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...
02-12-2017
Elon Musk: We Must Leave Earth For One Critical Reason
Elon Musk: We Must Leave Earth For One Critical Reason
In its early life, the Earth would have been peppered nearly continuously by asteroids smashing into our young planet. These fiery collisions made our world what it is today. It may seem like things have changed since then, given the vast assortment of life and wide blue oceans—and things have indeed changed. At least in some respects. However, Earth still receives thousands of tons of matter from space, but this is in the form of microscopic dust particles (as opposed to recurrent, energetic collisions).
Fortunately, in modern times, a large asteroid colliding with the surface of the Earth happens only very rarely. Nevertheless, it does happen from time to time.
As most are probably already aware, it is widely believed that an asteroid initiated the dinosaurs’ extinction some 65 million years ago. And more recently, the Russian Chelyabinsk meteor hit our planet in February of 2013. It entered at a shallow angle at 60 times the speed of sound. Upon contact with our atmosphere, it exploded in an air burst. The size of this body of rock (before it burned up and shattered) is estimated to be around 20 meters (across) and it weighed some 13,000 metric tons.
This isn’t large by any means, but it was enough to injure over a thousand people and damage nearly 20,000 buildings.
But what would happen if we were faced with a truly major threat today? Could we survive?
Well, it depends on the size of the object and where it hits, but in short…no. Unless an asteroid was very small, we wouldn’t be able to destroy it or vaporize it—this is simply beyond our technological capabilities (at the moment). We also don’t have the technology necessary to deflect the asteroid or veer it off course.
WHY WE NEED TO LEAVE EARTH
This is a bit of a problem because, assuming that humanity plans on sticking around for awhile, it is almost inevitable that we will have to face a large asteroid at some point. Of course, asteroids aren’t the only threat. There are a host of deadly diseases, volcanic eruptions, or other catastrophes that could bring about the end of civilization as we know it (and maybe even all life).
This is why it makes sense to transition into a multi-planet species as soon as possible. Blogger Tim Urban recently had a rather apt metaphor to illustrate why we need to leave our planet and venture out into the cosmos: Picture the Earth as a kind of hard drive. And on this hard drive we have saved everything. Every song. Every book. Every thought that has been thought and every word that has been uttered. Every memory.
And that’s not all: It also houses every single species. All of it is stored in a word document saved on that hard drive.
Oh, and the hard drive has broken before, and when it happened, we lost nearly everything. It got a virus and…that’s it, two-thirds of the population gone. It smashed into something and, alas, there goes another batch of data.
Blank pages. File corrupted.
So it makes sense to make a backup. As Urban puts it, “Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do? You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.”
That is why we need to leave Earth. We need to have another plan. A safeguard.
Of course, we should also do it for exploration and discovery, but we need to do it for life itself. And that is one of the primary reasons that Elon Musk wants to head to the Red Planet. It is a way of ensuring humanity’s continued existence (assuming that we think the document is worth saving). And ultimately, it’s why he doesn’t want to go with just a select set of scientists and experts.
He wants to take a significant portion of the data on our hard drive—Musk would like to send 1 million people to Mars.
At the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference in 2013, Musk explained his feelings, stating, “Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we’re increasingly doing ourselves in. The goal is to improve rocket technology and space technology until we can send people to Mars and establish life on Mars.”
Of course, this will be no simple task. Mars is, currently, a wasteland of dirt and sand.
“Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk said. “But we could make it work.” And honestly, even if we can’t make it work, it seems that we have no real choice but to try. Musk concludes, “I agree this is an unlikely outcome, but if we don’t keep improving technology every year, we won’t get there.”
Later this year, via his rocket firm SpaceX, Musk plans to disclose a spacecraft designed to transport as many as 100 people at a time to Mars.
Google's AutoML project, designed to make AI build other AIs, has now developed a computer vision system that vastly outperforms state-of-the-art-models. The project could improve how autonomous vehicles and next-generation AI robots "see."
An AI That Can Build AI
In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that’s capable of generating its own AIs. More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a “child” that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.
The Google researchers automated the design of machine learning models using an approach called reinforcement learning. AutoML acts as a controller neural network that develops a child AI network for a specific task. For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognizing objects — people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. — in a video in real-time.
Image Credit: Google Research
AutoML would evaluate NASNet’s performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times. When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets, which the Google researchers call “two of the most respected large-scale academic data sets in computer vision,” NASNet outperformed all other computer vision systems.
According to the researchers, NASNet was 82.7 percent accurate at predicting images on ImageNet’s validation set. This is 1.2 percent better than any previously published results, and the system is also 4 percent more efficient, with a 43.1 percent mean Average Precision (mAP). Additionally, a less computationally demanding version of NASNet outperformed the best similarly sized models for mobile platforms by 3.1 percent.
A View of the Future
Machine learning is what gives many AI systems their ability to perform specific tasks. Although the concept behind it is fairly simple — an algorithm learns by being fed a ton of data — the process requires a huge amount of time and effort. By automating the process of creating accurate, efficient AI systems, an AI that can build AI takes on the brunt of that work. Ultimately, that means AutoML could open up the field of machine learning and AI to non-experts.
As for NASNet specifically, accurate, efficient computer vision algorithms are highly sought after due to the number of potential applications. They could be used to create sophisticated, AI-powered robots or to help visually impaired people regain sight, as one researcher suggested. They could also help designers improve self-driving vehicle technologies. The faster an autonomous vehicle can recognize objects in its path, the faster it can react to them, thereby increasing the safety of such vehicles.
The Google researchers acknowledge that NASNet could prove useful for a wide range of applications and have open-sourced the AI for inference on image classification and object detection. “We hope that the larger machine learning community will be able to build on these models to address multitudes of computer vision problems we have not yet imagined,” they wrote in their blog post.
Though the applications for NASNet and AutoML are plentiful, the creation of an AI that can build AI does raise some concerns. For instance, what’s to prevent the parent from passing down unwanted biases to its child? What if AutoML creates systems so fast that society can’t keep up? It’s not very difficult to see how NASNet could be employed in automated surveillance systems in the near future, perhaps sooner than regulations could be put in place to control such systems.
Thankfully, world leaders are working fast to ensure such systems don’t lead to any sort of dystopian future.
Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and several others are all members of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society, an organization focused on the responsible development of AI. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEE) has proposed ethical standards for AI, and DeepMind, a research company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, recently announced the creation of group focused on the moral and ethical implications of AI.
Various governments are also working on regulations to prevent the use of AI for dangerous purposes, such as autonomous weapons, and so long as humans maintain control of the overall direction of AI development, the benefits of having an AI that can build AI should far outweigh any potential pitfalls.
There was a time when women were not allowed to fly any kind of airplanes, let alone be test pilots for military fighter jets. Marina Popovich, who passed away on November 30 at the age of 86, changed all of that. After enlisting in the then Soviet Air Force, she broke the sound barrier in a MiG-21 supersonic jet fighter and went on to log over 6,000 flight hours in 40 different planes and helicopters, setting 102 aviation world records. She came close to becoming a cosmonaut but married one instead — Pavel Popovich, the 4th cosmonaut in space and the 6th person to orbit the Earth. With that kind of experience, it’s not surprising that people listened when “Madam MiG” talked about her UFO encounters and research and her Bigfoot sighting.
“We had been researching UFOs for 25 years and talking about it in small groups, but underground. People who tried to talk in public about UFOs were either fired or put in psychiatric hospitals.”
Marina Popovich
In reports of Marina Popovich’s passing, both RT and TASSmention her strong commitment to UFO research and the search for evidence of extraterrestrials, even when it was dangerous to do so. She claimed to have three encounters herself, beginning in 1962, but had to keep her findings quiet until Mikhail Gorbachov introduced transparency or glasnost, and the Soviet Union eventually broke up. That transparency inspired the title of her book, “UFO Glasnost,” in which she claimed that Soviet military and civilian pilots reported over 3,000 UFO sightings and that the KGB had the debris from five crashed spaceships hidden somewhere.
In a 1991 interview reported in the Los Angeles Times, Marina Popovich also revealed that she believes in intelligent extraterrestrials and gives this explanation why they haven’t contacted us (in their words):
“’We are not going to give you our technological information until you raise your spiritual and moral levels on Earth. And the only way to raise them is with unity, as one Earth together to reducing negative feelings, pollution and other detrimental-based energies.”
Other interesting thoughts from this interview with Marina Popovich:
Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne and Ray Bradbury received messages and directions from aliens.
Soviet President Gorbachev could also have been an extraterrestrial medium because “he’s an epoch-making phenomenon.”
90% of UFO sightings are due to hallucinations, space debris, marsh gas, weather balloons, first ascendancy stars and Friday-night vodka parties.
She may have been right about that last one. However, she gave no indications that vodka was involved in her encounter with a Bigfoot in the Pamir Mountains in 1982.
Test pilot, ufologist, environmentalist. Marina Popovich was truly an interesting and influential woman.
Growing evidence points to a once-habitable world—and recent findings suggest that life could exist on Mars today.
