Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
19-10-2019
Two stars that have begun to randomly dim prompt scientists to examine if aliens are responsible
Two stars that have begun to randomly dim prompt scientists to examine if aliens are responsible
New readings from the Kepler Telescope show dimming star in Libra system
A distant star was recorded dimming 28 times in 87 days
Researchers have said dimming might be caused by 'alien megastructures'
Light from a distant star system has begun to dim, prompting some scientists to examine whether it might be a sign of alien life.
The star system in question, HD 139139, lies some 350 million light years from Earth, in the Libra constellation.
Scientists believe the system is home to a pair of stars that are bound to one another, given the joint nickname 'Random Transiter,' which have been observed frequently dimming over the last several months.
Scroll down for video
Stars that have been observed to frequently dim have been hypothetically linked to possible alien activity
The Kepler Space Telescope recorded 28 instances of random dimming over an 87-day period suggesting that something potentially interesting is happening.
There can be many different causes for stars dimming, according to a SFGate report, including debris floating in front of the star, or one of the 28 planets that orbit Random Transiter passing by.
Another possibility is that aliens have constructed some sort of technology that regularly interferes with the light emitted by the stars.
That option is perhaps the least likely, but it can't be definitely ruled out.
In 2017, scientists wondered whether the rapid dimming of Tabby's Star (pictured above) was being caused by alien megastructures
TABBY'S STAR
Tabby's Star, known officially as KIC 8462852, has baffled experts since it was discovered in 2015.
Observations revealed its light dimmed regularly, as do distant stars when their planets pass in front of them.
But while the stars of most exoplanet systems are seen to dim by a few per cent, KIC 8462852 dimmed by more than 20 per cent over periods of months.
Some have claimed this dimming could be evidence of a Dyson Sphere – a hypothetical structure which could be used by an advanced alien race to harness the energy of a star.
Scientists remain skeptical, offering that the dimming could be explained by a dust ring around the star or a hail of comets passing in between the star and Earth.
In a forthcoming paper, researchers at UC Berkeley point to all the unusual activity coming from HD 139139 as a reason to make it a focus of study.
'The mystery behind the origin of these events makes this system an interesting target for technosignature searches,' the group says in the paper, to be published in Research Notes of the American.
In the past, a number of other instances of star dimming have been linked to the potential existence of alien life.
In 2017, researchers investigated where the rapid dimming of Tabby's star might have been caused by an 'alien megastructure.'
In the end, they determined it was likely caused by microscopic fine dust that scattered the starlight.
Last year, a team of researchers from Harvard and Yale went so far as to suggest the idea of trying to dim our own home star, the sun, as a way of fighting climate change.
Using a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), researchers would deliver sulfates into the atmosphere with balloons and high altitude planes.
The sulfates would theoretically disperse the light from the sun.
The idea was strictly hypothetical, with an estimated starting cost of $3.5 billion.
As with a first encounter with alien life, scientists were unsure whether the longterm outcome would be better or worse.
A view of Tabby's Star taken from the Kepler Space Telescope
WHAT IS A DYSON SPHERE?
A suggested method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.
First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.
They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.
If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.
But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.
The Dyson Ring, left, is the simplest form of Dyson structure. Creating a Dyson bubble would be an incredible engineering challenge but it is considered to be far more feasible than surrounding a star in a rigid sphere
Somewhere in the galaxy, a white dwarf star suddenly started shining brightly. And now we understand the violent cataclysm that caused it: the star's gravitational field tore the asteroid to bits, scattering its metallic bits in a shiny halo around the star.
There's no telescope video of an asteroid shattering across space. But here's what we do know: There's a white dwarf star in our galaxy that, for years, emitted a consistent amount of mid-infrared (MIR) light. Then, in 2018, these emissions changed. Over the course of six months, the starlight from that point in space got about 10% more intense in the MIR spectrum — and that point is still getting brighter. The researchers think that's because of a newly formed cloud of metallic dust between Earth and the star, likely due to the recent breakup of the asteroid.
To an outsider, it may sound counterintuitive that a cloud of dust would make a star look brighter. But Tinggui Wang, an astronomer at the University of Science and Technology of China and lead author of a paper describing the event, said the brightening makes sense if you think about how the star and the cloud interact.
"When the debris are on our line of sight to the star, it would make the star dim," he told Live Science. "However, the [individual pieces of] debris cover only a small fraction of the sky, so the chance of being on the line of sight is small."
However, although individual pieces of debris are small and each cover only a tiny patch of sky, the whole cloud is large — much larger than the star. Under normal conditions, only photons that fly out of the star directly at Earth reach human telescopes. But the cloud changes that. Beams of light aimed in all sorts of directions strike the cloud of the debris, heating it up and causing the bits of asteroid to emit MIR light. That light reaches Earth too, even though the beams of light that caused it normally wouldn't have. The result is a bigger glowing region of the sky that our telescopes register as a spike in light, Wang said.
Imagine a faint flashlight in the distance on a clear night. If it's pointed right at you, you might notice it as a thin dot of light. But if you shine the flashlight through the billowing steam of a fog machine, there's a much bigger, bright object to catch your eye — even if the power of the light source stays the same.
Astronomers have seen clouds of debris like this before in space, said Malena Rice, an expert in the astronomy of debris disks around distant stars and doctoral student in the Yale University Department of Astronomy. And they've seen evidence of nonspherical objects, likely asteroids orbiting objects outside our solar system — possibly another white dwarf. But this may be the first time astronomers have spotted an asteroid disintegrating into a debris cloud around a star.
"This process has been theorized for over a decade," Rice, who wasn't involved in the research, told Live Science. "But we've never had a chance to study the full disruption process in action until now."
So, what could have ripped the asteroid to bits? Wang and his colleagues concluded that it was likely a gravitational effect called tidal disruption.
"A white dwarf is a very compact star," Wang said. "As such, close to the star, the gradient of the gravitational field can be very large," meaning gravity can change sharply over a short space.
Imagine you were floating in space, orbiting a star with your feet pointed toward it. The gravity on your feet would be greater than the gravity on your shoulders. If you're standing on Earth right now, you're experiencing the same effect, though the difference — the gradient — is so minimal that you don't notice it.
In the steep gravitational fields close to white dwarfs, Wang said, gradients can become so intense that they overwhelm forces holding an object together. Large asteroids are glued together with their own gravity, but that gravity isn't as strong as the gradients close to white dwarfs. When asteroids pass through those tidal regions, astronomers believe, they shatter, smearing across space as a cloud.
