Kunst uit de ruimte: NASA geeft adembenemende foto van Jupiter vrij - HLN.be

Bron: NASA

De ruimtesonde Juno legde de atmosfeer van de grootste planeet van ons zonnestelsel vast op de gevoelige plaat. Het onbemande ruimtevaartuig deed er vijf jaar over om het hemellichaam te bereiken en voert nu een jaar lang observaties uit rond Jupiter.

Lees ook

NASA onthult beelden van grote rode vlek op Jupiter

Deze foto werd midden december vorig jaar genomen vanop een afstand van meer dan 13.000 kilometer van de planeet. In de rechterbovenhoek is de overgang van dag naar nacht te zien, legt NASA uit op haar website.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

09-01-2018 om 12:48 geschreven door peter  

Amerika lanceert geheime spionagesatelliet... en is die nu kwijt - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

Een Falcon-draagraket van de Amerikaanse raketbouwer SpaceX moest de satelliet in een baan om de aarde brengen. De lancering vanaf Cape Canaveral was om technische redenen al eens uitgesteld.

Northrop Grumman is de bouwer van de satelliet, die de codenaam Zuma droeg en miljarden gekost heeft. Waarvoor de kunstmaan precies was bedoeld, is geheim. Een woordvoerder van SpaceX van Elon Musk wil niet ingaan op de missie. Wel laat hij weten dat op basis van de eerste data de Falcon 9 normaal heeft gefunctioneerd.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

09-01-2018 om 12:41 geschreven door peter  

How I discovered the origins of thecigar-shaped alien ‘asteroid’ ‘Oumuamua

Artist’s illustration of planet formation.

Image credit: NASA / Lynette Cook

One of the highlights of 2017 was the discovery of the first object in our solar system that definitely came from somewhere else. At first we thought it was a comet, then an asteroid, and now the International Astronomical Union has reclassified it as something new entirely, an interstellar object. The Hawaiian astronomers who discovered it aptly named it ‘Oumuamua, which means “a messenger from afar arriving first”, reflecting that this object is like a scout sent from the past to reach out to us.

Research has already helped us learn a lot about 'Oumuamua’s rare cigar-like shape, what it’s made of (ice with a carbon-rich surface) and its highly unusual orbit, which will take it out of our solar system at a speed of around 26 km/s. The Breakthrough Listen research program has even investigated whether 'Oumuamua is an alien space ship by scanning the object for life forms with the Green Bank Telescope. No intelligent signals have been identified so far, though further observations are planned.

Now my latest study gives us a glimpse of exactly where 'Oumuamua may have come from. Reconstructing the object’s motion, my research suggests it probably came from the nearby “Pleiades moving group” of young stars, also known as the “Local Association”. It was likely ejected from its home solar system and sent out to travel interstellar space.

Based on 'Oumuamua’s trajectory, I simulated how it has probably travelled through the galaxy and compared this to the motions of nearby stars. I found the object passed 109 stars within a distance of 16 light years. It went by five of these stars from in the Local Association (a group of young stars likely to have formed together), at a very slow speed relative to their movement.

It’s likely that when 'Oumuamua was first ejected into space, it was travelling at just enough speed to break away from the gravity of its planet or star of origin, rather than at a much faster speed that would require even more energy. This means we’d expect the object to move relatively slowly at the start of its interstellar journey, and so its slow encounters with these five stars suggests it was ejected from one of the group.

When was it kicked out of its home?

Stars typically move with an average speed when they are formed and gradually change speed as they encounter very large objects, such as massive stars and molecular clouds and are affected by their gravity. Unlike most nearby stars, 'Oumuamua moves very slowly compared to the average motion of the rest of the galaxy. This suggests it has only been travelling in interstellar space for a relatively short time and hasn’t had a chance to encounter many massive objects that would speed it up.

We also have evidence for 'Oumuamua’s relatively young age from the colour of its surface. Outside of the protection of a star’s magnetic field, objects in space are bombarded with cosmic rays and interstellar dust and gas that gradually alter their surfaces and turn them very red in colour. But 'Oumuamua has a more neutral colour, suggesting it has only been impacted by cosmic rays for, at most, hundreds of million years rather than for the billions of years that our solar system has existed.

How was it ejected?

