Former Head of Pentagon's Secret UFO Program Has Some (Strange) Stories to Tell

31-05-2019 om 22:25 geschreven door peter  

Strange Flashes

Several times a week, short bursts of light appear on the surface of the Moon — and so far, scientists have only been able to guess as to why. But a team of German astronomers have a new theory, and it could provide crucial information for humans who want to settle the Moon.

“Seismic activities were also observed on the moon,” said Hakan Kayal, professor of space technology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany in a statement. “When the surface moves, gases that reflect sunlight could escape from the interior of the moon. This would explain the luminous phenomena, some of which last for hours.”

Scanning The Skies

The strange flashes were actually first observed in the 1950s, but have received little attention from the world of science. But the team of JMU wants to change that with their newly built lunar telescope in southern Spain that started scanning the night sky in April.

Two cameras watch for the strange flashes at night. If both see the same flash, they take a series of photos and videos. But the software for their new telescope still needs a bit of work. Kayal and his team are planning to upgrade it with a neural network that can filter out false positives like birds and airplanes.

Street View

Understanding the phenomenon could be paramount to keep human settlers on the Moon safe.

“Anyone who wants to build a lunar base at some point must of course be familiar with the local conditions,” said Kayal.

These false-color frames extracted from the original black and white video show the explosion in progress. At its peak, the flash was as bright as a 4th magnitude star.

[still frames] [video]

NASA's lunar monitoring program has detected hundreds of meteoroid impacts. The brightest, detected on March 17, 2013, in Mare Imbrium, is marked by the red square.

An artists impression of a lunar explosion – caused by the impact of a meteorite.

NASA / Jennifer Harbaugh

• READ MORE: Flashes on the moon [Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg]
  
• More on the Moon: NASA is Using This Underwater Lab to Train Astronauts for the Moon

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

31-05-2019 om 22:10 geschreven door peter  

Sonic black hole confirms Hawking radiation theory

BY TIBI PUIU

In 1974, the late Stephen Hawking argued in a now-famous study that besides mass and spin, black holes can be characterized by a unique temperature. He also claimed that black holes don’t just devour matter, but also emit radiation. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology have set out to test this theory by creating a black hole analog in the lab. The results agreed with Hawking’s predictions, giving more credence to the theory.

Credit: Pixabay.

A black hole is defined as a region of spacetime whose extremely strong gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. This essentially means that we can’t see a black hole directly — although this year astronomers captured a picture of a black hole’s event horizon (the swirling, bright boundary of the black hole). Scientists are confident that black holes exist, judging from their theoretical calculations and observations of X-rays emitted by swirling disks of gas around the black hole. The motions of nearby stars can also infer the presence of a black hole. In fact, most galaxies — the Milky Way included — are thought to be held together by the gravity of supermassive black holes (with masses millions of times that of the sun), which lie at the galactic center.

But if everything gets sucked into a black hole, never to return, what happens to the information that these objects used to hold? According to the laws of quantum mechanics, matter cannot simply disappear without leaving behind information of its previous state. So, on the one hand, we have physics that says information is never truly lost, nor is it truly copied, while on the other hand, we know that an object that gets too close, and crosses the black hole’s event horizon, it can never escape.

This is known as the black hole information paradox — and Stephen Hawking had been trying to crack it for decades. His investigations eventually led him to develop the Hawking radiation theory, in which the physicist argued that not all matter falls into a black hole. In some cases, when entangled pairs of particles are attracted into a black hole, only one of them would fall in, while the other escaped. Hawking named these escaping particles Hawking radiation, theorizing that its nature should be thermal radiation whose temperature would depend on the size of the black hole.

Testing such a theory is virtually impossible because we currently lack the technology required to measure the radiation from a real black hole. Which is why a team of researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology had to come up with a creative solution. For their new study, the authors made a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) — the fifth form of matter where familiar physics fades away, and quantum phenomena start to take over, even at a macroscopic scale. BEC matter almost stops behaving as particles and starts behaving more like waves. In a BEC you can observe “waves of atoms”, moving synchronized with each other just like water drops in an ocean wave.

The experimental setup for the black hole analog.

Credit: Jeff Steinhauer.

To make BEC, the Israeli researchers trapped 8,000 rubidium atoms in a focused laser beam, chilling matter to only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. A second laser fired on one side of the BEC made it denser on that side. According to the researchers, this led to a transition that moves at a constant speed through the condensate from the denser area (outside of the black hole) to the less dense area (analogous to the inside of the black hole). This is where it gets a bit tricky: the researchers say that sound waves traveling through the denser region move faster than this transitional flow, allowing sound to move in either direction. However, in the less dense region, sound waves can only travel away from the sharp transition — in other words, further into the black hole analog.

Light can either move away or into a black hole (and never escape) and in this experiment, light was replaced by sound. In experiments, researchers forced one of a pair of phonons (like photons for sound) to fall into the flow of rubidium atoms, while the other was allowed to escape. When the researchers measured both phonons, they recorded an average temperature of .035 billionths of a Kelvin, which agrees with Hawking’s predictions.

These findings in no way prove Hawking’s theory — that would require technology that doesn’t currently exist. However, the study published in Nature shows that Hawking was definitely on to something.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

31-05-2019 om 21:35 geschreven door peter  

By: Nidhi Goyal 

Image courtesy covert shores

{ https://www.industrytap.com/ }

31-05-2019 om 21:22 geschreven door peter  

Did 2 F15s Intercept Contagion Spraying High Speed Craft? Event Now Confirmed!

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

31-05-2019 om 20:28 geschreven door peter  

The evil spirits who visit the sleeping: All too real, they leave sufferers paralysed with terror... now a new documentary reveals the cause

• Helena Adelina wakes up unable to move and thinks something is in room
• Sometimes she would see shadowy figure or sense or hear his presence
• She is one of tens of thousand of Britons who experience 'sleep paralysis'
• Condition leaves sufferers frozen in world between sleeping and waking

By DAVID DERBYSHIRE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

Night after night, Helena Adelina would wake up unable to move and convinced that something evil was in her room, clawing at her inert body or whispering in her ear.

Sometimes she would see a shadowy figure lurking in the darkness next to her. Other times she would sense or hear his presence.

‘He was a slim, tall figure but with no features, like a silhouette,’ says Helena, 24. ‘My sense was that he was terrifying, an ancient being, very dark and pure evil.

Frozen in fear: Elise Robson in new film the Nightmare, which explores the phenomenon of 'sleep paralysis'

‘Sometimes I would wake and not see him but hear his voice in my ear talking about destruction, war and death. Sometimes he would grab me around the ankles and drag me under the covers. I would be fighting it and be struggling to breathe.’

