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...
31-03-2020
Triangular UFO spotted again over Texas as mystery lights move across sky
Triangular UFO spotted again over Texas as mystery lights move across sky
It is the third sighting of the so-called triangular UFO in Texas, after one sighting on New Year's Day and another last month
And now, the object has been seen above Seguin in possibly the clearest video yet.
The clip shows a collection of seven lights moving in a triangle formation across the night sky.
A stunned man behind the camera can be heard exclaiming: “What the f***?”
The lights continue on their path and after just a few moments disappear out of sight.
(Image: YOUTUBE/DISCLOSE SCREEN)
YouTube conspiracy channel Disclose Screen posted the video in a round-up of UFO sightings on March 28.
One viewer suggested: “I think one or two of these are the army and the police playing with their new toys.”
Another ridiculously claimed the coronavirus quarantine was part of the conspiracy, saying: “So I guess I'm not the only one questioning why they are keeping people in.”
In the past, conspiracy theorists have come up with numerous outlandish suggestions for what triangular UFOs are.
Some believe they are an example of a top-secret government fleet of craft known as the TR-3B.
The TR-3 Black Manta is the name of a supposed surveillance plane of the United States Air Force, speculated to have been developed under a black project.
It is said to be a supersonic stealth spy plane with a triangular design although has never been officially confirmed.
But others have more realistic views, previously offering suggestions of Chinese lanterns, drones or simply passenger planes.
(Credit: Charles Carter/Keck Institute for Space Studies via NASA)
On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.
The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.
They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.
The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.
These are all long shots (not entirely crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft used ion propulsion to explore Ceres. Future missions could take the tech even further.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Rocket Reactions
For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.
Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.
What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.
Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.
But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.
An orbiting laser system could power an ion propulsion vehicle through the solar system, and prove reusable.
(Credit: Jay Smith/Discover)
Ion the Prize
While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.
Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.
There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.
As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.
At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.
“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”
Only the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, leaving the sun’s influence. New probes may one day study the interstellar medium lying beyond.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Interstellar Medium Well
After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.
Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”
Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.
“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”
The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.
Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.
“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.
It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”
How a solar gravitational lens works.
(Credits: Courtesy of Slava Turyshev; The Aerospace Corp.; Jim Deluca/Jimiticus via YouYube (2); Jay Smith)
Catch A Glimpse
Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a virtual mission to another star.
Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.
If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.
I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.
“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.
Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,
or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.
“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.
A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.
10 reasons why Aliens likely exist (however won’t visit us at any point in the near future)
10 reasons why Aliens likely exist (however won’t visit us at any point in the near future)
It’s a numbers game, and likelihood proposes outsiders are out there
Most researchers concur that outsider life in all likelihood exists known to mankind some place. Our universe contains in the locale of 300 billion stars, and we’re presently finding planets going around these stars. The more we look, and the more innovation we put out there, the a greater amount of these exoplanets we find. Until now, we have distinguished around 4,000 – and that is simply in our system. In the event that we take a gander at the universe overall, at that point there are roughly 200 billion cosmic systems. For what reason would life simply happen here? “We’re quite persuaded it’s out there,” says space researcher Maggie Aderin-Pocock. “It is absolutely a numbers game. It is likelihood.”
We definitely know about many conceivably livable planets
We can gauge the airs of these exoplanets utilizing a method called spectroscopy. This is the place starlight goes through the environment of the exoplanet, permitting us to do a concoction examination. On the off chance that we recognize the sort of substances we find in Earth’s climate, it wouldn’t really affirm such there’s reality out there – yet it’s a solid sign that it’s conceivable. “We are aware of many possibly tenable planets,” says Professor Tim O’Brien. “We’re in all likelihood – inside the following decade or somewhere in the vicinity – going to discover a planet that may well even show potential proof forever.”
We’ve discovered life on earth in places that we didn’t figure life might exist
At the point when we’re mulling over the presence of life past our planet, it merits thinking about that we’ve found organisms occupying spaces on Earth where the possibility of endurance was already incomprehensible. These lifeforms depend on well-known DNA – so it’s life as we probably am aware it – yet they exist in the profound channels of our seas, far away from daylight. Previously, we accepted life could just exist on a planet, a specific good ways from its neighborhood star (so it has the correct degrees of radiation). Discovering life on Earth flourishing where we didn’t think it potential has made us fully aware of the idea that there may be moons ready to help life as well.
The existence that is out there may not be canny life
Most researchers are certain about the odds of life existing known to mankind. What we don’t know is if there’s clever life. “For the greater part of the historical backdrop of life on Earth it was straightforward life. It was bacterial life for billions of years truth be told,” says Tim. Furthermore, it was a progression of chance occasions that prompted the advancement of even multicellular life on our planet. For outsider life to reach, it should be genuinely – and mechanically – progressed.
Insightful lifeforms might be living in conditions that make correspondence troublesome
With 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, numerous with heavenly bodies, and ten billion years or more in which a civilisation could have emerged right now, is hard to accept that no lifeform ever arrived at where it could traverse interstellar separations. As the incomparable Italian physicist Enrico Fermi stated, it’s difficult to clarify why outsiders haven’t made it to Earth. In any case, there are methods for clarifying why this hasn’t occurred, says Maggie: “Our most serious issue is we just have one case of life, and such is reality on this planet.”
We need to break new ground. For instance, she says, “In the event that you live by a star which is very dynamic, you may live beneath the ground… It doesn’t imply that shrewd life isn’t out there however you probably won’t have the methods for transmitting since you live underneath the surface.”
Or on the other hand we might be attempting to convey to one another utilizing contradicting techniques
When enormous telescopes like the one at Jodrell Bank Observatory were fabricated, researchers understood that if there was a civilisation out there with a comparable piece of innovation, we may have the option to get signals sent from one to the next. “We’ve currently utilized radio telescopes to tune in out for signals from extra-earthly civilisations since around 1960,” says Tim who is Director of Jodrell Bank. Be that as it may, there are such a significant number of various manners by which a lifeform may impart signs, we could spend our lives searching for them and get no place. It’s conceivable that we simply haven’t hit upon the correct strategy.
Stars are so far away, it could take a large number of years for an extra-earthbound message to contact us
Just as technique for correspondence, separation represents an enormous deterrent. For another undertaking called Breakthrough Listen, researchers are looking through a million of the closest stars, but at the same time they’re taking a gander at stars that are in our Milky Way, 25,000 light years away. A message sent from one of these stars would need to go in the area of 25,000 years before it even contacted us. On the off chance that outsider life is out there, it could take a huge number of years before we hear a peep from it.
