UFO was seen on Italian TV News during a broadcast coming from Rome

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12-05-2020 om 01:48 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious biological structure found inside the Martian meteorite Nakhla

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12-05-2020 om 01:43 geschreven door peter  

USO along the coast of Encinitas, California, then ascended and vanished

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12-05-2020 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

The most Incredibly Intriguing Skulls Ever Discovered

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12-05-2020 om 01:39 geschreven door peter  

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12-05-2020 om 01:15 geschreven door peter  

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12-05-2020 om 01:07 geschreven door peter  

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12-05-2020 om 00:51 geschreven door peter  

Scientists identify tiny satellite around an asteroid NASA's Lucy spacecraft will visit

By Meghan Bartels 

An artist's depiction of the Lucy spacecraft studying an asteroid.

(Image: © NASA)

NASA's Lucy asteroid mission already faced a busy itinerary with seven different space-rock targets. Now, the team has discovered that one of those asteroids has a tiny companion.

The realization came thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, which the team first recruited in 2018 to study a space rock called Eurybates. Like several of the other Lucy mission targets, Eurybates belongs to a group of asteroids known as Trojans, which occupy about the same orbit around the sun as Jupiter but cluster ahead of or behind the gas giant. Scientists had wondered whether Eurybates might have a companion, but combing through those 2018 Hubble images came up empty — until the researchers revisited the data in November 2019 and saw something.

"We asked for more Hubble time to confirm, and they gave us three tries," Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a co-discoverer of the Eurybates satellite, said in a statement. "In the first two observations in December we didn't see anything, so we began to think we might be unlucky. But on the third orbit, there it was." That third orbit came in early January.

• Related: Photos: Asteroids in deep space

Scientists working on the Lucy mission hope to get another look at the satellite next month, when it comes back into Hubble's view for the first time since the discovery was confirmed in January. In the meantime, they are focused on using what data they have to pin down the satellite's orbit around Eurybates, which should increase the odds of successfully observing it during the next attempt.

What the researchers know so far suggests that the newly identified space rock is truly tiny: because the object is more than 6,000 times fainter than Eurybates, the satellite is likely less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across, according to the statement.

The scientists on the Lucy mission hope that the newly discovered satellite — and the rest of the mission's Trojan tour — will help them understand how the solar system came to look the way it does. The Trojans are likely crumbs that slipped away during the formation of the gas giants and became trapped in these pockets of orbital stability, which means these space rocks should hold clues to the early days of the solar system.

Eurybates and its tiny companion may also be two pieces of a formerly larger space rock, the scientists suspect, which means studying the pair could help scientists understand what happens during solar system collisions.

"There are only a handful of known Trojan asteroids with satellites, and the presence of a satellite is particularly interesting for Eurybates," Thomas Statler, Lucy Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in the statement. "It's the largest member of the only confirmed Trojan collisional family — roughly 100 asteroids all traceable to, and probably fragments from, the same collision."

The discovery should not affect the plan for Lucy, according to NASA, although the team behind the mission will be evaluating the situation to be sure the spacecraft won't accidentally slip too close to the rock and smash itself to bits.

Lucy is currently scheduled to launch in October 2021 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and reach the first of its targets in 2027.

•  Solar system planets: Order of the 8 (or 9) planets 
•  This is NASA's best view yet (and closest, too!) of asteroid Bennu 
•  Scientists just watched a newfound asteroid zoom by Earth. Then they saw its moon. 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

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11-05-2020 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

Dead Cassini spacecraft could solve mystery of Saturn's hot atmosphere

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft is still helping scientists to explore Saturn, years after the spacecraft "died."

(Image: © NASA/JPL/ASI/University of Arizona/University of Leicester)

This insight not only helps scientists understand what is going on at Saturn, but perhaps also at gas giant planets in general. Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus all have strangely hot upper atmospheres as well. There are also numerous exoplanet gas giants far outside of our solar system that may exhibit similar behavior.

"The results are vital to our general understanding of planetary upper atmospheres, and are an important part of Cassini's legacy," study co-author Tommi Koskinen, a member of Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument team, said in a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Researchers previously used Cassini data to build a map of the temperature and density of Saturn's upper atmosphere, which was not well known before the spacecraft arrived at the planet in 2004. In this study, this map helped scientists to study how electric currents from Saturn's auroras heats the planet's upper atmosphere, generating the solar wind. The solar wind, in turn, distributes energy from the poles (where the auroras are located) towards the equator. That energy then heats the equator to twice the temperatures than could be generated from the sun's heat.

It's common for archival data from spacecraft like Cassini to continue providing new insights long after the craft are no longer operational. This particular dataset came from Cassini's final few months at Saturn when it did 22 very close orbits of the gas giant before deliberately hurling itself into the planet on Sept. 15, 2017 (to prevent possible Earthly contamination of Saturn's icy moons, which could host microbial life.) 

For six weeks, Cassini examined bright stars in the constellations Orion and Canis Major, watching as the stars rose and set behind Saturn. By observing the shifting starlight, scientists were able to learn more about the density of Saturn's atmosphere. Since density decreases with altitude, the rate of decrease is dependent on temperature, allowing scientists to estimate temperatures in Saturn's upper atmosphere. 

Cassini's observations showed the temperatures peaking around the auroras, in turn providing evidence that it is electric currents are what  Saturn's upper atmosphere so hot. Wind speeds on Saturn were also determined using density and temperature measurements.

