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...
12-03-2019
Water Hops All Around the Moon Over the Course of a Lunar Day
Water Hops All Around the Moon Over the Course of a Lunar Day
Water molecules are hopping around the moon as the lunar surface warms and cools throughout the day, new research suggests.
That research is based on observations gathered byNASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying our planet's close companion since 2009. A recent upgrade to an instrument onboard the orbiter called Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) has allowed scientists to keep a closer eye on where the moon's surface shows signs of water.
"This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation's space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration," Kurt Retherford, a co-author on the new research and the principal investigator of the LAMP instrument at Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a NASA statement.
Water on other planetary bodies could be a valuable resource not just for human explorers to drink, but also to serve as fuel for future robotic exploration, since water can be split to form rocket fuel, saving missions from having to carry that fuel from Earth.
But it was only in 2009 that scientists were able to confirm that there was water locked up in ice on the moon's surface. Now, they have tracked how individual water molecules bind and release from the rocky regolith as temperatures change over the course of the moon's monthlong daylight cycle.
According to the researchers' observations, water molecules remain stuck to the surface throughout the lunar morning. As the neighborhood warms up around lunar noon, some of the molecules lift off into the moon's puny atmosphere and migrate around the moon's surface until they stumble upon someplace cold enough that they can settle back down to the surface.
"More work is needed to fully account for the complexities of the lunar surface, but the present results show that [this] work is definitely worth doing!" Michael Poston, a co-author on the new research and a research scientist on the LAMP team at Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.
The research was described in a paper published Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
What does this idiom mean and who did we inherit it from?
Image via Pixabay.
Some idioms weather the years with grace. Their meaning keeps them relevant even after cultural context leaves them in the dust. We advise our friends against “beating a dead horse”, for example, or point out that you can take it to water but not make it drink — despite the fact that almost nobody today has even interacted with a horse.
Then there are those idioms that aren’t only removed from the modern way of life but are also factually incorrect. Yet they persist. “Sailing the seven seas” is one such idiom. Today, we’ll take a look at how it came to be and which seas, exactly, it harkens to.
Nowadays the term “seven seas” is a shorthand for “all the seas and oceans”; sailing the seven seas, then, means you’re quite the accomplished sailor. But, these “seven seas” carried various meanings throughout history and across cultures. Each civilization understood it differently, through the lens of their religion, culture, and the places they knew. Keep that in mind as we delve into the seven depths of this idiom.
Seven degrees of mystical seas
The earliest use (that we know of) is religious in nature. It comes from the ancient Sumerians, the first people to inhabit Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Enheduanna, a high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna from the city-state of Ur, and the first poet to have their name recorded in history, refers to ‘seven seas’ in a hymn written around 2300 BC. Betty De Shong Meador provides a translation of these hymns in Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000, page 73), which reads (note that I’ve added all the commas and breaks between verses based on how I interpret the text):
“[….] O, house / Your shining face is the great snake of the reed marsh / Your foundation, o, shrine / The fifty abzu’s, the seven seas, has plumbed the inner-workings of your prince / Decision maker / Crown of wide heaven / He, Ashimbabbar, king of heaven, o , Ur / Shrine has built this house on your radiant and placed his seat upon your dais.”
Ashimbabbar seems to be a normalized, alternative spelling of Nanna’s name; Nanna was a moon god and “the tutelary deity of the city of Ur”, according to Oracc. In this context, abzu’s — from ‘ab’ meaning waters and ‘zu’ meaning deep in Akkadian — are probably fresh underground waters, such as those from springs or dug wells. The Sumerians believed underground waters came from the primordial sea and held an important religious significance.
Ok, hardhats on, it’s time to go on a limb here. In the Babylonian creation epic, Abzu morphs into a key deity. It’s possible they/it has been so all along. But, the fact that Enheduanna cites ‘fifty’ abzu’s suggests to me that this wasn’t the case while she lived, or that the two concepts were similar but already separated. Abzu, as a deity, represents a primordial freshwater ocean which, after coupling with Tiamat, a primordial saltwater ocean, essentially leads to the creation of the Universe. The two birth younger gods, who eventually usurp & murder them and create the world as we know it from their corpses.
Fresh- and salt-water seem to play a central part in the Sumerian religion and culture. The fifty abzu’s (which are fresh, Abzu’s domain) and the seven seas (seas tend to be salty, Tiamat) may have symbolized the primordial, raw stuff of which reality was born from in Enheduanna’s eyes. These ‘seven seas’, then, may have symbolized knowledge, creation, or the essence of both the mundane and the godly — not a stretch of the map. Possibly; that’s my take on it.
Seven western seas
Western cultures likely inherit the idiom from the ancient Greeks and Romans (who basically exported Greek culture throughout Europe). NOAA states that “the Seven [Greek] Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a ‘sea'”. This fits well with the world as known to the ancient Greeks, who were quite the accomplished sailors themselves. Although they never moved out of the Mediterranean and its connected seas in large numbers, that still places them within a reasonable distance of Mesopotamia, its culture, and our known source for the idiom.
Another reference to the seven seas comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and admiral. Writing in his book The History of the World (the quote below is taken from Chapter 16, or ‘XVI’ in Roman numerals) these ‘seas’ were, in fact, the navigable salt marshes that the river Po forms when it meets the Adriatic sea.
“And there is not a river againe, that in so little a way, groweth to a greater streame [than the Po]: for over-charged it is and troubled with the quantitie of water, and therefore worketh it selfe a deepe channell, heavie and hurtfull to the earth under it, although it be derived and drawne into the other rivers and goles, betweene Ravenna and Altinum, for 120 miles: yet because he belcheth and casteth them out from him in so great abundance, he is said to make seven seas.”
“[….] All those rivers and trenches afore-said, the Tuscanes began to make first out of Sagis, carrying the forcible streame of the river acrosse into the Atrian meeres, which are called the seven seas, and made the famous haven of Atria a towne of the Tuscanes; of which the Adriaticke sea tooke the name afore time, which now is called Adriaticum.”
Here too we see that the ‘seas’ themselves weren’t necessarily seas per se, but the idiom has at least moved firmly into the realm of geography by this time.
