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...
25-10-2016
Sunken ‘Alien Spacecraft’ under Baltic Sea still baffles experts, 5 years after discovery
Sunken ‘Alien Spacecraft’ under Baltic Sea still baffles experts, 5 years after discovery
The team that discovered what is today referred to as the Baltic Sea Anomaly in 2011, point out that after five years, no one has been able to identify the object which causes electronic equipment in its vicinity to malfunction.
Artist’s impression of the anomaly by talented German artist Hauke Vagt –http://vaghauk.deviantart.com/
It turns out that there is a mysterious sunken object located at the bottom of the ocean which ever since its discovery, has baffled both experts and marine explorers. The object which bears resemblance to the legendary spaceship from Star Wars: the Millennium Falcon, is called the ‘Baltic Sea Anomaly.’ It was found by underwater explorer research group called Ocean X Team in 2011 at a depth of 91 meters. The team led by captain Peter Lindberg and co-researcher Dennis Asberg noticed the mysterious object and what appear to be drag marks behind it using side-scan sonar equipment.
However, everything was fine until the crew which found the object reported electronic malfunctions while in the vicinity of the sunken object.
“Anything electric out there, and the satellite phone as well, stopped working when we were above the object,” Professional diver Stefan Hogerborn, part of the Ocean X team, said.
“And then when we got away about 200 metres, it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work.”
The mysterious ‘Sunken UFO’ is sixty-one meters wide and measures approximately 8 meters in height. The mysterious spherical shape of the object has led people around the world to speculate what it might be, ever since its discovery, theories ranging from a giant mushroom to sunken Russian ship to an alien spaceship have been proposed by millions of people around the world.
One of the many sonar images which defy explanation due to the unnaturally geometric construction. Image Credit.
The mystery surrounding the enigmatic object at the bottom od the Baltic Sea deepened when geologist Steve Weiner said that according to his tests, the object WAS NOT a geological formation –suggesting that the structure was in fact made from “metals which nature could not reproduce itself.”
According to Volker Bruchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University: “My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago,” reports Life’s Little Mysteries.com.
Further reports indicate that Lindberg and Asberg apparently told the website Open Minds. Tv that the samples they offered for analysis were not from the object itself but from the vicinity of the object.
The most recent update regarding the anomaly was made in 2015 when Lindberg wrote for What’s Up in The Sky saying that while they had not been to the anomaly recently, they did, however, pass over it with the side-sonar and that they could not see anything new.
Lindberg said that they are planning on visiting the object again:“We will pretty much just be able to do the same things as we did in 2012. It is not for sure yet, but since we’re involved in a new TV project, it might give us the opportunity.”
Lindberg isn’t convinced that the object is actually an ET spacecraft. In response to one question about what the object might be, Lindberg responded: “I think it is something natural, however very odd in its shape. It is tough to give an explanation what it might be exactly since different scientists have different theories.
“For example; Kyle Kingman (marine geologist) are very certain it is a paleosol, Tom Flodén (marine geologist) think it might be a Manganese nodule of tremendous size, Andreas Olsson (marine archaeologist) was quite certain it must be man made after seen the blueview sonar film and videos and all other scientists who has different theories.
7 Things We Learned About 'Star Wars' Science at New York Comic Con
7 Things We Learned About 'Star Wars' Science at New York Comic Con
By Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer
Rei pauses on the planet Jakku during "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" (2015)
Credit: Lucasfilm
NEW YORK— How do lightsabers work? Do droids have rights? Would Kylo Ren's weapon slice off his wrists during combat? These are just some of the scientific questions that "Star Wars" and science experts aimed to answer Saturday (Oct. 8) here at New York Comic Con.
The event, called "Star Wars: The Science Awakens," featured seven panelists whose expertise included astrophysics, biology, psychology, filmmaking and general "Star Wars" nerdiness.
Experts assemble at the "Star Wars: The Science Awakens" panel at New York Comic Con Oct. 8, 2016. (Left to right: Janey Tracey, Christopher Mahon, Mara Wood, Travis Langley, Charles Liu, Eliot Sirota, Monique Renee)
Credit: Sarah Lewin/Space.com
1. Do lightsabers make sense scientifically?
Charles Liu, an astrophysicist at The City University of New York College of Staten Island, said the main issue with lightsabers is how much energy would be required. His explanation assumed lightsabers would be made of plasma.
"If you build plasma up to a high enough energy, they [lightsabers] actually can have a physical reaction with one another," Liu said. "So if you could contain superpowerful plasma in these magnetic bottles, or something, and they knock against one another, they might actually be able to release noise and a physical resistance."
"The problem is, if you have that much power and ability to confine that much plasma, you don't want to leave it in a stick — you want to blast and level a city with it," he added.
With today's technology, it would not be possible to get that much power into such a small, portable package, said Christopher Mahon, a writer at science/sci-fi website Outerplaces.com. It'd need about 100 times the power density of a cellphone, which isn't currently possible, he said.
"And look what happened when Samsung tried to make a slightly more powerful battery," Liu joked, referring to the company's recently recalled Note 7 smartphone. (Hint: They exploded.)
A lightsaber could be a beam of plasma shaped like a donut, circling in on itself and maybe controlled by some sort of black hole in the handle with adjustable strength, the panelists said. But even then, the plasma would give off way more excess radiation, spraying the surroundings with light and particles, unless it was somehow siphoned off into some other dimension, they said.
The group also discussed whether the Force was necessary for someone to operate a lightsaber, which would help explain any nonscientific functioning of the weapon. But Han Solo uses a lightsaber, and his connection to the Force is unclear, psychologist and "Talking Comics" podcast host Mara Wood pointed out. Ultimately, it's probably that the Force makes people better lightsaber users but isn't crucial to the weapon's function. [Is a Real Lightsaber Possible? Science Offers a New Hope]
2. Would Kylo Ren's lightsaber slice up his arms?
Eliot Sirota, a visual-effects artist and filmmaker, recalled when the internet freaked out over the first "The Force Awakens" trailer because it featured two short mini-beams coming out of the sides of villain Kylo Ren's lightsaber.
As it turns out, the design is more practical than one might expect, assuming lightsabers themselves actually worked. Sirota cited weapons expert Steve Huff, who had been on this same panel in the past.
Huff tested the design: He built a foam model of Kylo Ren's weapon and put chalk on the blades, covering every part of the light beams' surface to reflect how every edge is a cutting edge. Then, he tested the model out with a German longsword fighting style that featured similarly shaped swords. When he went through a series of movements from that fighting style, he didn't get any chalk on the wrists of his black gloves, indicating he wouldn't have cut his body.
Therefore, people with the Force who were well trained, like Jedi and Kylo Ren, would likely have nothing to fear from their own weapon, he said.
"That's also some security about somebody else just picking up your weapon, because they turn their hand slightly, and the hand goes to the floor," added Travis Langley, editor and lead writer of the book "Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind" (Sterling, 2015).
3. Do droids have rights?
Droids, like Luke Skywalker's companions R2D2 and C3PO, are beloved characters in the "Star Wars" movies, but most characters seem to treat them with complete disregard. It's unclear what rights droids have in "Star Wars" society, the panelists noted, if they have any at all.
"I'm a droid-rights advocate," Sirota said. "They're just disposable … [Scavengers] go out and just find them in the sand, and fix them up, sort of, and sell them off like a garage sale."
That behavior can seem jarring to audiences because the droids seem to be sentient, or they at least simulate sentience. After all, they seem to come up with original thoughts, meeting an artificial intelligence criterion called the Lovelace test, Mahon said. The Lovelace test evaluates whether an artificial being has creativity, and is an alternative to the Turing test (which evaluates whether it can pass as human). Moreover, the droids of the "Star Wars" universe have personalities that are more complex than anyone would probably program (such as C3PO's strange, complaining nature).
The characters in "Star Wars" seem to diverge in how they treat droids, the panelists noted: Skywalker family members seem to treat them well, but otherwise, they're pretty much viewed as machines.
A major exception, the panelists added, is cyborgs — characters who are part human and part machine, who seem to be treated as fully human. But where do you draw the line?
"Darth Vader is probably the perfect example of that," Langley said — he's transformed by and reliant on cybernetic implants, which could account for some of the drastic changes to his personality over the course of his storyline.
And perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to find that the ethical concerns in the "Star Wars" universe can be different from those facing humans on Earth. This is, after all, a civilization that relies on cloned human soldiers.
"There may be some ethical differences in the 'Star Wars' universe, given that we discuss the sentience of droids and it doesn't seem to be a topic [there]," said Monique Renee, who dresses in costume as part of the 501st and Rebel Legions and is studying zoology, biology and paleontology. "Cloning people might just be something they do there that we might not."
4. How would travel through hyperspace work?
The panelists' response to hyperspace is to cite string theory, a real-world framework that attempts to describe physics in terms of tiny, vibrating one-dimensional strings which exist in many more dimensions than we can sense. Essentially, if something like the string-theory universe were real, Mahon said, ships could travel largely through other dimensions — mostly outside of known space-time, but still leaving a "mass shadow," like a ghost, in their wakes).
"People are trying to develop a theory that explains our physics, here — not with four dimensions but with 10," Liu said. An 11-dimensional structure would tie them all together, he added — and by moving outside of our usual dimensions " you can literally jump back into any point in space-time," he said.
That might even explain the widely varying times it takes people to get around in the "Star Wars" universe, Liu added. For some string theories, the universe isn't uniform in all dimensions, so it could take longer to get to certain locations than to others.