A paper based on the research was published Monday (April 6) in Nature Astronomy. 

•  Cassini's Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring 'Rain' & Other Surprises 
•  Saturn's Moon Titan May Have 'Phantom Lakes' and Caves 
•  In Photos: Cassini Mission Ends with Epic Dive into Saturn 

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.  

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11-05-2020 om 23:35 geschreven door peter  

Recent Mufon Cases

1. The Mass Fleet Encounter of UFOs over Washington D.C. Capital (1952)

2.  Mufon Case: 108659 In the sky above Everett,Washington 5/7/2020

Long Description of Sighting Report

Myself and several others were enjoying the beach when these unknown objects kept appearing and reappearing with no sound, almost as if fading in and out from another dimension or cloaking or optical illusions. Not sure if it was military or not. It did not appear to be any aircraft I am familiar with but who knows. I just know I am unable to define what we all saw. We are near the Snohomish County/Paine Field airport and near Everett navy base.
https://mufoncms.com/cgi-bin/report_h...

3. MUFON Report Case Number 104601

A California witness at Menlo Park On Nov 20, 2019 spotted Blimp/ oval-like lights.
“I spotted a bright large blimp/oval like UFO. It was moving interestingly slow for a large object the Witness stated. The features were described as being strong white lights with a hint of yellow lights and a red blinking light at the bottom center of the craft. It appeared to have had a bulge on the top center. The front of the craft had a more rounded curve while the back had a sharper and smaller curve, almost egg-shaped. It took about 8 minutes to move NE to South. and was observed for 40 mins,

4. MUFON Report Case 103929 -

An Iowa witness at Cedar Rapids reported seeing a white light with rapidly flashing red and green lights on October 8,2019 at 9:58 pm. according to testimony. The witness stated “Out of our front window I saw a white light with rapidly flashing red and green lights all around it. It was moving slowly from the East and then seemed to pause. Here is the video we have on this.

{ Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)}

11-05-2020 om 23:10 geschreven door peter  

Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece

Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.

(Image: © NASA)

The voyage took several years. Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, and following a westerly course, the sailors observed the Sun as being on their right hand side, above the northern horizon. This observation simply did not make sense at the time because they didn’t yet know that the Earth has a spherical shape, and that there is a southern hemisphere.

1. The planets orbit the sun

A few centuries later, there had been a lot of progress. Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC) argued that the Sun was the “central fire” of the cosmos and he placed all of the then known planets in their correct order of distance around it. This is the earliest known heliocentric theory of the solar system.

Unfortunately, the original text in which he makes this argument has been lost to history, so we cannot know for certain how he worked it out. Aristarchus knew the Sun was much bigger than the Earth or the Moon, and he may have surmised that it should therefore have the central position in the solar system.

Nevertheless it is a jawdropping finding, especially when you consider that it wasn’t rediscovered until the 16th century, by Nicolaus Copernicus, who even acknowledged Aristarchus during the development of his own work.

2. The size of the moon

One of Aristarchus’ books that did survive is about the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. In this remarkable treatise, Aristarchus laid out the earliest known attempted calculations of the relative sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.

It had long been observed that the Sun and Moon appeared to be of the same apparent size in the sky, and that the Sun was further away. They realised this from solar eclipses, caused by the Moon passing in front of the Sun at a certain distance from Earth.

Also, at the instant when the Moon is at first or third quarter, Aristarchus reasoned that the Sun, Earth, and Moon would form a right-angled triangle.

As Pythagoras had determined how the lengths of triangle’s sides were related a couple of centuries earlier, Aristarchus used the triangle to estimate that the distance to the Sun was between 18 and 20 times the distance to the Moon. He also estimated that the size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of Earth, based on careful timing of lunar eclipses.

While his estimated distance to the Sun was too low (the actual ratio is 390), on account of the lack of telescopic precision available at the time, the value for the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon is surprisingly accurate (the Moon has a diameter 0.27 times that of Earth).

Today, we know the size and distance to the moon accurately by a variety of means, including precise telescopes, radar observations and laser reflectors left on the surface by Apollo astronauts.

3. The Earth's circumference

Eratosthenes (276BC to 195 BC) was chief librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, and a keen experimentalist. Among his many achievements was the earliest known calculation of the circumference of the Earth. Pythagoras is generally regarded as the earliest proponent of a spherical Earth, although apparently not its size. Eratosthenes’ famous and yet simple method relied on measuring the different lengths of shadows cast by poles stuck vertically into the ground, at midday on the summer solstice, at different latitudes.

The Sun is sufficiently far away that, wherever its rays arrive at Earth, they are effectively parallel, as had previously been shown by Aristarchus. So the difference in the shadows demonstrated how much the Earth’s surface curved. Eratosthenes used this to estimate the Earth’s circumference as approximately 40,000km. This is within a couple of percent of the actual value, as established by modern geodesy (the science of the Earth’s shape).

Later, another scientist called Posidonius (135BC to 51BC) used a slightly different method and arrived at almost exactly the same answer. Posidonius lived on the island of Rhodes for much of his life. There he observed the bright star Canopus would lie very close to the horizon. However, when in Alexandria, in Egypt, he noted Canopus would ascend to some 7.5 degrees above the horizon.

Given that 7.5 degrees is 1/48th of a circle, he multiplied the distance from Rhodes to Alexandria by 48, and arrived at a value also of approximately 40,000km.

