Guy Spots Silver Cylinder Over Oshawa, Canada On Nov 27, 2020, UFO Sighting News, MUFON.

Date of sighting: Nov 27, 2020
Location of sighting: Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Source: MUFON #112703

 

Guys, this is some outstanding raw footage of a UFO over Oshawa, Canada a few weeks ago. The guy runs to try to continue recording it and I see the object is rotating slowly. At one point 1:01 into the video the object appears bigger and round shape with a solid object in its center. Very strange, must pause video to see that. Perhaps it was only partly cloaked and we were actually seeing just a 10% of the UFO throughout most the video. Very interesting and 100% proof that aliens are flying low over our cities scanning how the public deals with Covid19.

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

Eyewitness states: 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

14-12-2020 om 15:08 geschreven door peter  

Strange objects flying through our sky and possible UFO fleet caught on ISS cam. 

Case 1: December 8, 2020 

Glowing anomaly changes from rectangular to circular shape over Three Folks, Montana 

This object was not in a hurry as I observed it for well over 30 min. watching the entire time for possible wings, blades, sound, speed, direction, color change The object was stationary for a long period of time, than moved extremely slowly SE and upwards until out of sight with altitude. mufon 

Case 2: December 11, 2020 

Square-like UFO hovering over Washington DC 

The witness was sitting in tree stand facing southeast deer hunting. At 5:38 pm cst he noticed a light overhead traveling east then the light changed direction to southeast. The light continued moving southeast for about 36 seconds before going out. mufon 

Case 3: December 12, 2020 

Flying sphere recorded on old tv show called Martial Law 

It was recorded by professional tv camera on the old tv show called Martial Law. Season 1 episode 17 about 32 minutes into the show. A perfect sphere just appears in the sky flying with directional changes then flies off the top of the screen. mufon 

Case 4: December 8, 2020 

Possible UFO fleet captured on ISS cam 

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

14-12-2020 om 14:53 geschreven door peter  

Motionless Cube-Shaped UFO Found in Leaked Government Photo

An image reportedly circulated among intelligence agencies in the U.S. shows what seems to be unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the Pentagon term for UFOs. The U.S. officials described the object in the picture as a silver cube object.

The leaked image dates back to 2018 from an intelligence report of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), the Department of Defense (DoD) official unit investigating UAP sightings.

Check out this amazing book about the top 10 UFO cases in the history.

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The Pentagon approved the formation of the task force in August, the first on record government UFO program since a 2000s-era unit lost its funding in 2012. However, multiple sources confirmed that the original UFO program remained active in secrecy after its shutdown. The UATPF has reportedly briefed military officials and the government on UAP-related matters for the last two years. The newly surfaced photo appeared in a report from the task force during that time.

According to The Debrief correspondent Tim McMillan, a defense official, who has access to the UAPTF’s intelligence reports, leaked the photo’s existence. Three other government officials affirmed with McMillan that the image comes from a 2018 task force report shared on a secure network utilized by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

A military pilot flying over the Atlantic Ocean on the U.S. East Coast reportedly encountered the object in 2018 and snapped a photo of it using their cell phone. Judging on the angle of the shot, it looked like a backseat weapon system operator on a F/A-18F Super Hornet snapped the picture of the object, which McMillan describes as “inverted” and “bell-shaped” with “ridges or other protrusions along its lateral edges that extends toward its base.

A GPS dropsonde may look like the UFO, but McMillan points out that he confirms with an atmospheric researcher that the actual dropsonde does not appear in the picture. The dropsonde is a square-cone parachute dropped by an aircraft but no aircraft above the UFO in the controversial photo.

Two defense officials tell McMillan that the object in question may not be a research balloon too. According to McMillan, the pilots who encountered the UFO said that the object was completely motionless and apparently unaffected by ambient air currents, unlike a research balloon under the same conditions.

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14-12-2020 om 14:29 geschreven door peter  

Cigar-shaped UFO filmed from a plane from Massachusetts to Florida

This tic tac UFO activity was filmed up in the clouds on a flight from Boston, Massachusetts to Florida. This happened back in September 2019 but it was just published on MUFON today.

Witness report: 

I was looking out of the plane window as I flew from Boston to Florida on 9.6.2019 at 7:27 pm. As I looked out the window I noticed a silver tic tac like object hovering/matching the flight of the plane. It was strange to me because it didn’t look like anything else I’ve ever seen out of a plane window nor have I ever noticed an object to maintain parallel height and motion with a plane like this did while emitting no exhaust/plume behind it. Other planes whiz by in the distance and are gone from view quickly—this was not like that. I took a series of 3 videos with my phone from 7:28-7:32 pm. I have since shown the videos to many friends and family who have all conceded it is a difficult object to explain.

After hearing more and more come out about tic tac like ufos I figured it would be worth it to submit in case it is in fact a UFO. It is a perfect shape and truly does not look like a plane or anything else. It is a silver smooth tic tac. I looked up other sightings from this date online and saw one submitted by a man in Clayville NY with two orbs that look similar. I am not sure where we were in air space at the time during the flight when these videos were taken. Will I be notified of the findings/analysis? Many thanks for your time!

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14-12-2020 om 14:20 geschreven door peter  

Is this the dawn of Skynet-style machines? Robot that can 'imagine itself' and became self-aware is built by scientists

• Initially, the machine behaved like a 'babbling infant', moving randomly

• It grasped objects with 100 per cent accuracy after 35 hours training

• Experts believe the advance is a giant step towards self-aware machines

By JOE PINKSTONE FOR MAILONLINE 

A robot able to 'imagine' itself has been created in a step towards the self-aware robots envisioned in the Terminator movies. 

Skynet and other sci-fi machines are able to learn and decipher from scratch but real-world robots have yet to master this art. 

Now, scientists have managed to create a machine that can learn without prior programming via 'deep learning'. 

After an initial 24 hours of behaving like a 'babbling infant' it was able to grasp objects from specific locations and drop them with 100 per cent accuracy thanks to 35 hours of training. 

Even when relying entirely on its internal self model - the machine's 'imagination' - the robot was able to complete the pick-and-place task with a 44 per cent success rate. 

Intelligent? After 35 hours of training, the 'self model' helped the robot grasp objects from specific locations and drop them in a receptacle with 100 per cent accuracy

The device consists of a jointed artificial arm and grasping 'hand' similar to those used in numerous production plants. 

What makes this robot different to thousands of others is that it knows that is what it is. 

US scientists gave it the ability to 'imagine itself' using a process of self-simulation. 

Professor Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab at the University of Columbia, New York - where the research was conducted, said: 'If we want robots to become independent, to adapt quickly to scenarios unforeseen by their creators, then it's essential that they learn to simulate themselves. 

'While our robot's ability to imagine itself is still crude compared to humans, we believe that this ability is on the path to machine self-awareness.' 

At the start of the study, the robot had no idea what shape it was, whether a spider, a snake or an arm. 

