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...
11-05-2019
Abrupt climate change killed off ancient South American populations
Abrupt climate change killed off ancient South American populations
Humans colonized South America with impressive ease and speed, but some 8,000 years ago, a sharp decline started taking place. Now, researchers have shown that climate change was responsible for this decline.
Image in public domain.
The initial human colonization of South America was a rapid process. Hunter-gatherers arrived on the continent some14,000 years ago, and within a few millennia, they covered every biome on the continent. However, while colonists were largely successful in their attempts, there was a period of about 4,000 years when things didn’t go so well. Researchers have found that a period called the Middle Holocene (8200 to 4200 cal BP) featured numerous shifts in climatic events.
“Archaeologists working in South America have broadly known that some 8,200 years ago, inhabited sites in various places across the continent were suddenly abandoned. In our study we wanted to connect the dots between disparate records that span the Northern Andes, through the Amazon, to the southern tip of Patagonia and all areas in between,” said Dr. Philip Riris (UCL Institute of Archaeology), lead author of the new study.
Through the analysis of radiocarbon dates using computer algorithms, they found that long-term rain patterns greatly correlate with the archaeological evidence. In other words, when the climate started to change, populations started to decline.
“Unpredictable levels of rainfall, particularly in the tropics, appear to have had a negative impact on pre-Columbian populations until 6,000 years ago, after which recovery is evident. This recovery appears to correlate with cultural practices surrounding tropical plant management and early crop cultivation, possibly acting as buffers when wild resources were less predictable,”added Dr. Riris.
However, it wasn’t the absolute magnitude of climate change that did most of the damage, but rather the frequency of exceptional climatic events. This is particularly interesting for us since while the overall trend of climate change is, in rough terms, rather clear, extreme weather events caused by climate change are much harder to foresee.
In other words, it wasn’t necessarily that there was more or less rainfall, but rather that the changes from low to high occurred much quicker than they were supposed to. Dr. Riris explained:
“We studied ancient records of rainfall such as marine sediments for evidence of exceptional climate events. Within windows of 100 years, we compared the Middle Holocene to the prevalent patterns before and after 8,200 years ago. Normal patterns of rainfall suggest on average an unusually dry or wet year every 16-20 years, while under highly variable conditions this increases to every 5 years or so.”
Climate change
If you’re a climate change denier, I know what you’re thinking: Aha! So climate has changed before in the past. Absolutely, our planet’s climate has changed and is changing all the time. However, there is overwhelming evidence that the current warming trends, along with all the events and consequences that derive from it, are caused by mankind’s emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide.
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution.
(Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).
ZIJN HET TIJDREIZIGERS OF BUITENAARDSEN? ( VIDEO )
ZIJN HET TIJDREIZIGERS OF BUITENAARDSEN? ( VIDEO )
Dat er objecten rondvliegen die door niemand kunnen worden geïdentificeerd is op zich geen nieuws meer.
Wat wel nieuws is, is dat de herkomst van deze objecten misschien wel een heel andere is dan wij denken.
Er zijn op dit moment eigenlijk twee gangbare theorieën over de herkomst van ufo’s, oftewel niet geïdentificeerde objecten in de lucht.
De eerste is dat ze afkomstig zijn van andere planeten en dat het onze ruimtebroeders zijn die ons komen bezoeken. De tweede is dat de mensheid al veel verder is voor wat betreft technologie dan dat het publiek wordt verteld. Dat we al lang een geheime ruimtevloot hebben, gebaseerd op van buitenaardsen afkomstige technologie en dat er al talloze menselijke nederzettingen zijn zoals bijvoorbeeld op Mars.
Beiden zijn uiteraard ook mogelijk en om een idee te krijgen welke vreemde dingen er zoal in de lucht gebeuren, onderstaand een videoclip van Tyler van Secureteam.
Met daarin onder andere iemand die vanuit een vliegtuig opnamen maakt en opeens met hoge snelheid een object dat hij omschrijft als een soort torpedo, langs ziet schieten.
En een andere waar een man geschrokken naar buiten rent vanwege een soort harde knal, allerlei dingen in de lucht ziet en waar vervolgens de complete hemel rood kleurt.
Naast bovengenoemde mogelijkheden is er sinds kort ook nog een derde.
En die mogelijkheid is afkomstig van een Amerikaanse professor die denkt dat voor wat betreft de herkomst van ufo’s, we dit veel dichter bij huis moeten zoeken dan bij andere planeten.
Michael M. Masters is professor aan Montana Tech University en zegt dat we hier heel goed te maken kunnen hebben met mensen uit de toekomst die een kijkje komen nemen in hun evolutionaire verleden.
Met andere woorden, de inzittenden van deze ufo’s zijn geen buitenaardsen, maar tijdreizigers.
Masters heeft hier een uitgebreid boek over geschreven, getiteld “Identified Flying Objects”.
Hij gebruikt zijn opleiding antropologie om te verklaren hoe het komt dat mensen die contact hebben gehad met buitenaardsen, allemaal ongeveer hetzelfde verhaal vertellen.
Ze praten over wezens die net als wij twee benen hebben, rechtop lopen, vingers hebben aan handen en tenen aan voeten en een symmetrisch gezicht bezitten met twee ogen, een mond en een neus en daarnaast zijn ze in staat om met ons te communiceren.
Masters staat helemaal achter de door hem ontwikkelde theorie en is bereid om met eenieder die dat wil erover in discussie te gaan.
Hij zegt dat hij het boek heeft geschreven voor zowel zijn wetenschappelijke collega’s als iedereen die geïnteresseerd is in het ufo fenomeen.
Zou Masters gelijk kunnen hebben en zijn het mensen uit de toekomst die ons bezoeken of toch wezens afkomstig van andere planeten?
Enkele jaren geleden hebben wij een soort handleiding gepubliceerd, afkomstig uit Rusland, met daarin alle buitenaardse wezens zoals die bekend zijn. En dat zijn er heel wat, dus misschien moeten we dan in plaats van twee mogelijkheden vanaf nu maar gewoon drie mogelijkheden aanhouden. Drie mogelijkheden die uiteraard ook allemaal tegelijk kunnen voorkomen.
Hierna een deel uit dat eerdere artikel en mochten er lezers zijn die slimme ideeën hebben over dit onderwerp, laat het ons weten.
In Rusland zijn ze over het algemeen wat verder met betrekking tot het fenomeen buitenaards leven en dat is dan ook het land waar veel nuttige informatie te vinden is.
Zo is er in Rusland sinds 1946-47 een boek bijgehouden over buitenaardse rassen.
Gelukkig is dit boek inmiddels vertaald in het Engels.
Er komen de meer bekende rassen in voor zoals de Pleijadiërs, de Reptilians, de Zeta’s en de Anunnaki.
Ook wordt in het boek de zogenaamde Council of Five genoemd. Die wordt gevormd door vijf buitenaardse rassen die klaarblijkelijk al miljoenen jaren de aarde en haar bewoners beschermen.
Deze Council besefte dat toen de Anunnaki eenmaal begonnen te knoeien met ons DNA, wij uiteindelijk zouden samenkomen met andere goedwillende sterrenfamilies.
Deze Council, of Raad, bestaat uit de vijf volgende buitenaardse rassen: Orela, Egarot, Ginvo, Redan en Emerther.
Het schijnt dat de Emerther één van de meest invloedrijke rassen zijn volgens dit boek. Zij zijn degenen die drie keer een ontmoeting hebben gehad met de Amerikaanse president Dwight Eisenhower en ook drie keer met hooggeplaatste Sovjet autoriteiten.
Klaarblijkelijk waren ze ook geïnteresseerd om de Amerikaanse president Nixon te bezoeken, maar deze wees het verzoek af, omdat hij te bang was dat de buitenaardsen in staat zouden zijn om zijn (mogelijk kwaadwillende) gedachten te lezen.
Je kunt het boek online doorbladeren en lezen. Wil je het liever op een volledig scherm klik dan op het vierkantje in de rechterbovenhoek.
Zeer merkwaardige zonsondergang leidt tot theorieën over aliens. Bekijk de foto’s
Zeer merkwaardige zonsondergang leidt tot theorieën over aliens. Bekijk de foto’s
In Canada is een wel heel vreemde zonsondergang vastgelegd. Rond de zon waren mysterieuze kringen te zien, die op internet voor de nodigde consternatie zorgden.
