What we now know (and still don't) about life on Mars

By Lauren Kent, CNN

(CNN)For decades, space was the final frontier. But as space exploration advanced, scientists increasingly set their sights on a new frontier: Mars.

The first lander to reach Mars was launched nearly 50 years ago, but much about the red planet remains a mystery. Scientists are still attempting to bring samples of Mars' red soil back to Earth for further study, and human trips to Mars are still years from being feasible.

After decades of roving, research, and taking illuminating photos of the red planet, the biggest question remains: Could there be life on Mars?

Breakdown of a planet

To understand Mars' potential for life, we need to go back in time about 3 or 4 billion years.

At that time, Mars and Earth shared many of the same characteristics. The red planet was warm and wet, with a robust atmosphere -- a far cry from the cold, unforgiving place it is today.

"Mars is a planet that started with all the same raw materials as Earth, but along the way has suffered changes," said the European Space Agency's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, David Parker. "You could say it's kind of broken down."

Because it was once Earth's sister planet, Parker said scientists must ask themselves, "When life got going on Earth, did it get going on Mars?"

Mars lost its magnetic field, meaning nothing shields the planet (or potential life forms) from radiation. Mars also lost most of its atmosphere -- another deviation from Earth, where the atmosphere supports life by giving us oxygen and acting as a blanket for the planet.

"Mars still has an atmosphere but it's very thin and mostly carbon dioxide, so it's colder," explained Parker.

That means the average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it an unforgiving planet for most life forms.

 

Signs of life

But just because Mars is cold and unprotected doesn't mean scientists have ruled out finding life.

In 2018, NASA's Curiosity rover found organic matter on Mars, which could mean that the building blocks for life once existed, or still exist, on Mars.

A self-portrait taken by NASA's Curiosity rover taken on Sol 2082 (June 15, 2018). A Martian dust storm has reduced sunlight and visibility at the rover's location in Gale Crater.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"Organic matter preservation is central to understanding biological potential on Mars through time," wrote NASA researchers in the journal Science. "Whether it holds a record of ancient life, is the food for extant life, or has existed in the absence of life, organic matter in martian materials holds chemical clues to planetary conditions and processes."

NASA's rover has also detected methane on Mars, which is considered the most simple organic molecule and could be another chemical clue of life.

"With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern," said Paul Mahaffy, director for NASA Goddard's Solar System Exploration Division, in a June press release.

Meanwhile, Europe and Russia's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter launched in 2016 with the aim of detecting atmospheric gases that could mean there's active, biological life on Mars. The ESA's Parker said that while the Curiosity Rover found methane on parts of the surface, they have not detected methane all across Mars' atmosphere.

The ExoMars 2016 lifts off on a Proton-M rocket in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. One of the scientific objectives of the collaborative project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency is to search for signs of past and present life on Mars.

(Photo by Stephane Corvaja/ESA via Getty Images)

"We have not seen methane globally on Mars, which means methane gas is being produced somehow," Parker said. "So is there a methane cycle on Mars?"

The discovery of localized methane presents an exciting breakthrough because a common source of methane on Earth is microbial life, according to NASA.

 

Water is key

Water and ice on Mars also provide valuable clues that suggest Mars might be more habitable than once thought.

In 2015, NASA scientists thought they found evidence of occasional flowing, salty water flows across the surface of Mars. However, another NASA study in 2017 determined that the flows were most likely grains of sand and dust.

But another breakthrough came in 2018 when the European Space Agency detected a small lake of liquid water beneath the southern polar ice cap of Mars, which the ESA said could further contribute to knowledge about Mars' evolution and habitability.

And this year, NASA's Curiosity rover found evidence in Mars' Gale Crater that there were once ancient salty lakes on the surface -- another hint that the red planet could have once supported microbial life.

"Water is key because almost everywhere we find water on Earth, we find life," wrote NASA on their website.

It's not just liquid water that space scientists are interested in, but also ice. Parker said the ESA is currently working on research about the ice below Mars' surface.

"We're getting more and more information about subsurface water ice ... it's further from the poles than we thought," Parker told CNN.

Ice could be further evidence of habitable conditions, and it could also be a valuable resource if space agencies send humans to Mars one day.

Human missions to Mars?

To unravel the more complex mysteries surrounding life on Mars, scientists want to collect samples, which would require a round-trip mission.

