Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
16-05-2018
NASA wants to send a tiny helicopter along with the next 2020 rover mission
NASA wants to send a tiny helicopter along with the next 2020 rover mission
It’s an amazing time to be alive. Consider this: humans have sent a man-made spacecraft around each and every planet in the solar system, as well as some of their moons. Although billions of miles might separate Earth from other planets in the solar system, and despite everything being in motion, we’ve managed this extraordinary feat.
No other planet has been more visited by our contraptions than Mars. We’ve sent orbiters, landers, and even 4×4 labs on wheels to the Red Planet. Now, for the first time, NASA wants to send a helicopter to Mars, which is meant to fly in very rarefied Martian atmosphere.
“Exploring the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars Helicopter exemplifies a successful marriage of science and technology innovation and is a unique opportunity to advance Mars exploration for the future,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “After the Wright Brothers proved 117 years ago that powered, sustained, and controlled flight was possible here on Earth, another group of American pioneers may prove the same can be done on another world.”
The little helicopter measures just one-meter long in rotor diameter, and its body is about the size of a small cat. It took four years of testing and tweaking to make the first prototype of the Mars-bound helicopter.
One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to build a helicopter that can fly in an atmosphere that’s about a thousand times thinner than on Earth. Just imagine that hovering just 10 feet (3 m) above the Martian surface is like soaring at 100,000 feet (30,000 m) above Earth. The highest a helicopter has ever flown is 40,000 feet (12,000 m), where the air becomes too thin to keep helicopters aloft.
“To make it fly at that low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be,” said Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Martian helicopter also features another innovation: it’s powered by solar cells that charge lithium batteries. Meanwhile, internal heating mechanisms will keep the flying machine warm through the frigid Martian night.
NASA’s Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020 rover, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Because it takes at least four minutes for light to travel to Mars from Earth (a delay that can grow to half an hour depending on how far the two planets are relative to each other), remote controlling the helicopter is out of the question. Instead, the machine is designed to receive pre-programmed commands from Earth, then execute them on its own, always autonomously navigating the environment in real-time.
The Mars Helicopter is expected to touch down on the Martian surface in February 2021, piggybacking a car-sized rover — a bigger, upgraded version of the Curiosity rover. After the rover lands on the Martian surface, the rotorcraft will detach and take off. Its first flight is intended to be short: just a 10-foot climb for 30 seconds before returning to the ground. If this initial test works well, the craft is supposed to make four more flights over a 30-day test period, with each flight getting progressively longer and more complex than the previous. If this little helicopter works as intended, it will set the stage for future, more complex rotorcrafts designed to act as scouts that can explore and map regions of Mars where scientists can’t even dream to send a rover.
“The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future explorers,” shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A80mBA6lHfcaid Zurbuchen. “We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from a ‘marscopter,’ we can only imagine what future missions will achieve.”
Here’s What We Know About The Robots That Might Build Our First Homes on the Moon
Here’s What We Know About The Robots That Might Build Our First Homes on the Moon
ispace
Rovers may soon traverse the surface of the Moon yet again. This time, though, they’ll have one noble mission: to build shelter the first human colonizers will inhabit.
A team of Japanese scientists is working to make this a reality. They started a company called ispace with the intention of launching a private space mission to the Moon. ispace envisions an entire colony, called “Moon Valley,” constructed not by human astronauts, but by robots instead. And they want to get started on it soon: the team is planning its first mission for late 2019, and a second in 2020.
The Moon is smaller than our other planetary neighbors, but it could become a second home for an exponentially growing human population back on Earth. But many, including Elon Musk, see the Moon as a stepping stone (or even just a place to stop for gas) to future space colonies on more distant planets, like Mars.
The team’s 8.3-pound lunar rover is shaped like a metallic beetle and is designed to house tools and instruments its clients may want (the company’s web site is strangely vague about what these may be, and what purpose they might serve). It also was designed to extract valuable resources that could later be used to build a city on the Moon. The team initially conceived of the project, at first dubbed “Sorato” (“white rabbit”), three years ago, as they planned to submit it to Google’s coveted Lunar X Prize, Wired reports.
But the X Prize Foundation has been pushing back its deadline for years. It was supposed to be 2014 originally, but after years of delays, it dissolved the prize this past January, since none of the finalists could meet Google’s ambitious deadlines.
That doesn’t seem to be fazing ispace. With a healthy $90 million in its first round of funding late last year (even SpaceX only raised $61 million in its first round, back in 2002), its effort to launch a private mission to the Moon no longer seems far-fetched.
But ispace isn’t the only company with ambitions to use robots to construct a new home on the surface of the Moon. The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration (PISCES) managed to build a four-wheeled robot that’s capable of building a landing pad for future space exploration on the Moon. It hasn’t done so, at least not yet — it’s only been tested in Hawaii under conditions that are decidedly Earth-like.
Other efforts, including one mission proposed by the European Space Agency, will test if local lunar soil could be used to 3D print a lunar base. By combining loose soil with special salts as “structural ink,” robotic 3D printers could one day build dome-shaped shelters that could house the first space explorers on the Moon.
MIT researchers created a competing project that looks particularly promising — last year, they 3D-printed the entire basic structure of a 12-foot high building in just 14 hours, with the help of a large industrial robotic arm. This “Digital Construction Platform” could build structures in remote places such as Antarctica first, and perhaps eventually on the Moon, or even Mars.
But who’s going to start building on the Moon first? NASA just canceled its only existing Moon Rover Project, and chances are, we’ll have a solid 4G phone connectionon the Moon, before we start actually living there. Private space companies might be a safer bet: SpaceX has big plans to build its own bases on the Moon, and eventually Mars, with the help of its BFR. Other companies, from Blue Origin to Moon Express, have already indicated they’re in the race, too.
It’s anybody’s guess when, or if, humans will call the Moon their home. But what isclear? It’s a pretty good idea to have robots build us a shelter first. And for that purpose, ispace seems to have a pretty promising candidate.
You may not carry your house on your back or release sulphuric acid, but you’ve got a lot more in common with a sea snail than you may think. Especially where your brain is concerned.
Yes, sea snails may have 20,000 neurons — a paltry sum compared to humans’ 100 billion. But scientists have been studying sea snails for a long time, and they know an awful lot about how the organisms learn. Many marine organisms function the same way mammals do, except the processes that keep them alive are just way less complicated. And sea snails are no exception — their nerves transmit impulses much the way ours do.