To begin with, it behaved like a 'babbling infant', moving randomly while attempting various tasks. 

Within about a day of intensive 'deep learning', the robot built up an internal picture of its structure and abilities.  

PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski, another member of the team, said: 'That's like trying to pick up a glass of water with your eyes closed, a process difficult even for humans.' 

Risk factor: Eerily, the scientists say they are aware of the potential dangers involved in giving robots the gift of self-awareness

Other tasks included writing text on a board using a marker. 

To test whether the robot could detect damage to itself, the scientists replaced part of its body with a deformed version. The machine was able to recognise the change and work around it, with little loss of performance. 

Self-aware robots may shed new light on the age-old mystery of consciousness, said Pressor Lipson. He added: 'Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists have been pondering the nature of self-awareness for millennia, but have made relatively little progress. 

'We still cloak our lack of understanding with subjective terms like 'canvas of reality', but robots now force us to translate these vague notions into concrete algorithms and mechanisms.' 

Self-aware robots and computers running amok or threatening the human race have been a rich source of material for sci-fi novels and films. 

The scientists say they are aware of the potential dangers involved in giving robots the gift of self-awareness. 

Writing in the journal Science Robotics, they warn: 'Self-awareness will lead to more resilient and adaptive systems, but also implies some loss of control. It's a powerful technology, but it should be handled with care.' 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

14-12-2020 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

MIT ENGINEERS BUILT AN AI THAT DESIGN ITS OWN ROBOTS

MIT

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14-12-2020 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

Do ETs and UFOs found in Apache Indian cave paintings prove ancient ALIENS visited Earth?

Getty*YouTube

Can you see aliens and UFOs in this Native American rock art?

{ http://amaznews.com/ }

13-12-2020 om 23:56 geschreven door peter  

How Mars brine could produce breathable air and fuel for a colony

We absolutely need this if we're to ever establish a colony on the Red Planet.

 by Mihai Andrei

Our understanding of Mars has been a true rollercoaster. Centuries ago, scholars thought Mars could host rivers and oceans like on Earth and maybe teeming with life. When the first observations came in from Galileo Galilei in 1610, astronomers discovered a planet with polar ice caps that was seemingly similar to Earth, so the hypothesis seemed to stand. But as we learned increasingly more, it became apparent that Mars isn’t exactly a lush planet.

Mars is barren nowadays, and while it may have been water-rich at some point in the past, that’s not really the case now. But there’s one more twist to the story: Mars really does have ice caps, and it does have some liquid water. Granted, that water is full of salts and buried beneath the surface, but it’s still liquid water.

According to a new study, this brine can be used to produce breathable air and fuel for Martian colonists — two valuable resources we would absolutely need on the Red Planet.

The rovers we’ve sent to Mars don’t really need oxygen. They do just fine in the ultra-thin atmosphere of the planet, wandering around and doing experiments in freezing temperatures. But if we want to establish a colony (or more likely, a research base), we can’t really manage without oxygen.

In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander came with some good news in that regard. It “tasted” the Martian water and upon analyzing it, found out how it manages to stay liquid on the freezing temperatures of Mars.

The key is something called perchlorate, a chemical compound containing chlorine and oxygen. Perchlorate is very stable in water, and its salts are very solluble — up to the point where they absorb and collect water vapor over time. As the perchlorate absorbs more water, it also dissolves into the water, substantially lowering its freezing temperature — this is how the water manages to remain liquid at temperatures way below the normal freezing point of water.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express has found several such underground ponds of perchlorate brine and now, a new study reports that these pockets of liquid water could be used to produce valuable resources.

Of course, you can’t drink salty water. You also can’t use it for too many things. If you want to apply the electrolysis to break it down into oxygen (for breathing) and hydrogen (for fuel), you’d normally need to remove the salt — a very costly and complicated process in the harsh Martian environment. This is where the research team led by Vijay Ramani from the University of Connecticut comes in.

Typically, electrolysis requires purified water, but Ramani’s research team found a way to apply electrolysis efficiently to extract hydrogen and oxygen out of the brine simultaneously, without needing to also extract the perchlorate.

“Our Martian brine electrolyzer radically changes the logistical calculus of missions to Mars and beyond” said Ramani. “This technology is equally useful on Earth where it opens up the oceans as a viable oxygen and fuel source”

An outcrop of rocks on the surface of Mars.

Image credits: NASA.

They built a modular electrolysis system and tested it at -33 Fahrenheit (-36 Celsius), showing that it really does work. The fact that it’s modular means you can start a small operation on Mars (say, a small research base) and then build on it. Ironically, they were also able to use the salt in their favor.

“Paradoxically, the dissolved perchlorate in the water, so-called impurities, actually help in an environment like that of Mars,” said Shrihari Sankarasubramanian, a research scientist in Ramani’s group and joint first author of the paper.

“They prevent the water from freezing,” he said, “and also improve the performance of the electrolyzer system by lowering the electrical resistance.”

The results are so promising, researchers say, that they’re even considering using a similar technology here on Earth. For instance, submarines or deep-sea could make great use of this technology, potentially enabling us to explore uncharted environments in the deep ocean.

“Having demonstrated these electrolyzers under demanding Martian conditions, we intend to also deploy them under much milder conditions on Earth to utilize brackish or salt water feeds to produce hydrogen and oxygen, for example through seawater electrolysis,” said Pralay Gayen, a postdoctoral research associate in Ramani’s group and also a joint first author on this study.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently en-route to Mars, is also carrying some instruments that will allow it to produce oxygen from the Martian brine — but no hydrogen. Perseverance’s equipment is also 25 times less efficient than that designed in Ramani’s lab, but it will be a test for the technology and could perhaps offer new insights on how to apply the technology.

While a Martian base is probably pretty distant possibility, a lunar outpost is almost in sight. NASA has concrete plans to send humans back to the moon in this decade, and it wants to lay down infrastructure for a permanent research base. If this is successful, a Martian base might not be that far off.

• The study “Fuel and oxygen harvesting from Martian regolithic brine” was published in PNAS. 

Mars colony game changer: New technology can extract water and fuel from salty water

Illustration: © Getty Images/Steven Hobbs/Stocktrek Images

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

13-12-2020 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

We're as good as it gets: Intelligent life is extremely UNLIKELY to exist anywhere else in the universe because it took a series of miracles for humans to evolve, say scientists

• Oxford researchers outline the various evolutionary steps to human existence 

• These steps take longer than a planet is actually habitable before its star dies 

• What's happened on Earth is unlikely typical of what happens on other planets

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

Statisticians say the evolution of intelligent life is 'exceptionally rare', and that human-like civilisations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets. 

In a new paper, Oxford researchers theorise that, for life to evolve in the same way elsewhere in the universe, it would take longer than the whole of Earth's projected lifespan. 

Evolution on Earth from the Big Bang up until the current day has involved a series of what they call 'evolutionary transitions' that were helped by chance. 

