NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend

NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend

NASA’s automated asteroid tracking system has detected four near-Earth objects that are expected to approach the planet this weekend. According to the agency, the biggest asteroid in the group is about as big as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

The first asteroid that will approach Earth this weekend has been identified by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) as 2020 FK. As indicated in CNEOS’ database, this asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 43 feet, which makes it the smallest in the group.

CNEOS noted that this asteroid is currently traveling across space at a speed of over 23,000 miles per hour.

Trailing behind 2020 FK is an asteroid known as 2020 FS. This space rock is currently flying towards Earth at a speed of about 9,600 miles per hour. CNEOS estimated that this asteroid measures around 56 feet wide.

Both 2020 FK and 2020 FS will visit Earth’s vicinity on Saturday. 2020 FK is expected to approach the planet on March 21 at 12:05 a.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00909 astronomical units or around 845,000 miles away.

2020 FS, on the other hand, will zip past the planet on March 21 at 11:29 a.m. EDT. During its approach, the asteroid will be about 0.02096 astronomical units from the Earth’s center, which is equivalent to around 1.9 million miles.

The second asteroid that will fly past Earth on Sunday is known as 2020 FF1. This space rock measures about 49 feet wide and is moving towards Earth at a velocity of almost 29,000 miles per hour.

2020 DP4 will fly past Earth on March 22 at 2:34 p.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00903 astronomical units or 840,000 miles away. As for 2020 FF1, this asteroid will approach from a much closer distance on March 22 at 6:09 p.m. EDT. According to CNEOS, this asteroid will zip past the planet from a distance of only 0.00477 astronomical units or 443,000 miles away.

Image: Artist illustration of an asteroid heading for the Earth Photo: Pixabay

{ https://www.ibtimes.com/ }

22-03-2020 om 17:08 geschreven door peter  

UFO spotted by Spacex rocket cam on re-entry

During the streamed launch of SpaceX Starlink 3/18/2020, during the decent of first stage rocket and seconds before the re-entry burn, an object is seen from under the rocket. The object is either stationary and the rocket is falling passed it or the object is traveling in a vertical direction (unknown if up or down). It appears to have the shape of a dodecahedron and silver-grey metallic surface that is reflective (yet not mirror reflective). This object was Danger close to their reentry vehicle and would expect some sort of report on it.

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

22-03-2020 om 16:06 geschreven door peter  

How a 'muon accelerator' could unravel some of the universe's greatest mysteries

A muon is almost identical to an electron, except that it is 207 times heavier. What’s more, it decays into other particles in two millionths of a second. This lifetime, although short for us, is quite a long time for an unstable fundamental particle, and this explains why muons make up almost all the charged cosmic rays which reach the Earth’s surface.

Much of our ability to investigate the structure of matter at the shortest distances depends on creating beams of particles and accelerate them to high energies. However there are only four stable particles which can be used in this way, the electron and its anti-particle (positron), and the proton and its antiparticle (antiproton).

Particle beams consisting of those have been used for many years, yet both of these pairs have drawbacks. The electron and its partner are very light – when we try to accelerate them, they radiate electromagnetic energy. This is can be useful for applications such as TV but makes it hard to reach the sort of energies which we need to improve our understanding of the universe.

Unlike electrons, the proton and the anti-proton are made up of more fundamental particles – quarks and gluons. In a collision between a proton and anti-proton it is these fundamental particles which actually collide, resulting in a lower energy crash than you would have got if protons had been truly fundamental particles.

The muons are heavy enough that they radiate much less energy, but fundamental (not made up of smaller particles) so that all their energy is available for the investigation. When scientists created the Nobel-prize winning Higgs particle with protons, they needed a machine 10km in diameter: the Large Hadron Collider. A muon machine, however, could achieve this with a circumference of just 200 metres.

The disadvantage of muons is that, unlike electrons and protons, they are unstable and need to be produced and then rapidly used before they all decay. We can produce muons by taking a narrow, high-intensity beam of protons and running it into a target made of a metal, such as titanium. This produces a beam of another fundamental particle called the pion.

Pions form a beam which fans out. If the original proton beam looks like a laser pointer, the pion beam looks more like a torch beam – with intensity dropping rapidly with distance. The pions then decay to produce the muons, meaning the beam spreads even more – resembling a light bulb.

We cannot accelerate such a beam in a machine like the LHC, so we need to create a beam which spreads out much less. This is challenging given that we have only have two millionths of a second to produce, accelerate and collide it.

But our team of physicists and engineers, from around the world – known as the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) – has now shown that it is possible. We used a process known as cooling to help compress the beam. This involves passing the muons through a container with liquid hydrogen at -250°C, slowing the particles down. We then passed them through an electromagnetic cavity, which caused the beam to accelerate in the required direction.

By repeating this several times it is possible to create a beam which spreads out much less and has a dense core. This beam can be injected into a particle accelerator to produce a high-energy muon beam. Such a beam can either be collided or left to circulate until the muons decay into an intense beam of neutrinos – far in excess of any neutrino beam which can currently be produced.

Probing the universe

In fact, a neutrino beam created from muons is part of a planned Neutrino Factory, which would allow us to answer many questions related to the origin and evolution of the universe – such as the mysterious imbalance between matter and antimatter.

Neutrinos could also help us understand the details of how life-essential elements such as oxygen, carbon and silicon, which are formed in stars, spread across universe. These heavier elements were not produced in the Big Bang and yet are responsible for the planet we live on and all the life around us. We know that bursts of neutrinos, which are released in star explosions (supernovas), are responsible.

We could also collide two beams of muons in the same way as we collide protons at the LHC. The muons, being simpler than the protons, would allow for more precise determination of the properties of the Higgs particle, for example.

The properties of the muon also makes it an invaluable tool in the field of material physics. The ability to create more closely focused beams may improve the current measurements and open up new diagnostic methods.

Our method may also be used to help increase the intensity of any other charged particle beams. It has been a long project lasting over a dozen years, but it has been worth the effort when we consider what a powerful tool we have created.

• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher

{ https://www.space.com/news }

22-03-2020 om 01:05 geschreven door peter  

Credit: NASA

CURIOSITY’S AWESOME 360-DEGREE VIDEO MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE STANDING ON MARS

We may have lost an Opportunity on Mars, but that isn’t holding Curiosity back. After hanging out at Vera Rubin Ridge on Mount Sharp since 2017, NASA’s Curiosity rover is crawling over the dusty terrain of the Red Planet again — but not before the Curiosity team released a panoramic video that will really make you think you’re standing right there in moon boots (because we don’t know what Mars boots look like yet).

For some perspective, I took this shot of the clean room within which Curiosity and its accompanying spacecraft were built back in 2011. One can see the heat shield being built toward the right (the white dome) while the rover sits behind it, its black legs sprawling out without wheels (at the time).

The video not only gives you a 360-degree view of Mars from the rover’s point of view, but also a closeup of the dust and regolith its wheels have to contend with as it explores what could be a future destination for astronauts. You can see why the drill site it’s standing on is appropriately nicknamed “Rock Hall”. The feeling of actually standing on a planet some 34 million miles from Earth is kind of mind-blowing.

Gaze out into the distance and you will experience a view of the ruddy peak of Mount Sharp, which the rover has been relentlessly climbing since 2014. You can also see the geological features that are Curiosity’s next destinations, including Glen Torridon, which the team believes is a “clay-bearing unit”, and the floor of Gale Crater, from which Mount Sharp rises.

In the wake of Curiosity taking off from Vera Rubin Ridge, the team is using its data in an attempt to figure out how exactly the ridge formed. It has mysteriously resisted erosion while the bedrock was slowly worn away by solar radiation blasts and other factors.

There is still no definite answer as to why the ridge itself has refused to go down, but Curiosity’s observations provided proof that the rocks on the ridge came into being from sediment settling in a lake that evaporated eons ago.

