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...
31-07-2018
Physicists Claim The Great Pyramid of Giza Focuses Electromagnetic Energy
Physicists Claim The Great Pyramid of Giza Focuses Electromagnetic Energy
The Great Pyramid of Giza remains one of the world’s most enduring sources of mystery. For thousands of years, the Great Pyramid has stood in the desert of what is now El Giza, Egypt to serve as a monument to the ingenuity and technical prowess of its builders. After its construction, the Great Pyramid bore the distinction of the world’s tallest man-made structure for close to 4,000 years. Not bad for an oversized mortuary.
One of the reasons the pyramids remain mysterious is the fact that there is still significant disagreement over how the pyramids could have been constructed with the materials and methods available at the time. Aside from the mystery over how the pyramids at Giza were built, there is the longstanding suspicion that the pyramids might have some unknown purpose or function which has been lost to history. Hidden structures and voids continue to be discovered within the pyramids, leading some to speculate that perhaps the pyramids still might contain more than meets the eye despite the countless research projects and excavations conducted on them over the years.
To build on that speculation, a new study conducted by an international team of physicists has concluded that the chambers inside the Great Pyramid might actually be capable of capturing and focusing electromagnetic energy. According to the authors, their research has “revealed that the Pyramid’s chambers can collect and concentrate electromagnetic energy for the both surrounding conditions” and “shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them.” The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
While this study sounds like it might hint at further high strangeness surrounding the ancient Egyptians, researchers found that only electromagnetic radiation within a specific, narrow wavelength has the ability to resonate within the Pyramid. Furthermore, this discovery is purely theoretical, having been discovered through the use of advanced simulations. As scientific supervisor and coordinator of the research Dr. Andrey Evlyukhin points out in a press release, “due to the lack of information about the physical properties of the pyramid, we had to use some assumptions.” Still, he notes that “with these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.”
It remains unknown if the ancient Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid were aware of this unique feature – or even if they knew what electromagnetic radiation was at all. While theories alleging the ancient Egyptians possessed technology or scientific knowledge far more advanced than what we know are often thrown around, we’ve yet to discover any concrete evidence supporting such claims. Could it be possible that ancient cultures possessed technology as advanced or even more advanced than our own? Who knows what we might find in the ground if we dig deep enough.
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
The world around us is not as it appears to be. In fact, far from it. As we go about our daily business, working, and living our lives, behind the scenes something dark and dangerous is taking place. And it has been going on since the dawn of civilization. Most people remain oblivious to the truth and don’t even realize it. Now and again, however, someone will stumble upon the startling reality that, potentially, affects and dictates the lives of just about all of us. What am I talking about?
Nothing less than a monstrous collection of supernatural entities that terrify and torment us, and have done so for millennia. They do far more than that, however: they feed upon us. Like bloated, paranormal leeches, they suck us dry as they seek to fuel themselves with our psychic energy, high states of emotion, sexual energy, and the human life-force. They hate and despise us, but, paradoxically, they cannot live without us.
Have you ever woken up, drained and utterly exhausted, from a terrifying nightmare that didn’t seem like just another, regular dream? If the answer is “Yes,” then you may have been “fed” upon by these infernal things. When we sleep, we are at our most vulnerable. And that’s exactly how they want us. A dream is not always a dream, as strange as that might sound. Sometimes it’s an indication that, as you sleep, and as your guard is down, these voraciously hungry monsters are, in essence, eating you.
Among these creatures are the Shadow People: hostile things that typically manifest between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M. and who have the ability paralyze us and drain our bodies of energy in much the same way that the vampires of folklore would drain people of blood. In fact, and as the book shows, such distorted tales of vampirism almost certainly had their origins in the worlds, and actions, of these multi-dimensional things.
In a paper prepared for me a few years ago, Jason Offutt wrote, in part: “Like the Men in Black, the Hat Man has floated in the periphery of our lives for decades, observing our movements, occasionally interacting with us, but always threatening. Charles was 13 years old in 1949 and lived with his mother, brother and grandmother in San Jose, California, when the Hat Man crept into his life. He lay in bed with his brother, talking before they drifted off to sleep, when the window sash moved. ‘A dark figure dressed in a black cloak and wearing a black hat with a wide brim appeared in the window,’ Charles said. ‘No facial features were discernible on this person, but I took it to be a man.’ This Hat Man opened the window and reached through with both hands. ‘I thought he was going to climb in,’ Charles said. ‘At that moment I started yelling my head off.’ As Charles’s young voice pierced the night, the Hat Man closed the window, turned and disappeared from sight. The next morning, Charles saw the window was locked from the inside. ‘I saw something,’ Charles said. ‘What in the hell was it?'”
Equally dangerous are what can accurately be termed supernatural seducers: dangerous entities that thrive on sexual energy are also part of the equation. A highly-charged, sexual dream may be deliberately initiated by such things, which, over the centuries, have been referred to as Incubus, Succubus, Lilith, and the Old Hag. Also relevant to this angle is the reason why so many supernatural encounters occur at so-called “Lovers Lane” locations. In these cases, voyeurism and sexual emotion lead to feeding. Indeed, at such Lovers Lane’s we can find numerous encounters with the likes off Bigfoot, Mothman, Goat-Men, and aliens.
Poltergeists – violent entities that can cause chaos in the home and who delight in tormenting us as much as they are energized by us – are also part of the equation, as are thought-forms and Tulpas; creatures created within the human mind and the depths of our imaginations, but which can be externalized and given a strange form of life in the real world. Key to the survival of Tulpas and thought-forms is that we believe in them. The stronger our belief, the greater the ability of the Tulpas to live. In other words, they feed on – and coldly and carefully nurture – our belief-systems.
Then, there is the Slenderman: a sinister figure which started out as an Internet experiment, but which has mutated drastically in the last few years, to the extent that numerous people report having seen the Slenderman in the real world. It’s a perfect example of a modern day Tulpa / thought-form running wild in our reality. Witnesses describe seeing the scrawny, black-suited figure looming over their beds in the dead of night, extracting energy and dining in a fashion that we don’t even want to think about.
The Men in Black fall into this category, too: those who have had UFO encounters and who have been visited by the pale-faced ghouls known as the MIB state that while being threatened and intimidated by the Men in Black they have felt cold, clammy, weak, and light-headed. As many of the unfortunate witnesses have stated, it’s as if the MIB are draining them in the same way that a flashlight drains a battery. And, using the same analogy, when the light finally goes out, we do, too. To slightly alter the words of Charles Fort: The stark and terrifying truth is that our planet may well be one big farm. And, for these energy-based entities, we are the cattle.
Something BIG spotted traveling through Solar System going behind Jupiter!
Something BIG spotted traveling through Solar System going behind Jupiter!
A sky watcher has captured an unknown object traveling through our solar system and going behind Jupiter.
It is difficult to say whether it is a huge alien spacecraft or something else, like a meteor, asteroid or eventually a satellite speeding through our solar system.
MrMB333 talks about Jupiter but is it really Jupiter or could it be another planet, anyway an interesting footage and if you look closely, it looks like the object has even disturbed the planet.
Ancient monuments deep under water. A once-thriving metropolis now half a mile under the sea. Lost cities submerged for thousands of years. All over the world, there are sunken cities.
There are more than 200 known sunken cities in the Mediterranean alone. What we’re looking at are the remains of cities at a time when mainstream archaeology tells us there were no cities, uh, anywhere in the world.
Are underwater monuments examples of mankind’s earliest civilizations?
Or is there evidence of skills far beyond that of primitive man? And if so, where did it come from?
The native legends are very clear that something or someone landed, and then, knowledge, all of a sudden, spread. There are many, many legends with lights coming from under the water.
You start to get the idea that there’s some kind of ancient alien underwater base Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? If so, what evidence lies deep underwater? Covering more than oceans are a vast and largely unexplored mystery.
For most of recorded history, mankind could only guess at what lay beneath the ocean’s surface. But new technologies are reaching new depths.
Researchers around the world are finding the unexpected underwater complexes and sophisticated monuments that defy the conventional historical record.
There are remains of urban civilizations on parts of the Earth that were exposed on land 10,000 and more years ago. Possible.
Scientific theory suggests that during Earth’s last Ice Age, ocean levels were once much lower than they are today. You have to envisage a world in which there are two-mile-deep ice caps sitting on top of northern Europe and North America, in which are accumulated enormous quantities of water.
And we know that this water began to melt about 21,000 years ago, and finished melting about 10,000 years ago.
As a result, rich coastal lands were slowly submerged by rising sea levels.
Ten million square miles of land was flooded all around the world. That’s roughly the size of Europe and China added together were just rubbed from the record.
They just disappear from the story.
And in my opinion, archeology is not doing enough work to investigate those lost and submerged lands.
While much of the ocean’s floor remains unexplored, for thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have been drawn to one of the greatest mysteries of the sea, the legend of the lost city of Atlantis.
It’s been said that more books have been written about Atlantis than any other subject.
But most of what we know comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote two books about Atlantis, the Timaeus and the Critias.
It’s stated that Atlantis had huge naval forces, which it used to conquer other parts of the world. It was an urban civilization.
According to the ancient Greek texts, Atlantis was connected with extraterrestrials from the beginning.
It was founded by the Greek god Poseidon.
Poseidon can be regarded as an extraterrestrial in the sense of not being of this Earth. Poseidon, one of the extraterrestrials, found a pretty, wonderful, young woman-girl on Earth. And he took this woman-girl, and he impregnated her.
