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...
17-07-2018
Chinese Airports Shut Down After Mass UFO Sighting
Chinese Airports Shut Down After Mass UFO Sighting
The thing that struck me about that incident was that it was a mass sighting with photographs from independent people taken from different angles in different areas of the city. Each of the photos depicts the same elongated structure, none resembling a helicopter.
Sure, you could fake photos from the same angle taken from the same camera, but you'd have to enlist the help of many confederates from all over the city to photograph the object with long exposures, then also convince the myriad of eyewitnesses to change their stories from helicopter to UFO to perpetuate the deception.
I don't think it was ever adequately explained. It happened, then nobody really talked about it after.
UPS AND DOWNS This view shows Pluto’s highest mountains, which rise 3 to 6 kilometers above the smooth nitrogen-ice plains of Sputnik Planitia. New maps of Pluto’s topography show more details of familiar landscapes like this one.
PAUL SCHENK/LUNAR AND PLANETARY INSTITUTE
The first global maps of Pluto and its moon Charon are now available, putting a bookend on NASA’s New Horizons mission.
“From a completionist’s point of view, they are all the good data we have, stitched together into a coherent, complete mosaic,” says planetary scientist Ross Beyer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The charts focus on the 42 percent of Pluto and 45 percent of Charon where New Horizons snapped images from at least two angles during its 2015 flyby, revealing the landscapes’ height and depth (SN: 6/27/15, p. 16).
These measurements add topographic detail to already familiar features. For instance, the smooth plains of Pluto’s distinctive, heart-shaped ice sheet, known as Sputnik Planitia, lie two to three kilometers below the region’s rim.
The biggest surprise on Pluto is a 3,200-kilometer-long system of ridges and troughs that traces a single, long line across the dwarf planet. That streak may stretch all the way around the globe, Beyer and colleagues report online June 11 in Icarus. This feature was only visible with all the data put together, Beyer says. The team doesn’t have a good explanation for its formation yet.
LONG AND LEAN This subset of the new Pluto map (bottom) shows part of a long series of ridges and troughs that extends over at least 3,200 kilometers. Astronomers aren’t sure how it formed. The digital elevation model (top) shows the same area. White arrows highlight the edge of Sputnik Planitia, the planet's heart-shaped plains of nitrogen ice.
P.M. SCHENK ET AL/ICARUS 2018
Charon’s map confirmed that the moon is made up of two large zones: smooth plains in the southern hemisphere and fractured blocks and canyons in the north, Beyer and colleagues report online July 3 in another paper in Icarus (SN: 4/2/16, p. 20). Initially, scientists thought both terrains were at the same elevation, but the new map shows that the plains are situated a kilometer or two lower than the northern terrain.
“We don’t know quite why that is yet, but it sure is interesting,” Beyer says.
Other planetary scientists will use these charts to continue unearthing Pluto and Charon’s secrets. “These maps really form the basis, the cartographic foundation, for anything any other scientist will do,” Beyer says.
On Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, perpetual fountains of alien seawater launch all sorts of curious stuff into space: water, salt, silica, and even simple carbon-containing compounds fly into the void—many of which are ingredients for life as we know it.
Now, scientists working with data from a dead spacecraft have discovered something even more potentially intriguing: heavy organic compounds containing hundreds of atoms arranged in rings and chains. These are the most complex organic molecules uncovered so far at Enceladus, and—sorry, Europa—they may make the moon the most promising place in our solar system to search for life beyond Earth.
“What we know today is telling us that Enceladus is an outstanding target to go look for life, and there may be microbes living in that ocean today,” says Cornell University’s Jonathan Lunine.
SATURN 101
How did the rings around Saturn form? How many moons does the planet have? See stunning NASA images of the gas giant studied by Christian Huygens and Giovanni Cassini.
Discovered by the Saturn-exploring Cassini spacecraft in late 2005, icy jets erupting from Enceladus were a surprise to most scientists. Blasting through fissures in the south polar region, the jets contain seawater from a global ocean locked beneath the moon’s icy shell. Over the years, scientists have been able to study those jets and calculate the salinity and acidity of the ocean, identify ejected organic compounds such as methane, and determine that hydrothermal vents in the seafloor are providing heat and energy.
But these newly detected complex molecules spin that story forward and raise questions about whether they’re the work of lifeless chemistry or a sign pointing toward alien life.
“We cannot decide this hundred-million-dollar question, but it certainly shows that something is going on there, that complex organic chemistry is happening and that we can probe it from space,” says Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, lead author on the paper describing the results today in the journal Nature.
“The moon freely delivers its organic inventory at high concentrations to the Cassini spacecraft. That’s just an amazing finding.”
Saturn's icy moon Enceladus sinks behind the planet in a farewell portrait from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which destroyed itself by diving into the ringed giant on September 15, 2017.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA, JPL- CALTECH, SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
That includes information Cassini gathered while flying near the planet’s E ring. Thin and diaphanous, this ribbon is formed by dust and ice ejected by Enceladus. As Cassini skirted the E ring’s edge, some of its particles collided with an onboard instrument designed specifically to study cosmic dust and return information about its ingredients.
Postberg and his colleagues decided to look at data gathered during E ring flybys between 2004 and 2008, when the instrument was least contaminated by interplanetary dust from elsewhere in the solar system. Over 15 separate intervals, the spacecraft collected and studied about ten thousand dust particles. And in roughly one percent of those, Postberg and his colleagues identified the signatures of complex organic compounds.
“It was kind of a needle in a haystack problem,” he says.
Clinging to grains of water ice ejected by Enceladus, these heavy, carbon-containing molecules had been launched into space, just waiting for Cassini to come by and collect them upon impact. What’s more, the large compounds are likely fragments of even larger parent molecules that could weigh thousands of atomic mass units, Postberg says.
Floating Film
It’s the first time such heavy organics have been identified at Enceladus. Previously, Cassini detected lighter, gassy molecules such as methane and ethane, which contain one or two carbon atoms and a smattering of hydrogens; these molecules weigh in at around 15 atomic mass units.
