Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
27-01-2016
Maya culturen wisten ook van de planeet NIBIRU (VIDEO )
Maya culturen wisten ook van de planeet NIBIRU (VIDEO )
Niet alleen in het heden wordt er nu zomaar ineens een totaal onbekende planeet in ons zonnestelsel ontdekt, ook uit het verleden duiken steeds meer aanwijzingen op.
De Mexicaanse overheid heeft gedurende zo’n 80 jaar objecten uit de Mayatijd verborgen gehouden die hele specifieke aanwijzingen geven over buitenaardsen en meer.
De Oostenrijkse onderzoeker, auteur en spreker Klaus Dona komt regelmatig met interessante objecten.
Hele oude objecten, meestal duizenden jaren, die vaak dingen uitbeelden die volgens de bestaande regels in onze maatschappij niet mogelijk zijn. Het zijn dan ook dingen die door de mainstream archeologie maar liever worden vermeden want daar houdt men niet zo van een “inconvenient truth”.
Eén van de objecten die via Klaus Dona bekend zijn geworden is de volgende. Het is een afbeelding zo te zien op steen van duizenden jaren oud die is gevonden in centraal Mexico.
Op het kunstwerk staan afbeeldingen die gewoonweg niet anders uit te leggen zijn dan als zijnde ruimteschepen/UFO’s. Zelfs met de beste wil van de wereld is er niets anders van te maken.
In de volgende video heeft Klaus Dona te gast ene Nasim Haramein. Samen bespreken ze voor een publiek een aantal van de gevonden objecten in centraal Mexico waaronder die op het plaatje hierboven.
Haramein is nogal omstreden vanwege zijn theorieën, maar daar gaat het nu niet om, maar wel om een aantal interessante dingen waar hij komt.
Zoals dat het voor hem helemaal duidelijk is dat op één van de objecten die Dona hem laat zien de UFO’s uit zogenaamde wormgaten komen.
Een wormgat, ook wel een Einstein-Rosen brug genoemd, is een theoretische doorgang in de ruimtetijd. Hierbij zou een wormgat de mogelijkheid bieden tot het afleggen van enorme afstanden in het universum, of zelfs tussen verschillende universa, aan snelheden groter dan het licht.
Dit is natuurlijk toch wel erg interessant om dit nu juist is wat de laatste jaren veelvuldig wordt waargenomen. UFO’s die via wormgaten of dimensieportalen zoals wij ze noemen, tevoorschijn komen en weer verdwijnen.
Een ander interessant punt uit de hiernavolgende video is de uitleg van Haramein bij het hierboven getoonde object.
Volgens hem is het duidelijk dat één van UFO’s (aan de rechterkant) aankomt op aarde in de baan van een komeet. De planeet op de afbeelding is de aarde vanwege de afgebeelde atmosfeer.
De reden dat Haramein zegt dat we een komeet zien op de afbeelding uit Mexico is vanwege de elliptische omloopbaan.
Als we vervogens kijken naar de eveneens elliptische omloopbaan zoals die begin jaren tachtig door de astronoom Dr. Robert Harrington werd getekend, van de planeet Nibiru dan zien we een verbluffende overeenkomst.
Het zou ook niet echt logisch zijn voor die oude Mayaculturen om een komeet af te beelden. Kometen zijn er altijd geweest en zullen er waarschijnlijk altijd zijnen dus op zich niet zo veel bijzonders.
Wat wel bijzonder is, is dat een planeet die eens in de zoveel jaar langskomt naast alle ellende ons ook weer in contact brengt met de buitenaardsen die waarschijnlijk verantwoordelijk zijn voor onze creatie.
Zo zien we misschien op een kunstwerk uit een ver verleden de antwoorden voor de nabije toekomst. Filmmaker John Gress was vergevorderd met het maken van een film over de Anunnaki welke om onbekende redenen nooit is uitgekomen en waar de betrokkenen op mysterieuze wijze geheel uit beeld verdwenen. Hij gaf kort voor het geplande verschijnen van zijn film een interview met een Nederlands televisiestation.
Is de afbeelding uit Mexico misschien een boodschap die ons laat zien dat UFO’s gebruikmaken van dimensieportalen en dat ze, onder andere, afkomstig zijn van een planeet die naar de onze gaat komen in een elliptische omloopbaan?
Het is natuurlijk ook niet voor niets dat één van de meest bijzondere astronomen ooit op deze wereld, Carlos Munoz Ferrada, de planeet Nibiru een cometa-planeta noemde, zoals wij eerder schreven:
Voor het eerst zien we hier fysiek, goed onderbouwd bewijs, wat ons betreft, over het daadwerkelijk bestaan van Nibiru, deze cometa-planeta. Overweldigend wordt het voor ons omdat wat deze man al in 1940 berekende alle andere serieuze theorieën, voorspellingen, channelings, verslagen, visoenen, overleveringen, legendes en verhalen ondersteunt. Dit is het eerste serieuze wetenschappelijke bewijs van het bestaan van een onbekende komeet-planeet in ons zonnestelsel. Jammer dat het zo lang heeft liggen onderstoffen. Zegt het voort!
Enkele dagen geleden schreven wij een artikel over dat er onlangs bekend is gemaakt dat er een onbekende planeet in ons zonnestelsel is ontdekt en dat deze al veel eerder is ontdekt zoals dat bleek uit een krantenartikel in de Washington Post in december 1983.
Wij ontvingen hierop de volgende reactie van Evert Jan Poorterman uit Brummen (Gelderland), auteur op deze site:
De genoemde planeet (die in 1983 al ontdekt zou zijn...) is al in 1978 door twee astronomen van het Marine-Observatorium in Washington ontdekt.
Zecharia Sitchin heeft hen, meteen na de publicatie in 1978, reeds bezocht. Hij sprak met hen en overhandigde hen zijn boek; ‘De Twaalfde Planeet’ en reeds vijf jaren later hadden de Amerikanen, samen met Nederland, reeds IRAS in elkaar geknutseld en de ruimte ingestuurd... met als bedoeling ‘warmtebronnen’ te gaan zoeken.
IRAS was het gevolg van het contact tussen Sitchin en de twee astronomen. Dit als aanvulling op jullie bericht.
Sitchin schrijft dit voor in zijn boek (de eerste druk in het Nederlands – Uitgeverij Mirananda, Wassenaar, uit 1980), vier jaren na de verschijning van het boek in Amerika.
IRAS was voor meer dan 50% een Nederlands project... en gezien de relatie Nederland-Anunnaki-Marduk, geen toeval... en ook niet omdat de VS/USA/Amerika nog steeds een kolonie is van Holland.
De banden (achter de schermen uiteraard – zijn zeer nauw).
Every August, the night sky is peppered with little bits of comet debris in what we call the annual Perseid meteor shower. In 2016, the Perseids will peak on Aug. 12 and 13, with up to 100 meteors per hour possible for observers with clear, dark skies, according to NASA. The Perseids are bits of the comet Swift-Tuttle and often create the most amazing meteor shower of the year.
Here are 10 cool facts you can use to impress friends and family late at night or early in the morning while watching for shooting stars:
Comet Swift-Tuttle, whose debris creates the Perseids, is the largest object known to make repeated passes near Earth. Its nucleus is about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) across, roughly equal to the object that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Back in the early 1990s, astronomer Brian Marsden calculated that Swift-Tuttle might actually hit Earth on a future pass. More observations quickly eliminated all possibility of a collision. Marsden found, however, that the comet and Earth might experience a cosmic near miss (about a million miles) in 3044.
Perseid meteoroids (which is what they're called while in space) are fast. They enter Earth's atmosphere (and are then called meteors) at roughly 133,200 mph (60 kilometers per second) relative to the planet. Most are the size of sand grains; a few are as big as peas or marbles. Almost none hit the ground, but if one does, it's called a meteorite.
When a Perseid particle enters the atmosphere, it compresses the air in front of it, which heats up. The meteor, in turn, can be heated to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 Celsius). The intense heat vaporizes most meteors, creating what we call shooting stars. Most become visible at around 60 miles up (97 kilometers). Some large meteors splatter, causing a brighter flash called a fireball, and sometimes an explosion that can often be heard from the ground.
Comet Swift-Tuttle has many comet kin. Most originate in the distant Oort cloud, which extends nearly halfway to the next star. The vast majority never visit the inner solar system. But a few, like Swift-Tuttle, have been gravitationally booted onto new trajectories, possibly by the gravity of a passing star long ago.
Perseid meteoroids (and if you've been following along, you know these are things in space before they hit Earth's atmosphere) are anywhere from 60 to 100 miles apart, even at the densest part of the river of debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. That river, in fact, is more like many streams, each deposited during a different pass of the comet on its 130-year orbit around the Sun. The material drifts through space and, in fact, orbits the Sun on roughly the same path as the comet while also spreading out over time.
