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 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
08-06-2017
Ingrediënt van leven ontdekt rond jonge zonachtige sterren
Ingrediënt van leven ontdekt rond jonge zonachtige sterren
Tim Kraaijvanger
Wetenschappers hebben sporen van methylisocyanaat ontdekt in het meervoudige stersysteem IRAS 16293-2422. Dit is een chemische bouwsteen van leven.
IRAS 16293-2422 is een drievoudig stersysteem op 400 lichtjaar van de aarde. Het bestaat uit twee sterren die 47 astronomische eenheden (AE) van elkaar verwijderd zijn. In vergelijking: 1 AE is de afstand van de aarde naar de zon, oftewel ruwweg 150 miljoen kilometer. Een derde ster bevindt zich op een afstand van 750 AE. De drie sterren zijn ongeveer even zwaar als de zon, alleen wel veel jonger.
Cadeautjes “Dit stersysteem blijft maar cadeautjes geven! Eerst hebben we hier suikers ontdekt, en nu methylisocyanaat,” vertellen Niels Ligterink (Sterrewacht Leiden) en Audrey Coutens (University College London). “Deze familie van organische moleculen is betrokken bij de synthese van peptiden en aminozuren, die – in de vorm van eiwitten – aan de basis staan van leven zoals wij dat kennen.”
GIFTIG
Methylisocyanaat bevat koolstof-, waterstof-, stikstof- en zuurstofatomen. Het is een zeer giftige verbinding en de belangrijkste doodsoorzaak na de industriële giframp in Bhopal in 1984. Direct na de ramp kwamen meer dan tweeduizend mensen om het leven.
ALMA Twee teams van astronomen hebben de Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chili ingezet om het prebiotische complexe organische molecuul methylisocyanaat te ontdekken. ALMA is het grootste astronomische project op aarde. Het bestaat uit 66 antenneschotels en is ontwikkeld om het licht van de koudste objecten in het heelal te bestuderen. Dit licht heeft een golflengte van ongeveer een millimeter en bevindt zich daarmee tussen infrarood licht en radiogolven.
De onderzoekers vonden de chemische vingerafdrukken van methylisocyanaat in de warme, dichte binnengebieden van de cocons van stof en gas rond de drie sterren.
Hoe is leven ontstaan? “We zijn heel enthousiast over dit resultaat. Deze protosterren vertonen sterke overeenkomsten met de zon in haar jonge jaren, onder omstandigheden die heel geschikt zijn voor de vorming van aardachtige planeten,” reageren hoofdauteurs Rafael Martín-Doménech en Víctor M. Rivilla van een van de twee papers over de ontdekking van methylisocyanaat. “Hoe is het leven op onze planeet ontstaan? Door prebiotische moleculen op te sporen, zijn we misschien weer een stapje dichterbij een antwoord op deze vraag gekomen.”
Niet uniek Gelukkig is methylisocyanaat ook niet zo uniek en dat is goed nieuws voor de zoektocht naar buitenaards leven. “Onze laboratoriumexperimenten laten zien dat methylisocyanaat inderdaad op ijsdeeltjes kan worden gevormd, onder omstandigheden die vergelijkbaar zijn met die in de interstellaire ruimte,” zegt onderzoeker Niels Ligterink. “Dit impliceert dat dit molecuul – en daarmee ook de aanzet tot peptide-verbindingen – waarschijnlijk rond de meeste jonge zonachtige sterren aanwezig zal zijn.”
Blijkbaar loopt onze soort al 100.000 jaar langer op aarde rond dan gedacht.
Wetenschappers ontdekten de fossiele resten op de archeologische vindplaats Jebel Irhoud in Marokko. Al in de jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw werden hier fossiele resten van moderne mensen teruggevonden. Lang bleef echter onduidelijk hoe oud ze precies waren. Dit nieuwe onderzoeksproject – dat al in 2004 begon – resulteerde in de ontdekking van nieuwe fossiele resten. In totaal werden er zo’n 16 nieuwe fossiele resten aangetroffen. En tevens zijn onderzoekers erin geslaagd om die pas ontdekte resten te dateren. De resten die al in 1960 werden teruggevonden – aangeduid als Irhoud 1 tot en met 6 – zijn eveneens gedateerd. “Irhoud 3 is de oudste Homo sapiens die nauwgezet is gedateerd: het is de eerste van onze soort,” benadrukt onderzoeker Renaud Joannes-Boyau.
Jebel Irhoud.
Foto: Shannon McPherron / MPI EVA Leipzig.
300.000 jaar oud De resten van de moderne mensen die in Marokko zijn teruggevonden, blijken zo’n 300.000 jaar oud te zijn. Daarmee komt de oorsprong van onze soort in één klap zo’n 100.000 jaar verder terug in de geschiedenis te liggen.
Een deel van een kaak die recent in Marokko is teruggevonden.
Enkele stenen gereedschappen die in Marokko zijn teruggevonden.
Foto: Mohammed Kamal / MPI EVA Leipzig.
Afrika En dat zet onze kijk op de evolutionaire geschiedenis van onze eigen soort op zijn kop. Zowel genetische informatie als fossiele resten wijzen erop dat onze soort in Afrika ontstond. De oudste resten die ons tot voor kort van moderne mensen bekend waren, waren zo’n 195.000 jaar oud en werden aangetroffen in Ethiopië. “Het feit dat er 100.000 jaar eerder al Homo sapiens waren en dat ze in Marokko voorkwamen, verandert ons begrip en de hypothese omtrent de verspreiding van onze soort door Afrika,” vertelt Joannes Boyau. Onderzoeker Jean-Jacques Hublin voegt toe: “We dachten altijd dat de wieg van de mens 200.000 jaar geleden in Oost-Afrika stond, maar onze nieuwe gegevens onthullen dat Homo sapiens zich rond 300.000 jaar geleden over het hele Afrikaanse continent verspreidde. Lang voor Homo sapiens Afrika verliet, verspreidde deze zich binnen Afrika.”
De evolutie van de moderne mens is nog altijd in nevelen gehuld. Dat is te wijten aan het feit dat er maar relatief weinig oude fossiele resten van moderne mensen zijn teruggevonden. Daarnaast is het best lastig gebleken om die weinige fossiele resten accuraat te dateren. Daarom zijn deze nieuwe ontdekkingen ook zo waardevol. Ze onthullen heel veel over onze soort: een soort die blijkbaar al veel langer op aarde rondloopt dan gedacht.
Bronmateriaal:
Nature -> The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age - doi:10.1038/nature22335 Nature -> New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens - doi:10.1038/nature22336
How Social Media Users Decoded a Simulated Message from Extraterrestrials
How Social Media Users Decoded a Simulated Message from Extraterrestrials
Humanity won’t share a language with an alien civilization, so how can we decode a message from ET if we receive one? One astrophysicist says: crowdsource it.