But the newly detected molecules are as heavy as 200 atomic mass units and comprise anywhere between seven and 15 carbon atoms, handfuls of hydrogens, as well as nitrogen and oxygen.
“While we have found large molecules outside of Earth before, this is the first time they have been detected emerging from a liquid water ocean,” says Morgan Cable of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who looks for life in improbable places on Earth. (Recently, scientists also found complex organics on cold, dry Mars.)
“Many large organic molecules are not stable in liquid water for extended periods of time, so one of the next questions to ask is, where are these organic molecules coming from?”
Postberg and his colleagues think it’s likely that newly formed heavy organics rise to the top of the moon’s buried ocean and end up floating in a layer near areas where water erupts from fissures at the south pole. There, they stick to ice grains that are carried into space by bubbles rising from the seafloor to the surface.
“Our oceans have a thin film of organic molecules floating on top—think 'oil slick' but made up of life and its byproducts—that covers the ocean to a significant extent,” Cable says. “Now it seems that Enceladus has this too. But is it also made by life?”
Lying in Wait
Though tantalizing, this soup of carbon-containing riches is not an indication of life yet. Many processes could have crafted such structures in the absence of extraterrestrial metabolisms.
“Are they being made by abiotic processing at the bottom of the ocean, where the rock and water meet, or are they the waste products of microbes? That’s the question, with a capital Q,” Lunine says.
Fundamentally, the molecular soup tells scientists that the environment beneath Enceladus’s icy shell is capable of extremely complex chemistries. Whether those reactions are completely independent of life and fueled simply by chemistry and geology, are part of a prebiotic mix from which life could one day emerge, are currently building alien microbes, or are perhaps the waste products of extraterrestrial lifeforms already living in the Enceladian sea is still unknown.
Fractures in the icy shell snake along the south polar region of Enceladus in this Cassini picture.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA, JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
“We should try to go back to Enceladus as soon as we can,” Lunine says. “It’s waiting for us. It’s not going anywhere, and think of all that microbial poo that could be spewed out into space and analyzed today.”
The instruments needed to answer these questions already exist—all it takes is a return trip. One such mission, designed by Lunine and his colleagues and called the Enceladus Life Finder, could have flown in the near future. But NASA declined to fund the project.
Soon, though, a fleet of spacecraft will be sent to explore another icy ocean world: Europa, which orbits Jupiter. Scientists don’t yet know what kinds of chemistry take place in that alien sea, or if the ingredients needed for life as we know it are similarly abundant.
For now, Enceladus will have to wait. And so will scientists, who will continue hoping that maybe someday soon, they won’t need to mine archival data to answer one of humanity’s most pressing questions, and instead coax this promising astrobiological target into revealing its secrets in real time.
CASSINI'S FATAL CRASH
A three billion dollar spacecraft is hurtling towards destruction, and it's no accident.
Un OVNI a été aperçu dans le ciel australien le mois dernier et la scène a été immortalisée par un habitant de la région. Elle a beaucoup tourné sur YouTube et les réseaux sociaux depuis, alimentant d’innombrables théories complotistes sur fond de vaisseaux extraterrestres. La réalité est cependant beaucoup moins excitante.
L’affaire remonte donc au mois dernier. Junelyn Bitalac venait de dép.oser sa mère au travail et elle était en train de se promener à Hastings lorsqu’elle a aperçu une étrange forme ronde filer à travers le ciel
Intriguée, elle a immédiatement sorti son téléphone pour filmer la scène. La séquence a ensuite été partagée sur les réseaux sociaux.
Un OVNI a été aperçu dans le ciel australien en juin
Très vite, la vidéo a commencé à être massivement relayée par les internautes sur la toile. Le lendemain, elle a été reprise par plusieurs chaînes spécialisées dans le domaine de l’ufologie avant de se retrouver en une d’un certain nombre de médias anglo-saxons.
En tout, la vidéo a été vu plusieurs centaines de milliers de fois en moins d’une semaine.
Certains ufologues se sont alors lancés dans une véritable enquête en ligne et de nombreuses théories fantaisistes ont commencé à voir le jour.
Pour certains, la soucoupe volante immortalisée en vidéo était un vaisseau extraterrestre venant d’un monde lointain. Pour d’autres, il s’agissait d’un drone ou d’un appareil testé par l’armée australienne. Il faut dire aussi que la scène s’est produite à quelques kilomètres à peine de HMAS Cerberus, une base appartenant à la Royal Australian Navy à Victoria.
Une soucoupe volante… sans le moindre alien à son bord
Mais voilà, dans les faits, il ne s’agissait ni d’un vaisseau alien ni même d’un nouvel aéronef militaire… mais plutôt d’un avion construit par un amateur.
Si vous vous intéressez un peu à l’aéronautique, alors vous avez peut-être entendu parler de David Rowe. C’est tout à fait logique, car cet ingénieur travaille depuis plusieurs années sur un prototype de soucoupe volante.
En 2016, il a même été assez loin en faisant une démonstration de son quatrième prototype, un prototype parfaitement fonctionnel et capable de voler comme n’importe quel avion. La performance avait été assez relayée à l’époque avant de tomber dans l’oubli.
Toutefois, depuis, David Rowe a multiplié les essais et ce étrange OVNI aperçu dans le ciel australien n’était en réalité rien d’autre que l’un de ses derniers prototypes.
Disk-shaped UFO goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan
Disk-shaped UFO goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan
The witness has taken several photographs of a disk-shaped UFO with port holes that according to the photographer goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan known for its many mysterious UFO sightings.
Below the statement of the witness:
On the night of March 31st 2018, about 10:20pm, it was a very clear, calm night with a bright full moon. I was driving along the coastline from Kewaunee to Algoma when I noticed a very long, brightly lit ship.
I initially thought it was a cargo ship. But the more I watched it, the more erratic the movements and lights became.