As Earth rotates, the side facing the direction of its orbit around the Sun tends to scoop up more space debris. This part of the sky is directly overhead at dawn. For this reason, the Perseids and other meteor showers (and also random shooting stars in general) are usually best viewed in the predawn hours.
Comet Swift-Tuttle was last seen in 1992, an unspectacular pass through the inner solar system that required binoculars to enjoy. Prior to that, it had last been seen in the year it was "discovered" by American astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle, 1862. Abraham Lincoln was president.
Swift-Tuttle's orbit has been traced back nearly 2,000 years and is now thought to be the same comet that was observed in 188 AD and possibly even as early as 69 BC.
Swift-Tuttle is due back in 2126 (as you know now, it won't hit us) and astronomers think it might become a spectacular naked-eye comet like Hale-Bopp. If historical calculations are correct (see Fact #9) then the 2126 appearance will mark the comet's 3rd millennium of human observation, assuming someone is in fact around to see it.
Editor's Note: If you snap an amazing picture of the 2013 Perseid meteor shower or any other night sky view that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to managing editor Tariq Malik atspacephotos@space.com
2 Correctional Officers See UFO’s Near Nuclear Facility
2 Correctional Officers See UFO’s Near Nuclear Facility
Case File Information
Date of Event / Case File: 10/18/2015
Case File Details
The following case is used on The Black Vault with permission from the author/investigator. It can not be reproduced in any way without contacting Mr. William Puckett.
Radar Analysis and Computation Worksheet Hanford, WA sighting of Large Orange Objects October 18, 2015 Prepared by William Puckett UFO Investigator and Meteorologist
Background: 2 Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) Officers saw bright orange lights for around 50 seconds between 9:52 and 9:57 PM on Oct 18, 2015. The lights were sighted in a southwesterly direction. The lights were larger than yard lights and were about 25 to 30 degrees above the horizon.
The officers were traveling south on Highway 395 between Connell and Mesa, WA.
James Clarkson MUFON Director for Washington State received the sighting report and requested assistance with analysis of radar data. In response to this request I wrote a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requesting aviation radar data for the Pasco, WA (Tri-cities) area.
I received the radar data submission from the FAA about 2 months later (December 18, 2015). The FAA provided the data that I requested.
FIGURE ONE – WITNESS & LOCATIONS OF 2 RADAR SITES.
Notes on Radar Data: The radar data were received for Pasco, WA Traffic Control and a NTAP (National Transportation Analysis Program) was also received. The NTAP included a long range radar from Fossil, Oregon which is about 100 miles south of Pasco, WA and the Pasco, WA Traffic Control radar. (See Figure One to the left).
The closest returns on radar were about 18 miles to the southwest (near Pasco, WA airport). (See Figure Two below.) The interesting thing about the data in Figure Two is that the Pasco radar report listed that returns were “target reports.” This suggests that data were filtered and weather returns, gr0und traffic, birds and radar angels were removed. This suggests that the remaining returns were actual moving aerial targets. All of the primary returns are shown in Figure Two below. A typical “unfiltered” radar map is shown in Figure Three below. The radar map in Figure Three is for Albany, New York. You can see A “conglomerate” of returns and it is difficult to determine real moving targets while Figure Two shows small patterns of returns.
We can’t definitively say for sure if the radar picked up the objects seen by the witnesses, but we can say that radar returns were in the direction (southwest) and at the time (9:50 to 10 PM) that the witnesses saw the objects. The radar returns were around 18 miles from the estimated witness location and near the Pasco radar. (See Figure Four below.) Figure Four shows the area of returns and a zoom in showing the speed and direction of movement of the returns.
The zoom in box to the left is for returns detected from 9:50 to 9:51 PM. For the box to the left there were six radar returns in sequence. The target was moving slowly east, then abruptly changes direction to the south-southwest at a higher speed and then turned east-southeast at original speed (38 MPH). One can’t say for sure if each return represents the same target, but the targets were in sequence with each turn of the radar antenna. The targets were not detected after 9:51 PM.
FIGURE TWO – ALL RETURNS 9:30 TO 10 PM – OCT 18, 2015.
The zoom in box to the right shows returns from 9:54 to 9:55 PM. The box to the right fits more closely with the witness observation time. Again the speed of the target is slow (38 to 48 MPH) and moving to the west-southwest. The target then turned direction to the northwest and nearly increased it’s speed tenfold. Again we can’t say for sure if this is one target, but it fits with the radar antenna rotation sequence. The direction of movement (westerly direction ) fits with what the witnesses saw. The targets were no longer detected after 9:55 PM.
Of course the targets could have been multiple targets, but may have showed up as one target on the radar scope if they were close together. The witnesses observed multiple targets.
There were also returns noted in the same area observed by the witnesses before the sighting time, but the witnesses would not have been in position to observe the returns.
Doppler weather radar data were collected from Portland, Oregon and Spokane, Washington. Both of these radars reach the Pasco, WA area. Some light showers were observed a few hours prior to the sighting. Skies were clear at Pasco Airport at the time of the sighting. The Doppler radar maps did not show anything unusual. The radar sites did show some scattered showers, but the area was well removed from the sighting area. However, Doppler radars are not designed to detect aircraft. The radars have a narrow beam width (one degree) which means that objects will not be detected unless they happen to fly through the narrow beam.
FIGURE THREE – MAP OF ALL PRIMARY RADAR RETURNS ALBANY, NY 9/5/2015.
The discussion below makes the assumption that the object(s) seen by the witnesses were detected by radar:
One of the officers said that his thumb would cover up the object. A thumb has a width of 2 arc degrees. (The moon has a width of 30 arc minutes which is about 25% the size of a thumb in apparent width.) Let’s assume that the object had a width of 1 arc degrees:
Using trigonometry the width of the object would be around 1,650 feet if what the witnesses saw was detected by radar. For comparison purposes the length of a 747 aircraft is 231 feet with a wingspan of 211 feet.
The witnesses thought that the object(s) were at an elevation of 20 to 30 degrees. For computations we will assume that the elevation was 25 degrees. If we assume that the primary radar returns belonged to the object we can say the following:
Using trigonometry if the radar returns represented the object, the elevation would have just over 44,000 feet.
If the returns represent what the witnesses saw the objects would have been quite large and would have been very visible from the Pasco, WA area. The fact that the time of the sighting was late (around 10 PM on a Sunday night before the week) and the fact that the objects were only visible for a short time may have resulted in fewer (in any) witnesses. Also there is a possibility that the objects may have appeared larger to the witnesses due to light scattering in the atmosphere which can make objects appear bigger. This is particularly true if objects are lower on the horizon (25 degrees or lower).
FIGURE FOUR – MAP & ZOOM IN OF AREA OF RADAR RETURNS.
Conclusion and Summary:
2 DOC officers saw 2 large orange objects to the Southwest while returning home from work around 10 PM on October 18, 2015. The officers were near Connell, WA and were returning to the Tri-Cities area. The officers had never before or have since seen the lights.
The lights were near the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Richland, Washington.
Aviation radar data were heavily filtered which eliminates most superfluous returns (birds, weather, ground targets, angels, etc.) Radar targets were detected in the direction and times when the witnesses saw the objects. The distance was large (around 18 miles).
The radar targets were only visible for 2 periods of time (9:50-9:51 PM & 9:54-9:55 PM) of around one minute. This is consistent with the brief time that the witnesses saw the objects. The radar targets were in a southwesterly direction which is where the witnesses saw the objects.
The targets were moving in a westerly direction at speeds of 38 to 48 MPH and then accelerated to over 300 MPH before vanishing from the scope. The radar detected this from 9:54 to 9:55 PM. This is consistent with the direction of movement reported by the witnesses and closest to the time (9:52 to 9:57 PM).
If the targets represent what the witnesses saw the objects would have flying around 44,000 feet and would have been over 1,500 feet in width.
The witnesses saw multiple targets. Perhaps the targets were so close to one another that the radar only painted one return?