4. The first astronomical calculator

The world’s oldest surviving mechanical calculator is the Antikythera Mechanism. The amazing device was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.

The device is now fragmented by the passage of time, but when intact it would have appeared as a box housing dozens of finely machined bronze gear wheels. When manually rotated by a handle, the gears span dials on the exterior showing the phases of the Moon, the timing of lunar eclipses, and the positions of the five planets then known (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) at different times of the year. This even accounted for their retrograde motion – an illusionary change in the movement of planets through the sky.-

We don’t know who built it, but it dates to some time between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, and may even have been the work of Archimedes. Gearing technology with the sophistication of the Antikythera mechanism was not seen again for a thousand years.

Sadly, the vast majority of these works were lost to history and our scientific awakening was delayed by millennia. As a tool for introducing scientific measurement, the techniques of Eratosthenes are relatively easy to perform and require no special equipment, allowing those just beginning their interest in science to understand by doing, experimenting and, ultimately, following in the foot steps some of the first scientists.

One can but speculate where our civilisation might be now if this ancient science had continued unabated.

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

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11-05-2020 om 22:17 geschreven door peter  

Kepler-88 has a new king! Planet three-times Jupiter's mass discovered in alien star system

11-05-2020 om 21:43 geschreven door peter  

Playing Asteroids is No Game: Humanity’s Future Could Depend on Diverting Asteroid Impacts

It isn't hyperbole to say, the survival of our species may depend on a sucessful me²thod of preventing an asteroid impact.

Earth is surrounded by thousands of Near-Earth Objects, a few of these are potentially hazardous, and fewer still which are classified as planet killers. An impact from the latter carries implications as severe the name suggests. Clearly, we need a method of diverting such objects. In fact, it isn’t hyperbole to say, the survival of our species may depend on it. 

News stories about massive objects skirting close to Earth are pretty common in the media, as a timely example, in April news organisations across the globe reported a mile-wide asteroid passing with just 3.9 miles of our planet. Fortunately, the rock identified as (52768) 1998 OR2, posed no real impact threat. 

Yet, our planet is scarred with the evidence of previous collisions with such objects. The most frequently thought of example is the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66-million-years-ago, the scale of which can be seen by examining the Chicxulub crater centred on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. 

The dinosaur destroying asteroid is estimated to have been around 10–15 km in width, but the crater it created was 150 km in diameter and the debris in threw into the atmosphere blacked out the Sun for months as well as triggering massive tidal waves which battered the entire continent of America and other deadly secondary effects. 

Even looking beyond the surface of our own planet, the Moon’s geology is strongly shaped by a history of asteroid impacts, as are the faces of other planets in the solar system.

The truth is the Earth exists within the vicinity of thousands of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), many of which carry the risk of colliding with our planet. If one of these asteroids — referred to as Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs) —did strike our planet, it could cause devastating effects including massive property and infrastructure damage, as well as significant loss of life. Within the population of PHOs is a smaller population of objects which could, much like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of all other animal life, trigger a major extinction event. 

It should be abundantly clear that developing a method of mitigating the impact of one of these objects by knocking off its collision course is imperative. Asteroid mitigation has been identified as one of NASA’s ‘Space Technology Grand Challenges’ — problems that require cutting -edge scientific solutions.  Indeed, many other institutions across the globe are working on their own mitigation strategies, each of which comes with its own unique pros and cons.

Should the possibility of an asteroid impact arise, the governments of Earth will be faced with a stark choice. Depending on a number of factors and characteristics they will have to choose between an instantaneous approach or a more gradual method .

Some of these methods and their potential successes and failures are listed below, starting with the more extreme, blunt solutions to asteroid mitigation.

The direct approach

There is probably nothing that constitutes ‘direct approach’ more than tossing a nuclear explosion at a problem. Thus, it may come as no surprise that many research hours have been devoted to devising a scheme in which an asteroid can be diverted with the aid of a nuclear weapon. 

The stark truth of the matter is, if the NEO is spotted on a collision course with Earth with less than 10 years warning, direct intercept with such a device may well be our only hope of diversion. Further to this, these ‘short lead time’ encounters are currently the most likely probable scenarios involving Earth and an encounter with a PHO. 

Hitting an asteroid with a nuclear weapon obviously provides mitigation by imparting energy to the object to divert it, even if only slightly. Another way of doing this is by slamming the PHO with another object. Instead of imparting nuclear energy, this kinetic impactor is a spacecraft that hits the PHO at a high velocity transferring momentum to it changing its velocity and hopefully diverting its course. 

Interestingly, this method requires the use of a reconnaissance craft to first map the characteristics of the PHO, such as its orbit, size, shape and rotation, even its chemical make-up so that the impact can be perfectly calibrated. One kinetic impactor system currently being researched is the NEOShield-2, which involves the reconnaissance craft launching together with the impactor. The two craft, initially stacked together, will separate with the reconnaissance craft hopefully reaching the asteroid first, and the impactor following through when details are collected.

In March last year, NASA unveiled early plans for a ‘best of both worlds’ mission that unites a kinetic impactor and nuclear device for the purpose of asteroid diversion. The Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) mission craft consists of a fore-body kinetic impactor which smashes into the asteroid, and an aft-body which when deposits a nuclear charge. The beauty of this arrangement is that if the impactor can create a crater in the asteroid, the nuclear blast will occur beneath the surface of the NEO, imparting more energy than a glancing blow could. 

