NASA’s Fermi Spots a Weird Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Racing Toward Earth

By FRANCIS REDDY, NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

On August 26, 2020, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a pulse of high-energy radiation that had been racing toward Earth for nearly half the present age of the universe. Lasting only about a second, it turned out to be one for the record books – the shortest gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the death of a massive star ever seen.

GRBs are the most powerful events in the universe, detectable across billions of light-years. Astronomers classify them as long or short based on whether the event lasts for more or less than two seconds. They observe long bursts in association with the demise of massive stars, while short bursts have been linked to a different scenario.

Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, other space missions, and ground-based observatories to reveal the origin of GRB 200826A, a brief but powerful burst of radiation. It’s the shortest burst known to be powered by a collapsing star – and almost didn’t happen at all.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“We already knew some GRBs from massive stars could register as short GRBs, but we thought this was due to instrumental limitations,” said Bin-bin Zhang at Nanjing University in China and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “This burst is special because it is definitely a short-duration GRB, but its other properties point to its origin from a collapsing star. Now we know dying stars can produce short bursts, too.”

Named GRB 200826A, after the date it occurred, the burst is the subject of two papers published in Nature Astronomy on Monday, July 26. The first, led by Zhang, explores the gamma-ray data. The second, led by Tomás Ahumada, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes the GRB’s fading multiwavelength afterglow and the emerging light of the supernova explosion that followed.

“We think this event was effectively a fizzle, one that was close to not happening at all,” Ahumada said. “Even so, the burst emitted 14 million times the energy released by the entire Milky Way galaxy over the same amount of time, making it one of the most energetic short-duration GRBs ever seen.”

When a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel, its core suddenly collapses and forms a black hole. As matter swirls toward the black hole, some of it escapes in the form of two powerful jets that rush outward at almost the speed of light in opposite directions. Astronomers only detect a GRB when one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.

Each jet drills through the star, producing a pulse of gamma rays – the highest-energy form of light – that can last up to minutes. Following the burst, the disrupted star then rapidly expands as a supernova.

Short GRBs, on the other hand, form when pairs of compact objects – such as neutron stars, which also form during stellar collapse – spiral inward over billions of years and collide. Fermi observations recently helped show that, in nearby galaxies, giant flares from isolated, supermagnetized neutron stars also masquerade as short GRBs.

GRB 200826A was a sharp blast of high-energy emission lasting just 0.65 second. After traveling for eons through the expanding universe, the signal had stretched out to about one second long when it was detected by Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. The event also appeared in instruments aboard NASA’s Wind mission, which orbits a point between Earth and the Sun located about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, and Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001. ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) INTEGRAL satellite observed the blast as well.

All of these missions participate in a GRB-locating system called the InterPlanetary Network (IPN), for which the Fermi project provides all U.S. funding. Because the burst reaches each detector at slightly different times, any pair of them can be used to help narrow down where in the sky it occurred. About 17 hours after the GRB, the IPN narrowed its location to a relatively small patch of the sky in the constellation Andromeda.

Using the National Science Foundation-funded Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory, the team scanned the sky for changes in visible light that could be linked to the GRB’s fading afterglow.

Discovery image of the fading afterglow (center) of GRB 200826A.

Credit: ZTF and T. Ahumada et al., 2021

“Conducting this search is akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack, but the IPN helps shrink the haystack,” said Shreya Anand, a graduate student at Caltech and a co-author on the afterglow paper. “Out of more than 28,000 ZTF alerts the first night, only one met all of our search criteria and also appeared within the sky region defined by the IPN.”

Within a day of the burst, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory discovered fading X-ray emission from this same location. A couple of days later, variable radio emission was detected by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. The team then began observing the afterglow with a variety of ground-based facilities.

Observing the faint galaxy associated with the burst using the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4-meter telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, the team showed that its light takes 6.6 billion years to reach us. That’s 48% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years.

But to prove this short burst came from a collapsing star, the researchers also needed to catch the emerging supernova.

“If the burst was caused by a collapsing star, then once the afterglow fades away it should brighten again because of the underlying supernova explosion,” said Leo Singer, a Goddard astrophysicist and Ahumada’s research advisor. “But at these distances, you need a very big and very sensitive telescope to pick out the pinpoint of light from the supernova from the background glare of its host galaxy.”

To conduct the search, Singer was granted time on the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the use of a sensitive instrument called the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. The astronomers imaged the host galaxy in red and infrared light starting 28 days after the burst, repeating the search 45 and 80 days after the event. They detected a near-infrared source – the supernova – in the first set of observations that could not be seen in later ones.

The researchers suspect that this burst was powered by jets that barely emerged from the star before they shut down, instead of the more typical case where long-lasting jets break out of the star and travel considerable distances from it. If the black hole had fired off weaker jets, or if the star was much larger when it began its collapse, there might not have been a GRB at all.

The discovery helps resolve a long-standing puzzle. While long GRBs must be coupled to supernovae, astronomers detect far greater numbers of supernovae than they do long GRBs. This discrepancy persists even after accounting for the fact that GRB jets must tip nearly into our line of sight for astronomers to detect them at all.

The researchers conclude that collapsing stars producing short GRBs must be marginal cases whose light-speed jets teeter on the brink of success or failure, a conclusion consistent with the notion that most massive stars die without producing jets and GRBs at all. More broadly, this result clearly demonstrates that a burst’s duration alone does not uniquely indicate its origin.

References:

• “A peculiarly short-duration gamma-ray burst from massive star core collapse” by B.-B. Zhang, Z.-K. Liu, Z.-K. Peng, Y. Li, H.-J. Lü, J. Yang, Y.-S. Yang, Y.-H. Yang, Y.-Z. Meng, J.-H. Zou, H.-Y. Ye, X.-G. Wang, J.-R. Mao, X.-H. Zhao, J.-M. Bai, A. J. Castro-Tirado, Y.-D. Hu, Z.-G. Dai, E.-W. Liang and B. Zhang, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01395-z
• “Discovery and confirmation of the shortest gamma-ray burst from a collapsar” by Tomás Ahumada, Leo P. Singer, Shreya Anand, Michael W. Coughlin, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Geoffrey Ryan, Igor Andreoni, S. Bradley Cenko, Christoffer Fremling, Harsh Kumar, Peter T. H. Pang, Eric Burns, Virginia Cunningham, Simone Dichiara, Tim Dietrich, Dmitry S. Svinkin, Mouza Almualla, Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, Kishalay De, Rachel Dunwoody, Pradip Gatkine, Erica Hammerstein, Shabnam Iyyani, Joseph Mangan, Dan Perley, Sonalika Purkayastha, Eric Bellm, Varun Bhalerao, Bryce Bolin, Mattia Bulla, Christopher Cannella, Poonam Chandra, Dmitry A. Duev, Dmitry Frederiks, Avishay Gal-Yam, Matthew Graham, Anna Y. Q. Ho, Kevin Hurley, Viraj Karambelkar, Erik C. Kool, S. R. Kulkarni, Ashish Mahabal, Frank Masci, Sheila McBreen, Shashi B. Pandey, Simeon Reusch, Anna Ridnaia, Philippe Rosnet, Benjamin Rusholme, Ana Sagués Carracedo, Roger Smith, Maayane Soumagnac, Robert Stein, Eleonora Troja, Anastasia Tsvetkova, Richard Walters and Azamat F. Valeev, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01428-7

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

04-08-2021 om 01:09 geschreven door peter  

The Mysterious Ancient Etruscan Monuments of Selva di Malano

Selva di Malano, which may be translated to mean ‘Forest of Malano,’ is an archaeological site located in Viterbo, in the central Italian region of Lazio. The site is known for its carved stone monuments, a number of which have been interpreted to be altars. It is believed that these altars date to the time of the Etruscans, though some of the site’s monuments are thought to be from the Roman period.

There is evidence that some of the Etruscan monuments were reused by the Romans for funerary purposes. It has been suggested that the monuments at Selva di Malano, as well as other Etruscan monuments in the area, played a part in the creation of the 16 ^th century Sacro Bosso (‘Sacred Grove’), located in nearby town of Bomarzo.

The Malano Jungle

Selva di Malano is a wooded area located between the municipalities of Soriano nel Cimino and Bomarzo. The forest is situated in the foothills of the Cimini Mountains, in the Vezza River Valley, and about 4 km (2.5 miles) to the west of the Tiber River . In terms of geology, the Selva di Malano “borders a long, exposed outcrop of quartzolatitic ignimbrite from the Cimini complex.” In other words, this is an area that has access to volcanic rock suitable for construction purposes. And there is evidence that the Romans carried out quarrying activities within the Selva di Malano.

The exploitation of this natural resource in the Selva di Malano, however, predates the Romans, as is evidenced by the monuments in the forest. Before the hegemony of Rome in Italy, the central part of the peninsula was dominated by the Etruscans. At the peak, during the 6 ^th century BC, the Etruscan civilization stretched as far north as the Po River valley and as far south as Campania. Additionally, by this time, the Etruscans had developed into three confederacies consisting of 36 cities. Central Italy, however, remained the heartland of the Etruscan civilization. This region, known as Etruria, corresponds roughly to modern day Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria.