5. Do planet-destroying lasers make sense?
"NO," Liu declared, the superweapons do not make sense.
Moreover, under the universal laws of physics, it would not be possible to funnel a star's energy into a planet without it immediately turning into a star itself, the panelists said.
If a planet were somehow vaporized, it would ultimately mess with the orbits of other planets in the system, Liu added. For instance, if Earth were turned to rubble, it would eventually become a ring system around the sun and, in turn, slowly change Mars' and Venus' orbits a bit. Saturn's rings, for instance, are held in place by shepherd moons that keep the rings from deviating.
6. Would destroying the Death Star ruin the economy?
An audience member brought up a theory, discussed by The Film Theorists on YouTube: that the destruction of the Death Star superweapon would be devastating to the galactic economy. The panelists, however, doubted that would be the case.
"A couple of astronomers and NASA technicians have said 'Star Wars' is the land of infinite fuel, because all the starships can go pretty much anywhere," Mahon said. "If you're dealing with star systems with thousands of planets across a galaxy, the resources are just incalculable. And the Galactic Empire loves superweapons; that's one of their big things. So they probably have the logistics system in place to make it happen."
"The Empire as a government doesn't care about how everyone else is doing; they just take what they want," Sirota added. "Let's just go to a planet and strip-mine it and take all their resources, and — 'Oh, sorry guys, see you later; we're going to go build a Star Destroyer.'" [Photos: 'Star Wars and the Power of Costume' Exhibition]
7. Is "Star Wars" science fiction or fantasy?
Janey Tracey, managing editor of Outerplaces.com, said this question puts "Star Wars" fans in a bind: It's either fantasy, or you have to accept midi-chlorians as real (the widely disliked biological explanation for the Force given in the series' prequel movies). Part of the reason people disliked that narrative turn, the panelists said, was that viewers didn't feel the need to understand the science behind the Force to appreciate the movies' storylines.
"'Star Wars' is really apart from something like 'Star Trek,' for me, because you look at 'Star Trek,' and the science is just so important to the fans and the creators," Renee said. "[In] 'Star Wars,' the science is more of a framework to hang the story off of. It really wasn't quite as important. It's there; it's just meant to explain what's going on, and you suspend your disbelief and just go with it."
That discussion raised another question: "Why has their science advanced so little in 1,000 years?" Langley asked. The panelists speculated that the dark days of the universe could have stalled technological development, as in Earth's Middle Ages, or perhaps the existence of the Force itself made technology irrelevant. After all, when the Force was weak, the technological Empire rose. [10 Real Alien Worlds That Resemble 'Star Wars' Planets]
"Star Wars" "could be science fiction, science fantasy, real — it just isn't necessarily human," Liu said later in the panel. "The fact that they look human is utterly coincidental if they're that far away and it's that long ago."
Ultimately, though, "Star Wars" is based on a traditional "hero's journey" narrative — the heroic quests that come up again and again in mythology around the world. Series' creator George Lucas purposely followed that format, the panelists said, and it's part of the reason the movies resonate so immediately with an audience (and also why people thought "The Force Awakens" ripped off "A New Hope"; both films hewed to that narrative.) "Star Trek," on the other hand, focuses on humanity's overall journey into the future.
"'Star Wars' is the hero's journey," Sirota said. "'Star Trek' is the human journey."
Mission to Mars: Here Are All of the Red Planet Plans in the Works
Mission to Mars: Here Are All of the Red Planet Plans in the Works
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
President Barack Obama announced Tuesday (Oct. 11) that NASA will send astronauts to Mars before the end of the 2030s, reaffirming a directive he gave the space agency back in 2010. But there's no guarantee that NASA will get there first; several other organizations also have the Red Planet in their sights, and on more aggressive timelines.
NASA is taking a multistep approach to its ultimate goal of putting boots on Mars.
The journey begins in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which has hosted rotating crews continuously since November 2000. During this time, NASA and its ISS partners have been learning more and more about how to support astronauts on space missions.
This effort took a big step forward this past March, when NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko wrapped up an unprecedented11-month mission aboard the orbiting lab that gave researchers new data about the physiological and psychological effects of long-duration spaceflight. (A Mars mission will be long-duration; it takes six to nine months to get to the Red Planet using currently available propulsion technology.)
In the next 10 years, NASA plans to extend the reach of human spaceflight out near the moon, to test spaceflight gear — such as the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion crew capsule, both of which are in development — in a "proving ground" in deep space. For example, in the mid-2020s, the agency plans to send astronauts out to lunar orbit, to visit an asteroid boulder dragged there by a robotic spacecraft. (The boulder-snagging first part of this Asteroid Redirect Mission is scheduled to launch in the early 2020s.)
After the proving ground comes the journey to Mars itself. Current plans call for sending astronauts to Mars orbit in the early 2030s, with trips to the surface coming sometime after that. NASA officials have said they hope to eventually set up a small outpost on the Red Planet, where astronauts would search for signs of Mars life and perform other research. [6 Private Deep Space Habitats to Pave Way to Mars]
Mars Base Camp
NASA officials have stressed that the agency's journey to Mars will be a group effort.
In this spirit of cooperation, earlier this year, aerospace company Lockheed Martin unveiled its proposal for "Mars Base Camp," a 132-ton (120 metric tons) Red Planet space station composed primarily of two Orion capsules and two habitat modules/science laboratories.
Mars Base Camp — a collaboration involving NASA, its international partners and private industry — would support up to six astronauts, who would stay aboard for a year or so. During this time, they would operate robots on the Martian surface, look for signs of life in samples of Red Planet dirt and rock, and take trips to the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, among other tasks, Lockheed representatives have said.
Mars Base Camp could conceivably be established as early as 2028, Lockheed representatives have said. The space station would also be a way station of sorts: Shortly after the first orbital mission, other crews would head down to the Red Planet, company representatives have said, though they have not yet discussed those surface plans in detail.
Artist's illustration of SpaceX's planned Interplanetary Transport System spaceship arriving at Mars.
Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX: A huge Mars colony
SpaceX's dreams are bigger than an orbiting Martian space station or small research outpost on the surface. Last month, the company's billionaire founder and CEO, Elon Musk, announced that SpaceX aims to help establish a million-person Mars colony in the next 50 to 100 years.
To make this happen, SpaceX plans to build the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which will combine the most powerful rocket in history with a 100-person spaceship that will ferry settlers to and from the Red Planet. [SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport for Mars in Images]
If everything goes perfectly, Musk said, the fully reusable ITS could launch its first crews in 2024. But SpaceX also aims to launch uncrewed missions using its Dragon capsule and Falcon Heavy rocket beginning in 2018, to test out landing systems and other technologies critical to the colonization effort.
This is no lark on SpaceX's part. Musk has stressed repeatedly that he founded SpaceX back in 2002 primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species, and he said during the ITS unveiling last month that the main reason he has been "accumulating assets" over the years is to fund Mars colonization.
Mars One: One-way trip
SpaceX isn't the only group angling for a Mars colony. The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One has the same goal, though on a much smaller scale.
Mars One plans to launch robotic precursor missions to the Red Planet in 2020, 2022 and 2024, to lay the groundwork for the first settlers, who will launch in 2026 and land on Mars in 2027. (Earth and Mars align favorably for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)
If everything works out, Mars One will continue sending four-person crews to the Red Planet at every launch opportunity, gradually building up a permanent, self-sustaining settlement. At the moment, there are no plans to bring any of these colonists home. (That's in contrast to SpaceX's system, in which spaceships will be flying back and forth between Earth and Mars repeatedly, giving Mars pioneers the option to come back.)
Mars One has estimated that it will cost about $6 billion to get the first four pioneers to Mars. The organization aims to raise most of this money by staging a global media event around the entire project, from astronaut selection, to launch, to the colonists' time on the Red Planet.
Other projects possible
It's possible other crewed Mars efforts will take shape in the near future.
For example, billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who leads the private spaceflight company Blue Origin, has said he aims to help get millions of people living and working in space eventually. Blue Origin has already launched multiple test flights of its suborbital New Shepard vehicle and recently announced that it's developing a big orbital rocket known as New Glenn.
Bezos also mentioned that the company plans to develop something called New Armstrong but revealed no details about the project. Will New Armstrong, or another Blue Origin effort down the road, help get astronauts to Mars? We'll just have to wait and see.
In the past, both the European Space Agency and Russia have expressed interest in putting boots on Mars, as has China (though China is working on getting people to the moon first). These players could end up making a push toward the Red Planet, either alone or as part of a coalition — perhaps NASA's coalition (though current U.S. laws prohibit extensive cooperation with China in spaceflight endeavors). To make a long story short: There's a lot happening, so stay tuned!
Infrared images of Uranus' two hemispheres taken with the Keck telescope July 11 and 12, 2004. The planet's north pole points down and to the right.
Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory
Weird waves in Uranus' rings suggest there might be two tiny, unknown moonlets orbiting there.
Researchers know little about the distant, icy planet Uranus compared to other planets in the solar system. Only one spacecraft has flown by it, Voyager 2 in 1986, and scientists have pieced together the rest of their observations through views from Earth-based and orbiting telescopes. The planet has rings — narrower and much darker in color than most of Saturn's, with uneven widths and strange, sharp edges — and is tilted dramatically on its side, giving rise to decades-long seasons and extreme weather patterns.