And to protect his new family, he founded Atlantis.
According to the legend, after a failed attempt to invade Athens, disaster struck the island. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed in a day and a night a cataclysmic destruction that sank the entire island and its capital city.
Some researchers believe that the Atlantians somehow destroyed themselves.
An artists illustration of what Atlantis may have looked like.
According to Plato, Atlantis was located in front of the Pillars of Hercules, a location beyond what some scholars attribute to modern Gibraltar. And to the ancients, as they left the Mediterranean Sea to go into the larger Atlantic Ocean, this was where they went beyond the Pillars of Hercules between Spain and Morocco.
Across the Atlantic lies the island chain of the Bahamas, just southeast of Florida. Here in 1968, archaeologist J.Manson Valentine believed he found part of Atlantis when he discovered an unusual rock formation off the coast of North Bimini Island.
It’s only in about 12 to 18 feet of water, so you can, uh, view it easily. At first, scientists thought this was just beach rock, but then several other scientists exploring the Bimini Road noticed that the beach rock was on top of other beach rock, with balancing stones wedged in between.
And nature doesn’t do that; man does. And they realized this is a harbor, a breakwater for a harbor.
From the shallow edges of Bimini all the way to the Gulf Stream in 300 feet of water, we have found many fascinating complexities that look like remnants of ancient cities or structures roads, pathways, structures covered in coral.
Remarkably, they were over a half mile down. Divers cannot do this kind of, uh, investigation, so we have to use a remote operating vehicle. And this vehicle is equipped with video cameras and manipulators. And it controlled, uh, from the deck of the ship.
The expedition was also armed with side-scan sonar equipment used to create images of large areas of the sea floor and underwater objects. I was in the control room on board the ship, and we were receiving that image coming from side-scan.
And this is just one of the many other images that we were obtaining of, the 80, uh, structures made of large stones placed one on top of another.
Well, what do they end up with?
It is an image that shows these rectangular 90-degree angles, over and over and over, on very large structures that seemed to have wide avenues.
The exploration found huge stone blocks in pyramid shapes, others more circular. Most were gigantic, reaching 16 feet in height and weighing several tons.
30 geometric structures emerged, appearing to be the remains of streets, buildings, tunnels and pyramids, all at a depth of 2,200 feet below the surface of the water.
We might well have here the evidence of a prehistoric culture that would probably go back tens of thousands of years, and that’s very exciting indeed.
Using dating techniques based on the presence of nearby volcanic ash, geologists estimated the underwater city sank over 6,000 years ago.
Could this be, a half mile down, some part of the sunken Atlantis from 9,000, 10,000 yrs ago that Plato talked about? Well, the Atlantis myth is integrally related with the area of the Caribbean and the Bahamas, in particular, Cuba.
Plato talks about an island empire.
He’s probably talking about dozens of different islands of different sizes, not just in the western Atlantic, but probably stretching out right into the central Atlantic area.
Both the Cuban and the Bahaman ruins lie on the western edge of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of ocean covering over 500,000 square miles, known for magnetic anomalies, extraterrestrial sightings and unexplained disappearances of aircraft and ships.
Could there be a connection between Atlantis and the area known as the Devil’s Triangle?
On the edge of the Bermuda Triangle, there are underwater ruins of the ancient city of Atlantis, the prehistoric city of Atlantis.
So, yes, there is a theory that Atlantis lies, not near Greece, but in the Bermuda Triangle. If Plato’s texts are true, then other Greek myths may provide a hint of the true fate of Atlantis.
One myth tells of the Titan goddess named Asteria, who fell from the sky and became an island.
In ancient Greece, we have a number of myths which describe islands bronze, gleaming islands that fell from the sky and landed in the water.
I don’t think that Atlantis, therefore, was an actual stationary, physical island. Atlantis, according to Plato, disappeared in one night with a lot of fire and a lot of smoke.
See, I don’t think that Atlantis sank. I think Atlantis lifted off. Was Atlantis a safe haven for ancient aliens before the end of Earth’s last Ice Age? And if so, could there be other alien cities submerged deep underwater?
Yonaguni, Japan.
This small island is at the westernmost tip of the Japanese archipelago. Scholars believe the first inhabitants migrated here from Southeast Asia during prehistoric times.
In 1987, in nearby waters, dive tour orator Kihachiro Aratake made a shocking discovery. A massive complex of stone formations lay hidden a mere 60 feet beneath the ocean surface.
Experts call it one of the greatest discoveries in the history of underwater archeology.
There are several reasons why I think this is not a natural formation. Some tools and engraved stones are found at the site.
Because of these things, there is no doubt that this is made artificially.
Submerged beneath largest of the underwater formations resemble a massive, five-layered stepped pyramid, the size of two football fields.
You see unambiguous carvings that clearly are geometric in nature, tons of right angles. We see channels that you can walk through with stairwells at the end that are perfectly rectangular in shape.
There are places where you find megaliths piled on top of one another to create a tunnel through which you can swim. There is a set of megaliths positioned side by side against the side of the cliff. There’s a gigantic human face carved underwater.
There is a stone that inscribes a big face, about seven meters in height. Our first impression was that it looked a lot like the Moai on Easter Island.
Then we began to realize that it strongly resembled the sphinx which guarded the pyramids, and we wondered, “Is that the function the face is serving “here?”
It’s the whole combination of all these structures together which convinced me that we’re looking at a at a ceremonial complex.
The mystery surrounding the Yonaguni underwater structure is, when did it go underwater? The geological evidence is that it was submerged during the meltdown of the last Ice Age.
All around the world, whether it is France, India or Japan, there are man-made structures that lie underwater.
Two ways how our ancestors could have done this. Either they had scuba gear I don’t think so or this stuff was built when the ocean levels were lower, and that was over 14,000 years ago, and 14,000 years ago, according to mainstream archeology, we were just dwelling in caves, hunter-gatherers.
Could the Yonaguni structures have been built by such primitive people?
And what evidence exists of the people who inhabited this island?
Human fossils were found, so I’m sure there were people living on the island, but I’m not sure if they had the technology to create structures or anything like this.
It’s not so much the question of could the stone have been chipped away and removed. It’s a question of the vision, of the scale of the complex, of thinking in those kinds of terms.
And we know of no other, uh, Stone Age culture that thought in those kinds of terms, of creating a gigantic, seemingly ceremonial complex.
If, according to scholars, the ancient Japanese people could not have built this monument, who did?
And how did it get here?
The speculation is that extraterrestrials created the Yonaguni monument.
The engineering is just beyond the capacity of Stone Age civilizations.
Ancient astronaut theorists also believe the key to the Yonaguni mystery is found in its global positioning.
Strangely, the complex lies within an area of the Pacific long suspected of extraterrestrial activity.
It’s called the Dragon’s Triangle.
Just south of Japan, you have a mysterious area called the Dragon’s Triangle, which is very similar to the Bermuda Triangle, because you have planes that have disappeared from the air, ships that have disappeared from the ocean.
In fact, Japan had declared this a disaster area. Don’t sail through it. Don’t fly through it.
Stay the heck away, because if you go in there, terrible things can happen to you.
In ancient Japan, and even into the relatively modern era, there are stories about the Dragon Sea, in which objects rise out of the water and sail through the air. In ancient Japan, these were winged monsters breathing fire.
In more modern times, these took on the appearance of actual machines.
When you compare those descriptions of these devices with the description that Columbus gave of a craft nearing the Bermuda Triangle actually rising out of the water, a light that followed the ship, you realize there’s a similarity in both of these locations to things, objects, that are in the water and rise out of the water and fly through the air.
But why are the two submerged structures found within the perimeter of these strange regions of the planet where so much unusual activity occurs?
Is it a coincidence that the Earth’s 25th parallel north cuts through both the Bermuda Triangle and the Dragon’s Triangle?
They lie on a plane along the same line, and both of them have the same magnetic phenomena, in which compass bearings are lost and instruments go down.
People wonder if there’s a real, strange UFO connection. If UFO’s and flying saucers do exist, then we should suspect that they could originally come from an ancient super civilization.
It makes you wonder if flying saucers, UFO’s, whatever you want to call them, actually use the area of the Triangle as their major base, and perhaps are even coming back to the remnants of a civilization that they were familiar with.
What if the sunken monuments at Yonaguni and near Cuba had alien origins?
Might they have been used as alien bases?
And if we believe extraterrestrials functioned on land, could they have also functioned underwater?
Could there be more evidence lying in the vast Pacific?
As an island nation, it should come as no mystery that much of Japan’s rich history is tied to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. But although many of Japan’s legends are largely unknown to the West, some are drawing the attention of ancient astronaut theorists.
One such legend dates back to a beach north of Tokyo. Allegedly, a craft that was quite large in size washed up on the shore in Japan. A strange round ship drifted ashore in this area.
The woman did not speak any language they could identify. There were written inscriptions inside her craft that they could not identify, and she’s clutching this box that she didn’t want anybody to touch.
Known as the legend of the Utsuro Bune, or “hollow ship,” the details of the story have puzzled historians for centuries.
Where, for example, did the mysterious hollow ship come from? Could it have come from the area of the submerged Yonaguni monument? Who was the strange woman? And what were the contents of the box she guarded so carefully?
Was it a human head? Or was it, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, a type of brain or other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence?
If so, could it have been intended as a gift to the early Japanese by an ancient space traveler? There are five different drawings that have survived from completely different regions of Japan. They’re almost identical to modern UFO reports.
