moon to test lunar technologies ahead of human landings.
One of those cubesats will be Lunar Flashlight, a collaboration among several NASA centers, which will look for ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters of the moon and try to estimate how much ice is there, using lasers. Explorers hope that water ice can address needs for drinking water or rocket fuel. (Water is also heavy to tote from Earth, so the ability to get water from lunar ice would reduce the cost of future exploration missions.) Another satellite with ground-penetrating radar, or some rover missions, could follow Lunar Flashlight to better characterize the depth of the deposits.
The second newly confirmed cubesat, CAPSTONE, is a commercial collaboration. And this cubesat won't launch on a NASA rocket; instead, it is scheduled to fly on a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle in early 2021. CAPSTONE will fly in the same lunar orbit planned for NASA'sGateway space station, to test entering the unusual orbit. Orbiting the moon is further complicated by mass concentrations under the lunar surface that perturb orbits, and NASA doesn't want to risk launching the larger and more expensive Gateway without a test. "No spacecraft has been placed there," Baker said. "We want to measure what it takes to get into and remain in that orbit," particularly fuel, he said.
CAPSTONE will also test future navigation without reliance on tracking from Earth, by figuring out the satellite's position relative to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This technique will allow missions to venture deeper into space without needing constant contact with Earth.
NASA is also looking at the possibility of using swarms of cubesats that work together to make observations and solve problems. Baker suggested that these cubesats could be used as a "quick reaction" tool to let researchers respond to the most pressing data as it comes in.
"Frankly, given the pace of the small spacecraft community, [along with] our academic and industry partners, there may well be an underestimation of what we can accomplish in the next five years," he said.
Can you really survive traveling through an enormous black hole? A team of physicists has been studying the notion.
(Roen Kelly/Discover)
One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.
Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density. This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel. That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period.
Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst. The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized.
Flying Through a Black Hole
My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal. If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically. That’s because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.
The reason that this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically “weak,” and thus does not damage objects that interact with it. At first, this fact may seem counter intuitive. But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one’s finger through a candle’s near 2,000-degree flame, without getting burned.
Hold your finger close to the flame and it will burn. Swipe it through quickly and you won’t feel much. Similarly, passing through a large rotating black hole, you are more likely to come out the other side unharmed.
(Credit:mirbasar/Shutterstock.com)
Hold your finger close to the flame and it will burn. Swipe it through quickly and you won’t feel much. Similarly, passing through a large rotating black hole, you are more likely to come out the other side unharmed. (Credit: mirbasar/Shutterstock.com)
My colleague Lior Burko and I have been investigating the physics of black holes for over two decades. In 2016, my Ph.D. student, Caroline Mallary, inspired by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film “Interstellar,” set out to test if Cooper (Matthew McConaughey’s character), could survive his fall deep into Gargantua – a fictional, supermassive, rapidly rotating black hole some 100 million times the mass of our sun. “Interstellar” was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua’s physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.
Building on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*.
Not Even a Bumpy Ride?
What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole’s so-called inner horizon singularity. This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid. Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity. In fact, there may no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.
Mallary also discovered a feature that was not fully appreciated before: the fact that the effects of the singularity in the context of a rotating black hole would result in rapidly increasing cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft. But for very large black holes like Gargantua, the strength of this effect would be very small. So, the spacecraft and any individuals on board would not detect it.
This graph depicts the physical strain on the spacecraft’s steel frame as it plummets into a rotating black hole. The inset shows a detailed zoom-in for very late times. The important thing to note is that the strain increases dramatically close to the black hole, but does not grow indefinitely. Therefore, the spacecraft and its inhabitants may survive the journey.
(Credit: Khanna/UMassD)
The crucial point is that these effects do not increase without bound; in fact, they stay finite, even though the stresses on the spacecraft tend to grow indefinitely as it approaches the black hole.
There are a few important simplifying assumptions and resulting caveats in the context of Mallary’s model. The main assumption is that the black hole under consideration is completely isolated and thus not subject to constant disturbances by a source such as another star in its vicinity or even any falling radiation. While this assumption allows important simplifications, it is worth noting that most black holes are surrounded by cosmic material – dust, gas, radiation.
Therefore, a natural extension of Mallary’s work would be to perform a similar study in the context of a more realistic astrophysical black hole.
Mallary’s approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics. Needless to say, we do not have the capability of performing real experiments in or near black holes yet, so scientists resort to theory and simulations to develop an understanding, by making predictions and new discoveries.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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