The targets were close to Pasco Airport. One would think that others would have witnessed the objects if the radar targets represented what the witnesses saw due to their large size and proximity to the Pasco area.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:News from the FRIENDS of facebook ( ENG )
UFO Causes Explosion Over Colima Volcano, Jan 3, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Causes Explosion Over Colima Volcano, Jan 3, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 3, 2016 Location of sighting: Colima Volcano, Mexico This long UFO was caught over Colima Volcano on Jan 3. The UFO passes over and through the lava shot up from the mouth of the volcano. As it gets above the mouth, there is a bust of light and all goes black. The UFO then flies away. I believe that as the UFO went over the mouth, it transported someone or something to or from the underground base below the volcano. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com
White UFO Change Shape Over San Antonio, Texas Jan 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
White UFO Change Shape Over San Antonio, Texas Jan 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 2016 Location of sighting: San Antonio, Texas, USA These UFOs are appear all over the world, but are easiest to see during the day when there are few clouds and a blue sky. I caught a similar one in Taiwan on Nov 2015. I didn't have a zoom like this guy. I only had a phone. Great catch. It is probably recording human history. Something we tend to forget and alter. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com Eyewitness states: For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon U.F.O VARIABLE....It is believed that these Crafts are converting the Suns Energy into Electromagnetic to travel around..If you pay close attention you will notice these U.F.O's have spheres that rotates inside them....According to the Hypotheses Thermomagnetic: In reality these spheres are converting Suns Energy into Electromagnetic.. I have researched this subject and come to realized this a Real Phenomenon..In my opinion i believe to have captured one traveling overhead...Thanks to my good friend and fellow Skywatcher Jason Bales...For a first we will clearly see it change shape..And witness for yourself as these U.F.O Orbs move around inside its structure...Rare look at how these U.F.Os Interact.... A High Definition Camera was used EQUIPMENT:JVC GZ-HD3U
If drone agriculture takes off — and there’s good reason to think it will — we’ll be spending a lot more time looking at farmland from the air. That’s great news for farmers looking to increase the output of their fields or minimize the negative effects of too much fertilizer. That’s bad news for people who want to preserve the mystery of crop circles, mainstays of pop alien mythology which have alwaysbeen made in pretty much the same way they are currently created — by guys with surveying tape and wooden boards.
Eyes in the Sky
A surprising amount of drone research comes out of the American heartland, and that’s because many of those institutions have deep agricultural roots. Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, a roboticist at the University of Minnesota, told Inverse in December that a major reason he wants to develop small, solar-powered dronesis to give farmers a tool that doesn’t have to come down frequently. From this vantage, farm drones can give you daily updates and resolution at the centimeter scale — fidelity that satellites currently can’t match.
As long as you’ve got the right sensors to collect data and the right algorithms to process the information, you can learn a lot. Proposed drone agriculture techniques include everthing from weed mapping to monitoring the application of glyphosate herbicides. A 2012 review in the journal Precision Agriculture lists disease, water levels, leaf chlorophyll concentration, crop height, plant species, soil quality, pest management, and others as possible data collection targets. There will likely be others that have not been yet put into practice.
Surveillance Agriculture
So what does that mean for would-be extraterrestrial messengers? Simply put, it will be tougher to sneak in and out of cornfields undetected. Though the cover of darkness will still be helpful, drones that monitor crop data don’t necessarily need the same amount of light as human eyeballs. Plus, in areas that are prone to vandalism — or, perhaps for crops, large nocturnal pests — flying monitors are still possible without solar power; the drone company CyPhy Works has proposed drones powered by tethers, for instance, that float in place like sleepless sentinels. We know drones work for spotting human-sized animals, particularly when there’s little tree cover — ecologists can easily spot 5-foot alligators from300 feet over a marsh.
Martin et al. 2012, "Estimating Distribution of Hidden Objects with Drones: From Tennis Balls to Manatees"
That’s not to say that drones couldn’t help us solve some mysteries of crop circles. The crop circle craze triggered some weird theories at its height — Stephen Hawking believed strange air vortices could have caused the crops to fall, and others thought they were the product of mating hedgehogs — but in 1991 two British men confessed to more than two decades and hundreds of crop circles. Though we know they’re man-made, the vandal/artists behind them have kept mum on just how they’re able to map out such complex symbols.
Cold Circle War
Richard Taylor, a University of Oregon materials scientist, wrote in 2011 that crop circle makers have adopted increasingly sophisticated techniques and technology— such as laser guides — to create intricate fractal shapes during a single night. Taylor cites the hypothesis (though he raises it as speculation more than anything else) that crop circles could be formed using magnetrons taken from microwaves, as the radiation would allow superheated stalks to bend in strange ways.
Catching the creation of a crop circle in the act has been tough for decades — but if there’s one way to clear up any questions that remain, it’s aerial surveillance.
Photos via Flickr.com/David Price and PLOS ONE/Martin et al. 2012 and Flickr.com/Le Petit Poulailler
As it turns out, the CIA did not use this opportunity to reveal that it has or ever had made contact with extraterrestrial beings, decided an unidentified flying object was alien in origin, or that aliens are among us — but there are plenty of choice cuts within the text that gives a glimpse of how seriously the government took the UFO phenomenon when it received its first massive wave of public scrutiny
The papers are dated from between 1949-1953, and there isn’t an overly obvious glut of redacted writing, so the reading is easy. For the most part, the material is focused on reported sightings and how UFOs can be explained — but there’s also steady chatter concerning governmental worries of the time, such as the Soviet Union and the ability to spot an invasive threat (as well as moments that practically scoff at the possibility of these sightings being unearthly visitors.)
Furthermore, tiny bits of jargon from the time add dated flavor to the content — with mentions of “Foo Fighters,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and “P.I.L.” — showing how buzzwords of yesteryear can eventually serve future generations with band names and movie titles.
The CIA presentation also explains “How To Investigate a Flying Saucer”— not so much to civilians trying to verify a sighting, but apparently to agents attempting to get to the bottom of a reported UFO. The column’s advice includes such dry and intense subheadings as “Conduct Controlled Experiments,” “Create a Reporting System To Organize Incoming Cases,” and “Determine the Objectives of Your Investigation.”
Finally, in what is surely just a strange coincidence, the CIA offers links to a few black-and-white photos taken roughly 50-60 years ago — but the links all turn up404 Not Found. However, the pics are elsewhere on the web:
Interesting to see those early photos when compared to the sort of UFO proof people capture in the 21st-century:
Mankind’s relationship to space changed in 2015: Not only did we find liquid water on Mars, the commercial space race heated up, making our own starry ambition seems more plausible than ever. But we didn’t find life and life didn’t find us — at least not in a verifiable way. UFOs were spotted, sure, but they stayed stubbornly U.
The most exciting and provocative alleged UFO sighting actually came from someone who probably has a better view for spotting them than anybody else: Astronaut Scott Kelly was floating 259 miles above the surface of the Earth aboard the International Space Station when he snapped and tweeted this pic:
Immediately, people began asking what that mysterious glint of light was in the corner. What could it be?
The answer, it turns out, was: “Lot of stuff.” Forbes made a pretty convincing argument that it was the High Definition Earth-Viewing System mounted on a module attached to the ISS. Light from the instrument seems to have reflected back at Kelly’s camera as he took the picture. In fact, you can see this much more clearly when you increase the contrast on the image:
That’s a letdown, sure. But there were plenty of other big, weird sightings throughout the year. There were strange lights flying over Los Angeles a few weeks ago, but the Navy claimed responsibility, saying it was part of a missile test flight off the Pacific coast.
Did you notice the UFO's flying over #capetown yesterday? 👽 Photo by @mijlof 📷
Naturally, not everyone bought that explanation.
Lenticular clouds freaked out a bunch of people over in Cape Cod, South Africa last month. And, to be fair, the whole thing did look an awful lot likeIndependence Day. In this instance, however, it’s much easier to accept a scientific explanation involving strange variations in the atmosphere. Still looks freaky though:
There were two big UFO sightings in India this year — one in June documented by a fifth grade student; and another, much larger object snapped by an individual who claims to have seen the mysterious ship rotating in the air. Both sightings were in the state of Uttar Pradesh and so far, there aren’t any clear explanations as to what they might have been.
That doesn’t necessarily mean those and other UFOs are signs of extraterrestrial objects zipping around through our sky. There are actually a ton of rational explanations for UFOs, ranging from aircraft balloons, aberrations of light, natural objects from space, and even birds. And ticking off those things from the list doesn’t mean it must be a ship from another planet.
Mankind’s constantly increasing access to the internet certainly hasn’t helped people keep a more rational mind about what they’re seeing. Just Google “UFO” one of these days and get lost in a k-hole community of people who are convinced those are alien objects coming to abduct human beings and signing secret deals with the government. In addition, the ubiquity of smartphones means everyone can document whatever strange things they see, and immediately post it to social media. Insert an appropriate hashtag like #UFO or #aliens or #FlyingSaucer. One can get lost in the pile of evidence.
Unfortunately, although smartphone cameras are getting better with every month, they’re still subject to a lot of the deficiencies that limit pretty much any kind of photographic equipment. Strange light or reflections can appear much brighter than they actually are. They might obscure the focus of an object and make it look more strange than it really is. While a lot of cameras allow you to manipulate the image quality in ways that offset those problems, most people neglect to do that before they send something straight to Twitter.
The only UFO this year that actually got scientists’ attention was the WT1190F object that burned up in Earth’s atmosphere about four weeks ago, over the Indian Ocean. No one was really what that piece of debris was, but scientists were pretty sure it was the remnants of some old rocketry equipment used in a previous launch.
