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...
14-09-2016
Robot Life on Mars! Meet the Machines Exploring the Red Planet Today
Robot Life on Mars! Meet the Machines Exploring the Red Planet Today
By Hanneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer
Credit: The Viking Project/NASA
Mars: Home of the Robots
Mars may be a barren desert with no alien life (that we know of), but the Red Planet certainly isn't lifeless. Thanks to Earth's ambitious space programs, several robotic scientists explore the Martian surface as well as its skies. Read on to find out about all the spacecraft that are actively exploring Earth's neighboring planet.
NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter has been circling the Red Planet since 2014. The spacecraft is studying Mars' atmosphere to help scientists figure out how the planet transitioned from a world that holds water to a barren, desert wasteland. So far, MAVEN has revealed that particles emanating from the sun, or solar wind, stripped Mars of its atmosphere. Additionally, data from MAVEN suggests that about half of Mars' atmosphere may have been lost to interstellar clouds of gas and dust. When Mars still had all of its atmosphere, the planet was warm enough to retain liquid water. Today, the planet is much colder and drier. [Photos: NASA's MAVEN Mission to Mars]
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Odyssey
NASA's Odyssey spacecraft has spent more than 15 years orbiting Mars, and the craft continues to hold the record for the longest Mars mission duration in history. The spacecraft arrived at Mars orbit in 2001, where it has been searching for evidence water and ice on the Red Planet. The orbiter's full name is 2001 Mars Odyssey, after a famous novel written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1968 titled "2001: A Space Odyssey." With high-power cameras on board, Odyssey keeps a close watch on the Martian weather conditions, like dust storms that could potentially damage rovers on the ground. [Mars Odyssey: Pictures from Longest Mars Mission]
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) arrived at Mars in 2006 with a mission to search for evidence that water previously existed on the planet. The orbiter bears the most powerful camera and spectrometer of any spacecraft at Mars. MRO's six science instruments study the atmosphere and the Martian surface while searching for possible underground deposits of water and ice. These instruments allow MRO to monitor the daily weather on Mars. MRO's camera also scopes out the Martian surface for potential landing sites for future Mars missions. [Latest Photos from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]
Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.
Opportunity (& Spirit)
NASA's twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, launched back to back in the summer of 2003 and landed on Mars by parachute in January 2004. These two robotic geologists both found evidence of ancient Martian environments that contained water and were potentially habitable. Unfortunately, Spirit got stuck in a sand dune and ran out of power in March 2010. But Opportunity is still roving, and it now holds the record for the longest-running Mars rover ever — both in terms of time and distance covered. The rover is beginning to show its age with memory problems, but it's still exploring the Red Planet nonetheless. [Latest Mars Rover Photos from Opportunity & Spirit]
Credit: ESA, C. Carreau
Mars Express
The European Space Agency (ESA) sent its Mars Express orbiter out to the Red Planet in 2003. It was the first time the ESA sent a spacecraft to explore another planet. Mars Express brought along a lander, named Beagle 2, but the little spacecraft didn't survive its plunge down to the surface. Mars Express carried on without its partner, however. The spacecraft made its first discovery before even getting settled into Mars orbit, spotting water ice on the planet's south pole. Just a few weeks later, Mars Express foundmethane on Mars — a sign of active geological processes deep inside the planet, and possibly methane-burping microbes living underground. [Photos: Red Planet Views from Europe's Mars Express]
Credit: ISRO
Mars Orbiter Mission
India's first interplanetary spacecraft joined the party on Mars in 2014. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also known as Mangalyaan (meaning "Mars craft" in Sanskrit), arrived at Mars orbit just two days after NASA's MAVEN orbiter. Officials with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have said that the mission was primarily a technology demonstration, but MOM is still doing plenty of science as it whizzes around the Red Planet. The craft's small,15-kilogram (33 lbs.) payload contains five scientific instruments, including a color camera, for studying Mars' atmosphere. The spacecraft's mission was originally planned to end after six months, but the little orbiter is still going strong. MOM could even last long enough to meet its little sister, Mangalyaan 2, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. [India's First Mars Mission in Pictures]
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
A spacecraft graveyard
Mars is littered with dead spacecraft. Some of their missions ended as planned, while others ran out of power, got stuck on Mars' terrain or were demolished in not-so-smooth landings. About a dozen spacecraft have died on Mars. Pictured here is NASA's Phoenix lander, which died when it ran out of power during a winter dust storm in 2008. Find out more about the lifeless spacecraft on Mars in this gallery: Mars: The Spacecraft Graveyard.
Elusive Planet? See Mercury at Its Best This Month
Elusive Planet? See Mercury at Its Best This Month
By Joe Rao, SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
On Sept. 28, Mercury will rise at 5:30 a.m. local time, well before the sun, and shine brightly against the predawn sky. The planet will be at its maximum angle away from the sun on this date. The waning crescent moon will sit about 10 degrees above the planet; the duo is shown here at 6 a.m.
Credit: Starry Night Software
Mercury has a reputation for being hard to spot. Indeed, the planet is known in some circles as the "elusive planet."
I've used this nickname before in our Space.com forum, and it perfectly captures the general feeling about this rocky, little world. In his book "The Solar System and Back" (Doubleday, 1970), the famed scientist and author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) argued that Mercury "is hardly ever visible when it is truly dark."
