Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
14-03-2019
Wetenschappers ‘draaien tijd terug’ met kwantumcomputer. Wat je moet weten over hun baanbrekende onderzoek
Wetenschappers ‘draaien tijd terug’ met kwantumcomputer. Wat je moet weten over hun baanbrekende onderzoek
Wetenschappers hebben de tijd teruggedraaid met behulp van een kwantumcomputer. Hun baanbrekende studie lijkt in strijd te zijn met de natuurkundige wetten.
Met behulp van elektronen en de kwantummechanica konden onderzoekers de tijd terugdraaien.
Het experiment is te vergelijken met biljartballen die na de start van het spel weer hun oorspronkelijke plek innemen.
Tijdmachine
De Russische, Zwitserse en Amerikaanse onderzoekers hopen de techniek nu verder te verbeteren.
De ‘tijdmachine’ wordt beschreven in het tijdschrift Scientific Reports en bestaat uit een kwantumcomputer die is opgebouwd uit qubits.
Qubits zijn eenheden informatie die worden aangeduid met een ‘één’ of een ‘nul’, of een ‘superpositie’ van beide staten.
Oorspronkelijke staat
Tijdens het experiment veranderde het patroon van nullen en enen. Op dezelfde manier schieten de biljartballen na de start van het spel alle kanten op.
Met behulp van een programma werd de staat van de kwantumcomputer op een dusdanige manier veranderd dat de tijd als het ware werd teruggedraaid: van chaos naar orde.
De qubits werden op deze manier in hun oorspronkelijke staat teruggebracht.
85,5 procent
Tijdens het experiment rolden de ballen als het ware terug naar hun oorspronkelijke positie.
Met twee qubits was het terugdraaien van de tijd in 85,5 procent van de gevallen succesvol. Toen er drie qubits gebruikt werden, traden er meer fouten op.
Those who survived the panic caused by the less-trouble-than-expected Y2K orMillennium Bug that was supposed to shut down computers when they tried to move their clocks from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 may scoff at the new April 6, 2019 bug that many predict will wreak havoc with the GPS systems drivers, pilots and many major industries depend on. Those who profited from the Y2K Bug (COBOL and assembler language programmers dragged out of retirement to fix old software) may be upset that no one told them about this one sooner. Those planning a flight or a road excursion on 4/6/2019 may suddenly be considering a postponement. The rest of us are wondering … what the heck is the April 6, 2019 bug?
“The GPS Internal Navigation Time Scale “GPS Time” is based on the weighted average of GPS satellites and ground station clocks. GPS Time is used for user navigation solutions. A nanosecond error in GPS Time can equate to one foot of position (ranging) error. The WN parameter is provided via a ten (10) bit parameter – or “counter.” The valid range of values for the WN parameter is 0 to 1023 (or 1024 total values). The WN parameter is incremented by one each week. At the end of the 1024th week, the counter experiences a rollover (resets) to 0. Each WN rollover event defines a new GPS Time Epoch. The WN value is referenced to the start of the current GPS Time Epoch. The last WN rollover was August 21, 1999. GPS Time is currently in the second Epoch. The next WN rollover is April 6, 2019.
GPS Time is adjusted by the U.S. Air Force GPS Directorate to maintain alignment with UTC as provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory. A GPS device that provides UTC time does so by converting GPS Time to UTC using multiple parameters – including WN – conveyed in page 18 of GPS sub-frame.
GPS devices with a poorly implemented GPS Time-to-UTC conversion algorithm may provide incorrect UTC following a WN rollover. Additionally, some GPS devices that calculate the WN value from a device-specific date rather than the start of the current GPS Time Epoch may provide incorrect UTC at some other device-specific date.”
That explanation came from a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in April, 2018. A one-year warning doesn’t seem like much time to fix old programs dependent on an antiquated 10-bit counter that bumps up one per week until it reaches binary 1111111111 (1023) and resets to zero, does it? DHS points out that this happened once before on August 22, 1999 and nothing bad happened then. Of course, that could be because most people were still folding paper maps in 1999 when GPS was still a new and much less used innovation.
On the other hand, in 2019 it seems that every cell phone, vehicle, watch and just about anything with a chip in it has GPS. Will we all go spinning aimlessly on 4/6/2019? Here’s an answer from FalTech GPS, a company specialized in GPS repeater technology.
“Who will be affected? The list is long and varied; some industries come to mind immediately as they are known to use the accurate timing information provided by the GPS constellation. Financial markets, power generating companies, emergency services and industrial control systems may be affected, as well as fixed-line and cellular communications networks. GPS tracking devices installed in a fleet management system to schedule and monitor deliveries could cause system errors if they start to provide location data that is potentially up to 20 years out of date.”
All together now …. ahhhh! Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Well, the government and GPS makers have been for a while. Most modern GPS receivers shouldn’t be affected. Older devices that have been getting regular firmware updates should also be OK. A lot of GPS devices can run without UTC or can get it from other sources. And don’t forget – GPS systems survived August 22, 1999, just as we survived January 1, 2000.
And yet … Tom’s Guide reports that a security expert at the recent RSA Conference 2019 (RSA is a computer and network security company) said in a presentation:
“I’m not going to be flying on April 6.”
Does that sound like a warning? Is someone keeping things quiet? Who? This is no April Fool’s joke. If you survive April 1, make it to April 7 by being extra careful just in case on April 6.
One of America’s most mysterious archaeological sites is finally being returned to its rightful owners after 200 years. In the small town of Franklin, North Carolina, a small mound of earth can be found alongside US Highway 441. The grassy mound today stands just just a dozen or so feet high (4 meters) and occupies the space of roughly a city block. While the mound may be easily overlooked by the untrained eye, it remains one of the most unknown structures in the United States and predates even the oldest known oral histories of indigenous American peoples. Who built the Nikwasi Mound?
The mound today. US 441 can be seen in the right of this image.
When the earliest European settlers encountered the Cherokee nation in what is now Western North Carolina, they inquired about the mound. Cherokee tribal elders told the explorers that the mound predates their tribe’s history and was already ancient when the Cherokee arrived. The original builders of the mound remain unknown, and it is believed the mound was once part of a sprawling tribal town which thrived around 1,000 CE. Despite the mystery surrounding the Nikwasi Mound, the Cherokee people have revered the mound as a spiritual and ceremonial place for centuries and consider it to be one of the last known structures built by their mysterious predecessors.
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) has worked for years to reclaim ownership of the mound and are finally poised to regain it. The Franklin City Council will soon vote to pass control of the mound to the nonprofit Nikwasi Initiative in the next few months, and the votes are expected to go in favor of the EBCI. “What this will do is allow the Cherokees — finally, after 200 years — to have some representation in the management of the mound,” Franklin Vice Mayor Barbara McRae told council members before the vote. “We have an opportunity to do something really historic, and to reverse that wrong.”
Main Street, Franklin NC. Make sure to check out Lazy Hiker Brewing if you’re ever in the area.
