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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
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...
06-10-2017
Investigations Say Deputy Sheriff Did Witness Crashed UFO and Dead Aliens
Investigations Say Deputy Sheriff Did Witness Crashed UFO and Dead Aliens
Investigators have concluded that a former deputy sheriff’s claim of witnessing a strange crash scene outside UFO hotspot Roswell, New Mexico is real.
The late Charles Forgus’ video interview circulated in June wherein he claimed to have seen the crash site of the Roswell UFO in July 1947 along with his senior. Forgus was a deputy sheriff of Big Springs in Howard County, Texas.
Mr Forgus told a private investigator that they saw a crashed UFO and dead extraterrestrials before they were being told to leave the scene. He further noted that they saw remains of aliens being removed from the flying saucer.
The account was recorded on video in 1999 and released in the book titled “UFOs TODAY, 70 Years of Lies, Misinformation and Government Cover-Up,” by Irena Scott, and published by Philip Mantle in June. British UFO investigator Mantle said that many criticised him for releasing the video as they believe that it was a false testimony. However, Mr Mantle believes otherwise after further inquiries.
Roswell UFO Incident took place in July 1947, and it started to become sensational after the military announced in a press release that it had found the crashed flying saucer in the desert nearby. However, it retracted the statement the following day, saying it was just a damaged US Air Force air balloon.
Many people later claimed to have seen dead alien bodies within the crashed craft. They further said that the military took the wreckage and the alien remains to a top-secret military base.
The bizarre behaviour of a star 1,300 light years from Earth may have finally been explained. NASA says the big dips in brightness of the star—KIC 8462852—could be down to a massive, uneven cloud of dust moving around it.
This is far less of an exotic explanation than other theories proposed over the last few years, which include an “alien megastructure” built by some advanced extraterrestrial civilization to harness power from the star.
Scientists first announced that they had observed weird dips in the brightness of KIC 8462852 in 2015. Normally, when you observe a star and an object—a planet, for example—passes in front of it, there is a small dip in the amount of light coming from that star. Because the size of the planet is fixed, the dip would happen at regular intervals and would block the same amount of light each time. But this is not what happened with KIC 8462852.
What the astronomers saw were huge fluctuations in the star’s brightness, ranging from two percent up to 20 percent, at irregular intervals. To block this much of the star’s light, the object must be extraordinarily large—a Jupiter-sized planet would block about two percent of the light from our sun.
An artist's impression of KIC 8462852, a mysterious star more than 1,400 light-years away.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH
Many hypotheses have been put forward over the last few years, including a massive swarm of comets and a giant ringed planet orbiting very close to KIC 8462852. None of these explanations quite explain what was being offered, however.
In an interview with Newsweek earlier this year, Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, who first discovered the dimming, said: “Every theory that’s been proposed is [far more extreme] than what we know to exist now. So we’re looking for a solution that works with a reasonable physical mechanism we can postulate.”
However, the mystery may now have been solved. In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers used NASA's Spitzer and Swift missions to examine the dimming in different wavelengths. What they found was there was less dimming when looking at the star in infrared light than when they observed it in ultraviolet.
If the cause of the dimming was anything bigger than dust particles, then the dimming in different wavelengths would be the same. "This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming," lead author Huan Meng, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement from NASA. "We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star with a roughly 700-day orbital period."
Artist impression of an uneven ring of dust orbiting KIC 8462852.NASA/JPL-CALTECH
The team observed KIC 8462852 between January and December last year. Findings showed the dimming was more pronounced in the infrared wavelength, suggesting the particles are bigger than interstellar dust—tiny particles that cannot remain in orbit around a star because pressure would drive it away.
This meant there was only one plausible explanation—circumstellar dust. This is bigger than interstellar dust, but no so big that the dimming would become uniform across the various wavelengths. Concluding, the authors say a huge, uneven cloud of circumstellar dust could explain the irregular dimming observed.
Their hypothesis comes with problems. It does not address short-term dimming events seen, nor does it explain the dips where 20 percent of the star’s light is blocked. Potentially, the dimming could be the result of this dust cloud combined with a massive swarm of comets. However, further research will be needed to fully solve the mystery of KIC 8462852.
Observations of the star revealed it was alternately dimming and brightening - and immediately sparked theories of an alien civilisation somehow harvesting the star for energy.
Instead, it appears that space dust might be the culprit.
According to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a cloud of cosmic dust may be orbiting the star roughly every 700 days - causing the light from the star to dim periodically.
(Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions)
Observations showed that the star's ultraviolet light was dimming more than its infrared light.
Huan Meng, lead author of the study at the University of Arizona, Tucson said: “This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming."
The team used two NASA telescopes to watch Tabby's Star (officially known as KIC 8462852) from October 2015 to March 2017 in order to measure the UV and infrared dimming.
“We found that from UV, throughout the visible spectrum, to IR, the star is dimming at every wavelength we monitored,” said Dr. Meng.
“It cannot be anything from the interstellar medium.
“Only microscopic fine-dust screens are able to scatter the starlight in the way characterised by measurements.”
The star is located roughly 1,400 light years away from Earth and has confused astronomers since it was discovered in 2015.
1. Dubbed as KIC 8462852 aka Tabby's Star, and present 1,280 light years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, the star was an area of interest for astronomers and researchers because of the weird phenomenon it possessed. The star showed sudden drops in its luminosity, which is not a normal behaviour portrayed by a star that is slightly bigger than the Sun.
2. The first significant drop of 15 percent in the star's luminosity was observed on 5 March 2011. The next time the luminosity dropped around 22 percent, which took place 726 days later on 28 February 2013. The third drop in the star's luminosity was around 8 percent, which was analysed 48 days later on 17 April 2013.
3. In September 2015, a cohort of astronomers from Yale University with Tabetha S. Boyajian as the lead researcher analysed the star and found that there was a drop of almost 22 percent in its luminosity. The star has been nicknamed 'Tabby's Star' in honour of the team lead -- Tabetha.
