Glowing Orbs Over Tampa, Florida Nov 15, 2021, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Nov 15, 2021
Location of sighting: Tampa, Florida, USA
Source: MUFON 

 

A person was driving along and noticed some lights in the sky, so they pulled over a recorded them on his phone. The objects have a reddish glow to them and flying together in the same direction. The objects were flying and each seems to be about the size of a car. Fantastic raw footage of a UFO fleet over Tampa. Many times I have said there is a alien base below Florida and it extends out into the ocean floor for about 50-70km. These UFOs came from that location. 

100% proof that UFO often want us to see them by deliberately lighting up. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

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

19-11-2021 om 16:43 geschreven door peter  

Greta Thunberg Time Traveler Photo Two Found! UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: November 19, 2021

Location of discovery: National Archives and Records Administration

Source photo at: 

• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/15/nebraska-native-american-boarding-school-students-died

Guys, I was looking at a news story about graves found in an old Indian school in Nebraska when I noticed something odd. Greta Thunberg was sitting in one of the students desk. She has been found before in other photos from 1890 in the Yukon territory doing gold mining, but this photo is from Nebraska in 1910. It would figure that she might time travel to such a place as this. So many terrible abuses took place against the Indian children at the school, so many children disappearing never to be seen again...and so many graves found. If this is her, she must have known what was going to happen and she tried to prevent it as much as possible. Greta has talked to the UN yelling at them like they were little children, she has talked to presidents, leading protests worldwide and even was on the cover of TIME as person of the year. It seems to me that she really does see the future and what she says will happen...is not a possibility, but a guarantee to happen. 

 

 

Why would Greta do this? In here own words, "Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago." So...Greta is here for the world...again and again through time. 

 

Check out my video and chat about it in below, and remember to subscribe to my Youtube channel for more new discoveries. 

 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

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

19-11-2021 om 16:32 geschreven door peter  

UFOs filmed over Tampa, Florida 15-Nov-2021

These strange unknown lights were flying across the night sky above Tampa, FL on 15th November 2021.

Witness report: 

There were lights in the sky in a prominent formation. They moved, changed colors then disappeared. I can’t remember hour long I was watching, but it was a good amount of time

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

19-11-2021 om 14:35 geschreven door peter  

Is there life at Alpha Centauri? Astronomers will launch a telescope into low-Earth orbit in 2023 to search for habitable planets orbiting our closest star system

• Breakthrough Initiatives and the University of Sydney are working on the project

• It will see a telescope launched into low Earth orbit to study Alpha Centauri

• This is the nearest star system to the Earth and could host habitable planets

• The new telescope will be designed to look for planets in the habitable zone 

By RYAN MORRISON FOR MAILONLINE 

The search for 'another Earth' has been a staple of science fiction for decades, and now a group of astronomers hope to discover one on our galactic doorstep.

Alpha Centauri is a triple star system just over four light years from the Earth, split into a pair of sun-like stars known as AB, and a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri.

So far planets have only been found orbiting Proxima Centauri, but experts from the University of Sydney and Breakthrough Initiatives believe they will find a world orbiting the larger binary pair using a new privately funded telescope. 

Known as the Toliman mission, it will launch in 2023 and scan Alpha Centauri AB for worlds in the habitable zone, where liquid water can flow on the surface.

The team hope to be able to say whether there are habitable worlds orbiting either or both of the binary stars by the middle of this decade. 

Professor Peter Tuthill, project leader from the University of Sydney, told MailOnline there was a 30 per cent chance of finding at least one planet orbiting Alpha Centauri AB, but it is difficult to properly assess due to the fact it is a binary star system.

A simulated view of what the TOLIMAN telescope could see of the Alpha Centauri binary through its diffractive pupil lens 

The closest star system to the Earth is the famous Alpha Centauri group. Located in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), at a distance of 4.3 light-years, this system is made up of the binary formed by the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri

While the cost hasn't been revealed, it will in part be funded by a $788,000 (£425,000) grant from the Australian government and includes work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Saber Astronautics in Australia. 

It is expected to be a multimillion dollar project, but will cost less than $20m. 

TOLIMAN stands for Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood, but is also the ancient Arabic name for the star. 

It is a new approach to exoplanet discovery, creating a telescope to focus on the nearest star systems, looking for potentially habitable worlds, instead of just any world. 

The telescope uses a diffractive pupil lense - a mirror that spreads starlight captured from nearby stars into a complex flower-like pattern.

This pattern makes it easier to detect perturbances of star movements that are the tell-tale signs of orbiting planets.

'Our nearest stellar neighbours – the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri systems – are turning out to be extraordinarily interesting,' said Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which is funding the mission.

'The TOLIMAN mission will be a huge step towards finding out if planets capable of supporting life exist there.'

Professor Tuthill said this will present a new window on the universe, including our nearest neighbour.

'Astronomers have access to amazing technologies that allow us to find thousands of planets circling stars across vast reaches of the galaxy,' he said. 

'Yet we hardly know anything about our own celestial backyard. It is a modern problem to have; we are like net-savvy urbanites whose social media connections are global, but we don't know anyone living on our own block.'

Having such a blind spot in our understanding of the local universe has 'important consequences' for astronomy, according to Prof Tuthill.  

'These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analysing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere – the tentative signals of life,' he added.

Telescope mirror engraving for TOLIMAN. Alpha Centauri is a triple star system just over four light years from the Earth, split into a pair of sun-like stars known as AB, and a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri

The team believe that either or both of the two stars in Alpha Centauri AB may host temperate planets - those with flowing water that could host life.

The third star, Proxima Centauri, is already believed to have one planet in a 'Goldilocks orbit', discovered in 2016.

Breakthrough Initiatives, founded by Israeli science and technology investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner, which is supporting the mission, has a number of programs engaged in the hunt for alien life throughout the universe. 

Its Starshot mission hopes to one day send a fleet of tiny probes to Alpha Centauri, flying using lightsails - a mission that will take 20 years from launch, and four years to send any information back to the Earth.

Proposed TOLIMAN mission telescope design. The team believe that either or both of the two stars in Alpha Centauri AB may host temperate planets - those with flowing water that could host life

Our closest neighbours: Alpha and Proxima Centauri are just four light years away, here photographed in visible and x-ray spectra

Other projects, including TOLIMAN, have been designed to find planets and search for life in our stellar neighbourhood.