As evidence to support their claims, ancient astronaut theorists point to early Japanese carvings and statuary, each suggesting a variety of extraterrestrial encounters. This is a Dogu figure, and it comes from Japan.
And even to the untrained eye, you look at this, and it’s as if this being is wearing some type of a suit with a helmet, some goggles, on the back, there are all these weird buckles and circles, you know, straps.
Very similar to a modern-day space suit.
In my opinion, this is a likeness of a possible extraterrestrial that visited Earth thousands of years ago.
Dogū, Ebisuda Site in Tajiri, Miyagi Prefecture, 1000–400 BC.
But could, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, these strange Dogu figures really be a primitive interpretation of a pressurized space suit or diving apparel?
The story behind those Dogu figures is very clear, and anyone can go and read translations of the ancient texts that the Dogu, a long time ago, descended from the sky and taught the first Japanese people in various disciplines.
And the whole Japanese culture, including the kimono, the tea ceremony, the use of wasabi and ginger for eating sushi, the way that they build their architecture, their written language, everything they say came from these visitors, from these gods, from the universe.
The pictures show beings who look like astronauts. They are dressed like an astronaut. They have the helmet as an astronaut. They have some strange tools in their hands, tools which we do not understand. Now, there is a link. The Japanese call it “Dogus.”
In North America, we have still the Hopi tribe, in Arizona, and the Hopi Indians are still making today kachina dolls. Kachina dolls look similar to the Japanese Dogu figures. Further back, in the Sahara Desert, Africa, we found cave paintings.
When you see the picture, you see definitely an astronaut suit. No doubt. Absolutely.
Now, you compare these cave paintings with the kachina dolls of the Hopi, and with the Dogu of Japan. You have one line.
Do the mysterious Dogu figures provide tangible evidence of extraterrestrial encounters in Japan’s ancient past?
And does the legend of the Utsuro Bune suggest that the Earth’s oceans may be hiding even more proof of alien contact?
Perhaps the answer can be found deep in the waters off the coast of India.
In 2001, researchers from India’s Oceanic Institute detected anomalies on the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat, seven miles from shore.
They had been commissioned by the Indian government to do a survey of pollution in the Gulf of Khambhat up in the northwest of India. And they were not expecting to find anything except a mess down there.
But suddenly, their side-scan sonar started returning images of regular structures. The images revealed an enormous network of stone buildings, now shrouded in mud and sand, and covering a distance of five square miles.
What we’re looking at in the Gulf of Khambhat are the remains of cities. There’s actually two of them.
And it turns out that they are positioned on the side of ancient river channels. They look lime cities that have been submerged for a very long time, at a time when mainstream archeology tells us there were no cities anywhere in the world.
Powerful crosscurrents made it nearly impossible to dive the 170 feet to the bottom. Still, scientists retrieved dozens of artifacts, including wood and pottery shards.
Some of the dates on some of the human artifacts that were brought up extended as far back as 32,000 years. But the oceanographers concluded that the area had been covered by water about 9,000 years ago.
So this city had apparently existed from 32,000 to about Mainstream scholars today claim that ancient Indian civilization only goes back 4,000 or 5,000 years. Yet, Hindu scholars themselves say that Hindu civilization is going back, uh, many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.
Might the ruins below the Gulf of Khambhat prove the Hindu scholars, right? Another recent discovery may support their claims.
The modern city of Dwaraka.
Featured Image Credit: Pinterest
Archaeologists digging deep under the city found signs of a settlement once inundated by the sea. Inspired by this clue, they began searching for more ruins in waters just off the coast.
Ancient Hindu texts explain that the legendary city of Dwaraka was said to be the dwelling place of Lord Krishna, a deity worshipped across many traditions of Hinduism.
Imagine what it would mean for the Christian world to all of a sudden discover the actual Holy Grail, the actual Ark of the Covenant. That would be akin, for the Indian population, to discover an actual Dwaraka. This was a very powerful city, which was ruled by Lord Krishna. And Krishna is still revered until today. He’s one of the highest gods that we have in Hindu culture.
Hindu texts explain that a king named Salwa attacked Lord Krishna in the mythical Dwaraka. Ancient astronaut theorists believe the descriptions of the battle suggest the use of alien technology and even spacecraft.
According to the ancient Sanskrit texts, with this spacecraft, Salwa attacked the city, raining down energy weapons that resemble lightning. He destroyed large parts of the city in this way When this happened, the king of the city, the god Krishna, responded by firing weapons at this spacecraft.
The weapons are described as arrows, but they’re not ordinary arrows. It’s said that they roared like thunder when they were launched, and resembled bolts of lightning or rays of the sun.
In response, it is said that the spacecraft began to appear in different places simultaneously. It appeared to be moving in ways that resemble modern descriptions of UFOs.
So what I find interesting about this account is, there’s a spacecraft made of metal that is firing down weapons on a city on Earth. The legend says that Krishna eventually departed Earth, and the ocean consumed his city of Dwaraka.
For many people, the description of fabulous ancient cities in the Sanskrit writings of India were simply mythology, but with the discovery of the remains of a sunken city off the coast of India in the location of Dwaraka, all that has changed.
People are beginning to look at these ancient writings in a new light, and see them not simply as mythology, but actual historical records.
Did India’s ancestors witness a war between extraterrestrial entities?
If the mythical city cited in the Hindu texts turned out to be real, could there also be evidence of Krishna and his supernatural powers?
Ancient alien theorists believe a link between the submerged ruins and extraterrestrials can be found in another set of texts known as India’s Sangam literature. Sangams were assemblies of sages.
It says that the first two Sangams took place on a sunken landmass called Kumari Kandam. This area was once above water thousands of years ago, according to the accounts, but it’s now underwater.
It’s also interesting that these assemblies of sages included extraterrestrial beings, as well. And this fits in with evidence discovered in the Gulf of Cambay, and off the coast of the present city of Dwaraka.
Are the interpretations of India’s ancient texts proof of alien contact in Earth’s past?
And are the descriptions of gods actually descriptions of extraterrestrials?
Perhaps another discovery one beneath a mysterious lake will yield even more evidence of alien visitors in the remote past.
The Andes Mountains, Peru.
Here, at an elevation of 12,500 feet, lie the dark waters of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable body of water in the world.
In August of 2000, an Italian team of divers and archaeologists launched an underwater investigation of the legendary lake.
There, submerged under 100 feet of water, the team uncovered traces of a paved road, a stone terrace, and a wall nearly a half mile long.
For centuries, local legends have spoken of a lost underwater city called Wanaku.
Could these ruins provide proof that such a city did, in fact, exist?
Then, another shocking discovery. Lying on the lake bed was a large, sculptured stone head.
Could this ancient relic offer a clue to the origins of this incredible archaeological find? Comparisons were quickly made to similar stonework found at the nearby ancient city of Tiahuana, just 12 miles south of Lake Titicaca a city long thought by ancient astronaut theorists to have extraterrestrial origins.
When the early conquistadors talked to the local Aymara Indians they were told that-that giants at the beginning of creation had created Tiahuanaco. The Spanish, too, were amazed by the gigantic blocks of stone. They felt that the devil had built this building.
If you look at some of the rock cut on megalithic structures at the site of Tiahuanaco, I personally believe very strongly that we are looking at an older episode of construction and the traces of a forgotten episode in the human story.
The Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco. Image credit: Shutterstock.
But if the ruins found at the bottom of Lake Titicaca are from the legendary lost city of Wanaku, what happened to it?
Did it fall prey to a major earthquake or another natural disaster?
Or was the city, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, deliberately flooded?
The more you know about Lake Titicaca, the stranger it gets. Archeologists have problems in really explaining why there are sunken ruins there because they’re saying that the ruins aren’t that old. They’re only 1,500 years old.
And that would mean that Lake Titicaca has gone through a number of major changes in that period. And it’s possible that somehow the lake itself and the shorelines were manipulated so that certain areas of Lake Titicaca were flooded in a sort of artificial way.
There is a type of seahorse that lives in Lake Titicaca. And seahorses are coming from saltwater and oceans, yet these seahorses are living at nearly 13,000 feet in the Andes.
But just how could an ancient people have artificially created South America’s largest lake?
A lake that is 118 miles long and 50 miles wide? When you ask the local population, “How did all of this come into being?” the Aymara Indians will tell you that all of this has existed since before the beginning of time.
In the Aymara legends, the lake is like the place of Genesis, the place where it starts all the civilizations in our continent.
We have these very, very, very old roots. I mean, we’re not talking only about this civilization, this humanity. We are talking about our seeds, the roots of the stars.
Some people believe that the extraterrestrial built, but what I believe is that the space brothers help us, direct us, teach us, because they had the experience in many ways.
The legend says that once the space brothers came to this planet to live with us, they were very important in our lives and they used to be very powerful people.
But is it possible that the lost city of Wanaku was really built, or inhabited, by the ancient ancestors of the indigenous Aymara people?
And if so, could it have been deliberately flooded to avoid detection from the outside world?
The elders, they used to talk about the underwater city.
They talk about the lights like stars connecting with the lake.
The stars, when they come down to the lake, there are changes in the temperatures.
There are many legends with lights coming from the underground of the lake.
It seems they come, they go and they return in different moments.
You start to get the idea that there is some kind of ancient alien underwater base. And it’s possible that some of these sunken ruins are, uh, somehow part of that base.
Could the ancient city of Wanaku really have been built by alien visitors?
And if so, why?
What was their purpose?
