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...
22-03-2020
UFO or space force? Strange flying vessels spotted in Texas sparks row
UFO or space force? Strange flying vessels spotted in Texas sparks row
The UFO video shot from Texas has made many believe that aliens are visiting the earth for unknown reasons.
It was around a couple of years back that Donald Trump, the United States president asked authorities to begin a space force to proclaim the dominance of the country in the skies and beyond. However, conspiracy theorists argue that the space force or a similar kind of sky army has been active for the past couple of decades, and they believe that sightings of a triangular aircraft, popularly known as TR-3B is concrete evidence of advanced space technology the country has attained.
Strange lights in Texas sparks debate
Recently, a YouTube channel named 'The Hidden Underbelly' has shared an eerie video that shows eight bright flying objects flying in formation in the skies of Texas. The strange video clip was captured by a man named Mario Rios, and it gained popularity after it was shared by the conspiracy theory YouTube channel.
After analyzing the video, the conspiracy theory channel revealed that these strange flying objects are not Chinese lanterns, as they don't seem flickering, and all these flying objects followed a path.
"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," said the conspiracy theorist in the YouTube video.
What are those flying objects?
After watching the video, viewers also shared their opinions to explain this weird UFO sighting. Most of the viewers argued that these flying vessels are not Chinese lanterns, and it could be most probably alien space ships from deep space. Some other people claimed that these vessels could be secretive military vessels developed by the United States army.
"It is more terrifying to think we are alone in the Universe that to know there are at least others out there," commented J Kennedy, a YouTube user. "Those lights are ours. It is said, that seventy-five percent of those lights are our own. Reverse engineered," commented Twisted Existence, another YouTuber.
SCIENTISTS FIRED A COPPER CANNONBALL INTO AN ASTEROID — HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT “All this is super exciting.”
SCIENTISTS FIRED A COPPER CANNONBALL INTO AN ASTEROID — HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
“All this is super exciting.”
What happens when you fire a cannonball at an asteroid?
Thanks to a wild new study published Thursday in the journal Science, we now know the answer.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft fired a copper cannonball into Ryugu, an 850 meter-wide near-Earth asteroid. The 2 kilogram "Small Carry-on Impactor," a bit larger than a tennis ball, hit the asteroid at approximately 7,200 kilometers/hour and blew out a 14.5 meter wide crater with a depth of .6 meters. After a year of analysis, scientists have reported their analysis of the plume created by the impact and properties of the crater. From Space.com:
The number and size of craters that pockmark asteroids such as Ryugu can help scientists estimate the age and properties of asteroid surfaces. These analyses are based on models of how such craters form, and data from artificial impacts like that on Ryugu can help test those models...
Features of the artificial crater and the plume suggested that the growth of a crater was limited mostly by the asteroid's gravity and not by the strength of the space rock's surface. This, in turn, suggested that Ryugu has a relatively weak surface, one only about as strong as loose sand, which is consistent with recent findings that Ryugu is made of porous, fragile material.
These new findings suggest that Ryugu's surface is about 8.9 million years old, while other models suggested that the asteroid's surface might be up to about 158 million years old. All in all, while Ryugu is made of materials up to 4.6 billion years old, the asteroid might have coalesced from the remains of other broken-apart asteroids only about 10 million years ago, Arakawa said.
Scientists used the Japanese-made spacecraft Hayabusa2 to fire a 2-kilogram copper cannonball at a speed of 2 kilometers-per-second into the asteroid Ryugu, a tiny, rocky body orbiting nearby, between Earth and Mars.
The cannonball, though tiny, managed to blast a 14-meter-wide, semicircular crater into the asteroid’s crisp surface. But aside from making an impact in the real sense, the shot transformed scientists' understanding of the asteroid's age, composition, and other properties.
The unprecedented results pave the way for researchers to better estimate these same details for the myriad other asteroids strewn across the universe.
“All this is super exciting,” Patrick Michel, director of research at the French Scientific Research National Center, tells Inverse.
“And in this crazy and dangerous world (...), it gives hope that we can fight big challenges! The SCI was an operation done on a tiny body, at several hundred million km from Earth. This is amazing and gives a lot of hope.”
WRECKING AN ASTEROID
The collision enabled scientists to capture images and samples from the asteroid that would be otherwise impossible.
“The surface of the asteroid is heated by the solar radiation and irradiated by the solar wind and the cosmic ray, so the outermost layer of the surface could be altered,” Masahiko Arakawa, professor of planetology at Kobe University, tells Inverse.
He explains that the organic materials and hydrated minerals on the surface of the asteroid can change dramatically over time.
“We wanted to have a fresh material without alteration, so we developed and operated a Small Carry-on Impactor, SCI, to form an artificial impact crater to expose the asteroid subsurface or interior,” Arakawa says.
The team then developed a microsatellite to observe the crater formation process and the continuous ejection of the subsurface material.
“Collisions play a fundamental role in the formation and history of our Solar System, starting with planet formation through collisional accretion,” Michel explains.
“So far, models developed to understand the collisional history of our Solar System rely on ad-hoc parameters to determine the outcome of each collision.”