Pete Klupar, Chief Engineer of Breakthrough Watch, said: 'These nearby planets are where humanity will take our first steps into interstellar space using high-speed, futuristic, robotic probes.

'If we consider the nearest few dozen stars, we expect a handful of rocky planets like Earth orbiting at the right distance for liquid surface water to be possible.'

Saber Astronautics will provide spaceflight mission operations support, including satellite communications and command, space traffic management and a range of other flight services to download data from the satellite. 

Dr Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics, said: 'TOLIMAN is a mission that Australia should be very proud of – it is an exciting, bleeding-edge space telescope supplied by an exceptional international collaboration. It will be a joy to fly this bird.' 

Dr Eduardo Bendek, a member of the team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said it is a huge technological challenge finding planets orbiting even the nearest and brightest stars in our galactic neighbourhood.

'Our TOLIMAN mission will launch a custom-designed space telescope that makes extremely fine measurements of the position of the star in the sky. If there is a planet orbiting the star, it will tug on the star betraying a tiny, but measurable, wobble.'

Most of the thousands of known planets outside the solar system have been discovered using space telescopes such as NASA's Kepler and TESS missions.

Finding exoplanets close to home will take more finely tuned instruments, which is where the TOLIMAN mission comes in.

Mr Klupar said: 'The signal we are looking for requires a real leap in precision measurement.'

Professor Tuthill added: 'Nobody is underestimating the challenge, but our innovative design incorporates new tricks. Our plan is for an agile, low-cost mission that delivers results by about the middle of the decade.' 

Pictured, a not-to-scale representation of how far away Proxima B is from Earth compared to Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object which was launched in 1977 

He told MailOnline he has spent time looking at the odds of finding a planet, and it isn't a question with a single clear answer.

'There are a few unknowns that the present state of astronomy knowledge are not yet up to answering,' he explained. 

'I think taking a moderately pessimistic case, then there is at least, say a 30% chance of at least 1 planet, and the more optimistic forecasts predict several planets.

'The problem here is the binary star,' Alpha Centauri AB, as 'nobody really knows what the implications of that are, so these numbers are under debate.'

He said TOLIMAN hopes to be able to view any planet the mass of Earth or larger - if it is the size of Mars or smaller then it won't be visible, even if it exists. 

'We are searching for Earth Analogs. Surely, eventually however, technology will catch up and we will exhaustively survey the Alpha Cen system.' 

BREAKTHROUGH STARSHOT 

Scientists hope the vehicles, known as nanocraft, will eventually fly at 20 per cent of the speed of lightt.

'The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this very thin gauzy light sail,' said Nasa's Pete Worden

'It would be something like 10, 12 feet across.'

He envisions sending a larger conventional spacecraft containing thousands of nanocraft into orbit, and then launching the nanocraft.

If they reach the star system and succeed in taking photographs, it would take about another four years to transmit them back. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

19-11-2021 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

Is there life at Alpha Centauri? New space telescope to seek out habitable planets around sun's neighboring star

19-11-2021 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

The Great Pyramid of Giza “is proof of alien technology”

In recent years, several enigmatic discoveries have been made at the Great Pyramid of Giza that have led to the formulation of various theories. Is it possible that this amazing monument is proof of ancient alien technology?

The Giza pyramid complex is regarded as the greatest feat   of human engineering of all time. Many engineers have tried to replicate the Great Pyramid of Giza today,  without success .

If we still can’t build them .. What technology did the ancient Egyptians use? Is it possible that a stranger? “One  brought from space .”

The Great Pyramid of Giza and the mystery of its construction

Most hypotheses about  advanced ancient civilizations  and ancient astronauts are totally rejected.

However, archaeologists and historians who are not governed by the mainstream of history have  arguments  that are too convincing to ignore.

One of the latest documentaries on the subject featured on Amazon Prime, called “Egypt Exposed: The True Origins of Civilization,” showed an interview with Robert Bauval.

The alternative theory enthusiast laid out a compelling story that shows a strong possibility that the pyramids were built using  advanced technology .

Bauval locates the origins of civilization in Ancient Egypt and Africa, connecting the stars and astrology with the pyramids, hieroglyphs and other elements. Doing his own research in the Cairo museum, he became convinced that the Egyptians did not.

He revealed that in a room where the museum keeps the  relics of the builders , there is a wall with a huge photograph. It was taken by the Egyptian Air Force in 1950, it showed a  direct overhead of the 3 pyramids .

Robert Bauvall raised the question, since in the early 1950s, there was no internet, so he was surprised to see an aerial image, since they  were not common at that time . Much less satellite images.

He took a photograph of the image on the wall and developed it into black and white film. The man described the photograph;

“There were three pyramids, two very large, clearly in a diagonal line. The base of the pyramid is a square, and it had 2 squares along the diagonal. The third pyramid was much smaller, and is offset to the east or the left side.

He explained that Egyptologists believe that the kings who built the pyramids were  megalomaniacs .

Clean energy and electricity

Another documentary, this time from Netflix, called ” The Pyramid Code, ” archaeologists and theorists claimed that ancient Egyptians sought the Great Pyramid of Giza for clean energy.

Theorist Abd’el Hakimawyan explained:

“From that place, you know, maybe it was the energy of the Earth it seems as if they were trying to control the flow of this energy and use it for their own purposes.”

It is believed that the energy of the pyramids was not only used by the ancient Egyptians, but by  other civilizations such  as the Mayans. Meanwhile, it has also been claimed that the ancient Egyptians revealed advanced technology in their hieroglyphs.

This is further explained on the YouTube channel “Strange Mysteries”, where the narrator mentions that the hieroglyphs depict ancient Egyptians using electricity with a light bulb.

It is extremely difficult to think that this civilization of more than 4,000 years could handle electricity, unless they have obtained the advanced knowledge necessary to do so … Who gave it to them?

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

COAST TO COAST AM – November 2021. Jon Sumple of j3FILMS is the director and one of the producers of the new documentary film, Extraordinary: The Revelations. In the first hour, he discussed the approach he took to the subject of the historical significance of extraterrestrial presence. 

The film is targeted to people who many not have been exposed to the topic.

Sumple explained, adding it provides context for phenomena that has been documented as far back as 40,000 years ago in cave paintings. 

According to Sumple, there are three paradigms that define the alien agenda: ascension (ETs are here to upgrade us), colonization (ETs are here to take over), and biblical (ETs are in the Bible and are repeating what has happened in the past).

"Which one is right we don't know," he noted, suggesting there may be components of each view that are correct.