To reach, our civilisation and an outsider civilisation need to exist simultaneously
An outsider civilisation additionally needs to exist simultaneously as people. It’s conceivable that extra-terrestrials have reached Earth – even visited – yet it was path back in the Jurassic time, when dinosaurs meandered the earth, thus we basically don’t think about it. “On the off chance that our civilisations don’t cover,” says Maggie, “at that point we will never meet the outsiders.” Perhaps they came quite a while prior, or they’ll come later on, long after human life has terminated.
Long separation space travel isn’t yet workable for us – and may not be for them
It’s at present past our capacities to send an enormous shuttle between the stars. As things stand, we can send radio waves at the speed of light – however that is only a radio wave, going through the vacuum of room. In the event that we need to send physical mass out into the ether, as tests or individuals, at that point it gets much all the more testing.
Leap forward Starshot, a task supported by Stephen Hawking before he kicked the bucket, is investigating the choice of utilizing a sun based sail – a sheet of metallised plastic that sits in space – to transmit objects into our nearby planetary group. It would include an immense bank of lasers shooting photons up to hit the sun based sail, move their force, and send the sun oriented sail quickening off at up to a fifth of the speed of light. As energizing as this may be, it would at present take a hundred years to arrive at a planet 20 light years away – and current innovation implies we can’t send anything heavier than one gram in weight. People unquestionably won’t get out there at any point in the near future! What’s more, it’s exceptionally conceivable that any outsiders haven’t broke intergalactic space travel either.
Extraterrestrials need to really need to visit us
Regardless of whether lifeforms with innovation unmistakably further developed than our own exist, they need to need to reach. Any outsiders out there may feel emotionless about us Earthlings! Also, they may not be excessively excited about going between the stars for a huge number of years so as to find a good pace individual. This could likewise clarify why we’ve never had extraterrestrial appearances – they’re essentially upbeat where they are.
Geologists say the worm-like creature – about the size of a grain of rice – is the 1st ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
Geologists say they have discovered a fossil of the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans. The fossil of the extinct worm-like creature was discovered in deposits in Nilpena in South Australia belonging to the Ediacaran Period, an interval of geological time ranging 635 to 541 million years ago.
The tiny creature, called Ikaria wariootia, lived about 555 million years ago and was about the size of a grain of rice. According to the study, published March 23, 2020, in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.
The development of bilateral symmetry, scientists say, was a critical step in the evolution of animal life, giving organisms the ability to move purposefully and a common, yet successful, way to organize their bodies. A multitude of animals, from worms to insects to dinosaurs to humans, are organized around this same basic bilaterian body plan.
For the new research, University of California/Riverside scientists Scott Evans and Mary Droser used a 3-D laser scanner to analyze miniscule oval impressions near fossilized burrows found in 555 million-year-old Ediacaran Period deposits in Nilpena, South Australia. Their research revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters (up to about a quarter of an inch) long and about 1-2.5 millimeters (up to about a tenth of an inch) wide, just the right size to have made the burrows. Evans said in a statement:
We thought these animals should have existed during this interval, but always understood they would be difficult to recognize. Once we had the 3-D scans, we knew that we had made an important discovery.
A 3-D laser scan of an Ikaria wariootia impression.
In spite of its relatively simple shape, Ikaria was complex compared to other fossils from this period. It burrowed in thin layers of well-oxygenated sand on the ocean floor in search of organic matter, indicating rudimentary sensory abilities. The depth and curvature of Ikaria represent clearly distinct front and rear ends, supporting the directed movement found in the burrows.
The burrows also preserve crosswise, “V”-shaped ridges, suggesting Ikaria moved by contracting muscles across its body like a worm, known as peristaltic locomotion. Evidence of sediment displacement in the burrows and signs the organism fed on buried organic matter reveal Ikaria probably had a mouth, anus, and gut.
Bottom line: Geologists have discovered the fossil of a worm-like creature that they say is the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
There are at least two bright spots in these strange times: Telescopes are still studying distant galaxies and penguins are still pooping across Antarctica. In both cases, if you're looking for new ways to pass the time while you stay home, you can help out scientists studying these phenomena.
Citizen science is nothing new, but it's a particularly appealing option as the spreading coronavirus prompts containment measures around the world. So if you'd like to take your mind off current events for a while, consider chipping in on a research project.
"I think where we can tap into people's enthusiasm through their computer, that kind of captures the zeitgeist of coronavirus: what can we do when we're all trapped at home," Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Space.com.
Lynch is affiliated with two different citizen-science projects aimed at better understanding penguins, which, listen, we know are not in space. One of those projects, called Penguin Watch and accessible here, enlists people to identify the birds in photographs taken automatically near their colonies. But the other relies on satellite imagery to identify such colonies.
Penguins are so, hmm, productive, that biologists find the birds by combing through satellite imagery looking for swaths of their poop, which scientists call guano. "So we can map out how much area is covered in guano, and that gives us a really good estimate of how many penguins were actually at the colony at that particular location," Lynch said.
Such estimates are valuable data that's otherwise difficult to acquire, she said. "Even though penguins are the most charismatic and maybe the most obvious wildlife to survey in Antarctica, until recently, we knew relatively little about how many penguins there were in Antarctica and how their abundance was distributed because surveying Antarctica is so difficult."
That's where the satellites come into play. Lynch and her colleagues use data gathered by a few different types of orbital systems. Commercial satellites offer data that is quite detailed, NASA's Landsat program offers a 40-year perspective on penguin activities and Google Earth pulls in publicly accessible satellite data that citizen scientists can comb through.
Satellite imagery of the Danger Islands, where scientists discovered previously unknown Adelie penguin colonies. (Image credit: NASA)
It's that data that supports Lynch's Mapping Application for Penguin Populations and Projected Dynamics project. The main goal of the initiative is to provide Antarctic policymakers with more comprehensive data about penguin populations in one place. But the scientists need help locating all those birds, and for that, they enlist what they call penguin detectives.
"The citizen science part of this comes in because there's just so much of Antarctica," Lynch said. "The way that we find penguin colonies is by and large through manual searching of imagery: image after image, foot by foot, scanning the coastline for evidence of penguin guano."
And the uncooperative buggers sometimes relocate without bothering to tell the scientists looking for them. "Every time we think that we've found all the penguin colonies," Lynch said, "we soon discover that we find more, or that new colonies are being established over time, because of climate change, for example."