The Etruscans: The People and Culture That Influenced Rome

The origin of the Etruscans has been debated since antiquity. Some have argued that they were an indigenous people of Italy, while others claim that they came from outside Europe, perhaps from Lydia, or from the Greek island of Lemnos. Though this debate continues even today, it is clear that the Etruscan civilization had a huge impact on Europe and the Mediterranean world, as a result of their influence on the Romans.

The Etruscans made a big contribution to Roman culture, as Rome was once situated within Etruscan territory. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that during the early part of Rome’s history, the city was dominated by the Etruscans. In fact, it was only in 396 BC when the Etruscan city of Veii was sacked by the Romans.

One of the important sources for our understanding of the Etruscan civilization are ancient texts. It may be pointed out, however, that these works were written by Greek and Roman authors, rather than the Etruscans themselves. In addition to these texts, archaeological work has also helped to shed light on this ancient civilization. Nevertheless, archaeology its own limitations. Very few preserved Etruscan constructions have survived, as the Romans who succeeded them built over their settlements.

On the other hand, archaeologists have discovered numerous Etruscan necropolises in the areas where they once inhabited. Amongst the most famous of these are the necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, which have been designated as World Heritage Sites . The tombs and grave goods unearthed at these necropolises offer us a glimpse into the world of the Etruscans, especially their artistic achievements.

Steps leading to an Etruscan rock altar.

Source: Project Tuscia

The Notable Etruscan Monuments of the Selva di Malano

Although Selva di Malano is an Etruscan site, it is not considered to be a necropolis since the original Etruscan monuments are not believed to have had a funerary purpose. Neither are the monuments that are remnants of a lost Etruscan settlement. Instead, the site is thought to have been a place where ritual ceremonies were carried out. Some have even speculated that sacrifices to the gods were performed by the Etruscans in the forest. Therefore, a number of monuments in the Selva di Malano have been interpreted as being ‘altars,’ or ‘sacrificial altars’.

Sasso del Predicatore or ‘Stone of the Preacher’ in the Selva di Malano.

( Youtube screenshot )

Amongst the most notable monuments in the Selva di Malano are the two so-called Sasso del Predicatore (‘Stone of the Preacher’). The monuments were given this name due to their resemblance to pulpits. Both monuments are quite similar, consisting of an ovoid boulder with an altar on its flattened top. A flight of stairs is carved into the boulder, which allows access to its top. On the top of the first Sasso del Predicatore are the remains of what may have been a small altar. The top of the second Sasso del Predicatore , on the other hand, was modelled into a cube-like structure, which is still visible today.

The actual function of these two monuments is unclear, though it is quite unlikely that the Etruscans used them for preaching. It has been suggested that the monuments were used for haruspicy, a form of divination involving the inspection sacrificed animal entrails. Alternatively, it has been speculated that the two monuments were used for augury, specifically the interpretation of omens based on the flight of birds, or that they were used for astronomical observations .

Incidentally, there is another Etruscan monument not far from the Selva di Malano that resembles the Sasso di Predicatore . Tacchiolo, near Bomarzo, is the location of the so-called Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo (‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo’). In spite of its name, the monument bears more resemblance to the Etruscan altars in the Selva di Malano. Like the Sasso del Perdicatore , steps were cut into the rock. The first flight of stairs leads to a pair of intermediate altars. Beyond the altars is another flight of stairs, which leads to the top of the rock, where there seems to have been another altar.

Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo or the ‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo.’

(Alessio Pelligrini / Flickr)

Within the Selva di Malano, the second Sasso del Predicatore is not the only monument in the area with a cubic structure. Not far from the first Sasso del Predicatore is another cubic monument called the Ara Cubica (‘Cubic Altar’). Unlike the two monuments mentioned previously, the Ara Cubica is thought to have been created during the Roman period, and that it served as a sepulchral memorial stone. The problem with these three monuments, however, is the fact that there are no identifying or epigraphic marks on them. This means that their date of creation and their purpose are still nothing more than speculations. Nevertheless, one cannot help but marvel at the ability of the Etruscans and Romans to carve such perfectly shaped cubes out of rocks.

Etruscan Sasso del Predicatore rock cube in the Selva di Malano, Italy.

(Project Tuscia / Youtube screenshot )

Rock-cut ‘Dice Tombs’ of The Selva di Malano

At the bottom of a steep tufo (or volcanic tuff) cliff in the Selva di Malano are three rock-cut tombs, which are also believed to have been created during the Roman period. The tombs are known as tombe a dado in Italian, which roughly translates to mean ‘dice tombs.’ They are believed to have been made during the Late Republican or Early Imperial period, based on the observation that they possess both Roman and Etruscan characteristics. One of the tombs is surmounted by a low relief pediment and entablature, which are supported by five fictive Doric columns in sunken relief. As these features were carved into the rock, it looks as though the monument is emerging from the rock.

Etruscan tombe a dado or “dice tombs” in the Salvo di Malano.

(Giulio Monaldi / Flickr)

Another tomb has the inscription “Heros V.A. XXV”, above a niche, indicating that this was the tomb of a 25-year-old slave with the Hellenized name of Heros. Interestingly, a Benedictine abbey called San Nicolao was built on the top of the cliff much later. Today, however, the abbey lies in ruins.  

Epigraphic marks and artistic features allow us to attain a better understanding of the monuments, as seen in the case of the tombe a dado . Another monument where inscriptions have been found is the so-called Coelius Altar, known also as the Coelius Tomb or the Coelius Monument. This monument is believed to have originally been made by the Etruscans. Later on, however, it was reused by the Romans. The inscription on this monument reads “D. Coelius D. L. Alexander / Quintia P. L. Hilara”, which means “Decimus Coelius Alexander, freedman of Decimus and Quintia Hilara freedwoman of Publius.” In addition to this inscription, a small modification was made to the original monument, in order to make it suitable for its new purpose. Two niches were carved on the top of the Coelius Altar. These were meant to hold the ashes of Coelius and Quintia.

• Do not Underestimate the Etruscans: Art and Culture of their Own
• Civita di Bagnoregio - Italy’s Most Enchanting and Surreal Ancient Town Is Dying
• Unlooted Etruscan Tomb Complete with Sarcophagi and Treasures Unearthed in Italy

Glaucus in the Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo.

( CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Connections Between Selva di Malano and the Parco dei Mostri

The monuments in the Selva di Malano may be regarded as relics of a lost civilization. Nevertheless, it seems that they were not entirely forgotten by the inhabitants of that region. Similarities have been drawn between these ancient monuments and the Sacro Bosso , a Renaissance garden in nearby Bomarzo. This has led to the suggestion that the garden was partly inspired by the monuments of the Selva di Malano.

The Sacro Bosso is known also as the Parco dei Mostri , or ‘ Park of the Monsters ,’ due to its grotesque sculptures. The garden is located beneath Orsini Castle, and was commissioned in 1552 (based on an inscription in the park) by Pier Francesco Orsini, known also as Vicino Orsini. According to one interpretation, the garden was designed as an expression of grief, and was meant to shock those who visited it. In any case, in order to comprehend the Sacro Bosso , one has to first gain some understanding of its patron.

Pier Francesco Orsini was born in 1523. He was the second son of Duke Gian Corrado Orsini of Bomarzo and Clarice di Franciotto di Monterotondo. When he grew up, Orsini became a condottiere (a mercenary captain) like his father and served under the banner of the Farnese family. In the early 1540s, Orsini married Giulia, the daughter of a fellow condottiere, Galeazzo Farnese. During the 1550s, Orsini was active in the field. He retired from military service around 1560.

It was also around the time of Orsini’s retirement that his wife died. It has been argued, therefore, that the death of Giulia left Orsini inconsolable, and that he created the Sacro Bosso in her memory. An alternative interpretation argues that the garden was Orsini’s pet project. This takes into consideration Orsini’s infidelity and the pride he took in taking nobles and learned men (Orsini himself was an accomplished man of letters) around the garden.

As mentioned earlier, the Sacro Bosso was filled with grotesque sculptures, many of which make a clear reference to classical mythology . These include the Orcus Mouth, Proteus with the weapons of the Orsini family, and a triton in a niche. Other sculptures include a war elephant seizing a Roman legionary in its trunk, a turtle with a winged woman on its back, and a giant tearing its victim apart.

If the inhabitants of the region during the Renaissance had no memory or understanding of the Etruscans, then the monuments of the Selva di Malano would have made no sense to them. In this case, the monuments in the forest and the sculptures in Orsini’s garden would have been similar, in the sense that they are both enigmas that puzzle on-lookers. Moreover, both the ancient monuments and the grotesque sculptures are covered with moss and lichen. In Orsini’s garden it is unclear whether he intended his sculptures to have this look, though one may imagine that he was inspired by the monuments in the forest and to allow nature to add the ‘finishing touches’ to his art pieces.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

04-08-2021 om 00:53 geschreven door peter  

This could be fodder for moon landing deniers – the Eagle may not have landed a second time. Wait … what? For those who don’t get the reference, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong radioed the following message from the lunar surface: “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.” That meant the Apollo 11 Lunar Module nicknamed ‘Eagle’ descended successfully. On July 21, Armstrong and Aldrin left the surface of the moon with their cargo of 22 kilograms of lunar rock in the ascent stage of Eagle. After docking and unloading, the Eagle was undocked and it was assumed to have ended a retrograde orbit by plummeting back to the surface for a second, albeit un-eagle-like, landing. Unfortunately, it was not tracked and no one knows where it crashed. Or did it?