4. This mysterious phenomenon led to the formation of numerous hypotheses like: The star might have swallowed a planet and it is not stable. A popular conspiracy theory that was formulated because of the star's mysterious phenomenon was that an alien megastructure orbiting around the star was causing the fluctuation in its luminosity. One more theory formed by researchers was a group of space rocks and debris are responsible for the star's dimming.
This artist's illustration shows comet fragments crossing the face of a star, one possible explanation for the strange dimming exhibited by Boyajian's star or Tabby star.NASA/JPL-Caltech
5. Further research carried out by astronomers from the University of Arizona, US with the help of NASA's Spitzer and Swift missions and AstroLAB IRIS observatory -- a public observatory with a 68 centimetre reflecting telescope located near the Belgian village of Zillebeke -- came to the conclusion that the dimming of the star is because of the presence of uneven dust cloud that is moving around the star.
6.Researchers found less dimming in the infrared light from the star than in its ultraviolet light using Spitzer.
"This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming," said Huan Meng from the University of Arizona, who is the lead author of the study.
"We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star with a roughly 700-day orbital period," Meng added.
7.Based on the strong UV dip, the astronomers concluded that the blocking particles must be bigger than interstellar dust, small grains that could be located anywhere between Earth and the star. Such small particles could not remain in orbit around the star because pressure from its starlight would drive them farther into space. Dust that orbits a star -- circumstellar dust-- is not so small it would fly away nor is it so big that it can block light uniformly in all wavelengths.
According to the researchers this is the best explanation about the enigmatic dimming of the Tabby's star.
The new video, released by NASA on Sept. 25, shows a prototype for an uncrewed Dream Chaser hanging from a Columbia 234-UT helicopter as the spacecraft is carried to the same altitude it will need to be for an upcoming free-flying drop test. The Aug. 30 test carried the Dream Chaser to an altitude of about 12,500 feet (3,810 meters) and was based out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is located at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.
"The captive carry is part of a series of tests for a developmental space act agreement SNC has with NASA's Commercial Crew Program," NASA officials wrote in a video description. "The data from the tests help SNC validate the aerodynamic properties, flight software and control system performance of the Dream Chaser."
Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser space plane is prepared for a captive carry test with a Columbia 234 UT helicopter at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert on Aug. 30, 2017.
Credit: NASA/Ken Ulbrich
Sierra Nevada is building the Dream Chaser space plane to carry NASA cargo to the International Space Station as part of the agency's Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) program. Under the NASA deal, Sierra Nevada will fly six uncrewed cargo delivery flights for the space agency by 2024. Two other companies, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, also have CRS-2 contracts to fly NASA cargo to the space station.
The Dream Chaser space plane looks much like a miniature space shuttle, but one-quarter the size of NASA's winged spaceships. Dream Chaser is 30 feet long (9.1 m) and designed to carry up to 12,125 lbs. (5,500 kilograms) of cargo to the space station. The spacecraft will launch into orbit atop an Atlas V rocket built by the United Launch Alliance.
The first Dream Chaser flight to the space station is expected to launch in 2020.
Sputnik's Beeping Legacy: Satellite's Simplicity Made It Iconic 60 Years Ago
Legends of Space, ep 8: Sputnik: The satellite that changed the world
Sputnik's Beeping Legacy: Satellite's Simplicity Made It Iconic 60 Years Ago
By Jesse Emspak, Space.com Contributor
A Soviet technician works on Sputnik 1 before its launch in 1957.
Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty
In October 1957, amateur radio operators monitored the first signal from a spacefaring civilization — and it was us.
Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, launched on Oct. 4 of that year from a site in Kazakhstan, then a part of the USSR. That site is now the Baikonur Cosmodrome; at the time it was site 1/5 at the Tyuratam range.
The Soviets had planned on a sophisticated scientific satellite, according to Cathy Lewis, curator of international space programs at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. But they felt they were under time pressure; they wanted a launch as soon as possible because even then they had a sense of urgency. "They needed something very simple," she told Space.com. [Sputnik 1! 7 Fun Facts About Humanity's First Satellite]
What they launched had only a set of batteries, a transmitter and a pressure-activated switch that could tell ground controllers if the 23-inch (58 centimeter) diameter sphere was punctured by a micrometeoroid, Lewis said.
The USSR had been planning satellite launches since January 1956, and the United States since 1955. Both countries planned for their first launches to take place during what had been dubbed the International Geophysical Year, which ran from July 1, 1957, to Dec. 31, 1958. Coincidentally, the IGY was intended to mark a new period of cooperation between the United States, the USSR and other nations. Neither planned launch announcement got much attention until the USSR launched Sputnik and surprised the world.
"There was panic," Lewis said. "For the first time that harsh reality of the fear of nuclear weapons landing came to life. You were not going to have a warning of fleets of bombers."
In the United States, the shock was in part driven by a belief in American technological superiority.
"The U.S. had an image of the Soviets as being technologically limited," said Matt Bille, a historian and author of "The First Space Race" (Texas A&M University Press, 2004). "If not outright backward. While the military had some of this sentiment, the August launch of an R7 (intercontinental ballistic missile) had generally awakened them." [Sputnik 1 in Photos: The World's First Satellite]
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world with its surprise launch of Sputnik-1.
Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com contributor
Bille added that then-President Dwight Eisenhower was not a technically oriented person and was often baffled by the public's reaction to Sputnik. The U.S. already had a missile program and a fledgling space program, and Eisenhower saw them as going well. In fact, the U.S. launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile months before the USSR did.
The Sputnik launch also drove Eisenhower to push for funding for science education at many levels, from grade school to college, via the National Defense Education Act, signed into law in 1958. Lewis said the country's experience in World War II had played a part in this — it was clear during the war that there weren't enough people with technical skills. Bille added that major publications, including U.S. News and World Report, had been lamenting the state of science education in the country, and Sputnik gave an additional push to improve.
