Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 1 MONTH.
ON 06/07/2024 MORE THAN 2.101.500
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
06-02-2017
A Stunning New Crop Circle Has Shown Up & It’s Very Mysterious
A Stunning New Crop Circle Has Shown Up & It’s Very Mysterious
A new crop circle has appeared in Reigate Hill, Surrey according to a recent report. While the reports are still recent and not much is known about the circle, including specific details about the formation that could tell us more about how it got there, this one is quite fascinating in design.
Why talk about crop circles? As we will discuss below, they are a phenomenon that simply can’t be ignored. Formations show up every single year and come with great mystery, even in the scientific realm. Many do not realize some of the amazing things that are happening inside crop circles that blow the board and rope theory out the window.
“Some of these formations are so immense and complex as to defy reason. And after all these decades, none of the perpetrators have been caught in the act of making any of the truly extraordinary formations.” – Richard Dolan, historian, academic, author, and one of the world’s leading UFO researchers (Source)
Richard’s thoughts there are quite telling of this reality, and even scientific minds are at a loss for words as although they believe the circles are done by humans, they are calling it the most science oriented art movement ever.
For example, Richard Taylor, a University of Oregon physicist, published a paper on them in the 2011 issue of Physics World, stating:
“Crop circle arts are not going to give up their secrets easily. This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.”
But what would cause a physicist to conclude that these works do not have an extraterrestrial explanation? Or even consider the issue seriously?
When you begin to explore the reality of crop circles you start to realize how one cannot simply pass the phenomenon off as people walking out into a field with some ropes and boards and making a design. It would be naive to make such a claim.
Above is a picture of an 800 foot crop circle that appeared in Wiltshire, England back in 2001. It caused a lot of commotion, and as you can see, it was very beautiful and extremely complex. The design consisted of 409 circles that form what’s known as atriskelion, a symbol that dates back thousands of years. There is some great footage of it in the documentary Crop Cricles: Quest for Truth by Academy Award-winning director William Gazecki. You can view that here.
“It was so large that it took us half an hour to find the centre.”
There are some more great images of it in this YouTube video. You can also see footage of it taken by a helicopter flying above from the documentary Thrive in this video (at the 26.16 minute mark). This circle marks just one of thousands of verified formations that continue to baffle scientists, researchers, and onlookers alike.
Richard Taylor, the aforementioned scientist who studied these circles, again expressed his belief that this was one of the greatest art revolutions in history when he published his scientific analysis of crop circles in the journal Nature in 2010.
After studying the affected grass in the lab, he concluded that the circle makers must be using GPS devices, lasers, and microwaves to create these designs because the nodes of some of the stalks had been blasted out on one side. This same effect has been replicated by highly localized microwave heating, which is what causes the stocks to flop over to one side.
While he was able to come up with a scientifically feasible explanation for this phenomenon, he fails to address how hoaxers could come into possession of such advanced technology. It’s clear that there would be no other way to make some of these circles, so what is really going on here?
“If something like this caused the formations, then we are clearly talking about a highly sophisticated agency behind the phenomenon.” – Richard Dolan
Did you know that the electromagnetic field over the area where a circle appears is usually electrostatically charged? Or that there is a rare form of electromagnetic energy called an “ionized plasma vortex,” also known as ball lighting, involved with these formations?
The helicopters you see in the video are military helicopters. Military involvement with UFOs is well documented, and this should be no surprise.
These are verified facts, which is why studies published in scientific journals have tried to come up with explanations that differ from unknown or extraterrestrial. For example, Dr. Terence Meadon, a professional physicist, meteorologist, and archaeologist at the University of Oxford, said that these balls of light are a result of wind currents and ionized plasmas. Whatever the case may be, the fact that scientists are taking note should signal that this phenomenon is worth our attention.
What Archaeologists Really Think About Ancient Aliens, Lost Colonies, And Fingerprints Of The Gods
What Archaeologists Really Think About Ancient Aliens, Lost Colonies, And Fingerprints Of The Gods
It’s no secret that far more people watch TV shows like the History Channel’s ‘Ancient Aliens’ than attend lectures by professional archaeologists and historians. Millions of people tune in to watch TV series and docu-dramas with a questionable grip on facts about the past. The stories spun by producers and writers may have some basis in truth, but they’re largely stories — they’re compelling stories, though, and they’re aimed at a general audience the way that most academic output isn’t.
People are also reading books about ancient aliens and other forms of pseudoarchaeology, according to archaeologist Donald Holly. He starts a recent open-access book review section in the journal American Antiquity by asking archaeologists to entertain the idea of pseudoarchaeology — just for a little bit — so that we can create better teachable moments, whether we’re talking to students or to anyone interested in our jobs.
People who read these books are not ignorant or obstinate, he points out, but rather undecided about alternative archaeological explanations and clearly interested in understanding the past. ”It’s time we talk to the guy sitting next to us on the airplane,” Holly asserts. In collecting nine reviews of popular-on-Amazon pseudo-archaeology books by professional archaeologists, Holly hopes that this will both “offer the silent and curious majority that is interested in these works a professional perspective on them” and give archaeologists unfamiliar with the books a pseudoarchaeology primer.
The article starts out with two reviews of books whose main premise is that we need advanced humans — or nonhumans — to make sense of past developments. First up, Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization, reviewed by Ken Feder, an archaeologist famous for his anti-pseudoarchaeology book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. The gist of Fingerprints is that an extraordinarily advanced civilization roamed the seas thousands of years ago, giving advice to the people they found in places like Egypt and Peru and helping them establish their own civilizations. In return, these advanced peoples were treated as gods, particularly after some cataclysmic event wiped them out. Feder’s main problems with Hancock’s book include the fact that he cherry-picked his data, not bothering to address all the evidence; that he relies on very old and discredited fringe thinkers; and that he can’t conceive of cultural evolution.
In the second review, The Ancient Alien Question, archaeologist Jeb Card points out, as does Feder, that the origins of this idea lay in Victorian mysticism and Theosophy, a movement that “blended hermetic magic, spiritualism, Western curiosity about Eastern religion, colonial racism, and misconceptions of evolution into a worldview of root races, lost continents, and ascended masters who originated on Venus or other worlds.” The author of The Ancient Alien Question, Philip Coppens, was a regular on the Ancient Aliens TV series and presents academic research as if science itself is mysterious. Most problematic, Card finds, is Coppens’ invocation of “the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and other book burnings as suppression of ancient truth without recognizing his own call for the destruction of the scientific order, replacing scientific investigation with a new history of mysticism and myth.”
Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. (Image via wikimedia commons user Teomancimit, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)
Other books in the review section focus on specific sites or cultures and illustrate that the popular author has artificially selected which information to present. Andrew Collins’ bookGöbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, reviewed by archaeologist Eric Cline, deals with the Neolithic site in Turkey that Collins tries to connect to the biblical Garden of Eden by treating the Bible as incontrovertible fact. Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egyptby Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy, reviewed by archaeologist Ethan Watrall, misunderstands both astronomy and the Bible to show that the Egyptian state was “black African” yet also manages to accurately point out that academic archaeology has for a long time ignored sub-Saharan Africa.
The southwestern U.S. is covered by Gary David’s Star Shrines and Earthworks of the Desert Southwest, reviewed by archaeologist Stephen Lekson. While Lekson admits that David is onto something with his “loose, journalistic style,” the “content [of the book] is fantastic, it is phenomenal, it is flabbergasting, it is… a mish-mash.” Archaeologist Kory Cooper tackles Iron Age America Before Columbusby William Conner, which suggests that there is evidence of iron smelting sites in prehistoric North America.
Cooper’s highest praise is that it “would make a useful reference for an Introduction to Logic course because the book is a veritable catalogue of logical fallacies.” And archaeologist Benjamin Auerbach reviews The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America: The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up by Richard Dewhurst, who uses old newspaper articles to claim that not only were the skeletons of giants found in the U.S., but that the most well-known science museum in the country tried to hide the evidence. Auerbach points out that he personally has studied many of the skeletons Dewhurst mentions and “none had statures over six feet.” The selective evidence in these books is clearly problematic, but not as problematic as the motif underlying many pseudoarchaeology books.