I decided to park at a local wayside right before entering Algoma, that overlooks the water of Lake Michigan where this UFO is.
I can now see it flashes different patterns of lights all long it's structure. The shape seemed to shift between a long rectangular object to a disc shape object.
The colors would vary from bright white, red, green, white blue, lights. It made a couple sharp turns than would correct itself on what seemed to be a Northeastern path.
It would sporadically hover over the water than seem to land on the water all the while gradually going northeast.
Then, when it seemed to have been completely aligned with my vehicle (maintaining a good mile out or less distance in front of me), all the electronics, my vehicle radio, dashboard lights, headlights, cell phone turned on by themselves bright and loud. After about 3 seconds they all suddenly turned off at once.
I took that as my sign to take off. I sat there another few minutes, trying to calm myself and locked my vehicle doors (out of instinct). After I got my wits about me, I left with the UFO still just meandering on it's way over the water going northeasterly.
The witness has submitted the sighting including the images to Mufon , case 93368
UFO Over Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain June 28, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Over Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain June 28, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 28, 2018 Location of sighting: Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain This UFO was recorded and sent into us at UFO Sightings Daily by Twitter user@RoyGibbo. This is a awesome sighting of a cigar UFO. Its very long and looks like a disk viewed from the side. He says it looks big and boy is he right. This is one big UFO! It looks like its rotating and almost has the appearance of a submarine from the side. A rare sighting indeed. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
I was taking my dogs for a walk in the evening before going to bed, I enjoy looking at the sky while walking but I hadn't looked up until I was at the end of my driveway on this occasion so when I did look up I was so shocked to see this craft. It was absolutely enormous! I could tell where it was in the distance as it was over some local mountains around Mojacar in southern Spain, I could tell that the size of the thing was like the Empire State building on its side and it wasn't moving at all, it stayed very very still. I ran back to my house in flip flops as fast as I could with my dogs behind thinking what's up.
Well I captured this video and I was still in shock at the size off the thing, it slowly faded out slowly in a seemingly controlled manner so it wasn't bright at all so my phone that I took the video on couldn't see it but I could still see it a very little bit for a few more seconds and then it was totally gone, it didn't fly off or move, it just disappeared. It was so strange!!
Two Black Triangle UFOs Seen Over Bay Area, California On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Two Black Triangle UFOs Seen Over Bay Area, California On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 24, 2018 Location of sighting: Bay Area, California, USA This UFO report was sent into us from Twitter user @IsaacShapil. He caught two dark triangle UFO shooting across the sky. They appear to be very high up. Although these could be stealth fighters being flown from a nearby USAF base. Hard to tell for sure, but still awesome catch. They don't move like jets. Lots of dark UFOs have been seen around the world, so this can't be dismissed so easily. If you live in the Bay Area and have seen these UFOs, please let us know on Twitter at @UFO_Sightings_X Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
June 24th 2018, Bay Area, California. I saw two triangular objects in the sky, I reached for my phone to take a video and a few seconds later the objects made a strange noise and then they disappeared.
As members of both the ufology community and mainstream media (whatever that means) still work to make sense of the disclosures of the Pentagon’s UFO research program and alleged declassified footage of truly anomalous flying objects stalking military vessels, more and more voices are being raised in support of taking the study of UFO phenomena seriously.
The latest voice to join that chorus is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former NASA research scientist who is currently a professor of physics at the University of Albany and the director of both the Knuth Information Physics Laboratory and the Knuth Cyberphysics Laboratory. Writing on The Conversation, Knuth argues that “blanket skepticism about extraterrestrial craft is not sustainable” in light of recent developments. Is this yet another sign of the beginning of a major step towards disclosure and discovery?
I sure hope so. In his wide-ranging article, Knuth touches upon such topics as the Fermi paradox, the recently disclosed Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, and international agencies devoted to studying UFOs. Knuth admits that he’s always been interested in UFOs and the possibility of interstellar travel, and that after years of skepticism, he now believes “we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar.”
Knuth points out that despite the growing evidence that militaries and government agencies worldwide have taken the UFO phenomenon seriously for some time, the study of anomalous aerial phenomena remains taboo among professional scientists:
Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
It’s not only the scientific community that’s to blame for this perception, Knuth adds, noting that popular culture and mass media have played right into this narrative as well:
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Despite this widespread skepticism, Knuth is confident that “many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.” Knuth also points the fact that UFO sightings are fairly common among astronomers, more than half of whom feel that the UFO phenomenon deserves serious scientific study.
What will it take to remove the stigma surrounding the study of UFOs? A mothership landing on the 50-yard line during the Super Bowl halftime show and unleashing a cybernetic hive mind? A little green woman using the Voyager 2 probe to take an intergalactic selfie? Or could the support of enough credible scientists turn the tide in favor of ufology as a legitimate science? On that note, Knuth closes with the observation that “while there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigour, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.”
And then there’s stuff like this.
Science is based on replicability, testable explanations, and empirical evidence; since UFOs don’t typically fit this model, they’re excluded from most scientific study. As history has shown, however, scientific paradigms can change as we discover or invent new methods of studying the phenomena around us. What will be the tipping point that brings ufology into the realm of the hard sciences?
The YouTube channel A51:S published a video clip that prompted debates among conspiracy theorists online. The clip shows a mysterious spherical UFO moving across deep space. The alleged imprinted drawings on its body add to the mystery. According to the YouTube channel, they found the strange object while researching the website of NASA’s stereo mission.
The video did not gain much attention after it was uploaded, but that has been changed after conspiracy theory channel UFOmania shared it online. On the video description, UFOmania wrote that the UFO has a planetarium and appears to have a force field around it.
The uploader described the UFO to be so massive, which approximately the same size as a planet. Many conspiracy theorists commented that the mysterious, gigantic object might be an alien mega-ship from deep space.
Some other commenters suggested the object could be an alien space station.
One user believed that Trump knew about it and that he formed a space force to prepare for something big.
