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 ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
30-09-2018
Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics
Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer
A team recovers NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) after a successful flight.
Credit: Australian Antarctic Division
There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it.
Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics — shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side.
And yet, since March 2016, researchers have been puzzling over two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays did burst out from the Earth, and were detected by NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) — a balloon-borne antenna drifting over the southern continent.
ANITA is designed to hunt cosmic rays from outer space, so the high-energy neutrino community was buzzing with excitement when the instrument detected particles that seemed to be blasting up from Earth instead of zooming down from space. Because cosmic rays shouldn't do that, scientists began to wonder whether these mysterious beams are made of particles never seen before.
All the explanations were intriguing, and suggested that ANITA might have detected a particle not accounted for in the Standard Model. But none of the explanations demonstrated conclusively that something more ordinary couldn't have caused the signal at ANITA.
A new paper uploaded today (Sept. 26) to the preprint server arXiv changes that. In it, a team of astrophysicists from Penn State University showed that there have been more upward-going high-energy particles than those detected during the two ANITA events. Three times, they wrote, IceCube (another, larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica) detected similar particles, though no one had yet connected those events to the mystery at ANITA. And, combining the IceCube and ANITA data sets, the Penn State researchers calculated that, whatever particle is bursting up from the Earth, it has much less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of being part of the Standard Model. (In technical, statistical terms, their results had confidences of 5.8 and 7.0 sigma, depending on which of their calculations you're looking at.)
Breaking physics
Derek Fox, the lead author on the new paper, said that he first came across the ANITA events in May 2018, in one of the earlier papers attempting to explain them.
"I was like, 'Well this model doesn't make much sense,'" Fox told Live Science, "but the [ANITA] result is very intriguing, so I started checking up on it. I started talking to my office neighbor Steinn Sigurdsson [the second author on the paper, who is also at Penn State] about whether maybe we could gin up some more plausible explanations than the papers that have been published to date."
Fox, Sigurdsson and their colleagues started looking for similar events in data collected by other detectors. When they came across possible upward-going events in IceCube data, he said, he realized that he might have come across something really game-changing for physics. [5 Mysterious Particles Lurking Underground]
The surface facility for the IceCube experiment, which is located under nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of ice in Antarctica. IceCube suggests ghostly neutrinos don't exist, but a new experiment says they do.
Credit: Courtesy of IceCube Neutrino Observatory
"That's what really got me going, and looking at the ANITA events with the utmost seriousness," he said, later adding, "This is what physicists live for. Breaking models, setting new constraints [on reality], learning things about the universe we didn't know."
As Live Science has previously reported, experimental, high-energy particle physics has been at a standstill for the last several years. When the 17-mile (27 kilometers), $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was completed on the border between France and Switzerland in 2009, scientists thought it would unlock the mysteries of supersymmetry — the mysterious, theoretical class of particles that scientists suspect might exist outside of current physics, but had never detected. According to supersymmetry, every existing particle in the Standard Model has a supersymmetric partner. Researchers suspect these partners exist because the masses of known particles are out of wack — not symmetric with one another.
"Even though the SM works very well in explaining a plethora of phenomena, it still has many handicaps," said Seyda Ipek, a particle physicist at UC Irvine, who was not involved in the current research. "For example, it cannot account for the existence of dark matter, [explain mathematical weirdness in] neutrino masses, or the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe."
Instead, the LHC confirmed the Higgs boson, the final undetected part of the Standard Model, in 2012. And then it stopped detecting anything else that important or interesting. Researchers began to question whether any existing physics experiment could ever detect a supersymmetric particle.
"We need new ideas," Jessie Shelton, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science in May, around the same time that Fox first became interested in the ANITA data.
Now, several scientists not involved in the Penn State paper told Live Science that it offers solid (if incomplete) evidence that something new has really arrived.
"It was clear from the start that if the ANITA anomalous events are due to particles that had propagated through thousands of kilometers of Earth, then those particles were very likely not SM particles," said Mauricio Bustamante, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, who was not an author on the new paper.
"The paper that appeared today is the first systematic calculation of how unlikely is that these events were due to SM neutrinos," he added. "Their result strongly disfavors a SM explanation."
"I think it's very compelling," said Bill Louis, a neutrino physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was not involved in the paper and has been following research into the ANITA events for several months.
If standard model particle created these anomalies, they should have been neutrinos. Researchers know that both because of the particles they decayed into, and because no other standard model particle would even have a fragment of a chance in a million of making it through the Earth.
But neutrinos of this energy, Louis said, just shouldn't make it through the Earth often enough for ANITA or IceCube to detect. It's not how they work. But neutrino detectors like ANITA and IceCube don't detect neutrinos directly. Instead, they detect the particles that neutrinos decay into after smashing into Earth's atmosphere or Antarctic ice. And there are other events that can generate those particles, triggering the detectors. This paper strongly suggests that those events must have been supersymmetric, Louis said, though he added that more data is necessary.
Louis said that at this stage he thinks that level of specificity is "a bit of a stretch."
The authors make a strong statistical case that no conventional particle would be likely to travel through the Earth in this way, he said, but there isn't yet enough data to be certain. And there's certainly not enough that they could definitively figure out what particle made the trip.
Fox didn't dispute that.
"As an observer, there's no way that I can know that this is a stau," he said. "From my perspective, I go trawling around trying to discover new things about the universe, I come upon some really bizarre phenomenon, and then with my colleagues, we do a little literature search to see if anybody has ever thought that this might happen. And then if we find papers in the literature, including one from 14 years ago that predict something just like this phenomenon, then that gets really high weight from me."
He and his colleagues did find a long chain of papers from theorists predicting that stau sleptons might turn up like this in neutrino observatories. And because those papers were written before the ANITA anomaly, Fox said, that suggests strongly to him that those theorists were onto something.
But there remains a lot of uncertainty on that front, he said. Right now, researchers just know that whatever this particle is, it interacts very weakly with other particles, or else it would have never survived the trip through the planet's dense mass.
What's next
Every physicist who spoke with Live Science agreed that researchers need to collect more data to verify that ANITA and IceCube have cracked supersymmetry. It's possible, Fox said, that when IceCube researchers dig into their data archives they'll find more, similar events that had previously gone unnoticed. Louis and Bustamante both said that NASA should run more ANITA flights to see if similar upward-going particles turn up.
"For us to be certain that these events are not due to unknown unknowns — say, unmapped properties of the Antarctic ice — we would like other instruments to also detect these sort of events," Bustamante said.
A team prepares ANITA for flight over the Antarctic ice.
Credit: NASA
Over the long-term, if these results are confirmed and the details of what particle is causing them are nailed down, several researchers said that the ANITA anomaly might unlock even more new physics at the LHC.
"Any observation a non-SM particle would be a game changer, because it would tell us which path we should take after the SM," Ipek said. "The type of [supersymmetric] particle they claim to have produced the signals of, sleptons, are very hard to produce and detect at LHC."