This is related to the reason some planets are surrounded by rings of dust, and not just moons, Rice said. The weaker tidal forces of large planets can keep the matter in their rings from clumping together into balls.
The astronomers are certain the debris wasn't from a comet in this case, Wang said, because comets move so fast that the debris would quickly leave the immediate warm neighborhood around the star and cool down. It's possible that a rocky planet blew up, he said, but the researchers believe a smaller, asteroid-sized object is more likely. (The precise distinction between a large asteroid and a small planet can be a bit vague. But when it comes to other star systems astronomers usually use "exoasteroid" to refer to smaller, jagged metal and rock objects and "exoplanet" to refer to objects large enough that their gravity has formed them into spheres.
Right now, the debris cloud is still circling the star, which goes by the name WD 0145+234. Over time, though, that cloud is likely to fall onto the stellar surface, Wang said. That infalling debris, made of metal and perhaps some warm gas, could explain how many white dwarfs end up with evidence of significant metal pollution in their starlight.
The research has not yet been peer reviewed and was published online Oct. 10 in the preprint journal arXiv.
Not long ago, we shared the news of two Romanian inventors who claim to have built a working prototype of what could be the world’s first fully functional hypersonic flying saucer. This week, military aviation site Alert-5 caused quite a buzz among UFO and aviation enthusiasts when it shared several images of a curiously shaped craft it labeled a “Chinese UFO.” The following day, state-run Chinese media outlet Global Times wrote that the attack chopper has a name: the “Super Great White Shark.”
Cutaway schematic of the 'Super Great White Shark' found on Chinese internet
Described as a “sci-fi like aircraft “ by Chinese media, designers say the Super Great White Shark’s “high-speed and stealth capabilities could give the weapon an edge on the battlefield.” But aerospace engineers and aviation historians say that the aircraft’s design isn’t new, and that it’s unlikely it’ll ever actually get very far off the ground.
Making its big debut at last week’s China Helicopter Exposition in Tianjin, a nearby information placard described the rotorcraft as an “armed helicopter” featuring “a composite wing-body fusion high-speed helicopter configuration designed for the future digital information battlefield.” Also dubbed “Super Jaws” by Chinese media, designers say the craft “refers to the international excellent and mature helicopter design technologies” and specifically names the US’s AH-64 Apache and CH-53 Sea Stallion, along with Russia’s Ka-52 and Mi-26. It’s unknown how these other traditional rotorwing designs compare with the “The Great White Shark,” As two of the listed models are attack helicopters, and the others are heavy transport aircraft.
English translations from an accompanying schematic say the"Super Great White Shark" will capable of traveling a little over 400 mph with a maximum ceiling of almost 20,000 feet. The concept rotorcraft has “two turbojet engines that could provide huge horizontal thrust for high speed movement”and the “fuselage is coated with stealth materials,” claims Chinese media
While designers describe the craft as making use of “internationally popular wing-body fusion design’ to create “a new type of high-speed helicopter,” at present, the Super Great White Shark doesn’t appear to show many differences from ducted-fan aircraft designs attempted and later abandoned by the United States military over 60 years ago.
SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF THE CRAFT
Using the same general concept to achieve lift and thrust as conventional rotor based aircraft, instead of mounting propellers on the outside, ducted-fan vehicles contain internal propellers within a larger housing. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Army and NASA experimented with several aircraft with ducted-fan based propulsion systems. It was relatively quickly determined that, in comparison to conventional airplanes and helicopters, there were no real advantages to a ducted-fan based aircraft.
Notably, the Super Great White Shark bears a striking resemblance to the U.S. Air Force, and later Army’s, most famous attempt at creating a saucer-shaped aircraft and the Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar. Not technically based on ducted-fan propulsion, the Avrocar attempted to use the so-called Coanda effect by using three jet blowing exhausts through the craft’s circular rim to achieve lift and thrust. When initial Air Force visions of a Mach 3.5 fighter called the “Y-2” were deemed dangerously unrealistic, the Army envisioned a tempered version of the flying saucer design—the Avrocar—as being a single replacement for both the jeep and helicopter. After three years of development, the Avrocar program was cancelled, with the saucer shaped craft never traveling more than 35mph and 3 feet off the ground.
THE AVROCAR.
IMAGE: US AIR FORCE NATIONAL MUSEUM
Even with one of the more recent promising flying saucer designs, the All Directions Flying Object or ADIFO, designers admit their novel approach of using vectored jet-propulsion is merely a prototype and presently is little more than a remote control drone.
Admittedly still a prototype itself, China hasn’t explained exactly how Super Great White Shark will succeed where all others have failed.
Nevertheless, developers say it will be ready to take its maiden flight at the 2020 Airshow China, in the South China Guangdong Province town of Zhuhai.
ALIENS BESPIONEREN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF QUASI-SATELLIETEN
ALIENS BESPIONEREN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF QUASI-SATELLIETEN
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Als aliens ons hebben opgemerkt en net zo nieuwsgierig zijn als wij, lijkt het niet ondenkbaar dat ze ons vanaf ruimtestenen nabij de aarde begluren.
Met dat idee komt de Amerikaanse wetenschapper James Benford op de proppen. In een paper – verschenen in het blad The Astronomical Journal – pleit hij er dan ook voor om de zoektocht naar aliens wat dichter bij huis te beginnen en ook deze nabije ruimtestenen af te speuren naar tekenen van buitenaards leven.
Quasi-satellieten Het idee dat aliens ons begluren, is niet nieuw. Al in de jaren zestig opperden onderzoekers dat geavanceerde buitenaardse beschavingen wel eens kunstmatig intelligente spionageapparatuur konden inzetten op of nabij bewoonde werelden om zo de ontwikkeling op die werelden te kunnen volgen. En ook in sciencefiction komen we dergelijke buitenaardse gluurders wel tegen. Tot op heden is er echter nog niet actief naar deze gluurders gezocht. En Benford stelt dat daar verandering in moet komen. Hij wijst erop dat nabij de aarde verschillende ruimtestenen te vinden zijn die perfect zicht bieden op onze planeet en dus uitermate geschikt zijn als uitkijkplaats voor aliens. Hij denkt dan met name aan quasi-satellieten (zie kader). Dit zijn geen echte satellieten, maar natuurlijke objecten die net zoveel tijd nodig hebben om een rondje rond de zon te voltooien als onze planeet. “Het betekent dat het object gedurende heel wat omloopbanen dicht bij de planeet blijft,” zo schrijft Benford. “Deze objecten nabij de aarde zijn de ideale plek om onze wereld vanaf een veilig, natuurlijk object te bekijken.”
