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...
01-11-2020
UFO Sightings in Belgium, Poland, California
UFO Sightings in Belgium, Poland, California
Recent UFO sightings have been reported in Belgium, Poland, California: Fast moving ball of light, weird bird like a winged reptile, spinning Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon in a fixed position.
At first, I thought it was a kite, but after a short while, I realized it is something else, it looks like a large bird like a winged reptile named pterosaur.
It was one of those “big, if true” stories. In September, scientists reported that Venus’ atmosphere seems to be laced with phosphine, a possible sign of life.
Now there’s increasing emphasis on the “if.” As scientists take fresh looks at the data behind the Venus announcement, and add other datasets to the mix, the original claim of inexplicable amounts of phosphine is being called into doubt. And that’s a good thing, many scientists say.
“It’s exactly how science should work,” says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who studies Venus but was not involved in any of the phosphine papers. “It’s too early to say one way or the other what this detection means for Venus.”
Here’s a closer look at efforts to get from “if” to “true:”
The big claim
On September 14, astronomer Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales and colleagues reported that they had seen signs of phosphine in Venus’ clouds using two different telescopes (SN: 9/14/20). The phosphine seemed to be too abundant to exist without some kind of source replenishing it. That source could be strange microbes living in the clouds, or some weird unknown Venusian chemistry, the team said.
Greaves and colleagues first spotted phosphine with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and followed up with the powerful ALMA telescope array in Chile. But those ALMA data, and particularly the way they were handled, are now being called into question.
Reading the data: Real molecules or random wiggles?
The key Venus observations were spectra, or plots of the light coming from the planet in a range of wavelengths. Different molecules block or absorb light at specific wavelengths, so searching for dips in a spectrum can reveal the chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.
Phosphine showed up as a dip in Venus’ spectrum at about 1.12 millimeters, a wavelength of light that the molecule was thought to be absorbing. If Venus’ spectrum could be drawn as a straight line across all wavelengths of light, phosphine would make a deep valley at that wavelength.
But real data are never that easy to read. In real life, other sources — from Earth’s atmosphere to the inner workings of the telescope itself — introduce wiggles, or “noise,” into that nice straight line. The bigger the wiggles, the less scientists believe that the dips represent interesting molecules. Any particular dip might instead be just a random, extra-large wiggle.
That problem gets even worse when looking at a bright object such as Venus with a powerful telescope like ALMA, says Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Cordiner uses ALMA to observe other objects in the solar system, like Saturn’s moon Titan, but was not involved in the Venus work.
“The reason those bumps and wiggles are here at all is because of the intrinsic brightness of Venus, which makes it difficult to get a reliable measurement,” Cordiner says. “You could think of it as being dazzled by a bright light: If there’s a bright light in your vision, then your ability to pick out fainter details becomes diminished.”
So astronomers do a few different things to smooth out the data and let real signals shine through. One strategy is to write an equation that describes the wiggles caused by the noise. Scientists can then subtract that equation from the data to highlight the signal they’re interested in, like fuzzing out the background of a photo to let a portrait subject pop. That’s a standard practice, says Cordiner.
But it’s possible to write an equation that fits the noise too well. The simplest equation one could use is just a straight line, also known as a first-order polynomial, described by the equation y=mx+b. A second-order polynomial adds a term with x squared, third-order with x cubed, and so on.
Greaves and colleagues used a twelfth-order polynomial, or an equation with twelve terms (plus a constant, the +b in the equation), to describe the noise in their ALMA data.
“That was a red flag that this needed to be looked at in more detail, and that the results of that polynomial fitting could be untrustworthy,” says Cordiner. Going all the way out to the power of 12 could mean a researcher subtracts more noise than is truly random, allowing them to find things in the data that aren’t really there.
To see if the researchers were a little overzealous in their polynomial fitting, astrophysicist Ignas Snellen, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues reapplied the same noise reduction recipe to the ALMA data on Venus and found no statistically significant sign of phosphine, they report in a paper posted at arXiv.org on October 19.
Then the researchers tried the same noise filtering on other parts of Venus’ spectrum, where no interesting molecules should be found. They found five different signals of molecules that aren’t really there.
“Our analysis … shows that at least a handful of spurious features can be obtained with their method, and therefore [we] conclude that the presented analysis does not provide a solid basis to infer the presence of [phosphine] in the Venus atmosphere,” the team wrote.
Looking for other data — and getting no help yet
Meanwhile, scientists at ALMA discovered a separate, unspecified issue in the data that were used to detect the phosphine and took those data off the observatory’s public archive to scrutinize and reprocess, according to a statement from the European Southern Observatory, of which ALMA is a part.
“This does not happen very often,” says Martin Zwaan of the ESO ALMA Regional Center in Garching, Germany, but this isn’t a first. When issues are discovered, it is standard practice to reprocess the data. “In many cases, it does not affect the science outcome significantly,” Zwaan says. “In the case of the phosphine on Venus, this [outcome] has not been established yet.”
What can scientists do while they wait? One of the best ways to confirm the phosphine is to see an equivalent signal at a different wavelength in Venus’ spectrum. Unfortunately, the news isn’t great there either. In a paper to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomer Thérèse Encrenaz of the Paris Observatory and colleagues (including Greaves and some other authors of the original paper) looked at archived data from an infrared spectrograph called TEXES that operates in Hawaii. Those observations could have spotted phosphine in Venus’ cloud tops, a lower part of the sky than what ALMA could see.
Greaves and colleagues had approached Encrenaz to look for phosphine in infrared wavelengths before the original paper came out, but those observations were cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. So Encrenaz looked through data she had collected between 2012 and 2015 — and found nothing.
“At the level of the cloud tops, there is no [phosphine] at all,” Encrenaz says. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no phosphine higher up in the sky — there’s just no clear explanation for how it would get there. “The reasoning in the paper by Jane Greaves was that phosphine was coming from the clouds,” Encrenaz says. “So there is a big problem.”
‘This is just what science looks like.’
There are still ways for Venus’ phosphine to pull through. If it varies with time, for instance, it might be there some of the times that astronomers look and not at others. It’s too early to invoke that scenario, though, Cordiner says. “There’s no point of talking about the time variability of a signal if it isn’t there.”
But this is not a crisis, says Clara Sousa-Silva, an astrochemist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and a coauthor of the original paper. Other groups challenging the finding “is completely normal and what I expected (nay, hoped) would happen,” she wrote in an e-mail. “This is usually a phase of a project that I enjoy, and I am hoping people will realize this is just what science looks like.”
The silver lining in all of this is that it’s gotten people excited about Venus, says Byrne, who is a member of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group.
“These papers provide much value and a needed assessment of these extraordinary claims,” he says. “If nothing else, it has shone a light on just how little we understand about Venus. And the only way we get those answers is if we go to Venus.”
OP AARDE NEERGESTORTE METEORIET BLIJKT WONDERBAARLIJK VEEL ONGEREPTE BUITENAARDSE ORGANISCHE VERBINDINGEN TE BEVATTEN
OP AARDE NEERGESTORTE METEORIET BLIJKT WONDERBAARLIJK VEEL ONGEREPTE BUITENAARDSE ORGANISCHE VERBINDINGEN TE BEVATTEN
Vivian Lammerse
De steen werd zo’n 12 miljoen jaar geleden weggeworpen en blijkt te bestaan uit duizenden organische verbindingen.
Op 16 januari 2018 verscheen over het Midden-Westen van de Verenigde Staten een heldere vuurbol aan de nachtelijke hemel. De meteoor haastte zich door de lucht en landde vervolgens op een bevroren meer in de Amerikaanse staat Michigan. Wetenschappers en meteorietjagers wisten niet hoe snel ze zich naar de landingsplek moesten begeven om de brokstukken op te rapen, voordat de chemische samenstelling door blootstelling aan vloeibaar water zou worden aangetast. Ze kwamen op tijd. Want de neergestorte meteoriet geeft onderzoekers nu een ongekend inkijkje in een miljoenen jaren oude ruimterots.
Meteoroïde, meteoor of meteoriet? Meteorieten zijn simpel gezegd ruimterotsen die op aarde zijn gevallen. Wanneer rotsbrokken in de ruimte tegen elkaar botsen, kunnen er stukjes afbreken. Deze stukjes rots, meteoroïden genaamd, blijven door de ruimte zweven en komen soms op ramkoers te liggen met planeten of hun manen. Wanneer een meteoroïde door de atmosfeer van de aarde scheert en we hem vervolgens als een vuurbol of vallende ster waarnemen, wordt hij een meteoor genoemd. Alle stukjes van die meteoor die de reis door de atmosfeer overleven en op het aardoppervlak neerstorten, noemen we meteorieten.
Minder dan twee dagen na de landing vond meteorietjager Robert Ward het eerste stukje van de meteoriet op het bevroren oppervlak van Strawberry Lake, nabij de Amerikaanse plaats Hamburg. “Ik heb het hele weekend de meteoriet geanalyseerd, omdat ik zo benieuwd was wat voor soort meteoriet ik onder ogen had en waar hij precies uit bestond,” vertelt onderzoeker Jennika Greer. “Bij elke meteoriet die valt bestaat de kans dat het iets compleet nieuws en totaal onverwachts is.” De onderzoekers ontdekten dat de meteoriet een zogenoemde H4-chondriet is. En dat is zeldzaam. Slechts vier procent van alle meteorieten die op aarde inslaan, kunnen onder dit type geschaard worden.