"Because the really powerful scientific instruments are huge, we can't take them and never will be able to take them to Mars. So we need to bring Mars back to Earth," Parker said. "By bringing Mars back, we can study it for the next 50 years."

Scientists are still attempting to bring samples of Mars' red soil back to Earth for further study, and human trips to Mars are still years from being feasible. NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars by 2035.

(Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 

Although no space agency has yet figured out how to launch an unmanned craft from the surface of Mars to get samples back to Earth, one way to bring back Martian samples would be for astronauts and cosmonauts to collect them in person.

But reaching Mars, which at its closest point is still about 33.9 million miles away from Earth, would be a feat of engineering.

"It's is an order of magnitude farther away. You're talking about a 3-year round-trip mission," said NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz.

If reaching the Moon was one giant leap for mankind, reaching Mars would be more like an Olympic long jump. And unlike traveling to the International Space Station (a mere 250 miles above Earth), traveling to Mars would potentially require a lot more packing.

"We send up resupply missions every few months (to the space station)," Schierholz said. "We don't have the luxury of doing that if we go to Mars."

Despite the challenges, NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars by 2035. That means the first life on Mars could be us.

{ https://edition.cnn.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 18:54 geschreven door peter  

by Alex Hollings

(U.S. Navy photo by Electrician's Mate 2nd Class Brian J. Hudson)

Last month, the United States Navy confirmed formally that two high profile videos allegedly captured from the nose of an F/A-18 Super Hornet attempting an intercept on an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena were real and notably, weren’t meant for release to the public. The Navy did not suggest that the strange craft shown in the videos was alien in origin, but rather did acknowledge that they truly didn’t know what they were seeing that night in January of 2015.

“I truly thought the official word on these videos would be ‘drones’ or something similar; but explainable,” John Greenewald, Jr, who runs the popular website The Black Vault, told SOFREP at the time. Greenewald was the man that got the Navy to discuss the videos, leading to a landslide of headlines throughout the media in the weeks that followed.

“We have official documents that have surfaced through FOIA that state just that. However, for the Navy to contradict that, and say that this ‘phenomena’ represents something ‘unidentified’ – that’s pretty amazing to me and proves yet again why we can’t lock ourselves into any one way of thinking or assume anything.”

Reports of unusual lights in the sky date all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, but there’s another unusual phenomena that often seems to coincide with these strange sightings that gets far less attention in the press: USOs, or Unidentified Submerged Objects. Like UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), USO is a sort of catch-all term used to describe anything seen operating beneath the surface of a body of water that defies explanation. Legends of USOs have permeated the maritime community for centuries, and remain a common facet of discussion among UFO researchers to this day. In fact, many UFO witness statements, including those provided by military aviators, have suggested that the unusual crafts they’ve spotted flying in the sky seem to operate just as readily in the far denser medium of water — suggesting that these unusual objects can function beneath the surface of the ocean just as well as they can in the air.

Even Christopher Columbus reportedly had a USO sighting during his 1492 voyage to the Americas. According to Columbus’ log, he spotted “a small wax candle that rose and lifted up, which too few seemed to be an indication of land.” They soon determined that it wasn’t a light source from land, but had instead been out at sea — leading to a centuries-long mystery that stands to this day. A more contemporary sighting near Shag Harbor in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia saw a UFO apparently crashing into the harbor’s waters in front of a number of witnesses in 1967. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police even launched rescue efforts early on, assuming the sightings were of a downed aircraft. Their efforts however, turned up nothing.

If the idea of an unidentified, fast moving craft operating under water seems just a bit too out of this world, you should know that USOs may not even be all that uncommon — the U.S. Navy just doesn’t make a habit of keeping track of them (much like UFOs or UAPs until recently).

Earlier this year, Tylor Rogoway at The War Zone interviewed a number of veteran U.S. Navy submariners, some of whom were SONAR operators with first hand experience spotting these unidentified underwater anomalies. Rogoway was looking for more information pertaining to an unsubstantiated story posted to social media by Tom Delonge, former Blink 182 front man turned UFO researcher and founder of To the Stars Academy — a high profile media think tank that champions disclosure of UFO related materials..

That story can be traced back to UFO researcher Marc D’Antonio, who claimed to be given a courtesy ride on a U.S. Navy fast attack submarine, during which he was present as a sonar operator identified a “fast mover” moving at hundreds of knots under the water in close proximity to the sub. D’Antonio’s story doesn’t quite add up in a number of ways (as one former submariner points out in Rogoway’s piece, “we don’t give ‘rides’ as favors”) but his account of a fast moving, unidentified object spotted by Navy personnel and then disregarded seems to ring true with those that have spent time operating America’s undersea vessels.