"We've had our fair share of surprises," Curiosity science team member Abigail Fraeman said. "We're leaving with a different perspective of the ridge than what we had before."

Curiosity has also unearthed proof of ancient water on Mars. The rover teamed up with a NASA orbiter exploring Vera Rubin Ridge from above, and when the orbiter picked up on a strong signal for hematite, which often forms in water, Curiosity zoomed in closer. It was able to not only confirm the presence of hematite but also find crystals and other evidence of groundwater that had long since dried up. Because these mineral deposits appeared in patches, the team believes that the flow of groundwater had different impacts on various parts of the ridge.

What the rover saw didn’t always match the view from space. This is why you need more than one robotic eye when it comes to studying the geology of another planet.

"The whole traverse is helping us understand all the factors that influence how our orbiters see Mars," said Fraeman. "Looking up close with a rover allowed us to find a lot more of these hematite signatures. It shows how orbiter and rover science complement one another."

Curiosity has also discovered organic molecules, which may or may not mean that Mars ever supported life, but it could have at least been habitable if the vast desert we see now was once a lush alien paradise. From the POV of that video, even the desert is fascinating.

• (via NASA) 

{ https://www.syfy.com/ }

22-03-2020 om 00:16 geschreven door peter  

Mysterie voor biologen: waarom zijn er plotseling zo’n miljoen pinguïns van de aardbol verdwenen? - HLN.be

Bron: Science Magazine

Ile aux Cochons is een onbewoond eiland, gelegen in de zuidelijke Indische Oceaan. Het ligt ergens tussen Madagaskar en Antarctica, en het was de thuis van wel 500.000 koppels koningspinguïns, de op een na grootste pinguïnsoort met een gele kraag. De kolonie op Île aux Cochons was daarmee ook de op een na grootste kolonie ter wereld. Totdat er plots 900.000 pinguïns verdwenen. Plots, zonder enig spoor na te laten. Dat moest blijken uit enkele satellietbeelden, want het eiland is zeer moeilijk bereikbaar.

Maar omdat het mysterie zo groot is, beslisten enkele onderzoekers van het Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) om een nieuwe expeditie te organiseren, de eerste naar het onbewoonde eiland in 37 jaar tijd.

Een vijftal maanden geleden, in november 2019, werden de onderzoekers met een helikopter gedropt op het afgelegen eiland. Ze hadden in totaal zo’n 700 kilogram aan onderzoeksmateriaal met zich meegebracht en arriveerden te midden van het broedseizoen. Die periode voeren vader en moeder pinguïn continu afwisselende taken uit: terwijl de ene de eieren uitbroedt, gaat de andere op zoek naar voedsel. Om de jacht naar voedsel te ‘tracken’ bevestigden de onderzoekers enkele elektronische tags bij tien verschillende pinguïns. 

Lees ook

Vrolijke video in coronatijden: pinguïns in gesloten Amerikaans aquariumpark mogen op verkenning

Roofdieren of ziekte? 

Er werden stalen bloed genomen, om te controleren op ziektes. En de onderzoekers controleerden of er plotseling roofdieren aanwezig waren op het eiland. Zo werden er nachtcamera’s geïnstalleerd in de buurt van de broedende pinguïns om de aanwezigheid van andere dieren te checken. Daarnaast bestudeerden ze de botten van enkele dode dieren om die te testen op veranderingen in het voedselpatroon van de pinguïns. Dat bleek niet zo te zijn.

Ook was er geen sprake van roofdieren die de pinguïns fataal zijn geworden. En in het bloed van de dieren werden geen aanwijzingen gevonden voor ziektes. De levende pinguïns zagen er overigens gewoon gezond uit.

Wat gebeurde er dan wel met de, bijna 1 miljoen, verdwenen pinguïns? Bij het afronden van hun (eerste onderzoek) kunnen de Franse biologen het nog niet met zekerheid zeggen, maar vermoedelijk leidden veranderingen in de omgeving tot het verlies van de pinguïns. Omdat de oceanen opwarmen, wordt het voedsel schaarser en moeten pinguïns steeds verdere zwemmen. Zo blijkt uit de data die de bevestigde tags registreerden, dat de zoektocht naar voedsel hen hen tot wel 500 kilometer ver kan brengen. Zo’n tocht kan er evengoed een zijn waarvan ze nooit meer terugkeren, zo stellen de onderzoekers. 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

21-03-2020 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

Among the cases of supposed UFO crashes, the infamous one at Roswell, New Mexico, seems to always take the spotlight. After all, this is the event that even people who know nothing of the UFO phenomenon at large know about, so iconic is it in scope. Yet, what many people might not realize is that Roswell is by far not the only supposed UFO crash in history, and not even the earliest. One very intriguing report comes from many years before the Roswell incident, and while not as famous, it is every bit as strange.

The story goes that in the spring of 1941, a Reverend William Huffman, of the Red Star Baptist Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was asked by the local Sheriff to come and help give last rites to the victims of a plane crash on the outskirts of town. Huffman then dutifully made his way out to the supposed crash site to find the place crawling with police, FBI agents, fire fighters, and military medical personnel who were all buzzing around a twisted mass of metal wreckage. At this point it seemed as if this was exactly as he had been told, a plane crash, but things would soon take a turn for the bizarre.

The reverend soon noticed that some of the pieces of the crashed craft were not as one would expect, and that rather than jagged as one would suspect, they seemed to have “a rounded shape with no edges or seams, and a very shiny, metallic finish.” This was decidedly odd, and did not seem to be a typical airplane, yet as he examined the wreckage further it got even weirder still. Charlette Mann, the reverend’s granddaughter and the one who first brought the case to attention after being told the story by her grandmother on her deathbed, would tell UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield of what he had seen in that wreckage thusly:

Upon arrival it was a very different situation. It was not a conventional aircraft, as we know it. He described it as a saucer that was metallic in color, no seams, did not look like anything he had seen. It had been broken open in one portion, and so he could walk up and see that. In looking in he saw a small metal chair, gauges and dials and things he had never seen. However, what impressed him most was around the inside there were inscriptions and writings, which he said he did not recognize, but were similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Taking this further into the realm of the outlandish was when Huffman was allegedly asked to come look at and pray over three dead bodies, but these did not appear to be human. The beings were described as being of almost childlike stature, with hairless large heads, big oval-shaped eyes, incredibly long arms and fingers, tiny mouths and ears, no discernible noses, and dressed from head to toe in what seemed to be a shiny material like “wrinkled aluminum foil.” Mann says of the state of the bodies:

There were 3 entities, or non-human people, lying on the ground. Two were just outside the saucer, and a third one was further out. His understanding was that perhaps that third one was not dead on impact. There had been mention of a ball of fire, yet there was fire around the crash site, but none of the entities had been burned and so father did pray over them, giving them last rites.

Huffman purportedly did administer last rites to these strange creatures, after which he was approached by some military personnel and told in no uncertain terms to keep it all total secret. He doesn’t seem to have done a very good job of this, because he apparently went home and immediately told his family what he had seen. However, they would not say a word about it to anyone, and Huffman’s wife would keep it all to herself until she came down with cancer and on her death bed in 1984 confided in Mann of what he had told them on that strange day, and she had apparently even seen a picture of one of the alien bodies, which was in the possession of her father. She has said of this picture:

Well, the first awareness that I had of it (the dead bodies) is actually a picture that my father had and it was at a dinner party. And, I had heard rumors, and bits and pieces over conversations, but it was a picture, an old picture, because it had … it was like the old Kodaks, with little lines and scallops around it. There were two men holding up a non-human, is the best way I can describe it. A little entity, a little person who appeared to be about 4 feet tall. They had him underneath the armpits with arms outstretched on either side of him.