Scientists were pretty excited about studying WT1190F reentry into Earth’s atmosphere to study the behavior of how objects plummet down from space into the Earth. It’s unclear yet what they found, but it ought to lead to some insights as to how meteors crash into Earth, and how humans can build better heat shields on spacecraft that are carrying astronauts back to Earth.
Photos via NASA and YouTube
Neel is a science and tech journalist from New York City, reporting on everything from brain-eating amoebas to space lasers used to zap debris out of orbit, for places like Popular Science and WIRED. He's addicted to black coffee, old pinball machines, and terrible dive bars.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:News from the FRIENDS of facebook ( ENG )
26-01-2016
Largest Solar System Ever Discovered: Planet Takes A Million Years to Complete One Orbit
Largest Solar System Ever Discovered: Planet Takes A Million Years to Complete One Orbit
IN BRIEF
Astronomers have learned that a planet, previously thought to be free-floating, actually orbits a neighboring red dwarf star at a distance of over 1 trillion kilometers.
A DISTANT COMPANION
Astronomers have found that a planet, formerly believed to be unattached and free-floating, is actually in a very distant orbit around another star. Ultimately, this makes the system the largest solar system ever discovered.
The object, called 2MASS J2126-8140, was previously identified as a member of the Tucana Horologium Association, a small cluster of stars and substellar objects about 140 million years old. Based on its youth and low mass, 2MASS J2126-8140 was classified as one of a very rare group of objects known as “free-floating planets,” which presumably formed about a star in the customary fashion, but were subsequently ejected through gravitational interactions within its parent system, or through the influence of nearby stars in the natal cluster.
But the team of astronomers involved in the new discovery reexamined the data, and learned that 2MASS J2126-8140 seemed to be moving through space in association with a small red dwarf star, TYC 9486-927-1, and that both objects were about 104 light years from the Earth.
It turned out that star and planet were simply so distant from one another that astronomers had failed to associate the two. And no wonder. 2MASS J2126-8140 orbits at a spectacular 6900 Astronomical Units from its primary, or 6900 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.
That’s over 1 trillion kilometers (621 billion miles), by far the largest orbital radius of any planet so far discovered. Indeed, Its orbit is ultimately 140 times wider than Pluto’s.
At that distance, the red dwarf TYC 9486-927-1 would seem to be but another star in the night sky, and hardly even the brightest; and 2MASS J2126-8140 would complete a single revolution in about a million years.
In fact, the star and its planet are so loosely bound that it’s hard to imagine the two remaining together for much longer. The slightest tug from a passing star would be more than enough to dislodge the planet, and it’s impossible that the system formed in a tightly-bound stellar cluster, as our own is believed to have done.
“We can speculate the pair formed 10 million to 45 million years ago from a filament of gas that pushed them together in the same direction,” observed Dr. Simon Murphy of the Australian National University, one of the astronomers involved in the study.
Once the age of the system was known, it was possible to estimate the mass of 2MASS J2126-8140 as between 11.6 and 15 times that of Jupiter, which places the object firmly astride the 13 Jupiter-mass so-called “deuterium-burning” dividing line that separates planets and brown dwarfs
Infrared image of the planet 2MASS J2126-8140 and its primary star. Arrows indicate common direction of motion for both objects.
Credit: 2MASS/S. Murphy/ANU.
STRANGE WORLD
With such a remote orbit, in the cold, distant reaches of its system, 2MASS J2126-8140 seems unlikely to host any sort of life as we know it; however, if it sits on the further end of the deuterium-burning line, it may generate enough heat to warm any moons it may possess (which could conceivably be as large as the terrestrial planets of our own solar system), and this fact—coupled with the system’s extreme youth—may be enough to foster some sort of biological evolution, unfamiliar to our experience but no less viable.
But the window is fast closing. Within a few million years, even a deuterium-burning brown dwarf will be unable to stave off the encroaching cold of deep space. Beyond that, only the prospect of billions of years of darkness remains for this strange, lonely planet.
Dying Star Betelgeuse Keeps Its Cool ... and Astronomers Are Puzzled
Dying Star Betelgeuse Keeps Its Cool ... and Astronomers Are Puzzled
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer
A direct-sky image of Betelgeuse, a star that is shedding its mass as it nears the end of its life.
Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.
The bright, red star Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, has entered the twilight of its life. Like many stars of a similar size that reach the end of the road, Betelgeuse is slowly shedding its mortal coil — by ejecting much of its mass out into space.
This phase of star death is extremely common in the universe — in about 5 billion years, when the sun starts to die, it too will become a "red giant." It will shed much of its mass and swell to such an enormous size that it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth. But new observations of Betelgeuse show that scientists still can't explain what causes a red giant's massive expulsion of matter.
"In the next million years, if Betelgeuse lives that long, it is going to shed about a quarter of its current mass, and the problem is we don't understand the basic physics of how that happens," said Graham Harper, an astrophysicist and senior research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "This is a big astrophysical problem." [The Brightest Stars in the Sky: A Starry Countdown]
Earlier this month, at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), Harper presented new observations of Betelgeuse that appear to further complicate the story of how these red giant and supergiant stars shed so much mass.
The findings show that the gas moving away from the star is much colder than expected, and so far, scientists can't come up with a mechanism that can eject so much mass from the star, but also generate so little heat. It's a problem of balancing energy in and energy out and right now the accounting doesn't add up.
This collage shows Betelgeuse as it appears in the Orion constellation (left; the star is identified by the marker), a zoom toward Betelgeuse (middle), and the sharpest-ever image of this red supergiant, obtained the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
Credit: ESO, P. Kervella, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and A. Fujii
The flying observatory
NASA's SOFIA instrument is neither a space-based telescope nor a ground-based one. Instead, it's on an airplane.
An observatory that can fly at 45,000 feet has some advantages over ground- and space-based telescopes. At that altitude, SOFIA can get almost entirely above the Earth's atmosphere, which is helpful because studying the cosmos through those protective layers can be like looking through a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription, or a windshield battered by rain. (This distortion may not be obvious to the human eye, but it does arise at the level of precision sought by astronomers).
The distortion is particularly bad when studying infrared light, which is what Harper and colleagues wanted to collect from Betelgeuse's outer layers (the star has now swelled to the point that if it were placed in Earth's solar system, it would extend to the orbit of Jupiter, according to NASA). There's no space-based observatory that gathers the specific wavelengths of light they were after, and gathering data with SOFIA was not only faster but significantly cheaper than launching something into space. Plus, scientists can strap new equipment onboard SOFIA with every flight.
So that's exactly what Graham and his colleagues did — they fitted a custom-made detector onto SOFIA to look at Betelgeuse in a way that had never been done before, and their results were immediately surprising.
Back in the 1980s, according to Harper, scientists came up with an explanation for what caused red giants, as well as red supergiants like Betelgeuse, to shed their mass The theory posited that the energy was created largely by magnetic fields shoving the electrically charged gas (called plasma) out into space. Magnetic field activity in the sun can set off massive explosions, and move around the glowing-hot material on the surface.
The red supergiant theory drew on what scientists know about magnetic fields in the sun, Harper said. With the theory in place, "Everyone got a little bit comfortable," Graham said.
That ended in 1997, when a group of scientists decided to scrutinize Betelgeuse using the Very Large Array (VLA), a massive radio observatory in New Mexico. The new high-resolution observations allowed the researchers to peer into the layers of material coming off Betelgeuse, and measure the temperature therein. They found it to be only about one-third of what the magnetic field model predicted it should be.
Heat is a common byproduct whenever energy is exchanged – consider how friction can make your hands warm when rubbed together, or how a computer heats up while it is on. When objects collide, they can also generate heat. The magnetic field theory of red supergiants predicted that the energy pushing the gas outward would also warm it up, but the observations showed that wasn't the case.
"The basic underlying physics was way off," Graham said. "If you're going to throw out and eject matter, you need to put energy in — and that energy is not heating the plasma at all."
Harper and his colleagues are hunting for answers to the red supergiant problem. But their most recent observations of Betelgeuse with SOFIA — along with some supplemental data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii — only seem to complicate the problem further. Their infrared detector aboard SOFIA observed even cooler temperatures than those found in the VLA study. They "[go] way below what we already thought was cold," Graham said. The finding agrees with the VLA observations that "there is much less hot material than we ever would have expected," based on the magnetic field model.
"Magnetic fields are very plausible but we don't know how to make them behave to get the right answer," Harper said, referring to scientists' current inability to come up with a model that matches the observations.
Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know Our Sun?
Many of us take the sun for granted, giving it little thought until it scorches our skin or gets in our eyes. But our star is a fascinating and complex object, a gigantic fusion reactor that gives us life. How much do you know about the sun?