While it’s unknown who exactly built the Nikwasi Mound, it is believed that the Southern Appalachian Mississippians likely constructed it at some point nearly a thousand years ago. The Mississippian people were the predecessors to modern American Indian nations and inhabited what is now the eastern United States from the 9th century to the 15th century before European colonization.
Climate change at the end of the Little Ice Age, deforestation and overhunting, and the ensuing cultural collapse eventually brought about the decline of the Mississippian culture and the subsequent development of the Native American Indian nations and culture we know today. Because the Mississippian people left behind no writing system, little is known about this ancient culture outside of archaeological artifacts, mounds like the Nikwasi Mound, and the oral histories passed down through indigenous peoples for centuries.
The Nikwasi Mound is believed to have once been the site of a townhouse which served as the seat of Cherokee tribes in the area.
Because of its sacred status, the Nikwasi Mound has never been excavated, and the Cherokee people request that no one even climb on it in order to preserve it. Who knows what mysteries lie in the earth of the mound? Luckily, we may never know. Some mysteries are worth preserving.
Around 2,600 years ago, a huge solar storm hit Earththat was approximately ten times more powerful than any solar storm recorded in modern times. According to a new study, these massive solar storms were actually quite common in the history of the Earth. Unfortunately, with how many of us rely on technology and electricity, if one of those storms hit our planet today, our daily lives would nearly become unmanageable.
The sun could attack our planet with explosions of immensely energetic particles that are called solar proton events, and if these “proton storms” were to hit Earth, it could even damage electronics located in the air and in space. Raimund Muscheler, who is an environmental physicist at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science, “Today, we have a lot of infrastructure that could be badly damaged, and we travel in air and space where we are much more exposed to high-energy radiation.”
When a proton storm hits Earth’s magnetosphere, our planet’s magnetic field traps it and when there is an interruption in our magnetosphere, that’s called a geomagnetic storm and that can destroy power grids all across the planet.
One example of this happening was in 1989 when a large solar storm put the entire Canadian province of Quebec in complete darkness, with the effects being felt all the way in New Jersey where some of their transformers were damaged. In fact, power grids in the United States from the mid-Atlantic to the Pacific Northwest were very close to shutting down.
A much more massive storm – approximately ten times more powerful than the one in Quebec – happened in 1859 and it’s called the Carrington Event. If a massive solar storm like the Carrington Event happened now, power outages could last weeks, months, or years, as we would have to wait for specific parts of the power grids to be replaced.
But wait, the massive Carrington Event may have been nothing compared to a solar storm that may have hit Earth in ancient times. Researchers have recently discovered radioactive atoms that were trapped in ice located in Greenland that seem to suggest that a gigantic proton storm hit our planet around 660 BC. Scientists studied two samples of ice from Greenland and noticed a spike of radioactive beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 from around 2,610 years ago. An even more interesting fact is that these findings coincide with tree rings that had a spike of carbon-14 around that same time period.
Two other major solar storms happened – one was around 993-994 AD, while the other happened around 774-775 AD – with the latter being the biggest-known solar eruption to have ever occurred.
“These enormous events are a recurring feature of the sun – we now have three big events during the past 3,000 years,” Muscheler said, adding, “There might be more that we have not yet discovered.” You can read the scientists’ findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by clicking here.
Solar flares are a common trait of the sun, but let’s hope that a massive storm like the ones mentioned above do not hit Earth anytime soon.
While many in the U.S. are still dealing with the after-effects of ‘springing forward’ one hour for Daylight Saving Time, a group of Russian scientists is celebrating falling back – not just by spinning their clocks but by actually resersing the forward trek of time. Does this mean do-overs are actually possible? Is Doc Brown’s DeLorean revving its engine? Is HG Wells begging for a trip back to Earth to change the ending of his novel?
“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future.”
Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and lead author of the new study published in the journal Science Reports, describes in simple terms how his team apparently broke the second law of thermodynamics by returning a quantum computer to a state in its past life. And not just once, but a reliably reproducible 85 percent of the time. Lesovik’s Russian team worked with quantum researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois using the public domain IBM Q System Hub, a universal quantum computing system with 20 superconducting qubits.
The second law of thermodynamics: an isolated system either remains static or evolves toward a state of chaos rather than order.
Phys.org gives a good, layman’s explanation of this discovery using billiard balls. When a triangle of 15 billiard balls is hit by a cue ball, they scatter into a chaotic state, never to return to that orderly triangle. What the Moscow team has done is returned two qubits (quantum bits) on the quantum computer back to their previous state after chaos and dispersion had begun. Sure, it’s just two qubits and not 15 colorful billiard balls, but it’s never been done before, and the fact that they could do it repeatedly puts the second law of thermodynamics on a walk of shame out of the physics books.
Or does it? We’re talking electrons here, not objects, cars or humans. The quantum computer couldn’t replicate the reverse time travel with three qubits, failing over half the time. And technically speaking, this was not really time travel but returning a machine to a previous state in time, akin to returning an adult to the body and mind they had as a teen or reverse aging. Except the machine could only return to the state or age it was in a fraction of a second ago.
Is this still a big deal?
“Time reversal can help—we do time-reversal of the final state of the computer and run the same quantum program again. If the computation was correct we will arrive to the initial state of the computer.”
That’s a physicist’s “yes” from Gordey Lesovik, who sees this as a tool for testing programs on quantum computers. It won’t return a billiard table to its previous pre-break state, it’s not a time machine or even an age-reversing picture of Dorian Gray. For now, we have to take Lesovik’s word that it’s indeed a big deal.
The Internet can be a pretty wild place, a badlands of rumors, hearsay, tall tales, fake videos, and straight up misinformation at times, all unregulated and seeming a bit like the Wild West. Through this din of off-the-wall stories and outlandish accounts, every once in a while one will stand tall as particularly bizarre and absurd, yet managing to get picked up and talked about to the point that it takes on a life of its own. Surely one such tale is the story of a man who came forward with his experiences that deal with super soldiers, Martian bases, and intergalactic war, which he claims are all completely true. So strap yourself in and maybe put on your tinfoil hat, because we are about to blast off on a wild ride into the orbit of the truly odd.
In 2006, a man calling himself “Captain Kaye” (later found to be Randy Cramer but Captain Kaye sounds cool so we’ll stick with that) stepped from the shadows of top secrecy, claiming to be a member of the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and with quite the incredibly bizarre tale to tell. It began, he said, when he was just a very small child of just 3 or 4 years old, when members of a shadowy organization came to him in the night to covertly recruit him into a program called “Project Manequin.” According to him, this was an ultra-secretive government program designed to create super-soldiers who would be stronger, more efficient, and more obedient killers on the battlefield. Children were chosen because their young minds were seen as more malleable and easily warped, their bodies abler to withstand and adapt to the rigors of what awaited them, and he would claim of the whole training process:
The techniques used to make me have been described to me as a “with-the-grain” style of programming as opposed to most “against-the-grain” styles of programming that try to force Super Soldiers to kill anything, anytime, anywhere – and as human animals, most of us just aren’t made that way, so we resist – and the main function then becomes ‘suppressing’ the urge to resist. Rather than creating the best Super Soldier you can, you only create the most compliant. The “with-the-grain” style programming doesn’t try to create something that kills on command, but, rather, it creates a deep seated instinct to protect its tribe and its territory when threatened. So, as long as you can explain the threat credibly, the soldier will use all of its strength and cunning to destroy any that would harm those it’s genetically predisposed to protect.
