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.
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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...
04-03-2018
De 'nabije' ster Betelgeuze staat op ontploffen, maar moet je daar wakker van liggen?
De 'nabije' ster Betelgeuze staat op ontploffen, maar moet je daar wakker van liggen?
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Kunnen supernova’s een gevaar vormen voor het leven op aarde?
Op zo’n 600 lichtjaar afstand van de aarde bevindt zich een rode superreus: Betelgeuze. Waarschijnlijk heb je deze ster op een heldere avond al wel eens aan de hemel zien staan. Hij valt op tussen al die andere lichtpuntjes, omdat hij een beetje rood van kleur is. Bovendien brandt de ster heel fel. Dat laatste komt echter met een prijs: hierdoor zal de ster ook relatief snel zijn brandstof opmaken en maar een korte levensduur hebben. De naar schatting acht miljoen jaar oude ster zal dan ook (naar astronomische begrippen) spoedig een supernova worden. En als het eenmaal zover is, kan dat ons mensen hier op aarde eigenlijk niet ontgaan. De explosie die dan ontstaat, is naar verwachting zelfs op klaarlichte dag vanaf de aarde te bewonderen!
Het ontstaan van een supernova
Supernova’s zijn de grootste explosies die in de ruimte voorkomen. Ze ontstaan doordat er een verandering optreedt in de kern van een ster. Die verandering kan het resultaat zijn van twee verschillende ontwikkelingen. In het geval van Betelgeuze treden de veranderingen op, doordat de ster door zijn brandstof heen is. Zonder die bron van energie kan de ster niet meer opboksen tegen de zwaartekracht en een deel van zijn eigen massa stroomt richting die kern. Die wordt steeds zwaarder en zwaarder, tot deze ineenstort. Dat resulteert in een gigantische explosie, oftewel supernova. Een supernova kan daarnaast ook ontstaan in een systeem dat uit twee sterren bestaat die om elkaar heen draaien. Hierbij steelt de ene ster materie van de andere ster, waardoor deze uiteindelijk zo zwaar wordt, dat deze explodeert.
Eerdere supernova’s Wanneer Betelgeuze ontploft, is dat niet de eerste supernova die in de nabijheid van de aarde ontstaat. In 2016 is een studie verschenen die aantoonde dat de aarde tussen 3,2 en 1,7 miljoen jaar geleden herhaaldelijk gebombardeerd werd met radioactieve isotopen, afkomstig van supernova’s in de buurt. “Het suggereert dat er sprake was van een serie supernova’s, waarbij de één na de ander ontplofte,” zo stelde onderzoeker Anton Wallner in een persbericht. Geschat werd dat deze sterren op dat moment zo’n 300 lichtjaar van de aarde verwijderd waren. Welke gevolgen de ontploffingen voor de aarde hadden, konden Wallner en collega’s niet achterhalen. Maar er zijn voorzichtige aanwijzingen dat de explosies niet ongemerkt aan het leven op aarde voorbijtrokken. Zo wijst Wallner erop dat het wel heel toevallig is dat deze supernova’s samenvallen met de periode “waarin de aarde afkoelde en het Plioceen plaatsmaakte voor het Pleistoceen”.
Betelgeuze is zo’n 100.000 keer helderder dan onze zon en dit is de scherpste foto die ooit van de ster is gemaakt. De foto werd vorig jaar zomer vrijgegeven door ESO.
Afbeelding: ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO) / E. O’Gorman / P. Kervella.
Mogelijke gevolgen Wallner en collega’s suggereren in hun studie dat een supernova voor grote veranderingen op aarde kan zorgen. Het is niet heel verbazingwekkend. We hebben het hier tenslotte over zware sterren die exploderen en daarbij tal van zware elementen en allerhande straling de ruimte in slingeren. Maar hoe kan dat nu precies voor problemen zorgen op aarde? Er zijn verschillende scenario’s te bedenken, zo blijkt onder meer uit een onderzoek dat vorig jaar verscheen. Zo kan een ster die in de buurt van de aarde ontploft leiden tot:
meer bosbranden. Wanneer een ster ontploft, komt er kosmische straling vrij. En als de ster redelijk dicht bij de aarde in de buurt staat, kan die kosmische straling in theorie vrij diep in de atmosfeer doordringen. Daarbij creëert deze als het ware een ‘pad’ door de atmosfeer en op dat pad worden atomen van hun elektronen ontdaan. Het maakt de weg vrij voor bliksemschichten die zich vanuit wolken naar de grond haasten. “Het resultaat zou een significante toename in bliksemschichten zijn: de belangrijkste oorzaak van bosbranden (op mensen na dan),” aldus onderzoeker Brian Thomas, één van de auteurs van het hierboven aangehaalde paper. Die bosbranden kunnen ervoor zorgen dat complete ecosystemen op losse schroeven komen te staan.
klimaatverandering.Wanneer er middels kosmische straling meer blikseminslagen zijn en wereldwijd grote bosbranden ontstaan, kan dat bijvoorbeeld leiden tot afkoeling. De bosbranden brengen namelijk roetdeeltjes in de lucht, waardoor zonlicht niet of nauwelijks meer het oppervlak kan bereiken.
kanker. De kosmische straling kan ook een directe impact hebben op het leven op aarde: “De duidelijkste consequentie die het baden in kosmische straling voor het leven op aarde heeft, is een toename van kanker en het sneller ontstaan van mutaties,” vertelt Thomas in een persbericht.
ernstige aantasting van de ozonlaag. Wanneer een ster ontploft, kan er ook gammastraling vrijkomen. Deze straling leidt tot chemische reacties hoog in de atmosfeer, die weer leiden tot de afbraak van ozon. Deze ozonlaag beschermt ons tegen (kankerverwekkende) UV-straling én kosmische straling en zo kan gammastraling de eerder genoemde problemen – die stuk voor stuk het resultaat zijn van kosmische straling – dus nog verder vergroten.
een verstoord ritme. Wanneer een supernova nabij de aarde ontploft, zal er gedurende ongeveer een maand een blauw licht aan de hemel staan. “Dat klinkt niet heel ernstig, maar er is aangetoond dat het voor bijna alle levende organismen een probleem is,” vertelt onderzoeker Adrian Melott die eveneens aan de hierboven aangehaalde studie meewerkte. Het gooit de productie van een hormoon (melatonine) dat van cruciaal belang is voor het dag- en nachtritme overhoop.
Een artistieke impressie van een supernova.
Afbeelding: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
Het draait allemaal om afstand Het moge duidelijk zijn: supernova’s kunnen een nachtmerrie zijn voor een levende planeet zoals de onze. Of een supernova ook echt in staat is tot het bezorgen van de hierboven beschreven ellende is echter voornamelijk afhankelijk van de afstand waarop deze zich bevindt. Wat ons natuurlijk brengt bij de vraag: hoever moet je bij een supernova uit de buurt blijven? Daar zijn astronomen het nog niet helemaal over eens. In een paper dat in 2003 verscheen, stelden onderzoekers dat een supernova die binnen 25 lichtjaar van de aarde ontstond, zou leiden tot massa-extincties op aarde. Maar het onderzoek dat vorig jaar verscheen, suggereert dat ook supernova’s voorbij 25 lichtjaar afstand behoorlijk gevaarlijk kunnen zijn. “We weten het niet precies,” moest Melott in een persbericht bekennen. “Maar we denken meer aan 40 tot 50 lichtjaar.” In hun studie bogen Melott en collega’s zich over een supernova-explosie die zo’n 2,6 miljoen jaar geleden plaatsvond, waarschijnlijk op zo’n 150 lichtjaar afstand van de aarde. Het leidde niet tot massa-extincties, maar mogelijk wel tot grote veranderingen op aarde. Zo zijn er aanwijzingen dat bossen in Afrika – mogelijk onder invloed van de door de supernova ingegeven bosbranden – verdwenen en plaatsmaakten voor graslanden. “En dat kan zelfs weer van invloed zijn geweest op de evolutie van de mens,” denkt Melott.
Betelgeuze Terug naar Betelgeuze: de dichtstbijzijnde ster die op relatief korte termijn (naar schatting binnen 100.000 jaar) een supernova dreigt te worden. De ster staat op een veilige afstand van zo’n 600 lichtjaar en is dus geen reden voor slapeloze nachten. Maar er zijn meer supernova-kandidaten in de buurt. Zo wordt IK Pegasi B bijvoorbeeld vaak genoemd. De ster – onderdeel van een dubbelstersysteem – bevindt zich op dit moment op slechts 150 lichtjaar afstand van de aarde en is daarmee de dichtstbijzijnde supernova-kandidaat. Het goede nieuws is echter dat deze ster niet – zoals Betelgeuze – op ontploffen staat. Het kan nog miljoenen jaren duren voor deze voldoende massa van zijn begeleider heeft afgepakt om te kunnen exploderen. En – nog meer goed nieuws – dit dubbelstersysteem beweegt bij ons vandaan. Dus wanneer deze eindelijk klaar is om te ontploffen, is deze zo ver van ons verwijderd dat we er weinig van te vrezen hebben. Hetzelfde geldt voor Spica, een supernova-kandidaat op 250 lichtjaar afstand.