Space enthusiast and Eagle researcher James Meador is not affiliated with NASA, but perhaps he should be. He tells Discover magazine he became intrigued with what happened to the Eagle after hearing about NASA’s 2012 mission to map the Moon’s gravitational field using a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory). They showed that the Moon’s mass is not evenly distributed, which causes tiny variations in its gravitational field that make most lunar orbits unstable in the long term.

Rendering of the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, and the lunar module, Eagle.

In 2012, NASA sent a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL to map the Moon’s gravitational field and this mission eventually created a detailed map of this varying field. Meador decided to use the data to calculate where the Eagle’s impact crater debris might be. This was not an issue with the lunar ascent modules from Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 because surface seismometers left by the astronauts recorded their impacts. GRAIL data is available to the public, as is an open-source program called the General Mission Analysis Tool developed by NASA and others to model a spacecraft’s trajectory in any gravitational field.

“The simulations show a periodic variation in eccentricity of the orbit, correlated to the selenographic longitude of the apsidal line. The rate of apsidal precession is correlated to eccentricity. These two factors appear to interact to stabilize the orbit over the long term.”

The model takes into account outside forces such as the gravitational pull of the Earth, the Sun and all the planets except Mercury and calculates how a spacecraft’s orbit changes over time. Meador used the supplied set of starting parameters for the Eagle — the time of jettison, the latitude, longitude and altitude, heading angle and others, and was able to manipulate them to see if they produced different results. Instead, they all came to the same conclusion. (Meador details the research in a pre-print paper.)

“Numerical analysis described here provides evidence that this object might have remained in lunar orbit to the present day.”

In other words, the Eagle HASN’T landed – it may still be in orbit. That means it could be located and observed. The Indian Space Research Organization lost contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, less than half the size of Eagle, in 2009 and it was found again in 2016 by modeling where it should be and aiming radar at that spot. In 2019, NASA found Apollo 10’s lunar module named Snoopy which had been left behind by the crew during their test flight for Apollo 11. That one left lunar orbit and was found circling the Sun.

Buzz Aldrin getting ready to leave the Moon

So, finding the Eagle is entirely possible. Will it convince deniers that the Moon landing really happened? Probably not. Will Jeff Bezos offer to retrieve the Eagle and bring it back to Earth so Buzz Aldrin can see it? Only if NASA gives him an exclusive contract.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

04-08-2021 om 00:24 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 03 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, Mexico ( August 1, 2021 )

UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, officially Ecatepec de Morelos, a municipality in the State of Mexico on August 1, 2021.

• credit :
  • Eduargo Lugo
  • Mauricio Escaleij
  • Pedro Durán Ramírez

UAP ORB Sighted In The Scottish Highlands ( June 6, 2021 )

Amazing UAP ORB sighted in the Scottish Highlands !
The distinct singular UAP ORB phenomenon was captured at Dukes Pass, Aberfoyle in Scotland on the 6th of June 2021.

This most fascinating video footage should be seen in its entirety.

• credit : PRET 

Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean ( July 30, 2021 )

Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean on July 30, 2021 : I present here the cigar-shaped interstellar object : alien spaceship : original and approach.

More evident every day

• credit : UFO Sightings Footage

Being That Is Just Legs (No Body) Captured On Camera & UFO Invisible To The Naked Eye (Redux)

First Clip:

This footage just appeared on the internet with no source or location but i liked it and this is why i wanted to show it to you guys. I feel that this footage is 100% real ( not CGI or any other trickery) but what do you guys think?

Second Clip:

This footage was filmed on May 23, 2021 from Taxco a town in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. This object which appears invisible to the naked eye and other recording devices but was only picked up by his night vision camera. The night vision that was used to film this was "Sionyx Aurora Pro" and this enabled him and us to see this object. There is a extinct volcano that is part of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range named Cerro Mohinora and this is where this object was filmed hovering over, with the witness recording from his vantage point we get a good view from where he filmed and we can see that there is nothing there....
The witness stated the following "I took this video on may 23, 2021 in Taxco Guerrero around midnight from a well-known hotel next to the magic town of Taxco, watching the song appreciate some lights on the left side of the town which are only perceptible through the night vision of a camera with Sionyx aurora pro."

SOURCE:

MUFON/UFO Stalker: Case Number 116553

• https://ufostalker.com/sighting/116553

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 23:48 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 3 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117138 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 2, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant ring came from cloud footage

Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117138
I never seen anything like this before.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-02
Date of Event : 2021-07-31
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : J00312021.mp4

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface

Methods of movement for robotic explorers of other worlds have been as varied as the worlds themselves. Some missions have been simple landers, some rovers, and now there’s even been a helicopter flight on Mars.  But there is an unexplored hybrid mode of movement that will soon be coming to a Moon near you – hopping.  NASA just granted an additional $41.6 million to support development of a hopping lunar lander that will explore the inside of craters that are permanently in shadow.

The mission, known as Micro-Nova, was granted as part of NASA’s $370 million “Tipping Point” contract for technologies that are developing milestone-based new technologies.  The $41.6 million was awarded to Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that specializes in developing autonomous systems for drones and other exploration technologies.  To be clear – the “hopping” the Micro-Nova will do is actually a control flight using thrusters rather than the more biological form of hopping that insects do on Earth. The company won’t be working alone on the project – they recruited scientists from Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.  

Those specialists will help to define what Micro-Nova will carry as part of its 1 kg payload.  Most likely it will involve cameras to peer into areas that no person has ever seen before.  The reason Micro-Nova uses its unique mobility technique is to peer into “permanently shaded regions” (PSRs) of the moon.  Rovers would be unable to descend into the craters, and helicopters wouldn’t work with the moon’s lack of atmosphere.  So a hopper is the best bet to reach these difficult environments.

They are not just difficult because they are hard to reach – they are also hard to observe and extraordinarily cold.  Even once Micro-Nova is in the crater, it will still only be able to take full color spectra images of its immediate surroundings, but it should be able to take black-and-white images of a wider swath of the whole crater.  Any information it is able to gather is better than the complete lack available right now at least.

Cold is a completely separate problem, with temperatures in these permanently dark areas dipping to 40°-80° Kelvin (-388° to -316° F).  Most electronics will not function at those temperatures, and even the materials themselves would fail if they were not especially designed to withstand them.

That is a lot to expect from a hopper that measures only 76.2 centimeters on a side.  But with the moon’s miniscule gravity and the hopper’s impressive leaping ability, it should be able to achieve its mission when it is dropped off by a Nova-C lander near the lunar south pole in December 2022.

Learn More:

• ASU – NASA funds hopper to explore lunar polar craters
• The Science Times – NASA Awards Over $41 Million Fund for Lunar Hopper to Hop Around Moon’s Surface, Takes First Pictures Inside Craters
• Intuitive Machines – Intuitive Machines and NASA Finalize Contract for Extreme Lunar Mobility Spacecraft
• NASA – 2020 NASA Tipping Point Selections

Lead Image:

• Artist’s depiction of the Micro-Nova hopper and it’s Nova-C landing craft deployed to the moon. 
  Credit – Intuitive Machines

The post NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface appeared first on Universe Today.

Source:

•  https://www.universetoday.com/152053/nasa-is-going-ahead-with-a-hopping-lander-to-explore-the-lunar-surface/

Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova, a lunar hopper that will explore permanently shaded regions of the moon.

(Credit: Intuitive Machines)

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03-08-2021 om 23:17 geschreven door peter  

Rood pigment in Spaanse grot blijkt aangebracht door Neanderthalers, ruim 60.000 jaar geleden

Neanderthalers werden lange tijd gezien als onnozel, maar volgens een gisteren gepubliceerde studie brachten ze meer dan 60.000 jaar geleden rood okerpigment aan op stalagmieten in een Spaanse grot in Malaga.

Tim Van Rodijnen  

 Bron: AD.nl

In 2018 verscheen al een onderzoek in Science waarin het rode okerpigment, gevonden op stalagmieten in Cueva de Ardales, werd bestempeld als werk van Neanderthalers. Sindsdien houdt het de wereld van de archeologie die zich verdiept in de oude tijd flink bezig.

Lees ook

• 

  Neanderthalers verdwenen duizenden jaren eerder uit België dan gedacht

• 

  Resten van negen neanderthalers gevonden in Italiaanse grot

In het onderzoek van drie jaar geleden werd geschreven dat de ‘kunst’ minstens 64.800 jaar oud is, maar de bevinding werd controversieel gevonden. “Wetenschappers zeiden dat de pigmenten wellicht een natuurlijke oorzaak hadden”, vertelt Fransisco d’Errico, hoogleraar aan de universiteit van Bordeaux en co-auteur van een nieuw onderzoek dat verscheen in het academische tijdschrift Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Spatten en blazen

© AFP

Een nieuwe analyse toont aan dat de samenstelling van de pigmenten niet consistent genoeg was voor natuurlijke processen. De rode kleur zou aangebracht zijn door middel van spatten en blazen. Ook komt de textuur van het pigment niet overeen met monsters uit grotten, wat suggereert dat ze van een externe bron kwamen.

Het onderzoek laat zien dat de pigmenten op verschillende tijdstippen werden aangebracht, waar soms wel 10.000 jaar tussen zat. Volgens d’Errico ondersteunt dit de hypothese dat Neanderthalers gedurende duizenden jaren verschillende keren de grot met pigment hebben gemarkeerd. Het onderzoek stelt dat het pigment geen uiting van kunst is, maar eerder een manier waarop Neanderthalers de betekenis van een ruimte aangaven.