So what mechanism could put so much energy into the material but not heat it?
In addition to magnetic fields, the explanation could be shockwaves, or great releases of plasma ejected from inside the star. All of these things could add up to explain what scientists are observing.
He also cautioned that the results from the SOFIA flight have not yet been repeated. The team is planning another flight for this year to verify their initial result. Once the findings are verified and published, they'll be tossed to the handful of theoreticians grappling with his problem and trying to come up with a solution (and Harper said there are some theoreticians working very hard on this problem).
There are other ways that scientists can try to crack this problem, including studying another nearby red supergiant, Antares. In addition, Harper said he and his would like to observe Betelgeuse and Antares using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in Chile. While ground-based, ALMA is located 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) above sea level, where it can avoid many of the distorting effects of the atmosphere. When the observatory is operating with the full power of its 66 antennas, ALMA will allow astronomers to peer deeper into Betelgeuse's layers, closer to the surface of the star, where they may find clues about what's driving the star's shedding, Harper said.
"As a physicist, I'm really interested in trying to fundamentally understand this so we can apply it to many other objects," Harper said.
At some point in the next million years, Betelgeuse is expected to follow the path of many red supergiants before, it and explode into a supernova. From Earth, it may appear as bright in the night sky as the full moon. This stellar explosion could take place tomorrow, but with any luck, scientists will have enough time before Betelgeuse explodes to solve the curious case of the cool red supergiants.
Of all the fringe interest groups orbiting the landscape of American politics, there are perhaps none quite as maligned as those committed to uncovering the truth about extraterrestrial life. In recent elections, these UFO advocates have mostly laid low, ignored—if not openly mocked—by politicians seeking higher office. But as the 2016 race gets officially underway, alien hunters are starting to wonder if this election might be different.
The group got some high-profile encouragement last month from none other than Hillary Clinton. In an interview with a small New Hampshire newspaper, the Democratic presidential candidate promised that, if elected, she would share whatever information exists about the government's contact with extraterrestrials.
"I'm going to get to the bottom of it," Clinton told the Conway Daily Sun. "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don't know for sure."
The comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it was enough to excite the diehard skeptics who have been fighting, unsuccessfully for more than half a century, to get the government to disclose what it knows about aliens. For this group, the remark seemed to confirm long-held suspicions that Clinton is sympathetic to its cause—suspicions rooted in her 90s-era ties to UFO activists like Laurence Rockefeller, and in her relationship to campaign chairman John Podesta, a noted skeptic who has called for greater government transparency around the alien question, and whose influence Clinton cited in her interview.
"He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out one way or another," Clinton told the newspaper. "Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51."
Regardless of whether Clinton meant for any of this to be taken seriously, the interviewsignaled to alien hunters that the 2016 presidential election could be a significant one for their movement—marking the first time since the other Clinton was in office that the topic of extraterrestrial contact might be broached by politicians on the national level.
A 1995 photo of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton embracing billionaire philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller, a well-known UFO activist.
Photo via the William J. Clinton Presidential Library
Beyond the UFO skepticism and government conspiracy theories, the election is also being watched by another group of alien hunters—namely scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, a global research field dedicated to scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life.
Since its inception, the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been plagued by politics. NASA's own SETI program, developed in the mid-1970s, was a frequent target of politicians who saw its mission—"to bag little green fellows," as one senator put it—as a joke and a waste of taxpayer dollars. It was permanently defunded in 1993. While NASA continues to fund research into the search for extraterrestrial life, the money now mainly goes to the field of astrobiology, with research focused on looking for microbes and other unintelligent life forms. Officially at least, the government is no longer interested in the search for thinking beings like us.
"SETI is very political, or has been in the past," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the SETI Institute, a California-based nonprofit that conducts research on the "origin and nature of life in the universe." "Politics was extremely important when I joined the SETI Institute—it killed the NASA efforts."
Inthe absence of government funding, SETI research in the US has relied on private donations, which tend to be sporadic. While a $100 million infusion from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner last year has given the field a measure of legitimacy, and assured future research, the lack of federal recognition means that SETI continues to exist outside of mainstream scientific circles.
"When somebody is studying something that doesn't have any obvious practical implications, [Congress] tends to think it is a waste of money," Shostak told me. "That's exactly wrong. Basic research is the kind that pays off in the long term—far more than the applied research."
There is little indication that will change under the next president. Most of the leading 2016 presidential candidates from both parties have voiced general support for NASA, and they have called for directing more federal resources to space exploration (the notable exception is Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has voted in the past toslash NASA's budget). But Shostak is skeptical that any of this would translate into support for a revamped SETI program at the space agency.
"It isn't a matter of 'let's vote for this person because they're interested in SETI,'" he said. "You're not going to find anybody like that."
In the absence of direct support for SETI research, SETI researchers say they are looking for candidates who show broad knowledge and support of scientific endeavors. "Anyone you elect to high office should have some knowledge of science," Shostak said. "So many of [the 2016 candidates] don't seem to have much knowledge of science, and that's distressing because of much greater considerations than SETI."
Shostak and his colleagues have also noted that making contact with intelligent alien life will have immense political repercussions here on Earth. Given that many SETI proponents believe this is likely to happen in our lifetime, they are looking at the 2016 presidential contenders for indications of how they might handle a post-contact world.
"One would expect individual SETI proponents to be generally supportive of those parties and candidates who have voiced strong support for a solid science agenda," said Paul Shuch, executive director of the SETI League, a grassroots group that promotes private SETI research and education.
"Since SETI is a multinational cooperative endeavor," Shuch continued, "we—as individuals—would tend to oppose those factions and candidates in all countries who would be likely to exhibit nationalistic tendencies to restrict the free flow of information."
Paradigm Research's Hillary Clinton ET flag.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Bassett
Of course, UFO activists who believe aliens have already made contact have more pressing concerns—namely, getting the government to end what disclosure advocate Stephen Bassett, Washington's only registered UFO lobbyist, calls the "truth embargo" on information about extraterrestrials.
"The extraterrestrial issue is perfectly analogous to the Cuban embargo," said Bassett, who works on behalf of the disclosure advocacy group Paradigm Research. "People knew there was an island down there, they knew there was a Cuba—they just couldn't go there. It's very much what happened with the extraterrestrial issue. Every year more and more people know that this phenomenon is not human, it's extraterrestrial, but they can't go there."
Like the Cuba embargo, Bassett said, the government's insistence on withholding information about extraterrestrial contact from the public seems increasingly anachronistic, and no longer justifiable as a national security concern. The issue, he explained, is trying to convince politicians that the problem even exists in the first place.
"This extraterrestrial advocacy movement has a problem that no other advocacy movement in history has had," Bassett said. "This movement is about something the government has claimed doesn't exist at all."
Bassett may have found an ally in Podesta. A consummate Washington insider who served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and as a special counselor to President Barack Obama, Podesta is a well-known X-Files fanatic who has publicly defended the public's right to know "what the truth is that's really out there," as he put it in a forward to the 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Last year, as he was leaving the Obama administration, Podesta ignited the UFO blogosphere by tweeting that his "biggest failure in 2014" was "once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files."
Stephen Bassett, Washington's only registered UFO lobbyist. Photo courtesy of Bassett
Podesta hasn't shied away from this position in his new role heading Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. "Notwithstanding the fact that serious scientists, military leaders, business people, and average citizens are interested in the subject of intelligent life in the universe, political leaders tend to worry about whether they will be lampooned if they broach the subject," he told me in an email. "I, on the other hand, am interested in just making the universe great again."
While Bassett seems to have gotten behind Podesta—and by extension, Hillary— not all disclosure activists agree that Clinton would be an ally in the Oval Office, with some citing her less than stellar record on government transparency as a possible red flag. But Podesta seems confident that, on this issue at least, his candidate will follow through on revealing government secrets. "She promised me she would!" he wrote in his email.
"Look, I believe that the government, in the name of transparency and openness should declassify and release information in regards to unidentified aerial phenomena," Podesta continued. "Obviously, there have been decades of speculation about what, if anything, is contained in these files. I'm confident that the American people can handle the truth."
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:News from the FRIENDS of facebook ( ENG )
“De kans is heel, heel groot dat we planeet X binnen nu en vijf jaar gaan vinden”
“De kans is heel, heel groot dat we planeet X binnen nu en vijf jaar gaan vinden”
Afgelopen week zeiden twee Amerikaanse wetenschappers nieuw bewijs te hebben voor het bestaan van een grote planeet achter Pluto. Groot nieuws natuurlijk, en sindsdien wordt er volop gespeculeerd over planeet X.
Eén van de twee wetenschappers, Mike Brown, zegt dat deze planeet binnenkort ontdekt gaat worden: “De kans is heel, heel groot dat we planeet X binnen nu en vijf jaar gaan vinden.”