Aardse quasi-satellieten
De aarde heeft meerdere quasi-satellieten. Voorbeelden zijn Cruithne – ongeveer 2 kilometer groot en nadert de aarde tot een afstand van 12 miljoen kilometer – en Kamo’oalewa – met een diameter van 40 tot 100 meter de kleinste, maar ook de dichtstbijzijnde en meest stabiele quasi-satelliet van de aarde die ons bekend is. De meeste quasi-satellieten vergezellen de aarde maar tijdelijk. Tijdelijk is in dit geval echter een vrij ruim begrip. Zelfs de quasi-satelliet met de meest onstabiele baan trekt bijna 1000 jaar met de aarde op. En de meeste quasi-satellieten doen dat dus nog veel langer; soms wel duizenden of zelfs honderdduizend jaar. Aangezien de meeste quasi-satellieten pas vrij recent zijn gevonden, is de verwachting dat er nog meer op ontdekking wachten.
Benford verwacht niet direct daadwerkelijk aliens op deze ruimtestenen aan te treffen. Hij acht het aannemelijker dat er buitenaardse robotische spionageapparatuur te vinden is. Deze apparatuur kan daar heel lang geleden reeds door aliens zijn geplaatst. “Als de apparatuur een goede energiebron heeft en en in staat is om zichzelf te repareren, dan kan deze over heel lange tijdschalen informatie verzamelen en terugsturen naar waar deze vandaan komt.”
Detecteren In principe zou het mogelijk moeten zijn om deze robotische ‘lurkers’ – zoals Benford ze noemt – te detecteren. Bijvoorbeeld door de quasi-satellieten met behulp van radio- en optische telescopen te bestuderen. De robotische apparatuur zou zich al prijs kunnen geven doordat deze zonlicht op een aparte manier reflecteert. Ook zouden we actief op zoek kunnen gaan naar signalen die deze ‘lurkers’ naar hun thuiswereld versturen. Een andere mogelijkheid is dat we zelf – op goed geluk – een signaal naar deze quasi-satellieten sturen, in de hoop dat de robotische sondes die aliens daar wellicht hebben geplaatst, reageren. We kunnen ook nog een stap verder gaan en zelf sondes of zelfs een bemande missie naar een quasi-satelliet sturen en zo ter plekken op jacht gaan naar sporen van buitenaards leven. Benford wijst er in het kader hiervan op dat bijvoorbeeld de quasi-satelliet 2016 HO3 binnen bereik ligt. “Misschien (…) luisteren de (buitenaardse, red.) sondes wel op ons en wachten ze tot we ze gevonden hebben.”
Dichtbij huis Als we de plannen van Benford tot uitvoer zouden brengen, zou de zoektocht naar aliens zich een stuk dichter naar de aarde verplaatsen. “Een goede reden om dichter bij de aarde te kijken, is dat we in de rest van het zonnestelsel niets gezien hebben,” stelt Benford. “En we hebben ook niets zien communiceren vanaf nabijgelegen sterren.” Bijna haastig voegt hij daaraan toe dat de schijnbare afwezigheid van aliens in en in de directe nabijheid van ons zonnestelsel niet tegen de aanwezigheid van buitenaardse spionageapparatuur op nabijgelegen ruimtestenen pleit. “(Buitenaardse, red.) beschavingen hoeven zich niet dicht bij het zonnestelsel te bevinden om ergens in de laatste eeuwen een sonde naar ons toe te kunnen hebben gestuurd. Stel je voor dat een sonde met een snelheid van een tiende van het licht gelanceerd wordt – iets wat conceptueel zeker mogelijk is, bijvoorbeeld met behulp van lichtzeilen of kernfusie-raketten – dan zou zo’n sonde ons vanaf 30 lichtjaar afstand binnen ongeveer 300 jaar kunnen bereiken. Binnen een straal van zo’n 100 lichtjaar bevinden zich zo’n 3000 Hoofdreekssterren (waartoe ook de zon wordt gerekend, red.), dus genoeg mogelijkheden voor buitenaardse beschavingen.”
Maar misschien wel het meest sterke argument voor het zoeken naar sporen van buitenaards leven op quasi-satellieten is dat we eigenlijk niets te verliezen hebben. “We zouden pas ontdekte objecten bestuderen die heel interessant zijn voor de astronomie en waar nog niemand echt naar gekeken heeft en waar we bijna niets van weten.” Kortom: zelfs als er geen spionage-apparatuur op de quasi-satellieten rust, kan de zoektocht ernaar van grote waarde blijken voor de astronomie. En mochten er wél ‘lurkers’ op quasi-satellieten worden aangetroffen, dan kunnen deze ons niet alleen meer vertellen over een tot op heden onbekende buitenaardse beschaving, maar ook veel meer onthullen over onszelf. Want stel je eens voor dat zo’n ‘lurker’ onze planeet al duizenden jaren observeert en al die informatie tevens lokaal heeft opgeslagen. Dan kan deze ons ook veel meer vertellen over onze eigen geschiedenis. “Zo verkennen we met het bestuderen van objecten nabij de aarde mogelijk zowel ruimte als tijd,” aldus Benford.
A new and very mysterious organism has found a new home in a large tank at the Paris Zoological Park. Nicknamed the “blob” after a 1958 horror movie, its official scientific name is Physarum polycephalum or “many-headed slime”. The yellow-colored slime is a unicellular living being that looks similar to a fungus but reacts like an animal.
This organism has been on Earth for approximately 500 million years longer than humans and has many mysterious features like the fact that it has almost 720 genders. Another amazing feature is that after being cut in half, it can heal itself in just two minutes. Additionally, it has no eyes, no mouth, and no stomach; however, it knows how to detect food and can digest it. It can also procreate on its own.
The organism’s scientific name translates to “many-headed slime”.
Although it appears to stay in one spot, it does move approximately one centimeter (or 0.4 inches) every hour looking for prey (mushroom spores, bacteria, and more microbes). The organism is normally found on leaves that are decaying, as well as tree trunks in the woods where the air is cool and moist.