  

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

18-11-2021 om 23:29 geschreven door peter  

Eerie video captures elusive, alien-like squid gliding in the Gulf of Mexico

18-11-2021 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

HAVE ALIENS VISITED EARTH? THESE SCIENTISTS WANT TO LOOK FOR THEIR TRASH

18-11-2021 om 18:26 geschreven door peter  

People Convinced They Can See Alien In Latest Photos From NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

Tom Sanders

Internet sleuths have been sent into a frenzy after a tiny white speck spotted in new photos from NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover has people convinced they've spotted an alien.

A recent tweet from the team behind the rover shared a number of new snaps from the red planet to their 2.8 million followers.

The photographs - which depict breathtaking views of the Martian landscape - are awe-inspiring in their own right, but one picture in particular has really got people talking.

The photo in question showcases a patch of rock that has had the surface layer removed by the Perseverance rover in order to offer closer inspection.

NASA stated the rover was 'peering inside to look at something no one's ever seen'.

It said: "I've abraded a small patch of this rock to remove the surface layer and get a look underneath. Zeroing in on my next target for #SamplingMars."

But when one person replied with a screenshot of a small white patch on one of the photos and said that it was 'definitely a tiny white alien', social media went into overdrive.

One person believed the white triangular patch was some sort of 'sign', while other users pointed out a similar-looking white arrow towards the right side of the image that looked far too suspiciously well-crafted to be a mere coincidence

More questions were raised when another eagle-eyed viewer noticed what appeared to be some sort of black hole in the bottom-left of the photo.

Another questioned if the Rover could 'turn over large rocks to look underneath them?'

They continued: "Something that may not have been disturbed for thousands of years? Who knows what may be under some of them?"

But while anything space-related is bound to generate all sorts of conspiracy theories, mostly people were content to enjoy the photos and marvel at the brief glimpses of another world.

To date, NASA is yet to comment on the triangle shape or any of the other signs and symbols people think they're seeing.

After all, Mars has such a rocky and dry surface it can be easy to think you're looking at a pattern or a shape when actually all you're seeing is rock and dust.

In other Mars-related news, NASA has recently announced it is accepting applications for people who wish to fire their names to the red planet as part of a new mission scheduled for 2026.

• Featured Image Credit: NASA

{ https://www.ladbible.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 17:41 geschreven door peter  

If you’re one of those people who knows that an ‘Einstein–Rosen bridge’ is the formal name for a wormhole, then you probably know that neither Albert Einstein nor Nathan Rosen would set foot in their theoretical namesake because they knew it might not stay stable long enough to get from one side of the universe to the other through a wormhole-connected black hole and white hole – the mirror image of a black hole at the exit. However, if astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and physicist David Finkelstein were here, they might convince Einstein and Rosen to follow them down the wormhole because a new paper maintains that it will remain stable and the proof is in their Eddington-Finkelstein metric. Wait … what?

“The Eddington-Finkelstein metric is obtained from the Schwarzschild metric by a change of the time variable. It is well known that a test mass falling into a black hole does not reach the event horizon for any finite value of the Schwarzschild time variable t. By contrast, we show that the event horizon is reached for a finite value of the Eddington-Finkelstein time variable t′. Then we study in Eddington-Finkelstein time the fate of a massive particle traversing an Einstein-Rosen bridge and obtain a different conclusion than recent proposals in the literature: we show that the particle reaches the wormhole throat for a finite value t′1 of the time marker t′, and continues its trajectory across the throat for t′>t′1. Such a behavior does not make sense in Schwarzschild time since it would amount to continuing the trajectory of the particle “beyond the end of time.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington

There … now do you understand? That’s the abstract from “Infall time in the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, with application to Einstein-Rosen bridges,” the paper written by Pascal Koiran for publication in the journal General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology on how those four geniuses plus Koiran and any of you brave enough to follow them would survive a trip through space-time in a stable wormhole. Fortunately, Live Science was able to explain the concept in terms non-geniuses can kind of understand.

A metric is a way to get from here to there. For most points in space, there are a lot of metrics (think of the options offered by your GPS – by car, by bus, on foot). For wormholes, Einstein and Rosen used the Schwarzschild metric from general relativity, which predicts that an object passing though a wormhole will break down (i.e. be destroyed) when it reaches the black hole’s event horizon – the point where not even light can escape. Koiran, a Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (a French institute of higher learning) computer scientist, took a different path – the Eddington-Finkelstein metric provides a route for a particle to cross the event horizon, enter the wormhole and exit out the white hole at other side in a finite amount of time without any instability or destruction.

David Ritz Finkelstein

Did Koiran drop the mic and book a trip through the nearest wormhole? Unfortunately, metric didn’t misbehave at any point in that trajectory. The Eddington-Finkelstein metric only solves the gravity challenge of getting past the black holes at either end of the wormhole – it doesn’t address the thermodynamics – heat and energy — inside the wormhole which other theories suggest would break the lack-hole-wormhole-white-hole apart before anyone could set foot in it. What Koiran’s paper does prove is that traveling through a wormhole is not impossible nor a death sentence – general relativity says so. All we need is the right metric.

Can you plug a black hole and a white hole into Google Maps?

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-11-2021 om 16:21 geschreven door peter  

Bob Lazar Explains What We See via UAP Research

The only qualified person that can really explain what we see in this video from 1991 is of course Bob Lazar. Why do UFO move so goofy? What is this glow? Bob gives us the answers in easy to understand terms. The full video presentation will follow shortly. Just for clarification: This VHS video was shot from Mailbox Road on public land. This is an unedited original 720x40p VHS recording and not a night vision recording.

As background I have used a photo showing the mountain range. The mountains have been carefully placed in the right position with an accuracy of 5-10 meters. How I achieved this and much more will be explained in our upload: Project Mailbox. The camera is looking South West towards a mountain range called White Sides. Some “expert debunkers” claim that this is a test of a laser induced plasma ball.

When you look at the position of the UFO when it dives in front of the mountain the laser would have been standing outside of Area 51 on public land and quite near the location of the filmer. So the plasma balls theory can be thrown in the bin, just like the planet theory that this is Mars, Venus, Jupiter, our Moon or the landing light of an airplane.

Sorry debunkers but you either have to think of a new theory or you can accept that you cannot explain what it is and therefore an unknown flying object.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 14:54 geschreven door peter  

UFOs FLY OVER PLANE IN LOS ANGELES!! : Alien madness on the air

Description of Sighting Report - MUFON Case 119255
Standing in my back yard, my little nephew looks into the sky and was like, what in the world is that. I looked up and saw 2 UFOs hovering in the sky.