By Diana Kwon
MARTIAN MISSION: Since landing on the Red Planet on August 5, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has roamed the environment collecting samples and taking photos in search of signs of life, both past and present.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This September, tech mogul Elon Musk unveiled his updated plans for colonizing Mars. By 2024, he said, his aerospace company SpaceX plans to deliver people to our neighboring planet in massive rocket ships, which he hopes to start constructing within the next year. Although perhaps the boldest declaration yet (outside of science fiction) of intent to actually spearhead extraterrestrial habitation, Musk’s ambition reflects an age-old curiosity: Can the Red Planet support life? Has it ever before?
In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 set down on Mars with the primary mission of answering those questions. While the two landers discovered no clear signs of living microorganisms on the planet’s barren surface, photographs taken from orbit revealed geological features that suggested a once-watery environment—dry valleys that resembled those created by rivers on Earth. “If you assume that liquid water is all life needs, then this could count as the first evidence that life might have been possible on Mars in the past,” says Alfonso Davila, a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in California.
Subsequent missions to the planet started to paint a clearer picture of its potential biological history. For example, in the early 2000s, NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity discovered sediments and minerals that couldn’t have formed without water, as well as materials, such as patches of silica, typically found in hot springs and steam vents, where extremophiles thrive on Earth. Most recently, the rover Curiosity, which landed on the planet in August 2012, has detected simple carbon-based organic compounds in the Gale Crater, a large cavity near the Martian equator.
Despite growing evidence that Mars might have been teeming with life eons ago, exploration of the planet has painted a bleak image of its contemporary environment.
Despite growing evidence that Mars might have been teeming with life eons ago, exploration of the planet has painted a bleak image of its contemporary environment. Because it lacks a thick atmosphere and a magnetic field, which are essential for making Earth a hospitable place to live, Mars is exposed to harmful ultraviolet (UV) light and ionizing radiation from cosmic rays. Those features, along with low temperature and pressure, “make the environment pretty hostile to life as we know it,” says Manish Patel, a senior lecturer in planetary sciences at the Open University in the U.K.
Nevertheless, scientists are uncovering aspects of the planet that indicate Mars could still be harboring isolated pockets of life. Although the chances may be small, these findings have major implications for continued missions to the Red Planet—and, of course, its potential future colonization by humans. (See “A Hostile Planet.”)
Remnants of a wet Mars remain the clearest hint that the planet once could have harbored life. Data gathered by Curiosity point to the existence of a massive freshwater lake in the Gale Crater billions of years ago, and scientists’ analyses suggest this environment had habitable conditions: a relatively neutral pH, low salinity, and elements that make up the building blocks of life—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, and phosphorus.1
Curiosity has also detected evidence of simple organic molecules in this region, including methane,2chlorobenzene,3 and hints of longer-chain molecules resembling fatty acids4—all of which have primarily biological origins on Earth. “The consensus is that Mars had a lot of water in its ancient past, and that life could have existed and grown then,” Patel says. (See “Ancient Microbes on Mars.”)
Nowadays, however, confirmed sources of Martian water exist solely as ice, primarily in the planet’s polar regions, with very recent evidence pointing to the possibility of ice patches at much lower latitudes, near the planet’s equator.5 And life—at least as we know it—needs liquid water to survive.
In 2000, scientists detected Martian gullies, channels traversing the landscape that appear similar to those created by flowing water on Earth.6 Images that the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft captured along the sides of craters, pits, and valleys suggested that these formations are relatively young, as they lack geological features such as impact craters or dusty dunes. These images hinted at the possibility that liquid water might have existed in the planet’s recent past—and might still sometimes be present on the planet’s surface. More evidence for this idea emerged a few years later when researchers reported that new, light-colored streaks in the form of fingerlike branches had appeared in some of the gullies, further signaling recent activity.7
Subsequent analyses, however, revealed that the streaks could have been produced through other processes. In 2010, based on images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists reported that the streaks appeared only during the Martian winters. During that time of year, water stays frozen and dry ice builds up on the planet’s surface, meaning that carbon dioxide, a gas that makes up more than 90 percent of the planet’s atmosphere, may have been the cause.8
Sure enough, when Patel and his colleagues tested this hypothesis last year, they found it to be a likely explanation. In the Open University’s Mars Chamber, which simulates the temperature, pressure, and atmospheric composition of the Red Planet, the researchers deposited carbon dioxide frost onto the surface of soil, then warmed the chamber with a heat lamp to mimic what happens when the sun rises. The resulting process of sublimation—where a solid transitions directly into gas—was enough to create very similar formations.9 And in another 2016 study, an independent group of researchers reported that data from MRO supplied no evidence of minerals associated with flowing water in those structures.10
Meanwhile, another feature of the steep Martian slopes, dubbed recurring slope lineae (RSLs), has provided more-tantalizing evidence that the planet could occasionally host liquid water. Unlike gullies, RSLs are dark streaks that appear during the warmest parts of the year, growing in the summer, when ice is most likely to melt, and fading in the winter.11 And although scientists have never directly detected liquid water, it may not take as much of it as some researchers expect to generate these features. In another Mars Chamber experiment, published last year in Nature Geoscience, Patel and colleagues placed a block of ice in the simulated Martian environment and found that a small amount of water, which boiled at much lower temperatures due to low pressure, was able to kick up the soil to create streak-like features.12 “That showed that if there is water, you need a lot less than originally [thought],” Patel says. Altogether, the presence of liquid H2O on the planet remains up for debate.
Two features of Mars’s surface suggest that water may, at times, flow on the planet. Channels known as gullies (top two images) that appear on steep slopes look comparable to formations created by flowing water on Earth, although recent analyses indicate that these were likely formed by other processes. More recently, researchers have identified recurring slope lineae (RSLs; lower two images), seasonal streaks also suggestive of flowing water. The primary theory, based on the identification of perchlorates, is that RSLs are formed by brine, or very salty water. Where the water would come from is still a mystery, and alternative theories challenge the idea that water is needed to form such structures. For example, some scientists have posited that dry sand avalanches could result in the same streaking pattern.NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIV OF ARIZONA
Salty surfaces
The case for contemporary water on Mars has been bolstered by signs of perchlorates, a type of salt, in the seasonal streaks.13 Perchlorates lower the freezing point and evaporation rate of water, which would allow H2O to exist as a liquid in Martian conditions. On Earth, perchlorates also act as an energy source for some microorganisms.
“People were getting really excited because they were thinking, well, bacteria can metabolize perchlorates, so perhaps these are potential habitats that we could maybe explore on future missions,” says Jennifer Wadsworth, a PhD student in astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. “So we thought, okay, well let’s look at perchlorates and see [whether] bacteria could survive under Martian conditions.”
As it turned out, when bathed in UV light, these salts can actually be lethal. When Wadsworth and her advisor exposed the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis to perchlorates while irradiating the cells with UV levels typical for the Martian surface, the microbes died within minutes.14 “Perchlorate seems to be quite abundant everywhere, and the radiation penetrates quite a few meters [beneath the planet’s surface], according to models,” Wadsworth says. “So it could mean that the top few meters of soil are in fact uninhabitable.” However, she adds, this finding does not rule out the possibility that there might be extremophiles that could survive these conditions, or that more-conventional microbes live farther underground.
Deep below the surface, UV and ionizing radiation are significantly reduced, while pressure and temperature begin to increase. “You can reach a point where you’re shielded from all the nasty things, and the temperature and pressure could be high enough to allow a habitable environment,” Patel says. “The evidence is piling up that if we want to find these signs of life on Mars, we really need to get down below the surface to get away from nasty oxidants and environmental influences.”
Experiments in the Open University’s Mars chamber, which simulates the environment on the planet, could help determine the conditions that form these geological structures.MANISH PATEL/OU
A LIVING LAKE?: More than 3 billion years ago, a massive meteor hit Mars, creating an approximately 155-km-wide crater in the planet’s surface. Data from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest that this area, known as the Gale Crater, was once filled with water, and may even have hosted life. Analysis of the sediments also points to once-habitable conditions, with evidence of simple organic molecules that may have originated from biological sources.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSSThe chances of finding life on Mars today may be slim, but many scientists believe that the planet hosted living organisms at some point during its history. One of the most promising regions for ancient Martian life is the Gale Crater, a large region near the planet’s equator. Data gathered from the crater by rovers and orbiters have revealed evidence both of past (and possibly present) water and of simple organic molecules—two essential ingredients for life.
Recently, while examining data collected by the rover Curiosity, a group of researchers discovered boron, a chemical element that can stabilize the sugars used to make RNA (Geophys Res Lett, 44:8739-48, 2017). Some scientists believe that this element may have even contributed to the origin of life on Earth. “Boron, when it’s dissolved in water, has very special properties—it can react with organic molecules to form other types of organic molecules,” says Patrick Gasda, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We found boron in this area [that used to have] lots of water; if there were organics there, that could actually mean that you could do these types of reactions on Mars.”