These include the emergence of primitive life from non-living matter (known as abiogenesis) and eukaryotic life (with cells that have a nucleus enclosed), the evolution of sexual reproduction, multicellularity, and intelligence itself.   

If intelligent life does exist on other planets, it would need to have gone through a series of comparable evolutionary transitions.   

Intelligent life in the Universe is exceptionally rare, assuming that intelligent life elsewhere requires analogous evolutionary transitions, scientist say. Pictured, an artists's impression of an Earth-like planet in another galaxy

'It took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions resulting in intelligent life to unfold on Earth,' the experts, from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, say in their paper. 

'In another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will make Earth uninhabitable for complex life. 

'Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude. 

'In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.'

The researchers used a special statistical technique called a 'Bayesian analysis' to determine the probability of events in Earth's history – a 'chain of multiple evolutionary transitions' – happening elsewhere.

'Our methods were basically statistics,' Dr Anders Sandberg at the Future of Humanity Institute told MailOnline.  

'We made use of the assumption that what happened on Earth is typical for what happens on other planets – not the exact times, but that there are some tricky steps life needs to get through in sequence to produce intelligent observers.'

For example, eukaryotes – organisms with a nucleus – needed more than a billion years ago to emerge from their nucleus-less prokaryotic predecessors.

This was a far less probable event than the development of multicellular life, which is thought to have originated independently over 40 times in nature. 

The fact that some transitions occurred only once in Earth's history suggests a remarkable stroke of luck that resulted in intelligent Earthlings today. 

Eukaryotic life - with cells that have a nucleus enclosed - took over a billion years to emerge from prokaryotic precursors. Pictured, cell of a eukaryote

The team quote American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who said that if the 'tape of life' were to be rerun, 'the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence' would occur. 

'What we added was a statistical approach that allows us to get estimates of just how unlikely the steps could be,' Dr Sandberg told MailOnline.

'We feed in data about when things happened on Earth and a guess of how many steps there were, and in return we get the most likely levels of difficulty.

'[These] turn out to indicate that, yes, we are an unlikely planet.' 

Arriving at the opposite conclusion – that life in the universe isn't rare at all – would require evidence for much earlier transitions than the ones that occurred on Earth, or multiple instances of transitions.  

The classic version of this argument stems from the work of Australian theoretical physicist Brandon Carter, who sought to explain why intelligent life emerged so late in Earth's history. 

It is unknown how abundant extraterrestrial life is, or whether such life might be complex or intelligent 

Earth is 4.5 billion years old and in another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will likely destroy Earth's ability to support complex life, due to increased surface temperatures. 

But humans – including our human-like ape ancestors that walked on two legs – have only existed on Earth for about the last 6 million years.

Homo sapiens, meanwhile, arrived around 200,000 years ago.

'[Carter] pointed out that there is no reason to think the tricky steps on average may take much more time than planets remain habitable,' Dr Sandberg said.   

'There might well be entirely different kinds of life and minds but they are likely as hard (or harder) to evolve than us.'

Dr Sandberg added that the new study fits into what one could call 'armchair astrobiology' as it deals with probabilities. 

'Just because we got our results doesn't mean it is a waste of time to look at the actual universe,' he said. 

'Data will always trump ever so careful reasoning and statistics.'

WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?

The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life. 

The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

He first posed the question back in 1950.

Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness. 

Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.

This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy

If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.  

Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.

 He said: 'One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.

‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'

Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.

Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.

If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. 

The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution. 

Read more:

• www.liebertpub.c...

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13-12-2020 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

Enormous Ancient Building Identified Beneath Monte Albán’s Main Plaza

Researchers in Mexico have discovered a vast ancient building buried beneath the Main Plaza at the ancient capital of Monte Albán.

Monte Albán is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site located in the Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán Municipality, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, approximately 9 km (5.59 miles) west of Oaxaca City. Representing one of the first developed cities in pre-Hispanic Mexico, this expansive civic-ceremonial center was situated on top of an artificially levelled ridge about 1,940 meters (6,364 ft.) above mean sea level and it rises 400 meters (1,312 ft.) from the valley floor.

Over the years, archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of artificial terraces and dozens of mounds concealing lost architecture that completely covered the entire ridgeline. Now, buried beneath the surface of Monte Albán’s Main Plaza researchers from the University of Oklahoma recently scanned and identified a hitherto unknown ritualistic building.

• The Zapotecs of Monte Alban - The First Civilization in Western Mexico?
• The Column of Death at Mitla, Hugged by Mesoamericans For Millennia
• Religion of the Aztecs: Keeping the Balance in an Unpredictable and Terrifying World

Reappraising the Monte Albán Plaza

Monte Albán was founded in 500 BC and became a powerful regional capital with many impressive stone buildings featuring a highly developed artistic style and written language system. The Main Plaza at Monte Albán was built, expanded upon, and remodeled over 1,000 years - before the site’s eventual demise around 850 AD. The ancient metropolis was partially excavated in the 1930s and the newly discovered building is similar to the temples discovered back then, which evidence suggested were used ritually, for burning incense , making offerings, and bloodletting.

Monte Albán.

( Dr. Marc Levine )

This new discovery was made by Dr. Marc Levine, assistant curator of archaeology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences . Using ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistance, and gradiometry to locate the structure, the researcher told KFOR that everything at this site “is deeply symbolic.” Furthermore, the intrepid explorer added that this new discovery “changes our understanding of the history of the Main Plaza and how it was organized and used.”

A Site Worth its Weight in Gold, Culturally

For almost a century, researchers have studied and investigated many of the stone buildings located around the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, which is deemed so important to modern Mexican culture that the site is featured on the country’s 20 peso note. However, the actual plaza itself has now been analyzed. Professor Levine says that to put the building in context we can look towards the “National Mall in Washington, D.C.” What he means by this is that every monument and every building on that mall has “a significance and was thought over, carefully planned and oriented in a certain way.” And the same goes for Monte Albán, according to the researcher.

Using ground penetrating radar at Monte Albán.

( Dr. Marc Levine )

To lift the lost building from its time capsule the OU team used drones to digitally map the entirety of Monte Albán’s Main Plaza and its surrounding structures and high resolution 3-D images revealed the sizes of all of the buried buildings. Levine estimates his team will spend the next two years analyzing all of their data to complete their study of the plaza. Their ultimate goal is to calculate how much work was involved in creating the site.

Ancient Mexican Vs Egyptian Pyramids

Since the creation of Lidar scanning technology, Mexico’s ancient secrets have been slowly revealed. For example, in July this year, the Guardian announced a mind blowing discovery at Aguada Fénix , near the Guatemalan border in Mexico’s Tabasco state. Scientists using an aerial remote-sensing method “discovered the largest and oldest-known structure built by the ancient Maya civilization – a colossal rectangular elevated platform built between 1000 and 800 BC.” Unlike Mexico’s other pyramids , this one was constructed with clay and earth, but like all of them, it was used for mass public rituals.