Mercury "will be seen only near the horizon in dawn or twilight, amid haze and sun glare," Asimov added. "I suspect, in fact, that many people today (when the horizon is dirtier and the sky much hazier with the glare of artificial light than it was in centuries past) have never seen Mercury." [10 Strange Facts About Mercury (A Photo Tour)]
From this description, I get the distinct impression that Asimov may never have laid eyes on Mercury. And yet, beginning on Sept. 19, people living north of the equator will have a great opportunity to view the planet in the early morning sky. On that day, the solar system's smallest planet will begin a three-week stretch during which it will be readily visible to anyone who has a clear and unobstructed view of the eastern horizon and is out looking about 45 minutes before sunrise.
On Monday (Sept. 12), Mercury moved through inferior conjunction — when the planet passes between Earth and the sun — and entered the morning sky. Mercury will quickly move out of the glare of the sun in subsequent days and will brighten rapidly.
Dual identity
In the pre-Christian era, Mercury actually had two names, as skywatchers then did not realize the planet could alternately appear on one side of the sun and then the other. Mercury was called Mercury when in the evening sky but was known as Apollo when it appeared in the morning. It is said that the famous Greek mathematician Pythagoras pointed out in the fifth century B.C. that Apollo and Mercury were one and the same.
In old Roman legends, Mercury was the swift-footed messenger of the gods. The planet is well-named, for it is the closest world to the sun and therefore the fastest-orbiting: Mercury travels at an average speed of 108,000 mph (174,000 km/h) and completes one orbit every 88 Earth days.
Interestingly, the time it takes Mercury to rotate once on its axis is 59 days, so all parts of the planet's surface experience periods of intense heat and extreme cold. Although Mercury's mean distance from the sun is just 36 million miles (57.9 million kilometers), the planet experiences by far the greatest range of temperatures: from 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius) on Mercury's dayside, all the way down to minus 280 degrees F (minus 173 degrees C) on the planet's nightside.
Photograph of Mercury via the American spaceonde MESSENGER - Foto: NASA
"Surprisingly easy"
kaanse ruimte
Mercury is called an "inferior planet" because its orbit is nearer to the sun than the Earth's. Therefore, Mercury always appears from an Earth-bound vantage point to be in the same general direction as the sun (as Asimov indicated).
After Monday (Sept. 12), Mercury rises before the sun for the rest of this month and will be surprisingly easy to see from Sept. 19 through Oct. 11. All you have to do is look low above the eastern horizon during morning twilight, about 45 minutes before sunrise. Mercury will appear as a bright, yellowish-orange "star."
Mercury will be at its greatest elongation (or greatest angular distance) west of the sun on the morning of Sept. 28. Greatest elongation will occur only 110 minutes after Mercury reaches perihelion (its closest point to the sun in space), so the planet's angular separation on this date is the minimum possible at a greatest elongation: just 17.85 degrees from the sun. (Your fist held at arm's length measures about 10 degrees across.)
Yet for observers in midnorthern latitudes, this elongation in the dawn sky is nearly vertical, placing Mercury due east and rising 90 minutes ahead of, and directly above, the sun. Mercury will rise as dawn breaks on Sept. 28 and shine at magnitude -0.4, making this the planet's best morning apparition of 2016. (Negative magnitudes represent brighter objects on the astronomers' scale; for comparison, Saturn's maximum brightness is magnitude 0, while that of Sirius, the Dog Star, is about -1.)
Mercury, like Venus and the moon, appears to go through phases. When Mercury makes its first appearance on Sept. 19, the planet will appear as a slender crescent, just 11 percent illuminated. At its greatest elongation, nine days later, Mercury will appear half-illuminated, and the amount of its surface illuminated by the sun will continue to increase thereafter. By Oct. 11, Mercury will be 91 percent illuminated. So although it will begin to turn back toward the sun's vicinity after Sept. 28, Mercury will continue to brighten steadily, which should keep it in easy view for another couple of weeks. [Visible Planets, September 2016: When, Where & How to See Them]
This view shows Mercury's north polar region, colored by the maximum biannual surface temperature, which ranges from hotter temperatures in red to lower temperatures in purple. Image released March 16, 2015.
A visit from the moon and Jupiter
On Sept. 29, skywatchers will get a bonus: The slender sliver of a waningcrescent moon, just 2 percent illuminated by the sun, will slide just over a degree to the lower left of Mercury. Once again, look low to the east about 45 minutes before sunrise for Mercury shining like an amber jewel to the upper right of the lunar sliver. Binoculars will enhance the view.
Mercury starts October still readily visible, approaching magnitude -1, surpassing the brilliance of every star in the sky with the exception of Sirius (the brightest of all stars). But the planet will also be getting noticeably lower in the dawn twilight. At the same time that Mercury is going down, Jupiter is coming up.
When October opens, Jupiter can be seen low in the east, midway through the morning twilight. But each morning thereafter, the king of planets rises earlier and climbs higher in the east. Finally, on the morning of Oct. 11, the biggest and smallest planets will rise side by side, separated by only 0.75 degrees, with Jupiter on the right and Mercury on the left. Look for them 5 degrees above the horizon about a half hour before sunrise.
That will be Mercury’s grand finale; thereafter, it will disappear into the glare of the sun.
This view of Mercury shows two craters. The one on the left has a sharp rim for about one-quarter of its circumference (at the right side).The other three quarters consist of a broad terrace, created by slumping and inward movement of material, the cause of which is unknown. Image released March 9, 2015.