Geen toeval
De planeet moet circa 10 keer groter zijn dan de aarde en 500 keer zwaarder dan Pluto. Planeet X beïnvloedt de baan van veel objecten in de Kuipergordel. De kans dat deze objecten toevallig op dezelfde manier om de zon draaien is slechts 0,007 procent. “Het kán haast geen toeval zijn,” aldus Brown. “Er moet iets zijn wat de koers van deze objecten bepaalt.”
De planeet zou mogelijk al te zien zijn op foto’s van de Subaru-telescoop in Japan en het Keck-observatorium op Hawaï. Het is goed mogelijk dat de planeet dichterbij de aarde staat en misschien al wel op bestaande foto’s van het heelal zichtbaar is.
Dit is nummer drie
Brown en zijn collega Konstantin Batygin hebben met wiskundige berekeningen op supercomputers bewijs gevonden voor het bestaan van de gigantische planeet. “Er zijn sinds de oudheid twee planeten ontdekt, dit is nummer drie,” aldus de hoogleraren astronomie.
De grote vraag is: waar komt de planeet vandaan? En hoe komt het dat deze zo’n aparte baan heeft? “Ik zou het geweldig vinden als wij hem zouden vinden,” zegt Brown. “Maar als een ander met die eer gaat strijken, vind ik het ook best. Ik hoop dat ons artikel mensen inspireert om de zoektocht naar de planeet te starten.”
VIDEO: Enorm prehistorisch bouwwerk in Israël stelt archeologen voor raadsel
VIDEO: Enorm prehistorisch bouwwerk in Israël stelt archeologen voor raadsel
Een reusachtig prehistorisch bouwwerk in het noorden van Israël, bijgenaamd Stonehenge van de Levant, blijft een groot raadsel.
Galgal Refaim (Hebreeuws voor ‘rad van geesten’) is de grootste en oudste structuur van steen in het Midden-Oosten. Het bouwwerk bestaat uit meer dan 42.000 basaltblokken en is meer dan 5000 jaar oud.
De vindplaats is gehuld in mysterie en experts kunnen maar niet achterhalen waar de structuur voor werd gebruikt. Het bouwwerk bevindt zich in de Golanhoogten en bestaat uit metershoge concentrische cirkels in de vorm van een labyrint.
Zonnewende
Tijdens de winter- en zomerwende schijnt het zonlicht precies door enkele gaten in de stenen. Om die reden denken sommige archeologen dat de structuur werd gebruikt als een soort kalender. Anderen denken dat Galgal Refaim werd gebruikt voor astronomische doeleinden.
De zes meter hoge grafkamer in het midden van de structuur doet sommige experts vermoeden dat er belangrijke mensen werden begraven. In de jaren zestig werden er voor het eerst opgravingen verricht.
Handvol
Hoewel beroemde prehistorische bouwwerken zoals Stonehenge, Chichén Itzá en Machu Picchu ieder jaar zo’n vier miljoen toeristen weten te lokken, brengt slechts een handvol mensen een bezoek aan Galgal Refaim. De meeste Israëliërs weten zelfs niet eens dat het bouwwerk bestaat.
Dat komt misschien omdat er weinig over wordt geschreven, omdat de cirkels alleen goed vanuit de lucht zichtbaar zijn of omdat het Israëlische leger doordeweeks in het gebied traint en mensen alleen in het weekend of op feestdagen welkom zijn.
Bedenker X-Files: “Ik dacht dat de productie zou worden stilgelegd door de FBI, te dicht bij de waarheid”
Bedenker X-Files: “Ik dacht dat de productie zou worden stilgelegd door de FBI, te dicht bij de waarheid”
Chris Carter, de bedenker van The X-Files, was bezorgd dat de FBI de productie van de hitserie zou stilleggen. Een mysterieuze man vertelde hem dat hij te dicht bij de waarheid zat.
“Toen de serie net op tv was, kwam er iemand op me af die zei dat hij voor een geheim overheidsagentschap werkte en dat we erg dicht bij de waarheid zaten,” vertelde hij aan The Huffington Post.
“Toen ik de pilotaflevering schreef belde ik de FBI op om onderzoek te doen,” vervolgde hij. “Ze waren aardig, maar wilden niet al te veel kwijt.”
Vrije energie
“Toen we op het punt stonden om de aflevering uit te zenden, werd ik gebeld door de FBI: ‘Wie ben jij en wat doe jij?’ Ik dacht even dat de productie zou worden stilgelegd door de lange arm der wet,” aldus Carter.
De iconische serie is voor het eerst in 14 jaar weer op tv te zien. Er komen allerlei onderwerpen voorbij zoals buitenaards leven, valse vlag-operaties, paranormale fenomenen, vrije energie, geheime technologie, reverse engineering en ontvoeringen.
Nog vreemder
Van The X-Files werden tussen 1993 en 2002 in totaal meer dan 200 afleveringen uitgezonden, verdeeld over negen seizoenen. De serie was wereldwijd een groot succes en won 16 Emmy Awards, vijf Golden Globes en tal van andere prijzen.
“De wereld is nog vreemder geworden tijdens de lange pauze van 14 jaar en het is daarom het perfecte moment om deze verhalen te vertellen,” zei Carter. De reeks gaat over twee agenten van de FBI, Dana Scully en Fox Mulder, die onderzoek doen naar mysterieuze zaken, zogeheten X-Files, waar de FBI geen raad mee weet. Van graancirkels tot overheidscomplotten die de aanwezigheid van buitenaardse wezens op aarde moeten verhullen.
FBI and WIKILEAKS CONFIRMS: Extraterrestrials Visit Us From Other Dimensions, Aliens and UFO’s…
FBI and WIKILEAKS CONFIRMS: Extraterrestrials Visit Us From Other Dimensions, Aliens and UFO’s…
As we progress even further into our future, it is becoming evidently clear that extraterrestrial life does in fact exist. Earlier last May, activists, political leaders, researchers, and other high ranking agency/military personnel have testified to extraterrestrial anomalies in front of several formed United States members of congress.
The official documentation released by dozens of governments worldwide and paint a picture of the reality that is the UFO phenomenon.
In fact, it is now clear that UFOs are able to be tracked on radar and can be seen performing multiple maneuvers that definitely defy humanity’s idea of what physics is.
Further documentation and other sources of information upon extraterrestrial life is almost impossible to breach or come across simply for how hard and dedicated our world is to studying/researching these flying spacecrafts.
As we all know, however, Wikileaks has been known to publish secret information, news, leaks, and other varieties of classified material from anonymous sources has proven that what we have thought about UFOs/extraterrestrials are absolutely true.
Wikileaks has proven to be a tremendous threat to the oppressive elite forces for many many years. In fact, they pose such a threat that they have gained the attention of a menagerie of mainstream media outlets all over the globe.
As of January 13th, Ambassador had called upon Dushanbe Mayor and Chairman of the upper house of Parliament Mahmadsaid ubaidulloev in his office.
To which the mayor then began the meeting with a seemingly long discourse of Afghanistan, which he thanked the United States for its contributions/sacrifices that had took place, and saying that U.S. activities there were very important.
However, it’s not that much of a surprise if the U.S. Ambassador in Canada was pretty worried about this group.
Considering that high level agencies are also concerned with abductees and ET contactees, that they even stamp their mail in such a way, even going as far as being constantly surveyed by army intelligence, phone tapping, and even being confronted by men in black.
So, it is pretty fair to say that the U.S. ambassador had good reason to be interested in this kind of UFO cult.
FBI Website:
The FBI have admitted on their very own website that we have been visited by “beings from other dimensions”.
The document says that the aliens are peaceful, human-like (but much larger), come from a different “etheric” planet, and can be reached by radar.
The FBI.gov website reveals:
A transcript of some of the most important details of the report have been compiled by UFO Sightings:
1. Part of the disks carry crews, others are under remote control
2. Their mission is peaceful. The visitors contemplate settling on this plane
3. These visitors are human-like but much larger in size
4. They are not excarnate Earth people, but come from their own world
5. They do NOT come from a planet as we use the word, but from an etheric planet which interpenetrates with our own and is not perceptible to us
6. The bodies of the visitors, and the craft, automatically materialize on entering the vibratory rate of our dense matter
7. The disks posses a type of radiant energy or a ray, which will easily disintegrate any attacking ship. They reenter the etheric at will, and so simply disappear from our vision, without trace
8. The region from which they come is not the “astral plane”, but corresponds to the Lokas or Talas. Students of osoteric matters will understand these terms.
9. They probably can not be reached by radio, but probably can be by radar. if a signal system can be devised for that (apparatus)
Addendum:
The Lokas are oval shape, fluted length oval with a heat-resistaning metal or alloy not yet known the front cage contains the controls, the middle portion a laboratory; the rear contains armament, which consists essentially of a powerful energy apparatus, perhaps a ray.