In 1961, a small group of scientists met at the Green Bank radio astronomy observatory in West Virginia to discuss the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One of the organizers was Frank Drake, who used the conference to present his now famous Drake equation describing the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But Drake also used the occasion to carry out a less-well-known experiment.
The question he addressed was the following. If humanity received a message from the stars, how could we decode it given that it we have no language in common? Similarly, if we want to send a message, how should we compose it?
To explore this issue, Drake created a message of his own and challenged the participants at the conference to decode it. He received a single reply written in the same code, clearly indicating that the message had been understood. Afterward, an amateur electronics magazine published the message, and about a year later, Drake received a letter with the correct solution from a reader of this magazine.
That points to an interesting idea. If we ever receive a message from the stars, one option would be to release it via social media and exploit the world’s combined brain power to decode it.
Last year, one researcher tested this idea by doing exactly that. Rene Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany created a simulated message from an alien civilization and released it on Twitter and Facebook for the world to decode. “On Tuesday, 26 April 2016, I submitted a fake SETI message to the social media Twitter and Facebook and called it the SETI Decrypt Challenge,” say Heller.
Today, he publishes the results of this experiment, showing how people joined forces to crack the seemingly alien code.
The challenge that Heller set is to imagine that Earth has received a message in the form of series of radio pulses from a fixed, unresolved source about 50 light years from Earth. These pulses have been received in a narrow band around an electromagnetic frequency of 452.13 MHz, a frequency that is pi times the emission frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms.
Heller has placed an audio version of the message here. And the question he asks: what does this message say?
Heller constructed the message using some techniques that have already been used in messaging extraterrestrial intelligences. The message consists of a number of pictures that can be constructed by arranging the data in an array of particular dimensions.
These dimensions are 359 by 757 pixels (both prime numbers) and are defined at the beginning of the message by sequences 757 0s and 359 1s. This encodes the first page of the message, which is otherwise blank. In total, the message contains seven pages (another prime number).
The next page is a list of numbers from 0 to 756 which uses a standard system of data encoding called little endian which defines things like the data being written from left to right and so on.
The third page lists the first 757 prime numbers in the same way. “Pages two (simple counting) and three (prime numbers) were meant to establish that we are talking binary and that we use numbers to describe and interpret the images,” says Heller.
The fourth page starts by defining two more numbers. The first is the wavelength used to transmit the message in units of the modified Planck Length. This number is 1.6368 x 1034 and acts as a kind of spatial yardstick.
The second number is 1.1677 x 1052. This is a temporal yardstick that, with some careful thought and simple mathematics, leads to the number 50—the distance of the transmitting civilization in light years. “As we know that the message comes from a star 50 light years away, our alien friends are telling us that they know their distance to us as well,” says Heller.
The rest of page four displays a sine wave, or more precisely the function—sin(x).
The first two lines of page five encode the numbers 6.048 × 1034 and 4.2038 × 1052. These represent the distance 2.45 meters in units of the modified Planck constant and a time of 180 years in units of the temporal yardstick. The rest of this page displays an image of an alien specimen with the clear implication that it is 2.45 meters tall with a life span of 180 years.
The sixth page shows an image of the device used to send the transmission; actually a picture of an Earthbound radio telescope called the Square Kilometer Array.
The final page encodes two numbers equivalent to a distance about 100 times larger than the Earth-moon distance and six billion years. It also displays an image of four astronomical objects, one of which is next to an image of an alien. The implication here is that this depicts ET’s home planet, which is a billion years older than ours.
Heller released this message on social media on April 26, 2016, and it didn’t take long for the world to respond. Heller received the first correct solution by e-mail the following day, and the number of responses increased as news of the challenge spread.
On May 6, Heller received the largest number responses after the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post reported the challenge. At this, a group on Reddit posted the answer, which probably distorted the result Heller got after this. In total he received, 66 correct solutions, two of which were from high school students.
That’s interesting work that has clear implications for the way humanity should deal with a message from the stars. The astronomical community is already committed to publicly releasing any message it receives from extraterrestrials.
But Heller’s work shows that this is not just lip service to the people who pay for astronomy. It shows that the global community is capable of decoding such a message and should be given the chance. “Distribution in the social media would not only offer an efficient means of decryption but also offer an unprecedented opportunity to unite humans all over the globe in a common scientific and cultural effort,” he concludes.
The participants of the first SETI meeting at Green Bank in 1961 would surely agree.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1706.00653: Decryption of Messages from Extraterrestrial Intelligence Using the Power of Social Media—The SETI Decrypt Challenge
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
LOCKHEED MARTIN'S 'KILL VEHICLE' (1999) - I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT THEY ARE TESTING NOW
LOCKHEED MARTIN'S 'KILL VEHICLE' (1999) - I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT THEY ARE TESTING NOW
Wow! I have never seen this before. That is crazy.
One of the most fascinating things in the world for me is hidden technologies. It's just overwhelming to think about the kind of things they probably have now. I literally think that they had star wars technology when the first movie came out.
DID THE US GOVERNMENT FORGED A PACT WITH AN ALIEN CIVILIZATION?
DID THE US GOVERNMENT FORGED A PACT WITH AN ALIEN CIVILIZATION?
During the history of the United States of America, multiple events provide proof of an pact forged between the US Government and an alien civilisation? What is the ultimate goal of this pact and why should we care? Is disclosure a part of the deal?
Ohio State University’s Big Ear Observatory caught one of the most promising SETI signals ever back in 1977. Astronomers are still debating if it came from aliens, or something closer to home.
(Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF)
In 1977, Ohio State University math professor Jerry Ehman walked into the Big Ear Observatory and looked over the past few nights’ observations. At the time, the radio telescope was the only observatory exclusively devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
It also was underfunded and had no full-time staff. That means no one was listening for aliens the night SETI had its closest call with the big one. On the night of Aug. 15, 1977, a 72-second signal arrived from deep space just at the right frequency astronomers believe aliens would use. Since no staff members were around, no one could alert other telescopes to listen in.
Without tying the radio signal to an object in the night sky, they couldn’t tell how far away it originated, Ehman told me last fall.
All Ehman could do was scribble “Wow!” on the data printout and hope the signal from Sagittarius would repeat.
It never did. But Antonio Paris, an astronomy professor at St. Petersburg College in Florida, thinks he has the solution. Two comets passed by that region of the sky in 1977, according to his hypothesis. And this year, those comets passed by again. That created a chance to test his theory. His research was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. (A preprint is available on Paris’ site.)
The comet 266/P Christensen is the one in question. Its orbit roughly aligns with Jupiter at its farthest distance and Mars at its closest to the Sun. According to Paris’ research, the comet “transmitted” at the 1420.25 MHz radio band. That’s near where the Wow! signal came from.
“We did everything we could to try to debunk our results but we kept getting a signal from the comet,” Paris told Discover. “That was when we said, ‘Eureka!’ ”
Paris, who along with his teaching duties runs the Center for Planetary Science and the UFO-hunting Aerial Phenomena Institute, proposed the hypothesis last year. Ehman scrutinized that original proposal, and didn’t believe it was likely to be comets.