The Sputnik launches were more than just a wake-up call for the U.S. In the scramble to show that the United States could stay ahead technologically, the space race was born, and with John F. Kennedy's announcement that the United States was going to attempt to send a man (it was going to be a man, no question) to the moon and bring him back, the die was cast. And there were other political effects; Kennedy, in the late 1950s, ran part of his campaign on the idea that Eisenhower, ever a fiscal conservative, was weak on defense and that the Russians had a sizable advantage in that area. Sputnik, Lewis said, was a gift to people pushing that idea. [Giant Leaps: Milestones of Human Spaceflight]
Bille said one reason the missile-gap concept had currency was that before satellite surveillance, few knew much about what was happening in the USSR at all.
In that sense, Sputnik enabled satellite surveillance, Lewis said. Before the satellite's launch there was some debate over "open skies" — whether spacecraft could fly over the territory of other nations. Aircraft were barred from doing so. Sputnik, Lewis said, made the question moot, because Sputnik flew over the U.S. in the course of its orbit, and therefore U.S. satellites could fly over the Soviet Union.
Even though the Soviets were unable to launch the more ambitious science payload, Lewis said that was part of Sputnik's enduring appeal. The satellite's beeps could be picked up by amateur radio operators; anyone could listen. That wouldn't have been the case for a true science instrument. Today, Sputnik's shape is in the logo of the Russian rocket company Energia, and it gave its name to the "Sputnik chandelier" design that became popular in the 1960s.
And beyond its physical appeal, "there's a simplicity and beauty in being first," Lewis said.
In late 2016, a sighting of a small drone-like object went viral when it was seen hovering above the supervolcano.
Jeanetta Foresta uploaded a video of the sighting under the heading "Things R flying all over - overnight".
She posted: "There were more than four at the beginning and this is overnight so there is no sun to reflect off of a plane.”
Famed UFO blogger Scott C Waring picked up on the video on websiteufosightingsdaily.com.
YOUTUBE
The 'UFO' darted over Yellowstone
He wrote: "Here we have several glowing orbs moving about over Yellowstone and this is the same area as Old Faithful, which could of course attract alien tourists as well as humans.
"Why wouldn't aliens be interested in the Earths natural wonders?
"The movement is proof its not Venus or a hot air balloon. If you knew the truth about the abundance of alien ships, craft and species around us every day, it would blow your mind.”
YOUTUBE
The UFO spotted last year
Yellowstone has also piqued the interest of many around the globe over fears that it could soon erupt.
The Yellowstone Caldera supervolcano last erupted 70,000 years ago but a spike in seismic activity around the national park has unsettled nerves.
If the Wyoming volcano were to erupt it would kill an estimated 87,000 people immediately and make two-thirds of the USA immediately uninhabitable.
GETTY
Yellowstone Volcano
The large spew of ash into the atmosphere would block out sunlight and directly affect life beneath it creating a “nuclear winter”.
The massive eruption could be a staggering 6,000 times as powerful as the one from Washington’s Mount St Helens in 1980 which killed 57 people and deposited ash in 11 different states and five Canadian provinces.
If the volcano explodes, a climate shift would ensue as the volcano would spew massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which can form a sulphur aerosol that reflects and absorbs sunlight.
MAN CLAIMS TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048 WARNS OF AN ALIEN INVASION
MAN CLAIMS TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048 WARNS OF AN ALIEN INVASION
A man was arrested by Casper police after he was found to have had too much to drink.
The man then told police that he was a time traveler and aliens had filled his body with alcohol.
JOHNSON CLAIMED TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048
Police arrested Bryant Johnson on October 2 when they were sent to a street and found him standing in the road saying that he had come from the future and that he was there to help people. Johnson said that he had time traveled from the year 2048 and said that he wanted to warn people that aliens would arrive the next year and that the people should leave as soon as they could.
He then said that he wanted to talk to the president of the town and went on to tell police that he was able to time travel because aliens filled his body with alcohol before standing on a huge pad that transported him to 2017. He went on to say that he should have been transported to 2018 but had ended up landing a year earlier.
Police said that Johnson had bloodshot, watery eyes and his speech was slurred and a strong smell of alcohol was coming from him. He was taken to the emergency room, but it was then said that he was causing a disturbance there. Police gave Johnson a breath test, and it revealed that his blood alcohol content was.136 and he was arrested for being intoxicated in public.
MANY THINK TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT CASPER POLICE FORCE
While police clearly did not believe that Johnson had traveled in time, it was recently revealed that a leading astrophysicist said that time travel is possible. He also revealed how astronauts could time travel. Talk of time travel is nothing new as it was Albert Einstein who first proposed traveling at the speed of light going away from Earth would slow down time for the person traveling, and people on Earth would see time at the normal rate. Many physicists claim that time travel is not only possible, but it has already occurred. It was said that astronaut Sergei Krikalev is in the future by 0.02 seconds after he spent 804 days in space thanks to time dilation.
Of course, if Johnson had met aliens in the future and they had the superior technology then perhaps time travel is commonplace in 2048.
MAN CLAIMS TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048 WARNS OF AN ALIEN INVASION
MAN CLAIMS TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048 WARNS OF AN ALIEN INVASION
A man was arrested by Casper police after he was found to have had too much to drink.
The man then told police that he was a time traveler and aliens had filled his body with alcohol.
JOHNSON CLAIMED TO BE FROM THE YEAR 2048
Police arrested Bryant Johnson on October 2 when they were sent to a street and found him standing in the road saying that he had come from the future and that he was there to help people. Johnson said that he had time traveled from the year 2048 and said that he wanted to warn people that aliens would arrive the next year and that the people should leave as soon as they could.
He then said that he wanted to talk to the president of the town and went on to tell police that he was able to time travel because aliens filled his body with alcohol before standing on a huge pad that transported him to 2017. He went on to say that he should have been transported to 2018 but had ended up landing a year earlier.
Police said that Johnson had bloodshot, watery eyes and his speech was slurred and a strong smell of alcohol was coming from him. He was taken to the emergency room, but it was then said that he was causing a disturbance there. Police gave Johnson a breath test, and it revealed that his blood alcohol content was.136 and he was arrested for being intoxicated in public.