Both of these missions are still at least ten years from reaching a viable testing-stage. And there is another, deeper problem.

The danger of any direct impact mission is that it could fragment the asteroid in question, especially as some asteroids are merely a loose conglomeration of smaller bodies. This could result in Earth being bombarded with a multitude of meteors — each causing untold destruction. Even worse, if the NEO in question has a core of pure iron, even a nuclear device/ kinetic impactor double-punch is unlikely to divert it.

This is the case if we have little notification of an asteroid’s impact — less than ten years, what if space agencies are granted more time to divert the PHO? 

Diverting asteroids — the gentle way

Methods that require a long lead time tend to be more gentle than short-lead time techniques, and interestingly, also tend to exploit our understanding of physics and energy way beyond that of kinetic energy alone. 

Perhaps the most well-known long-lead-time diversion method involves using gravitational energy to alter the orbit of a NEO. It’s also the most ‘gentle’ of even the long-lead-time methods, not even requiring contact with the asteroid. 

The idea is to place a spacecraft in orbit alongside a PHO over a period of many years or even decades. The gravitational influence of the gravity tractor gradually pulls the asteroid off course, thus preventing a close encounter with the earth. The gravity tractor method would work on asteroids of all compositions, and shapes, even if they are collections of smaller bodies, loosely gravitationally bound. There is a limit to the size of an asteroid that could be gravitationally pulled, however, making this a technique that is unlikely to tug a planet killer.

The theory behind gravity tractors is so robust and the control it allows is so precise, that it has even been suggested that the method could be used to place asteroids in positions where they could be beneficial for humanity — allowing them to be used for research or even commercial purposes. 

A less ‘contactless’ version of the gravity tractor approach, involves using an actual physical tether to divert the asteroid to a higher orbit. The tethered object would be smaller than the NEO and could either be a spacecraft launched from earth, or another NEO. The concept behind this method is that attaching the larger body to a smaller one changes the centre of mass of the body and thus adjusts its orbit. 

One potential drawback of the system is that is likely to require some pretty intensive surface operations, especially if the tether is to be attached to two NEOs. It also carries the risk of the tether becoming tangled, meaning before any operation was undertaken the motion of the PHO would have to be known precisely.

One of the most ‘out there’ ideas to divert an asteroid on course to strike the Earth involves spraying a thin layer of powdered paint on one side of an asteroid and allowing radiation from the Sun to alter the asteroid’s orbital path. The paint coating changes the amount of radiation reflected by the asteroid’s surface. This leads to unequal heating within the body, and thermal particles being ejected more strongly on one-side than the other. As a result, a strong net force is created which over the course of several years can shift the asteroid’s orbit. 

Again, these methods which are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of mitigation strategies, are still very much in the developmental phase, and moving them into the test stages could be a matter of some urgency. 

It’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’

“An asteroid collision would be something against which we have no defence… This is not science fiction; it is guaranteed by the laws of physics and probability.” 

 — Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to Big Questions, [2018].

If 2020 teaches humanity nothing else it should impart the lesson that we are simply not ready to deal with some of the hazards that nature can and will throw at us. If the strategies put in place to deal with a potential pandemic strike us as slap-shot, underwhelming and inadequate, the provisions taken thus far to prevent an asteroid strike fall considerably short of even this. 

The only real hope we have of diverting a PHO as things currently stand is spotting it well in advance and getting a satisfactorily long-lead time. But still, there is very little in the way of infrastructure in place to deal with such an eventuality.

Just as historians may one day look back at the MERS and SARS outbreaks as stark warnings of a coronavirus pandemic that governments around the world failed to take heed of, so too they may consider the close brush with 99942 Apophis as a warning to prepare for asteroid incursion.

The NEO with a diameter of 370 meters caused concern in December 2004 when observations indicated there was a 2.7% chance that on a future sweep past our planet in April 2029, it would strike the planet. Estimations changed between 2004 and 2006, first appearing that 99942 Apophis would miss both the Earth and the Moon, with the possibility that during the 2029 encounter it would pass through a gravitational keyhole, that would result in it impacting the planet in 2036. 

Fortunately, by 2008 it had been determined that the asteroid would both miss the Earth and the 1km gravitational keyhole that would shift it onto a collision course in 2036. As it currently stands, 99942 Apophis has a 1 in 150,000 chance of colliding with our planet in 2068. Pretty slim. But, unfortunately, 99942 Apophis is hardly the only PHO out there, and there are many that we have yet to discover. 

The Chelyabinsk meteor provides a stark example of such an unknown object. The object with a 20-meter diameter entered Earth’s atmosphere over Russia on 15th February 2013. Due to its high velocity and shallow entry angle, the meteor broke apart in an airburst at around 30 km over the Chelyabinsk Oblast. The energy it released was so potent that the airburst was brighter than the Sun, and could be seen from a distance of 62 miles away.

Over 1,500 people were injured as a result of the blast. 

Should it have actually hit the surface of our planet, impacting in a region with a population of 3.5 million people, it would have been the equivalent of the detonation of around 500 kilotonnes of TNT — around 33 times the energy released by the detonation of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. 

We had literally no idea it was there. We still don’t know where it came from.

The real key to asteroid mitigation is increased investment in space science and infrastructure. Developing mitigation strategies isn’t enough, as Chelyabinsk shows, we need to also focus on detection methods.