'Oumuamua is extremely elongated and has quite a different shape from other objects in our solar system. It was probably formed by a relatively high-energy process such as a collision, or ejected from a forming star. Most objects in the outer part of a planetary system are made more of ice and most objects in the inner regions are made more of rocks. Since 'Oumuamua is a more even mix of ice and rocks, it’s likely it came from the middle part of a solar system, similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that features a mixture of icy and rocky asteroids.

Perhaps the most plausible scenario is that 'Oumuamua was ejected from a closely separated binary star system made of two stars closely orbiting each other. Objects orbiting one of the stars in a binary system will be strongly affected by the gravity of the other and so can be more easily ejected from the system than if it had just one star.

'Oumuamua is probably just the tip of the iceberg. My research suggests there are likely more than 46m similar interstellar objects crossing the solar system every year. Most of them will be too far away for us to see with our current telescopes. But new telescopes and surveys should soon be able to find these interstellar messengers, which may be sending us important information about how stars and planets formed. Studying more objects like 'Oumuamua will enable us to work out how much debris is left over from star formation and how much this adds to the mass of our galaxy.

Another reason to study these interstellar objects is that they could one day threaten to collide with the Earth and cause catastrophic events such as mass extinctions. The more we know, the better prepared we’ll be if that day ever comes.

{ https://theconversation.com/au }

09-01-2018 om 12:31 geschreven door peter  

09-01-2018 om 12:04 geschreven door peter  

As if astronauts needed one more horror to worry about in the soul-crushing vacuum of deep space. Between the perils of cosmic radiation, the unknown side effects of unexplained genome changes, and the whole blowing up upon launch thing, it’s not easy being a space traveller. Now, a team of international medical researchers has conducted a study of astronauts’ health while aboard the International Space Station and has discovered a new threat: “space fever.” While space fever sounds like a perfect title for a 1950s B movie, the condition is actually a little understood and potentially life-threatening condition which could hamper our plans at deep space travel.

Space very well could be one of the worst places to get sick.

After combing through health records of eleven different ISS astronauts, researchers found that all astronauts’ body temperatures increased by 1°C (1.8°F) after just a few months in space and remained elevated for the duration of astronauts’ time in space. In their published data, the researchers claim that while mild, this “space fever” poses a significant problem for space agencies and their astronauts:

This space fever, as we may call it, has potential implications for long-term spaceflights in terms of astronauts’ health, well-being, and support, including energy, nutrient, and fluid requirements as well as physical and cognitive performance.

Even increase of body temperature of this small magnitude can lead to serious health complications if left unchecked for long periods of time. Along with the increased body temperatures, researchers also discovered increases in certain inflammation markers. Together, these all indicate that the human body is definitely better suited for life on Earth as opposed to space, meaning we have a lot more barriers to overcome than just fuel and food supplies before we can join Elon Musk’s car on Mars. We’ll figure it out though, right?

Should we create a genetically-altered race of deep space supermen to carry our stink throughout the galaxy?

Wouldn’t that be a cruel irony to develop the means of deep space travel but be unable to go due to the limitations of these crude, stinking meat sacs we’re cursed to inhabit. Of course, given recent advances in gene editing, it likely won’t be long before we can simply create genetically advanced astronauts who can withstand deep space much better than our current models. As with everything though, we likely won’t know the long-term implications of such therapies until space stations are crawling with horrifying human hybrids hell-bent on eating brains and chewing gum. And I don’t need to tell you how scarce gum is in space. Should we aim for the stars no matter what the cost? Per aspera ad astra.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

09-01-2018 om 11:46 geschreven door peter  

Three UFOs over Spokane, Washington

This video was filmed in April 2015 but was just recently submitted to MUFON.

Witness report:

I was on my way to work and my first turn was down a hill (My city is in a river valley). I saw these three bright lights in the sky not much higher than my current elevation. I drove down the hill and pulled off at a conveinent place and took out my cell phone. I believe it was a iphone 4s. I began to record these slow moving objects. I propped my cellphone on the hood of my truck so the images wouldn’t be too shakey (I do believe in UFOs and I hate shakey videos). Anyway. I saw what looked like a police car (Gonzaga University Police) was my first thought. I was at a new construction site and having worked the US Census in 2010 I knew these guys were no fun to deal with and cut my video because there was an arson fire at a previous build. Anyway, I left. I was hoping to catch the lights again on a bridge over a valley on my way to work (which would have been amazing). But, I never saw the slow moving lights again. I want to add I have about 10 years in Security and was on my way to work at an airport. These lights were not on any flight path I have ever seen (They mostly fly just north of my house). I believe this is the exact date. I am using my cellphones date / time stamp.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