Toenemend bewijs 

Deze nieuwe bevindingen dragen volgens het onderzoek bij aan het toenemende bewijs dat Neanderthalers, die zo'n 40.000 jaar geleden uitstierven, niet zulke ‘lompe verwanten’ van de homo sapiens waren als lange tijd werd gedacht. Het pigment in de grot speelde volgens de onderzoekers ‘een fundamentele rol in de symboliek voor Neanderthalers’, maar wat die symbolen precies betekenden blijft, ook na dit onderzoek, voorlopig een mysterie.

GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, uitgekozen en gepost  door peter2011

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03-08-2021 om 22:59 geschreven door peter  

Patty’s Triangle Remains Among Michigan’s Most Baffling UFO Sightings

Steve Friess

 

What am I looking at?

Nobody really knows. Unofficially, it’s called Patty’s Triangle because a woman named Patty Blackburn caught it on camera on June 14, 2006, near Lansing. In 24 seconds of video, Patty captured an unexplainable triangular configuration of lights that jerked around the sky. Maybe it’s a military aircraft that nobody’s seen before, or maybe it’s extraterrestrial beings from galaxies far, far away accidentally giving Earthlings a glimpse of themselves while surveilling humankind. Those, it seems, are the two most likely options to longtime aficionados of unidentified flying objects or, as the U.S. government has rebranded them, “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Why are you showing me this particular blur?

Mostly because, as obscured and fuzzy as it is, it’s the best available image of a UFO from a Michigan sighting. Hundreds of sightings are reported each year to the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), but the vast majority are resolved as something of clearly human origin. Patty’s Triangle is among the few that remain unexplained, says Michigan MUFON State Director Bill Konkolesky.

OK, but why should I care about something someone saw 15 years ago?

Because UFOs, once relegated to the province of crackpots, are having a big moment. The federal government, partly prompted by videos shot by U.S. Navy sailors of airborne objects moving in erratic manners that defy the understandings of modern physics, even released a report in June from the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that can be summed up thus:  That is, no evidence that E.T. is phoning home but no earthly ideas, either. Of 144 sightings involving military aviators, the task force was able to explain just one — it was a deflating  balloon. The other 143 remain a mystery. The feds have been taking the matter seriously for more than a decade now. Then-Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, secured $22 million for UFO research in 2007, and more recently Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, told 60 Minutes this spring that he wants answers, too. Last year, former CIA Director John Brennan told a podcaster these incidents “could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” And former President Barack Obama sent speculation into hyperdrive by telling TV’s James Corden recently there are “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” 

Whoa! Obama believes in little green men?

Not exactly. You don’t have to think a slow-moving alien invasion is underway to accept that there’s weird stuff in the air that defies explanation. But many avid ufologists — yep, that’s a legit word — reason that astronomers claim there are possibly millions of inhabitable planets and moons in the Milky Way or other galaxies. “If life happened somewhere else and they’re even just a couple hundred years more advanced than we are, they probably have the ability to visit us,” says Konkolesky, who notes MUFON officially has no position on the existence of extraterrestrial sentient life. Either way, Konkolesky says interest from credible leaders makes the topic “a lot easier to talk about now. Some neighbors and family members who used to treat it with a giggle now ask with sincere interest. It takes a very short time, when you’re a dedicated, sincere UFO investigator, to conclude something really unusual and unexplainable is happening.”

What’s this Konkolesky guy’s deal, anyway?

He’s a 50-year-old father of two who works in the Academic Support Center at Oakland Community College and found a kinship when he discovered MUFON. He’s  also a Michigan native who says that as a high school senior in February 1989, he and some buddies saw a blue football-shaped, car-sized ball of light the height of two telephone poles arching over their Chevette. Then it morphed into a display of white lights that “ping-ponged all over the sky,” followed by a red ball of light the size of a full moon. “We all saw the same thing,” he says. “It took a few years for me to find a group that actually investigates such things.”

Are there lots of UFO sightings in Michigan?

Michigan’s MUFON chapter received 2,789 sightings from 2010 to 2020, of which 80 to 95 percent turned out to have easy, earthly explanations, Konkolesky says. In 2019, for instance, a third of the reports turned out to be sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, a stream of thousands of machines floating in a line in low-Earth orbit that aims to provide low-cost internet access the world over. There are four still-unexplained sightings that stand out — a 1953 sighting of disc-shaped objects darting across Lake Superior over the Soo Locks; a cluster of sightings in 1966 in which “many hundreds of witnesses” saw UFOs across southeastern Michigan, capped by a claim by a Dexter man of a landing in his backyard; a 1975 incident in which people at four Air Force bases where nuclear weapons were stored around the U.S., including Wurtsmith in Iosco County, saw a white disc descend for a bit before flitting off; and a 1994 sighting outside Grand Rapids that prompted a flood of calls to 911 and front-page coverage in the Detroit newspapers.

What do I do if I see something? 

You can call the police, the military, or your shrink, as many people do. Or you can contact Konkolesky via mufon.com. Be aware, though, that Konkolesky offers this caveat: “If they’re saying something landed in their backyard, there’s not a lot we can do for them.”

{ https://www.hourdetroit.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

2 new ways to find aliens, according to a Nobel Prize winner

 

03-08-2021 om 22:15 geschreven door peter  

New files suggest that the “Philadelphia Experiment” was real

In the middle of World War II, “an American battleship put a technology designed by Einstein himself to the test and managed to become invisible and teleport.” This is how the “Philadelphia Experiment” was born.

This is, at least, what some conspiracy theorists say. Here is the true story of the USS Elridge, the ship that “traveled back in time”:

What is popularly known as the Philadelphia Experiment, (or Philadelphia Experiment), alludes to a supposed dark program of the US Navy called Project Rainbow.

Legend has it that the military were testing an electromagnetic field generator with which they were trying to find practical applications to the unified field theory proposed by Albert Einstein.

In one sentence: they wanted to achieve invisibility.

Private technicians who would not know what they were installing would equip two powerful generators, dozens of meters of electrical cable around the hull and other complex electronic devices to the USS Elridge, a 93 meter long battleship.

On July 22, 1943, the first supposed experiment would take place.

“The generators activated an electromagnetic field that made the battleship disappear from view for a few minutes surrounded by a greenish mist.”

“Some sailors complained of severe nausea caused by the test.”

“The equipment was readjusted and the second test took place on October 28. This time, the entire ship completely disappeared and appeared at the navy base in Norfolk , 600 kilometers away and 15 minutes in the past. ”

“He was sighted there during that time. After that he disappeared again in the middle of a blue lightning to return to Philadelphia ”.

Official statements from the navy

As they say, the consequences of this second experiment were so devastating for the crew that the Navy decided to cancel the project.

“Most of the sailors developed schizophrenia and some completely lost their minds.”

“Many were seriously injured when they materialized, and others, less fortunate, fused horribly with the ship’s hull.”

“Some faded days after the experiment and never reappeared.”

This is, broadly speaking, the gruesome story perpetuated by theorists, ufologists, and some science fiction movies. The navy has always denied the existence of the Philadelphia experiment.

In a statement released in November 2000, the Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) completely denied the existence of any invisibility or teleportation programs, as well as Einstein’s involvement.

But between 1943 and 1944, Einstein worked as a part-time consultant for the navy on theoretical research on explosives and blasting.

Of course, there is no evidence that Einstein has worked on anything related to invisibility or teleportation.

How did the Philadelphia Experiment come to light then?

The answer is through a series of letters sent by Carl Meredith Allen under the pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende.

Allegedly, Allen was a merchant marine who saw the USS Elridge disappear from his own ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth.

Allen described the alleged teleportation experiment in a correspondence with the writer and ufologist Morris Jessup.

Although the marine never provided any credible proof of what he said, Jessup was fascinated by the story and included it in a book called The Case For The UFO. Continue with more information in the following video:

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 21:56 geschreven door peter  

Godlike Power and Monster Malevolence: Mishipizheu of Lake Superior

In Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 song  The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald , he figuratively blames the sinking of that ship on the “witch” of November. Folks more familiar with Ojibway mythology might, however, have pointed to Mishipizheu, one of the most important of the underground mythological creatures of the Northeastern and Midwestern North American tribes.

This pictograph of the Great Lynx known as Mishipizheu was created by Ojibway spiritual leaders at Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.

( Chris Hill  / Adobe Stock)

Was Mishipizheu a God or a Monster? 

The “Great-Lynx” Mishipizheu blurs the line between god and monster and thus sheds light on what it takes to be one or the other. The Ojibway, an indigenous people from southern  Canada and the northern Midwestern United States, believed Mishipizheu was a giant lynx-like creature. An apt description would be that the Mishipizheu was a horned panther covered in copper scales with razor-sharp spikes down its back and a long flexible tail. 

According to Ojibway mythology, Mishipizheu lived under the vast waterways of their territory in the Canadian Shield, in and near the Great Lakes. It exercised complete control over the waterways and had a mean-streak which had to be placated with  copper or tobacco offerings lest it use its tail to create violent whirlpools or harsh waves to drown the people residing in the area. 