Geluk De wetenschappers hadden geluk. Omdat de meteoriet neerkwam op een bevroren meer, behield hij zijn ongerepte aard. “Doordat het meer bevroren was is ie nooit in contact geweest met vloeibaar water,” vertelt onderzoeker Philipp Heck aan Scientias.nl. “Hierdoor is hij niet echt verontreinigd geraakt met terrestrische organische stoffen. Meteorieten lopen vaak scheurtjes op en eenmaal geland kan vloeibaar water gemakkelijk deze scheurtjes binnendringen. De Hamburg-meteoriet is echter één van de weinige meteorieten die dit lot heeft kunnen ontwijken. Dat is wat deze meteoriet zo opmerkelijk maakt.”
De betreffende meteoriet die in 2018 neerkwam op het Strawberry Lake in de Amerikaanse staat Michigan.
Afbeelding: Field Museum
De onderzoekers ontdekten dat de Hamburg-meteoriet een rijke voorraad buitenaardse organische verbindingen bevat. “Ik vond het verbazingwekkend hoeveel organische verbindingen er nog in deze meteoriet zaten, ondanks zijn thermische metamorfose,” zegt Heck. “Deze meteoriet bevat echt duizenden organische verbindingen. Dit soort organische verbindingen zijn waarschijnlijk door meteorieten aan de vroege aarde geleverd en hebben mogelijk bijgedragen aan de bouwstenen voor leven.”
Superpizza De gevonden verbindingen zijn waarschijnlijk zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar geleden in het moederlichaam gevormd, direct nadat deze het levenslicht zag. “Hij was op dat moment nog heet door aanwas en door het verval van radioactieve elementen die aanwezig waren in het vroege zonnestelsel,” legt Heck uit. Waarschijnlijk bevatte het moederlichaam miljoenen verbindingen die uiteindelijk, mede door temperatuurschommelingen, kelderden tot enkele duizenden. De onderzoekers gebruikten een breed scala aan analytische technieken en bestudeerden monsters uit verschillende delen van de meteoriet om een zo volledig mogelijk beeld van de ruimtebrok en de mineralen die hij bevat, te scheppen. “Je leert veel meer over een meteoriet als je verschillende stukjes ‘proeft’,” vertelt Greer. “Het is net een superpizza. Als je maar naar een klein stukje proeft, zou je kunnen denken dat de pizza alleen uit peperoni bestaat. Maar er kunnen ergens anders nog champignons en paprika’s te vinden zijn.”
Organische verbindingen De onderzoekers kwamen op die manier veel ongerepte, buitenaardse organische verbindingen op het spoor. “De organische verbindingen die we in de neergestorte meteoriet aantroffen, zijn in methanol oplosbare verbindingen,” gaat Heck verder. “De meest voorkomende zijn polaire koolwaterstoffen, gevolgd door zwavel- en stikstofhoudende verbindingen. We moeten echter nog veel werk verzetten om de verschillende verbindingen en processen die de organische stoffen hebben doorstaan, beter te begrijpen.”
Leven op aarde De meteoriet geeft ons een uniek inkijkje in de ongerepte organische verbindingen die ons meer zouden kunnen vertellen over de oorsprong van het leven. Veel wetenschappers denken namelijk dat meteorieten belangrijke mineralen naar de aarde gebracht kunnen hebben, waar uiteindelijk het leven zoals wij dat kennen uit voort is gekomen. “Ik denk dat het feit dat we alleen al in de Hamburg-meteoriet 2600 organische verbindingen hebben aangetroffen, aantoont dat veel meteorieten organische stoffen kunnen afleveren,” zegt Heck. “In onze studie troffen we een grote diversiteit aan organische stoffen aan. Er bestaan echter ook meteorieten, zoals de Murchison-meteoriet die 51 jaar geleden neerstortte, die veel minder heet zijn geweest en rijker zijn aan organische stoffen. Het zou goed kunnen dat zelfs ver voordat leven op aarde bestond, dergelijke meteorieten op aarde – en mogelijk ook op andere planeten – neerploften en bouwstenen voor leven afleverden.”
Meer over de Murchison-meteoriet De Murchison-meteorietis een grote meteoriet die in 1969 op de aarde neerplofte nabij Murchison in de staat Victoria in Australië. Het is een van de meest bestudeerde meteorieten vanwege zijn massa en omdat deze tot een groep meteorieten behoort die rijk is aan organische verbindingen. De Murchison-meteoriet – die ouder is dan de zon – blijkt namelijk organische moleculen, en dus bouwstenen van leven te bevatten. Hierdoor geeft de steen een goed beeld van hoe het zonnestelsel er in het begin uitzag.
Waar de Hamburg-meteoriet ooit het levenslicht zag? “We kwamen erachter dat de Hamburg-meteoriet ongeveer 12 miljoen jaar geleden uit zijn moederlichaam werd geworpen voordat hij in 2018 op het bevroren Strawberry Lake neerkletterde,” zegt Heck. “De meteoriet vond waarschijnlijk zijn oorsprong in de planetoïdengordel die zich ruwweg tussen de planeten Mars en Jupiter bevindt. We ontdekten dat de laatste belangrijke thermische gebeurtenis op het moederlichaam van de Hamburg-meteoriet ongeveer 3 miljard jaar geleden plaatsvond.”
Volgens de onderzoekers heeft de studie meerdere implicaties. “Het laat zien dat elke meteoriet die neerstort moet worden bestudeerd, want je weet maar nooit wat je gaat vinden,” zegt Heck. Bovendien hebben we nu een goed beeld van de zeldzame Hamburg-meteoriet, wat een belangrijk puzzelstukje toevoegt aan ons begrip over het zonnestelsel. “Het zal heel interessant zijn om deze in de toekomst te vergelijken met andere meteorieten die in vergelijkbaar detail zullen worden bestudeerd,” besluit Heck.
ALIENS KUNNEN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF HONDERDEN NABIJE PLANETEN SPOTTEN
ALIENS KUNNEN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF HONDERDEN NABIJE PLANETEN SPOTTEN
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Zouden ze – terwijl wij tot op heden vergeefs naar hen zoeken – al van ons bestaan weten?
Het is één van de vragen die zomaar in je op zou kunnen komen als je door dit nieuwe onderzoek bladert. In de studie wijzen wetenschappers 1004 nabije zonachtige sterren aan die mogelijk planeten bezitten die perfect zicht bieden op onze aarde. Eventuele aliens op deze planeten zouden niet alleen in staat moeten zijn om onze aarde te spotten, maar ook de signalen van leven in onze atmosfeer kunnen detecteren.
Het onderzoek “Wij stelden ons de vraag waar sterren gesitueerd moeten zijn, wil men vanuit de omgeving van deze sterren in staat zijn om de aarde voor de zon langs zien te bewegen,” legt onderzoeker Lisa Kaltenegger aan Scientias.nl uit. “We maakten daarbij gebruik van de sterrencatalogus van NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (kortweg TESS, red.).”
Op jacht naar exoplaneten TESS zoekt naar exoplaneten rond nabije sterren en maakt voor die zoektocht onder meer gebruik van data verzameld door de satelliet Gaia, die de afgelopen jaren de locatie en eigenschappen van talloze sterren nauwkeurig heeft vastgesteld. Door langdurig naar die sterren te turen, hoopt TESS er getuige van te zijn dat de helderheid van die sterren met enige regelmaat afneemt. Zo’n afname in helderheid kan vervolgens wijzen op de aanwezigheid van een planeet die – terwijl deze zijn baantjes rond de ster trekt – herhaaldelijk tussen de ster en TESS langs beweegt en daarbij een (klein) deel van het sterlicht tegenhoudt. Op deze manier zijn – voornamelijk door de gepensioneerde ruimtetelescoop Kepler – al heel wat exoplaneten ontdekt.
Op jacht naar de aarde En op vergelijkbare wijze zouden aliens dus ook onze aarde kunnen spotten. Voorwaarde is echter wel dat ze vanuit hun locatie in staat zijn om de aarde voor de zon langs te zien bewegen. Maar Kaltenegger en haar collega Joshua Pepper tonen nu met behulp van TESS’ sterrencatalogus aan dat er – alleen al in onze directe omgeving – meer dan 1000 sterren zijn die mogelijk planeten bezitten vanwaar een aardovergang zichtbaar zou moeten zijn. “Wij hebben ons gericht op de dichtstbijzijnde sterren die hooguit 326 lichtjaar van ons verwijderd zijn. Binnen die afstand hebben we 1004 van deze sterren gevonden. Sommige van deze sterren zijn slechts 28 lichtjaar van ons verwijderd, andere 326 lichtjaar. Dus licht heeft tussen de 28 en 326 jaar nodig om van die sterren naar ons of vanaf onze zon naar die sterren te reizen.”
Planeten Of er rond deze zonachtige sterren ook daadwerkelijk leefbare planeten te vinden zijn, is overigens nog onduidelijk. “Maar TESS zal deze sterren in 2021 gaan bestuderen en dan zullen we te weten komen of rond deze sterren planeten ter grootte van de aarde te vinden zijn en of ze ook echt aardachtig zijn.” Mochten dergelijke planeten bestaan en ook echt intelligent leven herbergen, dan zijn die intelligente aliens prima in staat om de aarde te spotten. “Ze kunnen er getuige van zijn hoe de aarde de zon één keer per jaar gedurende minstens 10 uur wat minder helder maakt,” aldus Kaltenegger.
