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

The Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and when the two colossal entities meet, they’ll shred each other apart.

What remains less certain, however, is what will happen to each of the galaxies’ black holes — those cryptic places in space where gravity’s pull is so powerful, not even light can escape. Now, for the first time, scientists have observed two “supermassive” black holes orbiting each other in a galaxy unfathomably far away from Earth — 750 million light-years — providing a clue to our own galaxy’s smashing fate. The observations were published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.

Inside this far-off galaxy, University of New Mexico scientists spotted two black holes and have been watching them closely for over a decade. They are huge, with a combined mass of 15 billion times our humble sun, and scientists estimate that it takes 24,000 years for these black masses to orbit one another. This presents a problem, because us Earthlings can’t possibly live long enough to glimpse the curving nature of their orbits.

“The best way to detect orbital motion is to be able to see the curvature, but we would have to live 4,000 years,” the study’s lead author and astrophysicist Karishma Bansal, tells Inverse. “The process itself is slow — maybe after 1,000 years, but I won’t be here so I won’t know.”

A false color image of the two massive black holes, as observed by the Very Large Array radio telescopes. Each black hole is surrounded by discs of orbiting matter, with jets of other matter shooting out atop and below.

Measuring this curvature would be like trying to discern the travels of a snail in another solar system. “If you imagine a snail on the recently-discovered Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri — 4.243 light years away — moving at 1 centimeter per second, that’s the angular motion we’re resolving here,” said Roger W. Romani, a physics professor at Stanford University.

Lacking immortality, Bansal and her team tried another tactic. She pinpointed the locations of both colossal galaxies, using a system of 10 radio telescopes placed across the U.S., collectively called the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), and over a period of 12 years they measured how one galaxy moved in relation to the other. The plotted changes in position suggest that the two black holes, forced together by a convergence of galaxies, are orbiting one another, though the shape of their orbits remains unknown.

Orbiting black holes are certainly intriguing, but scientists like Bansal wonder what happens next. The assumption is that these black holes will one day collide (a recurring theme in our universe), creating the rippling gravitational waves discovered in 2016 by a team of over 1,000 scientists, but there is no observable evidence of this collision occurring.

Finding a more compact binary galaxy system — with two black holes that don’t take 24,000 years to orbit one another — could give researchers a better look into the behaviors of these orbiting mega-masses, perhaps an instance of two black holes orbiting each other, or even fusing together, or absorbing one another in some twisted, cosmic union. “If we manage to find something closer, that would be huge,” says Basnal. “That would tell us what would happen. Their fate – it’s a mystery.”

An image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows two galaxies colliding 140 million light-years from Earth.

And this will show us what fate has in store for our galaxy, the Milky Way, as it’s on course for a consequential meeting with the billion-star Andromeda, though in, perhaps, one billion years.

“They will rip one another apart, and the material around each other will merge,” explains Basnal. “Because they are both spiral galaxies, and are both so huge, they will distort the structure of one another.”

As for the black holes, it remains to be known, but scientists are peering into the cosmos to find out. “That’s what’s cool about astronomy,” she says. “You get to see something about our own future.”

Abstract: The radio galaxy 0402+379 is believed to host a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB). The two compact-core sources are separated by a projected distance of 7.3 pc, making it the most (spatially) compact resolved SMBHB known. We present new multi-frequency VLBI observations of 0402+379 at 5, 8, 15, and 22 GHz and combine them with previous observations spanning 12 years. A strong frequency-dependent core shift is evident, which we use to infer magnetic fields near the jet base. After correcting for these shifts we detect significant relative motion of the two cores at at . With some assumptions about the orbit, we use this measurement to constrain the orbital period yr and SMBHB mass . While additional observations are needed to confirm this motion and obtain a precise orbit, this is apparently the first black hole system resolved as a visual binary.

Photos via UNM Newsroom, NASA

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Something unusual was happening in the skies over Scandinavia in the summer of 1946.

The July 12, 1946 edition of the London Daily Telegraph featured a report on this curious new phenomenon, which read as follows:

“For some weeks a fair number of ‘ghost rockets’ going from south-east to north-west have been reported from various parts of the eastern coast of Sweden. Eye witnesses say that they look like glowing balls and are followed by a tail of smoke more or less visible. So many reports cannot be put down to pure imagination in the matter. As there is no definite evidence that the phenomena are of meteoric origin, there is growing suspicion that they are a new kind of radio-controlled V-weapon on which experiments are carried out.”