"So, it is very interesting if they can be observed by other types of experiments. Of course, if this is true, then we will expect a ladder of other [supersymmetric] particles to be observed at the LHC, which would be a complementary test of the claims."
In other words, the ANITA anomalies could offer scientists the key information necessary to properly tune the LHC to unlock more of supersymmetry. Those experiments might even turn up an explanation for dark matter.
Right now, Fox said, he's just hungry for more data.
For decades, scientists have been scanning Mars’ surface for signs of ancient life. But by digging a little bit deeper, they’ve come across historic habitable zones in unexpected places.
After expanding their search, a team of researchers found that the Red Planet’s ancient subsurface could have housed microbial life for hundreds of millions of years. By borrowing hydrogen electrons from water, microbes could’ve had enough energy to not only survive underground, but to thrive for miles below the surface. If true, future missions could search areas where the subsurface is now exposed and potentially prove the existence of Martian life once and for all.
The study, led by Brown University researchers and published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, was inspired by a curious phenomenon on Earth. Vast communities of underground microbes here live in darkness without access to the Sun’s chemical energy, the sole source of energy for most organisms on the planet. These enterprising bacteria, though, manage to survive by bumming hydrogen electrons from the water molecules that seep into the subsurface, a process that produces enough energy for them to live on.
Mars obviously doesn’t have the surface water needed to support life nowadays, but with clear signs of historic, flowing water, it likely did. Similar microbes could have theoretically existed there, too.
Unexpected Advantages
Despite harsh conditions, Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere and intense radiation would have actually supported these ecosystems. When radiation hits surface water, it kicks off a process called radiolysis, where water molecules to break down into hydrogen and oxygen. Once the molecules are broken down, microbes can easily use the molecular hydrogen to fuel their existence.
To find out if these underground communities could have existed, the research team looked at three different factors. First, they used data from NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft’s gamma ray spectrometer to chart abundances of thorium, potassium and uranium in Mars’ crust. These elements give off radiation when they break down, kickstarting radiolysis. They also decay at constant rates, so by calculating their current abundances, they could estimate how much radiation rained down throughout history.
Embedded lake beds and dried up rivers tell us that there was no shortage of water exposed to radiation, but the team still needed to figure out how much of it soaked into the ground. To do so, they used density measurements to see how porous Mars’ crust was, allowing them to estimate how much hydrogen dripped into the subsurface. The last step was to look for underground regions that boasted a comfortable temperature. They used geothermal and climate models to see which areas were warm enough to harbor liquid water, but weren’t so warm that heat from Mars’ core would harm the ecosystem.
Taken with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, the image shows Syrtis Major, a volcanic region that’s exposes Mars’ ancient subsurface. The area is currently being considered as a landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
Lively Beginnings
After adding up these factors, the researchers found that around 4 billion years ago, the Martian subsurface was soaking up enough hydrogen to energize microbes for hundreds of millions of years. Their model shows that the ecosystems extended several miles into the subsurface and could withstand both warmer and cooler conditions than expected. In fact, thick layers of ice actually trapped hydrogen molecules underground, making extremely cold regions the ideal home for hungry microbes.
“People have a conception that a cold early Mars climate is bad for life, but what we show is that there’s actually more chemical energy for life underground in a cold climate,” said the study’s lead author, Jesse Tarnas of Brown University, in a press statement. “That’s something we think could change people’s perception of the relationship between climate and past life on Mars.”
There are still a lot of factors to take into consideration, though. The study assumes that Martian microbes looked like those on Earth, when they could have behaved completely differently. Plus, whether or not any sort of life has existed on Mars is still unknown. But showing that it would have had enough energy to survive is another hopeful sign of extraterrestrials there.
The only way to prove this theory, though, is to investigate areas where the subsurface is now exposed, like deep meteor impact craters. Luckily, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will soon be heading to the Red Planet, and will use this new data to continue our never-ending search for Martian life.
Les matériaux d’un OVNI sont actuellement étudiés par des scientifiques de haute volée – et les résultats sont DINGUES
Les matériaux d’un OVNI sont actuellement étudiés par des scientifiques de haute volée – et les résultats sont DINGUES
Des scientifiques de haut niveau affirment étudier du matériel provenant d’un OVNI qui s’est écrasé dans ce qu’ils disent être un développement potentiellement révolutionnaire.
To The Stars Academy, un groupe d’anciens membres des services secrets, d’employés du gouvernement américain et de scientifiques, prétend avoir sept échantillons d’une soucoupe volante abattue.
“Chaque échantillon représente différents éléments de phénomènes aériens non identifiés potentiels et leur mode de fonctionnement”, a déclaré l’académie.
Les premières études des objets dans le cadre du Projet de recherche ‘Adam’ ont donné des résultats incroyables, selon les rapports.
Les matériaux auraient appartenu à des phénomènes aériens non identifiés (UAP).
Selon To the Stars Academy, l’échantillon de magnésium-zinc-bismuth provient de la récupération d’un crash d’UAP, mais admet que la “source ne peut être vérifiée”.
Selon des experts, il n’existe “aucun précédent pour cette combinaison structurée de matériaux” et “l’objet ou la fonction véritable du matériau est inconnu”.
Fait intriguant, il est dit qu’un côté de l’échantillon semble avoir été produit en usine parce qu’il a un contour défini.
Ils ont également découvert que le matériau agit comme un guide d’ondes pour les fréquences térahertz (ondes électromagnétiques).
“D’autres tests sont prévus sur les matériaux”, a rapporté Disclose TV.
Le gouvernement américain stocke les matériaux capturés d’OVNI dans un immense hangar lourdement gardé près de Las Vegas, ce qui a également été affirmé récemment.
L’Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) du Pentagone a enquêté sur les soucoupes volantes pendant quatre ans à partir de 2008.
Le programme de 18 millions d’euros a été lancé après que l’ancien sénateur démocrate du Nevada, Harry Reid, eut insisté pour sa création.
Bigelow Aerospace, fondée par l’entrepreneur et ufologue Robert Bigelow, 73 ans, a travaillé aux côtés de fonctionnaires, dont Luis Elizondo, et il a été rapporté que des matériaux et des alliages d’OVNIS qui se sont écrasés sont entreposés au siège social de l’entreprise, à la périphérie nord de Las Vegas.
Le New York Times a rapporté l’année dernière que “sous la direction de M. Bigelow, la société a modifié des bâtiments à Las Vegas pour le stockage d’alliages métalliques et d’autres matériaux qui, selon M. Elizondo et les entrepreneurs du programme, avaient été récupérés de phénomènes aériens non identifiés.”
“Les chercheurs ont aussi enquêté sur des personnes qui ont dit avoir subi des effets physiques à la suite de contacts avec les objets et les ont examinés à la recherche de changements physiologiques.”
The trillion-star Andromeda galaxy, the focus of a new, student-run project called the Trillion Planet Survey, which aims to find signs of alien life.