Sporen van leven Slimme aliens zouden echter niet alleen in staat moeten zijn om de aarde te ontdekken. Vanaf hun planeten kunnen ze ook vaststellen dat er op die ‘Pale blue dot‘ waarschijnlijk leven is. “Zodra ze de aarde voor de zon langs zien bewegen, kunnen ze ook het zonlicht dat door de atmosfeer van de aarde sijpelt alvorens het hun telescopen – er even van uitgaande dat ze met telescopen naar ons kijken – bereikt, detecteren.” En uit het spectrum van dat licht kunnen ze afleiden waar die atmosfeer uit bestaat. En de samenstelling van de atmosfeer is grotendeels te herleiden naar het leven op aarde. Zo is het bijvoorbeeld aan organismen te danken dat de atmosfeer vandaag de dag (veel) zuurstof en methaan bevat. “Of ozon in combinatie met methaan,” stelt Kaltenegger.
Zoveel mogelijkheden Het idee dat er alleen al in onze nabijheid mogelijk heel veel planeten zijn vanwaar aliens ons kunnen spotten, is opwindend. “We weten dat grofweg elke vijfde ster een planeet herbergt die aardachtig kan zijn. Rekening houdend met die schatting zou je verwachten dat de 1004 sterren die we geïdentificeerd hebben, samen ongeveer 200 aardachtige planeten bezitten van waar we reeds gespot kunnen zijn. En dat is alleen nog maar in onze nabijheid – binnen 326 lichtjaar afstand. Ter vergelijking: onze Melkweg heeft een diameter van 100.000 lichtjaren.”
Contact Tegelijkertijd roept het echter ook een interessante vraag op. Want als er zoveel planeten zijn vanwaar aliens ons kunnen zien, waarom hebben ze dan nog geen contact gezocht? “Laten we die vraag eens omdraaien,” stelt Kaltenegger voor. “Waarom zouden wij andere beschavingen contacteren? En laten we daarbij even aannemen dat we uit heel veel beschavingen kunnen kiezen. Zou je dan gaan voor de beschavingen die geavanceerder zijn dan wij of de beschavingen die minder geavanceerd zijn? Als ik deze vraag tijdens mijn colleges stel, dan wil de meerderheid altijd een geavanceerdere beschaving contacteren.” Het lijkt niet ondenkbaar dat aliens er net zo over denken. En dan kun je je afvragen of wij – wanneer aliens voornemens zijn om contact te maken met een beschaving – wel hun eerste keus zijn. “Je kunt gemakkelijk beargumenteren dat wij nog niet zo’n geavanceerde beschaving zijn. We hebben weliswaar mensen naar de maan gestuurd, maar nog niet eens naar de dichtstbijzijnde planeet, laat staan naar de dichtstbijzijnde exoplaneet. Dus als wij zouden kunnen kiezen, zouden we een geavanceerdere beschaving contacteren. Waarom zouden we dan wel verwachten dat aliens – als ze bestaan – ons al gecontacteerd zouden hebben?”
Dat er nu een kaartje is met daarop de sterren die mogelijk planeten bezitten vanwaar aliens ons kunnen spotten, is wel belangrijk, zo stelt Kaltenegger. “Als wij op zoek willen gaan naar intelligent leven in het universum dat ons zou kunnen vinden en misschien toch wel contact wil leggen, dan is er nu een sterrenkaartje waarop we kunnen zien waar we onze zoektocht het beste kunnen aanvangen. En wie weet, misschien wil niet iedereen enkel geavanceerdere beschavingen contacteren?” Ten slotte kan het ook geen kwaad om eens even op een andere manier naar het universum te kijken. “Als we ons – normaal gesproken aardcentrische – gezichtspunt veranderen, ontdekken we altijd iets interessants.”
An image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows molecular gas clouds around the region where the Milky Way's central, supermassive black hole is known to exist. That region, highlighted in red, looks dark and silent.
There's a beast hiding at the center of the Milky Way, and it's barely moving.
This supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (SgrA*), has a mass 4.15 million times that of our sun. It first revealed itself to scientists as a mysterious source of radio waves from the galaxy's center back in 1931; but it wasn't until 2002 that researchers confirmed the radio waves were coming from something massive and compact like a black hole —— a feat that earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. Just days before the team learned about their Nobel on Oct. 6, another group learned something new about the black hole: It's spinning more slowly than a supermassive black hole should, moving less than (possibly far less than) 10% of the speed of light.
Black holes, despite their awesome power, are extraordinarily simple objects. All the distinguishing features of the matter that forms and feeds them gets lost in their infinitesimal singularities. So every black hole in the galaxy can be described with just three numbers: mass, spin and charge.
Once researchers locate a black hole in space, measuring the mass is pretty straightforward —— just check how strongly its mass is tugging on nearby objects. To get the mass of SgrA*, scientists just observed its influence on the "S-stars," a collection of the Milky Way's innermost stars that get accelerated to incredible speeds as they whip around the black hole in tight orbits. And researchers assume that, like most large objects in space, black holes don't have strong electromagnetic charges.
(Planet Earth, for example, has some positively charged particles and some negatively charged particles, but they cancel each other out across the whole planet. The other planets and known stars work the same way. Researchers assume black holes are similarly neutral in charge.)
That leaves spin as the remaining measurable feature of SgrA*, and now researchers think they have evidence that the supermassive is an unusually slow spinner.
Spin matters for two main reasons.
First, as Live Science previously reported, a black hole's event horizon —— the shadowy region within which not even light can escape the monster's gravity —— grows as it gains more mass, reaching further and further from the singularity of the black hole. But as the black hole spins faster and faster, the event horizon shrinks. Very fast-spinning black holes should have smaller event horizons than slower-moving black holes of the same mass.
Second, spin is thought to play a role in the two white-hot jets of matter that sometimes launch into space at incredible speeds from a black hole's axis of rotation. Most Milky Way-sized galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center, and often these galaxies have enormous jets visible bursting from their cores.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured an enormous relativistic jet, in blue, emerging from the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. (The giant spiral galaxy itself appears as a bright point in the image, with the black hole too small to see.) The black hole's second jet extends in the other direction, and is hidden from view. (Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope/NASA)
But the Milky Way has no visible jets. That on its own implies that SgrA* probably isn't spinning very fast. Researchers think that a fast-spinning black hole stirs up the disk of accreting matter whirling just outside its event horizon, accelerating some of that matter to burst out as a jet. What scientists know about the quiet SgrA* already suggests it either has a small accretion disk, is barely spinning, or both.
In a new paper, a team of researchers attempted to measure SgrA*'s spin. Once again, they relied on the visible S-stars to learn what their big dark companion is doing.
Right now, the researchers found, the S-stars circle SgrA* on two orbital planes. If you were to draw their orbits around the black hole and view the system from the side, they'd form an X. SgrA* must be spinning at a rate less than 10% of the speed of light, they found, because any faster movement would have knocked the S-stars out of their X-shaped orbital planes by now.
That's because those orbits, the researchers wrote, are likely as old as the S-stars themselves. The stars still follow the orbits they were born with. If SgrA* were spinning very fast, that wouldn't be the case.
When heavy objects spin very fast in space, that spin influences anything in orbit around them. Over time, that massive object tugs on the orbits of those smaller objects, making them line up more and more with the rotating object's own direction of spin. The slower the spin is, the weaker the effect, and the longer it takes for those objects to line up in orbit around their hefty chief.
The stars are old enough that the spin should have noticeably tugged on them if it were very strong. With their orbits as pristine as the day they were born, the S-stars strongly suggest an upper speed limit for SgrA* at just one-tenth the speed of light. And it may be spinning much slower.
This result also would explain why SgrA* doesn't seem to have any visible jets, they wrote. A first close-up image of SgrA*'s shadow, expected to come in the near future from another research team, should help confirm this, they wrote.
Donald Trump has been dropping intriguing hints about his knowledge of UFOs lately - but will he use a big announcement to swing the election?Credit: Alamy Live News
Rising speculation about an imminent UFO disclosure isn’t being driven by internet gossip, but by hints dropped by President Trump himself.
Earlier this month on a Fox News show the president promised to take a "good, strong look" at UFOs, before launching into a statement about the formidable power of the US military, and weapons that he hoped would never have to be used.
Given the conspiracy theory that the Space Force was set up to counter an alien threat, the president’s bullish comments will only fuel the rumours about a real-life War of the Worlds.
The truth is out there
The president went further in an interview on his son’s TV show, Triggered.
When asked about Roswell – where UFO hunters believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947 – he cryptically responded: "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting", adding "I'll have to think about that one" when asked if he’d consider declassifying it.
Mannequin depicting an alien at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center New Mexico - arguably the most famous alleged UFO siting took place in the city in 1947Credit: Alamy
What makes these quotes even more extraordinary is the fact that less than three years ago the official position of the US government was that nobody was interested in UFOs and nobody was investigating.
UFO enthusiasts didn’t believe the denials and this time they were right. A series of bombshell revelations has exposed the shocking truth about America’s UFO secrets.