And maintaining an accurate map of penguin colonies is crucial if humans want to enact policies that keep the tuxedoed birds safe. For example, Lynch and her colleagues surveying Landsat imagery spotted some colonies of Adelie penguins on what's called the Danger Island archipelago.
When they visited the area to follow up on those observations, they found more penguins than they had ever imagined, even though they thought they'd found all the Adelie colonies in Antarctica. "In fact, these were some of the biggest Adelie penguins colonies in the world," Lynch said. "It was this sort of undiscovered hotspot of Adelie penguins."
That discovery has been passed along to policymakers who are deciding where to draw the borders of a marine protected area in the region. "It was exactly that kind of impact that we want to have," Lynch said.
But if penguin poop, even penguin poop from space, doesn't sound like your thing, here's an alternative: check out some weird-looking galaxies. You can do that through another citizen-science project, called Galaxy Zoo.
The program has been around for more than a decade, enlisting volunteers to classify the shapes of galaxies. That's the sort of task that anyone can do. "You don't even need to know what a galaxy is," Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, told Space.com. And although the shape isn't difficult to determine, it is valuable information to have.
"The shape of a galaxy tells you about its history: it tells you about when it accreted material, when it collided with other galaxies, when it formed stars and all sorts of other things," Lintott said. "But astronomers are quite good at getting images of galaxies and less good at sorting through the data." Hence, turning to the public. After a brief training session, volunteers are turned loose on the scientists' supply of images.
"We don't need people to spend hours contemplating a particular system unless they want to, just a guess and you get another galaxy," Lintott said. "Many people describe it as a bit like eating a packet of chips. You take one, you take another, you take another, and you can surf your way through the universe that way."
And recently, the project instituted a new twist that ensures things stay interesting. Although the Galaxy Zoo project was born of the premise that humans were better at classifying galaxies than computers, 12 years has changed the game a bit. Now, the project has added an algorithm, which takes care of the galaxies that are easiest to classify and saves the stranger ones for participants.
Galaxies come in a host of shapes, which can tell scientists about the history of these structures. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, J. DePasquale, F. Summers, and Z. Levay (STScI))
Identifications made by Galaxy Zoo volunteers have recently allowed scientists to determine that black holes at the center of galaxies grow steadily, not through collisions of the structures around them.
Having humans involved in the process is valuable, Lintott said, because of their willingness to notice things an algorithm might not. "People get distracted, and they're distracted along the way by the unexpected and the unusual," Lintott said. "We've found new types of galaxy and new sorts of things in the sky because somebody who was taking part in the project did a very human thing and just said, 'This is unusual. I don't know what this is.'"
And because the program pulls data automatically from observatory programs, bringing fresh images to the site, there's always something new to see. "You might well be the first person ever to see that galaxy," Lintott said. "Just by logging onto the website, you can literally see something that no one has ever seen before."
A next-generation crew spacecraft that China is preparing for a flight test this spring appears to be capable of docking with the International Space Station (ISS).
An image posted by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) shows the new spacecraft’s docking system, which appears compatible with the International Docking System Standard (IDSS).
NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia's federal space agency, known as Roscosmos, use IDSS-compatible systems or adapters. These are in use on the ISS to facilitate rendezvous and docking with spacecraft.
The new spacecraft is designed to boost China's capabilities in sending humans into orbit, reduce costs through partial reusability and allow astronauts to survive the radiation environment and high-speed reentries of deep-space missions.
The as-yet-unnamed spacecraft is 28.9 feet (8.8 meters) long with a mass at liftoff of 23.8 tons (21.6 metric tons). It will be capable of carrying six astronauts, or three astronauts and 1,100 lbs. (500 kilograms) of cargo to China’s planned space station.
A prototype of the next-gen crewed spacecraft is being prepared for a test flight at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. Launch on a Long March 5B rocket is expected in mid- to late April.
The IDSS docking mechanism is androgynous. A first such system was developed and used for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, meaning neither the U.S. nor Soviet spacecraft had "male" or "female" mechanisms.
China has demonstrated rendezvous and docking capabilities with Shenzhou crewed spacecraft and the Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 space labs, as well as with the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft.
The rendezvous systems on spacecraft, which facilitate the maneuvering and matching of vectors and velocities for close approaches, may, however, need to be adapted to be compatible.
But even if the new Chinese crewed spacecraft can technically rendezvous and dock with the ISS, it is currently not possible politically.
While China cooperates with ESA and Russia, the United States has effectively excluded China from the ISS project. The US government in 2011 introduced text into legislation, referred to as the "Wolf Amendment," that severely restricts opportunities for NASA and other agencies from bilateral cooperation with entities linked to the Chinese government.
The test flight of the new spacecraft will also test China's Long March 5B launch vehicle. If successful, the new rocket will subsequently be used to launch the 20-metric-ton modules of the Chinese Space Station.
While looking through Sol 1448 of Mars, I noticed a strange creature on the hillside. The object seems to be a species of lizard, but unlike anything we have here on Earth. This create has massive hind legs and two front thinner legs. Six legs in total. The animal has a short reptile like tail that curls at its end. The head of the creature is more similar to that of a mammal than a reptile. Its tall ears bent forward like a dogs, its long snout area and thick mouth area also similar to that of a dog. Perhaps its living species of pet that people on Mars preferred to keep company with? Hard to say, but it would be nice if the rover drove a bit closer to see this animal in more detail.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Mysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appears on the surface of the Moon
Mysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appears on the surface of the Moon
Amysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appeared on the surface of the Moon captured in a live telescope footage on March 29, 2020.
Strange ‘lights’ have been seen on the moon before and often, this phenomenon is associated with UFOs or extraterrestrial activities on the moon.
A possible explanation for these lights is the so-called ‘Transient Lunar Phenomenon' which is a short-lived light, color, or change in appearance on the surface of the Moon.
Claims of short-lived lunar phenomena go back at least 1,000 years, with some having been observed independently by multiple witnesses or reputable scientists. Most lunar scientists will acknowledge that transient events such as outgassing and impact cratering do occur over geologic time: the controversy lies in the frequency of such events.
It has been suggested that effects related to either electrostatic charging or discharging might be able to account for some of the transient lunar phenomena.
It is possible that the strange light is such a 'transent Lunar Phenomenon', however we can not rule out that the object is of extraterrestrial origin.
Extraterrestrial researchers have claimed they spotted a sliver UFO during a livestream from one of the Starlink satellites of SpaceX.
The mysterious object was observed during the livestream on March 18.
Using Falcon 9 rockets, Space X successfully launched into orbit 60 Starlink satellites at the end of February, the fourth Starlink’s overall launch.