Credit: S. Ozime
An ambitious, student-run hunt for intelligent aliens is underway.
The Trillion Planet Survey has begun scanning the huge Andromeda galaxy, as well as our own Milky Way, for beams of light that could have been produced by advanced alien civilizations. (The project's name stems from the fact that Andromeda harbors about 1 trillion stars, and stars in general are thought to host at least one planet on average.)
"First and foremost, we are assuming there is a civilization out there of similar or higher class than ours trying to broadcast their presence using an optical beam, perhaps of the 'directed energy' arrayed type currently being developed here on Earth," lead researcher Andrew Stewart, a student at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a statement. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]
"Second, we assume the transmission wavelength of this beam to be one that we can detect," Stewart added. "Lastly, we assume that this beacon has been left on long enough for the light to be detected by us. If these requirements are met and the extraterrestrial intelligence's beam power and diameter are consistent with an Earth-type civilization class, our system will detect this signal."
That system employs an image-analysis pipeline and the global network of small (1-meter-class, or 3.3 feet), robotically controlled telescopes operated by the Las Cumbres Observatorye.
Each telescope by itself captures a roughly 3 percent slice of Andromeda, which lies about 2.5 million light-years from Earth. The team will combine a set of these photos to create a single image, which will then be compared to a pristine "control" photo of the galaxy — one unsullied, for example, by satellites passing overhead.
Any differences between the two images could theoretically result from light signals produced by E.T. (though there could of course be natural explanations as well). Such "transients" will be processed by the data pipeline, which will help weed out false positives, team members said.
"One of the things the software checks for is, say, a satellite that did go through our image," Kyle Friedman, a senior from Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles, said in the same statement. "It wouldn't be small. It would be pretty big, and if that were to happen the software would immediately recognize it and throw out that image before we actually even process it."
Stewart, Friedman and their colleagues are in the research group of cosmologist Philip Lubin, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has a lot of space-laser experience.
For example, Lubin is a key player in the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot program, which aims to develop a spaceflight system composed of lasers and tiny, sail-equipped spacecraft. These lasers could accelerate the robotic nanoprobes to 20 percent the speed of light, Breakthrough Starshot team members have said, so the craft could reach nearby exoplanet systems just decades after launch. (Using current rocket technology, such flights would take tens of thousands of years at a minimum.)
And Lubin has previously proposed looking for signs of "directed energy" spaceflight systems that E.T. might be using.
A still from a video shows how an array of Earth-based lasers would propel a sail-equipped "nanocraft" to a distant star system in the Breakthrough Starshot program. If intelligent aliens have also developed such spaceflight systems, the beams they're projecting out into space could be detectable, researchers say.
Credit: Breakthrough Prize Foundation
The Trillion Planet Survey is already observing Andromeda and getting the project's pipeline ready to go, team members said. The image analysis may be complete in just a few weeks, but similar observations could continue to be made indefinitely, so the researchers can hunt for signs they may have missed.
For most of the 60-year history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence(SETI), researchers have hunted for radio signals. The new project is an example of a newer strategy known as optical SETI, which Trillion Planet Survey team members said should work in concert with the traditional method.
"In no way are we suggesting that radio SETI should be abandoned in favor of optical SETI," Stewart said. "We just think the optical bands should be explored as well."
The Maya Civilisation Was Far More Complex Than We Thought, Major Discovery Has Revealed
The Maya Civilisation Was Far More Complex Than We Thought, Major Discovery Has Revealed
In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew across the Yucatán Peninsula. With Charles at the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the jungles just below.
She wrote in her journal of Maya structures obscured by large humps of vegetation. A bright stone wall peeked through the leaves, “unspeakably alone and majestic and desolate – the mark of a great civilization gone.”
Nearly a century later, surveyors once again took flight over the ancient Maya empire, and mapped the Guatemala forests with lasers.
The 2016 survey, whose first results were published this week in the journal Science, comprises a dozen plots covering 830 square miles, an area larger than the island of Maui. It is the largest such survey of the Maya region, ever.
The study authors describe the results as a revelation. “It’s like putting glasses on when your eyesight is blurry,” said study author Mary Jane Acuña, director of El Tintal Archaeological Project in Guatemala.
In the past, archaeologists had argued that small, disconnected city-states dotted the Maya lowlands, though that conception is falling out of favor.
This study shows that the Maya could extensively “exploit and manipulate” their environment and geography, Acuña said. Maya agriculture sustained large populations, who in turn forged relationships across the region.
Combing through the scans, Acuña and her colleagues, an international 18-strong scientific team, tallied 61,480 structures. These included: 60 miles of causeways, roads and canals that connected cities; large maize farms; houses large and small; and, surprisingly, defensive fortifications that suggest the Maya came under attack from the west of Central America.
What lidar can reveal.
(Luke Auld-Thomas and Marcello A. Canuto/PACUNAM)
“We were all humbled,” said Tulane University anthropologist Marcello Canuto, the study’s lead author.
“All of us saw things we had walked over and we realized, oh wow, we totally missed that.”
Preliminary images from the survey went public in February, to the delight of archaeologists like Sarah Parcak. Parcak, who was not involved with the research, wrote on Twitter, “Hey all: you realize that researchers just used lasers to find *60,000* new sites in Guatemala?!? This is HOLY [expletive] territory.”
Parcak, whose space archaeology program GlobalXplorer.org has been described as the love child of Google Earth and Indiana Jones, is a champion of using satellite data to remotely observe sites in Egypt and elsewhere.
“The scale of information that we’re able to collect now is unprecedented,” Parcak said, adding that this survey is “going to upend long-held theories about ancient Maya society.”
With support from a Guatemala-based heritage foundation called Pacunam, the researchers conducted the massive and expensive survey using lidar, or light detection and ranging. They mapped several active archaeological sites, plus well-studied Maya cities like Tikal and Uaxactun.
Lidar’s principles are similar to radar, except instead of radio waves lidar relies on laser light. From an aircraft flying just a few thousand feet above the canopy, the surveyors prickled each square meter with 15 laser pulses. Those pulses penetrate vegetation but bounce back from hard stone surfaces. Using lidar, you can’t see the forest through the invisible trees.
Beneath the thick jungle, ruins appeared. Lots and lots of them.
Extrapolated over the 36,700 square miles, which encompasses the total Maya lowland region, the authors estimate the Maya built as many as 2.7 million structures. These would have supported 7 million to 11 million people during the Classic Period of Maya civilization, around the years 650 to 800, in line with other Maya population estimates.
“We’ve been working in this area for over a century,” Canuto said. “It’s not terra incognita, but we didn’t have a good appreciation for what was really there.”
Archaeologist Arlen Chase, a Maya specialist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who was not involved with this survey, said for years he has argued that the Maya society was more complex than widely accepted.