Editor's note: If you have an amazing skywatching photo you'd like to share with Space.com and our news partners for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y. Follow us @Spacedotcom,Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Ancient Aliens – Russia’s Secret Files History Channel, Season 11 Episode 12 12th August 2016
Russia is a vast country, spanning over 6 million square miles of some of the most rugged terrain on Earth, much of which is uninhabited and largely unexplored. It is also the home of ‘cosmism’ — a belief that human civilization originated in the cosmos and is destined to return to space. But many believe the rise of communism led to a wall of secrecy surrounding ancient and modern extraterrestrial contact in Russia. Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that otherworldly visitations predate the establishment of the Russian nation, and point to the ancient settlement at Arkaim as evidence–a centuries-old megalithic site that, like Stonehenge, is oriented along astronomical lines. In addition, tiny metal coils and springs recovered 30 feet beneath the Ural Mountains may indicate the presence of advanced technology on Earth thousands of years ago.
There’s No Up: New Study Reveals That The Cosmos is Completely Directionless
There’s No Up: New Study Reveals That The Cosmos is Completely Directionless
Andrew Pontzen and Fabio Governato/Flickr
IN BRIEF
Researchers have determined that it's almost certain that our Universe is not expanding in one preferred direction. This closes the debate on whether the Universe is really homogeneous and reinforces our standard model of cosmology as never before.
DIRECTIONLESS UNIVERSE
Every day, we are learning more about our great and wonderful Universe (like that it’s actually a lot smaller than we thought, for example). But underneath all of that is one rather solid fact: that the Universe is expanding, and it’s expanding everywhere, and it’s expanding ever faster. The key to all of this is that the distribution and expansion are equal all over—that things are roughly homogeneous.
However, one idea seeks to shatter that homogeneity. It’s known as the anisotropic hypothesis, where the Universe is expanding along a preferred axis or direction. That idea, if proven, would shatter all the models we have built of the expansion of the known universe and put our standard model of cosmology into question.
What principle would cause the cosmos to have a specific direction? Ultimately, we don’t know. However, if true, this idea could provide solutions to Einstein’s field equations (specifically, it lends weight to the Bianchi models).
But before we get to the viability of the idea, let’s back up a bit.
The anisotropic hypothesis was born when it was realized that galaxies and star clusters are scattered randomly. If the Universe was so homogeneous and isotropic, then why is matter not evenly distributed, why is star system formation random?
This theory was strengthened back in the 2000s, when NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) spacecraft found strange ‘bumps’ in the universe’s background radiation. In fact, astronomers have found a place where these ‘cosmic bumps’ line up so much that they called it the “axis of evil.”
All of these contrarian finds spurred researchers from the University College London in the UK to look at the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in order to see whether the anisotropic hypothesis actually holds up.
Now, it seems that the anisotropic/isotropic debate may be coming to a close.
The cosmos has no special direction that might be used to define a universal "up," according to a new study.
PUT TO THE TEST
The team probed the CMB for evidence that the Universe expands at different speeds along different axes, or whether gravitational waves distorted the Universe, stretching it in one direction and compressing it in another. Cosmologists breathed a collective sigh of relief when the study of the Universe’s background radiation showed (seemingly once and for all) that the cosmos is expanding everywhere uniformly, just as our models predicted.
An isotropic (A) and anisotropic (B) Universe. Science
The study used a supercomputer to search for these patterns in the utter randomness of the CMB. They determined that there is one-in-121,000 chance that the Universe is heading in a preferred direction. This is the most conclusive study of its kind to date, and it seemingly puts a lid on the question once and for all, proving that it’s just one aimless ride for all of us.
There’s no direction. There’s No preferred place…which may be less than stellar for the Bianchi models, but it’s good for our standard model of cosmology.
NASA Scientist Claims Space Mining is Possible With Today’s Tech
NASA Scientist Claims Space Mining is Possible With Today’s Tech
Concept image of a harvester for Deep Space Industries.
Foster + Partners
IN BRIEF
A new report explains how the world is ready for space mining. A fraction of NASA's budget investing over the next few decades would have the ability to transform Earth's industry.
A SELF-SUSTAINING INDUSTRY
Former NASA researcher and current University of Central Florida professor Dr. Phil Metzgerpresented a proposal stating that mining and manufacturing outside of our planet is currently possible with the technology we have today, and it would be advantageous to Earth, as well (as opposed to a money drain).
Surprisingly enough, the biggest challenge to humanity taking this next step isn’t money or the lack of technology. According to Dr. Metzger, “The main challenge for this concept, is neither technology nor cost but simply convincing people it is realistic.” He estimates making this goal a reality would take up about 3-12% of NASA’s budget each year for the next few decades.
Image credit: Dassault Systèmes
Space mining of the moon and nearby asteroids would allow for greater access to hydrogen, carbon, silicon, metals, and other materials that may be overmined on this planet. Metzger’s vision does not involve launching entire mining and manufacturing infrastructures to these distant bodies. Fortune reports, “He projects that only 12 tons (<11 tonnes) of initial assets on the Moon could build themselves out into 150 tons (136 tonnes) of equipment (close to the amount that has been deemed necessary for a lunar colony) using local resources.” This method is referred to as a Self-sufficient Replicating Space Industry (SRSI).
MORE THAN MINING
The Earthly benefit of a SRSI is far more inclusive than just industrial gains. Space mining and manufacturing will also ease some of the burden current mining practices put on the planet. Taking resources from space will help to keep from depleting the limited resources left.
Some space mining critics claim an economic focus of such a plan would take important funding and attention away from scientific pursuits. However, Metzger also explains that there are more celestial bodies near Earth than we would ever have funding to reach. Bringing along industrial interests could multiply the monetary resources dedicated to space study. This way, mining in space can benefit humans both economically and scientifically.
Boston Dynamics has just released a video of its Atlas robot balancing on a piece of wood. Just like a regular human, you can watch it shift, shake, and move to stay on the beam.