Alien hunters actually noticed two UFOs within 20 seconds, but the closer one was more visible. They observed its detail as a silver bowl with vast and fat domes on top and bottom. They also noticed the side disk edges were small and thin.
NASA scientists argued that all the reported strange UFO sightings were nothing more than “space dandruff” hovering in front of cameras.
According to former NASA engineer James Oberg, these spots of dandruff can be anything from flakes of ice, parts of chipped paint in zero gravity, or ISS insulation that has broken off.
However, some UFO hunters don’t believe these kinds of mundane explanations, saying that they only meant to push away the public from the truth.
The Starlink network currently composed of more than 200 satellites. The government plans to have 22 launches this year to form a constellation of hundreds of satellites for the creation of a global broadband internet network.
Acfer 086is one of a large collection of meteorites found in the Algerian Sahara desert.
The small space rock was found in Agemour, Algeria, in 1990 and weighed only 173 grams.
Acfer 086 is classified as a CV3 carbonaceous chondrite, and shows a low level of shock and a moderate degree of weathering.
In a new study, Dr. McGeoch and her colleagues from PLEX Corporation and Bruker Scientific LLC analyzed a sample of Acfer 086 from the Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum.
Using mass spectrometry, they detected the signal of an unusual iron- and lithium-containing protein.
Further analysis showed the new protein was mainly composed of glycine and hydroxyglycine amino acids.
“This is the first report of a protein from any extraterrestrial source,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“Room temperature extracts from micron-sized meteorite particles contain polymers of amino acids with a definite chain length centered at 16 residues.”
“Analysis via iron and lithium isotope satellites in mass spectrometry reveals a novel protein motif with iron atoms closing out the ends of anti-parallel peptide chains composed of glycine.”
Model of the hemolithin molecule: space-filling mode (top), ball and stick (center), enlarged view of iron, oxygen and lithium termination (bottom). White = H; orange = Li; gray = C; blue = N; red = O and green = Fe. Hydrogen bonds are shown by dotted lines.
Image credit: McGeoch et al, arXiv: 2002.11688.
Dubbed hemolithin, the newly-discovered protein is believed to have been created approximately 4.6 billion years ago.
“The principal indicator of extraterrestrial origin is an extreme raised D/H (deuterium/hydrogen) ratio that is revealed by close quantitative fitting of isotopic satellite peaks,” the scientists wrote.
“The average molecular deuterium excess above terrestrial is (25,700 ± 3,500)%0, or a D/H ratio of (4.1 ± 0.5) x10-3, comparable to cometary levels, interstellar levels and also equal to the highest prior report in micrometeorites.”
“Very high deuterium content indicates proto-solar disk or molecular cloud origin,” they added.
The team’s paper was posted on the arXiv.org preprint server in February 2020.
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Malcolm W. McGeoch et al. 2020. Hemolithin: a Meteoritic Protein containing Iron and Lithium. arXiv: 2002.11688
Space Physicists Find Plasmoid in Magnetosphere of Uranus
Space Physicists Find Plasmoid in Magnetosphere of Uranus
Uranus possesses an intrinsic magnetic field that encircles the ice giant and influences the local space environment. The solar wind plasma, made up of charged particles, flows away from the Sun and interacts with Uranus’ magnetic field to form what is called a planetary magnetosphere. In a new study, a duo of space physicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed high-resolution magnetic field data collected by Voyager 2 during the Uranus flyby in 1986 and found that the spacecraft flew through a plasmoid— a giant bubble filled with planetary plasma — in the tail of Uranus’ magnetosphere.
Uranus in natural colors.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Team / Erich Karkoschka, University of Arizona.
Little known at the time of Voyager 2’s flyby, plasmoids have since become recognized as an important way planets lose mass.
These giant bubbles of plasma pinch off from the end of a planet’s magnetotail, the part of its magnetic field blown back by the Sun like a windsock.
With enough time, escaping plasmoids can drain the ions from a planet’s atmosphere, fundamentally changing its composition.
They had been observed at Earth and other planets, but no one had detected plasmoids at Uranus — yet.
Dr. Gina DiBraccio, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, and her colleague, Dr. Dan Gershman, analyzed data from Voyager 2’s magnetometer.
With no idea what they’d find, they zoomed in closer than previous studies, plotting a new datapoint every 1.92 seconds.
Smooth lines gave way to jagged spikes and dips. And that’s when they saw it: a tiny zigzag with a big story.
“Do you think that could be … a plasmoid?” Dr. Gershman asked Dr. DiBraccio, catching sight of the squiggle.
The plasmoid they found occupied a mere 60 seconds of Voyager 2’s 45-hour-long flight by Uranus. It appeared as a quick up-down blip in the magnetometer data.
“But if you plotted it in 3D, it would look like a cylinder,” Dr. Gershman said.
Comparing their results to plasmoids observed at Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, they estimated a cylindrical shape at least 204,000 km (127,000 miles) long, and up to roughly 400,000 km (250,000 miles) across.
Like all planetary plasmoids, it was full of charged particles — mostly ionized hydrogen, the researchers believe.
Readings from inside the plasmoid — as Voyager 2 flew through it — hinted at its origins.
Whereas some plasmoids have a twisted internal magnetic field, Dr. DiBraccio and Dr. Gershman observed smooth, closed magnetic loops. Such loop-like plasmoids are typically formed as a spinning planet flings bits of its atmosphere to space.
“Centrifugal forces take over, and the plasmoid pinches off,” Dr. Gershman said.
According to their estimates, plasmoids like that one could account for between 15 and 55% of atmospheric mass loss at Uranus, a greater proportion than either Jupiter or Saturn. It may well be the dominant way Uranus sheds its atmosphere to space.
How has plasmoid escape changed Uranus over time? With only one set of observations, it’s hard to say.
“Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterize the entire Earth. Obviously it’s not going to show you anything about what the Sahara or Antarctica is like,” Dr. DiBraccio said.
But the findings help focus new questions about the planet. The remaining mystery is part of the draw.
“It’s why I love planetary science. You’re always going somewhere you don’t really know,” Dr. DiBraccio said.
The findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Fossils of a new dromaeosaur date to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs
Fossils of a new dromaeosaur date to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs
Newly discovered species suggests these fierce predators were diversifying right up to the end
Dineobellator notohesperus (illustrated in foreground) was a fierce, feathered predator that lived about 68 million years ago, alongside horned dinosaurs like Ojoceratops and sauropods like Alamosaurus (background).
A wolf-sized warrior, kin to the fierce, feathered Velociraptor, prowled what is now New Mexico about 68 million years ago.