Uranus has a crowded consortium of at least 27 moons named for literary figures, some orbiting in tight, unstable-looking formations. And now, new analysis of data from the Voyager 2 flyby suggests that two more tiny moons lurk even closer to the planet than those already known. [Photos of Uranus: A Strange, Tilted Planet]
Robert Chancia, a graduate student at University of Idaho, Moscow, investigated the patterns created when Voyager 2 beamed radio waves through the planet's rings toward Earth. Based on how much light makes it through the rings, researchers can discern how much ring material there is at a particular spot, Chancia told Space.com.
This image of Uranus from Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, taken in 1997, caught the planet's rotation and the movement of many of its moons over the course of 90 minutes. The three colors on the body of the planet correspond to three wavelengths of infrared light; blue indicates clearest atmospheric conditions, penetrating further down, whereas green shows a haze of methane gas and red shows hydrogen.
Credit: NASA/JPL/STScI
And he found something unexpected around two thin inner rings, called alpha and beta: "At the edges of the rings … it's almost like the amount of stuff is going up and down in a periodic fashion that looks kind of like a wave, with crests and troughs," Chancia said. "It seems consistent with something disturbing the rings there," he added.
The waves' composition seem to reflect the rippling wake of a passing moon, Chancia said. Plugging the data into a model used to discover one of Saturn's moons, the group found that the waves could be caused by small moonlets orbiting just outside each of the rings.
Although the moons would have moved on from their exact positions 30 years ago, the waves reveal their approximate masses and radial locations, which likely still apply today, Chancia said. To try and verify the new moons' existence, Chancia combined Voyager 2 images of the planet in which the moons should have been visible. While other known moons were highlighted using this method, the potential new moonlets did not materialize.
"Based on the amplitude of this wave pattern and that distance from the ring … and our attempts to find the moon in images, it basically points toward if they exist, they're pretty tiny," Chancia said. That means the moons are likely smaller than 3 miles (5 kilometers) in radius, which would make them smaller and closer in than any of Uranus' known moons. "The most likely scenario is that it's a small object that's right at the level of the noise in the images."
Understanding Uranus' rings, and the moons interacting with them, can help reveal more about the planet's gravity and interior structure. Eight of Uranus' nine main rings are very thin, less than 10 km (6 miles) thick, Chancia said. Researchers aren't sure how the rings stay narrow over time when the particle collisions should cause them to spread out, or how long they've existed around the planet, but the actions of "shepherd moons" orbiting along with the rings may be keeping some of them in line. The moons Cordelia and Ophelia appear to keep Uranus' outermost, widest ring relatively confined between around 20 and 100 km (12 and 62 miles) in width, for instance, and a similar setup may corral one of Saturn's rings.
"Finding a small moon like this that could be helping to keep the alpha and beta rings confined and shed some light on that story could help — or just confuse things more," Chancia said.
Mark Showalter, a researcher at SETI Institute in California, told New Scientistthat the moons' presence is "certainly a very plausible possibility." Chancia said that Showalter and others can investigate data about Uranus from the Hubble Space Telescope to try to scope out traces of the two new moons. A lot of what scientists know about Uranus came from similar telescope observations, and this data offers the best opportunity to verify the moons' existence, Chancia said — at least until some future mission approaches the ice giant once again.
The new work has been accepted to The Astronomical Journal, and is available online at the preprint site arXiv.
What's Up with 'Niku'? Object's Weird Orbit Puzzles Scientists
What's Up with 'Niku'? Object's Weird Orbit Puzzles Scientists
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor
An artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located about 4 billion miles from the Sun.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
A mysterious object in the outer reaches of the solar system is revolving around the sun in an abnormal way, and scientists currently cannot explain why.
The object has been nicknamed Niku, a Chinese adjective that means "rebellious," by the group of researchers who announced its discovery in August. This name was chosen because the object's orbit is retrograde, meaning it moves in the opposite direction of nearly everything else in the solar system.
Niku was discovered by researchers who used the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii, and it lies in the outer reaches of the solar system, about 35 times farther away from the sun than Earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune. [The Pan-STARRS Asteroid Hunting Telescope]
Niku's orbit is inclined at an extreme 110-degree tilt with respect to the relatively thin, flat zone in which the eight major planets of the solar system orbit. In contrast, most trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are in much less inclined orbits.
The retrograde and extremely tilted nature of the orbits of Niku and another TNO nicknamed "Drac" led the scientists to try to find out whether there were objects with similar orbital characteristics that were listed in the Minor Planet Center database (which contains information about more than 1,000 small bodies in the solar system). They discovered four other objects with orbits that were either retrograde or nearly retrograde (meaning is orbit is inclined by less than, but close to, 90 degrees) and were also highly tilted. Two of these objects are Centaurs — bodies that orbit between Jupiter and Neptune.
A gif showing Niku moving across the sky, taken with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii.
The scientists were surprised to find that all six of these objects appear to orbit within a common plane.
"They're not randomly distributed in the sky — they all seem to be aligned," study co-author Matthew Payne, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Space.com.
Computer simulations that the researchers carried out suggest that Niku and Drac may have been in their orbits for hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the scientists suggest that there may be more extremely inclined objects in this group.
It remains uncertain why these six objects apparently cluster together. Astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena recently found that they may have been scattered off-kilter from the rest of the solar system by the gravitational pull of "Planet Nine," a world about 10 times Earth's mass that may exist about 500 times farther away from the sun than Earth.
Another possible origin for this group is "galactic tides." As the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, it moves up and down within the disk of the galaxy, and "tidal forces are exerted on the solar system that are thought in general to have a variety of effects, such as disturbing the Oort Cloud and throwing comets into the solar system," Payne said.
The scientists detailed their findings Oct. 17 at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.
Mysterious Cosmic Objects Erupting in X-rays Discovered
Mysterious Cosmic Objects Erupting in X-rays Discovered
Astronomers have found a pair of extraordinary cosmic objects that dramatically burst in X-rays. This discovery, obtained with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory, may represent a new class of explosive events found in space.
The mysterious X-ray sources flare up and become about a hundred times brighter in less than a minute, before returning to original X-ray levels after about an hour. At their peak, these objects qualify as ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) that give off hundreds to thousands of times more X-rays than typical binary systems where a star is orbiting a black hole or neutron star.
Animation of flaring X-ray source in Galaxy NGC 5128. Credits: NASA/CXC/UA/J.Irwin et al.
This image shows the location in galaxy NGC 5128 of a remarkable source that dramatically flares in X-rays unlike any ever seen.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama, who led the study that appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature. “Astronomers have seen many different objects that flare up, but these may be examples of an entirely new phenomenon.”
While magnetars – young neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields – have been known to produce bright and rapid flares in X-rays, these newly discovered objects are different in key ways.
First, magnetars only take a few seconds to tens of seconds to decline in X-rays after a flare. Secondly, these new flaring objects are found in populations of old stars in elliptical galaxies, which are spherical or egg-shaped galaxies that are composed mostly of older stars.
This makes it unlikely that these new flaring objects are young, astronomically speaking, like magnetars are thought to be. Also, these objects are brighter in X-rays during their “calm” periods.
“These flares are extraordinary,” said Peter Maksym, a co-author from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “For a brief period, one of the sources became one of the brightest ULX to ever be seen in an elliptical galaxy.”
When they are not flaring, these sources appear to be normal binary systems where a black hole or neutron star is pulling material from a companion star similar to the Sun. This indicates that the flares do not significantly disrupt the binary system.
While the nature of these flares is unknown, the team has begun to search for answers. One idea is that the flares represent episodes when matter being pulled away from a companion star falls rapidly onto a black hole or neutron star. This could happen when the companion makes its closest approach to the compact object in an eccentric orbit. Another explanation could involve matter falling onto an intermediate-mass black hole, with a mass of about 800 times that of the Sun for one source and 80 times that of the Sun for the other.
“Now that we've discovered these flaring objects, observational astronomers and theorists alike are going to be working hard to figure out what’s happening,” said co-author Gregory Sivakoff of the University of Alberta.
One of the sources, located near and presumably associated with the galaxy NGC 4636 at a distance of 47 million light years, was observed with Chandra to flare once. Five flares were detected from the other source, which is located near the galaxy NGC 5128 at a distance of 14 million light years. Four of these flares were seen with Chandra and one with XMM-Newton.
The team looked at the X-ray variation of several thousand X-ray sources in Chandra observations of 70 nearby galaxies. Although several examples of flaring X-ray sources were found, none exhibited the behavior of the giant rapid flares reported here.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations.
“We hebben nog nooit zoiets gezien”: Astronomen spotten mysterieuze objecten in de ruimte
“We hebben nog nooit zoiets gezien”: Astronomen spotten mysterieuze objecten in de ruimte
Wetenschappers hebben twee mysterieuze objecten in de ruimte ontdekt die spectaculaire uitbarstingen van röntgenstraling vertonen. Ze zijn nog nooit eerder gezien.
Mogelijk gaat het om een nieuwe klasse van explosieve gebeurtenissen in de ruimte. Niemand weet precies waar we mee te maken hebben.
Deze mysterieuze objecten, die zich in twee verschillende sterrenstelsels bevinden, lijken op ultraheldere röntgenbronnen (ultraluminous X-ray sources, afgekort tot ULXs), maar hun ongewone gedrag komt niet overeen met bekende kosmische fenomenen.
Veel langer
De vreemde röntgenbronnen vlammen op en worden in minder dan een minuut tijd honderd keer zo helder, om in de loop van een uur weer af te zwakken tot het normale niveau. Daarmee duren de uitbarstingen veel langer dan die van bekende objecten.