Hopefully, this is a lesson that won’t be learned in hindsight, because as Hawking predicted in his final work shortly before his death in 2018, this is inevitable. And as estimates made using Earth’s history as a guide, collisions with an object of the size of 99942 Apophis occur roughly once every 80,000 years. That means we are currently well-overdue. 

Sources and Further Reading 

• Sugimoto. Y, Radice. G, Ceriotti. M, et al, Hazardous Near-Earth asteroid mitigation campaign planning based on uncertain information on fundamental asteroid characteristics, Acta Astronautica, [2014]
• Foster. C, Bellerose. J, Mauro. D, et al, Mission concepts and operations for asteroid mitigation involving multiple gravity tractors, Acta Astronautica, [2013]
• Lu. E, The Project B612 Concept, ARC, [2012]
• Dearborn. D, 21st Century Steam for Asteroid Mitigation, ARC, [2012]
• Spitale. J. N, Asteroid Hazard Mitigation Using the Yarkovsky Effect, Science, [2012]
• Belton. M. J. S, Morgan T. H, Samarasinha N. H, Yeomans D. K, Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids, Cambridge University Press. 
• Hawking. S, Brief Answers to Big Questions, Hodder & Stoughton, [2018].
• Kinetic impactor
  The principle of the kinetic impactor mitigation method is that the NEO or Asteroid is deflected following an impact…www.neoshield.eu
• NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  By providing strategic guidance, the Strategic Integration (SI) Office in collaboration with Stakeholders from the…www.nasa.gov
• An Innovative Solution to NASA’s NEO Impact Threat Mitigation
  An Innovative Solution to NASA’s NEO Impact Threat Mitigation Grand Challenge and Flight Validation Mission…www.nasa.gov

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

11-05-2020 om 21:07 geschreven door peter  

First British astronaut Helen Sharman says aliens exist – and may be 'here right now'

Joshua Bote

The first British person to go into space said she believes aliens are real – and they may be among us.

Helen Sharman made history in May 1991 as the first Brit to go to space when she was launched on the spacecraft Soyuz for eight days and visited the Soviet-operated space station Mir. She told the Observer about her belief in extraterrestrial forces in an interview published Sunday.

“There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life,” she said.

She said the beings may not be made of carbon and nitrogen – two of the composite elements in the human body – but rather of materials unseen by the human eye.

 “It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them,” Sharman said.

Elsewhere in the interview, she pointed out the sexism in the assumption that the first British astronaut must have been a man. "People often describe me as the first British woman in space, but I was actually the first British person," she said. "It’s telling that we would otherwise assume it was a man."

Sharman, 56, is a chemist at Imperial College in London. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

Though Sharman may be one of the first astronauts to share their beliefs in the alien unknown so publicly, she isn't alone. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, when asked on Twitter if he believed in life outside Earth, responded “yes” – without any further context. 

• Follow Joshua Bote on Twitter: @joshua_bote

{ https://eu.usatoday.com/ }

11-05-2020 om 18:02 geschreven door peter  

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT COULD FIGHT A DISEASE THAT KILLS 600,000 IN THE US A YEAR

Whether peering back to the beginning of our universe, winning wars, or looking deep inside the human body at dangerous tumors, radar technology has been a reliable extension of human vision for decades. And at 80-years old, thanks to quantum physics, it's about to get even more precise.

Using a supercooled refrigerator and entangled quantum photons, a team of international researchers has designed a proof-of-concept radar that would be more sensitive and less invasive than today's typical models, especially in "noisy" thermal environments. The process is called "MICROWAVE QUANTUM ILLUMINATION."

The researchers say that this could spell big improvements down the road for ultra-low power and sensitive scanners, especially those used for human health. While radar may not be as associated with medical uses as stethoscopes, the technology is used to monitor conditions associated with some of the most deadly diseases in the U.S., including heartbeats, detect strokes, and even identify cancerous tumors. Helping to identify tumor growth alone could improve the lives of nearly 600,000 patients who die each year in the U.S. from cancer.

A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances describes how researchers were able to achieve this sensitivity by taking advantage of a famous property of quantum particles: entanglement.

"Quantum radar or quantum illumination uses a source of entangled microwave radiation, while classical radar uses coherent signals or classically correlated noise signals," lead researcher and professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Johannes Fink, tells Inverse.

Kind of like best friends with two separate halves of a friendship necklace, entangled quantum pairs are connected to each other even at great distances through residual physical attributes and interactions. That means that information detected by one part of the pair can affect the other, even if they are physically far apart -- something Einstein (fearfully) called "spooky action at a distance."

For Fink's team, this spooky action was paramount. Fink tells Inverse that they used a supercooled dilution refrigerator (kept at just over -450 degrees Fahrenheit) to generate a fickle pair of photons, one of which they called the "signal" photon and the other the "idler" photon. In order to take a "look" at any given object, the signal photon was sent out to scout and the idler photon lingered at its origin. Fink tells Inverse that by comparing the information of these two different photons in the pair they could gather precise information about objects in the radar's field.

"One part of the entangled signal is sent to probe an object and the other part of it is kept and stored. A small amount is reflected by the object and this part is also subject to environmental noise," says Fink. "The noisy signal can then be measured together with the stored part of the source signal. Because of the similarity of the two signals (due to the common origin and the strong quantum correlations) a more efficient detection is possible."