This means researchers’ understanding of cosmic collisions are usually obtained from laboratory simulations, and not first-hand observations.
“Scaling the lab results to asteroid scales is not trivial,” Michel says.
“The SCI experiment is the first hyper-velocity impact experiment on such an asteroid, and it is a super complex operation, and yet achieved with high success.”
Ejecta curtain growth, and deposition.JAXA, Kobe University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Kochi University, University of Occupational and Environmental Health
MAKING HOLES, ANSWERING QUESTIONS
Firing the cannonball enabled researchers to directly observe the formation of a crater in microgravity for the first time, answering how much the microgravity affects crater formation.
The crater growth process appears to be controlled by the surface gravity, not by the surface material strength. In fact, the diameter of the new crater on Ryugu is about 7 TIMES LARGER than if it had formed on sand under the Earth’s gravity.
The impact crater made by the cannonball on Ryugu.
“We found that the crater’s formation and dimensions are such that the only way to explain them is that the process is controlled by the gravity of the asteroid, despite its extremely low value,” Michel says.
“This was totally unexpected, and I must say that I still have a hard time to interpret this.”
“How can such small gravity be the only contributor? And we see many boulders, which should have strength, so how is this possible? This is fascinating and opens a totally new window in our understanding of cratering physics in such different regimes than on Earth,” Michel says.
“IF WE WANT TO DEFLECT AN ASTEROID BY AN IMPACT, WE NEED A MUCH BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PROCESS.”
Aside from this finding, Arakawa and his colleague were also able to put a number on the asteroid's age — previously estimates had pegged it at between 9 million and 160 million years. Turns out Ryugu is on the younger side of the spectrum.
“Our results suggest that 9 million years is better for the surface age of Ryugu.”
DEFENSES UP
Knowing what Ryugu's surface is made of and how impact craters form there is critical for defending our own planet from incoming collisions from the cosmos, Michel says.
One of the main strategies scientists propose for any near-Earth object that looks like it might actually hit us is to send a projectile to knock it off course.
“If we want to deflect an asteroid by an impact, we need a much better understanding of this process,” Michel says.
“So, even if the SCI was not meant to deflect Ryugu because the impact energy is too small, its results will definitely feed planetary defense studies.”
According to Michel, this experiment helps to pave the way for NASA's DART and Hera missions, which will perform the first asteroid-deflection test using a kinetic impactor.
But in these missions' cases, the asteroid target is very different from Ryugu, and probably much less porous, so the results won't apply entirely. However the new study does offer a guide for using this "wrecking ball" method of data collection to understand how asteroids form, their key features, and whether they might do damage to Earth.
Abstract:
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft investigated the small asteroid Ryugu, which has a rubble pile structure. We describe an impact experiment on Ryugu using Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI). The impact produced an artificial crater with a diameter >10 m, which has a semicircular shape, an elevated rim and a central pit. Images of the impact and resulting ejecta were recorded by the Deployable CAMera 3 (DCAM3) for >8 min, showing the growth of an ejecta curtain (the outer edge of the ejecta) and deposition of ejecta onto the surface. The ejecta curtain was asymmetric, heterogeneous, and never fully detached from the surface. The crater formed in the gravity-dominated regime i.e., crater growth was limited by gravity, not surface strength. We discuss implications for Ryugu’s surface age.
Is New UFO Footage Videos Enabling You To Discover Alien Craft?
Is New UFO Footage Videos Enabling You To Discover Alien Craft?
The latest UFO footage on the web can offer you several excellent videos. It may be hard to believe, but it’s true. These strange alien craft videos can be found on the web in a number of ways, including your local television station. From there, it’s on to the internet and you get to watch them.
Now, if you’re a skeptic then perhaps you don’t want to try this new way of accessing footage. After all, you’re just going to have to live with your skepticism for now. However, there are more benefits to watching the UFO footage than just denying your doubts. You could actually be joining the club.
In fact, in this case, you might be the first person to see this strange video. Just imagine how excited your child would be if they found the video on YouTube. They’ll also get to see and understand why UFOs exist.
How would you feel if you could see that? If you haven’t seen one yet, then now is the time. You can find UFO footage online, and there are a number of sites that specialize in their documentary videos.
You can find more than just this site’s selection of UFO video on the web. There’s a variety of online sites that show a wide range of UFO footage. With these websites, you can view even the newest UFO footage on the web and see the latest ones.
Another major benefit is the very low cost. A great deal of money can be saved when you watch UFO footage online. Your savings will start out small, but over time you will save hundreds of dollars. When you’re just starting out in this hobby, you can use that savings to get the proper equipment to help you discover these ancient craft.
In addition, the economy is still recovering from a natural disaster’s effect on our economy. It’s a good time to save money on everyday items like gas and food. When you can watch UFO footage online, you won’t even think about spending a dime.
This, in addition to the financial benefits of looking for UFO videos online, is why it’s so important to have a membership to a credible site. You should pay only for videos that are worthy. Many of the UFO videos online have been verified, so you know they’re legitimate.