In 1998, he and archaeologist Diane Chase, his wife, described elaborate agricultural terraces at the Maya city of Caracol in Belize. “Everybody would not believe we had terraces!” he said.
He gets much less push back now, he said. “The paradigm shift that we’ve predicted was happening is in fact happening” Chase said, which he credits to lidar data. He has seen lidar evolve from a “hush-hush type of technology” used by the military to map Fallujah streets to a powerful archaeological tool.
Chase, who previously used lidar at Caracol, where as many as 100,000 people lived, compares this technology to carbon-14 dating. Radiocarbon dating gives archaeologists a much more accurate timeline.
Lidar is about to do the same for archaeologists’ sense of space, particularly in densely forested areas near the equator. Two years ago, researchers used lidar mapped dense urban infrastructure around Angkor, the seat of the medieval Khmer Empire in Cambodia.
“We’re just getting started in so many major sites around the world, whether it’s Angkor Wat, whether it’s Tikal in Central America or major sites in Egypt,” Parcak said.
For all its power, lidar cannot supplant old-fashioned archaeology. For 8 percent of the survey area, the archaeologists confirmed the lidar data with boots-on-the-ground visits.
This “ground truthing” suggests that the lidar analysis was conservative – they found the predicted structures, and then some.
“There is still much more ground to cover and work to do,” said Acuña, who will continue to study the large ancient Maya city of El Tindal.
Could you imagine, Canuto said, what might be found through a lidar survey of the Amazon? With technology like this, no forested frontiers are final.
Is This The Best Video Footage Ever Filmed of the Mysterious Triangle-Shaped ‘UFO’?
Is This The Best Video Footage Ever Filmed of the Mysterious Triangle-Shaped ‘UFO’?
The mysterious triangle-shaped ‘unidentified flying object’ is perhaps one of the most famous of UFOs.
Seen on countless occasions all around the world, the triangle-shaped UFO is perhaps the ultimate proof that UFO does not necessarily mean Extraterrestrial.
All evidence currently seems to support the idea that the mysterious object is in fact nothing other than an ultra-secret flying vehicle belonging to the government of the United States.
Did the Government really reverse-engineer Alien technology and build a triangle-shaped man-made UFO? Image Credit: The Object Report.
Dubbed as the TR-3B, the triangle shaped UFO was spotted by a driver who was returning home from work when he managed to record using his mobile, one of the best videos of the mysterious flying object.
Upon reviewing the recording, he observed that he had, in fact, spotted something inexplicable, a bright triangular object, flying in the distance.
The video has already accumulated thousands of ‘Likes’ after the source, who spoke to The Daily Star on condition of anonymity, published the footage online.
What do you think, is this the actual TR-3 Black Manta?
“It looks like a TR-3B surveillance plane with the circles under each corner of the triangle, if that makes sense,” said one viewer, who was supported by others who seemed to share his view. Another commentator, curisouly, even recalled helping build such ships “in a secret governemnt base in the 1960s.”
Many UFO experts are conviced that the Tirangle-Shped UFO is in fact the so-called the TR-3 Black Manta, a surveillance aircraft of the United States Air Force, speculated to be developed under a black project.
The only evidence we currently have for such an aircraft is based largely on speculations about several reported sightings of mysterious flying wing aircraft over Antelope Valley, an area of desert in southern California.
This stretch of desert draws people interested in supernatural phenomena as well as UFO sighintgs and “black project”-related aircraft sigthings, since it is located in vicinity to several known military research and testing areas, such as Edwards Air Force Base in California, and United States Air Force Plant 42.
Several ufologists maintain that this type of stealth aircraft (the TR-3 Black Manta) is the result of decades of research and reverse engineering applied to alien spaceships that crash landed on Earth decades ago.
Rumors suggest that the TR-3 was said to be a subsonic stealth spy plane with a flying wing design. It was alleged to have been used in the Gulf War to provide laser designation for Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk bombers, for targeting to use with laser-guided bombs. The TR-3 was claimed to have been manufactured by Northrop.
Curiosuly, there have been several reports of tiernagle shaped flying pbjects in Russia, Europe, and Australia.
UFO experts as well as alien hunters argue that these events are not isolated and that the strange tirangle—shaped aircraft is real, and is the result of reverse-engineered alien technology.
However, there are those who believe that the footage filmed over Texas is not the actual TR-3 Black Manta, but most likely a reflection of light caught on the window of the car.
Anyway, let me know what you think, and post your comments below!
Researchers Unearth ‘Ancient Mask’ of King Pakal—The So-Called Palenque Astronaut
Researchers Unearth ‘Ancient Mask’ of King Pakal—The So-Called Palenque Astronaut
King Pakal has been referred to as “the astronaut of Palenque”, mostly because of the engraving that has been found on the slab of his sarcophagus, which many authors claim is the representation of a man inside of a spaceship.
The mask unearthed in Palenque is believed to be the first ever relic found that depicts the mighty ruler, Pakal “El Grande.”
K’inich Janaab Pakal I—commonly referred to as Pacal, or Pacal the Great was ruler of the ancient city-state of Palenque. His name means Shield in classic Maya Language.
He is known for having reigned for a total of 68 years, which is considered the longest reign in the history of America.
The Palace of Palenque. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
Pakal’s tomb has been heavily connected to the ancient astronaut hypothesis. In Erich Von Daniken’s 1968 Best Seller Chariots of the Gods, the sarcophagus lid was reproduced by the author who compared the drawing to a man inside a spaceship. More precisely, Von Daniken compared the lid of Pakal’s sarcophagus to depictions of Astronauts inside spacecraft during Project Mercury.
Von Daniken wrote:
“In the center of that frame is a man sitting, bending forward. He has a mask on his nose, he uses his two hands to manipulate some controls, and the heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal with different adjustments. The rear portion is separated from him; he is sitting on a complicated chair, and outside of this whole frame, you see a little flame like an exhaust…”
Ancient alien theorists propose that the Sarcophagus lid of King Pakal clearly depicts him in some sort of spaceship during takeoff, and they argue that his hands appear to be manipulating some sort of machinery.
Now, experts have made a stunning new discovery.
Archaeologists have recovered a modeled mask which is believed to represent K’inich Janaab Pakal I. The finding was made during conservation works and archaeological studies in the ancient site known as El Palacio, in the archaeological zone of Palenque, in Chiapas, (Mexico). Experts report that in addition to the mask, they’ve also found ritual objects such as ceramic figures, carved bones, and flint.
“It is not a representation of a god. After looking at some images, it’s possible that it is Pakal the Great. We are quite sure of this at this time,” said archaeologist Arnoldo Gonzalez.
“During this process, under the (mask) head there were figurines, ceramic pieces, small plates, a lot of fish bones, which gives insight of a possible relationship with aquatics.”
Furthermore, according to Mexico’s the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), archaeologists have also uncovered the remains of a substructure in the building commonly referred to as Casa C.
The bust of King Pakal was made during the conservation work aimed at addressing the accumulation of water in the east courtyard of the so-called House E, reports INAH.