“I received a copy of their article from the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences and I studied it carefully,” Ehman said in an interview at the time. “I have concluded that neither of the two comets could explain the Wow! signal, and colleagues of mine at the observatory have also concluded the same thing.”
Indeed, peer reviewers on Paris’ paper remarked on the need to coordinate with Ohio State and others on the research, seeing that as one of the flaws in the paper.
“The only response from the peer review that we were concerned about was that no one, including Ohio State University, had previous research on detecting a signal from a comet,” Paris says. “We had to explain to the peer reviewers that we were the first to do so … thus no previous data was available.”
Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at Oxford University, isn’t buying any of the explanation.
“If real, this comet is detectable in the radio,” Lintott says. “But the signal isn’t bright enough or rapid enough to be a good fit to the Wow! signal.”
The methodology itself is flawed, according to Lintott. While staring at this region of the sky, he says there should have been about five minutes’ worth of signals if it were comets, but it only comes in intermittent bursts. And if it were comets, Lintott says we could expect to see Wow! signals all the time, rather than once in 1977 and once in 2017. Then there’s the choice of journal — in his words, “it’s not somewhere astronomers publish.”
Lintott has another problem with Paris’ research: He crowdfunded it.
“Bad papers get written and published all the time,” he says. “But this author asked people for money to fund his research, and if you do that you should hold yourself to the highest standards.”
Lintott isn’t sure what it is. But comets it ain’t.
“I don’t know what the Wow! signal was — it’s very hard to study something you’ve only seen once,” he says. Lintott suggests the study authors submit their research to one of the larger astronomy journals so they can get constructive feedback.
“This is just science by press release, and it’s depressing it’s picked up (by the press),” Lintott says.
Paris is aware of the criticism he’s receiving and believes his paper still stands up to scrutiny.
“I see one or two astronomers are skeptical. They emailed me, too,” he says. “But they can’t answer my question: Show me the evidence to refute my data. They might need to do some soul searching.”
For his part, Ehman remains (relatively) agnostic on the original signal, while wanting to believe the extraterrestrial cause. He acknowledges that limited equipment of the time led to a sort of dead end to the mystery.
“It’s an intriguing possibility that it’s a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, but it’s also one that I’ve had to declare that I can’t prove that it is, or prove that it isn’t,” Ehman says.
So I guess that makes two things now that some people think are aliens and others think are comets. There’s now a possibly plausible explanation for the Wow! signal, but that won’t stop SETI researchers from continuing to look for something just like it, hoping for that needle in the haystack that proves we’re not alone.
On February 6th, 1971, Alan Shepherd, pulled out a 6-iron, lined up his approach, and let fly—an occurrence that wouldn't be worth noting if weren't for the fact that it HAPPENED ON THE GOD DAMN MOON. 46 years later, Shepherd's (literal) moon shot remains the only instance of a human playing golf anywhere other than earth, but as NASA's Martian explorations intensify, it's time to set our sights on the dry, windswept links of Red Planet CC.
To that end (and, you know, science's too), on Thursday morning NASA unveiled their 2020 Mars Rover, a 6-wheeled research behemoth intergalactic golf machine, replete with on-course GPS, shot-tracker technology (on the premium model), and a mobile laboratory that can hold a couple sets of clubs when you're not using it to collect rare protein samples that might hold the key to extraterrestrial life.
Oh, and as if that's not enough, the Mars Rover concept—NASA says this bad boy will look A LOT different by the time it hits the first tee/Mars—also comes with an emergency life support system, which is sure to come in handy when that three putt on 18 looses the inevitable, golf-induced aneurism you've been holding back for years.
Thus far, NASA has landed a total of four rovers on Mars, and while the conversation surrounding sending humans to the red planet is a hot topic, there are no concrete plans to actually make the journey happen. When it does happen, however, the brave folks who make the trip are going to need something to drive on the planet’s surface if they hope to actually do any exploring. With that in mind, NASA has revealed a concept vehicle that has no business being sent to Mars, but the agency is pretty excited about it anyway.
The vehicle, which has been named simply “Mars rover,” looks like a cross between a Halo warthog, the Mako from Mass Effect, and the Batmobile. It’s a futuristic, manned exploration vehicle that looks like it would be more at home in the next Alien flick than actually being driven by astronauts. It’s packed with displays and controls that are straight up sci-fi, and it looks both rugged and incredibly intimidating.
That being said, this isn’t a NASA product. Despite being shown off at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and wearing NASA’s own badge right on its nose, the vehicle was actually crafted by a team of custom car builders who were clearly aiming for a specific look at the expense of all else. Still, the rover is a pretty capable machine, and is capable of speeds as high as 70 mph (around 15 mph on Mars) via its electric drivetrain. You definitely won’t see NASA sending one of these into space any time soon, but it sure is pretty to look at.
If a signal once believed to have come from an alien civilization is proven to be something else, can it still be called “Wow!”? Wikipedia and many annals of space and ET phenomenon may have to do some editing after an astronomer proved that a strange and powerful radio signal from space detected in 1977 which elicited a written “Wow!” exclamation on the printout should not have caused a gasp because it was just a gas.
The now famous Wow! signal was discovered by Jerry Ehman while working on a SETI project on The Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope located at Ohio Wesleyan University’s Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio. He noted the 72-second blast, which was 30 times stronger than the background radiation, with a big red “Wow!” on the printout and the debate on whether it was a transmission from an intelligent civilization or something else began.
The Big Ear radio telescope
“It’s aliens!” was leading in the polls until last year, when Professor Antonio Paris, an astronomer at St. Petersburg College in Florida, proposed that the signal had actually been produced by comets passing by the Earth on their seven-year orbits around the Sun. The comets — 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) which were discovered in 2006 – are surrounded by large hydrogen clouds which are known to produce a signal in the same frequency as Wow!. Scoffers scoffed and demanded that Paris prove their beloved signal was not a call from ET.
That he did. Paris knew that the comets would be in the same position (northwest of the globular cluster M55 in the constellation Sagittarius) in early 2017 as the Wow! signal’s source was on August 15, 1977. He used a GoFundMe page to raise the money to install a dedicated radio telescope at the Center for Planetary Science pointed at the Wow! sweet spot and then waited.
According to his paper published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Comet 266P took the wow out of Wow! when its signals matched the Wow! signal. In anticipation of objections, Paris also looked at other comets similar to 266P and found that their hydrogen clouds produced the same frequency signal, so if it wasn’t 266P, Wow! was produced by another gassy comet.
Blame a comet
What now, Wow! fans? Science wins again. One of the most famous and solid pieces of evidence of alien communications has been proven to be just gas. What’s next? Will Roswell turn out to be something other than aliens as well?
Check out this interesting footage of a bright lights that were filmed from a plane over California. This was filmed on 1st October 2016 and it was just submitted to MUFON.