The ‘seas’ in seven seas change over time, keeping pace with the most up-to-date maps. NOAA goes on to explain that in medieval European literature, “the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas”. On the Arabian side of the cultural divide, these seven seas were the waters on the Eastern trading routes — the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea, according to LiveScience.
As Europe crawled out of the middle ages and reached for cultural dominance through exploration (and sadly, colonization), the seven seas changed to mean the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico (when Europeans first reached the Americas), and then the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea as trade in spices and tea between Europe and Asia intensified.
In other words, the ‘seven seas’ idiom evolved over time to mean ‘a faraway place’ rather than a particular area or group of seas — probably under the combined efforts of sailors and captains looking to impress land-locked ladies. Maybe it’s an old-timey equivalent to ‘in a galaxy far, far away.’
But this still leaves one part of the puzzle unanswered:
Why is it always ‘seven’?
This is a trickier question to handle.
It may be a vestige of Enheduanna’s hymns. Ancient Sumerians regarded the heavens as being formed of seven domes, each made of a different type of precious stone. It’s possible, then, that each of the seas she refers to could have spawned one of the domes, and the wording just stuck.
Another possible explanation, in my view, has to do with the number itself. One of the most cited papers in psychology today, published in 1956 by George A. Miller, a Harvard psychologist, reports that the average memory span of young human adults is approximately 7 items. Whether this is the cause or not, I cannot say for sure — but the number seven pops up time and time again in all manners of places and contexts.
Rome was built on seven hills, and the world, according to Christian mythos, was made in seven days — although technically the last one was a cheat-day. Christian traditions also tell us of seven deadly sins and seven virtues, of Noah being told to bring seven pairs of every animal aboard his ark, of Jericho’s walls falling on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets march around it seven times. Hinduism tells of seven different chakras, Islam of seven hells and seven heavens, and Mahatma Gandhi lists Seven Blunders of the World — to name a few. A massive poll carried out by writer, mathematician, and broadcaster Alex Bellos a few years ago found that 7 was the most-voted ‘favorite number’ (10% out of some 44,000 voters).
Do I believe that the number 7 is magic? Of course not — the only magic I believe in is Santa Claus and that booze can make me dance. But, seeing the number pop up so often definitely suggests something is special about it.
“Seven is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided our multiplied within the group [it’s a prime number]. [It] is the only number between two and ten that is neither a multiple nor a factor of the others. In this way, “lucky number seven” stands alone—and we grasp this implicitly,” Bellos told Brandon Specktor for Reader’s Digest.
“It’s unique, a loner, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.”
“By associating seven with a group of things, you kind of make them special too. The point here is that we’re always sensitive to arithmetical patterns, and this influences our behavior—even if we’re not conscious of it.”
One voter from New Zealand even told Bellos in his comments that “People don’t usually tend to pick 7, and I like to be different,” humorously supporting his hypothesis.
'I KNOW I SAW IT' - New witnesses emerge in infamous 1973 ‘alien abduction’ case of two fishermen ‘taken by creatures with lobster claws’
'I KNOW I SAW IT' - New witnesses emerge in infamous 1973 ‘alien abduction’ case of two fishermen ‘taken by creatures with lobster claws’
The witnesses claim they saw a UFO and a strange figure emerge from the water the night two fishermen were allegedly "abducted".
EXCLUSIVE
By Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent
NEW witnesses to one of the most infamous "alien abductions" ever have come forward to tell their story for the first time.
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing on the banks of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, in 1973, when they claim a UFO landed nearby and three alien creatures kidnapped them.
JONNY DILLON
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, pictured, were left traumatised by the 1973 encounter
Police audio files obtained by Sun Online last year showed the pair were highly agitated by the alleged incident but they never wavered from their story - even when cops left them alone and secretly taped them.
And now, 45 years later, a couple have come forward to verify their story after seeing a strange UFO on the same night and location as the fishermen.
Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sat in their car looking out across the river when they saw strange blue lights in the sky.
Maria, now 69, said: "I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing.
JONNY DILLON
A sketch of the creatures which allegedly "abducted" by Calvin and Charles
ANGELA BLAIR/ PHILIP MANTLE
Vernon and Maria have come forward after 45 years
"And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”
They watched the strange lights for around 40 minutes before getting out of their car and walking down the pier towards a boat.
However events took a sinister turn as Maria spotted a strange figure emerging from the water.
She recalled: "We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry 'There’s somebody out there'.
"They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.
ARTISTS SEBASTIAN WOSCYK COURTESY PHILIP MANTLE
An artists impression of the alleged abduction
“He said 'Come on - there’s nobody out there'. I know I saw it.
"I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car."
Unbeknown to the couple, Charles and Calvin were on the opposite river bank having a terrifying close encounter with the UFO and its occupants.
They claim they were captured by three alien creatures, who came out of a door on the oval shaped "craft".
The men said the creatures had "lobster-like claws" at the ends of their arms, "carrot-like" growths for their nose and ears and their heads also appeared to connect directly to their shoulders, with no discernible neck.
The creatures' skin was described as pale in colour, wrinkled, with no eyes and slits for mouths.
JONNY DILLON
The creatures had carrot-like noses and ears, according to the pair
Onboard the UFO, Hickson claimed that he was examined by what looked like a large football-shaped mechanical eye, about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, that seemed to scan his body.
Calvin claimed that he could not recall what had happened to him inside the craft, although later, during hypnotic regression he offered some hazy details. Now, 45 years later, Calvin has written a book about his experiences called Pascagoula - The Closest Encounter, published by British UFO expert and author Philip Mantle.
Calvin, 64, also met Maria and Vernon for the very first time in person on Wednesday this week after only speaking to them on the phone.
He said: "It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning.
"It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding.
PHILIP MANTLE
Calvin Parker in 1973 shortly after the incident
PHILIP MANTLE
Calvin, pictured now, met the two witnesses for the first time
"I felt like I had known her for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day. This was of course me and Charles Hickson.
"Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay.
"But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.
"So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me.
"Just like me - she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.
"Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years."
