In a paper published in the journal Ecology, integrative biologist Alex Smith described the finding as an “unexpected and fascinating case of plants eating vertebrates in our backyard, in Algonquin Park.”

Pitcher Plant

Even though the plants at the provincial park have been observed for hundreds of years, nobody – until fairly recently – has reported seeing a salamander species being trapped by a pitcher plant anywhere in North America. In fact, it was in the summer of 2017 when Teskey Baldwin, who was an undergraduate student at that time and on a University of Guelph field ecology course, discovered a salamander trapped inside of a pitcher plant.

In the fall of 2018, a team of researchers studied pitcher plants that were located around a single pond and they noticed that approximately one in five of them contained tiny salamanders that were around the same size as a human finger. Even more surprising is that numerous plants held more than one salamander.

Since there are a limited number of fish in the bog ponds, it is believed that the young salamanders could have fallen into the plants because they were looking for insects. Another possibility is that they crawled into the plants in order to escape from predators. While some of the salamanders that were trapped inside of the plants died within just three days, others lived up to 19 days.

Smith stated that the pitcher plants could have turned carnivorous in order to get nutrients, such as nitrogen which is lacking in the soil of the bogs. In other parts of the world, flesh-eating plants – such as the sundews and the Venus flytrap – have also been found in environments that lack important nutrients.

Pitcher Plant

Other meat-eating pitcher plants have been discovered in other parts of the world since the eighteenth century, but it is believed that this is the first time such a plant has been found in North America. One example was a pitcher plant that was found in Asia a decade ago and it ate spiders and insects, but also mice and small birds.

Let’s hope that the pitcher plants stick with small vertebrates, as it would be quite concerning to see a large sign near the bog that reads, “Stay on the boardwalk and watch your children. Here be plants that eat vertebrates,” as Smith said.

A picture of a salamander caught inside of a pitcher plant, as well as a photo of the bog where the plants were found can be seen here.

Pitcher plant with a trapped salamander inside of it.

Credit: University of Guelph

Bog where pitcher plants are found.

Credit: University of Guelph

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-06-2019 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

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13-06-2019 om 17:32 geschreven door peter  

Kijken: Indiase nieuwszender suggereert dat vermist legervliegtuig is meegenomen door aliens

Een Indiaas tv-kanaal is onder vuur komen te liggen omdat het suggereerde dat een legertoestel dat eerder deze maand verdween, was meegenomen door aliens. Dat schrijft de Indiase nieuwssite Scroll.in.

Op 3 juni jongstleden verdween een transportvliegtuig van de Indiase luchtmacht op mysterieuze wijze. Een uitgebreide zoekactie leverde niets op.

Een presentator van het tv-station Zee Rajasthan suggereerde vervolgens dat het vliegtuig was ‘meegenomen door aliens’.

Vliegende schotel

De zender liet daarop beelden zien van een vliegende schotel die een straal afvuurde op het vliegtuig.

Er werd ook beweerd dat de aliens die verantwoordelijk zouden zijn voor de verdwijning van het toestel, samenwerkten met de Chinese overheid.

Het item kwam het station op felle kritiek te staan.

Zwart gat

Deze week kondigden functionarissen van de Indiase luchtmacht aan dat het wrak van het vliegtuig was gevonden en dat geen van de 13 passagiers de crash had overleefd.

Dit doet denken aan een uitzending op de Amerikaanse televisie enkele jaren geleden toen een presentator van CNN suggereerde dat vlucht MH370 van Malaysia Airlines was opgeslokt door een zwart gat.

Bekijk de beelden hieronder:

Snehesh Alex Philip@sneheshphilip

Offered without comments. The missing AN 32 could have been "taken away by aliens"

• 1,685

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13-06-2019 om 17:27 geschreven door peter  

The photographer who has submitted the image to Mufon states that he as in Peru taking a train back to Cusco from Machu Picchu and was taking pictures of ruins and beautiful mountains.