Dineobellator notohesperus was a dromaeosaur, a group of swift, agile predators that is distantly related to the much larger Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery of this new species suggests that dromaeosaurs were still diversifying, and even becoming better at pursuing prey, right up to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, researchers say March 26 in Scientific Reports.
That age came to an abrupt close at the end of the Cretaceous Period about 66 million years ago, when a mass extinction event wiped out all nonbird dinosaurs. A gap in the global fossil record for dromaeosaurs near the end of the Cretaceous had led some scientists to wonder whether the group was already in decline before the extinction, says Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg (SN: 4/21/16). The new find suggests otherwise.
A skeletal reconstruction of D. notohesperus shows that the dromaeosaur, one of a group of agile predators, was about the size of a modern wolf. Analyses of over 20 fossil bits revealed that the dinosaur had feathers and was likely stronger than the closely related Velociraptor.S. JASINSKI
Since 2008, Jasinski and his colleagues have recovered more than 20 fossilized pieces of the new species from the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, a rapidly eroding region of barren badlands in northwestern New Mexico. Analyses of muscle attachment sites on the fossilized forelimbs suggest the dinosaur was unusually strong for a dromaeosaur, with a very tight grip in its hands and feet. That grip, Jasinski says, was likely stronger than that of its famous kinfolk, Velociraptor and Utahraptor, giving the new species extra weaponry in its pursuit of prey.
Like many other dromaeosaurs, D. notohesperus had feathers, evidenced by the presence of quill nobs — bumps indicating where the feathers were attached — on its limbs (SN: 9/19/07). But, like Velociraptor, it probably used the feathers for purposes other than flight, Jasinski says, such as sexual selection, camouflage or added agility while on the hunt.
If Pluto has a subsurface ocean, it may be old and deep
If Pluto has a subsurface ocean, it may be old and deep
New research hints that liquid water might be common at the solar system’s edge
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft revealed Pluto’s largest impact basin, Sputnik Planitia, which makes up part of the dwarf planet’s famous heart-shaped feature. The basin may hide a subsurface sea.
A suspected subsurface ocean on Pluto might be old and deep.
New analyses of images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the dwarf planet has had an underground ocean since shortly after Pluto formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that the ocean may surround and interact with the rocky core.
If so, oceans could be common at the solar system’s edge — and may even be able to support life. That possibly “transforms the way we think about the Kuiper Belt,” the region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (SN: 3/27/19), says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
On its pass through the Kuiper Belt in 2015, New Horizons revealed that despite the dwarf planet’s location nearly 6 billion kilometers from the sun, Pluto showed signs of hosting an ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell (SN: 9/23/16).
How much liquid may lie beneath Pluto’s ground, how long it’s been there, and how much the water may have partially frozen over time is hard to tell from the surface. The new research, which had been scheduled for presentation the week of March 16 at the canceled Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, has dug into those questions.
Dark lines (circled) on the surface of Pluto, shown in this image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, could mark ripples created when a large object probably slammed into the opposite side of the dwarf planet.NEW HORIZONS TEAM
“If there’s an ocean today, it raises the question of, when did that ocean get there?” says planetary scientist Carver Bierson of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bierson considered two possible histories for Pluto’s potential ocean. If the dwarf planet had a “cold start,” any subsurface water would first have been frozen before melting under heat from decaying radioactive elements in the dwarf planet’s core, only to partially freeze again over time. In that scenario, Bierson expected to see cracks and ripples across Pluto’s icy shell from the orb’s contraction as the ice melted and then expansion as water refroze. Contracting would make the ice crumple into mountainlike features, while expanding would stretch the ice and create faults and graben.
Bierson’s second scenario envisioned a “warm start” for Pluto, where the ocean would have been liquid for nearly all of Pluto’s 4.5-billion-year existence. In that case, the surface would show only cracks from the sea expanding as it partially froze. And that’s exactly what Bierson and colleagues found in New Horizon’s images, suggesting that Pluto’s liquid ocean is nearly as old as the dwarf planet itself.
“That means maybe Pluto did start off warm,” Bierson says. “Maybe it started with a liquid ocean really early on.”
In a separate study, Denton and colleagues considered the impact that formed Sputnik Planitia, the left lobe of Pluto’s distinctive heart-shaped basin. Because of how New Horizons flew past Pluto, scientists’ view of half the dwarf planet is fuzzy. But the team was able to see lines on Pluto’s surface on the exact opposite side of the globe from Sputnik Planitia, the researchers reported in October 2019 at arXiv.org. Those lines might be the imprints of shock waves from a massive impact that formed the enormous basin, Denton says.
“If the impact is large enough … the planet itself can act like a lens, and focus the wave energy at the exact opposite point on the planet from the impact,” she says.
Pluto’s internal structure would have controlled how those shock waves shuddered through the dwarf planet. Looking at the cracks in the surface ice could give clues to the thickness of the proposed ocean or the core’s chemical makeup. So Denton and her colleagues ran computer simulations of an impact to look for clues.
“We got the fun answer,” she says. To explain the lines seen on the dwarf planet, not only would Pluto need a large ocean, 150 kilometers or more in thickness, but the core must contain minerals, such as serpentine, that form through interactions between rock and water. Astrobiologists think that water-rock interactions could provide energy and nutrients for life (SN: 5/19/15). The possibility of a somewhat soggy core could let life get a toehold at the fringes of the solar system, Denton says.
“It’s certainly not exactly a smoking gun,” she says. “But it’s exciting.”
The possibility that Pluto has a habitable ocean raises the odds that other Kuiper Belt objects do too, says planetary scientist James Tuttle Keene of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is a member of the New Horizons team but was not involved in either study.
“This lays out one of the coolest hypotheses that a future Pluto mission could test,” he says. “If Pluto can have an ocean and potentially be habitable, it’s very likely that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt also are ocean worlds and also are potentially habitable.”
They’re called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. Astronomers analyzed data from the Dark Energy Survey – which just completed 6 years of observations – to find over 100 new little worlds in the cold outer reaches of our solar system.
Computer-generated concept of the rotation of a trans-Neptunian object, in this case the small world we call Haumea. This little world is egg-shaped because of its fast rotation; its “day” is just under 4 hours long. Meanwhile, its “year” – or orbit around the sun – lasts about 285 Earth-years. Haumea is also known to have a ring and 2 tiny moons.
