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

IN BRIEF

A short video shows the movement in a system of planets about 129 light-years away from ours. The planets' orbits seem to be in resonance, producing a wonderful visual effect.
The star system presents an opportunity for more exoplanet research, including the planet-formation process.

Located about 129 light-years from Earth in the direction of the Pegasus constellation is the relatively young star system of HR 8799. Beginning in 2008, four orbiting exoplanets were discovered in this system which – alongside the exoplanet Formalhaut b – were the very first to be confirmed using the direct imaging technique. And over time, astronomers have come to believe that these four planets are in resonance with each other.

In this case, the four planets orbit their star with a 1:2:4:8 resonance, meaning that each planet’s orbital period is in a nearly precise ratio with the others in the system. This is a relatively unique phenomenon, one which inspired a Jason Wang – a graduate student from the Berkeley arm of the NASA-sponsored Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) – to produce a video that illustrates their orbital dance.

Using images obtained by the W.M. Keck Observatory over a seven-year period, Wang’s video provides a glimpse of these four exoplanets in motion. As you can see below, the central star is blacked out so that the light reflecting off of its planets can be seen. And while it does not show the planets completing a full orbital period (which would take decades and even centuries) it beautifully illustrates the resonance that exists between the star’s four planets.

As Jason Wang told Universe Today via email:

“The data was obtained over 7 years from one of the 10 meter Keck telescopes by a team of astronomers (Christian Marois, Quinn Konopacky, Bruce Macintosh, Travis Barman, and Ben Zuckerman). Christian reduced each of the 7 epochs of data, to make 7 frames of data. I then made a movie by using a motion interpolation to interpolate those 7 frames into 100 frames to get a smooth video so that it’s not choppy (as if we could observe them every month from Earth).”

The images of the four exoplanets were originally captured by Dr. Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. It was in 2008 that Marois and his colleagues discovered the first three of HR 8799’s planets – HR 8799 b, c and d – using direct imaging technique. At around the same time, a team from UC Berkeley announced the discovery of Fomalhaut b, also using direct imaging.

These planets were all determined to be gas giants of similar size and mass, with between 1.2 and 1.3 times the size of Jupiter, and 7 to 10 times its mass. At the time of their discovery, HR 8799 d was believed to be the closest planet to its star, at a distance of about 27 Astronomical Units (AUs) – while the other two orbit at distances of about 42 and 68 AUs, respectively.

Image of HR 8799 (left) taken by the HST in 1998, image processed to remove scattered starlight (center), and illustration of the planetary system (right). Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/R. Soummer

It was only afterward that the team realized the planets had already been observed in 1998. Back then, the Hubble Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) had obtained light from the system that indicated the presence of planets. However, this was not made clear until after a newly-developed image-processing technique had been installed. Hence, the “pre-discovery” went unnoticed.

Further observations in 2009 and 2010 revealed the existence of fourth planet – HR 8799 e – which had an orbit placing it inside the other three. Even so, this planet is fifteen times farther from its star than the Earth is from the Sun, which results in an orbital period of about 18,000 days (49 years). The others take around 112, 225, and 450 years (respectively) to complete an orbit of HR 8799.

Ultimately, Wang decided to produce the video (which was not his first), to illustrate how exciting the search for exoplanets can be. As he put it:

“I had written this motion interpolation algorithm for another exoplanet system, Beta Pictoris b, where we see one planet on an edge-on orbit looking like it’s diving into its star (it’s actually just circling in front of it). We wanted to do the same thing for HR 8799 to bring this system to life and share our excitement in directly imaging exoplanets. I think it’s quite amazing that we have the technology to watch other worlds orbit other stars.”

In addition, the video draws attention to a star system that presents some unique opportunities for exoplanet research. Since HR 8799 was the first multi-planetary system to be directly-imaged means that astronomers can directly observe the orbits of the four planets, observe their dynamical interactions, and determine how they came to their present-day configuration.

Astronomers will also be able to take spectra of these planet’s atmospheres to study their composition and compare this to our own Solar System’s gas giants. And since the system is really quite young (just 40 million years old), it can tell us much about the planet-formation process. Last, but not least, their wide orbits (a necessity given their size) could mean the system is less than stable.

In the future, according to Wang, astronomers will be watching to see if any planets get ejected from the system. I don’t know about you, but I would consider a video that illustrates one of HR 8799’s gas giants getting booted out of its system would be pretty inspiring too!

MIAMI – If you ever wanted to know the CIA’s secret recipe for invisible ink, how to spot spy messages hidden in suspicious fruit, or which top American spy was asked to appear in Penthouse magazine, you’re in luck. Millions of pages of once-classified agency documents are now available for the first time on your home computer after the agency moved one of its databases online.

The documents run the gamut from classic espionage (a Cold War mission to tunnel into East Germany to tap the Soviet Union’s military telephone system) to borderline-goofball research (trying to see whether “psychic” Uri Geller could read the minds of intelligence officers half a mile away) to tediously mundane housekeeping tasks (the opening of the agency’s new child care center).

