UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

One of 60 micrometeorites extracted from 2.7-billion-year-old limestone, from the Pilbara region in Western Australia. These micrometeorites consist of iron oxide minerals that formed when dust particles of meteoritic iron metal were oxidised as they entered Earth's atmosphere, indicating that the ancient upper atmosphere was surprisingly oxygen rich.
**Credit: Andrew Tomkins**

The oldest space dust yet found on Earth suggests that the ancient atmosphere of Earth had significantly more oxygen than previously thought, a new study finds.

Although oxygen gas currently makes up about one-fifth of Earth's air, there was at least 100,000 times less oxygen in the primordial atmosphere, researchers say. Oxygen easily reacts with other molecules, which means it readily gets bound to other elements and pulled from the atmosphere.

Previous research suggests that significant levels of oxygen gas started permanently building up in the atmosphere with the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago. This event was most likely caused by cyanobacteria — microbes that, like plants, photosynthesize and release oxygen. [Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom]

Most evidence regarding how much oxygen there was in Earth's air in the past concerned the lower atmosphere. Until now, scientists had no way to sample oxygen levels in Earth's ancient upper atmosphere.

In a new study, scientists analyzing tiny meteorites found that the upper reaches of the early Earth's atmosphere may not have been oxygen-poor as once thought. Instead, the ancient Earth's upper atmosphere may have possessed nearly the same amount of oxygen as it does today, the researchers said.

"With this project we have opened up a new way of investigating Earth's ancient atmosphere," said study lead author Andrew Tomkins, a geoscientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Space dust

The researchers analyzed 60 microscopic meteorites from samples of ancient limestone collected in the Pilbara region in Western Australia. These cosmic dust particles are 2.7 billion years old, the oldest yet found.

"We weren't certain that the project was going to work," Tomkins told Live Science. "The project started out as a student research project, and it was a bit of a risk to try and find micrometeorites when few other people had tried it before. I had some backup plans, but the extra tension made for a lot of excitement when we found our first micrometeorites."

The micrometeorites ranged from two to 12 times thinner than the width of an average human hair. They are cosmic spherules — remnants of meteorites the size of sand grains that broke apart during atmospheric entry. Previous research suggested that these kinds of particles melt at altitudes of about 45 to 55 miles (75 to 90 kilometers).

The scientists analyzed the micrometeorites using electron microscopes and high-energy X-rays from the Australian Synchrotron. They found that a significant portion of the iron in these meteorites had reacted with oxygen to form iron oxide minerals, which suggests that the thin upper atmosphere in which they melted was richer in oxygen than thought.

"Once we recovered the first micrometeorites, I realized that the minerals inside them were telling us that they had been oxidized in the upper atmosphere," Tomkins said. "These were essentially the first samples of our Earth's ancient upper atmosphere." [Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites]

This finding was unexpected, "because it has been firmly established that the Earth's lower atmosphere was very poor in oxygen 2.7 billion years ago," study co-author Matthew Genge, a professor in the Department of Earth Science & Engineering at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "How the upper atmosphere could contain so much oxygen before the appearance of photosynthetic organisms was a real puzzle."

What could have happened?

One possible origin of this oxygen is that sunlight broke apart water vapor in the lower atmosphere into hydrogen and oxygen — the oxygen could have risen to the upper atmosphere, while the lighter hydrogen would have escaped Earth's atmosphere into outer space. Another possibility is that sunlight broke apart sulfur dioxide gas emitted from volcanoes into sulfur and oxygen — the sulfur could have condensed to form particles that fell to Earth, leaving oxygen behind, the researchers said.

"A caution — it's important to understand that the density of the atmosphere at the very high altitudes sampled by micrometeorites is extremely thin," Tomkins said. "We are not talking about generating large amounts of oxygen here, but rather elevated proportions of oxygen relative to the other gases."

It remains uncertain how the ancient upper atmosphere could have stayed oxygen-rich while the ancient lower atmosphere remained oxygen-poor. The researchers suggest that a methane haze layer may have existed between the upper and lower atmosphere, reducing mixing between them.

"Methane is thought to have been produced by early single-celled organisms known as methanogens. These exist today as well," Tomkins said. "There has been a lot of debate as to how much methane there might have been, and when it might have first arisen. The general thought is that the methane, combined with carbon dioxide, may have created an organic haze if the conditions were right."