Bruno David, who is the director of the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, stated, “The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,” adding, “It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other.”
Researchers conducted an experiment in 2016 that found the mold could in fact learn things. They taught the mold to move across a bridge that had been lined with salt. Prior to this experiment, the mold wouldn’t go near salt. What’s even more incredible is that when they put the mold together with another mold that was not taught to cross the bridge, the first organism passed on what it learned to the other. Scientists believe that a type of “vein” that is created when the two organisms combine together is what allows the first mold to pass on its knowledge to the other one.
The blob can learn things and pass its knowledge on to other organisms.
Another incredible fact about the blob is that it’s extremely hard to kill. When it feels as if it’s in danger, it dries itself out in a type of hibernation and after receiving just a few drops of water, it immediately comes back to life. And it can grow to incredible sizes, as one lab grew a blob that was 33 feet in width.
“The blob is really one of the most extraordinary things that live on Earth today,” expressed David, who went on to say, “It has been here for millions of years, and we still do not really know what it is. We don’t really know if it’s an animal, if it’s a fungus or if it’s something between the two.” (A picture of the “blob” can be seen here.)
David Bowie sang about it. Ray Bradbury wrote about it. Elon Musk dreams about it being him. The possibility of life existing on Mars has intrigued humans ever since the red dot in the sky was called a planet and given a name. But no one – that includes robotic rovers – has ever proven without a doubt that there is life on Mars. Now, an ex-NASA scientist who worked on the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions to the Red Planet in the mid 1970s is claiming that life – or something that looked an awful lot like it – was discovered by the Viking landers but NASA dismissed all of the positive signs when it couldn’t duplicate them in an Earth laboratory. Now he wants the agency to send life detection equipment to Mars again. Wait a minute … you mean in 43 years NASA has NEVER sent life-detection instruments back to Mars? Is this a cover-up?
“NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results.”
In an article published in Scientific American, Gilbert V. Levin — an engineer and inventor and the principal investigator for the Labeled Release life detection experiment on NASA’s Viking missions to Mars – claims that what the landers found in two locations 4,000 miles apart couldn’t be anything BUT life forms, yet NASA pays lip service to a life-detection mission but has no plans for one, even after the Curiosity rover last year found organic matter in 3-billion-year-old mudstone and recently found evidence of salty lakes where organisms could live. Levin explains his frustration.
“Life on Mars seemed a long shot. On the other hand, it would take a near miracle for Mars to be sterile. NASA scientist Chris McKay once said that Mars and Earth have been “swapping spit” for billions of years, meaning that, when either planet is hit by comets or large meteorites, some ejecta shoot into space. A tiny fraction of this material eventually lands on the other planet, perhaps infecting it with microbiological hitch-hikers. That some Earth microbial species could survive the Martian environment has been demonstrated in many laboratories. There are even reports of the survival of microorganisms exposed to naked space outside the International Space Station (ISS).”
Swapping spit? That gives me an idea!
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in many scientific writings, Gilbert V. Levin has presented evidence which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Viking LR experiments detected living organisms metabolizing in a solution known to reliably detect life. Furthermore, subsequent missions have found methane, surface water, formaldehyde, ammonia and other substances needed for life as well as physical formations that indicate life. In fact, as he states in his article:
“No factor inimical to life has been found on Mars.” (Inimical: hostile or adverse.)
In conclusion, Gilbert V. Levin sees no other way to rule but:
“… the Viking LR did find life.”
Is he right? Why has NASA continued to look on Mars for evidence of past life, but not present life? The instruments are available and ready to go. What are they waiting for?
Even if Martians are just Earth spit, we have a right to know.
These two UFOs disguised as clouds were seen over Iceland this week. The closest UFO...which is egg shaped is hovering over some old houses. This makes me highly suspicious that the UFOs are scanning the inhabitants in order to learn more about human activity. They may even be abducting some people and then returning them all in a few minutes whiteout them ever knowing it happened. Although such a phenomenon is known as "missing time," it can happen so fast that no such time is missing at all. The chances that the egg shaped craft is abducting someone is extraordinarily high. I made one photo into a negative format above in order to see more detail of the UFOs. Scott C. Waring
UFO Recorded On Video By Drone Over Argentina! UFO Sighting News.
UFO Recorded On Video By Drone Over Argentina! UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighing: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Location of sighting: Oct 12, 2019
This UFO was caught by a high tech drone this week. As the drone is panning out, turning ever so slowly, an unknown object shoots past at incredible speed from the horizon and heading directly toward the drone, passing it in seconds. Alien drones are known for investigating planes and drones...probably to learn about the latest technology and software in it so that they can better asses human technological abilities.
Bright UFO speeds up, slows down, changes direction caught on camera over Russia
Bright UFO speeds +up, slows down, changes direction caught on camera over Russia
Thanks to Scott Waring - ET Data Base who states: This UFO was caught over Russia last week. The eyewitness mistakenly identified it as ball lightning. However ball lightning is not this big, nor can it change speeds like this does.
Also this UFO seems to change speed as it gets closer to the eyewitness. The UFO speeds up, slows down dramatically, then speeds up again. Only an intelligently controlled device could have some control over its speed.
This is also not a plane because it has no wings, and its speed is too fast. This can't be a meteor because its not being pulled down by gravity, but flying horizontal across the sky.
De stad waar ik vandaan kom is Brits ‘Area 51’. Beroemde acteur doet boekje open over buitenaardse hotspot
De Welshe acteur Michael Sheen heeft gezegd dat de stad waar hij is opgegroeid, Port Talbot, de Britse variant van Area 51 is. Hij heeft daar naar eigen zeggen UFO’s waargenomen.
De beroemde acteur suggereerde dat de stad mogelijk een hotspot is voor buitenaards leven.
“Mijn vorige buurvrouw, een zeer gerespecteerde dame, zei tegen ons dat ze op een ochtend in de keuken stond en koffie aan het maken was, toen er opeens een vliegende schotel in haar achtertuin verscheen,” vervolgde hij.
“Je zou denken dat dat onzin is, maar het was een hele serieuze dame,” klonk het.
Sheen zegt zelf ook vreemde dingen te hebben meegemaakt.
Formatie
“Op een dag kwam ik thuis en zag ik een formatie lichten in de lucht,” zei hij. “Ik dacht bij mezelf dat het een soort vreemde reflectie was.”
“Ze gingen richting de zee en verdwenen vervolgens,” aldus Sheen.