These were no ordinary dreams. Every time Helena felt that she was fully awake but utterly unable to move and gripped by an ungodly and suffocating fear.

And it wasn’t always a man.

‘Sometimes a woman would enter the scene, laughing and cackling,’ she recalls. ‘She would keep slapping me around the face and laughing and finding it very amusing. And there would be a serious ringing in my ears. When I came out of it my ears would be ringing very badly.

‘At the time it was happening it felt like it was going on for ever; how long it went on for I don’t know.’

It’s difficult for those who have never had a night-time ‘visitation’ or waking nightmare to imagine the pure horror of the experience. For Helena, a film student in London at the time, they got so bad she dreaded falling asleep.

Helena’s trauma is far from rare. She is one of tens of thousands of Britons who experience severe ‘sleep paralysis’; a terrifying medical condition that leaves sufferers frozen in the disturbing world that lies between sleeping and waking and which is the focus of a new documentary, The Nightmare.

In its classic form, sufferers wake up frightened, unable to move and convinced someone, or something, malevolent is close by. Often they see a shadowy man or a witch-like figure. Some sense the presence of an evil spirit in the room or feel something oppressive lying on their chest.

It may sound unlikely if you have never experienced it, but the phenomenon has been recorded in almost every culture throughout history and is almost certainly responsible for most of the myths of spirits, demons and ghosts that prey upon the sleeping.

Academics have linked it to the origin of the vampire; a hypnotic figure that visits entranced women at night, and the ‘incubus’, the medieval spirit which assaults women as they sleep.

Sometimes she would see a shadowy figure lurking in the darkness next to her. Other times she would sense or hear his presence

Sleep paralysis is the focus of a new documentary, The Nightmare (pictured, the film's poster), which is in cinemas now

T he condition probably explains the German folk stories of the ‘mare’, a goblin that rides on the chests of people while they sleep, and the Newfoundland Old Hag, a woman who sits on a sleeper’s chest to suffocate them.

The Japanese tell of the ghosts of children who sit on the chests of sleepers, while in St Lucia, sleepers are visited by the ‘kokma’ — the spirit of an unbaptised baby which throttles its victims in bed.

Sleep paralysis could even account for tales of alien abductions. Professor Chris French, psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and one of the UK’s leading experts in sleep paralysis, believes about 30 per cent of the population experience the phenomenon at least once, while five per cent have more frequent episodes.

‘It is a very common experience but typically people haven’t heard of it,’ he says.

‘I have people calling me about it and often they have the same story; they’ve been suffering and never told anyone because others would think they were crazy. In the whistles and bells version, people get a strong sense of a presence and they may also get hallucinations. They may see dark shadows and lights and monstrous figures, or footsteps and mechanical sounds or voices.

‘They may feel as if they are being dragged out of bed. It is absolutely terrifying. There is also intense fear. It doesn’t have a dream-like quality; it feels incredibly real.’

The sufferer’s eyes are open during this state, so to an onlooker they seem fully awake, although they cannot move.

Tens of thousands of Britons experience severe ‘sleep paralysis’; a terrifying medical condition that leaves sufferers frozen in the disturbing world that lies between sleeping and waking

After a time, which can feel interminable for those afflicted, the ability to move returns, which may be a gradual or sudden process.

Thankfully, few are affected as badly as Helena, who began to be afflicted in her first year at university. ‘I started to dread falling asleep and began to suffer from insomnia,’ she says.

‘It had a knock-on effect on my mental health but I didn’t tell anyone how much of a state I was in.’

For a phenomenon so common, few people seem to know about it. After talking to Prof French and Helena, I asked friends and relatives if they had experienced anything similar. A remarkably high number said yes.

One friend recalled how she woke up in bed when living in China to see a man with pointed teeth eating her feet. The vision was vivid and unlike any dream. ‘Even thinking about it now makes my heart skip a beat,’ she said.

Another recalled lying in her boarding school bed, frozen to the spot as a bearded dwarf walked across the dormitory in the dead of night. To this day, she vividly recalls the figure’s terrifying red eyes.

Another told me how she regularly wakes up convinced that a shadowy man is trying to get into her bedroom at night yet she is unable to scream or shout. She finally gets control of her body, gasping and petrified.

Scientists have only a rough idea of what causes sleep paralysis and why some suffer more than others. During a normal night’s sleep you go through 90-minute cycles and within each you go through different stages of sleep,’ says Prof French.

‘One of these is REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep. This is the phase typically associated with vivid dreams and, during REM sleep, it is normal for your muscles to be paralysed to stop you acting out your dreams.’

People are most likely to recall their dreams when they wake during REM sleep. Normally, as our bodies come out of REM sleep, we gain control over our muscles before we wake, but with sleep paralysis something goes wrong. The conscious mind wakes up but the body doesn’t, and in this halfway house between sleeping and waking, images and hallucinations from dreams break into reality.

In its classic form, sufferers wake up frightened, unable to move and convinced someone, or something, malevolent is close by

The imagery or sensations vary but almost all suffer intense fear, whether or not they see or sense demons, witches or evil spirits.

That suggests to Prof French that fear is not the brain’s reaction to scary hallucinations but is an integral part of sleep paralysis, caused by unusual activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear.

It’s possible the visions of shadow-men and hags are concocted by the confused brain to justify why it is experiencing so much terror for no apparent cause. If you are unlucky enough to suffer from these waking nightmares, what can you do?

A ccording to Prof French, getting into good sleeping patterns helps. Avoid alcohol, caffeine and eating too close to bedtime, go to bed at the same time each night and avoid sleeping on your back — all of which can lead to disturbed sleep.

If you sleep with a partner, encourage them to wake you if you seem distressed.

‘Even learning that there is such a thing as sleep paralysis can help you appreciate that you are not crazy, and that it is not ghosts or demons, so you are not lying awake worried that it may happen,’ he says.

Some people have even learned to accept it and enjoy the experience, just as they would a horror film, but they are, it must be said, an extreme minority. Most sufferers find the experience ghastly.

Helena Adelina, a film-maker who has made short films and animations about her experiences and now lives with her parents in Somerset, says the episodes have become less frequent and she is no longer frightened about going to sleep.

‘I experience it every now and then, but it has not been as terrifying,’ she says. ‘It’s usually when I am overtired or stressed, but it’s had knock-on effects. I still have a bit of a phobia about the dark and I have to have a nightlight.’