They were side by side, round, dark metallic objects. I immediately took my phone out, which is an iPhone 12 Pro Max, and recorded 8 total minutes of these objects in 4k video in a total of 3 videos.

The video quality is exceptionally good but the objects were still far away and at times looked blurry almost looking like they were trying to cloak or disappear in a way.

At first they were close by and then moved a ways apart and then back close together before heading west towards Fort Polk military base. During the event, a passenger jet flew right underneath the two UFOs.

In the video you can clearly tell these things aren’t jets or planes or drones or anything like that. I’ve seen things like this plenty of times before in my life. I instantly knew what this was or have some kind of idea what it isn’t. They definitely weren’t stars because of the time of day. They weren’t satellites or drones. I’ve seen like 40 to 50 starlink satellites in a row before just like the video that y’all have up.

I have a star and satellite tracker app on my phone and nothing showed up on my app. Also, I served 6 years in the Army and 18 months in combat in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq 2008-2010.

I know what drones look and sound like. The event happened at 4:45 pm a day after daylight savings time changed. The objects at points were glowing bright in the sky almost like stars. The sun was just starting to go down, so I’m sure the objects were some kind of dark metallic reflective metal because the sun was reflecting off of them.

That’s the only reason we saw them was because of how bright they were shinning. Other than that, they just looked like black balls hovering in the sky.

They looked to be rotating at times. I’ve seen things like this in the sky before. I’ve seen triangles flying faster than anything I’ve ever seen in my life twice within a 2 week period.

My first experience witnessing UFOs was in 2006 just getting out of basic training and AIT for the Army. I was at my moms in the same city as I am in now. It was 9:45pm and there was an F-18 fighter jet circling my neighborhood.

It was so loud that it was rattling the pictures on the walls. I walked outside to see all of my neighbors standing outside staring up at the sky watching this jet fly in circles.

My mom walked outside and as soon as she did, the F-18 flew in the center of the circle towards what appeared to be two bright glowing stars at the time. When the jet got closer the 2 stars took off from a dead standstill.

You could clearly tell that these glowing starlike objects weren’t planes or anything else of that nature. The object on the right side appeared to fly upwards into outer space and disappeared and the other object flew West then SW and the F-18 chased it until we couldn’t see it anymore.

I had never seen anything take off from a dead standstill and fly faster than a fighter jet. Every hair on my body stood straight up and at that moment in time, I quickly realized, we are not alone in this universe.

That moment changed my life. Since then, I keep my eyes in the sky and I have witnessed several things that are unexplainable.

I always try to logically explain things or debunk things before assuming it’s UFO or UAP. The 3 videos are in order as to what we saw. The 1st video is 0:14 seconds then the 2nd video is 4:17 and the 3rd is 3:21. The 2nd video (4:17) is the one where the jet flys underneath these 2 objects @ 1:16. I’ve zoomed in and have taken a few screen shots which I will post also.

Nothing really crazy happens in the videos. It’s just something unexplainable and I would love to know what exactly they are and what are they doing here. I try to keep an open mind about everything because there’s so much out there that we as humans have no earthly idea about. We assume things but in all reality, we actually don’t know. Enlightenment would be nice.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 13:47 geschreven door peter  

Aliens in Alaska – The Mother Ship S01E06

Ancient Aliens – The Mother Ship

Season 1, Episode 6

3rd May 2021, Discovery+

A man finds a mysterious implant in his leg after a nighttime snowmobile ride. Four friends witness the same eerie light An amateur photographer captures floating orbs on camera. UFOs circle a larger, egg-shaped mother ship floating high above Anchorage. A brother and sister watch in awe as a massive aircraft disappears behind a mountain range.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

18-11-2021 om 13:22 geschreven door peter  

The U.S. Might Get Its Own UFO Investigations Office

 BY KYLE MIZOKAMI

BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES

• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has proposed a new UFO investigative effort: the "Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office," or ASRO.

• ASRO would be the highest-level U.S. government office to look into "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAPs).

• The office would place particular emphasis on investigating UAPs as a potential threat to the U.S. and whether they are controlled by hostile governments.

---

The U.S. government could soon have a brand-new bureau dedicated to investigating "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP)—or what the rest of us refer to as UFOs.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has proposed setting up the Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office (ASRO) within the defense and intelligence communities. If adopted, the office would collect data on UAPs, cooperate with allies mounting similar efforts, and brief lawmakers twice a year on their progress. In addition to UAPs, the effort would also investigate so-called "transmedium" object sightings, or UAPs that come and go from oceans.

A 1959 photograph of an alleged UFO spotted over Alamogordo, New Mexico, from the archives of the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigation effort, Project Blue Book.

Earlier this month, Sen. Gillibrand authored and submitted SA 4281 as an amendment to the Senate's version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, commonly known as the U.S. defense budget. Gillibrand's amendment is mirrored in the House of Representatives by a similar one authored by Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). Unless there's movement to have it removed, there's a pretty good chance that President Biden could sign it into law.

Nick Pope, an author who investigated UFOs for the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence, tells Popular Mechanics that he welcomes Sen. Gillibrand's new amendment.

"The new processes would overshadow any previous investigative programs such as Project Blue Book, and would leverage the full resources and capabilities of the U.S. military and intelligence community in a way that hasn't been done before," he says. "The establishment of an advisory committee with a civilian component would bring unprecedented oversight and accountability. The UFO phenomenon isn't a partisan issue."

👽 DIVE DEEPER

• 

Here's What the Government's UFO Report Says

ASRO would assume the duties of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAP TF), a body of the Department of Defense created in 2020 to study the rash of unexplained UAP sightings from U.S. military personnel. That task force released a report in June 2021 that was largely inconclusive. While UAPs posed a "safety of flight" issue and "may pose a challenge to U.S. national security," per the report, "the limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP."

Additionally, ASRO would designate existing organizations—presumably the Office of Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and others—to perform field investigations of sightings on its behalf. It would also develop and establish procedures for reporting UAPs, coordinating with other federal agencies and departments including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), NASA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

A Pentagon-shaped UFO photographed over Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, 1966.