MANY THINK TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT CASPER POLICE FORCE
While police clearly did not believe that Johnson had traveled in time, it was recently revealed that a leading astrophysicist said that time travel is possible. He also revealed how astronauts could time travel. Talk of time travel is nothing new as it was Albert Einstein who first proposed traveling at the speed of light going away from Earth would slow down time for the person traveling, and people on Earth would see time at the normal rate. Many physicists claim that time travel is not only possible, but it has already occurred. It was said that astronaut Sergei Krikalev is in the future by 0.02 seconds after he spent 804 days in space thanks to time dilation.
Of course, if Johnson had met aliens in the future and they had the superior technology then perhaps time travel is commonplace in 2048.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Saturn's icy moon Dione, with the giant planet and its rings in the background, on August 17, 2015. Measurements by Cassini suggest an ocean may lurk beneath Dione's surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Our solar system is filled with oceans. But only a few of those have captivated our attention.
During its 1979 Jupiter flyby, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft found the surface of the moon Europa to be a cracked-up jumble of water ice, as if composed of icebergs floating atop some hidden sea. As the craft moved on to Saturn, it took measurements of that planet’s massive moon, Titan, and revealed the frigid world bore a thick atmosphere that could sustain lakes or seas of liquid hydrocarbons on the veiled, cryogenic surface below.
It took follow-ups by NASA’s Galileo mission that arrived at Jupiter in 1995, and later by the Saturn orbiter Cassini—a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)—to confirm this early evidence for extraterrestrial oceans. Galileo also hinted that two other Jovian moons, Callisto and Ganymede, perhaps harbored oceans as well. Cassini found abundant evidence of multiple ocean-bearing moons during its 13 years of studying the Saturnian system. In part because of these discoveries, both Galileo and Cassini were deliberately crashed into their respective gas-giant subjects, burning up in their atmospheres to avoid any chance of biocontaminating each planet’s promising moons. Galileo’s self-immolation occurred in 2003, and Cassini’s fiery end just unfolded on September 15.
When it reached Saturn in 2004 Cassini deployed a European-built lander, Huygens, to land on Titan’s frozen surface, where it found a bizarre landscape of methane–ethane lakes and hydrocarbon snows. In later observations Cassini revealed Titan possesses a watery ocean beneath its surface of hydrocarbon slush. The breakout star of Cassini’s investigations, however, was unquestionably Enceladus, an icy moon about as big as England is wide—too small, researchers had thought, to sustain much interesting geologic activity.
Against all odds Cassini found the moon jetting plumes of salty water vapor from its south pole—an unmistakable signpost of some kind of mysterious ocean hidden beneath its icy crust. Where there is liquid water, the thinking goes, there might well be life—just as there is on Earth, where water forms the cornerstone of biology as we know it. And unlike Jupiter’s moon Europa, which Galileo had shown contains a sunless sea perhaps impenetrably sealed beneath a thick crust of ice, Enceladus’s plumes offered a way to obtain direct samples of its dark waters. Starry-eyed astrobiologists were instantly enamored with this wee moon—and they still are.
But other astrobiologically interesting moons circle Saturn, too. A bit more than 400,000 kilometers from Enceladus spins another icy satellite, named Dione. Twice as big and similarly coated in ice and snow, it has something else in common with Enceladus: it is probably an ocean world. “There’s really good evidence” for Dione’s ocean, says Bonnie Buratti, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Cassini mission. “I kind of feel this is one of the things we’ve left hanging as we leave the Saturn system, that we just haven’t answered.”
Ocean worlds are bodies in the solar system that manage (or managed in the past, like Mars) to hold onto enough liquid water to form seas, lakes and other potential aquatic abodes for life. The newly discovered ones in the outer solar system still harboring oceans today all possess some internal energy source that keeps them from freezing solid like some of their siblings. Scientists argue over the details but most agree those worlds are warmed from within by a combination of radioactive decay and tidal heating (the friction-inducing flexure of their crusts from the gravitational pull of the parent planet).
Buratti lays out the case for Dione’s membership in this elite club: Its surface is fairly smooth, meaning something has been filling in and covering up the spots where craters and fissures might otherwise form. Liquid water rising from a moon-girdling subsurface reservoir, then freezing, would work nicely for that. Tentative evidence from Cassini’s instruments also hinted at plume activity—albeit much weaker than at Enceladus—as if a similar but subtler mechanism is at play inside Dione. Buratti and others suspect that Janiculum Dorsa, one of the moon’s few mountains, may be somehow responsible, but the scientists were unable to gather definitive proof before Cassini’s termination.
Janiculum Dorsa may be Dione’s equivalent of Enceladus’s south pole, where water gushes more than 60 kilometers into space. On the latter this mechanism (called cryovolcanism) is fed by an underwater ocean—and there is similar albeit more circumstantial evidence for Janiculum Dorsa as the source of similar “cryovolcanic” plume activity on Dione.
Cassini’s measurements of Dione’s gravitational field also indicate that something strange is going on beneath the surface. When a spacecraft flies by a completely solid body, the craft’s trajectory tends to be more or less “straight.” In simple terms, it flies by without a discernable difference in the amount of gravity attracting it. But if the body is less homogeneous—for instance, a liquid ocean beneath an icy crust—the spacecraft’s trajectory can exhibit faint but detectable deviations in the tug due to this liquid mass. This is precisely what Cassini experienced as it swooped by Dione. “If Dione has an ocean, it’s another example where there might be a habitable environment because we have liquid water—there’s a heat source and there might be organic molecules in there that contribute to primitive bacterial life,” Buratti says.
And Dione is not the only promising place passed over by many astrobiologists infatuated with Enceladus, Titan and Europa. There are at least a half dozen other ocean worlds that might merit inclusion in the quest to discover alien life. “Might” being the operative term here—these oft-overlooked oceans tend to be less accessible than their more popular peers. They are either locked beneath thicker ice crusts or just so far out in the solar system (in the cases of moons of Uranus and Neptune) that no one can yet say how promising their hidden seas really are. That is, save Dione—which appears to be a sleepier but no less interesting cross between Enceladus and Europa.