• The Nightmare is in cinemas now.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

31-05-2019 om 20:17 geschreven door peter  

Kimberly Rackley is a gifted psychic and a very good friend of mine. She has had a lifetime of paranormal experiences, including multiple, terrifying encounters with the Men in Black. In terms of her early MIB encounters, Kim said in an interview I did with her: “Since I was a teenager I’ve always had the same dream and then, of course, I didn’t know what they were. Two Men in Black would come through my bedroom window and take me away to a place that’s underground. They would sit me in a chair, with this green light that comes down over the chair. If I would reach out with my arm, it would electrocute me. It would send energy up my arm. Then, I would find myself back in bed again. I had that dream since I was probably fifteen. This was when I was living in Florida. Then, after that, they went away. Not until I was probably, I think, thirty-two was when they started to come back. From being a teenager to now, this has probably happened about fifteen or sixteen times.”

Kim adds: “They are always in black and they are very tall – probably six-five. There’s no structure to the face; no cheekbones; none. I could see where the face should be, but it would look melted, like putty. That’s what their faces always remind me of: Silly Putty; white Silly Putty. There are no eyes. And, you could see where there would be an outline of a nose and a mouth, but there’s nothing actually there. If you put a stocking over your face – like a bank-robber – it would look exactly like that. That’s just how they look. When I see them, it’s like their skin is not skin. The face moves, like a vibration, like a frequency. So, it’s like they appear solid, but they’re not solid at all; they’re an energy.”

She had far more to say: “When you’re dreaming, everyone automatically goes to the astral plane; but most people aren’t even aware of that. On the astral plane there are different levels. Some people call them different degrees: different degrees of Heaven, different degrees of Hell, and different degrees of the astral plane. Any other entities from another realm can open doors to our astral plane, when we are sleeping. So, with the right frequency, you can get on the astral plane. It doesn’t matter if you’re a being from Heaven or Hell, they can all access the astral plane. So, I think some of those dimensional beings have the frequency codes to access the astral plane and that’s how they meet their agenda with people who are dreaming. That’s how they get into my dreams – the guys in black.

“Every person has what you could call an imprint. It’s a frequency. Everyone has a soul imprint which identifies them specifically. So do angels. And so do demons. But, once they have your imprint, it’s like an ID code. Once they have it they can find you. Anywhere. People told me that when I moved to Texas from Florida in 2016, the dark stuff would stop, because they wouldn’t be able to find me. But, they still found me. That’s really when I began realizing that the whole soul imprint thingis probably true.”

It was in late June 2016 when Kim had one of her most terrifying encounters. On June 22, Kim told me: “Had an experience last night / morning. A little drained this morning. Freaked me out. I was awoken by what seemed like thousands of voices that were excited and upset. I sometimes hear the astral plane at night but this was crazy. I need to make it stop so I lift into astral and all these entities are everywhere in agitated state. I ask what’s wrong and they all circle me and then this being, very tall and slender, in a black suit but with a long coat comes straight for me. The entities circling me close in tighter. They are trying to protect me. But he pushes them away with a flick of his hand and I’m suddenly back in my body. There, in my room, was the man. He had the same non-aura energy, like MIB. He pointed at me and the place in my wrist where the previous MIBs always try to place a chip in me started burning. Then I passed out. I feel electric inside, like I’m going to jump out of my skin and I’m nauseated. Kind of frightened. I look like death” (Ibid.).

Later on, Kim got back to me and wrote: “If you feel like death warmed-over then you most definitely look like death warmed-over as I discovered this morning when I ungraciously made my way to the bathroom. You would feel and look the same if you experienced the more than unnerving events I had. Yours truly is still trembling, not quite certain if it is from the panic of the frightening encounter or the electrical jolt received. Being a medium I am not fearful of the supernatural or unearthly, but there is one thing that has filled me with terror since I was a child and that is the MIB. I’ve told the story of my repetitive MIB encounters before but it needs repeating because I believe it is significant to the most recent encounter.”

More from Kim: “From the time I was eight and witnessed a glowing figure slightly similar to a grey walking down the hallway of my home, I have been subject to frequent MIB visits. These visits are always from the same two men, mostly in my dream state until I began realizing my abilities as a medium and then the visits would occur in meditation or altered states of consciousness. Never before this newest encounter has one been a physical encounter. The two men come to me, usually appearing through my bedroom window. My normal MIB’s resemble ninja’s or soldiers, always in black skin-tight clothing or fatigue uniforms, and always with the aura of intense panic. They will point at me and say ‘No, Kya, not yet.’ I have no idea why they call me Kya. Is it too much to hope for that they have me confused with someone else? I also have no inkling of what ‘not yet’ signifies. They then pull up a holographic ball where they show me that I will be taken away and put in this metal room, underground. The room has one single chair and surrounding me is a bluish force field. Sounds like a science fiction movie, right? Then they point at my right wrist, and a chip appears under my skin. They vanish, leaving me always in full panic mode.

“I know you are wondering about the chip. I have yet to discover its purpose but each occasion that they place the chip, I immediately remove it. Alien or dimensional implants are more common than you might imagine and can be detected when you are in the theta state. These implants have an etheric vibration which means they can be removed etherically as well. This newest encounter was much different than the above so let me get on with the story. I was awoken around 4:00 a.m. to a thousand voices in my head. It is quite common for me to hear the astral plane but this was like a war going on. I know I have to stop the voices before I end up on Zany Street with men in white coats chasing me. I lift up to the astral where I find the entities in an agitated and anxious state. Curiously they are all gathered in a very close proximity to each other.”

The story continues: “I ask what is wrong and the entities immediately circle me. I am not afraid as I have been to the astral many times and have friends here. Suddenly, a very tall man comes from the mist. He is in a black suit and wearing a long coat. The man is whitish-gray, bald, and no facial hair; yeah, not even an eyelash. I’m filled with immediate panic because I see no aura or residual of life force energy. The same non-energy I see with the MIB. However, there was an electrical charge around him which is something I always see around the MIB of my past encounters. The entities attempt to tighten the circle around me but the being in black swipes them away with a flick of his hand. I fall back into my body, sit up and to my horror the being is standing in my room. He raises his arm, palm out and I am jolted with a shot of intense energy. I pass out.

“When I awaken, it all comes flooding back to me. My body feels as if I am going to jump out of my skin and I am nauseated. I realize that the astral voices may have been attempting to warn me and certainly they were trying to protect me. This indicates that whatever the MIB are, even the astral plane is aware and afraid of them. Could it be that my recent talk with [you] on this very subject have triggered this encounter? I believe the MIB have every account of who attempts to reveal them. I’m always left with sheer panic and more questions after an encounter with the MIB. The panic I experience however, won’t stop me from seeking the truth nor will it stop me from being who I am or doing what I do.”