09-01-2018 om 01:37 geschreven door peter  

Steve Pierce: Witness to the Travis Walton alien abduction incident

Steve Pierce, witness to the famous Travis Walton alien abduction incident, tells of his trials and tribulations following the 1975 event.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

09-01-2018 om 01:33 geschreven door peter  

{ http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

09-01-2018 om 00:41 geschreven door peter  

Filer’s Files #1 – 2018 Happy UFO New Year - PART II

{  http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

09-01-2018 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX's Secret "Zuma" Mission Is Successful

Here's how the top secret mission for the U.S. government went down.

By Eileen Guo

  

Photos via SpaceX

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

09-01-2018 om 00:16 geschreven door peter  

Proof of aliens? What is the Rendlesham Forest incident? UFO sighting in a Suffolk forest

ALIEN encounters of signs of aliens are some of the most intriguing mysteries for human kind. Was proof of aliens found in the Rendlesham Forest incident in Suffolk? Local men claimed to have seen UFO sighting.

{ https://www.express.co.uk/ }

08-01-2018 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

New Year UFO? Strange emerald fireball blazes through night sky above UK town

CRYSTAL clear footage of a giant emerald fireball zooming across the night sky above Wakefield has caused a stir after going viral online.

By George Mills

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

08-01-2018 om 23:43 geschreven door peter  

New Yorkers report seeing EIGHTY FIVE UFOs over the city in two years including round orange orbs, a cigar-shaped craft and fireballs of light

• There have been 27 UFO sightings above Manhattan since 2016, researchers say
• Brooklyn saw 24 over the same period while there were 20 reports from Queens
• Sightings have included 'clusters' of UFOs as well as orange orbs and 'fireballs'

By Julian Robinson for MailOnline

New Yorkers have reported seeing 85 UFOs over the city in two years including orange orbs, a cigar-shaped craft and fireballs of lights, researchers have revealed. 

There have been a total of 27 sightings above the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan since 2016, according to the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center.

Brookyln saw 24 over the same period while in Queens, there were 20 reports of unidentified objects including a 'group of about seven UFOs, with a leader to the side, and a cluster to its north,' in June.

New Yorkers have reported seeing 85 UFOs over the city in two years including orange orbs, a cigar-shaped craft and fireballs of lights, researchers have revealed

In Queens, there were 20 reports of unidentified objects including a 'group of about seven UFOs, with a leader to the side, and a cluster to its north,' in June, according to the New York Post.

This compared to just eight strange such incidents in The Bronx and just six in Staten Island.

The Post reports that one report from Manhattan told of an object 'rotating like a drill as it was also moving off axis and in a line towards the east'.

While this was happening, the witness said, you could see 'four lights that would only be on one side and seen' after it fully rotated. The unidentified witness, who saw the object out of a gym window, said it was hundreds of feet long and included 'four other smaller craft appeared that were to me saucer or spherical that blipped in and out.'

Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said of the findings: 'It only takes one or two regular witnesses, UFO investigators, groups or promoters to highlight UFO activity in one particular area. 

'Another area might have just as many UFO sightings, but if there are no active ufologists there and/or a local media that ignores such stories, then they will never get any attention. 

There have been a total of 27 sightings above the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan since 2016, according to the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center

'Internet reporting sites like the National UFO Reporting Centre make it easy to report sightings, but this is just raw data that needs to be processed and investigated to make any useful basis for analysis. 

'When looking at this data you need to obtain detailed reports from witnesses who are reliable and credible. 

'Even then expert witnesses, like pilots, can be mistaken and it is notoriously difficult to separate knowns (e.g. misidentified stars, aircraft, rockets etc) from unknowns. 

'Large data bases tend to be riddled with a wide variety of errors due to these problems and only give an accurate guide to levels of UFO reporting rather than UFO activity.' 

In February last year, it was revealed that more people were reporting sightings of spaceships and UFOs than ever before.

Exactly 104,947 UFO sightings had been reported since the first sign of aliens was spotted in 1905, according to data from the Center's data.