So, it’s impressive that researchers from UCLA were able to transfer memories of being shocked between marine snails. Even more impressive? That early research may someday pave the way for similar processes in humans.
In the study, published Monday in the journal eNeuro, snails in one group were trained to respond to a stimulus — in this case, a shock to the tail (animal lovers, don’t fear — the shock didn’t hurt the snails. It just triggered a defensive curl reflex, sort of like snatching your hand away from a hot stove). At first, the snails would only curl for a few seconds. But through repeated shocks, the researchers trained them to curl for longer, up to about 50 seconds.
Next, the team took some ribonucleic acid (RNA), which forms proteins based on cells’ DNA, from nerve tissue in the upper abdomen of trained snails and injected it into the untrained snails’ necks to get to their circulatory system. When they were shocked, the snails that weren’t injected with RNA curled for only a few seconds, the way all snails do when they haven’t been trained. But the ones injected with RNA from the trained snails? They held the pose for 40 seconds, as if they remembered how to respond to a stimulus, even though they had never encountered it before. The researchers also tested some of the same techniques on snail neurons in a petri dish.
This is a big deal because it helps clear up a longstanding scientific debate. See, some researchers think memories are stored in the synapses (the spaces between nerve cells). Another camp believed memories were stored in the nuclei of neurons. As study author David Glanzman told the BBC, “If memories were stored at synapses, there is no way our experiment would have worked.”
To treat memory-related illnesses in humans, we’ve first got to understand how the brain stores memories in the first place. The UCLA team suggests their research might one day allow us to, as the study states, “modify, enhance, or depress memories.” That could lead to new ways for people with early-stage Alzheimer’s to regain some of what they lost, or novel treatments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Let’s not get carried away, here — these are snails, after all. These findings don’t close the debate about where memories are stored, and they certainly don’t mean that we can instantly restore detailed memories in humans.
But there are many different types of RNA, and Glanzman’s team plans to do more research to figure out determine which types most directly impact memory.
So, we’re still a ways off from becoming a karate black belt simply by injecting some RNA into our necks, or downloading sweet dance moves directly to our minds. But we may be a step closer to it, thanks to the humble, oft-shocked sea snail.
WETENSCHAP Zo groot als 20 miljard zonnen. Het is amper voor te stellen, maar zo gigantisch is het superzware zwarte gat dat Australische astronomen hebben ontdekt. De grootste quasar ooit zou al dateren uit het vroege universum. Om de twee dagen slokt het gulzige monster een massa gelijk aan onze eigen zon op, en dat op meer dan twaalf miljard lichtjaar van ons.
Het zogenaamde supermassief zwart gat of quasar werd gespot door astronomen van de Australian National University (ANU), geleid door Christian Wolf van de Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, met de SkyMapper-telescoop, met behulp van de GAIA-satelliet van ESA. Het zwart gat produceert ultraviolet licht en X-stralen, doordat het gassen en stoffen opslorpt. De temperaturen lopen er zo hoog op dat ze mogelijk het sterrenstelsel waartoe het zwart gat behoort, zouden kunnen verwoesten.
Het is, voor zover bekend, het snelst groeiende zwarte gat in het heelal. Ontstaan op het moment dat ons universum, van inmiddels 13,8 miljard jaar, zo’n 1,2 miljard jaar oud was.
1 procent groter elk 1 miljoen jaar
“Het groeit zo snel dat het duizenden keren helderder schijnt dan een heel sterrenstelsel doordat het dagelijks zoveel gassen opzuigt en zo heel wat wrijving en hitte doet ontstaan”, zegt Wolf. Elk één miljoen jaar groeit het met één procent aan, wat extreem zeldzaam is. “Als een dergelijk monster in het centrum van onze Melkweg zou zitten, dan zou het tien keer helderder zijn dan de volle maan. Het zou schitteren als een ongelooflijk heldere puntige ster, die bijna alle sterren aan de hemel zou uitvegen.”
Ook onze Melkweg kent een superzwaar zwart gat, maar dat is een lichtgewicht in vergelijking met deze ontdekking. Met een massa van vijf miljoen zonnen is dat ‘van ons’ maar liefst 40.000 kleiner dan wat de SkyMapper ontdekte. Mocht dát zwarte gat zich centraal in ons melkwegstelsel bevinden, dan zou leven op aarde waarschijnlijk niet mogelijk zijn door de hoeveelheid röntgenstralen. “Maar geen paniek”, zegt Wolf. “Het zal ons niet opslokken. Daarvoor is het te ver weg van ons.”
Big Bang
“Verrassend genoeg hebben we al zo’n 800 miljoen jaar na de Big Bang zulke enorme zwarte gaten gevonden in het vroege universum.” Hoe ze tot zo’n massa groeiden, zo snel na de oerknal, is een groot mysterie voor de natuurkunde. Ze moeten lange tijd supersnel gegroeid zijn, of ze zijn ontstaan uit massieve zwarte gaten, die zich vormden tijdens de donkere vroege tijden door directe instorting.” Het onderzoeksteam is nu op zoek naar nog sneller groeiende zwarte gaten om antwoorden te vinden.
“Dit heeft implicaties voor hoe het universum ontstond en welk mechanisme de oerknal teweegbracht”, zegt Tamara Davis van de University of Queensland nog.
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15-05-2018
Leven we in een multiversum dat vol buitenaards leven zit? Dit nieuwe onderzoek werpt licht op de zaak
Leven we in een multiversum dat vol buitenaards leven zit? Dit nieuwe onderzoek werpt licht op de zaak
Andere universa zitten mogelijk vol buitenaards leven, zo blijkt uit een nieuwe studie waar The Independent over schrijft.
Astronomen vragen zich al geruime tijd af of we in een universum leven dat slechts één van vele is. Je kunt je vervolgens afvragen of andere universa ook leven bevatten.
Als het multiversum blijkt te bestaan zit het mogelijk vol met verschillende soorten buitenaards leven, aldus het nieuwe onderzoek.
Veel geschikter
Aan de hand van computersimulaties hebben wetenschappers vastgesteld dat andere delen van het multiversum veel geschikter zijn voor leven dan voorheen werd gedacht.