Kim’s most recent experience reads as follows: “The encounter happened when I was at the Free Comic Book Day in Folsom, California on June 12, 2017. I was staying with a friend; it was the first night I was there and I went to be about ten-thirty; I was so tired. Usually, I wake up about every forty-five minutes or so; it’s just how I sleep. But, that night, I slept for four hours straight, and then I just suddenly woke up, because I felt something pulling at me; something was tugging at me in the bed. I sit up and on the right side of the bed and there are two of the men. They had that pasty skin; the Silly Putty again; the bank-robber-stocking look. And they pointed at me and said: ‘It’s time to come.’ I was like: ‘I don’t think so!’ So, I went to turn around to the front of the bed, to psychically try to make them go away. To push light at them. And, the next thing I know, literally my feet were pulled out from under me. I was dragged off the bed to the door of the bedroom. Then, they were gone; it was over. I don’t remember anything after that until the morning.”

As Kim’s extensive, decades-long encounters with the Men in Black demonstrate, there is nothing positive about the MIB. They are among the most disturbing of all entities that lurk in the realm of Ufology.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-05-2019 om 17:41 geschreven door peter  

New Theory Explains Ball Lightning As ‘Bubbles of Light’

One of the often-cited explanations for alleged UFO sightings is ball lightning, a rare natural phenomenon which remains somewhat of an unsolved mystery despite centuries of reports and several attempts by scientists to explain it. The unexplained electrical phenomenon appears as luminous orbs ranging from pea-sized to several meters across that can last up to several seconds. Reports of ball lightning are often connected to thunderstorms, but not always. There are numerous reports of ball lightning floating straight through walls, dancing around ship masts, traveling down electrical lines, or even inside submarines. 

It’s generally accepted that ball lightning is some unknown type of electrical discharge that can form under certain specific circumstances, but its true nature remains somewhat of a mystery. The latest scientific study to take a stab at the ball lightning phenomenon was published this month in Optik, a scientific journal devoted to the research of optics, light, and electrons. In this current research, Vladimir Torchigin from the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that ball lightning isn’t lightning at all, but instead a “bubble of light” trapped inside a thin sphere of air.

As it turns out, whenever any particle absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation, it ‘jiggles’ slightly from the force. This latest research claims that whenever traditional lightning strikes, it can cause air molecules to jiggle in just the right way to trap photons in a rotating pressurized sphere of air if just the right conditions are met. According to the study, the “intensity of the rotating light is more than a billion times greater than that of the light propagating in a straight line,” leading to ball lightning’s incredible luminosity.

Torchigin seems pretty confident that he’s finally solved the ball lightning mystery, writing that “we have shown that the behavior of a light bubble and ball lightning are the same, and there are no mysteries in the behavior of ball lightning. The question of the nature of ball lightning resolved.” Has the mystery actually been solved?

Whether or not it has, I’m all for this research – think about it: if we can learn the mechanism by which ball lightning is created, we could theoretically find ways to create it for ourselves. Remember that weird story about Russia’s secret “dome of light” weapon? Sounds pretty familiar. Could we harness these “bubbles of light” to create our own ball lightning?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-05-2019 om 16:32 geschreven door peter  

UFOs have come out of the fringe and into the mainstream

By Nick Pope

You’d have to be living on another planet not to have heard one of the biggest news stories in recent times: After years of denial, it turns out that the US government has a secret program, researching and investigating UFOs.

The conspiracy theorists were right all along.

The story broke in December 2017 and generated unprecedented mainstream media coverage of the UFO phenomenon, which continues to this day, as the story continues to unfold. This coverage includes The Post’s new docu-series “The Basement Office,” which delves into this story as part of a wider investigation of the UFO mystery.

The Pentagon’s secret UFO program was called AATIP — Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The title cleverly blurred the lines between next-generation aviation threats and the phenomena they were really studying. Maybe as an unintended consequence, but perhaps by design, the cryptic title also kept the program hidden from the numerous people who make Freedom of Information Act requests about “UFOs.” AATIP was set up in 2007, largely on the initiative of the then-Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. When AATIP’s existence was revealed, Reid tweeted: “The truth is out there. Seriously.”

Related revelations and developments came thick and fast. Details were released of multiple events where UFOs have been tracked on radar and chased by military jets, including a November 2004 incident where the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was buzzed by multiple UFOs. Videos of three of these spectacular midair encounters have been made public, though many more have yet to be released. The Senate Armed Services Committee investigated the USS Nimitz incident last year and interviewed some of the pilots and radar operators. Also last year, the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed Congress on AATIP’s work.

In a Jan. 9, 2018, letter to John McCain — copied to other senior congressional figures and to key committees — the DIA disclosed that they had researched anti-gravity, warp drives, wormholes and other theoretical physics concepts needed for interstellar travel, as part of an effort to understand what they termed “foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats.” It raised the question “How foreign is foreign?” — did they mean Russia, China, or somewhere considerably farther afield?

In April of this year, the Navy announced they would issue new guidance to pilots who encountered UFOs, following a recent upsurge in “incursions” by “unidentified aircraft.” Then, just last week, The Post secured a stunning admission from the DOD that AATIP investigated “unidentified aerial phenomena” — a phrase they had previously been very careful to avoid. This bombshell revelation was the final proof that this had never been about Russian or Chinese aircraft, missiles and drones. Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the accepted government, military and intelligence community term for what the public calls UFOs.

When I worked on this issue for the UK’s Ministry of Defence, we used “UAP” in our internal policy discussions, thus avoiding the pop-culture baggage that came with the term “UFO” and reframing the discussion as a defense and national security issue. That’s how those of us who have looked at the phenomenon from within government view it.

UFOs have finally come out of the fringe and into the mainstream. Multiple stories have appeared in major media outlets. There is congressional interest. Pilots, radar operators and intelligence officers involved in these encounters and investigations are going on the record, calling for action. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that there’s a bigger picture here. The pace of events is picking up, and we seem to be building up to something. Something is happening. Something new. Something big.

Nick Pope worked for the UK Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994, he was posted to a division where his duties included researching and investigating unidentified aerial phenomena.