When reviewing the pictures, he noticed a very geometrical frisbee shaped object in a picture. It’s a copper color that has a glowing/mist coming from. It looks very geometric and not like a reflection.

It is not the first time that UFOs have been photographed near and above Machu Piccchu.

A tourist visiting Machu Picchu has accidentally taken an image of a UFO in the sky above the ancient ruins located in the Andes Mountains in Peru.

A woman who lives in Peru visited Machu Picchu some time ago. After a while she and her friends went on to the mountain when suddenly she saw a weird being hidden behind a rock in front of a cave.

And during a trip to Machu Picchu another tourist took many photos of the site. After back in the hotel she looked at the photos and saw in two photos something that she could not identify or didn’t remember it when she took the photos.

The fact that UFOs still appear above Machu Picchu could be a proof that this ancient site has more secrets than we know.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

13-06-2019 om 17:11 geschreven door peter  

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-06-2019 om 02:04 geschreven door peter  

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-06-2019 om 01:51 geschreven door peter  

David Icke, Steven Greer: Top Secret Black Ops - UFO's, Aliens & Cover-Ups 2019

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-06-2019 om 01:48 geschreven door peter  

13-06-2019 om 01:34 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

13-06-2019 om 01:25 geschreven door peter  

• First complete genome sequence of an ancient North American offers clues to Native American ancestry
• Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way We View Skin Color

The archaeological site where two 31,000-year-old milk teeth were found.

(Image: Elena Pavlova )

Led by David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University, who coauthored the new study, the researchers in this second paper suggest that during the about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, during the ‘Last Glacial Maximum’ changing environmental conditions forced about “500 or so Ancient North Siberians” to travel from southern Beringia with folk migrating from East Asia. This mixed nomadic population would give rise to both the lineages that dispersed through Siberia and the first Peoples of North America.

Meltzer wrote, “It doesn’t change the fact that there’s no direct historical descent in terms of the artifacts, but it does tell us that there was this population floating around in far northern Russia 31,000 years ago whose descendants contributed a bit of DNA to Native Americans.”

The two 31,000-year-old milk teeth found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Russia which led to the discovery of a new group of ancient Siberians.

Credit: Russian Academy of Sciences / Nature

Ancient Chickens And Eggs

When these two studies are brought together they confirm what has always been suspected, but they also highlight that ancient people migrated both east and west. This became apparent when the scientists tested a relatively modern genome, about 10,000-years-old, that was unearthed near Siberia’s Kolyma River. The DNA was found to be mixture of Ancient North Siberian lineages and East Asian “and similar to that seen in Native American populations - a much closer match than any others found outside of North America.”

Meltzer says, “The Bering land straight… Was open, relatively flat, no glaciers - it wasn’t like you wander through and the door closes behind you and you’re trapped in America” so people flowed in both directions during the Pleistocene.

The studies both published by Nature and are available at the following DOIs:

• https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1251-y
• https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1279-z
• Top image: Two men found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in northern Siberia in Russia date to about 32,000 years ago, providing the earliest direct evidence of humans in the region.          
• Source: Elena Pavlova

By Ashley Cowie

{https://www.ancient-origins.net/general }

13-06-2019 om 00:35 geschreven door peter  

Scientists spot massive ‘anomaly’ five times the size of Hawaii beneath the moon’s largest crater that could be ancient metal from asteroid impact 4 billion years ago

• Huge mass anomaly was spotted beneath the South Pole-Aitken basin on moon
• Researchers say it could be material from iron-nickel core of an ancient asteroid
• Possible metal deposit is heavy enough to weight basin flood down half a mile 

By CHEYENNE MACDONALD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM 

Scientists have detected a mysterious mass of material beneath a 1,200-mile crater on the surface of the moon.

The South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the moon is said to be the largest crater in the solar system and extends several miles deep.

And, according to the new research, the recently-spotted material is weighing down the basin floor by more than half a mile.