Hoe dit gedrag ontstaat is nog onduidelijk. Eén van de mogelijkheden is dat het dubbelsterren betreft, bestaande uit een normale ster en een zwart gat of een neutronenster.
De opvlammingen zouden ontstaan wanneer de ster zijn zware begeleider zo dicht nadert, dat er materie aan hem wordt onttrokken.
Volstrekt nieuw fenomeen
“We hebben nog nooit zoiets gezien,” zegt astronoom Jimmy Irwin van de Universiteit van Alabama. “Astronomen hebben al veel verschillende opvlammende objecten gezien, maar dit zijn mogelijk voorbeelden van een volstrekt nieuw fenomeen.”
Eén van de röntgenbronnen bevindt zich in de buurt van het 47 miljoen lichtjaar verre sterrenstelsel NGC 4636. Van dit object is één uitbarsting waargenomen, in februari 2003.
De andere bron staat in de buurt van het stelsel Centaurus A, dat 14 miljoen lichtjaar van ons is verwijderd. Daarvan zijn tussen 2007 en 2014 vijf uitbarstingen geregistreerd.
Eén van de helderste
“Deze opvlammingen zijn buitengewoon,” zei Peter Maksym van het Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Korte tijd werd één van de bronnen één van de helderste ULXs die we ooit hebben gezien in een elliptisch sterrenstelsel.”
Astronomen proberen de komende tijd uit te zoeken wat hier precies aan de hand is, aldus Gregory Sivakoff van de Universiteit van Alberta.
SPOREN OBJECT BODEM OOSTZEE WIJZEN NAAR ATLANTIS ( VIDEO )
SPOREN OBJECT BODEM OOSTZEE WIJZEN NAAR ATLANTIS ( VIDEO )
De afgelopen jaren deden we regelmatig verslag over een mysterieus object op de bodem de Oostzee, waarvan velen denken dat het een gecrashte UFO is.
Na uitgebreid onderzoek is in ieder geval duidelijk dat het een kunstmatige constructie is en dat het dus niet natuurlijk is ontstaan.
Vooralsnog blijft het vreemde object op de bodem van de Oostzee nog een raadsel, alhoewel er nu een aantal mensen zijn die denken dit mysterie te hebben opgelost.
Afgelopen zomer haalden ze de internationale pers met het bericht dat ze eigenlijk per ongeluk ontdekt hadden dat er een groot UFO-achtig object op de bodem van de Oostzee lag.
Zoals op onderstaande foto te zien is, bedraagt de doorsnede van het object ongeveer 60 meter en is er op de bodem van de zee ook een soort spoor te zien van ongeveer 300 meter lang, alsof het object gecrashed is en doorgeschoven op de zeebodem
Volgens een groep onderzoekers die bekendstaan onder de naam Resonance Group is het raadsel van het Oostzee object opgelost en hebben we hier te maken met een oud monument van ongeveer 14.000 jaar oud, thuishoort in het late paleolithicum en waarschijnlijk onderdeel vormt van het oude Atlantis.
Zij denken dat dat wat er uitziet als een soort landingsbaan een ceremoniële laan is die je wel vaker aantreft bij tempelcomplexen in centraal Amerika en Mexico.
Daarnaast hebben ze een aantal tekens (hiëroglyfen) ontdekt die zouden kunnen wijzen op het voormalige Atlantis.
Al eerder werd duidelijk dat er metalen zijn gebruikt in de constructie van dit object, waarvan er één titanium is. Dit laatste is weer een materiaal dat wordt geassocieerd met de bouw van ruimteschepen en dergelijke.
Volgens de Human Resonance Group zorgen de metalen deeltjes in de constructie ervoor dat er een geleider ontstaat die elektromagnetische golven omzet in een soort vortex.
Dit zou dan volgens hen verklaren waarom alle elektrische apparatuur in de buurt van het object uitvalt. Deze vortex zorgt dan voor verstoringen, vergelijkbaar met die die optreden in buurt van piramides, zoals dat is ervaren door zowel militaire als civiele piloten in landen als Egypte, Mexico en Guatemala.
Titanium in de constructie en het uitvallen van elektrische apparatuur zijn natuurlijk ook beiden kenmerken van het UFO fenomeen. Bij de bouw van UFO's wordt waarschijnlijk titanium gebruikt en er zijn talloze verhalen en voorbeelden bekend waarbij de elektrische stroom in de buurt van UFO’s is uitgevallen.
Nu hoeft misschien het één het ander niet uit te sluiten en is het heel goed mogelijk dat dit object stamt uit het tijdperk van Atlantis.
Of het dan een monument was, of dat het een totaal andere functie had, staat dan nog open. En wie weet, was er in de tijd van Atlantis wel sprake van druk ruimteverkeer met andere planeten en speelde het object op de bodem van de Oostzee daar een bepaalde rol in.
Als het object op de bodem van de Oostzee ons iets duidelijk maakt, dan is dat het feit dat we zo goed als niets weten over onze eigen menselijke geschiedenis.
Er zijn verschillende manieren om beelden te krijgen van de Maan, maar de meest eenvoudige is een telescoop.
Wanneer je daar dan doorheen kijkt en je ziet iets, dan kun je er gevoegelijk vanuit gaan dat het echt is.
Een Youtube gebruiker die bekendstaat onder de naam UFOvni2012 heeft een video online gezet waarin beelden voorkomen van de maan die gemaakt zijn met een telescoop.
De telescoop die gebruikt is heet Celestron Nexstar Evolution 9.25. Het zegt ons weinig, maar kenners waarschijnlijk wel.
Hoe dan ook, met deze telescoop wordt iets ontdekt op de noordpool van de maan en wanneer wat verder wordt ingezoomd, dan blijkt dat een merkwaardig gebouw te zijn.
Dat roept dan een aantal interessante vragen op.
De eerste is natuurlijk dat er zich volgens NASA op de maan geen vreemde gebouwen bevinden die misschien toebehoren of toebehoorden aan beschavingen die of op de maan bivakkeerden of daar misschien zelfs wel woonden.
De tweede vraag die boven komt, is alleen voor de aanhangers van de platte aarde theorie:
Waarom zou men als de aarde plat is en de maan niets anders is dan een hologram die in de lucht hangt, de moeite nemen om daar op de noordpool een gebouw te projecteren? Het zou kunnen natuurlijk en ook dat daar dan een reden voor zou zijn en mocht iemand die (denken te) weten, dan horen wij het graag.
Al met al blijft dit een interessante opname, want het is weer eens wat anders dan opnamen van NASA waarvan je nooit weet of ermee geknoeid is of niet.
Dan geldt uiteraard ook voor UFOvni2012, alhoewel we er vooralsnog vanuit gaan dat het gebouw op de noordpool van de maan inderdaad is geregistreerd door zijn telescoop.
Nieuw onderzoek trekt versnelde uitdijing van universum in twijfel
Nieuw onderzoek trekt versnelde uitdijing van universum in twijfel
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het bewijs voor de versnelde uitdijing – dat drie astronomen in 2011 de Nobelprijs opleverde – is bij nader inzien toch niet zo overtuigend.
Aan het eind van de jaren negentig kwamen drie astronomen tot de conclusie dat het universum versneld uitdijde. Ze baseerden zich op een analyse van supernova’s van type Ia en mochten jaren later – in 2011 – een Nobelprijs in ontvangst nemen voor hun ontdekking. De wetenschappelijke wereld heeft de uitdijing van het universum inmiddels omarmd en zelfs een mysterieuze substantie in het leven geroepen die de drijvende kracht zou zijn achter de versnelde uitdijing: donkere energie.
Dunnetjes Maar misschien moeten we nog eens goed nadenken over de versnelde uitdijing, zo suggereren onderzoekers van de universiteit van Oxford in het blad Scientific Reports. Het bewijs ervoor is – bij nader inzien – namelijk wat dunnetjes.
3 sigma De onderzoekers trekken die conclusie nadat ze 740 supernova’s van type Ia bestudeerden. Dat zijn er ongeveer tien keer meer dan de Nobelprijswinnende astronomen in de jaren negentig van de vorige eeuw analyseerden. “En we ontdekten dat het bewijs voor versnelde uitdijing hooguit een 3 sigma is, zoals natuurkundigen dat zeggen,” zo vertelt onderzoeker Subir Sarkar. “Dat is veel minder dan de “5 sigma-standaard” die nodig is om een ontdekking van fundamentele betekenis te claimen.”
Over sigma Sigma vertelt iets over hoe zeker wetenschappers van hun zaak zijn. Wanneer ze spreken over 5 sigma dan is de kans dat hun gegevens op toeval berusten één op 3 miljoen. Hebben ze het over 3 sigma dan is de kans dat hun gegevens op toeval berusten 1 op 1000. “Een vergelijkbaar voorbeeld is de recente suggestie dat er met behulp van de Large Hadron Collider een nieuw deeltje ontdekt was met een massa van 750 GeV,” legt Sarkar uit. “In eerste instantie had het een 3.9 en 3.4 sigma-meting in december. Maar nieuwe gegevens lieten in augustus zien dat de significantie gedaald was naar minder dan 1 sigma. Het was gewoon een statistische fluctuatie en het deeltje bestaat niet.”