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On the one hand, we might consider him a god as he exercised supernatural power over a vast area of waterways and accepted tokens or  sacrifices for his cooperation with human endeavors. On the other hand, he is primarily a malevolent presence, drowning those who forget their offerings to him, creating tumult capriciously with a whip of his tail, and standing in opposition, in many stories, to the heroic Thunderbird. He was godlike in his power, but monster-like in his malevolence.

The SS. Algoma went down on Lake Superior in 1885. It was the worst loss of life in the history of Lake Superior.

( Public domain )

The Malevolent Intentions of Mishipizheu the Underwater Panther

It is no wonder that a malevolent spirit was felt to inhabit Lake Superior. Some people believe Mishipizheu has sunk at least 400  ships on the lake in recorded memory alone, in addition to the Edmund Fitzgerald. Some have even said that the island of Michipicoten, in Ontario (Canada) in the northeastern part of Lake Superior, is the primary abode of Mishipizheu, when he is not swirling through underground tunnels and caverns throughout the region. 

The belief of  indigenous tribes  of the region is that Mishipizheu lives and travels through a vast system of tunnels and caverns underlying the vast waterways of Midwestern United States and  Canada, often wreaking havoc on those who sail those waters. But, why?

Mishipizheu guards the vast amount of copper which, to this day, lies within the  Great Lakes . Native inhabitants of the Great Lakes region, stretching back to about 7,500 BC, discovered copper that was 99% pure in Lake Superior, in veins or just lying around in nugget form. Initially they used the copper for spear points and tools, but as a larger social organization developed the copper was used for personal ornamentation denoting social standing. 

There was only one problem. Lake Superior was not a gentle lake to those extracting the copper, in fact it was quite fierce. The fierceness was attributed to a creature which seemed obviously to be guarding the  copper. Hence the existence of Mishipizheu. Indeed, if we dig a little deeper, the belief in this creature points to why  monsters were created in the first place. In pre-scientific cultures, folks often attributed evil intentions or ill will to events possessing no evil intentions or ill will. 

To this day, in some villages, when someone falls ill a shaman might declare that a personal enemy sent an evil spirit to possess the victim. A person does not just fall ill, someone or something must desire that. Thus it is with the sea and other bodies of water. Unpredictable tragedies occurred and we were quick to attribute the tragedies to an invisible malice or ill will. Anything other than natural causes. 

We seem to be wired, for whatever reason, to be super-keen to perceive and attribute malice and malevolence to adverse things that happen to us. It was too difficult for us to believe that things affecting us negatively could just happen. Mishipizheu became the figuration of the malice of the sea, part godlike in his scope, mostly monstrous in his intentions. But, interestingly, we attributed a reason for his malice – his irrational desire to possess all the copper in Lake Superior.

Stormy sky over Lake Superior, the home of Mishipizheu.

( boundlessimages / Adobe Stock)

Mishipizheu Ancillary Stories

The odds are that the origin of the Mishipizheu myth is derived from the destructive power of Lake Superior and other violent waterways of the Canadian Shield and the emotionally painful tragedies caused by the unpredictable harshness of these bodies of water. Mishipizheu became the malicious element causing the lake to harm innocent people. From this initial birth of the  monster, various tribes added on stories, which is not uncommon in myth-making. In fact, we can look at Mishipizheu as a good example of the possible evolution of a myth.

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Hunting and gathering peoples often have animistic beliefs. Every natural element has a spirit, even stones and streams. Perhaps it was recognized early on that Lake Superior’s was not a gentle spirit. Lake spirits often became personified in world  mythology. If you can imagine one being or creature controlling the lake, it is easier to deal with this entity through sacrifice and bargaining. 

Once you create a god, spirit or monster that you can appease or cajole, then stories concerning the exploits of this being can be constructed. You can even think of the Greek myths this way. Zeus was once a sky and thunder spirit. Then, through story-telling, he morphed into the leader of a pantheon and a character in a rich mythological tradition.

Some of the stories concerning Mishipizheu even purport that he engaged in acts of benevolence, thus adding to his stature as a god and not solely a  monster. In one story Mishipizheu was responsible for the primordial flood. In another story, we learn that swamps and quicksand are due to his slithering on the ground when he chose to take shortcuts from river to river. 

In one particular mythological tale, Mishipizheu is referred to as the ancestor of all  snakes, due to the belief that he was hit by lightning and shattered into thousands of those creatures. Another story tells of Mishipizheu the trickster. A shaman seeks a powerful medicine from Mishipizheu who happily complies. Unfortunately, the medicine only works for the shaman as he remains healthy while he watches his family and loved ones deteriorate and die around him.

Artists rendering of the famed Mishipizheu.

(Australopithecusman /  CC-BY-SA)

Final Verdict On Mishipizheu: Godly Extortion or Defender of Humanity

So is Mishipizheu more monster than god? What might tip the scales is that he does not engage in acts of benevolence. He is predisposed to cause harm continually and only will desist from this if he receives, basically, extortion money. But gods receive extortion money too, do they not? Did the ancient Greeks not placate Poseidon before sea travel? It seems that the gods like to be appreciated and remembered but are also quick to do good things for good people. They also might need to be coaxed a little into supplying help.

And it is not like the gods are a constant threat which has to be avoided. So the scales would seem to tip more toward  monster in this case, yet one interested in mythology might ask whether a primarily malevolent “god” is possible. Or, dare we stretch and say that  Mishipizheu was not at all malevolent but merely attempted, as well as he could, to steer humanity away from the world bought through copper, in an attempt to keep humanity living in a land of paradise.

• Top image: The malevolent Mishipizheu monster-god of Lake Superior.
• Source: SJB1995 /  CC-BY-SA

By Daniel Gauss

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

03-08-2021 om 21:31 geschreven door peter  

The Disc of Sabu: Ancient Egyptian Water Pump or Alien Hyperdrive?

There is no doubt that the Ancient Egyptian civilization is filled with wonders and mysteries beyond our comprehension. An exceptionally old culture that reaches far back to the early dawn of man’s advancement, Egypt left behind it many man-made wonders. From the enormous pyramids, the giant statues, and the sprawling mortuary temples, their monuments are many and glorious. 

While some of these are easy to understand, study, and explain, others remain an absolute mystery. One such enigma is the so-called “Disc of Sabu”, a curious stone object that almost defies all logic. Over the years, many odd theories arose have arisen in an attempt to uncover its true purpose.

The Tomb of Prince Sabu

Anyone visiting the sprawling museum of antiquities in  Cairo will be awed by the wealth of Ancient Egyptian treasures contained inside it. From the famed treasures found in the Tomb of  Tutankhamun, to the pharaonic statues and well-preserved mummies, this museum is the number one stop for all lovers of this ancient culture. But while you will be dazzled by these popular treasures, one curious item can be easily overlooked. The Disc of Sabu.

This odd item is circular in shape and measures roughly 610 millimeters (24 inches) in diameter and roughly 104 millimeters (4 inches) in height. It was discovered in 1936 by a renowned British Egyptologist, Mr. Walter Bryan Emery, and has been dated to the earliest periods of Ancient Egypt.

Emery devoted his career to excavations in the Nile River valley, and between 1935 and 1939 he conducted numerous surveys and digs in the burial grounds of Saqqara. The resting grounds of many high-status individuals from the early dynastic period, Saqqara is one of the oldest and largest necropolises from Ancient Egypt.

The Necropolis at Saqqara

(Jose Javier Martin Espartosa / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )

Of course, digging in Saqqara yielded many important and valuable items, but none so odd as the Disc of Sabu. Emery discovered it while excavating the tomb of Prince Sabu, a First Dynasty governor and the son of the famed Pharaoh Anedjib. The latter was the fifth ruler of the First Dynasty, and succeeded the powerful Pharaoh Den.

Sadly, little is known of Anedjib’s son, Prince Sabu. He did not succeed his father on the throne, but still received an honorable burial at Saqqara. History does not record a lot of details about the dynastic relations in the First Dynasty, so we may never know of Sabu’s fate, his exact role in the court, or the political events of that time. Emery writes that Sabu was likely a high official and an administrator of a province, both during the reigns of Pharaoh Den (likely his grandfather), and his father Anedjib.

The Mysteries Beneath the Sands of Saqqara

The Mastaba (tomb) of Prince Sabu was discovered on the very edge of the plateau in the northern part of Saqqara. It was situated roughly 1.7 kilometers (1.1 miles) north of the iconic  Stepped Pyramid of Djoser . Designated as “Tomb 3111”, it was excavated by Emery on January 10th, 1936. 

The tomb consisted of seven funerary chambers, each strewn with assorted grave goods. The largest room held the body of Prince Sabu, which was accompanied by many funerary items. Most of these were nothing out of the ordinary - animal bones, flint implements, pottery vessels, ivory items, stone bowls. But one item stood out like a sore thumb: Emery discovered a curious disc, broken into numerous pieces.

The Disc of Sabu

(Gretarsson /  Public Domain )

Once painstakingly re-assembled, the Disc of Sabu intrigued many leading Egyptologists. The disc-shaped object resembles a round-bottomed bowl and has three extremely thinly carved, curving lobes at roughly 120 degree intervals around the bowl’s periphery. These lobes are separated from the rim by three biconvex holes. 

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In the center of the disc is a thin tube, roughly 10 centimeters in diameter. The object is constructed of  metasiltstone, elsewhere referred to as  schist. This is a porous, fragile rock that would be extremely difficult to carve - especially in such delicate detail.