Christine McNaughton uit Canada plaatste onderstaande foto’s op Twitter. Ze zijn gemaakt op Manitoulin Island, nabij Toronto.
“Jongens, kijk die zonsondergang!” schreef ze erbij.
Vliegende schotel
De beelden trokken onder meer de aandacht van mensen die zich bezighouden met buitenaards leven.
Scott C. Waring van de website ET Database zei bijvoorbeeld dat de vreemde kringen werden veroorzaakt door een opstijgende vliegende schotel.
De UFO zou overdag schuilen in een nabijgelegen meer en ’s avonds tevoorschijn komen.
Cirruswolken
Volgens website Earthsky.org ging het echter om cirruswolken, waarin ijskristallen zitten. Die breken het zonlicht en weerkaatsen het.
Dat proces zou volgens de website de vreemde kringen veroorzaken die op de foto’s te zien zijn.
The scenario involves oftentimes, a late night knock at the door. Once the door is opened, either one or two young children are seen standing on the porch with their heads down. As they raise their heads though, it becomes clear that there is something just not right about them. Their eyes are pitch black.
The new nature of warfare in many parts of the world has made it increasingly difficult to identify who is a target and who is an innocent civilian. Terrorist groups, in particular, often have no reservations about placing their leadership among civilian populations or even schoolchildren in order to shield them from attacks. To combat this, the U.S. and its allies have been testing new methods of “reducing collateral damage,” or “blowing up innocent people” to use a non-sterilized term.
An MQ-1 Predator drone outfitted with a Lockheed Martin AGM-114 Hellfire Missile
While this has most often meant reducing the explosive payloads of traditional munitions, it turns out that the CIA has been using a terrifying and highly advanced new weapon which could radically change the nature of warfare as we know it. According to a Wall Street Journalreport published today, it turns out the CIA has been using a high-precision kinetic warhead known as the RX9 packed with “a halo of six long blades that are stowed inside and then deploy through the skin of the missile seconds before impact, shredding anything in its tracks.” Yikes. Military news site Task and Purposewrites that “this is basically like dropping a rocket-assisted meteor full of swords on someone.”
Details about the RX9 are still scarce, and The Wall Street Journal has not disclosed its source for the existence of the RX9 but writes that it can confirm the CIA and Department of Defense are indeed using the weapon.
A typical Hellfire missile, believed to be the platform for this kinetic blade warhead.
There is some suspected evidence of its use, too. In 2017, Al-Qaeda second-in-command Abu Khayr al-Masri was killed in a precise drone strike by something which smashed right through the top of his car and yet caused very little other damage. Photos of the smashed car show 4 distinct ‘slice’ marks in the windshield and roof of the car; could they have been made by an RX9’s halo of six long blades as they shredded whatever was in its tracks in the car? Ouch.
Just wait until these things start being dropped from space. By soulless AIs. I don’t know of any deterrent more effective than the fear of a freakin’ sword falling from the heavens directly on one’s head after being dropped by an omniscient non-physical entity. It’s got a mythological ring to it. Still, while these secret missiles might prevent civilian casualties and sound objectively rad, they’re still instruments of death. How impersonal can we make killing from a distance until warfare loses all of its meaning?
For the past several months, I’ve been conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a clearer picture of global UFOlogy today.
RG: Who have been the defining figures in Norwegian UFOlogy over the past 70 years, for better or for worse, and why?
TT: As the main investigator of the Hessdalen UFO-phenomenon and an internationally established lecturer on these topics, Dr. Erling Strand is certainly a defining figure in Norwegian UFOlogy. Also important are Mentz Kaarbø and Ole Brænne for their role as editors of the only Norwegian UFO magazine since the seventies. Being the present leader of Norwegian UFO Center, Oftedal is a significant figure. This list should also include individuals such as Kenneth Jacobsen and Arnulf Løken, who are long-time leaders of local UFO groups. Also worthy of inclusion are Bjørnar Hvidsten, an Oslo-based event organiser and UFO activist, and Terje Wulfsberg, a Westcoast-based event organiser and UFO activist. I would also include myself as the producer of two internationally rewarded documentaries on the UFO subject: The Portal – The Hessdalen Light Phenomenon and The Day Before Disclosure, both of which are available on Vimeo through my website.
Dr. Erling Strand, of Project Hessdalen.
RG: Aside from the anomalous lights often sighted around Hessdalen, what do you consider to be the most compelling Norwegian UFO incident on record, and why?
TT: There are so many, from the “Ghost Rockets” of the 1940s, to several reports of close encounters with landed craft and face-to-face meetings with ETs. Many retired airliner pilots I have met with have told me privately about numerous incidents with UFOs during their careers.
RG: Why is Hessdalen so important? What clues, if any, might it offer as to the underlying nature of the UFO enigma?
TT: Hessdalen received national attention from February 1981, as reports came of daily observations of lights and structured craft moving up and down the small valley. For more information about this, I would recommend my documentary, The Portal. Hessdalen has been visited by many researchers and scientists from all over the world, among them Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who proclaimed that Hessdalen was a “UFO-laboratory” due to the high frequency of observations there in the 1980s.
A famous time-lapse image of the mysterious Hessdalen lights.
RG: Is Hessdalen still an active area for UFO sightings?
TT: Yes, still active but not as much so as in the 1980s and 1990s.
RG: What is the Norwegian government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?
TT: The subject of UFOs doesn’t seem to be a noticeable to our government, and I cannot recall any comments made by any officials.
The Norwegian Ministry of Defence building in Oslo.
RG: Does the Norwegian Ministry of Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?
TT: Not to my knowledge.
RG: Has the Norwegian government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?
TT: No files have been released from our government. It’s simply not a topic here.
RG: Does Norway have a national UFO investigations organisation today, and how many smaller Norwegian UFO groups are you aware of?
TT: We have a group called Norwegian UFO center that collects reports and presents them in their magazine, together with articles on the subject. It is published four times a year. Some smaller private groups of engaged people have been organised over the years, but nothing significant. Actually, just recently, in May 2019, we had a full-day conference on the UFO subject in Oslo, and it gathered 100 attendees. Not bad!
RG: What are the most active regions of Norway for UFO sighting reports hotspots?
TT: Hessdalen is probably still the place, and, as far as I know, some fjords on the west coast.
RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings?
TT: Once, in Hessdalen. Around midnight, sitting on a mountain top with several people. Two bright lights appeared right above us, hovering side-by-side for 20 seconds before they shot into the stars. No sound. Pretty amazing!
RG: How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?
TT: I have been interested in the subject since I was a 12-year-old boy in 1962 and came across a book on my father’s bookshelf: George Adamski’s The Flying saucers have landed. He bought it in 1954 after a UFO incident on a Norwegian airfield where he worked at the time. A large disc had hovered over the remote military airfield and was seen on radar and by many of the personnel there. This incident triggered my father’s interest, and later my own. I have pursued the subject all my life and I’m convinced of its legitimacy and importance. I believe we are being visited—or, perhaps more accurately, monitored—by many ET groups. All the ongoing craziness on this planet must be of great anthropological interest to anyone out there watching. I also believe that an apparent alien hybridisation programme is a key part of this story, which is still unfolding. Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack, Barbara Lamb and many others have done a great job exploring this.
But, as Edgar Mitchell once pointed out to me: “Beware, you are entering a minefield!” So much dis-and-mis-information; so many wild conspiracy theories; so many self-proclaimed experts and prophets with and big egos, and so on… these are choppy waters to sail. The truth is out there—unfortunately, it’s not always down here. That’s one of the reasons the media has kept its distance, as a great deal of UFO reports are hard to verify. Quoting someone who is later proved to be a fraud does not well serve the publishing businesses. I can understand the editors’ reluctance. It can be very unclear at times what one should believe or not.
RG: How can Norwegian UFOlogy, and UFOlogy in general, better itself?