This massive ancient structure measures 1,400 meters, almost a mile long, by 400 meters (a quarter-mile) wide, it stood 10 to 15 meters (33 to 50 ft.) high, and it is estimated that its total volume exceeded ancient Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza . Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza was built 1,500 years earlier and as such it has become the outright winner so far as the most talked about pyramid in the world, but it isn't the biggest pyramid by a long shot.

The greatest of all Great Pyramids is the Great Pyramid of Cholula , an ancient Aztec temple in Puebla, Mexico, with a base four times larger than Giza's, and nearly twice the volume. What we can derive from the size and number of the Mexican pyramids is, if the building of pyramids was indeed an act of prestige by powerful, semi-divine rulers, than the regality and control held by kings in Mexico made the Pharaohs of Egypt look like mere landlords.

The Great Pyramid of Cholula. 

(juancramosgonzalez /Adobe Stock)

• Top Image: Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico. 
• Source: WitR /Adobe Stock

By Ashley Cowie

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{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/general }

13-12-2020 om 22:58 geschreven door peter  

By Ken Croswell

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

13-12-2020 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

By Lisa Grossman

Astrophysicist Miguel Montargès has a clear memory of the moment the stars became real places to him. He was 7 or 8 years old, looking up from the garden of his parents’ apartment in the south of France. A huge, red star winked in the night. The young space fan connected the star to a map he had studied in an astronomy magazine and realized he knew its name: Betelgeuse.

Something shifted for him. That star was no longer an anonymous speck floating in a vast uncharted sea. It was a destination, with a name.

“I thought, wow, for the first time … I can name a star,” he says. The realization was life-changing.

Since then, Montargès, now at the Paris Observatory, has written his Ph.D. thesis and about a dozen papers about Betelgeuse. He considers the star an old friend, observing it many times a year, for work and for fun. He says good-bye every May when the star slips behind the sun from the perspective of Earth, and says hello again in August when the star comes back.

So in late 2019, when the bright star suddenly dimmed for no apparent reason, Montargès was a little alarmed. Some people speculated that Betelgeuse was about to explode in a brilliant supernova that would outshine the full moon. Astronomers know the star is old and its days are numbered, but Montargès wasn’t ready to see it go.

“It’s my favorite star,” he says. “I don’t want it to die.”

Other researchers, though, were eager to watch Betelgeuse explode in real time. Supernovas mark the violent deaths of stars that are at least eight times as massive as the sun (SN: 11/7/20, p. 20). But astronomers still don’t know what would signal that one is about to blow. The outbursts sprinkle interstellar space with elements that ultimately form the bulk of planets and people — carbon, oxygen, iron (SN: 2/18/17, p. 24). So the question of how supernovas occur is a question of our own origins.

A bit dim

The SPHERE instrument in Chile took images of Betelgeuse in January (top) and December (bottom) 2019. The December image shows a dark splotch, a dimming, over Betelgeuse’s southern hemisphere.

January 2019

December 2019

But the explosions are rare — astronomers estimate that one occurs in our galaxy just a few times a century. The last one spotted nearby, SN 1987A, was more than 33 years ago in a neighboring galaxy (SN: 2/18/17, p. 20). Betelgeuse is just one of the many aging, massive stars — called red supergiants — that could go supernova at any moment. But as one of the closest and brightest, Betelgeuse is the one that space enthusiasts know best.

So when the star started acting strangely at the end of last year, Montargès and a small band of Betelgeuse diehards aimed every telescope they could at the dimming giant. Over the following months, the star returned to its usual brightness, and the excitement over an imminent supernova faded. But the flurry of data collected in the rush to figure out what was happening might help answer a different long-standing question: How do massive, old stars send their planet-building star stuff into the cosmos even before they explode?

Orion’s shoulder

If you’ve looked up at the stars during winter in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ve probably seen Betelgeuse, whether you realized it or not. The star is the second brightest in the constellation Orion, marking the hunter’s left shoulder from our perspective.

And it’s huge. Estimates for Betelgeuse’s vital statistics vary, but if it sat at the center of our solar system, the star would fill much of the space between the sun and Jupiter. At about 15 to 20 times as massive as the sun, somewhere between 750 and 1,000 times its diameter and just about 550 light-years from Earth, Betelgeuse is typically between the sixth- and seventh-brightest star in the sky.

Betelgeuse’s brightness varies, even under normal circumstances. Its outer layers are a bubbling cauldron of hot gas and plasma. As hot material rises to the surface, the star brightens; as material falls toward the core, the star dims. That convection cycle puts Betelgeuse on a semiregular dimmer switch that fluctuates roughly every 400 days or so. The star’s brightness also varies about every six years, though astronomers don’t know why.

Big deal

Betelgeuse is the left shoulder of the Orion constellation (left). The star’s first portrait, made with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996, took some doing. Hubble’s operators worried that the bright star would fry the telescope’s detectors. So astrophysicist Andrea Dupree had to use every filter Hubble had — “like wearing four sets of sunglasses,” she says. “There was nothing. Black. No light got through.” Only by taking off the sunglasses could she finally see the massive star, with a diameter that rivals the width of Jupiter’s orbit.

A. DUPREE/HARVARD & SMITHSONIAN’S CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS, R. GILLILAND/STSCI, NASA, ESA

What they do know is that Betelgeuse is running out of time. It’s less than 10 million years old, a youngster compared with the roughly 4.6-billion–year-old sun. But because Betelgeuse is so massive and burns through its fuel so quickly, it’s already in the final life stage of a red supergiant. Someday in the not too distant future, the star won’t be able to support its own weight — it will collapse in on itself and rebound in a supernova.

“We know one day it’s going to die and explode,” says Emily Levesque, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle. But no one knows when. “In astronomical terms, ‘one day’ means sometime in the next 200,000 years.”

In October 2019, Betelgeuse started dimming, which wasn’t too strange in and of itself. The change fit within the normal 400ish-day cycle, says astronomer Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who has been tracking Betelgeuse’s cycles of brightness since the 1980s.

But by Christmas, Betelgeuse was the dimmest it had been in the 100-plus years that astronomers have measured it. And the dimming continued all the way through February.

Guinan was one of the first to sound the alarm. On December 7, and again on December 23, he and colleagues posted a bulletin on The Astronomer’s Telegram website announcing the star’s “fainting” and encouraging fellow astronomers to take a look.

There was no reason to think that the dimming was a harbinger of a supernova. “I never said it was going to be one,” Guinan says. But because these explosions are so rare, astronomers don’t know what the signals of an imminent supernova are. Dimming could be one of them.

That report of odd behavior was all astronomers and amateur space enthusiasts needed to hear. Online, the story caught fire.

“On Twitter, it was hysterical,” says Andrea Dupree, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. She recalls seeing one tweet suggesting that the explosion was going to happen that night, with the hashtag #HIDE. “Where am I going to hide? Under my desk?” (When Betelgeuse finally explodes, it probably won’t hurt life on Earth — it’s a safe distance away.)