THE MOST MASSIVE MOON OF ALL
Ganymede is a truly giant moon. Larger than Mercury and not much smaller than Mars, it is a would-be planet forever demoted from that lofty status by its host Jupiter. Just as Dione is perennially overshadowed by Enceladus and Titan, Ganymede tends to take a back seat to its sister ocean world, Europa, which is slated to be studied up close by NASA’s Europa Clipper mission sometime in the 2020s. But Ganymede is deserving of study, too: Telltale cycles of auroral activity on the surface, witnessed from afar by the Hubble Space Telescope in Earth orbit, reveal oscillations in the moon’s magnetic field best explained by the internal sloshing of a huge ocean hundreds of kilometers below the surface.
How huge? Olivier Witasse, a project scientist working on ESA’s future Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), says Ganymede’s ocean is even bigger than Europa’s—and might be the largest in the entire solar system. “The Ganymede ocean is believed to contain more water than the Europan one,” he says. “Six times more water in Ganymede’s ocean than in Earth's ocean, and three times more than Europa.”
UICE will orbit Ganymede, giving scientists a chance to study this second-fiddle moon in detail. On the way there the craft will make several sweeps past another potentially ocean-bearing Jovian moon, Callisto. “We think that Callisto also harbors a subsurface ocean, but the available data is unclear,” Witasse says. “What we hope to do is to check whether there is an ocean or not—and if yes, at which depth.”
ICY MOONS AROUND ICY GIANTS
Out past Jupiter and Saturn other ocean worlds may be found as well. The moon Ariel twirls in a two-day orbit just 190,000 kilometers from the gas-giant Uranus. All we know about the moon comes from a single encounter with the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986. That flyby revealed Ariel to be relatively smooth, as if its surface was being continually renewed by activity deep within. It is currently believed to be the only ocean world in the Uranian system.
The smoothness of Ariel’s surface may be a hallmark of “extrusive cryovolcanism,” or geyser activity that throws material onto a world’s surface. Imagine a flow of molten rock from a volcano on Earth, except with the flow being made of molten ice—in other words, liquid water. Zibi Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, says finding and studying instances of cryovolcanism would be a “holy grail in solar system evolution” that could explain how icy worlds, oceanic or not, change over time. She says there may also be a tentative connection between Ariel’s geology and the Uranian rings—but without more data, not much more can be said. (Enceladus’s plumes similarly interact with one of the rings of Saturn, steadily replenishing and maintaining the ring’s tenuous existence with injections of icy particles.) “Really, the best way to learn about the interiors and geologic history—the evolution of these satellites—is going to be another mission that goes through or in orbit around the Uranian system,” she notes.
Farther out, the gas-giant planet Neptune has only one moon of any substantial size, Triton. The satellite appears to be a captured interloper from the Kuiper Belt, a diffuse ring of icy bodies at the outer reaches of the solar system. That would make it kin to Pluto, the Kuiper Belt’s largest denizen. Data from Voyager 2, which encountered Neptune in 1989, suggest Triton possesses a very thin atmosphere and more than a few geysers on its surface. “What is actually driving the cryovolcanism? It’s got to be pretty powerful because it’s shooting this material quite high above tiny Triton,” says Heidi Hammel, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute. “It’s not just that it’s leaking, it’s jetting these materials.” The answer, as far as researchers can tell, is the same combination of radioactive decay and tidal forces that sustains oceans on other frozen moons of the outer solar system. But geysers that shoot as high as Triton’s, she notes, would require a particularly potent heat source and a massive ocean. “There’s no doubt that there’s a case to be made to look at Triton in the light of a very habitable environment,” she says. “It’s an active world. It has cryovolcanoes and we’ve seen them. There’s a whole lot of material from these cryovolcanoes that is black, dark,” which indicates the presence of organic materials, according to Hammel.
Triton, it seems, is a hipster ocean world—it was seen spouting geysers decades before the plumes of Enceladus were astrobiology’s next big thing. That it has been overlooked for so long is due to its immense distance from Earth and the fact that it has only been visited once, for a handful of hours by Voyager 2. But if Triton is so promising, what then of Pluto, its Kuiper Belt cousin? On this world, planetary scientists may find the weirdest potential ocean world of all.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
During its 2015 Pluto flyby NASA’s New Horizons probe only had about 12 hours to study the dwarf planet Pluto before it was a fading point of light in the rearview. The spacecraft had to make use of every available moment, and that intense scrutiny revealed signs of something spectacular but not yet entirely certain: Pluto appears to have an ocean, too.
Pluto's Moon Charon
Scientists had long suspected what New Horizons confirmed: Pluto is mostly made of ices—not only water, but also of more volatile substances like nitrogen and methane that freeze solid at extremely low temperatures. Yet the spacecraft measured Pluto to be more compact than it was expected to be, given its mass, because freezing water should have expanded and pushed the surface outward. There is also a surprising amount of geologic activity at Sputnik Planitia, the heart-shaped region sprawled across one of Pluto’s hemispheres. All that tumult on a world long thought to be locked in deep-freeze suggests some reservoir of heat must linger within—an ocean, perhaps. If so, though, that ocean would be decidedly atypical.
Bill McKinnon, a Washington University in Saint Louis professor and New Horizons team member, says ammonia is believed to be plentiful on Pluto, albeit hard to detect remotely from a spacecraft flying by at thousands of kilometers per hour. That ammonia, he says, should mix with any water below, which might still be in liquid form even billions of years after the dwarf planet’s formation. “If the ocean is able to cool and not freeze, then the ammonia helps to keep it from disappearing,” he says. This would make the ocean fairly viscous. “At those temperatures it ends up having the consistency of honey,” he says. But the scant bit of time New Horizons spent in the Plutonian system means one unfortunate thing: There is insufficient data to conclusively prove the model. “It’s a story, it’s not proof,” McKinnon notes. “At least it hangs together conceptually.”