Vader
Hij zei verder dat zijn vader ongeveer vijf jaar geleden een object in de lucht zag waar allerlei lichten omheen draaiden.
“Het bleef heel lang hangen en schoot vervolgens weg,” zei de acteur.
Fingerprints of Earth's Original Building Blocks Discovered in Diamond-Bearing Rocks
Fingerprints of Earth's Original Building Blocks Discovered in Diamond-Bearing Rocks
Primordial chemical signatures discovered in modern kimberlites trace back 2 billion years.
U of A geochemist Graham Pearson was part of an international research team that analyzed modern rock formed from magma and discovered chemical clues to how Earth formed.
Credit: John Ulan
Scientists have detected primordial chemical signatures preserved within modern kimberlites, according to new research by a multi-national team involving a University of Alberta scientist. The results provide critical insight for understanding the formation of Earth.
“Knowing the chemical signature of Earth’s original building blocks is the holy grail of geochemistry,” said Graham Pearson, author on the study. “This knowledge can help us understand the formation of the planets in the solar system as well as their relationship to each other.”
Kimberlite sample from the Cumberland Peninsula on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada.
The research team analyzed kimberlites–a type of rock formed by cooling magma that sometimes carries diamonds–from around the world, including many from Canada.
“We found that kimberlites’ chemical signatures are remarkably uniform and very like the chondritic building blocks thought to have formed the Earth 4.55 billion years ago,” added Pearson, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Henry Marshall Tory Chair, and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate. “We think this is the cleanest signal of this primordial signature found in any group of rocks on Earth.”
The interior of our planet is constantly cycling, as minerals at Earth’s surface are continually returned to great depths through movement of the tectonic plates. “This mixing makes it very difficult to detect the starting ingredients–a bit like trying to detect the brand of flour that was used by tasting an over-cooked cake,” explain
ed Pearson. “The final twist is that in the last 200 million years, these signatures became more scarce, likely due to events associated with the breakup of the supercontinent, Pangaea.”
The discovery of these ancient, primordial signatures suggest that reflect the melting of deep, isolated regions of pristine material within the Earth that have remained untouched by billions of years of tectonic plate recycling–revealing a glimpse of the holy grail that will shed new light on how Earth, and planets like it, formed.
Contacts and sources:
Katie Willis
University of Alberta
Citation:
“Kimberlites reveal 2.5-billion-year evolution of a deep, isolated mantle reservoir,” was published in Nature (doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1574-8).
For many months now, an incident involving pilots who attempted to intercept a strange, oblong-shaped white aircraft while part of a training mission with the U.S.S. Nimitz carrier group in 2004 has been at the center of the modern UFO discussion. The incident has received even more attention in recent weeks, following an appearance by Commander Dave Fravor, one of the principal witnesses, on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
No one who takes the UFO subject seriously would dispute that the incident is noteworthy. However, many with long-held interests in the subject will also recognize that it is only one of many similar instances where such an object has been observed. In fact, some accounts from the historic record detail sightings of remarkably similar things dating at least as far back as the 1940s.
Loren Gross was among the handful of historically-minded UFO chroniclers who, for many decades, collected and self-published annual UFO commentaries. Beginning in the late 19th century with the famous reports of “mystery airships” and proceeding up until around 1960, Gross’s historical record-keeping on the UFO topic had been noteworthy for its lack of sensational details (unlike the majority of the UFO writing of both then, and now).
One unique report from the early days of UFOs (that is, prior to Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting) occurred in September 1944, near Oak Ridge, Tennessee; a site that would be notable for other UFO sightings over the years, which some commentators find unsurprising due to the area’s proximity to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(Public Domain).
The report states that at about dusk on a September evening in 1944, a witness identified only as “Mr. Nelson,” who had been “in the company of two other Oak Ridge workers, A.C. Butler and Albert Profitt, were driving from Oliver Springs into Oak Ridge,” the report states. As the drivers reached a point about two miles outside of Oliver, they said: “a strange object showed up about 50 feet in front of the car ended about the height of the windshield.”
The report says that Nelson, the primary observer, described it as “glossy white in color, and the reflected light had a dimension of about 30 feet long and 4 feet wide.”
“When Nelson eased the car up to the object, it moved slowly away, and when he stopped the car, it also stopped. Nelson claims that he called people out from a house to the roadside to see what they were observing and they were as dumbfounded at the site as the three men were.”
This unusual cat-and-mouse game between the drivers and the strange object continued for several minutes, as Mr. Nelson moved the vehicle back and forth toward the object, watching as it appeared to mimic their movements, moving away as they approached, or following when they backed away.
“Finally, after Nelson had moved forward and stop again several times, the light rose high into the air and disappeared over Black Oak Ridge,” the report states.
Afterward, the incident was reported to several local authorities, along with the FBI’s Knoxville Field Office. According to Mr. Nelson (who had presumably been the one who made the report to the Bureau), “Nelson said that at first the FBI was very interested in the report but then they seemed to lose interest in it completely. He assumed that they found out that the object was some sort of secret weapon being developed at Oak Ridge and so it was no longer of any interest to them.” Whether or not this had actually been the reason for the FBI’s waning attention or not remains unclear.
Certain aspects of the craft observed–particularly the glossy white color and the oblong shape–are notable for their similarity to the now-famous “tictac” UFO observed during the equally well known U.S.S. Nimitz UFO incident of 2004 (Commander Dave Fravor, one of the witnesses to this incident, can be heard describing the object in his interview with Joe Rogan here).
Whether or not this truly indicates any continuity between the two object sightings, observed more than half a century apart, can’t be determined from their descriptions alone. The descriptions of their appearance could very likely be superficial, and the possibility that either or both cases might have been experimental aircraft tests cannot be ruled out.
However, it does appear to show that certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon–whatever it ultimately represents–that have been widely discussed in recent months are not particularly new… although that certainly isn’t news to the many of us who have studied this subject for years, if not decades.
It was on December 2, 1952 that the CIA’s Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell stated the following to agency personnel: “Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.” Chadwell did more than that; he prepared the following guidelines for the National Security Council: “The Director of Central Intelligence shall formulate and carry out a program of intelligence and research activities as required to solve the problem of instant positive identification of unidentified flying objects. Upon call of the Director of Central Intelligence, Government departments and agencies shall provide assistance in this program of intelligence and research to the extent of their capacity provided, however, that the DCI shall avoid duplication of activities presently directed toward the solution of this problem. This effort shall be coordinated with the military services and the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense, with the Psychological Board and other Governmental agencies as appropriate. The Director of Central Intelligence shall disseminate information concerning the program of intelligence and research activities in this field to the various departments and agencies which have authorized interest therein.”