NOAA might seem like an odd choice at first. But it makes more sense when you consider that Gillibrand's amendment also directs an investigation into transmedium vehicles, or Unidentified Submarine Objects (USOs). In 2004, U.S. Navy aircrew flying F/A-18F Super Hornets not only witnessed a UFO-like craft, but also an underwater craft that one eyewitness described as being as large as a commercial jetliner—and somehow interacting with the UAP. There have been transmedium vehicle sightings for decades, though they've generally been folded in with the larger, more frequent aerial phenomena.

ASRO would create both unclassified and classified reports on its findings and brief members of Congress every six months. An advisory committee would draw members from NASA, the FAA, the National Academies of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and Harvard University's Galileo Project, which studies extraterrestrial technological signatures.

A UFO spotted by an Army private at Fort Belvoir, date unknown. The eyewitness described the object as a "black, non-reflecting ring." From the files of the Air Force's Project Blue Book.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The new office would be particularly interested in "identification of potential aerospace or other threats posed by unidentified aerial phenomena to the national security of the United States," per Sen. Gillibrand's amendment. It would also place a priority on investigating UAPs "that can be attributed to one or more adversarial foreign government." Think: Russia or China.

ASRO will look into "efforts to capture or exploit discovered unidentified aerial phenomena" like the alleged discovery of a crashed UFO in Roswell, New Mexico in 1957. It will also probe sightings near locations involved in the "production, transportation, or storage of nuclear weapons." Such sightings have been reported for decades, and just last month, four Air Force veterans came forward about their own encounters with UFOs while on active duty working in and around nuclear weapons.

✅ EXTRA CREDIT

• 

Pentagon Reports Show UFOs Breaking Sound Barrier

• 

Inside the Pentagon's Secret UFO Program

• 

The Weird History of Mysterious Underwater Craft

ASRO won't be a permanent organization if it comes to fruition; it would terminate exactly six years after its establishment. While the office will probably be effective at the surveillance part of its mission, how well it will address the "resolution" part remains to be seen.

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 01:35 geschreven door peter  

TOLIMAN Space Telescope Will Look for Potentially Habitable Exoplanets in Alpha Centauri System

Astronomers from the University of Sydney, the Breakthrough Initiative, Saber Aeronautics and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced this week the TOLIMAN (Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood) mission, which will look for planets in the habitable zone around stars in the triple-star system Alpha Centauri. Toliman is also the Arabic-derived name of Alpha Centauri.

Alpha Centauri, also known as Rigil Kentaurus, Rigil Kent and Gliese 559, is located in the constellation of Centaurus.

This triple system is made up of the bright binary star formed by Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C.

The two brighter components are roughly 4.35 light years away from Earth. Alpha Centauri C, better known as Proxima Centauri, is slightly closer at 4.23 light years.

Compared to the Sun, Alpha Centauri A is of the same stellar type G2, and slightly bigger. Alpha Centauri B, a K1-type star, is slightly smaller and less bright.

Alpha Centauri A and B orbit a common center of gravity once every 80 years, with a minimum distance of about 11 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Three planets are currently known in the Alpha Centauri system: a warm sub-Neptune around Alpha Centauri A and two planets — Earth-mass Proxima b and much massive Proxima c — around Proxima Centauri.

“Our nearest stellar neighbors — the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri systems — are turning out to be extraordinarily interesting,” said Dr. Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives.

“The TOLIMAN mission will be a huge step towards finding out if planets capable of supporting life exist there.”

“Astronomers have access to amazing technologies that allow us to find thousands of planets circling stars across vast reaches of the Galaxy. Yet we hardly know anything about our own celestial backyard,” added TOLIMAN project leader Professor Peter Tuthill, an astronomer in the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

“It is a modern problem to have; we are like net-savvy urbanites whose social media connections are global, but we don’t know anyone living on our own block. This blind spot in our local knowledge has important consequences.”

“Getting to know our planetary neighbors is hugely important,” he added.

“These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analyzing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere — the tentative signals of life.”

“These nearby planets are where humanity will take our first steps into interstellar space using high-speed, futuristic, robotic probes,” said Pete Klupar, chief engineer of Breakthrough Watch.

“If we consider the nearest few dozen stars, we expect a handful of rocky planets like Earth orbiting at the right distance for liquid surface water to be possible.”

“TOLIMAN is a mission that Australia should be very proud of — it is an exciting, bleeding-edge space telescope supplied by an exceptional international collaboration. It will be a joy to fly this bird,” said Dr. Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics.

“Even for the very nearest bright stars in the night sky, finding planets is a huge technological challenge,” said TOLIMAN team member Dr. Eduardo Bendek, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Our TOLIMAN mission will launch a custom-designed space telescope that makes extremely fine measurements of the position of the star in the sky. If there is a planet orbiting the star, it will tug on the star betraying a tiny, but measurable, wobble.”

_____

• Peter Tuthill et al. 2018. The TOLIMAN space telescope. Proc. SPIE 10701, Optical and Infrared Interferometry and Imaging VI, 107011J; doi: 10.1117/12.2313269

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 00:42 geschreven door peter  

Germinating Pine Cone Found Encased in Baltic Amber

Seed germination — a crucial stage in the development of all plants — normally occurs in the soil after the seed has fallen from the mother plant. In some infrequent instances, precocious germination — a type of viviparity or vivipary — occurs when the seed sprouts while still within the fruit. In a new paper published in the journal Historical Biology, Oregon State University’s Professor George Poinar Jr. described the first case of precocious germination of a fossil plant involving a number of seeds that have germinated in a pine cone embedded in a piece of 40-million-year-old (Eocene epoch) Baltic amber.

“Crucial to the development of all plants, seed germination typically occurs in the ground after a seed has fallen,” Professor Poinar said.

“We tend to associate viviparity — embryonic development while still inside the parent — with animals and forget that it does sometimes occur in plants. Most typically, by far, those occurrences involve angiosperms.”

“Angiosperms, which directly or indirectly provide most of the food people eat, have flowers and produce seeds enclosed in fruit.”

“Seed germination in fruits is fairly common in plants that lack seed dormancy, like tomatoes, peppers and grapefruit, and it happens for a variety of reasons. But it’s rare in gymnosperms.”

Precocious germination in pine cones is so rare that only one naturally occurring example of this condition, from 1965, has been described in the scientific literature.

“That’s part of what makes this discovery so intriguing, even beyond that it’s the first fossil record of plant viviparity involving seed germination,” Professor Poinar said.

“I find it fascinating that the seeds in this small pine cone could start to germinate inside the cone and the sprouts could grow out so far before they perished in the resin.”