The discovery is the result of the first stage of a conservation project that the Ministry of Culture of Mexico, through INAH, and with the support of the US Embassy in Mexico, made at the pre-Colombian site.
Un étrange OVNI photographié à Salta, en Argentine
Un étrange OVNI photographié à Salta, en Argentine
En cette fin de mois de septembre, plusieurs membres d’une même famille ont observé un OVNI très étrange dans le quartier El Prado, situé à Salta, en Argentine.
Le vendredi 21 septembre 2018, à minuit 20, Ignacio Pancetti, un architecte, marchait en famille à travers la place du quartier El Prado, au sud-ouest de la ville, lorsqu'il a été témoin d'un événement inhabituel. Il s’agissait d’un OVNI lumineux qui changeait de forme. Il était clairement visible et semblait se tenir à côté de la lune dans un ciel parfaitement clair.
«Il se dirigeait vers le sud-ouesten direction dunord-ouest. Je pensais que c'était un avionvolant àhaute altitude. Après ça,j’ai émis l’hypothèsed’un satellite. Et soudain, au-dessus de moi, il est resté immobile et a commencé à osciller.Puisil estparti avant derevenir. Serait-ce un avion qui amanœuvrépour perdre de l'altitude ? C'était fou. J'ai donc sorti mon téléphone portable (Samsung G. s7), j'ai placé le caméscope en position de zoom maximum (x8) mais un seul point de lumièreétaitvisible, sans plus de détails. Donc,j’ai continué à prendre desphotosetj’ailaissél'exposition maximaleavec un zoom x8. Et quand j'aivisionné les images, j'ai commencé àremarquercommentcette chosese transformait.Au départ ce n’était qu’une lumière, puisaprès avoir explosé,il a pris la forme d’unanneau avec une lumièreen soncentre.Cette lueur a ensuitedisparu,avant de réapparaîtreà nouveau.Un instantplus tard, il a denouveauexplosé.Au total, j'ai pris plus de 200 photos. Il a continuéà se mouvoir pendant8ou10minutes, mais je devais y aller. Et le phénomènes’est poursuivi. Quand j'aipublié les photos, beaucoup de gens ont dit l'avoir vu aussi», explique Ignacio.
En effet, à côté des photos de Pancetti sur Facebook, des personnes comme N. Avellaneda et Kookie Salinas ont affirmé avoir vu ce phénomène surnaturel.
« Ce qui a attiré mon attention est quecette chosene tombaitpas comme un météore, maisse déplaçait,avantde s'arrêter.Puis il s’est balancé et estrestéimmobiledans le ciel. Ce sont des choses qui donnent à réfléchir parce que ce n’étaitunobjeten chute libre, mais quelque chose quinous dépasse.C’étaitpeut être la manifestation d'une sorte d'énergiequi ne cessait d’exploser. Dans les images, vous ne voyez pas d'objet défini et précis. Et je suppose qu’ilétait àunebasse altitude parce que,malgréle zoom, jene parvenais pas à le voir endétails », poursuit l'architecte. Il ajoute que c’est la première fois qu’il a été témoin d’un OVNI similaire.
Cette année, il y a eu une véritable « vague d’OVNI » à Salta. Les observations ont été très fréquente depuis janvier. Des touristes à bord du fameux « Train des Nuages » ont observé un corps métallique qui se déplaçait dans le ciel au-dessus de la Quebrada del Toro.
A Rosario de la Frontera, le chef des pompiers local José Exequiel Álvarez a assuré avoir pris contact avec les conducteurs qui ont confirmé ce qui s’était passé. Lui-même avait filmé à deux reprises des lumières dans le ciel. A Orán, une flotte de lumières a choqué bon nombre de témoins.
For over 1,000 years, an ancient city has been untouched by human beings for the most part.
Below the green, dense and lush Petén rainforest of Guatemala lies the city, which was inhabited by millions of Mesoamerican native people who built what some refer to as an empire, but others would refer to it as home.
For the first time now, tens of thousands of incredible ancient structures have been identified and mapped out by a team of international archaeologists. They used techniques involving airborne light detection and ranging technology over 810 square miles or 2,100 square kilometers of the Guatemalan lowland.
In 2009, that LiDAR technique was first applied to the region. It focused on nothing but the immediate surroundings of particular individual sites. In February however, this vast metropolis was first discovered by archaeologists, as reported by the usual mainstream outlets to acknowledge such discoveries.
A science nonprofit group from Guatemala called the PACUNAM Foundation led the discovery, and six months later, their work is published in the journal Science.
This is insane: over 61,000 ancient structures have been confirmed within this area, and that includes houses, ceremonial centers, pyramids, and large palaces.
The thick, dense and rich forest canopy was penetrated by this LiDAR system, and that revealed distinct changes in elevation, allowing the researchers to, according to one article, “identify these topographical features as manmade walls, roads, and buildings without ever having to set foot on the ground. With this information, they are able to create three-dimensional maps in a matter of minutes, avoiding years of arduous fieldwork.”
“Seen as a whole, terraces and irrigation channels, reservoirs, fortifications, and causeways reveal an astonishing amount of land modification done by the Maya over their entire landscape on a scale previously unimaginable,”said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a member of the team in a statement.
Now it has been indicated that upwards of 7 to 11 million people were present in this place at the height of what is referred to as the Late Classic period, lasting from around 650 – 800 CE. Over 61,000 ancient structures have been identified in this surveyed region alone. If you want some perspective on that 7 – 11 million number, today New York City is home to about 8.5 million people.
Something unique about the situation seems to be the fact that the populations were very unevenly distributed, with varying levels of “urbanization,” spread out more than modern cities over 810 square miles, or 1,200 square kilometers.
It was even reported that these people figured out how to support such a large population in a creative way, and they modified the land for the intense agricultural production.
“It seems clear now that the ancient Maya transformed their landscape on a grand scale in order to render it more agriculturally productive,” said Marcello A. Canuto, a Maya archaeologist. “As a result, it seems likely that this region was much more densely populated than what we have traditionally thought.”
Extensive networks and causeways were also mapped out by the team, and those chambers connected the various urban centers according to them. The different city centers seem to have been extensively connected, with a much different distribution of population compared to today’s cities. Defensive systems were also at play in these places.
The authors concluded that their findings “generate new questions, refine targets for fieldwork, elicit regional study across continuous landscapes, and advance Maya archaeology into a bold era of research and exploration.”
What they found was astonishing: not only was this galaxy forming stars at an unexpectedly high rate, but the clouds that fuel the birth of stars were unusual as well. Galaxies that form stars at higher rates are called starburst galaxies, and COSMOS-AzTEC-1 seemed to fit that archetype. However, in starburst galaxies, the star-formation predominantly occurs at the center of the galaxy.