Two days later, the Intelligence Advisory Committee agreed with Chadwell’s plans and made a recommendation that “the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence in the light of pertinent scientific theories” should be employed. It was as a direct outcome of this development that what became known as the Robertson Panel was created; a group headed by Howard Percy Robertson, who was a highly respected consultant to the Agency. He was also a noted physicist, and the director of the Defense Department Weapons Evaluation Group. It was Chadwell’s job to select a group of individuals who were deemed to be the right people to tackle the UFO problem – which included anxieties concerning Russian propaganda. The group included Luis Alvarez, physicist, radar expert (and later, a Nobel Prize recipient); Frederick C. Durant, CIA officer, secretary to the panel and missile expert; Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, Brookhaven National Laboratories nuclear physicist; and Thornton Page, astrophysicist, radar expert, and deputy director of Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office. In rapid time they plunged into the heart of the mystery.
There have been longstanding rumors in the field of Ufology that the CIA knows all about the truth of the UFO enigma, of the Roswell incident of 1947, and of what really goes down at Area 51. The Robertson Panel’s conclusions, however, suggested that UFOs did not have a direct, significant impact on the United States’ national security. Rather, the major worry of the panel was how the public mindset could, in theory, be affected by bogus tales of UFO encounters – and created and weaved by the Reds. On this very matter, the Robertson Panel recorded these words: “Although evidence of any direct threat from these sightings was wholly lacking, related dangers might well exist resulting from: A. Misidentification of actual enemy artifacts by defense personnel. B. Overloading of emergency reporting channels with ‘false’ information. C. Subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare [italics mine].”
Clearly, when it came to UFOs, it was those matters concerning “mass hysteria” and “false information” that dominated the thinking of the Robertson Panel. The possible presence of real aliens in the United States seemed to be very much in the background for the CIA. There was also a recommendation that a number of the public UFO investigative groups which existed in the United States at the time should be “watched” carefully due to “the apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes.” For the CIA, “subversive purposes” meant the actions of the Soviets, or, worse, of home-grown-and-groomed communists. Maybe, both. It’s entirely possible that at least some reports of fear-filled encounters with the so-called “Men in Black” in that era may have been provoked by such surveillance. Particularly so if UFO researchers were threatened by fedora-sporting and trench-coat-wearing government agents late at night – which typifies the appearances and actions of the MIB.
Weird pyramid-shaped alien object spotted in the sky above Munich, Germany
Weird pyramid-shaped alien object spotted in the sky above Munich, Germany
New video from Mrmb333 shows a strange blinking and flashing object in the sky that de-cloaks itself into a v-shaped craft.
Besides the strange v-shaped craft the video shows unnatural sky phenomena where a pyramid-shaped object in the sky above Munich in Germany is the most striking phenomenon which cannot be easily explained.
Could it be that it a hologram projected from another dimension or this pyramid-shaped object, wherein the outlines of the pyramid are clearly recognizable, is an alien space ship like a Vimāna as described in Hindu texts and Sanskrit epics?
Mysterious Flashing Lights in Ayrshire Skyline Spook Glasgow Couple
Mysterious Flashing Lights in Ayrshire Skyline Spook Glasgow Couple
Adam Devlin and Maxine Steel spotted the bright white lights spinning in the clouds while traveling on the A77 near Galston at around 9 pm.
The Ayrshire couple were left baffled after seeing the strange lights. Adam,29, said they had no idea as to what it was. He added that it was one of the most unusual things he had ever seen.
The mysterious lights totally freaked them out, according to Adam. He was confident it wasn’t a helicopter or a plane. He thought it could have been a UFO.
Now residents in Glasgow, the couple were driving down visiting family when the strange lights caught their attention reflecting on their windscreen. At first, Adam did not think anything of it, but then they stopped the car, and there was nothing else around. They heard no sound from the lights.
Adam said the lights were up in the clouds spinning around in a circular motion. Maxine added that they were freaking out, and they did not and still don’t have a clue about the unusual lights.
Aliens or Something Else - Whatever They Are They Are Coming to Earth
Aliens or Something Else - Whatever They Are They Are Coming to Earth
This is a terrific interview that covers everything from close encounters to strange beings. It avoids the temptation to endorse any hypothesis regarding the nature and origin of extraterrestrials, focusing instead on interactions between humans and an unknown reality with which we are not prepared to cope. Philip Mantle, a seasoned and respected UFO investigator has drawn on his extensive real world UFO research experience to bring us this amazing insight.
The U.S. Army and a prominent UFO research group are teaming up to investigate mysterious technology, but won’t come out and say where the tech comes from.
To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, the organization led by former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, will work with the Army to “characterize” technology under the organization’s control, and then use the tech to improve military vehicles. We have a lot of questions about this bizarre partnership, starting with the most important: Where did the technology come from?
To The Stars, which released the infamous Navy-confirmed UFO videos, made the announcement today on its website, saying it has entered into a “Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to advance TTSA’s materiel and technology innovations in order to develop enhanced capabilities for Army ground vehicles.”
CRADAs are a form of joint research agreement between an agency of the federal government and research organizations, particularly academia, in which the feds provide “laboratories ... personnel, facilities, equipment or other resources with or without reimbursement.”
According to multiple definitions of CRADAs on federal websites, the transfer of federal funding is prohibited.
TTSA describes its contribution to the agreement as “technology solutions” that include “material science, space-time metric engineering, quantum physics, beamed energy propulsion, and active camouflage.”
In 1966, a 13-year-old boy was walking his dog and reportedly took this photo of a flying saucer in Wall Township, New Jersey. He showed it to the Army, but no comment was made by the military.
BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES
The Army will provide “laboratories, expertise, support, and resources to help characterize the technologies and its applications.”
“Our partnership with TTSA serves as an exciting, non-traditional source for novel materials and transformational technologies to enhance our military ground system capabilities,” said Dr. Joseph Cannon of Army Futures Command in the press release. “At the Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center, we look forward to this partnership and the potential technical innovations forthcoming.”
Where did TTSA’s impressive list of technology come from? The implicit answer is: UFOs, also known as Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).