Even though the relationship between these photons isn't long-lasting, their joint information creates a signature or pattern of the object that cuts through any thermal noise that may be around it.

"Compared to classical correlated noise, quantum physics allows for stronger correlations to exist at the source, which helps by a certain amount even though the true entanglement is lost before the two signals are recombined (due to the noise)," says Fink.

But that said, while their study has demonstrated the possibility of creating a quantum radar like this, Fink tells Inverse that it's far from fool-proof yet.

In general, Fink says that quantum radars are primarily effective in noisy, close-range environments. Trying to achieve the same accuracy at a longer range wouldn't be possible due to the quantum nature of the photons. Additionally, Fink says that their system right now works best only when very careful calibration is applied to the system, making moving this technique out of the lab more challenging.

"This means we could show a proof of principle working prototype in the lab, but in practice - and without the applied calibration procedure - we would not have been able to outperform the theoretically strongest classical detection strategy," says Fink.

As these challenges continue to be met in years to come, Fink says he foresees two main ways this technology could be used in practice.

"We believe its usefulness is confined to short and medium range applications where the object is not supposed to know (security applications) or notice (sensitive objects like biological tissue) that it is being detected," says Fink.

Abstract: 

Quantum illumination is a powerful sensing technique that employs entangled signal-idler photon pairs to boost the detection efficiency of low-reflectivity objects in environments with bright thermal noise. The promised advantage over classical strategies is particularly evident at low signal powers, a feature which could make the protocol an ideal prototype for non-invasive biomedical scanning or low-power short-range radar. In this work we experimentally investigate the concept of quantum illumination at microwave frequencies. We generate entangled fields using a Josephson parametric converter to illuminate a room-temperature object at a distance of 1 meter in a free-space detection setup. We implement a digital phase conjugate receiver based on linear quadrature measurements that outperforms a symmetric classical noise radar in the same conditions despite the entanglement-breaking signal path. Starting from experimental data, we also simulate the case of perfect idler photon number detection, which results in a quantum advantage compared to the relative classical benchmark. Our results highlight the opportunities and challenges on the way towards a first room-temperature application of microwave quantum circuits.

{  https://www.inverse.com/ }

11-05-2020 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

HIGHEST RESOLUTION IMAGES OF JUPITER REVEAL ITS FIERY STORMS IN GREAT DETAIL

Jupiter's storms, including its famous Giant Red Spot, are made up of layers of gas that shift and tangle with swirling winds and a layer of dense clouds. Taken all together, they shroud the solar system's largest planet in mystery.

New images captured by the Gemini North Telescope reveal the tremulous, stormy world of Jupiter in all its fiery glory, and unlocking new data on the gas giant's lightning strikes and deep clouds.

The findings from the images were published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Using an intricate technique called 'lucky imaging,' the team of researchers behind the new images spent three years collecting observations of Jupiter, resulting in the highest resolution images of the planet ever obtained from Earth.

Lucky imaging is when a telescope captures a large number of images in a row, with short exposure time, and only the sharpest ones are selected, depending on the stability of Earth's atmosphere.

The resulting image shows Jupiter as a giant, carved out Halloween pumpkin, bursting with its violent winds in a fiery swirl that goes around the planet. The final image was compiled from a mosaic of nine separate observations.

Thick clouds appear dark in the infrared maps, while clearings appear bright.

“THESE IMAGES RIVAL THE VIEW FROM SPACE.”

The longer wavelength infrared light of the Gemini telescope goes through the thin haze of Jupiter's atmosphere, but is obscured by thicker clouds high in the atmosphere. That's why the warm, deep layers of the planet's atmosphere glow through the gaps of its thick cloud cover.

“These images rival the view from space,” Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley, who led the team behind the new images, says in a statement. “The Gemini data were critical because they allowed us to probe deeply into Jupiter’s clouds on a regular schedule.”

The researchers then combined the new images with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Juno spacecraft of Jupiter in order to better understand the planet's violent storms.

These violent storms, like the Great Red Spot, and other, high pressure, anticyclones are part of what makes Jupiter stand out, beyond its heavyweight crown as the largest planet by a long shot.

Previous observations of the Great Red Spot revealed dark spots, which researchers had interpreted as different variations in the color of the clouds. However, the new observations revealed that these dark spots are actually gaps in the cloud cover.

The gaps appeared as bright infrared hotspots. If they had been thick clouds, then the infrared glow, from Jupiter’s internal heat, would have been blocked by them.

By combining the three sets of data, the researchers were also able to investigate the structure of the clouds. They found that the storms' lightning strikes, and some of the largest storm systems that create them, are formed in and around large convective cells over deep clouds of water ice and liquid, according to the researchers.

“Scientists track lightning because it is a marker of convection, the turbulent mixing process that transports Jupiter's internal heat up to the visible cloud tops,” Wong says. “Ongoing studies of lightning sources will help us understand how convection on Jupiter is different from or similar to convection in the Earth's atmosphere.”