Huidige theorieën voorspellen dat er veel meer donkere energie in ons eigen universum zou moeten zijn.
Voegen we echter meer donkere energie toe aan ons heelal, dan zou het zo snel uitdijen dat materie geen sterren en planeten kan vormen.
Vele verschillende universa
Het multiversum kan dit verklaren. Volgens sommige wetenschappers zijn er vele verschillende universa en hebben sommige meer donkere energie dan andere.
De nieuwe studie laat zien dat sterren en planeten zich ook gewoon kunnen vormen als er meer donkere energie is.
Nauwelijks invloed
“We vroegen ons af hoeveel donkere energie er kan zijn voordat leven onmogelijk is,” zei Pascal Elahi van de University of Western Australia.
“Onze simulaties toonden aan dat de versnelde expansie als gevolg van donkere energie nauwelijks invloed heeft op de geboorte van sterren, en dus plekken waar leven kan ontstaan,” vervolgde hij.
Ons universum is dus eigenlijk niet zo heel speciaal.
Mysterieus harig zeewezen aangespoeld op Filipijnen. Lokale bewoners staan voor een raadsel
Mysterieus harig zeewezen aangespoeld op Filipijnen. Lokale bewoners staan voor een raadsel
-Op de Filipijnen is een mysterieus zeewezen aangespoeld. Er wordt gespeculeerd dat het gaat om het karkas van een wezen uit de diepste delen van de oceaan.
Het zes meter lange object, dat bedekt lijkt te zijn met haar, stelt lokale bewoners voor een raadsel.
Het wezen, dat aanspoelde op het strand van San Antonio in de provincie Oriental Mindoro, trok veel bekijks.
Grijswitte massa
Vrijdag om 19.00 uur lokale tijd spoelde de grijswitte massa aan. Velen maakten foto’s van het vreemde wezen.
Autoriteiten vermoeden dat het gaat om het lichaam van een walvis dat in staat van ontbinding is.
Lokale bewoners reageerden geschokt. “Oriental Mindoro zal worden getroffen door een aardbeving,” zei Tam Maling. “Dit is een teken dat er iets ergs staat te gebeuren. Bid voor ons.”
Geschrokken
“Velen reageerden geschrokken toen ze het nieuws kregen, waaronder ikzelf,” voegde Vincent Dela Pena Badillo toe.
“Volgens overleveringen gebeurt er iets ergs als wezens uit de diepste delen van de oceaan beginnen te verschijnen,” klonk het.
Dood monster
De kinderen van Imelda Mariz dachten dat het een ‘dood monster’ was. “Ik kon het niet geloven. Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien,” zei ze.
In februari vorig jaar spoelde er ook al een mysterieuze ‘harige’ massa aan op de Filipijnen.
Zoals duidelijk werd op het eiland Hawaii zijn de vreemde apocalyptische geluiden misschien in verband te brengen met heftige aardveranderingen.
Soortgelijke geluiden worden niet alleen daar gehoord, maar ook bijvoorbeeld bij onze zuiderburen in België.
Voor ons zijn de ervaringen van lezers heel waardevol, omdat wanneer je een goed beeld wilt krijgen van iets dan is de aanwezigheid van getuigen altijd belangrijk.
Daarom worden bij geniepige False Flag operaties de videobeelden met daarop verklaringen van getuigen altijd heel snel verwijderd, omdat getuigen meestal gewoon vertellen wat ze hebben ervaren.
Naar aanleiding van ons verhaal over de vreemde apocalyptische geluiden op Hawaii, enige tijd voor de aardbeving en de vulkaanuitbarsting, stuurt een lezer uit België het volgende (dank!):
Ik lees net het artikel over ‘ trompetgeschal’.
‘n 10-tal dagen geleden , het was nog vrij warm , stond ik ’s nachts ( rond 3.oo u ,3.30’u) voor het raam , en vond het …raar…..
Ik woon in de stille Kempen , niet direct op den buiten , maar zeker ’s nachts hoor je hier bijna niets, tenzij gekende geluiden hier en daar … soms.
’s Morgens zeg ik tegen mijn man ; “ wat raar vannacht . ’t Was alsof Francorchamps een race had vannacht , hier ergens in de buurt … ik hoorde aanhoudend het scheurende geluid van racende auto’s in de verte … het leek erg op dat geluid van die video (10 mei).
Door de video te horen , schoot het mij weer te binnen, mét kippenvel ….
Tussendoor hoorde ik herhaaldelijk ‘ een HST ’ trein in de verte voorbij donderen , … die geluiden wisselden zich af …
Hier is een spoor en een eindstation op 7 min. stappen ,maar om 23.50u stopt de laatste trein hier , en een trein loopt hier langzaam binnen ,of vertrekt net … en overdag horen we wel eens iets in de verte , als de wind goed staat ….
Dan was er nog iets , maar dat ben ik vergeten (ik ben al wat ouder )….
Misschien willen jullie graag zo ’n bevestiging horen ….
Bedankt voor wat jullie doen.
Tot zover de lezer.
Wat die geluiden dan ook mag veroorzaken, ze houden op een bepaalde manier verband met de steeds heftiger wordende aardveranderingen. Deze, op hun beurt, kunnen weer heel goed het gevolg zijn van een naderend mini zonnestelsel dat steeds heviger inwerkt op onze aarde.
Hieronder volgt een samenvatting van de soms krankzinnige toestanden waarmee wij als aardbewoners tegenwoordig moeten leven.
Wat opviel gedurende deze maand april was dat het op verschillende plekken ongewoon koud was en er op veel plaatsen nog hevige sneeuwval voor kwam. Nu gebeurt dit wel eens in de maand april, maar over het algemeen wordt deze maand toch beschouwd als een lentemaand.
Regen die doet denken aan de zondvloed, overstromingen en gigantische hagelstenen zijn een aantal oorzaken van grote problemen in gebieden zoals het Midden Oosten, Kenia, Zuid Afrika, centraal Amerika en het zuiden van de Verenigde Staten.
Sinkholes, waar men zo’n tien jaar geleden nog nauwelijks had gehoord en die op steeds meer plaatsen ter wereld spontaan verschijnen, zijn nu een soort standaard onderdeel van ons leven geworden. Het lijkt alsof de aardkorst letterlijk openscheurt.