Could the discovery of this and other sunken cities pride the evidence that mankind has been seeking for centuries evidence that proves that we are not alone?
These mysterious underwater structures really don’t have any context or any background; they just seem to come from nowhere.
They seem to stand out as being out of place in time, so there’s some question marks, some mystery surrounding them that might shed new light on human history.
Atlantis, Lake Titicaca, Dwaraka. All those ancient mystery places always have had a connection to the gods.
The gods who, in the ancient astronaut opinion, were flesh and blood extraterrestrials.
And in the end, the ancient astronaut theory will be proven right.
NOTE: This article is an edited version of episode three, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
Leaked video shows Russian "Doomsday Device" capable of triggering tsunamis of up to 300-feet.
Following President Trump's contentious meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian governmenthas released a series of videos showcasing an array of new nuclear weapons. One video, in particular, is most disconcerting. It is rumored to be a giant torpedo purpose-built to avoid US defenses. One expert has nicknamed it a "Doomsday Machine."
Putin himself has addressed the weapon on March 1st. According to a Kremlin translation of Putin's remarks, the weapon is said to be remotely-controlled, allowing for no Russian casualties, be able to hold masses of nuclear power, as well as have few vulnerabilities. "It is really fantastic," said Putin, "there is really nothing in the world capable of withstanding them".
A torpedo-shaped device called 'Poseidon' featured on the Russian Ministry of Defenses' YouTube account on July 19th. The new clips show real-world footage of a prototype warhead. Defense analyst H.I. Sutton believes Poseidon could measure in at about 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide and 20 meters (66 feet) long rendering capable of holding great nuclear power.
Why is this new weapon so terrifying?
In 2015 the Russian government released diagrams of weapon that looks eerily similar to Poseidon which suggested the weapon would be capable of carrying a 50-megaton nuclear bomb which is about as powerful as Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever donated.
US nuclear tests of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, including the underwater operations Crossroads Baker and Hardtack I Wahoo, illustrated why bombs detonated underwater could be so devastating. Warships were staged around the explosions to test the effect of the bombs, which were roughly as energetic as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki on August 1945. Some warships were vaporized, others were flipped and sunk, while only a few sustained cracked hulls and damaged engines.
However, experts have questioned the purpose and effectiveness of Putin's device. While it could potentially create a Tsunami, if detonated above ground the effects could be far more destructive and widespread. There is also no guarantee the Tsunami would occur, especially as the bomb would be detonated miles from shore and waves lose energy as they approach land meaning it would be a waste of a nuclear bomb and a significant amount of money for Russia.
Why Would Russia Develop Such A Weapon?
While the reports and leaked videos/images portray a terrifying 'Doomsday Machine', it is still unconfirmed whether Putin has developed this weapon of mass destruction or not.
In 2015, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear policy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote an article saying there wasn't speculation that the underwater bomb might be "salted", or surrounded with metals like cobalt, which would drastically increase the radius of fatal radiation levels from fallout for at least several months, or possibly even decades. However, if detonated underwater, the vast majority of the fallout or 'source term' will never escape the water as airborne particles.
Whereas, if it was dropped on land, almost 100% of the source term would end up on the land and so the devastation from a "salted" weapon detonated on land would be far worse than that of a weapon detonated below the water, salted or not.
To Lewis and many other nuclear experts, it doesn't really matter whether the rumors are real or not and Russia really has this kind of weaponry:
"Simply announcing to the world that you find this to be a reasonable approach to [nuclear] deterrence should be enough to mark you out as a dangerous creep, "Lewis said.
To conclude, this is certainly a worrying development emerging from one of the most powerful countries in the world, and we should all be wary indeed.
The Notorious 'Hangar 18' Has Now Been Off Limits For Over 40 Years
The Notorious 'Hangar 18' Has Now Been Off Limits For Over 40 Years
Whether this history channel show is authentic or total intentional disinfo - it's a great overview starting with the handling of Roswell, evidence collection, press, Project Moondust, Declassified docs and deep underground chambers DUMBs.
Interviews with nuclear physicists, military officials, retired employees, pilots, historians, avid international aeronautic researchers, politicians, a family of deceased veterans etc. It is well done and aired on quasi MSM-history channel-so it's not too fringe.
Asteroid on a collision course with Earth? These astronomers will likely see it first. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies – now entering its 3rd decade – makes over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries. Here’s how and why they do their work.
View full video. | This NASA animation depicts a mapping of the positions of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) at points in time over the past 20 years. It finishes with a map of all known asteroids as of January 2018. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there was a chance that the half-mile-wide (nearly one km wide) object could hit Earth in 2028.
The message came from the Minor Planet Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the worldwide repository for such observations and initial determination of asteroid orbits. And although it was intended to alert only the very small astronomical community that hunts and tracks asteroids to call for more observations, the news spread quickly.
The animation depicts a mapping of the positions of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) at points in time over the past 20 years, and finishes with a map of all known asteroids as of January 2018. Asteroid search teams supported by NASA's NEO Observations Program have found over 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids currently known. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
Most media outlets did not know what to make of the announcement, and mistakenly highlighted the prospect that Earth was doomed.
Fortunately, it turned out that Earth was never in danger from 1997 XF11. After performing a more thorough orbit analysis with the available asteroid observations, Don Yeomans, then the leader of the Solar System Dynamics group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, along with his colleague Paul Chodas, concluded otherwise. Chodas, who is now director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), located at JPL, said:
The 2028 impact was essentially impossible.
To this day we still get queries on the chances of XF11 impacting in 2028. There is simply no chance of XF11 impacting our planet that year, or for the next 200 years.
Chodas knows this thanks to CNEOS’ precise orbit calculations using observation data submitted to the Minor Planet Center by observatories all over the world that detect and track the motion of asteroids and comets. For the past two decades, CNEOS calculations have enabled NASA to become the world leader in these efforts, keeping close watch on all nearby asteroids and comets – especially those that can cross Earth’s orbit. Chodas said:
We compute high-precision orbits for all asteroids and comets and map their positions in the solar system, both forward in time to detect potential impacts, and backward to see where they’ve been in the sky. We provide the best map of orbits for all known small bodies in the solar system.
The chart depicts the cumulative number of known Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) versus time. The area in red depicts the number of known NEAs larger than 0.6 miles (1 km). The area in orange depicts the quantity of known NEAs larger than 460 feet (140 meters). The area in blue depicts the number of known NEAs in all sizes.
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets in orbits that bring them into the inner solar system, within 121 million miles (195 million km) of the sun, and also within roughly 30 million miles (50 million km) of Earth’s orbit around the sun.
The media frenzy around NEO 1997 XF11 demonstrated the need for clarity and precision in communicating with the public about the close passes by Earth of these objects, as well as, Chodas said:
… the importance of peer review before public statements like these are made.
NASA’s original intent was to fulfill a 1998 Congressional request to detect and catalog at least 90 percent of all NEOs larger than one kilometer in size (roughly two-thirds of a mile) within 10 years. To help reach the Congressional goal, NASA Headquarters requested that JPL establish a new office to work with the data provided by the Minor Planet Center for submission of all observations of asteroids and comets. The new office would also coordinate with observatories operated by academic institutions around the United States, as well as U.S. Air Force space surveillance assets.
In the summer of 1998, NASA established the Near-Earth Object Observations Program, and JPL became the home for the agency’s research data and analysis on NEOs, then called the Near-Earth Object Program Office.
In 2016, the office was renamed the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in conjunction with the establishment of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For about 20 years, CNEOS has been NASA’s central hub for accurately mapping the orbits of all the known NEOs, predicting their upcoming close approaches, reliably assessing their chances of impact to our planet, and delivering that information to both astronomers worldwide and the general public.
Predicting Close Approaches and Impacts: Sentry and Scout
The first and most important step in assessing the impact risk of an asteroid or comet is to determine whether any given object’s orbit will cross Earth’s orbit – and then how close it will actually get to our planet. JPL was determining high-precision orbits for a few NEOs even before NASA launched its NEO Observations Program, and has since upgraded its orbit models to provide the most accurate assessment available for asteroid positions and orbits.
Observatories around the world take digital images of the sky to detect moving points of light (the asteroid or comet) over days, weeks, months and even decades. They then report the positions of these moving objects relative to the static background of stars to the International Astronomical Union-sanctioned Minor Planet Center (for more details, see How a Speck of Light Becomes an Asteroid). The CNEOS scientists then use all this observation data to more precisely calculate an NEO’s orbit and predict its motion forward in time for many years, looking for close approaches and potential impacts to the Earth, its moon, and other planets.
A CNEOS system called Sentry searches ahead for all potential future Earth impact possibilities over the next 100 years – for every known NEO. Sentry’s impact monitoring runs continually using the latest CNEOS-generated orbit models, and the results are stored online. In most cases so far, the probabilities of any potential impacts are extremely small, and in other cases, the objects themselves are so small – less than 20 meters in size, or nearly 66 feet – that they would almost certainly disintegrate even if they did enter Earth’s atmosphere. Steve Chesley of JPL, a member of the CNEOS team who was the main developer of the Sentry system, said:
If Sentry finds potential impacts for an object, we add it to our online ‘impact risk’ table, and asteroid observers can then prioritize that object for further observation. The more measurements made of the object’s position over time, the better we can predict its future path.
In most cases, the new measurements mean the object can be removed from the risk list because the uncertainties in the orbital path are reduced and the possibility of impact is ruled out.