Surprisingly, astronomers detected two massive clouds of gas several thousand light-years away from where they thought the star-formation should be concentrated. When they investigated more closely, they found that the gas in COSMOS-AzTEC-1 is extremely unstable, fueling runaway star-formation, and turning it into a monster galaxy. And yet, when scientists attempted to model this galaxy, their computer simulations could not explain all of its characteristics. Simply put, COSMOS-AzTEC-1 shouldn’t exist.
Monster galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1 observed with ALMA. ALMA revealed the distribution of molecular gas (left) and dust particles (right). In addition to the dense cloud in the center, the research team found two dense clouds several thousand light-years away from the center. These dense clouds are dynamically unstable and thought to be the sites of intense star formation. CREDIT: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), TADAKI ET AL.
The international team of scientists, led by Dr. Ken-ichi Tadaki from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, that discovered COSMOS-AzTEC-1 published their findings in Nature on Wednesday, reporting that they achieved unprecedented angular resolution by observing the galaxy with ALMA. Poor resolution has impeded studies of submillimeter-bright galaxies in the early universe and has been an obstacle to understanding their physical and dynamical properties.
Studying galaxies like COSMOS-AzTEC-1 is important, as they are thought to be the ancient predecessors of massive galaxies in the present universe, and the improved resolution has revealed several unexpected findings. In addition to the mysterious off-center clouds, COSMOS-AzTEC-1 has a regularly rotating, ordered gas disk instead of a more chaotic distribution, which is what scientists expected. Not only does this complicate the common model of early galaxy evolution, but it makes future high-resolution observations of similar galaxies an imperative.
Radio telescope antennas of the ALMA ( Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) project are seen in the Chajnantor plateau, Atacama desert, some 1500 km north of Santiago, on March 12,2013. The ALMA, an international partnership project between Europe, North America and East Asia, with the cooperation of Chile, is presently the largest astronomical project in the world. On March 13, 66 high precision antennas will be opened, located at an altitude of 5000 meters above sea level in the extremely arid Atacama desert. Credit: AFP PHOTO/Martin BERNETTI/Getty Images
Thankfully, the ALMA observations didn’t just raise more puzzles for scientists to solve; they also answered many long-standing questions about the nature of galaxies in the early universe. Before ALMA, astronomers knew that massive, young galaxies existed just 1 billion years after the Big Bang, but they were unable to answer how these galaxies formed or how they were able to stockpile massive reserves of gas so quickly.
One of the clues that this research team uncovered was hidden in the nature of COSMOS-AzTEC-1’s gas clouds, a feature that was previously unable to be observed. In normal galaxies, the gas clouds are in equilibrium; the gravity pulling the cloud inward is balanced by the gaseous pressure pushing outwards. Given the right environmental conditions, the gravity eventually becomes stronger than the pressure, causing the cloud to collapse, become extremely dense, and begin to form stars.
These stars and their eventual supernovae increase the outward pressure within the gas, stabilizing it, and regulating the rate of star formation. In COSMOS-AzTEC-1, the gas clouds are extremely unstable, and the outward pressure is significantly weaker than the gravity, which prevents any of the aforementioned stabilization. Instead, COSMOS-AzTEC-1 has a runaway star-formation rate over 1000 times that of our Milky Way galaxy, and Tadaki’s team estimates it will run out of gas in just 100 million years.
The mechanism that causes COSMOS-AzTEC-1’s gas instability remains unclear. Tadaki and his colleagues hypothesize that it could be caused by a galaxy merger: a collision between two or more galaxies that can transport gas efficiently throughout the galaxy and can initiate a burst of star-formation. However, their current observations didn’t detect any of the signs of such an event, and a merger wouldn’t entirely explain how COSMOS-AzTEC-1 was able to keep its enormous surplus of gas from becoming stars before it began its starburst period.
Despite the lingering questions though, Tadaki and his team’s research is a perfect example of how technological improvements will find the solutions to long-standing scientific mysteries and reveal unexpected secrets hidden throughout our universe.
SEE-THROUGH MAYA Ruins at the Classic Maya city of Tikal in northern Guatemala poke out of dense forests that, thanks to aerial laser mapping, have revealed the unexpected size and complexity of this ancient American civilization.
ICKANDGAK/PIXABAY
A laser-shooting eye in the sky has revealed the previously unappreciated size and complexity of ancient Maya civilization, both before and during its presumed heyday, scientists say.
Maya people in what’s now northern Guatemala built surprisingly extensive defensive structures and roads as part of political systems featuring interconnected cities, starting at least several hundred years before the rise of Classic Maya society, an international team reports in the Sept. 28 Science. Classic Maya sites date to between around 250 and 900.
Aerial laser maps of northern Guatemala obtained in 2016 and map-guided ground surveys and excavations in 2017 compel a reevaluation of traditional assumptions about the ancient Maya, the team concludes. A long-standing idea that Classic Maya civilization, which covered parts of southern Mexico and much of Central America, once contained relatively small city-states ruled by warring kings has drawn increasing skepticism over the last decade (SN Online: 4/17/18). Laser technology shot down that scenario by gazing through forests and vegetation at 10 Maya sites — as well as in two areas with signs of Maya-era activity but no named sites — dating from a couple hundred years before the start of the Classic period to near its end. “Every Maya city was bigger and more populated than we previously thought,” says archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University in New Orleans. Estrada-Belli led the investigation along with archaeologists Marcello Canuto, also at Tulane, and Thomas Garrison of Ithaca College in New York.
A small plane carrying light detection and ranging equipment, or lidar, emitted laser pulses that gathered data on the ground’s shape across 2,144 square kilometers of northern Guatemala. Based on the more than 60,000 lidar-identified structures, the researchers estimate that a minimum of 7 million to 11 million people inhabited northern Guatemala near the end of the Classic Maya period.
UNVEILING TIKAL Dense forest surrounds the city center of this Classic-era Maya site (top). Laser mapping of the same view (bottom) revealed structures and causeways hidden by the jungle.
F. ESTRADA-BELLI/PACUNAM
Lidar views of the ancient Maya’s urban and rural infrastructure are particularly impressive, Estrada-Belli says. Water control was crucial. Much of the unsettled wetlands throughout northern Guatemala contain remnants of crisscrossing drainage channels that form grids within what must have once been agricultural fields. Some channels extend for one kilometer or more. Remains of stone terraces and low walls enclose many cultivation areas.
Drainage channels and terraces controlled water flow and eased soil erosion in heavily cultivated fields. “The ancient Maya were good stewards of their environment,” Estrada-Belli says.
Evidence of carefully irrigated agricultural fields challenges a popular view that Classic-era centers relied on food from soil-damaging, slash-and-burn farming. That practice eventually contributed to Maya civilization’s downfall, some researchers have argued.
Although sustainable cultivation techniques appear to have been standard for the ancient Maya, farmland near the largest Maya cities would not have provided enough food for local populations, the researchers say. Additional food was imported from distant sites belonging to common political networks, the team suspects.