Witness report:
bright lights visable from 30,000 feet up – midflight . approx 3 hours into the flight from BALT to LA I noticed 3 very bright lights hovering and I cap it with iphone camera , I was overwheled with and very excited to see such an amazing event.
Mysterious Lights Appear In The Sky During A Massive Blackout In Northern Uruguay
Mysterious Lights Appear In The Sky During A Massive Blackout In Northern Uruguay
Several residents in Northern Uruguay had experienced a massive outage, including Salto, Constitución, Belén and some parts of Bella Unión as well as Paysandú. However, they were disrupted not just because of the inconvenience of the blackout but also to the presence of several lights in the skies.
Strange lights were seen forming a triangle formation and holding their position longer than an aircraft or a helicopter would do. Adding to the mystery, the lights were dazzling and separated from each other by a vast distance, according to eyewitness’ accounts.
The Uruguayan Air Force (FAU) created a UFO research commission 32 years ago, the first in Latin America. Confirming a UFO needs several factors to be discounted.
The FAU formed an office devoted to investigating UFO phenomenon called the Comisión Receptora e Investigadora de Denuncias de Objetos Voladores No Identificados (CRIDOVNI). The Air Force decided to form such commission after a series of UFO sighting reports during the 1970s.
Wat krijg je te zien als je inzoomt op de ringen van Saturnus? Nog meer kleinere ringen!
Ontelbaar veel ringen in beeld. Ze lijken te golven.
De bovenstaande foto is gemaakt op 4 juni door de Cassini-ruimtesonde. NASA deelde de foto onlangs via Twitter. Het is een onbewerkte foto. Hierdoor is er nog wat ruis zichtbaar.
Helaas is er verder geen informatie bekend over deze foto. Zo is de afstand tot de ringen onbekend. Deze vraag hebben we neergelegd bij NASA, dus hopelijk krijgen we snel antwoord. Aangezien NASA deze onbewerkte foto heeft gedeeld via Twitter, zal er over enkele dagen ongetwijfeld een bewerkte versie verschijnen met meer details over de getoonde ringen.
Eerder dit jaar maakte Cassini een foto van propellers. Propellers zijn verstoringen die ontstaan door piepkleine maantjes. Alleen in de A-ring van Saturnus bevinden zich naar schatting duizenden propellers.
Cassini’s einde De brandstof van Cassini is bijna op. Om te voorkomen dat de sonde straks zonder brandstof rond gaat dolen en op één van de potentieel leefbare manen van Saturnus neerstort en eventuele aardse microben die nog op de sonde huizen aldaar afzet, is besloten de sonde te vernietigen. Dat doet NASA door deze in september opdracht te geven zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus te boren. Daarmee komt er een eind aan een spraakmakende en baanbrekende missie.
Wat krijg je te zien als je inzoomt op de ringen van Saturnus? Nog meer kleinere ringen!
Ontelbaar veel ringen in beeld. Ze lijken te golven.
De bovenstaande foto is gemaakt op 4 juni door de Cassini-ruimtesonde. NASA deelde de foto onlangs via Twitter. Het is een onbewerkte foto. Hierdoor is er nog wat ruis zichtbaar.
Helaas is er verder geen informatie bekend over deze foto. Zo is de afstand tot de ringen onbekend. Deze vraag hebben we neergelegd bij NASA, dus hopelijk krijgen we snel antwoord. Aangezien NASA deze onbewerkte foto heeft gedeeld via Twitter, zal er over enkele dagen ongetwijfeld een bewerkte versie verschijnen met meer details over de getoonde ringen.
Eerder dit jaar maakte Cassini een foto van propellers. Propellers zijn verstoringen die ontstaan door piepkleine maantjes. Alleen in de A-ring van Saturnus bevinden zich naar schatting duizenden propellers.
Cassini’s einde De brandstof van Cassini is bijna op. Om te voorkomen dat de sonde straks zonder brandstof rond gaat dolen en op één van de potentieel leefbare manen van Saturnus neerstort en eventuele aardse microben die nog op de sonde huizen aldaar afzet, is besloten de sonde te vernietigen. Dat doet NASA door deze in september opdracht te geven zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus te boren. Daarmee komt er een eind aan een spraakmakende en baanbrekende missie.
Om Jupiter draaien niet alleen grote, maar ook tientallen piepkleine maantjes. Astronomen hebben er weer twee ontdekt.
De ontdekking van S2016 J1.
Met de twee nieuwe manen S/2016 J1 en S/2017 J1 komt het totaal aantal joviaanse manen op 69. “We zijn momenteel op zoek naar objecten in het buitengebied van het zonnestelsel, zoals planeet X, en toevallig kwam Jupiter ook voorbij”, vertelt astronoom Scott Sheppard. Hierdoor zijn de twee nieuwe maantjes gespot.
S/2016 J1 en S/2017 J1 zijn slechts een tot twee kilometer breed. Het zijn dus echt minimaantjes, die maar net te zien zijn door de beste telescopen ter wereld. Zo is S/2016 J1 op 8 maart 2016 ontdekt met de 6,5 meter telescoop van het Las Campanas observatorium in Chili. De maan is 20,6 miljoen kilometer van de grootste planeet van het zonnestelsel verwijderd en doet 1,65 jaar over een rondje om de planeet. De maan is voor het eerst gespot door Sheppard.
De ontdekking van S2017 J1.
S/2016 J1 is op 23 maart 2017 gevonden met de Chileense Victor Blanco reflector. Deze maan is nog verder verwijderd van Jupiter, namelijk 23,5 miljoen kilometer. De maan heeft net iets meer dan twee jaar nodig om rond Jupiter te draaien.
Beide objecten hebben een retrograde baan, wat betekent dat ze in de tegengestelde richting om Jupiter draaien. Dit vertelt iets over de ontstaansgeschiedenis van de twee maantjes. Waarschijnlijk zijn ze ergens anders in het zonnestelsel ontstaan en pas op latere leeftijd door Jupiter gevangen.
"Mars was ooit vijf keer zo nat als de hedendaagse aarde" 6 juni 2017Tim Kraaijvanger8 Wetenschappers hebben berekend hoeveel water er nodig was om de valleien op Mars te vormen. In een nieuw paper melden zij dat de rode planeet natter was dan gedacht.
"Mars was ooit vijf keer zo nat als de hedendaagse aarde"
Tim Kraaijvanger
Wetenschappers hebben berekend hoeveel water er nodig was om de valleien op Mars te vormen. In een nieuw paper melden zij dat de rode planeet natter was dan gedacht.
Zo blauw zag Mars er vier miljard jaar geleden mogelijk uit.
Onderzoeker Wei Luo en zijn collega’s beweren in een paper in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Nature Communications dat Mars een warm klimaat had en dat er sprake was van een actieve hydrologische cyclus. Zij geloven dus dat water uit de oceanen verdampte en dat het ooit regende op de rode planeet. De wetenschappers hebben computeralgoritmes ontwikkeld om de hoeveelheid water op Mars te berekenen. Ze keken daarbij naar de diepten van alle Martiaanse valleien.