Cracks in Pluto's Moon Could Indicate it Once Had an Underground Ocean
The only way to further study these ocean worlds is via targeted missions. Europa, of course, will be lavished with attention by Europa Clipper and JUICE. But outside of that, Ganymede and Callisto are currently the sole also-ran ocean worlds with planned visits—from JUICE. Despite their revered status, even Enceladus and Titan lack committed follow-up investigations, but that could change by the end of the year if NASA chooses to pursue a mission to either as part of the agency’s New Frontiers program of midsize interplanetary missions. Uranus and Neptune missions have been discussed—and rejected—for decades, with no concepts for exploration ever advancing beyond the preplanning stages. Of all the lesser-known worlds, Turtle says, “the two that really cry out to me are Ariel and Dione. I think Dione has some surprises still.”
JUICE could make Ganymede and Callisto’s oceans seem less remote and more dynamic, and maybe even confirm some tentative evidence of cryovolcanism at Ganymede, once again revolutionizing our understanding of these mysterious moons. But without more missions to the outer solar system, inquisitive scientists—as well as the curious public they serve—will be left with more questions than answers for several decades to come. The oceans, of course, will wait. Will we?
A local UFO researcher says Kansas City is a hot spot for sightings.
Margie Kay is assistant state director for the Missouri chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, and author of a new book, The Kansas City UFO Flaps. The publication documents numerous sightings, mostly in Eastern Jackson County in 2011 and 2012.
"Flap" is a term used to describe sudden grouping of sightings of UFOs in an area that appear to be related.
The accounts involve close encounters in which someone had a really good look at strange objects in the sky, Kay said. In one case, a photograph showed what she called small beings that don't appear to be human.
"There's never cooperation from government agencies," Kay said. "We filed a freedom of information request asking for radar reports and there's hardly ever a response."
A lot of people report seeing multi-colored objects that rotate counter clockwise at high rates of speed. The sightings continue, Kay said.
MUFON wants people to file reports whenever they see something in the sky they can't explain. The organization has set up an online registry.
Yet another theory has been developed to explain the mysteries of Tabby's Star, one much more plausible than previous, eccentric theories of an "alien megastructure." A new study from NASA and Belgian AstroLAB IRIS observatory suggests that the star's odd behavior could be explained by an "uneven dust cloud."
This is not the most exciting explanation of the famous-in-astronomy-circles Tabby's Star, also known as KIC 8462852. It's been observed in the night sky since 1890, but in September 2015, Dr. Tabetha Boyajian, then of Yale and now of Louisiana State, published a paper titled "Where's the Flux?" which looked at 846's highly unusual light curve. Tabby's Star, as it became known, would experience a series of eccentric photometric "dips," which would dim its light with seemingly no pattern.
Theories erupted about what could be causing the dips. The most outlandish of these was that Tabby's Star was, or at least was involved in, the creation of an alien superstructure. But there have been other, more plausible theories. A planet with uneven, wobbly rings near the star could also potentially generate a similar effect.
Continued study, however, has shown less dimming in the infrared light coming from Tabby's Star than in its ultraviolet light.
"This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming," says Huan Meng, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, who is lead author of the new study looking at the dust theory published in The Astrophysical Journal, in a press statement. "We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star with a roughly 700-day orbital period."
From January to December of last year, researchers looked extensively at the light from Tabby's Star in ultraviolet, infrared, and visible. Based on dips in ultraviolet light, they determined that tiny particles were blocking the star's light. Dust near a star, known as circumstellar dust, hits the Goldilocks test for what could be causing continued dimming. It's not so fine that it would fly away from the star, but not thick enough to uniformly cover everything.
NASA compares the experience to going "to the beach on a bright, sunny day and sitting under an umbrella." While the umbrella will block some of the sunlight, it won't be able to stop the sunset from changing colors. The light changes through the scattering of particles, and Tabby's Star might experience a similar process from our vantage point. "The new study suggests," NASA says, "the objects causing the long-period dimming of Tabby's Star can be no more than a few micrometers in diameter (about one ten-thousandth of an inch)."
While NASA appears to be quite confident in the larger dust theory, there are still smaller mysteries within, like a three-day period earlier this year of continued short-term dimming. It's had to move its telescopes off the star for now, but it's clear that Tabby's Star will remain an object of curiosity in the sky.
"Tabby's Star could have something like a solar activity cycle," says Siegfried Vanaverbeke, an AstroLAB volunteer who helped convince the Belgian lab to make it a point of study. "This is something that needs further investigation and will continue to interest scientists for many years to come."
A Fast UFO Flying was Filmed by a US Air Force Veteran, He Sent the Footage to MUFON for Investigation
A Fast UFO Flying was Filmed by a US Air Force Veteran, He Sent the Footage to MUFON for Investigation
The UFO was filmed with a DJI Phantom 3 Professional 4K aerial camera mounted on a drone above Ayden District Park travelling too fast to be spotted with a naked eye. The 59- year-old veteran was astonished after reviewing the recorded footage that showed a UFO flying in a blur under the drone.
The retired USAF veteran has told MUFON that he had never previously experienced anything similar in his 20 year military career and that this footage took him back.
The object travelled around 1.2 miles just in one-third of a second, meaning, it travelled at around 13,000 mph per hour or 17 times the speed of sound an altitude of just 50 feet.
The object on the footage can be seen clearly only when slowed down. It is when it stays on the screen long enough to be seen. The description on YouTube video says that it traveled 6200 feet (about 1.2 miles) in 1/3rd of a second.
The UFO was reported with MUFON and then a copy of the video was sent to NASA. Both agencies are investigating and anysing it.
The object looked like a solid metallic object which reflected or emitted its own light.It appears like a blur and it covers a distance during one-third of a second without making a sound.
MUFON’s North Carolina investigator Sanford Davis wrote in the official report that the object was not observed nor seen personally. It was spotted after reviewing drone footage and the whole sighting occured within a third of a second – a stroke arising in the background, streaking across the screen before disappearing in the foreground.
It appears as a white dot, turning into a ‘light disk’ right before it disappears off screen.”