Living large

After millions of years, stars that are between eight and 30 times the sun’s mass evolve into yellow supergiants, spend a few thousand years as such, then become red supergiants like Betelgeuse. Ultimately these stars explode violently as supernovas. The images above are not to scale.

Most astronomers didn’t really believe that Betelgeuse’s end was nigh, even as they rushed to schedule telescope time. But some got caught up in the excitement.

“I don’t expect it to blow,” Guinan recalls thinking. “But I don’t want to blink.” He signed up for phone alerts from telescopes that detect invisible particles called neutrinos and ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. A detection of either one might be an early sign of a supernova. He found himself outside at 1 a.m. in January after a report of gravitational waves from the direction of Orion. “It was cloudy, but I thought I might see a brightening,” he says. “I’ve gotten crazy about it.”

Others were believers too, until their data cast doubt on the notion.

“I thought it might,” says astrophysicist Thavisha Dharmawardena of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “We knew there were other explanations, and we might have to look into it. But we know Betelgeuse is an old star, close to the end of its life. It was exciting.”

Two camps

Once the star started returning to its usual brightness in mid-February, talk of an imminent supernova faded. A paper published in the Oct. 10 Astrophysical Journal boosted confidence in Betelgeuse’s longevity, suggesting that the star is just at the beginning of its old age and has at least 100,000 years to go before it explodes. But what was it up to, if it was not on the verge of exploding?

As results from telescopes all over the world and in space flooded in, most astronomers have fallen into two camps. One says Betelgeuse’s dimming was caused by a cloud of dust coughed out by the star itself, blocking its glow. The other camp isn’t sure what the explanation is, but says “no” to the dust speculation.

If the dust theory proves true, it could have profound implications for the origins of complex chemistry, planets and even life in the universe. Red supergiants are surrounded by diffuse clouds of gas and dust that are full of elements that are forged only in stars — and those clouds form before the star explodes. Even before they die, supergiants seem to bequeath material to the next generation of stars.

“The carbon, oxygen in our body, it’s coming from there — from the supernova and from the clouds around dying stars,” Montargès says. But it’s not clear how those elements escape the stars in the first place. “We have no idea,” he says.

Montargès hoped studying Betelgeuse’s dimming would let scientists see that process in action.

In December 2019, he and colleagues took an image of Betelgeuse in visible light with the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. That image showed that, yes, Betelgeuse was much dimmer than it had been 11 months earlier — but only the star’s bottom half. Perhaps an asymmetrical dust cloud was to blame.

Observations from February 15, 2020, seem to support that idea (SN: 4/11/20, p. 6). Levesque and Philip Massey of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., compared the February observations with similar ones from 2004. The star’s temperature hadn’t dropped as much as would be expected if the dimming was from something intrinsic to the star, like its convection cycles, the pair reported in the March 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

That left dust as a reasonable explanation. “We know Betelgeuse sheds mass and produces dust around itself,” Levesque says. “Dust could have come toward us, cooled and temporarily blocked the light.”

Dark cloud

A strong vote for dust came from Dupree, who was watching Betelgeuse with the Hubble Space Telescope. Like Guinan, she has a decades-long relationship with Betelgeuse. In 1996, she and colleague Ronald Gilliland looked at Betelgeuse with Hubble to make the first real image of any star other than the sun. Most stars are too far and too faint to show up as anything but a point. Betelgeuse is one of the few stars whose surface can be seen as a two-dimensional disk — a real place.

By the end of 2019, Dupree was observing Betelgeuse with Hubble several times a year. She had assembled an international team of researchers she calls the MOB, for Months of Betelgeuse, to observe the star frequently in a variety of wavelengths of light.

Yo-yo

In late 2019, Betelgeuse started dimming (V curve, right) more than its normal up and down (V curve, left). The blue and green dots are brightness measurements from ground-based observatories.Betelgeuse brightness measurements, 2019-2020

The goal was the same as Montargès’: to answer fundamental questions about how Betelgeuse, and perhaps other red supergiants, lose material. The MOB had baseline observations from before the dimming and already had Hubble time scheduled to track the star’s brightness cycles.

Those observations showed that in January and March 2019, Betelgeuse looked “perfectly normal,” Dupree says. But from September through November, just before the dimming event, the star gave out more ultraviolet light — up to four or five times its usual UV brightness — over its southern hemisphere.

The temperature and electron density in that region went up, too. And material seemed to be moving outward, away from the star and toward Earth.

Dupree and colleagues’ theory of what happened, reported in the Aug. 10 Astrophysical Journal, is that one of the giant bubbles of hot plasma always churning in the star’s outer layers rose to the edge of the star’s atmosphere and escaped, sending huge amounts of material flowing into interstellar space. That could be one way that red supergiants shed material before exploding.

Once it had fled the star, that hot stuff cooled, condensed into dust and floated in front of Betelgeuse for several months. As the dust cleared, Betelgeuse appeared brighter again.

“It seems to us that what we saw with the ultraviolet is kind of the smoking gun,” Dupree says. “This material moved on out, condensed and formed this dark, dark dust cloud.”

Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, shared the Hubble results in a NASA online town hall meeting on September 10 as if it were the final answer. “Mystery solved,” he said. “Not gonna supernova anytime soon.”

Cycles and spots

Maybe not — but that doesn’t mean dust explains the dimming.

In the July 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters, Dharmawardena and colleagues published observations of Betelgeuse that ran counter to the dust explanation. Her team used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii in January, February and March to look at Betelgeuse in submillimeter wavelengths of light. “If we think it’s a dust cloud, the submillimeter is the perfect wavelength to look at,” she says.

Dust should have made Betelgeuse look brighter in those wavelengths, as floating grains absorbed and reemitted starlight. But it didn’t. If anything, the star dimmed slightly. “Our first thought was that we’d done something wrong — everyone in the community expected it to be dust,” she says. But “the fact that it didn’t increase or stay constant in the submillimeter was pretty much a dead giveaway that it’s not dust.”

Infrared observations with the airborne SOFIA telescope should have found the glowing signature of dust too, if it existed. “It never showed up,” Guinan says. “I don’t think it’s dust.”

Instead, Guinan thinks the dimming may have been part of Betelgeuse’s natural convection cycle. The star’s outer atmosphere constantly pulsates and “breathes” in and out as enormous bubbles of hot plasma rise to the surface and sink down again. “It’s driven by the internal core of the star,” he says. “You have hot blobs rising up, they cool, they get more dense, they fall back.”

Multiple cycles syncing up could explain why the 2019 dimming was so extreme. Guinan and colleagues analyzed about 180 years of observations of Betelgeuse, dating back to astronomer John Herschel’s 1839 discovery that the star’s brightness varies. Guinan’s group found that, in addition to the roughly six-year and 400-day cycles, Betelgeuse might have a third, smaller cycle of about 187 days. It looks like all three cycles might have hit their brightness nadirs at the same time in late 2019, Guinan says.