Objects like Haumea, depicted above, are minor planets, called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. They orbit in the cold outer reaches of our solar system, out beyond Neptune, taking hundreds of years to orbit the sun once. There are estimated to be perhaps 70,000 TNOs, each at least 60 miles (100 km) across. This month, astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania announced that they’ve successfully pinpointed over 100 new TNOs. As with all known planets, moons and minor planets in our solar system, each one of these little worlds is sure to be unique. The new study also outlines a new approach for finding even more of these far-off worlds.
The updated peer-reviewed findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series on March 10, 2020.
The results come from data obtained by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which just completed six years of observations this past January. DES’s focus, as the name implies, is to study dark energy, but it is also well-suited to finding TNOs and other smaller solar system objects beyond Neptune. DES typically looks at galaxies and supernovas, so the researchers needed to devise a new way to track movements of much smaller and closer objects. Grad student Pedro Bernardinelli, who led the study, said in a statement:
Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it’s easy to track them down. One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements.
Locations of the new TNOs discovered in the DES dataset from the first four years. The outline shows DES’s search range and the color of each dot shows how far away the object is in astronomical units (one AU is the sun-Earth distance, 93 million miles or 150 million km). Two of the detections were more than 90 AU, over 8 billion miles (13 billion km) away.
The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find.
So how did the researchers find all of these TNOs?
Images from the first four years of DES data contained about 7 billion “dots” that are all of the possible objects able to be detected by the DES software. But many of those would be data errors or larger objects like stars, supernovas or galaxies, which are actually much farther away. Bernardinelli removed any objects that were visible in the same locations on multiple nights, narrowing down the list to about 22 million candidates. He then looked at those objects to see if any of them formed pairs or triplets. That would help the researchers see where those objects might appear on subsequent nights.
That process whittled down the list of candidates much further still, down to about 400 objects. Bernardinelli said:
We have this list of candidates, and then we have to make sure that our candidates are actually real things.
Size comparison of the largest TNOs, including Pluto.
Some of those candidates might still not be actual TNOs, however. So how to figure out which ones are, if any?
The researchers looked for additional images of the objects of interest. According to Bernstein:
Say we found something on six different nights. For TNOs that are there, we actually pointed at them for 25 different nights. That means there’s images where that object should be, but it didn’t make it through the first step of being called a dot.
Another method to ferret out any real TNOs was to stack the images, creating a sharper view. This helped to further sort out real objects from false ones. Bernardinelli said:
The most difficult part was trying to make sure that we were finding what we were supposed to find.
In the end, 316 confirmed TNOs were found in the DES data. Of those, 145 are new objects, not previously discovered. These TNOs range from 30 to 90 times the distance of Earth from the sun. By comparison, Pluto, the best-known TNO (and dwarf planet), is 40 times that distance.
The Blanco Telescope dome at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The telescope used the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) for the Dark Energy Survey.
Finding over 300 TNOs overall is impressive, especially for a survey that isn’t even intended to look for them as a primary goal. The researchers think that as many as 500 may be found in the DES data once they rerun their analysis on the entire dataset. Also, the same techniques can now be used in additional astronomical surveys, such as by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Bernardinelli said:
Many of the programs we’ve developed can be easily applied to any other large datasets, such as what the Rubin Observatory will produce.
These kinds of datasets could even help scientists finally find the long-sought-after Planet Nine, a hypothetical giant planet about the size of Neptune that may orbit the sun in the extreme outer fringes of the star system, much farther than Pluto. By studying the orbits of additional newly-found TNOs, researchers might finally be able to determine Planet Nine’s location, if it does indeed exist. As Bernstein said:
There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet. Making the catalog is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource, you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.
PedroBernardinelli at University of Pennsylvania, who led the new TNOs study.
Even if Planet Nine isn’t found, however, the datasets of these intriguing little worlds will provide a wealth of new information about how they – and other planets, moons, asteroids and comets – first formed in the early history of our solar system.
Bottom line: Researchers using the Dark Energy Survey have found over 100 new minor planets beyond Neptune. They’re called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs.
One Scientist’s Alternate Theory If The UFOs Weren’t Created By Aliens
One Scientist’s Alternate Theory If The UFOs Weren’t Created By Aliens
JAZZ SHAW
We haven’t touched on this topic in a while, but in my desperate search to find some news (any news!) not having to do with the you-know-what, I ran across this interesting item. A physicist from the University of Albany and a former scientist for NASA, Kevin Knuth, was interviewed about his recent work involving unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAPs, or UFOs as I still insist on calling them). He shares a number of his thoughts about the subject, including the work he’s been doing analyzing the performance data of the objects seen in the Navy UFO videos that
Given the data showing that the objects can accelerate almost instantly, at roughly 5,000 times the base acceleration rate of gravity, the idea that we’re observing some sort of conventional advancement of current human technology is highly unlikely. Knuth says he isn’t completely “married” to the idea that these are definitely extraterrestrial in nature. That’s one possibility, but there’s another one out there worth considering. These might have been built by humans after all, just not humans that most of us are aware of. (Altamont Enterprise, emphasis added)
Before the coronavirus hit, Knuth was scheduled to give a lecture at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, where he would have presented the findings of his most recent study into the acceleration patterns of some of these unidentified crafts, which he says are up to 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity and indicate an unnatural, and inhuman, origin.
“That is the data,” Knuth said. “Now the trick is looking for an explanation.”
Knuth said that he’s not entirely married to the concept of these sightings as evidence of extraterrestrial life, acknowledging that there are two working hypotheses that he entertains while approaching each incident. One is that the encounters are perpetrated by extraterrestrials. The other, known as the “Wakanda hypothesis” in reference to the eponymous fictional kingdom in the Black Panther comic series, considers the possibility of an Earth-based civilization that has “extreme technology,” Knuth said.
“For me, it suggests that we missed some physics somewhere,” Knuth said on how he reconciles the still relatively unpopular field of UFO research with more mainstream branches of science.
Knuth isn’t just looking at the subject from his chalkboard at the university. He’s now a member of UAP eXpeditions, which we’ve discussed here previously. That means he’s working alongside the likes of Kevin Day (who was present at the USS Nimitz UFO incident) and quantum physicist Deep Prasad, who talked to us about UAP eXpeditions last year.
Later this spring, the group will be taking two ships out in the Pacific off the coast of southern California and Mexico and running tests to attempt to detect the presence of UFOs in the region. But how does the currently available data about the tic-tacs and orbs line up with the idea that these could be the property of human beings not associated with any terrestrial governments that we’re aware of?