Maria, who lives in Theodore, Alabama, said: "I enjoyed meeting Calvin, it was like we have always known each other for ever. He is truly a wonderful person."
Calvin has written a book about his paranormal experiences
Philip Mantle, of Pontefract, West Yorks, who runs Flying Disc Press, has appealed to any new witnesses to contact him at philip.mantle@gmail.com.
He added: "I have little doubt that there were other witnesses to this remarkable event."
Charles died in 2011, aged 80, but never backed away from his alien abduction story despite ridicule.
The Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for blocking dangerous and deadly solar winds, radiation and cosmic winds from reaching the atmosphere and surface of the Earth. It has been noted that since early 2014, the magnetic field has been decaying at least ten times faster than usual. Not only is it decaying at a very rapid rate, but it is also experiencing many anomalies and is shifting.
The magnetic pole has been moving away from Canada and towards Serbia and it has been moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts to take action. All of this will lead to many severe changes on a global scale, including the weakening of the Earth’s atmosphere as solar winds will strip it away. Weather patterns will change and hurricanes, tornadoes and thunderstorms will become more severe. The Earth will absorb more solar and cosmic particles which will further destabilize it’s geological structure and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become far more prevalent. Massive amounts of radiation will cause cancers and sterility. Power outages and damages to electronics and EMPs will occur. Overall, nearly all life on Earth will die off from the magnetic field weakening.
Mysterie rond de Roswell-crash ontrafeld. Wat is er gebeurd met de wrakstukken en de lichamen?
Mysterie rond de Roswell-crash ontrafeld. Wat is er gebeurd met de wrakstukken en de lichamen?
Burgemeester van Roswell Del Journey neemt ons mee naar Walker Air Force Base, waar de wrakstukken van de UFO en lichamen van aliens naartoe zouden zijn gebracht na de Roswell-crash.
Hij vertelt dat de wrakstukken en de lichamen daarna overbracht zouden zijn naar Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Onderzoekers beweren dat de overheid er ook voor heeft gezorgd dat getuigen van het incident al die tijd hun mond hebben gehouden.
Verfrommelen
Toch zijn velen van hen later alsnog naar buiten getreden. Eén van hen was de eerste legerofficier die op de plek van de crash aankwam, majoor Jesse Marcel.
Zijn kleinzoon zegt dat hij zijn ervaringen deelde met de rest van de familie. Hij nam zelfs een aantal wrakstukken mee naar huis.
Die leken te bestaan uit een vreemd soort metaal, dat gemakkelijk vouwbaar was. Je kon het verfrommelen als een stuk papier, maar zodra je het losliet, nam het zijn oorspronkelijke vorm weer aan.
Bevelen geeft
Marcel zei dat het metaal niet het materiaal was dat is te zien op de beroemde foto die werd verspreid na het incident.
Op die foto kijkt de majoor niet naar de camera, maar omhoog, naar iemand die bevelen geeft, aldus de kleinzoon.
SLECHT NIEUWS VOOR AANHANGERS PLATTE AARDE THEORIE ( VIDEO )
SLECHT NIEUWS VOOR AANHANGERS PLATTE AARDE THEORIE ( VIDEO )
Al jarenlang is er een discussie gaande over de vorm van de aarde en de groep mensen die gelooft dat de aarde plat is, groeit gestaag.
Echter, voor deze groep is er slecht nieuws, want een platte aarde aanhanger die probeerde te bewijzen dat de aarde plat is, bewees het tegenovergestelde.
Het volgende verhaal zal de fervente aanhangers van de platte aarde waarschijnlijk niet afschrikken en zij zullen blijven geloven dat de aarde plat is. Echter, voor veel aanhangers van de ronde aarde is het volgende verhaal een overtuigend bewijs dat de aarde wel degelijk een ronddraaiende bol in het heeal is.
Voor de duidelijkheid: Wij hangen niet een specifieke mening aan over de vorm van de aarde en brengen nieuws op dit gebied wanneer het zich voor doet. Tenslotte is onze complete 3D wereld een illusie en als zodanig is uiteraard ook iedere vorm mogelijk.
Bob Knodel is een bekend figuur binnen de wereld van de platte aarde theorie en zegt dat hij een achtergrond heeft als ingenieur en piloot. Vanuit die ervaringen is hij ervan overtuigd dat de aarde zo plat is als een pannenkoek en loopt hij al een tijd te piekeren over hoe hij dit kan bewijzen.
Knodel en zijn volgelingen slaagden erin om 20.000 dollar bij elkaar te krijgen om een zeer nauwkeurige lasergyroscoop aan te schaffen. Met een dergelijke gyroscoop kan zonder enige twijfel worden aangetoond of de aarde om haar eigen as draait of niet.
Wanneer dit wel het geval is dan draait de aarde in 24 uur 360 graden rond, hetgeen betekent dat er per uur 15 graden wordt afgelegd.
Wanneer de aarde plat is en niet om haar eigen as draait, zal de gyroscoop geen drift (verschuiving) vertonen, wanneer de aarde wel in 24 uur om haar eigen as draait, dan zal de gyroscoop een drift van 15 graden per uur registreren.
Met andere woorden, Bob Knodel en zijn volgers waren ervan overtuigd dat deze nieuwe dure gyroscoop voor eens en voor altijd zou bevestigen dat de aarde plat is en niet om haar as draait.
Wat er vervolgens gebeurde zie je in de volgende video:
Duidelijk is dat dit geen goed nieuws is voor de aanhangers van de platte aarde theorie en het is misschien ook veelzeggend dat het populaire videokanaal van Bob Knoder, Globebusters genaamd, opeens geen video’s meer bevat.
In de achtergrond zijn ze nu waarschijnlijk druk bezig met het zoeken naar bewijs dat er iets niet goed zou zijn met de test of de gyroscoop of een verklaring waarom de gyroscoop ook met een platte, niet roterende aarde een drift laat zien van 15 graden per uur.
Maar vooralsnog is dat nog niet gelukt en het wachten is nu of Bob Knodel alsnog een konijn uit de hoge hoed kan toveren of dat het vanaf nu stil blijft bij Globebusters.
