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

A large, unidentified metal object fell from the sky yesterday (Nov. 10) in the remote mountainous region of Myanmar.

The cylindrical object, which is about 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and 5 feet in diameter, blasted into the village of Lone Khin, near a jade mine. Villagers woke early in the morning to a loud boom and vibrations, when the object fell to the ground. Though no one was injured, the UFO ripped through a jade miner's tent, and afterwards, the smell of burning filled the air, according to The Myanmar Times.

"Initially, we thought it was a battle. The explosion made our houses shake. We saw the smoke from our village," Lone Khin villager Daw Ma Kyi told The Myanmar Times.

Aerial object

At first glance, the object looks like it may have come from an aircraft.

"I think it was an engine because I found a diode and many copper wires at the tail of the body," villager Ko Maung Myo told The Myanmar Times. "It also looks like a jet engine block."

However, government officials say that they haven't identified the object and are sending experts to examine it. One former government official with the Department of Aviation said that the image shown on Facebook of the metal "UFO" looked more like a rocket booster than part of a commercial plane.

Just yesterday China announced the successful launch of a Long March Rocket 11 into space, along with five satellites and an experimental X-ray pulsar navigation spacecraft, Spaceflight Insider reported. The XPNAV-1 (an acronym for Maichong Xing Shiyan Weixing), a 530-pound (240 kilograms) spacecraft fitted with solar arrays and two detectors that use X-ray emissions from pulsars to navigate, is meant to identify the locations of spacecraft in deep space.

Space debris is a regular part of satellite and rocket launches. Though the odds of any individual person getting struck by detritus is low, the odds that it hits one of the 7 billion people on Earth is surprisingly high: After the launch of a school bus-sized satellite in 2011, Mark Matney, a scientist in the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, previously told Live Science that the odds of anyone being hit by that debris immediately after the launch were approximately one in 3,200.

Space is littered with junk from past exploration. All told, there were at least 500,00 pieces of space junk marble-size or larger that are orbiting our planet in 2010, though most pieces are on the small side. Of that space junk, more than 20,000 pieces are larger than a softball, according to NASA. In 2012, Switzerland proposed building a kind of space janitor to clean up some of that debris.

Original article on Live Science.

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Ajoint investigation between scientists from the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute and METI International resulted in the discovery of exactly zero radio transmissions emanating from KIC 8462852, aka Tabby’s Star, aka that “alien megastructures” star everyone freaked out about late last year. According to new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, we still haven’t found signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Our cold streak continues.

In case you don’t remember, there was a big hooplah last fall when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, dropped a small suggestion that strange stellar light patterns glowing from Tabby’s Star, nearly 1,500 light-years away from Earth, were caused by “alien megastructures,” a catchall phrase for materials artificially placed in orbit. Since then, study after study has basically put that hypothesis to rest, with more reasonable ideas like a family of weird cometsgarnering more and more support based on new data.

But science is about making confirmations, so the dutiful scientists at the SETI Institute and METI international came together and used the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory in Panama to determine whether or not the strange dimming patterns were caused by intelligent extraterrestrials, as well as use the Allen Telescope Array in California to measure whether the star system was spewing out any radio signals indicative of advanced technology.

“We were looking to see if there are intentional laser signals being beamed at us,” says METI International research and study coauthor Douglas Vakoch. He tells Inverse he and his colleagues were looking for the kinds of signs of technology that us humans on Earth might be capable of building and using to broadcast our presence to the rest of the universe.

Unfortunately, they did not find any radio signals, and the optical signals found were less than encouraging. No optical signal of a particular period pattern was measured, and the power of the light pulsing from Tabby’s Star didn’t seem characteristic of a laser signal. “If there is a large laser facility kicking out signals of 5 mega-joules or stronger, we would have been able to detect those,” says Vakoch. “We didn’t.”

Vakoch emphasizes that the results don’t totally discount alien life living in the star system. He and his team were using Boquete during Panama’s rainy season — “the worst possible time,” he says. He acknowledges that the results “don’t say for sure there aren’t extraterrestrials out there.” It’s always possible E.T. is sending weaker signals out or exhibiting patterns stretching across a larger timeframe.

“But we can say that within the scenario where we could have possibly gotten a signal, we didn’t get one,” says Vakoch.

Disheartening, sure, but there’s a strong silver lining to the new findings. While SETI research around the world centers in large part around the measure of radio signals, the new investigation allowed the scientists to flex their optics muscles and get practice at looking for signs of E.T. across other frequencies as well. “If we get a signal, there may be different sources of information at different frequencies, so we need to be ready to jump on that,” said Vakoch.

Moreover, the study demonstrated the feasibility of using even a modest-sized optical telescope to conduct SETI observations. This runs counter to the whole “bigger is better” mentality that permeates space science, and Vakoch thinks the new methodological approaches he and his colleagues outline in their paper illustrate a new model for doing SETI research that is more efficient and sustainable. He says a major goal of METI International, after all, is to answer “how do we sustain the search going forward” as funding for these types of projects drop or become thinned out over more and more initiatives.

“We still don’t have a natural explanation for what is going on” with Tabby’s Star, says Vakoch. And he doesn’t find that particularly discouraging. “This is the type of ambiguity we can expect if we really got a signal from E.T. It will be a slow unfolding and grappling of the data. So we continue to search for answers.”