Of course, it might be assumed that one variety of these unusual aerial objects had already begun to turn up prior to the end of the war. Colorful reports of strange lights that dogged aircraft over parts of Europe would soon be known as “Foo Fighters,” of which at least a majority of reports could have entailed things like lightning sprites observed by pilots.

However, while the “ghost rocket” craze was well underway in Europe and Scandinavia, a very different kind of rocket was being seen in other parts of the world.

One of the most remarkable incidents involving an unidentified flying object, which occurred prior to the subject’s popularity coinciding with Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, involved Captain Jack Puckett, the assistant chief of flying safety, Tactical Air Command. On the morning of August 1, 1946, Puckett was piloting a twin engine C-47, and had left Langley Field for MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida.

Puckett was thirty miles from his destination when what appeared to be a long, brightly illuminated object nearly collided with his C-47. Puckett filed an incident report after he landed, according to which he stated:

“[The aircraft] continued toward us on a collision course, at our exact altitude. At about 1,000 yards, it veered to cross our path. We observed it to be a long, cylindrical shape approximately twice the size of a B-29 bomber, with luminous portholes.”

Puckett and his crew aboard the C-47 watched the object in amazement, until it disappeared over the horizon, traversing an estimated 100 miles over the course of three minutes.

In my book The Ghost Rockets: Mystery Missiles and Phantom Projectiles in Our Skies, I note the rocket like functions of this unusual aircraft, in relation to rocket technologies that were being developed in Germany during the war:

The object Puckett witnessed also produced a strange, sparkling tail, much like a rocket would; this detail would certainly present a lot of confusion among aviation officials at the time, in addition to increasing speculation about new kinds of technologies that might be under development elsewhere in the world. The technical information about rocketry advancements spearheaded in Nazi Germany during World War II, along with many of the leading experts in this field, were acquired by the British, Soviet, and American governments during and immediately following the war. America had previously gained access to V-2 rocket technology the Allies recovered at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen, where an underground German rocket base known as the Mittelwerk factory, had been located. British forces managed to take away a wealth of information prior to the later Soviet occupation of the area. By late 1945, this information formed the basis of what became Operation Backfire, a program where British V-2 rockets were built and launched for purposes of demonstrating their capabilities.

The significance of Puckett’s encounter goes beyond the mere recollection of a “mystery aircraft” for a number of reasons. For one, as mentioned earlier, this sighting took place well in advance (by almost a year) the sighting of objects over Mount Rainer, Washington, that sparked the eventual “flying saucer craze.” In addition to the sighting taking place prior to the swelling of reports that accompanied Kenneth Arnold’s initial UFO sightings over the northwest, the fact that the assistant chief of flying safety with Tactical Air Command would report an aircraft of this sort, and only months after the conclusion of the Second World War, would likely have been considered to be of sincere concern as far as national security; to have fabricated such a report would have meant severe repercussions for Puckett and his crew.

Additionally, the object in question had initially been considered a meteor by Puckett and his crew, while still at a fair distance from them. “This object continued toward us on a collision course at our exact altitude,” he continued in his incident report. “At about 1000 yards it veered to cross our path. We observed it to be a long, cylindrical shape approximately twice the size of a B-29, with luminous portholes.” It would seem unusual indeed that the pilot and crew would see a meteor, and then mistake the meteor as it traversed their altitude for being a massive aircraft of some kind, adorned with “luminous portholes”.

Finally, the idea that the object had been a misidentification of some variety of natural phenomenon seems unusual, since Puckett and his crew’s description matched a number of similar UFO reports that would follow, most notably the famous 1948 Chiles and Whitted UFO encounter (dramatized in the image above), along with a similar observation that occurred shortly afterward in France.

Granted, by the time the Chiles and Whitted sighting occurred, the “UFO craze” was already well underway. Indeed, Captain Jack Puckett’s unusual observation of a weird, “ghost rocket” over the American Southeast remains one of the most unusual, and perhaps significant observations of unexplained aerial activity in the modern era.