Constante uitdijing En ook over de versnelde uitdijing van het universum zijn de onderzoekers dus nu iets minder zeker. Sterker nog: het nieuwe onderzoek wijst erop dat het universum heel constant uitdijt. Het zou goed kunnen verklaren waarom we maar geen grip kunnen krijgen op de aard van donkere energie – de hypothetische drijvende kracht achter de uitdijing – want als het universum niet uitdijt, is er ook geen donkere energie.
Kosmische achtergrondstraling Maar hoe zit het dan met al die andere gegevens die het idee van een sneller uitdijend universum onderschrijven? Je moet dan bijvoorbeeld denken aan de kosmische achtergrondstraling. “De kosmische achtergrondstraling wordt niet direct beïnvloed door donkere energie,” merkt Sarkar fijntjes op. Hij wijst er tevens op dat veel vervolgonderzoek uitgevoerd is met de gedachten dat het universum versneld uitdijt en dat donker energie daar achter zit, in het achterhoofd.
“Natuurlijk moet er nog veel meer werk verzet worden om de natuurkundige wereld hiervan te overtuigen, maar ons werk laat zien dat een belangrijke pijler van het standaardmodel van de kosmologie vrij wankel is. Hopelijk leidt het tot betere analyses van kosmologische data en inspireert het theoretici om genuanceerdere kosmologische modellen te bestuderen.”
'Planet Nine' Can't Hide Much Longer, Scientists Say
'Planet Nine' Can't Hide Much Longer, Scientists Say
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of Planet Nine, a world about 10 times more massive than Earth that may lie undiscovered in the outer solar system.
Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
Planet Nine's days of lurking unseen in the dark depths of the outer solar system may be numbered.
The hypothetical giant planet, which is thought to be about 10 times more massive than Earth, will be discovered within 16 months or so, astronomer Mike Brown predicted.
"I'm pretty sure, I think, that by the end of next winter — not this winter, next winter — I think that there'll be enough people looking for it that … somebody's actually going to track this down," Brown said during a news conference Wednesday (Oct. 19) at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Brown said that eight to 10 groups are currently looking for the planet. [The Evidence for 'Planet Nine' in Images (Gallery)]
At the "next one of these [DPS-EPSC meetings], we'll be talking about finding Planet Nine instead of just looking for it," added Brown, who's based at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.
That would be a pretty quick path from hypothetical planet to confirmed world. The existence of Planet Nine was seriously proposed for the first time just in 2014, by astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, respectively.
Sheppard and Trujillo noted that the dwarf planet Sedna, the newfound object 2012 VP113 and several other bodies far beyond Pluto share certain odd orbital characteristics, a coincidence that would make sense if their paths through space had been shaped by an unseen, giant "perturber" in the region.
The researchers suggested that this putative planet is perhaps two to 15 times more massive than Earth and lies hundreds of astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance, about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
This interpretation was bolstered in January of this year by Brown and fellow Caltech astronomer Konstantin Batygin, who found evidence of a perturber's influence in the orbits of a handful of additional distant objects. This "Planet Nine," as Batygin and Brown dubbed the putative world, likely contains about 10 Earth masses and orbits on a highly elliptical path whose aphelion (farthest distance from the sun) is about 1,000 AU, the researchers said. (For perspective, Pluto gets just 49.3 AU from the sun at aphelion.)
The evidence for Planet Nine's existence has continued to grow over the past nine months, as several different research teams have determined that the orbits of other small, distant objects appear to have been sculpted as well.
One team, led by Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona, discussed four such objects at the DPS/EPSC meeting Wednesday. And Brown's team, led by Elizabeth Bailey of Caltech, announced at the meeting on Tuesday (Oct. 18) that Planet Nine appears to have tilted the orbits of all eight "official" planets by 6 degrees relative to the sun.
The ongoing Planet Nine research also includes efforts to pin down where the world might be in the sky these days. This is a key part of the discovery effort, since a blind search for an object so far away, and with such a huge and elliptical orbit, has little chance of success in the near term, Brown has said.[Evidence Mounts for Existence of 'Planet Nine' (Video)]
It's likely that Planet Nine is currently at or near aphelion, located perhaps 1,000 AU from the sun, in a patch of sky measuring about 400 square degrees, Brown said. (For comparison, the full moon viewed from Earth covers about 0.5 degrees of sky.)
Astronomers have said Planet Nine is perhaps four times wider than Earth, and such an object would be easily visible with professional-grade equipment if it were relatively close to Earth, Brown explained. In addition, planets on highly elliptical orbits spend most of their time near aphelion, since they're traveling most slowly on this part of their path, he said.
An object four times bigger than Earth that's located at 1,000 AU would have a magnitude of about +25 on astronomers' brightness scale, Brown added.
"This is well within reach of the giant telescopes," he said. "The Subaru telescope, I think, on Mauna Kea, [in Hawaii] — the Japanese national telescope — is the prime instrument for doing the search. But there are a lot of other people who have clever ideas on how to find it, too, that are trying with their own telescopes."
So which research team will ultimately find Planet Nine? Brown said he isn't sure, and he stressed that getting credit for the historic discovery should be a secondary concern for astronomers.
"There are a lot of people looking, and we are trying as hard as we can to tell people where to look," he said. "We want it to be found."
Scientists from NASA’s New Horizons mission have identified some cloud candidates in the atmosphere of Pluto, using images taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, during the spacecraft’s July 2015 flight through the Pluto system. None of the features can be confirmed as clouds with stereo imaging, but the scientists say they are suggestive of possible, rare condensation clouds.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
PASADENA, Calif. — Scientists may have spotted more than a half dozen clouds in Pluto's hazy atmosphere, researchers announced today (Oct. 18).
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in July 2015, revealing a bounty of unexpected details about the frozen world. For instance, the mission discovered that Pluto possesses a complex, layered atmosphere.
"We've noticed a large number of concentric layers of haze, more than two dozen," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said during a news conference here at the 2016 American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science meeting. "These haze layers stretch very high into the sky — more than a half million feet, or 200 kilometers." [Photos of Pluto and Its Moons]
Preliminary images of Pluto hinted at the presence of a cloud in the dwarf planet's atmosphere. Now, Stern and his colleagues have revealed seven bright features that might be clouds in that world's exotic skies.
"If there are clouds, it would mean the weather on Pluto is even more complex than we imagined," Stern said in a statement from NASA.
All these potential clouds "are similar in that they are very low-altitude, and all are very similar in length scales, measured in kilometers or tens of kilometers," Stern said. "We're not seeing decks or banks of clouds — we're seeing individual, discrete cloud features," he said.
All seven of these features lie near the terminator, the dividing line between day and night, "either near dawn or dusk, which suggests they may be clouds, because there are cooler conditions there where condensation processes are likely to occur," Stern said.
Computer models of Pluto's atmosphere suggest that the most likely place to find clouds on Pluto are at low altitudes, where the seven features presented today are located. The models suggest that any such clouds are likely made of minor trace constituents of Pluto's atmosphere, such as acetylene, ethane and hydrogen cyanide, Stern said.
The researchers cannot confirm that these bright features are clouds because New Horizons cannot confirm their altitude and thus whether they are separate from the surface, Stern said.
"To confirm if these features are clouds, we need to go back to Pluto with new instruments and be there for longer periods with something like a Pluto orbiter," he said.
If these clouds do exist, it remains unknown how long they might last, the researchers said.
"One might expect, since they're seen near the terminator, that they're short-lived phenomena seen near dawn or dusk each day on Pluto," Stern said. "A day on Pluto is equivalent to 6.4 days on Earth, almost a week."
Stern noted that Pluto is not nearly as cloudy as Earth — its hazy skies appear 99 percent free of clouds.
"The situation on Pluto is like that in the western United States, where the skies are not cloudy all day," Stern said.
Pluto
Pluto, the most famous dwarf planet in our solar system, underwent a well-publicized (and somewhat controversial) reclassification that took away its title as the ninth and most distant planet from the sun. So, how well do you know this fascinating world?
The New Horizons spacecraft is currently about 3.4 billion miles (5.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and about 340 million miles (540 million km) beyond Pluto, speeding away from the sun at about 32,400 mph (52,100 km/h). The last bits of data that the mission gathered are scheduled to be transmitted to Earth on Oct. 23, but it will still take a while for scientists to analyze all of the information.
"The hard work of understanding the Pluto system is going to take years — it's much more complex and nuanced than we ever expected," Stern said.
Editor's note: This article previously stated that New Horizons is currently 3.4 billion miles beyond Pluto; it is 340 million miles beyond Pluto.
Cosmic rays may feed alien life found on Earth and potentially on other planets, researchers suggest.
Credit: NSF / J. Yang
Extreme microbes that live in hostile places on Earth may feed off of cosmic rays that zip through space, according to a study of a bizarre bacterium thriving deep in a dark gold mine.
If life exists on other planets such as Mars, it too could be gobbling upcosmic rays in order to survive, the new study suggests.
"When you have radiation penetrating deep below the surface, where there might be water on Mars or [Jupiter's moon] Europa, then it could start chemical reactions that life could use," said study author Dimitra Atri, a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle. Organisms that live off of galactic cosmic rays could even dwell on rogue planets that are not bound to any star and instead drift throughout interstellar space, Atri added. [Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures]
Where there's no light
Life on Earth relies largely on energy from the sun. Light drivesphotosynthesis, which, in turn, supplies the nutrients that most organisms use, either directly or indirectly, in order to survive. Still, if light is not available, life can find other sources of energy, such as heat, or chemical energy, previous research has found.
A colony of Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, discovered in a 1.7-mile-deep (2.8 kilometers) gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa.
Credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Prior work has even found that life-forms can live off the ionizing radiation — which has enough energy to ionize or charge atoms — from radioactive materials. For instance, the bacteriumCandidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, found about 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) deep in a South African gold mine, lives off the energy from radioactive isotopes of uranium, thorium and potassium in the rocks there. Specifically, ionizing radiation from these isotopes breaks down water in the area into hydrogen gas, which the bacterium can use as fuel, and helps to generate other biologically useful molecules.
"Most research on ionizing radiation concerns its potentially harmful effects, such as damage to DNA," Atri told Live Science. "But a bacterium that is cut off completely from sunlight and the rest of the biosphere can survive completely off of ionizing radiation."
Atri investigates galactic cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles, mostly protons, that careen across space from beyond the solar system. After he read about radiation-loving Ca. D. audaxviator, he began to wonder if other microbes could live off of energy from galactic cosmic rays as well.
Cosmic rays and extreme life
Galactic cosmic rays possess much higher energy than other sources of radiation on Earth. When they hit the atmosphere or surface of a planet, they generate a cascade of particles — such as electrons, positrons and neutrons — as well as dangerous gamma-rays. "Galactic cosmic rays are everywhere, and they have so much energy, they can penetrate even below the surfaces of planets," Atri said.
Using computer simulations, Atri found that galactic cosmic rays, though rare, could provide a steady flow of energy for life underground; this energy was comparable to that emitted by radioactive substances on Earth.
The energy flow could extend to potential life on other planets as well, he said.
Atri suggested that one way to see if this concept might actually help sustain life would be to conduct a lab experiment that exposed the bacterium Ca. D. audaxviator to the kind of particles that galactic cosmic rays generate when they hit the atmospheres or surfaces of planets.
Atri detailed his findings online Oct. 5 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Much of the universe is made of of matter that we can't see.
Credit: agsandrew / Shutterstock.com
Most of the universe is made up of "stuff" that is invisible, possibly intangible and interacts with other things only via the force of gravity. Oh, yes, and physicists don't know what the stuff is or why it makes up so much of the universe — some four-fifths of its mass.
So where is this mysterious stuff that makes up such a huge chunk of our universe, and when will scientists find it?
First, though, how do we know it's even out there?
Dark matter was first hypothesized in the 1930s when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky realized that his measurements of the masses of galaxy clusters showed some of the mass in the universe was "missing." Whatever was making galaxies heavier, it didn't give off any light, nor did it interact with anything else except via gravity.
Vera Rubin, in the 1970s, found that the rotation of galaxies was not following the predictions of Newton's laws of motion; the stars in galaxies (notably Andromeda) all seemed to be orbiting the center at the same speed, rather than those farther out moving more slowly as theories of gravity said they should. Clearly, something was adding mass to the outer parts of galaxies, something nobody could see. [Does the Universe Have an Edge?]
Other pieces of evidence came from gravitational lensing, which happens when the gravity of a large object bends the light waves around that object. Per Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity bends space (like a sumo wrestler might deform the mat he is standing on), so light rays bend around massive objects even though light itself is massless. Observations indicated that there wasn't enough visible mass to bend the light by as much as it was bending around certain galaxy clusters — in other words, the galaxies were more massive than they should be.
Then there is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the "echo" of the Big Bang, and supernovas. "What the CMB tells you is that the universe is spatially flat," said Jason Kumar, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. "Spatially flat" means that if you were to draw two lines across the universe, they would never meet, even if those lines were a billion light-years across. In a steeply curved universe, those lines would meet at some point in space.
Researchers then calculated how much matter the universe must have in order to be flat and produce the amount of normal matter (also calledbaryons) observed in the universe.
"I ask myself, 'Is the amount of matter I have equal to baryonic matter, and it's not," Kumar said.
There's now little dispute among cosmologists and astronomers that dark matter exists. Yet it seems unaffected by light, and it isn't charged like electrons or protons are. So far it has eluded direct detection.
"That's kind of the mystery," Kumar said. There are may ways scientists have tried to "see" dark matter – either via its interactions with normal matter or looking for particles that dark matter might become. "Those experiments are going to keep getting better, and don't seem to have any hiccups so far as they go to better detectors."
What we know it isn't
A number of theories have come and gone as to what dark matter is. One of the first was logical enough: The matter was hidden within massive astrophysical compact halo objects, or MACHOs, such as neutron stars, black holes, brown dwarfs and rogue planets. They don't emit light (or they emit only very little), so they are effectively invisible to telescopes. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
Yet surveys of galaxies looking for small distortions in the light of background stars produced by a MACHO passing by — called microlensing events — couldn't account for the amount of dark matter around galaxies, or even a significant portion of it. "MACHOs seem as ruled out as ever," said Dan Hooper, an associate scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.
Dark matter doesn't appear to be clouds of gas that telescopes wouldn't see, either. Diffuse gas would absorb light from the galaxies that are farther away, and on top of that, ordinary gas would re-emit radiation at longer wavelengths – there'd be a massive radiation of infrared light in the sky. Since that doesn't occur we can rule that out as well, Kumar said.
What it might be
Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, are some of the strongest contenders to explain dark matter. WIMPs are heavy particles — about 10 to 100 times heavier than a proton — that were produced during the Big Bang, though just small quantities are left today. These particles interact with normal matter via gravity or the weak nuclear force. More massive WIMPs would move more slowly through space, and therefore be "cold" dark-matter candidates, while lighter ones would move faster, and be "warm" dark matter. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]
One way to find them is in "direct detection" experiments, such as the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, which is a container of liquid xenon in a South Dakota mine. If a xenon nucleus seems to "bounce" with no explanation, that would be a candidate for getting hit with a dark-matter particle. The magnitude of the bounce would give an idea of the new particle's mass. But Hooper said that LUX hasn't seen anything yet.
Another way to see the WIMPs might be particle accelerators. Inside accelerators, atomic nuclei smash into each at near the speed of light, and in the process that energy of the collision gets turned into other particles, some new to science. So far, though, particle accelerators haven't detected anything that looks like a dark matter candidate, either.
Results from both direct detection and particle accelerators, however, have placed limits on the size and mass of this hypothetical dark-matter particle, Kumar said. The sensitivity of LUX is down to 200 MeV, or about a fifth of a proton's mass, and it could theoretically see particles as heavy as 1 TeV, which is comparable to some types of quarks. Since LUX saw nothing so far, that could well mean that dark matter isn't in that range.
Kumar said that it's possible that WIMPs are really heavy, and because they are so massive there just aren't that many of them, meaning the chance they'll hit a xenon atom is small.
Another possibility: axions. These subatomic particles could be detected indirectly by the kinds of radiation they emit as they annihilate or as they decay into other kinds of particles, or appear in particle accelerators. Yet there hasn't been any direct evidence of axions, either.
Since detecting heavy, slow-moving "cold" particles, like WIMPs or axions, hasn't yielded results yet, some scientists are looking at the possibility of lighter, faster-moving particles, which they call "warm" dark matter. There has been a renewed interest in such a dark-matter model after scientists found evidence of an unknown particle, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, in the Perseus cluster, a group of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth. The known ions in that cluster produce certain X-ray emission lines, and in 2014, scientists saw a new "line" that may correspond to an unknown lightweight particle, Nicola Menci, an astrophysicist at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), told Live Science in an email.
If dark-matter particles are light, scientists are going to have a difficult time detecting them directly, said Tracy Slatyer, a physicist at MIT. Slatyer has proposed new kinds of particles that might make up dark matter.
"Dark matter with [a] mass below about 1 GeV is really hard to detect with conventional direct detection experiments, because they work by looking for the unexplained recoils of atomic nuclei… but when the dark matter is much lighter than the atomic nucleus, the recoil energy is very small," Slatyer said. Protons — a hydrogen nucleus — can't be any lighter than about 938 MeV, so a particle that weighs in the keV range would be 1,000 times lighter. "Think bouncing a ping-pong ball off a bowling ball; the bowling ball doesn't move very much," she said.
Slatyer said there is a lot of research being done on how to find dark-matter particles if current methods fail. Using "superfluid" liquid helium, semiconductors and even breaking of chemical bonds in crystals, are among the ideas being floated.
Kumar said one reason dark matter is so mysterious is precisely that physicists feel that they understand, to a point, how the Big Bang nucleosynthesis ― the origins of matter ― worked. The Standard Model, which predicted the Higgs boson, has been very successful so far, so unless they've all been really wrong about something fundamental it's odd that nobody has managed to detect a dark-matter particle yet.
If, for example, dark-matter particles are very different from what many current models predict, it's possible that particle accelerators wouldn't have seen it. Accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider are better at seeing things that interact with the strong nuclear force, which decay into other particles.
"If that's the way your dark matter works it's a great machine to find it," he said. "But if there isn't a heavier particle like that it's harder."
Russia’s secret UFO files: Soviet Union waged Cold War conflict with aliens
Russia’s secret UFO files: Soviet Union waged Cold War conflict with aliens
It is believed that the Soviet Union was engaged in a conflict with aliens. Russian contact with aliens happened during 1940s and 1950s.
During the 1940s and 1950s UFO-mania gripped the US as reports of flying saucers, men in black and alien abductions filled newspaper pages.
Around the same time the Soviets also began to have increasing contact with apparent aliens and growing reports of spacecraft entering airspace over Russia.
Soviet-born UFO researcher and author Paul Stonehill told Daily Star Online: “The Soviets were shocked so many UFOs could penetrate their borders and basically just do what they wanted without any control from the Kremlin.