Remember when astronomers found Tabby’s Star and said they’d never seen anything like it? Now there’s another one … maybe
Artist’s concept of Tabby’s Star. It’s possible that dust causes its mysterious dips in brightness, which are similar to those in a newly found star, called VVV-WIT-07.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Remember Tabby’s Star? It periodically dims in a sporadic and mysterious way. For a while, astronomers thought it might have an alien-builtDyson spherearound it, but nowthey think not. Astronomers have now found another mysteriously dimming star, perhaps similar to Tabby’s Star!
Tabby’s Star – aka Boyajian’s Star – created a lot of public interest last year and earlier this year when it started to “act up” again, periodically dimming in brightness in ways that astronomers still haven’t fully explained. It even brightened significantly more than usual sometimes. Although astronomers now know that fine dust near Tabby’s Star is at least part of the answer, they don’t yet know where this dust might come from, or why it is behaving the way it does. So the mystery of Tabby’s Star continues.
This month (November 2018), astronomers have been hashing over what may be a newly discovered second star similar to Tabby’s Star. At least, the new-found star displays some similar characteristics. The star – called VVV-WIT-07 (for “What is this?”) – was found by astronomers in Chile using the VISTA telescope in the Atacama Desert. Roberto Saito of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, and his colleagues first reported the star’s odd flickering November 6, 2018, in a peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.org. The findings were then reported in Science News on November 16. As Saito simply put it:
We don’t know what the object is, and that’s interesting.
Artist’s concept of VVV-WIT-07, which has been observed dipping in brightness in a manner similar to Tabby’s Star.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The team wasn’t actually looking for something like VVV-WIT-07, rather they were searching for supernovas – exploding stars – part of a larger survey of the center of the galaxy called the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea, or VVV.
But this star, like Tabby’s Star, suddenly dimmed. The star had been observed to periodically dim and brighten again before, between 2010 and 2018, with no set pattern, similar to Tabby’s Star. But while Tabby’s Star has been seen dimming as much as about 22 percent, this star was observed to suddenly dim as much as 80 percent! According to astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who Tabby’s Star is named after:
If this phenomenon is the same as what’s happening with Tabby’s star, then we can’t invoke an elaborate explanation for what’s happening in both systems. If you’re starting to see stars similar to this all over the place, then it’s got to be a really common thing that happens in nature. That’s really cool.
Light curve of VVV-WIT-007 from 2010-2018. The star dipped in brightness an incredible 80 percent in 2012 (shown in more detail in inset).
Image via R. K. Saito et al.
If other stars could be found which dim in a similar manner, then they may be fairly common.
Astronomers are still not even exactly sure what type of star VVV-WIT-07 is. It lies in the plane of the galaxy from our viewpoint, so there is a lot of dust that partially obscures it. If it’s a young variable star, then the dimming might simply be internal to the star itself. But if it’s not, then it is still a largely open question. As Boyajian noted:
Pretty much everything’s on the table for it right now. We need more data.
There is also another star – J1407 – that may be an even closer match to Tabby’s Star. that star has been observed to periodically dim by up to a whopping 95 percent. Astronomer Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester in New York and his colleagues reported the discovery in 2012. Astronomers think that J1407 hosts an orbiting young giant planet or brown dwarf with an enormous ring system – much larger and heavier than Saturn’s – that periodically eclipses the star.
False-color image of VVV-WIT-007.
Image via R. K. Saito et al.
According to Mamajek:
This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today. You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.
The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings. The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon.
VVV-WIT-07 may also turn out to be more similar to J1407, where a giant young planet or brown dwarf with a gigantic ring system orbits the star.
Image via Ron Miller.
Figuring out what is causing the weird dimming of VVV-WIT-07 – as with Tabby’s Star – will require further observations. Saito and his colleagues are hoping to be able to follow up using bigger telescopes, like the twin 8.1-meter Gemini telescopes or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, both in Chile. Until then, astronomers can mostly just make educated guesses and come up with theories to explain the star’s behavior.
Bottom line: The mystery of Tabby’s Star still hasn’t been solved yet, and now there is another star that seems to be behaving in a similar manner – VVV-WIT-07. The findings made about one of them may help to solve the enigma of both – or it may turn out that there are two different exotic explanations for why these stars suddenly dip in brightness so much. Either way, what we learn about them should be very interesting.
Astronomers Puzzled by Yet Another Mysteriously Dimming Star
Artist’s concept of Tabby’s Star. It’s possible that dust causes its mysterious dips in brightness, which are similar to those in a newly found star, called VVV-WIT-07.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Astronomers Puzzled by Yet Another Mysteriously Dimming Star
Aside from the curious interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua and the ongoing quest to identify fast radio bursts, one of the most mysterious astronomical stories of the past few years has been the saga of Tabby’s Star. In 2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian spotted bizarre light patterns coming from the distant star KIC8462852. Something appeared to be causing the star to periodically dim, leading to speculation that it may be surrounded by amassive alien “megastructure.”In the nearly three years since then, astronomers have gathered enough data to now believe that the more likely reason for the dimming behavior is that the star issurrounded by dense clouds of cosmic dust.
An artist’s depiction of Tabby’s Star
Artist’s concept of VVV-WIT-07, which has been observed dipping in brightness in a manner similar to Tabby’s Star.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
That doesn’t mean all astronomers are ready to give up on the hope that Tabby’s Star might be home to an alien civilization. SETI astronomers are currently scanning the planet for any signs of laser activity. While none has been found, the study has provided scientists with a wealth of data and methodologies for carrying out similar research in the future in the search for alien life.
To add to the growing body of data concerning mysteriously dimming stars, an international team of astronomers has just published a study of a new star, EPIC 204376071, found a galactic stone’s throw from Earth just 440 light-years away. EPIC 204376071 has been observed to dim by up to 80 percent for an entire day. The researchers still aren’t sure what may be making the star’s light dim, but their leading suspicions are a cloud of dust or a ring of cosmic debris.
Could star-sized alien megastructures actually exist? Given the unimaginable size of the universe, it would be foolish to rule out any possibility.