One of the primary challenges with bigger robots is making them move without falling over. Big, human-sized robots either can’t walk at all, or they walk like a one-legged man having a seizure. Balance, stability, grace—these are the things we have yet to see in a humanoid robot.
Now, we may finally have a contender. Boston Dynamics has been working on the Atlas robot, and it looks like it can balance on a piece of wood as well as any person can.
In the video, we can see Atlas balancing on a thin piece of wood for thirty seconds. But its not just the balancing part that’s awesome—its seeing a robot move, shift its weight, and react like an actual person.
Notably, its original specs were meant to make it humanoid. It has a height of approximately 1.8 meters (6 feet) and a weight of 150 kg (330 pounds). It’s also fairly robust—it’s made of aircraft-grade titanium and aluminum with blue LED lights mounted inside its chest.
Remarkably, its reaction when it finally loses to gravity even mimics how a person would when taking a tumble, twisting its torso in the opposite direction.
A black hole weighing around 140 million Suns, will be sucked up by the most massive black hole known in the universe—the OJ 287—weighing around 18 billion Suns. The violent impact caused by this collision will unleash a power that will rival 20,000 supernovae explosions in the same spot.
10,000 years into the future, mankind will witness what may be the most spectacular devastation in our entire existence. Proven to be inevitable, two massive black holes are set to have the ultimate collision of all time.
One of these black holes weighs around 140 million suns. Massive, right? Think again. Its competitor, the OJ 287, is determined to be the most massive black hole in the known universe—weighing around 18 billion Suns. That’s about 130 times bigger than it’s contender! Quite the bully don’t you think?
The smaller one currently orbits the OJ 287, on its way to being sucked up. As mentioned earlier, the smaller black hole has no chance of escape. Energy leaches away from the binary orbit, bringing the pair closer together and making each cycle around the behemoth a little shorter than the last.
When black holes merge, the bigger one either banishes the smaller one out of its galaxy or eats it up like a midnight snack. In this case, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. has offered us a mini preview of the event.
In the end, the violent impact caused by this collision will unleash a flood of ultraviolet radiation, releasing as much energy as 20,000 supernovae explosions in the same spot.
This Eerie New Drone Comes With Spider-Like Grasping Arms
This Eerie New Drone Comes With Spider-Like Grasping Arms
Prodrone
IN BRIEF
A Japanese company first revealed their newest drone model. The upgrade will give the flying machine a set of arms built to lift up to 10 kg.
The proliferation of drone technology has certainly been beneficial to users, albeit whileannoying some others. One manufacturer is about to start producing the next evolution of the technology.
At the InterDrone show in Las Vegas, Japanese drone manufacturer, Prodrone claims that the PD6B-AW-ARM is “the world’s first dual robot arm large-format drone.” Prodrone has taken its previous PD6B-AW model and upgraded it with 5-axis grasping arms. It can carry up to 10 kg (22 lb). The PD6B-AW-ARM also has a stabilizing feature that balances the aircraft while the arms carries and moves stuff around.
Image credit: Podrone
The drone will have an maximum flight time of up to a half-hour per charge. The drone can also clock in with forward speeds of 60 km/h (37 mph) and fly up to an altitude of 5,000 m (16,404 ft) This likely doesn’t account for the extra force of lugging its cargo. Grabbing and lifting isn’t all the arms can do. As New Atlas reports, “Along with the obvious grasping and carrying of cargo, the company’s suggested uses…also include attaching or joining items, cutting cables, flicking switches, delivering lifesaving buoys, or retrieving hazardous materials.”
The company has yet to announce a release date for the upgraded drones. Pricing is also forthcoming.
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NASA’s Curiosity Captures Astonishingly Detailed Photos Of Mars
NASA’s Curiosity Captures Astonishingly Detailed Photos Of Mars
NASA
IN BRIEF
NASA just released detailed colored images of Mars like never before. The agency plans on releasing more photos as Curiosity explores more of our Earth's neighbor.
NASA spent a fortune on the Curiosity rover — and it’s a good thing they didn’t hold back on the on-board camera. The agency just released incredibly detailed photos of Mars that make us feel like we’re there.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“Curiosity’s science team has been thrilled to go on this road trip through a bit of the American desert Southwest on Mars,” shared Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist.
The images captured by the rover were snapped just last September 8. They show sharp and colorful photos of the Murray Buttes region, inside the Red Planet’s giant Gale crater.
According to Vasavada, the Curiosity scientists learned that ancient sand dunes in Mars were “formed and were buried, chemically changed by groundwater, exhumed and eroded to form the landscape that we see today.”
The photos released are just teasers. NASA plans to show us more as Curiosity explores extensive mountains and rockier terrains. If they keep this up, it might not be long before we have a full view of our sister planet.
Nieuwe metingen hebben het bestaan bevestigd van drie door onder meer astronomen van de Luikse universiteit ontdekte exoplaneten bij dwergster TRAPPIST-1. Dit meldt astronomie.nl op gezag van het vakblad Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In mei meldde een team onder leiding van wetenschappers van de ULg drie levensvatbare exoplaneten te hebben gevonden.
De astronomen ontdekten het planetair systeem met de TRAPPIST-robottelesoop in het Chileense La Silla. De drie planeten draaien rond een ster die veel kleiner, kouder en roder is dan onze Zon. Het hemellichaam, 2MASS J2062928-0502285 alias TRAPPIST-1, is nauwelijks iets groter dan "onze" Jupiter. Dergelijke ultra-koude dwergsterren komen in onze Melkweg zeer frequent voor, meer dan sterren die op onze Zon gelijken. Voorheen waren er rond dergelijke dwergsterren geen planeten gevonden.