Van Betelgeuze en collega’s hoef je dan ook niet wakker te liggen. En dat is ook wat Melott aan een ieder die hem naar de rode superreus vraagt, meedeelt. “Ik vertel ze dat ze zich zorgen moeten maken over klimaatverandering en kernoorlogen, maar niet over dit soort dingen.”
The conspiracy theorists spotted the strange shape in footage taken from Google Earth
The shape, which was seen on South Georgia Island – a Brit territory with a population of 30, could be a crazed spacecraft created by an alien civilisation, it has been claimed.
The “vehicle” was spotted by a user of a well-known alien site, who posted the video on Youtube.
Using satellite mapping, web theorists at Secureteam10 zoomed in on the unknown mass near the 10,000ft tall Mount Paget.
GOOGLE EARTH
SPACESHIP? Alien hunters claim this is proof of a crashed spaceship in Antarctica
It appears to have skidded for a considerable distance before grounding to a halt.
But some people who watched the vid appear not to be convinced and have their own theories about what the object is.
One viewer who claimed he had been station on the island with the Royal Navy punctured the ET theory.
GOOGLE EARTH
CAPTURED: The sight was seen in footage taken by Google Earth
“Santa had a little to much to drink”
Non-believer
Rain606 said: "The research station on the island asked us to fly a photographic recce over the entire island to document population and locations of reindeer.
"As the photographer on that recce, I can confirm 100 per cent that what you see in the image is just the result of a glacial slide. Sorry."
Others saw a funny side to the clip.
One joked: "Santa had a little to much to drink".
GOOGLE EARTH
REMOTE: The South Georgia Island is home for 30 people
The outlandish video has been viewed more than 100,000 times.
It’s not the first time conspiracy theorists have claimed to have spotted an alien civilisation on Google Earth.
Google Maps is one of the most useful tools available on the internet, allowing people to visit all areas of the world from the comfort of their own home.
GOOGLE EARTH
DRAG: It appears the "vehicle" landed and was dragged a fair distance
But as well as its informative qualities, the site also provides countless entertaining images.
Alongside the ordinary looking residential streets and national parks is everything from the amusing to the downright bizarre.
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Google Maps: Is this proof of alien existence? UFO hunters claim to find underwater base
Google Maps: Is this proof of alien existence? UFO hunters claim to find underwater base
GOOGLE MAPS can be a great tool for exploring different parts of the world without actually having to travel there. But the web mapping service has picked up both the weird and wonderful during its existence, including unusual objects UFO hunters have claimed are alien bases.
Argentinian alien researcher, Marcelo Igazusta, believed he’d found evidence of a “giant pyramid” beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean back in 2016
Argentinian alien researcher, Marcelo Igazusta, believed he’d found evidence of a “giant pyramid” beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean back in 2016, and that it could be an alien underwater base.
The sighting was detailed on Scott Waring’s blog UFO Sightings Daily.
The object in the sea, which can be found at coordinates 12°8'1.49”N 119°35'26.39”W, is reportedly 8.5 miles across its base.
Whether it is actually an underwater alien base is unknown.
GOOGLE
Google Maps: Argentinian alien researcher Marcelo Igazusta believes it's an alien base
GOOGLE
Google Maps: The object in the sea is reportedly 8.5 miles across its base
But Scott said the discovery was incredible all the same.
He said: “Even if this is not a UFO that landed in the ocean that was being used as an alien base, it still is a monumental discovery.
“An 8.5-mile pyramid… biggest the world has ever known, and it’s right off of Mexico, near the ancient Mayan and Aztec pyramids. Humans could never have built such a construction. Only aliens could accomplish making such a massive structure.”
Another image that appears on Google Maps shows a Star Wars-like structure in the middle of the Egyptian desert.
GOOGLE
Google Maps: A Star Wars-like structure in Egypt also sparked the interest of UFO hunters
The unique sight triggered a debate among UFO hunters who claimed the unique building has links to UFO research.
Some have even described it as a “secret UFO base”.
The structure’s existence was noted by SecureTeam10, a source for “UFO sighing videos”.
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This Week's Top Space Stories
This Week's Top Space Stories
By SPACE.com Staff
Photo Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for Science, NASA/SDO, NASA/JPL
The Week's Top Space Stories
The Expedition 54 crew makes a safe landing from the International Space Station, a new species of "water bear" was discovered in a Japanese parking lot and researchers found the imprints of the universe's first stars. These are some of this week's top stories from Space.com.
Photo Credit: PTScientists via collectSPACE.com
1. The moon is getting a 4G network.
Vodafone Germany will work with Nokia to build the first 4G network on the moon in 2019. This network will support PTScientists, a private moon mission development team from Berlin that hopes to launch a lander and two small rovers for the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 moon landing.
2. Expedition 54 crew makes safe landing from space
Two U.S. astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut returned safely to Earth on Tuesday (Feb. 27). The Expedition 54 crew completed a total of 168 days aboard the International Space Station. Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA, alongside Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos, re-entered the atmosphere inside a Soyuz MS-06 capsule and landed in Kazakhstan at 9:31 p.m. EST (0231 GMT).
3. New "water bear" species found in Japanese parking lot
Kazuharu Arakawa found a new species of tardigrade, also known as a "water bear," in a sample of moss he scraped from the parking lot outside his apartment in Tsuruoka City, Japan. The tardigrade biology researcher thinks that the unusual-shaped eggs of this species, which have long filaments, may help the vulnerable cargo attach to where it's laid. This minuscule animal can withstand extreme radiation and even the vacuum of space.
4. NASA envisions astronauts on the moon in ten years.
On Feb. 20, NASA's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot spoke at a Space Transportation Association event, revealing NASA's newest vision for lunar exploration. This includes sending astronauts to the moon's surface by the late 2020s. The Lunar Orbiting Platform, according to Lightfoot, would serve as a place from which astronauts would transit back and forth from the moon.
Photo Credit: Sarah Stewart/UC Davis based on NASA rendering
5. First came the moon, then came Earth?
Scientists have developed a new theory about Earth's formation which suggests that the moon formed about 1,000 years before the Earth. This theory helps explain certain lunar features, and is the first model that matches the pattern of the moon's composition, according to the research team.
Black holes may not be entirely impenetrable after all. A new paper published on Jan. 17 suggests that at certain points along a black hole's event horizon, the boundary after which matter is thought to be destroyed and impossible to study, there may be tiny spots where Einstein's theories of gravity break down and finite measurements no longer apply. They are hypothetical places of entry into a black hole where an observer would not be destroyed instantly.
Photo Credit: N.R. Fuller, National Science Foundation
7. Signs of the universe's earliest stars spotted
Researchers finally found evidence that stars were shining as early as 180 million years after the Big Bang. Finding their signals involved looking at the cosmic background radiation; this indirect method was necessary because the further back in time you go, the more difficult it gets to spot a star directly with a space telescope, for instance.
8. New Sally Ride stamps will be issued this spring
On May 23, 2018, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will issue its commemorative Forever stamp to honor Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly to space. The USPS also set April 6, 2018 as the first day of issue for a stamp series dedicated to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.
Photo Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for Science, NASA/SDO, NASA/JPL
9. Nearby star flays its planet with a superflare
If there was life on the rocky planet circling the star closest to the sun, Proxima Centauri, a recent finding does not bode well for its existence now on this planet. The red dwarf parent star blasted Proxima b with a powerful solar flare, whose high-energy radiation would have scorched any existing atmosphere or ocean.
10. Curiosity successfully tests out new drill moves
NASA engineers have been working for 15 months to reprogram the Mars rover Curiosity so that it can drill Martian rocks using a new technique. The drill instrument on Curiosity's robotic arm has not been used since 2016, and on Monday (Feb. 26) it bored a half-inch hole into a target rock on its trial run.
Mythological hybrids are legendary creatures combining body parts of more than one species, one of which is often human.
Since ancient times there has been a fascination with the idea of creatures who are half human and half animal. The strength of this archetype can be seen in the persistence of modern tales of werewolves, vampires, different monster and horror characters.
Ancient myths include many monstrous beings. Some resemble hybrids between different species, while others are of the same species but having un-natural extra heads or limbs.
The Sanskrit epics of India feature gods in the form of elephants, monkeys, and snakes. The Sumerians depicted gods with bird heads and wings, Egyptians did portray many of the gods with animal features.
Let’s have a look at 12 of the most bizarre hybrid mythical creatures from ancient history:
1 – Ammit (Egyptian Mythology)
Ammit or Ammut is translated as the ‘Soul Eater’, and was claimed to be an underworld-dwelling Ancient Egyptian goddess/demon who personified divine retribution. With an anatomy of a lion, hippopotamus and a crocodile, she waited to devour the hearts of the unworthy people, thus, cursing their ’empty’ souls to roam aimlessly for eternity. She epitomized the collective fear of Egyptians that was apparently pertained to ‘second death’.
2 – Buraq (Islamic Mythology)
The dome of rock is a spot venerated by Muslims as they consider it sacred because from there Prophet Mohammad rose to heaven on a supposedly fantastical white-hued, horse-like creature named Buraq. It was apparently half mule, half donkey and had wings.