Another user revealed that the massive thing had been out there moving around for at least a year and NASA won’t comment on it. The same user wrote that it could look bizarre sometimes like it is shooting a missile.
Some other commenters on the video argued that it could be planet Nibiru, which could collide with Earth.
If you think the world is strange right now, wait until you watch HISTORY's new series, Project Blue Book.
Blue Book chronicles actual U.S. Air Force-sponsored investigations into the reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in America during the 1950s and '60s. Some 12,000+ cases were reported, and close to 10 percent of those cases remain unexplained today. And they're fodder for some great television: documented government investigations on UFO sightings makes it a real-life X-Files, complete with conspiracy theories, Russian spies, and military coverups.
Game of Thrones alum Aidan Gillen plays the main character in the series, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He's an astrophysicist, family man and UFO skeptic who is appointed as the Chief Scientific Advisor to Project Blue Book.
Hynek encounters a variety of Air Force Generals, who each have their own agenda including his partner, decorated World War II hero, Captain Michael Quinn, played by The Vampire Diaries' Michael Malarkey. Quinn's instincts and impulsive behavior clash with Hynek's scientific mind.
SYFY WIRE visited the set of Project Blue Book in Vancouver for a close-up look at the production and to learn about the series with creator David O'Leary. We are also revealing one of the first images used to promote the series, an image of Hynek and Quinn, that's going to wrap one of the walls of Petco Park by San Diego Comic-Con. We've also got one of the early looks at Gillen as Hynek below.
Project Blue Book Petco Wrap
Setting the stage:
The government began looking into UFO studies under Project Sign at the end of 1947. A year later, it launched Project Grudge, which was more of a debunking operation. But to the dissatisfaction of United States Air Force generals, Project Blue Book replaced Grudge in March 1952 and ran through 1969. History's Project Blue Book begins in the fall of 1951.
"The conception of the show was always like Mad Men, beginning in the 1950s and ending in the late 1960s and every season we would move forward in time a little bit," O'Leary told SYFY WIRE. "All the cases we explore (this season) happened in 1953 and before. By the 10th episode, the Season 1 finale, we're definitely planting seeds for future story, we're closing some loops while opening and expanding other loops."
X-Files came up again as a way to describe the series, but during this earlier era, there was still an innocence to the idea of UFOs. Fortunately, Project Blue Book doesn't have to fill 22 episodes and do odd one-off episodes, like the long-running Fox series. It can stay focused. "Blue Book could go deeper, and not be forced to do vampires. Don't get me wrong, I was a big X-Files fan, but I always thought it was at its best when it felt real and plausible," he said "I love that we're doing 10 episodes in this first season, because we're able to craft one large mystery. Then there's a dark undercurrent of something mysterious, like a David Lynch-ian, tweaky X-Files thing happening underneath. It's like a grounded sci-fi noir."
Real people, real stakes
The historical aspect of the series sets the show apart. These are real people, or amalgamations of many real people, living real lives with real consequences; scientific minds trying their hardest figure things out but finding things beyond the limits of human knowledge. Members of the military acting on morals, others following orders. There are plenty of gray areas explored in Blue Book, where the government wanted to define it as black or white.
Nearly 1,000 cases were left officially unexplained, and even that number is hard to verify as there was pressure to explain cases, whether or not facts could actually do so. O'Leary tells me that the official explanations of many cases never sat right with those investigating it. They didn't sit right with Hynek, who would eventually conclude two things over the course of his time working on the project:
"One, that Bluebook became a misinformation campaign, a government front used to control the public perception to UFOs. And two, something of intelligence of an unknown origin — and he never said 'alien' definitively — but something unearthly, something that is not mankind is flying in our skies."
Aidan Gillen as Dr. J. Allen Hynek encounters alien subject.
Photo by Eduardo Araquel / HISTORY.
The work of Dr. J. Allen Hynek
Hynek was also the father of the close encounter classification system, creating the terms, creating the first, second and third kind rating. Appropriately, he was the consultant on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and made a cameo in the film. One of his five children, Joel, grew up to become a special effects supervisor and was part of the Oscar-nominated team that created the camouflage effect in Predator.
"Hynek was born amidst Haley's Comet in 1910 and died when it returned in 1986," O'Leary shared. "So there's this cool cosmic something with him, which we touch upon a little bit, like he was destined to do this work. He was the father of what we know as the language of UFOs. If you look at his books, he's a detail-oriented guy. He's meticulous, with just endless sightings and pages of data, looking for patterns."
Hynek wrote five books after Project Blue Book closed, delving into his studies on UFOs that he pursued on his own. The scope of Blue Book, should it continue to run, is vast considering how long the actual project ran, the number of historical and legendary UFO sightings, as well as Hynek's gradual change in belief.
"We were pretty good about sticking with history," O'Leary explained. "For example, there would be a case that we would love, but it happened in 1956. Fortunately, there were so many great cases that it wasn't hard to find some really good ones in that little slice. If we were to get a second season, maybe we advance our scope to cases from 1953-1957. As a writer, you then just have to figure out how to take that framework and build the spookiest thing, inside of what was reported, known, and documented."
Living History
There's a natural curiosity from viewers, who want to know how much of what they just saw was real and seek out more knowledge. HISTORY has taken this approach first with Vikings, Six, Knightfall, and now Blue Book. The title of each episode will be named after an actual case, so viewers can go back and look these cases up. There is also potential for HISTORY to track down people who are still connected to these cases for new specials.
Another influence on the series is FX's The Americans, in the way that series had multiple layers. It was a family drama, a contained spy drama, with the backdrop of the government and military, and an attention to detail from the set design to prop generation. "That sense of paranoia, conspiracy, that sense of, 'can I trust my neighbor?' – all of those elements we try to layer into Blue Book," O'Leary said. "My hope is that people feel like it's real. Our production team has made authentic, accurate, and time-appropriate sets and props."