To engage in this training, he says that these agents would whisk him away from his home in the middle of the night and take him to a secret base off-planet, where he was trained and indoctrinated for days or weeks at a time. In order to make sure that no one knew he was gone, time travel was used to bring him back to the exact moment he had been abducted, leaving the memories within his mind like a dream. Kaye, along with the 300 child recruits, would also take part in a program called “Project Moon Shadow,” which was next stage and according to him an offshoot of the government mind control program called MK Ultra.
When he turned 17 his training was considered complete, and he was supposedly sent to join what he calls the “Mars Defense Force “(MDF) part of the U.S. Secret Space Program (SSP), which had been established for the purpose of protecting Earth’s five Mars colonies and claiming Mars as a U.S. territory, as well as providing a safe place to retreat in the event of some world-ending cataclysmic event on Earth. Interestingly, this was purportedly a joint program run by the United States, China, and Russia, who were secretly working together to make everything run smoothly behind the scenes. These colonies had apparently been on the planet since the 1960s(!) and that the moon landings had been a cover to divert public attention from the real aims of NASA, which was Martian colonization and planetary defense.
In order to get to Mars, he claims that he was first taken to a cutting edge facility on our moon, after which he was whisked away to the Red Planet aboard a special shuttle and stationed at the colony he calls Aries Prime, at a secret MDF base called Forward Station Zebra. There were also teleport jump pads available, but at the time these were supposedly still seen as risky. Of his actual arrival on Mars he says that he was surprised that the atmosphere was breathable, and he says of his experience of disembarking:
We touched down at Aries Primus, HQ of the MCC (Mars Colony Corporation) and the MDF (Mars Defense Force). To my surprise, we walked down the gangplank and right out into the Martian air. The air was thin and cool, but the sun was beating down enough to feel it. Even though it’s dimmer, the sun can still be quite hot and bright in the direct light. We walked, in a line, to personnel with scanners in their hands who would scan your transfer packet, and then direct you to whichever shuttle pad was to take you to your duty station.
He would also be surprised to learn that humans were not alone on Mars, and that there were in fact two indigenous alien species on the planet. Stay with me now. One of these is described as an insectoid species, rather imaginatively called the “Insectoids,” which lives underground in elaborate hives, while the other is more reptilian in nature, and you don’t get any points if you guessed they are called the “Reptoids.” These two species had had a rather hit and miss relationship with the humans who had inhabited their world, going from indifference, to occasional skirmishes, to peace again on several occasions.
Captain Kaye would be stationed here for the next 17 years, during which time he claims he underwent flight training and he also says he participated in some of these battles himself, often wearing a powered suit, because hell yeah! Peace only truly came when the humans, Insectoids, and Reptoids joined forces to fight a race of evil alien invaders called the Draconians (MU Editorial Dept.- Hi Brent, could you change the references to Draconians to “Dracoids” from here on out? Our research shows that people respond to “oids” Thanks.) People, seriously, I am not making this up. Shortly before his two decades of duty were up, he says that there was a massive battle against the Dracoids that drove them off but left hundreds dead. Shortly after this Kaye’s tenure came to a close and he was moved back to the moon, where the story gets possibly even weirder than it already is.
At the moon base, Kaye says he went through a drawn out reverse-aging process of regressing him back to his younger self, and then sent back through time to Earth in 1987, at a point before he had even left. Before being sent back, there was a ceremony to honor the occasion, attended by none other than former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld himself. Again, I am not making this up. It would then take him years to regain the lost memories, that had either been disrupted by the time travel process or intentionally wiped, but come back they did, and left him in a state of shock.
Right about now you might be wondering just why Captain Kaye felt that he could safely come forward with this world-changing information, and you might be surprised to know that according to him he was told to blow the whistle on the whole thing by his own superior officer. Kaye says that a mysterious Brigadier General Smythe, one of the top guys in the program, came to him with the permission to let the lid off of everything, and he says of this:
When he personally gave me the go-ahead (he said, and I quote, “I’m giving you the go-ahead to go public with everything you know…”), I asked, “Everything?” and he said, “EVERYTHING!”, and then we had a deal. As long as I had the assurance that my direct chain of command was behind me and that I had no restrictions on truthful content, I knew it was for real – and that HE was for real. No one – not even an enemy – would want me to do that, or tell me to do that. He even said I could use his name, which I just did, to let the people who need to know, that I answer to him, and only to him… and if they didn’t like it, they could take it up with him, or the CMC.
It all sounds completely and totally off the rails, and it is, but Captain Kaye has continued to assert that this is not some bad science fiction pulp story, but all very, seriously real. He has continued to write of his experiences, give interviews about it all, and even has his own newsletter devoted to it. While I have only covered the basics here there is much more to it all, about which he goes into incredibly, meticulous detail. His stories go as far as to explain the exact layouts of rooms, the equipment used, and the colors of all of the uniforms, and even what type of carpet the moon base has, and his story is so tight that he never contradicts himself. Adding to this, he tells his tale with such earnestness and at times raw emotion that rather than some hoax it is hard to think of it as anything other than that he either really did experience these things or that he is severely, deeply delusional.
Unbelievably, there have been other individuals who have come forward claiming to have been a part of the Mars Defense Force as well, spinning their own tales of sci-fi insanity, and one is left to wonder what to make of it all. Also rather incredible is the large number of people who seem to actually believe it all, coming to the conclusion that there really are moon and Mars bases and that these tales are true. Are these the ravings of disturbed individuals or a giant hoax? Do they really believe what they are talking about? Is there anything to it at all? No matter what camp you are in or what you believe, one thing I think most of us can agree on is that it is all a wild roller coaster ride of weirdness, and entertaining at the very least.
Something big happened along Florida’s storied Space Coast, and seismologists are currently clueless about what it may have been. On the evening of Friday, March 8, homes throughout east Central Florida were shaken by a powerful tremor around 10:45 pm local time. Residents reported doors shaking or walls vibrating for minutes, but luckily no severe damage or injuries were reported by what seismographs in the town of Century, Florida recorded as a 2.6 magnitude earthquake.
Florida is one of the least seismically active states, so geologists and seismologists aren’t exactly sure if the tremor was an earthquake per se. Some meteorological events can cause the ground to shake, and there are plenty of man-made phenomena which can rattle the ground forcefully enough to be recorded by seismographs; hundreds of such events have been recorded over the past few years. Is this event related to the mystery boom phenomenon I’m currently obsessed with?