3 – Gajasimha (Indian Mythology)
In the Hindu Mythology, Narsimha was one of the 10 avatars of Lord Vishnu. Gajasimha is probably a variant in that being, who was half human and half lion. Gajasimha is depicted as half elephant, half lion, where Elephant is the representation of Lord Ganesha.
4 – Hatuibwari (Melanesian Mythology)
It is signified as the primordial ancestor of human beings with four eyes, serpent like body and humongous wings. The Hatuibwari was most probably worshiped as a cosmic creature, and is described in the folklore of Melanasia.
5 – Hippalectryon (Greek Mythology)
This half-horse and half-rooster featured creature has depictions as old as 3,000 years. Some speculate it to have originated from the Middle Eastern folklores and some claim it to be an alternative representation of the renowned winged-horse Pegasus.
6 – Khepri (Egyptian Mythology)
Usually depicted as a man with a beetle head in Ancient Egyptian funerary papyri, it is symbolic of the god epitomizing the forces that moved the sun across the vast expanse of the sky. Derived from the Egyptian word ‘Kheper’ meaning ‘to change’, this creature derives its connection from the Scarab Beetles, who rolled balls of dung across the rigorous desert surface, while the young beetles emerged from inside the dung, from the eggs laid by the parent.
7 – Matsya (Indian Mythology)
With the head of a human and underpart of a fish, Matsya is claimed to be one of the avatars of Vishnu. Also, in the popular Noah’s Arc depicting from the Bible and the story of Manu from the Vedic literatures who made an arc and survived against the catastrophic floods, there was a character ‘Matsya’ who guided them towards a safe place to repopulate the Earth.
8 – Monocerus (Medieval legends)
Monocerus is derived from the Greek word Μονόκερος, which simply pertains to an animal with a single horn, similar to a unicorn. However, the medieval descriptions say that it had a head of a stag, the body of a horse, the legs of an elephant and a tail of a boar, topping which, was one horn to target the belly region of its opponents, the Elephants.
9 – Onocentaur (Greek Mythology)
Half man and half horse have much been talked about, but the Onocentaur is a version of Centaur with Donkey credentials. Moreover, a Greek poetic mythology mentions another exotic centaur hybrid known as Ichthyocentaur, with upper torso of a man, the lower front of a horse and tail of a fish.
10 – Pazuzu (Babylonian Mythology)
Pazuzu was the Dog head, eagle-like feet, a scorpion’s tail and a serpentine penis, with some ominous aspects. The demon of winds who could bring upon catastrophic famines during the rainy seasons. But Pazuzu was also invoked to fight against other evil spirits.
11 – Qilin (Chinese Mythology)
Also known as the Chinese Unicorn, the Qilin goes hand in hand with whimsicality and mysticism, signifying the birth (or death) of a sage or eminent ruler. The features of this creature are depicted as having a body of a deer with a single horn, a tail of an ox and hooves of an horse, while their backs project a vivacious palette of colors, complemented by a yellowish belly.
12 –Tarasque (French folklore)
Golden Legend, the medieval bestseller, has the most renowned mentions of Tarasque. It describes Tarasque as a dragon or a dragon-like creature having a head of a lion, a body of an ox covered with a turtle shell, legs of a bear and a scaled tail like that of a scorpion.
We are on the cusp of discovering new technologies that “will take us even farther as we explore the planets and the stars” — and lead us closer to making contact with alien life, writes Michio Kaku in “The Future of Humanity.”
We know that one out of every five stars in the Milky Way galaxy has an Earth-like planet orbiting it — which means that there are more than 20 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to Kaku. Though there are other conditions necessary to creating life (there must be a Jupiter-size neighbor to keep asteroids and debris out of the planet’s path and the Earth-like planet requires a moon to stabilize it), there seem to be plenty of options out there for life to exist.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, thanks in part to funding from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, devotes 42 high-power telescopes to scanning a million stars to listen for alien communication.
Last year astronomers sent out a signal from the Norwegian city of Tromsø, containing electronic music and information on geometry and binary numbers, hoping it will reach ET ears.
Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute told Kaku that he believes we will make contact before 2025, though he upped that number by 10 years in a recent article for science magazine The Nautilus.
“I’ve bet a cup of coffee to any and all that by 2035 we’ll have evidence of ET,” Shostak wrote. “I’m optimistic by nature — as a scientist, you have to be . . . I feel that we’re on the cusp of learning something truly revolutionary.”
But what would ETs look like once we finally meet them?
To find out, Kaku interviewed experts in exobiology, a field that studies what life might be like in distant worlds with different ecosystems. Based on his research, Kaku decided that intelligent alien life would have three necessary features:
The aliens, like humans, would have stereo vision, which allows eyes to compare images and track distance — a necessary feature in predators, who hunt and track their prey. “In all likelihood, intelligent aliens in space will have descended from predators that hunted for their food,” Kaku writes. “This does not necessarily mean that they will be aggressive, but it does mean that their ancestors long ago might have been predators. We may be well served to be cautious.”
The aliens would have some form of opposable thumbs or grasping appendages, necessary for hunting prey and creating tools (which they would have to do to be sophisticated enough to make contact).
They would also need to have language. “In order to hand down and accumulate essential information from generation to generation, some form of language is crucial,” Kaku writes.
In addition, Kaku theorizes that many alien civilizations will exist on ice-covered moons (like Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus), where life would exist completely underwater. So how would an aquatic species become truly intelligent beings?
Kaku takes this thought experiment back to Earth. The one Earth-bound underwater animal that nearly fits all the above criteria — stereo vision, graspable appendages — is the octopus, he writes. The cephalopod, which has survived on Earth for at least 165 million years, only lacks language.
On a different planet, however, cephalopods could easily develop language — in fact, if conditions changed drastically on Earth, Kaku says it could even happen here, too.
“On a distant planet under different conditions, one can imagine that an octopus-like creature could develop a language of chirps and whistles so it could hunt in packs,” Kaku writes. “One could even imagine that at some point in the distant future, evolutionary pressures on Earth could force the octopus to develop intelligence. So an intelligent race of octopods is certainly a possibility.”
So that’s what we can expect? An intelligent race of octopods, like in the movie “Arrival”?
PACKS A PUNCH Engineers are testing a new spacecraft shield by slamming a bullet into it at 7 kilometers per second.
FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR HIGH-SPEED DYNAMICS
Engineers are taking a counterintuitive approach to protecting future spacecraft: shooting at their experiments. The image above and high-speed video below capture a 2.8-millimeter aluminum bullet plowing through a test material for a space shield at 7 kilometers per second. The work is an effort to find structures that could stand up to the impact of space debris.
Earth is surrounded by a cloud of debris, both natural — such as micrometeorites and comet dust, which create meteor showers — and unnatural, including dead satellites and the cast-off detritus of space launches. Those pieces of flotsam can damage other spacecraft if they collide at high speeds, and bits smaller than about a centimeter are hard to track and avoid, says ESA materials engineer Benoit Bonvoisin in a statement.
FLASH BANG Watch as a bullet slams through the first layer of a new, experimental space shield, and a second layer deflects the shrapnel.
To defend future spacecraft from taking a hit, Bonvoisin and colleagues are developing armor made from fiber metal laminates, or several thin metal layers bonded together. The laminates are arranged in multiple layers separated by 10 to 30 centimeters, a configuration called a Whipple shield.
In this experiment at the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics in Germany, the first layer shatters the aluminum bullet into a cloud of smaller pieces, which the second layer is able to deflect. This configuration has been used for decades, but the materials are new. The next step is to test the shield in orbit with a small CubeSat, Bonvoisin says.
TOTALLY LIT The first stars in the universe switched on by 180 million years after the Big Bang, radio observations indicate. Ultraviolet light from early, blueish stars (illustrated) interacted with hydrogen gas, causing it to absorb background radiation, and creating a signature scientists have now detected.
N.R. FULLER/NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
For the first time, scientists may have detected hints of the universe’s primordial sunrise, when the first twinkles of starlight appeared in the cosmos.
“It’s a tremendously exciting result. It’s the first time we’ve possibly had a glimpse of this era of cosmic history,” says observational cosmologist H. Cynthia Chiang of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, who was not involved in the research.
The oldest galaxies seen directly with telescopes sent their starlight from significantly later: several hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. The new observation used a technique, over a decade in the making, that relies on probing the hydrogen gas that filled the early universe. That approach holds promise for the future of cosmology: More advanced measurements may eventually reveal details of the early universe throughout its most difficult-to-observe eras.
But experts say the result needs additional confirmation, in particular because the signature doesn’t fully agree with theoretical predictions. The signal — a dip in the intensity of radio waves across certain frequencies — was more than twice as strong as expected.
The unexpectedly large observed signal suggests that the hydrogen gas was colder than predicted. If confirmed, this observation might hint at a new phenomenon taking place in the early universe. One possibility, suggested in a companion paper in Nature by theoretical astrophysicist Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University, is that the hydrogen was cooled due to new types of interactions between the hydrogen and particles of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe.
If the interpretation is correct, “it’s quite possible that this is worth two Nobel Prizes,” says theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University, who was not involved with the work. One prize could be given for detecting the signature of the cosmic dawn, and another for the dark matter implications. But Loeb expresses reservations about the result: “What makes me a bit nervous is the fact that the [signal] that they see doesn't look like what we expected.”