Warp drives and wormholes
It started in December 2017 with a New York Times exclusive, revealing the existence of a shadowy Pentagon project called AATIP – Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – set up years earlier by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
AATIP is still shrouded in mystery, but in a letter to Congress the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that this multi-million dollar programme had conducted research into the sort of theoretical physics that would be needed for interstellar travel, including anti-gravity, warp drives and wormholes.
The Department of Defense claimed that AATIP focused on "next-generation aerospace threats" and it’s true there’s huge concern about things like hypersonic missiles and drone swarms controlled by Artificial Intelligence.
An intercontinental ballistic missile launching in Russia - the US set up AATIP in response to new aerospace threatsCredit: AP:Associated Press
But one of the AATIP research papers related to the Drake equation – used by astronomers to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
The implication was clear: if AATIP was about advanced aerospace threats, it wasn’t threats from Russia or China, but from somewhere much further away...
Verified footage of UFOs
The next bombshell was the release of three videos showing US Navy jets chasing UFOs.
Several of the pilots have spoken on the record about these sightings and when quizzed about these mid-air encounters President Trump praised the pilots, saying: "Some of them really see things that are a little bit different than in the past, so we’re going to see, but we’ll watch it".
A still from a video of a US Navy pilot chasing an 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAP)Credit: AFP or licensors
In another interview he said: "That’s a hell of a video", adding: "I just wonder if it’s real."
It was real. On April 27 the Pentagon issued a press release confirming that all three films "were indeed Navy videos", adding that the phenomena observed remain "unidentified".
Aliens deactivating nukes
It turned out that there is – and has been for many years – an ongoing series of incursions into restricted military airspace, and over sensitive military installations.
It’s even claimed that UFOs have hovered over nuclear bases and deactivated the weapons, in what UFO hunters believe is a chilling warning to the human race.
American nuclear missiles have allegedly been deactivated by UFOs
In response to all this, the US Navy issued instructions to its pilots, telling them what to do if they encounter a UFO.
But they refuse to reveal what these instructions say – they’re classified.
Senior political figures have demanded action. Two powerful Senate bodies, the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee have taken a particular interest and classified briefings have taken place, though the senators involved have remained tight-lipped.
"I'm not going to get into any of the contents of the briefing. It was a classified briefing," was all Mark Warner – Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee – said, when quizzed by a reporter.
Senate Armed Services Committee member Jeanne Shaheen went a bit further when she admitted: "We have been briefed. It was a classified briefing so I'm not allowed to talk about it.
"But if you were to ask me personally do I believe there are UFOs, I think that there are events that have happened that have not been explained adequately".
UK kept in the dark
Whatever these senators were told about UFOs by the military intelligence briefers must have spooked them.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee published the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, a section had been inserted under the heading ‘Advanced Aerial Threats’, in which they demanded a report on the phenomenon from the Director of National Intelligence.
Navy pilots have encountered UAPs on more than one occasion Credit: US Department of Defense
In response to the committee’s demand that spy chiefs and the military get to the bottom of the UFO mystery, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist authorized the creation of a new group called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
Led by the Navy and with involvement from the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, no details of this shadowy unit will be made public, though a Pentagon press release dated August 14 offered some intriguing clues, when it stated: "The Department of Defense established the UAPTF to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.
What does the United States know about UFOs that the United Kingdom doesn’t know?
Nick Pope
"The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security".
People who’ve been following developments closely have noticed that the word ‘threat’ crops up repeatedly in official statements and documents about UFOs.
So what does the United States know about UFOs that the United Kingdom doesn’t know?
All this high-powered activity suggests the Americans are aware of some profound truth about UFOs.
Nick Pope investigated aliens for the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s
But it’s not being shared with allies. The so-called Special Relationship doesn’t seem to extend to UFOs, which is unfortunate if there is a threat.
Officially at least, the UK is no longer researching and investigating UFOs.
The Ministry of Defence project I ran in the Nineties was axed at the end of 2009, despite our having had some influence over US policy: it was our rebranding of ‘UFO’ to ‘UAP’ in the Nineties that finally got the subject taken more seriously, and a US press officer recently acknowledged that the term UAP "was borrowed from the United Kingdom".
But the UK desperately needs to get back in the game, reopen investigations, and exchange information with the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.
I formally call on the Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace, to take these actions, in consultation with his US opposite number Mark Esper.
Will Trump reveal the truth?
Back in the US, as the election approaches, interest in UFOs is reaching fever pitch.
And celebrities are getting in on the act too, with pop princess Miley Cyrus revealing she had her own UFO encounter in California, confessing to being "chased down" and then making "eye contact" with an alien being.
Miley Cyrus is one of many celebrities who claim to have seen aliens in the flesh
Hers is the latest in a long line of celebrity saucer sightings, dating back to John Lennon seeing a UFO in New York in 1974.
Robbie Williams – who I met at a UFO conference in 2008 – has gone skywatching at the infamous Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, where numerous UFO sightings and paranormal events have been reported.
Despite the intense speculation, I don’t know whether or not President Trump will make any announcement about UFOs in the run-up to the election, or in his second term, if he wins.
And if Trump loses, we have yet to learn what Joe Biden would do – though interestingly, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, so she may already have been briefed.
The bombshell UFO sightings that rocked the US
As speculation about imminent UFO revelations reaches fever pitch, a series of bombshell sightings has rocked the US.
In January 2015, US Navy fighter jets from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had a series of spectacular mid-air encounters with UFOs off the coast of Florida. As the F-18 Super Hornets chased the mystery objects, the elite military pilots captured the events on infrared cameras. On the soundtracks of two separate videos, the Top Guns can be heard whooping with excitement as they track the UFOs at incredible speed. The Pentagon confirmed these videos were real in April 2020 when they put them on a government website, along with another video taken in 2004 by a Navy pilot with the USS Nimitz task group, who chased a UFO described as being shaped like a Tic Tac. The two videos are named GOFAST and GIMBAL.
In February 2018, the Federal Aviation Administration released recordings of shocked commercial airline pilots describing how they encountered a UFO at 37,000 feet over the state of Arizona. The pilots described an incredibly bright light that wasn't an aircraft, and a subsequent investigation seemed to rule out military activity or weather balloons. Declassified UK Ministry of Defence UFO files contain several accounts of terrifying near-misses between airlines and UFOs, and the Civil Aviation Authority also has casefiles on such incidents.
In September 2020, cars were literally stopping on a New Jersey highway as astonished drivers honked their horns and got out of their cars, pointing and yelling in shock at the sight of a huge, saucer-shaped UFO. A video went viral on TikTok, but skeptics claimed that the mystery object was an airship, causing a furious row which is still raging. The video has since been posted multiple times on YouTube, with some of the clips having been viewed over a million times, showing the immense public interest in this subject.
In August 2014 in Houston, Texas, multiple photos and videos were taken showing a mystery object in the night sky. There were numerous independent witnesses and the pictures showed a disc-shaped craft with a ring of blue lights around the edge. The story even made the evening news as panicked locals heard the story and called in with details of their own sightings.
The island state of Hawaii has been the site of numerous UFO sightings over the years and some conspiracy theorists even think there's an alien base somewhere in the mountains. Ancient astronaut theorists believe that in the distant past, visiting extraterrestrials were worshipped as gods. In October 2016 a tourist was astounded when he captured a classic disc-shaped UFO hovering over the mountains at Waikane. The picture was passed to the Mutual UFO Network, a UFO-hunting organization that investigates thousands of sightings each year.
Aliens would certainly be the ultimate October Surprise, but whether or not we get official disclosure, government, military and intelligence community figures in the US have finally woken up to the fact that UFOs are a serious national security issue.
As for what happens next – watch this space.
Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he ran its UFO project.
The left image shows OSIRIS-REx’s collector head hovering over the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) after the probe’s robotic arm moved it into the proper position for capture. The right image shows the collector head secured onto the capture ring in the SRC. Both images were captured by OSIRIS-REx’s StowCam camera. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin)
NASA's pioneering OSIRIS-REx probe has bagged up its precious asteroid sample for return to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx has finished stowing the bits of the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu that it snagged last Tuesday (Oct. 20), successfully locking the material into the spacecraft's return capsule, mission team members announced Thursday (Oct. 29).
And the sample appears to be substantial — far heftier than the 2.1 ounces (60 grams) the mission had set as a target, team members said. Indeed, OSIRIS-REx collected so much material on Oct. 20 that its sampling head couldn't close properly; the head's sealing mylar flap was wedged open in places by protruding Bennu pebbles.
The OSIRIS-REx team noticed that issue last week when examining photos of the head and its collected sample; flakes of escaped asteroid material drifted through the frames. To minimize the amount lost, the team decided to expedite the precise and complex stowing procedure, which was supposed to happen next week.
So, over the course of 36 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday (Oct. 27 and Oct. 28), engineers directed OSIRIS-REx to deposit the sampling head, which sat at the end of the probe's robotic arm, into the return capsule; tug on the head to make sure it was secured properly; sever connections with the robotic arm; and lock up the return capsule via the locking of two latches.
This was all done while OSIRIS-REx was about 205 million miles (330 million kilometers) from Earth, meaning it took 18.5 minutes for each command to reach OSIRIS-REx, and another 18.5 minutes for each update from the probe to come back down to Earth.