The primary theme among these popular pseudoarchaeology books that professionals have a major problem with is ethnocentrism, or the idea that we can judge other cultures based on the yardstick of our own. But racism figures in here too. Archaeologist Larry Zimmerman reviews The Lost Colonies of Ancient Americaby Frank Joseph, who insists that mainstream archaeologists are the ones ignoring information on transoceanic voyages and that any number of past civilizations may have colonized the New World first.
Zimmerman, though, notes that “Joseph echoes half a millennium of speculation geared toward inventing a deep Old World history in the Americas, thereby challenging the primacy of American Indians in the hemisphere, or at least implying their inferiority, their poor stewardship of the land, and the need to civilize them, all in the service of Manifest Destiny and justification for taking their land.”
Similarly, John Ruskamp’s Asiatic Echoes: The Identification of Chinese Pictograms in Pre-Columbian North American Rock Writing, reviewed by archaeologist Angus Quinlan, puts forth the idea that pictograms found in North American rock art are Chinese script characters left by an otherwise archaeologically invisible trip across the Pacific. The similarity is substantial, Ruskamp insists, but Quinlan calls it “another illustration of deductive thinking at its worst.” Further, Quinlan points out that these sorts of interpretations that try to shoehorn in foreign visitors to explain New World culture are “disrespectful of the Native American cultures that used rock art in their sociocultural routines.”
Native American pictograph (painted rock art) from a panel of images found in Horseshoe/Barrier Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
(Image via wikimedia commons user Scott Catron, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)
Archaeologists are trained as anthropologists to recognize and celebrate the diversity of humanity, both today and in the past. Eric Cline succinctly explains this in his review, noting “pseudo archaeologists cannot accept the fact that the mere humans might have come up with great innovations such as the domestication of plants and animals or built great architectural masterpieces such as the Sphinx all on their own; rather, they frequently seek or invoke divine, or even alien, assistance to explain how these came to be.”
Pseudoarchaeology books are problematic for archaeologists for a number of reasons. First, of course, they tend to present misinformation, cherry-picked from legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) sources that is often taken as fact because it’s presented as fact. Archaeologists, as scientists, can no more select what data to consider than a chemist can select which laws of chemistry to follow. Second, pseudoarchaeology seems like a legitimate body of scholarship because authors tend to cite one another, creating a body of information that, however outlandish it sounds, fits together. Archaeology also does this, but as scientists, we are invested in improving our understanding of the past rather than in protecting our own theories the way pseudo archaeologists do.
But these books are perhaps most problematic for archaeologists because, as Lekson notes, “alternative archaeology is more interesting than the stuff we write… more interesting to more people, that is.” Academic archaeologists are not trained to write readably, which means there is a large opening for authors to connect with the “guy on the airplane.” Archaeologists like Brian Fagan who do write more approachable books have to walk a fine line between making data interesting and not making extraordinary claims.
Unfortunately, tales of ancient aliens and extraordinary humans creating the Pyramids as a communication device are often more fascinating than slow cultural change. We as archaeologists need to find a way to showcase the humanity of the past and get across the idea that ancient humans were intelligent, capable, and innovative — that those of us alive today are the product of that long history of innovation, and that we are continuing the tradition of our early ancestors by inventing cars, computers, and, yes, even pseudoarchaeology.
Découvertes exceptionnelles au Lac Titicaca par une équipe belge d’archéologues-plongeurs
L’archéologue Christophe Delaere ( FNRS, CReA Patrimoine, Université libre de Bruxelles) et son équipe de plongeurs ont mis au jour des dépôts d’offrandes précolombiennes dans les eaux du Lac Titicaca en Bolivie. Datées de plusieurs périodes successives, notamment Inca et Tiahuanaco, elles comprennent des céramiques intactes associées à des objets en or et en matières précieuses. Cette découverte inédite filmée au jour le jour fait l’objet d’un documentaire qui sera présenté prochainement.
Cet été, en Bolivie, une équipe d’archéologues-plongeurs emmenée par Christophe Delaere - Université libre de Bruxelles, FNRS - a mis au jour une série d’offrandes en contexte clos, au pied du récif de Khoa, proche de l’Ile du Soleil. Le site subaquatique, détecté en 1977, n’avait été que superficiellement exploré, mais était réputé pour la qualité de son matériel inca (15e-16es.). La stratégie de recherche et les moyens techniques et humains engagés ont permis une fouille en stratigraphie. Les archéologues- plongeurs ont méthodiquement décapé les différentes couches du fond lagunaire lors de deux sondages.
Scellées par un mètre de sédiments et d’éboulis, des «urnes» en céramique de la période Tiahuanaco (6e-11es.) ont été découvertes en connexion à un vaste dépôt anthropique composé de macrofaune, fibres végétales, cuir, pierres semi-précieuses, objets en or et en alliages, ancres et fragments de charbon de bois.
L’analyse du mobilier révèle que ces dépôts sont exclusivement subaquatiques, intentionnels, et témoignent d’activités cérémonielles intermittentes mais continues depuis la période formative (6es. av. JC) jusqu’au 21e siècle. (autrement dit, les archéologues ont aussi été repêcher les offrandes qui datent d'hier... pas très fin ni respectueux...)
Avec un total de près de 2500 objets et fragments, ces découvertes documentent non seulement une pratique rituelle méconnue d’offrandes au lac pour certaines périodes d’occupation, mais fournissent également de précieuses informations sur la transmission orale du savoir et l’importance de la pérennité culturelle en Bolivie. Le patrimoine du bassin lagunaire a été régulièrement pillé jusqu’au 19e siècle et une partie de ce patrimoine disparu, détruit ou oublié, a donc été redécouvert dans des conditions de conservation idéale.
La présence de coquillages importés du littoral Pacifique équatorial et de lapis-lazuli du Chili dans les eaux du Titicaca montre l’importance et la complexité des échanges régionaux et continentaux entretenus durant les périodes pré-inca.
La découverte de nombreux objets en or et alliages atteste, quant à elle, et au-delà du caractère exceptionnel du matériau, d’une maîtrise achevée de la métallurgie, totalement inconnue jusqu’ici dans la région pour certaines périodes.
Avec la participation du Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM), un robot sous-marin (ROV) a permis d’accéder à des zones dangereuses et inaccessibles aux plongeurs afin de récolter des données sur le fond lagunaire. La plongée en altitude, à 3809 mètres au-dessus du niveau de la mer, a en effet nécessité un encadrement et des conditions de travail adaptés.
Le projet a été documenté par le réalisateur et producteur belge Frédéric Cordier qui présentera le documentaire dans le courant de l’année 2014 sur les fouilles subaquatiques. La participation active du NEMO 33 dans le cadre du projet a par ailleurs permis de donner à celui-ci l’impulsion nécessaire à la concrétisation des fouilles. La mission a été menée sous l’égide du Centre de Recherche en Archéologie et Patrimoine , CReA - Patrimoine de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, avec l’accord du ministère de la Culture de Bolivie, et a bénéficié du soutien de nombreux partenaires et sponsors tels que le FNRS, l’Union des Anciens Étudiants de l’ULB (UAE), les Chantiers Beaumontois, DAN Europe et 2ASM.
Les prochaines opérations, programmées dans le courant de l’année 2014, auront pour objectifs de compléter l’étude sous l’eau, de restaurer et d’analyser le mobilier conservé en surface.
In de periode van 2004 tot 2010 heeft ESA’s Mars Express 32 foto’s gemaakt van de noordpool van de rode planeet. Wetenschappers hebben de foto’s samengevoegd, waardoor een prachtig mozaïek is ontstaan.
Mars heeft een permanente ijskap. Dit betekent dat het topje van de planeet altijd wit is. Toch neemt de dikte van de ijskap in de winter met een meter toe, omdat de temperaturen dan flink dalen. Ongeveer dertig procent van de koolstofdioxide in de atmosfeer van Mars dwarrelt dan namelijk neer op de ijskap.
Op dit moment is het winter op de noordpool van Mars. Dit betekent dat de ijskap lekker dik is. In de warmere zomermaanden sublimeert het koolstofdioxideijs en komt het in de atmosfeer terecht. Het onderliggende waterijs blijft dan nog wel liggen.