To increase scientists’ confidence, the result must be verified by other experiments and additional tests, says theoretical cosmologist Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Several other efforts to detect the signal are already under way.
Experimental cosmologist Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe and colleagues teased out their evidence for the first stars from the impact the light had on hydrogen gas. “We don’t see the starlight itself. We see indirectly the effect that the starlight would have had” on the cosmic environment, says Bowman, a collaborator on the Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature, EDGES, which detected the stars’ traces.
TURN THE TABLES Detecting the signature of the first stars required a radio antenna about the size of a table (shown), located in western Australia, far from artificial sources of radio waves.
BRETT HISCOCK AND LOU PULS/CSIRO AUSTRALIA
Collapsing out of dense pockets of hydrogen gas early in the universe’s history, the first stars flickered on, emitting ultraviolet light that interacted with the surrounding hydrogen. The starlight altered the proportion of hydrogen atoms found in different energy levels. That change caused the gas to absorb light of a particular wavelength, about 21 centimeters, from the cosmic microwave background — the glow left over from around 380,000 years after the Big Bang (SN: 3/21/15, p. 7). A distinctive dip in the intensity of the light at that wavelength appeared as a result.
Over time, that light’s wavelength was stretched to several meters by the expansion of the universe, before being detected on Earth as radio waves. Observing the amount of stretching that had taken place in the light allowed the researchers to pinpoint how long after the Big Bang the light was absorbed, revealing when the first stars turned on.
Still, detecting the faint dip was a challenge: Other cosmic sources, such as the Milky Way, emit radio waves at much higher levels, which must be accounted for. And to avoid interference from sources on Earth — like FM radio stations — Bowman and colleagues set up their table-sized antenna far from civilization, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the western Australian outback.
Scientists hope to use similar techniques with future, more advanced instruments to map out where in the sky stars first started forming, and to reveal other periods early in the universe’s history. “This is really the first step in what’s going to become a new and exciting field,” Bowman says.
Expand to full size to see this video from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, which caught a close-up view of the little Mars moon Phobos, moving in front of distant Saturn.
On March 1, 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) released this video from its Mars Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since December 2003. The video combines 30 images as individual frames and shows Phobos passing through the frame with the gas giant planet Saturn, some 600 million miles (roughly a billion km) further away. Be sure to expand the video to full size to see Saturn as a small ringed dot in the background.
Putting Together a Community Strategy To Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Putting Together a Community Strategy To Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I regret that the formatting of this column was askew earlier; I hope it didn’t make reading too difficult. But now those problems are fixed.
Behind the front page space science discoveries that tell us about the intricacies and wonders of our world are generally years of technical and intellectual development, years of planning and refining, years of problem-defining and problem-solving. And before all this, there also years of brainstorming, analysis and strategizing about which science goals should have the highest priorities and which might be most attainable.
That latter process is underway now in regarding the search for life in the solar system and beyond, with numerous teams of scientists tackling specific areas of interest and concern and turning their group discussions into white papers. In this case, the white papers will then go on to the National Academy of Sciences for a blue-ribbon panel review and ultimately recommendations on which subjects are exciting and mature enough for inclusion in a decadal survey and possible funding.
This is a generally little-known part of the process that results in discoveries, but scientists certainly understand how they are essential. That’s why hundreds of scientists contribute their ideas and time — often unpaid — to help put together these foundational documents.
With its call for extraterrestrial habitability white papers, the NAS got more than 20 diverse and often deeply thought out offerings. The papers will be studied now by an ad hoc, blue ribbon committee of scientists selected by the NAS, which will have the first of two public meetings in Irvine, Calif. on Jan. 16-18.
Then their recommendations go up further to the decadal survey teams that will set formal NASA priorities for the field of astronomy and astrophysics and planetary science. This community-based process that has worked well for many scientific disciplines since they began in the late 1950s.
I’m particularly familiar with two of these white paper processes — one produced at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo and the other with NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS.) What they have to say is most interesting.
This is what Shawn Domagal-Goldman, an astrobiologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, had to say about their effort, which began 16 months ago with a workshop in Seattle:
“This is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ problem, and we held a workshop to start drawing a wide variety of scientists to the problem. Once we did, the group gave itself an ambitious goal – to quantify an assessment of whether or not an exoplanet has life, based on remote observations of that world.
“Doing that will take years of collaboration of scientists like the ones at the meeting, from diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences.”
Chaitanya Giri, a research scientist at ELSI with a background in organic planetary chemistry and organic cosmochemistry, said that his work on the European Rosetta mission to a comet convinced him that it is essential to “develop technological capacities to explore habitable niches on various planetary bodies and find unambiguous signatures of life, if present.” There is some debate about the organic molecules — the chemical building blocks of life — identified by Rosetta.
“Over the years there have been scattered attempts at building such instruments, but a coherent collaborative network was missing,” Giri said. “This necessity inspired me to put on this workshop,” which led to the white paper.
We’ll discuss the conclusions of the papers, but first at little about the decadal surveys:
Here are the instruction from the NAS to potential white paper teams working on life beyond Earth projects and issues:
Identify promising key research goals in the field of the search for signs of life in which progress is likely in the next 20 years.
Identify key technological challenges in astrobiology as they pertain to the search for life in the solar system and extrasolar planetary systems.
Identify key scientific questions in astrobiology as they pertain to the search for life in the solar system and extrasolar planetary systems
Discuss scientific advances that can be addressed by U.S. and international space missions and relevant ground-based activities in operation or funded and in development
Discuss how to expand partnerships (interagency, international and public/private) in furthering the study of life’s origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe
Quite a wide net, from specific issues to much broader ones. But the teams submitting their papers are not expected to address all the issues, but only one or perhaps a related second.
The papers range from a SETI Institute call for a program to increase the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to address a range of astrobiology issues; to tempting possibilities offered by teams already in the running for future missions to Europa or Enceladus or elsewhere; to recommendations from the Planetary Science Institute about studying and searching for microbialites, living carbonate rock structures once common on Earth and possibly on Mars as well.
Proposed White Paper Subjects
Saturn’s moon Enceladus and plume of water vapor flowing out from its South Pole.
(NASA)
Microbialites are fresh water versions of the organic and carbonate structures called stromatolites — which are among the oldest signs of life detected on Earth.
The white paper from ELSI focuses how to improve and discover technology that can detect potential life on other planets and moons. It calls for an increasingly international approach to that costly and specialized effort.
The paper from Giri et al begins with a disquieting conclusion that only “lately, scattered efforts are being undertaken towards the R&D of the novel and as-yet space unproven ‘life-detection’ technologies capable of obtaining unambiguous evidence of extraterrestrial life, even if it is significantly different from {Earth} life. As the suite of space-proven payloads improves in breadth and sensitivity, this is an apt time to examine the progress and future of life-detection technologies.”
The paper points to one discovery in particular as indicative of what the team feels is necessary — an ability to search for life in regions theoretically devoid of life and therefore requiring novel detection techniques or probes.
“For example,” they write, “air sampling in Earth’s stratosphere with a novel scientific cryogenic payload has led to the isolation and identification of several new species of bacteria; this was an innovative technique analyzing a region of the atmosphere that was initially believed to be devoid of life.”
Other technologies they see as promising and needing further development are high-sensitivity fluorescence microscopy techniques that may be able to detect extraterrestrial organic compounds with catalytic activity surrounded by membranes, i.e., extraterrestrial cells. In addition, they support on-going and NASA-funded work on genetic samplers that could go to Mars and — if present — actually identify nucleic acid-based life.
“With back-to-back missions under development and proposed by various space agencies to the potentially habitable Mars, Enceladus, Titan, and Europa, this is a right time for a detailed envisioning of the technologies needed for detection of life,” Giri said in an e-mail.
The NExSS white paper on potentially detectable biosignatures from distant exoplanets– one of four submitted by the group– is an especially ambitious one. The NASA-sponsored effort brought in many top scientists working in the field of biosignatures, and in the past year has already resulted in the publication or submission of five major science papers in addition to the white paper.
In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of NExSS, the paper brought in people from many fields and ultimately advocates for a Bayesian approach to exoplanet life detection (named after 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. )
In most basic terms, the Bayes approach describes the probability of an event based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. A simple example: Runners A and B have competed four times, and runner A won three times. So the probability of A winner is high, right? But what if the two competed twice on a rainy track and each won one race. If the forecast for the day of the next race is rain, the probability of who will be the winner would change.
This approach not only embraces probability as an essential way forward, but it is especially useful in terms of weighing probabilities involving many measurements and fields. Because the factors involved in finding a biosignature are so complex and potentially confounding, they argue, the field has to think in terms of the probability that a number of biosignatures together suggest the presence of life, rather than a 100 percent certain detection (although that may some day be possible.)
Nancy Kiang of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, explores (among other subjects) the possibility of using photosynthetic pigments as biosignatures on exoplanets.
Both Domagal-Goldman and collaborator Nancy Kiang of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies are eager to adopt climate modeling and it’s ability to use known characteristics of divergent sub-fields to put together a big picture. (Those two, along with Niki Parenteau of NASA Ames Research Center led the NExSS effort.)