This is the stuff of some real flights of fancy, but since everyone is on lockdown anyway, we might as well bat it around. Some of the folks in the ufology field are convinced of the realities of UFOs, but still believe that the vastness of space makes it unlikely that any other species would be able to reach us. I don’t tend to agree, but I suppose it’s still a plausible argument to put forward. So if the technology didn’t come from “somewhere else” but it also wasn’t cooked up by the United States, the Russians or the Chinese, who does that leave?
How about a conspiracy theory concept that’s been around for a long time? Maybe they were created by a breakaway civilization. It’s the idea that at some point in the past, a group of humans left the fold of humanity and went… somewhere else. (The most common proposition is that they went underground.) And there, they began developing amazing technologies in secret and raced ahead of the rest of us.
Before your eyes glaze over entirely, as I mentioned above, I’m not a proponent of this theory, though I find it highly entertaining. But here’s one thought to chew on that could tie the reports of the Nimitz encounters to this idea. If the UAPs keep showing up off the coast of southern California, is it possible that their owners have a base in the area? That would certainly be more convenient than having to commute back and forth between Earth and the Sirius star system, right? But how could there be such an advanced, technological base here on Earth without us having discovered it? Well… what if it’s underwater? Like way underwater.
It’s regularly been noted that we know more about the surface of Mars now than we do about the deeper bits of the ocean floor. And in the tale of David Fravor’s account of his encounter with the tic-tac, the full reports indicated that the craft (or one very like it) emerged from the water before it started flitting around in the sky. A second report claimed (I can’t verify this one yet) that one of our submarines operating in the area at the time, possible as part of the same training exercise, reported an underwater contact moving at unbelievable speeds on sonar. If we’re to accept that these things are real and they wanted to stay out of sight, a hole in the ocean floor might be a perfect choice, no?
As I said, this is mostly just a flight of fancy to entertain ourselves until UAP eXpedtiions finish their work and (hopefully) finds something. But if you don’t believe that these things were built by extraterrestrials and you don’t like the breakaway civilization theory, what’s left? I think at that point we’re down to time-traveling humans coming back to check on us from the distant future. Of course, if that’s the case, it’s still good news because it means that we eventually survive the thing I promised not to mention in this article. Stay safe out there, folks. (I mean, of course, safe from alien abductions.)
IMAGE: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY - MEHAU KULYK VIA GETTY IMAGES
A weird, unidentified X-ray signal radiating out of nearby galaxies has perplexed scientists ever since it was first detected in 2014. Now, a promising study into its origins has come up empty-handed, meaning that whatever is causing the faint signature is currently unknown to us and more mysterious than ever.
The origins of the faint glow, which emits 3.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV) of energy, are especially intriguing because the signal matches key predictions about the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance from which most of the universe is made. For years, scientists have debated whether the glow was long-sought evidence of a hypothetical particle that makes up dark matter. A clear answer to that question could finally unravel the true nature of dark matter, which is the “holy grail of astroparticle physics at the moment,” said Benjamin Safdi, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, in a call.
Well, Safdi and his colleagues have good and bad news on that front. The good news is that the researchers pioneered an innovative new method to search for dark matter around our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is outlined in a study published on Thursday in Science.
The bad news is that the hunt came up empty, and that effectively rules out dark matter as the source of the signal. “On the one hand, this was not the outcome that we were hoping for,” Safdi said. “We were certainly hoping to discover dark matter.”
“On the other hand, we’re really excited that we now have this better method to look for dark matter,” he added. “We didn’t discover dark matter this time, but there's no reason to think that we won’t in the future.”
Scientists know that dark matter exists because they can see its gravitational pull on galaxies and other radiant objects. But because this form of matter does not emit light, researchers are literally left in the dark about most of its properties.
Many theoretical models have been proposed to explain dark matter, such as the existence of a particle called a sterile neutrino. Scientists have suggested that sterile neutrinos might slowly decay in a somewhat similar process to radioactive particles here on Earth.
“We know that dark matter is pretty stable because it was created at the Big Bang and it’s still around today billions of years later," Safdi explained. “If it decays, it must decay very slowly.”
REPRESENTATION OF X-RAY EMISSION LINE CONCENTRATED AROUND THE CENTER OF THE MILKY WAY (IN BLACK AND WHITE).
IMAGE: ZOSIA ROSTOMIAN AND NICHOLAS RODD/BERKELEY LAB; AND CHRISTOPHER DESSERT AND BENJAMIN SAFDI/UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Even with a long half-life, this speculative decay of sterile neutrinos might produce a very small amount of light, which would mean that dark matter is not completely black. The 2014 study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal, appeared to detect exactly this type of signature, causing a major splash in the dark matter research community.
“There was pretty intense debate, over the years following this paper, trying to understand whether or not this emission was coming from dark matter or ordinary matter within these galaxies,” Safdi said.
Safdi had assumed that the question would be cleared up by the slick observational capabilities of Japan’s Hitomi satellite, an X-ray observatory that launched in 2016. But due to multiple malfunctions, Hitomi fell apart after just six weeks in space, and no equivalent replacement for it has filled the gap in X-ray observations since.
Though the loss was disappointing, Safdi and his colleagues soon began ruminating on other ways to study the 3.5 keV emission line. “We asked the question: What can we do with the existing data?” he recalled. “We realized that there was a very natural analysis to do with the data from the XMM Newton space telescope, which has been in the sky for over 20 years.”
The team searched through every image and datasat captured by XMM Newton, launched in 1999 by the European Space Agency. By removing the portions of images that contained luminous objects, Safdi and his colleagues were able to analyze two decades of negative “blank” sky.
If sterile neutrinos were decaying around the Milky Way, the signature would have been extremely bright in this dataset. Alas, the search revealed only empty space.
“That tells us very definitively that this line that was observed in other galaxies is not coming from dark matter decay,” Safdi said. “But that doesn’t mean that the 3.5 keV line doesn’t exist. Likely what is causing that emission is some currently unknown process going on within those galaxies that has to do with the ordinary matter, not the dark matter.”
It’s possible that the 3.5 keV emission is caused by specific elements within the hot gases of the galaxy clusters, or interactions between hot plasmas and cold gas clouds, according to the study.
Ultimately, the new results leave scientists with two mysteries to solve: the origins of this eerie glow and the true identity of dark matter. Safdi and his colleagues are optimistic that novel techniques and next-generation observatories will be able to constrain both of these tantalizing questions.
“The exciting thing right now about the field of dark matter is that, from a data-driven perspective, we have absolutely no idea what dark matter is at a real microscopic level,” Safdi said. “Sterile neutrinos are one model, but there are many other models out there.”