Abstract: 

Imaging observations of Jupiter with high spatial resolution were acquired beginning in 2016, with a cadence of 53 days to coincide with atmospheric observations of the Juno spacecraft during each perijove pass. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) collected Jupiter images from 236 to 925 nm in 14 filters. The Near-Infrared Imager (NIRI) at Gemini North imaged Jovian thermal emission using a lucky-imaging approach (co-adding the sharpest frames taken from a sequence of short exposures), using the M' filter at 4.7 μm. We discuss the data acquisition and processing and an archive collection that contains the processed WFC3 and NIRI data (doi:10.17909/T94T1H). Zonal winds remain steady over time at most latitudes, but significant evolution of the wind profile near 24°N in 2016 and near 15°S in 2017 was linked with convective superstorm eruptions. Persistent mesoscale waves were seen throughout the 2016–2019 period. We link groups of lightning flashes observed by the Juno team with water clouds in a large convective plume near 15°S and in cyclones near 35°N–55°N. Thermal infrared maps at the 10.8 micron wavelength obtained at the Very Large Telescope show consistent high brightness temperature anomalies, despite a diversity of aerosol properties seen in the HST data. Both WFC3 and NIRI imaging reveal depleted aerosols consistent with downwelling around the periphery of the 15°S storm, which was also observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. NIRI imaging of the Great Red Spot shows that locally reduced cloud opacity is responsible for dark features within the vortex. The HST data maps multiple concentric polar hoods of high-latitude hazes.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

11-05-2020 om 17:27 geschreven door peter  

There have been countless UFO sightings and encounters over the decades, which have taken all shapes and sizes. There seems to be no agreed upon norm for how a UFO should look, and while saucer-shaped or spherical are the most common, they really do run the range of appearances. And then you have the sizes reported, from tiny to very large. How big would you say a UFO would have to be before it would be considered truly imposing? As big as a bus? An airliner? How about larger still? What would you think of a UFO the size of a football field or even beyond? While rare, there have been some reports of UFOs of these sorts of dimensions, and here we will look at some of the biggest ever reported.

The earliest case we will look at here comes to us from 1956, an era during which the UFO and flying saucer craze was in full swing. It was originally related by a Major Donald E. Keyhoe, who at the time was first heard the story in 1959, during which time he had been serving as Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Keyhoe was approached by a Navy Captain James Taylor, who had a remarkable story to tell, one which he had long sought to keep out of the public eye. According to Taylor, in 1956 he had been aboard a Navy R7V-2 transport piloted by a Commander George Benton and co-piloted by Lieutenant Peter W. Mooney, on a flight across the Atlantic towards Naval Air Station, Patuxent, Maryland, in the United States, along with several other Navy men returning from duty abroad, several dozen crew members, and 30 airmen-pilots, navigators and flight engineers. On this evening they were approaching a stop at Gander, Newfoundland, under reportedly clear and calm conditions with excellent visibility when a series of bizarre events would play out.

As Benton looked out over the tranquil sea, he noticed that rather than within the dark expanse that spread out to the horizon unmarred before, there was now a “cluster of lights, like a village” out in the distance ahead. It turned out that the co-pilot could clearly see it too, and they both agreed it looked like a small town just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere. The problem was, there should have been nothing out there but open water. At first, they thought they must be off course and that they were approaching land, but a check of their instruments showed that they were right on course as planned. It was then speculated that they were seeing ships, but attempts to radio the vessels were met with silence, and a check with his radio man turned up no records of any groups of ships scheduled to be out there. It didn’t help that these didn’t look like any ships they had seen before. It was weird enough that they woke some of the other crew members, most of who had been asleep, and several other men crowded into the cockpit to see the strange sight for themselves. They were now practically right on top of the enigmatic lights, and began to circle around them in order to try and figure out what was going on. That was when the cluster of lights suddenly dimmed, and Keyhoe would write of it:

As the transport began to circle, the strange lights abruptly dimmed. Then several colored rings appeared, began to spread out. One, Benton noticed, seemed to be growing in size. Behind him, someone gave an exclamation. Benton took another look. That luminous ring wasn’t on the surface – it was something rushing up toward the transport.

“What the devil is it?” said Mooney. “Don’t know,” muttered Benton. He rolled the Constellation out of its turn to start a full-power climb. Then he saw it was useless. The luminous ring could catch them in seconds. The glow, he now saw, came from the rim of some large, round object. It reached their altitude, swiftly took shape as a giant disc-shaped machine.

Whatever it was, it was enormous. The plane they were on is called a Super-Constellation, an enormous four-engine aircraft more like a flying fortress than a plane, 116 feet long and with a 117-foot wingspan, and this mystery object reportedly absolutely dwarfed it, by Benton’s estimation clocking in around 400 feet in diameter. It was coming up fast, and the plane banked in an evasive maneuver, but right when collision seemed inevitable, the object swung around to the side of their aircraft and began pacing them on the port side. It was then that they could see the true enormity of it, and Keyhoe says:

Its sheer bulk was amazing; its diameter was three to four times the Constellation’s wing span. At least thirty feet thick at the center, it was like a gigantic dish inverted on top of another. Seen at this distance, the glow along the rim was blurred and uneven. Whether it was an electrical effect, a series of jet exhausts or lights from opening in the rim, Benton could not tell. But the glow was bright enough to show the disc’s curving surface, giving a hint of dully reflecting metal. Though Benton saw no signs of life, he had a feeling they were being observed. Fighting an impulse to dive away, he held to a straight course. Gradually, the strange machine pulled ahead. Tilting its massive shape upward, it quickly accelerated and was lost against the stars.