And since the 1990s, the number of other-worldly sightings had shot up from 10,000 to 45,000 a year.

The National UFO Reporting Centre, which is based in Washington, is a site dedicated to keeping track of UFO sightings from across the world.

Data from the site released last year showed that people living in the UK, the US and Australia were most likely to report seeing an alien spaceship, while countries such as Russia, China and Greenland rarely catch a glimpse of extraterrestrial activity.

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

08-01-2018 om 23:30 geschreven door peter  

Alien Spotted Boarding UFO in Romania?

A video purportedly shows a small alien boarding a spaceship in a field.

CLAIM

• A video showed an alien boarding a spaceship in Romania in January 2018.

RATING

 FALSE

ORIGIN

A video purportedly showing an alien boarding a spaceship in a field near the Romanian city of Târgoviște and then flying the UFO over the forest racked up millions of views as it was passed around social media in January 2018.

The most popular iteration of this video was likely the one posted to the Târgoviște+  Facebook page where it garnered more than 15 million views:

Although many expressed skepticism about the footage, some were convinced that this video documented an actual alien making a pit stop in Romania.

This video doesn’t actually show an extraterrestrial being. 

For one, internet users couldn’t quite agree on where this video supposedly took place. Most claimed that the video was shot in Târgoviște, but others shared this video as if showed an incident outside of Bacău, a Romanian city approximately 300 kilometers to the northeast, while others claimed that the footage showed an alien invasion in Alaska. This is a common trope of internet hoaxes. As the footage is not rooted in reality, the location can be changed to make it more appealing to audiences in various locales. 

But this video was not filmed in Romania or Alaska. This video was posted to the YouTube page “Alien Unleash” on 2 January 2018 (the day before the Târgoviște+ video) and was not accompanied by any information about where this incident allegedly took place. Rather, the description for the video was simply a list of relevant keywords: 

Alien, UFO, Real Aliens, 2018, NASA, Thirdphaseofmoon, Spacecraft, Flying Saucer, Humanoid, Area 51, Alien Footage, UFO Sightings, Secureteam10, Grey Alien, Mothership,

The Alien Unleash YouTube page is full of similar videos. Over the last few months, the YouTube page has published videos purportedly showing dragons, alien abductions, motherships, and UFOs all over the world:

In fact, they published a a similar (yet much less convincing) video in October 2017 which showed another little grey alien boarding a spaceship:

This video was not filmed in a field outside of a Romanian city. It originated on an alien-centric YouTube page with a penchant of promoting similar hoax videos.

Although this particular video was good enough to convince some viewers that it was real, it still contained a few errors which revealed it to be a hoax. When the UFO makes its way over the trees, for instance, it appears that the spacecraft is flying through the trees and not over them:

{ https://www.snopes.com/ }

08-01-2018 om 23:18 geschreven door peter  

Real-life X-Files: Former MoD UFO investigator reveals what they know - and how close the sci-fi show is to the truth

Nick Pope worked for the MoD investigating UFOs for more than 20 years where he encountered real cases

By Jo-Anne Rowney, Deputy Audience Growth Editor

Anyone who's driven alone at night and looked up at the vast sky has probably wondered if we’re alone.

Whether you believe in aliens or not, there’s an undeniable fascination with the unknown. It’s part of our psyche to wonder, to look beyond what we can see - the UFO obsession never goes away.

Perhaps no show has achieved this quite as well as The X-Files, the sci-fi phenomenon from the mind of Chris Carter.

The show ran from 1993 to 2002 initially following the exploits of Agents Mulder and Scully -the believer and the sceptic - who took the cases no one else wanted including the search for alien life.

They believed the truth really was out there.

But while we watched the pair run around deserts and the FBI's corridors trying to save the day, government officials sat in their offices thumbing through ‘secret’ files.

Skip forward to 2018 and some of these have already been released, albeit with redacted sections, but thousands of papers are there ready for people to read.

The man behind many of them is former MoD official Nick Pope, who spent 20 years investigating UFOs. Nick spoke to the Mirror about whether we are actually alone, and how realistic The X-Files were.

“I think it’d be inconceivable that we’d be the only life in the universe,” he said. “I suspect in the cosmos things are pretty crowded and there are other life forms and other civilisations too, which I think poses the fascinating question [of] if they are more advanced than us what might they be able to teach us.”