"We wanted to only attempt stow one time, and we wanted to make sure we were successful," OSIRIS-REx mission operations manager Sandra Freund, of Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, said during a NASA news conference Thursday. "And we definitely were."
The change of plans required a last-minute reallocation of time on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), the system of radio telescopes that the agency uses to communicate with its far-flung probes. Because the stow operation was so important and so involved, OSIRIS-REx needed a large block of continuous DSN time, which other NASA missions sacrificed for the greater good.
It's unclear exactly how much asteroid material now sits in OSIRIS-REx's return capsule, which will come down to Earth in September 2023. The team canceled a planned post-sampling weighing procedure that would have involved spinning the probe, because this maneuver would have resulted in more sample loss. (Moving the arm — to photograph the sample and conduct the stow operation, for example — imparted grain-liberating acceleration, mission team members explained. So they wanted to minimize such motions.)
But there's definitely a lot of asteroid material on board, said mission principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.
The sampling operation on Oct. 20 went extremely well, Lauretta said, and the head penetrated deep into Bennu's surface — perhaps 19 inches (48 centimeters) or more. The team is confident that OSIRIS-REx pretty much filled its sampling head that day, meaning it likely backed away from Bennu with about 4.4 lbs. (2 kilograms) of collected material.
The losses over the ensuing days appear minimal by comparison — probably "tens of grams" in total, Lauretta said. And recent photos of the sampling head showed that it was still packed. Mission team members could only see 17% of the head's volume in those photos, but they estimate that about 14.1 ounces (400 g) of Bennu material is jammed into that space, Lauretta said.
If that estimate is accurate, and if the 17% slice is representative of the entire sampling head, then OSIRIS-REx may have held onto more than 4.4 lbs. (2 kg) of sample. Lauretta's overall prediction is more measured than that, but it's still decidedly bullish.
"I believe we still have hundreds of grams of material in the sample collector head — probably over a kilogram, easily," Lauretta said during today's news conference.
That would be great news. Such a large amount would allow lots of research groups to study the Bennu dirt and rock, and to perform a wide variety of experiments with the pristine cosmic sample. As an example, Lauretta pointed to organic chemistry — specifically, analyses involving sugars.
Sugars are "expected to be present in very low abundances [on asteroids like Bennu], requiring several grams of sample to extract them from," Lauretta said. "And we thought that would not be feasible with the 15-gram allocation but something that does open up with the larger mass available for analysis."
(The OSIRIS-REx science team gets to analyze up to 25% of the returned sample. If the total sample ended up being the targeted 60 grams, the team would get to study up to 15 grams of it.)
If all goes according to plan, such experiments will reveal a great deal about the solar system's early days and the role that asteroids like Bennu may have played in helping life get going on Earth, by delivering lots of water and carbon-containing organic chemicals. Shedding light on such big questions is the chief goal of the $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission, which launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in December 2018
The mission's next big steps involve gearing up for the return trip (though engineers are also trying to figure out if they can somehow get a rough mass estimate of the now-stowed sample). Orbital dynamics dictate that OSIRIS-REx must start heading for home between early March and May, and the current plan is to target the earliest part of that window, team members said today.
OSIRIS-REx is NASA's first asteroid-sampling mission, but it's not the first one in history. Japan's Hayabusa mission delivered small bits of the stony asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010, and that probe's successor, Hayabusa2, is scheduled to return a sample of the carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu this coming December.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.
Video of rocket body fragments captured over Haleakalā by an AMOS system camera.
Courtesy: AMOS Haleakalā
Thousands were mesmerized by a mysterious flurry of lights that appeared to float across Hawaiʻi’s evening sky on Saturday, October 24. Photos and videos of the string of lights flooded social media, leaving many to believe the sighting could be anything from a spaceship carrying extra terrestrials to a meteor shower.
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy Professor Richard Wainscoat believes onlookers witnessed the reentry of a spent rocket booster used to launch Venezualan satellite, Venesat-1, back in 2008. The used rocket has been circling Earth since the launch, slowly losing altitude due to friction with the tenuous atmosphere in low-Earth orbit. On Saturday, the booster made its final orbits.
Reentry captured by ATLAS, an asteroid impact early warning system on Haleakalā. (Photo credit: ATLAS/Larry Denneau)
Wainscoat works with the Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakalā, and said the reentry was predicted to occur over the Atlantic Ocean at 7:24 p.m. HST on October 24. He added that the object stayed in orbit a little longer than expected, and finally burned up in the atmosphere over Hawaiʻi, an occurrence that does not happen very often.
“Seeing a reentry is relatively rare for a specific location like Hawaiʻi, since we can only see the reentry if it occurs relatively close to us,” Wainscoat explained. Reentries are a common occurrence, with typically one to two per week taking place somewhere around the Earth. According to Wainscoat, although it’s possible for large solid pieces to survive reentry, most of the object will burn up, and any surviving debris will usually fall in the ocean or in uninhabited locations.
The reentry was also spotted by many of the sky-monitoring cameras at the Maunakea and Haleakalā observatories. The Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope cloud camera on Maunakea captured an image of the streaking debris, as did the all-sky monitor on the ATLAS telescope on Haleakalā. AMOS systems on Haleakalā and Maunakea captured the rocket re-entry, as well. The observations by AMOS are used for observations and analysis of meteors and fireballs to help astronomers understand the structure of the solar system.
Telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunakea also play a critical role in tracking potentially hazardous asteroids and assist with rapid follow-up observations to verify an asteroid’s orbit and if it poses any threat to Earth.
AMOS observatory on Haleakalā spotted disintegrating debris of the rocket booster
NASA has released a photo of the “Greater Pumpkin” galaxies and it is the perfect timing in regards to Halloween. The two galaxies, named NGC 2292 and NGC 2293, are located approximately 120 million light-years away from us in the constellation Canis Major and are beginning to collide.
The picture that was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope looks like a gigantic pumpkin with glowing eyes and a crooked smile. The “eyes” are actually a bunch of stars that are surrounding two supermassive black holes, while the faint blue-colored “smile” is a cluster of newborn stars. The “pumpkin’s” orangish color is a result of red stars.
In a statement, NASA further described the picture, “Hubble’s holiday offering is a pair of colliding galaxies that resemble the cartoon Peanuts character Linus’ imagining of the elusive Great Pumpkin,” adding, “’Great’ is an understatement in this case because the galaxy pair spans 100,000 light-years.”
Interestingly, when the two galaxies finish merging, they could form a gigantic spiral galaxy. In fact, while the “smile” is made up of a cluster of newly formed stars, it is actually the beginning of the formation of a spiral galaxy. The “smile” stretches from one galaxy to the next and was probably created from compressed interstellar gas when the collision began.
William Keel, who is an astronomer from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, has speculated that when the two merge together, it could turn out to be quite similar to the spiral galaxy known as UGC 2885 (or Rubin’s Galaxy) which is absolutely massive as it is two and a half times wider than the Milky Way and has ten times the amount of stars. It is located about 232 million light-years away from us in the constellation Perseus.
This photo comes a year after NASA posted an image to their Facebook page of our sun also looking like a giant pumpkin. In their description, they stated that the photo was taken by an ultraviolet light on their Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite back in October of 2014. The “jack-o-lantern face” was caused by increased activity of sun spots. That picture can be seen on NASA’s Facebook page as well as on their website.
Happy Halloween!
NASA Shares ‘Galactic Pumpkin’ Photo Captured By Hubble For Halloween
Hubble shared an image of two galaxies forming what astronomers dubbed the "Greater Pumpkin"
The image is a result of a collision between two galaxies, the NGC 2292 and NGC 2293
The galaxy pair is located 120 million light-years away from the Milky Way galaxy
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a "galactic pumpkin" just in time for this year's Halloween. The Hubble captured an image of a pair of galaxies that looks like a Halloween decoration in space as they are in the early stages of a collision.
Described as the "Greater Pumpkin" by astronomers, the photo NASA shared on its Twitter and website shows what appears to be two eyes and a crooked smile inside a pumpkin-shaped head. The object emits a bright orange color, while the sector surrounding the "smile" is bluish.
The so-called "Greater Pumpkin" consists of two galaxies, identified as NGC 2292 and NGC 2293, that together span 109,000 light-years in diameter.
The orange color emitting from the two gala
xies is due to aging red stars, while the bluish hue of its smile is due to newborn star clusters scattered along a newly forming dusty arm. The "eyes" of the pumpkin, meanwhile, are actually concentrations of stars around a pair of supermassive black holes.
Check out the image of Hubble's "galactic pumpkin" below
Explaining the collision, Hubble astronomers said on the NASA website that galaxies lose their flattened spiral disks when they crash into one another, and their stars are gathered into a football-shaped volume of space, resulting in an elliptical galaxy.
Waarom de volle maan vanavond extra speciaal is: onze wetenschapsexpert ontwart feiten en fabels
Hebben katten en honden vannacht meer kans op een ongeval? Klopt het dat er tijdens een nacht met volle maan meer hersenbloedingen, nierstenen enzovoorts opduiken op de spoeddiensten van ziekenhuizen? Er bestaan al duizenden jaren heel wat gelijkaardige theorieën over volle maan. Onze wetenschapsexpertMartijn Peters bekijkt op basis van studies welke kloppen en welke niet, en vertelt er meteen bij waarom deze Halloween-maan extra speciaal is.