Other supporting cast members include Laura Mennell (Alphas, Man in the High Castle) who will play Mimi Hynek, Allen's wife who goes from being a stay-at-home wife and mother to something much more; Ksenia Solo (Lost Girl, Orphan Black) is Susie Miller, Mimi's friend; Michael Harney (Orange is the New Black) is General Hugh Valentine and Neal McDonough (Justified, Minority Report) is General James Harding who may or may not be allies to Captain Quinn.
Changing minds
Besides creating the show, O'Leary co-executive produces with Sean Jablonski (Suits, Nip/Tuck) the showrunner, and with Robert Zemeckis(Contact, Back to the Future) and his partners Jack Rapke and Jackie Levine of Compari Entertainment. The first two episodes are directed by Robert Strongberg (Maleficent) and the last two are directed by Alex Graves (Game of Thrones).
"The biggest goal of the show is that people take a real hard look at America's history with UFOs as much as I did and many other people before me, when researching the show," he said. "That's when I realized that there's something here. I believe. We're dramatizing it as a piece of entertainment but it is also this weird, strange era of American history that if half of this stuff is for real, it changes the nature of the reality we live in. It could be a huge story."
In this current era of "fake news" and the government trying to control the narrative of truth and misinformation, Project Blue Book is a study into a moment of time when the control of information was as relevant as it is today. Even though UFOs are not making headlines in sheer quantity like they once did in the 50s and 60s, new sightings are still being reported and hastily recorded on cellphone cameras. The curiosity about our place in the vast universe remains healthy, and whether or not we are alone is intrinsic to our very nature.
Stay tuned to SYFY WIRE for more exclusive stories about Project Blue Book and the series in the near future.
The central portion of Osuga Valles on Mars resembles features found in the arid deserts of Arizona, rather than those formed by emerging groundwater in Florida.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Martian surface is crisscrossed with what looks like the scars of running water cut into its dusty dry surface. For years, researchers have argued over the source of this water, whether it was fed by rainwater falling from the sky or from ice melting beneath the surface. By taking a statistical approach to the features, a trio of researchers now argue for rivers of rainwater.
The team studied all the mapped river valleys on Mars, measuring the angles where they divided from one another. These angles are determined by how dry an area is and whether water has emerged from the ground, among other things. They found that the angles are comparatively low, allowing them to rule out the influence of groundwater as a major formation process for the channels.
The narrow angles of the valleys bear a stronger resemblance to those found in Earth's arid landscapes, such as in the deserts of Arizona. In Florida, where groundwater re-emerges, the river networks have much wider angles between their tributaries. [Amazing Mars Rover Curiosity's Latest Photos]
The emergence of groundwater and the dryness of a region both play a role in determining the angle between the branches of a river.
Credit: Seybold 2018, Science Adv
According to lead author Hansjörg Seybold, this implies there must have been a similar hydrological environment with sporadic heavy rainfall on Mars over a prolonged period. The rainwater would have quickly run off over the surface, shaping the network of valleys.
Seybold, a physicist at ETH Zurich, worked with terrestrial geologist James Kirchner, also at ETH Zurich. Edwin Kite, a planetary specialist at the University of Chicago, was the third team member. Their research was published June 27 in the journal Science Advances.
Although Mars is dry today, scientists think it once held an ocean of water in much of its northern hemisphere nearly 4 billion years ago. The thicker atmosphere it used to have kept the liquid on the surface. As water evaporated, it would have condensed around the volcanoes in the highlands south of the ocean, then rained down, carving out the river valleys.
The Colorado River from space on March 12, 2013.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
"Recent research shows that there must have been more water on Mars [in the past] than previously assumed," Seybold said in a statement.
But the Red Planet's wet period was short-lived, lasting only a few hundreds of millions of years. The atmosphere was lost to space, and any liquid on the surface quickly disappeared, leaving scientists to ponder where the water went.
"It's likely that most of it evaporated into space," Seybold said. "But it could still be in the vicinity of Mars."
"This is a question for a future space mission," he said.
FALSE REPORTS CLAIM NASA DESTROYED PROOF OF ALIEN LIFE ON MARS
The base of Mars' Mount Sharp - the rover's eventual science destination - is pictured in this August 27, 2012 NASA handout photo taken by the Curiosity rover ( REUTERS/NASA/Handout )
FALSE REPORTS CLAIM NASA DESTROYED PROOF OF ALIEN LIFE ON MARS
There almost certainly wasn't any such proof to destroy
Nasa has been falsely accused of destroying proof of alien life on Mars.
But despite a huge number of reports to the contrary, there was no proof of aliens, and Nasa might not even have destroyed anything relevant.
In truth, the report was looking at why organic molecules – an important building block of life – were only found recently when the space agency had explored the surface of the planet decades ago. It revealed that might have been the result of a slip-up by Nasa, when it burnt away those molecules during the testing process.
But there is no truth to the claim that Nasa destroyed proof of alien life – because the agency did not have it in the first place. Those organic molecules are important parts of the building blocks of life, but they are not aliens themselves.
And the molecules themselves might not even have been there. In fact, the report speculated that the reason Nasa's Viking mission failed to find the molecules – despite searching for things that we now know are there – was because they were burnt away during the testing process.
Despite all of that number of reports claimed that Nasa had found evidence of aliens on Mars and then accidentally destroyed it.
"Life on Mars? NASA may have accidentally BURNED evidence of aliens on the red planet almost 50 years ago," read one headline. "NASA may have 'accidentally BURNED' evidence of life on Mars 40 years ago, says study," another said.
The controversy arrived because of a new report that study that looked to explain the mystery of why the Viking mission's on-board Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, which was intended to look for proof of organic molecules, failed to actually find them. The twin Viking spacecraft's primary goal was to test whether life could survive on Mars, and their results were surprisingly pessimistic.
To solve the mystery of why it failed to find those organic molecules, or building blocks of life, the new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggested that it could be the result of a mistake in the testing process that burnt them away.