It’s possible, especially given that due to the area’s proximity to space launch facilities and Air Force installations, many Florida residents suspected the tremor could have been caused by aerospace activity. “It could be something like a hypersonic jet, munitions…or a sonic boom,” says Paul Earle, a seismologist with the USGS. “Unfortunately, we can’t give a definitive answer on exactly what it was.”
Naturally, a spokesperson for Patrick Air Force Base gave a statement claiming there were no military air exercises that day which could have caused the tremor:
We’ve been informed that there have been reports of a rumbling noise in the Space Coast area this past Friday. Having checked with our local organizations within the 45th Space Wing, it does not appear to have come from us. So I cannot comment at this time as to its origin.
With little other information to go on, this mysterious tremor will be thrown on the already massive and still growing pile of evidence suggesting a mysterious natural or unnatural phenomenon is shaking the Earth throughout the United States. Will we ever know what’s behind these unexplained booms and tremors?
A very rare piece of rock art dating back 12,250 years old depicts odd carvings not typical for that time during the Paleolithic Period. In fact, it has several oddities that make it quite different from other Late Upper Paleolithic art pieces. This rock in particular featured carvings of birds rather than deer, goats, and bison that were normally seen in drawings. The fact that rock is portable is also quite rare.
In addition to the birds drawn on the rock, it appears to show an actual scene instead of just individual figures of animals and/or humans. That would mean that it’s one of the earliest forms of narrative art ever discovered in Europe.
The limestone art piece, which measures 11.8 inches wide, was found at the Hort de la Bequera archaeological site in Spain in 2011. And it’s the only piece of its kind to have been discovered at the site even though they’ve been excavating that location for fourteen years.
Ancient carving from the Paleolithic Period (not the one discussed in this article)
Whoever created the art piece used a flint tool to engrave the lines into the soft limestone and the artist was very neat as there were no messy stroke marks which had been previously found in other art pieces from that time. There are five images engraved onto the rock: two humans, one large bird (probably a crane), and a chick. As for the fifth motif, there is a strange image close to the second human-like figure that can’t be identified. You can see pictures of this fascinating rock art by clicking here.
Photorealistic 3D model with 2D digital drawings superimposed.
Image: Ine´s Domingo et al., 2019
Image: University of Barcelona
In addition to the great, well-preserved condition the rock was in, researchers also created a 3D digital model of the art piece. While it’s hard to say for sure what the image represents, it is believed that it’s in reference to hunting and motherhood.
Inés Domingo from the University of Barcelona, and who is the lead author of the new study, described the rock art in a press release, saying in part, “This is one of the few found scenes so far which suggest the birth of a narrative art in Europe, and this theme is unique… In the represented scene the birds catch the attention, they are copied or chased by two human figures. We do not know the meaning of the scene for prehistoric peoples, but what it says is that not only they [the birds] were regarded as preys but also as a symbol for European Paleolithic societies.”
Ancient rock art (not the one discussed in this article)
The details of this discovery were published in the science journal L’Anthropologie which can be read here.
The art piece indicates that the artists during that time were a lot more sophisticated than previously thought, as they were able to create stories on rocks for people to find and admire thousands of years later. Now that’s remarkable.
This metallic looking object on the surface of Mars is Not from the Curiosity Mars Rover!
This metallic looking object on the surface of Mars is Not from the Curiosity Mars Rover!
A strange piece of what looks like to be a manufactured item has been spotted on the surface of Mars.
The metallic looking object which has a perfect circular hole in the middle has been spotted by Neville Thompson who posted it on hisGigapan page. The object can also be found onSOL 2013.
It's clearly not a part of the rover since there are no tracks around the object which is twisted up and almost destroyed. It is possible that the object originates from a vehicle or craft that was present at that location in the past?
NASA has announced yesterday that they would open up sealed boxes of moon rocks to study them more deeply. They said the tools today were not available back in the 1970s, so they could learn so much more...or so they said.
I of course throw that excuse in the garbage. You see NASA has been saying those rocks are really from the moon, however all evidence available to the public points to them being fake.
Lets go back to Aug 2009, when the world news announced that the Dutch National Museum has in its possession and on display...a fake moon rock. This moon rock was tested and found to simple petrified wood. Now unless the moon had ancient forests...LOL, this should be impossible. This moon rock, which is fake, is 100% proof that the Apollo missions were faked to make other countries perceive America as a world power.
The rock was first given to Prime Minister Willem Drees who received it back in Oct 6, 1969 from US Ambassador William Middendorf during a visit from the three Apollo 11 astronauts.
Since the NASA has done everything in its power to steal back the moon rocks from those who were given them. They would even go so far as to get court papers stating that those moon rocks who astronauts families own, were property of NASA and must be given back. Why? Because they were all fake moon rocks. Yes, its true.
I have to admit I am curious at what the scientists are actually doing opening those boxes? Perhaps NASA has purchased meteorites that were from the moon and are going to replace them with those to be tested? A simple switch behind closed doors and nobody would be the wiser.
Here is a another true fact. We no longer need NASA. They are obsolete and fail to give the public what they promised. Now we have Ellon Musk, who delivers on his promises in mere weeks. Its time to close down NASA and stop wasting the tax payers money on an organization with so much falsehood and lies behind it.
Remember the Dragon capsule Ellon Musk made in just a two weeks after NASA asked him to make it? Well it docked at the space station a few days ago, the video SpaceX uploaded to Youtube was HD quality. I saw the same footage on the NASA Internet live cams which was horrible quality...like that of an iPhone 3. So I ask you, what has NASA really done for us lately? Who has inspired the generations of kids and adults to take a new interest in science and space? Yeah, Ellon Musk of course.
BLASTS FROM THE PAST Swift, powerful bursts of charged particles emitted by the sun can be strong enough to breach Earth’s magnetosphere (blue bubble in illustration). To see how common such emissions have been in Earth’s past, scientists look for telltale data in tree rings and ice cores.
As the sun’s magnetic field shifts, it occasionally releases bursts of charged particles into space. In the most extreme solar storms, called solar proton events, these charged particles are dramatically sped up by interactions with other solar emissions: solar flares or coronal mass ejections. Even Earth’s protective magnetic field can’t deflect such swift, energetic particle streams. The radiation is particularly hazardous to modern technology and astronauts.
It’s unclear how common such extreme events are; satellite- and ground-based instruments have tracked them for only about 70 years. To look farther back in time, researchers hunt for spikes in cosmogenic radionuclides such as carbon-14 — recorded in tree rings — or beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 — preserved in ice cores. Such radionuclides form when cosmic rays interact with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2017, scientists identified a sudden spike in tree ring carbon-14 dating to about 660 B.C. that might indicate a solar proton event. But a carbon-14 spike can also signal a supernova or a solar flare.