Een ander ding waar misschien maar weinig mensen bij stil staan is dat de steeds heftiger wordende aardveranderingen ook grote gevolgen hebben voor landbouw en veeteelt, wat zich dan weer vertaalt in steeds hoger wordende voedselprijzen.
Onze overheid weet dat ook en daarom hebben ze maar vast een verhoging van 50 procent doorgevoerd op de diefstalbelasting, BTW genaamd. Hoe hoger de voedselprijzen, des te meer zullen zij roven van de bevolking.
Welkom op onze krankzinnige wereld waar de weersomstandigheden eigenlijk niets anders zijn dan een weerspiegeling van de gemoedstoestand van veel mensen op aarde: krankzinnig.
The controversial theory that mysterious and biologically complex octopus is so unique that it had to come from another planet just got a scientific paper backing it.
“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus’ sudden emergence on Earth circa 270 million years ago.”
OK, “should not be discounted” is not exactly a bet-your-life savings-on-it endorsement, but it’s still a big deal. In a paperentitled “Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?” published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biologyjournal, 33 scientists researching the cause of the Cambrian Explosion – the mysterious point in Earth’s history when single-cell organisms were suddenly overshadowed by complex animals – linked the panspermia or cosmic cause to the equally mysterious and sudden appearance of octopuses.
“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large. One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth – most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs.”
“Cryopreserved and matrix protected” sounds like a Superman origin story with creatures sent by another civilization to populate the galaxy (let’s take a moment to remember Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane to Christopher Reeve’s movie Superman and passed away this week), but the paper leans more towards the idea that Earth received a bombardment of comets and asteroids that could have been carrying organisms that somehow managed to survive the cold, the radiation and the long trip. Only a complex species could devise a way to do this … an advanced species with a really big brain like … an octopus?
Yes, that seems to be the flying octopus in the panspermian ointment of this particular paper. It singles out octopuses as an (or possibly the only) advanced species that sent preserved eggs during the same period that it speculates asteroids and comets were involuntarily bringing other hardy cells and viruses en masse to ignite the Cambrian Explosion some 540 million years ago. “Speculates” because there’s no physical proof yet of the real cause of the Cambrian Explosion – so panspermia, climate change, evolution and others are in play.
If they’re an advanced species, do they know about this?
Octopuses are a special and highly unusual species that can edit their own RNA and slow down their evolution – a process that science can’t explain yet. It’s interesting that many scientists think the idea of intentional panspermia as their origin on Earth “should not be discounted.” Does this mean octopuses are aliens? Only an eight-legged, squishy Jor-El knows for sure.
While the search for extraterrestrial life here in this universe is complicated enough, the problem becomes even murkier when you account for the multiverse theory—our universe might one of many “universes” that make up a collective multiverse. Theoretical physicists have long assumed that the vast majority of parallel universes would be unable to harbor alien life, but that assumption is being challenged. A research team of scientists from Durham University, Western Sydney University, and the University of Western Australia have now found evidence that upends previously held notions of why the universe formed as it did, and suggests that the conditions to create a habitable universe are much more likely that previously imagined.
Just as Earth is an assumed rarity in our universe—a Goldilocks planet, not too hot, not too cold, and full of liquid water—our universe as a whole was previously considered to be an extreme rarity among potential alternate universes. Why? Dark energy, the strange and baffling invisible force that is driving our universe’s expansion. Jaime Salcido, postgraduate student at Durham University told Newsweek:
“The multiverse theory suggests that our universe is only one of many, baby universes being born like bubbles in a bigger multiverse, with a wide range of physical laws and fundamental constants. The existence of life seems to depend on a small number of fine-tuned fundamental physical constants, such as the strength of gravity and the amount of dark energy. The formation of stars and galaxies is the result of a tug-of-war between these values: gravity causing matter to clump together, the dark energy causing the universe to fly apart.”
The multiverse theory states that our universe is just one in a perhaps never ending series of other universes.
Scientists thought that if there were any less or any more dark energy in a parallel universe than what we find in our own—dark energy makes up about 70 percent of our observable universe—the alternate universe wouldn’t have the physical laws that allow galaxies, stars, and planets to form in the first place.
To test this, the Australian research team studied computer models of the formation of the universe (because we can do that now…) using EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments), the most advanced computer simulation of how our universe was formed. They found something surprising.
It seems that celestial bodies like stars and galaxies form even when they amount of dark energy is no where near the amount predicted to be necessary. In one case, the researchers added one hundred times the amount of dark energy to the system, and a functioning, potentially habitable universe still formed. Salcido says:
“Our research shows that even if there was much more dark energy, or even very little, in the universe, then it would only have a minimal effect on star and planet formation, raising the prospect that life could exist throughout the multiverse.”
Inter-dimensional aliens are objectively more awesome than regular aliens, so that’s pretty cool.
New research shows that a universe will form galaxies regardless of the amount of dark energy.
The findings do cause a bit of a problem though. The multiverse theory was created as a way to explain the amount of dark matter, and the relationship it has with the fundamental formation of the universe. It doesn’t work anymore. While the researchers say this doesn’t disprove a multiverse, it does mean that our understanding of dark energy was rather flawed:
“It seems that we need a new physical law to understand dark energy. The puzzle remains.”
Streetcap1 has recorded a strange and unusual astral phenomenon that showed up on the Stereo Ahead satellite.
The footage shows a normal picture of the solar system when suddenly ‘something’ completely disturbed the images resulting in a picture of a distorted solar system.
It is unclear what caused the disruption, but it looks like a huge shock wave is travelling through space.
People staring at the night sky over the Trinity Park a couple of months ago might have seen a UFO.
A local geologist Adam Murfet caught an apparent UFO while recording on video an intense storm activity with his camera.
Mr Murfet said that he saw the strange light in the sky during the end of a lightning storm. He explained that there was no lightning going on by the time he noticed what could be described as an unidentified flying object.
The video shows a small object hovering, zipping around erratically and seemingly vanish before reappearing.
He said that it shot up and disappeared.
Then all of a sudden, the pitch black sky reignites with lightning quickly after the light vanished.
The possible existence of little green men in the skies makes Mr Murfet to consider starting a Northern Beaches UFO watchers group.
He said that he has never created one before, but believes they could form a group together to see what they could see.
He sent the footage to Mutual UFO Network for consideration.