Scientists suspect the unusual deposit beneath the crater may contain metal from the asteroid that formed it.

Scientists have detected a mysterious mass of material beneath a 1,200-mile crater on the surface of the moon (circled). The simulations suggest that the material could be from the iron-nickel core of an asteroid

‘Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground,’ said lead author Peter B. James, from Baylor University’s College of Arts & Sciences.

‘That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected.’

In the study, the team analyzed data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission (GRAIL).

‘When we combined that with lunar topography data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we discovered that the unexpectedly large amount of mass hundreds of miles underneath the South Pole-Aitken basin,’ James said.

‘One of the explanations of this extra mass is that the metal from the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the moon’s mantle.’

The simulations suggest that the material could be from the iron-nickel core of an asteroid, which, if dispersed into the upper mantle, could be weighing down the basin as seen in the spacecraft data.

It could also be a concentration of dense oxides from the last stage of lunar magma ocean solidification, according to the researcher.

The South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the moon is said to be the largest crater in the solar system and extends several miles deep. And, according to the new research, the recently-spotted material is weighing down the basin floor by more than half a mile

‘We did the math and showed that a sufficiently dispersed core of the asteroid that made the impact could remain suspended in the moon’s mantle until the present day, rather than sinking to the moon’s core,’ James said.

The basin itself is thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago, making South Pole-Aitken the largest preserved crater in the solar system.

According to the researcher, it’s ‘one of the best natural laboratories for studying catastrophic impact events, an ancient process that shaped all of the rocky planets and moons we see today.’

WHAT ARE THE THEORIES ON THE ORIGIN OF THE MOON?

Many researchers believe the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago.

This is called the giant impact hypothesis.

The theory suggests the moon is made up of debris left over following a collision between our planet and a body around 4.5 billion years ago.

The colliding body is sometimes called Theia, after the mythical Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, the goddess of the moon.

Many researchers believe the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago. This is called the giant impact hypothesis

But one mystery has persisted, revealed by rocks the Apollo astronauts brought back from the moon: Why are the moon and Earth so similar in their composition?

Several different theories have emerged over the years to explain the similar fingerprints of Earth and the moon.

Perhaps the impact created a huge cloud of debris that mixed thoroughly with the Earth and then later condensed to form the moon.

Or Theia could have, coincidentally, been chemically similar to young Earth.

A third possibility is that the moon formed from Earthen materials, rather than from Theia, although this would have been a very unusual type of impact.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

13-06-2019 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

My God, it's full of... really dense metal?

By Richard Speed 

Eggheads in Texas have discovered a huge, dense mass lurking beneath an enormous crater on the Moon.

The Baylor University study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, combined data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) missions and found the huge blob lurking over a hundred miles beneath the South Pole-Aitken basin.

The mass, which isn't immediately obvious on the surface, appears to be dragging down the lunar landscape above it by around half a mile. In terms of size, lead author of the paper, Peter B. James, compared it to a pile of metal five times the size of Hawaii's big island.

The South Pole-Aitken basin itself is an impact crater on the far side of the Moon, and measures approximately 1,600 miles in diameter and 8.1 miles deep. It is one of the largest known impact craters in the Solar System and is home to China's Chang'e 4 lander and the Yutu 2 trundlebot.

The scientists have a number of theories for where this mass could have come from, including one that involves the solidification of an ocean of lunar magma.

The leading theory posits the mass comes from an asteroid with an iron-nickel core that smacked into the lunar surface four billion years ago. Scientists calculated that a sufficiently dispersed impactor core could remain suspended in the Moon's mantle rather than sink to the core.

Having recently enjoyed a visit to the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at London’s Design Museum, we at The Register have another theory. The only logical explanation is that Arthur C. Clarke's writing was more prediction than fiction, and that lurking beneath the surface is a colossally dense monolith.