It is important to note, however, that the building blocks of life are entirely distinct from the life itself. Even now, Nasa has never reported evidence of life anywhere else in the universe – despite having found those building blocks in a range of different places.
Hawaiian Asteroid-Warning Telescope Passes Key Test
Hawaiian Asteroid-Warning Telescope Passes Key Test
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Impact time and location predictions for asteroid 2018 LA. The long blue bar shows the predictions prior to ATLAS data being obtained. The much shorter red bar shows the prediction including ATLAS data, while the yellow star marks the actual location.
If you're someone who worries about death from above, this should make you sleep a little easier.
A telescope that's part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii showed its chops on June 2, spotting an incoming space rock about 5 hours before the interloper smashed into Earth's atmosphere.
The asteroid, called 2018 LA, was tiny — on the order of 6 feet (1.8 meters) across or so — and the ATLAS scope picked it up as part of an automated survey, not a directed search, researchers said. (ATLAS didn't discover 2018 LA, however; the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona did, a few hours earlier that same day.) [Asteroid Threat: Potentially Dangerous Space Rocks in Pictures]
"This is a great test of the system," ATLAS principal investigator Larry Denneau, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), said in a statement. "We've confirmed that ATLAS can find impactors. If 2018 LA had been big enough to cause a dangerous explosion, like the asteroid that hit Russia in 2013, we'd have had enough warning that people could evacuate the impact zone."
Almost all of 2018 LA burned up over southern Africa on June 2. ATLAS' observations allowed scientists to pinpoint the rock's entry point and tie it to a fireball spotted that day by observers in Botswana. Researchers later journeyed to the fall zone and nabbed a few bits of the asteroid that managed to survive the trip to Earth's surface.
A fragment of the asteroid 2018 LA, which a team of experts found in Botswana on June 23, 2018, three weeks after the space rock fell to Earth.
Credit: Peter Jenniskens
"This is only the second time in history that fragments have been found from an asteroid whose orbit was known prior to its impact with Earth — and when they have been chemically analyzed, we'll know what kind of asteroid 2018 LA was," officials with the IfA, which operates ATLAS, wrote in the same statement.
ATLAS consists of two 1.6-foot (0.5 m) telescopes about 100 miles (160 kilometers) apart — one on the Big Island's Mauna Loa volcano and the other on the Maui mountain Haleakala. The two-scope system became fully operational in June 2017.
The ATLAS telescopes scan the sky autonomously several times every night, looking for potentially hazardous asteroids and other objects of interest. Together, they find about 100 space rocks that are 100 feet (30 m) wide or bigger per year, IfA representatives said.
Asteroids of that size have the potential to wipe out a city. And that's where ATLAS comes in: It's designed to spot such rocks with enough lead time to allow folks in the projected impact zone to scurry to safety.
Actually steering a big, incoming asteroid away from Earth would require much more warning time — likely several years at the minimum, experts have said.
Adorning an ear or encircling a finger, a natural diamond is synonymous with luxury. The average cost of a diamond engagement ring is about $6,000, which is a lot of cash for a tightly bound piece of carbon. A new study in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, however, points out that the value of diamonds would be very different if humans had better access to the subterranean world.
“Diamond is not a particularly rare mineral,” Roberta Rudnick, Ph.D., an earth science professor an earth science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells Inverse. Rudnick is part of the international team behind the new study.
She and her colleagues, brought together by the Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research (CIDER), discovered that there may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamonds scattered throughout the Earth, buried within ultra-deep slabs of rocks stretching between the planet’s crust and mantle. These ancient, immovable rocks are known as cratonic roots, and the diamonds stuck there lie 90 to 150 miles below the Earth’s surface.
Co-author and Harvard University postdoctoral fellow Li Zeng, Ph.D. explains to Inverse that during the 2016 CIDER workshop, the seismologists in the collaboration revealed evidence of a strange anomaly deep within the Earth. Seismologists study sound waves, or seismic activity, to study ground-shaking events like earthquakes, but that data also can help explain the contents of Earth’s interior. This team picked up on sound waves that were moving unusually quickly as they passed through cratons.
There may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamond hidden in the Earth's interior.
Originally, says Zeng, there were several possible explanations for this anomaly in seismic data, which led the team to build a three-dimensional model of the velocities of the seismic waves moving through the Earth’s major cratons. Introducing various virtual rocks into the model, they calculated how fast sound waves would move through these rocks.
Of all the original explanations, says Zeng, “the most fascinating one was the possibility of diamonds — that there exists a sweet spot in terms of pressure, temperature, and redox conditions for the growth and retainment of diamonds at that depth.” Sure enough, the data revealed that might be the case.
“When the experimental results in hand, I began calculating sound speeds expected for continental cratons,” MIT research scientist Ulrich Faul, Ph.D. tells Inverse. He compared the experimental results to measurements made on actual rocks in continents, and, through process of elimination, “ended up with diamonds as the only plausible and reasonable explanation as a solution to this puzzle.”
It turns out that only one type of rock can produce the same velocity that the seismologists measured: One that contains minor amounts of a coarse-grained rock called peridotite, includes a little bit of oceanic crust, and is one to two percent diamond. This means that there is at least 1,000 times more diamond in the cratons than scientists had previously estimated.
Diamonds aren't as rare as you might think.
Faul says that this discovery may affect our understanding of how continental cratons were assembled and stabilized, which is an important step in understanding some of the oldest parts of Earth. But generally, the findings add support to older theories about Earth’s treasure trove of diamonds. While the finding may alter our view about diamond resources, says Rudnick, it doesn’t significantly alter our understanding of the planet. The idea that cratonic roots may contain 2 percent diamond is within predictions based on global carbon estimates.
“While it is a higher concentration of diamonds than we would have expected based on the rocks that have come up from those depths, it is not more than the Earth can handle,” study co-author and geochemist Megan Duncan, Ph.D. tells Inverse. “We’re not adding lots of extra carbon to the Earth’s overall budget. It doest have some interesting implications for ancient Earth processes, like subduction, and how it may or may not changed with time.”