Mr Murfet said that UFOs have always fascinated him, but it was the first time he has seen one.
Speculation about the existence of extraterrestrial life has been a perennial occupant of humanity’s endless capacity for wonder. To see if there is anyone out there, we sent both Voyagers, not to study a particular star, but to leave our shores and explore other islands in the vast oceans of outer space. Astrophysicists have also wondered (if we do discover one) about the nature of such an alien civilization.
If we were to infer the biochemistry of any life form from what we have already encountered, which is well, us, we’d conclude that it would be based on carbon. Carbon, or as science fiction regularly depicts, carbon’s closest cousin, silicon. However, Carl Sagan called this parochial view Carbon chauvinism. He believed that we shouldn’t limit our imagination and ridiculed the assumption that alien life would resemble life on Earth.
Life in all its variety.
Still, due to its sheer dominance on Earth, carbon remains our best guess. Given that, what makes carbon so special?
Life is complex
Every life form, whether plant or animal, is the embodiment of complexity. The first self-replicating organism evolved more and more complex biological functions by incorporating more and more molecular complexity. Here, complexity refers to fostering millions of intricate chemical bonds and reactions that are imperative to sustain higher forms of life. A primitive life form, such as an amoeba, fosters far lesser molecular complexity than a higher mammal, such as a dog.
Molecular complexity enabled the synthesis of functions, such as breathing, excretion, digestion and most importantly, reproduction. None of this would have been possible without carbon. Without carbon, there would have been no DNA, proteins, lipids, sugar, fat, muscle tissue or anything else that makes up the stuff of life.
(Photo Credit: Pixabay)
Considering the 118 elements known to man, it’s strange why only 5-6 of them are used to construct organic life. The most common of them is, of course, carbon, dedicated to whose antics is an entire branch of chemistry. It is carbon’s extraordinary thermodynamic and chemical properties that render it so superior to other elements.
Carbon amiability
A carbon atom consists of four valence electrons, allowing it to form four single bonds (methane), two double bonds (carbon dioxide) and a triple bond (acetylene, a welding fuel and a raw material for synthesizing plastic). The dominance of carbon, however, isn’t a result of its ability to form these complex bonds, but rather the ease and pliancy with which it forms them. In fact, all the elements residing in the column that carbon occupies in the periodic table possess four valence electrons, but the stability of the bonds they form is incomparable to carbon.
The chemical structure of a four base pair fragment of a DNA double helix.
(Photo Credit: Thomas Shafee / Wikimedia Commons)
Even silicon, the element that resides right below carbon, forms countless molecules, but a double-bonded silicon molecule, unlike double-bonded carbon, is transient – its instability eventually forces it to part into single-bonded silicon atoms. Carbon molecules, such as hydrocarbons, one of the most crucial species of molecules to sustain life, are neither too frail to easily break down, nor too rigid to deter plasticity and adaptability. This allows enzymes to easily manipulate carbon molecules. Furthermore, reactions with silicon aren’t all that efficient; silicon dioxide is a huge molecule (sand), as compared to carbon dioxide, which comfortably exists as a gas.
Silicon-based life can’t survive on Earth anyway. Silicon is more reactive than carbon and can form long ‘chains’ of molecules, reminiscent of hydrocarbons, but it will also react violently with oxygen at relatively low temperatures. This means that silicon chains or ‘silanes’ couldn’t have survived within our atmosphere. Carbon-based life also wouldn’t have survived if organisms stored energy directly as hydrocarbons — alkanes are quite flammable themselves (petrol and kerosene), but carbon-based organisms store energy as sugars, lipids, alcohols and other hydrocarbons that exhibit very different chemical properties.
A strawberry poison frog from a tropical rainforest in Panama.
(Credit: Dirk Ercken/Shutterstock)
All of these properties can be explained by a single statement: carbon is the smallest atom that possesses four valence electrons. Its size renders it the ideal friend to make. Bonds on one branch are unaffected by bonds on other branches. However, life would have been impossible to manufacture if nature lacked the raw materials itself. Carbon is abundant on Earth, so nature couldn’t have missed the opportunity. It leveraged its properties to build life right from scratch!
Related video: US Navy release footage of 'UFO' caught on camera
There might be plenty of aliens – living in other universes, according to a new study.
Whether we live in a universe that is just one of many, inside a multiverse, is a question that has long troubled astronomers. And, after asking that, another question that is even more perplexing follows: would those other universes contain life of their own?
Now new research has shown that if that multiverse exists it could be filled with many examples of different alien life.
Scientists used vast computer simulations to predict that other parts of the multiverse would be far more hospitable to life than we had previously thought.
But it also causes major problems for the idea of the multiverse. In fact, the strangeness of our own universe might better be explained by an undiscovered natural law, they said.
The idea of the multiverse comes about because in physics terms, our universe is very lucky to exist at all.
Current theories predict there should be much more dark energy inside of our own universe than there is. That is a problem because adding more dark energy would lead it to expand so quickly that any matter would be diluted before it could form the stars or planets that we need to live.
In response to that, some have suggested that we might in fact be living inside of a multiverse. There are in fact lots of different universes – many of which will have more dark energy and so could not host life – and we simply live inside one that worked out in the right way.
But the new study suggests that we might have been overstating how lucky we are. It might actually be possible for stars and planets to form even if there is much more dark energy.
“We asked ourselves how much dark energy can there be before life is impossible,” said Pascal Elahi, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia. “Our simulations showed that the accelerated expansion driven by dark energy has hardly any impact on the birth of stars, and hence places for life to arise. Even increasing dark energy many hundreds of times might not be enough to make a dead universe.”
It is still true that our universe could be very special. But it does not need to be quite so special, the researchers showed.
“The multiverse was previously thought to explain the observed value of dark energy as a lottery – we have a lucky ticket and live in the Universe that forms beautiful galaxies which permit life as we know it,” said Luke Barnes, a John Templeton research fellow at Western Sydney University.
“Our work shows that our ticket seems a little too lucky, so to speak. It’s more special than it needs to be for life. This is a problem for the multiverse; a puzzle remains.”
That puzzling fact might suggest that the multiverse theory is not true in the first place. The study does not rule out the idea but does suggest that the small amount of dark energy in our universe would be better explained by a law of nature that we do not yet know about.
At the time, researcher Chrstopher Russell said the find was the "building blocks of life" and meant "we need to explore Ceres".