When Stringfield heard the story of the crash he immediately launched an investigation into the case. Stringfield found that other living witnesses such as Mann’s sister and the living brother of the Cape Girardeau County sheriff in 1941 were both able to corroborate the story. He also was able to uncover fire department records of a plane crash in the area at the specified time, and he even managed to track down a photograph of the alleged alien, which was kept by Guy Huffman, the reverend’s son and Charlette’s father. Stringfield would publish his findings in an article for the UFO publication Status Report, and he would later include the account in his book UFO Crash / Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum.

It is hard to know what to make of this case. The account comes from a woman who got it from her grandmother, who got it from her grandfather, so already we have this as a third hand account at best. Stringfield found that others corroborated the account, but that still leaves the chance that Huffman himself was spinning tall tales. There is evidence that a crash did happen at the time, but it is clearly and unambiguously described as an airplane crash, with no mention of dead alien bodies. The photograph that Mann and Stringfield claimed to have seen remains elusive, and no one has been able to track it down, leaving it in limbo. There just doesn’t seem to be much solid evidence that this ever happened, and yet what if it did? Was this another Rosewell UFO crash that in this case managed to slip between the cracks and be successfully brushed under the carpet by the government? What did Huffman encounter out there, if anything? These are questions destined to remain unanswered, and this story of a lesser known UFO crash will probably remain even more shrouded in shadows than its more famous cousin.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

21-03-2020 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl
Nighttime would find me in Rosa’s Cantina
Music would play and Feleena would whirl

El Paso, Texas, owes a debt of gratitude to the late country singer Marty Robbins for writing and recording a song that was his best and still the best-loved song about the West Texas city. (Sing along with Marty here.) However, it was released in 1960 and a lot has happened since then in El Paso beyond gunfights over a beautiful girl. Maybe it’s time for a new song about the latest phenomenon to hit El Paso – UFOs. Garth, Keith, Miranda, Carrie … are you listening?

A video of an alleged fleet of UFOs flying over El Paso on March 17, 2020, was uploaded by the YouTube channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, which regularly posts a variety of paranormal videos. This one is said to have come from a Mario Rios who was driving at 7:15 pm on an unnamed El Paso freeway when he spotted the lights moving slowly low in the sky. That’s about all an excited Mario has to say about them. (Watch the video for yourself here.) While you ponder what you think the lights might be, here’s what Hidden Underbelly 2.0 has to say.

“In this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building. Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don’t seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path. If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together. It’s not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared.”

Yes, that’s a good argument against Chinese lanterns, especially as bright as these lights are at the distance they seem to be recorded from. There’s too many to be Venus or another planet and they’re too bright to be Elon Musk’s satellites that have been mistaken for UFOs so often recently. Space force testing? Aliens? There’s a lot to be scared or anxious about these days, so Mario’s excited voice can be excused, but that doesn’t mean he’s looking at alien spaceships.

Out through the back door of Rosa’s I ran
Out where the horses were tied
I caught a good one, it looked like it could run
Up on its back and away I did ride
Just as fast as I could
From the West Texas town of El Paso
Out to the badlands of New Mexico

Marty Robbins’ El Paso cowboy had a good reason for jumping on a horse and riding out of town … murder charges. These El Paso orbs could be law enforcement as well – El Paso is a Mexican border town and there are plenty of police and DEA helicopters patrolling the area, but four at a time? And moving so slowly?

What about weather balloons? A UFO over El Paso in December 2019 was eventually identified as one of those, but they usually ride alone like the guy in the song. There was another ‘fleet’ of UFOs seen by many people in El Paso in January 2020. Those turned out to be flares – not surprising since El Paso is home to Fort Bliss, the huge U.S. army base known for missile and artillery training and testing. It’s most likely that those are what Mario saw, although no one has offered definitive proof.

That shouldn’t stop any aspiring country songwriters from penning lyrics to a tune called “UFOs Over El Paso.” Here’s a start to the music of the Marty Robbins classic …

Over the skies of the town of El Paso
UFOs flying, my eyes opened wide
Looked at my pickup and boy was I jealous
I hoped they’d see me and give me a ride.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

21-03-2020 om 21:52 geschreven door peter  

13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About

13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About

Something highly secret is being monitored by NASA, an ancient satellite orbiting earth that’s not ours! First detected by Nikola Tesla and then by astronomers around the world, this strange polar orbiting craft may still be producing signals…

Presented by David Wilks at Awakening UFO & Conspicuous Life Expo, Manchester, UK.

OTHER  Videos, peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

21-03-2020 om 21:08 geschreven door peter  

Acommercial airliner is flying at a high altitude when a passenger notices an elongated UFO in the sky on which he decided to film it.

Although the location and date of the sighting is unknown, the first part of the video shows the original footage captured by the passenger. With the second part slowed down and enhanced you will be able to see the orbs form a triangle.

Could it be that this unidentified flying object is a secret craft equipped with the latest cloaking technology tested by the military similar to the infamous tic-tac UFOs?

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com }

21-03-2020 om 20:40 geschreven door peter  

Bright UFO flying over Miami, Florida 19-Mar-2020

Fresh new video of a bright unidentified flying object making maneuvers in the night sky above Miami, Florida. This happened on 19th March 2020.

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

21-03-2020 om 19:41 geschreven door peter  

Farmington reaches 70th anniversary of mass UFO sighting

The front page of The Daily Times on March 18, 1950, chronicles the appearance of several strange objects in the sky above Farmington.

Courtesy image

FARMINGTON — Farmington has reached the 70th anniversary of one of the more sensational events in its history this week, but it's a safe bet to say few residents will pay much attention to that milestone – or even be aware of it.

From March 16 to March 18 in 1950, the city experienced a mass UFO sighting, with some reports indicating "hundreds" of residents saw strange objects in the sky in broad daylight over the three-day period.

Their accounts were reported in breathless fashion not just in this publication — "HUGE 'SAUCER' ARMADA JOLTS FARMINGTON" screamed the banner headline on page 1 of The Daily Times on March 18, 1950 – but in many others as well. Those include The Santa Fe New Mexican ("Farmington 'Invaded' by Saucer Squadron") and the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Daily Optic ("'Space Ships' Cause Sensation").

An account of the incident by The Associated Press was picked up by newspapers across the country.

It's a fantastic story, one that might have seemed destined to leave an indelible impression on UFO history and the sizable community of amateur sleuths and researchers who have made it their duty to investigate and publicize such incidents.

And, yet, the Farmington UFO incident of 1950 largely has been lost to history, especially when it is compared to its in-state counterpart, the famed, alleged crash of an alien spacecraft on a ranch northwest of Roswell in June 1947.

While that incident — sketchy as its details may be — is widely regarded as the most famous UFO-related event in history, having achieved legendary status over the years, the Farmington event that took place a few years later barely registers on anyone's radar.

With seven decades having passed, that remains true, even though Farmington's brush with UFO fame, or infamy, holds up to scrutiny far better than most other incidents, many of them much better known. That's the assessment of an Albuquerque man who studies such phenomena, but who acknowledges the need to take a skeptical approach to most UFO reports.

David Marler

Courtesy photo

David Marler, an independent UFO researcher and author who works in the health care field, has spent years studying the Farmington UFO incident, delivering his findings in the form of a website that serves as the most exhaustive and in-depth report on the event. He labels it "one of the most dramatic and well-documented cases in the history of UFO phenomenon" and said his research has uncovered dozens of similar sightings in the American Southwest, Mexico and Central America during that same time period.

"There was a lot more other than Farmington going on (during March 1950)," he said.

Marler isn't alone in feeling compelled to gain a better understanding of the incident. Many people who take a keen interest in the history of San Juan County share that fascination, and some of them have direct ties to the mass sighting that has become part of their family lore.