In the new study, researchers led by geologist Paschal O’Hare, then at Lund University in Sweden, examined two Greenland ice cores. O’Hare, now at Heathgate Resources in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues found spikes in beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 dating to the same time.
The relative abundance of the radionuclides in the ice suggested that the 660 B.C. event was about 10 times more powerful than a 1956 event, the strongest solar storm recorded by instruments. The only known solar storm to rival the ancient storm’s power occurred in A.D. 774–775, an event also recorded in tree rings and ice cores.
Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days.
Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event– now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during theMaastrichtianage at the end theLate Cretaceousepoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to wipe out the largest creatures to ever walk on the Earth – and countless others as well.
There has, however, been some debate as to what was happening before the mass extinction. Some scientists thought the dinosaurs were flourishing right up until their demise, while others suggested that they had already been in decline before they were finished off.
So which scenario is correct? A new study by researchers from Imperial College London, University College London and University of Bristol shows that it was the former.
Illustration of a late Maastrichtianpalaeoenvironment in North America, where dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, Edmontosaurus and Triceratops roamed the floodplains 66 million years ago. The Maastrichtian was the latest age of the Late Cretaceous epoch.
Dinosaurs were likely not doomed to extinction until the end of the Cretaceous, when the asteroid hit, declaring the end of their reign and leaving the planet to animals like mammals, lizards and a minor group of surviving dinosaurs: birds.
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
According to the researchers, previous studies had underestimated the number of living species at the end of the Cretaceous period – when the asteroid hit – due to changing fossilization conditions. This led to the erroneous conclusion that some species had already been in decline or gone extinct before the asteroid collision.
The study focused on North America, where some of the most well-known dinosaurs used to roam, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
A massive asteroid impact – or possible intense volcanic activity – caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, according to current research.
Image via James Thew/iStockphoto.
Way back then, North America was split into two halves by an inland sea. The Rocky Mountains in the western half were forming at this time, and sediment from the mountains created ideal conditions for preserving dinosaur bones. Conditions in the eastern half were far less conducive to preservation, however. Fossils in the western half, along with some mathematical predictions, had been used to suggest that dinosaur populations were in decline before the asteroid hit. Paper co-author Philip Mannion, from University College London, explained:
Most of what we know about Late Cretaceous North American dinosaurs comes from an area smaller than one-third of the present-day continent, and yet we know that dinosaurs roamed all across North America, from Alaska to New Jersey and down to Mexico.
The researchers used a method called ecological niche modelling – or species distribution modelling – that takes into account different environmental conditions, such as temperature and rainfall, which each species needs to survive. When they mapped these conditions, both across the continent and over time, they were able to determine where different dinosaur species could most easily survive changing conditions – before the asteroid impact occurred.
Global map showing distribution of surface temperature on the Earth in the Late Cretaceous period. Warmer colors show higher temperatures while colder colors indicate lower temperatures.
Instead of being in decline, they found that many species were actually more widespread than previously thought. Those species, however, were in locations where fossils were less likely to be preserved and those locations were smaller than initially estimated. The lesser numbers of fossils in these areas had previously led scientists to the conclusion that those species were already in decline, when they actually were not.According to the researchers:
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
Bottom line: These findings make this tale all the more tragic – dinosaurs were thriving at their peak on this planet in the Late Cretaceous. They had taken over the world, and survived other potential calamities, only to have a random chunk of rock from space – or unprecedented volcanic eruptions – seal their ultimate fate.
Back in December of 2018, we reported on a mysterious chaff cloud thatemerged over the Midwest. Just days later, we were first to point out a number of other similar and highly persistent formations that popped upacross the eastern United States. In the first case, we were able to get the USAF to tell us where that cloud of metallic radar reflective material came from, at least according to them, but in the other cases we didn't have as good of luck. Now, a new radar clip shows the formation of a big chaff cloud near Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.
The event occurred on March 5th, 2019 at around 19:20 UTC, which equates to roughly 12:20pm local time. Over a swath of sky beginning to the west of Cannon Air Force Base, the plume first appears, covering roughly 30 miles over a couple hours time. Cannon AFB is used by Air Force Special Operations Command and is home the 27th Special Operations Wing and its MC-130s, AC-130s, CV-22s, MQ-9s, U-28s, C-146s and other propeller-driven aircraft, some of which could have deployed the chaff from their expendable countermeasures systems.
GOOGLE EARTH
Cannon AFB continues to expand after being converted to a master base for USAF Special Operations Command aircraft.
See the radar recording below. The weather was very mild at the time. With partly cloudy conditions and no precipitation whatsoever.
There is the 'Pecos' cluster of Military Operating Areas (MOAs) just to the west of Cannon AFB that extends out nearly 100 miles, it seems as if this may have been where the release began from an aircraft. It took roughly two hours for the chaff to cross the state line into Texas. Like other chaff plumes we have seen as of late, it stayed remarkably cohesive over a long period of time.
We watched the aviation activity over the area at the time and didn't see anything out of the ordinary or a culprit that could have released the chaff as part of a test or other unique operation. Keep in mind that most military aircraft aren't tracked using the software. We also listened to radio recordings from the time period and didn't hear Albuquerque Center communicate with an aircraft about the chaff release.
We have reached out to Cannon AFB about the peculiar chaff cloud, but after 24 hours they haven't gotten back to us yet. We will update this post if they do.
Author's note 1:15pm PST 3/7/19: The time stamp was read wrong, which means the deployment wasn't nearly as fast. Changes have been made to the text to reflect this.
Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6052, a pair of colliding galaxies that lies in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away from Earth.
A new image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescopeshows what happens when two galaxies collide. That's relevant for us residents of the Milky Way, because our own galaxy is expected to collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in about four billion years.
The image captures a scene some 230 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Hercules. (One light-year is the distance that light travels in a year — about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.) Here, Hubble zooms in on the merging galaxies, a double object known as NGC 6052.
When NGC 6052 was first cataloged in 1784 by William Herschel, it was classified as a single, irregular galaxy with an odd shape. Now, however, we know that shape is odd because two galaxies are coming together.
Scientists study mergers such as NGC 6052 to better understand galactic evolution, and to get an idea what our own collision will look like a few billion years from now. Galactic mergers are very common in the universe; we know, for example, that Andromeda devoured one of the Milky Way's siblings long ago. The Milky Way-Andromeda collision isn't expected to pose any threat to Earth, because the distances between individual stars in galaxies are so vast, but scientists are still interested in the mechanics of how these interactions happen.
"A long time ago, gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a description of the new photo. (Hubble is a joint mission of NASA and ESA.)
"Stars from within both of the original galaxies now follow new trajectories caused by the new gravitational effects," they added. "However, actual collisions between stars themselves are very rare, as stars are very small relative to the distances between them — most of a galaxy is empty space. Eventually, the galaxies will fully merge to form a single, stable galaxy."