Most of the documents have been declassified for decades or even longer. But they were available for viewing only on a handful of computers at an outpost of the National Archives, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. After years of wrangling with open-government advocates, ranging from lawsuits to a mocking Kickstarter campaign to pay for photocopying that was intended to shame the CIA, the agency finally relented this month.

“Now you can access it from the comfort of your own home,” Joseph Lambert, the CIA’s longtime director of information management, said grandly as the database — known as the CIA Records Search Tool, or CREST — went online.

That may sound a bit overblown, but researchers across the United States saluted Lambert. “I’ve been using that database for years, but it’s not easy flying to Washington and driving out to Maryland to get on their computers,” said Jeffrey T. Richelson, the Los Angeles-based author of several well-regarded academic studies of intelligence. “The last few days, I’ve been finding all kinds of things on it that I didn’t even know existed.”

None of them, at least so far, have been blockbusters, though the bits of intelligence run from the oddly fascinating (East Germany, in the summer of 1973, faced a daunting shortage of barbers) to the monumentally incorrect (a breezy pronouncement that Iran’s Muslim clergymen didn’t constitute “a well-organized threat to the regime,” made barely years before they toppled the government and put the country on a disastrous collision course with the United States that persists to this day).

There are even tantalizing hints of James Bondish bang-bang. Who drew that hand-drawn map of an explosives plant in Romania, including a diagram of the wiring of its electronic security gate, and why? Will an answer turn up as journalists and academics plow through the 12 million pages on the database?

But a few days spent sifting random documents reveals a couple of unexpected things. One is the indefinably vast expanse of the CIA’s interests. There are large numbers of documents about UFOs, psychic research and any number of other subjects that would excite a New Age Wiccan priestess.

Some are so peculiar as to defy comprehension. What on Earth prompted a CIA officer to even pick up a leaflet advertising the (now defunct) Buffalo Bill Wax Museum and its “107 life-size wax figures” of Bill, Wyatt Earp and Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang (“in living wax!”) — much less to preserve it in an agency file — will likely remain a cryptic secret for generations to come.

What is very clear is that the CIA’s declassification team has the come-on coquetry of a striptease dancer and the piquant sense of humor of the editors at the Onion. The title of one document — “Clarifying Statement to Fidel Castro Concerning Assassination” — sent journalistic hearts pounding across the world. It turns out to be an unremarkable 1977 exchange of notes between then-CIA director Stansfield Turner and an agency press public affairs officer about getting a transcript of a television interview of Fidel Castro by Barbara Walters.

At the bottom of the 26-page file, though, is a payoff of sorts: a letter from the porn magazine Penthouse, requesting an interview. Four decades later, the idea of Turner — a legendarily straight-laced Christian Scientist who didn’t drink, smoke or swear — agreeing to an interview to be sandwiched between Penthouse’s nakeder-than-naked photo displays still makes CIA veterans giggle four decades later. “It would have been hysterical, if he had done it, which I’m sure he didn’t,” said one former agency official. Apparently not; the letter got no reply.

Another wisecrack title is attached to a package of files on the CIA’s interest in UFOs: “Top 5 CIA Documents Mulder Would Love To Get His Hands On,” a reference to Fox Mulder, the FBI agent on TV’s The X-Files who believes the world is secretly governed by space aliens.

Those files, and many others, detail an interesting trajectory in CIA attitudes toward UFO reports. The minutes of a secret 1952 meeting of senior agency officials — conducted at a time when reports of flying saucer-sightings were popping up all over the world — recount a discussion about directing the CIA’s physics and electronic division to investigate.

CIA spies complied enthusiastically, filing report after report about flying saucer sightings around the world, including behind the Iron Curtain, where an East German defector reported having seen a UFO crew poking around on the ground — though, technically speaking, it was really a flying “frying pan” by his account.

But by the next year, a group of distinguished physicists convened by the CIA was dismissing tales of flying kitchen accoutrements of all types, arguing in a report that even talking about UFOs would result in “mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.”

Anyway, the report added, even if space aliens were prowling the skies and streets of the United States, so what? “Extraterrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are not cause for alarm.” The report conceded that at least one member of the panel disagreed, arguing that any verified evidence of space invaders would be “of immediate and great concern not only to the U.S. but to all countries.” But the report dismissed him as a paranoid war hawk: “Nothing like a common threat to unite peoples!”

The real threat, concluded the report, was not from flying saucers but the people who reported seeing them, who might be pursuing “subversive purposes.” Groups that urged more serious government investigation of UFOs, the report added, “should be watched.”

The CIA’s interest in flying saucers, and even the minutes of the two meetings, have long been known to UFO researchers, said Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. But he’s happy the documents are finally available on the internet where they can be easily accessed.

UFO researchers — for decades among the most aggressive users of the federal Freedom of Information Act to force government documents out into the open — have been eagerly combing the new database, Rodeghier added, but so far they’ve found no blockbuster revelations, and don’t really expect to: “One of the things the CIA is really good at is never releasing anything that means anything.”