“For instance,” Kiang said, “the general circulation model (GCM) at GISS simulates the global circulation patterns of a planet’s wind, heat, moisture, and gases, providing statistical behaviors of the simulated climate.” She sees a similar possibility with exoplanets and biosignatures.
Such a computer model can take in data from different fields and come up with some probabilities. The model “might tell us that a planet is habitable over a certain percent of its surface,” she said.
“A geochemist or planetary formation person might then tell us that if certain chemistry exists on that planet, it has good potential for prebiotic compounds to form. A biologist and geologist might tell us that certain surface signatures on the planet are plausible for either life or mineral background.” That’s not a robust biosignature, but the probability that it could be life is not zero, depending on origin of the signature.
“These different forms of information can be integrated into a Bayesian analysis to tell us the likelihood of life on the planet,” she wrote.
One arm of the NExSS team is already using the tools of climate modeling to predict how particular conditions on exoplanets would play out under different circumstances.
I will return to the NExSS biosignatures white paper later, since it is so rich with cutting edge thinking about this upcoming stage in space science. But I do want to include one specific recommendation made by the group, which calls itself the Exoplanet Biosignatures Workshop Without Walls (EBWWW).
What they say is necessary now is for more biologists to join the search for extraterrestrial life.
“The EBWWW revealed that the search for exoplanet life is still largely driven by astronomers and planetary scientists, and that this field requires more input from origins of life researchers and biologists to advance a process-based understanding for planetary biosignatures.
“This includes assessing the {already assessed probability} that a planet may have life, or a life process evolved for a given planet’s environment. These advances will require fundamental research into the origins and processes of life, in particular for environments that vary from modern Earth’s. Thus, collaboration between origins of life researchers, biologists, and planetary scientists is critical to defining research questions around environmental context.”
The recommendation, it seems to me, illustrates both the youth and a maturing of the field.
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ENCIRCLED BY AN UFO? THE WEIRD ENCOUNTER OF CAPTAIN JÚLIO MIGUEL GUERRA
ENCIRCLED BY AN UFO? THE WEIRD ENCOUNTER OF CAPTAIN JÚLIO MIGUEL GUERRA
Following my own demarcations about the nature of a strange flying object having been sighted, I see a UFO as any object in the air which cannot be accounted for with our current knowledge. It stands to reason this isn’t necessarily the same thing as an alien spacecraft.
A UFO encircles a helpless aircraft. Artistic creation.
Given this definition, the general claim that UFOs really exist isn’t extraordinary by any means and seems almost certain to anyone having taken a look at the most puzzling sightings with an open eye.
Yet one can still find hardcore skeptics such as German debunker Werner Walter confidently asserting that there are “no unsolved cases“.
As we saw with the disappearance of Australian pilot Frederick Valentich, having “solved“ an intriguing case generally means picking and choosing some facts fitting the pet-theory of the “Skeptics“, while ignoring all other elements or explaining them away by resorting to incredibly unlikely ad-hoc hypotheses.
But there are some incidents which are ignored altogether by debunkers who do not write a sole page to “account“ for them in a conventional way.
In what follows, I reproduced such a case for which I’ve been (until now) utterly unable to find any debunking explanation.
Portugal, 1982
In the chapter he wrote for “UFOs,” Airline Captain Júlio Miguel Guerra relives his lengthy encounter with a highly active UFO while serving as a flight instructor for the Portuguese Air Force in 1982.
He writes: “At various times the object had been very close to me and I was able to verify that it was round with two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. I carefully looked at the lower one, which seemed to be somewhere between red and brown with a hole or dark spot in the center.
“The center band looked like it had some kind of a grid, and possibly a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was so bright and was reflected.”
The object circled his small airplane for 15 minutes while he was alone in the sky, in his DHC-1 Chipmunk. He made this drawing the day after the encounter and submitted it with his report to the Portuguese Air Force.
(Júlio Guerra, CNIFO Case Report)
Guerra states that the object “flew at a fantastic speed in a large elliptical orbit to the left, between 5,000 feet to the South and approximately 10,000 feet to the North, always from left to right, repeating this route over and over. “I tried to keep it in sight.”
Two fellow Air Force officers, Carlos Garcês and António Gomes, flew to the location, and they too watched the object repeat its elliptical course, passing between the two planes on each return, for about 10 minutes. They were able to estimate the size, given its proximity to the two aircraft: about eight to 10 feet.
After landing, all three pilots filed detailed, independent written reports with the Air Force. General José Lemos Ferreira, the Portuguese Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, authorized the release of all the records to a team of scientists and experts, which conducted a lengthy scientific investigation.
The group estimated that the unidentified object was flying at over 300 MPH vertically and its velocity when it circled Guerra’s aircraft was about 1550 MPH.
Since leaving the Air Force in 1990 after 18 years of service, Júlio Guerra has been a Captain with Portugália Airlines (TAP), Portugal’s largest commercial airline. He has 17,000 hours of flight experience, and in 2009 he received an aeronautic science degree from the Lusofona University of Oporto. (Courtesy Júlio Guerra)
It is worth noting that as he first noticed the object, the captain was flying at 5000 feet and perceived it as a metallic disk flying not far from the ground. He turned around to better observe it and the thing flew up to him in only 10 seconds. The sky was clear and the visibility was excellent.
Trying to put myself in the shoes of a debunker is really hard in that specific situation. I’ll nevertheless try to put on my pseudo-skeptical hat and look for conventional explanations compatible with known phenomena or aircrafts.
Weather balloon
Weather balloon
This is the first thing which sprang to the mind of the flight officers and other pilots he contacted by radio while having this strange experience.
Their initial reaction was that it must be a kind of weather balloon and some of his colleagues even laughed at him.
The problem is that Guerra could clearly recognize that the object was initially flying close to the ground while the visibility was incredibly good under this cloudless sky. Whilst distance appreciations are never perfect, it is extremely far-fetched to think that this experienced pilot would perceive an object flying just below him as being near to the soil, that is at least 4000 feet lower than it actually was.
Given that, the fact that the thing covered vertically in only 10 seconds such a distance rules out that it was some kind of non-motorized balloon.
What is more, in order to circle Julio’s plane (a fact attested by the two other pilots having attended to the event), it needed to have glided considerably more quickly than him.
Its peculiar orbiting movements would also involve an extraordinarily improbable wind distribution at the time and place of the incident.
Consequently, I think we can completely forget this possibility.
Conventional aircraft
The next theory would be that Guerra had been confronted with a conventional helicopter or plane he and the two other pilots misidentified.
Unknown form
The first objection is that this doesn’t fit at all the shape of the object which had neither body nor rear.
Its oval form made up of two halves doesn’t correspond to any known aircraft.
Incredible velocity
The scientific committee having meticulously studied this case estimated the speed of the object during his vertical ascension to 300 miles per hour and even to 1550 miles per hour as it was circling around Julio Guerra, based on the data of the three men who had already produced three independent reports after the sighting. While such numbers might be imprecise, it can be deduced that it was truly flying much faster than their planes, which is at the very least incompatible with it being a helicopter or any usual type of planes back in 1982.
Weird behavior
The whole behavior of the object is also completely at odds with it being a private or military aircraft being piloted by someone else. What motive could have had any other pilot to rapidly fly towards another aircraft and start out circling him in such a bizarre fashion?
Taking together, these three factors make it extremely implausible that the three men had just encountered a conventional piloted aircraft.
Full fleshed hallucination
(c) Alan Davie; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Delirious hallucination.
I think that the only way a debunker could cope with this sighting would be by declaring it was entirely hallucinatory.
The sober and experienced pilot Julio Guerra began to see an object which didn’t exist and during the next 15 minutes, he hallucinated it doing coherent movements around him even though there was nothing at all out there.
Since the two other pilots were expecting to see something, they experienced a similar hallucination consistent with what their colleague had shortly described to them.
Needless to say that the probability of three mentally sane individuals having such a shared coherent hallucination during a elongated timespan is astronomically low.
Imagine they had just reported having sighted another plane flying illegally. After having made their report to the local military police, one of the responsible just shrugged and said: “Well, I’m pretty sure they saw no plane at all but just dreamed up the whole thing.“ what would be your own reaction?
Would not such a statement sound incredibly ridiculous and even outrageously absurd?
Yet, for die-hard skeptics convinced that there must be an ordinary explanation for anything seen in the sky, this is pretty much the only game in town.
Conclusion: an unknown flying object
I myself wholeheartedly echo Guerra’s own conclusion: “I have no clue about whether or not it stemmed from another universe, another planet or was of earthly origin. I just don’t know.“
It doesn’t seem to me unlikely that what he saw was a sophisticated purely human creation (such as a sort of very advanced drone or robot). But this would then mean that there is a huge gap between human technology as it is publicly known and the very best vehicles and weapons our governments really dispose of.
Anyway, such kinds of incidents show us that when “Skeptics“ affirm that there isn’t any sighting they can’t conventionally account for, all what they mean is that one can explain everything away through piling up widely implausible assumptions made in hindsight.
Op het nog steeds bevroren continent van Antarctica komen steeds meer dingen boven water, zoals nu een object dat lijkt te zijn neergestort.