Hubble launched to Earth orbit in April 1990. The iconic telescope received multiple visits from astronauts over the years, to maintain or replace its components. The last visit, in 2009, installed the Wide Field Camera 3, which obtained the new image. Hubble also took an image of NGC 6052 with an older instrument, Wide Field Camera 2; scientists released that one in 2015.
Hubble is expected to keep operating well into the 2020s. Its successor, the $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2021.
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
Novel fuel cells can help store electricity from renewables, such as wind farms, by converting it into a chemical fuel for long-term storage and then changing it back to electricity when needed.
ISTOCK.COM/RON_THOMAS
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa. Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the equation. Now, researchers have created lab-scale gadgets that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.
The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.
Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then convert that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the grid.
But commercial electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts to speed up the two reactions, meaning a single device can’t do both jobs. To get around this, researchers have been experimenting with a newer type of fuel cell, called a proton conducting fuel cell (PCFC), which can make fuel or convert it back into electricity using just one set of catalysts.
PCFCs consist of two electrodes separated by a membrane that allows protons across. At the first electrode, known as the air electrode, steam and electricity are fed into a ceramic catalyst, which splits the steam’s water molecules into positively charged hydrogen ions (protons), electrons, and oxygen molecules. The electrons travel through an external wire to the second electrode—the fuel electrode—where they meet up with the protons that crossed through the membrane. There, a nickel-based catalyst stitches them together to make hydrogen gas (H2). In previous PCFCs, the nickel catalysts performed well, but the ceramic catalysts were inefficient, using less than 70% of the electricity to split the water molecules. Much of the energy was lost as heat.
Now, two research teams have made key strides in improving this efficiency. They both focused on making improvements to the air electrode, because the nickel-based fuel electrode did a good enough job. In January, researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported in Energy & Environmental Science that they came up with a fuel electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that harnessed 76% of its electricity to split water molecules. And in today’s issue of Nature Energy, Ryan O’Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, reports that his team has done one better. Their ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, harnesses as much as 98% of the energy it’s fed to split water.
When both teams run their setups in reverse, the fuel electrode splits H2 molecules into protons and electrons. The electrons travel through an external wire to the air electrode—providing electricity to power devices. When they reach the electrode, they combine with oxygen from the air and protons that crossed back over the membrane to produce water.
The O’Hayre group’s latest work is “impressive,” Haile says. “The electricity you are putting in is making H2 and not heating up your system. They did a really good job with that.” Still, she cautions, both her new device and the one from the O’Hayre lab are small laboratory demonstrations. For the technology to have a societal impact, researchers will need to scale up the button-size devices, a process that typically reduces performance. If engineers can make that happen, the cost of storing renewable energy could drop precipitously, helping utilities do away with their dependence on fossil fuels.
Solar storms can be even more powerful than what our measurements so far have indicated — and we’re still very unprepared.
Image via Pixabay.
Although our planet’smagnetic fieldkeeps us blissfully unaware of it, the Earth is constantly being pelted with cosmic particles. Sometimes, however — during events known as solar storms, caused by explosions on the sun’s surface — this stream of particles turns into a deluge and breaks through that magnetic field.
Research over the last 70 years or so has revealed that these events can threaten the integrity of our technological infrastructure. Electrical grids, various communication infrastructure, satellites, and air traffic can all be floored by such storms. We’ve seen extensive power cuts take place in Quebec, Canada (1989) and Malmö, Sweden (2003) following such events, for example.
Now, new research shows that we’ve underestimated the hazards posed by solar storms — the authors report that we’ve underestimated just how powerful they can become.
‘Tis but a drizzle!
“If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our high-tech society,” says Raimund Muscheler, professor of geology at Lund University and co-author of the study. “That’s why we must increase society’s protection again solar storms.”
Up to now, researchers have used direct instrumental observations to study solar storms. But the new study reports that these observations likely underestimated how violent the events can become. The paper, led by researchers at Lund University, analyzed ice coresrecovered from Greenland to study past solar storms. These cores formed over the last 100,000 years or so, and have captured evidence of storms over that time.
According to the team, the cores recorded a very powerful solar storm occurring in 600 BCE. Also drawing on data recovered from the growth rings of ancient trees, the team pinpointed two further (and powerful) solar storms that took place in 775 and 994 CE.
The result thus showcases that, although rare, massive solar storms are a naturally recurring part of solar activity.
This finding should motivate us to review the possibility that a similar event will take place sooner or later — and we should prepare. Both the Quebec and Malmö incidents show how deeply massive solar storms can impact our technology, and how vulnerable our society is to them today.
“Our research suggests that the risks are currently underestimated. We need to be better prepared,” Muscheler concludes.
The paper “Multiradionuclide evidence for an extreme solar proton event around 2,610 B.P. (∼660 BC)” has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a surprising new study, scientists claim that sound waves could theoretically carry mass, which implies that they’re also affected by gravity.
“You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now,” Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper, told Scientific American. “It’s something we stumbled upon almost by chance.”
Previously, researchers at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University showed that phonons could have mass in a superfluid — a liquid that flows without friction. Phonons are particle-like excitations which correspond to collective oscillations of atoms inside a molecule or a crystal.
It’s easier to understand phonons in relation to their cousins, the much more famous photons. We know from Newtonian physics that atoms and molecules vibrate away from their equilibrium positions, a motion that we recognize as heat. Basically, the more the atomic lattice vibrates, the higher the temperature. But this classical view doesn’t offer the full picture unless we also include quantum mechanics — the physics of the microscopic world.
‘Quantum’ refers to the smallest indivisible unit to things. For instance, a quantum of light is a photon — the smallest amount of light there is. Similarly, when you apply quantum mechanics to a lattice structure, there’s a ‘smallest packet of lattice vibration’ called a phonon.
The word phonon is derived from ‘phonos’, which is greek for sound. This is because long-wavelength phonons can be interpreted as single waves of sound propagating through the lattice.
In their new study, Esposito and colleagues used approximations known as effective field theory to show that phonon could not only have mass in a superfluid, but in other types of materials as well, including room-temperature liquids and solids; even in air, the primary medium through which sound waves propagate.
The study not only contradicts that popular notion that phonons are massless, but also suggests that they carry negative mass. Something with negative mass also implies negative gravity, which means it would repel other matter around it. Likewise, if you’d push an object with negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. Phonons having negative mass implies that their trajectory would gradually move away from a gravitational field such as that of the Earth. For water, the researchers calculated that phonons traveling through such a medium would drift by about one degree over 15 kilometers, which makes it extremely challenging to measure.
“In a gravitational field phonons slowly accelerate in the opposite direction that you would expect, say, a brick to fall,” Rafael Krichevsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, told Live Science.
Hover, this mass is extremely tiny — comparable with a hydrogen atom, about 10–24 grams. This is another measuring challenge, although it is still theoretically possible to do. According to the researchers, we do not currently have the necessary technology to measure the mass of phonons. However, they envision an experimental setup where super-precise clocks would detect the slight curvature of a phonon’s path.