Martijn Peters
Bron:Content redactie
Van alle gedaanten die onze maan aanneemt, is volle maan wellicht de bekendste. “Meestal krijgen we er zo twaalf per jaar te zien, mooi verdeeld over de maanden. Maar eens om de 2,7 jaar zijn er twee volle manen in één maand, waarbij die tweede de titel ‘blauwe maan’ krijgt, van het Engelse 'once in a blue moon’”, zegt Peters. “Die dertiende volle maan krijgen we vanavond te zien.”
Talloze eigenschappen zijn toegeschreven aan volle manen, van mensen die zich vreemder gedragen tot veranderen in weerwolven
Martijn Peters
Maar daar blijft het niet bij. “Het is ook een 'micromaan’, omdat hij zich op de verst mogelijke afstand van de aarde bevindt: het zogenaamde ‘apogeum’, gemiddeld zo’n 405.500 km van de aarde. (In normale omstandigheden bevindt de maan zich op zo’n 384.400 km van de aarde, red.) De maan zal optisch dus kleiner zijn dan anders, maar dat verschil merk je amper op.”
Naast de bekendste is de volle maan ook de meest tot de verbeelding sprekende schijngestalte. “Talloze eigenschappen zijn toegeschreven aan volle manen, van mensen die zich vreemder gedragen — denk aan ‘lunatic’, het Engelse woord voor ‘krankzinnig’ — tot veranderen in weerwolven. Broodjeaapverhalen, maar er zijn ook beweringen die wél wetenschappelijk zijn getoetst.”
Bewering 1 – Volle maan heeft invloed op de aarde - JA!
“Dat klopt, want bij volle maan zijn er straffere getijden”, zegt Martijn Peters. “Eb en vloed ontstaan immers door de zwaartekracht van de maan. En als maan, zon en aarde zich op één lijn bevinden komt daar nog de zwaartekracht van de zon bij. Eb en vloed komen hierdoor 20 procent hoger en lager te liggen. Dat kan natuurrampen versterken, zoals overstromingen bij stormen of orkanen, doordat het water hoger komt te staan bij vloed.”
Zelfs al zou de volle maan de kans op een aardbeving verhogen, zou die volgens wetenschappers minder dan 1 procent zijn
Martijn Peters
Over de invloed van volle manen op aardbevingen spreken onderzoekers elkaar tegen. “Een studie zag géén verband bij meer dan 200 zeer zware aardbevingen (vanaf 8 op de schaal van Richter) in de voorbije vier eeuwen”, zegt Peters. “Een andere, waarbij wetenschappers keken naar tienduizend aardbevingen vanaf 5.5 op de schaal van Richter, concludeerde dat ze heviger werden bij volle of nieuwe maan. Oorzaak zou de verhoogde druk zijn die het getijde uitoefent op breuklijnen in onze aardkorst. Maar zelfs al zou de volle maan de kans op een aardbeving verhogen, zou die volgens wetenschappers minder dan 1 procent zijn. Haast verwaarloosbaar.”
Door diezelfde zwaartekracht van de maan valt er wél minder regen. “Dat zagen wetenschappers die weerdata van honderd jaar bestudeerden. Door de aantrekkingskracht zet de atmosfeer uit in de richting van de maan, stijgt de luchtdruk en daalt de kans op regen. Maar ook dat zal je zelf niet opmerken.”
Bewering 2 – Volle maan heeft invloed op ons lichaam - NEE!
Al in de Griekse Oudheid opperde de filosoof Aristoteles dat ons brein, dat voor 73 procent uit water bestaat, misschien vatbaar is voor de invloed van de maan. En tot op vandaag geloven velen dat ons lichaam zich vreemder gedraagt bij volle maan. “De wetenschap ontkracht dat”, stelt Peters. “Ten eerste is het effect van de zwaartekracht niet sterk genoeg om veranderingen in de hersenen te veroorzaken, en als die er zouden zijn, moet je die evengoed zien bij nieuwe maan, en daarover circuleren er geen vreemde verhalen. Studie na studie wijst uit dat er níet meer bevallingen, psychologische problemen, gewelddaden, misdaden en zelfmoorden plaatsvinden bij volle maan. Ook epilepsie- en hartaanvallen, spoedopnames, verkeersongelukken, mislukte operaties, hersenbloedingen, nierstenen enzovoorts zouden dan vaker voorkomen, maar niets is minder waar. Enkel over het effect op de nachtrust is er nog discussie.”
Opmerkelijke vaststelling: rond volle maan hebben katten en honden respectievelijk 23 procent en 28 procent meer kans op een ongeval
Martijn Peters
Bewering 3 – Volle maan heeft invloed op fauna en flora - JA!
Het planten- en dierenrijk ondervindt wel degelijk effect van een volle maan. “Opmerkelijke vaststelling na het bestuderen van bijna 12.000 dierenartsbezoeken: rond volle maan hebben katten en honden respectievelijk 23 procent en 28 procent meer kans op een ongeval, al is de reden niet bekend”, zegt Martijn Peters. “Even opvallend is een studie die aantoont dat mensen vaker gebeten worden door dieren tijdens nachten met een volle maan.”
Prooidieren blijken dan ook voorzichtiger te worden. “Wellicht omdat ze kwetsbaarder zijn voor roofdieren”, aldus Peters. “Zo kampt de das met ‘voortplantingsangst’ bij volle maan. Om te compenseren zullen roofdieren in de dagen na een volle maan sneller overdag jagen. Je past dus beter extra op.”
Het koraal van het Australische Groot Barrièrerif in Australië vindt het licht van de volle maan dan weer zeer romantisch. “Ergens in december lost het hele rif massaal eitjes en sperma en verandert de zee heel even in een winterwonderland.”
Tot slot is er ook nog de aanname dat er meer paddenstoelen opduiken rond volle maan. “Dat klopt dan weer niet, bewijst een studie uit 2011.”
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En de maan werd rood als bloed
En de maan werd rood als bloed
Het is een beetje stil rondom de onbekende planeet die zich in ons zonnestelsel bevindt. Een beetje stil misschien, maar verdwenen allerminst en de tekenen van die aanwezigheid blijven komen.
We kregen een vraag van een lezer of de planeet Nibiru misschien volledig van het toneel was verdwenen.
Ik ben al jaren een trouwe lezer van jullie website, ik wacht ook al jaren op het einde der tijden dat vele malen door jullie voorspeld werd. Maar nu sinds de COVID-19 crisis lees ik niets anders meer dan COVID-19 bullshit, mijn vraag is dan ook waar is planeet X oftewel Nibiru? Is deze opeens verdwenen of spelen jullie mooi in op de lopende hot topics??
Aangezien wij ook mensen zijn zullen wij inderdaad ook berichten over hot topics, zoals de lezer het noemt, in onze maatschappij en dat zeker als ze betrekking hebben op de nep corona pandemie.
Daarnaast voorspellen wij geen einde der tijden, we weten soms wel veel, maar zoveel nu ook nu weer niet. Wat we wel doen is regelmatig berichten plaatsen van onderzoekers die zich bezighouden met de planeet Nibiru en alles wat daarmee samenhangt. Aangezien ook zij mensen zijn, houden ze zich op dit moment ook meer bezig met actuele zaken zoals de nep coronapandemie en besteden minder tijd aan hun onderzoek, waardoor er ook automatisch minder nieuws naar buiten komt.
Ook hebben wij geschreven dat de vreemde verschijnselen die zich soms kunnen voor doen in onze huidige tijd erop zouden kunnen wijzen dat wij ons in de eindtijd bevinden.
Maar, dat alles betekent niet dat de planeet Nibiru en haar metgezellen van het toneel zijn verdwenen. Want midden tussen alle corona en de presidentstoestanden in Amerika komt Nancy Lieder toch wel met een interessant bericht.
En dat bericht heeft te maken met de rode luchten en het rode stof waar wij af en toe mee te maken hebben op aarde. Dit verschijnsel doet zich volgens Nancy voor sinds 2003 en dat was ook het moment dat de planeet Nibiru in ons zonnestelsel arriveerde.
Hierna volgen enkele feiten zoals die zijn verzameld door onderzoekers naar Planet X of Nibiru, voornamelijk op basis van oude teksten.
1) Mythologisch gezien ziet Nibiru eruit als een vurig beest die aan de hemel zal verschijnen als een tweede zon.
Openbaring 12:3
En er werd een ander teken gezien in den hemel; en ziet, er was een grote rode draak, hebbende zeven hoofden, en tien hoornen, en op zijn hoofden zeven koninklijke hoeden.
2) Nibiru is een magnetische planeet waardoor de aarde voor een deel zal kantelen wanneer deze passeert.
3) Men denkt dat Nibiru ongeveer vier keer groter is dan de aarde en 23 keer meer massief is.
4) Volgens de oude teksten is Nibiru gehuld in een wolk van rood ijzeroxide stof.
Volgens Zetatalk zweeft deze rode wolk als een gigantische staart achter de planeet aan en zal in de aanloop van de passage zich onder andere voor doen als extreem rode/oranje luchten vooral tijdens zonsopgang en ondergang.