Aerospace Engineer Veteran Blows The Whistle On UFOs. William Mills Tompkins was assigned by the Navy to Intelligence because of his remarkable memory skills, Bill was exposed immediately to the Navy’s knowledge of Hitler’s UFO program.
After the war he began working in a Think Tank at Douglas Aircraft Company for aerospace executive Elmer Wheaton and with Naval Intelligence to offer creative suggestions and designs for huge Naval spacecraft carriers.
The authenticity of part of the story is corroborated by Editor Wood, who was employed at the same facility at the same time and knew some of the same company leaders.
The cute Nordic secretaries Bill was given may have used their psychic powers to keep NASA on the right track for an effective Apollo program, and to begin the covert Naval exploration of the galaxy.
Stephen Hawking has warned of the potential downfalls of humanity
The theoretical physicist identified artificial intelligence (AI), nuclear war and genetically-engineered viruses as just some of the man-made problems that pose an imminent threat to humanity.
And the 74-year-old said that as we rapidly advance in these fields, there will be "new ways things can go wrong”.
We are at a point in history where we are "trapped" by our own advances, with humanity increasingly at risk from man-made threats but without technology sophisticated enough to escape from Earth in the event of a cataclysm.
He warned: "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
"By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.
Getty
Hawking has touted nuclear war as one of the things that might kill us
"However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.”
He added that humans do have a knack of "saving the day" just in time, and urged fellow scientists to continue trying to make advances in their respective fields.
Prof Hawking said: "We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognise the dangers and control them. I'm an optimist, and I believe we can.
Getty
Hawking is still optimistic
"It's important to ensure that these changes are heading in the right directions.
“In a democratic society, this means that everyone needs to have a basic understanding of science to make informed decisions about the future.
"So communicate plainly what you are trying to do in science, and who knows, you might even end up understanding it yourself."
Hawking's comments come just months after he warned the human race could be wiped out by Terminator-style killer robots after research into "autonomous weapons".
He was among more than 1,000 leading scientists and businessmen to sign an open letter from the Future of Life Institute. The letter, presented at a conference in Argentina, suggested the ability to create autonomous weapons that think for themselves is "feasible within years".
It said: "If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable.
"Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilising nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. A military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity."
ONE OF THE OLDEST QUESTIONS MAY BEANSWERED IN OUR LIFETIMES.
The Drake equation, formulated in 1961, estimates the number of alien civilizations we could detect. Recent discoveries of numerous planets in the Milky Way have raised the odds.
The final step: Multiply the number of radio-savvy civilizations by the average time they're likely to keep broadcasting or even to survive. If such advanced societies typically blow themselves up in a nuclear holocaust just a few decades after developing radio technology, for example, there would probably be very few to listen for at any given time.
The equation made perfect sense, but there was one problem. Nobody had a clue what any of those fractions or numbers were, except for the very first variable in the equation: the formation rate of sunlike stars. The rest was pure guesswork. If SETI scientists managed to snag an extraterrestrial radio signal, of course, these uncertainties wouldn't matter. But until that happened, experts on every item in the Drake equation would have to try to fill it in by nailing down the numbers—by finding the occurrence rate for planets around sunlike stars or by trying to solve the mystery of how life took root on Earth.
It would be a third of a century before scientists could even begin to put rough estimates into the equation. In 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva detected the first planet orbiting a sunlike star outside our solar system. That world, known as 51 Pegasi b, about 50 light-years from Earth, is a huge, gaseous blob about half the size of Jupiter, with an orbit so tight that its "year" is only four days long and its surface temperature close to 2000°F.
Nobody thought for a moment that life could ever take hold in such hellish conditions. But the discovery of even a single planet was an enormous breakthrough. Early the next year Geoffrey Marcy, then at San Francisco State University and now at UC Berkeley, would lead his own team in finding a second extrasolar planet, then a third. After that, the floodgates opened. To date, astronomers have confirmed nearly two thousand so-called exoplanets, ranging in size from smaller than Earth to bigger than Jupiter; thousands more—most found by the exquisitely sensitive Kepler space telescope, which went into orbit in 2009—await confirmation.
None of these planets is an exact match for Earth, but scientists are confident they'll find one that is before too long. Based on the discoveries of somewhat larger planets made to date, astronomers recently calculated that more than a fifth of stars like the sun harbor habitable, Earthlike planets. Statistically speaking, the nearest one could be a mere 12 light-years away, which is practically next door in cosmic terms.
That's good news for astrobiologists. But in recent years planet hunters have realized that there's no reason to limit their search to stars just like our sun. "When I was in high school," says David Charbonneau, an astronomer at Harvard, "we were taught that Earth orbits an average star. But that's a lie." In fact, about 80 percent of the stars in the Milky Way are small, cool, dim, reddish bodies known as M dwarfs. If an Earthlike planet circled an M dwarf at the right distance—it would have to be closer in than the Earth is to our sun to avoid being too cold—it could provide a place where life could gain a foothold just as easily as on an Earthlike planet orbiting a sunlike star.
Moreover, scientists now believe a planet doesn't have to be the same size as Earth to be habitable. "If you ask me," says Dimitar Sasselov, another Harvard astronomer, "anywhere from one to five Earth masses is ideal." In short, the variety of habitable planets and the stars they might orbit is likely to be far greater than what Drake and his fellow conferees conservatively assumed at that meeting back in 1961.
A microbe retrieved in 2013 from Lake Whillans, half a mile beneath the Antarctic ice, reveals life's ability to take hold even in the most extreme environments. TRISTA VICK-MAJORS AND PAMELA SANTIBÁÑEZ, PRISCU RESEARCH GROUP, MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY, BOZEMAN
That's not all: It turns out that the range of temperatures and chemical environments where extremophilic organisms might be able to thrive is also greater than anyone at Drake's meeting could have imagined. In the 1970s oceanographers such as National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard discovered superheated gushers, known as hydrothermal vents, nourishing a rich ecosystem of bacteria. Feasting on hydrogen sulfide and other chemicals dissolved in the water, these microbes in turn feed higher organisms. Scientists have also found life-forms that flourish in hot springs, in frigid lakes thousands of feet below the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet, in highly acidic or highly alkaline or extremely salty or radioactive locations, and even in minute cracks in solid rock a mile or more underground. "On Earth these are niche environments," says Lisa Kaltenegger, who holds joint appointments at Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "But on another planet you can easily envision that they could be dominant scenarios."
The one factor that biologists argue is critical for life as we know it is water in liquid form—a powerful solvent capable of transporting dissolved nutrients to all parts of an organism. In our own solar system we've known since the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter mission in 1971 that water once likely flowed freely on the red planet. So life might have existed there, at least in microbial form—and it's plausible that remnants of that life could still endure underground, where liquid water may linger. Jupiter's moon Europa also shows cracks in its relatively young, ice-covered surface—evidence that beneath the ice lies an ocean of liquid water. At a half billion miles or so from the sun, Europa's water should be frozen solid. But this moon is constantly flexing under the tidal push and pull of Jupiter and several of its other moons, generating heat that could keep the water below liquid. In theory, life could exist in that water too.
In 2005 NASA's Cassini spacecraft spotted jets of water erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus; subsequent measurements by the spacecraft reported in April of this year confirm an underground source of water on that moon as well. Scientists still don't know how much water might be under Enceladus's icy shell, however, or whether it's been liquid long enough to permit life to exist. The surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has rivers, lakes, and rain. But Titan's meteorological cycle is based on liquid hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, not water. Something might be alive there, but what it would be like is very hard to guess.
Mars is far more Earthlike, and far closer, than any of these distant moons. The search for life has driven virtually every mission to the red planet. The NASA rover Curiosity is currently exploring Gale crater, where a huge lake sat billions of years ago and where it's now clear that the chemical environment would have been hospitable to microbes, if they existed.
Penelope Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the National Cave and Karst Research Institute captures a drop of biofilm from the Cueva de Villa Luz ("cave of the lighted house") in Mexico. The viscous goo—dubbed a snottite—harbors bacteria that derive energy from hydrogen sulfide within the toxic cave. Life-forms in such extreme ecosystems serve as earthly analogues for organisms that might thrive in extraterrestrial environments.
A cave in Mexico isn't Mars, of course, and a lake in northern Alaska isn't Europa. But it's the search for extraterrestrial life that has taken JPL astrobiologist Kevin Hand and the other members of his team, including John Leichty, to Sukok Lake, 20 miles from Barrow, Alaska. The same quest has lured Penelope Boston and her colleagues multiple times to the poisonous Cueva de Villa Luz, a cave near Tapijulapa in Mexico. Both sites let the researchers test new techniques for searching for life in environments that are at least broadly similar to what space probes might encounter. In particular, they're looking for biosignatures—visual or chemical clues that signal the presence of life, past or present, in places where scientists won't have the luxury of doing sophisticated laboratory experiments.