Schist is comprised of coarse grains and characterized by elongated minerals in marked layers. It has the propensity to flake when worked, and can be crushed very easily when tools are applied to it. So here we have our first mystery: how was the disc carved in such fine detail? 

When asking this question, we need to consider the age of the disc. Prince Sabu’s tomb is dated to circa 3,000 BC, making the disc at least 5,000 years old! It is believed that the tools used back then were made of stone and copper, which would make fine craftsmanship quite challenging, if not impossible, especially on such a fragile material as schist stone. Somehow, the Disc of Sabu seems out of place in a tomb of a First Dynasty noble.

An Ancient Egyptian Puzzle

The next mystery is the purpose of this object. Over the years, many convincing theories surfaced. Almost immediately following its discovery, the disc was “dismissed” as being a “vase” or  “incense burner” , or simply a trivial decorative or ceremonial item. But many believe that this is far, far from the truth. One glimpse and just the basic knowledge of mechanics and engineering offers a wholly different interpretation – this disc could be a part of a mechanism.

There are marked similarities between the disc and a modern pump impeller

(Asurnipal /  CC BY-SA 3.0 )

One resourceful amateur historian may have solved the mystery. Armed with a 3D printer, this person created an accurate replica of the disc of Sabu in an attempt to prove his own theory: the disc was an ancient “impeller”, a part of a centrifugal  pump. When placed in a housing and propelled at high speed via the small shaft at its center, the disc was extremely efficient at displacing water. 

Furthermore, when propelled without a housing to direct the displaced water, the disc creates a powerful vortex. Observing these recorded experiments makes one thing clear: the curiously folded lobes and a slightly concave shape of the disc are there for a purpose. Thanks to the intricately carved details, the disc is able to displace water with ease, and is seemingly a crucial component of a water pump mechanism.

One fact supports this theory: Ancient Egypt depended on  irrigation. Later in their history they perfected water management through basin irrigation, a process that allowed them to control the rise and fall of the river. Thus they managed to maximize their crops and boost their agricultural capabilities. So, why should it be odd to consider that they made attempts at creating an advanced design that would help them irrigate land quickly and efficiently?

An even older clay object dated to the Predynastic  Naqada II period (3650 - 3300 BC) is oddly similar to the disc of Sabu.  This object shows three “snakes” leaping up from the center of a disc that looks extremely similar to the Sabu disc, complete with the central shaft and the three biconvex holes. Could this clay object represent three water spouts being propelled from the disc? It seems very likely.

Proof of Ancient Astronauts?

But schist does not seem a strong enough material for a pumping mechanism. This suggests something else: were craftsmen from the First Dynasty of Egypt attempting to recreate an older object using the tools and materials available to them, an object they perhaps did not completely understand? 

Many theories suggest that the disc of Sabu is just a schist stone replica of an original item made from metal. It is even suggested that the object was discovered amongst the remnants of an older, more advanced civilization, one that preceded the earliest history of Ancient Egypt.

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The renowned  Swiss author, Erich Von Däniken , is one of the leading proponents of the theory that extraterrestrials or superior, advanced civilizations influenced early humans. He suggests that the Disc of Sabu was an Egyptian stone copy of an internal component from an extraterrestrial ship’s  hyperdrive, or more simply a stone model of a  flying saucer . Others likened the disc to the advanced light-rimmed flywheels that were developed in the 1970’s by Lockheed missile engineers, and there are indeed plenty of similarities. 

Does the Disc suggest alien contact with Ancient Egypt?

( Matrioshka / Adobe Stock)

Some however have proposed a much simpler role for the disc. They state that the three lobes were used to hold strands of  silk or rope: when the disc was spun, it would weave the three strands into one, creating twine and thicker ropes. This theory is often dismissed as simply too straightforward: the Egyptians would not go to such extreme lengths to create the disc just to weave fibers when other methods were available quite early on.

There are other theories, some more extreme than the others. One  French author suggests that the Disc of Sabu is just one of many that were an integral part of an early “factory”. This complex theory explains how the Ancient Egyptians manufactured Sodium Carbonate within  pyramids using advanced systems and technologies. 

As can be seen, a lot of proposals simply swerve into the realms of the impossible, and seem more based on wish-fulfilment than sound archaeology. Ancient hyperdrives, factory complexes, steering wheels, and other unlikely suggestions are simply impossible to prove.

Certainly More than a Vase

On the other hand, mainstream science has a suspicious tendency to dismiss every suggestion that the disc is part of a mechanism. Mainstream archaeology considers the disc to be an incense burner, or – bluntly – a  vase. 

Going to such extreme lengths to polish and shape the super-delicate schist stone into such a complex form simply to create a “vase” seems, on the face of it, unlikely. Even the process used to create the disc is difficult to explain, given its age. But, if we accept the fact that this is something craftsmen of the First Dynasty were able to create with the  tools at their disposal, the question still remains: for what purpose? It seems clear that the disc of Sabu was part of something complex.

Schist was a popular choice for funerary carvings through Ancient Egypt

(Daderot /  Public Domain )

Walter Bryan Emery made note of his discovery in his  Great Tombs of the First Dynasty , mentioning it as simply “a container in the form of a schist bowl.” He later mentioned it again in his work  Archaic Egypt , where he described it as a “cachivache” – a knick-knack or trinket, a gadget. 

However, several sources point to the fact that he was well aware of the problem it posed in scientific circles, where it was described “as a small hole that threatens to become a much larger one”. It is perhaps, for this reason, that the Disc of Sabu is often overlooked in scholarly literature. In fact, little is known at all about Prince Sabu, his tomb, or his peculiar disc.

Ancient Doesn’t Mean Primitive

In the end, it remains entirely possible that the Disc of Sabu was a crucial part of a more advanced design, one likened to a water pump. Considering the fact that the experiments using a disc replica were highly successful in that role, it could certainly function as one. 

Ancient Egypt was highly dependent on irrigation to survive in the desert

( dejank1 / Adobe Stock) 

With an adequate housing, water outlet, and means of propulsion, the Disc of Sabu could have easily displaced large amounts of water, quickly and efficiently. And given the need for  irrigation in Ancient Egypt , the pieces of the puzzle quickly seem to fall into place. Given how unusual the design of the disc is, and given how useful a pump of this kind would be, it seems beyond coincidence that the disc would not be used for that purpose.

Perhaps it is time that we looked at the early Egyptians from a different perspective. Even though Prince Sabu lived 5,000 years before present, it doesn’t mean he and his contemporaries weren’t able to observe the world around them and come up with logical and ingenious solutions to the problems of their time. Even so, plenty of aspects about this disc cannot be easily explained, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

• Top image: The Mysterious Disc of Sabu.                         
• Source: Christian Hart /  Public Domain

By Aleksa Vučković

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

03-08-2021 om 21:10 geschreven door peter  

Neanderthals Hunted with Leaf-Shaped Spears, Archaeologists Say

Archaeologists say they have found a 65,000-year-old leaf point in a cave in the Swabian Jura, Germany.

“This discovery represents the first time a leaf point has been recovered from a modern excavation, allowing us to study the fresh find with state-of-the-art methods,” said Professor Nicholas Conard, a researcher at the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.

“The last time archaeologists in the region recovered such artifacts was in 1936.”

The leaf point was found at the archaeological site of Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian Jura of Germany.

The artifact is 7.6 cm (3 inches) long, 4.1 cm (1.6 inches) wide, 0.9 cm (0.35 inches) thick, and has a mass of 28 grams.

“Our results document how the tool was made, used and why it was discarded,” Professor Conard said.

“Thanks to a series of four ESR-dates the find is securely dated to over 65,000 years ago.”

“Until now finds of leaf points were interpreted as belonging to the period between 45,000 and 55,000 years ago — the last cultural phase of Neanderthals in Central Europe,” he added.

“The new results demonstrate that our assumptions about the dating of the cultural groups of the late Neanderthals were wrong and need revision.”

Using detailed microscopic analyses, the researchers found that the leaf point was mounted on a wooden shaft.

“Damage to the tip indicates that the artifact was used as a hafted spear point, and that the spear was likely thrust into prey rather than being thrown,” they said.

“Neanderthals used plant-based glue and bindings made from plant fibers, sinew, or leather, to secure the leaf point to the spear.”

“They clearly used the spear for hunting. While they re-sharpened the tool it broke, leading to its discard.”

“Neanderthals were expert stone knappers and knew exactly how to make and use complex technologies combining multiple parts and materials to produce and maintain deadly weapons,” said Dr. Veerle Rots, a researcher at the University of Liège.

“Homo heidelbergensis used sharpened wooden spears for hunting too, but their spears lacked mounted stone points like those used by Neanderthals.”

The team’s results appear in two papers in the journal Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg and the journal Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte.