Patty Tharp of the San Juan County Historical Society is the niece of one of the witnesses to the incident, Clayton Boddy, who served as the business manager of The Daily Times in 1950. She recalls her late uncle regularly talking about the sighting when she was growing up and said the tale of the UFO armada is well known among the county's older residents.

She remembers her uncle as a man not given to exaggeration, and said he wasn't the kind to call attention to himself by manufacturing outlandish stories. He definitely believed he witnessed something out of the ordinary that day, Tharp said.

"He described the object and said several other people saw it, as well," she said.

A well-documented event

Marler said there are several elements that separate the Farmington UFO incident from so many others, mostly the fact that so many people claim to have witnessed it. The sightings took place between 11 a.m. and noon each day in the skies over San Juan County, not at night in some remote location where they were witnessed by only a single person or a handful of people.

Farmington was a much smaller community in those days — it had a population of between 3,600 and 5,000 people then, according to Marler — but the incident was by no means restricted to just a few sets of eyeballs. Marler also notes the sightings were thoroughly documented and reported in various newspapers at the time, and references to it exist in a great many government documents, as well.

The Daily Times' account chronicles how pedestrians along Main Street could be seen looking skyward and pointing, and the paper reportedly was "deluged" with calls from readers reporting the objects, although the story explains that high winds and a dust storm prevented clear vision.

The account explains how the objects appeared to play tag, traveling at "almost unbelievable speeds." The paper quoted Boddy, a former Army captain, who said he was on Broadway Avenue when he became aware of the phenomenon.

"All of a sudden, I noticed a few moving objects high in the sky," he is reported as having said. "Moments later, there appeared to hundreds of them."

Boddy declined to estimate the size or speed of the objects, but he said they appeared to flying at an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet.

Several other witnesses were quoted in the story, as well, including merchants, housewives, mechanics, insurance agents and Harold F. Thatcher, head of the Farmington unit of the Soil Conservation Service. Thatcher was quoted as emphatically denying a theory that the objects people had seen were bits of cotton floating in the air.

Many of those witnesses reported seeing a single red object that appeared to be leading the others. In his investigation of the incident, Marler would go on to dub that object "Red Leader" — a reference he believed "Star Wars" fans would appreciate.

Also quoted in The Daily Times story was Marlo Webb, then a 26-year-old manager in the parts department at the Perry Smoak Chevrolet Garage on Main Street in downtown Farmington. Webb told the paper he estimated the objects were small, about the size of a dinner plate, and noted the objects moved in an unusual way — "sideways, on edge and at every conceivable angle," he said. "This is what made it easy to determine that they were saucer-shaped."

Webb's testimony lends the event considerable credibility. He went on to become the town's mayor in the 1970s and now, at the age of 96, serves as chairman of the boards at Farmington's Webb Chevrolet, where he still works nearly every afternoon.

Webb seems willing enough to discuss his memory of the incident these days with anyone who asks. But, as a World War II Naval aviator used to seeing unusual things, he seems to regard the event as little more than a curiosity.

"I know how easy it is to be deceived by something in the sky," he said.

In fact, when he was contacted by The Daily Times last week, Webb said he had no idea the 70th anniversary of the incident was approaching and insisted he couldn't remember the last time he had thought about it.

"I can tell you everything I know about it in five seconds because I don't know much," he said.

Webb said he was working at his stepfather's Chevy dealership across the street from the Totah Theater on March 17, 1950, when someone told him they had seen some saucer-shaped objects in the sky. Webb went out to have a look, and when he turned his eyes to the north, he said he could make out 12 to 20 objects. He said they were loosely arranged, certainly not flying in formation, but moving steadily from east to west.

"They were darting around almost like leaves in the sky being blown around," he said.

Webb watched the objects for approximately 10 to 15 minutes, then went back inside to work.

"I couldn't leave my department uncovered," he said.

He said the duration of the event seemed to last much longer than that, however, because he recalled seeing people on Main Street looking into the sky for a long time afterward. He recalled many of those witnesses seemed a lot more taken by the event than he was, discussing what they had seen for years afterward.

"They almost made a career out of repeating what they saw," he said.

Webb wasn't one of those people.

"I never thought about it," he said, when asked what kind of significance he attached to the event. "There are a lot of things happening in the sky we're not aware of. I just won't waste my energy. I can't do anything about it anyway. … I don't have the background to research it and decide what it is."

Webb said he spoke to a military investigator after the incident and told him the same story. He understands some people want to draw other conclusions from what they've heard about the event, but he said he never felt the urge to do that.

"I've never said what I thought it was or made a judgment on it," he said.

A matter of family history

The Daily Times story about the event quoted approximately a dozen witnesses by name, but numerous other accounts have lived on through accounts passed down among family members.

Zang Wood, former president of the San Juan County Historical Society, was a Farmington High School student in the fall of 1950 and said he never saw a thing.

"A lot of kids said they did," he said. "I don't know if it was mass hysteria or what."

But Wood's mother, who was a San Juan County employee, was driving to work with another woman to Aztec from Farmington that day. When they got to Flora Vista, they said an object appeared above them and passed directly over their car.

"I'm not going to call my mom a liar," he said, recalling her as "a pretty level-headed lady. She didn't see things."

Wood said he doesn't buy the flying saucer stories because he didn't see them himself. But he refuses his dismiss his mother's account.

"If she saw something, she saw something," he said.

Another well-known authority on local history, Marilu Waybourn, author of "Homesteads to Boomtown — A Pictorial History of Farmington, New Mexico, and Surrounding Area," said she was in college in Missouri in the spring of 1950 when the incident took place. But she got an earful about it from her friends when she returned to Farmington at the end of the semester.

Waybourn wound up writing about the mass sighting on its 40th anniversary in the March 1990 edition of CrossCurrents, an independent publication that described itself as "A Journal of Life in the Four Corners."

In her story, Waybourn recounts that she heard the story at least a dozen times after she returned from college, and a group of her friends took her to a location that was purported to be a landing site of one of the objects. She described it as "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter, with the sagebrush flattened out and singed weeds around the edge."

Waybourn also quoted a Farmington resident named Pauline McCauley who said she was a little girl at the time of the sighting. McCauley said she was herding sheep south of town that day in the spring of 1950 when she heard a sound above her, looked up and spied a circular object that looked like an upside-down bowl. McCauley told Waybourn the object had windows, and she could see three people inside wearing striped caps and navy blue uniforms with brass buttons.

Waybourn heard various other stories over the years, many of them from people who didn't want their names used for fear of being ridiculed. She said the incident sparked a great deal of curiosity at the time and remains a topic of discussion for older folks today.

"They took it for what it was," she said. "That it was something they wanted to know more about."

Rio Rancho resident Ron Boddy, the son of witness Clayton Boddy, said his father talked about the incident occasionally over the years, but he never made a big deal of it.

"The last time I really talked to my dad about that was probably 40 years ago," he said, adding that his father, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, was not easily impressed. "It was unusual to him, but not earth shattering or life changing."

Ron Boddy said his father was still a major in the Army Reserve at the time of the incident, and he recalled his father getting a phone call later from a military official asking him to refrain from doing any more interviews on the subject.

"I remember him saying he was asked not to bring it up or talk about it," Ron Boddy said.

But the younger Boddy regrets not pressing his father for details about the incident now.

"I wish now, looking back, I wish I had talked to my dad about it more," he said, explaining that he never got the sense his father thought the objects he saw were extraterrestrial in nature.

"To him, it was an unidentified flying object, not a spacecraft," Ron Boddy said.

Tharp, Clayton Boddy's niece, also has taken a keen interest in the event. She said the wire services picked up the stories on the incident from the New Mexico papers, and she has collected clippings that mention her uncle from newspapers all over the country. She agreed with her cousin Ron Boddy that her uncle didn't consider the appearance of the strange objects to be an alien visitation.

"He seemed to think it wasn't something from another planet — that it was a military deal," she said.

What to make of all this?