TT: It depends on what your goals are. Are UFOs something we “need” to force on the general public, or is this a phenomenon that by itself attracts the people who are ready for it? I kind of feel the latter is where I stand at the moment. What we can best do is to help make credible information available, but people must decide for themselves whether or not they wish to engage with it. It is an evolutionary process; one that that cannot be pushed too much. It must follow a natural flow. We cannot save the planet by yelling out that UFOs are real, but by presenting credible information through quality presentations, we can create a curiosity for this and other “paranormal” phenomena, showing that they are not paranormal at all, but actually completely normal and explicable. Mainstream science has just not arrived here yet. Discovering that we are not alone in the universe and becoming a part of a galactic brotherhood is likely to be a natural part of our evolution and it will come when the world is ready for it. But we probably have to grow up first as a civilisation, and to discipline our barbaric nature, which still haunts us and keeps visitors at safe distance. Meantime, we UFO-nerds can enjoy the ride.
One of the foremost authorities on British UFO research has come forward to urge the British government to re-open its investigation of anomalous aerial phenomena. Nick Pope, former head of the Ministry of Defence UFO desk, has publicly called for the MoD to restart its research into unidentified flying objects and other aerial anomalies. Will the Ministry of Defence take heed?
Nick Pope
Nick Pope served at the Ministry of Defence from 1991 to 2006 where he was tasked with investigating reports of UFOs to determine if they posed any risk to British defense. In reality, as our own Nick Redfern has pointed out, Pope was likely merely there to serve as a lightning rod to attract reports which were then actually investigated by members of the Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) with security clearances.
Still, like Tom DeLonge, Pope was given a level of access to information and institutions that few civilians ever do – even if either one or both were merely part of a government disinformation or public appeasement campaign of some kind. Like DeLonge, Pope also now makes quite a bit of money and publicity off of his legit UFO researcher cred, regardless of if he ever came across any ‘real’ proof of anything anomalous.
Thus, make of it what you will when Pope pops up in the news with some big development. This week, Pope is making the rounds in the British tabloids with his call for the MoD to follow the lead of the U.S. Navy and draft a new policy for documenting and reporting UFOs. “I strongly support the US Navy’s policy, which is a sensible response to the defence, national security and air safety issues raised by the phenomenon – whatever its true nature,” Pope told Metro. “I hope the US policy initiative will lead to the UK following suit. It’s time either to re-open the MoD’s UFO project or put some new reporting arrangements in place.”
Footage alleged to show U.S. Navy aircraft tracking advanced unknown objects surfaced in 2017, bringing the topic of disclosure into the public eye.
Pope even drafted a set of guidelines of his own for reporting unidentified aerial phenomena, writing that the MoD should create a new dedicated unit for collecting these reports:
A new MoD unit should be set up to investigate all such occurrences. All aircrew of all branches of the military who see such objects/phenomena, all civilian aircrew, all radar operators who detect uncorrelated targets, and any other military, MoD or defence contractor witnesses should make a full report to this unit as soon as possible.
Pope writes that the MoD should take each report seriously, cross-checking each with military, civilian, and space radar operated by the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales. Given the number of times the Royal Air Force has been scrambled in response to unidentified objects lately, I’d say they likely already do, but who knows?
A Eurofighter Typhoon at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire, England.
Will the MoD follow the U.S. Navy and publicly release new guidelines for reporting UFOs? If all of this is in fact a matter of national security in the U.K. and U.S., why is it receiving so much press? Wouldn’t these two governments want to suppress knowledge and reports of incursions into their airspace by unknown incredibly advanced aircraft?
Maybe all of this is misinformation designed to muddy the waters. If the public is convinced these incursions are being committed by inter-dimensional beings or aliens, no one will freak out that the Russians or Chinese or whoever are flying reality-bending aircraft above our heads. Is any of this leading to any ‘real’ disclosure, or this yet another smokescreen?
Nick Pope's guidelines for the reporting of unidentified aerial phenomena
A recent US Navy policy initiative concerning “unidentified aircraft” making incursions into military-controlled ranges and designated airspace has highlighted the need for similar policy guidance in the UK.
Current reporting is patchy. The 2009 termination of the MoD’s UFO research and investigation program may have created a false perception that military authorities were unconcerned by such reports. The term “UFO” is, in and of itself, unhelpful, in view of the pop culture baggage associated with it. Military and civilian pilots have thus been deterred from making reports, resulting in potentially significant occurrences going unreported. On occasion, to avoid such loaded terminology, phrases such as “unusual aircraft” or “unconventional helicopter” have been used, or – as in the case of recent incidents at Gatwick Airport – sightings have been attributed to drones, which may or may not be the explanation in this instance. To ensure continuity of terminology, the term UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) should be used.
The recent US Navy initiative has brought the requirement into focus, in parallel with US Department of Defense acknowledgement of some aspects of their AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program) program. This is a program designed to assess “foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats from the present out to the next 40 years”, and which included the study of “anomalous events, such as sightings of aerodynamic vehicles in extreme manoeuvres, with unique phenomenology, reported by US Navy pilots or other credible sources.” A new MoD unit should be set up to investigate all such occurrences. All aircrew of all branches of the military who see such objects/phenomena, all civilian aircrew, all radar operators who detect uncorrelated targets, and any other military, MoD or defence contractor witnesses shokd make a full report to this unit as soon as possible.
The MoD should investigate each occurrence thoroughly, cross-checking visual sightings with military and civilian radar data, and the space-tracking radar at the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales
Self-evidently, HMG, the MoD, HM Armed Forces and the CAA need to be aware of all activity in the UK Air Defence Region, because of the clear defence, national security and air safety issues raised. Unusual aerial activity (actual or perceived) may have a number of different causes, including:
Foreign (or non-state actor) military activity, involving aircraft, missiles or drones engaged in operational activity, flight testing, espionage, terrorism, narcotics smuggling, or attempts to assess the capabilities of our air defence network by means of unauthorized penetrations aimed at eliciting a military response.
‘Black projects’ involving prototype technologies operated by another part of HM Armed Forces, allied nations, or defence contractors, in circumstances where the project may be highly classified, with information held only by a very few individuals with the appropriate security clearances and ‘need to know’.
Drone activity from commercial companies or private individuals engaged in legitimate or illegitimate aerial photography, or in deliberately dangerous and/or disruptive activity.
Google Attacks My Discovery Of A UFO Over Cape Of Good Hope, South Africa, Deleting It. UFO Sighting News.
Google Attacks My Discovery Of A UFO Over Cape Of Good Hope, South Africa, Deleting It. UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: 2011 Location of discovery:Cape of Good Hope, South Africa Google Earth Coordinates (deleted): 34°21'12.33"S 18°29'24.02"E Guys, I found this UFO way back in 2011 and had it on my old channel, but I just transitioned from a windows computer to an Apple computer and was still learning the ropes. So there was no sound on it. It was taken by others and some said it was a fake because of no sound. Its 100% real and I know because I made the video in 2011 on my old channel UFOTeamTNT. This UFO is the exact same craft worked on by Area S4 Nuclear engineer Bob Lazar. This leads me to believe that there is a USAF top secret base in the area of Cape of Good Hope. The fact that the UFO was deleted within 4 weeks of announcing it to the world is evidence that Google Headquarters is infiltrated by aliens trying to control the minds of the public by controlling what we see and don't see on Google maps, searches and more. Thats right. I am accusing the higher ups in Google of actually being alien species that believe they are our overlords. Please watch the video below to see the original and learn why Google deleted it. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan UFO Researcher
BAD NEWS, NASA: ASTRONAUTS’ BRAINS ARE FILLING WITH LIQUID
BAD NEWS, NASA: ASTRONAUTS’ BRAINS ARE FILLING WITH LIQUID
ANTHROGAN1337 VIA PIXABAY/VICTOR TANGERMANN
DAN ROBITZSKI
Space Brain
Zero gravity can become a nuisance. Astronauts will Velcro themselves in place while they sleep so they don’t drift away, but there are fewer ways to keep things inside their body in place.
For instance, it turns out fluids float upward into astronauts’ brains during long spaceflights, causing their brains to expand. Even months after they’ve returned to Earth, the astronauts’ ventricles — the sacs in the brain that contain cerebrospinal fluids — remain enlarged, causing vision problems and other medical issues, according to research published Monday in the journal PNAS.
Water Balloons
The study, conducted by a large team of European neuroscientists, found that the ventricles of 11 Russian cosmonauts who returned to Earth had expanded by more than 11 percent, stretched out by the fluid buildup in their brains.