Scientists currently only have speculative estimates about when the Red Planet was last amenable to life. For example, NASA researcher Alfonso Davila and his colleagues have proposed that parts of Mars may have been habitable as recently as 5 million to 10 million Earth years ago (Astrobiology, 13:334-53, 2013). They estimate that during that period, the planet was tilted at an angle that may have provided polar regions with enough solar energy to melt the subsurface ice. After completing additional analyses, the researchers also posited that the water composition in the atmosphere during these periods was similar to that seen in the driest parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile, where microbes have been found living in extremely arid soil (Astrobiology, 16:159-68, 2016).
“While this does not necessarily mean that Mars was as habitable as the Atacama during those periods, it does suggest that the habitability window near the surface might have closed not billions of years ago, but perhaps tens of millions to several hundred million years ago,” Davila says. And the current conditions on the planet, while probably not conducive to modern microbial activity, are promising for researchers searching for signs of living organisms in the planet’s history, he adds. “Those same conditions, extreme dryness and extreme cold, that prevent life from being active in the environment are also very good at preserving evidence of life.”
Curbing contamination
Of course, the most definitive way to confirm life on Mars would be to collect live or previously living specimens. ExoMars, a rover that the European Space Agency plans to send to Mars in 2020, will be equipped with a drill that can extract soil samples from depths down to two meters, the deepest of any Mars sampling to date. The robot’s onboard laboratory will carry out tests on collected specimens. Another upcoming rover expedition, NASA’s Mars 2020, plans to collect samples to set aside for future missions to ferry back to Earth.
Without knowing exactly what life-forms, if any, exist on our red, dusty neighbor, it is difficult to predict what people might encounter when they eventually get there. “How do you look for something that you don’t know [about]?” Patel asks. “It’s a real problem that we face. All we can do is look for what we do know—and even then, it’s incredibly difficult to measure everything.”
Directly probing for life on the Red Planet takes some finesse, as scientists must ensure that they do not accidently misidentify organisms that hitched a ride from Earth as Martian. Although it is not possible to reduce the risk of contamination to zero, researchers can take measures to lower the chances that they will introduce Earthly organisms into their experiments. Curiosity, for example, is barred from exploring the RSLs, due to concerns that the rover, which was not completely sterilized prior to launch, might contaminate the suspected water in those regions.
The evidence is piling up that if we want to find these signs of life on Mars, we really need to get down below the surface to get away from nasty oxidants and environmental influences.—
Manish Patel, Open University
“Being able to clean [spacecraft] well enough to identify Mars microbes if they might be present and distinguish them from the residual contamination from Earth is an extremely challenging problem,” says Cassie Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer. Future rovers will be subjected to various sterilization strategies before launch, including wiping down surfaces with sterilizing solutions, baking heat-resistant components at high temperatures, and using highly sensitive biosensors to identify the presence of microbes.
Researchers are also trying to ensure that the human explorers NASA plans to send to Mars by the 2030s do not contaminate the planet—a much more difficult task, as most of the methods used to clean spacecraft cannot be applied to people. “We can be confident about how much contamination we sent on [robots], because we can measure it before launch and be confident that it won’t increase,” Conley says. “Once humans start landing on Mars, there will be associated microbes that come along.”
Monitoring microbial migrants within astronaut communities is also important for managing human health. In a study published earlier this year, Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is involved in the Planetary Protection Program, and colleagues found that after four people spent 30 days in an enclosed habitat that mirrored conditions on the International Space Station, the diversity of certain fungi—including those associated with allergies and asthma—in their surroundings increased.15 In another recent investigation, researchers reported that bacterial communities in a simulated spacecraft changed after hosting six crew members for 520 days.16In this case, cleaning agents were able to keep the microbial populations under control, pointing to the importance of maintaining strict sterilization protocols in space.
Keeping any potential life-forms native to Mars from hitching a ride back to Earth is another concern. Scientists and policy makers want to ensure that samples brought back by rovers or human explorers—or living organisms that accidently hitch a ride—will not endanger species on Earth. Such Mars-to-Earth contamination, Conley says, presents “a much more complicated set of questions about public health and the potential for invasive species.”
NASA hopes to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, and private companies, such as SpaceX, Mars One, and Lockheed Martin, have grand plans to establish human settlements on the planet. But big questions remain about the plausibility and safety of such missions.
People who land on the Red Planet will face harsh conditions, such as frigid temperatures, low pressure, and an atmosphere with precious little oxygen. Micron-size dust particles may also be a major factor, as they could cause respiratory problems and contain toxic materials. In addition, Martian soil contains abundant amounts of perchlorates, a type of salt that can impair the functioning of the human thyroid, which could be hazardous to scientists digging in the dirt.
On the other hand, perchlorates might actually be extremely useful during a mission to the Red Planet. Not only are they a component of rocket fuel, the compounds could also be a source of oxygen for human consumption: many microbes metabolize perchlorates, generating this element as a by-product, and some scientists have proposed prototypes of portable emergency systems that exploit these microbial pathways to generate breathable air (Int J Astrobiol, 12:321-25, 2013).
A much more serious concern about living on Mars is radiation. Without a protective magnetic field like that surrounding the Earth, the surface of the Red Planet is constantly bombarded with galactic cosmic rays—high-energy particles from space that can lead to a variety of health problems. At the doses of cosmic radiation that humans would receive on a trip to the Red Planet, one of the primary problems they will face is cancer. According to analyses by Francis Cucinotta, a radiation biologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, astronauts on the International Space Station can exceed their lifetime limits of radiation, based on NASA’s radiation standards, in just 18 months for women and two years for men (PLOS ONE, 9:e96099, 2014). And radiation levels would likely be even higher on a trip to Mars, which is far beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. (The cancer risk is slightly higher in women because they have the added concerns of breast and ovarian cancer plus a greater risk of developing lung cancer, although the latter association is not well understood, Cucinotta says.)
Rodent experiments have revealed that exposure to radiation akin to that experienced on Mars can lead to an increased risk of cancer in “bystander” cells close to those damaged by radiation, which can release “oncogenic signals” (Sci Rep, 7:1832, 2017). Radiation exposure can also alter the tumor microenvironment in ways that promote cancer. Using mouse models of breast cancer, Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues discovered that when healthy epithelial cells were transplanted into an animal that had been exposed to Mars-like radiation, tumors developed from those unirradiated cells (Cancer Cell, 19:640-51, 2011). “You create the seed of the cancer with mutations, but they still have to be in the appropriate soil for the cancer to actually develop,” Barcellos-Hoff says. “[We’ve found that] the kind of radiation found in space likely perturbs [the tumor microenvironment] in a more profound way than radiation that’s found on Earth.”
More recently, scientists have amassed evidence suggesting that cosmic radiation may have worrisome effects on the brain. Specifically, Charles Limoli of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues have shown in animal experiments, mostly with rodents, that these galactic particles can cause deficits in learning and memory, reduce the complexity and density of dendritic spines, and lead to persistent neuroinflammation (Sci Adv, 1:e1400256, 2015; Sci Rep, 6:34774, 2016). “The data suggests that the irradiated brain is never normal,” says Limoli. “Now, how precisely these cognitive deficits will manifest and impact astronaut performance is another important question that’s very difficult to pinpoint.”
While radiation risks are concerning, they are not deal breakers for future Mars travel, Limoli says, and researchers are now working on ways to mitigate these issues. For example, NASA is exploring ways to protect astronauts from radiation with compounds that repair damaged DNA. One such compound is nicotinamide mononucleotide, which scientists recently reported could reverse aging in mice by activating processes involved in DNA repair (Science, 355:1312-17, 2017).
In addition, Limoli and his colleagues are developing drugs that could help alleviate radiation effects in the brain. “We’re working on a variety of pharmacologic interventions,” Limoli says. “[And] we can always hope that our engineering colleagues come up with better and better shielding.”
Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist living in Berlin, Germany.
J.T. Wilson et al., “Equatorial locations of water on Mars: Improved resolution maps based on Mars Odyssey Neutron Spectrometer data,” Icarus, 299:148-60, 2018.
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S. Diniega et al., “Seasonality of present-day Martian dune-gully activity,” Geology, 38:1047-50, 2010.
M.E. Sylvest et al., “Mass wasting triggered by seasonal CO2 sublimation under Martian atmospheric conditions: Laboratory experiments,” Geophys Res Lett, 43:12,363-70, 2016.
J.I. Núñez et al., “New insights into gully formation on Mars: Constraints from composition as seen by MRO/CRISM,” Geophys Res Lett, 43:8893-902, 2016.
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1J. Wadsworth, C.S. Cockell, “Perchlorates on Mars enhance the bacteriocidal effects of UV light,” Sci Rep, 7:4662, 2017.
1A. Blachowicz et al., “Human presence impacts fungal diversity of inflated lunar/Mars analog habitat,” Microbiome, 5:62, 2017.
P. Schwendner et al., “Preparing for the crewed Mars journey: Microbiota dynamics in the confined Mars500 habitat during simulated Mars flight and landing,” Microbiome, 5:129, 2017.