{ https://nypost.com/ }

31-05-2019 om 01:42 geschreven door peter  

'Fleet of UFOs' Followed US Aircraft, Navy Pilot Says

31-05-2019 om 01:35 geschreven door peter  

US and Japan to Cooperate on Return to the Moon

31-05-2019 om 01:19 geschreven door peter  

Astronomen ontdekken “verboden planeet” die drie keer groter is dan de Aarde: “Een unieke vondst”

door mrra | Bron: EXOPLANET EU, METEO WEB

{ https://www.nieuwsblad.be/ }

31-05-2019 om 00:54 geschreven door peter  

Curiosity Rover finds clay cache on Mars — potential sign of water

 BY MIHAI ANDREI 

Curiosity’s drilling instrument has gathered two samples from a Martian soil unit geologists called the “clay-bearing” unit. Worthy of its name, the unit turned out to contain a substantial amount of clay — a mineral typically formed in the presence of water.

The rover snapped this selfie after gathering the samples. To the lower-left of the rover are its two recent drill holes, at targets called “Aberlady” and “Kilmarie.”

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Although the Curiosity Rover was expected to run for two years, it’s still providing valuable information now, seven years after its landing in 2012. The rover is currently located on the side of lower Mount Sharp, in an area that drew the attention of NASA scientists even before Curiosity landed on Mars because it seemed to contain quite a lot of clay. Prosaically, they called it the “clay-bearing unit“.

However, prosaic or not, the name was very accurate. Curiosity harvested two small drills in the area, using its CheMin instrument (Chemistry and Mineralogy) to confirm that the unit has the highest amounts of clay minerals ever found on Mars.

This animation shows the initial proposed route for NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mount Sharp on Mars. The annotated version of the map labels different regions that scientists working with the rover would like to explore in the coming years.

Image credits:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Universityof Arizona/JHUAPL/MSSS/USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

This strongly suggests that this area on Mount Sharp contained significant amounts of water. Clays typically form over long periods of time, through a process of weathering and accumulation of diluted solvents. Judging by the appearance and chemistry of this clay (which also includes very small amounts of hematite, an iron oxide that was abundant in the vicinity of the clay-bearing unit), it seems that these rocks formed as layers of mud in ancient lakes.

It’s not the first time Curiosity has found traces of ancient water on Mars. Time and time again, the rover has confirmed that water once flowed on Mars, sparking a heated debate about the possibility of microbial life on the Red Planet. Unfortunately, Curiosity is not well-equipped to look for signs of life so for now, that will remain a matter of speculation.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover imaged these drifting clouds on May 17, 2019,

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

After the analysis, the rover took a well-deserved rest, taking advantage of the moment using its black-and-white Navigation Cameras (Navcams) to snap images of drifting Martian clouds. NASA believes these are likely water-ice clouds — so Curiosity is not only finding water beneath the ground — it’s also finding it in the sky.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

31-05-2019 om 00:42 geschreven door peter  

A recently discovered gaseous planet called NGTS-4B – or better known as the “Forbidden Planet” – is almost the same size as Neptune (20% smaller than Neptune and three times the size of Earth) and is around 920 light years away from Earth. There’s one major problem with this planet: it shouldn’t exist.

Located in a region of space called the “celestial desert”, the planet has a surface temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius (or 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit). With a temperature that hot, the atmosphere on the planet should have evaporated since it’s so close to its star. But incredibly it still exists and it orbits around its star every 1.3 days.

(Not NGTS-4B)

It’s also the first exoplanet to have been discovered in the Neptunian Desert, which is an area close a star where no Neptune-size planets have ever been located. Being that close to its star, the planet’s gaseous atmosphere should be completely evaporated; leaving it with nothing more than a rocky core, but NGTS-4B still contains its gassy atmosphere.

It was first discovered when telescopes that were run by the University of Warwick noticed the planet when it passed in front of its star as the brightness of the star dimmed by 0.2 percent. Researchers are baffled as to why the planet remains in existence being so close to its star. They do, however, have some theories, such as the planet ended up in its current position within the last million or so years; or that the planet was once much bigger than it currently is and it’s continuously getting smaller as the atmosphere is evaporating.

(Not NGTS-4B)

Dr. Richard West, who works in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, said, “This planet must be tough – it is right in the zone where we expected Neptune-sized planets could not survive,” adding, “It is truly remarkable that we found a transiting planet via a star dimming by less than 0.2 percent – this has never been done before by telescopes on the ground, and it was great to find after working on this project for a year.”

This incredible discovery has researchers looking for more possible Neptune-sized planets surviving so close to their host star. “We are now scouring out data to see if we can see any more planets in the Neptune Desert – perhaps the desert is greener than was once thought,” West stated

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-05-2019 om 00:28 geschreven door peter  

The dwarf planet has short-lived ammonia on its icy surface

BY LISA GROSSMAN

HIDDEN DEPTHS  Pluto sports pimple-like peaks and jagged cracks across its surface, especially to the west of heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia. Some of those cracks could be cryovolcanoes that spewed liquid water onto the surface.

Z.L. DOYLE/SWRI/JHU-APL/NASA

Red ice found on Pluto suggests the dwarf planet recently spewed fountains of water into space. And it hints at complex — and possibly organic — chemistry in Pluto’s salty subsurface sea, researchers report May 29 in Science Advances.

“This was a huge surprise to all of us about Pluto,” says planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “It means there are lots of surprises waiting to be uncovered in that part of the solar system.”

Cruikshank and colleagues analyzed the wavelengths of light, which can act as signatures of chemical compounds, in images of Pluto’s surface taken when the New Horizons spacecraft flew past the dwarf planet in July 2015 (SN: 12/26/15, p. 16). Those images previously had revealed a variety of ices overlaying a bedrock of water ice, which at Pluto’s frigid temperatures is so hard that it can sculpt mountains.

In the new analysis, the researchers found signs of ammonia where that water ice was exposed. Ammonia is a fragile molecule that can be broken down by ultraviolet sunlight and cosmic rays in just 400,000 to a billion years. “If you find it at all, it suggests that it has been put there fairly recently,” Cruikshank says. “There is really no limit [to how recently], as far as I can see in the geology.”

The ammonia-rich water ice is clustered around a large crack in the dwarf planet’s surface called Virgil Fossa, west of Pluto’s large heart-shaped feature. That crack is probably a fissure, from which liquid water once erupted in a cryovolcano, the team reports.

Watery window

The jagged red crack called Virgil Fossa, shown in this 2015 image (left) cutting across the surface of Pluto, could represent a volcano that violently sprayed ammonia and organic-rich water recently. In the colored image (right), the red, yellow, orange and purple pixels correspond to higher concentrations of ammonia in water ice.

C.M. DALLE ORE ET AL/SCIENCE ADVANCES 2019

Previous observations had suggested Pluto could hide a watery ocean beneath its icy crust (SN Online: 9/23/16). But “there’s a big difference between seeing evidence of liquid ocean from various surface features, and seeing parts of the ocean, the liquid, actually come out onto the surface,” says planetary scientist Steven Desch of Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the new discovery.