Or maybe the darkness in the southern hemisphere that Montargès’ team saw with SPHERE was an enormous star spot, Dharmawardena offers. In the sun’s case, those dark splotches, called sunspots, mark the sites of magnetic activity on the surface. Betelgeuse is one of a handful of stars on which star spots have been directly seen.

But to cause Betelgeuse’s dimming, a star spot would have to be enormous. Typical star spots cover about 20 to 30 percent of a star’s surface, Dharmawardena says. This one would need to cover at least half, maybe up to 70 percent.

“That’s rare,” Dharmawardena admits. “But so is this kind of dimming.”

Pandemic disruptions

Analyses are still coming in. But just as Betelgeuse was returning to its normal brightness, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“We were hoping to have a lot more data,” Dharmawardena says.

A few observations came in right under the wire. The SOFIA observations were made on one of the last flights before the pandemic grounded the plane that carries the telescope. And Montargès took another look with SPHERE just days before its observatory shut down in mid-March.

But one of Montargès’ most hoped-for results may never come. Eager to solve the dust versus not-dust mystery, his plan was to combine two kinds of observations: making a 2-D picture of the whole star’s disk, like Dupree did with Hubble in the ’90s, but in longer wavelengths such as infrared or submillimeter, like Dharmawardena’s images from early 2020. That way, you could differentiate the dust from the star, he reasoned.

Only one observatory can do both at once: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. Montargès had planned to ask to observe Betelgeuse with ALMA in June and July, when the winter skies in the Southern Hemisphere are most free of turbulence. But ALMA closed in March and was still closed in September.

“When I realized ALMA will not get the time in June, I thought … we are never going to solve it,” he says. “We may never be completely certain, because of COVID.”

Any other star

Montargès and his colleagues have submitted their analysis of the SPHERE pictures from March for publication. Though he’s not yet willing to share the results, he thinks they could pull the two camps together.

Ultimately, if Betelgeuse did cough out a cloud of dust last year, it could teach us about the origins of life in the universe, Montargès says. If the dust camp is even partially right, Betelgeuse’s dimming may have been the first time humans have watched the seeds of life being launched into the cosmos.

In the meantime, he’s relieved to see his favorite star shining bright again. “I must admit that since [last] December, since this whole stuff started, every time I see it, I am like, phew, it’s still there,” he says.

People keep asking him if he would like ​Betelgeuse to go supernova so he can study it. “I would like another star to go supernova,” he says. “Antares, I don’t care about it; it can explode anytime. But not Betelgeuse.”

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

13-12-2020 om 21:45 geschreven door peter  

UFO Filmed Over Ancient City In Greece Is ‘Same’ One Spotted In Jerusalem in 2011, Claims Expert

by Douglas Charles 

A forest in Mexico. The United Arab Emirates. The Dominican Republic. And now, Thessaloniki, Greece. All places where mysterious UFOs have been spotted and filmed over the past three-plus weeks.

It looks like the aliens have not only decided that camouflaging their crafts is not as big a priority as it used to be, they have also started to expand their areas of inspection as Greece is becoming a more prominent UFO hotspot of late.

This latest UFO sighting took place in August and the video was uploaded to the internet by YouTuber GREEK POWER.

It was later brought to the attention of prominent UFO and alien expert Scott Waring who enhanced the video and discussed the sighting on his website.

Watch this video and you will see a huge flashing UFO over the ancient city of Thessaloniki, Greece.

The city was founded over 2335 years ago in 315 BC.

That makes this area a very important location since aliens can monitor the human inhabitants over a long time period and make accurate predictions of the future of the city.

This glowing light looks similar to the one seen a back in 2011 over Dome of Rock (Holy temple) in Jerusalem in which thousands saw the UFO and recorded it. This…is the same UFO.

Here’s the footage that was recorded in Greece back in August…

And here’s a report on the UFO sighting, filmed from multiple angles, that made news in Jerusalem back in 2011.

“This thing is showing up everywhere I’m getting scared,” wrote one viewer on the Greece video.

“There’s one in Melbourne too,” commented another.

It won’t be long now and the truth will be told, because…

FOX

More alien news and evidence…

• Astronomers track source of mysterious radio signals to a location within our galaxy
• NASA announces water has been discovered on the moon, bringing us one step closer to proof of alien existence
• Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reveals ‘UFOs interfered with U.S. nuclear program’ in new documentary
• Three lakes found beneath surface of Mars could be home to alien life on the red planet
• Japanese defense minister issues official protocols to military for UFO encounters; do they know something?
  
• Signs of life found on Venus? Alien bio-signature discovered by astronomers on Earth’s ‘twin’
• New study says microscopic aliens may have been visiting Earth, and multiplying, for centuries
• New study suggests interstellar space rock Oumuamua ‘could have been sent by aliens’
  
• Landmark new research claims evidence of alien life may exist under ancient ice sheets on Mars
  
• Ex-Pentagon UFO program astrophysicist admits examining ‘vehicles not made on this earth’

{ https://brobible.com/ }

13-12-2020 om 21:21 geschreven door peter  

Is this really video of a UFO crashing into a Mexican volcano...or just a load of hot air?

By JOSHUA GARDNER

A video currently making the rounds on the web appears to show an unidentified flying object diving headlong into the smoldering caldera of a Mexican volcano.

Popocatepetl, an active volcano in the Puebla state of southern Mexico, was being recorded by media company

Televisa the evening of May 30 when a light-emitting and fast-flying object appeared to make a quick left turn in order to fly directly into the top of the erupting mountain.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEOS...

Hot air? Footage taken May 30 of an active Mexican volcano appears to show an unidentified, rapidly flying object fly directly into the smoldering caldera

And this isn’t the first time video footage has shown suspicious activity near Popocatepetl.

In November, footage—also from Televisa—showed a cigar shaped object appear to take a nose dive directly into the 18,000 foot volcano 40 miles south of Mexico city. 

The latest video appears to be something a lot more aircraft-like, however. The object seems to make a conscious decision to quickly slow down and plunge into the smoky-filled hole.

The Huffington Post reached out to a U.S. government contractor who also runs a UFO website to get his take on the May 30 footage.

Maneuverable: The brightly lit object starts from far off, but veers quickly, and perhaps even purposefully into the fiery depths after slowly down in a blink of an eye

‘What I think is that this is not a likely fake. I think, for the moment, this is a genuine image capture,’ said Marc Dantonio. ‘This is a low light camera (which) allows the volcanologists studying the footage to see any incandescence on the flank of the volcano in night shots. As such, any brighter lights that are captured will appear very bright, as the one planet/star indicates.’

Myth? Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano lies 40 miles south of Mexico City and is very active. It is named for a man of Aztec legend who became an angry volcano after losing his love

But that doesn’t mean the video analysts believes this is a true UFO sighting. He told Huffpo the appearance of the object veering into the volcano is just a trick of perspective.

‘I am leaning toward the object being a captured commercial jet passing through the field of view,’ he said.