De planeten zouden qua afmetingen en samenstelling veel overeenkomsten vertonen met de Aarde.
Ter bevestiging hebben Amerikaanse astronomen met een speciale camera op de Gemini South Telescope, eveneens in Chili, gezocht naar de aanwezigheid van een mogelijke begeleider van TRAPPIST-1. Als die op kleine afstand gezelschap zou hebben van een tweede dwergster - dat zou een rode of een bruine dwerg kunnen zijn -, zouden de eerdere metingen misschien te verklaren zijn door diens aanwezigheid en gedrag.
Maar het nieuwe onderzoek geeft aan dat TRAPPIST-1 geen dubbelster is. Nu het bestaan van een begeleidende dwergster is uitgesloten, is de laatste mogelijke twijfel rond de ontdekking van de drie "Belgische" exoplaneten weggenomen, luidt het.
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VIDEO: Is hindoegod Shiva een buitenaards wezen?
VIDEO: Is hindoegod Shiva een buitenaards wezen?
Bij de stad Aurangabad in de Indiase staat Maharashtra bevinden zich de grotten van Ellora. Grot 16, beter bekend als de tempel van Kailasa, is gewijd aan hindoegod Shiva.
De tempel is twee keer zo hoog als het Parthenon in Athene. Archeologen vermoeden dat het bouwwerk van boven naar beneden uit de rotsen is gebeiteld. Sommige historici hebben gezegd dat er tijdens de bouw in totaal 400.000 ton rots is verwijderd. De tempel zou in slechts 18 jaar zijn gebouwd.
“Zelfs met de technologieën die vandaag de dag beschikbaar zijn, is zoiets niet mogelijk,” zegt oprichter van Phenomenal Places Praveen Mohan.
Moeilijk te geloven
Ingenieur A.V. Srinivasan vindt het moeilijk te geloven dat de tempel in slechts 18 jaar is gebouwd. “Zelfs nu is dat moeilijk voor te stellen. Op basis van de hoeveelheid rots die is weggehaald zou je verwachten dat het hele proces ongeveer een eeuw in beslag heeft genomen,” zegt hij.
Een ander opmerkelijk feit is dat de honderdduizenden tonnen rots die verwijderd zouden zijn nergens zijn teruggevonden, aldus professor Deepak Shimkhada van de Claremont School of Theology. “Waar is al dat materiaal gebleven?” vraagt hij zich af.
Machine
Mohan wijst erop dat in de Veda’s wordt gesproken over een machine waarmee rots letterlijk kon worden veranderd in lucht. Onder de grotten van Ellora bevinden zich tunnels die volgens de lokale autoriteiten leiden naar een enorme ondergrondse stad.
Sommige theoretici menen dat deze oude stad ooit een buitenaardse basis was en dat de Indiase god Shiva een buitenaards wezen is.
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system and is known for the absolute hellish conditions that exist on it.
With its acid thunderclouds, its atmosphere which is a mixture of poisonous sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide, atmospheric pressure that would crush your bones, and above all, the absence of water, it is one of the most uninviting places in the entire solar system.
However, some scientists insist this was not always the case, and they have mounting evidence that Venus was once habitable.
Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York created models of what Venus may once have looked like, considering the speed at which it may have rotated and how much sunlight it received. Their research suggests that planet Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures anywhere between 2.9 billion and 715 million years ago.
As per Michael Way, a researcher at GISS, “Many of the same tools we use to model climate change on Earth can be adapted to study climates on other planets, both past and present. These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.”
Scientists consider that Venus might once have been habitable, having a similar atmosphere to Earth’s and flowing water on its surface. Although Venus has an ozone layer, owing to the runaway greenhouse effect and the lack of a magnetic field, the temperature of the planet increased rapidly, and water disappeared. Its atmosphere got thicker and trapped heat, and eventually led to the hellish Venus of today.
Nidhi Goyal
Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. You can also find Nidhi on Google+.
Fire Tornadoes (Image Courtesy UMD http://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/sites/umdrightnow.umd.edu/files/cover_figure_1_2.jpg)
Nearly Soot Free Combustion
Nearly everyone has seen the out-of-control “fire tornadoes” or “fire whirls” thought to have been made worse and more intense by global climate change. Scientists have been thinking for years about how these “fire whirls” might be used for constructive purposes.
Now a group of scientists has developed a high-efficiency, low-emissions combustion process it calls “blue whirls.” A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) details the findings.
When the team studied “fire whirls” over oil-contaminated water, they stumbled upon what could become a highly efficient, nearly soot free method of cleaning up oil spills. Another type of flame, known as a yellow flame, produces significantly higher emissions and is more turbulent.
For more pictures & videos of blue whirls, visit UMD.
The following video of the blue whirl is provided by UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.
David Russell Schilling
David enjoys research and writing about cutting edge technologies that hold the promise of improving conditions for all life on planet earth.
Here, an image from the Grolier Codex, a Mayan text that researchers now say is authentic.
Credit: Justin Kerr
The authenticity of the Grolier Codex has been disputed for the last four decades. A group of researchers who revisited the rare Maya text now argue that there's no way it could be a forgery.
If the 800-year-old Grolier Codex is indeed authentic, it would be the oldest known paper manuscript from the Americas, and one of just four Maya codices that are known today.
The calendar spans 104 years, meaning the codex could have been used by at least three generations of calendar priests or "day-keepers," the authors of the new study wrote. For the Maya, Venus was an omen for unfortunate events, and the different cycles of the planet were linked to particular gods—most of whom are depicted in the Grolier Codex as dangerous, holding weapons like spears, darts and knives used for beheading.