Former SETI director Jill Tarter: ‘An alien signal isn’t coming to the US, it’s coming to planet Earth’
Former SETI director Jill Tarter: ‘An alien signal isn’t coming to the US, it’s coming to planet Earth’
During her career at SETI, Tarter thought she had made first contact with alien life on three occasions. As the search continues, she reflects on what first contact will mean... if it ever comes
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
The search for space aliens just hit a speed bump
The search for space aliens just hit a speed bump
Spotting signs of life in an exoplanet’s atmosphere may be tougher than we thought.
by Mike Wall, Space.com
Artist's illustration of the Earth-size planet TRAPPIST-1d and its red-dwarf host star.
MPIA Graphics Department
Spotting signs of life in an alien planet's atmosphere may be tougher than scientists had thought.
One prominent such "biosignature" target, ozone, may get trapped near the equators of Proxima b, TRAPPIST-1d and other potentially habitable worlds that orbit close to their host stars, making the gas hard to detect from afar, a new study suggests.
"Absence of traces of ozone in future observations does not have to mean there is no oxygen at all," study lead author Ludmila Carone, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said in a statement. "It might be found in different places than on Earth, or it might be very well hidden." [Exoplanet Discovery: The 7 Earth-Sized Planets of TRAPPIST-1 in Pictures]
Ozone is an unstable molecule that consists of three oxygen atoms. Here on Earth, the stuff is generally produced in the atmosphere after ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun splits "normal" diatomic oxygen (O2).
The vast majority of Earth's O2 is generated by living organisms — plants and photosynthetic microbes — so ozone serves as a sort of secondary biomarker, at least for Earth-like life.
Earth's atmospheric flows distribute most ozone relatively evenly into our planet's famous ozone layer, which helps shield life from harmful UV radiation. So hypothetical aliens studying Earth from afar with powerful telescopes would have a good chance of detecting the gas.
Earth's atmosphere has a "transportation belt" of air flows that move ozone trappfrom the main production areas near the equator toward the poles. This mechanism is important for creating Earth's global ozone layer. MPIA (L. Carone And Graphics Dept.)
But the situation is likely different on Proxima b, TRAPPIST-1d and other tidally locked worlds — those that always show the same face to their parent stars, and therefore have a "dayside" and a "nightside" — according to Carone and her colleagues. (Tidal locking is a consequence of a very tight orbit; TRAPPIST-1d and Proxima b complete one lap around their stars every four Earth days and 11 Earth days, respectively.)
Modeling work performed by the researchers indicates that, on planets with orbital periods of 25 Earth days or less, airflows tend to concentrate ozone (and other photochemically produced molecules) in an equatorial band.
"We all knew from the beginning that the hunt for alien life will be a challenge," Carone said. "As it turns out, we are only just scratching the surface of how difficult it really will be."
The new results also suggest that worlds like Proxima b don't have a global ozone layer. That may or may not have a significant negative effect on their habitability, Carone said.
Tidally locked exoplanets could have air flows that trap ozone in the equatorial regions, presenting a previously unforeseen complication for the search for traces of life on these planets. MPIA (L. Carone And Graphics Dept.)
"Proxima b and TRAPPIST-1d orbit red dwarfs, reddish stars that emit very little harmful UV light to begin with," she said in the statement. (Tidally locked planets pretty much have to orbit dim dwarf stars to be habitable; worlds that orbit so close to sunlike stars are far too hot to host life as we know it.)
"On the other hand, these stars can be very temperamental, and prone to violent outbursts of harmful radiation, including UV," she added. "There is still a lot that we don't know about these red dwarf stars. But I'm confident we will know much more in five years."
In five years, astronomers will have a lot more data — from telescopes such as NASA's $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in early 2019 — to inform their inferences about the habitability of red-dwarf planets. And advances in modeling techniques over this time span should help as well, study team members said.
Pluto, whether or not you want to call it a planet, is really, really far away from the sun—40 times farther than Earth is—which means it's really, really cold. Its surface may be as cold as minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. But according to a recent paper published in the journal Icarus, deep inside Pluto, and other distant worlds like it, there may be a surprisingly balmy refuge for possible life.
“These objects need to be considered as potential reservoirs of water and life,” lead author Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release. “If our study is correct, we now may have more places in our solar system that possess some of the critical elements for extraterrestrial life.”
Eris seen with its moon Dysnomia, with the distant sun in the background.
NASA
Trans-Neptunian objects already have a couple of ways of staying warm despite the lack of sunlight. Certain forms of elements like uranium and potassium can decay radioactively, releasing a little heat as they do. Saxena and his colleagues wanted to look at another potential form of heating, caused by tidal forces.
Yes, that tidal, as in ocean tides here on Earth, produced by the gravitational interaction of the planet and its moon. Earth and moon have a pretty stable relationship at this point: The moon's orbit is circular, and paced with its rotation so that the same side of the moon always faces Earth. It's the sort of interaction that takes a lot of time to build as two celestial bodies iron out the irregularities in their orbits.
Pluto's texture in this photo is due to giant spikes of ice.
NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
A side effect of this organized pattern is that the moon's gravitational tug pulls at Earth—but since the planet's surface is covered in liquid water, it simply sloshes over to appease that tug, creating tides.
Other worlds with moons are still finding their way to that stable relationship, but as it does develop, tides will start to develop there as well. That typically manifests as both bodies stretching and compressing each other as the moon orbits, creating friction that turns into heat.
So Saxena and his colleagues calculated how much heat would be produced between pairs of trans-Neptunian objects, like Pluto and its largest moon, Charon; Eris and its moon Dysnomia; and a handful of other distant pairs. Those calculations showed that tidal heating is strong enough that it could allow water to remain liquid under the surface of those objects.
We have accomplished a lot in our (relatively) short time on Earth. We’ve sent humans to the Moon and to live in space, developed massive and sophisticated telescopes to see the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and even rocketed rovers to Mars and probes to the edge of our solar system. However, a number of organizations have taken humanity’s voyage into the final frontier a step farther. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the research collective behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have been working tirelessly to find out if we are alone, once and for all.
Already, a number of projects exist that scan the stars for signs of intelligent life. And despite the fact that many of them have been looking to the skies for decades, we have yet to make contact. And that’s a bit of a problem.
0. The Paradox That Started It All
To put it mildly, our solar system is very old. In fact, scientists are still figuring out just how old — clues gathered from meteorites suggest it is almost 5 billion years old, and surrounding star systems are likely billions of years older. While interstellar travel still seems to be a distant dream, new technology is born every year that allows us to scan the skies for signals from civilizations in the most distant corners of the cosmos. The number of known alien worlds and star systems discovered through these technologies continues to rise, but our creative methods of listening to space have not yet revealed anything that resembles extraterrestrial communications or civilizations.
Given the size and age of our universe, it seems like we should have made contact. We, of course, have not.
In the early 20th century, physicist Enrico Fermi asked himself a now-famous question: Given the scope of our universe, why haven’t we found intelligent extraterrestrial life yet (or why haven’t they found us)? This is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox or the Great Silence. Scientists have floated many possible answers in the century since Fermi first asked this question. Here are some of the most plausiblereasons why he haven’t made first contact.
Basic probability asserts that alien life must exist. Since we haven’t made contact yet, one theory goes, there must be something barring life from interstellar travel or, at least, barring it from communicating with other alien species. This barrier is known as the “Great Filter,” and it is a force or event that stops a civilization from getting to the aforementioned point of interstellar travel or communication.
If the theory holds true, there are two primary reasons that we haven’t made contact: Because societies kill themselves off before they reach a state advanced enough to explore the stars or interstellar travel is simply not possible on a technological scale. Neither option is particularly pleasing.
And according to the experts behind the work, the filter event is of equal or greater probability than the existence of alien life itself. This is the point argued by Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, in his discussion of the topic.
No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life.
Since we have not been able to detect alien life (or leave the solar system much, for that matter), how far are we from being caught up in some event that would bar us from ever finding aliens? “The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are,” Hanson writes. In other words, the more life there is in the cosmos, the greater the likeliness that we are about to reach a cataclysmic, life-ending event or reach the cosmic limits of technological advancement.
2. Do Not Disturb the Aliens
Another hypothesis asserts that alien civilizations certainly exist, but they’re simply inactive. That’s the “aestivation hypothesis” (aestivation refers to an organism’s state of prolonged inactivity, similar to a bear hibernating or a frog that buries itself in sand during hot weather), which was put forth by researchers from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade.
The theory, published in a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 2017, states that aliens may be “hibernating” until the environmental conditions are just right to become active and build their super society. The researchers argue that the laws of thermodynamics directly limit computation, as computing technologies need to be cooled in order to function. This makes it exceedingly difficult to create advanced technologies, as keeping them cool at scale quickly becomes prohibitively difficult. So the aliens are falling into a dormant until, to be blunt, the universe cools.
But distilling the development of a civilization to the kinds of conditions that our current, and somewhat imperfect, models can predict could be reductive. What if intelligent extraterrestrial life has found a way around the thermodynamic conditions that limit its ability to compute? “What if there are other forms of value that can be generated?” the study authors write. If they’re wrong about the relationship between thermodynamics and technology, the aestivation hypothesis would be moot. In this case, perhaps one of the other ideas here holds true.