Seven months after they returned, the ventricles were still six percent larger than normal, according to the study, which connected the swollen ventricles to existing reports of worsening astronaut eyesight.
Brain Trust
But because this is an emerging field of medicine, doctors don’t know whether the effect increases during longer spaceflights.
“We need to really check the brain, check the visual system, check cognition because we do not know if this has any effect on that, and check people who spent different durations in space to tell if the effect keeps increasing,” University of Antwerp neuroscientist Angelique Van Ombergen told New Scientist. “Currently, nobody knows.”
Four Glowing UFOs Seen During Day Over Majave Desert, California, Dec 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Four Glowing UFOs Seen During Day Over Majave Desert, California, Dec 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: December 2018
Location of sighting: Giant Rock, Mojave desert, California, USA
The eyewitness said the group was meditating and then the UFOs appeared. Meditation does work, but only if its done with 100% relaxed mental state. Its hard to achieve for me, but has worked.
I have seen a similar sighting long ago here in Taiwan. Seen from the mountain my son goes to school on. Its called Yuming Mountain in Taipei, Taiwan. Back in 2004 a similar sighting occurred, glowing UFOs were seen in a similar formation, but for a longer amount of time. Watch the videos and compare. They are the same craft in both videos.
It is my belief that these UFOs appeared from above at high speed and stopped in their position. Waiting...for the underground base to bring them in. Which happens so fast, that the UFOs seem to shrink and vanish. But in reality, they were transported underground to the alien base 4-6km below. So, we now know there is an alien base below Giant Rock.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
These light orbs suddenly appeared following a large group meditation at Giant Rock, in the Mojave desert.
BELOW IS THE 2004 UFO SIGHTING SEEN DURING A WEDDING ON TOP OF YUMING MOUNTAIN, TAIPEI, TAIWAN.
BANG, CRASH Physicists using the LIGO and Virgo observatories are catching all sorts of cosmic collisions, including of pairs of neutron stars (illustrated). But scientists hope to bag even more exotic quarry.
NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/CI LAB
Seekers of gravitational waves are on a cosmic scavenger hunt.
Since the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory turned on in 2015, physicists have caught these ripples in spacetime from several exotic gravitational beasts — and scientists want more.
“We’re just beginning to see the field of gravitational wave astronomy open,” LIGO spokesperson Patrick Brady from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee said May 2 in a news conference. “Opening up a new window on the universe like this will hopefully bring us a whole new perspective on what’s out there.”
The speed and pitch of gravitational wave signals allow astronomers to make out what’s stirring up the waves. Here are the sources of gravitational waves that scientists that already have in their nets, and what they’re still hoping to find.
1. Pairs of colliding black holes
Status: Found
LIGO’s first catch was a pair of colliding black holes, each around 30 times the mass of the sun (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). The experiment detected vibrations from the merging black holes on September 14, 2015, four days before the official start of observations for the freshly upgraded LIGO.
That first discovery proved that massive, moving objects do in fact shake spacetime to produce gravitational waves, as Einstein predicted a century earlier. Not only that, the find proved that experiments on Earth could detect those waves, something of which Einstein was skeptical. Three of LIGO’s founders were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017 for the detection (SN: 10/28/17, p. 6).
In total, LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from 10 confirmed pairs of colliding black holes, plus another three candidates netted in the last month.
2. Pairs of colliding neutron stars
Status: Found
It was thought that a pair of merging neutron stars, the dense stellar corpses of massive stars that died in a supernova, could also set off gravitational waves. Then, in August 2017, the LIGO-Virgo team caught the first known instance of such an event, and a second on April 25 (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6).
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR GRAVITATIONAL PHYSICS
Follow-up observations with telescopes that are sensitive to light across the electromagnetic spectrum revealed hidden details of that first neutron star crash, including that the collision forged precious elements like gold, silver and platinum.
3. A neutron star crashing into a black hole
Status: Maybe
Another type of merger that could spawn ripples in spacetime is like the chocolate-vanilla swirl at an ice cream stand: one black hole and one neutron star merging into a single object. The observatories saw a possible signature of this kind of merger on April 26, but the signal was too weak for scientists to be sure.
If the team confirms that that signal really represents a black hole and neutron star swirl, it would prove that the two kinds of objects can live side by side. Before merging, the black hole and neutron star would have had to orbit each other in a close binary system.
“We’d be surprised if they didn’t exist, but we haven’t seen one” of these combinations, says LIGO team member Christopher Berry of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Studying such a system could help illuminate the mysterious material called nuclear pasta that makes up neutron stars (SN: 10/27/18, p. 8). “Neutron stars are kind of like giant atomic nuclei. They’re nothing like what we can create on Earth,” Berry says. The neutron star merger spotted in 2017 gave some details of the stars’ makeup (SN: 12/23/17, p. 7), including their maximum mass and squishiness. Spying a black hole-neutron star merger could show how a neutron star deforms near the extreme gravity of a black hole, another piece in the puzzle of how nuclear pasta behaves.
4. A collision involving an intermediate-mass black hole
Status: Not yet
All the black holes that LIGO and Virgo have detected so far have been stellar mass, which means that they typically weigh less than 100 times the mass of the sun. Physicists also know of supermassive black holes that weigh millions or billions times the mass of the sun (SN: 4/27/19, p. 6). But it’s not clear if there are black holes with masses in between.
Such intermediate-mass black holes “could be the link between stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies,” Virgo team member Giovanni Andrea Prodi of the University of Trento in Italy said May 2 at a news conference.
Previous research has seen hints of such middleweight black holes, but a collision detected with gravitational waves would be more definitive proof. If they don’t exist, “that’s really interesting,” Berry says, because it would mean supermassive black holes must have been born bigger than physicists can explain (SN Online: 3/16/18).
5. A bumpy neutron star
Status: Not yet
Another way to steal the secrets of neutron stars’ mysterious nuclear pasta is to detect miniature “mountains” on their surfaces. All massive objects that accelerate generate gravitational waves, but most of them are too faint to detect. Physicists think that a lone neutron star with a slight imperfection on it, like a bump about a millimeter high, would emit detectable gravitational waves as it spins. Such waves could help tell how stiff the neutron star material can be, in order to support the bumps.
Unlike most other sources on this list, bumpy neutron stars would produce continuous gravitational waves, detected as a constant “hum” by the observatories.
6. Supernova explosions
Status:Not yet
LIGO and Virgo might also be able to pick up gravitational waves from supernova explosions, the bright cataclysms at the end of massive stars’ lives.
Supernovas emit many types of light and particles, including ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos that are born deep in the heart of the explosions (SN: 2/18/17, p. 20). But scientists still don’t know exactly what makes a star explode as a supernova in the first place.
STARBURST SNAPS Astronomers got a good look at a nearby supernova in 1987 when a star exploded in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud (shown in this image from NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory). Scientists could one day spot a supernova explosion using gravitational wave observatories, shedding light on the powerful event.
NASA’S AMES RESEARCH CENTER
What they do know is that during a supernova explosion, the central core of the star collapses, and the resulting proto-neutron star gathers material from the remainder of the collapsing core. The turbulence at the surface of the proto-neutron star makes it vibrate like a bell, sending off gravitational waves. That specific gravitational wave signal is strongly related to the strength of the turbulence and the structure of the nascent neutron star, astrophysicist David Radice of Princeton University and colleagues report April 29 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Gravitational waves, neutrinos, and light from the next galactic supernova could allow us to understand the structure of the exploding star, and the nature of the mechanism powering its explosion,” Radice says.
The catch is that a supernova would have to be fairly close, in our own Milky Way galaxy, for the current LIGO detectors to catch it. And astronomers don’t know when the next supernova will happen (SN: 2/18/17, p. 24).
“The expected detection rate is only about two per century, so we will need to be really lucky, or very patient,” Radice says.
7. Waves triggered by the Big Bang
Status: Not yet
Physicists expect that many small gravitational waves from all over the universe crash into Earth all the time. These waves make up a random background of gravitational waves, like a jumble of voices in a crowded room.
Physicists think that at least some of those voices come from the Big Bang. Detecting relic gravitational waves generated by the Big Bang itself would mean seeing back further in the universe’s history than ever before. But it will be difficult to tease that signal apart from all the others.