For much of the 90s Pope ran the Ministry of Defence’s UFO project, where his job was to “investigate sightings and assess whether any were of ‘defence significance’”, a term that really doesn’t have a proper definition.

The X-Files began when Pope was in the role, and the links and parallels were unquestionable.

People would whistle the theme tune at Pope as he walked down the Ministry's corridors or popped into the staff canteen, and they even nicknamed him ‘Spooky’ - the same label given to Mulder.

But the investigator brushes it off.

“It was flattering and a piece of fun to liven up the day,” he says. “Absolutely there were similarities: we were a government programme looking at UFOs and because we looked at UFOs we found ourselves really drawn into anything weird and wonderful that was reported because there was no where else in Government that would take those sort of reports.”

And the team really did get everything. From “bread and butter” UFO sightings to the “things people thought were linked to UFOs, alien abductions and crop circles” and then the even more distantly related, like ghosts on military bases or psychics.

“It could be anything!” Pope says. “There is that direct parallel [to The X-Files]. We really were the real-life X-Files unit. Having said that, we didn’t go running around with torches and guns and sadly I didn’t have a Scully either.”

The comparison, of course, isn’t that simple. There are parallels between the fictional series and real-life, but there are differences. While Scully and Mulder had a deep seated distrust of the establishment, Pope and his team were part of it.

“Much of what we did was perhaps what you’d expect [us] to do. We were alongside air force colleagues and much of what we did was to tie in UFO sightings with anything that would be tracked on military radar and going through the process to eliminate a lot of things that gave rise to a lot of these things.”

Pope explains that a lot of ‘sightings’ were explained by matching them with military aircraft or exercises taking place. They also used data on weather balloon launches, astronomical data at Royal Greenwich observatory - basically anything in the skies we could find out about it.

Pope says there were 200-300 cases a year that they tried to tie in with what they knew about or could find out about.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, and there were areas where they had to “tread carefully”.

“We knew some of these things were likely going to be secret prototype sky planes or aircrafts or drones,” Pope explains.

Among all the cases, there were some that couldn’t be explained or were the closest to confirming something extra-terrestrial.

For Pope the stand out case was in 1993 on March 30-31.

“There was a wave of sightings across the UK over a period of about six hours,” Pope says.

“Quite a lot of witnesses were police, military personnel and a civilian who said it was so big he didn’t realise he was looking at a UFO.”

It was dismissed initially as heavy cloud cover, but “one by one, stars disappeared...blocked out by huge triangular shaped craft.”

For Pope it was a direct link back to The X-Files, reminding him of the “alien colonist arc.”

“You see the immense craft, something like that, there’s no middle ground,” he admits. “When they say that and it’s an airforce officer, you can’t turn around and talk about weather balloons and aircraft from unusual angles. I think they’d have a fit!”

Whatever it was, it flew over two air force bases. Pope remembers interviewing one particular officer the morning after - the sighting had been at 2am.

The officer said the “triangular-shaped craft was moving very slowly, no more than 40-50 mph, 200ft or so above the ground, firing a narrow beam of light at the fields.”

He heard low humming sound and told Pope from the very slow speed it accelerated to the horizon “in an instant”.

Pope has heard similar stories from many witnesses all echoing “that staggering acceleration, that seems a quantum leap above what we can do, even now.”

And that officer? He simply said: “I’ve been in the air force for eight years and never seen anything like that.”

When Pope pushed him to estimate the speed, he added: “Imagine a fast jet like a Red Arrow. Orders of magnitude above and beyond that.”

Were you a believer?

Having heard case after case, testimony after testimony, Pope found himself changing the way he thought about UFOs and the alien question.

“I think I started as a Scully but ended up as a Mulder. I really didn’t know much about the whole UFO mystery.”

He admitted he came in and saw it as “another government job.”

“We’re moved around every few years and I’d got a promotional transfer,” he says confessing he thought he’d do three years and then “hopefully move on.”

That didn’t happen - but Pope has clearly learnt so much from his time at the MoD.

Doesn’t culture just influence our views?

“I think it’s a two-way street, sceptics would say quite a lot of the witnesses are just picking up things they’ve seen in sci-fi,” Pope says, but asks that people look at it another way.

“When you look at something like The X-Files we know Chris Carter did his research at the start (in great depth) so when you look at story lines and in terms of the Government cover up and syndicate and type of UFOS.