Although sound waves carrying mass will not influence our daily lives, the notion carries certain important practical implications in science. For instance, in the dense cores of neutron stars, sound waves move at nearly the speed of light — that’s a lot of energy, meaning that an anti-gravitational sound wave should pose significant effects on the star’s behavior.
What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in Our Solar System
What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in Our Solar System
Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it drifts by on its way to the center of the solar system.
The dust consists of crushed-up remains from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago — rubble from asteroid collisions or crumbs from blazing comets. Dust is dispersed throughout the entire solar system, but it collects at grainy rings overlying the orbits of Earth and Venus, rings that can be seen with telescopes on Earth. By studying this dust — what it’s made of, where it comes from, and how it moves through space — scientists seek clues to understanding the birth of planets and the composition of all that we see in the solar system.
Two recent studies report new discoveries of dust rings in the inner solar system. One study uses NASA data to outline evidence for a dust ring around the Sun at Mercury’s orbit. A second study from NASA identifies the likely source of the dust ring at Venus’ orbit: a group of never-before-detected asteroids co-orbiting with the planet.
“It’s not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system,” said Marc Kuchner, an author on the Venus study and astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is right in our neighborhood.”
In this illustration, several dust rings circle the Sun. These rings form when planets’ gravities tug dust grains into orbit around the Sun. Recently, scientists have detected a dust ring at Mercury’s orbit. Others hypothesize the source of Venus’ dust ring is a group of never-before-detected co-orbital asteroids.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith
Another Ring Around the Sun
Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, both solar scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did not set out to find a dust ring. “We found it by chance,” Stenborg said, laughing. The scientists summarized their findings in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 21, 2018.
They describe evidence of a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercury’s orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles wide. Mercury — 3,030 miles wide, just big enough for the continental United States to stretch across — wades through this vast dust trail as it circles the Sun.
Ironically, the two scientists stumbled upon the dust ring while searching for evidence of a dust-free region close to the Sun. At some distance from the Sun, according to a decades-old prediction, the star’s mighty heat should vaporize dust, sweeping clean an entire stretch of space. Knowing where this boundary is can tell scientists about the composition of the dust itself, and hint at how planets formed in the young solar system.
Scientists think planets start off as mere grains of dust. They emerge from giant disks of gas and dust that circle young stars. Gravity and other forces cause material within the disk to collide and coalesce. (illustration)
Credits: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but that’s partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. No matter how scientists look from Earth, all the dust in between us and the Sun gets in the way, tricking them into thinking perhaps space near the Sun is dustier than it really is.
Stenborg and Howard figured they could work around this problem by building a model based on pictures of interplanetary space from NASA’s STEREO satellite — short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory.
Ultimately, the two wanted to test their new model in preparation for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is currently flying a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, swinging closer and closer to the star over the next seven years. They wanted to apply their technique to the images Parker will send back to Earth and see how dust near the Sun behaves.
Scientists have never worked with data collected in this unexplored territory, so close to the Sun. Models like Stenborg and Howard’s provide crucial context for understanding Parker Solar Probe’s observations, as well as hinting at what kind of space environment the spacecraft will find itself in — sooty or sparkling clean.
Two kinds of light show up in STEREO images: light from the Sun’s blazing outer atmosphere — called the corona — and light reflected off all the dust floating through space. The sunlight reflected off this dust, which slowly orbits the Sun, is about 100 times brighter than coronal light.
“We’re not really dust people,” said Howard, who is also the lead scientist for the cameras on STEREO and Parker Solar Probe that take pictures of the corona. “The dust close to the Sun just shows up in our observations, and generally, we have thrown it away.” Solar scientists like Howard — who study solar activity for purposes such as forecasting imminent space weather, including giant explosions of solar material that the Sun can sometimes send our way — have spent years developing techniques to remove the effect of this dust. Only after removing light contamination from dust can they clearly see what the corona is doing.
The two scientists built their model as a tool for others to get rid of the pesky dust in STEREO — and eventually Parker Solar Probe — images, but the prediction of dust-free space lingered in the back of their minds. If they could devise a way of separating the two kinds of light and isolate the dust-shine, they could figure out how much dust was really there. Finding that all the light in an image came from the corona alone, for example, could indicate they’d found dust-free space at last.
Mercury’s dust ring was a lucky find, a side discovery Stenborg and Howard made while they were working on their model. When they used their new technique on the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along Mercury’s orbit — more dust, that is — in the light they’d otherwise planned to discard.
“It wasn’t an isolated thing,” Howard said. “All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecraft’s position, we could see the same five percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it’s something that extends all around the Sun.”
Scientists never considered that a ring might exist along Mercury’s orbit, which is maybe why it’s gone undetected until now, Stenborg said. “People thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a dust ring,” he said. “They expected that the solar wind and magnetic forces from the Sun would blow any excess dust at Mercury’s orbit away.”
With an unexpected discovery and sensitive new tool under their belt, the researchers are still interested in the dust-free zone. As Parker Solar Probe continues its exploration of the corona, their model can help others reveal any other dust bunnies lurking near the Sun.
Asteroids Hiding in Venus’ Orbit
Ths isn’t the first time scientists have found a dust ring in the inner solar system. Twenty-five years ago, scientists discovered that Earth orbits the Sun within a giant ring of dust. Others uncovered a similar ring near Venus’ orbit, first using archival data from the German-American Helios space probes in 2007, and then confirming it in 2013, with STEREO data.
Since then, scientists determined the dust ring in Earth’s orbit comes largely from the asteroid belt, the vast, doughnut-shaped region between Mars and Jupiter where most of the solar system’s asteroids live. These rocky asteroids constantly crash against each other, sloughing dust that drifts deeper into the Sun’s gravity, unless Earth’s gravity pulls the dust aside, into our planet’s orbit.
At first, it seemed likely that Venus’ dust ring formed like Earth’s, from dust produced elsewhere in the solar system. But when Goddard astrophysicist Petr Pokorny modeled dust spiraling toward the Sun from the asteroid belt, his simulations produced a ring that matched observations of Earth’s ring — but not Venus’.
This discrepancy made him wonder if not the asteroid belt, where else does the dust in Venus’ orbit come from? After a series of simulations, Pokorny and his research partner Marc Kuchner hypothesized it comes from a group of never-before-detected asteroids that orbit the Sun alongside Venus. They published their work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 12, 2019.
“I think the most exciting thing about this result is it suggests a new population of asteroids that probably holds clues to how the solar system formed,” Kuchner said. If Pokorny and Kuchner can observe them, this family of asteroids could shed light on Earth and Venus’ early histories. Viewed with the right tools, the asteroids could also unlock clues to the chemical diversity of the solar system.