Shady provenance
When it surfaced in the 1970s, the codex was eyed as a possible forgery. Those suspicions arose in part because of the manuscript's shady collecting history; it was not discovered by archaeologists, but looters, who sold it to a Mexican private collector JosuéSáenz in the late 1960s.
Sáenz presented what many scholars thought was an outlandish story about how he had acquired the manuscript. He said he was taken in a light plane to a remote airstrip in an undisclosed location in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There, the looters allegedly showed him the codex —along with other Maya artifacts, including a wooden mask and a child's sandal—and told him that the objects had been found in a cave.
According to the research consortium Trafficking Culture, Sáenz allowed archaeologist Michael Coe to display the text at theGrolier Club in New York (hence the name of the codex) where it gained international attention. It then apparently sat for years in the basement of the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology.
"It became a kind of dogma that this was a fake," study researcher Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University, said in a statement. "We decided to return and look at it very carefully, to checkcriticisms one at a time."
Evidence of authenticity
Coe, Houston and two other researchers have just published their 50-page reassessment of Grolier Codex in the journal Maya Archaeology.
Among the supporting evidence they present are radiocarbon dates that show the manuscript dates back to the 13th century. This would suggest the text was created toward the end of the early post-Classic period (A.D. 900–1250), when both Chichen Itza in Yucatan and Tula in Central Mexico were falling into decline, and the authors say that the Grolier Codex contains imagery similar to what's been found at those two archaeological sites.
Skeptics had previously argued that a hoaxer could have created a forgery using genuinely ancient Maya paper. But the researchers also argue that the codex bears features that Mayanists in the 1960s didn't fully understand, and so a forger wouldn't have been able to create such features. The manuscript, for instance, contains images of deities that hadn't yet been discovered, the authors write, and some of the paintings are rendered in a pigment known as "Maya blue," which hadn't been accurately synthesized in a lab until the 1980s.
"A reasoned weighing of evidence leaves only one possible conclusion: four intact Maya codices survive from the pre-Columbian period, and one of them is the Grolier," the authors wrote.
The three other Maya codices —which are much longer and in better condition than the Grolier Codex —are the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex and the Paris Codex, each named after the city where the text is housed. It's not that the Maya didn't produce many written records. But many texts were written on organic material like strips of paper made from the inner bark of fig or mulberrytrees, and they likely disintegrated under the wet conditions of Central America. Still, others were deliberately destroyed by European Christians who saw the manuscripts as heretical works.
Some book burnings were even described in colonial accounts that would make any historian's heart sink. For example, one 16th-century Spanish Franciscan friar named Diego de Landa wrote about finding a large number of Maya books that contained "nothing in which there was not superstition and lies of the devil," so, he and his fellow missionaries burned them all, which the Maya, unsurprisingly, "regretted to an amazing degree."
This artist’s concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. LADEE scientists announced the discovery of a ring of tiny dust particles around the moon in 2015; now, scientists have discovered even smaller dust particles around Earth's largest satellite.
Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry
The moon is shrouded by an unstable cloud of "nanodust" kicked up by cosmic impacts, and lit up by sunlight, a new study finds.
Similar clouds of teeny dust particles may envelop other airless bodies, researchers say.
Airless space objects such as the moon are surrounded by tenuous layersknown as exospheres, which are made of particles gravitationally bound to those bodies. Unlike the particles of thicker atmospheres, like that of Earth, which regularly collide with each other, those in exospheres rarely collide.[The Moon: 10 Surprising Facts]
The particles in exospheres may originate in part from the way airless bodies are worn down by their environment — for example, by meteoroid impacts or storms of high-energy particles from the sun. As such, analyzing exospheres can shed light on these "space- weathering" events.
Last year, researchers reported that the probe had detected a permanent asymmetric exosphere made of dust particles as small as 300 nanometers, or billionths of a meter in diameter, about the same width as a wavelength of orange light. The particles in this exosphere are not permanently aloft — rather, forces acting on the moon's surface sporadically kick up a certain amount of dust, said study co-author Amanda Cook, a lunar scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.
Now, scientists analyzing LADEE data have found evidence in the exosphere of much smaller nanodust that is nonetheless dense enough to detect via the sunlight it scatters. And this smaller-grain dust appears to come and go with meteoroid streams.
"We weren't actually looking for a fluctuating exosphere," Cook told Space.com. "It's just something that came out of the data."
The researchers examined two sets of data from the shadowed side of the moon, which yielded the best conditions for low-light observations. One set of data was taken near the peak of Quadrantid meteoroid stream impacts to the moon in January 2014, whereas the other set was captured three months later during a time of relatively weak meteoroid activity.
During the meteoroid stream, the spacecraft saw scattered sunlight, which is consistent with dust grains less than 60 nanometers wide. Less such light was detected during the quieter period.
This artist's concept shows the lunar dust exosphere surrounding the moon, discovered by the LADEE spacecraft. That discovery was announced in 2015. The craft's trajectory around the moon is also shown.
Credit: University of Colorado Boulder/Daniel Morgan/Jamey Szalay
A changing nanodust cloud
The nanodust cloud may envelop the moon and vary over space and time, depending on meteoroid impact rates, the researchers suggest.
"This result is exciting because if the detected signal is indeed originating from nanodust, then there seems to be much more of it than we expected to see, by several orders of magnitude," study lead author Diane Wooden, a lunar scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, told Space.com.
Increasingly, observations of other airless bodies in the solar system, such as the asteroids and Mercury, "indicate that very small particles are present in their exospheres as well," Wooden said.