The quality and quantity of the information surrounding the Farmington UFO event has always impressed Marler. He said the accounts of the witnesses who were quoted in The Daily Times were remarkably consistent, and when those people talked about their memories of that day years later, their stories did not change.

"I'm really struck by the sincerity and honesty of the people I interviewed," he said. "They're not saying they saw flying saucers, but they saw something."

That separates them from the principals in other UFO stories he has investigated, many of whom are not nearly as credible.

"It really smacks of realism," he said, adding that the children of the witnesses he has spoken to unfailingly recall their parents as grounded, level-headed people who weren't looking for attention.

He also notes that an account of a UFO sighting occurred that day in Tucumcari, an event reported in the March 18, 1950 edition of the Tucumcari Daily News, and an Air Force captain and two technical sergeants at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque reported seeing three strange objects in the sky that afternoon.

Marler also has collected newspaper accounts of UFO sightings from that time period not just across New Mexico, but all over Texas and well into Mexico.

His website explains that, after an official investigation, a government official responded to the public curiosity over the event by claiming the objects that people had seen were the remnants of a ruptured, high-altitude U.S. Navy Skyhook balloon. Marler, who has presented several lectures on his findings, flatly dismisses that theory, explaining that it might have been plausible for one day of UFO sightings, but not three. He also points to research that shows there were no documented Skyhook balloon launches around that time frame.

Given the technological limitations or that era, no photos or film footage of the Farmington incident are known to exist. Marler points out that if such an event were to happen now, there likely would be an abundance of such material. But he takes the mass UFO sighting here much more seriously than he does many other events he has investigated and said he is not sure why it hasn't gotten the attention he thinks it deserves.

He said the Farmington incident is well known in UFO researcher stories, but he acknowledged it is not nearly as well known as the Roswell incident or even the alleged crash of a UFO outside Aztec in 1947 — an event commemorated through an annual mountain bike race and etched in local pop culture.

Through his research, Marler said he has tried to eliminate various possible explanations for what happened in Farmington in the spring of 1950.

"When you eliminate those prosaic explanations, it's like checking off a list," he said. "What you're left with is an unknown. But unknown does not equal extraterrestrial."

The question of why the Farmington incident never captured the public's imagination the way Roswell did is a riddle to Marler and some others interviewed for this story. He gives some credence to the idea that Farmington is a very conventional town and perhaps has collectively downplayed the incident for fear of being labeled the same way Roswell has been.

But Tharp doesn't see it that way.

"I would disagree with that," she said. "Roswell is just as conservative as Farmington. There were so few people in 1950 who lived here. … Maybe it just kind of went by the wayside."

Wood agrees that Farmington is a conservative place that likely would bristle at being associated with little green men. But mostly, he thinks folks here have just decided to leave the incident behind.

"It's just like so many other things," he said. "Just like coronavirus — they'll talk about it for a year, then move on. … We have other things to worry about."

Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com. 

Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/216TU0e

{ https://eu.daily-times.com/ }

21-03-2020 om 01:10 geschreven door peter  

Newfound Comet ATLAS is getting really bright, really fast

By Joe Rao 

A comet that passed by Earth in December 2018

(Image: © NASA)

For years, amateur astronomers have been waiting for a bright, naked-eye comet to pass by Earth — and finally, such an object may have arrived. 

The possible celestial showpiece is known as Comet ATLAS, or C/2019 Y4. When it was discovered on Dec. 28, 2019, it was quite faint, but since then, it has been brightening so rapidly that astronomers have high hopes for the spectacle it could put on. But given the tricky nature of comets, skywatchers are also being cautious not to get their hopes up, knowing that the comet may fizzle out.

It's been awhile since a comet gave skywatchers a good show, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. In March 2013, Comet PanSTARRS was visible right after sunset, albeit low in the western sky. But although it briefly attained first magnitude with a short, bright tail, its low altitude and a bright, twilight sky detracted from what otherwise would have been a much more prominent object. Comet Lovejoy in 2011 and Comet McNaught in 2007 both evolved into stunning objects, but unfortunately, when at their best, were visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. 

• Related: Photos: Spectacular comet views from Earth and space

It has now been nearly a quarter of a century since we have been treated to a spectacularly bright comet: Comet Hale-Bopp passed by during the spring of 1997 and Comet Hyakutake did so exactly one year earlier. Both were truly "great" comets, very bright and fantastically structured; in very dark conditions, Hyakutake's tail appeared to stretch more than halfway across the sky.

So now, after a "comet drought," Comet ATLAS may finally enliven the evening skies of early spring. Or then again, maybe not.

Guarded optimism

The comet's moniker is an acronym for Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a robotic astronomical survey system based in Hawaii and optimized for detecting smaller near-Earth objects a few weeks to a few days before their closest approach. But on occasion, the survey will also find a comet.

When astronomers first spotted Comet ATLAS in December, it was in Ursa Major and was an exceedingly faint object, close to 20th magnitude. That's about 398,000 times dimmer than stars that are on the threshold of naked-eye visibility. At the time, it was 273 million miles (439 million kilometers) from the sun. 

But comets typically brighten as they approach the sun, and at its closest, on May 31, Comet ATLAS will be just 23.5 million miles (37.8 million km) from the sun. Such a prodigious change in solar distance would typically cause a comet to increase in luminosity by almost 11 magnitudes, enough to make ATLAS easily visible in a small telescope or a pair of good binoculars, although quite frankly nothing really to write home about.

Except, since its discovery, the comet has been brightening at an almost unprecedented speed. As of March 17, ATLAS was already magnitude +8.5, over 600 times brighter than forecast. As a result, great expectations are buzzing for this icy lump of cosmic detritus, with hopes it could become a stupendously bright object by the end of May. 

• Related: Interstellar Comet Borisov shines in incredible new Hubble photos

A famous lineage

Another factor buoying hopes for ATLAS as a potential dazzler is that its orbit is nearly identical to that of the so-called Great Comet of 1844.

Like the 1844 comet, ATLAS follows a trajectory that would require 6,000 years per orbit and take it to beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, roughly 57 billion miles (92 billion km) from the sun. Probably in the far-distant past, a much larger comet occupied this same orbit, but fragmented into several pieces — including the 1844 comet and ATLAS — upon rounding the sun. 

But any comparison is dangerous. The 1844 comet was not discovered until shortly after perihelion, so we have no knowledge of its brightness behavior beforehand. But that information is currently all we know about ATLAS, and we won't be able to see the object after it reaches the sun. 

And let's not forget some of the comets of the past that seemingly had "glory" written all over them, only to utterly fail to live up to expectations: Comet ISON in 2013, Comet Austin in 1990 and Comet Kohoutek in 1974.

So what's ahead?

John Bortle, who has observed hundreds of comets and is a well-known expert in the field, got his first look at Comet ATLAS through 15 x 70 binoculars on Sunday night (March 15). And he's stumped, he wrote. "For the first time in many years I am left at a bit of a loss as to what honestly worthy advice I can offer would-be observers. I really don't know quite what to make of this object." 

The head (or coma) of Comet ATLAS is big, albeit "very faint and ghostly," Bortle said, which doesn't make sense. "If it's a truly significant visitor, it should be considerably sharper in appearance. Instead we see, at best, a quite modestly condensed object with only a pinpoint stellar feature near its heart." 

The unpredictability of comets is an old story. Astronomers use special formulas to try to anticipate how bright a comet will get. Unfortunately, comets' individual behavior and characteristics can be as varied as people: No two are alike. 

Now, here is the conundrum regarding Comet ATLAS: Until a couple of weeks ago, it was brightening at an astounding rate. That brightening has slowed somewhat, but it is still an impossible rate of brightening to maintain. Were ATLAS to continue to brighten at this rate all the way to its closest approach to the sun at the end of May, it would end up rivaling the planet Venus in brightness! 