I don’t know what they are… We usually logged it as seismic or biologic. We were instructed that nothing is ever ‘unknown.'” Explained a former submariner turned professional gamer that now goes by the name “Jive Turkey.”

“That’s the thing, it’s so quick you can’t measure the speed. In the examples I am thinking of, it is a detection that lasts a few seconds on the towed array. There is no way to measure the speed accurately because there isn’t enough data… I agree it’s odd. There are a lot of odd things in the ocean. Mainly, submariners!”

Jive Turkey’s funny name notwithstanding, he’s not the only former submariner to acknowledge unusual readings from America’s nuclear submarines that suggested they weren’t alone in the water. Unsurprisingly, however, these anomalies tend to go ignored unless they represent a threat to the vessel or an obstacle between the crew and accomplishing their mission. The ocean is vast, full of man made ships and living creatures, and things like sound travel differently through water than they do through air. As a result, living and working beneath the waves comes with a certain acceptance of the eerie as a new “normal.” In other words, strange is just a part of business when you’re operating a fast attack sub.

In the minds of some, these sightings are related to other unexplained ocean phenomena, like the infamous “Bloop” — which was a massive underwater sound recorded in 1997. The sound was so loud that it was recorded simultaneously on underwater microphones located more than 3,000 miles apart. In the years since, the Bloop has been explained away as an underwater earthquake or tectonic shift, but some remain unconvinced.

According to Navy submariners, standard operating procedure doesn’t allow for the exploration of strange readings that pop up on sonar or other systems, and there is no procedure established for the further investigation of these sightings. That means that unusual objects beneath the surface of the ocean largely go unreported altogether, provided whatever is spotted doesn’t appear as though it will interfere with the mission.

Without reporting guidelines and government disclosure, we may never know if USO sightings are highly rare or entirely commonplace, but submariner accounts confirm that weird stuff is normal in the dark depths of Earth’s oceans. Just like with sightings in the sky, weird doesn’t have to mean alien — it just means unexplained… for now.

{ https://sofrep.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 18:34 geschreven door peter  

by Corbin Black

You never know what you could find in the depths of the ocean. Never-before-seen alien-like organisms are discovered all the time. This time, a diver exploring the depths of a fjord in Orstafjord Norway came across a huge alien blob. The video has captivated the internet with over 491K views to date.

Diver Ronald Raasch with the research vessel REV Ocean was exploring the site of a WWII shipwreck in early October. As a group of divers returned to the boat, Raasch and captain Nils Baadnes came across the blob about 55 feet beneath the surface. Inside, the transparent egg contains thousands of squirming babies.

See the mesmerizing video below:

Later on Twitter, the REV Ocean team posted a Tweet:

#Mystery solved! #REVOcean captain @Nils Baadnes & Ronald Raasch discovered this giant gel ball while diving in Orstafjord #Norway, which is actually an eggmass of 10-armed #squid 🦑👀

REV Ocean@rev_ocean

#Mystery solved! #REVOcean captain @Nils Baadnes & Ronald Raasch discovered this giant gel ballwhile diving in Orstafjord #Norway, which is actually an eggmass of 10-armed #squid

More info from @Halldis Ringvold/Sea Snack Norway/Geleballprosjektet https://youtu.be/wJMHsi0HBUo 

• 209

1:28 PM - Oct 7, 2019

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Although the researchers identified the blob as an egg sac produced by a 10-armed squid, that doesn’t identify which species it might be. All squid have ten arms.

These alien squid sacs are rarely seen since they are thought to be laid deep down in the ocean, sinking ever-lower to 500 feet. At these depths, the babies hatch and start their lives in the cover of darkness.

Science Alert noted different squid species have different egg sacs. Scientists suspect the female squids lay a small mass that expands to a larger size.

One species has been seen inflating the egg with water.

“Squids that live in the Norwegian Sea that the fjord connects to include the European flying squid (T. sagittatus) and the much smaller Boreoatlantic armhook squid (Gonatus fabricii). However, another Gonatus species, G. onyx, has been observed actually brooding its eggs, so it may be a less likely candidate.

Interestingly, G. onyx has also been observed pumping seawater into her egg mass to inflate it, so that may be another clue about how the masses get so big.”