Future study of these small dust grains could reveal details about the meteor showers, solar flares or the solar wind that propelled them, Wooden said, as well as details about magnetic anomalies on planetary surfaces.
Reference: Guiana Space Center: Europe's Spaceport
Reference:
Guiana Space Center: Europe's Spaceport
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Ariane 5 on the launch pad.
Credit: Arianespace
The Guiana Space Center is a facility used by the European Space Agency and the French government to launch satellites into space. The center is located near Kourou in French Guiana.
The French government began launching satellites there in 1964, and offered to share it with the European Space Agency when the latter was created in 1975. ESA contributes two-thirds of the spaceport's annual budget every year. The spaceport has also been used for launches for the United States, Japan, Canada, India and Brazil, among other countries.
Location and summary
Like many launch sites worldwide, Kourou is located near the equator. Its latitude is 5 degrees 3 minutes north, ESA says, which makes it a good location to launch missions that will operate at or near the equator. That's because the Earth's rotation acts as an extra source of propulsion for the rocket as it brings the satellite into space, saving fuel and money. It also allows for satellites to be heavier since less fuel is required.
French Guiana is also only lightly populated, with about 90 percent of the country covered by forests rather than human habitations. It's in a zone that is not prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, and its launch angle of 102 degrees allow for several kinds of missions to launch to the east or the north.
In 1962, the French space agency (CNES) started to look for a launch site close to the equator. Fourteen sites were considered among several selection criteria. Some of those criteria included political stability, the existence of a port and an airport, and enough geographical area to ensure launch security, CNES said on a webpage written in French.
On April 14, 1964, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou officially chose Guiana due to numerous attributes, such as its location near the equator, its small population, its excellent access to the Atlantic Ocean, its stable climate and the fact that there was already some infrastructure in place that could be expanded for a future space site.
The spaceport's first mission was in April 1968, when the liquid-propellant French Veronique sounding rocket lifted off, according to launch provider Arianespace. Other missions followed, with the Diamant B launch vehicle (starting in 1970) and the European Europa launcher (1971). After the Europa program ended, European launch programs continued with the Ariane series (which is ongoing today).
Ariane initially operated from the ELA-1 Launch Complex (the same complex that Europa used) between 1979 and 1989, during which time 25 Ariane vehicles were launched. (The facility is now being repurposed for Arianespace's forthcoming Vega set of lighter rockets.) ELA-2 saw 116 launches of the Ariane 2, 3 and 4 launch vehicles between June 1998 and February 2003.
ELA-3 began operations in 2008 for heavy-lift Ariane 5 launches. The program is still ongoing and is well-known for launching all five Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo ship to the International Space Station between 2008 and 2014. Arianespace's medium-launch Soyuz rocket also began operations at Guiana in 2011.
The Soyuz launch site at Europe's spaceport near Kourou, in French Guiana.
Credit: ESA/S. Corvaja
Recent notable launches
Excluding launches of various new rocket types by Arianespace, here are some of the notable missions that took place in the past few years (or will very shortly) after a launch at the Guiana Space Center.
March 2, 2004: An Ariane rocket launched the Rosetta mission that made its way to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, arriving in August 2014. After three months mapping the surface, Rosetta deployed the lander Philae that touched down on Nov. 12, 2014. Philae was supposed to hook into the comet's surface, but the harpoons failed to deploy after a decade of being in space. The solar-powered lander bounced several times and landed in a shady area, using its dwindling battery power to do just over 60 hours of work on the surface. Rosetta remains in orbit. The mission's milestones not only include the first comet landing, but finding organic molecules and a different kind of water on the comet than on Earth.
March 9, 2008: The first Automated Transfer Vehicle (named Jules Verne) left for the International Space Station. This series of five cargo vehicles was not only used to bring cargo to the orbiting complex, but also was studied to improve future space mission design. For example, sensors were used in the last mission, Georges Lemaître, which deorbited in 2015. Scientists were interested in seeing how the spacecraft broke up as it re-entered the atmosphere, and planned to use the information for future landing vehicles.
May 14, 2009: The Herschel and Planck space telescopes were brought into space together on an Ariane 5 rocket. Both observatories operated until 2013. Herschel, an infrared telescope, discovered molecular oxygen in space and also did studies of deuterium in the comet Hartley 2. The findings suggested some comets share the same kind of water as Earth. Planck mapped the cosmic microwave background, which is the leftover glow of the energy of the Big Bang.
October 2018: The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch from the center. The telescope is a next-generation successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and will be most powerful in infrared wavelengths. JWST's mission is to uncover the origins of the universe, including when the first galaxies formed. The telescope is also able to examine exoplanets and perhaps probe the atmospheres of some of the closer and larger ones, which would be a huge boon to that field of science since atmospheric studies are mainly theoretical right now.
Artist's impression of the Colossus telescope, the successor to PLANETS telescope undergoing fundraising right now.
Credit: PLANETS Foundation
If there's anything we've learned from scouring thousands of planetary candidates over the past decade, it's that finding life beyond Earth is an intensive search.
We've got observatories in space and observatories on the ground. We've got plenty of evidence of rocky planets in the habitable regions of their respective stars. What we're missing, though, is information about these planets' atmospheres. Is there oxygen or other life-friendly elements?
A group of astronomers now hope to fill this gap in our knowledge. They are raising money for a nearly $4 million project called the Polarized Light from Atmospheres of Nearby ExtraTerrestrial Systems (PLANETS) telescope. If funding, site approvals and construction all line up, they hope to have the 1.85-meter telescope ready by mid-2018.