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
KEY POINTS
NASA detected four asteroids approaching Earth
The biggest asteroid in the group measures 180 feet wide
All four asteroids will approach 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.
On Sunday, Earth will be visited by two asteroids. The first one is called 2020 DP4, which is the biggest asteroid in the group. According to CNEOS, this space rock has an estimated diameter of 180 feet. It is currently moving across the Solar System at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour.
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 EarthPhoto: Pixabay
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.
Paul Kyberd, Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics Informatics, Brunel University London
The fact that we are here at all is one of the greatest puzzles of physics. We are made from normal particles such as electrons, but every such particle also has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. When matter andantimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other in a flash of light.
Physics suggests that matter and antimatter were created in almost equal quantities in the Big Bang. So how come there’s almost only matter left today – why didn’t the matter and antimatter annihilate each other to render the universe lifeless? Our new research has enabled scientists to build a new type of accelerator, based on particles called muons, that could help us find out.
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.
Each particle also has an antiparticle, not included here. (Image credit: Publicdomainpictures.net)
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.
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
CURIOSITY’S AWESOME 360-DEGREE VIDEO MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE STANDING ON MARS
Credit: NASA
CURIOSITY’S AWESOME 360-DEGREE VIDEO MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE STANDING ON MARS
We may havelost 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.
DIERENIn 2017 zijn er plotseling 900.000 pinguïns van de aardbol verdwenen. Terwijl er eerst meer dan een miljoen koningspinguïns op het onbewoonde eiland Île aux Cochons leefden, waren dat er in 2017 amper 200.000. Zelfs drie jaar later houdt het mysterie biologen nog steeds bezig.
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.
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.
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.
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.
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
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.
Bright elongated UFO releases orbs filmed by plane passenger
Bright elongated UFO releases orbs filmed by plane passenger
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?
Farmington reaches 70th anniversary of mass UFO sighting
Farmington reaches 70th anniversary of mass UFO sighting
Mike EasterlingFarmington Daily Times
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.
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 beenbrightening 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
The Curiosity rover has found organic molecules called thiophenes, which, on Earth, are associated with biological systems. Are they evidence for once-living microbes on Mars?
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.
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-reviewedpaper 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum develops a network of interconnected tubes as it explores the environment for food. (Photo credit: Frankenstoen/CC BY)
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.
How slime mold helped scientists map out the cosmic web
How slime mold helped scientists map out the cosmic web
Astronomers have struggled to visualize the giant tendrils of matter that connect galaxies
The intricate patterns of this yellow slime mold can help tease out the structure of the vast strings of matter that connect galaxies in the universe’s cosmic web.
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 scientistsstruggle to image it directly (SN: 10/3/19).
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum develops a network of interconnected tubes as it explores the environment for food. (Photo credit: Frankenstoen/CC BY)
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).
Scientists produced this map of the universe’s cosmic web based on locations and masses of known galaxies and the lacy patterns of slime mold.J. BURCHETT ET AL/ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS 2020
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.
New telescopes could help spot ‘photon ring’ of the first black hole ever imaged
New telescopes could help spot ‘photon ring’ of the first black hole ever imaged
Detecting the thin rings would reaffirm Einstein’s theory of gravity
A computer simulation of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 shows two rings: a thick orange line and a pixel-thin bright band at the inner edge of that thick line. New telescopes could help identify the presence of such rings, which were hidden in the previous black hole image.
Faint rings of light surrounding enormous black holes could be spotted with the help of a future generation of telescopes in space.
The doughnut-shaped glow spotted in the first image of a black hole, released in April 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration (SN: 4/10/19), is more complex than the worldwide network of radio telescopes could discern. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that some particles of light, called photons, can circle the black hole partway — or once, twice or multiple times — before escaping to be picked up by telescopes. Those orbiting photons produce a “photon ring,” made up of a series of subrings — circles of light that appear successively thinner and harder for telescopes to pick out.
“It’s sort of like a hall of mirrors, where we’re getting an infinite series of images,” says astrophysicist Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Now, Johnson and colleagues calculate that, with the help of new telescopes in space, the photon subrings theoretically could be observed around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, the subject of that first black hole snapshot.
The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, combines the powers of telescopes across the world, via a technique called very long baseline interferometry, so that they operate like one, larger telescope (SN: 4/10/19). But to tease out more details, such as black hole subrings, researchers would need to add telescopes separated by even larger distances.
A radio telescope orbiting Earth could capture the first subring, the team reports March 18 in Science Advances. But observing the second subring would require an even more distant telescope — on the moon. The third subring could be detected with a telescope even farther out, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Scientists previously have proposed such telescopes, but the plans haven’t yet gotten off the ground. Johnson says that the new study provides new motivation for adding a space-based telescope to the EHT’s network.
Although the EHT wouldn’t directly photograph the subrings, it could detect their existence. That detection would reaffirm Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, which predicts the rings’ existence. It also could allow for better measurements of the black hole’s mass and how fast it is spinning.
The idea “will be challenging, but it’s something to look forward to,” says astrophysicist Avi Loeb at Harvard University, who was not involved with the research. “It is an exciting goal for the next generation.”
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.
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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.
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Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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