Threaten

While the enormous mass of the finding on the Moon speaks to something somewhat larger and more blobby than Clarke’s neat 1:4:9 object, poked at by a fictional Heywood Floyd, in the interests of whimsy we'll give it a pass. Although the fact it also wasn't found in the relatively youthful Tycho crater either threatens to snap the increasingly tenuous link.

Joking aside, NASA has, of course, lately been interested in finding water on the Moon to support future human missions. However, charting the lunar gravitational field has also been a priority, with the two spacecraft of the GRAIL mission charting variations in gravity, including mascons (mass concentrations), often associated with craters.

The South Pole-Aitken basin, however, is different. Rather than the typical bulls-eye affair seen with mascons, the data suggests a huge sub-surface mass.

As with all good science, the discovery has created more questions, some of which may be answered by future missions to the region.

We, however, look forward to astronauts unearthing something of impenetrable blackness before embarking on a doomed jaunt to Jupiter, accompanied by a glitching AI. Google and Microsoft probably have just the thing.

Thanks to the anonymous Register reader for drawing our attention to the mystery mass on the Moon. ®

{ https://www.theregister.co.uk/ }

12-06-2019 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 22:19 geschreven door peter  

Rare Meteorites on Earth Forged in Massive Crash on Asteroid Vesta

By Charles Q. Choi 

An artist's depiction of Vesta experiencing a hit-and-run collision.

(Image: © Makiko Haba)

Mysterious rare meteorites made of a mix of stone and iron likely formed when Vesta, the brightest asteroid in the sky, experienced a giant impact, a new study finds.

That impact took place more than 4.5 billion years ago when a still-young Vesta and a hunk of rock about a tenth its size collided and the latter penetrated all the way to Vesta's core, the researchers argue. The resulting meteorites have let the scientists piece together a more detailed biography of the large asteroid, lead author Makiko Haba, a planetary scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, told Space.com.

There are three main groups of meteorites: stony, iron and stony-iron. Stony meteorites, the largest group, formed from the outer crust of an asteroid or planet and are made up mostly of silicon-rich minerals known as silicates. Iron meteorites, the next most common kind, consist mostly of iron and nickel and formed from the core of asteroids or planets. The rarest kind of meteorite are the stony-iron meteorites, containing about equal parts of stone and iron.

• Related: Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn Spacecraft 

One kind of stony-iron meteorite are mesosiderites, the chemistry of which suggested their ingredients came from both the stony crust and the molten metallic core of an asteroid, but oddly not the mantle layer in between, raising questions as to how that might have occurred.

Now, researchers suggest these mystery meteorites originated after a colossal impact that Vesta, the second-largest asteroid known, experienced in the early days of the solar system. "We propose a new evolutionary history for Vesta," Haba said.

The scientists analyzed five mesosiderites that were unearthed from Chile, Iowa and northwest Africa between1861 and 2014. They noted that zircon crystals in the meteorites likely formed when metals in these mesosiderites were molten. The physical features of the crystals and metals in the meteorites suggested these materials mixed in the molten core of an asteroid about 330 miles (530 kilometers) wide, matching Vesta, they said.

Haba and her colleagues next analyzed about two dozen zircon crystalsextracted from the five mesosiderites. After examining levels of uranium and lead isotopes in these zircons, they concluded that the silicates in these meteorites formed about 4.55 billion years ago and the silicates and metals mixed about 4.52 billion years ago. 

The scientists proposed that after Vesta formed and cooled enough to separate into distinct crust, mantle and core layers, a rock about one-tenth the size of Vesta smashed into the asteroid. This hit-and-run collision blasted a crater on Vesta's northern hemisphere that reached all the way into the asteroid's core, they said.

Some of the debris from this impact, made up from all three of Vesta's layers, fell back onto the asteroid, mostly on Vesta's southern hemisphere, the researchers wrote. This would explain the unusually thick crust that NASA's Dawn spacecraft detected at Vesta's south pole.