Laser maps show that Maya cities varied substantially in population density and typically included less crowded zones in between city centers and rural areas. Most sites had a surprising number of defensive structures, Estrada-Belli says. Strategically placed bridges, ditches, ramparts, stone walls and terraces suggest military conflicts occurred frequently.
That didn’t stop cities from maintaining long-distance contacts and forming networks of politically aligned sites. Raised roads, or causeways, connected the earliest Maya sites, including three dating to a few hundred years before the Classic period, to nearby centers. These 10- to 20-meter-wide causeways run for as many as 22 kilometers. Later Maya cities primarily contain short causeways that served as entrances to public and ritual areas.
The new study builds on previous, smaller-scale lidar studies in and around Caracol, a Classic Maya city in western Belize (SN: 3/14/16, p. 22). Archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas directed that research.
“The new lidar data show that interconnected Maya cities go back to at least 300 B.C.,” Arlen Chase says.
Further lidar-guided surveys and excavations are planned, Estrada-Belli says. Some newly identified causeways extend beyond the edges of lidar maps, a sign that Guatemala’s forests hold further Maya revelations, he adds.
There may be misaligned disks of material rotating around the black hole. Rings of gas may be breaking off and colliding, leaving gas to fall directly towards the black hole at unfathomable speeds.
We’ve known for decades that black holes exist, and that matter sometimes falls into them, and now we have the first published evidence – from a team of UK astronomers – of matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent of the speed of light. This is much faster than what’s been observed in the past, but it isn’t unexpected. Recent computer simulations suggest a mechanism – via misaligned disks around the hole – by which gas can fall directly in at high speed. The team used data from the European Space Agency’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton to make the discovery. The black hole is a supermassive one, located at the heart of a galaxy known as PG1211+143, about a billion light-years away.
Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester, who led the team that made the discovery, said:
We were able to follow an Earth-sized clump of matter for about a day, as it was pulled towards the black hole, accelerating to a third of the velocity of light before being swallowed up by the hole.
The velocity of light is 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second.
Cool, yes? These results appeared in a paper published September 3, 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The XMM-Newton spacecraft, via ESA/ University of Leicester/RAS.
The researchers used XMM-Newton data to examine at X-ray spectra (where X-rays are dispersed by wavelength) of the galaxy PG211+143. This object was already known as one likely to have a supermassive black hole at its core (as most galaxies now are thought to do). The team’s statement explained:
The researchers found the spectra to be strongly red-shifted, showing the observed matter to be falling into the black hole at the enormous speed of 30 per cent of the speed of light, or around 100,000 kilometers per second [60,000 mps]. The gas has almost no rotation around the hole, and is detected extremely close to it in astronomical terms, at a distance of only 20 times the hole’s size (its event horizon, the boundary of the region where escape is no longer possible).
Most infall to black holes doesn’t move so fast, because, before it enters the hole, the material forms an accretion disk. The astronomers explained:
… black holes are so compact that gas is almost always rotating too much to fall in directly. Instead it orbits the hole, approaching gradually through an accretion disk – a sequence of circular orbits of decreasing size.
Why, then, did the material observed in galaxy PG211+143 fall directly into a black hole? The astronomers said the high velocity could have been the result of misaligned disks of material rotating around the black hole:
The orbit of the gas around the black hole is often assumed to be aligned with the rotation of the black hole, but there is no compelling reason for this to be the case …
Until now it has been unclear how misaligned rotation might affect the in-fall of gas. This is particularly relevant to the feeding of supermassive black holes since matter (interstellar gas clouds or even isolated stars) can fall in from any direction.
As it turns out, theorists at University of Leicester recently used the UK’s Dirac supercomputer facility to simulate the ‘tearing’ of misaligned accretion disks around compact objects. The astronomers explained:
This work has shown that rings of gas can break off and collide with each other, cancelling out their rotation and leaving gas to fall directly towards the black hole.
And now, as often happens, the theoretical work has been followed by an observation. Pounds commented:
The galaxy we were observing with XMM-Newton has a 40 million solar mass black hole which is very bright and evidently well fed. Indeed some 15 years ago we detected a powerful wind indicating the hole was being over-fed. While such winds are now found in many active galaxies, PG1211+143 has now yielded another ‘first’, with the detection of matter plunging directly into the hole itself.
Characteristic disk structure from the simulation of a misaligned disk around a spinning black hole.
Image via K. Pounds et al./ University of Leicester/RAS.
Bottom line: Astronomers used data from ESA’s X-ray space observatory XMM-Newton to discover a supermassive black hole, in a galaxy about a billion light-years away, into which matter is falling at some one-third of light speed.
A balloon mission flying over the North Pole captured 6 million images of these bright blue noctilucent clouds in their home in the upper atmosphere.
On the cusp of our atmosphere live a thin group of seasonal electric-blue clouds. Forming 50 miles (80 km) above the poles in summer, these clouds are known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs). This summer, a NASA balloon mission observed these clouds over the course of five days at their home high in Earth’s atmosphere. The resulting photos, which scientists have just begun to analyze, will help to better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, as well as in oceans and lakes and the atmospheres of other planets, and may even improve weather forecasting.
Atmospheric turbulence – small-scale, irregular air motions characterized by winds that vary in speed and direction – is important because it mixes and churns the atmosphere and causes water vapor, smoke, and other substances, as well as energy, to become distributed both vertically and horizontally.
Noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds observed by NASA balloons as they flew over the Arctic in July 2018.
On July 8, 2018, NASA’s PMC Turbo mission launched a giant balloon to study noctilucent clouds 50 miles (80 km) above the surface. For five days, the balloon floated through the stratosphere from its launch at Esrange, Sweden, across the Arctic to western Nunavut, Canada. During its flight, cameras aboard the balloon captured 6 million high-resolution images filling up 120 terabytes of data storage. The images include a variety of noctilucent cloud displays, revealing the processes leading to turbulence. Scientists are now beginning to go through the images and the first look has been promising.
Noctilucent (also called night-shining) clouds coalesce as ice crystals on tiny meteor remnants in the upper atmosphere. The results make brilliant blue rippling clouds that are visible just after the sun sets in polar regions during the summer. These clouds are affected by what’s known as atmospheric gravity waves — caused by the convecting and uplifting of air masses, such as when air is pushed up by mountain ranges. The waves play major roles in transferring energy from the lower atmosphere to the mesosphere.
Dave Fritts is principal investigator of the PMC Turbo mission at Global Atmospheric Technologies and Sciences in Boulder, Colorado. He said in a statement:
This is the first time we’ve been able to visualize the flow of energy from larger gravity waves to smaller flow instabilities and turbulence in the upper atmosphere. At these altitudes you can literally see the gravity waves breaking – like ocean waves on the beach – and cascading to turbulence.