"We should expect the rate of increase to slow again," Carl Hergenrother, an assiduous comet observer based in Arizona, said. "This is where it gets tricky for predicting just how bright it will get." Right now, no one can predict how long it will continue to quickly brighten and how dramatically that brightening will slow.

• Related: Photos of Halley's Comet through history

Where to look and what to expect

The only thing left to do is to track Comet ATLAS in the days and weeks ahead. Fortunately, its path in March and April will be very favorable for Northern Hemisphere observers, as it will be circumpolar and always remain above the horizon. As darkness falls, it will be positioned more than halfway up in the north-northwest sky. Right now, the comet is in western Ursa Major, and it will shift into the boundaries of Camelopardalis the Giraffe — a rather dim, shapeless star pattern — by March 29. There it will stay, right on through the month of April.

As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that's anybody's guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star. 

Whether ATLAS continues to overperform and shines even brighter, develops a significant tail or suddenly stops brightening altogether and remains very faint and ghostly are all unknown right now. We'll just have to wait and see.

"It's going to be fun the next few weeks watching Comet ATLAS develop (and provide a nice distraction from the current state of the world), Hergenrother wrote. "Here's to good health and clear skies!"

• Best night sky events of March 2020 (stargazing maps)
• Night sky, March 2020: What you can see this month [maps]
• The brightest planets in March's night sky: How to see them (and when)

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

20-03-2020 om 23:56 geschreven door peter  

This is Mars, the planet next door, as seen through the robot eyes of the Curiosity rover. This is where the Curiosity rover found ancient organic molecules in Martian mudstones.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.

The search for evidence of life on Mars, past or present, just took an interesting new twist. Researchers studying the data sent back by NASA’s Curiosity rover have found evidence for organic molecules called thiophenes, which, on Earth at least, are primarily a result of biological processes. The researchers are not claiming proof of life, but the discovery is certainly intriguing. The finding is being called “consistent with the presence of early life on Mars.”

The findings were announced by researchers from Washington State University, and the peer-reviewed paper was published in the journal Astrobiology on February 24, 2020.

On Earth, thiophenes are often found in coal, crude oil, kerogen and even a species of mushrooms called white truffles. They can also be found in stromatolites and microfossils. On Mars, they were found by Curiosity, along with other organics, in an ancient mudstone formation called the Murray Formation.

The new paper explores some of the ways that thiophenes could be created on Mars, either biologically or abiotically (without life). As astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, one of the two authors, explained in a statement:

We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof. If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.

A slab of mudstone called Old Soaker in the Murray Formation. Curiosity took these images on December 31, 2016. The mudstone shows what are thought to be mud cracks from when the region was once wet and then dried up a few billion years ago.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS.

Thiophenes are essential to biology, containing four carbon atoms and one sulphur atom in a ring. They can, however, occur without any connection to life. On Mars, this could be from meteor impacts or perhaps thermochemical sulphate reduction (TSR), where a set of compounds is heated to 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius) or more. This could conceivably have happened during volcanic activity on early Mars.

There are several ways that thiophenes can be formed biologically, however, which is what makes them of such interest to scientists looking for evidence of Martian life. Bacteria can create a sulphate reduction process – biological sulphate reduction (BSR) – that results in thiophenes. The thiophenes themselves can also be broken down by bacteria in several ways.

One interesting aspect of the Martian thiophenes is that the geological processes that can create them require the sulphur to be nucleophilic, where sulphur atoms donate electrons to form a bond with their reaction partner. But most of the sulphur known to exist on Mars is non-nucleophilic. TSR could reduce them to nucleophilic sulphides, but so could BSR.

One problem is that while Curiosity can detect molecules such as thiophenes, it is limited in how much detailed analysis it can do. The onboard lab it uses – the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument – primarily breaks down large molecules into smaller pieces using heat, although some additional testing can be done using wet chemistry.

So how can scientists tell if these thiophenes are biological or non-biological in origin?

It isn’t easy with the tools that Curiosity has, so an answer will probably have to wait for a follow-up mission such as NASA’s Perseverance rover, set to launch this July, or Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, also scheduled to launch in July or August 2020.

Self-portrait of Curiosity taken on February 3, 2013.

Image via NASA/ Phys.org.

Rosalind Franklin, in particular, will use the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) to analyze these kinds of molecules with additional non-destructive methods.

One big clue can come from the carbon and sulphur isotopes of the molecules. Lighter variations of isotopes – with fewer neutrons – are preferred by living organisms. Schulze-Makuch said:

Organisms are “lazy.” They would rather use the light isotope variations of the element because it costs them less energy.

Interestingly, as noted in an Air & Space article by Schulze-Makuch, the isotopic signature of sulphur-containing sediments found by Curiosity is very similar to that found in rocks from the Haughton impact crater in Nunavut, Canada … which are thought to result from BSR.

If one of the rovers found these or similar molecules with the lighter isotopes, that would be very suggestive of a biological origin, although perhaps still not proof. Additional analysis would still be needed to definitively determine whether the molecules were associated with once-living microbes. Better yet, of course, would be finding actual microfossils of ancient microbes.

Until then, we have tantalizing clues and hints at possible former life, but more research is needed. A biological explanation does seem at least plausible when other factors are taken into account, including now well-established evidence that conditions on Mars were once much more habitable on the surface then they are now. In Gale crater, the Curiosity rover has found that there used to be lakes and streams; it even found riverbed gravel left over from an ancient stream that used to empty into the crater lake.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Washington State University.

Image via Wikipedia.

The rover also found a variety of organic compounds in rocks, not just the thiophenes, and confirmed that both methane and oxygen increase and decrease on a seasonal cycle in that area. This is still not proof of life, but taken all together, these lines of evidence may be starting to paint an intriguing picture. As Schulze-Makuch noted:

As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.

• Bottom line: The Curiosity rover has found organic molecules called thiophenes, which may be evidence for ancient life on Mars.
• Source: Thiophenes on Mars: Biotic or Abiotic Origin?
• Via Washington State University

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

20-03-2020 om 23:12 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers use slime mold model to reveal dark threads of the cosmic web

The problem-solving prowess of a simple slime mold has been harnessed to trace the large-scale structure of the universe

By Tim Stephens

A computational approach inspired by the growth patterns of a bright yellow slime mold has enabled a team of astronomers and computer scientists at UC Santa Cruz to trace the filaments of the cosmic web that connects galaxies throughout the universe.

Their results, published March 10 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, provide the first conclusive association between the diffuse gas in the space between galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmic web predicted by cosmological theory.

According to the prevailing theory, as the universe evolved after the big bang, matter became distributed in a web-like network of interconnected filaments separated by huge voids. Luminous galaxies full of stars and planets formed at the intersections and densest regions of the filaments where matter is most concentrated. The filaments of diffuse hydrogen gas extending between the galaxies are largely invisible, although astronomers have managed to glimpse parts of them.

None of which seems to have anything to do with a lowly slime mold called Physarum polycephalum, typically found growing on decaying logs and leaf litter on the forest floor and sometimes forming spongy yellow masses on lawns. But Physarum has a long history of surprising scientists with its ability to create optimal distribution networks and solve computationally difficult spatial organization problems. In one famous experiment, a slime mold replicated the layout of Japan’s rail system by connecting food sources arranged to represent the cities around Tokyo.

This intricate filamentary network (above) is a reconstruction of the cosmic web created by feeding data on the locations and masses of 37,000 galaxies into an algorithm based on the growth patterns of a slime mold. The images below are expanded views of small regions, showing the underlying galaxies on the left and, on the right, the filaments of the cosmic web superimposed on the galaxies. See larger image here.

(Image credit: Burchett et al., ApJL, 2020)

Slime mold algorithm

Joe Burchett, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, had been looking for a way to visualize the cosmic web on a large scale, but he was skeptical when Oskar Elek, a postdoctoral researcher in computational media, suggested using a Physarum-based algorithm. After all, completely different forces shape the cosmic web and the growth of a slime mold.