Take the Mexican cave. Orbiting spacecraft have shown that caves do exist on Mars, and they're just the sorts of places where microbes might have taken refuge when the planet lost its atmosphere and surface water some three billion years ago. Such Martian cave dwellers would have had to survive on an energy source other than sunlight—like the dripping ooze that has Boston so enchanted. The scientists refer to these unlovely droplets as "snottites." One of thousands in the cave, varying in length from a fraction of an inch to a couple of feet, it does look uncannily like mucus. It's actually a biofilm, a community of microbes bound together in a viscous, gooey blob.
The snottite microbes are chemotrophs, Boston explains. "They oxidize hydrogen sulfide—that's their only energy source—and they produce this goo as part of their lifestyle."
Snottites are just one of the microbial communities that exist here. Boston, of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the National Cave and Karst Research Institute, says that all told there are about a dozen communities of microbes in the cave. "Each one has a very distinct physical appearance. Each one is tapping into different nutrient systems."
One of these communities is especially intriguing to Boston and her colleagues. It doesn't form drips or blobs but instead makes patterns on the cave walls, including spots, lines, and even networks of lines that look almost like hieroglyphics. Astrobiologists have come to call these patterns biovermiculations, or bioverms for short, from the word "vermiculation," meaning decorated with "irregular patterns of lines, as though made by worm tracks."
Microbe-rich biofilms—referred to as snottites—drip from the sunless walls of Cueva de Villa Luz in Mexico. Living off sulfur compounds, the microbes in turn feed midges that live in the cave.
It turns out that patterns like these aren't made only by microorganisms growing on cave walls. "It happens on a variety of different scales, usually in places where some resource is in short supply," says Keith Schubert, a Baylor University engineer who specializes in imaging systems and who came to Cueva de Villa Luz to set up cameras for long-term monitoring inside the cave. Grasses and trees in arid regions create bioverm patterns as well, says Schubert. So do soil crusts, which are communities of bacteria, mosses, and lichens that cover the ground in deserts.
If this hypothesis holds up—and it's still only a hypothesis—then Boston, Schubert, and other scientists who are documenting bioverms may have found something crucially important. Until now, many of the markers of life astrobiologists have looked for are gases, like oxygen, that are given off by organisms on Earth. But life that produces an oxygen biosignature may be only one kind among many.
"What excites me about bioverms," says Boston, "is that we've seen them at all these different scales and in all these wildly different environments, and yet the characters of the patterns are very similar." It's highly plausible, she and Schubert believe, that these patterns, based on simple rules of growth and competition for resources, could be literally a universal signature of life. In caves, moreover, even when the microbial communities die, they leave the patterns behind. If a rover should see something like this on the wall of a Martian cave, says Schubert, "it could direct you where to focus your attention."
At the opposite end of North America, the scientists and engineers shivering at Sukok Lake are on a similar mission. They're working at two different locations on the lake, one next to a cluster of three small tents the scientists have dubbed "Nasaville," and the other, with just a single tent, about a half mile away as the crow flies. Because methane gas bubbling from the lake bottom churns up the water, ice has a hard time forming in some places. To snowmobile from one camp to the other, the scientists have to take a curving, indirect route to avoid a potentially fatal dunking.
It was the methane that first drew the scientists to Sukok and other nearby Alaska lakes back in 2009. This common hydrocarbon gas is generated by microbes, known collectively as methanogens, that decompose organic matter, making it another potential biosignature astrobiologists could look for on other worlds. But methane also comes from volcanic eruptions and other nonbiological sources, and it forms naturally in the atmosphere of giant planets like Jupiter as well as on Saturn's moon Titan. So it's crucial that scientists be able to distinguish biological methane from its nonbiological cousin. If you're focused on ice-covered Europa, as Kevin Hand is, ice-covered, methane-rich Sukok Lake isn't a bad place to get your feet wet—as long as you don't do it literally.
Hand, a National Geographic emerging explorer, favors Europa over Mars as a place to do astrobiology, for one key reason. Suppose we do go to Mars, he says, and find living organisms in the subsurface that are DNA based, like life on Earth. That could mean that DNA is a universal molecule of life, which is certainly possible. But it could also mean that life on Earth and life on Mars share a common origin. We know for certain that rocks blasted off the surface of Mars by asteroid impacts have ended up on Earth. It's also likely that Earth rocks have traveled to Mars. If living microbes were trapped inside such spacefaring rocks and survived the journey, which is at least plausible, they could have seeded whichever planet they ended up on. "If life on Mars were found to be DNA based," says Hand, "I think we would have some confusion as to whether or not that was a separate origin of DNA." But Europa is vastly farther away. If life were found there, it would point to a second, independent origin—even if it were DNA based.
Europa certainly seems to have the basic ingredients for life. Liquid water is abundant, and the ocean floor may also have hydrothermal vents, similar to Earth's, that could provide nutrients for any life that might exist there. Up at the surface, comets periodically crash into Europa, depositing organic chemicals that might also serve as the building blocks of life. Particles from Jupiter's radiation belts split apart the hydrogen and oxygen that makes up the ice, forming a whole suite of molecules that living organisms could use to metabolize chemical nutrients from the vents.
The big unknown is how those chemicals could make it all the way down through the ice, which is probably 10 to 15 miles thick. The Voyager and Galileo missions made it clear, however, that the ice is riddled with cracks. Early in 2013 Hand and Caltech astronomer Mike Brown used the Keck II telescope to show that salts from Europa's ocean were likely making their way to the surface, possibly through some of those cracks. And late in 2013 another team of observers, using the Hubble Space Telescope, reported plumes of liquid water spraying from Europa's south pole. Europa's ice is evidently not impenetrable.
This makes the idea of sending a probe to orbit Europa all the more compelling. Unfortunately the orbiter mission the National Research Council evaluated in its 2011 report was deemed scientifically sound but, at $4.7 billion, too expensive. A JPL team led by Robert Pappalardo went back to the drawing board and reimagined the mission. Their Europa Clipper probe would orbit Jupiter, not Europa, which would require less propellant and save money, but it would make something like 45 flybys of the moon in an attempt to understand its surface and atmospheric chemistry, and indirectly the chemistry of the ocean.
All told, Pappalardo says, the redesigned mission should come in at under two billion dollars over its whole life span. If the mission concept goes forward, he says, "we envision a launch sometime in the early to mid 2020s." If that launch takes place aboard an Atlas V rocket, the trip to Europa will take about six years. "But it's also possible," he says, "that we could launch on the new SLS, the Space Launch System, that NASA is currently developing. It's a big rocket, and with that we could get there in 2.7 years."
BRUIE (Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration) crawls along the underside of the surface ice in a test in Sukok Lake. Bubbles of methane and other compounds signal the presence of life below.
The Clipper likely wouldn't be able to find life on Europa, but it could help make the case for a follow-up lander that could dig into the surface, studying its chemistry the way rovers have studied Mars's. The Clipper could also scout out the best places for such a lander to set down. The next logical step after a lander—sending a probe down to explore Europa's ocean—could be a lot tougher, depending on how thick the ice is. As an alternative, mission scientists might try to reach a lake that may be entirely contained within the ice near the surface. "When that undersea explorer eventually does come to fruition," says Hand, "in evolutionary terms, it'll be like Homo sapiens to the Australopithecus we've been testing in Alaska."
Frank Drake is still looking for extraterrestrial signals—a discovery that would trump everything else.
The relatively crude rover Hand and his crew are testing at Sukok Lake crawls along under a foot of ice, its built-in buoyancy keeping it firmly pressed against the frozen subsurface, sensors measuring the temperature, salinity, pH, and other characteristics of the water. It doesn't look for organisms directly, however; that's currently the job of the scientists working on another aspect of Hand's project across the lake, including John Priscu of Montana State University, who last year extracted living bacteria from Lake Whillans, half a mile under the West Antarctic ice sheet. Along with geobiologist Alison Murray, of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, and her graduate student Paula Matheus-Carnevali, Priscu is investigating what characteristics frigid environments need to make them friendly to life and what sorts of organisms actually live there.
Useful as the study of extremophiles is to contemplating the nature of life beyond our planet, it can only provide terrestrial clues to an extraterrestrial mystery. Soon, however, we will have other means to fill in missing parts of the Drake equation. NASA has approved a new planet-hunting telescope known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Scheduled to launch in 2017, TESS will look for planets around our nearest neighboring stars, finding targets for astrophysicists searching planetary atmospheres for biosignature gases. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for a 2018 launch, will make those searches far easier than they are today— although recent observations with the Hubble, including the discovery of clouds on a super-Earth known as GJ 1214b, make it clear that nobody is sitting around waiting for the Webb.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.