“At the sprouts’ tips are needle clusters, some in bundles of five, associating the fossil with the extinct pine species Pinus cembrifolia, which was previously described from Baltic amber.”

According to the scientist, viviparity in plants typically shows up in one of two ways.

“Precocious germination is the more common of the two, the other being vegetative viviparity, such as when a bulbil emerges directly from the flower head of a parent plant,” he said.

“In the case of seed viviparity in this fossil, the seeds produced embryonic stems that are quite evident in the amber.”

“Whether those stems, known as hypocotyls, appeared before the cone became encased in amber is unclear. However, based on their position, it appears that some growth, if not most, occurred after the pine cone fell into the resin.”

Research on viviparity in extant gymnosperms suggests the condition could be linked to winter frosts.

“Light frosts would have been possible if the Baltic amber forest had a humid, warm-temperate environment as has been posited,” Professor Poinar said.

“This is the first fossil record of seed viviparity in plants but this condition probably occurred quite a bit earlier than this Eocene record.”

“There’s no reason why vegetative viviparity couldn’t have occurred hundreds of millions of years ago in ancient spore-bearing plants like ferns and lycopods.”

_____

• George Poinar Jr. Precocious germination of a pine cone in Eocene Baltic amber. Historical Biology, published online November 8, 2021; doi: 10.1080/08912963.2021.2001808

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

18-11-2021 om 00:25 geschreven door peter  

French Prankster Tricks Everyone With Fake UFO Sightings and an Alien With a Crashed Spaceship

LORI DORN

The brilliant French prankster Rémi Gaillard, who has pulled off some wild hoaxes in the past, really outdid himself by creating highly believable UFO sightings in Southern France that the media lapped up with glee. The sightings then led to a stray alien with a crashed spaceship showing up in rather odd but commonplace locations.

Gaillard, who is the master of straight face comedy, portrayed the wayward alien who blocked traffic, tried to get the spaceship towed by a local garage, called the fire service for assitance, and even tried to steal a cow, as aliens often do.

UFOs spotted in France : behind the scenes of the hoax that fooled the media… Here is my new prank video ! Watch out, they’re coming

Gaillard stated that his pulled this prank in order to fool the media.

18-11-2021 om 00:06 geschreven door peter  

Bizarre UFO Appears To Be Captured On Doorbell Camera

I don’t know what that is in the sky, but it definitely doesn’t look like a plane or a helicopter. If it were either, I’m not sure why the lights would be positioned the way they are.

Is it possible it’s just an optical illusion captured on camera? I suppose so, but it seems unlikely.

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by UFOs and whatever they might be. I truly have no idea, but at this point, can anyone truly deny something strange isn’t going on?

I think the answer to that is no. There are simply too many examples of unexplained events, and it’s not like people wearing tinfoil hats are making the claims.

Our own government has released videos captured by fighter jet pilots. Clearly, something out of the ordinary is happening.

Let us know in the comments what you think it is!

{  https://dailycaller.com/ }

17-11-2021 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

The ancient village of Culham, nestled in a bend of the River Thames west of London, seems an unlikely launching pad for the future. But next year, construction will start here on a gleaming building of glass and steel that could house what many people consider to be an essential technology to meet demand for clean energy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector; the 18 firms that have declared their funding say they have attracted more than US$2.4 billion in total, almost entirely from private investments (see ‘Fusion funding’). Key to these efforts are advances in materials research and computing that are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long.

The latest venture at Culham — the hub of UK fusion research for decades — is a demonstration plant for General Fusion (GF), a company based in Burnaby, Canada. It is scheduled to start operating in 2025, and the company aims to have reactors for sale in the early 2030s. It “will be the first power-plant-relevant large-scale demonstration”, says GF’s chief executive Chris Mowry — unless, that is, its competitors deliver sooner.

Designed by British architect Amanda Levete, GF’s prototype plant illustrates the way fusion research has shifted from gargantuan state- or internationally funded enterprises to sleek, image-conscious affairs driven by private companies, often with state support. (GF will receive some UK government funding; it has not disclosed how much.)

Artist’s impression of General Fusion’s planned plant at Culham, UK. Credit: AL_A for General Fusion. Lead image: The world's strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet will be used in a 2025 fusion reactor in Massachusetts.

Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021

In this respect, advocates of fusion technology say it has many parallels with the space industry. That, too, was once confined to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private enterprise. This is “the SpaceX moment for fusion”, says Mowry, referring to Elon Musk’s space-flight company in Hawthorne, California.

“The mood has changed,” says Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. “We can smell that we’re getting close.” Investors sense the real prospect of returns on their money: Google and the New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, for instance, are among those funding the fusion company TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, California, which has raised around $880 million so far. “Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build,” says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion — desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy — within a decade. “There’s a very good shot to get there within less than ten years,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s.

Several fusion researchers who don’t work for private firms told Nature that, although prospects are undeniably exciting, commercial fusion in a decade is overly optimistic. “Private companies say they’ll have it working in ten years, but that’s just to attract funders,” says Tony Donné, programme manager of the Eurofusion consortium which conducts experiments at the state-run Joint European Torus, established at Culham in the late 1970s. “They all have stated constantly to be about ten years away from a working fusion reactor, and they still do.”

Timelines that companies project should be regarded not so much as promises but as motivational aspirations, says Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist who is the FIA’s UK director of communications, and a communications consultant for the fusion firm Tokamak Energy, in Culham. “I think bold targets are necessary,” she says. State support is also likely to be needed to build a fusion power plant that actually feeds electricity into the grid, adds Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).

But whether it comes from small-scale private enterprise, huge national or international fusion projects, or a bit of both, practical nuclear fusion finally seems to be on the horizon. “I’m convinced that it’s going to happen”, says Chapman. Chris Kelsall, chief executive of Tokamak Energy, agrees. “Sooner or later this will be cracked,” he says. “And it will be transformative.”

Seventy-year dream

Nuclear fusion, says Klinger, is “the only primary energy source left in the Universe” that we have yet to exploit. Ever since the process that powers the stars was harnessed in the 1950s for hydrogen bombs, technologists have dreamt of unlocking it in a more controlled manner for energy generation.

Existing nuclear power plants use fission: the release of energy when heavy atoms such as uranium decay. Fusion, by contrast, produces energy by merging very light nuclei, typically hydrogen, which can happen only at very high temperatures and pressures. Most efforts to harness it in reactors involve heating the hydrogen isotopes deuterium (D) and tritium (T) until they form a plasma — a fluid state of matter containing ionized atoms and other charged particles — and then fuse (see ‘Fuel mix’). For these isotopes, fusion starts at lower temperatures and densities than for normal hydrogen.