A pair of overlapping impact craters seen near Vesta's south pole from two collisions — one likely occurring about 2 billion years ago, the other about 1 billion years ago — could have dislodged rocks made up of mixtures of materials from Vesta's crust and core. This would explain the mesosiderites seen on Earth, the researchers said.

"We found that this model can explain all problems regarding Vesta," Haba said. "It was a eureka moment."

All in all, "we determined the precise timing of mesosiderite formation on Vesta and demonstrated that we could reconstruct Vesta's evolution based on this chronology," Haba said. "This is a first step for us, and we will apply this concept to as many other planetary bodies as possible."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (June 10) in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

•  Vesta Up Close: What the Dawn Probe Revealed 
•  Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space 
•  NASA Probe Snaps Stunning New Pics of Dwarf Planet Ceres 
• Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi.
• Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 21:45 geschreven door peter  

White Holes: Black Holes' Neglected Twins

By Charlie Wood

You've heard of black holes, but what about their inverted twins — white holes?

This visualization shows a jet blasting from a black hole near the speed of light. In theory, a white hole looks similar to a black hole, but instead of sucking matter in, a white hole pushes matter away. 

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

White holes were long thought to be a figment of general relativity born from the same equations as their collapsed star brethren, black holes. More recently, however, some theorists have been asking whether these twin vortices of spacetime may be two sides of the same coin.

To a spaceship crew watching from afar, a white hole looks exactly like a black hole. It has mass. It might spin. A ring of dust and gas could gather around the event horizon — the bubble boundary separating the object from the rest of the universe. But if they kept watching, the crew might witness an event impossible for a black hole — a belch. "It's only in the moment when things come out that you can say, 'ah, this is a white hole,'" said Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Théorique in France. 

Physicists describe a white hole as a black hole's "time reversal," a video of a black hole played backwards, much as a bouncing ball is the time reversal of a falling ball. While a black hole's event horizon is a sphere of no return, a white hole's event horizon is a boundary of no admission — space-time's most exclusive club. No spacecraft will ever reach the region's edge. 

Objects inside a white hole can leave and interact with the outside world, but since nothing can get in, the interior is cut off cut off from the universe's past: No outside event will ever affect the inside. "Somehow it's more disturbing to have a singularity in the past that can affect everything in the outside world," said James Bardeen, a black-hole pioneer and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. 

 

Twin no man’s lands

Einstein's field equations hit physics like a tsunami in 1915, and theorists are still sorting through the wreckage. Beyond describing the force of gravity, his hypotheses also brought a paradigm-shattering message about the nature of reality. More than a rigid backdrop, space and time bend and fold along with the mass of stars and planets. That insight sparked a race to calculate just how much abuse space could take from the matter that drifts through it. 

Within a year, physicist and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution to Einstein's equations, calculating how space-time curves around a single ball of mass. In his answer lay the seeds of what physicists today call a singularity — a spherical mass shrunken down to an infinitely dense point, wrapping space around it so tightly that the region pinches off from the rest of the universe. It forms a no man's land whose event horizon fractures the link between cause and effect. 

Black holes, the most famous singularities, are regions of space so warped that no exits exist. The outside universe can influence the inside of a black hole's horizon, but the interior can't affect the exterior. 

When mathematician Martin David Kruskal extended Schwarzchild's black hole description in 1960 to cover all domains of space and time, his new picture contained a reflection of the black hole singularity, although he didn't realized its significance at the time. Later, as black holes entered the vernacular, a natural term emerged for their theoretical twins. 

"It took 40 years to understand black holes, and it's only recently that people have been focusing on white holes," Rovelli said.

(Image: © EHT Collaboration)

Why white holes don't exist

While general relativity describes white holes in theory, no one knows how one might actually form. A black hole cordons off its bit of space when a star collapses into a tiny volume, but playing this video backwards doesn't make physical sense. An event horizon exploding into a functional star would look a bit like an egg unscrambling itself — a violation of the statistical law demanding that the universe gets messier over time. 