Corioliseffect De ijskap op de noordpool heeft een duidelijke spiraalstructuur. Deze structuur is veroorzaakt door wind. Wind waait van het centrum naar de randen va de poolkap, maar omdat de planeet draait, is er sprake van een dwarskracht. Dit wordt het corioliseffect genoemd. Dit treedt ook op bij orkanen. Hierdoor lijken de wolkenmassa’s rond een orkaan op de ijskap op Mars.
Gigantische kloof Een van de hoogtepunten van het mozaïek is een 500 kilometer lange kloof, die twee kilometer diep is. Van boven lijkt het net alsof de ijskap in tweeën is gesplitst. Deze kloof wordt Chasma Boreale genoemd.
Twee kilometer dik De Europese ruimtevaartorganisatie meldt dat de ijskap van Mars uit meerdere lagen van ijs en stof bestaat en ongeveer twee kilometer dik is.
Op de foto zien we onder meer gaslagen die met ongelofelijke snelheden – tot wel 1 miljoen kilometer per uur – weggeslingerd worden.
Als een ster sterft, is dat een spectaculaire gebeurtenis. Dat blijkt ook wel uit deze prachtige foto van OH 231.8+04.2 – bijgenaamd de kalebas- of rotte eieren-nevel.
Rot ei? Dat deze nevel ook wel rotte eieren-nevel wordt genoemd, komt doordat deze veel zwavel bevat. Wanneer je dit element combineert met andere elementen ruikt het als een rot ei.
Planetaire nevel in wording We zijn hier getuige van de dood van een ster met een lage massa. De ster zit midden in een transformatie en verandert van een rode reus in een planetaire nevel. Tijdens deze transformatie worden de buitenste gas- en stoflagen van de ster in de omringende ruimte geblazen. Het recent weggeslingerde materiaal begeeft zich – met enorme snelheden – in allerlei richtingen. Zo beweegt het gas dat op deze foto een gelige kleur heeft, zich met een snelheid van bijna 1 miljoen kilometer per uur voort.
Foto: ESA / Hubble & NASA / Judy Schmidt.
Zeldzaam Het gebeurt maar zelden dat astronomen getuige zijn van deze transformatie. De transformatie duurt namelijk – in astronomische begrippen – maar kort. Over zo’n 1000 jaar is OH 231.8+04.2 al een volgroeide planetaire nevel.
De ster die je hier een transformatie ziet ondergaan, heeft – net als onze zon – een lage massa. Staat onze moederster dan exact hetzelfde lot te wachten? Ja, maar het duurt nog even. Over zo’n vijf tot zes miljard jaar zal ook onze zon stervende zijn. Meer weten? Lees hier hoe de dood van de zon in zijn werk gaat en wat dat betekent voor de aarde.
RoboDragonfly: Tiny Backpack Turns Insect into a Cyborg
RoboDragonfly: Tiny Backpack Turns Insect into a Cyborg
By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer
A first generation version of the backpack guidance system that includes energy harvesting, navigation and optical stimulation on a to-scale model of a dragonfly.
Credit: Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
Scientists look to flying animals — birds, bats and insects — for inspiration when they design airborne drones. But researchers are also investigating how to use technology to interact with, and even guide, animals as they fly, enhancing the unique adaptations that allow them to take to the air.
To that end, engineers have fitted dragonflies with tiny, backpack-mounted controllers that issue commands directly to the neurons controlling the insects' flight.
This project, known as DragonflEye, uses optogenetics, a technique that employs light to transmit signals to neurons. And researchers have genetically modified dragonfly neurons to make them more light-sensitive, and thereby easier to control through measured light pulses. [7 Animals That Wore Backpacks for Science.
Dragonflies have large heads, long bodies and two pairs of wings that don't always flap in sync, according to a 2007 study published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The study authors found that dragonflies maximize their lift when they flap both sets of wings together, and they hover by flapping their wing pairs out of synch, though at the same rate.
Meanwhile, separate muscles controlling each of their four wings allow dragonflies to dart, hover and turn on a dime with exceptional precision, scientists found in 2014. Researchers used high-speed video footage to track dragonfly flight and build computer models to better understand the insects' complex maneuvers, presenting their findings at the 67th Annual Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, according to a statement released by the American Physical Society in November 2014.
DragonflEye sees these tiny flight masters as potentially controllable flyers that would be "smaller, lighter and stealthier than anything else that's manmade," Jesse Wheeler, a biomedical engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (CSDL) in Massachusetts and principal investigator on the DragonflEye program, said in a statement.
A close-up of the backpack board and components before being folded and fitted to the dragonfly.
Credit: Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
The project is a collaboration between the CSDL, which has been developing the backpack that controls the dragonfly, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), where experts are identifying and enhancing "steering" neurons located in the dragonfly's nerve cord, inserting genes that make it more responsive to light.
"This system pushes the boundaries of energy harvesting, motion sensing, algorithms, miniaturization and optogenetics, all in a system small enough for an insect to wear," Wheeler said.
Even smaller than the dragonfly backpack are components created by CSDL called optrodes — optical fibers supple enough to wrap around the dragonfly's nerve cord, so that engineers can target only the neurons related to flight, CSDL representatives explained in a statement.
And in addition to controlling insect flight, the tiny, flexible optrodes could have applications in human medicine, Wheeler added.
"Someday these same tools could advance medical treatments in humans, resulting in more effective therapies with fewer side effects," Wheeler said. "Our flexible optrode technology provides a new solution to enable miniaturized diagnostics, safely access smaller neural targets and deliver higher precision therapies."
Ah, wormholes. The intergalactic shortcut. A tunnel through space-time that allows intrepid travelers to hop from star system to star system without ever coming close to the speed of light.
Wormholes are a workhorse of sci-fi interstellar civilizations in books and on the screen because they solve the annoying problem of "Well, if we stuck to known physics, 99.99999 percent of the story would be as fascinating as watching people sleep."
The concept of wormholes got its start when physicist Ludwig Flamm, and later Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, realized that black holes can be "extended." When one goes about solving the fantastically complicated equations of general relativity, the machinery that predicts a black hole also predicts a phenomenon called a white hole. A white hole is pretty much what you think: Whereas a black hole's event horizon marks a region of space that once you enter you can't leave, it's impossible to enter a white hole's horizon, although anything already in there can escape.
That same mathematical machinery delivers a bonus, too: All black holes would be naturally "connected" to white holes via their singularities, making a tunnel through space. Woohoo, wormholes here we go!
Or not. While we have gobs of evidence for the existence of black holes, white holes appear to be mathematical fiction. There's no known process in our universe that would actually form them, and even if they did pop into existence, their natural extreme instability would snuff them right out again. [Watch: Wormhole instabilities.]
Oh, yeah, and the mechanism for making black holes — the collapse of massive stars — also automatically prevents the formation of a symbiotic white hole.
And even if they did form (and they don't), the extreme gravity of the mutual singularities would cause the wormhole tunnel to immediately stretch and snap much more quickly than anything could cross it.
Death by wormhole
But that doesn't stop anybody from playing a fun game of "what if." What if white holes could naturally form, or be constructed? What if we could stabilize them? What if we could attach a white hole's singularity to a black hole and make a wormhole? What if? What if? What if?
Well, for one thing, traveling down such a wormhole would really, really suck. Literally. The entrance to the wormhole — the "throat" — sits inside the event horizon of the black hole.
That's a problem.
The very definition of an event horizon — their very cosmiqueraison d'etre — is that once you enter them, you don't get to come out. No way, no how. It doesn't matter if there's a wormhole tunnel inside it — you don't get to leave.
Inside a black hole event horizon, you have only one destination: singularity town, the place of infinite density and soul-crushing gravitational forces.
So let's say you enter a wormhole. You can watch light from another patch of the universe filter in from the opposite side. If someone else jumps in, you can meet them and have some tea together. And you can die — miserably — as you careen into the singularity. [Chasing Wormholes: The Hunt for Tunnels in Space-Time]
Positively negative
Is there any way to make a working, even fun, wormhole, instead of a terrifying portal to inevitable destruction?
Surprisingly, yes. Well, not quite 100 percent absolutely "this is a normal part of our universe" yes. More like "if we play pretend" yes.
To construct a traversable wormhole, you need to overcome two important obstacles. First, the entrance to the wormhole has to actually sit outside the event horizon. That would allow you to enter the wormhole and blast through it to your faraway destination without fearing a "singular" encounter.