The next step "is to try and extract micrometeorites from rocks of a range of ages, to examine how the chemistry of Earth's upper atmosphere might have changed over very long periods of geological time," Tomkins said. "It should be possible to use micrometeorites to investigate changes in atmospheric composition across very broad periods of time."

"It should also be possible to find micrometeorites on Mars," Tomkins added. "If the rovers can find them, and somehow determine their age of atmospheric entry, they could be used to investigate changes in Mars' atmosphere."

The scientists detailed their findings in the May 12 issue of the journal Nature.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

It works! An ‘impossible’ fuel-free engine that defies the laws of Physics has been proven to work by numerous independentlaboratories. However, researchers are still unsure as to how it actually works.

Scientists are sure how it works since the so-called EmDrive defies all known laws of physics

The ‘impossible’ fuel-free engine called EmDrive could transport astronauts to Mars in just 10 weeks has been proven to work, even though no one known how or why it works. The revolutionary engine creates thrust by bouncing microwaves in a closed chamber and is powered only by solar energy.

While researchers have pointed out the engine is an impossible concept since it defies all known laws of physics, the engine has turned out to be a feasible option for future spacecraft.

Now, scientists have come up with a theory that could explain how it can actually work. In the next coming months, the engine will undergo peer review as scientists hope it can become a reality shortly.

The idea, however, isn’t new. The concept was proposed for the first time 16 years go when researcher Roger Shawyer came up with the incredible idea. Since 2000, four independent research facilities including one belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have recreated the drive and even though it creates thrust, no one has been able to explain how. The EmDrive converts electrical energy into thrust without the necessity for rocket fuel. Classical physics suggest that this engine should not work since it appears to violate the law of conservation of momentum.

According to the law, the momentum of a system is constant if there are no external forces acting on the system –because of this, propellant is used in traditional rockets.

However, Dr. Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University firmly believes he might have figured out the impossible drive, and his explanation is based on a new theory of inertia, describing the resistance of massive objects to changes in motion and acceleration.

A prototype of the ‘impossible’ fuel-free engine

The idea as to why inertia exists at all has puzzled researchers for centuries.

Dr. McCulloch proposes that inertia can be explained from an effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity called ‘Unruh radiation.’ This effect states that if there is an acceleration in a vacuum, empty space will contain gas particles at a temperature which is proportional to that of the acceleration, meaning that that universe basically heats up objects as the accelerate.

Dr. McCulloch suggests that inertia can be defined as the pressure exerted by the Unruh radiation on an accelerating body. Size matters, this is why when accelerations involved are smaller, like the case of the EmDrive, the wavelength of Unruh radiation gets larger. At extremely low accelerations, wavelengths become simply put, too large to fit into the observable universe. Researchers suggest that as a result, inertia may only take on whole-wavelength units over time, causing it to become ‘quantized.’

Researchers have discovered that at extremely low accelerations, inertia jumps unexpectedly in value, an effect already observed by scientists previously when spacecraft perform a flyby of Earth, causing them to move much faster that what scientists calculated they should.

However, we could be looking at the same thing in the EmDrive by reducing the size of allowed wavelengths of Unruh radiation.

One of the images from an as-yet unpublished paper on the EMDrive.

According to Dr. McCulloch, since photons have an inertial mass, they experience inertia when they perfect. However, since due to the EmDrive truncated cone, the Unruh radiation in tiny.

According to a report by MIT, the cone allows Unruh radiation of a certain size at the large end but only a smaller wavelength at the other end. The inertia of photons inside the cavity changes as these bounce back and forth. In order to conserve momentum, they are forced to generate thrust.

McCulloch says there is some evidence that exactly this happens. ‘This thrust reversal may have been seen in recent Nasa experiments,’ he says.

The next step is to test out the EmDrive on a larger scale, and if it works, it could carry both passengers and equipment to the moon in just four hours, or take them to the red planet in just ten weeks. The EmDrive will be a huge thing if it works on a larger scale since it would make it possible for humans to travel outside our solar system. Fro example, a trip to Alpha Centauri would take tens of thousands of years with our current technology, however, using the EmDrive engine, a trip to Alpha Centauri would take just 100 years.

Journal Reference:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03449

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa…

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive…

Featured Image Credit: StarTrek Movie

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