But Elek, who has always been fascinated by patterns in nature, had been impressed by the Physarum “biofabrications” of Berlin-based artist Sage Jenson. Starting with the 2-dimensional Physarum model Jenson used (originally developed in 2010 by Jeff Jones), Elek and a friend (programmer Jan Ivanecky) extended it to three dimensions and made additional modifications to create a new algorithm they called the Monte Carlo Physarum Machine.

Burchett gave Elek a dataset of 37,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and when they applied the new algorithm to it, the result was a pretty convincing representation of the cosmic web.

“That was kind of a Eureka moment, and I became convinced that the slime mold model was the way forward for us,” Burchett said. “It’s somewhat coincidental that it works, but not entirely. A slime mold creates an optimized transport network, finding the most efficient pathways to connect food sources. In the cosmic web, the growth of structure produces networks that are also, in a sense, optimal. The underlying processes are different, but they produce mathematical structures that are analogous.”

Elek also noted that “the model we developed is several layers of abstraction away from its original inspiration.”

Of course, a strong visual resemblance of the model results to the expected structure of the cosmic web doesn’t prove anything. The researchers performed a variety of tests to validate the model as they continued to refine it.

Dark matter

Until now, the best representations of the cosmic web have emerged from computer simulations of the evolution of structure in the universe, showing the distribution of dark matter on large scales, including the massive dark matter halos in which galaxies form and the filaments that connect them. Dark matter is invisible, but it makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe, and gravity causes ordinary matter to follow the distribution of dark matter.

Burchett’s team used data from the Bolshoi-Planck cosmological simulation—developed by Joel Primack, professor emeritus of physics at UC Santa Cruz, and others—to test the Monte Carlo Physarum Machine. After extracting a catalog of dark matter halos from the simulation, they ran the algorithm to reconstruct the web of filaments connecting them. When they compared the outcome of the algorithm to the original simulation, they found a tight correlation. The slime mold model essentially replicated the web of filaments in the dark matter simulation, and the researchers were able to use the simulation to fine-tune the parameters of their model.

“Starting with 450,000 dark matter halos, we can get an almost perfect fit to the density fields in the cosmological simulation,” Elek said.

Burchett also performed what he called a “sanity check,” comparing the observed properties of the SDSS galaxies with the gas densities in the intergalactic medium predicted by the slime mold model. Star formation activity in a galaxy should correlate with the density of its galactic environment, and Burchett was relieved to see the expected correlations.

Now the team had a predicted structure for the cosmic web connecting the 37,000 SDSS galaxies, which they could test against astronomical observations. For this, they used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Intergalactic gas leaves a distinctive absorption signature in the spectrum of light that passes through it, and the sight-lines of hundreds of distant quasars pierce the volume of space occupied by the SDSS galaxies.

“We knew where the filaments of the cosmic web should be thanks to the slime mold, so we could go to the archived Hubble spectra for the quasars that probe that space and look for the signatures of the gas,” Burchett explained. “Wherever we saw a filament in our model, the Hubble spectra showed a gas signal, and the signal got stronger toward the middle of filaments where the gas should be denser.”

In the densest regions, however, the signal dropped off. This too matched expectations, he said, because heating of the gas in those regions ionizes the hydrogen, stripping off electrons and eliminating the absorption signature.

“For the first time now, we can quantify the density of the intergalactic medium from the remote outskirts of cosmic web filaments to the hot, dense interiors of galaxy clusters,” Burchett said. “These results not only confirm the structure of the cosmic web predicted by cosmological models, they also give us a way to improve our understanding of galaxy evolution by connecting it with the gas reservoirs out of which galaxies form.”

Creative coding

Burchett and Elek met through coauthor Angus Forbes, an associate professor of computational media and director of the UCSC Creative Coding lab in the Baskin School of Engineering. Burchett and Forbes had begun collaborating after meeting at an open mic night for musicians in Santa Cruz, focusing initially on a data visualization app, which they published last year.

Forbes also introduced Elek to the work of Sage Jenson, not because he thought it would apply to Burchett’s cosmic web project, but because “he knew I was a nature pattern freak,” Elek said.

Coauthor J. Xavier Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC who has done pioneering work using quasars to probe the structure of the intergalactic medium, said, “This creative technique and its unanticipated success highlight the value of interdisciplinary collaborations, where completely different perspectives and expertise are brought to bear on scientific problems.”

Forbes’ Creative Coding lab combines approaches from media arts, design, and computer science. “I think there can be real opportunities when you integrate the arts into scientific research,” Forbes said. “Creative approaches to modeling and visualizing data can lead to new perspectives that help us make sense of complex systems.”

In addition to Burchett, Elek, Prochaska, and Forbes, the coauthors include Nicolas Tejos at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile; Todd Tripp at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Rongmon Bordoloi at North Carolina State University. This work was supported by NASA.

{ https://www.ucsc.edu/index.html }

20-03-2020 om 22:00 geschreven door peter  

Creeping tendrils of slime seem to mirror the structure of the universe’s enormous filaments. That superficial similarity, in an organism called a slime mold, helped scientists map out the cosmic web, the vast threads of matter that connect galaxies.

Made up of gas and the unidentified substance called dark matter, the cosmic web began forming early in the universe’s history, as matter clumped together due to gravity. Computer simulations of that formation suggest that a tangled tatting should link galaxies, but the web is so ethereal that scientists struggle to image it directly (SN: 10/3/19).

Enter the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism that appears as a slimy yellowish lace, often seen bedazzling rotting tree trunks. Normally, a slime mold forms connections between sources of food. Its patterns have striking similarity to human-made networks, such as railroads (SN: 1/21/10).

Astronomer Joseph Burchett and computer scientist Oskar Elek, both of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues adapted a computer method for producing slime mold–like patterns so that, instead of food sources, it could connect more than 37,000 known galaxies sprinkled throughout space. Surprisingly, that technique reproduced the kinds of structures seen in computer simulations of the cosmic web, scientists report March 10 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers compared their map with measurements that reveal the density of gas at certain points in the web. Brilliant sources of light called quasars shine through this network, which absorbs some of their light. By studying the amount of absorption, the team found that regions that the slime mold technique predicted should be somewhat denser also had more hydrogen gas.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

20-03-2020 om 21:47 geschreven door peter  

20-03-2020 om 20:43 geschreven door peter  

An eye-opening event in the lives of most children occurs the day one of their precious toys or perhaps the television or an electronic device stops working and they bring it to their father to fix. Watching anxiously for him to carefully open it, do something inside, close it up and turn it on, a more likely scenario is that Dad holds it in one hand, takes the other and smacks it hard. If that doesn’t work, he may bash it against the table or hit it with something harder than his and as you look on in horror.

Of course, horror turns to admiration when the thing begins working again as Dad brags that it’s not how hard you hit it, it’s knowing WHERE to hit it. Well, NASA is obviously run by a few dads because that’s exactly what happened recently when a heat probe nicknamed “the Mole” didn’t dig a hole as its name suggests it should, so the Insight received instructions to … get ready … whack a Mole! Did it work?

NASA training lab?

The “Mole,” part of the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, is a 16-inch-long (40 cm) spike connected to a hammering mechanism that’s supposed to dig up to 16 feet (5 meters) into the Martian surface. Unfortunately, the soil in the area where InSight is parked is denser and rockier than expected, and the mole has twice popped back out of its hole before reaching 16 feet. This has been going on for a year and, after all other suggestions for fixing the problem failed, the NASA team decided to tell InSight to whack the mole with the shovel it’s supposed to use to scoop the dirt excavated by said mole. The whack was gentle – almost a push – so as not to damage the cover on the mole. Just like a dad, the team held its breath as it tried to activate the expensive excavation device again.