“The whole Scully abduction - that reflects in a way what is in the UFO literature. Art imitates life or life imitates art?

“You can’t get away from the fact the Roswell crash is part of pop culture, but when you see that reflected in The X-Files it’s not like it’s come from nowhere, it reflects what people already believe because of what people have already reported.”

The latest The X-Files offerings are no different, with season 11 premiering for Gillian Anderson’s final season, and Audible creating new audiobooks.

The last being Stolen Lives, which Pope says “brings us back to the fundamental questions” of who exactly knows what.

Though, despite the fact most of us think information is being kept from us, Pope says that’s not really the case, and while there are indeed ‘secret’ files, more and more are being made public.

“It’s huge,” he says. “The MoD has already declassified and released around 60,000 pages of UFO documents, some of which, at the time, were classified as secret ‘UK eyes only’, which is only one down from top secret so there is a vast amount of info out there.”

There’s another batch due for release too, but “there’s been delay after delay after delay”. However, Pope expects the last files to be released soon.

While the documents have been made accessible, it doesn’t mean everything is out in the open.

Due to the FOI (Freedom of information) Act there are exemptions that can’t be released due to intelligence, national security and other security reasons.

When you look at the documents, parts are blacked out. Pope explains: “Now in many cases the reasons are very innocuous, it’s a military base's system, but [with] some redactions I can understand why conspiracy theorists do get quite excited by this sort of thing and why they do believe that they’re not being told the full story.”

That may not go any way towards appeasing theorists, but Pope’s aim isn’t to dissuade people from believing in aliens. In fact, he has even thought about what we’d say to them when they arrive.

“I think the first fundamental question - I say this with my MoD background - is there a threat to us here? What is the reason for coming? Are they conquerors, explorers, scientists or anthropologists? That question turns up if there’s any threat.”

“The biological hazard is a pretty critical first order question to ask,” he adds. “What would first interest me would be their science or technology. What do they have?

“We can make very few assumptions. One good assumption we can make is if they come here their technology is above and beyond our own. We’re only just taking baby steps into the solar system. They would have mastered interstellar travel. That’s a phenomenal leap!

“What have they got and what would they share with us?” That’s the real question.

*Stolen Lives is the latest The X-Files audiobook from Audible, you can listen here .

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

08-01-2018 om 23:05 geschreven door peter  

08-01-2018 om 22:41 geschreven door peter  

Could US government hold key information on Rendlesham UFO sightings?

Katy Sandalls

The UFO trail in Rendlesham Forest.

Picture: TOM POTTER

Information about Suffolk’s best known UFO encounter might be contained in a dossier held by the US government, according to a former MoD staff member.

The incident at Rendlesham back in December 1980 has received a lot of attention from national and global media over the years and has often been called Britain’s Roswell.

American officers stationed at the former RAF Woodbridge site reported seeing strange lights and an alien craft on two occasions in the forest area surrounding the base.

Sceptics have since rubbished the claims of extraterrestrial activity by claiming that the beams were nothing more than lights on a police car or nearby Orfordness Lighthouse.

Recently new information has come to light in the United States about a dossier that may be held by the Department of Defense.

American newspaper the New York Times revealed that over $20 million had been spent on what was known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP by the Department of Defense between 2007 and 2012.

Another US publication, the Washington Post, stated that a 490 page report from this program contained alleged historical UFO sightings from foreign countries as well as the United States.

Nick Pope was the Ministry of Defence’s UFO desk officer between 1991 and 1994, he led a review into the case years after the event itself.

“For many years the US said we don’t do UFO’s but the Pentagon has had a programme all along,” says Nick.

It is not known exactly what details may be inside the file but Nick believes the incident at Rendlesham has a strong case for inclusion.

“It’s inconceivable to me that information on the Rendlesham Forest incident wouldn’t be in that dossier, as it’s the UK’s best-known and most credible UFO incident, and because it involved US personnel at USAF bases,” says Nick.

“It’s a big deal. It may be that the Pentagon has data nobody in the UK (even in the MoD) has about the case, and possibly a definitive explanation for the Rendlesham mystery.”

What information is or isn’t held about the incident is unclear, but the hope remains that information in the dossier may help to explain what happened nearly 40 years ago.