Second, the tunnel itself has to be stable and strong. It has to withstand the extreme gravity of the singularities and resist tearing apart when something flies down its length.
There is indeed a material that solves both problems. But that material has a problem all its own: It has negative mass.
That's right: mass, but negative. A ring of negative-mass material could be used to construct a fully functional and useful wormhole. Since the exotic nature of negative mass warps spacetime in a unique way, it "inflates" the entrance to the wormhole outside the boundary of the event horizon, and stabilizes the throat of the wormhole against instabilities. It’s not an intuitive result but the math checks out.
But could such a substance exist? We've mapped out a good chunk of the universe, and we've never seen negative mass. If it did exist, it would have some pretty weird properties. For example, following the math of Newton’s Laws with some minus signs tossed in, we find that a negative-mass particle would push on a positive-mass particle, while the positive-mass particle would pull on the negative-mass one. Set two opposite-mass particles next to each other, perfectly still, and the pair would start accelerating, zooming off without any input of force.
What about the Casimir effect, the odd and fascinating attraction of two metal plates due to vacuum energy? That’s often trotted out as an example of the universe behaving badly, and a possible route to negative mass. But the Casimir force is characterized by local negative pressure (it pulls rather than pushes), not negative mass.Sure, we don't know everything there is to know about quantum gravity and the nature of space-time at super-duper-teensy scales. Could an advanced civilization discover the path to negative mass and manipulate gravity in just the right way? Would a breakthrough in physics point a way to fashioning wormholes?
Honestly, probably not. There are just too many things working against them. Working wormholes would violate so many aspects about known (and extremely well tested) physics that I think it's better to just work on other problems.
I know some people might accuse me of not being creative enough, but the universe doesn't care about our creativity. The tools of science are harsh but fair judges; if an idea doesn't work, it simply doesn't work. There are many varied and beautiful mysteries in our universe, and we certainly haven't unlocked all of the inner workings of the cosmos. But wormholes probably aren't one of them.
Learn more by listening to the episode "Wormholes - deal or no deal?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to @SkaTaTah and @bretthines61 for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul
A man who claims he was abducted by aliens – and has a metal implant in his leg – has explained what actually happens when people wake up with unexplained ‘gaps’ in time.
Chris Augustin claims that he knows that time had passed in an instant – because he suddenly ‘came to’ behind the wheel of his car.
Chris Augustin, ‘Three minutes and 40 seconds took place inside my car. I felt like I’d come aware from something – like a daze.’
‘My hands are on the wheel, executing a turn – and then three-and-a-half minutes are gone. I was afraid, afraid of what I didn’t understand.
In a wide-ranging speech at a UFO conference in late January, Augustin claims that years later, he started to wake up with blood on his sheets – and that aliens implanted a metal object in his leg.
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual said, ‘‘American ufologist and artist Budd Hopkins categorised many of the prime elements of the abduction experience. He discovered that UFO witnesses, with no inclination of an abduction experience, often cannot account for a missing period, ranging from minutes to hours.
(Picture: Youtube)
‘Abductions often start in childhood, continue throughout a person’s life, and are not just isolated incidents. Abductees regularly find mysterious scars on their body; they are often confused and worried by dreams or nightmares that they have had since childhood. Under hypnosis they remember being inside a flying saucer.
‘Typical memories recall medical procedures that include the taking of sperm or ova. At times, the experience amounts to a form of ritualized rape. From his study of hundreds of reports, Hopkins believes that aliens are abducting people to create human/alien hybrids.
‘As might be expected, such ideas have attracted the attention of both sceptics and believers. Sceptics regard the abduction researchers and abductees as gullible fools who do not know the difference between fact and fantasy. The believers regard the abductees as tortured victims who need understanding and help after the trauma of alien encounters.’
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The Most Amazing Space Stories This Week!
The Most Amazing Space Stories This Week!
By Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer
Blazars form extremely active cores of some galaxies. They consist of a supermassive black hole with a dense, whirling disk of material around it, which generates the energy for near-lightspeed jets of material aimed perpendicular to the disk. If one of those jets is aimed toward Earth, it appears particularly bright and the core is classified as a blazar.
Credit: M. Weiss/Cfa
Results from the astronaut twins, a chemistry test for life, plants on a satellite and Earth's oxygen on the moon — it's Space.com's best space stories of the week.
Double trouble
Early experimental results from astronaut Scott Kelly's nearly yearlong stay in space reveal subtle but significant impacts to his body. Kelly was also compared with his twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelly, who stayed on the ground. [Full Story: How 1-Year Space Mission Affected Astronaut Twin Scott Kelly: Early Results]
The American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union and American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics signed a letter protesting last week's White House executive order restricting immigration to the United States from seven Muslim-majority nations, and the International Astronomical Union also spoke out with their concerns. Many space industry organizations, on the other hand, have described a "wait-and-see" approach. [Full Story: Mixed Reactions in Space Community to Immigration Executive Order]
Blazing bright
Five gamma-ray blazars, shooting intense radiation from enormous supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, have been spotted further away than ever before, dating back to when the universe was nearly one-tenth its current age. [Full Story: These Powerful Blazars Are the Most Distant Ever Seen]
Moon air time
A new study has discovered a type of oxygen common in Earth's atmosphere embedded in the lunar soil, suggesting that that the moon has been picking up the charged substance during a specific part of its orbit — ever since plants on Earth began generating it. [Full Story: Moon's Been Getting Oxygen from Earth's Plants for Billions of Years]
ET chemistry test
A new chemical analysis could detect specific amino acid types on the surface of an alien world, letting robotic missions autonomously sniff out evidence of life. The analysis can distinguish between "left-handed" and "right-handed" amino acids with extreme sensitivity — while natural amino acids form in both varieties equally, life generates just one. [Full Story: Finding Alien Life Could Be a Simple Chemistry Test Away]
An icy mystery
New results from the IceCube neutrino detector experiment, buried under the Antarctic ice, have revealed a strange symmetry in measurements of the neutrinos' masses, suggesting there's an underlying physics scientists don't understand behind the ghostly particles. [Full Story: Cosmic Neutrino Detector Reveals Clues About Ghostly Particle Masses]
Space plants
A satellite scheduled to launch later this year will grow tomatoes experimentally at moon and Mars gravity by rotating on its axis at different speeds. The German Aerospace Center project will help researchers understand how to best grow plants for future settlements on those worlds. [Full Story: Space Farming: Satellite's Greenhouses to Simulate Moon, Mars Gravity]
Junk collector fail
A space junk "collector" attached to a Japanese space station resupply vehicle ran into a glitch, failing to propel a long tether into space. The system would ultimately use such a tether to reach large pieces of dangerous debris and pull them down to be incinerated in Earth's atmosphere. [Full Story: A Japanese Space Junk Removal Experiment Has Failed in Orbit]
Hey neighbor
Breakthrough Starshot, a project to send tiny probes to our neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, initially described probes that would whiz by after a journey at 20 percent the speed of light. A new study explores how such a probe could slow down enough to get into orbit around Alpha Centauri or the associated star Proxima Centauri, giving it a chance to investigate the newly-discovered planet Proxima b (although the journey would take much longer). [Full Story: Studying Proxima b: Tiny Sailing Probes Could Orbit Nearby Exoplanet]
How New Hubble Telescope Views Could Aid Interstellar Travel
How New Hubble Telescope Views Could Aid Interstellar Travel
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor
Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to study the clouds of material along the paths of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft through interstellar space.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have gotten their best looks yet at the mysterious interstellar clouds surrounding the solar system, a new study finds.
These observations could shed light on the challenges that future interstellar missions dispatched to the nearest stars might face, the researchers said.
In 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 probe crossed the so-called heliopause — the giant bubble of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields surrounding the sun — and, in the process, became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977, giving the world some of its first good looks at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the moons of these planets. [Photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 Probes]
NASA notes that Voyager 1 and 2 are currently zipping through space at roughly 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h). Voyager 1 is about 12.8 billion miles (20.6 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it the farthest human-made object ever built. In about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, in the constellation Camelopardalis, the agency says.
Voyager 2 hasn't entered interstellar space yet; it's about 10.5 billion miles (17 billion km) from Earth, NASA says. In 40,000 years, the probe will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star Ross 248, the agency says.