Generalized diagram of a kimberlite pipe.
Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to get access to these diamonds with a drill anytime soon. The deepest hole ever drilled is about 7.5 miles deep — and these diamonds are more than 10 times deeper. “We’ll have to wait for them to come up the old-fashioned way,” says Duncan. “In kimberlites.”
Kimberlite pipes — igneous rock formed from the cooling of molten magma after deep-source volcanic eruptions — act as conveyor belts that move deep-rooted diamonds closer to the Earth’s surface. They are often found at the edges of cratonic roots, and most diamonds on the market come from kimberlite pipes that sample these regions of the mantle. Finding these pipes is what’s rare — not the diamonds themselves — so if a miner finds a pipe, then they can do business.
Despite SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic racing to be the first to bring tourists to Mars, NASA’s latest photos depict a volatile Martian landscape that might not be ready for a tourist season. Such is the case with the latest photo from the Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reveals a region in the red planet’s south pole that looks to be covered with spiders.
On ThursdayNASAreleased photos captures by the Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 13 of spider formations in the normally ice-capped region of Mars’ south pole. This photo was released just weeks after the Orbiter captured the planet’smesmerizing blue sand dunesas part of its mission to understand Mars’ geological diversity. The cobalt blue sand dunes could make someone rethink the “red planet” moniker, but the south pole spider fleet is enough to make someone rethinkElon Musk’s proposed colony.
Spider formations on Mars' landscape
Luckily, these “spiders” aren’t actually organic lifeforms, but are called “araneiform terrain.” It’s a radiating mound that forms when carbon dioxide ice heats up below the surface, causing to change from a solid to gas, much like dry ice here on Earth. Thanks to the sun’s warmth each spring, the carbon dioxide gas trapped below the surface before it builds enough pressure to break through the ice.
Once the gas is released into the atmosphere, darker dust can be deposited around the vent or transported by winds to produce streaks. The loss of the sublimated carbon dioxide leaves behind heaps of dust mounds that look like giant arachnids crawling along the landscape. And there’s nothing like a warm spring day on Mars to help the spider-mounds bloom.
The Martian spiders were captured on film thanks to the Orbiter’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. The camera, which is operated by University of Arizona, Tucson, has helped NASA decrease the noise and bad pixelation of earlier images by employing a longer warm-up time and is expected to continue returning images that help scientists understand Mars’ diverse and divergent geological properties.
With the commercial race to Mars still on, it’s important to know what to expect before tourist board a spacecraft from Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or SpaceX, all of which promise to offer trips to the red planet in the near future. Between its blue dunes, violent dust storms, and now blooming spiders, even if the planet cannot sustain organic life, it can at least sustain trippy nightmares.
Laguna Negra in the Chilean Andes is a glacial lake that contains the remains of ancient life and is exposed to ultraviolet light.
Credit: Wamba Wambez/Wikimedia Commons
Detecting biomarkers in glacial lakes on Earth could pave the way for astrobiologists to detect evidence for life on other worlds, and also unravel the properties of the environments in which that life lived.
High in the Andes Mountains in Chile, unrelenting ultraviolet (UV) radiation blasts the nutrient-poor waters of Laguna Negra and Lo Encañado, two lakes fed by rapidly melting glaciers. In this hostile and remote environment, researchers are trialling life-detection technology to see if we can use it on other planets.
Understanding these lake systems will help scientists to interpret biomarkers in ancient lakes both on Earth or other planets. Although the organisms themselves are long dead, the traces and history of their deaths are encoded in the biomolecules that litter the lakes' sediments.
The implications of these biomolecules extend far beyond the boundaries of these lakes: they could help scientists to recreate the evolutionary history of extraterrestrial life. The scientists' findings were described in a recent article in Astrobiology.
"Once a microbe dies, different physiochemical factors – such as humidity, temperature, oxygen, or the presence of metals – affect the degradation or chemical alteration of its structures and molecular components," says lead author Victor Parro, based at the Centro de Astrobiología, in Madrid, Spain.
Certain biomarkers are characteristic of certain groups of microbes and even particular metabolisms, he says. "From this information it is possible to infer what the environment where they developed was like."
Crater lakes
In the Andes, this can tell us about the paleoclimate of the mountains and their rapidly thawing glaciers. But it could possibly unravel the geochemical and atmospheric histories of other worlds, such as Mars and Saturn's moon Titan.
"These high-altitude lakes in the Andes mountains are interesting for astrobiology because they are exposed to high levels of ultraviolet radiation," says Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster, in London, who was not involved in the research. "Understanding how microbial life in the lake copes with these UV levels is important for the search for life beyond Earth – on Mars, for example, where there are believed to have once been crater lakes but also very high UV levels. "
The researchers used a Life Detector Chip (LDChip) to hunt for these fragments of life. An LDChip is a biosensor that can detect the presence of life (recent or ancient) from protein fragments and other biomolecules.
"An LDChip doesn't need entire living microbes, it just needs biological material, whether it is alive or dead, recent or ancient, free or as part of large polymers or even organo-mineral particles [which are mineral by-products of life]," Parro says. The chip needs between four and ten amino acids to identify the protein or family of proteins that the amino acids came from.
Gale Crater on Mars, which NASA’s Curiosity rover is exploring, used to contain a lake that was exposed to the ultraviolet radiation incident on the surface of the red planet, and which may contain evidence for past life. Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech
Testing for life in situ
The LDChip is the core of the Spanish Signs Of LIfe Detector (SOLID), an instrument that can liquidize up to two grams of solid rock, soil or ice, which can then be screened for biopolymers.
Importantly, especially when viewed through the lens of astrobiology, it can test for life in situ.
Researchers can treat these extreme environments as proxies for the remote and harsh conditions on other planets, allowing them to test their theories and technologies on Earth. Astrobiologists often view Laguna Negra as a stand-in for the lakes of Titan.