“There were many more cases of direct encounters than in the United States, and anything which was flying over the Soviet Union was very interested in secret military installations.”
Throughout the Cold War and the space race Soviet forces frequently clashed with UFOs.
Mr Stonehill said: “The Kremlin was paranoid but they could not do anything about it.
“They tried on several occasions where orders were given out from on high to shoot down UFOs, or local commanders would take it upon themselves.
“However, it always ended badly for them.”
The researcher, whose articles have been published in 11 languages, unearthed a culture of total secrecy over the phenomena in the Soviet Union.
Kremlin bigwigs would pass off any public reports of the phenomena as a “hoax perpetrated by the Western powers”.
A secret research programme called SETKA was established in 1977 after the Petrozavodsk incident in which 48 UFOs appeared in the atmosphere across the Soviet Union.
The incident came to a head in the industrial city of Petrozavodsk when a huge glowing object appeared overhead – seemingly beaming shafts of light towards the Earth.
The aim of the programme was to work out what the UFOs were – with Soviet higher-ups acknowledging the craft could not be of Earth-bound origin.
Stonehill said much of the archives of the programme remain under lock and key, but he added it was passed down between the communist state’s top military minds and scientists.
Forms were also then handed to any soviet soldier, sailor or airmen who reported a UFO encounter for them to file fully detailed reports.
He said: “It was prolific enough to really make you wonder just how much the Soviets knew”.
A bloody encounter between an alien craft and Soviet forces occurred in 1953 shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin.
The large UFO, initially thought by witnesses to be a “blimp of dirigible”, appeared above the Taiga in Siberia.
Soviet military chiefs dispatched a military special detachment to the area.
When they attempted to engage the craft with aircraft the three Soviet planes just “burned away”, says Mr Stonehill.
A secret order was issued to Soviet forces during the mid-1960s giving Russian commanders strict instructions to “not shoot at UFOs, leave them alone”.
Mr Stonehill said: “The aliens would fight back and destroy whatever unit would shoot at them.
“They would disintegrate planes, and in some cases the UFOs also acted first.”
He added: “No government wants to be powerless in the face of a threat, and it got to the case of the Soviets being very scared.”
But despite these violent clashes, he says most Soviet encounters were characterised by alien craft simply “observing” activity.
He said: “It was as if they were under a microscope. There were reports of UFOs present at most, if not all, of the Soviet space launches.
“The craft seemed to know about the space ports and the secret facilities.”
However, he added the motivations of whoever is piloting the UFOs remains a mystery.
Mr Stonehill has spoken to former military intelligence personnel, government officials and Soviet scientists to reveal the depths of the Soviet UFO encounters.
He has had numerous books published on the subject such as Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon, Soviet UFO Files and UFO Case Files of Russia.
His most recent publication deals with the related “USO encounters” in Soviet seas as the Russian navy encountered unexplained objects beneath the seas.
RUIMTEVAART Marslander Schiaparelli is waarschijnlijk gevonden. Gisteravond publiceerde ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA beelden die de Amerikaanse Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter heeft gemaakt. Op de weinig gedetailleerde zwartwitopnamen is een zwarte stip te zien en een kleinere wittevlek met nog enkele verstoringen.
Uit de beelden zou blijken dat de Europese Marslander Schiaparelli woensdag op de Rode Planeet is neergestort en mogelijk ontploft, zo maakt het Europese Ruimtevaartbureau ESA bekend.
De zwarte stip op de foto is waarschijnlijk de gecrashte marslander Schiaparelli en de kleinere witte vlek de parachute waaraan hij naar beneden is gekomen. Hoewel de beelden weinig details bevatten, weet ESA zo goed als zeker dat het de marslander betreft, omdat de opnamen zijn gemaakt in het landingsgebied van de sonde, en doordat de stip in het marslandschap er eerder niet was.
"Jammer, maar we moeten vaststellen dat de sonde niet succesrijk is geland", zei directeur-generaal Jan Wörner aan het Duitse persbureau DPA.
In het kader van de eerste Europees-Russische Marsmissie ExoMars moest de Schiaparelli (of EDM in het ESA-ees) woensdag landen op het oppervlak van onze buurplaneet, met name in het gebied Meridiani Planum. Maar kort voor het neerstrijken viel het contact met de sonde uit.
Op een persbriefing zei ESA donderdagochtend niet te weten wat er met de lander was gebeurd. Maar zoals de gezaghebbende website russianspaceweb.com gisteren al had gemeld, heeft de MRO foto's genomen van het landingsgebied en daar iets gevonden dat er bij een eerdere opname, in mei, niet lag.
De vrije val zou op 4 tot 2 kilometer hoogte zijn begonnen, waardoor de robot met meer dan 300 kilometer per uur op het Marsoppervlak is neergekomen. Mogelijk is het tuig dan ontploft omdat de tanks van de remraketten wellicht nog vol staken.
ESA beklemtoont dat er meer analyse nodig is en heeft er vertrouwen in dat de teams "met grote accuraatheid" de keten van gebeurtenissen zullen kunnen reconstrueren.
Volgende week zal de HiRISE-camera op de MRO met zijn hogere resolutie het impactgebied opnieuw bekijken. Mogelijk zal de sonde dan ook het voorste hitteschild vinden dat op grotere hoogte is afgeworpen.
ESA beklemtoonde gisteren toch tevreden te zijn omdat de Schiaparelli een demonstrator was voor de twee robots die in het kader van het tweede luik van ExoMars moeten landen. Het tuig heeft een massa data over de afdaling in de Martiaanse atmosfeer doorgestuurd, in het bijzonder het AMELIA-instrument waarbij ook wetenschappers van de Koninklijke Belgische Sterrenwacht (KSB) betrokken zijn, en via de "orbiter" TGO die woensdag ongeveer tegelijkertijd succesvol in een baan op de Rode Planeet is gekomen. Ook waren er metingen met een radiotelescoop en de Europese Mars Express die sinds 2003 succesrijk rond Mars wentelt.
Op die "Trace Gas Obiter" staat het Belgische NOMAD-instrument dat het sporengas methaan in de Martiaanse atmosfeer meet vanuit de existentiële vraag of het een geologische dan wel biologische oorsprong heeft. De TGO functioneert ondertussen "zeer goed" en zal volgende maand twee keer ijkdata vergaren, zegt ESA.
Eerder op de dag meldde het doorgaans betrouwbare russianspaceweb.com dat software ervoor verantwoordelijk zou zijn dat de remraketten van de Schiaparelli onvoldoende lang werkten. Het communiqué van ESA zegt daarover enkel dat "de exacte aard van de anomalie aan boord van de Schiaparelli nog voorwerp van onderzoek is".
In 2003 mislukte ook de landing van de dochtersonde van de Mars Express, de in wezen Britse Beagle-2.
Amerikaanse wetenschappers hebben nieuw licht geworpen op een Marsmissie van 40 jaar geleden en dat zou verstrekkende gevolgen kunnen hebben. In een bodemstaal werden toen sporen gevonden die op leven konden duiden, maar het resultaat werd alom in twijfel getrokken omdat controletests geen duidelijk uitsluitsel gaven. Nieuw onderzoek toont nu aan dat de oorspronkelijke onderzoekers het tóch bij het juiste eind gehad zouden kunnen hebben.
De nieuwe studie werd uitgevoerd door Gilbert Levin van de universiteit van Arizona en Patricia Ann Straat van het Nationaal Gezondheidsinstituut in Bethesda, Maryland. Allebei waren ze ook betrokken bij de oorspronkelijke missie van de Vikingsatellieten en hun landers in 1976. Het was toen de meest ambitieuze poging van de wetenschap om de rode planeet te verkennen.
Vikings In maart 1976 kwamen de twee Vikings in een baan rond Mars, iets minder dan een jaar nadat ze op aarde waren vertrokken. Ze brachten als eerste de volledige oppervlakte van de planeet in kaart en ontdekten aanwijzingen dat er water op de planeet was. Of toch ooit was geweest.
Op 20 juli zette de eerste Vikinglander een poot aan de grond op Mars, zes weken later ook de tweede, zo'n 4.000 kilometer verderop. Ze zouden drie tests uitvoeren en als er ook maar één positief zou zijn, zou geconcludeerd kunnen worden dat de rode planeet bewoond was.
Geluk De eerste test - waarbij de bodem werd verhit en de moleculen werden gemeten die in gas veranderden - was negatief. En ook de tweede - waarbij aan een bodemstaal helium, water en voedingsstoffen werden toegevoegd om te zien of er een teken van leven was - kwam negatief terug. Maar bij de derde test hadden de wetenschappers meer geluk.
Bij die test werden voedingsstoffen toegevoegd aan een bodemstaal en vervolgens gelabeld met het radioactieve C14. Als er leven was, zou dat laatste element veranderen in radioactief kooldioxide, zoals op aarde. En dat gebeurde, bij de stalen van allebei de landers.
Controletest Een controletest - die moest uitmaken of het resultaat biologisch was of misschien eerder een chemisch proces - was echter niet duidelijk en dat bracht alom twijfel of er nu echt leven was gevonden of niet. De experimenten werden nooit verder gezet, dus het resultaat bleef onbeslist.