“Onze meest voorzichtige schattingen laten zien dat er tien keer meer water nodig was om de valleien te eroderen dan voorheen gedacht”, aldus Luo. In het paper spreken de auteurs over een minimale watermassa van 6.860.000.000.000.000.000 kubieke meter, oftewel 6,86 triljoen m3. Dat betekent dat Mars waterrijker was dan de hedendaagse aarde. Op aarde ligt momenteel namelijk zo’n 1,4 triljoen kubieke meter water, volgens het USGS.
“Water werd gerecycled op Mars en stroomde regelmatig door de valleien”, vervolgt Luo. “Omdat de rode planeet een grote oceaan had, was er een waterkringloop mogelijk.”
Toch zijn er nog steeds vragen. Als Mars veel vloeibaar water op zijn oppervlak had, dan was de kleine planeet lekker warm. “Maar Mars is verder verwijderd van de zon dan de aarde”, zegt Luo. “Toen de zon jonger was, was de ster minder fel. Kortom, er is meer bewijs nodig om onze theorie te ondersteunen.”
Een ander onderzoeksteam beweerde in januari dat Mars vier miljard jaar geleden warm werd gehouden door een uit de hand gelopen broeikaseffect. Interacties tussen methaan, koolstofdioxide en waterstof zorgden voor warmere perioden, waardoor het water vloeibaar op het Martiaanse oppervlak bleef liggen. Hoewel Mars in relatief korte tijd afkoelde en opdroogde, stroomde er zeer recent nog vloeibaar water op Mars. In 2014 vonden wetenschappers sporen in een krater, die erop wijzen dat hier 200.000 jaar geleden water stroomde.
Twee precies dezelfde exoplaneten hebben toch andere atmosferen
Twee precies dezelfde exoplaneten hebben toch andere atmosferen
Tim Kraaijvanger
Wetenschappers hebben met de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop ontdekt dat dezelfde exoplaneten toch heel anders kunnen zijn.
Het gaat om de exoplaneten WASP-67 b en HAT-P-38 b. Deze Hete Jupiters draaien om vrijwel dezelfde sterren. Daarnaast is de afstand tot de moederster, de grootte van de planeet en de temperatuur nagenoeg identiek. Toch verschillen de atmosferen.
“Als we naar de twee atmosferen kijken, dan zijn ze juist niet gelijk”, concludeert hoofdonderzoeker Giovanni Bruno van het Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “Exoplaneet WASP-67 b is namelijk bewolkter dan HAT-P-38 b. Dit ahdden we niet verwacht. We gaan nu uitzoeken waarom de atmosferen zo verschillen.”
Het onderzoeksteam gebruikte het Wide Field Camera 3-instrument om de chemische samenstelling van de planeten vast te stellen. “Wolken hebben invloed op de spectrale signatuur van water, waardoor we de hoeveelheid wolken in de atmosfeer kunnen bepalen”, zegt Bruno. “Het feit dat WAS-67 b meer wolken heeft, zegt iets over het verleden van de planeten. Er is iets in het verleden gebeurd, waardoor de atmosferen niet op elkaar lijken.”
Vandaag de dag draaien de twee exoplaneten iedere 4,5 dagen om hun gele dwergsterren, maar vroeger was dit mogelijk anders. Het kan zijn dat een exoplaneet verder van zijn moederster is geboren en later naar het centrum is gemigreerd. Hierdoor is het mogelijk dat de ene planeet anders is ontstaan dan het andere object. Bruno: “Je kunt zeggen dat hier sprake is van nature versus nurture.” De exoplaneten lijken dan wel ‘genetisch’ op elkaar, maar zijn door hun ‘opvoeding’ beïnvloed.
Nieuwe Jupiterachtige planeet is warmer dan de meeste sterren
Nieuwe Jupiterachtige planeet is warmer dan de meeste sterren
Tim Kraaijvanger
Met een oppervlaktetemperatuur van circa 4.300 graden Celsius is de exoplaneet KELT-9b warmer dan de meeste sterren. De dagzijde van de planeet is slechts 1.200 graden kouder dan het oppervlak van onze zon.
Wetenschappers hebben deze week een paper gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Nature, waarin de ontdekking van KELT-9b wordt genoemd. Het gaat om een gasplaneet die 2,8 keer zwaarder is dan Jupiter, maar die tevens veel minder compact is. Dit heeft ermee te maken dat de exoplaneet is opgezwollen door de straling van de moederster. Hierdoor zet de atmosfeer uit als een ballon.
HOE IS KELT-9B ONTDEKT?
In 2014 gebruikten astronomen de KELT-North-telescoop van het Winer observatorium in Arizona. Ze zagen het licht van een ster iedere anderhalve dag ongeveer een half procent dimmen. Latere observaties bevestigden het bestaan van een zogenoemde Hete Jupiter, oftewel een Jupiterachtige planeet die dicht om zijn moederster draait. Er zijn inmiddels al veel Hete Jupiters bekend, hoewel het voor ons altijd exotische objecten blijven. In ons eigen zonnestelsel hebben we namelijk geen Hete Jupiter.
Eén kant van KELT-9b is altijd naar de moederster gericht. Dit betekent dat het op de ene kant van de planeet altijd dag is, terwijl er eeuwige duisternis is op de andere zijde. Astronomen noemen dit verschijnsel synchrone rotatie. We zien het ook in ons eigen zonnestelsel. Zo zien we vanaf de aarde altijd dezelfde kant van de maan. Dit betekent dat de omlooptijd van de maan om de aarde gelijk is aan de rotatieperiode van de maan om zijn eigen as. Dit geldt dus ook voor KELT-9b.
Toekomst van KELT-9b KELT-9b doet slechts anderhalve dag over een rondje om zijn moederster. In vergelijking: de aarde draait in 365 dagen om de zon. Dit betekent dat de afstand tussen KELT-9b en de ster enorm klein is. Daarnaast is de ster KELT-9 twee keer zo groot en twee keer zo heet als onze zon. “KELT-9 straalt zoveel ultraviolette straling uit, dat de exoplaneet uiteindelijk volledig verdampt,” reageert professor Keivan Stassun van de Vanderbilt universiteit. “Als de gasplaneet een rotsachtige kern heeft, dan blijft er uiteindelijk een droge planeet over, zoals Mercurius.”
Komeetachtige staart Er is ook een kans dat KELT-9 zijn gasplaneet verorbert. “KELT-9 zwelt de komende miljard jaar op en wordt een rode gasreus”, vervolgt Stassun. “Op lange termijn ziet het er voor KELT-9b niet goed uit.” De astronomen vermoeden dat KELT-9b misschien wel een komeetachtige staart heeft of krijgt, omdat de planeet – volgens modellen – veel gas verliest.
Geen teken van leven Wetenschappers hoeven sowieso niet te zoeken naar sporen van leven op KELT-9b. Op de dagzijde van de planeet is het zo heet dat moleculen als water, koolstofdioxide en methaan zich daar niet kunnen vormen. Het is mogelijk dat deze moleculen zich wel kunnen vormen op de nachtzijde, maar in dat geval zijn ze er maar heel kort.