“As you get a more sensitive detector, you may be able to pick out individual voices,” Berry says. “It’s currently an unsolved problem.”
8.New sources?
Status:Not yet
There’s still the possibility that detectors will catch gravitational waves from a source that scientists don’t recognize. Each time researchers have looked at the universe in a new way, they’ve discovered something that they didn’t predict, Berry says. “Now we’re looking in gravitational waves, a completely different kind of radiation,” he says. “It might be a bit arrogant to think we know everything that’s out there.”
Think robots are all square corners and rigid metal parts? Think again.
Two interns at NASA are part of a larger group working on "soft robots" that could be used for exploring worlds beyond Earth. This includes the moon, NASA'snext major destinationfor astronauts.
The advantage of a soft robot is that it's flexible and, in some ways, better able to adapt to new environments. Soft robots move in ways similar to living organisms, which expands their range of motion, perhaps making it easier to squeeze into a tight spot, for example.
Interns Chuck Sullivan and Jack Fitzpatrick are working at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to create soft robot actuators. (Actuators are machine components that control a robot's moving parts.)
"When you actuate the soft robot, it changes how you use the material properties," Fitzpatrick said in a statement. "A piece of rubber going from flat to the shape of a finger, it changes the material into something else."
Researchers at NASA's Langley Research Center are developing soft robot actuators from 3D-printed flexible silicone molds to study how "soft robots" can be used for space exploration.
The design is early stage and not nearly space-ready, but the interns are trying to see how these actuators could be used in a real space mission. Sullivan and Fitzpatrick build the actuators by 3D-printing a mold and then pouring it into silicone or another type of flexible substance.
"By design, the actuator has chambers, or air bladders, that expand and compress based on the amount of air in them," NASA said in the statement. "Currently, these two interns are operating the design through a series of tubes in the air bladders, allowing them to control the movement of the robot. By adjusting the amount of air in the chamber of the soft robotic actuator, the robot can flex and relax, just like a human muscle."
In particular, the interns are investigating four key properties of the actuators — mobility, joining, leveling and shaping — and how to use them in space exploration. Mobility refers to how the soft robot moves in its environment, while joining concerns how robots can link together (for example, to make a large temporary shelter). Leveling refers to how actuators can create a surface, such as filling in space underneath a lunar habitat, while shaping examines ways of adding strength to materials like dust shields.
"We see these four things as the crux of the problem. Once we can accomplish those in individual unit tests, we would like to figure out ways to combine them, so maybe we combine mobility and joining," Sullivan said in the same statement.
Both interns are working with principal investigator and computer engineer James Neilan, as well as co-principal investigator and aerospace research engineer Matt Mahlin, who together created this intern project at NASA's Langley Research Center to examine how well soft robots would work in space. This month, researchers and robotics experts from around the country will visit Langley to give the interns feedback on their soft robotics, and the students will continue to make improvements throughout the summer, NASA added.
In 1969, a giant earthquake off the coast of Portugal kicked up a tsunami that killed over a dozen people. Some 200 years prior, an even larger earthquake hit the same area, killing around 100,000 people and destroying the city of Lisbon.
Two earthquakes in the same spot over a couple hundred years is not cause for alarm. But what puzzled seismologists about these tremors was that they began in relatively flat beds of the ocean — away from any faults or cracks in the Earth's crust where tectonic plates slip past each other, releasing energy and causing earthquakes.
One idea is that a tectonic plate is peeling into two layers — the top peeling off the bottom layer — a phenomenon that has never been observed before, a group of scientists reported in April at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly held in Vienna. This peeling may be creating a new subduction zone, or an area in which one tectonic plate is rammed beneath another, according to their abstract.
The peeling is likely driven by a water-absorbing layer in the middle of the tectonic plate, according to National Geographic. This layer might have undergone a geological process called serpentinization, in which water that seeps in through cracks causes a layer to transform into soft green minerals. Now, this transformed layer might be causing enough weakness in the plate for the bottom layer to peel away from the top layer. That peeling could lead to deep fractures that trigger a tiny subduction zone, National Geographic reported.
This group isn't the first to propose this idea, but it's the first to provide some data on it. They tested their hypothesis with two-dimensional models, and their preliminary results showed that this type of activity is indeed possible — but is still yet to be proven.
This research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Astronauts on the International Space Station will begin testing an innovative algae-powered bioreactor to assess its feasibility for future long-duration space missions.
The algae-powered bioreactor, called the Photobioreactor, represents a major step toward creating a closed-loop life-support system, which could one day sustain astronauts without cargo resupply missions from Earth. This will be particularly important for future long-duration missions to the moon or Mars, which require more supplies than a spacecraft can carry, according to a statement from the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
The Photobioreactor arrived at the space station Monday (May 6) on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship. The experiment is designed to use algae to convert the carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts on the space station into oxygen and edible biomass through photosynthesis.
The Photobioreactor is expected to work in conjunction with the physicochemical air-recycling system, or Advanced Closed-Loop System (ACLS), which was delivered to the space station in 2018. The ACLS extracts methane and water from the carbon dioxide in the space station cabin. In turn, the algae in the Photobioreactor will use the remaining carbon dioxide to generate oxygen, creating a hybrid solution formally known as PBR@ACLS, according to the statement.
"With the first demonstration of the hybrid approach, we are right at the forefront when it comes to the future of life-support systems," Oliver Angerer, team leader for Exploration and project leader for the Photobioreactor experiment at DLR, said in the statement. "Of course, the use of these systems is interesting primarily for planetary base stations or for very long missions. But these technologies will not be available when needed if the foundations are not laid today."
German astronaut Alex Gerst of the European Space Agency poses with the Advanced Closed-Loop System (ACLS) at the International Space Station on Oct. 19, 2018.
The experiment will cultivate microscopic algae called Chlorella vulgaris aboard the space station. In addition to producing oxygen, the algae also produce a nutritional biomass that astronauts could eat.
Creating an edible biomass from carbon dioxide within the spacecraft means less food would need to be transported or delivered on space missions. The researchers estimate roughly 30 percent of an astronaut's food could be replaced by algae due to its high protein content, according to the statement.
The search forlife on Marsshouldn't focus exclusively on the distant past, some researchers say.
Four billion years ago, the Martian surface was apparently quite habitable, featuring rivers, lakes and even a deep ocean. Indeed, some astrobiologists view ancient Mars as an even better cradle for life than Earth was, and they suspect that life on our planet may have come here long agoaboard Mars rocksblasted into space by a powerful impact.
Things changed when Mars lost its global magnetic field. Charged particles streaming from the sun were then free to strip away the once-thick Martian atmosphere, and strip it they did. This process had transformed Mars into the cold, dry world we know today by about 3.7 billion years ago, observations by NASA's MAVEN orbiter suggest. (Earth still has its global magnetic field, explaining how our planet remains so livable.)
But this turn of events doesn't necessarily mean that Mars is a dead planet today.
"If Mars had life 4 billion years ago, Mars still has life. Nothing has happened on Mars that would've wiped out life," said Michael Finney, co-founder of The Genome Partnership, a nonprofit organization that runs the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conferences.
"So, if there were life on Mars, it may have moved around, it may have gone into hiding a bit, but it's probably still there," Finney said last month during a panel discussion at the Breakthrough Discuss conference at the University of California, Berkeley.
Going underground?
One of the most promising hiding places is the Martian underground. Though the Red Planet's surface has no liquid water these days — apart, possibly, from temporary flows on warm slopes now and again — there's likely lots of the wet stuff in buried aquifers. For example, observations by Europe's Mars Express orbiter suggest that a big lake may lurk beneath the Red Planet's south pole.
Earth's diverse residents advertise their presence in dramatic and obvious ways; an advanced alien civilization could probably figure out pretty quickly, just by scanning our atmosphere, that our planet is inhabited.
We don't see any such clear-cut evidence in the Martian air, but scientists have spotted some intriguing hints recently. For example, NASA's Curiosity rover has rolled through two plumes of methane inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, which the six-wheeled robot has been exploring since its 2012 touchdown. The rover mission also determined that baseline methane concentrations in Gale's air go through cycles seasonally.