But he added "Ceres may have been able to take this process only so far" and the elements were "a long way" from life.
NASA
NEW DAWN: The probe was launched in 2007 and will orbit Ceres until 2018
NASA
ALIEN WORLD: Ceres is fast becoming one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system
"More and more, we are learning that Ceres is a complex, dynamic world that may have hosted a lot of liquid water in the past, and may still have some underground," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, project scientist for Dawn.
Scientists found its crust was a mixture of ice, salts and “hydrated materials” – which suggest the existence of an ancient ocean.
And they believe beneath this harder crust could be a soft layer which may have soaked up water.
Even if NASA do not find proof of life, the discovery is key to understanding how our solar system formed.
It will also provide insight into working to find aliens on worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way.
NASA said: "The team thinks most of Ceres' ancient ocean is now frozen and bound up in the crust, remaining in the form of ice, clathrate hydrates and salts.
"It has mostly been that way for more than 4 billion years. But if there is residual liquid underneath, that ocean is not yet entirely frozen.”
Ceres is believed to have formed 4.57 billion years ago in the earliest days of our solar system.
NASA
DWARF PLANET: Ceres is just 600 miles across but may have been covered in oceans
Astrophysicists found 12 possible black holes near the supermassive black hole at our Milky Way’s heart. They could be the 1st known members of a black hole swarm.
When you look at this image, you’re looking toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy, toward the giant black hole called Sagittarius A*. The white circles indicate likely binary systems containing white dwarf stars. The red circles indicate possible black holes.
Image via Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Scientists using X-ray data said on May 9, 2018, that they now have evidence for a swarm of stellar-mass black holes – typically weighing between five to 30 times the mass of our sun – within three light-years of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The galactic center is already known to be inhabited by a supermassive black hole, with some 4 million times the sun’s mass. Astronomers call this behemoth Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), and they’re calling the possible swarm of smaller black holes near it the Sagittarius A* Swarm.
The evidence takes the form of the discovery of just 12 stellar-mass black holes, identified via X-ray data near our galaxy’s center. Chuck Hailey of Columbia University in New York led the team that made the discovery, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. He said in a statement from Columbia:
Everything you’d ever want to learn about the way big black holes interact with little black holes, you can learn by studying this distribution. The Milky Way is really the only galaxy we have where we can study how supermassive black holes interact with little ones because we simply can’t see their interactions in other galaxies.
The scientists said this new evidence is the first confirmation of decades of theoretical studies of the dynamics of stars in galaxies, which have indicated that a large population of stellar mass black holes could drift inward over the eons and collect around the galaxies’ central supermassive black holes.
The researchers used Chandra data to search for X-ray binaries – systems where a black hole is locked in a close orbit with a star and is pulling matter from the star, resulting in X-ray emission – near Sagittarius A*. They studied the X-ray spectra — that is, the amount of X-rays seen at different energies — of sources within about 12 light-years of the galaxy’s heart. A statement from Chandra X-ray Observatory explained:
… they detected 14 X-ray binaries within about three light-years of Sgr A*. Two X-ray sources likely to contain neutron stars based on the detection of characteristic outbursts in previous studies were then eliminated from the analysis.
The dozen remaining X-ray binaries are identified in the labeled version of the image [above] using red colored circles. Other sources with relatively large amounts of high energy X-rays are labeled in white, and are mostly binaries containing white dwarf stars.
Hailey and his collaborators concluded that a majority of these dozen X-ray binaries are likely to contain black holes.
Sagittarius A* is about 26,000 light-years from Earth. The scientists said that – at this distance – only the brightest X-ray binaries containing black holes are likely to be detectable. Therefore, they said:
… the detections in this study imply that a much larger population of fainter, undetected X-ray binaries — at least 300 and up to 1,000 — containing stellar-mass black holes should be present around Sagittarius A*.
Artist’s concept of the stellar-mass black holes found near the giant supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, via Columbia University.
Bottom line: Astrophysicists found 12 possible black holes within three light-years of Sagittarius A*, the 4-billion-solar-mass black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The smaller black holes could be the 1st known members of a black hole swarm.
Because sometimes we, as a society need help to realize what exactly is going on around us, and how things have changed, and not for the better, here are 30 images that prove the end is near.
Take a look at the largest diamond mine in the world. The Mir Mine. What exactly is mankind ready to do to get what they want? Does mother nature stand a chance against destructive humans?
This image above is a satellite view of the metropolitan area of New Delhi in India. It is the world’s third-largest metropolis, and it continues to grow.
A Plastic Bag was recently discovered at the deepest point on Earth.
Black Friday: Need I say more? Sigh.
Remember the Fukushima Disaster in Japan? Why not resort to eco-friendly energy?
Yeah, this was once an elephant.
The Ancient Temple of Ain Dara reduced to rubble after the war.
Chemtrails. Not a conspiracy anymore.
This is an oilfield in California.
Deforestation in Canada.
This image was shot in Java, Indonesia where people still surf beautiful turquoise waves, despite the trash and filth.
Yeah, that’s Toxic plume.
Melting ice is producing an incredible waterfall right on top of an iceberg in this stunning yet worrying image.
Welcome to the Concrete Jungle. L.A., evidence of a consumption-oriented, car-dependent society.
As ecosystems change and ice caps melt, changes occur. This image shows a polar bear that starved to death. Experts say that ice caps are disappearing alarmingly.
Scenes like these are common all around the globe.
After stripping electronic devices of any ‘precious’ metals, this is what remains. Plastic, plastic, and yeah, more plastic.
Rising sea levels could see places like the Maldives disappear beneath the ocean.
Satellite image of the tar sands region. As we can see in the image, mining operations and tailing ponds are so widespread; they are visible from space.
That ‘colorful scenery’ inside the albatross is plastic.
And if our waste doesn’t get the animals, poachers will hunt them down to extinction level.
We cut down trees without thinking about the consequences.
Wildfires have become frequent around the globe. These destructive fires are another consequence of a warming planet.
In this image, we can observe a waste treatment plant in India. There are surely better ways to treat waste?
Oil is not the energy of the future. But those who profit from it don’t really care, right?
A shepherd photographed in Inner Mongolia cannot stand the smell as he navigates the Yellow River.