The balloons were equipped with seven specially-designed imaging systems to observe the clouds. Each included a high-resolution camera, a computer control and communications system, and 32 terabytes of data storage. The seven imaging systems were arranged to create a mosaic of wide views extending 100 miles (160 km) across, with each narrow view able to image turbulence features as small as 20 yards (918 meters) wide. A lidar — or laser radar — measured the precise altitudes of the clouds as well as the temperature fluctuations of the gravity waves above and below the clouds.
Learning about the causes and effects of turbulence will help scientists understand not only the structure and variability of the upper atmosphere, but other areas as well. Turbulence happens in fluids across the universe and the results will help scientists better model it in all systems. Ultimately, the results will even help improve weather forecast models.
Bottom line: In July 2018, a NASA balloon mission floated over the Arctic to study noctilucent clouds 50 miles (80 km) above the surface.
That may be true in movies about old baseball players, but when it comes to old plazas of the Mayans, a better saying might be, “If you build it, they will come and find it … eventually.” That’s the case in a Guatemalan jungle where researchers using airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) have located over 60,000 distinct Mayan structures hidden by dense vegetation too difficult to explore on the ground. Those structures include a pyramid complex and were surrounded by an extensive network of roads. Were they expecting us?
“Even though some earlier lidar studies had prepared us for this, just seeing the sheer quantity of ancient structures across the landscape was mind-boggling.”
In a study published in Science, Ithaca College archeologist and co-author Thomas Garrison, described the Lidar scanning which began in July 2016 in northern Guatemala near the Mexican border. In a 12 period, they flew over 800 square miles of jungle, firing three lasers at 300,000 pulses of light per second. Lasers that managed to penetrate the canopy and then bounce back were picked up by a detector, which collected enough data to create a 3-D map of the topography with one-meter resolution.
El Castillo before excavation, 1860
“Seen as a whole, terraces and irrigation channels, reservoirs, fortifications and causeways reveal an astonishing amount of land modification done by the Maya over their entire landscape on a scale previously unimaginable.”
Marcello A. Canuto, director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane and study co-author, described the unbelievable scenes the archeologists saw on the map (see a video here and map samples here). It shows that the area was much more densely populated than previously thought – possibly between 7 million and 11 million people in this Maya Lowlands area at its peak during the Late Classical Period (650 to 800 CE). The irrigation canals and farm areas indicate how necessary and important agriculture was to this Mayan civilization, and how they changed the topology to accommodate it without the use of plows – techniques that could help farmers today.
Mayan pyramid
The power of LiDAR was shown in the discovery of the pyramid, a large structure that has somehow not been found in previous other searches of the area. And the abundance of roads and fortifications indicates that the Mayans were militarized defensively and waging wars earlier than previously thought. However, the LiDAR mapping is limited in that it can’t identify what time period the various structures existed in, giving instead one picture covering centuries of existence, as Garrison explains to Gizmodo.
“Not everything was occupied all at the same time, and it is now our job as archaeologists to sort all of this out. But we’re certainly happy to have these new problems!”
Spoken like a true archaeologist. They built it and he will keep on coming.
Rare triangle-shaped UFO caught over London, England
Rare triangle-shaped UFO caught over London, England
London England - 09-23-18 - The observer and videographer of this event states that he saw this triangle-shaped object flying above his head in London.
He states that he just had enough time to grab his 90x zoom camcorder and capture video and still frames of the enigmatic vehicle.
The object in question is seemingly unique in its color and shape in that the top or cupalo appears to be off-center as compared to other reports of triangle-shaped UFOs.
Of course with today's technology it is easy to create something like this and it is wise to be skeptical. You will see a blue color along with gray on the other side with the blue, off-centered top. Mufon case 95215.
Is Earth ready for alien contact? IT IS NOW - Government UFO expert pens contingency plan
Is Earth ready for alien contact? IT IS NOW - Government UFO expert pens contingency plan
EXCLUSIVE: A UFO expert who investigated alien sightings for the UK Government has drafted a contingency plan for the day humans discover extraterrestrial life.
Nick Pope, who worked for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) between 1985 and 2006, says the world is incredibly underprepared for the eventuality of extraterrestrial contact.
Whether humans discover alien microbes on Mars or detect radio signals from a distant civilisation, Mr Pope said “top-level strategic planning” needs to be readily available.
And exclusively for Express.co.uk, the UFO expert took it upon himself to draft a five-page-long document outlining what he thinks is an adequate response to discovering aliens.
You can read the entire contingency plan written by Mr Pope below.
Mr Pope said he believes people have grown disillusioned with outer space after the Apollo program failed to extend humanity’s reach into the stars.
He thinks this somewhat dampened public excitement around the hunt for alien life, which in turn has left our defences wide open.
Mr Pope said: “It’s an uphill struggle. It’s always tricky to convince people to spend money on what a lot of people might consider white elephant projects, considering a lot of the social problems we have.
“As often as I like to say questions like ‘are we alone or not in the universe’ – that is one of the most profound questions we could ask.
UFO expert Nick Pope drafted a response plan for when we discover alien life
(Image: NICK POPE/GETTY)
“And if we can get an answer to that, we want that answer and why wouldn’t we really push hard for it?”
According to Mr Pope, one of the biggest threats surrounding Earth’s lack of readiness is the possibility of coming in contact with deadly alien contaminants.
The UFO expert fears outside of NASA, there is no adequate legislation in place, to deal with potentially lethal extraterrestrial microbes and viruses.
In his drafted plan, Mr Pope urged the UK Government to ensure proper biological hazard containment protocols are in place.
He wrote: “In scientific terms, this danger is described as ‘back contamination’ and is part of ‘planetary protection’ policy.
‘Are we alone or not in the universe’ – that is one of the most profound questions we could ask
Nick Pope, UFO expert
“In NASA, this falls under the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA).
“In the event of any sample-return or discovery-return mission, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) will wish to seek robust assurances that the lead agency – probably NASA, but maybe the space agency of another nation, or a private company such as SpaceX – has appropriate biological hazard containment protocols in place.”
Mr Pope believes there is no adequate legislation in place to prepare for this
(Image: NICK POPE)
(Image: NICK POPE)
(Image: NICK POPE)
He now says he thinks people are simply unaware of the dangers lurking in space.
He added: “I don’t think people understand the issues. I don’t think people understand how close we might be to getting an answer."
According to Mr Pope, there are three ways in which humans might one day find the answer to “are we alone in the universe”.
The most likely of the three is the discovery of alien microbes, dead or alive, on alien worlds such as Mars.
(Image: NICK POPE)
(Image: NICK POPE)
The other two scenarios bank on technologically advanced alien civilisations beaming signals into space or sending spacecraft to Earth.
Mr Pope’s contingency plan outlines a set of guidelines on how to react to each of these scenarios.
These include immediate actions that would need to be taken in situations that directly threaten the safety of the planet.
He wrote: “There are three very different scenarios, which will be dealt with in turn, because each raises separate issues, where very different actions will need to be taken.”
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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 73 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.