The two Voyager spacecraft remain in contact with Earth through NASA's Deep Space Network of telecommunications links. The probes are still collecting data that scientists can analyze to learn more about the interstellar medium — the clouds of gas and dust that lie between the stars. The interstellar medium holds the building blocks of stars and planets, and is replenished when stars and planets die.
In the future, the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot project, unveiled in 2016, aims to launch tiny spacecraft to the nearest star system to the sun, Alpha Centauri. It consists of three stars: Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and a small red dwarf named Proxima Centauri. Recently, astronomers discovered that Proxima Centauri hosts a small, potentially habitable rocky planet, raising scientists' hopes that Starshot might be able to send probes to an alien world in our lifetimes.
These new projects and discoveries make any data that the two Voyager spacecraft gather on the interstellar medium potentially key for exploration, the researchers said.
"It's important for us to be aware of what kinds of objects are present beyond our solar system, since we are now beginning to think about potential interstellar space missions, such as Breakthrough Starshot," said study lead author Julia Zachary, an undergraduate astronomy student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
To learn more about the interstellar medium, Zachary and her colleagues examined data that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope collected regarding the same interstellar gas and dust that Voyager 1 and 2 are currently analyzing.
In this artist's conception, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird's-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
"An analogy we like to use is that of Google Maps," Zachary told Space.com. "If the Voyager spacecraft are the Google Maps cars going around neighborhoods, taking pictures and giving you the street view, then Hubble provides the overview."
Until 2015, Hubble had not gazed at any nearby stars lying along the paths of the Voyager spacecraft. The scientists used Hubble to analyze the light from these stars to learn more about the interstellar clouds the radiation passed through.
The scientists discovered at least two interstellar clouds along Voyager 2's path, and one or two interstellar clouds along Voyager 1's path. They were also able to measure the density of electrons in the clouds along Voyager 2's path, and found that one had a greater electron density than the other.
"We think the difference in electron density perhaps indicates a difference in composition of overall density of the clouds," Zachary said.
In addition, the researchers successfully detected a broad range of elements in the interstellar medium, such as electrically charged ions of magnesium, iron, carbon and manganese. They also detected neutrally charged oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
All in all, "we think the Voyager spacecraft are moving into a very rich and complex interstellar environment," Zachary said.
Zachary and her colleagues Seth Redfield, an associate professor in the Wesleyan University Department of Astronomy; and Jeffrey Linsky, a research professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, detailed their findings Jan. 6 at the 229th American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Texas.
The Fermi Paradox is one of the major unanswered questions in astrobiology. It started with physicist Enrico Fermi, who in 1950 asked his co-workers over lunch: “Where are they?” What he meant was intelligent extraterrestrials. If there are billions and billions of stars and probably even more planets, why have we not already been in contact with extraterrestrial (ET) civilizations?
This is even more puzzling since our Sun and Earth are relatively young, meaning that life could have originated on other worlds long before it did here, and intelligent beings on those planets could easily be millions of years ahead of us.
There are two principle answers to the paradox: The alien civilizations are (1) present but for some reason we can’t detect them, or (2) they simply are not there, or at least not in our vicinity. In regard to the first option, Star Trek’s prime directive comes to mind, or perhaps a scientific variation of the Zoo hypothesis (aliens don’t interfere with us because we are an unstable emerging civilization).
There are in fact so many possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox that whole books are written about it. Nevertheless, assuming aliens are around us, shouldn’t there be some evidence? Well, not necessarily. Carl Sagan pointed out that if an ET civilization is far ahead of us, their actions would appear to us as magic. Just imagine us flying a spy drone over our Stone Age ancestors!
What about the so-called UFO sightings that we astrobiologists are sometimes asked about (see, for example, the top UFO cases of 2012 as judged by the Mutual UFO Network). On one hand, I believe that we scientists are sometimes too dismissive of eyewitness reports, and too quick to rationalize them away as natural phenomena or hallucinations. On the other hand, we rely on the scientific method, and reported sightings are not reproducible events that we can test in the laboratory.
What about the second answer—that aliens simply do not exist? The Drake equation, which is usually used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe, includes a term for the probability of life originating on a planet. If this term is near zero, the number of expected ET civilizations is near zero. Usually we assume that life on Earth was not a singular event, and that it would have happened elsewhere under similar conditions, but we don’t know for sure. We still don’t know how life occurred on Earth, and what ingredients were needed. It’s possible that the rise of intelligent civilizations is such a rare event that the next civilization with our kind of technology is thousands or even millions of light years away.
Or perhaps there’s another possibility, which I raised once at a SETI meeting when we were examining the question of why we haven’t had a positive detection yet. Imagine using a walkie-talkie in modern New York, and wondering why no one responds on your frequency. It’s because everyone is on Facebook or Twitter! So it might be with ET, who may be using technology well advanced of our own.
This artist's concept illustrates an interstellar probe—a giant light sail—approaching the potentially habitable planet Proxima b in our nearest neighboring star system Alpha Centauri. A new study suggests that such a sail could launch from Earth to reach and enter orbit around the nearest stars on a timescale of centuries. Credit: PHL/UPR Arecibo/Abel Mendez
Interstellar travel, a timeworn staple of science fiction, can already be science fact if one has cash to spare. For just $100 million or so, a customer could actually purchase a top-of-the-line commercial rocket and ride right out of the solar system. But patience would be key. If launched tomorrow toward the nearest port of call—Proxima b, a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet recently discovered in the triple star system of Alpha Centauri about four light-years away—that rocket would take 80,000 years to arrive.
Instead of spending $100 million on a slow boat to the stars, in April of last year the billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced he would use that same sum to forge a new path to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime. Called Breakthrough Starshot, the initiative calls for largely abandoning rockets in favor of “light sails”—gossamer-thin reflective sheets that, once unfolded in space, could be propelled to very high speeds by laser beams. Starshot’s tentative plans involve using conventional rockets to place thousands of one-gram, four-meter-wide light sails in Earth orbit as early as the 2040s. Each sail would be embedded with a one-centimeter-wide chip containing cameras, sensors, thrusters and a battery. From Earth orbit, each featherweight spacecraft would be boosted toward Alpha Centauri at 20 percent light-speed by a minutes-long pulse from a ground-based, 100-gigawatt laser array. The interstellar crossing would take just a little over 20 years, so the probes could reach Alpha Centauri in the 2060s.
But such high speeds come at a high price. Even the most conservative cost estimates for Starshot far exceed Milner’s initial $100-million investment—the multi-decadal project could easily consume $10 billion, and perhaps much more, largely due to the enormous expense of building the ground-based laser array. Government assistance and international collaboration would likely be required. Moreover, the light sails that survive the 20-year voyage would pass through the Centauri system in a flash, moving so fast they would have only seconds to capture high-quality close-up images and other data from Proxima b and any neighboring planets that may be there. As they fall deeper into the dark between the stars, the light sails would attempt to transmit their precious findings back to Earth using laser beams no more powerful than the signal from a typical cell phone.
A SLOWER SAIL TO THE STARS
Some critics say these problems make Starshot’s rush to Alpha Centauri look like a poor investment. “When we read about [Starshot], we found it wasteful to spend so much money on a flyby mission which is en route for decades, while the time for a few snapshots is only seconds,” says Michael Hippke, an independent researcher in Germany. Working with René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Hippke has developed an alternative mission profile that he says could offer greater scientific returns for a fraction of the cost. Rather than using multibillion-dollar laser arrays to boost small light sails to relativistic speeds for one-time flybys, Heller and Hippke propose using starlightalone to send larger sails on more leisurely journeys that would take them to all three stars in the Alpha Centauri system and leave them parked in orbits there. Their findings appear in the February 1 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The crux of their proposal is not only to use sunlight to accelerate outbound light sails, but also rely on the light and gravitation of Alpha Centauri’s triple stars at journey’s end. Heller and Hippke have calculated that a mind-bogglingly low-density sail weighing approximately 100 grams but spread across 100,000 square meters (that’s about 15 football fields!) could do the trick. Such a sail’s construction appears possible, based on rapid progress in material science. Incrementally adjusting its angle as it approaches to soak up more radiation pressure from the stars, that sail could bleed off enough speed to be captured into orbit within the system.