Het heeft waarschijnlijk een berg geraakt en komt na een spoor door de sneeuw van meer dan een kilometer uiteindelijk tot stilstand.
Bovenstaande lijkt een logische verklaring wanneer je kijkt naar de satellietbeelden waarop te zien is hoe een onbekend object een lang spoor door de sneeuw maakt en dan abrupt stopt.
De plek waar dit gebeurt is, is een eiland wat zich bevindt tussen het uiterste puntje van Antarctica en het Zuid Amerikaanse Chili. Het eiland is met een rode cirkel aangegeven.
Wanneer we verder inzoomen, ziet het er zo uit.
En daar, ergens op dat eiland, is een langwerpig, sigaarvormig object te zien in de sneeuw dat na een lang spoor te hebben gemaakt abrupt tot stilstand komt. Om het zelf op te zoeken, gebruik je de volgende coördinaten:
Wanneer je de beelden goed bekijkt, begint het spoor aan de rand van een berg, waardoor het lijkt alsof dit object eerst de rand van die berg heeft geraakt waarna het uiteindelijk een kilometer verderop in de sneeuw tot stilstand kwam.
Wanneer je de plek bekijkt bij de berg waar het spoor begint, dan lijkt het alsof dat de plek is waar dit object de berg heeft geraakt, verschillende onderdelen alle kanten zijn opgevlogen en het hoofddeel van het sigaarvormig object de sneeuw in wordt gelanceerd waar het na ongeveer een kilometer tot stilstand komt.
Hier is een opname gemaakt vanaf de andere kant van het object en hier zie je duidelijk de grote schaduwen. Deze is op het hoogste punt 12 meter, waardoor je dus over een behoorlijk object spreekt.
Wanneer je het spoor van dichtbij bekijkt, dan zie je goed dat hier geen sprake is van iets dat natuurlijk is gevormd, maar een duidelijk spoor dat door een solide object is gemaakt.
Er zijn misschien nog andere verklaringen mogelijk, maar duidelijk is dat daar iets in de sneeuw ligt wat niet door de natuur is gevormd.
Lying within the Tualatin Valley of Oregon, in the United States, just 25 miles from the major city of Portland, is the rustic suburb of Forest Grove. Originally sprouted from a farming community, the quiet town has a population of just over 20,000, and is usually a peaceful place outside of major news and the noise of the city. However, in 2016 the usual quiet was rudely broken when terrified residents of the rural town began to report hearing an unearthly loud shrieking noise piercing out from the surrounding countryside at night that no one could explain, and which would go on to generate national news and baffle experts.
To those who heard it, the sound was described variously as being a shrill squeal, a flute-like blare, the screeching of car brakes, a steam whistle, a mechanical scream, metal scraping against metal, an off-kilter siren, or a banshee like moan, but it was agreed by all that no matter what exactly it sounded like it was a truly intense and nerve-wracking racket which purportedly kept people awake and was said to drive pets nuts. The weird noise was also described as coming from the trees, from backyards, and even from the middle of the street, and no one could quite figure out where or what it was emanating from. The story was propelled even further into the mainstream consciousness when a video made by resident Paula Lynch was released purporting to contain one of the mystery shrieks, and the Internet went nuts trying to figure out what it was. One Dave Nemeyer, fire marshal of Forest Grove Fire and Rescue, investigated and said of it:
It’s definitely a horrendous noise. I have no idea what the noise is. [The resident] described to us that it was coming from the middle of the street. To me, it sounds like the sound of train tracks, that metal screeching sound, but there are no train tracks near her home … so that’s obviously ruled out.
Forest Grove, Oregon
Several other people began to come forward with their own recordings of the anomalous noise, which supposedly typically lasted from 10 seconds all the way up to several minutes, and the whole mystery deepened further. It was widely thought that the sound perhaps came from some broken pipeline or leak, but when this was checked out it was found that the sound did not really match this audio signature. For their part, Forest Grove Public Works and the gas company Northwest Natural denied that the sound could be coming from them or a ruptured gas line, and that even if it had it would have absolutely released a strong odor of gas, and the fire department also put to rest the idea that it was coming from a fire alarm somewhere. The Department of Forestry also said that whatever it was did not originate from them. Additionally, the nearby train tracks are rarely used, and authorities explained that this could not be the origin of the sound either. Some suggested that pranksters could have been behind it, but there was no evidence of this. Forest Grove Police Capt. Mike Herbs said of the noise:
There would be a city ordinance violation if somebody was creating a noise like this, that late at night, on purpose to annoy people. At this point, we don’t have information that would lead us to believe that’s the case. It sounds to me like some kind of release valve or some kind of pipe that’s under pressure. We’ve had different suggestions from folks that it’s an alien mother ship or a warning sign of something to come.
Yes, of course aliens come into the picture. The wilder theories included that the sound was made by UFOs or that it was the wailing of some strange creature or entity like a ghost or Sasquatch, or even the portentous trumpeting of angels from Heaven. Indeed, whole forums were dedicated to the unexplained noise, where there were theories ranging that it was produced from vast underground bases and government mind control experiments, to the inscrutable activities of government installations or more paranormal explanations like ghosts and UFOs. Whatever it was, the mystery shriek of Forest Grove was all over the news on websites, in newspapers, on news shows, and on TV programs such as Inside Edition and World News Tonight.
Then, almost as suddenly as it appeared the noise stopped and the town was quite again. In the void of silence left by the lack of the mysterious squeal, the speculation has continued and theories remained rampant, with people of all opinions sticking fast to their own ideas on what it could have been. The most rational explanation is still that tis was some sort of problem with a pipe or a valve, and a physics professor at Forest Grove’s Pacific University, an Andy Dawes, has thrown in his two cents by saying:
An audio analyst from Florida emailed me a fairly detailed report that certainly agreed well with the hypothesis that it came from a faulty valve within an HVAC (or heat pump) unit. If the original source was a failing valve, then it may have gone away completely when the failure was complete.
Is that all this was, some leaky pipe? Or was there something more to this? Was it perhaps something beyond our ability to rationally explain? Whatever it was, the mystery shriek of Forest Grove has never been solved, and continues to baffle all who hear it. Considering that it has not been heard since, there is the very real possibility that we may never know what caused it, but for now it seems as if the residents of the area can rest easy. At least for now.
Sky-Watcher caught Being-Plasma Ball traveling through Space
Sky-Watcher caught Being-Plasma Ball traveling through Space
A sky-watcher David S captured a strange phenomenon through his telescope on the evening of March 2, 2018 around 9.30 pm using a Canon powershot camera with a Celestron 130 telescope with an 18 mm eyepiece and a 2x barlow lens.
The short footage shows a strange object that looks like a kind of transparent plasma ball with a being or alien residing inside the ball.
Image left: Original Enlarged - Image right: Original Enlarged Over Exposed
Despite this kind of phenomenon is not yet understood, it is not the first time images have been captured of orbs or plasma balls that show beings residing inside the objects.
Former Pentagon X Files Project Head Reveals US Intelligence Officers Leak UFO Footage Themselves To Get More Pieces of the Puzzle
Former Pentagon X Files Project Head Reveals US Intelligence Officers Leak UFO Footage Themselves To Get More Pieces of the Puzzle
Defence officials need help from the public after all to find answers on top secret UFO videos. Former head of real life X-Files programme of the Pentagon revealed that defence officials leak UFO footage themselves to the public in a bid to find answers.
Luis Elizondo, the former top secret programme head, revealed that the releasing of two strange videos of UFO encounters late in 2017 was intended to ask help from the public in solving these mysteries by putting together more pieces of the puzzle.
The Pentagon confirmed back in December the existence of the $22 million programmed which investigated UFO sightings from 2007 to 2012.
In a recent video clip, Elizondo claims that the defence officials declassified and released the footages themselves so that members of the public could try identifying the mysterious objects in those videos.
The Pentagon claimed that the funding for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and its operation ceases in 2012 but Elizondo said that the program itself had not ended. The bombshell revelations provide the clearest insight so far on the secret UFO project of the Pentagon.
Elizondo has promised to reveal some more information as long as it has been approved for release. Ufologist Alejandro Rojas said that the insider’s view of Elizondo is invaluable.
Humans Are Being Alien Abducted. Why Is It Happening?
Humans Are Being Alien Abducted. Why Is It Happening?
People forget that Cthulhu is not actually evil, he’s amoral. He just doesn’t care about you one way or the other. These aliens could be the same way. So all the fear you endure, the tears, the pain from their experiments, all the things you feel from their research; it means nothing. They’re just insignificant reactions to them. Not because they’re sociopaths, but because they just don’t give a shit about humanity either way. They just want to come here, do the research they were going to do, and get the hell off this crazy monkey planet.
Let’s say that there are aliens and they live in the closest star system to us, Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is about 4.2 light years away. It will take us tens of thousands of years to travel that distance with our current technology. If they can cross that distance, that would mean that they are really smart cookies.
The aliens would have to cross the void of space very quickly for it to be practical to do research about another sentient species in another star system. If it took them thousands of years to cross the gap, they would likely be looking to colonize. If it took hundreds of generations to travel somewhere, it would be pointless to even send a scouting mission, as it would take hundreds of generations to get any data. When space travel is that slow, traveling vast distances would have to be an all or nothing effort. So if they were sending only a few researchers over (as a ship that can support generations of life forms would be easily detected), that would mean that they were crossing the void at least fast enough for time dilation to take effect so a few researchers can survive the journey. This means that they are really really smart cookies.