Even if large white holes did form, they probably wouldn't hang around too long. Any outgoing matter would collide with the matter in orbit, and the system would collapse into a black hole. "A long-lived white hole, I think, is very unlikely," said Hal Haggard, a theoretical physicist at Bard College in New York. 

A visualization from a supercomputer simulation shows how positrons behave near the event horizon of a rotating black hole.

(Image: © Kyle Parfrey et al./Berkeley Lab)

Why white holes might exist 

For a while, white holes seemed to share the fate of wormholes — mathematically permissible contortions of space-time likely prohibited by reality. But in recent years, some physicists have brought white holes back in an attempt to save their darker siblings from an unseemly death. 

Ever since Stephen Hawking realized in the 1970s that black holes leak energy, physicists have debated how the entities could possibly shrivel up and die. If a black hole evaporates away, many ask, what happens to the internal record of everything it swallowed? General relativity won't let the information out and quantum mechanics forbids its deletion. 

"How does a black hole die? We don't know. How is a white hole born? Maybe a white hole is the death of black hole," Rovelli said. "The two questions join nicely, but you have to violate the general relativity equations in the passage from one to the other."

Rovelli is a founder of quantum loop gravity, an incomplete attempt to move beyond general relativity by describing space itself as built from Lego-style particles. Guided by tools from this framework, he and others describe a scenario where a black hole grows so small that it no longer obeys the common-sense rules of stars and billiard balls. On the particle level, quantum randomness takes over and the black hole could transform into a white hole.

Such a microgram-size white hole, being similar in mass to a human hair, would have none of the gravitational drama of its black hole ancestor, according to Haggard, but would hide a cavernous interior containing the information of everything it had swallowed in its previous life. Too small to attract orbiting matter, the white hole might remain stable enough to eventually spit out all the information accumulated by its forerunner. 

In this picture, white holes would one day come to dominate the universe, after the stars have burnt out and black holes have withered. Any observers then could easily detect the objects as relatively large particles Haggard speculates, but those days are countless trillions of times the current age of the universe in the future. "It's the craziest time scale I've seen in physics," Haggard said. 

The ultimate white hole

Alternatively, the aftermath of a white hole may exist everywhere. To black hole physicists, the Big Bang's explosion of matter and energy looks like potential white hole behavior. "The geometry is very similar in the two cases," Haggard said. "Even to the point of being mathematically identical at times." 

Cosmologists call this picture the "the Big Bounce," and some seek characteristic white hole features in the universe's earliest observable light. Rovelli also wonders if violent radio bursts represent the cries of theoretical mini black holes left over from the Big Bang as they make an early transition into white holes (although this explanation appears increasingly unlikely). 

The universe may not contort itself into all the shapes general relativity allows, but Haggard thinks physicists should follow this rabbit hole all the way to the end. "Why wouldn't you investigate whether they [white holes] have interesting consequences," he said. "It may be that those consequences aren't what you expected, but it would be foolhardy to ignore them."

Additional resources: 

• Read more about the black hole to white hole transformation. 
• See how white holes emerge from the same space-time diagrams as black holes in PBS's space-time video.
• Read more about the parallels between a white hole and the Big Bang.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 21:24 geschreven door peter  

The Search for Habitable Alien Worlds in Earth's Backyard Heats Up

A new planet-hunting instrument has begun studying our bright neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.

(Image: © ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin)

Coronagraphs block the superbright light of stars, potentially allowing dim orbiting planets to be seen. Since NEAR is a thermal coronagraph, team members are looking for heat radiated by worlds in the Alpha Centauri system rather than visible-range starlight reflected off their surfaces.

Alpha Centauri is a three-star system that lies about 4.37 light-years from the sun. Two of the three stars are sunlike neighbors that together form a binary system called Alpha Centauri AB. The third star, Proxima Centauri, is a small, dim, more far-flung red dwarf. (Proxima Centauri is the closest individual star to the sun, located about 4.2 light-years away.)