In Peru, the rainforest has survived mercury poisoning coming from the south produced by diamond mines. To the North, oil companies destroy everything they find along the way. This image shows the rainforest burning.
Check Out The Floating Pyramid City That Makes 100% Of Its Food, Water And Electricity
Check Out The Floating Pyramid City That Makes 100% Of Its Food, Water And Electricity
I’ve got to admit, every once in a while, I get tired from the life in a big city.
Modern ways of life have twisted the fabrics of our society to a point where people live by the clock without consideration, by the routine.
We live in a monotony, where every day is similar to the previous one and a strictly embedded pattern in our society unconsciously dictates how our lives unfold.
Society, our communities, and life, in general, has drastically changed, and we have become hugely dependent on things that did not matter previously.
So if you have become tired of Suburbia, you may have a pretty awesome alternative: applying to live on the ocean, in a community made of self-sufficient, solar powered, Pyramid-shaped buildings.
Need I say more?
The Waya Adobes were designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini a man who managed to blend the past and the future, inspired by ancient Mayan and Japanese architecture.
A pretty awesome project, right? Image Credit: Pierpaolo Lazzarini
His pyramid-shaped buildings come in a variety of designs and sizes and are specifically built to serve different purposes.
According to New Atlassome exist as floating homes, whereas others function as greenhouses, hotels, and cinemas.
The largest of the structures was designed to be around 30 meters tall, above the water line.
According to Lazzarini, the Pyramid-shaped Waya modules are to be built of fiberglass, carbon fiber as well as steel. The buildings are to be installed on massive floating platforms, containing basements locate beneath the water, suitable for bedrooms or living rooms.
As the floating Pyramid-shaped city aims to be fully autonomous and self-sustaining, the Waya modules will have solar-powered motors that will propel the structures.
Image Credit: Pierpaolo Lazzarini
The Pyramid-city would also have a small marina where the inhabitants could accommodate their boats and other water vehicles.
Lazzarini envisioned how each Waya module would obtain electricity from solar panels and water turbines.
Sounds interesting right?
Image Credit: Pierpaolo Lazzarini
However, the city, Wayaland, is still in concept stage, and Lazzarini is currently raising funds to begin the construction of the pyramid-shaped floating city with a crowdfunding campaign.
The Smallest Waya module will cost around $422,000 USD.
The modules would also be available for rent, with a cost of around $1,200 USD per night.
Image Credit: Pierpaolo Lazzarini
All of those who purchase a Waya module will participate in the community giving them rights like voting for where the Pyramid-shaped city would be located, based on a pre-selected list of optimal locations.
Lazzarini plans the inauguration of Wayaland to take place in 2022.
Image Credit: Pierpaolo Lazzarini
So, if you have a bit of cash to space, like Pyramids–floating pyramids–and want to live in a fully autonomous and self-sustaining city, hop over to Lazzarini’s website and found more about this revolutionary project.
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Scientists Find Genetically ‘Different’ Humans Adapted For Diving
Scientists Find Genetically ‘Different’ Humans Adapted For Diving
No, scientists didn’t discover fish people, nor did they find a new species of humans.
A mystery people living in Southeastern Asia has baffled scientists for years.
The people of the Bajau tribe, in Southeast Asia, only need a breath of air to dive up to 70 meters underwater and fish, remaining submerged for several minutes. This has led experts to question how dey manage to do it.
These people were almost like “super-humans” and have “extraordinary” capabilities…
Image Credit: Melissa Ilardo
A recent study published in the Journal cell describes how a certain population of humans has genetically adapted to dive underwater.
Experts describe a population that has remarkably larger organs, which help them stay underwater for greater periods of time.
This isn’t the first time that experts have found genetic mutations in humans.
The more we peer into our genes, the more we discover how people from around the world have adapted to their surroundings, making them remarkably unique in a number of ways.
For example, people in Tibet and the Ethiopian highlands have ‘evolved’ to better adapt to living at extremely high altitudes.
People in East Africa and Northern Europe have adopted a genetic mutation that allows them to better digest milk as adults.
And now, scientists reported a new type of genetic mutation different from the above-mentioned in sea-dwelling people in Southeastern Asia.
This genetic mutation allows them to become exceptional divers.
According to experts, the Bajau people, who are scattered in several communities across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have evolved to longer survive underwater.
“They are simply a stranger to the land,” said Rodney C. Jubilado, a University of Hawaii anthropologist who studies the Bajau but was not involved in the new study.
Scientists studied the extraordinary capacity of the Bajau and have reached a conclusion: they can spend minutes without breathing thanks to a genetic mutation that has caused, among other things, to develop a bigger spleen.
This organ, among other functions, can store oxygen-bearing red blood cells.
In their study, whose results were published in the journal Cell, the scientists were guided by previous studies on Seals.
As it turns out, some species of seals can dive longer than others. These Seals have spleens larger than expected.
Inspired by this unexpected find, the team of scientists used an ultrasound device to measure the spleen in 43 people from the Bajau and 33 people from a neighboring group of farmers, the Saluan.
Scientists found that one variant of a gene called PDE10A influenced the size of Spleens in the Bajau people. Experts found that people with one copy of the mutant gene had much larger spleens that people with one. Scientists also found that people who have two copies of the mutant gene had even bigger spleens.
However, scientists found this surprising, as they’ve never found a special role for PDE10A in the spleen.
“This connection was a bit bizarre,” Dr. Ilardo concluded.
According to TechTimes, Dr. Melissa Ilardo said that Bajau people were almost like “super-humans” and that had “extraordinary” capabilities but also stated that natural selection is much more powerful than realized and should be given more credit.
Dr. Ilardo also said that she was excited to share her findings with the Bajau people as she felt that they understood the “science” behind her research and to satisfy their curiosity about the world and themselves.
“It seemed like the perfect opportunity for natural selection to act on a population,” said Dr. Ilardo.
In the dark, frozen wasteland that lies just beyond Neptune, few things really stand out — and now, astronomers have found one of them: a carbon-rich asteroid, the first asteroid of its kind to be discovered at the outskirts of our solar system.
Artistic depiction of the exiled asteroid 2004 EW95, the first carbon-rich asteroid confirmed to exist in the Kuiper Belt and a relic of the primordial solar system.
Image credits: ESO/M. Kornmesser.