{ http://www.eadt.co.uk/ }

08-01-2018 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

AREA 51 SENSATION: 'Whistleblower' says secret USAF base has 'time-travelling Roswell UFO'

A "WHISTLEBLOWER" claiming to have worked inside the mysterious Area 51 US Air Force base has extraordinarily said the Nevada facility DOES house UFOs recovered from visiting aliens.

08-01-2018 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

Physicists catch a glimpse of four spatial dimensions with quantum mechanics experiments

BY TIBI PUIU 

The world around us makes sense in only three spatial dimensions: left and right, up and down, forward and backward. Mathematically, on the other hand, some very clever people have argued that reality may be comprised of at least four spatial dimensions. Modern string theory even goes as far as postulating up to 10 spatial dimensions.

All of these are rather abstract ideas with equally abstract proofs. This is why a recent experiment performed by Swiss and American physicists is so exciting. Their work demonstrates a possible pathway by which higher-dimensional phenomena can be observed in a lower-dimensional system, perhaps even ours.

As you may have guessed already, such experiments are based on our good old ally — quantum mechanics — which never fails to scramble our fragile reality and boggle the mind.

Essentially, each of the two teams, one in the USA, the other in Europe, devised an experimental setup — one with ultra-cold atoms and another with light particles — that allowed them to glimpse the fourth spatial dimension by virtue of the quantum Hall effect; the dynamical version of the effect to be more precise which was previously predicted to occur in 4-D systems.

To understand what these researchers are on about, it helps to picture a more familiar example. When struck by light, a 3-D object will cast a 2-D shadow. Though the shadow doesn’t have depth, you can still learn much about the 3-D object that casts it. For instance, a circle corresponds to a sphere and a square corresponds to a cube. Conversely, a cube can be considered the shadow or 3-D projection of a 4-D object called a hypercube, which we can’t really fathom, just like a 2-D ‘flat-lander’ has no hope of visualizing 3-D. Carl Sagan explained this crucial difference during a historic program.

Bearing all of this in mind, we can consider quantum Hall physics as the “4-D shadow” manifesting itself in 3-D.

The Hall effect occurs when charged particles move in a two-dimensional plane in the presence of a magnetic field. The magnetic field deflects the particles in the direction orthogonal to their motion. This can be interpreted by reading a transverse Hall voltage, which can only take certain quantized values. These values are identical irrespective of the specific properties of the experimental sample. What’s more, scientists have proven that this quantum effect cannot take place in three-dimensional systems.

For decades, physicists were convinced that the Hall effect can only manifest itself in 2-D systems, but more recently there have been voices that claimed a similar effect could also take place in four-dimensional systems. In 4-D, there would be even more remarkable properties including a novel, non-linear Hall current, or so the prediction goes.

Finally, two separate groups of researchers led by Professor Oded Zilberberg at ETH Zürich and Professor Mikael Rechtsman at Penn State have now demonstrated a way to observe physical phenomena proposed to exist in higher-dimensional systems.

One group employed so-called topological charge pumps that simulate the transport of electric charges between rubidium atoms that are trapped by lasers. The cloud of atoms that are cooled down close to absolute zero by the lasers is then placed in a 2D optical lattice created by another set of laser beams that fire at a certain wavelength along two orthogonal directions. The resulting ‘charge pump’ resembles an egg-carton-like “crystal of light” in which the rubidium atoms can move. Finally, yet another laser beam which fires with a different wavelength in each direction helps create a superlattice. By carefully monitoring and analyzing at which positions in the superlattice the atoms are located, scientists demonstrated that the transverse motion of modulation that the atoms predominantly use is the equivalent of the non-linear Hall response. This is the essential feature of the 4D Hall effect.

illustration of light passing through a two-dimensional waveguide array.

Credit: Rechtsman Laboratory, Penn State.

Another experiment involved passing light through a series of special glassware eerily similar to fiber wire that can control the shape of the light wave. These photonic structures can also reveal the intricate boundary phenomena that accompany this same transverse motion as a result of the 4D quantum Hall effect.

“When it was theorized that the quantum Hall effect could be observed in four-dimensional space,” said Mikael Rechtsman, assistant professor of physics and an author of the paper, “it was considered to be of purely theoretical interest because the real world consists of only three spatial dimensions; it was more or less a curiosity. But, we have now shown that four-dimensional quantum Hall physics can be emulated using photons — particles of light — flowing through an intricately structured piece of glass — a waveguide array.”