For most of us around the world, our way of life has significantly changed in the last few weeks. Although America is only recently being confronted with the global reality that is the current coronavirus pandemic, with more than 82,000 U.S. citizens infected it now has more confirmed cases than Italy, and even China, where the outbreak first emerged.
“As the number of known cases reached into the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands, life across the country has changed in swift, profound ways,” the New York Times reports alongside an updated map with numbers of infections per county across the country.
As the evolving coronavirus situation continues to keep us on edge, many industry leaders in virology, health care, technology, and the intelligence community say they were aware that such a pandemic was not only possible but that it was just a matter of time.
Business magnate and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been talking about the threat of future pandemics for years. Back in 2015, as concerns about the possible outbreak of Ebola were still fresh on our minds, he was looking ahead at the possibility that a future outbreak could indeed be far worse.
Bill Gates meeting U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis
(public domain).
“As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse,” Gates wrote about a TEDx talk he gave in 2015. “The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”
It was recently reported that Gates also advised President Trump on pandemic preparedness two years ago, saying that “The president was kind enough to spend time with me, and one of the issues I brought up is this opportunity to build new tools that would help us deal with a pandemic.”
Gates isn’t the only person who had been expressing such concerns.
In his recent book Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus, Virologist Robert G. Webster, an authority on avian flu, said in December that the next pandemic was “just a matter of time.”
Webster’s thoughts on such an imminent threat are prescient, to say the least:
“It is sobering to realise that, after nearly 100 years of studying the 1918 influenza, we still do not know precisely why the virus was such a killer; nor are we significantly better prepared to deal with a repeat event.
“Nature will eventually again challenge mankind with an equivalent of the 1918 influenza virus. We need to be prepared.”
A particularly sobering view was offered byJeremy Konyndyk, former director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under USAID, in a Politico article from 2017, where he noted that every U.S. President since Ronald Reagan has faced a similar health crisis:
“A major new global health crisis is a question of when, not if. Every president dating back at least to Ronald Reagan has dealt with major and unexpected outbreaks—HIV/AIDS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Zika. In recent years the world has been fortunate that these outbreaks have been either highly contagious (the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic infected up to 200 million people), or highly fatal (the H5N1 “bird flu” strain had a fatality rate of up to 60 percent)—but not both at once.”
However, it was what Konyndyk had to say about a future pandemic that was particularly sobering.
“At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge,” Konyndyk said, “like the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which infected one third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people.”
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease,” a 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment stated, “that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
The potential threat of such a virus has been an item of speculation and future forecasts for far longer than just the last decade, as other recentMUarticles have suggested. Many have even pointed out that in a 2008 book, the late psychic Sylvia Browne wrote that “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.”
It cannot be denied that Browne made such a prediction, although some take issue with the accuracy of the forecast, as Benjamin Radford recently noted:
Covid-19 is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness” (though it can in some cases lead to pneumonia)… Browne also says the disease she’s describing “resists all known treatments.” This does not describe Covid-19; in fact, doctors know how to treat the disease—it’s essentially the same for influenza or other similar respiratory infections.
However, the more fundamental takeaway here is that it didn’t require any psychic powers to see the threat potential of a future virus outbreak the likes of COVID-19. Experts from multiple areas of government and industry had warned us about it. Now that these concerns have become a reality, it is time to take action, and realize that things could certainly get worse before they get better.
Nonetheless, as with past pandemics like the 1918 Spanish Flu, it is also important to know that we, as humans, will get through this. We always do, and we should never underestimate human resilience in the face of a threat, no matter how bad things may be capable of getting. That, too, is important to remember in trying times like these.
There is probably no book of the Bible that annoys NASA more than the Book of Ezekiel. That’s the one with the flying chariot with a “wheel within a wheel” that has come to be known as Ezekiel’s wheel. This is the book which is stuck like glue to Erich von Däniken and the theory of ancient aliens – both of which inspired NASA engineer Josef F. Blumrich to write “The Spaceships of Ezekiel” while still employed by the agency, thus linking NASA to Ezekiel and his wheel – which Blumrich attempted to duplicate with his patented “Omnidirectional wheel.” Fans of ufology know that it’s a rare occasion when NASA acknowledges, let a lone addresses, a UFO sighting, yet that was the case this week when it gave an official explanation for a UFO which was being described as a – you guessed it – Ezekiel’s wheel. Was NASA just annoyed … or is it trying to hide something about this particular UFO?
Huge “Ezekiel’s Wheel” Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By STEREO A Camera. February 29, 2020
That’s the headline describing a video uploaded to YouTube by The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, who credits a “Vasco Fernandes” for spotting it on a video from the A camera of the STEREO Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) pair. (Watch the video here.)
These satellite were launched in 2006 and positioned ahead of and behind Earth in the same orbit to give stereoscopic images of the Sun and solar phenomena … and UFOs? Contact was lost with STEREO B in 2014 but STEREO A continues to broadcast … except when it’s interrupted by … NASA? That’s the assumption in the video’s narration, which highlights the appearance of the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” for a few seconds before the video cuts out. When it returns, the anomaly is gone and the narrator says:
“NASA’s gonna have to have some explaining for this.”
“Some people have noticed an odd shape, sort of a cross inside a circle, entering the field-of-view of the HI2 telescope on STEREO Ahead around February 20,2020. Eventually there is a cone shape that appears next to it. You can see the feature in question in this movie moving from right-to-left, just below the trapezoidal occulter on the right side of the image.
The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image. At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-A field-of-view from the left. Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector. This is not a coincidence. The strange looking geometrical “object” is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”
The “UFO” with NASA’s captions
Well, that explains it for everyone except the true believers in Ezekiel’s wheel – it’s Venus being reflected inside the telescope. It should make sense to anyone who knows a little about cameras (remember those?), lenses and optics. However, rather than leaving it at that, NASA sees it necessary to bring up something else.
“We have also gotten some questions about why the images from the most recent few days are of lower quality and are sometimes incomplete. This is because our data comes in two streams – highly compressed and lower quality but fast space weather beacon data, which are replaced after a few days with better science-quality images.” (– is NASA’s weird character stream.)
Hmm. Why would NASA, so historically unwilling to address any sort of unusual space anomalies, bring one up on its own? For those who watch these video feeds for such anomalies or just out of scientific curiosity, the fact that NASA actually has two visual feeds of the same area must be puzzling. And why has it suddenly switched to what it admits is a lower quality feed right after the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” appeared? Is there something to hide?
Sorry, NASA, that annoying Ezekiel’s wheel is not going away and neither are the dedicated watchers who wonder what you’re up to.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