Naturally, alien megastructures have already been ruled out, because how dare scientists acknowledge the possibility, however small, that there may yet be truly awesome left things to discover in the universe? While neither EPIC 204376071 nor Tabby’s Star are the extraterrestrial smoking gun we’ve all been waiting for, their discoveries suggest that any day now, we may stumble across the one to change everything in a strangely dimming star far across the universe. Will it be written off as cosmic dust, stuck in an academic journal somewhere, and forgotten about? It’s time we take the search for extraterrestrial life seriously, and studies like this one are just the site for such bold thinking.
Light curve of VVV-WIT-007 from 2010-2018. The star dipped in brightness an incredible 80 percent in 2012 (shown in more detail in inset).
Alien Abductee talks about UFOs, Mantis Beings and Shadow People
Alien Abductee talks about UFOs, Mantis Beings and Shadow People
Paul Shishis had dreams of being abducted as a child that at the time he shrugged off as just nightmares but throughout the years his increasing UFO sightings began to indicate to him that perhaps he had been in touch with extraterrestrials his whole life and that they weren't, in fact, dreams but real alien abductions.
In recent years he has begun trying to document them with his camera. Most of Paul's sightings have occurred in and around Scarborough Ontario, Canada.
More on his abduction dreams in Part 2, the Mantis Beings and Shadow People.
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Three Mile Long UFO Over Mount Fuji Volcano, Japan On March 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Three Mile Long UFO Over Mount Fuji Volcano, Japan On March 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 10, 2019
Location of sighting: Mount Fuji, Japan
Wow, its not often you see a UFO of this size. This is about three to four miles across! Its huge. This awesome UFO was caught over Mount Fuji two days ago. The UFO has actually left a cloud trail behind it moving from the horizon, then zig zagging its way to the Mountain. This UFO is creating and controlling the smoke around it so that it appears like a cloud. However the the UFO outline is becoming very apparent here giving away its hiding place.
It has long been believed by me that most aliens that created bases on Earth did so under the floors of the ocean and under volcanos. Why? Because those are the two places that humans are least likely to bother or even discover them. The less humans, the less chance of being discovered.
Awesome video of a large UFO near Mount Fuji. I only wish that the 51 seconds of footage was a bit longer so that we could see how the UFO left the area. Absolute evidence here that aliens do in fact visit volcanos.
Antarctic Mountain Rumoured to be 'Earth's Oldest Pyramid' Built By Aliens
Antarctic Mountain Rumoured to be 'Earth's Oldest Pyramid' Built By Aliens
While adherents of the “alien builders” theory speculated that the Antarctic peak might be some kind of “master pyramid” or even a node in an energy-generating network of pyramids spanning the globe, at least one geologist proposed a much more mundane explanation.
While some conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters explore theories about aliens building pyramids in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, others now claim that the oldest pyramids in existence may have been erected by extraterrestrials amid the frozen wastes of Antarctica, the Daily Express reports citing the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens TV show.
As the newspaper notes, one Antarctic geological feature in particular draws the attention of conspiracy theorists: a "pyramid-like structure" located near the Shackleton mountain range, whose "four steep sides" make it look somewhat like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
David Childress, an American author and the owner of Adventures Unlimited Press, even speculated that this so called "Shackleton pyramid" might be "the oldest of its kind" on the planet.
"If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like," he said.
Dr Michael Salla, an ET research expert and author of the "Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence", even ventured a guess that this rocky formation may be merely one node in a "global network of power-generating pyramids strategically places around Earth".
"One of the theories is that pyramids are power generators and so, if you have these pyramids strategically placed around the world generating a charge, it’s possible to create a general standing wave around the world that is a wireless transmission of energy," he noted.
However, Dr Mitch Darcy, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, offered a much less exciting explanation, arguing that the “pyramid” in question is merely a nunatak – an exposed rocky peak or element of a ridge, some of which can be natural pyramidal peaks.
"The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape. It’s not a complicated shape, so it’s not a special coincidence either. By definition, it is a nunatak, which is simply a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or an ice sheet. This one has the shape of a pyramid, but that doesn’t make it a human construction," he said.
Bevindt de oudste piramide ter wereld zich op Antarctica? Onderzoekers doen opvallende beweringen
Bevindt de oudste piramide ter wereld zich op Antarctica? Onderzoekers doen opvallende beweringen
Sommigen beweren dat er op Antarctica piramides kunnen worden gevonden. Al jaren circuleren hierover berichten in de media.
Zo zou er onder meer een piramideachtige structuur zijn te vinden bij de Shackleton-berg, die zou lijken op de Grote Piramide.
Schrijver David Childress heeft zelfs gesuggereerd dat de zogeheten Shackleton-piramide mogelijk de oudste van zijn soort is op aarde, schrijft persbureau Sputnik.
Stroom
“Als deze gigantische piramide op Antarctica een kunstmatige structuur is, zou het waarschijnlijk de oudste piramide op de planeet zijn,” zei hij.
Dr. Michael Salla zei dat het bouwwerk mogelijk onderdeel is van een ‘wereldwijd netwerk van piramides die energie opwekken en die allemaal op strategische plaatsen zijn neergezet’.
“Volgens één van de theorieën werden de piramides gebruikt om stroom op te wekken,” zei hij.
Nunatak
“Wellicht zijn de piramides op strategische plaatsen gebouwd om een staande golf te creëren en de wereld draadloos van energie te voorzien,” voegde hij toe.
Geoloog Mitch Darcy van het Duitse onderzoekscentrum voor geowetenschappen in Potsdam stelde dat de piramide in werkelijkheid een nunatak is, een blootgestelde top van een berg.
Toeval
“De toppen bestaan duidelijk uit rots en het is toeval dat deze specifieke top de vorm van een piramide heeft,” zei hij.
“Dat de bergtop de vorm van een piramide heeft, hoeft niet te betekenen dat het een door mensen gemaakt bouwwerk is,” klonk het.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) just spotted “moving water molecules” on the near side of the Moon — which could be a big deal for future human missions to the Moon.
Scientists observed water molecules moving around as the lunar surface heated up during the Moon’s day cycle. Researchers had previously assumed that the main source of water — hydrogen ions from solar wind — would be cut off when the Earth travels between the Moon and the Sun. But the new findings didn’t see any decrease when the Earth cut off solar wind to the Moon, suggesting that it could harbor a more sustainable source of water than previously believed.