D–T fusion generates some radiation in the form of short-lived neutrons, but no long-lived radioactive waste, unlike fission. It is also safer than fission because it can be switched off easily: if the plasma is brought below critical thresholds of temperature or density, the nuclear reactions stop.

FUEL MIX

Many reactors fuse deuterium (D) with tritium (T) to release energy. This mix ignites, or creates a self-sustaining fusion reaction,at around 100 million kelvin. It produces neutrons, which can make the chamber radioactive.

Deuterium  +  Tritium                         Helium 4      +         neutron

Other reactions, such as fusing protons (p) with boron-11 (¹¹B), don’t produce neutrons, but ignition requires higher temperatures.

p             Boron-11                                             3a

What makes it so difficult to conduct in a controlled manner, however, is the challenge of containing electrically charged plasma that is undergoing fusion at temperatures of around 100 million kelvin — much hotter than the centre of the Sun. Generally, researchers use magnetic fields to confine and levitate the plasma inside the reactor. But instabilities in this infernal fluid make containment very difficult, and have so far prevented fusion from being sustained for long enough to extract more energy than is put in to trigger it.

This is necessarily big science, and until this century, only state-run projects could muster the resources. The scale of the enterprise is reflected today in the world’s biggest fusion effort: ITER, a fusion reactor being constructed in southern France and supported by 35 nations, including China, European Union member states, the United States, Russia, South Korea and Japan, with a price tag of at least $22 billion.

Although the first test runs are scheduled for 2025, full D–T fusion is not scheduled until 2035, ultimately with the goal of continuously extracting 500 MW of power — comparable to the output of a modest coal-fired power plant — while putting 50 MW into the reactor. (These numbers refer only to the energy put directly into and drawn out of the plasma; they don’t factor in other processes such as maintenance needs or the inefficiencies of converting the fusion heat output into electricity.)

A further series of big reactors might follow ITER: China, which has three fusion reactors feeding results into ITER, plans a China Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR) in the 2030s, and both South Korea and the EU propose to build demonstration power plants that would follow on from ITER.

The big national and international efforts won’t succeed soon enough to enable the decarbonization needed to address climate change, although fusion is expected to become a key part of the energy economy in the second half of the century. But private companies hope to have working and affordable devices sooner (see ‘Fusion rush’).

As with space exploration, one of the benefits of a private fusion sector is greater diversity of approaches than monolithic state enterprises can muster. ITER is using the most common approach to confining plasma, in a device called a tokamak, which uses powerful superconducting magnets to hold the plasma in a ring-shaped (toroidal) vessel. The flow of the electrically charged plasma particles themselves also generates a magnetic field that helps to confine the plasma.

But a tokamak isn’t the only option. In the early days of fusion, in the 1950s, US astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer showed that magnetic fields could be configured in a twisted loop, rather like a figure of eight, to make a ‘magnetic bottle’ that could be filled with plasma. This design was known as a stellarator. But solving the equations describing the plasma for this complex geometry was too computationally intensive, so the concept was mostly abandoned once tokamaks had been shown to work.

As supercomputers became available in the late 1980s, however, researchers revisited the idea. This led to a stellarator project at the IPP called the Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Costing more than €1 billion (US$1.15 billion) to build, staff and operate up to its first plasma testing in 2015, with construction costs of €370 million largely borne by the German government, Wendelstein 7-X will be completed by the end of this year. Then comes a long process of working out how to operate it routinely as a demonstration project.

Stellarators have the advantage that their plasma is more easily confined, with no need (as in tokamaks) to drive strong electric currents through it to keep a lid on instabilities, says fusion physicist Josefine Proll at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. But it’s not clear whether it will be possible to implement stellarator technology in a reactor in 20–30 years. “It seems not all that likely at this moment,” she says. “We have a lot of basic questions still to answer,” says Klinger. “This is a first-of-a-kind machine, so one must be patient and go step by step.” Private companies set shorter-term goals because they have to satisfy their stakeholders, he says — but that doesn’t mean they can deliver.

Alternative designs

Some private fusion companies are sticking with the tokamak design, but scaled down. At Tokamak Energy, a team of around 165 employees is working on a spherical tokamak, shaped like an apple with its core removed. At 3.5 metres across, it will be many times smaller than the ITER tokamak, which, with surrounding cooling equipment, will be almost 30 metres wide and tall. Some state-funded schemes are considering the compact spherical design, too: the UKAEA, for example, has launched a project called STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) that aims to create such a device in a prototype plant that would deliver at least 100 MW to the national grid by 2040. The UKAEA has shortlisted five sites to host the plant, and expects the final choice to be made next year.

Hydrogen plasma in Tokamak Energy’s ST40 spherical tokamak. This video has no sound.

Credit: Tokamak Energy Ltd

Key to these designs are new kinds of magnets made from ribbons of high-temperature superconducting materials, which should produce much stronger fields than the conventional superconducting magnets used by ITER. They are “a potential game-changer”, says Klinger — not just because of their higher fields, but also because conventional superconductors need liquid-helium cooling. That is an engineering nightmare: liquid helium’s viscosity is almost zero, allowing it to leak through any tiny cracks. High-temperature superconductors, by contrast, can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, which is abundant, cheap and easy to store.

Both Tokamak Energy (in collaboration with CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland) and CFS are banking on these new magnets. In August, CFS announced that it had made them in the form needed for its tokamaks — “on schedule and on budget”, Mumgaard says proudly.

In 2018, CFS was spun off from the Plasma Science and Fusion Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and Klinger considers the firm “the most promising, most valuable and most thought-through private fusion initiative”. MIT and CFS together are preparing to build what Mumgaard calls “the first fusion machine that makes net energy” — producing more energy than goes into it. Named SPARC, it is being constructed in Devens, Massachusetts. Mumgaard says it will be running by the end of 2025, and will be “commercially relevant” because it will generate around 100 MW of power.

First Light Fusion, a company spun off from the University of Oxford, UK, in 2011, is pursuing a different strategy, called inertial confinement. Here, the fusion plasma isn’t held by magnetic fields: rather, a shock wave compresses it to the immense densities needed for fusion, and the plasma retains its shape just for a split second by inertia alone, before spreading out and dissipating its energy. The idea has been around since the 1950s, and is also being studied at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where pea-sized plastic capsules of D–T fuel are imploded by nanosecond pulses of laser light to ignite fusion. In August, NIF reported a laser shot that produced a fleeting energy output 8 times higher than it had ever before achieved — and amounted to 70% of the energy that had gone into the reaction. That has raised hopes of net gain from inertial-confinement laser fusion, although such an energy-intensive process might be more useful for fundamental research than for large-scale power generation.