Seeing evidence for a cryovolcano on Pluto is vindicating, Desch says. “We have thought for a long time that these [small, icy] planets, Pluto included, should have cryovolcanic activity,” he says. “It’s kind of a mystery why we don’t see more indications of it.”

Ammonia is an excellent antifreeze that can lower water’s freezing point by 100 degrees Celsius, Desch says. If Pluto’s subsurface ocean contains ammonia, that could explain how the water remains liquid so far from the sun.

Some scientists are still waiting for more evidence of cryovolcanism, though. "I’d love to believe this,” says Marc Neveu, an astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the study. “But the images are still a little bit too blurry to really make this a slam dunk." Barring getting better pictures, scientists could use a combination of New Horizons data and laboratory studies to analyze the ammonia and organics in the mix to figure out how those molecules might have formed in a space environment.

Evidence suggests Pluto’s eruption, or eruptions — the researchers can’t tell if it was a one-time event or not — spread ammoniated ice as far as 200 kilometers from the fissure, Cruikshank says. That means the eruption would have shot water at about 300 meters per second up into the atmosphere, where it froze midair before falling back to the surface across a wide swath.

“It would have been a violent thing,” Cruikshank says, not unlike his experience standing 50 meters from an erupting geyser in Yellowstone National Park one winter. “I was completely coated with frozen ice.”

The ice observations on Pluto revealed another surprise: a red material that Cruikshank’s team thinks represents complex organic material. The team had seen organic molecules on Pluto before and thought the molecules were formed on the surface or in the atmosphere. This is the first suggestion that the subsurface ocean could contain organic molecules, too.

Irradiating ice rich in ammonia and organics in the lab can create molecules that are important to life, including the nucleobases that make up DNA and RNA, Cruikshank and colleagues noted in the journal Astrobiology in March. That doesn’t necessarily mean life got a start on Pluto, but it could mean that the chemical precursors to life can happen in surprisingly inhospitable environments.

"It’s telling you pretty much that you don’t need to be around a star for interesting things to happen,” the NASA astrobiologist Neveu says. “If it happens deep inside Pluto, in the dark, with a very cold surface ... this prebiotic, prelife chemistry can happen anywhere."

Citations

• C. M. Dalle Ore et al. Detection of ammonia on Pluto’s surface in a region of geologically recent tectonism. Science Advances. Published online May 29, 2019. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav5731.
• D. P. Cruikshank et al. Prebiotic chemistry of Pluto. Astrobiology. Published online March 23, 2019. Doi:10.1089/ast.2018.1927.

Further Reading

• C. Crockett. Year in review: Pluto unveiled as a world like no other. Science News. Vol. 188, December 26, 2015, p. 16.
• C. Crockett. Ice gave Pluto a heavy heart. Science News. Vol. 190, December 24, 2016, p. 15.
• C. Crockett. A salty sea could lurk beneath the heart of Pluto. Science News Online, September 23, 2016.
• A. Yeager. Ice flows, haze offer more clues to Pluto’s geology. Science News. Vol. 188, August 22, 2015, p. 7.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

31-05-2019 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

For years – or perhaps even for centuries – the Men in Black have been elusive, fear-inducing figures who hover with disturbing regularity upon the enigmatic fringes of the UFO subject. They nurture and weave their very own unique brand of terror and intimidation. Like true specters from the outer edge, the MIB appear from the murky darkness, and roam the countryside provoking paranoia and fear in their notorious wake, before returning to that same shrouded realm from which they originally oozed. Very often traveling in groups of three, this definitive trinity of evil seemingly appears and disappears at will. They are very often seen driving 1950s-style black Cadillac’s. Particularly strange is the fact that most of the witnesses say that the cars of the Men in Black vanish almost impossibly quickly. It’s almost as if the vehicles of the MIB are beamed aboard UFOs. Maybe, that’s not too far from the truth.

As bizarre as it might sound, there are a number of reports on record of black cars (A) entering and exiting UFOs late at night; and (B) of apparent aliens exiting UFOs and getting in cars. Yep, I know: it’s really weird. Back in 2009, longtime Ufologist Tim Beckley shared just such a story with me. Tim said: “I remember one incident where I was lecturing and a gentleman – a professor at the college where I was lecturing – came up to me  and told this story about how he was driving outside of a town in Michigan. It was rather late at night,  and he saw these lights in the woods. He pulled over, and there was no other traffic coming in either direction, but there was already another car parked at the edge of the road.”

Tim continued: “He described seeing some sort of ship in the distance – a UFO. A group of human-like aliens got out of the UFO, walked to the car – which was a Cadillac, or something like that. He watched them and could see they looked human. They just got in the car and drove off. But then, a couple of weeks later, he sees one of the same guys in a supermarket. These reports sound farfetched, but there’s so many of them of what seem to be aliens being able to move among us.”

Moving on, there’s the very odd tale of a man named Michael Wilcox. On the night of March 6, 1961, Wilcox had an encounter of the creepy car kind. At the time, Wilcox was living in South Miami, Florida. His home backed onto an eight-acre tomato field. At around 10:15 P.M., Wilcox saw to his amazement, through the window of his living-room, a huge object hanging low in the night sky. He described it as looking “like a Navy blimp.” He added that, “…but it was larger than any blimp I had ever seen.” Wilcox raced outside and watched with amazement as a large doorway on the craft slowly began to open. When the doorway was open to its fullest, three small, circular objects exited the craft and shot away into the darkness. But, that was only the start of things. Matters were about to get really strange.

According to Wilcox, one-by-one three black-colored Ford Galaxie cars were lowered from the UFO to the ground by “a hydraulic”-like elevator. Yes, you did read that right! When the three cars were safely on the ground, a rectangular-shaped object exited the UFO and landed in the field, adjacent to the cars. Then, something amazing happened, as Wilcox noted: Four groups of four people walked out of that same rectangular-shaped craft “and entered each car.” Wilcox looked on dumbfounded, as the cars – one after another – raced out of the field and onto the nearby road! He quickly lost sight of them as they hit South Miami’s 136th Street. The amazing encounter was over.

There’s absolutely no doubt at all that cases like the ones I have detailed above are not just controversial but way beyond controversial. Nevertheless, such accounts – of mysterious cars, of MIB, and of vanishing vehicles abound. Here’s one example and here’s another. Given that I’ve written four books on the MIB and one on the Women in Black, maybe my next book should be titled Cars in Black…

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 23:56 geschreven door peter  

One of my home state’s most well-known unexplained phenomena was caught on camera recently by a group of researchers from Appalachian State University. The team has two cameras set up in the mountains near Morganton, North Carolina trained on Brown Mountain. For over a century, witnesses have reported strange orbs or streaks of light darting among the hills of the Pisgah National Forest around Brown Mountain, but scientists have yet to produce a definitive explanation for the phenomenon. Will we ever solve the mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights?