NASA InSight
@NASAInSight
Mar 13
A bit of good news from #Mars: our new approach of using the robotic arm to push the mole appears to be working! The teams @NASAJPL/@DLR_en are excited to see the images and plan to continue this approach over the next few weeks. 💪 #SaveTheMole

The mole was saved! The gentle tap worked and the mole is back to inserting the probe in order to measure heat under the Martian surface and help determine how the planet was formed.

Ready for a manned Mars mission

While NASA engineers are excited about whacking the mole back into operation, it’s also a bit depressing when you realize the project is a true metaphor for where our space program is today – we really are just barely scratching the surface of planetary exploration and are a long way from putting footprints on the ground and real probes deep into the planet.

When compared to the technology dreamed up in movies, TV series and sci-fi novels, we really are just at the Whack-a-Mole stage.

Now, go call your dad and thank him for preparing you for a career with NASA.

There was nothing funny about this story.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ )

20-03-2020 om 17:58 geschreven door peter  

Incredible Video Of An Alien Craft Buzzing The Space X Rocket

DECEMBER 22, 2019 …….VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE , CALIFORNIA

Elon Musk‘s plan to deliver universal internet access via a network of low Earth orbit satellites has left some stargazers confused, after the first batch prompted hundreds of UFO reports.

SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of its Starlink project last week, which the private space firm says will form the first part of a 12,000-strong satellite network that will beam high-speed internet back down to Earth.

The size of the satellites also mean it is unlikely that people looking up at the night sky will be able to see them with their naked eye. 

Reports from some astronomers, however, suggest the solar panels on the Starlink satellites create a flare, causing them to appear brighter than any star that they are passing in front of.

Mr Musk, the CEO of the space firm, said the first 60 satellites deployed successfully but will not be operational until another 800 have been launched.

Below is a photo of the alien craft, it was extracted from the video

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Source: 

• http://worldufophotosandnews.org/?p=25558

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20-03-2020 om 17:23 geschreven door peter  

NASA Releases A Picture Of The Curiosity Rover With A Mysterious Shadow

In September 2012, Nasa released a pictureriosity, a rover that was exploring Mars. A regular photo of the rover’s exploration containing a mysterious shadow intrigued the internet and raised questions.

Other videas by perter2011

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20-03-2020 om 16:51 geschreven door peter  

How will NASA deal with the moon dust problem for Artemis lunar landings?

By Leonard David 

The Apollo experience holds many lessons.

On Apollo 15, crewmembers could not see that they were descending onto the rim of a broad crater. After shutting off the engine, the lunar module rocked backward about 11 degrees into the crater until the rear footpad contacted the ground. The front footpad was then off the ground, bearing no weight. This 11-degree tilt was near the design limits for the lunar module.

(Image: © NASA)

Study teams have gone back to look at Apollo lunar landing data to appraise how much moon terrain was ejected into space. 

Not only did Apollo landing crews get fogged out by the blown dust, making touchdowns troublesome, but substantial amounts of rock and debris were also sent flying during the rocket-powered landings. 

NASA aims to put astronauts on the moon again by 2024, so what to do about the dust problem? Scientists are trying to devise the workarounds that appear needed if traveling to the moon is to become routine.

• Related: Lunar legacy: 45 Apollo moon mission photos

Apollo memories

First, there are several historical accounts concerning safe touchdowns of humans on the moon, starting with the very first Apollo lunar landing, in July 1969. As Neil Armstrong, commander of the Eagle lunar module, reflected in a technical debrief, "at something less than 100 feet, we were beginning to get a transparent sheet of moving dust that obscured visibility a bit. As we got lower, the visibility continued to decrease."

Similarly, on Apollo 12, Pete Conrad ran into so much dust that he was blinded as he made his final descent to the surface. He later recounted that "the dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me. I knew I was in a generally good area and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."

Several follow-on Apollo landing commanders noted similar concerns.

Making for a bad day

NASA hopes to apply the lessons from the Apollo era to future lunar missions.

"To paraphrase an old bromide, those who forget the past are doomed to land like it," said Chirold Epp, project manager for the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

"Having looked at the Apollo landings, I have come to two conclusions: One, those crews did a great job. Two, data from several of the landings support the idea that we must give future moon landers more information to increase the probability of mission success," Epp added.

Epp said that if a lunar module came to rest at an angle beyond 12 degrees, the astronauts might not be able to launch themselves off the surface. "So, if a crew landed on a hill or with a footpad or two on a large rock or in a crater, that could make for a bad day," he said.

Physics of rocket exhaust

"The moon is a low-gravity and airless body, which makes the rocket plume effects very different than what we experience on Earth," said Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando.

"On Earth, rocks travel the farthest, while dust is stopped just a short distance away by the drag of Earth's atmosphere," Metzger told Space.com. "On the moon, it is the exact opposite, with the dust going the fastest and farthest. The dust can cause severe damage to the surfaces of materials if we land too close to other hardware on or orbiting the moon."

Lunar lander engine exhaust blows dust, soil, gravel and rocks at high velocity and will damage surrounding hardware — such as lunar outposts, mining operations or historic sites — unless the ejecta are properly mitigated, Metzger said.

Over the past 20 years,  researchers have developed a consistent picture of the physics of rocket exhaust blowing lunar soil, "but significant gaps exist," Metzger said. "No currently available modeling method can fully predict the effects. However, the basics are understood well enough to begin designing countermeasures."

Related: Moon rush: private lunar lander plans

Wanted: launching pads

Metzger and other team members at UCF's Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science (CLASS) say landing pads are needed for missions that repeatedly visit a lunar outpost.

For lunar landings, CLASS research has shown that the sandblasting that will occur at a lunar outpost is unacceptable, as it will excessively degrade optics, solar cells, thermal control surfaces and moving joints on mechanisms. Impacts of blowing rocks could also break hardware. 

Florida Space Institute rsearchers are investigating methods to mitigate the effects of these blasts, such as sintering lunar regolith. They're also looking at robotics for bulldozing and building berms, as well as considering the use of gravel or pavers. And they're organizing a series of robotics competitions for landing pad construction technologies in conjunction with machine learning firms to further advance the necessary robotics capabilities.

"NASA takes the potential ejecta issues associated with rocket engine plume surface interaction very seriously," said Robert Mueller, senior technologist and principal investigator in the Exploration Systems and Development Office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

That's for good reason, Mueller said; future human landers will have more issues with plume effects than Apollo landers because of higher engine thrust. NASA researchers are developing concepts for lunar landing and launchpads for crewed landers as well.

The space agency is currently taking steps to evaluate the potential effects in a lunar vacuum environment, Mueller told Space.com, with new computer modeling codes that have been under development through NASA's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs.

Caught on camera

There has not been any concerted effort to mitigate the lunar dust problem, ever, said Michelle Munk, entry, descent and landing system capability lead at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "We have a 'production' code to predict what will happen — but it is not validated with data, so we really don't know how good the predictions are."

Munk said it is especially challenging to run a realistic ground test for the lunar environment, which would provide good "truth" data. NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate recently started a project that has both ground-testing and computational-modeling components. 

Additionally, Munk is the principal investigator for four stereo cameras that will be carried on board Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lunar lander, which is scheduled to launch in 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The payload is called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS).

SCALPSS is being developed at NASA Langley and leverages camera technology used on the agency's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, Munk said. The camera cluster will capture video and still-image data of the lander's plume as the plume starts to impact the lunar surface until after engine shutoff, which is critical for future lunar and Mars vehicle designs, she said.

• Moon dust could be a problem for future lunar explorers
• NASA's 17 Apollo moon missions in pictures
• Moon rush: NASA wants commercial lunar delivery services to start this year

Leonard David is the author of the 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. 

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20-03-2020 om 01:09 geschreven door peter