UFO/UAP traditionally means anything we spot in the sky that's unusual. But here's the thing: Swamp gas and Venus sightings don't leave behind technology that's so advanced, it needs to be "characterized" by the federal government.
Whatever this technology is, and even To The Stars apparently isn't quite sure, it comes from what we commonly call flying saucers.
According to The New York Times, the Pentagon spent $22 million between 2008 and 2011 on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an organization tasked with looking into UFOs. The program reportedly stored “metal alloys and other materials" that Luis Elizondo, then the director of the AATIP and now the director of global security and special programs at To The Stars, said had been "recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena."
In July, we reported that TTSA acquired “several pieces of metamaterials” sourced from “an advanced aerospace vehicle of unknown origin.” The organization claims it can track ownership of the materials all the way back to the mid-1990s. Exactly where the materials came from is anyone's guess.
Lights in the morning sky over Coast Guard Air Station Salem, Salem, Massachusetts, July 16, 1952. The lights, speculated to be UFOs, were photographed by US Coast Guardsman Shell R. Alpert and witnessed by fellow Coast Guardsman Thomas E. Flaherty.
TIME LIFE PICTURESGETTY IMAGES
It’s hard to know what to make of all this. The Army obviously thinks there's something worth sticking its reputation out for, but there isn't any evidence available to the public to justify its association with a UFO research group.
Funding research into UFOs is one thing, and the U.S. government has done it multiple times over the past 70 years. Expecting actual technology samples from UFOs is another thing. Agreeing to do research and development work on them is something else entirely.
If—and it’s a big if—this technology could be ported over to the military, could it give U.S. troops an advantage on the battlefield? Yes, although at best, that advantage might be no better than giving a caveman’s spear a titanium shaft.
At worst, the technology could prove unreplicable by our modern standards. If you went back in time and gave Benjamin Franklin an iPhone, he would certainly find it fascinating, but be completely unable to duplicate it—and that’s with a time difference of just over 200 years. UFOs, if they are indeed from another world, could be thousands of years ahead of us.
Could To The Stars technology list benefit the Army? Theoretically, yes. “Material science” could lead to tougher, lighter materials able to better resist enemy fire. “Beamed energy propulsion,” which sounds like the use of microwaves or lasers to transfer energy, could enable drones to fly longer. “Active camouflage” sounds like a mimetic camouflage system such as that used by squid or even the Predator.
But does TTAS actually have this technology? Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
Michael Sheen claims Port Talbot is a 'hub' for extraterrestrial life after spotting UFOs flying in the Welsh town.
The actor, 50, grew up in the Welsh community before finding fame in films including The Damned United, The Queen and Frost/Nixon.
Speaking on Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre podcast today, Sheen said his hometown was a 'stop-off' for alien life, like the 'Little Chef of the galaxy'.
Michael Sheen joked Port Talbot was a 'hub' for extraterrestrial life after spotting UFOs flying in the Welsh town
Port Talbot: The Welsh town is the epicentre of UFO activity in the UK according to the Hollywood star
Herring described Sheen as 'the fantastic UFOologist' as he joked about his extraterrestrial experiences growing up.
Sheen said: 'I think Port Talbot, where I come from, is on some weird alien map. It's like some sort of stop off, it's like a lay-by. It's like the Little Chef of the Galaxy.
'The lady who lived next door - who was a very respectable lady and someone who wouldn't make up stories - told us that one morning she was in the kitchen which overlooked the back garden.
'She said she was standing there making a coffee and a flying saucer came down and hovered over her back garden and then went.
'Of course, you think that's nonsense but she was a very serious lady.'
Sheen continued by saying both he and his father had had similar close encounters.
He said: 'One day I was coming home from school. I got off the school bus and I was walking up my street.
'I was just about to turn up the path to my house and coming round the mountain [near his house] was a formation of lights.
'I stood there looking at it thinking, 'this is going to be some sort of weird reflection'.
'There was a formation of some things coming round and going out across the sea then disappearing.'
Sheen said of Port Talbot (pictured): 'It's like some sort of stop off, it's like a lay-by. It's like the Little Chef of the Galaxy'
He continued: 'And then years later on New Year's Eve - not that long ago, about five years ago - my dad, who had not had a drink that night, went up to bed.
'He said he saw a light in the sky. My dad is a character but is not someone who would make this up.
'He said he saw a thing in the sky with lights going around it - it was there for ages then it shot off.
'I think Port Talbot is some kind of hub.'
Host Richard Herring then quipped: 'People in Port Talbot maybe haven't seen a helicopter before - could it be that?
To which Sheen replied: 'That is entirely possible.'
Port Talbot is located seven miles to the east of Swansea and has a population of around 37,000.
Space Mysteries: If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, how can a star be more than 14 billion years old?
This Digitized Sky Survey image shows the oldest star with a well-determined age in our galaxy. Called the Methuselah star, HD 140283 is 190.1 light-years away. Astronomers refined the star's age to about 14.3 billion years (which is older than the universe), plus or minus 800 million years. Image released March 7, 2013.
For more than 100 years, astronomers have been observing a curious star located some 190 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. It rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). But more interesting than that, HD 140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — is also one of the universe's oldest known stars.
In 2000, scientists sought to date the star using observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, which estimated an age of 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather mind-blowing and also pretty baffling. As astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University pointed out, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background — is 13.8 billion years old. "It was a serious discrepancy," he said.
Taken at face value, the star's predicted age raised a major problem. How could a star be older than the universe? Or, conversely, how could the universe be younger? It was certainly clear that Methuselah — named in reference to a biblical patriarch who is said to have died aged 969, making him the longest lived of all the figures in the Bible — was old, since the metal-poor subgiant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.
But more than two billion years older than its environment? Surely that is just not possible.
Taking a closer look at the age of Methuselah
Bond and his colleagues set themselves to the task of figuring out whether or not that initial figure of 16 billion was accurate. They pored over 11 sets of observations that had been recorded between 2003 and 2011 by the Fine Guidance Sensors of the Hubble Space Telescope, which make a note of the positions, distances and energy output of stars. In acquiring parallax, spectroscopy and photometry measurements, a better sense of age could be determined.
"One of the uncertainties with the age of HD 140283 was the precise distance of the star," Bond told All About Space. "It was important to get this right because we can better determine its luminosity, and from that its age — the brighter the intrinsic luminosity, the younger the star. We were looking for the parallax effect, which meant we were viewing the star six months apart to look for the shift in its position due to the orbital motion of the Earth, which tells us the distance."