Hot Topic
The discovery is described in a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by researchers from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The data was collected by the LRO’s Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), an ultraviolet spectrograph that was built to map ultralight wavelength reflections on the lunar surface.
“This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation’s space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration,” said Kurt Retherford, principal investigator of the LAMP instrument from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in a statement. “We recently converted the LAMP’s light collection mode to measure reflected signals on the lunar dayside with more precision, allowing us to track more accurately where the water is and how much is present.”
The Shape Of Water
A groundbreaking 2017 study from Brown University suggested that there may be substantial amounts of waterinside lunar rocks. At the time, the discovery was a major shift from the consensus view that most water on the Moon is located near its poles.
This year’s results discovered by LAMP seem to underline that the lunar water cycle could make water far more accessible to us during future missions to the Moon than we previously thought — the more water already exists on the Moon, the less time and resources we have to spend in trying to get it there.
Stay overnight on an Antarctic ice shelf, and you might feel the shaking from thousands of tiny quakes as the ice re-forms after melting during the day.
In a recent study on Antarctica’sMcMurdo Ice Shelf, scientists used seismometers to record hundreds of thousands of tiny “ice quakes” that appear to be caused by pools of partially-melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
University of Chicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal is co-author of the study, published in the Annals of Glaciology on December 17, 2018. MacAyeal said in a statement:
In these areas we would record tens, hundreds, up to thousands of these per night. It’s possible that seismometers may be a practical way for us to remotely monitor glacier melting.
The team set up seismometers for 60 days during the melt season in two locations near seasonal meltwater lakes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. One location was drier; the other was slushier, with pools of melted water forming and refreezing. The wetter location, they found, was alive with seismic activity at night. MacAyealexplained:
In these ponds, there’s often a layer of ice on top of melted water below, like you see with a lake that’s only frozen on top. As the temperature cools at night, the ice on the top contracts, and the water below expands as it undergoes freezing. This warps the top lid, until it finally breaks with a snap.
The energy vibrates out into the surroundings, where it’s picked up by seismometers. Some of the cracks re-heal, but some do not, MacAyeal said. He suggested that the phenomenon might explain why icebergs actually break off more frequently during colder times of the year.
Researchers plant a seismometer on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. Image via Alison Banwell/University of Chicago.
Bottom line: Scientists recorded hundreds of thousands of tiny ice quakes on an Antarctic ice shelf that appear to be caused by pools of partially melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
Egypt REVELATION: Great Pyramid of Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED'
Egypt REVELATION: Great Pyramid of Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED'
EGYPT’s Great Pyramid is at the centre of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis that shows the Giza-Orion correlation theory is accurate, the "New Egyptologist" has claimed.
Conventional archeology tells us the great pyramids at Giza were built as tombs for the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Constructed during the Old Kingdom’s fourth dynasty 4500 years ago, the monuments have been shrouded in mystery for millennia. Built with incredible accuracy and containing many puzzling features, the true purpose of the pyramids has inspired endless speculation.
In the 1980s, an extraordinary theory emerged that attempted to explain why the pyramids were built with such accuracy.
The theory claims there is a correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars comprising the belt in the constellation of Orion.
It is thus claimed that there is a purposive relationship between the pyramids of the 4th Dynasty on the Giza Plateau and the alignment of three stars comprising, which is commonly referred to as Orion’s belt.
The theory, originally proposed by the "New Egyptologist" Robert Bauval in 1983, noted how the smallest of the three pyramids at Giza – The Pyramid of Menkaure, was offset slightly from the other two.
Great Pyramid Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED’
(Image: Getty)
Publishing his findings in a book in 1994, "The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids", Mr Bauval said the similarity between this and the offset in the third star of Orion’s Belt.
Mr Bauval overlaid the stars of Orion over an aerial view of the pyramids and was astonished to discover they matched almost exactly.
He said: “It substantiated my theory that the three pyramids of Giza were symbols of Orion’s Belt.
“My next step was to find further visual evidence. I had a good photograph of the three stars of Orion’s Belt and was able to place it against the aerial shot of the three Giza pyramids.
“The correlation was stunning. Not only did the layout of the pyramids match the stars with uncanny precision but the intensity of the stars, shown by their apparent size, corresponded with the Giza group.
A correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars
(Image: Getty)
“There were three stars, three pyramids, three Osiris-Orion kings."
Not only did the three pyramids match Orion’s Belt, Mr Bauval argued that the Great Sphinx mirrored the constellation of Leo, and the monument’s alignments to the Nile matched the stars positions relative to the Milky Way.
Using astronomical computer programs, Mr Bauval dialled back the skies over Giza to the supposed date of the construction of the Pyramids – 2500BC. Disappointingly they could find no match.
But 2500BC was during the astronomical Age of Taurus – represented by a bull.
Dialling the starfields back thousands of years, Robert Bauval was able to find an amazing match — in 10500BC, whilst the pyramids matched Orion's belt, the Sphinx was looking directly at the constellation of Leo.
10500BC marked the dawning of the Age of Leo and, even more astonishingly, the date the pyramids and Sphinx’s position relative to the nearby River Nile matched Orion and Leo’s position relative to the Milky Way.
Project Blue Book deals with the UFO “Flap” of 1952. In July of that year, a fleet of UFO’s was spotted on radar above the White House. Is this the proof of what Hynek has been searching for?
Project Blue Book ends its illustrious first season with an adaptation of the 1952 UFO “Flap” over Washington, D.C. A flap is a rush of sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) in a short period of time.
The Background
On July 19, an air traffic controller at the Washington National Airport reported seeing seven blips on his radar screen that were definitely flying away from civilian or military aircraft. While this was occurring, the controller’s colleagues were peering out of the tower window. They noticed a hovering light in the distance traveling at an unprecedented speed.
Andrews Air Force Base was also tracking the bogies and a commercial airline pilot radioed in his description of the UFOs. Something was definitely occurring over the District’s skies that night. However, when Captain Edward Ruppelt, (the character on which Captain Michael Quinn is based) tried to investigate for Project Blue Book, he was denied access.