Now technology that uses energy will give off some form of radiation as a waste product. This is because the laws of the universe prevent things from being 100% percent efficient. (This is why phones, tablets, and computers heat up during use). If they had the technology to travel that quickly and then slow down in our solar system (as an object in motion stays in motion and if one had enough energy to go 50% the speed of light, for example, they would need just as much energy to slow back down), it would give off radiation that would be detectable to us. Even if their technology is 99.9% efficient, it would give off some radiation that we could detect.
And don’t forget that 0.1% of the energy needed to slow down from 50% light speed is still a lot of energy. Along with that, they would need to communicate back to their homeworld any data they gather. This would also be something we could pick up on. If they established a base of operations in the solar system, then the energy used to power the technology keeping them alive and processing data would also give off some radiation signature.
We have probes all over the place. The various rovers and satellites would have picked up something if they were on Mars. The sphere of satellites around Earth and the moon would pick up something if they were there. Juno would likely pick up on something if they were on one of Jupiter’s moons. Cassini would found them if they were on one of Saturn’s moons. Flybys of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto likely would have found them out if they were there. And if they were on Mercury or Venus, Earth would have been between them and Proxima Centauri multiple times, so we would have stumbled upon their communications with sensors here on Earth. For us to not detect them means that they have found a way to hide their radiation from us. This means that they are really really really smart cookies.
Given that they are hiding their existence from us, and they aren’t trying to make their presence known far and wide without a shadow of a doubt to Earth’s people (or at least the scientific community), they aren’t trying to make first contact.
One could argue that they are making contact with the government and the government is hiding this from us, but this logic is flawed. First, meeting aliens is a big fucking deal. The US government could barely keep the contents of the patriot act secret for as long as it did. That was leaked in about a decade. A big deal like this would likely be leaked much faster by a whistleblower, assuming a hacker doesn’t beat them to it. Second, scientists want information to be seen by many so they can use their knowledge to advance mankind. There would be no reason for a scientist to hide this information from everyone, so this makes the odds of a whistleblower revealing this more likely. Lastly, the US government is likely not the only government that they would make contact with, and one of these governments is likely to be less deceptive to its populace than the US is. Let’s say that they also contacted Denmark, and Denmark is transparent to its citizens about first contact. The news will spread over Twitter in literal seconds, making any US efforts to hide first contact pointless.
So they aren’t here to be known. They also aren’t here to take resources. Given that they can cross multiple light year gaps in space and can hide any waste radiation that they produce, the aliens are very advanced. The difference in technology between them and us would be greater than that between us and an ant hill. Remember when I said they were “really really really smart cookies”. That was a massive understatement. They could get any resource they want in abundance from the solar system without getting close to the Earth. Metals and minerals are common in the asteroid belt. Gases can be taken from the gas giants. Heck, if they needed a specific molecule, they could just siphon hydrogen from Jupiter, use nuclear fusion to convert it into the atoms they need, and arrange the atoms into the molecules they need. They have no reason to visit earth and would likely leave us alone. If there was a convoluted scenario they did need a non-living thing from Earth, they could just bulldoze the planet. Again, we are an anthill to them.
So that leaves research. They’ve taken great efforts to hide their presence from us, so they want to keep the research a secret. Why would they take humans at night, then return them to tell their friends that the aliens are there? To reiterate, we are ants to them. If they were doing any level of research on us they would know, based off of news stories, that it isn’t uncommon for someone to go missing and never be found again, or found several years later as a corpse in a river or something. If they killed their test subjects, they will remain hidden.
But if they do take people at night and return them, why would they do so?
It wouldn’t be a moral reason. Again, they would see our media and know that contact with an advanced alien species would topple religion, cause several revolutions, and a war or two may be started. At the very least, mass rioting would ensue. More humans would die if their presence was known. Why let one person live when it dooms a hundred to die?
So maybe they want their presence to be known, a little. They keep the major giveaways of their presence hidden, so most people think that their existence is improbable at best. Yet they let one or two people see them and make everyone else think that the people who saw them are crazy. They may also mess with some NASA footage now and again to make their presence kinda known, but not common knowledge. Then they sit back and watch the show.
I bet that this would turn into some entertainment to them. They watch as the hairless monkey creatures squabble amongst themselves about the existence of magical creatures from the sky. They would now be laughing their asses off as they watch Ancient Aliens. It is utterly hilarious that some people will credit their entire civilization to beings that the scientific community doesn’t even have strong evidence to prove their existence. If they were messing with us, there is no way they could have expected Ancient Aliens to be made.
If there were aliens that shaped the course of human civilization, they likely already have enough notes on us to make abductions pointless today. If a different race of aliens came to us, they would likely also know of the aliens that already shaped our civilisation and opt to trade notes instead of doing their own research (That, and the existence of one race of aliens is already unlikely, so the odds that there are two races close enough to us to do research on us, and the odds that, if they both existed, both managed to remain as hidden from us as well enough that their existence is considered a conspiracy theory to most people today, are astronomical).
But, if you are a follower of William of Ockham (Occam’s Razor) it leaves us with the following scenario.
Aliens are not taking us, it’s a sleep disorder thing. Before aliens were invented, people would say they were taken by demons. This has been going on for many centuries. Humans have several flaws in the way our brains behave under certain stresses. If you experience sleep paralysis, your body will not move and you’re brain will be half asleep. This allows dream-like images to become part of the real world. Your brain will make up stories about why you can’t move and you can easily hallucinate animals, aliens, or a succubus. Imagine half waking up and not being able to do anything. Imagine the fear of struggling to move, but thinking you’re being held down. It’s natural that your brain would go through all of the possibilities and arrive at something you fear. With most people that fear is something getting in your house, violating your body, and doing it all while you’re utterly defenseless.
Your hypnogogic state will seem just as real to you as when you are awake. That is because the same parts of the brain that create your daytime reality are the ones that are utilized in your hallucinatory state.
Of course, that does not answer to the claims of multiple people being abducted at the same time or wide awake abductions that happen nowhere around bedtime. It all comes down ultimately to the evidence. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence in peoples accounts of being taken but absolutely nothing else of substance.
With the recent release of the Pentagon’s UFO footage, which comprised of two videos filmed by U.S. Navy pilots of objects performing maneuvers that defy our current understanding of aerodynamics, the topic of UFOs has once again grabbed headlines around the world.
The video was a step forward towards disclosing the fact that there are unknown objects in our atmosphere that are commonly spotted and tracked on radar by defence authorities. They are highly technologically advanced, more so than any air-craft which is available in any global inventory at the moment.
Further to this, many people have had strange sightings that don’t really ‘make sense,’ in the realm of known aircrafts. The frequency of these sightings are not uncommon these days, especially for avid star gazers.
Haven’t seen one yourself? Well, how often are you looking up into the night sky? For many people, the answer is little to never.
Who Man’s These Craft’s?
The next question to be asked is, are these objects, or at least some of them, extraterrestrial?
According to one of the pilots who filmed the UFO released by the Pentagon, yes, they are, at least that’s their belief. The Pentagon’s “aerial defence” program director, Luis Elizondo also shared his belief that they are, along with hundreds of other high ranking personnel from several branches of military, intelligence, academia, aerospace and academia. He said that there is plenty of evidence to make that connection… The most recent example might be Robert Bigelow, founder of the Bigelow Aerospace corporation who, not long ago, stated that he knows we are being visited, and have been visited by ET’s.
“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. . . . We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time. . . . I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.”
Ancient history is fascinating to say the least, and we’ve discovered so much about it. But, at the same time, we still know very little about Earth’s history and even the history of humanity. One of the most fascinating points to make about ancient history is that much of which was once considered mythological, is actually turning out to be true.
Perhaps information that didn’t fit within our framework of accepted knowledge was deemed mythological? How can we take seriously the writings of ancient Greek philosophers when describing social life and other aspects of humanity, yet when it comes to other areas of theworld, like the Oracle at Delphi, they are placed in a the mythological realm?
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Perhaps some was mythological, but perhaps some of what we call mythological was actually real.
Another great example is the Lost Land of Atlantis, a highly technologically advanced civilization that would shake what we thought we knew of human history, it’s not so much a tale anymore, and it’s one of many examples that show what we’ve been taught may not be completely correct.
For anybody who has done their research in this area, it’s quite clear given the evidence we now have, that Atlantis was far from a mythological place. Given our research on Atlantis, and many scholars out there, Atlantis is no joke, and perhaps before that, Lemuria as well.
This is why when it comes to stories of figures like Quetzalcoatl, it’s always interesting to contemplate that they were real.
The video footage mentioned above, which was released by the Pentagon, was done so in conjunction with To The Stars Academy headed by Tom Delonge, along with Luis Elizondo (mentioned earlier), and several other figures who’ve held high level positions within the Department of Defence. The Pentagon is working with the academy in the disclosure of UFO’s.
That in itself is a completely different discussion with many implications. It’s hard to trust the government these days, so can we really trust them with UFO disclosure and what that means? Will leave this for another time.