Understanding water, glaciers and ice is a fundamental part of astrobiology. "Ice and glaciers were and are common in other planetary bodies, such as Mars, and they must have played a critical role in the hydrogeology of those planets, the formation and behavior of ancient lakes, as well as in the development and evolution of potential Martian microbiology," says Parro.
In their study, Parro's team investigated the shallow sediments of the lakes. They reported the presence of sulphate-reducing bacteria, methanogenic (methane producing) archaea, and exopolymeric substances (polymers, such as biofilms, secreted by organisms) from Gammaproteobacteria.
Proof of life
Don Cowan, a professor of microbial ecology at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, says that their presence is unsurprising and "just what one would expect in a glacial lake sediment".
Asked if they were significant biomarkers, he says that "All are important, in a general sense, in that identification of any of these biomarkers (which are examples of many possible biomarkers) in an 'astrobiological' sample, such as from Mars, would be definitive evidence of life."
A library of biomarkers is the next step in Parro's research. "We need further studies and understanding of what biomarkers we can expect to find in different planetary environments," he says. This involves identifying the most universal ones, discovering how they are preserved and how they respond to radiation and other environmental conditions, and then using that information to hone their tests for the presence of life.
The end game is to see the SOLID instrument with its LDChip on extraplanetary missions to test for biomarkers or assist astronauts in biohazard detection. Until then, the researchers plan to deploy it in as many terrestrial environments as they can, from extreme environments to the veterinary sector, Parro says.
More information: Víctor Parro et al. Biomarkers and Metabolic Patterns in the Sediments of Evolving Glacial Lakes as a Proxy for Planetary Lake Exploration, Astrobiology (2016). DOI: 10.1089/ast.2015.1342
The object known as 1I/2017 U1 (and nicknamed ‘Oumuamua) was traveling too fast (196,000 miles per hour, that’s 54 miles per second or 87.3 kilometers per second) to have originated in our solar system. Comets and asteroids from within our solar system move at a slower speed, typically an average of 12 miles per second (19 km per second) . In non-technical terms, ‘Oumuamua is an interstellar vagabond.
Artist’s concept of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua.
Image via ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser.
2. We’re not sure where it came from.
‘Oumuamua entered our solar system from the rough direction of the constellation Lyra, but it’s impossible to tell where it originally came from. Thousands of years ago, when ‘Oumuamua started to wander from its parent planetary system, the stars were in a different position so it’s impossible to pinpoint its point of origin. It could have been wandering the galaxy for billions of years.
3. We know it’s out of here.
‘Oumuamua is headed back out of our solar system and won’t be coming back. It’s rapidly headed in the direction of the constellation Pegasus and will cross the orbit of Neptune in about four years and cover one light year’s distance in about 11,000 years.
4. We don’t really know what it looks like.
We’ve only seen it as a speck of light through a telescope (it is far away and less than half a mile in length), but its unique rotation leads us to believe that it’s elongated like a cigar, about 10 times longer than it is wide. We can’t see it anymore. Artist’s concepts are the best guesses at what it might look like.
5. We know it got a little speed boost.
A rapid response observing campaign allowed us to watch as ‘Oumuamua got an unexpected boost in speed. The acceleration slightly changed its course from earlier predictions. Davide Farnocchia, of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said:
This additional subtle force on ‘Oumuamua likely is caused by jets of gaseous material expelled from its surface. This same kind of outgassing affects the motion of many comets in our solar system.
6. We know it’s tumbling.
Unusual variations in the comet’s brightness suggest it is rotating on more than one axis.
This illustration shows ‘Oumuamua racing toward the outskirts of our solar system. As the complex rotation of the object makes it difficult to determine the exact shape, there are many models of what it could look like.
Image via NASA/ESA/STScI.
7. We don’t know what it’s made of.
Comets in our solar system kick off lots of dust and gas when they get close to the sun, but ‘Oumuamua did not, which led observers to consider defining it as an asteroid.
Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy, said small dust grains, present on the surface of most comets, may have eroded away during ‘Oumuamua’s long journey through interstellar space. She said:
The more we study ‘Oumuamua, the more exciting it gets.
It could be giving off gases that are harder to see than dust, but it’s impossible to know at this point.
8. We knew to expect it.
Just not when. The discovery of an interstellar object has been anticipated for decades. The space between the stars probably has billions and billions of asteroids and comets roaming around independently. Scientists understood that, inevitably, some of these small bodies would enter our own solar system. This interstellar visit by ‘Oumuamua reinforces our models of how planetary systems form.
9. We don’t know what it’s doing now.
After January 2018, ‘Oumuamua was no longer visible to telescopes, even in space. But scientists continue to analyze the data gathered during the international observing campaign and crack open more mysteries about this unique interstellar visitor.
10. We know there’s a good chance we’ll see another one … eventually.
Because ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object ever observed in our solar system, researchers caution that it’s difficult to draw general conclusions about this newly-discovered class of celestial bodies. Observations point to the possibility that other star systems regularly eject small comet-like objects and there should be more of them drifting among the stars. Future ground- and space-based surveys could detect more of these interstellar vagabonds, providing a larger sample for scientists to analyze. Meech said:
I can hardly wait for the next interstellar object!
Bottom line: What science knows and doesn’t know about ‘Oumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object to pass through our solar system.
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Three Bright UFOs Filmed Over France in Broad Daylight
Three Bright UFOs Filmed Over France in Broad Daylight
This footage captured by Sebastien Monnetver in Lyon, France shows 3 bright UFOs hovering in the daytime. The brights ufos were seen for several minutes before fading away. Good daytime UFO footage can be hard to find! For recent news about UFO sightings visit our YouTube channel!
Checkout This Dynamic New Crop Circle That Was Just Reported in the UK
Checkout This Dynamic New Crop Circle That Was Just Reported in the UK
This impressive crop circle was just discovered in the UK on July 14th. The details in this one are pretty remarkable. To us it looks like 24 star systems circling the core of the galaxy!
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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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.