Because it’s dispersed over a larger orbit, Venus’ dust ring is much larger than the newly detected ring at Mercury’s. About 16 million miles from top to bottom and 6 million miles wide, the ring is littered with dust whose largest grains are roughly the size of those in coarse sandpaper. It’s about 10 percent denser with dust than surrounding space. Still, it’s diffuse — pack all the dust in the ring together, and all you’d get is an asteroid two miles across.
Using a dozen different modeling tools to simulate how dust moves around the solar system, Pokorny modeled all the dust sources he could think of, looking for a simulated Venus ring that matched the observations. The list of all the sources he tried sounds like a roll call of all the rocky objects in the solar system: Main Belt asteroids, Oort Cloud comets, Halley-type comets, Jupiter-family comets, recent collisions in the asteroid belt.
Asteroids represent building blocks of the solar system’s rocky planets. When they collide in the asteroid belt, they shed dust that scatters throughout the solar system, which scientists can study for clues to the early history of planets. (illustration)
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
“But none of them worked,” Kuchner said. “So, we started making up our own sources of dust.”
Perhaps, the two scientists thought, the dust came from asteroids much closer to Venus than the asteroid belt. There could be a group of asteroids co-orbiting the Sun with Venus — meaning they share Venus’ orbit, but stay far away from the planet, often on the other side of the Sun. Pokorny and Kuchner reasoned a group of asteroids in Venus’ orbit could have gone undetected until now because it’s difficult to point earthbound telescopes in that direction, so close to the Sun, without light interference from the Sun.
Co-orbiting asteroids are an example of what’s called a resonance, an orbital pattern that locks different orbits together, depending on how their gravitational influences meet. Pokorny and Kuchner modeled many potential resonances: asteroids that circle the Sun twice for every three of Venus’ orbits, for example, or nine times for Venus’ ten, and one for one. Of all the possibilities, one group alone produced a realistic simulation of the Venus dust ring: a pack of asteroids that occupies Venus’ orbit, matching Venus’ trips around the Sun one for one.
But the scientists couldn’t just call it a day after finding a hypothetical solution that worked. “We thought we’d discovered this population of asteroids, but then had to prove it and show it works,” Pokorny said. “We got excited, but then you realize, ‘Oh, there’s so much work to do.’”
They needed to show that the very existence of the asteroids makes sense in the solar system. It would be unlikely, they realized, that asteroids in these special, circular orbits near Venus arrived there from somewhere else like the asteroid belt. Their hypothesis would make more sense if the asteroids had been there since the very beginning of the solar system.
The scientists built another model, this time starting with a throng of 10,000 asteroids neighboring Venus. They let the simulation fast forward through 4.5 billion years of solar system history, incorporating all the gravitational effects from each of the planets. When the model reached present-day, about 800 of their test asteroids survived the test of time.
Pokorny considers this an optimistic survival rate. It indicates that asteroids could have formed near Venus’ orbit in the chaos of the early solar system, and some could remain there today, feeding the dust ring nearby.
The next step is actually pinning down and observing the elusive asteroids. “If there’s something there, we should be able to find it,” Pokorny said. Their existence could be verified with space-based telescopes like Hubble, or perhaps interplanetary space-imagers similar to STEREO’s. Then, the scientists will have more questions to answer: How many of them are there, and how big are they? Are they continuously shedding dust, or was there just one break-up event?
Dust Rings Around Other Stars
In this illustration, an asteroid breaks apart under the powerful gravity of LSPM J0207+3331, a white dwarf star located around 145 light-years away. Scientists think crumbling asteroids supply the dust rings surrounding this old star.
The dust rings that Mercury and Venus shepherd are just a planet or two away, but scientists have spotted many other dust rings in distant star systems. Vast dust rings can be easier to spot than exoplanets, and could be used to infer the existence of otherwise hidden planets, and even their orbital properties.
But interpreting extrasolar dust rings isn’t straightforward. “In order to model and accurately read the dust rings around other stars, we first have to understand the physics of the dust in our own backyard,” Kuchner said. By studying neighboring dust rings at Mercury, Venus and Earth, where dust traces out the enduring effects of gravity in the solar system, scientists can develop techniques for reading between the dust rings both near and far.
Since the early 1970’s numerous reports of a humming nose have been reported across theworld. Original reports began in the United Kingdom and spread to the US in the early1990’s. Reports include a type of diesel engine noise heard at a low-frequency indicating some type of electromagnetic energy noise that some people hear due to sensitivity, while others do not. People have speculated that the sound could be due to cell-towers, delusions, local noises in the area, HAARP, UFO’s, and more. But most of the research has led people to dead ends….until now!!!
A geoscientist by the name of David Deming has done some intense research on this subject and may just have the answer you’re longing to know. The video below dives through some of Deming’s research and I believe you will be shocked when you find out the true source…..
Every claimed alien abduction case is weird by default, but the 1973 abduction of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson in Pascagoula, Mississippi is weird even by those standards. The two men were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula river when, they said, a UFO appeared hovering above the ground. Three creatures disembarked from the craft, paralyzed Parker and Hickson, and brought them aboard. According to the men, the creatures were pale with remarkably wrinkled skin, “lobster-like” claws for hands, and carrot-shaped growths where their eyes and ears should have been. The creatures seemed to each have one thick leg, like two legs had been fused together. On the ship, the creatures allegedly performed medical procedures and levitated them back to their original position 20 minutes later.
The story drew international attention and became one of the most well-known alien abduction cases. Through the course of the investigation, some of the big guns of the UFO world were brought out, with Hickson and Parker being interviewed by James Harder and J. Allen Hynek (of Project Blue Book fame), who concluded that Parker and Hicks had “a very real, frightening experience.” While some small details changed over the course of time, neither man ever recanted their stories. Charles Hickson passed away in 2011, and to the end of his life he maintained that the story was true.
Now 46 years later, a couple from the Pascagoula area has come forward claiming that they too saw something that night, but never before went public with their testimony for fear of ridicule. According to the Sun, Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sitting in their car looking out over the Pascagoula river, on the opposite bank from Parker and Hickson, when they saw strange blue lights begin circling around the area. Maria Blair says:
“I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing. 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.”
The couple allegedly watched the lights for approximately 40 minutes, before stepping out of their car and walking down the pier towards the water. Maria says that’s when she saw one of the creatures emerge from the water:
“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.
[Jerry] 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.”
The impetus for the Blairs coming forward was apparently the recently published book Pascagoula-The Closest Encounter by Calvin Parker, who had previously remained largely hidden from media attention since the incident. Calvin Parker met with Maria and Vernon last Wednesday for the first time and says he felt an immediate connection to the couple:
“It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning. It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding. I felt like I had known [Maria] 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.
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.”
It’s a weird case. The aliens are weird. The witness testimony is weird. There are weird holes in the descriptions of events. And everyone involved is weirdly earnest. Witness testimony is never proof of anything, but it’s yet another layer in one of the strangest encounters with the paranormal that’s ever been recorded.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.