To reach the potentially habitable planet Proxima b, these “photogravitational” assists counterintuitively require first sending the light sail swooping blisteringly close to the bright, sunlike stars Alpha Centauri A and B—even though they are nearly two trillion kilometers farther from us than Proxima b’s smaller, dimmer host star, Proxima Centauri. This is because the greater radiation pressure from Alpha Centauri A and B provides more deceleration, and thus a faster approach, for any light sail targeting the system. But the twin stars’ radiation pressure has its limits; if Heller’s and Hippke’s 100,000-square-mter light sail came in any faster than 4.6 percent light-speed, it would simply overshoot the system. All together, they envision their sail’s journey to Alpha Centauri A and B taking nearly a century, followed by another half-century voyage to the final destination—a stable orbit around Proxima.
This schematic animation shows how a giant, low-density light sail traveling at nearly 5 percent the speed of light could decelerate and enter orbit in the Alpha Centauri star system.
“You would need to travel about seven times as long as Starshot’s 20-year mission, but in return you would get years or decades of close-up exploration instead of only seconds,” Heller says. Comparing the ratio of exploration time with travel time for both cases, Heller adds, “Starshot could use one hundred-millionth of the mission’s lifetime for in situ science whereas we could use of the order of one hundredth—or about a million times more.” Plus, by using sunlight to launch the sail, the new proposal obviates the need for a multibillion-dollar gigawatt-scale laser array.
Even so, their proposed 150-year voyage could not start tomorrow. Heller’s and Hippke’s proposal utilizes a rare configuration of Alpha Centauri’s stars that only occurs once every 80 years, when their orbits all align in a plane that intersects the trajectory of any incoming probe from our own solar system. Alpha Centauri’s 80-year triple-alignment next occurs in 2035, far too soon for any conceivable light sail from Earth to be anywhere close to the system; instead, Heller and Hippke suggest it might be more realistic to target the subsequent alignment, in 2115.
As far-off as that is, the timing could be much worse, Heller says: Sending their sail directly to Proxima Centauri would demand much slower interstellar speeds due to the smaller star’s weaker radiation pressure and braking ability, raising the total travel time to nearly a millennium.
PATIENCE, PLEASE
For Hippke, a multigenerational mission ending in orbit around Alpha Centauri would be worth the wait, even if he would never see its returns. “Our children and grandchildren will receive the amazing photos from these space probes. Imagine alien rivers, volcanoes and perhaps exotic life!” Opting for a mission with a century timescale also opens possibilities for exploring other nearby bright stars, Hippke says. The massive star Sirius, for example, is just over twice as far away as Alpha Centauri—but because it shines some 25 times brighter than our sun, it offers a stronger radiation-pressure braking effect, allowing light sails to approach at much higher speeds. If nothing else, the possibility of sending light sails to orbit many nearby stars suggests a natural next-generation, longer-term follow-up to Starshot’s more urgent mission goals.
Despite these perks, Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University and chair of Breakthrough Starshot’s Scientific Advisory Committee, remains unconvinced this alternative proposal offers realistic advantages over Starshot’s plan to use gigawatt-class lasers to boost smaller sails to the stars. “In using starlight to reach relativistic speeds, one must use an extremely thin sail,” Loeb says, noting that the weaker push of sunlight calls for a correspondingly lower-density light sail. Hippke and Heller say their sail could in theory be constructed from low-weight, high-strength material such as graphene, but Loeb questions whether making and using a few-atoms-thick 100,000-square-meter sheet of graphene for an interstellar probe would actually be any easier than building a massive laser array. “Such a surface is orders of magnitude thinner than the wavelength of light that it aims to reflect, and so its reflectivity would be low,” Loeb says. “It does not appear feasible to reduce the weight by so many orders of magnitude and yet maintain the rigidity and reflectivity of the sail’s material.” In other words, a 100,000-square-meter graphene sail could prove far too flimsy to actually fly. Additionally, Starshot plans to fly thousands of sails, not just one—even if each successful interstellar crossing yielded only a few seconds of close-up observations, they could quickly accrue across multiple successive flybys.
Perhaps the biggest issue, Loeb says, is whether ambitious plans for multigenerational projects can really survive their inescapable encounters with human mortality. “If one ignores the duration of the journey, one can always use conventional rockets and reach Alpha Centauri in 80,000 years for a very modest cost,” he says. “But the people who work on Starshot are more ambitious. We want to get there within our lifetime.”
ALLEGED APOLLO 20 CIGAR UFO FINALLY FOUND IN A MOON CRATER ON GOOGLE EARTH MAP
ALLEGED APOLLO 20 CIGAR UFO FINALLY FOUND IN A MOON CRATER ON GOOGLE EARTH MAP
William Rutledge is well known in UFO research circles for the extraordinary claims he made about his work for NASA on the Apollo missions.
Rutledge alleged that he was part of the crew on the top secret Apollo 20 mission which deployed a team of astronauts to the surface of the Moon to investigate the Delporte crater. The Delporte crater had been the site of an alien craft crash and NASA and the government of the United States were keen to recover their technology. They discovered ample technological components which was later put to use in America’s own military industrial project and the bodies of two alien creatures, one of whom appeared to be alive.
GOOGLE EARTH FOOTAGE OF THE DELPORTE CRATER CONFIRMS UFO STORY
Rutledge and the rest of the team were sworn to secrecy by the United States government but he made the bold decision to break his silence when he was in his late 70s. At this time, he was retired and living with his wife in the African country of Rwanda and did not believe that his safety or his livelihood would be endangered by his revelations at that time.
Rutledge proceeded to record his story on videos which he uploaded to YouTube. They were promptly removed by persons unknown, presumably the Central Intelligence Agency. Rutledge told that prominent UFO research Scott Waring that he was frightened and intimidated by the speed of the CIA’s reaction but he refused to be silence. Instead, he uploaded the videos to a smaller content platform similar to YouTube. These videos lasted a little longer but were also removed promptly by state agents. During the brief period that they were online, they were downloaded and duplicated by a number of individuals who brought the public’s attention to Rutledge’s sensational story. For his trouble, Rutledge was subjected to a long-standing public campaign of ridicule.
But despite the attempts to silence, discredit and humiliate Rutledge, there were many people who believed his story. Therefore when Google made satellite images of the lunar surface available to the public view they decided to scour the surface in search of the enormous ship Rutledge described. What UFO researchers discovered when assessing the Delporte Crater appeared to vindicate Rutledge’s story. The images recovered clearly show a cigar-shaped vessel of approximately 3000 metres in length.
Following the dissemination of these images, Google sprang into action and removed the zoom option for this particular portion of the Moon. The swiftness with which the government and their corporate allies have acted to keep the public from viewing anything related to the Apollo 20 mission has only served to bolster the integrity of Rutledge’s original story. If there was no truth in his story, they wouldn’t be making such a phenomenal effort to cover it up.
Date of discovery: 1970s
Location of discovery: Delporte Crater, Earths moon
Pillar lights were seen over a Korean city this week. Similar pillar lights have been seen all over the world for unknown reasons. Scientists try to explain it, but it seems few scientists can settle down on one theory and this amazing and beautiful phenomenon continues to go unexplained. I will place another video with pillar lights from around the world below to compare. Could they be caused by a fleet of UFOs? Or are they light beings, watching over an area together? Maybe, but it looks natural, like the Aurora Borealis. Like its a cosmic connection between the Earth and the rest of the universe. I am however worried...about it being caused by CERN. The last thing we want is a black hole to form that would eat the earth from inside out. This could be CERN messing around again. Scott C. Waring
News states: Unidentified flying objects in Busan night sky, columns of light like UFO appear, and it is gone for a long time. There are many speculations among the citizens, but it is the explanation of the refraction phenomenon of light caused by squid fishing boats with strong lighting. Reporter Kim Jongho. Something shaped like a pillar appeared in the night sky. Over ten pillars remain in the same place over time. The so-called 'light pillars' in Busan on the last three nights. A lot of citizens witnessed the sea. [Preferential w / Busan Munhyun-dong: It's growing in convex lens form. So this is not an object or something, but I thought it was where the light was reflected or something.] By the way, Moonhyun-dong was located at the back of Pusan Hangang Bridge, at Dongzam-dong National Maritime Museum, and at Yeongju-dong Observatory at Yeongdo-dong Observatory. Along with the sightings spread to the SNS, there were also citizens who were worried about UFO, Aurora, and "Analysis of Disaster". However, the Meteorological Agency explained that it is a phenomenon caused by the strong lighting on the squid fishing boat and the ice crystal, an ice crystal in the clouds. [Eum Ki-cheol / Busan Regional Weather Bureau: (squid grilled pear) Reflecting on the cloud or something like that, from the side we see, the light is said to be a 'light pole' because it looks like a pole. Experts explain that this phenomenon is sometimes seen on the east coast, where squid catches are frequent, even if not frequently.