As for the 2012, cigar UFO, Dantonio said that one, at least, may have actually come from outer space.

‘It is a particularly brilliant meteor and likely was moving much more slowly than typical meteors. In my view,’ he said, ‘it meets all the criteria.’

For those still holding out hope, a 24-hour webcam monitors Popocatepetl, allowing any couch conspiracy theorist to observe the mysterious mountain and watch for phenomenal occurrences from the comfort of their own home. 

Tourist spot? Popocatépetl has been the site of UFO sightings before. In 2012, video appeared to show a cigar-shaped object making a similar nosedive into the crater

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{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/  }

13-12-2020 om 18:46 geschreven door peter  

The Nephilim: Giant Offspring of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Man?

Who were the nephilim? The word nephilim appears twice in the Old Testament of the Bible. They are first mentioned in chapter 6 of the book of Genesis and then again in Number 13:33. But their brief mention in the Bible has led to an ongoing debate as to who or what the nephilim were. 

Much of this debate stems from the passage in the Bible that states:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward - when the sons of God went in to the daughters of man, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown . 

Genesis 6: 1-4

The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair (1923) by Daniel Chester French. Corcoran Gallery of Art.

( CC0)

What Does ‘Nephilim’ Mean?

The traditional definition of Nephilim is giant. Some dictionaries describe the nephilim as being giants who also possess super human strength. The Greek Septuagint, an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible , refers to them as gigantes, which actually means "earth -born," a concept we will be coming back to as we continue.

It is believed that the word Nephilim comes from the root word "Naphal" which means to fall. In biblical circles this definition has quickly put the Nephilim into the role of the children of the fallen angels . The word Naphal, however, is never directly associated with the concept of fallen angels. Its meaning in context is more closely associated with the idea of lying prostrate or of prostrating oneself. There are also ties in this word to the concept of failure, falling short, or being cast down.

• The Mysterious Didanum People
• New DNA Testing on 2,000-Year-Old Elongated Paracas Skulls Changes Known History
• Enochian: The Mysterious Lost Language of Angels

‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’ (1685) by Charles Le Brun.

( Public Domain )

Mythos of the Nephilim

Over the years a mythos has developed around the concept of the nephilim. It alleges that these giants were the offspring of the "Sons of God" and the "Daughters of Man". Are the nephilim the children of the untoward relationship?

The connection between the biblical text and this claim, although commonly pointed to as the basis of this belief, is unfounded. The document in which we find statements that support this claim actually comes from the apocryphal Book of Jubiliees :

And it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the angels of God saw them on a certain year of this jubilee, that they were beautiful to look upon; and they took themselves wives of all whom they chose, and they bare unto them sons and they were giants.

The Book of Jubilees - Chapter V: 1

Is the claim that the nephilim were the offspring of the sons of god and the daughters of men supported by sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition?  In other words, does mythology worldwide support this belief?

The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair, by Maurice Greiffenhagen.

( Public Domain )

Giants Roaming the Earth Across Cultures

The notion of giants roaming the earth can be found in cultures worldwide. Greek mythology tells us that the Titan Cronus castrated his father Uranus in order to gain control of the Greek pantheon . It is from the blood of the castrated Uranus that fell upon the earth that the giants, the "earth-born", were created.

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{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

13-12-2020 om 18:15 geschreven door peter  

Ancient megafloods may have shaped Mars’s landscape

Early Mars may have gone through global megafloods, but was it habitable?

 by Tibi Puiu

Mars is barren and inhospitable today but billions of years ago the red planet had water and a very dynamic global weather system. We know that the planet was once home to oceans of water and river systems. Now, according to a new study, Mars may have once even been subjected to powerful megafloods.

Around four billion years ago, an asteroid impact melted ice stored on the Martian surface, triggering a cascade of effects that may have unleashed gigantic megafloods. Although the water is now long gone, signs of the floods’ are still on Mars in the form of megaripples, also known as antidunes.

“We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the rover Curiosity,” said co-author Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. “Deposits left behind by megafloods had not been previously identified with orbiter data.”

Just like on Earth, present-day geological features on Mars bear the marks of the passage of water and wind, whose touches have been frozen in time.

These include megaripples at Gale crater — wave-shaped features etched in the sedimentary layer that can reach up to 9 meters (30 feet) in height spaced 135 meters (145 feet) apart.

According to the researchers at Cornell, these ripples are almost identical to those formed on Earth by the melting of ice about two million years ago.

Four billion years ago a large impact generated copious amounts of carbon dioxide and methane — both powerful greenhouse gases — that heated the climate, ultimately melting Mars’ reservoirs of ice. The water vapour trapped heat in the atmosphere even more, causing the red planet to undergo a brief period of warm and wet conditions.

Water vapor clouds formed through condensation likely unleashed a planetary-level torrential rain. Some of the water fell on Gale Crater, then combined with water flowing downhill from Mount Sharp, producing gigantic flash floods.

Previously, scientists established that Gale Crater was once the site of persistent lakes and streams in Mars’ ancient past. Coupled with the present findings, the authors of the new study claim that both Gale Crater and Mouth Sharp were capable of supporting microbial life.

“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” Fairén said in a press release. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life."

“So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that the next rover Perseverance … will help to answer.”

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{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

13-12-2020 om 17:44 geschreven door peter  

13-12-2020 om 17:11 geschreven door peter  

Australia is dragged into worldwide monolith mystery as bizarre structure is discovered in Adelaide covered in cryptic coordinates

• A three-metre-tall metal monolith was found in Adelaide's suburbs on Thursday

• It is covered in coordinates that point to New York, Cairo and a Pacific Island 

• Similar structures have been found across the US and Europe, including the UK

By SHIVE PREMA FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA and ED WRIGHT FOR MAIL ONLINE

A mysterious monolith covered in coordinates has appeared in Adelaide after similar structures appeared across the US and Europe. 

The latest monolith is a three-sided, three-metre-tall silver structure that was first sighted near the Seaford Train bridge in Noarlunga in Adelaide's southern suburbs at 6pm on Thursday.  

Coordinates on the structure point to various locations across the globe, some of which are landmarks and some of which are seemingly random. 

The latest monolith (pictured) is a three-sided, three-metre-tall silver structure that was first sighted near the Seaford Train bridge in Noarlunga, Adelaide at 6pm on Thursday

The top coordinate is a brownstone building in Brooklyn, New York, while the second location is the uninhabited island of Managaha in the Northern Mariana Islands, near Guam, in the Pacific Ocean. 

Lastly, the bottom coordinates mark The Sphinx in Egypt's Al Giza Desert.

The monolith is located in Noarlunga, which is part of the City of Onkaparinga. 

An Onkaparinga Council spokesman said he was only made aware of the structure after being contacted by the media and was currently investigating its origins. 

The Adelaide sighting comes after two monoliths were spotted in Poland on Wednesday. 