Both experiments demonstrate what an effect would look like were it to happen in four dimensions. However, this is not any proof that a genuine four-dimensional system behaves this way.

“Right now, those experiments are still far from any useful application,” Zilberberg admitted.

Though there is no practical application in the short term, this kind of research might help unravel aspects of string theory, according to which many higher dimensions are simply compressed in such a way that only our normal three-dimensional world exists.

Findings appeared in two separate papers, both published in the journal Nature (one and two).

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08-01-2018 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

First topographic map of Titan reveals surprisingly Earth-like features

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

Titan, one of the least Earth-like places in our solar system, turned out to have surprisingly Earth-like features.

Doom Mons (mountain) and Sotra Patera (depression), two remarkable features on the surface of Saturn. Topography has been vertically exaggerated by a factor of 10 for visibility. The false color shows different surface material compositions as detected by Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.

Image credits: NASA/JPL.

Until recently, not much was known about Saturn’s moon Titan. But the Cassini-Huygens mission changed all that. Titan, a Mercury-sized world with a surface shrouded in a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, was found to be the only place other than Earth where clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.

Titan is also a prime candidate for finding extraterrestrial life, which is why researchers have been trying to better understand its structure. Now, in two published papers, astronomers present the first proper map of Titan, revealing its features in unprecedented detail.

It took doctoral student Paul Corlies a year to assemble the map from all existing data. It was no easy feat since only 9 percent of Titan’s topography has been observed in relatively high-resolution. Another 25-30 percent of the topography imaged in lower resolution. The rest was created using an interpolation algorithm — which means we don’t really know how the rest of Titan is like, but we know how it probably looks like.

Cassini’s radar mapper has obtained stereo views of Titan’s surface during 19 flybys over the last five years.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS.

For starters, the map reveals Titan to be a bit flatter (more oblate) than previously thought. This suggests that the thickness of Titan’s crust also varies more than expected. Corlies also reports that the surface of Titan is covered by mountains, though none of them are higher than 700 meters (2300 feet). The map also shows Titan’s lows, allowing scientists to confirm that two locations in the equatorial region are in fact depressions — and not dried seas, as another theory proposed.

Researchers also analyzed Titan’s impressive lakes, but don’t get your hopes up just yet. As opposed to Earth’s lakes, which are covered by water, Titan’s lakes are filled with liquid methane, a hydrocarbon.

Starting from sea level

Corlies found that Titan’s three most massive lakes (or seas) share a common equipotential surface — which is just a fancy way of saying that they have a common sea level. Titan’s lakes communicate with each other through the subsurface; the lakes that are dry are all at higher elevations than the filled lakes in their vicinity. Alex Hayes, assistant professor of astronomy and also an author, predicted this in his previous models of Titan.

“We don’t see any empty lakes that are below the local filled lakes because, if they did go below that level, they would be filled themselves. This suggests that there’s flow in the subsurface and that they are communicating with each other,” said Hayes. “It’s also telling us that there is liquid hydrocarbon stored on the subsurface of Titan.”

The fact that astronomers are understanding so much about a satellite so far away from Earth is truly astounding, yet this is only a stepping stone for other research. Study authors say that the map will help others working on Titan’s geology and morphology, as well as those trying to improve models for extraterrestrial bodies. Ultimately, it could even help scientists understand whether or not life exists on Titan.

“We’re measuring the elevation of a liquid surface on another body 10 astronomical units away from the sun to an accuracy of roughly 40 centimeters. Because we have such amazing accuracy we were able to see that between these two seas the elevation varied smoothly about 11 meters, relative to the center of mass of Titan, consistent with the expected change in the gravitational potential. We are measuring Titan’s geoid. This is the shape that the surface would take under the influence of gravity and rotation alone, which is the same shape that dominates Earth’s oceans,” said Hayes.

Journal References:

1. P. Corlies, et al. Titan’s Topography and Shape at the End of the Cassini Mission. Geophysical Research Letters, 2017; 44 (23): 11,754 DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075518
2. A. G. Hayes, et al . Topographic Constraints on the Evolution and Connectivity of Titan’s Lacustrine Basins. Geophysical Research Letters, 2017; 44 (23): 11,745 DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075468

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08-01-2018 om 21:36 geschreven door peter