According to the “Gaian Bottleneck” hypothesis, life needs particular environmental conditions to develop, and they’re not so common. Astrobiologists at the Australian National University penned their explanation to the Fermi Paradox in 2016.
Extinction is “the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe,” the researchers wrote. That’s because a planet has to be actually inhabited for it to be habitable, because organisms change the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A Catch-22 emerges: no life without habitability, no habitability without life.
For alien life to persist, the researchers write, it must hang on: “like trying to ride a wild bull. Most life falls off.” Life can only take place with the presence of an unlikely feedback loop. In this case, Earth is the exception to the rule.
4. Trapped in Deep Oceans
In 2015, after nearly a decade in transit, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first to do a close flyby of Pluto. It offered humanity its first look at its icy surface and raised questions about the possibility of subsurface oceans of water, and lots of methane and nitrogen. These questions put Pluto on a short but growing list of worlds with buried oceans trapped under a thick crust of ice and rock (some of the other worlds are Saturn’s moons Europa, Callisto, Enceladus and Ganymede, as well as Jupiter’s moon Titan).
Those oceans figure prominently into another theory of where life might be lurking, one that Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, touches on. Since buried oceans form a much more stable ecosystem than flowing surface streams, changes such as altering tides and dissipationtake place over a longer time period. A hard outer shell protects hypothetical life in the oceans from a harsh climate and a lethal mix of gases on the surface. “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter,” Stern told Space.com.
Any intelligent alien life that forms in these deep oceans would have to overcome a big hurdle to reach inhabitants of other worlds: drilling through that thick, protective crust. All that work would only get them to the surface — sending signals to other planets become even more unlikely.
For the past eighty years or so, we’ve been listening for signs of extraterrestrial life with radio technology. The Allen Telescope Array, situated 470 km (290 miles) northeast of San Francisco, is one of the biggest — since 2007, 42 dishes have stood at the ready to scan the skies regularly in the hope of receiving radio signals from extraterrestrial life.
But what if extraterrestrial life doesn’t operate on those frequencies? Attempts at contact could simply be passing us by simply because we don’t comprehend the right wavelengths.
Instead of using telescope arrays and scanning the skies for radio signals, Duncan Forgan at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland suggests creating a galactic communications network. The same way we blink our high beams to send a signal to other drivers, we could use the shadow that Earth creates when it passes in front of the Sun to send a message to our fellow inhabitants of the universe. Forgan suggests that we build powerful lasers that contain those encoded messages, which are sent out as we pass in front of the Sun.
“If you want to communicate with someone on the other side of the galactic centre, there’s lots of stuff in the way – dust, stars, a big black hole – so you can take the long way around using the network,” Forgan tells New Scientist. Rather than letting intergalactic messages get lost in the vastness of space, civilizations in different galaxies could agree to use this “galactic communications network” to ensure their messages get to their intended recipients – a unified system to cut through the chatter.
6. We are Being Impatient
We’ve only been actively reaching out for alien life for about a century — a mere blip in the long history of the solar system and of the universe overall. Evan Solomonides, an astrophysics and mathematics undergrad and researcherat Cornell University, suggests that it could take a while — about 1,500 years from now, to be precise — before we hear from any extraterrestrials.
In a paper submitted to the American Astronomical Society, Solomonides examines the probability of finding life. “We predict that under 1 percent of the galaxy has been reached at all thus far, and we do not anticipate to be reached until approximately half of the stars/planets have been reached.” Solomonides believes that we will have explore around half of the Milky Way galaxy before we hear anything, which will take a while since we’ve barely explored our own galactic neighborhood.
Solomonides is careful to note that the 1,500 years is not a deadline. “This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone. We simply claim that it is somewhat unlikely that we will not hear anything before that time.”
Does a bright moon means you can’t see the northern lights? No. Here’s awesome proof that, for photographers at least, moonlight can enhance the view.
A composite of 6 overhead photos of the aurora and a bright moon – just 3 days past full – from Doug Short in Anchorage, Alaska. November 7, 2017.
Auroras are beautiful natural phenomena, whose primary cause is activity on the sun. They happen when charged particles from storms on the sun strike atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. The charged solar particles excite those earthly atoms, causing them to light up, creating the aurora. This sort of activity in Earth’s atmosphere happens during geomagnetic storms, and a full moon has absolutely no effect on either solar storms or geomagnetic storms. Still, as every astronomer knows, a full moon casts a lot of light in the sky. Can that light drown an aurora from view?
The answer depends on the strength of the aurora. A weak auroral display might be drowned in bright moonlight, just as bright moonlight can drown faint stars from view.
But, as the photos on this page show, a strong auroral display can withstand bright moonlight. AndyOz, who wrote a particularly good article on this subject, which you can access here, wrote:
If you get a moderate to high level of [auroral] activity … you should still get a good view of the northern lights. In some cases when there has been a solar storm and the level of activity is very high, the moon can actually enhance the viewing and make the display look even more magical. So it all really depends on how strong a display you are witnessing.
Aurora borealis and rising moon on February 14, 2013 from EarthSky Facebook friend Stigs Netrom in northern Norway.
Some photographers say they actually prefer to capture the aurora when there’s a moon in the sky. Todd Salat at the website AuroraHunter.com wrote of shooting the aurora in moonlight:
I personally like moonlight because it lights up the foreground and makes the sky a deep blue instead of pitch black like with no moon. I watch the lunar phase very carefully.
View larger. | Aurora and a full moon. Photo by Antti Pietikainen via the Aurora Zone. Antti created this mosaic from 10 images, taken from his backyard. He said the weather was good, no clouds and very cold. The moon was high in the sky, and it illuminated the whole landscape. “You could read a book outside!”
Bottom line: Contrary to what you might have heard, it is possible to see the aurora borealis, or northern lights, when there’s a bright moon, even a full moon, in the sky. The key is that the auroral display itself be moderate to strong. A weak display of the aurora might be drowned in bright moonlight.
Legendary Soviet first class test pilot Marina Popovich, dubbed “Madam MIG” for going supersonic in the cockpit of a MiG-21 fighter jet, has died at the age of 86. The aviatrix developed a passion for the extraterrestrial, claiming to have encountered UFOs and a Big Foot.
Born in 1937, Popovich enlisted in the Air Force in the post-war years to revenge the fascist killings in her native village in Smolensk Region. She would tell the Russian media her family was to repeat the fate of many others burned or shot dead by fascists on a killing spree in the village if it was not saved by local militias.
The horrific experience left a deep imprint on her. Popovich was only 16 when she wrote a letter to Soviet Minister of Defense Voroshilov asking to let her become a professional pilot, a career then closed to women. She would add several years to her age to pursue her dream, pretending she was 22 at the time she started training.
Since Popovich claimed she was six years older than she really was, and that deception was reflected in official documents, her “official” age differed from her actual one and caused confusion over the years.
In 1961, Popovich became the only Soviet first class test pilot and in 1964, a military test pilot. A year later, she broke the sound barrier reaching the speed of 2,320 km/h on a MiG-21, a supersonic jet fighter and interception aircraft.
During her long career in aviation, she flew 40 different planes and helicopters, setting 102 aviation world records.
Ten of these records were set on the Antonov An- 22 Antei heavy military transport aircraft, which remains the world’s largest turboprop-powered airplane to date. She retired in 1984, having flown nearly 6,000 flight hours.
After her retirement, Popovich focused on her other long-time passion, the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. She was outspoken about her own experiences with UFOs, claiming to have witnessed them herself three times, first in 1962, and collected numerous accounts of sightings around the world.
She also claimed to have met the mythical Bigfoot creature during a trip to the Pamir Mountains in 1982.
In her book "UFO-Glasnost" she even wrote that Soviet military and civil pilots have reported some 3,000 UFO sightings and that the KGB had the debris of five crashed UFOs hidden away, claims she reiterated in public interviews.
“I believe UFO do exist, its behavior is logical, its behavioral motives are sensible, its origin is artificial…I made another conclusion for myself, a warning – you need to be cautious and vigilant when encountering UFOs, as sometimes these meetings can be tragic,"she wrote in her other book, "UFOs over Planet Earth," in 2003.
Popovich was awarded one of the highest state honors in the Soviet Union, the Hero of Socialist Labor, the Order of Courage in 2007, and other decorations.
Black holes think they can act however they want just because they’re massive voids. Sadly, a couple of unruly ones decided to photobomb our closest galaxy in a new image composed from X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from ground-based telescopes.
Scientists have long thought that a source called LGGS J004527.30+413254.3 (AKA J0045+41) was located in the Andromeda Galaxy (AKA M31), was located just 2.5 million light-years away. Not only did astronomers find that J0045+41 was much farther away than they thought — about 2.6 billion light-years from Earth, to be exact — using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Gemini-North telescope in Hawaii and the Caltech’s Palomar Transient Factory in California, they discovered a tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes within it. The team’s findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“We were looking for a special type of star in M31 and thought we had found one,” the paper’s lead author Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein of the University of Washington said in a statement. “We were surprised and excited to find something far stranger!”