Mass hysteria was abounding as newspaper headlines chased the sensational with “Saucers Swarm over Capital.” So, to mitigate the potential panic that was brewing, the Air Force held a press conference stating the whole incident was not an alien invasion. It was just the after effects of a temperature-inversion.
Even though a military pilot came forward and reported that he had chased the mysterious objects, it was easier to cover up what had really happened with a meteorological event that would be easier for the public to handle. According to History.com:
“A temperature inversion occurs when a layer of warm air forms in the low atmosphere, trapping cooler air beneath. Radar signals can bounce off this layer at shallow angles and mistakenly show near-ground objects as appearing in the sky.”
The Truth Will Set You Free
At the end of last week’s episode, the Man in Black gave Dr. J. Allen Hynek a plane ticket to Washington so that he wouldn’t miss the proof that he has been seeking. And that turns out to be more than anyone bargained for when the lights in the sky are back. This time they are in the nation’s capital.
Generals Harding and Valentine are very concerned because this is something that they weren’t anticipating. Neither was Captain Quinn. The Man in Black is amazed because even though Quinn has witnessed actual UAP’s, he still refuses to believe that the possibility exists for extraterrestrial visitations.
Everything that Quinn and Hynek have experienced has led up to this penultimate episode. I still can’t shake the feeling that the Generals are somehow aware of the alien agenda. Maybe our questions and Allen’s will be answered.
Watch the Project Blue Book finale this Tuesday at 10 p.m. on the History Channel.
What was your favorite Project Blue Book episode? Let us know in the comments. We want to hear from you.
In November of last year, UFOs were caught hovering over the Outer Banks by a fisherman late at night. What were those mysterious lights?
UFOs are a hot topic again thanks to the extremely popular History Channel show, Project Blue Book. People want to believe, they really do. That is why whenever a sighting is reported, it usually turns into a viral news story.
Last November, a fisherman on Cape Lookout caught strange lights hovering over the ocean late at night. According to the Charlotte Observer, this is not an unusual occurrence for residents of the area. The phenomenon has been occurring for more than two decades.
In the fall of 2018, we reported on a North Carolina man that supposedly captured an unusual craft on his cell phone. This account later turned out to be debunked. It was deemed an optical illusion.
However, the sighting on the Outer Banks is something else entirely. At first, you see two glowing orange orbs in the distance. But then, out of nowhere, two other lights join. These smaller ones are white in color and then turn the same hue as the original pair.
After a bit of hovering together, one pair drops out of sight leaving one remaining. It is fascinating to watch. Check out the clip courtesy of C.R. Larkin, ViralHog and the Charlotte Observer.
Theories Abound
Much like the Phoenix Lights incident, some viewers commented on the video claiming that it was probably parachute flares. Although, as everyone knows, flares flicker. These particular lights did not.
Also, if they were distress flares and anyone that has watched Deadliest Catch on the Discovery channel can attest, they arc into the sky. Others felt that more than likely, the orbs were flames off the top of an oil rig. While there was a proposal by the Trump administration to “open the entire coastline of the lower 48 United States to oil and gas drilling, starting in 2019,” North Carolina chose preserving their ocean habitat over this initiative.
Interesting to note, Cape Lookout is home to a lighthouse but this doesn’t seem to be an explanation for the hovering lights above the ocean. Also, car headlights were mentioned more than once. While feasible that doesn’t seem to be the answer either.
There is a Marine Corps air station at New River and one viewer commented that these lights were “turning for approach to landing.” He also stated that the orange tint of the lights suggests atmospheric effects.
Playing devil’s advocate, what if weren’t any of the above-mentioned theories? While not necessarily intelligent craft driven by extraterrestrials, could the lights possibly be something that our military might be testing? Maybe drone technology?
But would they do a test late at night? Since these types of sightings have been occurring over several decades in the same area, what if it is something from another world?
What do you believe? Do you think the lights are a hoax or is there a logical explanation? Could they be UFOs? Let us know in the comments. We want to hear from you.
BOSTON — Earth's vast magma oceans, roiling deep beneath our feet, seem to be pumping oxygen into the planet's liquid core. And that oxygen is shaping earthquakes and volcanoes all over our planet.
That's the conclusion of a body of research University College London physicist Dario Alfe presented Tuesday (March 5) here at the March meeting of the American Physical Society. Though it's impossible to observe oxygen in the Earth's core directly — thousands of miles of hot rock impede that view — Alfe and his collaborators used a combination of seismological data, chemistry and knowledge about the ancient history of our solar system to draw their conclusions.
The main bit of evidence that something like oxygen is hiding out in the iron core? Earthquakes. The rumblings we feel on the surface are the result of waves that move throughout our entire planet. And the behavior of those waves offers clues to Earth's contents — almost like an ultrasound of the whole planet.
When earthquake waves bounce off the core and back to the surface, their shape indicates that the liquid iron outer core is significantly less dense than the pressurized solid iron core inside it. And that density difference impacts the shape of earthquakes and the behavior of volcanoes on the surface. But that's not how pure iron should behave, Alfe told Live Science after his talk. [In Photos: Ocean Hidden Beneath Earth's Surface]
"If the core was pure iron, the density contrast between the solid inner core and the liquid [outer core] should be on the order of 1.5 percent," he said. "But seismology tells us it's more like 5 percent."
In other words, the outer core is less dense than it should be, suggesting there's some non-iron element mixed in, making it lighter.
So that raises the question: Why would the lighter element be mixed in with the outer core but not the solid inner core?
When atoms are in a liquid state, they flow freely past each other, making it possible for a mixture of different elements to coexist, even in the extreme environment of the inner Earth, Alfe said. But as extreme pressures force the inner core into a solid state, the atoms there form a more rigid lattice of chemical bonds. And that stricter structure doesn't accommodate foreign elements as easily. As the solid core formed, it would have spat oxygen atoms and other impurities into its liquid surroundings like toothpaste shooting out of a squeezed tube.
"You see a similar effect in icebergs," he said.