Helicopter follows and waits patiently for UFO to leave the area In Palm Springs, Feb 4, 2017, UFO Sighting News.
Helicopter follows and waits patiently for UFO to leave the area In Palm Springs, Feb 4, 2017, UFO Sighting News.
These are two examples of real UFO sightings at Palm Springs, but not the one from this report.
Date of sighting: February 4, 2017 Location of sighting: Palm Springs, California, USA Source: MUFON #81924 Wow, I read this report and I really wish I was in Palm Springs to see it. This guy saw a helicopter hunting a red orb UFO that had landed on the mountain top. Of course the helicopter can only watch and wait for the aliens to get the message to leave. I included two photos above of past UFO sightings in Palm Springs, because the report didn't come with one. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
In my front yard checking my security camera. We have the Palm Springs mountain directly across from our home and often look up at it when the moon is out because of the glow from the moon on the snow I enjoy. What I saw first was a helicopter flying around the top of the mountain by the arial tramway.(we have request reports of missing hikers on the mountain)and when I saw the helicopter shining a spot light on the mountain,I though they were looking for someone,and went inside and got my wife to outside and take a look. I was in the Marine Corp with a helo squardren as a medic and got to see quite a few different styles of helicopter so I knew what I was looking at, especially after I heard the rotors of the helicopter and the search light. I then went inside and got my field telescope to see what was going on.
The helicopter seem very focused on the one particular area but did fly around to different spots. The area they focused on when I zoomed in on the area I saw a large red sphere that remained on. The helicopter never shined the light directly on the object but behind and to the right side of it. I assumed it was a team of people maybe rescue crews looking for others? I made a comment to my wife about how skilled this pilot must have been,I had an outstanding view of the helicopter even at 7 pm in the evening and because it really isn't that far from our home.the pilot remained absolutely still in midair over the object for very long periods of time without moving at all,completely stationary.and that was on the side of the mountain about 10,100 feet up, 400 feet from the very top of the mountain by the tram itself.
My wife had a few looks of it too and we still were wondering what on earth was going on up there. I made a few comments as time was going by like how very strange this all was,was this a downed plane? I brought the tripod and telescope closer to end of the property in my front yard to get even closer look and to my absolute astonishment as I was looking at the helicopter shining the spotlight again,this sphere changed different colors first white then light blue then red again and paused changing colors. With my wife right beside me and as I was looking through the scope the red sphere changed shape, flattened like a pancake and from the exact spot it was on flew straight to the right due north with the helicopter observing it,it traveled about a quarter of a mile then stopped changed direction and traveled due south and disappeared out of view. It wasn't flying fast at all more like a controlled glide.
It observed flat from the side but as I was able to keep it in view with the telescope I could clearly see 3 lights, 2 brilliant red (like rubies) the front and rear and a smaller white on the side, the object appeared see through and triangular in shape and when observing it,it had a dreamlike quality to it, it was exceptionally beautiful to look at and it never made a sound.As I'm writing this seeing how it happened less than 2 hours ago I'm absolutely amazed at what I saw,my wife got to view this object and the helicopter also but didn't see the object change color or shape as I witnessed. I have mixed feeling,shock comes to mind,I never thought in a million years that the red object that we were observing would actually take flight and fly away. We lost sight of it as it went behind the lower edge of the mountain going south with the helicopter still flying around the top of the mountain by the Tram. I wonder now, we're they looking for occupants on the side of the mountain? I will submitted a drawing if asked. An added noted note: Palm Springs Tramway is a very popular attraction during the winter months here.
When we were observing the helicopter flying around and then seeing the red sphere the tramway that runs every fifteen minutes with a trolling going up and coming down the mountain,not one cable car came up or down the mountain,chances are for the length of time we were looking we would have seen one of the cable cars or both. Also during the entire event through the telescope we saw different (teams?) of people with high powered flashlights trying to get over to where the helicopter was shining the spot light by this object but with the recent snow fall from storms weren't having much luck,or so it seemed.
UFO sighting caught on tape over Whitby, Canada 4-Feb-2017
UFO sighting caught on tape over Whitby, Canada 4-Feb-2017
This UFO video of a bright objects hovering in the sky above Whitby, ON, Canada was filmed on Saturday, 4th February 2017.
Witness report:
Observed 5-6 pulsing lights moving slowly back and forth low in sky 30+km away from position. At approximately 9 -10 p.m on February 4th 2017 on Ashburn Rd. In Whitby,Ontario we first observed 4 lights, 3 of which in rough triangle formation viewed head on to west of position while driving. Stopped to observe objects and took approx. 1.30 min video. Observed objects hovering and moving lazily in no specific flight path. Objects(5-6) appeared to pulse and glow with orange/yellow light ONLY when hovering.Would dim considerably when moving. Two objects appeared to “exchange” light or energy with one dimming and the other brightening in close proximity. Objects also appeared to “fly” in very close proximity on purpose with no apparent regard to their proximity. Objects would move from hovering position approx. North of first position and back and forth in an indeterminate manner almost “lazily”. Observed this for approximately 1.5 hours. Dimmer lights appeared to travel north and back to original position. At first we thought the objects could be helicopters or planes but we observed them glowing and dimming and doing odd, lazy movements in sky approx. 50° to 60° over horizon. No spotlights seen. Objects appeared to have red and green lights when dim. Felt that objects were NOT normal aircraft due to odd behaviour. Was exhilarated at prospect of encountering unknown objects in sky never having seen anything like it before. Did not feel any particular negative feelings, just that we were seeing something unusual. Attempted to move to higher ground to observe objects more clearly. Watched them in two positions over approx. 1 hour. As far as we know we were the only people to observe this event. Never truly lost sight of objects and left after 1.5 hours as it was late and we were tired.
How New Hubble Telescope Views Could Aid Interstellar Travel
How New Hubble Telescope Views Could Aid Interstellar Travel
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor |
Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to study the clouds of material along the paths of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft through interstellar space.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have gotten their best looks yet at the mysterious interstellar clouds surrounding the solar system, a new study finds.
These observations could shed light on the challenges that future interstellar missions dispatched to the nearest stars might face, the researchers said.
In 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 probe crossed the so-called heliopause — the giant bubble of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields surrounding the sun — and, in the process, became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977, giving the world some of its first good looks at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the moons of these planets. [Photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 Probes]
NASA notes that Voyager 1 and 2 are currently zipping through space at roughly 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h). Voyager 1 is about 12.8 billion miles (20.6 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it the farthest human-made object ever built. In about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, in the constellation Camelopardalis, the agency says.
Voyager 2 hasn't entered interstellar space yet; it's about 10.5 billion miles (17 billion km) from Earth, NASA says. In 40,000 years, the probe will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star Ross 248, the agency says.
The two Voyager spacecraft remain in contact with Earth through NASA's Deep Space Network of telecommunications links. The probes are still collecting data that scientists can analyze to learn more about the interstellar medium — the clouds of gas and dust that lie between the stars. The interstellar medium holds the building blocks of stars and planets, and is replenished when stars and planets die.
In the future, the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot project, unveiled in 2016, aims to launch tiny spacecraft to the nearest star system to the sun, Alpha Centauri. It consists of three stars: Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and a small red dwarf named Proxima Centauri. Recently, astronomers discovered that Proxima Centauri hosts a small, potentially habitable rocky planet, raising scientists' hopes that Starshot might be able to send probes to an alien world in our lifetimes.
These new projects and discoveries make any data that the two Voyager spacecraft gather on the interstellar medium potentially key for exploration, the researchers said.