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The researchers think the two black holes could have come from two galaxies that merged billions of years ago. Now, these two voids are just a couple of buddies who live less than a hundredth of a light-year apart. In fact, it’s possible this black pair might actually merge one day.
“We’re unable to pinpoint exactly how much mass each of these black holes contains,” the study’s co-author John Ruan of the University of Washington said. “Depending on that, we think this pair will collide and merge into one black hole in as little as 350 years or as much as 360,000 years.”
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Washington/T.Dorn-Wallenstein et al.;Optical: NASA/ESA/J. Dalcanton, et al. & R. Gendler
While astronomers didn’t exactly find what they set out for, they found a couple of cosmic oddballs. I smell a buddy comedy.
Gravitational Waves Could Help Scientists Solve A Major Black Hole Mystery
Black holes are the undoubtedly some of the hungriest boys in space. Though we’re unlocking some of the mysteries about these spooky voids, there’s still so much out there to be learned — for one thing, we’ve never even directly observed one.
Now, astrophysicists at Brown University and Harvard University who study gravitational waves say these ripples in the fabric of space and time could help them investigate the possible existence of a very specific kind of black hole, one that hypothetically formed right after the Big Bang. The team’s work on how scientists can do this in the future was published Thursday in Physical Review Letters.
Here’s the logic: In the moments after the Big Bang, the density of the cosmos fluctuated so much that this would have caused gravitational collapse, thus creating a number of primordial black holes across the universe. Some scientists have suggested these black holes would have created dark matter, or the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the material universe. But of course, there’s lots of layers of ambiguity and speculation to all of this.
When it comes to primordial black holes, there’s a lot left to investigate — and some very smart people have tried to do just that. In the 1970s, Astrophysicist Stephen Hawkingwas among the first to suggest the existence of primordial black holes — but alas, still no luck finding them.
Simulation frames from a NASA Goddard neutron star merger animation
The researchers involved in this new work think that gravitational wave detectors like those from the LIGO and VIRGO Scientific Collaborations — which had some incredible recent successes in their most recent observing run — could be helpful tools for primordial black hole hunting.
“The idea is very simple,” the study’s co-author Savvas Koushiappas, an associate professor of physics at Brown University, said in a statement. “With future gravitational wave experiments, we’ll be able to look back to a time before the formation of the first stars. So if we see black hole merger events before stars existed, then we’ll know that those black holes are not of stellar origin.”
Scientists use redshift — which describes the frequency of wavelengths — to determine how far back in time an event took place. The higher the redshift, the older an event.
For the sake of this study, the events in question would be black hole mergers. According to the researchers, gravitational wave detectors should be sensitive enough to detect a redshift of 40, which is equivalent to about 64 million years after the Big Bang. If they’re able to detect black hole mergers beyond this redshift, this could prove the existence of primordial black hole mergers.
At this point, there are still so many more questions than answers when it comes to primordial black holes. Future generations of gravitational wave detectors will be even more sensitive, allowing scientists to understand so much more about these space-time ripples.
At least the hunt for these ancient, hungry giants will be fun.
Supervolcano eruptions would make any other eruption pale in comparison.
Image via Wikipedia.
Volcanic eruptions come in many sizes and “flavors”. There are the basic, almost harmless lava flows like in Hawaii, the small rock-throwers, the pyroclastic flows, and then there are the really big ones; on top of all eruptions, in terms of strength, are the so-called supervolcano eruptions, large enough to change life as we know it and potentially return humanity to a pre-civilization state. Needless to say, we’d want to know as much as possible about these eruptions.
Thankfully, they happen quite rarely. A 2014 study estimated that such eruptions (which throw over 1,000 gigatons of material) happen once every 45,000 to once every 714,000 years. There’s no fixed cyclicity and there’s an inherent variability of such estimates, but even at the lower end, that’s not a panic-inducing figure. After all, 45,000 years is much longer than the time that has passed since mankind emerged as a proper civilization. But a new study concluded differently.
Researchers from the University of Bristol’s Schools of Earth Sciences and Mathematics report that, according to their analysis, the average time between such eruptions is only slightly greater than the age of our civilization. Jonathan Rougier, Professor of Statistical Science, says the “best guess value” is once every 17,000 years:
“The previous estimate, made in 2004, was that super-eruptions occurred on average every 45 – 714 thousand years, comfortably longer than our civilization.”
“But in our paper just published, we re-estimate this range as 5.2 – 48 thousand years, with a best guess value of 17 thousand years.”
They reached this conclusion by analyzing a large database. The difference doesn’t necessarily come from a different type of analysis or statistical approach, it comes from the fact that we now we have access to a larger database than we did a decade ago. Basically, we’ve had enough time to do more studies and we now know more about eruptions than we did in 2004.
Based on these recent figures, we’ve been quite lucky to evade supereruptions in our recent history, but it’s also important to note that volcanic activity follows no strict cycle or pattern. Just because eruptions tend to happen with this periodicity doesn’t mean they’ll always stick to it.
“On balance, we have been slightly lucky not to experience any super-eruptions since then,” Rougier added in a statement. “But it is important to appreciate that the absence of super-eruptions in the last 20,000 years does not imply that one is overdue. Nature is not that regular.”
The chances of such an eruption happening in the next 1,000 years is relatively small, and our civilization will change in unforeseeable ways in the next thousand years (just think of how much has changed in the past century). Furthermore, researchers argue, there are other issues far more pressingthan a supervolcano eruption.
Journal Reference:
‘The global magnitude-frequency relationship for large explosive volcanic eruptions’ by J. Rougier, S. Sparks, K. Cashman, and S. Brown, in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
WASP-18b was first identified by the Wide Angle Search for Planets survey which uses a double setup each comprising 8 cameras that cover 480 degrees of the sky. One set of cameras lies in the northern hemisphere, the other in the southern hemisphere. Since both setups entered operation in 2006, astronomers have used them to gather data on 30 million stars. By studying small changes or wobbles in the light of a star, scientists can determine whether a planet is passing by and, if yes, they can derive some of its properties. WASP-18b, along with another 100 planets or so have been discovered by the survey in this manner.
What's a Hot Jupiter
A ‘Hot Jupiter’ is an exoplanet like Jupiter but much hotter, with orbits that take it feverishly close to the parent star.
This behemoth planet is quite different from many others discovered by the WASP survey or the prolific Kepler Space Telescope responsible for over 2,000 confirmed exoplanet sightings. When NASA scientists directed the lenses of the Hubble and Spritzer telescopes towards WASP-18b, they determined that there likely isn’t any water in the stratosphere which is instead largely made of carbon monoxide. Data suggests the stratosphere is packed with hot gas while the lower troposphere is dominated by cooler carbon monoxide.
“The composition of WASP-18b defies all expectations,” said Kyle Sheppard of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We don’t know of any other extrasolar planet where carbon monoxide so completely dominates the upper atmosphere,” Sheppard said.
The team determined the two types of carbon monoxide signatures at a wavelength of about 1.6 micrometers and an emission signature at about 4.5 micrometers. This is the first time researchers have detected both types of fingerprints for a single type of molecule in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.
With a smothering stratosphere loaded with carbon monoxide and devoid of water, the hot-Jupiter-class planet WASP-18b may have formed quite differently from our own Jupiter: http://go.nasa.gov/2BA4PIj
All of these observations point to the curious possibility that this planet may contain 300 times more metals than other exoplanets of similar mass. If that’s true, WASp-18b clearly did not form in the same way as other Hot Jupiters before it.
“This rare combination of factors opens a new window into our understanding of physicochemical processes in exoplanetary atmospheres,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, a co-author of the study from the University of Cambridge.
SCIENTISTS HAVE CREATED A SEMI-SYNTHETIC ORGANISM THAT PRODUCES BIOLOGICAL COMPOUNDS UNKNOWN TO NATURE
SCIENTISTS HAVE CREATED A SEMI-SYNTHETIC ORGANISM THAT PRODUCES BIOLOGICAL COMPOUNDS UNKNOWN TO NATURE
The building blocks of DNA have been expanded by scientists who have created a semi-synthetic organism that is stable that is able to produce biological compounds that have never been seen before.
NEW LIFE-FORM RESEARCHERS DEVELOPED HAVE SIX NUCLEOTIDES NOT FOUR
DNA makes up all things that are living on Earth, and it is made up of four nucleotides that are basic. However, the new life-form researchers in the United States have developed have six, and this leads to things becoming very interesting. The SSO, or semi-synthetic organism, that has been engineered by a team from Scripps Research Institute in California has been made up from the four regular nucleobases that humans are.
Fluorescent image of Synthorx’s semi-synthetic organism
These are adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, but it also has two nucleotides that are unnatural too. This means that it gets two more letters, X, and Y in the DNA base pairs, which are essentially the rungs of the ladder that hold the helix spirals of the DNA together.
Members of the research team engineered the same kind of synthetic DNA base pair in 2014, and this revealed that it could be incorporated into E. Coli bacteria that had been modified. This led to the creation of the first-ever living organism with extra letters in it, and it also gave way to the expansion of genetic code that could essentially allow for new types of biological process. However, there was an issue, and this was with the stability. The semi-synthetic organism was able to hold onto its unnatural nucleotides, but it was unable to maintain them when cells were dividing, indefinitely.