More recently, CNEOS also developed a system called Scout to provide more immediate and automatic trajectory analyses for the most recently discovered objects, even before independent observatories confirm their discovery. Operating around the clock, the Scout system not only notifies observers of the highest priority objects to observe at any given time, it also immediately alerts the Planetary Defense Coordination Office of any possible imminent impacts within the next few hours or days. A recent example is the Scout-predicted impact of the small asteroid 2018 LA over Botswana, Africa.
More Hunting to Do
With the addition of more capable NASA-funded asteroid surveys over the years, NASA’s NEO Observations Program is responsible for over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
Although the original Congressional goal from 1998 has been exceeded and much progress has been made in asteroid discovery and tracking over the past two decades, the work isn’t over. In 2005, Congress established a new, much more ambitious goal for the NEO Observations Program – to discover 90 percent of the NEOs down to the much smaller size of 450 feet (140 meters), and to do so by the year 2020.
These smaller asteroids may not present a threat of global catastrophe if they impact Earth, but they could still cause massive regional devastation and loss of life, especially if they occur near a metropolitan area. CNEOS continues to make improvements to its orbital analysis tools, image and graphic presentation capabilities, and updates of its websites to quickly and accurately provide the very latest information on NEOs to the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, the astronomical community and the public.
Bottom line: Asteroid heading toward Earth? NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies – now entering its 3rd decade – makes over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries.
More information about CNEOS, asteroids and near-Earth objects can be found at:
Strange Golden Lights Captured on Camera in Northwoods Wisconsin
Strange Golden Lights Captured on Camera in Northwoods Wisconsin
A man camping with his family on private land in northern Wisconsin reported seeing a floating cloud of glowing golden lights at approximately 3 a.m. on July 28th.
The man told the Singular Fortean Society that he had awoken from a "dead sleep" and saw the lights hovering next to a lantern.
He managed to take a video with his cellphone camera, which captured some of the golden lights floating near the blue-white light of the lantern.
"[The lights] had a lot of smaller spots that floated around, zig zagged, and left glowing lines in the air inside this aura of gold color," he said. "And then larger brighter golden lights that winked in and out, and sort of moved around but slower, which is about all you can see in the video,"
The unusual aerial display lasted for around 15 minutes, at which time the lights disappeared.
"They winked out in the same place, the smaller ones first and then the big ones," the witness said. "Since they were appearing and disappearing it was more like they just went out one by one and didn't come back. Then the entire golden aura/blob went out that contained the lights."
The area in which the lights appeared was northeast of their campsite, and a hill obscures the only house in that area, which stands about 1/2 mile from the site--meaning the lights could not have come as a result of distorted houselights. Otherwise, the campsite exists within nothing but hundreds of acres of woods and water.
Historical weather data from the date and location of the sighting shows that the temperature at the time was hovering near 47 degrees, which is much cooler than fireflies prefer, making it unlikely that the glowing insects were responsible for the sighting. Fireflies prefer warm, humid air, and are significantly less active when the temperature dips below 60 degrees; they also don't often swarm in such tight, cloud-like formations.
"[There were] no insects really," he reported. "Normal flies during the day, but no biters and almost no skeeters. Then at night, nothing."
Other natural phenomena like ball lighting and swamp gas can likely be ruled out, since they do not appear as dozens of tiny individual glowing lights, but rather as a single object.
The witness and his family do stay regularly at the site, and he has promised to investigate the phenomenon should he see it again.
"If I see it again I'll hit it with a high powered flash light," he said. "But I had that sitting on my truck."
"Believe it or not getting out in the woods with 'something' isn't really an attractive thing when you're there."
Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth lies 26,000 light-years away at the centre of the Milky Way. This gravitational monster, which has a mass four million times that of the Sun, is surrounded by a small group of stars orbiting around it at high speed.This extreme environment - the strongest gravitational field in our galaxy - makes it the perfect place to explore gravitational physics, and particularly to test Einstein's general theory of relativity. New infrared observations from the exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY, SINFONI and NACO instruments, developed under the lead of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018. At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometres from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometres per hour - almost three percent of the speed of light.
The team compared the position and velocity measurements from GRAVITY and SINFONI respectively, along with previous observations of S2 using other instruments, with the predictions of Newtonian gravity, general relativity and other theories of gravity. The new results are inconsistent with Newtonian predictions and in excellent agreement with the predictions of general relativity.
These extremely precise measurements were made by an international team led by Reinhard Genzel (MPE) in Garching, Germany, in conjunction with collaborators around the world, at the Paris Observatory-PSL, the Universite Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cologne, the Portuguese CENTRA (Centro de Astro?sica e Gravitacao) and ESO. The observations are the culmination of a 26-year series of ever-more-precise observations of the centre of the Milky Way using ESO instruments.
"This is the second time that we have observed the close passage of S2 around the black hole in our galactic centre. But this time, because of much improved instrumentation, we were able to observe the star with unprecedented resolution," explains Genzel. "We have been preparing intensely for this event over several years, as we wanted to make the most of this unique opportunity to observe general relativistic effects."
The new measurements clearly reveal an effect called gravitational redshift. Light from the star is stretched to longer wavelengths by the very strong gravitational field of the black hole. And the change in the wavelength of light from S2 agrees precisely with that predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. This is the first time that this deviation from the predictions of the simpler Newtonian theory of gravity has been observed in the motion of a star around a supermassive black hole.
The team used SINFONI to measure the velocity of S2 towards and away from Earth and the GRAVITY instrument in the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) to make extraordinarily precise measurements of the changing position of S2 in order to define the shape of its orbit. GRAVITY creates such sharp images that it can reveal the motion of the star from night to night as it passes close to the black hole - 26,000 light-years from Earth.
"Our first observations of S2 with GRAVITY, about two years ago, already showed that we would have the ideal black hole laboratory," adds Frank Eisenhauer (MPE), principal investigator of GRAVITY and the SINFONI spectrograph.
"During the close passage, we could even detect the faint glow around the black hole on most of the images, which allowed us to precisely follow the star on its orbit, ultimately leading to the detection of the gravitational redshift in the spectrum of S2."
More than one hundred years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more - in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined!
"Due to the extremely strong gravitational field we expect to see the effects of general relativity - but only if we can look close enough," says Stefan Gillessen, "This is why we needed to push the technology. With SINFONI we can measure the radial velocity of stars very accurately and GRAVITY gives us extremely sharp images and accurate positions."
Continuing observations are expected to reveal another relativistic effect very soon - a small rotation of the star's orbit, known as Schwarzschild precession - as S2 moves away from the black hole.
Xavier Barcons, ESO's Director General, concludes: "ESO has worked with Reinhard Genzel and his team and collaborators in the ESO Member States for over a quarter of a century. It was a huge challenge to develop the uniquely powerful instruments needed to make these very delicate measurements and to deploy them at the VLT in Paranal. The discovery announced is the very exciting result of a remarkable partnership."
Clean rooms are the final line of defense in extraterrestrial exploration: Spacecraft departing for other worlds are stripped of any biological contaminants there, and samples returning from space, such as the Apollo moon rocks, are stored in pristine conditions to be studied later. But a new study suggests that a clean room storing meteorite samples at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, may not be quite so clean, after all. It’s contaminated with an abundance of terrestrial fungus. The microbes—most from the common genus Penicillium—could confound the search for life in off-world specimens, just as the lab is preparing to receive samples from Mars and the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu.
“I’d characterize it as eye-opening,” says spectroscopist Marc Fries, who curates the cosmic dust collection at JSC but was not involved in the new work. “It drives home this point that fungi are an important part of microbial contamination.”
The results aren’t entirely shocking—the room in question was designed to be what’s known as ISO class 6, an international standard running from class 1 to class 9, in which class 1 is the cleanest—but they still mean that researchers need to be on their toes when curating future samples, says geomicrobiologist Aaron Regberg of JSC, who presented the findings this week at the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
As part of a series of in-depth evaluations at JSC, Regberg and his colleagues swabbed the floor, table, and workbench of the lab where Antarctic meteorites are stored and processed for research. The meteorites, which blasted from the surface of other worlds before landing on Earth, are kept in cabinets pumped full of nitrogen at above-atmospheric pressures to help prevent material from entering the sealed environments. The researchers found between four and 28 viable cells per passport photo–size unit of area—similar to those in clean rooms at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida where spacecraft are assembled. Much higher contaminant counts were detected inside the air filter for the nitrogen gas—installed in 1979 and not opened for nearly 40 years—but Regberg says the bugs were growing on the filter’s outer parts and multiple additional lines of defense separated this fungi from the actual samples.
Although most microbes in the other facilities were bacteria, between 83% and 97% of the microbes at the meteorite lab were fungus. That’s alarming because fungi can easily penetrate samples and grow branching filaments that chemically alter rocks. Some fungi also produce the amino acids α-aminoisobutyric acid and isovaline, which are rare on Earth but often found in carbon-containing asteroids. Were such earthly impurities to find their way into extraterrestrial samples, they could skew results, Regberg says.
In fact, the findings have already caused astrobiologist Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to rethink his own research on lunar soils stored at NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation office, which had detected some α-aminoisobutryic acid. He originally suspected that the amino acid came from meteorites crashing into the moon, but now he wonders whether it might have a more terrestrial origin story.
Exactly why the researchers found more fungi than in previous tests is unclear. It’s possible that the low-nutrient environment at the curation office somehow favored fungal growth, but Regberg suspects that it’s because prior analyses failed to include the right mix of food and incubations times and temperatures in the growth media they used to cultivate the samples. “I wonder if we’ve not found fungi in other locations because we weren’t looking for them,” he says.