More than 90% of Earth's atmospheric methane is produced by microbes and other organisms, so it's possible the gas is a signature of modern Martian life.
But the jury is most definitely still out on that. Abiotic processes can generate methane, too; the reaction of hot water with certain types of rock is one example. And even if the Mars methane is biogenic, the creatures that created it could be long dead. Scientists think the Red Planet methane plumes leaked out from underground, and there's no telling how long the gas lay trapped down there before making its way to the surface.
NASA's 2020 Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch next summer, will hunt for signs of long-dead Red Planet life. So will the European-Russian ExoMars rover, a mission that will lift off at about the same time.
But some researchers are pushing to expand the hunt to extant Martian life. One of them is molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun, who's based at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Ruvkun is one of three principal investigators on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG) project, which is developing an instrument to detect past or present DNA- or RNA-based life on Mars and other alien worlds.
He was on the Breakthrough Discuss panel with Finney and several other researchers, and he also gave a talk at the conference laying out the case for putting the SETG instrument on future Mars rovers and other robotic explorers.
Part of that case centers on panspermia, the idea that life has spread widely throughout the solar system, and perhaps the galaxy, by either natural or artificial means. If life did indeed come to Earth from somewhere else, there's a good chance it once flourished on Mars as well, the thinking goes. The Red Planet could have been the source, or it may have been "seeded" as Earth was.
Ruvkun views panspermia as very likely; during his Breakthrough Discuss talk, he described himself as "a religious fanatic" about the idea. Ruvkun cited as supporting evidence the very early emergence of ATP synthase, the enzyme that makes the energy-storage molecule adenosine triphosphate.
ATP synthase goes all the way back to the base of the tree of life on Earth, meaning this intricate and complex molecule was up and running by about 4 billion years ago, Ruvkun said.
"It's not just that life kind of got up to kind of working," he said. "It's like it got to being super highly evolved very fast. That's why panspermia is so attractive."
If panspermia is indeed a thing, then any life-forms we find on Mars — or anywhere else in our solar system — will likely be related to us, Ruvkun and others have reasoned. That is, such organisms will use DNA or RNA as their genetic molecule. So, we should go hunt for this stuff.
"It seems really idiotic to not look for DNA on Mars," Ruvkun said during his talk. "It's an experiment that's worth doing, we would say."
Mars isn't the only place in our solar system where alien life might flourish today. Indeed, most astrobiologists would put the Red Planet down the list a bit, behind the Jupiter moon Europa and the Saturn satellites Enceladus and Titan.
Europa and Enceladus harbor deep oceans of salty liquid water beneath their icy shells. Titan is thought to have a buried water ocean as well, and it also sports lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons on its surface. (NASA is developing an ocean-characterizing Europa flyby mission that will launch in the early to mid-2020s. The agency also aims to send a life-hunting lander to the moon's surface in the near future. And a Titan mission is one of two finalists for a NASA "New Frontiers" launch in 2025, along with a comet sample-return project. We should learn which one NASA picks by the end of the year.)
Even hellish Venus, a climate-change cautionary tale for Earth, might still harbor some habitable redoubts, scientists say.
Like Mars, Venus once had plentiful surface water, but a runaway greenhouse effect baked the stuff away and left the planet with surface temperatures high enough to melt lead. However, conditions appear to be pretty clement about 30 miles (50 km) above the Venusian surface.
Penny Boston, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in California, said she thinks the chances of modern-day Venus life are low because of the "dewatering" of the planet.
Regardless, the possible existence of cloud-dwelling life on Venus "definitely needs to be interrogated," Boston said during the same Breakthrough Discuss panel discussion.
A new study suggests that our moon formed from a splash of magma when a large object crashed into a proto-Earth covered in a fiery ocean.
Animation simulating an object’s collision with a magma-covered proto-Earth, resulting in the formation of the moon.
Via 2019 Natsuki Hosono, Hirotaka Nakayama, 4D2U Project, Naoj
For more than a century, scientists have struggled to explain how the Earth’s moon formed. The most widely-accepted explanation is that the moon formed from the debris left over after a Mars-sized object, known asTheia, slammed into the early Earth and ejected enough debris to form the moon.
The problem is that when this idea was tested, computer simulations indicated that the moon would be made primarily from the same stuff as the impacting object. Yet the opposite is true. We know from analyzing rocks brought back from Apollo missions that the moon consists mainly of material from Earth.
A new study published April 29, 2019, in Nature Geoscience by a team of scientists from Japan and the U.S. has offered an explanation for the discrepancy.
The key, according to Yale geophysicist Shun-ichiro Karato, who is a study co-author, is that the early, proto-Earth — about 50 million years after the formation of the sun — was covered by a sea of hot magma, while the impacting object was likely made of solid material. The impact splashed magma out into space, and that material formed the moon.
Snapshots of numerical modeling of the moon’s formation by a giant impact. The central part of the image is a proto-Earth; red points indicate materials from the ocean of magma in a proto-Earth; blue points indicate the impactor materials.
Karato and his collaborators set out to test a new model, based on the collision of a proto-Earth covered with an ocean of magma and a solid impacting object.
The model showed that after the collision, the magma is heated much more than solids from the impacting object. The magma then expands in volume and goes into orbit to form the moon, the researchers say. This explains why there is much more Earth material in the moon’s makeup. Previous models did not account for the different degree of heating between the proto-Earth silicate and the impactor.
Karato said in a statement:
In our model, about 80 percent of the moon is made of proto-Earth materials. In most of the previous models, about 80 percent of the moon is made of the impactor. This is a big difference.
Karato said the new model confirms previous theories about how the moon formed, without the need to propose unconventional collision conditions — something theorists have had to do until now.
Bottom line: The moon formed from a splash of magma when a large object crashed into a proto-Earth covered in a fiery ocean, according to a new study.
Distant water exoplanets might have oceans thousands of miles deep. That’s in contrast to Earth’s ocean, which is about 6.8 miles (about 11 km) deep at its deepest point.
Artist’s concept of a water world exoplanet as described in a new study. If they do exist, these distant water worlds might have global oceans much, much deeper than any in our solar system.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Water worlds– planets or moons with global oceans – used to be considered part of science fiction, but we are starting to learn now that, not only do they exist, they might actually be fairly common. In our own solar system, the moons Europa, Enceladus, Titan and Ganymede are known or suspected to have such oceans beneath their outer ice crust. EvenPlutois now thought to have one! Perhaps other worlds in our solar system have water we haven’t found yet. Scientists also think they’re getting closer to finding exoplanets – planets orbiting distant stars – that are water worlds as well, including planets with global or near-global oceans on their surfaces.
Now, a new study suggests that some exoplanet water worlds could have oceans much deeper than any in our solar system. Unfathomably deep, even, as in hundreds or thousands of miles deep. The new research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on April 29, 2019, by Harvard University astronomer Li Zeng and his colleagues. Zeng explained that, according to the team’s computer simulations, some planets may have incredibly deep oceans:
Hundreds or thousands of kilometers … Unfathomable. Bottomless. Very deep.
Earth’s oceans are nowhere near as deep. The average ocean depth on Earth is about about 2.2 miles (3.5 km). The maximum depth is 6.8 miles (about 11 km) at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
The data the team gathered from their computer simulations suggests that water worlds are probably common in our galaxy, particularly in sub-Neptune-sized planets – or mini-Neptunes – that have radii two to four times that of Earth but are smaller than Neptune. These planets are most likely to have deep global oceans, rather than thick atmospheres like gas dwarfs, ice giants or gas giants. Moons like Europa and Enceladus have deep subsurface oceans, for their size, but those are still not nearly as deep as the oceans that would exist on sub-Neptune worlds.
Other kinds of water worlds may be rocky exoplanets with global surface oceans, more similar to Earth. This artist’s concept is of Kepler-22b, a super-Earth and the first exoplanet that NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed to orbit in a star’s habitable zone.
Image via NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech.
These sub-Neptune worlds are one of two primary kinds of exoplanets found so far. The others are super-Earths, between one and four times the size of Earth, which are dense and rocky. There aren’t any super-Earths in our solar system, with the possible exception of Planet Nine (if it is ever found). The sub-Neptunes have much lower densities, and astronomers haven’t been sure if they are gas dwarfs, like Jupiter or Saturn but smaller, with a rocky core and a thick hydrogen atmosphere. Or did their low density mean they contained a lot of water?