CRISPR-CAS9 WAS USED BY RESEARCHERS
Floyd Romesberg, the senior lead researcher, said that the genome is not only stable for a day; it needs to have stability over the scale of a lifetime. He went on to say that if the semisynthetic organism was going to be an organism, then it has to be able to maintain the information in a stable condition.
Professor Floyd Romesberg (right) and Graduate Student Yorke Zhang led the new study at The Scripps Research Institute
To work around this, the researchers came up with a way for the semi-synthetic organism to be able to hold onto the X and Y base pair that was unnatural. This was made possible due to a nucleotide transporter so that better DNA replication was better, a Y molecule that was optimized and an engineering system that was refined and which made use of CRISPR-Cas9.
RESEARCHERS REVEALED FIRST STABLE ORGANISM WITH 6-LETTER CODE IN JANUARY
The results of this were first revealed in January and it was the first ever organism formed that was stable using the 6-letter genetic code.
Now a new study has been published and the researchers have revealed that more improvements of that kind have been made to the molecular stability thanks to semi-synthetic bacterium that is able to transcribe and then translate the unnatural X and Y nucleotides with the exact same efficiency as the natural nucleotides, which are A, C, G, and T.
Thanks to a new transcription process the organism is able to synthesize proteins that contain the non-canonical amino acids and this is a process that might shed new light on ways of replicating molecules with reliance that is less on hydrogen bonds.
At an extremely high magnification of 44,818x, this colorized scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image reveals some of the morphologic details
The team of scientists said in a paper that this showed that for each step of information storage and its retrieval, the hydrogen bonds, which were central to the natural base pairs, might be in some part replaced with packing that was complementary along with hydrophobic forces. Despite the mechanism of decoding, which was said to be novel, the codons could be decoded just as efficiently as their natural counterparts.
BY-PRODUCTS ARE FIRST GENERATION DERIVED PROTEINS NEVER SEEN BEFORE
The scientists have revealed that the by-products are the first of a new generation of derived proteins that are semi-synthetic and which have never before been seen in nature due to them having stable and indefinite incorporation of the base pair that is unnatural. The researchers said that they had examined the decoding of the two unnatural codons and the UBP is not likely to be limited to them.
They went on to say that the first SSI that was reported is thought to be only the first of the new type of semi-synthetic life that can gain access to a wide range of forms and functions that have not been available to natural organisms. At the moment the researchers do not know where this is going to lead, however, one thing is for sure and this is that complexity of life on Earth has taken a huge step forward.
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INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE DOESN'T EXIST IN THE UNIVERSE, SCIENTIST CLAIMS
INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE DOESN'T EXIST IN THE UNIVERSE, SCIENTIST CLAIMS
When the Earth was formed, there was no life on the planet until proteins got together correctly and life burst forth.
For many billions of years, life on Earth was uninteresting and simple, the oceans were packed with simple single-cell organisms and it remained this way for many years.
Then life got more interesting as organisms began to get more complex and had more than a single cell. They grew larger, up to 10,000 times bigger by volume according to professor of evolutionary chemistry, Nick Lane, from the University College London.
INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY AND SIZE WAS IMPORTANT STEP TO EXISTENCE OF HUMANS
This step was one that was important and the sudden increase in the complexity and size is something that cannot be overstated. Without this step, more complex life, such as human beings, would not exist. But just how this step came to happen is one of the biggest questions in evolutionary biology. There are many theories as to how life managed to get so much more complicated. One theory that Lane has is a focus on energy.
Instinct, Study Claims Cells need energy in order to be able to build structures that are more complex. The theory of Lane is that single-celled organisms managed to merge with bacteria called mitochondria. This has an electrical charge and brings power to cells and it is possible, although not very likely, that the two bacteria fitted together and was able to survive and live, which is even less probable. The happening may have made possible all forms of complex life is rare, but Lane believes that it happened once.
EVERYTHING CAME FROM MERGER OF TWO CELLS
Lane said that it comes down to a merger of two cells, which then became one and then everything came from that. This includes humans, birds, fungus, algae, every type of life that can be seen and even those that we cannot, all came from that single cell.
When considering how life got so much more complicated it is important to consider the history of life on Earth and it could help to inform the search for life on other planets. Complex life is very rare but does this mean it is less likely for people to find intelligent life in the universe. Instead, should we look for something that is smaller and much simpler? Could it be possible that the universe that is outside of Earth is only populated by organisms that are single-celled? As the specific conditions are unlikely is it also possible that complex life might exist only on planet Earth?
MITOCHONDRIA HELPED WITH EVOLUTION OF ORGANISMS WITH MULTI-CELLS
Experts have debated the theory of Lane and asked if they think intelligent extra-terrestrial life is possible. Professor of biology at Duke University, Mohamed Noor, said that he thought Lane’s theory was true. He said that mitochondria arrived in the ancestor of plants, animals, and fungi a long time ago and it helped facilitate the evolution of organisms with multi-cells.
He also said that there is a single common ancestor in all life on Earth and it is carbon/water based and was replicated by nucleic acids and lived in conditions that existed on both ancient and in modern Earth. He went on to say that if life had arrived on a world that was much colder, other parameters in the environment would be different.
The director of research at the Mathematics Institute of Marseille said that the symbiosis between eukaryotes and bacteria had happened numerous times throughout the evolution of life. He said that cyanobacteria merged with plant cells and then became chloroplast. If the organisms such as bacteria and eukaryotes were present on any other planet, then symbiosis would happen.
He said that they did not have any other information about the type of life that might exist on other planets. However, planets and galaxies had managed to evolve a great deal throughout the history of the universe and so it may be possible that life would too.
FREE OXYGEN FUELED COMBINATION OF PRE-MITOCHONDRIAL BACTERIUM AND PRE-EUKARYOTE
Senior scientist at the SETI Institute, John Rummel, said that with the advantages that were offered by the symbiosis of pre-mitochondrial bacterium and pre-eukaryote, it might be possible that only once would have been enough as free oxygen might have been present and this would have fueled the combination.
He went on to say that we have no idea where and at what the eating of pre-mitochondria scale might have become popular on planet Earth. Biochemistry is the key to whether or not it is advantageous and whether or not it is widespread in the cosmos is a question that is more biochemical than a natural science one. With the advantages of mitochondrial, it may have been quite a struggle for anoxic, complex biochemistries to develop that would be able to support the evolution of intelligence on a world that was physically challenging, but not entirely impossible.
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EUROPEAN TELESCOPE REVEALS 72 HIDDEN GALAXIES
EUROPEAN TELESCOPE REVEALS 72 HIDDEN GALAXIES
When astronomers working with the powerful Hubble Space Telescope captured images of around ten thousand galaxies in the distant universe, it was considered to be one of the richest and most phenomenal images of the universe to have ever been captured.
It was assumed that it would take a long time for astronomers to be able to top this incredible achievement. However, astronomers working in Chile seem to have managed to add to this astonishing accomplishment.
The stunning image of thousands of galaxies was captured by researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope between September 2003 and January 2004. The researchers turned the telescope towards a small patch in the sky in the Fornax constellation – approximately in an area less than two percent of the area of the full moon – where thousands of galaxies could be found. It was immediately discovered that some of these galaxies were formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
REMARKABLE NEW IMAGE FROM HUBBLE SHOWS 72 PREVIOUSLY UNDISCOVERED GALAXIES!
Now, astronomers using MUSE have found that this particular area of the universe is even richer than the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope suggested. They were able to study an additional 1600 galaxies in that region by breaking down the light in the area into various colors using a technique called spectroscopy. Using this method, the astronomers discovered seventy-two galaxies which had not been detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, and they believe that these galaxies may have formed around 13 billion years ago, in the period following the Big Bang.
"MUSE can do something that Hubble can't — it splits up the light from every point in the image into its component colours to create a spectrum, "explained Roland Bacon from the Lyon Centre for Astrophysics Research who worked on the project, "This allows us to measure the distance, colours and other properties of all the galaxies we can see — including some that are invisible to Hubble itself.
The data produced by this study is considered to be of immense significance to scientists across various fields. It has been said that the observations made by the astronomers have turned up a veritable goldmine of information particularly when it comes to the hydrogen haloes that form around galaxies which were created in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
The observations were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics:
UT AustinGeoffrey Smith en Brent Landau deden de ontdekking.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETTwee professoren van de universiteit van Texas in Austin hebben een uitzonderlijke ontdekking gedaan tijdens opzoekingswerk in de bibliotheek van de universiteit van Oxford. Ze vonden er een origineel exemplaar van een verboden christelijk geschrift waarin de geheime leer van Jezus staat.