The remarkable electromagnetic properties of the Great Pyramid of Giza could soon inspire nanoparticle designs for highly-efficient sensors and solar cells.
Scientists have discovered the famous pyramid concentrates electric and magnetic energy into its internal chambers and below its base, creating pockets of higher energy.
If this concentrating effect is able to be recreated on a nanoscale size, it could lead to a wave of new, more efficient sensors and solar cells, the researchers claim.
While the 481-foot pyramid constructed thousands of years ago for Pharaoh Khufu has long drawn intrigue for its purported mythical qualities, the study is among a growing body of research that attempts to finally get to the bottom of its physical properties.
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Scientists have found that the famous Great Pyramid of Giza can concentrate electric and magnetic energy in its chambers and below its base, giving rise to distinct pockets of higher energy
‘Egyptian pyramids have always attracted great attention,’ says Dr Andrey Evlyukhin, scientific supervisor and coordinator of the research.
‘We as scientists were interested in them as well, so we decided to look at the Great Pyramid as a particle dissipating radio waves resonantly.’
The international research team looked into the relationship between the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza and its ability to focus electromagnetic energy.
To do this, the team led by ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia, created a model of the pyriadmid, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, to accurately measure it electromagnetic response.
The researchers used the model to see how wave energy is scattered or absorbed by the pyramid. They tested the interactions with waves of resonant length, ranging from 200 to 600 metres (656ft to 1,968ft).
However, due to the lack of reliable information about the properties of the pyramid, the team was forced to fill-in the blanks for some factors of their model.
‘We had to use some assumptions,’ Evlyukhin admitted. ‘For example, we assumed that there are no unknown cavities inside, and the building material with the properties of an ordinary limestone is evenly distributed in and out of the pyramid.
‘With these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.’
Scientists used multipole analysis – a method widely-used in physics to study the interaction between a complex object and electromagnetic field – to reveal how the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy into in its underground chambers.
A multipole analysis shows the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy in its hidden chambers. The distributions of electric (a)–(e) and magnetic (f)–(j) field magnitude in the Pyramid and its supporting substrate is shown above
This includes the two chambers believed to have contained the remains of Pharaoh Khufu and his wife, as well as the third unfinished chamber buried beneath the base.
The Ancient Egyptians that built the pyramids more than 4,400 years ago were not aware of this quirk of design.
However, researchers now believe the relationship between the design of the pyramid and its ability to focus wave energy through to its core could play a hugely-important for nanoparticle research in the future.
When considering the pyramid on a substrate – such as the limestone plateau – the researchers say it focuses the energy through the empty spaces to the substrate.
‘In the case of the Pyramid on the substrate, at the shorter wavelengths, the electromagnetic energy accumulates in the chambers providing local spectral maxima for electric and magnetic fields,’ the researchers wrote in the study.
‘It is shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them in to the substrate region.’
A multipole analysis shows the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy in its hidden chambers. Distributions of electric (top row) and magnetic (bottom row) field magnitudes in the free space are shown
While the 481-foot pyramid built thousands of years ago for Pharaoh Khufu has long drawn intrigue for its purported mythical qualities, the study is among a growing body of research attempting to finally get to the bottom of its physical properties
THE PYRAMID OF GIZA
The Great Pyramid, also known as Khufu's Pyramid, is the sole survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World
For more than 4,500 years, Egypt's pyramids have kept their secrets hidden deep within the labyrinth of passages and chambers that lie inside their towering stone structures.
But the long-running row over whether the Great Pyramid of Giza is hiding a network of previously undiscovered tunnels behind its stone walls has now been answered.
The researchers confirmed the find using cosmic particles known as muons to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza.
They used the scans to create maps to reveal the internal structure of the 479 feet (146m) high pyramid.
Last year thermal scanning identified a major anomaly in the Great Pyramid, the largest and oldest of the pyramids at Giza and one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others.
This led to theories that they may be hiding a secret chamber that had yet to be discovered.
A team of experts then set up the ScanPyramid's project to use muons, tiny subatomic particle that are typically produced by cosmic rays smash into atoms on Earth, to peer through the pyramid's huge stone blocks, some of which weight up to 15 tons.
Dr Hawass has in the past been sceptical of the usefulness of conducting such scans.
He recently clashed publicly with British Egyptologists over their theory that a secret burial chamber may be hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb in his pyramid in the Valley of the Kings.'
Although this research seems unconventional, modern physical approaches have been previously used to study the Great Pyramid, and led to a discovery of a completely new structure,' said Antonija Grubisic-Cabo, a physicist from Monash University who was not involved in the research.
'As this research is completely theoretical, it is difficult to say what we can expect it to lead to, or if it is even possible to do this in real life.'
However, the researchers behind the study are confident that the manner in which electromagnetic energy distribute in the pyramid could help scientists create efficient nanoparticle designs in the future.
That depends on whether the researchers are able to recreate the concentrating effect observed in the Great Pyramid of Giza on a nanoscale size.
Dr Polina Kapitainova, of the Faculty of Physics and Technology of ITMO University, said: 'Choosing a material with suitable electromagnetic properties, we can obtain pyramidal nanoparticles with a promise for practical application in nanosensors and effective solar cells.'
Scan the Pyramid project uncovering secrets of Egypt's wonders
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Great Pyramid of Giza can focus energy through its chambers
On July 18, 2018 a passenger flying to LAX noticed the bright lights out the window. He did a second take because he first thought it must be a reflection.
Passenger: Used my Iphone 10 to record it and could tell almost immediately it was in fact an actual object(s).
The lights would go in and out of the clouds, change elevation and location from my particular viewpoint.
I’m assuming it took place over Nevada based on the time. If you look closely, a white blinking light appears randomly both in front and behind the object.
This object when viewed by human eyes was white and glowing. Lost sight of it after 5 or 6 minutes as it slowly went behind the wing.
In a commercial airline so was traveling at least 500mph. I felt beyond excited because I knew then I was seeing something strange and was grateful to have the foresight to record it. I have submitted the footage to Mufon.
But could this footage be the evidence UFO hunters need to finally settle the debate on whether alien visitors to Earth exist or not?
It is extremely unlikely the lunar photos have anything to do with aliens but both MIDAS and the ESA agree the flashes were very much extraterrestrial in origin.
The ESA said: “On July 17, 2018, an ancient lump from space thwacked into the Moon with enough energy to produce a brilliant flash of light.
“With another rock seemingly in pursuit, a second flash lit up a different region of the Moon almost exactly 24 hours later.”
Despite the force of impact, current estimates suggest the foreign impactors were no larger than the average walnut.
UFO news: Two flashes of light were spotted on the surface of the Moon
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
The flashing lights were spotted from observatories in Spain
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
Space rocks of this size dubbed meteoroids are typically remnants of bigger asteroids and comets drifting aimlessly through space.
On July 17, 2018, an ancient lump from space thwacked into the Moon
European Space Agency (ESA)
The flashing meteoroids in question most likely originated from the dusty comet trail left behind in the wake of the Alpha Capricornids meteor shower.
The Alpha Capricornids shower usually starts as early as July 15 and continues until mid-August.
The ESA said: “For at least a thousand years people have claimed to witness short-lived phenomena on the face of the Moon.
“By definition these transient flashes are hard to study, and determining their cause remains a challenge.”
The flashing lights were not UFOs but small meteor hitting the Moon
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
Three astronomical observatories in Spain scan the Moon for the transient flashes on behalf of the MIDAS project.
The observatories use powerful telescopes and CCD cameras to detect and identify the various impacts that rock the glowing orb.
Jose Maria Madiedo, MIDAS, said better understanding these lunar impacts can help better protect Earth from similar dangers.
The space expert said: “By studying meteoroids on the Moon we can determine how many rocks impact it and how often, and from this we can infer the chances of impact on Earth.”
A filmed version of Hamilton, starring the 2016 cast, could be headed to movie theatres or a streaming service soon: “According to The Wall Street Journal, multiple studios are currently bidding on the rights to the recording, as is Netflix, which would likely host the film on its streaming service.”
Priests and UFOs: “Michael Burke-Gaffney, S.J., a Canadian priest who is an astronomer and professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had an extensive personal interest in U.F.O.s—even covertly investigating them for Canada’s National Research Council and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1966, after the noted astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek penned an infamous letter to Science magazine offering seven reasons why U.F.O.s merited scientific study, Father Burke-Gaffney responded with his own letter. He takes a more cautionary tone. Until we identify mysterious ‘atmospheric phenomena,’ he asks, should not scientists strive ‘(i) to exhort people to have patience, and (ii) to remind them that, up to the present, U.F.O.s have furnished no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, and (iii) to point out that the existence of extraterrestrial little green men is no more firmly established than that of leprechauns?’ There is no official Vatican position on U.F.O.s and aliens, although in 2014 the Vatican Observatory co-hosted a conference on the subject with the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, called ‘The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System: Exoplanets, Biosignature and Instruments.’ The next year, Pope Francis gave an interesting response to a question about extraterrestrial life: ‘In every case I think that we should stick to what the scientists tell us, still aware that the Creator is infinitely greater than our knowledge.’”