In 2016, astronomers discovered a roughly Earth-size planet circling Proxima Centauri. This planet, known as Proxima b, appears to lie in the habitable zone, the just-right range of distances where liquid water might be stable on a planet's surface. 

This past April, astronomers announced the detection of another possible planet circling farther away from Proxima Centauri. This world, known as Proxima c, has yet to be confirmed, however; it remains a planet candidate. 

No planets are known to reside near the binary star Alpha Centauri AB, but NEAR may change that fact. The coronagraph — a joint project of ESO and Breakthrough Watch, a program that hunts for potentially Earth-like planets around nearby stars — upgrades an existing VLT instrument called VISIR (VLT Spectrometer and Imager for the Mid-infrared). 

This upgrade slashes the overwhelming glare of the two parent stars and optimizes the instrument's sensitivity in infrared wavelengths that might be given off by a habitable-zone planet. NEAR also employs "adaptive optics" to compensate for the blur induced by Earth's atmosphere, Breakthrough Watch representatives said.

"NEAR is the first and (currently) only project that could directly image a habitable exoplanet," Breakthrough Watch lead scientist Olivier Guyon said in a statement. "It marks an important milestone. Fingers crossed — we are hoping a large habitable planet is orbiting Alpha Cen A or B."

NEAR is capable of spotting planets about twice Earth's size or bigger in the Alpha Centauri system, project team members said. 

The "first light" operations that kicked off on May 23 run through tomorrow (June 11), and represent 100 hours of observing time.

Breakthrough Watch is part of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a suite of programs designed primarily to search for alien life. The initiatives also include the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) program Breakthrough Listen and Breakthrough Starshot, which aims to launch superfast laser-sailing probes to Proxima b and other nearby exoplanets in the next 30 years or so.

"Human beings are natural explorers," Breakthrough Initiatives founder Yuri Milner said in the same statement. "It is time we found out what lies beyond the next valley. This telescope will let us gaze across."

• Amazing Space Views of ESO's Very Large Telescope (Photos)
• Proxima b: Closest Earth-Like Planet Discovery in Pictures
• How Habitable Zones for Alien Planets and Stars Work (Infographic)
• Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now.
• Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
• Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 20:20 geschreven door peter  

Weird 'Anomaly' at the Moon's South Pole May Be a Metal Asteroid's Grave

By Meghan Bartels

A topographical map of the far side of the moon shows the South Pole-Aitken basin in blue shades and the mass anomaly studied in the new research within the dashed line.

(Image: © NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona)

The research relied on two key missions in NASA's moon-exploration portfolio. The GRAIL mission included two spacecraft, which spent more than a year orbiting the moon, with each spacecraft using the other to map the gravitational tug of the moon. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spent nearly 10 years at work and has made billions of measurements of the precise height of the moon's surface.

When it comes to the South Pole-Aitken basin, the topography is particularly striking. The feature is a massive crater stretching 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) across the far side of the moon, making it the largest crater planetary scientists know of to date. As the name implies, it's located near the south pole of the moon as well, and experts believe it was created perhaps 4 billion years ago.

So when the team saw an increase in the gravitational tug of the moon roughly lining up with the neighborhood of the South Pole-Aitken basin, the scientists wondered if the anomaly could trace directly back to the crater itself. "One of the explanations of this extra mass is that the metal from the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the moon's mantle," James said.

Another possible explanation for the anomaly, the researchers wrote, is that the area is rich in oxides, which likely would have formed as the moon's ancient magma ocean cooled and solidified.

However it formed, the fact that the mass anomaly is still so prominent and that it seems to be located about 186 miles (300 km) down also offers scientists an intriguing idea: These facts suggest that the moon's insides can't be all that gooey; if they were, the moon's gravity would pull the massive patch into the lunar center.