Normally, they would be assumed to be gas dwarfs, since water worlds would need to be beyond the “snowline” in a planetary system, where temperatures are cold enough for water or ice, and many sub-Neptunes are very close to their stars. But the new computer simulations suggest that is not always the case, that many sub-Neptunes have much smaller atmospheres as related to their size, more like smaller terrestrial planets like Earth or Venus. Their atmospheres would be nowhere near as thick or deep as other gas dwarf-type sub-Neptunes.
As outlined in the new paper:
The discovery of numerous exoplanet systems containing diverse populations of planets orbiting very close to their host stars challenges the planet formation theories based on the solar system. Here, we focus on the planets with radii of 2-4 Earths, whose compositions are debated. They are thought to be either gas dwarfs consisting of rocky cores embedded in hydrogen-rich gas envelopes or water worlds containing significant amounts of water-dominated fluid/ice in addition to rock and gas. We argue that these planets are water worlds.
Yet another kind of hypothesized water world – an “eyeball” planet – where there is an ocean only on the star-facing side. The rest of the surface is ice.
But if there are water world sub-Neptunes close to their stars, how did they form? The findings suggest that they first formed farther out from their stars, and then gradually drifted in closer over time. As Zeng said in Gizmodo:
A water world close to its star must have formed much farther away and then moved closer as its orbit shrank. The planet’s composition was set when it was farther away on a colder orbit. The process of orbital shrinking is called ‘migration’ and it is driven by the gravity of the disk of gas from which the planets formed. If water worlds are common that provides a really strong confirmation that migration really does happen and is a key process in how planets form, both around other stars and in our own solar system.
The research indicates that many sub-Neptunes are quite wet, but just how wet are they? The results show that at least 25 percent of their mass would water or ice, and perhaps up to 50 percent. That’s a staggering amount. We think of Earth as being a water world, but its mass is actually only 0.025 percent water, by comparison. Some water worlds may have so much water that they are completely water-logged, fluid all the way down into the deepest parts of the planet.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a water world, with a deep global ocean beneath its outer ice crust. This view is from the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s.
The pressures far down in some of those oceans could also be like nothing on Earth, similar to a million times the atmospheric surface pressure that we experience. In those extreme environments, liquid water would be compressed into uniquely high-pressure phases of ice, such as Ice VII or superionic ice. These ices don’t occur naturally on Earth, but have been created in the laboratory. As Zeng said:
These high-pressure ices are essentially like silicate-rocks within Earth’s deep mantle, they’re hot and hard. These are utterly different worlds compared to our own Earth.
The computer models also took into account other variables, including the abundance of nebular gases, water-rich ices, rocky materials consisting primarily of iron and nickel and influences by complex chemical processes driven by temperature, cooling rates, evaporation, condensation, density and distance to host star. As Zeng noted:
Statistically speaking, these water worlds may be more abundant than Earth-like rocky planets. Perhaps every typical Sun-like star has one or more of these water worlds [and maybe] our solar system is less typical. Generally speaking, this type of planetary system architecture with close-in rocky super-Earths and water-rich sub-Neptunes may be more common in the Milky Way than our type of solar system.
Earth is of course the best-known water world, with oceans that cover about 70% of the surface. That amount of water pales in comparison to what may exist on the water worlds discussed in the new paper, however.
Image via NASA.
So with all that water, could these planets be potential homes for life? Yes, there’s a lot of water, but what about the chemical elements and nutrients needed, as found on the on the ocean floors of Earth, and maybe Europa and Enceladus? According to Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), these kinds of water worlds may not be ideal, although they would still be much better than gas dwarfs:
While water worlds are not entirely perfect for life since the heavier elements may be buried under hundreds of kilometers of high-pressure ice, they are likely far better than gas dwarfs.
If the water worlds described in this study do indeed exist, it would open a whole new chapter in exoplanetary exploration. These worlds would be unlike any ever seen before, sort of like taking parts of Earth, ocean moons and gaseous planets and combining them, but on a much larger scale. The water worlds in this study are essentially water worlds on steroids.
Bottom line: If the findings in this new study are accurate, then our galaxy may be full of water worlds. Unlike Earth, these would be larger planets with global oceans that are not only deeper than any in our solar system, but mind-bogglingly deep.
A 60-meter fictional asteroid slammed into the heart of New York City with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The blast obliterated buildings from Central Park to lower Manhattan, causing up to 1.3 million fatalities. Luckily, this was just a drill — the culmination of a week-long exercise held in Washington last week which tested various planetary defense strategies at our disposal in the event of an asteroid threat. The findings suggest that we are still woefully unprepared to deal with threats from the sky.
Asteroids are one of the few extreme natural disasters that can be prevented
Dozens of astronomers, scholars, and disaster relief experts gathered at the biennial Planetary Defense Conference held last week. The main objective of the gathering was to assess the response ability of space missions and to what degree evacuation plans can mitigate the damage caused by a hypothetical asteroid impact.
The participants, which included experts from NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and other federal agencies, were warned 8 years in advance that a 140- to 160-meter asteroid (500- to 850-foot-wide) was going to collide with Earth, somewhere near Denver, Colorado.
In this fictional scenario, NASA collaborates with the world’s foremost space agencies from Europe, Russia, China, and Japan to launch six spacecraft tasked with deflecting the killer asteroid by slamming into it. This approach, known as the kinetic impact technique, will actually be tested by NASA in the real world in 2021 with a mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Some alternatives include gravitationally tugging the asteroid using a nearby spacecraft, painting the asteroid white to change the amount of radiation it absorbs from the sun and thereby shifting its trajectory, and blasting the space rock with nuclear weapons.
Each day of the conference, the clock was advanced by months or years and the participants had to make new decisions based on the updated situation of the simulation. Not long before the conference was supposed to end, the participants were announced that their efforts resulted in the deflection of the asteroid. However, the impact also knocked off a 60-meter fragment from the asteroid that continued its trajectory towards Earth.
Map of the damage zones from the 60-meter asteroid fragment impacting Manhattan. Red zone is the site of total annihilation, in orange buildings collapse and clothing would catch fire, while the outer zone could cause second-degree burns.
Credit: NASA.
On the last day of the conference and ten days before impact in the simulation’s time frame, the participants announced that the asteroid would make a direct hit on Central Park, in the heart of Manhattan, at 43,000 miles per hour. The situation was dire and the only thing the experts could do was to call for the evacuation of 10 million people living in a metropolis bottlenecked by bridges and tunnels. Although there are evacuation plans in place for New York, none is designed to take on this scale so authorities in the simulation quickly became overwhelmed.
“I think the exercise illustrated how time is the most valuable asset when it comes to asteroid hazards,” said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a participant in the simulation. “In reality, having many decades of warning gives us multiple options and multiple tries to prevent catastrophe.”
Fortunately, a scenario in which an asteroid would hit a major city is extremely unlikely. Instead, an asteroid would likely hit the ocean, which covers most of the planet’s surface. What’s more, there is no known asteroid with a significant probability of impacting Earth in the next century. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t prepare considering the catastrophic potential of an asteroid impact. According to researchers, there are 25,000 near-Earth asteroids as big as the space rock used in the simulation, two-thirds of which are not tracked.
At the conference, NASA stressed that the biggest takeaway from such a simulation is that asteroids represent a real threat to planetary security. Although most people associate asteroid impacts with Hollywood blockbusters, their devastating power is as real as it gets. Unlike the dinosaurs, however, we have the tools to avert our annihilation as long as we prepare properly.
According to NASA and FEMA, the best asteroid defense strategy is finding and deflecting a threat before it ever comes near Earth. In the future, NASA hopes to send a spacecraft to visit asteroid Apophis, which will narrowly miss Earth by just 19,000 miles in 2029.
The ripples in space-time known as gravitational waveshave already helped answer major questions regarding the nature of matter and black holes. And upcoming gravitational-wave observatories both on Earth and in space could soon help solve some of the greatest mysteries in science.
"We're going to be able to learn a lot about the universe," said Cole Miller, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The existence of gravitational waves was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity results from how mass warps space and time. When any object with mass moves, it generates gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light, stretching and squeezing space-time along the way.