V. V. Krapiva, a researcher and writer who resides in Odessa, Ukraine, years ago had attended numerous lectures presented by veteran officers of Soviet nuclear powered submarines. They had served in the Soviet North, aboard secret naval installations and bases. The lectures sometimes veered off from the planned presentations, and many spellbinding tales were told as a result. For instance, episodes when Soviet sonar operators were hearing strange targets present at great depths. Soviet Navy submarines were actually being chased by other submarines.
The pursuers changed their speed at will, speeds that were much greater than any other similar vessel in the world could produce at that time. Lieutenant Commander Oleg Sokolov confidentially informed the students that while on duty during his submarine’s navigation, he had observed through a periscope an ascent of some strange object in the water. He was not able to identify it, because he viewed it through the optical system of the periscope. This underwater takeoff took place in the early 1960s.
An interesting observation of a UFO was recorded by a crew of a Soviet nuclear submarine in 1965. This case is on file in the Colonel Kolchin archives. All those who had observed the UFO were ordered to report the details and provide drawings to the Special Department. The submarine was to rendezvous with a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. They arrived at the meeting place an hour and a half before the time of the rendezvous, and the captain allowed the crew to come to the outside deck. No ships were in the area, and the sky was starry and cloudless. Then the watchman observed a cigar shaped object moving noiselessly through the sky. Although the submarine was in international waters at the time, the Soviets assumed the unidentified object was American, and decided to dive immediately. But their onboard radar did not record anything, and the captain decided to stay put, above water. Suddenly three rays shot out from the UFO, and the Soviet submariners noticed something very unusual about the object.
The UFO had no gondolas, and no horizontal or vertical rudders. The object was about 750' long, and Soviet submariners were not familiar with such dirigibles, for those used by American Air Force were much smaller. Then something strange took place, the UFO slowly descended to the surface of the ocean, its searchlights still on, about half a mile from the submarine, and dove underwater. The submarine’s sonar had registered a strange and very intensive hissing sound, as the UFO submerged, but the sound was of a very short duration.
A well known Soviet UFO researcher and author A.S. Kuzovkin had been engaged in UFO research ever since he observed one such object in 1964. He was a physicist and researched ecology of anomalous phenomena for Vokrug Sveta, a very popular Soviet magazine. Kuzovkin mentioned in his writings that while visiting Sevastopol, a port city in Ukraine, he met with local marine scientists who had descended into the depths of the Black Sea in deep water bathyscaphes. They observed, among other things, an object that resembled a wheel as large as a ten story building, standing vertically underwater. The scientists saw and later described to Kuzovkin the wheel that would remain immobile for a while, and then move into a horizontal position, rotate, and depart.
Another well known Russian researcher of the paranormal, author Aleksandr Petukhov, mentioned an incident from 1951. It took place in the territorial waters of the USSR. A Soviet submarine encountered a strange underwater object of gigantic size. It did not react to the submarine communication to identify itself, and continued an unhurried movement towards the nation’s shores. The captain of the submarine ordered depth bombs to be dropped into the site where USO was located. The unidentified object did not react to the attack, and continued its course, at the same speed. After a while it unexpectedly and abruptly ascended to the surface of the sea. At the depth of 160', it stopped its ascent, changed the course, and departed.
In July of 1978, there was a UFO sighting in the Mediterranean. The captain of the Soviet motor ship Yargora immediately sent a radiogram about it to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The coordinates of the sighting were 37° northern latitude and 3° degrees 40' of eastern longitude. The time was between 7:30 a.m. and 8:40 a.m.. The object observed by Soviet seamen was shaped like a flattened out sphere, its color that of a white pearl. There were three protruding constructions in the bottom portion of the UFO which resembled antennae. The object moved from east to west. No reply to the radiogram ever came from the Academy. This sighting was mentioned in the 2001 article written by Valentin Psalomschikov, and published in NLO magazine. An unnamed Russian source mentioned that Yargora’s Captain Cherepanov sent a telegram from the ship to Moscow, Soviet Academy of Sciences, regarding the sighting.
On December 26, 2002, the Russian newspaper Zhizn published an article about Soviet observations of UFOs. The chairman of the Anomalous Phenomena Commission of the Russian Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg made a presentation at the society’s monthly meeting. The society, founded in 1980, had studied tens of thousands of cases UFO sightings, and had reached the conclusion that UFOs are real. America should follow suit. The chairman at the time, Yevgeny Litvinov, recalled that his experience with the UFOs had begun when he was a Soviet Navy officer and did not take seriously any published UFO related information. Then came the winter of 1979-80, and several incidents had rocked the Northern Fleet, forcing the Soviet general staff to take UFOs seriously. UFOs had visited a Soviet submarine base at the Western Dvina every week during a six month period.
The craft were shaped like disks, and hovered over the armaments preparation sites. The UFOs also flew above the top secret Soviet military town. While the military personnel below freely observed the flying saucers, the anti-aircraft radars did not register anything. Captain Beregovoy, head of the Naval Intelligence for the Northern Fleet, ordered that photographs of the UFOs be taken, but to no avail, the film turned out to be accidentally exposed each time.
The Soviets were busy trying to find out the nature of UFOs flying over their heads. Initially they suspected NATO, but then it was explained to them that potential adversaries do not possess such technology. To prevent panic, those in command told their military personnel that the UFOs above were actually Soviet-made craft, and that tests were underway. Of course, high-ranking officers knew better, and felt terrified by the uncertainty.
Rather serious incidents took place during that winter. The crew of a Soviet Project 671 submarine, Victor class sub, per NATO classification) encountered a UFO. The sub’s commander was Aleksey Korzhev. The sub was coming to the base, sometimes it surfaced, sometimes it would descend to 650'. They wanted to be undetected by spy satellites. Then they received a report that up and straight ahead was an airplane. The commander was surprised, for the weather was absolutely not conducive for aircraft flights. But fifty meters from the sub a silvery disc was hovering, slowly moving with the sub, staying a bit ahead of it. The crew looked at it, feeling mesmerized. Then the UFO emitted a ray of light, and this pillar of bright white light did not immediately reach the surface of the water, but contrary to the laws of physics, it slowly descended. Korzhev immediately ordered a change of the ship’s course. The disc slowly ascended and disappeared in the clouds. Litvinov said that the Soviets speculated that the UFO wanted to scan the submarine that actually happened to carry new weapons aboard.
Mikhail Soroka, a paranormal phenomena researcher from Kiyiv, Ukraine, also described the same incident in more detail in an interview he gave to FAKTY newspaper (December 2007). Soroka mentioned fascinating details of the USO encounter when a nuclear submarine was accompanying a surface vessel. The submarine surfaced, and a large object appeared in the sky. Its shape was that of mushroom with its cap turned down. Its bottom part shone white light, the part above shone yellow light, the next part shone reddish light, and the uppermost part shone bright red light. The object not only approached the ships, but also directed toward one of them a ray from its searchlight. Then the object unexpectedly disappeared. He also mentioned that Soviet Navy’s intelligence believed that UFOs generally appeared over military vessels and coastal installations.