Another even bigger squid sac was discovered in 2015. National Geographic shared a video of a 13-foot-wide egg sac from a neon flying squid.

(pictured above)

The jellylike substance helps protect the eggs from predators as well as infection and bacteria.

See the National Geographic video below:

Featured image: Screenshot via YouTube, Ronald Raasch

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 18:16 geschreven door peter  

The Existence of Reptilians Was Confirmed By Romanian General

Romanian Army General Strainu is an ex counterintelligence officer that before 1989 he was hunting CIA and KGB operatives in Romania. Since 2004, Romania is a full NATO member and a strong ally of the USA. Also, General Strainu is a specialist in radiolocation and a doctor in Geophysical warfare.

General Strainu had access to some of the most terrifying secrets of the cold war and also at classified information about UFO and aliens.

General Strainu claims that the reptilian aliens exist and that they live in huge underground basses.

A good friend of Strainu, an active Romanian Colonel that is also a colonel in NATO, called General Strainu to tell him a story about how he accidentally met with a reptilian. As a side note, this Colonel has served in Iraq, Afganistan, Africa and also South America and because he is still active he asked Strainu to keep his identity confidential.

Near Bucharest.

Colonel X was returning from a short camping trip from Brasov, and around 5 O’clock in the morning, his car was out of gas, and he stopped to refuel at a small gas station right outside of Bucharest, when he noticed a khaki US military Humvee with black windows, parked outside the station with the motor running.

One of the doors was opened and he could see inside a huge reptilian, while a US private was fueling the car. The reptilian had no clothes, only military boots, was completely covered in scales and had a crest on his head. This also confirms that on some special occasions, maybe in some black ops, the US military is cooperating with these reptilians. After refueling, he paid and went to his truck.

After a few kilometers on the road to Bucharest, Colonel X was terrified by what he has seen but the adventure was not over yet. Down the road, he had seen again the same Humvee stationed outside the road, this time with all 4 doors opened and near the car, he saw two dark huge reptilians arguing. He passed by the Humvee and tried to understand what he has just seen.

After this event, he started an investigation on his own to see if there were other witnesses but he found none.

{ http://yourminds.org/ }

31-12-2019 om 17:56 geschreven door peter  

In The Year 2019 UFOs Became a Little More Legit

We didn’t find ETs in 2019, but the U.S. government did become a little more chatty about flying saucers.

31-12-2019 om 17:44 geschreven door peter  

There Might Be Cracks in the Universe — But We Can't See Them from Earth

By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer

The cracks, if they exist, are old, remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang.

(Image: © Optical image – A. Mellinger, U.Central Michigan; radio image – E. Carretti, CSIRO; radio data – S-PASS team; composition – E. Bresser, CSIRO)

There might be cracks in space-time, but humanity's telescopes can't see them.

The cracks, if they exist, are old — remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang when the universe had just shifted from a hotter, more alien state to the cooler, more familiar one we see today. That great cool-down, what physicists call a "phase transition," started earlier in some places than others, the theory goes. Bubbles of cooler universe formed and spread, blooming across space until they met other bubbles. Eventually, all of space transitioned, and the old universe disappeared. 

But that old, high-energy state might have lived on at the borders between the bubbles, cracks in the fabric of space-time where those cooling regions met and didn't perfectly fit together. Some physicists thought we might still see evidence of those cracks or defects — known as "cosmic strings" — in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the heat left over from the universe's violent emergence. But according to a new paper, that evidence would simply be too faint for any telescope to ever pick out against the noise.

• Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time

Cosmic strings are difficult objects to imagine, said Oscar Hernández, a physicist at McGill University in Montreal and co-author of the paper. But they have analogs in our world.

"Have you walked on a frozen lake? Have you noticed cracks laced through the frozen lake ice? It's still quite solid. There's nothing to be afraid of, but there's cracks," Hernández told Live Science 

Those cracks form through a similar phase-transition process as cosmic strings.

"Ice is water that has gone through a phase transition," he said. "Molecules of water were free to move as a fluid, and then all of a sudden, somewhere, they start to form into a crystal. … It starts to tile itself in tiles, which are [often] hexagons. Now, imagine having tiles that are perfect hexagons and tiling [the lake] with that. If somebody at the other end of the lake starts to tile [it] again," there's essentially zero chance that your tiles will line up.

Imperfect meeting places on a frozen lake surface form long cracks. In the fabric where space and time intersect, they form cosmic strings — if the underlying physics is correct.