Some users on YouTube commented that it has prosaic origins while the others see it as valid proof of UFO’s existence .
Without any doubts, the results of the NASA analysis will share the former’s opinion.
Neil Armstrong: Their ships were far superior to ours-Boy, was the big”
Neil Armstrong: Their ships were far superior to ours-Boy, was the big”
Everyone is familiar with the broadcast images of Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on the moon, and many believe his footsteps to be the first ever on the lunar surface. However, during a documented NASA symposium, Armstrong made comments alluding to the fact that not only had other species visited the moon but that there were signs of colonization thereupon.
THE REAL REASON NASA REFUSES A RETURN TO THE MOON
Armstrong stated in an interview with an unnamed professor at the symposium that their presence on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission was immediately noticed and addressed by an alien race. The beings that occupied the lunar airspace made very clear their displeasure of the human’s arrival on the moon’s surface: Armstrong: It was incredible … of course, we had always known there was a possibility … The fact is, we were warned off. There was never any questions then of a space station or a moon city. Professor: How do you mean “warned off”? Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology – Boy, were they big! … and menacing … No, there is no question of a space station. Armstrong: Naturally – NASA was committed at that time, and couldn’t risk a panic on earth…. But it really was a quick scoop and back again. (Above Top Secret, p. 186) Additionally, there are reports that upon arrival on the moon Armstrong witnessed structures on the surface resembling shops and other buildings obviously not designed by man. It is believed that while footage exists of these findings, the decision was made not to make these films public so as to not incite public panic. NASA’s unwillingness to move forward with lunar cities or even stations can easily be explained by the fear of going against the will of a much more advanced race. Armstrong stated that this fear is what leads to the following Apollo missions to only include a quick landing and sample collection. With this limited access to the moon, NASA or any other space exploration organization would be greatly hindered in their efforts to establish surface space stations of any type and lunar colonies would be completely infeasible. Could it be that human’s exploration of the cosmos is closely regulated by alien races? What lengths would those races go to prevent space travel advancement by humans? Perhaps in the future, humans will gain the favor of the celestial inhabitants and be privy to the mysteries of beyond.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
The 1980 Rosedale UFO
The 1980 Rosedale UFO
This photograph, taken on the evening of May 26, 1988, is typical of several taken in recent years of enormous, slow-moving structures with lights along the perimeter.
CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES
The sounds of frightened cattle woke a rancher from a sound sleep in the early morning of September 30, 1980, near Rosedale, Victoria, Australia. When he went outside, he was astonished to see a domed disc with orange and blue lights gliding about ten feet above the ground. It rose slightly in the air, hovered briefly above an open 10,000-gallon water tank, and then landed 50 feet away. The rancher jumped on a motorcycle and sped toward the object, which was making a "whistling" sound. Suddenly, an "awful scream" sounded as a black tube extended from the UFO's base. With an ear-splitting bang the strange craft rose into the air. A blast of hot air almost knocked the witness down.
The sounds ceased as the object slowly moved to a position about 30 feet away and eight feet above the ground. Hovering briefly, it dropped debris -- stones, weeds, cow dung -- from underneath it, then flew away, disappearing in the east.
Where the disc had landed could be found a ring of black, flattened grass 30 feet in diameter. When he examined it in the daylight, the witness discovered that all the yellow flowers within the circle had been removed. Only green grass remained. But even more bizarre, the water tank was empty, with no evidence of spillage. Only the muddy residue at the bottom of the tank was left, and there was something peculiar about even this: It had been pulled into a two-foot-high cone shape. The witness was sick with headaches and nausea for more than a week afterward.
A similar ring was found the following December at Bundalaguah, not far from Rosedale. The water in a nearby reservoir was also mysteriously missing.
DANGEROUS UFOS
Did you know that witnesses have reported damaged property and even personal injury after UFO sightings? Take a look at these stories of dangerous UFOs:
It’s official: Researchers have discovered a SECOND Earth
It’s official: Researchers have discovered a SECOND Earth
Researchers have confirmed the existence of a SECOND Earth located in the Proxima Centauri System. The planet is believed to have oceans just like Earth…
In the past, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the universe, but none of them is like Proxima B.
Proxima b, as has been baptized, has very ‘promising characteristics’: it is probably rocky, slightly more massive than our own planet and is located in the region around its star that would allow liquid water on its surface to exist.
Researchers have discovered a planet located in the Proxima Centauri system, one of the closest stars to Earth which they believe harbors liquid water and potentially alien life.
The planet, named Proxima B is believed to be around 1.3 times the size of our planet and has the ideal temperature on the surface for water in a liquid state to exist.
Proxima B is located four light years away from Earth –over 25 TRILLION MILES—meaning that in order to visit the planet in the near future, future generation would have to come up with super-fast spacecraft that would allow them to travel to the Proxima Centauri system with ease.
If the planet proves to be ‘a SECOND Earth’ it could become one of the best options for future human colonization.
Researchers believe that the temperature on the surface of the planet could be between -90 degrees Celsius and 30 degrees Celsius.
According to researchers, Proxima B may be the best opportunity we have come across to find DIRECT evidence of the existence of Alien Lifeforms outside of out solar system.
The planet which has already been dubbed ‘a second Earth’ is located at an ideal distance from its host star for liquid water to exist, which means that life as we know it is very likely to exist.
Proxima B is the closest exoplanet we have ever discovered, and according to researchers, a mission to the planet to search for signs of life could be something achievable within our lifetime.
The distance from our planet to Proxima B may seem insurmountable, but it is actually formidably shorter when compared to other candidates to host life. This means that Proxima B could become the first objective for future interstellar travel.
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf located in the constellation Centaurus. The star itself is too weak to be observed with the naked eye, but in recent months, scientists have not taken their eyes off of it.
In fact, during the first half of this year, Proxima Centauri was followed regularly with the HARPS spectrograph installed on the 3.6-meter telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla (Chile) and monitored simultaneously with other instruments from around the world.
“Many exoplanets have been found, and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us,” Dr. Guillem Anglada-Escudé, lead author of the paper, said.