In een later stadium, kort voor de werkelijke passage zal deze ijzeroxide in onze atmosfeer ervoor zorgen dat ook het water in de rivieren rood wordt en zwaar vergiftigd.
De mainstream verklaring van dit verschijnsel is dat we te maken zouden hebben met dingen zoals dat het afkomstig is van de industrie of dat het Saharazand is.
Onlangs zijn er echter berichten verschenen die aantonen dat dit verschijnsel zich niet alleen op aarde voordoet, maar bijvoorbeeld ook op onze Maan. En aangezien ze daar, in ieder geval aan de kant van de maan die wij hier op aarde zien, nog geen zware industrieën hebben en geen Sahara moet dit verschijnsel door iets anders worden veroorzaakt.
Maar voor roestvorming is nog wat meer nodig dan alleen water:
Roest is aantasting van metaal doordat het reageert op een combinatie van water en zuurstof. In het geval van ijzer ontstaat er dan ijzeroxide. Daarom wordt roesten ook vaak oxideren genoemd.
Er zou dan in ieder geval ijzer aanwezig moeten zijn op de maan en daarnaast zuurstof.
En aangezien dit volgens mainstream informatie niet het geval is, hebben we volgens Nancy hier te maken met ijzeroxide, afkomstig uit de enorme wolk die achter Nibiru aan sleept.
Maar, dit alles roept dan natuurlijk ook weer een andere vraag op en dat is de volgende: als er inderdaad sprake is van ijzeroxide in de staart van Nibiru, dan moet het ijzer ook ooit ergens in aanraking zijn geweest met zuurstof om dit te kunnen vormen.
Het antwoord op die vraag is niet gemakkelijk te vinden, maar in een artikel uit 1995 zegt Nancy Lieder het volgende:
The gases and dust curl toward the Earth, and are first noticeable as a fine red iron dust, turning the water a bitter blood red. Does this dust not burn in the available oxygen, and end as so many tiny flying star specs? This dust, already oxygenated, does not burn.
Oxygenation betekent dat er ergens zuurstof moet zijn toegevoegd, maar hoe en waar dit dan heeft plaatsgevonden wordt ons niet duidelijk. Duidelijk is wel dat dit dan buiten de aarde moet zijn gebeurd.
Ze heeft natuurlijk wel een punt dat roest zich niet op de maan kan vormen en dat is ook iets waar wetenschappers stom verbaasd over zijn. De verklaring van Nancy is uiteraard dat die rode stof daar ook afkomstig is van de staart van Nibiru.
Het geheel ziet er ongeveer als volgt uit volgens Nancy:
Wat weer erg overeenkomt met de vuurspuwende draken van de Chinezen.
De plaag waarde door het land, de rivier was bloedrood en overal was bloed. Zij die dronken van de rivier moesten onmiddellijk overgeven. Het stof beet zich vast in de huid van zowel mens als dier.
Door de gloed van de Verwoester was de aarde gehuld in een roodachtig licht. Het land was platgeslagen en verwoest door enorme hagelstenen die neer beukten op alles wat stond. Ze kwamen naar beneden in hete buien en achter hen aan kwam een soort vreemd gloeiend vuur dat over de aarde liep.
Het Griekse woord ‘seismos’ betekent aardschudding. Het gaat hier om een krachtige schok die de gehele planeet treft. Niet onwaarschijnlijk is dat de stand van de aarde gewijzigd zal worden. Jesaja profeteerde: ‘De aarde waggelt zeer als een beschonkene’ (24:19-20). Dan zullen alle bergen en eilanden van hun plaats worden gerukt. Grote kosmische brokstukken (meteorieten) zullen de aarde treffen. De zon zal zwart worden als een haren zak en de maan als bloed (vgl. Joël 2:32). Dit is een gelijktijdige verduistering van de zon en de maan. Astronomisch gezien kunnen deze twee dingen niet samengaan. Deze ingrijpende gebeurtenis kan daarom niet door de NASA voorspeld worden (zoals met de vier rode bloedmanen in 2014-2015). Dit zal iets buitengewoons zijn, dat door een direct ingrijpen van God zal gebeuren!
De gehele aarde zal bang zijn als de planeet waggelt! Triest is dat de mensen zich niet bekeren, terwijl ze weten dat Gods toorn is gekomen. Liever schuilen ze in de holen en rotsen der aarde. En in plaats van te bidden tot God, smeken zij tot de rotsen: ‘valt op ons en verbergt ons voor het aangezicht van Hem’ (vers 16). Wat een dwaasheid. Als wedergeboren christen kun je je dat bijna niet voorstellen, omdat Zijn liefde en vergevingsgezindheid zoveel groter is dan de hopeloze toestand van de mens. Ook nog tijdens de Verdrukking!
En om nog maar even bij de bijbel te blijven: Het lijkt meer dan duidelijk dat de eindtijd waarvan in het boek Openbaringen wordt gesproken, onze hedendaagse corona maatschappij is:
Opb 13:16En het maakt dat men aan allen, de kleinen en de groten, de rijken en de armen, de vrijen en de slaven, een merkteken geeft op hun rechterhand of op hun voorhoofd; Opb 13:17 en dat niemand kan kopen of verkopen dan wie het merkteken heeft: de naam van het beest of het getal van zijn naam. Opb 13:18 Hier is de wijsheid. Wie verstand heeft, laat die het getal van het beest berekenen, want het is het getal van een mens, en zijn getal is zeshonderdzesenzestig.
Raadsels. Gebeurtenissen die zich duizenden jaren geleden voor deden zullen zich misschien herhalen. Voor wie wil zien, zijn er overal tekenen te vinden.
Maar, om het spannend te houden: Hoe het nu precies verder zal gaan weet eigenlijk niemand.
GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, geselecteerd and gepost door peter2011
I found a woman figure standing at the end of a hill on Mars in a NASA gigapan photo today. Now I say woman, because her breast area is covered up and she has a pregnant belly stick out and a long flowing dress down to her feet. However, he stomach may be the norm for the species and may not be pregnant. The statue would be a historical and monumental discovery had it been found in Egypt today, but because its on Mars...archeologists dismiss it, refusing to believe their own eyes. This is 100% proof that important women ruled in the alien culture on Mars. That women had prominent positions and were highly valued.
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Glowing Orange Sphere Over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Oct 21, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing Orange Sphere Over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Oct 21, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 21, 2020 Location of sighting: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Watch as a guy gets blown away by the incredibly close encounter of a glowing sphere UFO. The sphere is huge and its outer layer seems to change shape with some kind of electro static waves of sorts. This particular UFO has been seen around the world and even I have recorded it over my apartments a few years ago, just weeks after I saw it on TV news in Hong Kong too! This thing gets around. Not only is this 100% alien...this is one of the closest UFOs you may ever encounter first hand one day.
UFOs in Triangle Formation over Peoria, Arizona, USA June 30 2020, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs in Triangle Formation over Peoria, Arizona, USA June 30 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 30, 2020 Location of sighting: Peoria, Arizona, USA
The eyewitnesses must have been incredibly close or have a really great zoom on their phone. This shows us the glowing spheres close up. You can clearly see its not planets at all. The objects are flying in triangle formation...military formation. Some of them are even dark but still flying along their sides...which means its not lanterns, when lanterns are dark its because the candles die out after 1-3 minutes and they fall. No sound, no wings, no aircraft lights...there is only one thing these objects could be...UFOs. And seen in the hotbed of hotbeds for UFO sighting...Arizona.
UFO sighting after earthquake in Whittier, California
UFO sighting after earthquake in Whittier, California
Here’s one really interesting UFO sighting that was filmed in the night sky above Whittier, a city in Southern California in Los Angeles County, part of the Gateway Cities. This happened back July 5th, 2019 but it was just published on MUFON’s website today. This triangle formation appeared in the sky just after a huge earthquake.
Witness report:
Six lights observed ascending from earth in triangular pattern, moving in synchronization with one another, and disappearing into the dark atmosphere. About an hour to an hour and a half prior to the UFO sighting, in Whittier, CA., there was a short but strong Earthquake. The earthquake was like nothing I’ve felt before; much like a swinging motion or swaying of the earth, that only lasted for a few seconds, but was strong enough to cause the power lines above my friends house, to rock quite a bit. When it came time for me to depart from my friends house, it was around 9:25pm. I was headed to another one of my friends houses, which was only about a 6 or 7 minute car drive. As I entered the neighborhood, of my destination, I noticed some strange bright lights moving at a very steady pace, in a triangular pattern ascending into the sky, starting from right above the tree level of my current field of vision, and kept ascending until each individual light disappeared one by one, into the dark night sky above. There were six bright yellowish-orange, sphere-shaped lights all together. One light in the front, Two in the middle and three behind. By the way that it seemed to be moving, it was as if they were all attached by something solid. They never got any closer or further away from each other as they moved along the night sky.
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“The Moon is a key witness of the early conditions when life emerged on our planet. As the daughter of the Earth, she holds keys for understanding our origins and for preparing for the future exploration of the Solar System.”
Bernard Foing, ESA's SMART-1 Project Scientist
The fashionable theory is that the Moon is the result of a collision during the birth of the Solar System 4500 million years ago. When the Earth was nearly complete, a gigantic wandering asteroid the size of Mars supposedly collided with our planet, flinging vapourised rock and debris from both bodies into space. Some of it went into orbit around the Earth, and congealed to make the Moon.
