While most astronomers are looking for signs of life on other planets, a few on the apocalyptic side are looking for signs of dead stars and dead planets in an attempt to look into Earth’s hopefully far-off future. What they have found so far is mysterious zombie signals coming from these planets that are no more than giant balls of metal orbiting dead white dwarfs. What is making these strange zombie sounds? Are they calling around the universe for brains?

lumina_obscura / Pixabay

“Nobody has ever found just the bare core of a major planet before, nor a major planet only through monitoring magnetic signatures, nor a major planet around a white dwarf.”

That is, nobody before Dr. Dimitri Veras from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics and his team in May of 2019 discovered SDSS J1228+1040 – a white dwarf star (a dead star with no fusion occurring) located about 411 lights years away. According to the press release announcing their new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they also found the remains of one planet. Specifically, the rock orbiting SDSS J1228+1040 appears to be the core of the planet – what’s left after the dying star stripped it of its atmosphere and outer layers, leaving just a cold mass of hardened metals.

It’s a zombie planet … not a planet of zombies

They also discovered something else – a radio signal coming from the zombie planet. Based on a similar signal coming from Jupiter and its moon Io, they determined that the white dwarf and the planet core formed a unipolar inductor circuit with the metallic core acting as a conductor. The radiation from the unipolar inductor circuit forms radio waves which can be picked up by radio telescopes on Earth. Why is this a big deal?

“There is a sweet spot for detecting these planetary cores: a core too close to the white dwarf would be destroyed by tidal forces, and a core too far away would not be detectable. Also, if the magnetic field is too strong, it would push the core into the white dwarf, destroying it. Hence, we should only look for planets around those white dwarfs with weaker magnetic fields at a separation between about 3 solar radii and the Mercury-Sun distance.”

Veras points out that astronomers now have an excellent tool for finding other dead planets. And why is THAT a big deal?

“A discovery would also help reveal the history of these star systems, because for a core to have reached that stage it would have been violently stripped of its atmosphere and mantle at some point and then thrown towards the white dwarf. Such a core might also provide a glimpse into our own distant future, and how the solar system will eventually evolve.”

Yep. Looking at SDSS J1228+1040 and its signal-sending zombie planet are a look into our future. How far into our future? That depends on us (oh boy) and the lifespan of our sun, which is estimated to be about five billion more years. What this new discovery does tell Veras is how long a dead Earth will continue to exist and send its own zombie signals to other galaxies … one billion years.

Which do you think will come first … the end of the Sun or the end of the Earth? Don’t bother betting – there won’t be any bookies left anyway.

We’ve all read the endless headlines. Millions of people may or may not be “storming” Area 51 next month only to find impenetrable roadblocks manned by heavily armed private security forces equipped with gear we didn’t even know existed. Regardless of what becomes of the “Storm Area 51” phenomenon, the highly classified United States Air Force research and testing facility located deep within the Nevada desert has become somewhat of a cause célèbre. 

Companies large and small and celebrities from all walks of public life are jumping on the social media bandwagon to try and attach their name to the event which, if nothing else, has provided the year’s best memes and reminded us just how soullessly devoid of a sense of humor the Armed Forces are. But hey, maybe that’s their job.

There’s nothing funny about the business of killing people.

Case in point: declassified documents from the CIA’s CREST database were unearthed recently revealing the great lengths the USAF went to in an attempt to lure the nation’s best mindsto the desolate Area 51 facility. The documents were dug up by government accountability and transparency advocates MuckRock who regularly publish declassified FBI and CIA files. 

The documents detail the difficulties the Air Force faced in both attracting and retaining personnel during the OXCART program, the above top secret research project which led to experimental aircraft such as the A-12 OXCART and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird. That project required the extraordinary talents of the nation’s best aerospace engineers – engineers who weren’t too keen on moving to a remote facility in the middle of the scorching, desolate Nevada desert.

The internal CIA memo describes how the Air Force struggled to keep its best scientists for various reasons, although those who remained at the base did so solely to avoid taking their children out of school or avoid selling their houses during low-demand times:

That memo goes on to describe the Air Force’s attempts to avoid a “mass exodus” of scientists and engineers fed up with the bleak living and working conditions, noting that “personnel problems at Area 51 and throughout the OXCART project continue to be a point of issue”:

To help attract and retain the personnel necessary to keep the OXCART program running, the CIA put together a list of selling points which could be pitched to prospective Area 51 employees. These include descriptions of Las Vegas as “an affluent metropolis” full of “high-priced homes” and “a population as transient as a desert thunderstorm.” Sign me up!