The ultimate goal is to create a $600-million Colossus telescope with 60 independent off-axis 8 meter telescopes, all in a single structure, but that's down the road. First things first: the PLANETS telescope has less than a million dollars of funding to go before construction can begin.
The PLANETS Foundation has a team of astrophysicists and imaging experts on board, as well as several institutions and they are hoping to convince the astronomy community that they can make a valuable contribution to looking at potentially habitable planets. Jeff Kuhn, the leader of the consortium, talked about the recent discovery of a planet around Proxima Centauri as one example worthy of study.
Artist's impression of the planet around Proxima Centauri.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
"One of the interesting questions that we're all faced with is this planet around Proxima is very close to the star, and there's a lot of interest in understanding whether planetary atmospheres can exist in those conditions," said Kuhn, who is also a professor at the University of Hawaii's institute of astronomy, in an interview with Discovery News.
For a ground-based telescope, light is both an enemy and a friend. It can see light from distant stars and planets, but the atmosphere tends to scatter the light and make those objects more difficult to see. Telescopes themselves can also scatter light, even while collecting it.
The PLANETS telescope has an optical design that is supposed to minimize scattered light by eliminating a secondary mirror that often contributes to this problem. The mirrors are also intended to be lightweight and flex according to the light it receives from the star.
The off-axis telescope has several scientific targets, including atmospheres of planets in the solar system, atmospheres of exoplanets, protoplanets being born, and biosignatures (chemical signatures of life) on potentially habitable exoplanets.
Site approvals are currently being sought for an existing building on Hawaii's Haleakala, a location also known for hosting observatories such as Pan-STARRS and the Zodiacal Light Observatory. For more information on the project, visit the PLANETS Foundation website.
Are we living in a hologram? Energy fields are decoded by our brains into a 3D picture, to give the illusion of a physical world.
Despite its apparent materiality, the universe is a kind of 3-D projection and is ultimately no more real than a hologram. And some recent scientific discoveries support the conclusion that the universe is one big holographic projection.
The building blocks of reality are behaving in ways which are inexplicable and can only make sense if we think of the universe in terms of a holographic field, not an empty container filled with objects. A recent study published in Nature suggests that the universe may be one big projection, according to their simulations.
As the paper states: In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed [1] that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics.
The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.
It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a ‘duality’, that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa (see ‘Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate‘).
But although the validity of Maldacena’s ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.
In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.
In one paper [2], Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence.
In the other3, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team’s work.
In other words, our world is a projection of infinitesimally small vibrating strings which gives rise to the appearance of a physical world. Our world is a shadow of the real world where the activity is actually taking place.
As an article in Discover Magazine states reports, physicist Brian Greene believes that properties at the black hole’s surface — its event horizon — suggest the unsettling theory that our world is a mere representation of another universe, a shadow of the realm where real events take place.
Even weirder than a holographic universe is the idea that we live in massive computer simulation. We’ve seen the Matrix, right?
Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford, argues that we are almost certainly living within a computer simulation. Right now we have been able to produce very tiny simulations of the universe.
To that end, they’ve created an ultra-small version of the universe that’s down to the femto-scale. Interestingly, the researchers consider their simulation to be a forerunner to more powerful versions in which molecules, cells, and even humans themselves might someday be generated.
Here is an interview with physicist and NASA consultant Tom Campbell talking about why he believes the virtual model of reality best explains our universe:
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Video – Impossible vanishing stars could be signs of advanced alien life
Video – Impossible vanishing stars could be signs of advanced alien life
It’s a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. A team of astronomers say that the next search for advanced extraterrestrial civilisations should look for stars – or even galaxies – that have vanished without a trace, as anything so unexplainable could only be due to life far more intelligent than us.
Beatriz Villarroel at Uppsala University in Sweden says this crazy idea has been gnawing at her since her first year of graduate studies. Now she and two undergraduates have finally taken the plunge. They scoured multiple surveys of the night’s sky by eye in order to see if any of nearly 300,000 light sources disappeared from one survey to the next.
So far the results are mixed. The team found one interesting artefact that looks like it might have vanished, but they can’t be sure. “It was a depressing case in the sense that we neither could reject it and neither could we say that it was a real candidate,” says Villarroel. Although the team checked for so-called false positives, throwing out hundreds of similar disappearing objects, this one withstood all tests – but only just.
Even if the disappearance is real, there could still be an astrophysical explanation. Quasars – the bright centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes – can shut down in less than a decade and drop drastically in brightness. Stars, too, can be highly variable.
Video – Impossible vanishing stars could be signs of advanced alien life
That’s why Villarroel and her colleagues plan to search for this missing object (and any others found in the future), on the largest telescopes. If it is still not visible, then they will be able to rule out most astrophysical phenomena and say with more likelihood that it has vanished. Only then will they begin speculating about extraterrestrial causes
“I think it’s a very reasonable thing to do,” says Jay Olson at Boise State University, Idaho. “It’s a deliberate search for something very unusual, which could be hiding in existing data across time. At this stage of the game, it’s a very limited search, but it illustrates well what can be accomplished.”
Unlike Tabby’s Star, a baffling star that dips in brightness and made headlines last year when astronomers suggested that “alien megastructures” could be the culprit, these objects would have no physical culprit behind their sudden disappearance – it’s just not possible for something to suddenly vanish from the universe without a trace. Instead, Villarroel and her colleagues invoke Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So while other teams search for possible signatures of astro-engineering like the one suspected around Tabby’s star, Villarroel and her colleagues are searching for things that seem impossible. If they confirm a star that has vanished without an accompanying supernova explosion or a galaxy that has disappeared from view, there’s simply no physical explanation – save for aliens.
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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.