The Brown Mountain Lights have been covered by North Carolina newspapers for decades, and one of the earliest accounts of the Brown Mountain Lights was published in the Charlotte Daily Observer in 1913. This most recent documented took place earlier this year when one of the cameras set up by an Appalachian State research team caught a few unidentified lights on camera. See the footage for yourself.

A picture of the lights from 1962.

While the video certainly shows a few ambiguous streaks of light, it sure does look a lot like the “rod” phenomenon which occurs when cameras capture insects flying faster than their frame rate. The result is that tiny insects can appear like massive flying rods, which themselves have been the source of several studies and paranormal claims. The fact that they are caused by flying insects is still disputed by some.

Were these alleged Brown Mountain Lights merely insects? Even the video’s author notes that they are “likely lightning bugs but it’s winter.” The video was taken months before lightning bug season in North Carolina, but that doesn’t mean another insect couldn’t have reflected light from traffic in the distance. In his YouTube description of the footage, Appalachian State astronomer Dr. Daniel Caton claims the lights were captured on two different cameras, but that the second camera’s footage is unusable “due to camera quitting after a storm.” It’s always the camera, isn’t it?

Brown Mountain

While many simple explanations for the Brown Mountain Lights have been put forward over the years, they are still considered a mysterious phenomenon and are somewhat rare. A few friends of mine claim to have seen them inadvertently while camping, but then there are those who have looked for them for years and have never witnessed the lights. Still, reports and studies of other similar unexplained Earth lights around the world lend legitimacy to reports of the Brown Mountain Lights.

In Norway’s Hessdalen valley for instance, witnesses have for decades reported strange orbs of light of various colors that appear both by day and night. Possible explanations include piezoelectric discharge due to underground conductive crystals rubbing together, some unknown type of chemical combustion which can occur under extremely specific conditions, or even by ionization of air and dust caused by deposits of radioactive elements underground.

Unexplained illumination photographed over Table Rock, North Carolina

(image by Bill Fox).

What could be causing these strange, seemingly natural Earth lights? Are they indeed a natural phenomenon? It’ll take a lot more than one blurry YouTube video to get to the bottom of this mystery.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 23:46 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers say exploding stars might have forced our ancestors to walk upright

BY TIBI PUIU

Credit: Pixabay.

One of the most distinguishable human features is our upright mode of locomotion, which is unique among mammals. Scientists have proposed many ideas that might explain the circumstances that enabled our species to evolve as bipeds. Perhaps the most ‘out there’ theory proposed thus far comes from astronomers at the University of Kansas who claim that human bipedalism might have been triggered by giant cosmic explosions. But before you laugh, read on because, wild as it may sound, this theory has some interesting evidence backing it up.

Some time ago, scientists reported that ancient seabeds contain a layer of iron-60 isotopes. These rare isotopes cannot be made on Earth, which means their origin must be extraterrestrial, most likely the result of a supernova —  a transient astronomical event that occurs during the last stellar evolutionary stages of massive star’s life. Because iron-60 has a known half-life, it is relatively easy to accurately date when the supernovae’s cosmic rays reached our planet.

Scientists traced the isotopic signatures to two major events: one 6.5 to 8.7 million years ago (300 light-years away from Earth) and the second 1.7 to 3.2 million years ago (163 light-years). That’s around the time of Homo habilis, the upright human ancestor nicknamed “handyman” because of their ability to master stone tool technology.

Based on this information, Adrian Melott and colleagues at the University of Kansas hypothesized what kind of changes these cosmic rays might have caused on Earth. One of the first things that should have happened was a dramatic increase in the rate of ionization of the lower atmosphere.

Ionization is the process by which an atom or molecule acquires a negative or positive charge by gaining or losing electrons. In this case, the cosmic rays knocked off electrons from molecules in the atmosphere. According to Melott, the supernova events would have increased ionization in the atmosphere by 50-fold. With so many free electrons in the atmosphere, cloud-to-ground lightning would have been much easier to occur, increasing the odds of forest fires.

“The bottom mile or so of atmosphere gets affected in ways it normally never does,” Melott said. “When high-energy cosmic rays hit atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, they knock electrons out of them — so these electrons are running around loose instead of bound to atoms. Ordinarily, in the lightning process, there’s a buildup of voltage between clouds or the clouds and the ground — but current can’t flow because not enough electrons are around to carry it. So, it has to build up high voltage before electrons start moving. Once they’re moving, electrons knock more electrons out of more atoms, and it builds to a lightning bolt. But with this ionization, that process can get started a lot more easily, so there would be a lot more lightning bolts.”

In time, savannas replaced torched forests in northeast Africa. Now, walking was far more advantageous for our ancestors than climbing trees. The upsurge in global wildfires is supported by the discovery of carbon deposits found in soils that correspond with the timing of the cosmic-ray bombardment.

“It is thought there was already some tendency for hominins to walk on two legs, even before this event,” said Melott, professorof physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. “But they were mainly adapted for climbing around in trees. After this conversion to savanna, they would much more often have to walk from one tree to another across the grassland, and so they become better at walking upright. They could see over the tops of grass and watch for predators. It’s thought this conversion to savanna contributed to bipedalism as it became more and more dominant in human ancestors.”

That’s quite a great deal of speculation but the evidence suggests that such a scenario might have been possible — however improbable as it may sound. What about something like happening in the future? Slim chance, say the researchers who point to the fact that the nearest supernova candidate is now 652 light-years away from Earth. Instead, Melott says we should be cautious about a more immediate threat — solar flares.

“Betelgeuse is too far away to have effects anywhere near this strong,” Melott said. “So, don’t worry about this. Worry about solar proton events. That’s the danger for us with our technology — a solar flare that knocks out electrical power. Just imagine months without electricity.”

• The findings appeared in the Journal of Geology.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 23:38 geschreven door peter  

Pluto’s volcanoes might spew out liquid water, new study finds

BY MIHAI ANDREI

Pluto’s volcanoes appear to have spewed out ammonia-rich watery fountains into space, hinting at a complex (and quite possibly, organic) chemistry of Pluto’s subsurface sea.

“This was a huge surprise to all of us about Pluto,” says planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “It means there are lots of surprises waiting to be uncovered in that part of the solar system.”