Delonge recently made some interesting comments about his experiences so far, and the contacts he’s been able to make, and the discussions that have been had.
“I went and met a former director of the CIA and NSA…Right when I sat down and told him about the book you know what he says to me? He goes, “I didn’t read much science fiction when I was a kid but I read a lot about Greek mythology”…The sixth biggest defense contractor in the world is a company called Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)…and in the front of the building (SAIC’s headquarters) you have an obelisk coming out of a fake leg and two Atlantians on thrones, and they’re both holding pyramids and one says the past and one says the future, and they’re 8 foot tall statues.”
So, who was Quetzalcoatl? Considered to be a mythical tale, Spanish chronicler Juan de Torquemada states that Quetzalcoatl was ‘a fair and ruddy complexioned man with a long beard. Another describes him as follows:
“A mysterious person…a white man with strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes, and a flowing beard. He was dressed in a long, white robe reaching to his feet. He condemned sacrifices, except of fruits and flowers, and was known as the god of peace…When addressed on the subject of war he is reported to have stopped up his ears with his fingers.” (source)
Graham Hancock, one of the world’s foremost researchers into such things, describes another description from Central American Mayan tradition in his book, Fingerprints of the Gods:
“He came from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles. He was a tall, bearded white man who taught people to use fire for cooking. He also built houses and showed couples that they could live together as husband and wife; and since people often quarrelled in those days, he taught them to live in peace.”
This figure is spoken of the Mesoamerican culture.
It’s interesting because there are multiple accounts of various figures, not just Quetzalcoatl, all of which seemed to have provided humanity with a little ‘push’, here and there, and assistance with regards to discovery. Nothing was really done for humanity, it seemed that the common theme through all of these contacts was for us to better ourselves, and be responsible for our own progression, with a little bit of assistance.
Not all of the ‘gods’ were kind, loving and peaceful. There were others who required sacrifices, and seemed to almost be a little opposite of ones like Quetzalcoatl.
What’s also interesting is that the descriptions of Quetzalcoatl resemble modern day descriptions of some, supposed extraterrestrial beings. Those who have examined the lore, like myself, would know this. Could these have been who we consider today, benevolent extraterrestrial beings? Perhaps.
Ancient history, along with many ancient cultures who pre-date modern-day religion, all have very interesting stories which can easily be interpreted has highly advanced beings from another place.
The idea that these are just mere interpretations seem to be dwindling every year. Being an avid researcher in the field for more than a decade, I can tell you that extraterrestrial intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg. It truly does open up Pandora’s box, and there is much more to this universal story, so much so that we probably couldn’t even comprehend it.
The evidence today points to the idea that we’ve been visited for a long time, so to contemplate the idea that these were extraterrestrial visits is not out of the question.
“There are objects in our atmosphere which are technically miles in advance of anything we can deploy, that we have no means of stopping them coming here … [and] that there is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations….Who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
–Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)
If they have been here as well as visiting us for a long time, that’s good news. It takes out the idea of an ‘extraterrestrial invasion’, because, if that were the case, it would have already happened by now.
To find all of our archived articles on the UFO/Extraterrestrial phenomenon, you can visit theexopolitics section of our website.
The meaning of Quetzalcoatl is “feathered serpent,” this is the translation that comes from ancient South America, from the Maya and the Aztecs. In Hancock’s book, he goes on to describe how there were other entities who resembled Quetzalcoatl quite closely:
“There were other deities, among the Maya in particular, whose identities seemed to merge closely with those of Quetzalcoatl. One was Votan, a great civilizer, who was also described as pale-skinned, bearded and wearing a long robe. Sholars could offer no translation for his name but his principal symbol, like that of Quetzalcoatl, was a serpent. Another closely related figure was Itzamana, the Mayan god of healing, who was robed and bearded individual, his symbol, too, was the rattlesnake.”
Graham, in his book, goes on to state:
“All of the legends stated unambiguously that Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan/Gucumatz/Votan/Itzamana had arrived in Central America from some-where very far away (across the “Eastern Sea”) and that amid great sadness he had eventually sailed off again in the direction whence he had come.”
This is an interested quote, and relates closely to a sentiment shared by a First Nations Canadian storyteller, Richard Wagamese:
“My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.” (source)
Interesting to think about. These are versions of history that old more plausibility to them than the ones we currently consider concrete. As we continue to move forward exponentially, perhaps our destiny is in the stars and we ourselves one day will be the extraterrestrials, or perhaps we already are.
There May Be Alien Life In Our Solar System, Say Experts
There May Be Alien Life In Our Solar System, Say Experts
According to scientists, certain microbes can develop and produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen under extrapolated conditions on Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth largest moon, according to a study published in Nature.
What does this mean? Well, it means that there’s a very high chance that we may not be the only life forms in our solar system, and that aliens are…real.
Satun’s satellite has been found to have a warm underground ocean and strange hydrothermal vents which may help support life, according to experts. Now, new research has offered groundbreaking evidence that certain microbes could survive in the moon’s ocean.
Enceladus’s plumes.
Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Now, scientists which refer to Enceladus as a hot spot in the search for alien life have discovered how certain methane-producing microbes on Earth, have the ability to survive extremely harsh conditions which may exist on Enceladus.
Furthermore, scientists explain how methane found around Enceladus’ surface may have been produced by microbial life, located just beneath its icy crust.
According to the cited scientific publication, prokaryotic microorganisms known as methanogenic archaea could develop under certain conditions assumed on Enceladus, using carbon dioxide and molecular hydrogen for growth, releasing methane.
Enceladus as seen from afar across Saturn’s rings.
Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
“I’m pleased people are starting to take deep looks at biological methane production,” says Christopher Glein, a geochemist and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute speaking to WIRED. “The next step is doing this hard work in the lab to figure out what life might look like from a spacecraft instrument’s point of view.”
To reach this conclusion, a team of researchers from the University of Vienna cultivated three of these microorganisms in the laboratory, under gas compositions and pressures similar to those attributed to Enceladus. One of the microbes, called Methanothermococcus Okinawensis, grew and produced methane, even in the presence of components that inhibited the growth of other methanogenic archanes, such as ammonia, carbon monoxide or formaldehyde.
This graphic shows how Cassini scientists think water interacts with rock at the bottom of the ocean of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, producing hydrogen gas.
In addition, scientists found that serpentinization – a process in which rocks are geochemically altered – that possibly occurred in the Enceladus nucleus, could generate enough hydrogen to support these prokaryotic microorganisms.
The recently obtained results support the idea that methanogenic archaea could, in theory, develop and produce methane in Enceladus. However, experts warn that methane can also be generated by geochemical, not biological, processes.
To find out whether or not Enceladus may in fact be an alien homeworld, “Future missions to Enceladus or other icy moons should be equipped to be able to detect methanogenic biosignatures related to methanogens, like certain lipids or ratios of certain carbon isotopes,” said study co-author Simon Rittmann, of the Department of Ecogenomics and Systems Biology at the University of Vienna in Austria, in an interview with space.com.
Record Breaker! Powerful Supernova Is Most Distant Ever Seen
Record Breaker! Powerful Supernova Is Most Distant Ever Seen
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
An extraordinarily powerful "superluminous supernova" that occurred 10.5 billion years ago is the most distant star explosion ever observed, a new study reports.
The Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, which means that light from the superluminous supernova (SLSN) has been streaking through space for about three-quarters of the universe's existence.
Astronomers first spotted SLSNs just a decade or so ago. As the name suggests, these objects are extreme versions of "normal" supernovas. Several different phenomena may trigger these events, including the infall of material onto neutron stars, the rapidly rotating corpses of once-massive stars, study team members said. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions]
The newfound SLSN is known as DES16C2nm, because it was first spotted by the Dark Energy Survey, an international research effort that aims to better understand the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion. The initial detection came in August 2016; DES16C2nm's brightness and distance were confirmed two months later by astronomers using the Very Large and Magellan telescopes in Chile and Hawaii's Keck Observatory.
"It's thrilling to be part of the survey that has discovered the oldest known supernova," study lead author Mathew Smith, of the University of Southampton in England, said in a statement. "DES16C2nm is extremely distant, extremely bright, and extremely rare — not the sort of thing you stumble across every day as an astronomer."
The discovery of DES16C2nm holds more than mere gee-whiz value, Smith added.
"The ultraviolet light from SLSN informs us of the amount of metal produced in the explosion and the temperature of the explosion itself, both of which are key to understanding what causes and drives these cosmic explosions," he said.
DES16C2nm may not keep its distance record for lon
"Finding more distant events, to determine the variety and sheer number of these events, is the next step," study co-author Mark Sullivan, also of the University of Southampton, said in the same statement. "Now [that] we know how to find these objects at even greater distances, we are actively looking for more of them as part of the Dark Energy Survey."
The Dark Energy Survey is a five-year project that kicked off in 2013. It uses a 570-megapixel camera, mounted on a telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes, to study 300 million distant galaxies throughout the cosmos.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that DES16C2nm lies 10.5 billion light-years from Earth. Because of the expansion of the universe, the object is actually much farther away than that. The previous version also equated SLSN with hypernovae; in reality, these are two similar but distinct types of star explosions.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.