When salt water in the ocean freezes, it expels its impurities. So icebergs end up as chunks of solid freshwater floating over the sodium-rich ocean.
There's no direct evidence that the lighter element in the liquid core is oxygen, Alfe said. But our planet formed from the dust clouds of the early solar system, and we know what elements were present there. [Photo Timeline: How the Earth Formed]
The research team ruled out other elements, like silicon, that might theoretically be present in the core based on the makeup of that cloud but don't explain the observed effect. Oxygen was left as the most likely candidate, he said.
Further, the levels of oxygen theoretically present in the core seem lower than what chemistry would predict based on the oxygen contents of the mantle. That suggests more oxygen is probably getting chemically pumped into the outer core even today from the more oxygen-rich mantle surrounding it.
Asked what the oxygen in the core looks like, Alfe said not to imagine bubbles or even the rust that forms when iron bonds directly to oxygen. Instead, at those temperatures and pressures, oxygen atoms would float freely among iron atoms, creating buoyant clumps of liquid iron.
"If you take a parcel of liquid that has 90 iron atoms and 10 oxygen atoms, this parcel will be less dense than a parcel of pure iron," and so it will float, Alfe said.
To help confirm these results, Alfe said he's looking forward to the results of efforts to measure neutrinos formed in our planet and radiating out toward the surface. While "geoneutrinos" are very rare, he said, they can offer a lot of information about what specifically is going on in the planet when they do turn up.
But without any way of directly accessing the core, physicists will always be stuck making their best possible judgments about its makeup from limited, secondary data.
Would-be explorers have high hopes that caches of water scattered throughout the solar system willfuel future rockets.
In new estimates, scientists grapple with just how much water might be out there, looking specifically at near-Earth asteroids as a potential resource. Astronomers have spotted nearly 20,000 such space rocks, and we even have up-close observations of a handful: Japan's Hayabusa2 mission and NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission are each currently orbiting such an object. Not all of them necessarily carry water — but some do.
"We know that there are minerals with water in them on asteroids. We know that from meteorites that have fallen to the ground," lead author Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in a statement. "It's also possible that Earth's water came largely from impacts."
In addition to the scientific drive behind understanding how life came to be on Earth, mapping water across the solar system is important because water — which can be split into hydrogen and oxygen — might also be used to make rocket fuel. If that scenario becomes common, it would dramatically reduce the price tags of round-trip journeys to space, since rockets leaving Earth would no longer need to be powerful enough to lift the weight of their homebound fuel.
To make their calculation, the team relied on ground-based telescope observations of these asteroids. But those observations are tricky, because the signature of water in Earth's atmosphere can interfere with asteroid measurements. So, the team used a slightly different signature — one that doesn't actually represent water but has only been found in conjunction with the signature that does.
By combining those observations with other measurements as well as data about meteorites that have fallen to Earth from asteroids, the team calculated a basic estimate for how much water could be trapped inside near-Earth asteroids. According to that estimate, there may be between 100 billion and 400 billion gallons (400 billion to 1,200 billion liters) of water spread among these space rocks.
Ideally, the team would like to run similar calculations based on data gathered from space, where Earth's atmosphere won't interfere with the direct signature of water. But those measurements would rely on the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently planned for 2021.
The research is described in a paper published in December in the journal JGR Planets.
Scientists from Japan, one of the most seismically active regions of the globe, claim that a new earthquake detection method based on gravity could provide an earlier warning than traditional methods.
Contour maps depict changes in gravity gradient immediately before the earthquake hits.
Credit: Kimura Masaya.
In 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit eastern Japan, along a subduction zone where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide. The tremor came as a one-two punch, generating a huge tsunami in the process which led to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The effects of the powerful quake were devastating, with more than 120,000 buildings left in rubble and $235 billion-worth of incurred damage.
Japan handled the onslaught bravely and admirably. Thanks to its sophisticated network of sensors, Tokyo residents were given a minute warning via texted alerts on their cell phones before the city was hit by strong shaking. These sensors also recorded a wealth of data that is still keeping researchers busy with work that might lead to improved earthquake detection.
Exactly 8 years after the Tohoku earthquake, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) used some of this data to argue that a new detection method based on gravimeters could theoretically detect earthquakes earlier than seismometers.
Gravimeters are sensitive devices for measuring variations in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re typically employed by industries to prospect subterranean deposits of valuable natural resources, including petroleum and minerals, but also by geodesists who study the shape of the earth and its gravitational field.
When an earthquake occurs at a point along the edge of a tectonic plate, it generatesseismic waves that radiate outward at up to 8 kilometers per second. These waves transmit energy through the earth, thereby altering the density of the subsurface material they pass through. Denser material has a slightly greater gravitational attraction than less dense material, and since gravity waves propagate at the speed of light, it’s possible to measure these changes in density before the arrival of a seismic wave.
The Japanese researchers combined gravimetry and seismic data, which they fed into a complex signal analysis model. The results scored 7-sigma accuracy, meaning that there’s only a one-in-a-trillion chance that they are incorrect.
“This is the first time anyone has shown definitive earthquake signals with such a method. Others have investigated the idea, yet not found reliable signals,” ERI postgraduate Masaya Kimura said in a statement. “Our approach is unique as we examined a broader range of sensors active during the 2011 earthquake. And we used special processing methods to isolate quiet gravitational signals from the noisy data.”
TOBA prototype.
Credit: Ando Masaki.
At the moment, the researchers are working on a new kind of gravimeter called the torsion bar antenna (TOBA), which aims to be the first instrument specifically designed to detect earthquakes by gravity. A network of such devices could theoretically warn people 10 seconds before the first seismic waves arrive from an epicenter 100 km away. These precious extra seconds could mean the difference between life and death in many situations.
“SGs and seismometers are not ideal as the sensors within them move together with the instrument, which almost cancels subtle signals from earthquakes,” explained ERI Associate Professor Nobuki Kame. “This is known as an Einstein’s elevator, or the equivalence principle. However, the TOBA will overcome this problem. It senses changes in gravity gradient despite motion. It was originally designed to detect gravitational waves from the big bang, like earthquakes in space, but our purpose is more down-to-earth.”
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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.