Later, when Litvinov was with the special commission of the Soviet Navy’s main staff, he was able to read dozens of UFO reports that came from the intelligence channels. One report described a UFO landing in Motovsky Bay in the Barents Sea. Years later, a leakage of liquid radioactive waste from a spent fuel storage facility took place in the Motovsky Bay and Litsa Fjord.
Zapadnaya Litsa is the largest and most important Russian naval base for nuclear powered submarines. The base is located on the Litsa Fjord at the westernmost point of the Kola Peninsula, about 50 miles from the Norwegian border. The Litsa Fjord heads into the Kola Peninsula interior from the Motovsky Fjord, just across from the southeastern coast of the Rybachky Peninsula. Few people in the West know exactly what was going on there during the Soviet rule. No radar station in the vicinity registered the UFOs. Soviet experts assumed that an ionized cloud enveloped the UFOs.
Another incident, mentioned by Litvinov to Zhizn, comes from the archives of the Russia’s Geographic Society. It took place in the Mediterranean, in November 1976. Soviet diesel submarine Project 641 Foxtrot, per NATO classification, navigated through the Gibraltar, and surfaced. It was at 2:00 a.m., and the sea was absolutely still. The captain, the watch officer, and signalman came to the submarine deck to verify the vessel’s coordinates. They noticed a radiant silvery sphere to the left, over the horizon. The sphere ascended rapidly, and they saw right in front of the sub, on the water, a radiant map of the Mediterranean. It appeared at precisely the moment when the navigator was to determine the sub’s location measuring the position of stars. The impression was that someone aboard the sphere read the Russia navigator’s thoughts. Moreover, the radiant map also indicated the sub’s position. The sphere flew away, and the map disappeared.
Yevgeny Litvinov revealed in the interview that he is convinced that UFOs exist. But he puts aside his convictions when he is asked to determine the veracity of reports. He has developed a complex method for systematic selection, as is done by intelligence officers. His scale of credible authenticity is based on 350 criteria.
Litvinov has concluded that out of all data, about 70% result from technogenic reasons, natural phenomena, or mystification. But the other 30% are real observations of UFOs. There are too many of them to simply wave them away. His database contains 10,000 observations and incidents. Litvinov stated that most often UFOs are observed over military installations, areas of ecological disasters, and geological faults.
In the 1970s, reports issued by Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence department, described an unknown, gigantic cylindrical object sighted by Soviet Navy in faraway regions of Pacific Ocean. The object was 2800' long. When it hovered over the ocean, smaller objects exited from one of its ends, like bees from a beehive, and descended into the waters. Some time later they reentered the gigantic UFO. After the smaller objects entered, the UFO would fly away and disappear over the horizon. This information was revealed in Vladimir Ajaja’s interviews to Russian media.
According to MosNews.com (July 16, 2009), former Rear Admiral and nuclear submarine commander Yury Beketov was quoted describing events that occurred in the Bermuda Triangle. We repeatedly observed that the instruments detected the movements of material objects at unimaginable speed, around 250 mph.
It’s hard to reach that speed on the surface, only in the air is it readily possible. The beings that created those material objects significantly exceed us in development.
Russian Naval intelligence expert and Captain First Rank Igor Barklay noted that the unidentified objects were most often spotted in deep water near where military forces are concentrated off the Bahamas, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the east coast of the United States. The February issue of the remarkable Belarus newspaper Sekretniye Issledovaniya, contained an article written by Valeriya Peresilkina. Titled Zagadki glubin, Secrets of the depths, it lists cases of USOs observed by the Russian Navy in various seas of our planet. The author mentions Captain First Rank, retired, Yuri Vinogradov who had served in the Soviet Navy from 1975 to 2000. A top expert in his field, he had been involved in a number of submarine search and recovery operations, a veteran of high risk units, and a participant in four long range missions. He had been to the Devil’s Sea, also know as the Dragon Triangle it is located between Japan, Guam, and northern Philippines. Some call this area the Pacific Bermuda Triangle. In the 1980s, Vinogradov had participated in the search and rescue operations of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, submarines and surface vessels had been involved. Twice he and other officers had observed, on the sonar screen, a USO that had moved at great speed, and disappeared in the depths.
If you close your eyes and imagine a planet far from our own, chances are there’s already a well-formed picture waiting in your mind – is it barren, with cracks cutting through the surface, or is it covered in sprawling oceans?
In many ways, our visions of alien worlds are shaped by the artists who breathe life into troves of scientific data, piecing together the most plausible depiction of their landscapes.
A pair of artists known for their breathtaking concept images of exoplanets, including the recently discovered Trappist-1 system, have revealed a bit of insight on the extensive process of creating visualizations that both captivate the public and satisfy scientists’ stipulations.
As the experts explain, the job comes with ‘a lot of responsibility’ as they transform numbers and ‘squiggles on charts’ into believable representations of real planets.
Visualization scientist Robert Hurt of Caltech’s IPAC center, and multimedia producer Tim Pyle have together created some of NASA’s most memorable images based on data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and other observatories.
‘Our artist’s concepts are going to be the public face for some of these objects,’ Pyle explained in a recent video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, acknowledging at the significance of the task.
The breathtaking image reveals what weather might look like on a 'brown dwarf' - a cool, star-like object that lack the mass to sustain nuclear fusion at their cores
The images can’t just be pretty – they also have to show the planet’s environmental conditions as accurately as possible.
Take Trappist-1, for example.
‘The properties that we come away with from this kind of observation include the diameters of the planet, its orbital period,’ Hurt explained.
‘Whether it’s likely to be tidally locked,’ Pyle added, ‘which will say something about what the planet probably looks like.’
‘If it’s less dense than the Earth, it might have more volatiles, like water on it, which is why two of the Trappist planets were shown as water worlds,’ Hurt said.
‘If it has a higher density than Earth, then it’s probably a little more rocky.’
In the case of Trappist-1d, for example, the artists explain their depiction was initially turned down for its inaccurate portrayal of liquid water on the ‘dayside’ of the planet.
According to the scientists, the water is more likely to be found on the dark side instead.
Situations such as this often lead to compromise, Hurt explained.
In the end, they created an image that better represented the data, but also included more water on the scientists would expect.
Not only do artist concept images help the public get a better understanding of what the conditions could be like on faraway worlds, but the experts say they also act as a ‘visual history’ of the evolution of science.
‘If you go back and you look at the whole history of space art and science based illustration, reaching back many, many decades, you have a visual history, a visual record of our evolving understanding,’ Hurt said.
‘The art is as much a historical record of our changing understanding of the universe as the textbook that we write.’
Source: NASA
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Artist Lynette Cook painted this representation of Epsilon Eridani b and moons, from the book Infinite Worlds.