The impact would have greatly altered the outer layers of the Earth too. So fuller understanding of both the Earth and the Moon depends crucially on confirming or refuting this theory.
If the story is right, then the Moon should contain less iron than the Earth, in proportion to lighter elements such as magnesium and aluminium. By gauging the relative amounts of chemical elements comprehensively for the very first time, SMART-1 can make a distinctive contribution to this momentous scientific issue.
D-CIXS (pronounced dee-kicks) is the instrument for the job. X-rays from the Sun cause atoms in the lunar surface to fluoresce, emitting X-rays of their own. The precise energy carried by each X-ray is a signature of the element emitting it.
“Surprisingly, no one has yet made the observations that we plan. That's why our small instrument on the small SMART-1 spacecraft has the chance to make a big contribution to understanding the Moon and its relation to the Earth.”
Manuel Grande, UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, D-CIXS Team Leader
OTHER THEORIES
1. Earth smashed into Planet Theia.
Known as the giant impact hypothesis, the reigning lunar origin theory holds that the moon formed when Earth collided with a planet half its size—roughly as big as Mars—some 4.5 billion years ago. (Scientists call this imagined planet Theia after the deity who gave birth to the moon goddess in ancient Greek mythology.) The crash caused debris from both celestial bodies to orbit Earth—then a ball of partly molten rock rather than the solid orb we know today—and eventually coalesce to create the moon. Dating back to the mid-1970s, this model implies that the moon is an amalgam of materials from both Earth and Theia. A study published March 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience called the giant impact hypothesis into question by showing that the moon’s composition is nearly identical to Earth’s, suggesting that another planet had little or no contribution after all.
2. The moon once filled the Pacific Ocean’s basin.
Charles Darwin’s son George, an astronomer and physicist, first proposed the fission theory of moon formation in the late 1800s. According to this hypothesis, a chunk of matter spun off from a whirling Earth early in the history of the solar system and became our planet’s satellite. Geologist Osmond Fisher took the concept a step further, proposing that the Pacific Ocean occupies the space once filled by the moon. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that fission fell out of favor, partly because scientists determined that a force capable of dislodging a moon-sized piece of Earth would have destroyed the planet. Lunar rocks collected during the Apollo missions indicated that the moon was once hotter than Earth, offering more evidence against fission.
3. Earth ensnared a drifting moon.
According to the capture theory, the moon formed elsewhere in the solar system and happened to hurtle past Earth at just the right moment. As a result, Earth’s gravitational field “captured” the moon and brought it into orbit. Scientists now believe an object as large as the moon would have broken apart or bounced off after encountering the forces surrounding Earth. They also consider it unlikely that conditions would have allowed such an auspicious meeting.
4. Earth and the moon were twins.
The condensation or co-accretion hypothesis states that the moon and Earth were born at the same time, sprouting from a single cloud of material within the original nebula that created the entire solar system. This event would have taken place shortly after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. If co-accretion formed Earth and the moon, however, gravitational forces would have fused both celestial bodies or they would share more basic characteristics, experts now think.
5. Two moons crashed to form one.
In a study published last August, researchers speculated about another major milestone in the moon’s very early history—one that might account for its two very different faces. (The near side of the moon is low and flat, while the far side is high and mountainous.) The paper posited that a tiny second moon once orbited Earth before slamming into its sibling, roughing up the larger satellite’s surface. Scientists had previously believed that gravitational forces created the far side’s highlands.
“11 transient bright flashes were detected in Jupiter’s atmosphere using the UVS instrument on the Juno spacecraft. These bright flashes are only observed in a single spin of the spacecraft and their brightness decays exponentially with time, with a duration of ∼1.4 ms.”
As described in a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, astronomers working on the Juno project – NASA’s tiny spacecraft that’s been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 – were looking at new data collected by its ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS) when they spotted never-before-seen flashing lights. They had expected to see auroras but not flashes, according to the press release. They could be ‘sprites’ – tall, sinewy transient luminous events (TLEs) that occur in Earth’s upper atmosphere and are triggered by lightning discharges from thunderstorms below them – or ‘elves’, which are flat Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources, or sprite halos, which are flat sprites caused by weak ionization. Sprites, elves and sprite halos are generally red due to interaction with nitrogen, but the lights on Jupiter are blue or pink from the hydrogen in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere.
This illustration shows what a sprite could look like in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI)
Wait a minute, you say … the Moon has flashes too, but doesn’t have much of an atmosphere and no thunderstorms.
Good observation. The flashes on the Moon are referred to as Transient Lunar Phenomena which, although they’ve been reported for a thousand years, are irreproducible on Earth and doubted by many scientists. They could be caused by gas escaping from underground cavities, meteor showers, electrostatic discharge from the surface cracking or just reflections or distortions in observation lenses.
While sprites and elves were predicted to be found on Jupiter, Juno had found nothing but lighting until recently. This cause was ruled out for these new lights because they occurred 186 miles (300 km) above the altitude where most of the planet’s lightning forms, and because the colors were different.
Sprite on Earth observed from the International Space Station
Is this big news? Rohini Giles, Juno scientist and lead author, thinks so.
“Now that we know what we are looking for, it will be easier to find them at Jupiter and on other planets. And comparing sprites and elves from Jupiter with those here on Earth will help us better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres.”
That’s a good idea for the time when space probes travel at much lower altitudes and could be fried by electrical discharges.
Who would have thought a giant planet could have sprites and elves? This will make for some interesting sci-fi fairy tales.
RELATED PHOTOS AND VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere
A rotating, solar-powered spacecraft, Juno, arrived at Jupiter in 2016 after making a five-year journey. Since then, it has made 29 science flybys of the gas giant, each orbit taking 53 days
A gigantic asteroid named Apophis (it’s also been nicknamed the “God of Chaos”) is picking up speed and may end up hitting us in the year 2068. If it does hit, since the asteroid measures more than 1,000 feet in width, the results would be catastrophic as the impact would be equivalent to 880 million tons of TNT.
Asteroid Apophis is composed of rocky materials with a mix of metallic nickel and iron. The fact that it is gaining speed increases the possibility of it hitting the Earth on April 12, 2068. They call this burst of speed the Yarkovsky effect, which is when sunlight heats up the dayside of a rotating asteroid and as it turns, the night side releases the heat which gives it a push through space.
When it was first discovered back in June of 2004 by astronomers Roy Tucker, David Tholen and Fabrizio Bernardi at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, experts claimed that there was no chance of it hitting us. Ever since its discovery, the asteroid has been studied as it orbits our sun (it completes a full orbit in less than one Earth year) and the new findings do suggest that there is a chance of it hitting us in 48 years.
(Not the asteroid Apophis)
David Tholen, who is one of the astronomers who first detected the asteroid, explained, “The new observations we obtained with the Subaru telescope earlier this year were good enough to reveal the Yarkovsky acceleration of Apophis, and they show that the asteroid is drifting away from a purely gravitational orbit by about 170 meters per year, which is enough to keep the 2068 impact scenario in play.”
In fact, it has been ranked the third-highest threat on NASA’s Sentry Risk Table, behind asteroid (29075) 1950 DA, and asteroid Bennu. According to the table, Apophis has a 1 in 150,000 chance of hitting us. The first two won’t hit for a long time as asteroid (29075) 1950 DA has a 1 in 8,300 chance of hitting Earth in the year 2880, while Bennu has a 1 in 2,700 probability of impacting us sometime between the years 2175 and 2199.
(Not the asteroid Apophis)
There is a lot more research that needs to be done in regards to Apophis’ orbit to know for sure whether or not it will hit us. Experts have changed their minds on whether or not it will impact us. Back when it was first discovered, they said that an impact was impossible, then there was a 2.7% chance, and now it will pass by us at a distance of just under 20,000 miles from our planet. What is known for sure is that this is the first time that scientists have been able to see and study in advance an asteroid of this gigantic size that may come very close to hitting us.
Researchers have stated that they will “know well before 2068 if there is any chance of an impact”. Let’s hope they’re right. Pictures of the asteroid Apophis can be seen here.
An asteroid named after the God of Chaos is gaining as it travels on a path twoards Earth – and could strike our planet in 48 years. Astronomers confirmed Apophis (circled) has accelerated on its path due to non-uniform radiation, which acts like a tiny thruster
Prior to the discovery, the impact was said to impossible, but the new findings suggest the asteroid has a chance of crashing into Earth on April 12, 2068. An impact would be equivalent to 880 million tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) exploding all at once. (Pictured are images of the asteroid in 2012)
The asteroid contains nickel and iron and radar images suggest it is elongated with the two lobes, making it look something like a peanut (artist impression). Data estimates that there is a one in 150,000 chance of the asteroid hitting Earth in 48 years
NASA Whistleblower On NEO Asteroid Apophis is Apollyon in Revelation, Could Hit Earth, Angel to Bottomless Pit
NASA Whistleblower On NEO Asteroid Apophis is Apollyon in Revelation, Could Hit Earth, Angel to Bottomless Pit
NASA Whistleblower On NEO Asteroid Apophis is Apollyon in Revelation, Could Hit Earth, Angel to Bottomless Pit
Revelation Chapter 9 King James Version 9 Verse 1 KJV And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. 9 Verse 11 KJV And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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