Anna Aslanyan reviews a film of a country that does not exist: “A young man stares into the camera, blinking, then turns his head away. His name is Kolya, and he was born in 1990 in what was then the USSR. Later that year, his native Transnistria broke away from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and proclaimed itself an independent state; today, it remains unrecognized by most countries and the UN. To Kolya, ‘it’s not important whether it’s recognized or not’. He has a Russian passport, but he doesn’t see himself as a Russian citizen; nor can he quite verbalize what connects him to this narrow strip of undistinguished land between the Dniester river and Ukraine. Extinction, directed by the Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas, and screened this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a black-and-white portrait of a country that exists largely in the minds of its inhabitants.”
What is secularism?
It is the belief that “the things of this life and of the next cannot only be distinguished but also divided—what is more, that they ought to be.” Is this the best way to organize modern societies?
Essay of the Day:
What can Russian populism in the late nineteenth century teach us today?Gary Saul Morson explains:
“Populism fed on guilt, and everything about Likharev, down to his very gestures, expressed a consciousness of guilt about something. The populist ideologists insisted that all high culture depends on wealth stolen from the common people and is therefore tainted by a sort of original sin. As Russia’s greatest autobiographer Alexander Herzen lamented, ‘All our education, our literary and scientific development, our love of beauty, our occupations, presuppose an environment constantly swept and tended by others . . . somebody’s labor is essential in order to provide us with the leisure necessary for our mental development.’ Shame and guilt over unearned privilege shaped a generation of the ‘repentant nobleman.’ Pyotr Lavrov’s Historical Letters (1868-69), the populist bible, put it this way: ‘Mankind has paid dearly so that a few thinkers sitting in their studies could discuss its progress.’
“Perhaps high culture should be abolished altogether? This urgent question came to be called ‘the justification of culture,’ with many writers contending that justification was impossible. Since the symbol of Russian culture was Pushkin, critics, most notably the nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, insisted that any pair of boots is worth more than all of Pushkin’s verse. The nihilists at least worshiped science—like Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, who dissects a frog to show that people are nothing but complex amphibians—but the populists rejected science as well. A story about the writer Vsevolod Garshin as a boy tells how he too dissected a frog, only to take pity on it, sew it up, and let it go. Not knowledge but pity became the moral touchstone. The populist argument about ‘the justification of culture’ became part of what philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called “the Russian Idea” and, so far as I know, marks Russian culture as unique. (To be sure, it is common today to convict the Western tradition as the product of imperialism and dead white males, but that is still different from rejecting high culture per se.)”
How to Grow Crops on Mars Before Humans Colonize the Red Planet
How to Grow Crops on Mars Before Humans Colonize the Red Planet
What exactly will humans eat on Mars?
By Briardo Llorente, The Conversation
Preparations are already underway for missions that will land humans on Mars in a decade or so. But what would people eat if these missions eventually lead to the permanent colonization of the red planet?
Once (if) humans do make it to Mars, a major challenge for any colony will be to generate a stable supply of food. The enormous costs of launching and resupplying resources from Earth will make that impractical.
Humans on Mars will need to move away from complete reliance on shipped cargo, and achieve a high level of self-sufficient and sustainable agriculture.
The recent discovery of liquid water on Mars — which adds new information to the question of whether we will find life on the planet — does raise the possibility of using such supplies to help grow food.
But water is only one of many things we will need if we’re to grow enough food on Mars.
What Sort of Food?
Previous work has suggested the use of microbes as a source of food on Mars. The use of hydroponic greenhouses and controlled environmental systems, similar to one being tested onboard the International Space Station to grow crops, is another option.
This month, in the journal Genes, we provide a new perspective based on the use of advanced synthetic biology to improve the potential performance of plant life on Mars.
Synthetic biology is a fast-growing field. It combines principles from engineering, DNA science, and computer science (among many other disciplines) to impart new and improved functions to living organisms.
Not only can we read DNA, but we can also design biological systems, test them, and even engineer whole organisms. Yeast is just one example of an industrial workhorse microbe whose whole genome is currently being re-engineered by an international consortium.
The technology has progressed so far that precision genetic engineering and automation can now be merged into automated robotic facilities, known as biofoundries.
These biofoundries can test millions of DNA designs in parallel to find the organisms with the qualities that we are looking for.
Mars and Earth still differ in many ways.
Mars: Earth-Like but Not Earth
Although Mars is the most Earth-like of our neighbouring planets, Mars and Earth differ in many ways.
The gravity on Mars is around a third of that on Earth. Mars receives about half of the sunlight we get on Earth, but much higher levels of harmful ultraviolet (UV) and cosmic rays. The surface temperature of Mars is about -60 degrees Celsius, and it has a thin atmosphere primarily made of carbon dioxide.
Unlike Earth’s soil, which is humid and rich in nutrients and microorganisms that support plant growth, Mars is covered with regolith. This is an arid material that contains perchlorate chemicals that are toxic to humans.
Also — despite the latest sub-surface lake find — water on Mars mostly exists in the form of ice, and the low atmospheric pressure of the planet makes liquid water boil at around 5 degrees Celsius.
Plants on Earth have evolved for hundreds of millions of years and are adapted to terrestrial conditions, but they will not grow well on Mars.
This means that substantial resources that would be scarce and priceless for humans on Mars, like liquid water and energy, would need to be allocated to achieve efficient farming by artificially creating optimal plant growth conditions.
Adapting Plants to Mars
A more rational alternative is to use synthetic biology to develop crops specifically for Mars. This formidable challenge can be tackled and fast-tracked by building a plant-focused Mars Biofoundry.
Such an automated facility would be capable of expediting the engineering of biological designs and testing of their performance under simulated Martian conditions.
With adequate funding and active international collaboration, such an advanced facility could improve many of the traits required for making crops thrive on Mars within a decade.
This includes improving photosynthesis and photoprotection (to help protect plants from sunlight and UV rays), as well as drought and cold tolerance in plants, and engineering high-yield functional crops. We also need to modify microbes to detoxify and improve the Martian soil quality.
These are all challenges that are within the capability of modern synthetic biology.
Benefits for Earth
Developing the next generation of crops required for sustaining humans on Mars would also have great benefits for people on Earth.
The growing global population is increasing the demand for food. To meet this demand we must increase agricultural productivity, but we have to do so without negatively impacting our environment.
The best way to achieve these goals would be to improve the crops that are already widely used. Setting up facilities such as the proposed Mars Biofoundry would bring immense benefit to the turnaround time of plant research with implications for food security and environmental protection.
So, ultimately, the main beneficiary of efforts to develop crops for Mars would be Earth.
Aztec Ball Court Discovered Beneath Mexico City Streets
Aztec Ball Court Discovered Beneath Mexico City Streets
Written byReuben Westmaas
One of the great travesties of the European invasion of the Americas—if you can set aside the genocide, the chattel slavery, and other war crimes—was the destruction of history. Across the continent, invaders burned books, wiped out languages, and replaced ancient cities with their own settlements. That's what happened in Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. But now, the excavation of an Aztec temple and a ceremonial ball court in the city itself has revealed that history can look strangely familiar to modern eyes.
Because so many great indigenous cities were destroyed, it's easy to slip into the assumption that they were small, or primitive, or ephemeral by design. But Tenochtitlan was an undisputed architectural marvel. Using advanced draining and construction techniques, the city of stone seemed to rest on the surface of Lake Texcoco, and used freshwater springs that fed the lake as a constant source of drinking water. In the words of conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, "We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments... on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream."
The discovery of this 15th-century ball court and temple has already revealed much about the customs of the Aztecs before the Spanish invasion. The temple was devoted to Ehecatl, a god of the wind, and its prominent, half-circle design would have stood in stark contrast to the angular buildings that made up the rest of Tenochtitlan. The ballcourt may be the more significant discovery, however, because of the role the Mesoamerican ball game played in cultures as far north as Arizona to Nicaragua. The game wasn't just a national pastime, and that's putting it mildly. Besides the play area at this particular court, for example, archaeologists unearthed no fewer than 32 severed neck vertebrae—likely belonging to the losing teams. So what was this game that would inspire players to literally risk their necks?
It's hard to overstate the importance of the Mesoamerican ball game to indigenous cultures across the Americas. It's one of the oldest sports in the world, and the first we know of to have used a rubber ball—examples of these balls have been dated to 1600 B.C.E. The game changed a lot as it slowly migrated north over its long history, but some rules remained constant in pretty much every iteration. Like racquetball, the goal is to keep the ball in play, and points can be scored when the opposing team knocks it out of bounds. In most versions, players can only knock the ball around with their hips—hands and feet are off limits. Later versions added the great stone-walled courts, which were then further modified with vertical hoops that players could bounce the ball through in order to score bonus points.
But as you might have guessed by that pile of vertebrae, winning the game wasn't just a matter of hometown pride. In the Mayan version of the game, opposing city-states might choose to settle their differences on the ballcourt instead of on the battlefield, and also used the game as a means of foretelling the future. By the time the Aztecs adopted it, the ritual decapitation of the losing team was as much a part of the game as the pop-up fly rule is in baseball—though probably not as controversial.
Believe it or not, the Mesoamerican ball game isn't just one of the oldest known sports, it's one of the oldest that's been continuously played up to this day. Called ulama, the modern-day version of the game features substantially less decapitation than its predecessor. It survived in remote communities, and in recent years, a new generation of the descendents of Mesoamerican peoples have found a new fascination with the game. In 2017, hundreds of people from various Latin American countries visited the ancient city of Teotihuacán for the first international ulamatournament. If it's true that ulama can be used to tell the future, then maybe the game is on the cusp of a new revival.
Watch And Learn: How Long Have They Been Making Rubber Balls In Mexico?