At First Light, the compression shock wave is created not by energy-hungry lasers, but by using an electromagnetic projectile gun to fire a small piece of material into a target containing the hydrogen isotopes. The company is keeping details of the process secret, but has said that to achieve fusion, it will need to fire the material at 50 kilometres per second — twice as fast as is typically achieved in current shock-wave experiments.

GF is taking yet another approach, called magnetized target fusion. It involves the plasma being compressed more slowly — for instance, using pistons — but with the aid of magnetic confinement that prevents heat from dissipating as the plasma is squeezed. This idea, suggested in the early 1970s by researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, seeks an optimal compromise between the energy-intensive high magnetic fields needed to confine a tokamak plasma, and the energy-intensive shock waves, lasers or other methods used to rapidly compress plasma in inertial-confinement designs.

GF’s design for its Culham reactor uses a centrifuge to spin a chamber filled with molten lead and lithium. That motion opens a cavity in the liquid metal, where the plasma sits. A piston system pumps more liquid metal into the chamber, compressing the plasma over a few tens of milliseconds. Fusion begins; then the pressure is released and the process repeated in pulses, about once a second.

One especially neat aspect of this reactor is how it generates tritium fuel — a hugely expensive resource that can be made only in nuclear reactions, and decays rapidly. In ITER and other designs, tritium will be produced when neutrons escaping the reactor hit a lithium blanket lining the tokamak. In GF’s design, tritium is made when neutrons hit lithium within the liquid-metal compression system itself.

GF has cracked key challenges only in the past few years — making a plasma target that lasts for long enough to be compressed, and smoothly and rapidly collapsing the liquid- metal cavity. The firm says, however, that after it has its UK demonstration plant operating in 2025, it will “power homes, businesses and industry with clean, reliable and affordable fusion energy by the early 2030s”.

TAE Technologies has, in some ways, an even more audacious concept. It plans to abandon D–T fuel altogether, instead fusing boron-11 atoms with hydrogen-1 nuclei (protons). This idea, championed by TAE’s co-founder, the Canadian plasma physicist Norman Rostoker, and dubbed p–¹¹B fusion, requires temperatures ten times greater than for D–T fusion: about one billion kelvin. The advantage is that this reaction uses only abundantly available fuel, and generates no neutrons that could contaminate the reactor. Binderbauer says that the concept offers lowers maintenance costs and a much more sustainable end goal.

In TAE reactors, the plasma is confined inside a cylindrical magnetic field made by a solenoid — a design that draws on particle-accelerator technologies. The plasma rotates around the axis; that rotation, as in a spinning top, generates inherent stability. Confinement doesn’t require strong external magnetic fields; those are mostly generated by the spinning plasma itself. To keep it rotating, tangential beams of boron inject angular momentum, rather as a top is torqued by a whip.

The company has made prototypes to demonstrate this set-up; since 2017, it has been working with a test system called Norman, and it is now starting work on a device called Copernicus that will run with normal hydrogen (or other non-fusing) plasmas to avoid producing neutrons. Computer simulations will show what energy would be generated if real fusion fuel were used. If TAE achieves the conditions needed for D–T fusion — which it hopes to do by around the middle of this decade — the company plans to license the technology to others who are pursuing those fuels. Binderbauer calls Copernicus a “stepping stone” to the temperatures needed for p–¹¹B fusion. “We’re convinced that we can go to the billion-degree level,” he says — and he hopes to see this towards the end of the decade.

Among the many other private fusion firms, Helion Energy, in Everett, Washington, has attracted the most interest from investors: this month, it announced a $500-million funding round, bringing its total to $578 million. Its aim is to generate electricity directly from fusion, rather than using the process to heat fluids and drive turbines. Helion’s technique involves firing pulses of plasma together inside a linear reactor, then rapidly compressing the merged plasma with magnetic fields. When fusion occurs, the plasma expands and its magnetic field interacts with that surrounding the reactor to induce an electric current. Helion hopes to fuse a mixture of deuterium and helium-3, which would not produce neutrons as a by-product. But helium-3 itself would need to be produced by D–D fusion. The company is building a demonstration reactor called Polaris, which it aims to have in operation by 2024.

How Helion’s technology will generate electricity. This video has no sound.

Credit: Helion Energy

Cheaper reactors?

The reactors built by private companies, being smaller than ITER-scale projects, will be much more affordable. Tokamak Energy’s co-founder, David Kingham, envisages billion-dollar devices, and Binderbauer thinks TAE’s systems could be built for around $250 million.

The aim is to make small fusion reactors that are compatible with existing energy grids. Kelsall says they could also serve industries that are particularly energy-intensive, such as metal smelting — a sector that can’t be supplied by renewables. Mowry adds that shipping could be another important market: devices producing around 100 MW of power are “just the right size for a large container ship”.

Donné remains cautious about the prospects, however, saying that private companies “are working on aggressive time paths compared to publicly funded projects, but also have a much higher risk of potential failure”. All the same, TAE, for one, insists that it is still on the track that it promised in the mid-2010s, of having a fusion device ready for commercialization by around the end of this decade  

Despite his scepticism, Donné adds: “I see the booming of private fusion companies as a good sign. There can be mutual benefits in keeping close ties between public and private fusion projects.” That’s certainly happening. Not only is the private fusion industry building on years of state investment in projects such as ITER, but it is benefiting from governments that see value in supporting it — which is why the UK government and the US Department of Energy are also investing in firms such as Tokamak Energy, CFS and GF. Mowry thinks that such public–private partnerships are the way forward — as they were for COVID-19 vaccines. And, as with the vaccines, fusion will be needed everywhere, especially as energy use rises in lower-income countries.

The vaccines showed “what you can do if you have the resources”, says Windridge. “If we had that kind of commitment in energy, I think it would be incredible to see what can be achieved.” As with the vaccines, too, society desperately needs more clean, carbon-free sources of energy. “This is an existential challenge,” says Mowry. “Fusion is the vaccine for climate change.”

• Philip Ball is a science writer in London.

{ https://www.nature.com/ }

17-11-2021 om 22:21 geschreven door peter