It really shouldn’t be there, and as it so often happens in such studies, researchers first thought it was a mistake. Astronomers would have expected this kind of space rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter but instead, it was drifting along just beyond Neptune.
The asteroid, which was named 2004 EW95, might be the first of a new class of space objects lurking the frigid area we call the Kuiper belt — the circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending outward from the orbit of Neptune.
So how did the asteroid, which likely originated in the inner parts of our solar system, migrate so much?
It probably has a lot to do with our solar systems’ gas giants, which, in their infancies, caused quite a ruckus in the solar systems. During their early days, the gas giants probably orbited much closer to the Sun than they do today. But they started their outwards migration not long after the solar system was formed, and as they did so, they created all sorts of chaos.
Among this chaos, chunks of ice and rock such as 2004 EW95 were hurled away, which explains how it could have gotten there — and it also supports previous theoretical models of early planetary evolution. But even more interestingly, this means that the asteroid (and others of its kind) could provide insight as to how the solar system looked in its earlier days.
A lone rock far away from home
It’s not the first time objects that originated in the inner solar system were found so far away, but none were confirmed to the level of quality of 2004 EW95. It all started when Tom Seccull, a doctoral student at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to look at the light signatures of icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. When they found a 90-mile-long object, located 2.5 billion miles from Earth, something just wasn’t right — the object wasn’t exhibiting the same properties as its neighbors. Further analysis revealed that the object did not share the same icy past as other rocks drifting nearby. Instead, it appeared to have formed in a hotter environment, closer to the Sun.
“When we first looked at this, we thought it was wrong,” said Mr. Seccull, the lead author of the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “The rock had been altered by the presence of liquid water.”
The team also determined the asteroid’s chemistry, using a technique called spectrometry. Since Kuiper Belt Object 2004 EW95 has a strong spectrum, its light can be broken down into different wavelengths, enabling researchers to determine what the asteroid is made of. However, identifying the chemical composition of such a distant object is extremely difficult.
The dramatic distance and the asteroid’s relatively small size make it an extremely difficult target to track, and the fact that it features carbon molecules, which makes it appear darker in color, doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s like observing a giant mountain of coal against the pitch-black canvas of the night sky,” said Thomas Puzia, an astronomer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-author of the research paper.
Still, the team was able to overcome these difficulties, finding that the asteroid contains carbon, iron oxides, and phyllosilicates (sheet-like silicate minerals). This is the first object ever found in the Kuiper belt containing these elements, all of which indicate that the asteroid formed in the inner parts of the Solar System.
With all this information, the research team concluded that 2004 EW95 probably formed between Mars and Jupiter, and was dragged along as the gas giants moved to their current orbits, thus offering important information about the dynamics of the early solar system.
We should also probably be thankful for this migration of the gas giants. Astronomers have found strong evidence that in many cases, these planets don’t move outwards, and stay in very close orbit to the Sun, creating what is called Hot Jupiters. Hot Jupiters are believed to deter the formation of rocky planets such as the Earth.
Whatsmore, as they migrate, they can destroy everything in their path, including the proto-Earth. So we should be grateful that they moved in just the right way to allow our planet to be formed, and ultimately, enable a species of primates we call humans emerge and evolve on this blue dot we claim as home.
The study “2004 EW95: A Phyllosilicate-bearing Carbonaceous Asteroid in the Kuiper Belt” by T. Seccull et al., which appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
NASA’s Galileo shuttle has found evidence of water plumes on Jupiter’s Moon Europa, transporting material from the internal ocean out into space. This not only confirms that Europa has liquid water beneath its frozen surface, but opens up the possibility of sampling Europa’s water without needing to get down to the surface.
A graphic showing water emissions detected above Europa in Hubble Space Telescope observations from December 2012.
Credit: NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne.
When people first considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the Moon or Venus seemed likely candidates. Then, as we understood that isn’t really the case, Mars became the main point of interest. But once again, rovers showed that life isn’t really thriving on Mars — though that might have been the case at some point in the past. Now, unlikely candidates have emerged: frigid satellites like Europa.
Europa is archetypical of the outer Solar System’s ‘ocean worlds’ — frozen satellites with liquid water hidden beneath a few kilometers of ice. Naturally, an ocean of warm, liquid water sounds like a great place for life to emerge and develop — but how do you study that? The most straightforward way would be to send a lander to places like Europa, drill through the ice, and take samples, but that’s problematic for numerous reasons.
First, it would be extremely costly and pose several technical difficulties. Not only do you need to somehow land on the rough and unforgiving ice, but you also need to drill several kilometers deep. Then, there’s also the risk of contamination, the problem of analyzing the results, and about a million things that could go wrong in the process. But there’s another way which might offer similar results: instead of digging down to the liquid water, what if the liquid water comes to us?
Telescope observations have indicated the existence of water plumes — columns of liquid water flowing to the surface, and even way above it. In 2012 and 2016, Hubble Space Telescope observed plume-like phenomena, but it’s still unclear if what Hubble saw was actually a plume, since the observation was made very close to the telescope’s maximum resolution.
Now, however, NASA has found much clearer evidence of these plumes, thanks to the Galileo spacecraft.
Galileo studied the planet Jupiter and its moons from 1989 to 2004. Looking through the data of a Europa flyby, Xianzhe Jia and colleagues spotted something unusual. During this flyby, which dropped below 400 km altitude, the shuttle’s magnetic instruments detected some unusual magnetic waves and plasma — which they interpreted as a plume.
Reconstructing Galileo’s path, they found that the magnetic anomaly coincides with a region of anomalous temperatures. This unusually hot area can only be fully explained by a transport of heat from Europa’s interior — something was carrying heat from Europa’s depths to the surface. In other words, all the evidence points towards a plume.
This finding could be extremely helpful for future missions to Europa, such as NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer spacecraft, which are scheduled to arrive in Jupiter’s system in the 2020s and 2030s respectively. Being able to study surface water or even better, plumes high up in the atmosphere would make a big difference for these missions.
It’s also not just Europa — Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan are also top priorities for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, and they’re also frozen moons with a subsurface ocean of liquid water. We certainly live in exciting times.
Journal Reference: “Xianzhe Jia et al. Evidence of a plume on Europa from Galileo magnetic and plasma wave signatures,” Nature Astronomy. DOI 10.1038/s41550-018-0450-z.
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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.