The research is described in a paper published April 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

•  This NASA Video Tour of the Moon in 4K Is Simply Breathtaking 
•  Latest Moon Photos from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 
•  The Lunar South Pole Is a Rich Target for NASA's 2024 Moon Goal 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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12-06-2019 om 19:40 geschreven door peter  

UFO Crash On Snowy Island In South Pole Region, Google Earth Map, UFO Sighting News.

Coordinates: 61°28'6.31"S 55°33'28.87"W

(Google Earth )

I was using Google map to find Nazi bases or alien bases or plane crashes in the polar regions when I accidentally came across this crashed alien ship. It looks like it crashed long ago. The crash marks behind it go for several hundred meters. The ship itself is about 118 meters across according to Google ruler. The black window cockpit area is easy to make out. The nose of the craft is pointed and becomes wider at the pilots area, then thins at its middle and becomes wide at its back again. Also one of the fins on its back is folded upward. Just like some aircraft can fold their wings upwards to store them. 

I have to feel bad for an alien that lands on this island. There seems to be nothing here. A crash landing means almost certain death unless he was able to call rescuers to come get him. But a craft this big would easily carry several hundred passengers. Since its the size is 118 meters and a 747 is 76 meters, we can assume since the 747 can carry 416 passengers. This means the crash UFO could have had hundreds of people on board at the time of the crash...and they may be dead inside the craft if they were not rescued or died in the crash.
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 18:00 geschreven door peter  

By Chris Ciaccia | Fox News

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6039861971001/

A large mass of unknown material has been discovered on the largest crater on the Moon and scientists aren't sure what it is.

According to an April 2019 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers believe the mass could contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the celestial satellite, which resulted in the aforementioned crater, known as the Lunar South Pole-Aitken basin.

"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That's roughly how much unexpected mass we detected," lead author Dr. Peter James, assistant professor of planetary geophysics at Baylor University, said in a statement.

• MYSTERIOUS LIGHT FLASHES ON THE MOON HAVE BEEN BAFFLING RESEARCHERS FOR DECADES

At roughly 1,550 miles in diameter, the Lunar South Pole-Aitken basin stretches across approximately one-fourth of the Moon, according to NASA. The Moon's circumference is roughly 11,000 kilometers.

This false-color graphic shows the topography of the far side of the Moon. The warmer colors indicate high topography and the bluer colors indicate low topography. The South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin is shown by the shades of blue. The dashed circle shows the location of the mass anomaly under the basin.

(Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona)

In addition to being the largest crater on the Moon, the Pole-Aitken basin is also one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system and is thought to be approximately 4 billion years old.

James and his team looked at data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission and the changes in gravity they discovered surprised them.

"When we combined that with lunar topography data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we discovered the unexpectedly large amount of mass hundreds of miles underneath the South Pole-Aitken basin," James said. "One of the explanations of this extra mass is that the metal from the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the Moon's mantle."

The anomaly – "whatever it is, wherever it came from," James added – is weighing down the basin floor by more than half a mile. The team of researchers ran computer simulations that show the iron-nickel core of an asteroid could have been placed into the upper mantle of the Moon following impact.

• EXOMOONS COULD BE HOME TO EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE, RESEARCHER SAYS

"We did the math and showed that a sufficiently dispersed core of the asteroid that made the impact could remain suspended in the Moon's mantle until the present day, rather than sinking to the Moon's core," James noted.

One other possibility for the unexplained mass is that it could be an area where dense oxides compiled following the last stage of lunar magma ocean solidification.

Whatever it is, James said the basin is "one of the best natural laboratories for studying catastrophic impact events, an ancient process that shaped all of the rocky planets and moons we see today."

Researchers believe the mass could contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the Moon.

Picture: Joe Klamar/AFPSource:AFP

{ https://www.foxnews.com/ }

12-06-2019 om 14:57 geschreven door peter  

12-06-2019 om 14:45 geschreven door peter