Before the New Horizons mission, our understanding of Pluto was very limited. The interplanetary space probe whooshed by the planetoid, offering an unprecedented view of Pluto’s surface and that of its satellites, showing that the entire planetary system is much more complex than previously anticipated. This sparked a renewed interest for studying Pluto — and data from New Horizons keeps coming in.

Now, a new analysis of spectral images obtained with the New Horizons spacecraft indicates the presence of ammonia on Pluto’s surface. These spectral data (essentially different wavelengths of light) can reveal the chemical signature of different substances. Cruikshank and his colleagues analyzed the images and found a variety of ice on top of a bedrock of water ice — Pluto’s surface temperature is about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 270 degrees Celsius), which is cold enough to form mountains from water ice. It’s not this water that was surprising — researchers have suspected for a while that Pluto’s dense core surrounded by a mantle of water ice, and they’ve also known that Pluto’s surface hosts mountains of water ice.

Instead, it’s the ammonia that was surprising.

Ammonia isn’t able to survive for a long time on the surface of a body like Pluto. Without an atmosphere to protect it, ammonia is destroyed with relative ease, in as many as 400,000 years (which, at a planetary scale, is the blink of an eye). So the presence of ammonia suggests that Pluto has a young or renewed surface.

“If you find it at all, it suggests that it has been put there fairly recently,” Cruikshank says. “There is really no limit [to how recently], as far as I can see in the geology.”

A section of Virgil Fossae. Arrows point to topographic features that are muted in form by an apparent mantling by material ejected in a cryovolcanic event within the fossa main channel. Below, the same region shown with water ice distribution: darker shade of blue indicates greater concentration. It’s stunning that we can see features on Pluto in such detail.

Image credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins University, Southwest Research Institute

This isn’t the only possibility though. Ammonia might also survive in a more durable chemical form such as a hydrated or an ammoniated salt, which are much more resilient. However, the location of the newly-discovered ammonia signatures is also intriguing: it appears to be clustered around a geological feature called Virgil Fossae — essentially a large ditch-like feature, probably a fissure associated with ice volcanism (also called cryovolcanism).

Ammonia is also an excellent antifreeze, researchers write. In sufficient quantities, ammonia can lower water’s freezing point by 100 degrees Celsius. If Pluto’s subsurface mantle ocean contains ammonia, that would help explain how the water remains liquid despite sub-freezing temperatures. A recent study also shed more light on Pluto’s liquid water, suggesting that it is kept in place by a thin layer of gas.

The observations revealed another surprise: a red material that Cruikshank’s team thinks represents complex organic material. This is consistent with the existence of ammonia molecules and could suggest that Pluto’s ocean also has organic molecules. This was not confirmed, and even if this is the case, it doesn’t mean that Pluto can host life — it merely suggests that the chemical precursors to life can emerge even in such inhospitable places.

Distribution of red-tinted water ice exhibiting the spectral signature of ammonia in Virgil Fossae and surrounding terrain.
(B) is an image illustrating the uniquely bright red coloring of Virgil Fossa, while (C) showcases the geographical distribution of water ice and ammonia.

Image credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins University, Southwest Research Institute.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Marc Neveu, an astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the study, says that the quality of these images is not sufficient to draw a definite conclusion. Also, without a direct chemical analysis, it’s very difficult to assess the exact chemistry of Pluto’s surface.

Also, there’s no indication so far as to whether this was a singular eruption or a regular phenomenon. Ammoniated ice was spread as far as 200 kilometers from the fissure, but this could have been produced by a singular eruption. If this was the case, the eruption would have shot water at speeds of over 300 meters per second (1080 km/h), with the water freezing midair before falling down around Virgil Fossae.

At any rate, the Virgil Fossae complex is part of a tectonic system, which seems to include some form of cryovolcanism. Researchers make a good case for supporting this idea, suggesting that these eruptions also bring ammonia from Pluto’s mantle up to the surface. While the case isn’t settled yet, it’s yet another indication of how intriguing Pluto’s geology really is.

• Journal Reference: C. M. Dalle Ore et al. Detection of ammonia on Pluto’s surface in a region of geologically recent tectonism. Science Advances. Published online May 29, 2019. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav5731.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 23:19 geschreven door peter  

Wetenschappers ontdekken ‘verboden planeet’ - HLN.be

Bron: CNN

De ‘verboden planeet’ is ook bekend als NGTS-4b. Deze exoplaneet is drie keer groter dan onze planeet en ongeveer twintig procent kleiner dan Neptunus. De temperatuur kan er oplopen tot maar liefst 1000 graden Celsius, dat is zelfs warmer dan de planeet Mercurius. 

Lees ook

Nieuwe planetenzoeker TESS vindt vierde exoplaneet en honderden sterren waar leven mogelijk is

Het is de eerste exoplaneet die werd gevonden in de ‘Neptunuswoestijn’. “Dit is een zone vlak bij de ster, waar normaal geen planeten van de grootte van Neptunus te vinden zijn”, zo verduidelijkt onderzoeker Richard West van de Universiteit van Warwick. De straling is er namelijk zo sterk dat al het gas rond zo’n planeet onmiddellijk verdampt, waarna er enkel nog een steenachtige kern aanwezig is. Opvallend genoeg kan de ‘verboden planeet’  toch een gasachtige atmosfeer behouden. 

Verklaringen

Hoe kan de NGTS-4B overleven in de ‘Neptunuswoestijn’, zo luidt de hamvraag van de onderzoekers. Het wetenschappelijke team geeft enkele mogelijke verklaringen. Het is mogelijk dat de planeet slechts recent - in de laatste miljoen jaar - in de ‘Neptunuswoestijn’ arriveerde. Een tweede optie is dat de planeet erg groot was en dat de atmosfeer op dit moment nog steeds aan het verdampen is. 

De ‘verboden planeet’ werd gevonden met behulp van het Next-Generation Transit Survey Telescopes-systeem (NGTS). De telescopen staan opgesteld in de Atacamawoestijn in Chili, waar onderzoekers kijken naar vlekjes tegen de achtergrond van de zon. Als een vlekje beweegt over verschillende foto’s, wijst dat erop dat het een planeet(achtige) is. NGTS-4b is zo klein dat andere telescopen deze planeet waarschijnlijk niet hadden opgespoord. 

“We zijn nu aan het bekijken of er zich nog meer planeten in de Neptunuswoestijn bevinden,” zegt West. “Misschien is die woestijn wel groener dan we dachten.”

{  https://www.hln.be/ }

30-05-2019 om 20:57 geschreven door peter