“Many people’s stories and efforts have converged on this discovery. The result is also a tribute to all of them. The search for life on Proxima b comes next.”
There are already two papers which describe and go through the potential habitability of Proxima B.
Future observations, for example using the 39-m ESO E-ELT telescope under construction in Chile, will allow further investigation of Proxima b and of the hypothetical presence of a thick atmosphere and a liquid water reservoir. If this turned out to be the case, it would be very exciting that the nearest star to the Sun also hosts the nearest habitable (perhaps inhabited?) planet. (Source)
Suspected huge asteroid explodes in the sky over Yunnan Province, China
Suspected huge asteroid explodes in the sky over Yunnan Province, China
A suspected huge asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere over China on October 4, 2017 and exploded at 37 kilometers height near Shangri-La County in Southwest China's Yunnan Province.
Some people caught the asteroid on camera at the moment of its final impact behind thick clouds.
What strikes is the strange rectangular shaped cloud above the asteroid moments of its final impact as it doesn't really look like a natural cloud but more like cloaked object!
NASA said that the explosion was equivalent to 540 tons of TNT. Seismic agencies registered a seismic impact of 2.1 Magnitude.
Asteroid and meteor observers speculate that there might be remains of the asteroid have been falling on the ground, since the asteroid exploded at a relatively low height above the Earth’s surface.
Two years ago, physicists detected for the first time the infinitesimal ripples in space itself set off when two black holes whirled into each other. The observation of such gravitational waves fulfilled a century-old prediction from Albert Einstein and opened up a whole new way to explore the heavens. Today, three leaders of the massive experiment that made the discovery received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Rainer Weiss, 85, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and Kip Thorne, 77, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena hatched plans for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 1984. Barry Barish, 81, a Caltech particle physicist, later guided the construction of the twin LIGO observatories in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Weiss will receive one half of the $1.1 million prize, and Thorne and Barish the other half. LIGO's third founder, Ronald Drever, died in Edinburgh on 7 March at age 85. (Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.)
Other physicists rate the discovery of gravitational waves among the most important ever in physics. “It's revolutionary,” says Abraham Loeb, a theorist at Harvard University. It's very rare that we open a completely new window on the universe.”
Weiss, however, says that he finds the prize somewhat embarrassing. “Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous,” he says. "The best way I can think of it is we're symbols for the much bigger group of people who made [LIGO] happen.” Weiss says he has arranged to donate the prize money to MIT to help support students.
The entire notion of gravitational waves is mind-bending. In 1915, Albert Einstein explained in his general theory of relativity that gravity comes about when mass and energy warp spacetime, causing freely falling objects to follow curving trajectories. A year later he predicted that a twirling barbell-shaped arrangement of mass—such as two spiraling black holes—should radiate ripples in space that would zip through the universe at light-speed.
Detecting the incredibly feeble waves is a challenge. Each of LIGO's L-shaped interferometers acts like a pair of perpendicular rulers. A passing gravitational wave will generally stretch the two 4-kilometer-long arms by different amounts, and by comparing laser light bouncing back and forth in the arms, physicists can detect that slight differential stretching. LIGO’s interferometers can detect a difference in length as small as 1/10,000 the width of a proton.
Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Ken Richardson
Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech Alumni Association
Weiss, a consummate tinkerer who once flunked out of college, wasn't the first person to think of using an interferometer to try to detect gravitational waves. In the 1960s, U.S. physicist Robert Forward built a small interferometer for the task. However, Weiss analyzed the problem far more thoroughly and recognized the need for kilometers-long interferometers. He also identified the main sources of extraneous noise, and explained how to deal with them in an unpublished report in 1972 that became the basis for LIGO.
After overcoming his initial skepticism, Thorne championed the project and pressed Caltech to pursue gravitational wave research by hiring Drever in 1979. Thorne also shaped LIGO’s scientific goals, says Saul Teukolsky, a theorist at Cornell University. For example, early on, many physicists thought the most likely sources of gravitational waves would be supernova explosions. Thorne realized that pairs of spiraling neutron stars or black holes would be more powerful sources and encouraged experimenters to tailor LIGO to spot them, Teukolsky says. Thorne also pushed physicists to assemble a vast catalog of numerical simulations to help them spot potential signals in their data.
Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech
If Weiss and Thorne conceived of LIGO, Barish made it a reality. He took over leadership of the project in 1994, when it was stalled and the National Science Foundation was thinking of canceling it. Barish expanded the LIGO collaboration, made a key design change, and saw the project through construction before stepping down in 2005. “LIGO wouldn't have happened without his leadership,” says Stanley Whitcomb, a physicist at Caltech and an original member of LIGO. “It was something that Rai[ner] and Kip couldn't do.”
Barish, too, says he's uncertain what to think of the prize. “I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the recognition of individuals when so much of this was a team effort,” he says.
Had he lived, Drever would have shared in the prize, many physicists think, even though his difficult personality got him drummed out of LIGO in 1990. Drever invented several key elements of the LIGO design, Whitcomb says, but he was not as self-effacing as Weiss and Thorne. “It will be a cruel thing to Kip and Rai[ner] because they have to live with this [attention] for the rest of their lives,” Whitcomb says. “And it's cruel to Ron because he would have enjoyed it.”
LIGO appears to be delivering on its promise. The first discovery revealed the merger of star-sized black holes that were more massive than theorists had thought possible. Last month, researchers announced the discovery of a fourth black-hole merger that had been spotted not only by the LIGO detectors, but also by Europe’s premiere detector—the freshly upgraded Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy—which enabled scientists to better pinpoint the merger’s location on the sky. And rumors are swirling that LIGO has spotted the merger of two neutron stars in a violent explosion that was also seen by conventional telescopes. Such “multimessenger” astronomy could provide unprecedented insight into numerous astrophysical phenomena.
The one thing LIGO has yet to deliver is a surprise, Weiss notes. “We haven’t found anything that we can’t explain at all,” he says. “I hope that will happen.”
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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 74 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.
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