"It's important for us to be aware of what kinds of objects are present beyond our solar system, since we are now beginning to think about potential interstellar space missions, such as Breakthrough Starshot," said study lead author Julia Zachary, an undergraduate astronomy student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
To learn more about the interstellar medium, Zachary and her colleagues examined data that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope collected regarding the same interstellar gas and dust that Voyager 1 and 2 are currently analyzing.
In this artist's conception, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird's-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
"An analogy we like to use is that of Google Maps," Zachary told Space.com. "If the Voyager spacecraft are the Google Maps cars going around neighborhoods, taking pictures and giving you the street view, then Hubble provides the overview."
Until 2015, Hubble had not gazed at any nearby stars lying along the paths of the Voyager spacecraft. The scientists used Hubble to analyze the light from these stars to learn more about the interstellar clouds the radiation passed through.
The scientists discovered at least two interstellar clouds along Voyager 2's path, and one or two interstellar clouds along Voyager 1's path. They were also able to measure the density of electrons in the clouds along Voyager 2's path, and found that one had a greater electron density than the other.
"We think the difference in electron density perhaps indicates a difference in composition of overall density of the clouds," Zachary said.
In addition, the researchers successfully detected a broad range of elements in the interstellar medium, such as electrically charged ions of magnesium, iron, carbon and manganese. They also detected neutrally charged oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
All in all, "we think the Voyager spacecraft are moving into a very rich and complex interstellar environment," Zachary said.
Zachary and her colleagues Seth Redfield, an associate professor in the Wesleyan University Department of Astronomy; and Jeffrey Linsky, a research professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, detailed their findings Jan. 6 at the 229th American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Texas.
The dishes of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array depicted making the first-ever localization of a Fast Radio Burst.
Danielle Futselaar [www.artsource.nl]
For as long as astronomers have known about Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), they’ve been stumped. About a decade ago, researchers discovered in archived 2001 data an extremely fast — just a few milliseconds — burst of radio emissions. They’d never seen anything like it before, and didn’t know where it came from or what could cause it.
Finally, we’re starting to get a few answers.
Astronomers announced today at the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society that, for the first time, they’d pinpointed the origins of one of these FRBs: a small dwarf galaxy about 2.5 billion light-years away. Today’s news, which is also detailed in articles in Nature and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, also found a new source of persistent, weaker radio emissions nearby; presumably the two are related but it’s not clear.
It’s big step in the study of the cosmos, but we’ve still got a ways to go before we fully understand FRBs.
Seeing Clearly
The first break came in 2012, when the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico detected the first-ever repeating FRB, dubbed FRB 121102 (after the date of the first detection, Nov. 02, 2012). Before that, each one had been a single, one-off event. That alone was instructive: FRBs (or this one, at least) must not be the result of cataclysmic events, since something was still around to send the repeated signals. But even better, it meant other observatories could look in the same area to try to spot future repeat. It was “A good place to go fishing,” said lead author Shami Chatterjee of Cornell.
Luckily, the universe obliged.
“The FRB was extremely generous to us,” said Casey Law of UC Berkeley, one of the co-authors, because the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) observed a total of 9 bursts in its 83 hours of observing time in 2016. This narrowed down FRB 121102’s origins considerably, but still not enough. Subsequent observations from around the world, in radio and visual light spectra, found the source galaxy, in the direction of Auriga. Finally, we learned for sure FRBs (or, at least, this one) originated outside the galaxy, as had been suspected.
These observations also revealed a steady source of radio emissions within 100 light-years of the FRB’s precise location. The two could be results of the same process, or be otherwise related, but the answers will have to wait until more observations come in.
Start of Something Big
So, mystery solved, right? Not quite. We still don’t know what actually causes FRBs, but at least now astronomers have some improved hypotheses. One option is a variety of exotic star, a highly magnetic kind of neutron star, which could cause just the right kind of emissions astronomers are seeing. Another possibility is a massive black hole within FRB 121102’s host galaxy, which could cause the radio signals.
Still, the scientists cautioned, this is still just a single data source. It’s still the only known repeating FRB, after all; maybe there are multiple types of FRB, or this particular one is just an outlier.
But that’s good news! “New mysteries in astronomy are somewhat rare,” Sarah Burke-Spolaor of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, so FRBs are increasingly becoming the exciting new thing. There are more hypothesized models causing FRBs than actual detected bursts, said Chatterjee, “a great situation for us to be in.”
With any luck, the next few years will answer more of these questions — and pose new ones.
It’s not just a cloudy day somewhere here on Earth. For Hubble, it’s always a cloudy day along the paths of the Voyagers 1 and 2.
Mind you, Hubble can’t see the car-sized probes that far out. But Hubble has actively been working with the Voyager probes to measure and define interstellar space.
The results are … weird.
“It looks like in our local neighborhood, there’s a big blob of stuff,” Julia Zachary, an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, said in a press conference at the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “That’s actually a cloud of interstellar dust.”
Those clouds extend out for several light-years. Voyagers 1 and 2 are headed in separate directions. When Hubble glances in the direction of each probe, it uses four total stars as guide posts. For Voyager one, those stars are Gliese 686 and Gliese 676A. For Voyager 2, that’s Gliese 780 and Gliese 754.
The Voyagers use their still-operational instruments to measure interactions between “outward moving solar wind and inward pressure from the interstellar medium.” Optically, Hubble can characterize what the materials in the path are.
The Hubble telescope’s images reveal that the clouds of dust can obscure the view of stars, dimming them in the same way a cloudy day on Earth can blot out the Sun. This is a problem for Gliese 754, the dimmest of the stars at 12th magnitude.
“Unfortunately we’ve had some trouble detecting magnitude features from (Gliese 754),” Zachary says.
There’s only a few years left to make these kinds of studies. The Voyagers are currently the only operational probes at or near the edge of interstellar space, but the decay of the Plutonium-238 inside each craft will reach a half-life within a decade that will dampen the ability of power output to match up with spacecraft needs. Even now, only the lowest power instruments, like the magnetometers and particle detectors, are online. After the P-238 energy is exhausted, the Voyagers will likely go dark.
The Voyagers are some of NASA’s oldest operating spacecraft. But be careful how you put that.
“Well … they’re not old,” Zachary said. “They’re only 40. It’s old for a space craft, let’s put it that way."
There have been a number of recent “flying saucer” sightings that don’t necessarily fit the category of UFOs since they were seen on the ground. However, they stirred up talk of spacecrafts, aliens and all the usual speculation on what these saucer-shaped UGOs (unidentified grounded objects) might be. Here’s an update on three of them.
The Internet went crazy this week over Google Earth images of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where an object that looked suspiciously like a flying saucer was seen on the runway and in the nearby grass. Since the images dated back to 2014, it was unlikely NASA was hiding a flying saucer out in the open for everyone with access to Google Earth to see.
Sure enough, a NASA engineer from JPL showed he had the right stuff by debunking the rumors with a selfie posted on Twitter of himself, a fellow engineer and the mysterious object – which is actually a … well, Dr. Nacer Chahat doesn’t really say what it is but instead makes a wonderful observation based on current U.S. events:
Here is what you think is a UFO. The only alien is me.
Most speculation now centers on the object being a storage container or the cover of some kind of underground bunker. What’s inside? That’s a mystery for another day.
Next up is the flying saucer sighting in Antarctica using … you guessed it … Google Earth: The Saucer-Seeker’s Friend (trademark pending). Images of what appears to be a round disc sticking out from under a rock ledge also made the rounds this week on the web. One of the theories proposed was that it was actually a pond made from melting glacier ice which was distorted because those satellites are just so darned high. Sure enough, if you pull back on that Google image and look around, you see other ponds that didn’t go viral because they suffer from an ailment known as “not round like a saucer.”
Finally, yet another “OMG! It was right there out in the open on the freeway!” saucer sighting came from somewhere on I-74 in Central Illinois where a truck was spotted hauling a large saucer-shaped object. For those who want to believe but don’t want to get fooled again, the saucer was quickly identified as part of an X-47B. Well, that explains it.
What? You don’t know what an X-47B is? That’s Grumman’s experimental fighter-sized unmanned drone designed to take off and land on aircraft carriers and refuel in the air. It’s scheduled to be deployed in 2019 but you may see one flying around Area 51 or on the road in Illinois.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