After this harrowing experience, Benton immediately called the tower on the ground and asked if they had picked up anything strange, and they confirmed that the object had been picked up on their radar, but things got very odd when they landed at Granger. According to Taylor, they were met by Air Force intelligence officers who gave them lengthy interrogations about what they had seen and seemed to believe that is was all fact, never questioning what the men saw, but rather wanting details. After that the mysterious officers refused to answer any questions about what they themselves thought was going on, and told the crew who had witnessed the phenomena to keep quiet about it. Benton would claim to be approached by an unnamed scientist several days later, who showed him photographs of the object they had seen but refused to divulge any more information on it. The report would be drawn out of obscurity in the Flying Saucer Review, Volume 49/2, Summer 2004, pp. 21-23, and we are left to wonder just what those men saw out there.

More recently there was a rather bizarre report from 1996, in the area of Pelotas, Brazil. On November 5 of that year, Brazilian pilot Haroldo Westendorf was out for a private flight in his single engine Embraer EMB-712 aircraft. Haroldo was an avid private pilot and flight acrobat, and this was purely a recreational flight, yet it would become quite a harrowing experience after just 12 minutes in the air. At around 10:30 AM, the pilot was making his way across a nearby lake, when he noticed before him a gigantic object hovering in the air. After checking with ground control that they saw it too, Haroldo then made the perhaps foolish decision to approach for a closer look. It would turn out to be far more bizarre than he had ever expected.

Upon closing the distance, he could see that it was some sort of immense 8-sided pyramid-shaped object, estimated as being about 70 meters (225 feet) high and about 100 meters (325 feet) in diameter, and Haroldo would report that he got a good look at it, circling it several times at a distance of only 40 meters. He claimed that each side of the pyramid had upon it a series of opaque triangular bay windows, and that the object was seemingly metallic and brown in color. The massive structure also seemed to be spinning very slowly, and inexorably inching towards the nearby coast at an estimated speed of about 60 nautical miles per hour. As the pilot stared at this massive object in awe, it then purportedly disgorged a smaller, disc-shaped craft from an opening in its top, which completely ignored the plane and sped off at incredible speed.

Sketch of the object

Haroldo then gained altitude in order to get a look at the top of the monolithic object, but as he did so it allegedly began spinning more rapidly as it shot off ominous beams of red light. After several moments of this, this enormous pyramid then purportedly shot straight up into the sky at a very rapid pace, which was quite alarming as the pilot fully expected a possibly catastrophic shockwave of turbulence. He even began evasive maneuvers for the expected incoming wall of turbulence, but he claims it never came, as if the craft had defied the laws of physics. The story gained quite a bit of media attention in Brazil at the time, but although Haroldo would claim that it had been witnessed by at least two air traffic control installations, they denied seeing anything. Despite this, several witnesses would step forward to say that they had seen it as well, and we are left to wonder if he saw anything at all or if there was some sort of cover-up.

Even more recently still is a report from April of 2007, and is the possibly the biggest UFO of all of these. Experienced pilot Captain Ray Bowyer was flying off the coast of Alderney, of the Channel Islands, when he spotted a bright yellow light about to the west of the island. It was hard to tell what it was, but it was clear that it was absolutely gigantic. Bowyer would say of the strange object:

It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realized it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a 737. But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide. I can’t explain it. At first, I thought it might have been a reflection from a vinery in Guernsey, but that would have disappeared quickly. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes. As I got closer to it, it became clear to me that it was tangible. I was in two minds about going towards it to have a closer look but decided against it because of the size of it. I had to think of the safety of the passengers first.

He would later spot an identical object in another area, and it would also become clear that at least one of the objects had been spotted by another pilot, although ground control radar did not detect them. Interestingly, several years earlier, on January 28, 1994, a similar object had been seen in roughly the same general vicinity, and had been estimated as being over 1,000 feet in diameter. What are these craft and why are they so impossibly huge? Besides the obvious technological marvels that must be in place to allow them to operate, what is their purpose? Are these perhaps motherships holding the smaller craft that are more commonly seen? Or are they something else? Size may not matter, but whatever they are, they add another layer to the strangeness of the UFO phenomenon as a whole.

Videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

11-05-2020 om 13:25 geschreven door peter  

Young Boy In Philippines Records UFO During Day In Video, May 6, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: May 6, 2020
Location of sighting: Philippines

A young boy was recording the sky from his rooftop when he noticed a white disk high above his home. The object sits in a clear blue sky without a single cloud visible. The UFO appears to be disk shaped and white, but not a cloud. These types of UFOs often make clouds to hide inside of or dart from cloud to cloud as they watch and record all things on the ground and in the sky. This one is helpless since its a cloudless sky and it got caught out in the open. An awesome and rare report from the Philippines and defiantly 100% real UFO. 

This kid caught it because he tried, he put effort into something that most would not attempt. What is the quote...and a child shall lead them.
Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

11-05-2020 om 12:45 geschreven door peter  

Daytime UFO over Pearland, Texas – 2018

This daytime UFO sighting was filmed in the sky above Pearland in Texas. This happened back in 2018 (30th November) but it was just recently submitted to MUFON.

Witness report: 

I noticed the orb in the sky moving west to east, while the prevailing winds were east to west. The area is approximately over Houston hobby airport. I noticed the orb moved from west to east until it disappeared into a cloud. I do not believe this to be a balloon as it was quite large In the sky, considering the distance and as I mentioned previously it was moving contrary to the prevailing winds.

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

11-05-2020 om 12:36 geschreven door peter  

Chaos reigns in detailed new views of Jupiter's icy moon Europa

11-05-2020 om 01:33 geschreven door peter