For the Area 51 base itself, the CIA recommended promoting it to USAF staff by advertising free lodging and meals, television, air conditioning, and, I kid you not, “pies and cakes”:

Head over to MuckRock to read the whole trove of documents for yourself.

The USAF’s personnel retention campaign must have worked, because the CIA was able to successfully develop the A-12 and SR-71, two of the world’s most advanced spy aircraft. To this day, the SR-71 holds the world record for the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft and is likely the cause of many UFO sightings and much misinformation as the USAF and CIA worked to keep their most advanced aircraft in the dark.

Forget seeing them aliens. When we storm Area 51 next month, let’s go for the real prize: America’s unsung heroes, the pies and cakes of Area 51.

Let’s see them pies and cakes.

To understand the challenge of capturing data on fast radio bursts, it pays to spend some time on a late summer night watching kids trying to catch fireflies. The bugs blink rapidly and unexpectedly in places whether they’re not looking, and are gone by the time they get to the location … only to see them blink somewhere else. Fast radio bursts – the mysterious radio waves from other galaxies – act in a similar manner, with the added challenge that their blink happened billions of years ago, so tracing the light back to the source – catching the FRB firefly – is impossible without being able to look right at it when it flashes. While it won’t help the firefly chasers (good news for the bugs), artificial intelligence may have allowed a group of astronomers to watch fast radio bursts in real time.

“It is fascinating to discover that a signal that travelled halfway through the universe, reaching our telescope after a journey of a few billion years, exhibits complex structure, like peaks separated by less than a millisecond.”

That explains why Wael Farah, a Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) PhD student, was inspired to develop a Fast Radio Burst detection system, and is the first person to discover FRBs in real-time with a fully automated, machine learning system. But how did he do what no other scientist has done before? With machine learning. As described in a press release from the university announcing the publication of Farah’s study (with others) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Farah used the on-site computer at the Molonglo Radio Observatory near Canberra to recognize the signs of FRBs and immediately capture them, filtering out the signals of cell phones, earth transmission, pulsars and other radio waves. Is this a big deal?

“By using a real-time FRB detection system, we captured raw voltages for five of the six events, which allowed for coherent dedispersion and very high time resolution (10.24 μs) studies of the bursts.”

The study reveals that Farah’s FRB detection system found five FRBs in real time in the short period between June 2017 and December 2018. To put that in perspective, the first FRB was detected in 2007 and only about 40 have been seen since. Farah found five more in just 18 months, including an FRB described as “the most energetic one yet.”

But wait … there’s more.

The study did not find any repeating bursts, which shows just how difficult they are to find, and estimated that there are about 59 to 157 FRBs occurring every day, which is seven times lower than previous estimates. This is all the more reason to congratulate Farah and his team for developing their detection system.

Now, can he come up with a phone app for detecting fireflies? Asking for a friend.

It the annals of “This changes everything!” discoveries, this story may be quickly charging to the top, potentially pushing one or more by Albert Einstein out of the way. An ancient star just 190 light years from ours is living up to its nickname of the “Methuselah star” after new calculations of the age of the universe put this star’s birthday slightly BEFORE the Big Bang. Is that vibration you feel Albert Einstein spinning in his grave or Dr. Sheldon Cooper banging on a Hollywood producer’s door demanding one more episode?

“Measurements made using relatively nearby galaxies suggest the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the age indicated by the heat still radiating outwards from the Big Bang. And the difference between them seems too large to dismiss as a fluke. Worse still, some of the results now imply that the universe is younger than the oldest known star.”

Which came first?

Physicist Robert Matthews, a member of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society writing for The National in the United Arab Emirates, digs deeper into a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy and presented at an astronomy meeting in California in July 2019. “A Hubble constant measurement from superluminal motion of the jet in GW170817” is obviously written for physicists and astronomers, so it’s nice of Matthews to break it down into simple-to-understand concepts – scary as they might be. Using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, scientists have long traced the ever-expanding universe back to its origin point – the so-called Big Bang – put the age of the universe at around 13.8 billion years. That total has become accepted because … Einstein.