There were also uncertainties in the theoretical modelling of the stars, such as the exact rates of nuclear reactions in the core and the importance of elements diffusing downwards in the outer layers, he said. They worked on the idea that leftover helium diffuses deeper into the core, leaving less hydrogen to burn via nuclear fusion. With fuel used faster, the age is lowered.
This is a backyard view of the sky surrounding the ancient Methuselah star, cataloged as HD 140283. Image released March 7, 2013.
(Image credit: A. Fujii and Z. Levay (STScI))
"Another factor that was important was, of all things, the amount of oxygen in the star," Bond said. HD 140283 had a higher than predicted oxygen-to-iron ratio and, since oxygen was not abundant in the universe for a few million years, it pointed again to a lower age for the star.
Bond and his collaborators estimated HD 140283's age to be 14.46 billion years — a significant reduction on the 16 billion previously claimed. That was, however, still more than the age of the universe itself, but the scientists posed a residual uncertainty of 800 million years, which Bond said made the star's age compatible with the age of the universe, even though it wasn't entirely perfect.
"Like all measured estimates, it is subject to both random and systematic error," said physicist Robert Matthews of Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who was not involved in the study. "The overlap in the error bars gives some indication of the probability of a clash with cosmological age determinations," Matthews said. "In other words, the best supported age of the star is in conflict with that for the derived age of the universe [as determined by the cosmic microwave background], and the conflict can only be resolved by pushing the error bars to their extreme limits."
Further refinements saw the age of HD 140283 fall a bit more. A 2014 follow-up study updated the star's age to 14.27 billion years. "The conclusion reached was that the age is about 14 billion years and, again, if one includes all sources of uncertainty — both in the observational measurements and the theoretical modelling — the error is about 700 or 800 million years, so there is no conflict because 13.8 billion years lies within the star's error bar," Bond said.
This graphic shows a timeline of the universe based on the Big Bang theory and inflation models.
(Image credit: NASA/WMAP)
Taking a closer look at the age of the universe
For Bond, the similarities between the age of the universe and that of this old nearby star — both of which have been determined by different methods of analysis — is "an amazing scientific achievement which provides very strong evidence for the Big Bang picture of the universe". He said the problem with the age of the oldest stars is far less severe than it was in the 1990s when the stellar ages were approaching 18 billion years or, in one case, 20 billion years. "With the uncertainties of the determinations, the ages are now agreeing," Bond said.
Yet Matthews believes the problem has not yet been resolved. Astronomers at an international conference of top cosmologists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in July 2019 were puzzling over studies that suggested different ages for the universe. They were looking at measurements of galaxies that are relatively nearby which suggest the universe is younger by hundreds of millions of years compared to the age determined by the cosmic microwave background.
In fact, far from being 13.8 billion years old, as estimated by the European Planck space telescope's detailed measurements of cosmic radiation in 2013, the universe may be as young as 11.4 billion years. One of those behind the studies is Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
The conclusions are based on the idea of an expanding universe, as shown in 1929 by Edwin Hubble. This is fundamental to the Big Bang — the understanding that there was once a state of hot denseness that exploded out, stretching space. It indicates a starting point that should be measurable, but fresh findings are suggesting that the expansion rate is actually around 10% higher than the one suggested by Planck.
Indeed, the Planck team determined that the expansion rate was 67.4 km per second per megaparsec, but more recent measurements taken of the expansion rate of the universe point to values of 73 or 74. That means there is a difference between the measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today and the predictions of how fast it should be expanding based on the physics of the early universe, Riess said. It's leading to a reassessment of accepted theories while also showing there is still much to learn about dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to be behind this conundrum.
A higher value for the Hubble Constant indicates a shorter age for the universe. A constant of 67.74 km per second per megaparsec would lead to an age of 13.8 billion years, whereas one of 73, or even as high as 77 as some studies have shown, would indicate a universe age no greater than 12.7 billion years. It's a mismatch that suggests, once again, that HD 140283 is older than the universe. It has also since been superseded by a 2019 study published in the journalSciencethat proposed a Hubble Constant of 82.4 — suggesting that the universe's age is only 11.4 billion years.
Matthews believes the answers lie in greater cosmological refinement. "I suspect that the observational cosmologists have missed something that creates this paradox, rather than the stellar astrophysicists," he said, pointing to the measurements of the stars being perhaps more accurate. "That's not because the cosmologists are in any way sloppier, but because age determination of the universe is subject to more and arguably trickier observational and theoretical uncertainties than that of stars."
A visualization of the formation of the first stars.
(Image credit: Wise, Abel, Kaehler (KIPAC/SLAC))
So, how will scientists figure this out?
But what could be making the universe potentially appear younger than this particular star?
"There are two options, and the history of science suggests that in such cases the reality is a mix of both," Matthews said. "In this case that would be sources of observational error that haven't been fully understood, plus some gaps in the theory of the dynamics of the universe, such as the strength of dark energy, which has been the prime driver of the cosmic expansion for many billions of years now."
He suggests the possibility that the current "age paradox" reflects time variation in dark energy, and thus a change in the rate of acceleration — a possibility theorists have found might be compatible with ideas about the fundamental nature of gravity, such as so-called causal set theory. New research into gravitational waves could help to resolve the paradox, Matthews said.
To do this, scientists would look at the ripples in the fabric of space and time created by pairs of dead stars, rather than relying on the cosmic microwave background or the monitoring of nearby objects such as Cepheid variables and supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant — the former resulting in the speed of 67 km per second per megaparsec and the latter in 73.
Trouble is, measuring gravitational waves is no easy task, given they were only directly detected for the first time in 2015. But according to Stephen Feeney, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York, a breakthrough could be made over the course of the next decade. The idea is to collect data from collisions between pairs ofneutron starsusing the visible light these events emit to figure out the speed they are moving relative to Earth. It also entails analyzing the resulting gravitational waves for an idea of distance — both of which can combine to give a measurement of the Hubble Constant that should be the most accurate yet.
The mystery of the age of HD 140283 is leading to something bigger and more scientifically complex, altering the understanding of how the universe works.
"The most likely explanations for the paradox are some overlooked observational effect and/or something big missing from our understanding of the dynamics of the cosmic expansion," Matthews said. Precisely what that "something" is, is sure to keep astronomers challenged for some time.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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