For those who have followed the story since the discovery of the nearby Trappist-1 system, which is known to contain seven Earth-sized planets, and three which even fall within the habitable zone, the handful of concept photos have become embedded in our minds when imagining what they might look like.
One, in particular, shows a breathtaking look at the jagged protrusions and liquid water that could exist at the surface of Trappist-1f.
The artists work with scientists to ensure that their concept images are headed in the right direction.
And, if something isn’t right, scientists will reject that version.
Imagine standing on the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. This artist's concept is one interpretation of what it could look like
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a new exoplanet discovery: the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.
The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water–key to life as we know it–under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.
“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”
At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets.
This artist's concept shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses and distances from the host star.
Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech
This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.
The new results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and announced at a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated.
Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated–scientists believe it could be an icy, "snowball-like" world, but further observations are needed.
"The seven wonders of TRAPPIST-1 are the first Earth-size planets that have been found orbiting this kind of star," said Michael Gillon, lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the TRAPPIST exoplanet survey at the University of Liege, Belgium. "It is also the best target yet for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds."
In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star–classified as an ultra-cool dwarf–is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. The planets also are very close to each other. If a person were standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky.
The planets may also be tidally locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.
Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. In the fall of 2016, Spitzer observed TRAPPIST-1 nearly continuously for 500 hours. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing–transits–of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. Engineers optimized Spitzer’s ability to observe transiting planets during Spitzer’s “warm mission,” which began after the spacecraft’s coolant ran out as planned after the first five years of operations.
"This is the most exciting result I have seen in the 14 years of Spitzer operations," said Sean Carey, manager of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. "Spitzer will follow up in the fall to further refine our understanding of these planets so that the James Webb Space Telescope can follow up. More observations of the system are sure to reveal more secrets.”
Following up on the Spitzer discovery, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has initiated the screening of four of the planets, including the three inside the habitable zone. These observations aim at assessing the presence of puffy, hydrogen-dominated atmospheres, typical for gaseous worlds like Neptune, around these planets.
In May 2016, the Hubble team observed the two innermost planets, and found no evidence for such puffy atmospheres. This strengthened the case that the planets closest to the star are rocky in nature.
"The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets," said Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope also is studying the TRAPPIST-1 system, making measurements of the star's minuscule changes in brightness due to transiting planets. Operating as the K2 mission, the spacecraft's observations will allow astronomers to refine the properties of the known planets, as well as search for additional planets in the system. The K2 observations conclude in early March and will be made available on the public archive.
Spitzer, Hubble, and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone, and other components of a planet's atmosphere. Webb also will analyze planets' temperatures and surface pressures–key factors in assessing their habitability.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center, at Caltech, Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
The images are not intended to imply that what’s shown is exactly what those planets are like, Pyle explained.
But, they do aim to ‘illustrate almost the whole breadth of what would be plausible.’
‘For the public, the value of this is not just giving them a picture of something somebody made up,’ said Douglas Hudgins, a program scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
‘These are real, educated guesses of how something might look to human beings.
Scientists have all kinds of reasons why aliens won’t try to fly to Earth and enslave humanity. Even so, the US Military has a backup plan, just in case. Two Air Force teams, the 26th Space Aggressor Squadron (26th SAS) and the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron (527th SAS), are tasked with protecting assets in space, developing strategies to secure US space-based interests, and plans that involve deflecting extraterrestrial invaders. Both are based in Colorado.
The hostile invasion scenario may not be their topmost concern. Space is big, after all. We’ll probably see any shifty aliens coming from far off, and have time to prepare for their arrival. Instead, protecting our satellite infrastructure is their utmost priority. The US, more than any other country, has come to rely on a system of satellites. Consider driving somewhere you’ve never been before without GPS. Scary, I know.
The GPS system contains a network of 31 satellites, which are owned by the US government and run by the US Air Force. Take one out and navigation goes bye-bye. It isn’t just civilians who rely on it, but the US military itself. Without GPS, US forces lose their battlefield advantage, having to revert to older forms of communication and navigation.
GPS Satellite Constellation. National Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian Institute.
It isn’t just that but civilian life is set back decades. Bank transactions, stock prices, weather reports, air traffic control, and in some cases, even traffic lights are reliant on satellite infrastructure. Executive director of the Office of Space Commerce, Ed Morris, recently authored a disturbing report, outlining the repercussions of an attack on our satellite system. He wrote, “If you think it is hard to get work done when your internet connection goes out at the office, imagine losing that plus your cell phone, TV, radio, ATM access, credit cards, and possibly even your electricity.”
Because of this, Defense Department advisor, Peter Singer, contends that the next war will begin in space. North Korea or a non-state actor getting their hands on a rocket is one scenario. However, the immediate threats are Russia and China. Tensions with these countries have ramped up lately.
Both have assets that can take out US satellites. China has the "Shiyan.” Using its robotic arm, it can grab a satellite, and fling it out of orbit. The Middle Kingdom is also developing lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns, and high-powered microwaves to disrupt satellite systems. Russia meanwhile has the "Kosmos 2499." This device can approach a satellite and disable or destroy it. In light of these developments, US officials are beginning to take space-based warfare seriously.
In 1982 the US Air Force Space Command was created. Today, it has 134 locations globally, employs 38,000, and has an annual operating budget of nearly $8.9 billion. The Pentagon’s space budget in total is $22 billion. Those in the 50th space wing, a group of over 8,000 men and women, are in charge of monitoring the skies. They have no actionable capabilities, for now.
Tech. Sgt. Steven St. John, 527th Space Aggressor Squadron. U.S. Air Force.
In 2015, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work recognized the growing threat to the country’s assets in orbit. He said that the US had to become "ready to do space operations in a conflict that extends into space." The aggressor force was born.
Captain Christopher Barnes is the chief of training for 26th SAS. He told Seeker, “We study threats to the space realm, either coming from space or based on land. If we can’t directly replicate them with hardware, then we figure out if there’s a software solution or some way we can train people to the point where they can fight through them, if they have to, in a conflict.”
One tactic they’re trained in is “brute force jamming.” Here, satellite networks send signals that make transmitted messages garbled to those who may be listening in. SAS also runs simulations on how to respond to land-based and space-based threats. Right now, their weapons systems are in the conceptual stage. Plans are being made to allow for defensive and even offensive capabilities.
These include utilizing the US Navy’s Laser Weapons System (LAWs). One is already aboard the USS Ponce, stationed in the Persian Gulf. LAWs can shoot down projectiles, light aircraft, and drones, as well as jam enemy communications and monitoring systems.
Another possible candidate is the X-37b—a secretive space drone. Some military watchers consider it capable of espionage, and it’s possibly equipped with defensive or even offensive capabilities. In addition to these efforts, the US is also collaborating with allies, through the Multinational Space Collaboration effort, to build up mutual defense systems.
To learn more about the US Air Force’s Space Command, click here:
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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.
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@MikeWehner