In de teksten onthult Jezus aan Johannes een reeks geheimen over het rijk van zijn vader in de hemel en hoe hij daar kan binnenkomen, maar ook enkele toekomstige gebeurtenissen, waaronder de marteldood van Johannes zelf. Hij geeft ook raad over hoe hij bovennatuurlijke uitdagingen het hoofd kan bieden. Doel was dat hij die leer dan verder zou doorgeven na de dood van Jezus. “Het is een aanvulling op de figuur en het leven van Jezus die we kennen uit de Bijbel”, aldus professor Geoffrey Smith.
De geschriften werden in de vierde eeuw niet opgenomen in het boek dat later de Bijbel zou worden. Athanasius, de bisschop van Alexandrië, somde toen in zijn ‘Paasbrief van 367’ de 27 boeken op van het Nieuwe Testament en voegde toe: “Niemand mag er nog iets aan toevoegen of uit weglaten”. Daardoor werden ze als verboden en ketters beschouwd.
De professoren vermoeden dat het handschrift een model was dat een leraar gebruikte om zijn leerlingen te leren lezen en schrijven. “Bijna alle woorden zijn verdeeld in lettergrepen, wat bijzonder ongewoon is voor oude manuscripten, tenzij is een onderwijscontext”, aldus prof Brent Landau.
Volgens Smith en Landau gaat het om documenten uit de vijfde of zesde eeuw, maar zouden ze zelf ook afstammen van nog veel oudere teksten. Ze werden opgesteld in het Grieks en waren tot nu toe alleen bekend van latere Koptische vertalingen.
Uitzonderlijk
De vondst is uitzonderlijk, want tot nu toe werd maar een klein aantal originele Griekse exemplaren gevonden van de Nag Hammadigeschriften. Dat is een verzameling teksten uit de begintijd van het christendom, waarvan in 1945 een Koptische vertaling werd gevonden in Boven-Egypte.
“Zeggen dat we opgewonden waren toen we beseften wat we gevonden hadden, is te zacht uitgedrukt”, lacht Smith. “We hadden nooit durven denken dat er nog Griekse fragmenten van de Eerste Apocalyps van Johannes uit de oudheid bewaard gebleven zouden zijn. Maar daar waren ze.”
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Er was helemaal geen oerknal. Braziliaanse wetenschapper zet kosmologie op zijn kop
Er was helemaal geen oerknal. Braziliaanse wetenschapper zet kosmologie op zijn kop
Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat het universum is ontstaan na de Big Bang of oerknal. De Braziliaanse natuurkundige Juliano Cesar Silva heeft daar zo zijn bedenkingen bij.
Volgens hem is er geen oerknal geweest. In het tijdschrift General Relativity and Gravitation stelt Neves dat het universum op een cyclische manier uitdijt en samentrekt.
Hij denkt aan een cyclische versie van het heelal, zo zegt hij in gesprek met Sputnik Brasil. “Mijn kosmologische model houdt rekening met de expansie van het universum en andere bekende fenomenen zoals kosmische straling.”
Grootste onopgeloste problemen
“Het belangrijkste probleem is de Big Bang en het punt met een bijna oneindig grote dichtheid, de singulariteit,” vervolgt hij.
Het begrijpen van de vroegste fasen in de geschiedenis van het universum is momenteel één van de grootste onopgeloste problemen in de natuurkunde.
Wetenschappers denken dit probleem in de toekomst op te kunnen lossen met de hulp van de kwantumgravitatie, een theorie die de kwantummechanica en relativiteitstheorie met elkaar verenigt, maar nog niet bestaat.
Soms heb je situaties waarin je deze twee theorieën wel moet combineren, bijvoorbeeld vlak na de oerknal toen alle massa samengepakt zat in een hele kleine ruimte.
Kapot
Maar ook wanneer je naar onvoorstelbaar kleine afstanden gaat kijken, moet je beide combineren. Op de zogenoemde Planckschaal kun je niet meer één van de twee theorieën los gebruiken.
Op de meest fundamentele schaal, het kleinste van het kleinste, is de kwantummechanica óf relativiteit niet meer toereikend.
Die twee spreken elkaar gigantisch tegen en de natuurkunde gaat daar kapot.
Op de Planckschaal geldt de kwantum-zwaartekrachtstheorie. Maar die is nog altijd niet experimenteel bevestigd.
Cyclisch model
Volgens Neves kan dit probleem worden opgelost zonder kwantumtheorieën te gebruiken. In zijn model is er geen beginpunt.
De natuurkundige zegt dat er geen explosie of knal was, maar stelt een model voor waarin het heelal terugveert.
“Als dat zo blijkt te zijn, was er nog een andere fase voordat het universum begon uit te dijen,” zegt hij. “Als het momenteel uitdijt, moet het hiervoor zijn samengetrokken.”
Op basis hiervan kan een cyclisch model worden gemaakt waarin het universum steeds samentrekt en uitdijt, licht Neves toe.
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Er was helemaal geen oerknal. Braziliaanse wetenschapper zet kosmologie op zijn kop
Er was helemaal geen oerknal. Braziliaanse wetenschapper zet kosmologie op zijn kop
Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat het universum is ontstaan na de Big Bang of oerknal. De Braziliaanse natuurkundige Juliano Cesar Silva heeft daar zo zijn bedenkingen bij.
Volgens hem is er geen oerknal geweest. In het tijdschrift General Relativity and Gravitation stelt Neves dat het universum op een cyclische manier uitdijt en samentrekt.
Hij denkt aan een cyclische versie van het heelal, zo zegt hij in gesprek met Sputnik Brasil. “Mijn kosmologische model houdt rekening met de expansie van het universum en andere bekende fenomenen zoals kosmische straling.”
Grootste onopgeloste problemen
“Het belangrijkste probleem is de Big Bang en het punt met een bijna oneindig grote dichtheid, de singulariteit,” vervolgt hij.
Het begrijpen van de vroegste fasen in de geschiedenis van het universum is momenteel één van de grootste onopgeloste problemen in de natuurkunde.
Wetenschappers denken dit probleem in de toekomst op te kunnen lossen met de hulp van de kwantumgravitatie, een theorie die de kwantummechanica en relativiteitstheorie met elkaar verenigt, maar nog niet bestaat.
Soms heb je situaties waarin je deze twee theorieën wel moet combineren, bijvoorbeeld vlak na de oerknal toen alle massa samengepakt zat in een hele kleine ruimte.
Kapot
Maar ook wanneer je naar onvoorstelbaar kleine afstanden gaat kijken, moet je beide combineren. Op de zogenoemde Planckschaal kun je niet meer één van de twee theorieën los gebruiken.
Op de meest fundamentele schaal, het kleinste van het kleinste, is de kwantummechanica óf relativiteit niet meer toereikend.
Die twee spreken elkaar gigantisch tegen en de natuurkunde gaat daar kapot.
Op de Planckschaal geldt de kwantum-zwaartekrachtstheorie. Maar die is nog altijd niet experimenteel bevestigd.
Cyclisch model
Volgens Neves kan dit probleem worden opgelost zonder kwantumtheorieën te gebruiken. In zijn model is er geen beginpunt.
De natuurkundige zegt dat er geen explosie of knal was, maar stelt een model voor waarin het heelal terugveert.
“Als dat zo blijkt te zijn, was er nog een andere fase voordat het universum begon uit te dijen,” zegt hij. “Als het momenteel uitdijt, moet het hiervoor zijn samengetrokken.”
Op basis hiervan kan een cyclisch model worden gemaakt waarin het universum steeds samentrekt en uitdijt, licht Neves toe.
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Jekaterinburg: Bewohner melden Ufo-Absturz am Flughafen – VIDEOs
Jekaterinburg: Bewohner melden Ufo-Absturz am Flughafen – VIDEOs
In der Ural-Stadt Jekaterinburg breiten sich am Montag Gerüchte über den Absturz eines unidentifizierten Flugobjekts (Ufo) aus. Amateurvideos zeigen einen Feuerball, der über den Himmel rast und dann niedergeht. Die Behörden haben den Vorfall vorerst nicht bestätigt.
In den sozialen Netzwerken spricht sich herum, dass im Raum des Flughafens Jekaterinburg Kolzowo möglicherweise ein Meteorit eingeschlagen sei.
Der regionale Katastrophenschutz teilte auf eine Sputnik-Nachfrage mit, in der Stadt seien keinerlei Vorfälle registriert worden.
Auch der Flughafen arbeitet nach eigenen Angaben ohne Beeinträchtigung.
Anfang 2013 war über dem Ural ein Meteorit mit einem geschätzten Durchmesser von 19 Metern in die Erdatmosphäre eingetreten und explodiert. Durch die Druckwelle und zersplitterndes Fensterglas wurden in mehreren Regionen mehr als 1500 Menschen verletzt. Der über den Horizont rasende Himmelskörper wurde von zahlreichen Zeugen gefilmt. Seine Splitter fielen wie Feuerbälle auf die Erde und richteten beträchtliche Schäden an. Am schlimmsten betroffen war das Gebiet Tscheljabinsk, nach dem der Himmelskörper schließlich benannt wurde.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
Rothschild Sole Owner of Major Semi-conductor Patent Due To MH370
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Ancient galaxies detected by astronomers give new insight into the scale of the universe
Our universe contains a staggering 2 TRILLION galaxies, 10x times more 