Gravitational waves are extremely weak, making them extraordinarily difficult to sense, and even Einstein was uncertain whether they really existed and if they would get detected. After decades of work, researchers succeeded in discovering the first direct evidence of gravitational waves in 2015 using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
LIGO uses a pair of detectors — one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana — to sense the distortions that gravitational waves cause as they move through matter. Each detector is shaped like a gigantic L, with legs about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) long. The legs of each detector are normally the same length, so laser beams take the same amount of time to travel down each. However, if gravitational waves pass through Earth — making the detector legs expand and contract by about one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — atomic clocks can detect the split-second differences in time it takes for laser beams to zip down one leg of the detector versus the other.
Because LIGO's detectors are about 1,865 miles (3,000 km) apart, it can take up to 10 milliseconds for a gravitational wave to cross from one detector to the other. Scientists can use this difference in arrival times to deduce where the gravitational waves come from. As more gravitational-wave detectors come online — such as the Virgo facility near Pisa, Italy — researchers will get better at pinpointing the sources of gravitational waves.
The gravitational waves that LIGO can best detect are the most powerful ones, which are released when extraordinarily massive objects collide with one another. The first gravitational waves LIGO detected were from colliding black holes, and with Virgo, it detected merging neutron stars. These findings have shed light on everything from the nature of gravity to the origin of most of the elements heavier than iron.
The immediate future
Not only are LIGO and Virgo continuing to sense bursts of gravitational waves, but they are getting upgrades to increase their sensitivity to detect even more events. In addition, other gravitational-wave observatories are coming online soon. Japan has built KAGRA, which is planned to join the LIGO and Virgo network in 2019, and LIGO-India will hopefully be operational by the mid-2020s, Miller said.
"More detectors means a better determination of the direction of gravitational-wave sources," Miller told Space.com.
Beyond 2025, scientists are discussing two advanced gravitational-wave observatories — the Einstein Telescope and the Cosmic Explorer. The plan for the Einstein Telescope is to build it underground to reduce the amount of noise experienced from seismic vibrations, whereas the aim for Cosmic Explorer is to use cryogenic systems to help cut down the noise experienced from heat on its electronics. Decreasing noise in turn boosts sensitivity to gravitational-wave events.
The next generation of ground-based gravitational-wave observatories may detect mergers of intermediate-mass black holes, ones that are hundreds to thousands of times more massive than the sun. Previous research suggested that intermediate-mass black holes are the building blocks of the supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the sun's mass found at the hearts of galaxies such as the Milky Way, "but their existence has not yet been conclusively proven," Miller said.
The current and planned ground-based gravitational-wave observatories are all sensitive to wavelengths of about 60 miles (100 km), the kind generated by neutron stars and black holes up to a few dozen times the mass of the sun. However, scientists have long planned space-based gravitational-wave observatories with detectors separated by vast distances that could sense even longer wavelengths, the type released by supermassive black holes.
One space-based gravitational-wave observatory under development is the European Space Agency's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, scheduled to launch in 2034. LISA will consist of a constellation of three satellites in orbit around the sun and trailing Earth. Inside each satellite is a cube that will fall freely through space, tracing a path that will only get perturbed by gravitational waves. These satellites will carefully monitor the position of each cube to look for signs of space-time ripples.
Each of LISA's satellites will be millions of miles away from each other. In principle, LISA will be able to detect gravitational waves with wavelengths of about 18 million miles (30 million km) from the mergers of black holes 10,000 to 10 million times the mass of the sun, Miller said. The hope is that LISA and similar proposed projects, such as TianQin from China, can help shed light on the mergers of galaxies.
"We can learn how galaxies and supermassive black holes assemble," Miller said.
However, what scientists are likely most looking forward to with gravitational-wave observatories is the unexpected. "We may see unanticipated types of sources of gravitational waves, or see the sources we generally knew about with twists that might surprise us," Miller said.
For example, the hearts of black holes are infinitely dense, infinitely small points known as singularities. And researchers have long suspected that infinitely dense, infinitely thin rings known as cosmic strings might also exist. "If cosmic strings are real, we may be able to detect gravitational waves from them over a broad range of energies," Miller said.
In addition, scientists have long suggested the possible existence of primordial black holes, ones born less than a second after the Big Bang, when dense clumps of the newborn universe collapsed under their own gravity. Such black holes would have masses just that of asteroids or planets.
"If we saw gravitational waves from something, say, half the mass of the sun, there would be no other way to produce them but primordial black holes," Miller said.
Furthermore, some physicists have suggested that black holes may not actually exist. If they do not, then gravitational-wave observatories may discover their actual nature, Miller said.
Generally, researchers think most black holes form when massive stars finish burning their fuel and rapidly collapse under their own weight, getting crushed into singularities that are hidden by invisible boundaries known as event horizons from which nothing can return. (The Event Horizon Telescope recently got the first-ever look at one of these points of no return recently, imaging the boundary of the supermassive black hole at the core of the M87 galaxy.)
However, the possibility of singularities clashes with laws of physics suggesting that destruction of information is impossible, including information encoded within anything falling into black holes.
As such, physicists have suggested that when massive stars die, they may instead form structures with names such as "black stars" and "gravastars." These alternatives resemble black holes in nearly every way but lack singularities and event horizons, sidestepping the conundrums these aspects of black holes raise.
One way to find out whether black hole alternatives exist is by analyzing gravitational waves unleashed by what scientists currently think are merging black holes. As black holes spiral toward one another, they should each give off gravitational waves, but their event horizons should absorb those directly falling onto them. However, since black hole alternatives lack event horizons, they can reflect gravitational waves, and gravitational-wave observatories could detect these "echoes," Miller said.
If such echoes are discovered, they could yield insights into both general relativity and quantum physics. Doing so could finally help lead to a model of "quantum gravity" marrying both long-disparate theories, Miller added.
Miller and his colleague Nicolás Yunes, of Montana State University in Bozeman, detailed this research online April 24 in the journal Nature.
WETENSCHAPEen stuk uit Stonehenge dat al zestig jaar zoek was, is uiteindelijk toch teruggekeerd naar de prehistorische site. Het was de 89-jarige Brit Robert Phillips die het onderdeel al die tijd had verstopt. Tot hij besloot het terug te geven.
Het gaat om een onderdeel van iets meer dan een meter lang, dat verdwenen was na de archeologische opgravingen in 1958. Bij die werken was ook Robert Phillips, nu 89, betrokken. Hij verborg de staaf in zijn kantoor om het pas nu terug te schenken. ‘English Heritage’ hoopt dat de stenen staaf kan helpen bepalen waar de wereldberoemde stenen oorspronkelijk vandaan komen.
61 jaar geleden trokken archeologen een omgevallen trilithon - een structuur van twee verticale stenen waarop een derde horizontaal rust - weer recht. Een van de verticale stenen vertoonde scheuren. Als versterking werden drie gaten in de stenen geboord waarin metalen staven werden aangebracht. De herstellingswerken werden gemaskeerd met fragmenten sarsen-steen, gevonden bij de opgravingen.
BELGAIMAGE
Maar Phillips, een Brit die inmiddels in Florida woont, nam een van de drie kernen van ongeveer een meter lang mee naar huis. Hij bewaarde de stenen staaf eerst in een plastic koker in zijn kantoor in Basingstoke, op 80 km van Londen. Later bevestigde hij het aan de muur van zijn huis in de VS. Het is uitzonderlijk goed bewaard. Het is niet bekend waar de andere twee staven gebleven zijn.
Aan de vooravond van zijn 90ste verjaardag besloot hij nu het alsnog terug te geven aan ‘English Heritage’. Het blijft nog altijd een raadsel hoe de sarsen-stenen van 25 ton duizenden jaren geleden naar hun eindlocatie bij Amesbury konden worden gesleept, zonder de moderne technologie van vandaag. Misschien kan het langwerpige stuk van Phillips het mysterie helpen ontrafelen, of toch de precieze herkomst van de grotere exemplaren tussen de stenen bepalen.
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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.
![This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: [[LINK||http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/||NOAA]])](https://climate.nasa.gov/system/content_pages/main_images/203_co2-graph-021116.jpeg)
Christine McNaughton@chancesmommy