However …

“We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age.”

In 2013, Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University and a team of astronomers used the Hubble Telescope to determine that the age of HD 140283, — the Methuselah star – is
14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which makes it older than the universe. The study reviewed by Matthews was supposed to resolve this obvious dilemma for astronomers by using gravitational ways as an alternative method for determining the age of the universe and the date of the Big Bang. This method is based on the Hubble constant – which is the speed at which a galactic object is moving away from the Earth divided by the distance traveled. Unfortunately, using the collision of two stars in 2017 as the event they measured, astronomers found that the Hubble constant … wasn’t. As a result, it delivered a different age of the universe … one that’s still less than the age of the Methuselah star.

Could the age of HD 140283 be the problem?

“Astronomers now know it contains very little iron – which means it must have been formed before this element became common in the universe.”

Because of its close proximity to Earth, that measurement is considered reliable, meaning that its estimated age of 14.5 billion years is accepted. Now what?

“Unfortunately, it’s still too rough and ready to resolve the paradox of the Methuselah star or the mystery of the two cosmic ages. In the meantime, theorists have been busy dreaming up new physics that might solve the problem. And in another case of history repeating itself, one of the leading ideas is the “force-from-nowhere” dreamt up by Prof Hoyle, who was later knighted. Astronomers already think this so-called Dark Energy played a critical role in the Big Bang – although they still have no idea where it came from. But with one leading astronomer at last month’s meeting describing the current impasse as a scientific crisis, the time may have come to think the unthinkable.”

English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle coined the term “Big Bang” but later rejected the theory in favor of his steady-state model, which is based on a continuous creation of matter rather than one big bang, thus making the universe age-infinite. While this would resolve the Methuselah conflict, this theory was rejected by most astronomers and physicists as unthinkable.

Is it time to reject the Big Bang theory? Is it time to think the unthinkable?

Dr. Cooper?

Despite what many see as a fundamental flaw in the government Disclosure movement, many hopeful seekers hold on to the notion that world governments may someday release their knowledge of alien visitation, long-forgotten advanced civilizations hiding on Earth, or other high-strangeness. This hope is predicated entirely on the belief that world governments in fact have knowledge to hide, a belief that many in the ufological world suspect is misguided.

Still, we’ve entered an era where politicians and figures within the U.S. Department of Defense seem to be taking seriously the UFO phenomenon and other related phenomena. Seem to be, anyway. There remains much we don’t know about what has been said in closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill and the content of those briefings will likely remain unknown. 

Some perhaps small basis for the current ‘small-d’ disclosure in Washington stems from the run-up 2016 presidential election. During that hotly contested election, Wikileaks released a trove of emails between Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta and Tom Delonge discussing high-level government officials and topics ranging from the Roswell crash to what we now know is To the Stars Academy. That leak led to pressure on both Clinton and Trump to debate the UFO phenomenon on the 2016 campaign trail – although that debate never materialized.

Now, as the 2020 presidential election looms, candidates are already being asked about what has become one of the hottest topics of the day. This week, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a front runner in 2016 and again now in 2020, went on the Joe Rogan Experience to discuss his platform for president. During the interview, Rogan naturally asked Sanders about extraterrestrials and what Sanders would or would not disclose if elected:

Rogan: “If you got into the office and you found out something about aliens, if you found out something about UFOs, would you let us know?”

Sanders: “Well I tell you, my wife would demand I let you know.”

Rogan: “Is your wife a UFO nut?” 

Sanders: “No, she’s not a UFO nut. She goes, Bernie, ‘What is going on do you know? Do you have any access?’”

Rogan: “You don’t have any access? You’ll let us know though?”

Sanders: “Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?”

Rogan’s show has in recent months hosted many of the most controversial figures in the UFO community including Tom Delonge and Bob Lazar, so it’s no surprise that Rogan asked Sanders about aliens. Sanders played the question off in characteristic nonchalance before moving on to more terrestrial topics.

Joe Rogan

As the UFO phenomenon continues to take center stage in Washington, D.C., could we actually soon see a president elected on a platform of disclosure?

Perhaps the bigger question remains: is there anything actually to disclose?