Maar volgens de nieuwe studie zouden resultaten van ándere wetenschappelijke experimenten die sindsdien op Mars werden uitgevoerd - op zoek naar water, methaan en andere organische elementen - wel degelijk wijzen in de richting van leven. "Leven is waarschijnlijk op Mars", schrijven de auteurs. "We zullen het evenwel nooit met zekerheid weten, want de stalen van de Vikings - die als eerste op Mars landden - zijn de enige waarvan we zeker weten dat ze niet besmet waren met aardse microben. Als we nu teruggaan, kunnen al sporen van leven gevonden worden die de afgelopen jaren werden achtergelaten bij allerhande missies naar de rode planeet."
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Landing Marssonde Schiaparelli ging op laatste moment mis - HLN.be
Landing Marssonde Schiaparelli ging op laatste moment mis - HLN.be
VIDEOToch nog goed nieuws voor Europa: de marslander Schiaparelli is geland op de rode planeet. De vraag is alleen: hoe? Gisteren moest Schiaparelli aankomen op de rode planeet, maar tijdens de afdaling raakte het contact met de robot verloren. Er is iets misgelopen bij het afwerpen van het valscherm. Of en hoe het tuig de landing heeft overleefd is nog onduidelijk.
De vluchtleiding in het Duitse Darmstadt kreeg nu pas na lang wachten het verlossende signaal dat de lander op Mars staat.
De data van Schiaparelli die verzameld werd tijdens de landing, een 600 kilogram zware robot, is ontvangen door het moederschip. Dit betekent dat alle hardware geactiveerd is. Volgens de European Space Agency (ESA) is dat het meest belangrijke deel van Schiaparelli. Alle fases van de landing zijn volgens de planning verlopen, behalve de landing zelf. Daar reageerde de lander anders dan verwacht, aldus ESA.
Tot nu toe is niet bevestigd of Schiaparelli zacht geland is, of dat het om een crash-landing gaat. Daarmee is dus niet duidelijk of de marslander nog intact is. "Je hebt een beetje geluk nodig om te slagen", aldus Andrea Accomazzo, het hoofd van de ExoMars-missie. De werking van het hitteschild was voorbeeldig, maar die van de remmende parachute niet. De vluchtleiding bestudeert de signalen daarvan nog, zo deelde de ESA vandaag mee.
TGO ESA plaatste gisteren een satelliet genaamd Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in een baan rond Mars en liet de zogenaamde ExoMars landen. Schiaparelli moest rond 16.48 uur Belgische tijd op het oppervlak aankomen.
De robot en de satelliet zijn de afgelopen maanden samen naar Mars gevlogen, met als doel om onder meer de dampkring van onze buurplaneet te onderzoeken. Zo speurt de Trace Gas Orbiter vooral naar methaan, een gas dat kan wijzen op minieme vormen van leven. De missie wordt samen met Rusland uitgevoerd.
2020 De landing van de Schiaparelli is in de eerste plaats bedoeld om de technologie te testen voor deel twee van de missie. Europa en Rusland willen namelijk rond 2020 weer naar Mars. In dat jaar moet een onbemande verkenner naar de rode planeet worden gebracht. Die kan over het oppervlak rijden en metersdiepe gaten boren, op zoek naar meer sporen van leven.
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Expert: Ruimtesonde Voyager 2 van de NASA ‘gekaapt’ door aliens
Expert: Ruimtesonde Voyager 2 van de NASA ‘gekaapt’ door aliens
Er gaan verhalen rond dat de onbemande ruimtesonde Voyager 2 is gekaapt door aliens. Op 22 april 2010 ontstond er een probleem met de communicatie tussen de aarde en de sonde.
De Voyager, die al sinds 1977 in de ruimte is, stuurde signalen naar de aarde die niet te ontcijferen waren. Een bitje was spontaan van 0 naar 1 gesprongen. NASA resette de computer van de ruimtesonde, die sindsdien weer naar behoren lijkt te werken.
De Duitse academicus Hartwig Hausdorf stelde dat Voyager 2 vreemde signalen stuurde omdat de sonde was overgenomen door buitenaards leven.
Niet de hele waarheid
Sinds de lancering stuurde Voyager 2 continu gegevens naar de aarde, maar op 22 april 2010 kwam daar plotseling verandering in. NASA claimde dat er problemen waren met de software aan boord van de sonde, maar Hausdorf zei dat het mogelijk ging om het werk van aliens.
Hij merkte op dat alle andere delen van het ruimteschip normaal functioneerden. “Het lijkt erop dat iemand de sonde heeft gekaapt of opnieuw heeft geprogrammeerd,” vertelde de expert aan de Duitse krant Bild. “We kennen dus misschien nog niet de hele waarheid.”
Gouden plaat
Aan de Voyager 2 is een gouden plaat bevestigd, die begroetingen van aardbewoners in 55 talen en geluiden van de natuur op aarde bevat.
Deze plaat is een soort tijdcapsule, bedoeld als boodschap aan buitenaardse levensvormen, aldus dr. Edward Stone, die meewerkte aan het project.
British Cop Witnesses TALL WHITE Aliens Inspecting Fresh Crop Circl
British Cop Witnesses TALL WHITE Aliens Inspecting Fresh Crop Circle
Not many people know this, but back in 2009 a British police officer witnessed ‘Alien Beings’ inspecting a fresh crop circle in a middle of a field!
The Police Sergeant who has not been named, witnessed the event back in 2009. The Policeman was off duty at the time when he noticed the unusual ‘Beings’ in the field.
The Police Officer pulled his car over and walked over to the field to see what was going on as he apparently had a ‘strange’ feeling about what he was seeing. However, as he approached the ‘men’ – who were all way over 6ft tall with long blond hair – he suddenly heard “the sound of static electricity” and the trio ran away ”faster than any man he had ever seen” so fast that it apparently almost seemed ‘unreal’.
Many crop circles, including this one in May 2009, have appeared near Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
Leaving the scene of the strange event the Police Officer jumped quickly back into his car and travelled back home to Marlborough, Wiltshire, and then contacted paranormal experts and told them he had spotted a UFO.
Not surprisingly the Police force that the Officer works for, refused to comment at the time and stated “That it was a personal matter!”
The unnamed Police Officer asked for support off a Gentleman called Andrew Russell who is a Crop Circle Investigator.
Andrew described in detail what the Police officer saw on that unusual day:
”At first he thought they were forensic officers as they were dressed in white coveralls. He stopped his car and approached the field. ‘The figures were all over 6ft and had blond hair. They seemed to be inspecting the crop. When he got to the edge of the field he heard what he believed to be a sound not dissimilar to static electricity.
”This crackling noise seemed to be running through the field and the crop was moving gently, close to where the noise was.
”He shouted to the figures who, at first, ignored him, not glancing at him. When he tried to enter the field they looked up and began running.
”He said; ‘They ran faster than any man I have ever seen. I’m no slouch but they were moving so fast. I looked away for a second and when I looked back they were gone.
”I then got scared. The noise was still around but I got an uneasy feeling and headed for the car. For the rest of the day I had a pounding headache I couldn’t shift.”
This strange incident happened on July 6th as the Police Officer was driving down the road. Apparently the three very tall figures were inspecting the odd-shaped Crop Circle in the field. They all appeared deeply interested and analysing the Crop Circle – was it them who made it, or possibly was it their fellow colleagues from a far!?
The crop circle had been there in the field for a few days before this incident.
2009 was a very popular year for Crop Circles in the Wiltshire area, UK.
When the Police Officer walked over the unusual beings, they suddenly become ‘disturbed’ looking and ran off at speeds beyond the Officers belief! As soon as he looked away for a split second they were ‘gone’
A spokesman for Wiltshire Police said:
”The police officer was apparently off duty when this happened so we have no comment to make because it is a personal not a police matter.”
Another Crop Circle Expert, Colin Andrews, who investigated the incident alongside Andrew Russell, said he is ”convinced” by the police officer’s story and does not see any reason at all why the Officer would of made this story up!
”I am quite convinced the officer had an experience that day and one that we have not fully explored.”I think with the unusual movement of the being and the poltergeist experiences there is too much additional information to say that is something in nothing.” He said
Some have suspected that this was the Tall White Aliens that the Officer had witnessed. The Tall whites have even been acknowledged by Edward Snowden, who believes that they are very much in contact with Planet Earth and watching our every move.
The Tall Whites
U.I.P SUMMARY –
It is very interesting that this sighting was in Wiltshire, as this is one of the key UFO/Crop Circle areas around the world (please click HERE for more information on this). Could it possibly be that what this Police Officer saw were the Beings who are responsible for these crop circles being formed around the UK, or perhaps they are just as curious as to ‘what else’ is out there trying to communicate with Earth.
Yes Crop Circles have been deemed by many to be elaborate fakes by students or Drunk Famers at night, but when you actually look at the sheer amount of detail involved to these incredible designs, I personally feel it is impossible for any humans to create such a spectacle over night, in the pitch black of night!
Some people believe that Crop Circles were made by Orbs – please see a video below of an ‘apparent’ Orb caught on camera making a crop circle:
As far as what or WHO these Beings are, is a completely different matter altogether! The way that they have been described sounds just like the Tall White Aliens, and the way they move would kind of confirm that there were no odd-ball humans, but something else, something very unique and different!?
Is it a coincidence that one of the most unknown areas of the world, Stonehenge, is in Wiltshire, and that we have so many unusual sightings in this part of the UK……I don’t think so, and this is why this part of the world is one of THE top UFO Hotspots.
Hope to see you all at the end of August at one of the UK’s main UFO event – Warminster 2015
MWV – U.I.P
Stonehenge – One of the many Mysteries of Wiltshire
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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 74 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.
