UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Back in 2015, astronomers noticed a star that was behaving in a very unusual way. Nicknamed “Tabby’s Star” after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, the star exhibits strange and unexplained dips in its light output. This led many to speculate that Tabby’s Star was surrounded by some sort of artificial technological structure like a Dyson sphere constructed by an advanced alien civilization. Radio monitoring of Tabby’s Star didn’t turn up any alien chatter or anything else unusual, but it didn’t explain what was going on with the star either. Now astronomers have discovered another star with mysterious dips in its light output (behavior which usually suggests it’s being orbited by something) for which astronomers also have absolutely no explanation.

According to Scientific American, the star was discovered using the now-retired Kepler space telescope, an extremely precise exoplanet hunting space telescope. After analyzing Kepler’s data on the star, called HD 139139 (it doesn’t have a fancy name like Tabby’s Star yet), for more than a year, astronomers have no explanation for what might be causing its anomalous behavior. Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin says:

“We’ve never seen anything like this in Kepler, and Kepler’s looked at 500,000 stars.”

As an exoplanet hunting telescope, Kepler’s job was to look for periodic dips in brightness coming from stars. These dips in brightness usually indicate orbiting planets as they pass in front of the star. Data from these observations are fed through algorithms that look for repeated patterns, a good indicator exoplanets considering they should be spinning around the star in a consistent pattern. Some of the patterns though are too complex for the algorithms to handle, and are instead placed in the hands of volunteer civilian astronomers. It was one of these astronomers contacted Vanderburg and told him to check out HD 139139, a star the size of the sun about 350 light-years away.

So what exactly makes this star so strange? According to Vanderburg:

“When I got that e-mail, I looked more closely and said, ‘okay, this definitely looks like a multiplanet system. But I can’t find any [planets] that appear to line up.'”

The dips in light make the star seem like it should be a multiplanet system, but it can’t be. The star displayed 28 dips in light, each of which lasted between 45 minutes and 7.5 hours with no repeats. The team says it looked more like noise than an actual signal. The team thought it may be a glitch in the system, but after checking again, the data turned out to be real.

One explanation was that this star had at least 14 planets and perhaps as many as 28—more planets than any other known system. That would in itself be very strange, but in order for even that explanation to work all of those exoplanets would have to be the same size, only slightly larger than Earth.

Yet there’s another problem with that explanation, according to Vanderburg. based on the short duration of the light dips, the planets would need to be in extremely close orbit to the star. But that doesn’t match the lack of a repeated pattern in the light dips. For there to be no repeats in the 80 days the telescope was pointed at the star is essentially impossible if the planets were as close to the star as they would need to be. So it’s not planets.

Among the other proposed explanations are a second, invisible source of gravity pulling on the star, the dust cloud of a planet disintegrating in front of the star, and short-lived starspots (cooler versions of our suns sunspots that have never been observed). For various reasons, none of these explanations hold up either.

A Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure that could harvest the energy of the enclosed star.

Vanderburg says there was one explanation left out of the recent paper he published on the star: an alien megastructure. Vanderburg says that explanation is extremely unlikely (which is the least surprising thing here), but astronomer Jason Wright, who led the investigation into Tabby’s Star, says HD 139139 will definitely be added to the list of places being investigated for alien technosignatures.

It’s unlikely any further investigations will happen for a while, though. The Kepler space telescope has been decommissioned and there are few other telescopes that can match its precision. So until another telescope is pointed at this mysterious star, all we’re left with is wild speculation. And the experts that are running the numbers and actually have the know-how to comment on it, of course.

An ancient Greek pyramid dating back to the Bronze Age – making it the same age as Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt – has been discovered on an island in the Aegean Sea and has archeologists and Greek historians throwing around the exclamation “This changes everything!” It certainly changes one thing … who knew the Greeks built pyramids? And how did they get a pyramid’s worth of marble to an island 4,600 years ago? Did they get any advice from the Egyptians or the early Brits? Did they give them any?

“It is by far the largest prehistoric marine transport operation that has ever come to light anywhere in the world. It demonstrates quite clearly just how important, and integral to their culture, seafaring was to these early Bronze Age Aegean people.”

Keros

The story broke this week in The Independent but the actual announcement of the discovery was made earlier by members of the four-year Cambridge Keros Project centered at the University of Cambridge, with help from the Ephorate of the Cyclades and the Cyprus Institute. Keros is the well-known Aegean island where the large collection of artistic and unbroken marble Cycladic figurines now called the “Keros Hoard” was previously found. The nearby smaller island of Dhaskalio, was once linked to Keros by a narrow causeway, is where pyramid was discovered under what was once a settlement. There are few quality marble formations on Keros or Dhaskalio, so this massive pyramid-covering amount of the stone had to be transported there by Bronze Age sailors – a concept that archeologists and historians never believed these ancient Greeks were capable of.

How much marble? The project team estimates between 7,000 and 10,000 tons of glossy white marble was transported by sea from the island of Naxos, about 10 km (6.2 miles) north. It’s estimated that the Aegean boats at that time — Cycladic boats that were only 10-15 meter long and capable of carrying only between one and two tons of stone – made over 3,500 trips over a 20-year period totaling 45,000 miles.

What the builders used all of that marble for was a six-step terrace pyramid built by terraforming the island’s small mountain. (Photo here.) The terraces were six meters wide the end result was a thousand meters of glistening marble pyramid. The archeologists believe the top terrace was once flat and used for ceremonies, and Greek sanctuary expert Dr. Alan Peatfield of University College Dublin’s School of Archaeology thinks this may have been the first and a model for the later ones.

Aerial view of sophisticated prehistoric public architecture uncovered at Keros, Greece.

Image credit: Cambridge Keros project

Excavation in Trench B at the staircase.

Image credit: Cambridge Keros Project

An intact metalworking hearth from 2500 BCE at Keros, Greece. Image credit: Cambridge Keros Project

Keros

ENGINEERING: The pyramid shape of the island is man-made

(Pic: Cambridge Keros Project)

“It is potentially a fundamental place of origin for the phenomenon of sacred mountains within the Greek world.”

If it was the first, it was an impressive start, according to Professor Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge and co-director of the excavation.

“At Dhaskalio we see a number of sophisticated architectural techniques employed in a well-thought through manner. These include massive entranceways, stone-flagged stairways, and an intricate drainage system covering the entire island. This gives the clear impression of a skilled architect and a guiding hand planning and executing a building programme whose scope can only be compared with a site like Knossos on Crete.”

An Egyptian steppe pyramid

The mountain pyramid may have symbolized the importance of Dhaskalio and Keros as a metalworking center and marketplace for metal products such as high-quality daggers. With those metal products being found throughout the islands, this new discovery reinforces the new theory that the seafaring skills of the ancient Greeks began earlier and were much more impressive than first thought.

Is it just a coincidence that this Greek pyramid, Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids (and possibly those in Central and South America and Asia) were built at about the same times? Or was something else going on that influenced these nearly simultaneous “This changes everything!” constructions? That’s a question for another day and a different set of experts.