One was found on the banks of the Vistula river in the nation's capital Warsaw on Wednesday afternoon.

Prior to this, another was spotted in the southern city of Kielce at a former quarry turned into a nature reserve on Wednesday morning. 

The first shiny pillar was spotted in southern Utah on November 18 by baffled locals and news of the object quickly went viral around the world.  

A woman looks at a metal monolith that popped up on a riverbank of the Vistula in the Polish capital Warsaw on Wednesday afternoon

Some observers pointed out its resemblance to the avant-garde work of John McCracken, a US artist who lived for a time in nearby New Mexico and died in 2011.

But McCracken's representatives have given ambiguous and at times conflicting responses to this theory, prolonging an international guessing game that intensified further with the monolith's sudden removal on Friday.

The Most Famous Artist, also known as Matty Mo, is also thought to have been behind some of the monoliths that appeared in the US. 

The monoliths have sparked comparisons to those seen in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Others have since popped up across the US, as well as in Colombia, Romania and the Netherlands.

The first shiny pillar was spotted in southern Utah on November 18 by baffled locals and news of the object quickly went viral around the world

Prior to the Polish structures, a monolith appeared on the top of a hill in Glastonbury in the UK on Wednesday with the words 'Not Banksy' etched onto it. 

Walkers discovered the large silver structure on top of Glastonbury Tor - an ancient hill linked to King Arthur and celtic mythology.

It was believed the monolith had been placed there overnight - but was felled by a gust of wind. 

The shiny triangular pillar featured a stencil drawing of a rat, similar to the style used by street artist Banksy.

Prior to that, another popped up on the Isle of Wight on Sunday, drawing a crowd of locals looking to take a selfie with the unusual object.

Designer Tom Dunford later admitted that he installed it as a tribute to others around the world. 

UK: A three-sided metal monolith has appeared on a beach on the Isle of Wight on Sunday, following a month of similar structures being discovered and then disappearing across the US and in Romania

Structures also appeared this week in a small German town, a forbidding Spanish hillside and a muddy potato field in Belgium.

One of the bleak silver columns showed up in Sulzbach, Germany, overlooking a field near a shopping centre. 

Another was by the ruins of an old church in Ayllon, Spain, where local authorities warned people to steer clear of the dangerous slopes - while a third was spotted on Tuesday in the Flemish village of Baasrode. 

While the people behind some of the mysterious structures have been revealed, for the most part their origins remain a mystery. 

Theories abound, including suggestions that artists, aliens or savvy marketing executives are behind the statures.

The fact that some of the monoliths were quickly removed has only added to speculation about their potential origins.  

THE NETHERLANDS: A group of hikers were left intrigued after they spotted a metallic column in a nature reserve in a village in Oudehorne, Friesland on Sunday

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{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

13-12-2020 om 16:30 geschreven door peter  

Newsflash

Another mysterious monolith has been discovered, this time in the Netherlands. 

If you’re keeping score at home of the number of mysterious monoliths to appear around the world in the past month (and if you’re not, what are you doing to pass the time during the pandemic shutdown – the rest of us want to know!), the total has reached 66 and counting. That tally includes multiple monolith appearances in California (the U.S. leader with 9), the U.K. (6), the Netherlands (4), France (4) and Belgium (2). (Photos of the better-known ones here.)  If you go by continents, none have been reported so far in Asia, Africa and Antarctica. While some are still standing, many have disappeared almost as fast as they were found. Most have obvious signs that they’re manmade, with at least two sources offering to sell them. However, none (so far) can top the strangeness meter like the latest monolith discovered in Australia – the first on that continent and the only one with cryptic engraving. Can we finally say “It’s aliens!”?

Photos of these monoliths are shown below
with the date discovered/reported, the monoliths location,
the source that reported it,
as well as a brief note on any interesting features.
This list is being updated, for a complete list see Wikipedia here.

Date: Dec 10 2020.
Location: along the Seaford railway line,
just south of the Noarlunga Centre inAdelaide, Australia
Source: 7News
Feature: scratched on it is four sets of latitude/longitude coordinates:
{top to bottom} (40.7624N,73.9738W), (15.2413973N,145.7122932E),
(17.75N,142.5E),(29.97N, 31.1375E).
These coordinates point approximately to:
(1) Trump Tower New York,(40.7624N,73.9738W)
(2) Managaha Island North Mariana Islands,(15.2413973N,145.7122932E)
(3) The Mariana Trench (NW of Managaha Island), (17.75N,142.5E)
(4) The Sphinx Egypt,(29.97N, 31.1375E)
These coordinates point in a line from Trump Tower to the Sphinx to the Mariana Trench.

You can Google those coordinates, but we’ll reveal the locations in a minute. They’re engraved on a monolith (the standard 10-foot, three-sided, silver kind) found on December 10 next to the Seaford railway train bridge just south of the Noarlunga Centre in Adelaide, South Australia. (Photo here.) It was reported to 7 News and other media sites which dutifully posted the report immediately, because the monoliths are much more fun than anything else going on in 2020. The name Noarlunga is an English misspelling and mispronunciation of the native Kaurna word Nurlongga (‘at the curvature’), a reference to the horseshoe bend near the mouth of the Onkaparinga River it sits on.

A monolith has appeared at Noarlunga Centre in South Australia.

Source: Nine News/Google Maps

We’re still waiting for the mysterious locations.

Sorry about that, and you’re right … they are mysterious. Starting from the bottom, they are the coordinates of the Sphinx in Giza, Egypt; the Mariana Trench in the Pacific (the deepest oceanic trench on Earth); Managaha Island in the North Mariana Islands (a historic site of the major World War II Battle of Saipan; and Trump Tower in New York City.

Trump Tower??!!

Yes, Trump Tower. We’re as puzzled as you are.

“Our customer relations team hasn’t received any enquiries about the monolith. However I’m not surprised that whoever (or whatever) is responsible chose our region, with our 31 kilometers of stunning beaches, McLaren Vale wineries and Mediterranean lifestyle.”

Noarlunga Mayor Erin Thompson wasted no time promoting the town’s monolith as a major tourist attraction on par with its beaches and wineries, conveniently ignoring any speculation on the meaning of the disparate coordinates. No one else has speculated who placed it there either, and, as of this writing, it’s still in Noarlunga.

Managaha Island

Perhaps the Noarlunga monolith’s erector placed it there as a fun connect-the-dots what-do-these-have-in-common game to play during the socially-distanced, attendance-limited holiday parties. It would certainly be more healthy than a piñata and less annoying than yet another marathon game of Monopoly.

Here’s a start – if aliens were leaving a guidepost of “interesting places to visit on this otherwise worthless planet”, they might include the Sphinx which they had a part in building, the Mariana Trench which is a great secluded parking space, the Managaha Island to remind you where you parked, and the Trump Tower where the leader who has been warned not to reveal your existence once lived.

Your turn.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-12-2020 om 15:34 geschreven door peter  

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-12-2020 om 15:07 geschreven door peter