_____

• Nicholas J. Conard & Alexander Janas. Ausgrabungen im Hohle Fels: Fundschichten aus dem Mittelpaläolithikum und Neues zur Jagdtechnik der Neandertaler. Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg 2020: 60-65
• Veerle Rots et al. 2021. A Leaf Point Documents Hunting with Spears in the Middle Paleolithic at Hohle Fels, Germany / Eine Blattspitze belegt die Jagd mit Speeren im Mittelpaläolithikum am Hohle Fels, Deutschland. Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte 30: 1-28

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 20:42 geschreven door peter  

Look up at the stars tonight. Those twinkling diamonds are several thousand light-years away. Our planet is just a grain of sand on a virtually endless beach, a small dot in a gigantic galaxy. Is it the only dot with life on it? That’s a question humankind has been asking ever since we started to understand the basics of astronomy thousands of years ago. Now, we’re closer than ever to finding the answer, as an unprecedented crush of ultrapowerful telescopes and interplanetary missions try to trace where else life might possibly exist. Today’s Daily Dose travels to the far reaches of the universe on that search, taking you through the latest breakthroughs and the people behind them. Curious? You should be.

COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE

Age-Old Search

Some 2,500 years ago, two Greek philosophers looked to the sky and wondered if humans were alone in the universe. Today, many scientists believe the question is a no-brainer. For decades, one of the fundamental laws of physics formed the basis of our understanding of life on Earth. The law of increasing entropy insists that energy tends to dissipate instead of coming together: pour ink in water and watch it diffuse. If that’s true for the universe, then the sublime marriage of millions of cells and molecules for the creation of life on Earth could be a low-probability fluke that needn’t repeat itself. But some researchers now believe that the existence of extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily violate that basic law: In fact, they argue, it could be what drives the creation of living beings.

Count the Stars

And then there’s simple math to consider. There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each one home to tens of billions of stars circled by at least a planet each. See where I’m going? From the first astronomer eager to catch audio signals using radio in the early 1900s to the rovers currently exploring Mars, our fascination with outer space has always in part had to do with the hunt for potential neighbors beyond our planet. Sophisticated new tools, including the soon-to-be-deployed largest telescope in history, are capable of exploring the atmosphere of planets trillions of miles away, potentially bringing us within reach of an answer.

Move Over, Mars

While Mars has long been the poster child for out-of-Earth exploration, (it is, after all, the most similar to Earth in many ways), scientists are expanding their horizons. In fact, researchers at Washington State University have already identified more than 20 planets outside our solar system that could sustain life even better than Earth (don’t pack your bags just yet though; they are all more than 100 light-years away). Meanwhile, even as it waits for a robotic rover to deliver Martian samples by the end of the decade, NASA wants to explore one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. The agency is planning to send a mission to probe Europa’s frozen oceans and volcanoes as early as 2024. Another moon catching everyone’s attention is Titan, Saturn’s largest, where a mission will be launched to analyze liquid methane lakes in 2027.

Not So Fast

But some scientists are urging caution, saying the broadly accepted global guidelines on how to respond to a potential alien encounter are not enough. Physicist Mark Buchanan worries that these new civilizations could be more advanced and powerful than ours. “Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own,” he wrote in The Washington Post in June. On the opposite side is a slightly more eerie argument: If these super smart aliens wanted to kill us all, they would have already done it.

Wait, Are They Already Here?

What if we’re the aliens on Earth? While a recently declassified report on alleged UFO sightings by U.S. navy pilots raised more questions than it provided answers, some prominent scientists have been positing a much more interesting theory: that life on Earth could have actually originated on Mars, making us, well, Martians. How? Life forms when planets cool down and liquid water eventually emerges. Evidence is increasingly pointing to the fact that Mars formed and cooled down before Earth, and that it had methane (an ingredient for the birth of life). Add that to the theory that various forms of life travel across the universe through asteroids and other debris, and you have a hypothesis more credible than distant sightings by pilots that could be explained in part by optical illusions.

Who Are the Aliens?

Scientists have recently discovered more than 2,000 stars from where Earth would be visible when it passed in front of the sun. That means that aliens with powerful telescopeson planets near those stars could actually be looking at us without visiting us on UFOs. The good news? Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, says that if there’s life out there, we currently have a good chance of finding it. “The new large telescopes will allow us to scrutinize the chemical composition of many exoplanet atmospheres,” he tells OZY. “With those tools, we could find life elsewhere within the next 10 to 20 years.”

HOW ARE WE FINDING THEM?

Telescopes

From the moment Galileo Galilei, one of modern astronomy’s founding fathers, pointed his telescope upward in the 1600s, the instrument has been central to our understanding of the universe. It helped early scientists study the surface of our moon and discover Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. Since then, telescopes have evolved in ways the Italian astronomer probably never dreamed of. In 1931, American engineer Karl Jansky’s giant rotating antennas detected the first radio signal from the center of the Milky Way. And more than seven decades later, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope identified thousands of planets that orbit around stars other than the sun between 2009 and 2018.

Best Bet

While China and the European Space Agency — apart from America — are investing in new rovers to explore Mars’ surface, modern versions of the telescope represent our best shot at discovering the truth about possible extraterrestrial life. China recently unveiled one of the largest single dish observatories in the world, so sensitive that it can detect anything from dead stars to hydrogen in distant galaxies. Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to send up the James Webb Space Telescope this year. This $10 billion observatory will work from space, its state-of-the-art technology allowing it to look through the gas and dust that usually obscure the view for other telescopes.

The Future

Telescopes are poised to become ever more sophisticated, with the ability to provide better images of smaller planets located farther away. The Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and the European Extremely Large Telescope (brownie points for original naming) are both due to be up and running by 2025. They promise to deliver images so sharp scientists might be able to identify the fine imprint that molecules leave in the atmospheres of other planets, tracking clues to the possibility of life. Another Harvard University-led project will search for possible technologies aliens might have discarded as junk. Meanwhile, other researchers are developing ultrafast light-driven nanocrafts, similar to the ones aliens could have, to launch toward Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to ours (about 25 trillion miles away) that could potentially harvest life. Why is it so important to search for life elsewhere? Astrophysicist Socas-Navarro tells OZY the answer is simple: “All the life that we know descends from one line. Biology has only one sample to work with in trying to understand life itself and how it originates. It’s like trying to study medicine in a world with only one person.”

THE NEXT GALILEOS

Yuri Milner

Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson aren’t the only billionaires locked in a space race. Milner, an Israeli Russian businessman and one of the moneybags behind Facebook and Twitter, founded Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015 and has invested more than $200 million in the search for alien life on Jupiter, Saturn and in the clouds over Venus. The businessman, who was named after the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to venture into space, has always been interested in what is out there. “I think it is only appropriate that we, as a civilization, devote at least some resources to try and ask the biggest existential questions; for example, are we alone in the universe?” he told CTech. But his biggest strength might be his proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who heads a state with one of the world’s most sophisticated space programs at its disposal.

Latinas in Nasa

Latinos represent just 7% of NASA’s workforce, though they constitute 18% of the U.S. population. For Hispanic women, making it to NASA can be as hard as getting to Jupiter. Mexican Ali Guarneros Luna is shattering that glass ceiling, remaking the space agency’s reputation for a new generation. Growing up in Mexico, she read about space missions in an encyclopedia — and was instantly hooked. Then, at the age of 12, she immigrated to California with her mother after an earthquake devastated her native Mexico City in 1985. After high school, she gave up on her college dreams to support her four children. After she finally went back to school and earned two degrees, a professor convinced her to try out for NASA. She now works as part of the Agency’s small satellite technology program, which develops new tools for space missions, and is a top safety expert at the agency. Shooting for the stars has paid off for her.

You

But you don’t need to be a space engineer to satiate your curiosity about possible alien life. All you need is a telescope and a ton of time. NASA is recruiting amateur astronomers keen to observe planets from outside our solar system as they pass in front of the sun. The idea is that mass observation will help build a body of data pointing to the time and frequency at which these planets travel near the sun, allowing more experienced astronomers to know when to point the larger telescopes.

IN POP CULTURE

Fact or Fiction?

If they exist, what do aliens look like? Are they green and cute as in E.T., tall and skinny as in Signs, human-looking like Sally from 3rd Rock From the Sun or perhaps angry and gooey like in Aliens? For decades, popular culture has stepped in where science has been unable to answer questions. Some argue these stories reflect other social fears (think about the many reports of UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 during the Cold War).

Mirror, Mirror

OK, that’s Hollywood. What do scientists say about the way aliens might actually look? That we should look at evolution, and keep an open mind. They argue that the way we humans look is pretty much a result of necessity (two eyes for wide vision, two ears for stereo audio, two legs to stand up and grab things from high up). Each species is different, based on their own evolutionary needs. So aliens can actually look completely different to us. Where we are going wrong is that we are only imagining beings similar to creatures on Earth.

Man on Mars

What if we could combine scientific research with the spectacle of films? A series of cool new documentaries does just that, exploring some of the questions NASA scientists are asking themselves and offering a front-row seat to their findings. Among them is Nat Geo’s Mars, a documentary-style fiction series that takes viewers on a trip over the next few decades as humans settle on Mars. Spoiler alert: It will take more than finding a new habitable planet to rid humanity of its problems.

{ https://www.ozy.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 20:18 geschreven door peter  

Motion activated security camera (Uniden-AppCam) mounted on shed activated and sent alert to phone. On inspection it shows a clear UFO Fastwalker. 

UFO shows up in only one single frame This single image of a UFO proves that crafts equipped with advanced technology flying through the sky that are not visible to the naked eye due to their enormous speed.

source: www.mufon.com

  

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

03-08-2021 om 18:43 geschreven door peter  

Navy Photographer captured flying saucer on Catalina Island, California 1966

Navy Photographer Lee Hansen captured this footage on Catalina Island, California, April 15th 1966 at 9.45 am.