Rubber Balls in Mexico: A Long History and a Mayan Tradition
Nothing changed with our atmosphere — just our calculations and assumptions have gotten better.
Image credits NASA.
A new research paper proposes that we are all one step closer to space than we assumed. If the calculations are proven correct, we might, in fact, be a full 12 miles closer. The exact altitude of this boundary — the plane where the laws that order airspace get superseded by those governing outer space — is an important piece of information in world politics, the authors note.
The recalculated frontier
“The argument about where the atmosphere ends and space begins predates the launch of the first Sputnik,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and sole author of the new paper. “The most widely accepted boundary is the so-called Karman Line, nowadays usually set to be 62 miles altitude.”
The boundary between atmosphere and space is known as the Kármán line after its discoverer, aerodynamics researcher, and engineer Theodore von Kármán. In 1963, when the line was proposed, von Kármán suggested that the speed needed to lift an object into the atmosphere is the same as the speed needed to keep it in orbit around the Earth. He also believed that the horizontal movement of the object on orbit would counteract the effects of gravity. According to McDowell, however, this just isn’t true. The position of the line was therefore calculated based on a faulty assumption and without any real means of testing — this was a time before real-life orbital readings could be performed.
For his study, McDowell drew on North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) data detailing the orbital comings and goings of over 43,000 satellites. Most of these orbited far above the Karman line, so McDowell removed their paths from the study. About 50 satellites, however, were used in the calculations.
What set these 50 apart is that they all performed at least full rotations around the planet at low altitude (below 100km / 63 miles) as they re-entered the atmosphere at the end of their missions. The Soviet satellite Elektron-4, for example, performed ten full rotations around the planet at around 83 km (52 miles) before it burned up in the atmosphere in 1997. In other words, these cases revealed that satellites could still behave as if they were in outer space below the Karman line — which raises the possibility that the altitude line itself is overestimated.
McDowell used a mathematical model to find the altitude at which the orbits of these satellites finally started to degrade and they dropped back into the atmosphere — he found that these events occurred between 70 to 82 kilometers (41 to 55 miles) high. However, for most satellites, the 80-kilometer (50-mile) mark seems to be the lowest possible stable orbit. So McDowell proposes this altitude as the new accepted boundary between our atmosphere and outer space.
The suggestion may actually get some traction in the scientific community. The 80-kilometer mark fits with what we know of the atmosphere’s structure. The mesopause, stretching roughly between 83 and 100 kilometers high, is an area where the air’s chemical composition changes dramatically and charged particles become more abundant — which harkens more to the state of gases in outer space than those in our atmosphere. Below the lower edge of the mesopause, Earth’s atmosphere becomes a stronger force for airborne objects to reckon with, McDowell wrote.
“It is noteworthy that meteors (traveling much more quickly) usually disintegrate in the 43 to 62 miles altitude range, adding to the evidence that this is the region where the atmosphere becomes important,” he adds.
While most outer space operations, such as rocket launches, should remain relatively unchanged if the new boundary is adopted, McDowell wrote, it could raise some important political and territorial issues
The airspace above each country is generally considered to be part of that country — but outer space isn’t owned by anyone. If the limit of space is set at 100 kilometers high, for example, and an unauthorized satellite passes at 80 kilometers high, it could be rightfully considered an act of military aggression between states. Seeing as satellites tend to sometimes wobble up and down along their orbits, a lower limit of the atmosphere might help ease tensions.
The paper “The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line” will be published in the October issue of the journal Acta Astronautica.
German Television Station Program Shows a Mysterious UFO
German Television Station Program Shows a Mysterious UFO
Conspiracy theory YouTube channel ‘mavi777’ seemingly shows an unidentified flying object (UFO) in a German TV station program. Soon after the video was uploaded, it became the hottest debating point among alien enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. The incident took place over a month back, revealed the YouTube channel.
The clip shows a UFO in the backdrop of a TV studio. The strange object emanates light at times. It seems to appear and vanish rhythmically, which rules out a meteor.
The UFO sighting video soon went viral, and multiple conspiracy theorists began suggesting that this event captured on camera is authentic evidence of space alien existence. These theorists also criticized the government for staying mum about the incident. They believe governments are aware of these extraterrestrial visitors, but they are covering up the facts to prevent public panic.
A few days back, another UFO sighting was recorded on video during a weather program Skywatch7. WKBW-TV, an ABC affiliated TV station, released the strange sighting showing a blinking UFO in the skies during the live show.
The show’s newscaster was also seen pointing her fingers at the object. She then suggested that it could be a drone. However, conspiracy theorists said that a human-made drone could not travel at such astonishing speed across the skies.
Some conspiracy theorists think that Nibiru’s approach towards Earth causes the increasing number of anomalies in the skies. According to these theorists, Nibiru is a killer planet and now in its collision course with the Earth, and when this happens, devastating catastrophes will destroy the entire world.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a promising place to search for evidence of alien life. New research provides insights on what might be the best – and easiest – way to search.
Artist’s concept of a plume from Europa’s subsurface ocean. Radiation from space has the potential to destroy organic molecules that have made their way via plumes like this one to the surface of Europa. New research now shows scientists where to look for such organics.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
When it comes to the question of what places in the solar system would be the best to search for alien life, Europa immediately comes to mind. This small moon of Jupiter seems to have everything necessary – a global subsurface ocean and likely sources of heat and chemical nutrients on the ocean floor. But looking for evidence isn’t easy; the ocean lies beneath a fairly thick crust of ice, making it difficult to access. That would require drilling through many meters or even several kilometers of ice, depending on the location.
But there may be ways around that problem. It is almost certain now that plumes of water vapor can erupt from the surface, originating from the ocean below, where they could be sampled and analyzed by a flyby or orbiting probe. And now there is another potential solution – a new study, described in Space.com on July 23, 2018, shows that a lander on Europa (now in preliminary concept studies) might only have to dig a few inches/centimeters into the ice to search for evidence of active or past biology, such as amino acids.
It all depends on radiation, which Europa receives a lot of, from Jupiter. The study, led by NASA scientist Tom Nordheim, modeled the radiation environment on Europa in detail, showing how it varies from location to location. That data was then combined with other data from laboratory experiments documenting how quickly various radiation doses destroy amino acids.
Europa as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.
The results, published in a new paper in Nature Astronomy, showed that equatorial regions receive about 10 times more radiation dosage than middle or high latitudes. The harshest radiation zones appear as oval-shaped regions, connected at the narrow ends, that cover more than half of Europa.
According to Chris Paranicas, a paper co-author from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland:
This is the first prediction of radiation levels at each point on Europa’s surface and is important information for future Europa missions.
The good news from this is that a lander in the least-radiated locations would only have to dig about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) into the ice to find viable amino acids. In more radiated areas, the lander would need to dig about 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm). Even if any organisms were dead, the amino acids would still be recognizable. As Nordheim told Space.com:
Even in the harshest radiation zones on Europa, you really don’t have to do more than scratch beneath the surface to find material that isn’t heavily modified or damaged by radiation.
Artist’s concept of a future lander on Europa.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
As Nordheim also noted:
If we want to understand what’s going on at the surface of Europa and how that links to the ocean underneath, we need to understand the radiation. When we examine materials that have come up from the subsurface, what are we looking at? Does this tell us what is in the ocean, or is this what happened to the materials after they have been radiated?
Kevin Hand, another co-author of the new research and project scientist for the potential Europa lander mission, elaborated a bit more:
The radiation that bombards Europa’s surface leaves a fingerprint. If we know what that fingerprint looks like, we can better understand the nature of any organics and possible biosignatures that might be detected with future missions, be they spacecraft that fly by or land on Europa.
Europa Clipper’s mission team is examining possible orbit paths, and proposed routes pass over many regions of Europa that experience lower levels of radiation. That’s good news for looking at potentially fresh ocean material that has not been heavily modified by the fingerprint of radiation.
Data from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013 showing the location of a water vapor plume.
Image via NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne.
Nordheim and his team used data from the old Galileo mission (1995-2003) and electron measurements from the even older Voyager 1 mission (Jupiter flyby in 1979).
Since material from the subsurface ocean is thought to be able to come up to the surface through cracks or weaker areas of ice, it should be possible to sample it right on the surface without needing to drill. That would be a huge advantage, and it would be possible to send a lander to a location where there is a relatively fresh deposit not yet completely degraded by radiation. Right now, the images of Europa’s surface are not high enough resolution, but the ones from the upcoming Europa Clipper mission will be. As noted by Nordheim:
When we get the Clipper reconnaissance, the high-resolution images – it’s just going to be a completely different picture. That Clipper reconnaissance is really key.
Artist’s concept of the Europa Clipper mission at Europa.
Image via NASA.
Europa Clipper is tentatively scheduled to launch sometime in the early 2020s, and will be the first mission back to Europa since Galileo. It will perform dozens of close flybys of the moon, studying both the surface and the ocean below. Mission concepts for the lander to follow Europa Clipper are also being devised, using data from Clipper to select a landing spot. Both missions should be able to bring us closer to knowing if any kind of life exists in Europa’s dark ocean.
Bottom line: Europa’s subsurface ocean offers the tantalizing possibility of alien life elsewhere in our solar system. Drilling through the thick ice crust on top of it for a sample would be difficult though. But now new research shows that a future lander might only have to “scratch the surface” to access any organic molecules deposited from the ocean below, in areas where there is less radiation exposure. Looking for life on Europa may actually be easier than we thought.
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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.
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