A Navy Photographer Lee Hansen captures this footage of this object with no apparent flight control surfaces or engine On this „clear, clear day“ he describes the object as „silver with a shadow underneath as though as metallic“ and „maybe 20 meters across“ – quote end.

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

03-08-2021 om 18:18 geschreven door peter  

X-RAY ECHOES BEHIND BLACK HOLES PROVIDE “EXTREME” PROOF EINSTEIN WAS RIGHT

The massive gravity of a black hole actually bent X-ray echoes from around its back.

WHEN SCIENTISTS FIRST TURNED the X-Ray space telescopes NuSTAR and XMM-Newton toward a supermassive black hole in the center of a distant galaxy with the memorable name of IZwicky1, they knew their mission:

How could it be that some of nature’s darkest forces are also some of its brightest? Black holes are called black holes for a reason. Yet, the hot gasses that fall into black holes become superheated and glow intensely.

This was a question the international team aimed to solve. Instead, they wound up confirming Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in one of its most extreme tests to date.

Through a serendipitous observation of exceptionally bright X-ray flares around the supermassive black hole and careful analysis of the flare’s “echoes,” researchers were able to prove that what they were actually seeing were X-ray reflections from behind the black hole.

The black hole’s massive gravity was bending the X-ray light around the corner, so to speak.

“It’s really further confirmation that this light bending is still working as Einstein predicted it, even when the gravity gets really strong and really close to a black hole,” Dan Wilkins tells Inverse. Wilkins is the paper’s first author and a Stanford University research scientist.

“It’s confirming what we already knew,” he says, “but at a more extreme scale.”

These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

WHAT’S NEW

In his Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Einstein discusses two interrelated theories — one being general relativity, a concept proposed in 1915.

The theory of general relativity suggests that a massive object can warp space-time around it, creating what we experience as gravity. This facet of the theory has been proven many times, perhaps most famously during a solar eclipse in 1919, when astronomer Arthur Eddington confirmed that the sun’s gravity bent the light from stars — just as Einstein predicted.

“IT’S GRAVITATIONAL LENSING AT ITS MOST EXTREME.”

Astronomers have since used the gravity of distant galaxies to see around them toward even more distant objects, a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing.”

But this new work takes gravitational lensing to a whole new level, according to Wilkins.

“It’s not just light being reflected a little bit. It’s coming from all the way behind the black hole, being bent all the way around into our line of sight,” he says. “It’s gravitational lensing at its most extreme.”

HOW THEY DID IT

 As stellar gas and dust fall into a supermassive black hole, they flatten out and spin around it in a disk, like water going down a drain, Wilkins says. This creates a high-intensity glow in the visual and X-ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

His team was measuring the X-rays when “all of a sudden, it started emitting what we refer to as X-ray flares,” he says. “Suddenly the X-rays got about 2.5 times brighter for a very short period of time.”

The extremely bright flares reflect, or echo, off of the spinning disk of hot gas around the black hole.

Echoes, and the flares that cause them, are known phenomena, but Wilkins says the team began noticing extra echoes they hadn’t anticipated.

“These were the echoes from the backside of the disk,” he says. “The echoes that come off the far side of the disk — the part that is hidden by the shadow of the black hole — actually get bent around the edge of the black hole.”

WHY IT MATTERS — In the big picture, the new findings add one more brick in the column of evidence supporting general relativity. There are also implications for better understanding galaxies, stars, and black holes themselves.

It’s thought that most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at their center, including our own Milky Way. Better understanding how these supermassive black holes function could help scientists better understand their possible role in galaxy formation, according to Wilkins.

And in the process of verifying the gravitational bending of the X-rays around this particular supermassive black hole, the researchers also developed a new tool to help them study other black holes. Most such objects are too distant to photograph, but Wilkins says they can now use measurements of X-ray echoes as a sort of sonar “to reconstruct that picture, of that map, of the extreme environment outside a black hole.”

WHAT’S NEXT

The immediate next step for Wilkins and other researchers is to refine the new techniques to get better and better measurements of X-ray echoes, as well as a better picture of what the area around a black hole actually looks like.

New X-ray space telescopes, such as the European Space Agency’s Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics (ATHENA) — planned for the early 2030s — could be a big help.

“It will be the biggest X-ray telescope we’ve ever launched and having a bigger telescope, we will have a much more detailed view,” Wilkins says. “We will get a clearer and clearer picture of this extreme environment just outside the black hole and find out what is happening to this gas in its final moments before it falls in.”

Abstract: The innermost regions of accretion disks around black holes are strongly irradiated by X-rays that are emitted from a highly variable, compact corona, in the immediate vicinity of the black hole. The X-rays that are seen reflected from the disk, and the time delays, as variations in the X-ray emission echo or ‘reverberate’ off the disk provide a view of the environment just outside the event horizon. I Zwicky 1 (I Zw 1) is a nearby narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy. Previous studies of the reverberation of X-rays from its accretion disk revealed that the corona is composed of two components: an extended, slowly varying component extending over the surface of the inner accretion disk, and a collimated core, with luminosity fluctuations propagating upwards from its base, which dominates the more rapid variability. Here we report observations of X-ray flares emitted from around the supermassive black hole in I Zw 1. X-ray reflection from the accretion disk is detected through a relativistically broadened iron K line and Compton hump in the X-ray emission spectrum. Analysis of the X-ray flares reveals short flashes of photons consistent with the re-emergence of emission from behind the black hole. The energy shifts of these photons identify their origins from different parts of the disk. These are photons that reverberate off the far side of the disk, and are bent around the black hole and magnified by the strong gravitational field. Observing photons bent around the black hole confirms a key prediction of general relativity.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 01:17 geschreven door peter  

Watch NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity explore intriguing Raised Ridges in new video

03-08-2021 om 01:06 geschreven door peter  

Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

Bezos' Blue Origin protested SpaceX deal, but GAO said NASA didn't break any laws.

03-08-2021 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

Over a decade ago, scientists made just such a discovery, when an analysis of data from NASA's ICESat satellite revealed that variations in ice elevation in West Antarctica reflected a vast mass of subglacial water movement underneath the ice sheet.

Prior to the discovery, it had been thought that hidden meltwater lakes – deeply concealed at the bottom of the ice sheet, where the ice meets the continental bedrock underneath – existed in isolation, cut off from one another.

But in 2007, researchers found that fluctuations in the height of Antarctica's surface ice signified the movement of water flowing between a hidden network of subglacial lakes, which alternately fill and drain before their water escapes to the Southern Ocean.

The new lakes discovered.

(Siegfried et al./NASA Goddard/YouTube)

Now, the ICESat mission's follow-up – ICESat-2, launched in 2018 – is giving scientists an even keener glimpse at this mysterious, deeply buried lake network, while revealing two lakes never before discovered.

"The discovery of these interconnected systems of lakes at the ice-bed interface that are moving water around, with all these impacts on glaciology, microbiology, and oceanography – that was a big discovery from the ICESat mission," says glaciologist Matthew Siegfried from the Colorado School of Mines.

"ICESat-2 is like putting on your glasses after using ICESat, the data are such high precision that we can really start to map out the lake boundaries on the surface."

In a new study, Siegfried and fellow researchers compiled altimetry data from ICESat-2 and the original ICESat mission, along with measurements taken from CryoSat-2, an ice-observing satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

By combining the datasets – encompassing the period from 2003 to 2020 – the researchers are able to monitor active subglacial lakes at timescales shorter than ICESat-2's repeat cycle (the 91-day gap before it can observe the same region again).

"Surface deformation due to active subglacial lakes filling and draining provides one of the few remotely accessible windows into the evolution of basal water systems; these systems are otherwise hidden beneath up to 4 km [2.5 miles] of ice and remain one of the major physical uncertainties on projections of future ice sheet dynamics," the researchers write in their paper.

"ICESat-2 laser altimetry can not only extend the record of subglacial lake activity but also provides better understanding of hydrological processes by capturing denser and more precise spatial detail."

In addition to giving us a more detailed look at the activity and outlines of known subglacial lakes in Antarctica – of which there are over 130 already documented – the analysis found two anomalies that appear to be hidden lakes, previously undetected.

These potentially active lakes – called Lower Conway Subglacial Lake (LSLC) and Lower Mercer Subglacial Lake (LSLM), lie near previously discovered lakes, and may have been missed by the original ICESat mission, falling within the narrow gaps between its observations.

In this region – underneath the Mercer and Whillans ice streams in West Antarctica – the lake system, which is dominated by two large active subglacial lakes (Conway Subglacial Lake and Mercer Subglacial Lake), appears to be in the midst of its third drainage event since ICESat observations began in 2003.

Just a few weeks ago, one of the same researchers involved here – glaciologist Helen Fricker from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – co-authored a related study, detailing a dramatic lake drainage event in East Antarctica, where a surface lake on a floating ice shelf vanished in the space of days.

Far below the ice sheet in West Antarctica, the water draining from subglacial lakes is also thought to eventually flow into the ocean, although the concealed escape route is much harder to visualize.

"These are processes that are going on under Antarctica that we wouldn't have a clue about if we didn't have satellite data," Fricker says.

"We've been struggling with getting good predictions about the future of Antarctica, and instruments like ICESat-2 are helping us observe at the process scale."

• The findings are reported in Geophysical Research Letters.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

03-08-2021 om 00:31 geschreven door peter