In space, researchers believe, there are fields that determine the behavior of fundamental forces and particles. The first phase transitions of the universe brought these fields into being.

"There could be a field relating to some particle that has to, in some sense, 'pick a direction to freeze and cool in.' And since the universe is really big, it could pick different directions in different parts of the universe," he said. "Now, if this field obeys certain conditions … then when the universe has cooled down there will be lines of discontinuity, there will be lines of energy that cannot cool down."

Today, those meeting points would appear as infinitesimally thin lines of energy through space.

Finding those cosmic strings would be a big deal because they would be another piece of evidence that physics is bigger and more complicated than the current model allows, Hernández said.

Right now, the most advanced theory of particle physics that researchers feel has been conclusively proven is known as the Standard Model. It includes the quarks and electrons that make up atoms, as well as more exotic particles like the Higgs boson and neutrinos. 

However, most physicists believe the Standard Model is incomplete. As Live Science has reported previously, there are all sorts of ideas on how to expand on it, from supersymmetric particles (i.e., the "stau slepton") to superstring theory — the idea that all particles and forces can be explained as vibrations of tiny, multidimensional "strings." (Note: The "strings" of superstring theory are not the same sort of thing as cosmic "strings." There are only so many metaphors available and sometimes physicists in different fields reuse one.)

"Many extensions of the Standard Model that people really like — like a lot of superstring theories and others — naturally lead to cosmic strings after [post-Big Bang] inflation takes place," Hernández said. "So what we have is an object that is predicted by very many models, so if they don't exist then all these models are ruled out. And if they do exist, oh my god, people are happy."

Since 2017, there's been a flurry of interest in trying to spot strings in the CMB, Hernández and his co-author wrote in their paper, published Nov. 18 to the arXiv database and not yet peer-reviewed.

Hernández, together with Razvan Ciuca of Marianopolis College in Westmount, Quebec, had argued in the past that a convolutional neural network — a powerful type of pattern-finding software — would be the best tool for spotting evidence of the strings in CMB.

Assuming a perfect, noise-free map of the CMB, they wrote in a separate 2017 paper, a computer running that sort of neural network should be able to find cosmic strings even if their energy levels (or "tension") are remarkably low.

But revisiting the subject in this new 2019 paper, they showed that in reality, it's almost certainly impossible to provide clean enough CMB data for the neural network to detect these potential strings. Other, brighter microwave sources obscure the CMB and are difficult to fully disentangle. Even the best microwave instruments are imperfect, with limited resolution and random fluctuations in their recording accuracy from one pixel to the next. All those factors and more, they found, add up to a level of information loss that no current or planned method of recording and analyzing the CMB will ever be able to overcome, they wrote. This method of hunting cosmic strings is a dead end.

That doesn't mean all is lost, though, they wrote.

A new method for hunting cosmic strings is based on measurements of the expansion of the universe in all directions across ancient parts of the universe. This method — called 21 centimeter intensity mapping — doesn't rely on studying the movements of individual galaxies or on precise images of the CMB, Hernández said. Instead, it's based on measurements of the speed at which hydrogen atoms are moving away from Earth, on average, in all parts of deep space.

The best observatories for 21-cm mapping (so named because hydrogen emits electromagnetic energy with a telltale 21-cm wavelength) aren't yet online. But when they arrive, the authors wrote, there's hope for clearer evidence of cosmic strings in their data. And then, Hernández said, the hunt can begin anew.

• The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics
• The Large Numbers That Define the Universe
• Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 17:22 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers Discover Exoplanets with Cotton Candy Density in Kepler 51 Star System

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 17:01 geschreven door peter  

POPULAIRE UFO-ONDERZOEKER GEARRESTEERD EN GEMARTELD ( VIDEO )

Als de eigenaar van een bekend Youtubekanaal met een miljoen abonnees plotseling niets meer plaatst, dan is dat hoogst verdacht.

Zonder één enkele mededeling verdween Tyler Glockner van Secureteam en niemand wist wat er was gebeurd, tot nu.

Dagelijks verschenen daar nieuwe video’s over vreemde en interessante zaken op het gebied van onbekende vliegende voorwerpen en Tyler dook steeds dieper in de materie. Echter, als je nu kijkt op zijn kanaal dan zie je dat de laatste video enkele maanden geleden is geplaatst en daarna wordt het opeens stil.

En dan krijgen we maandag het volgende bericht van Paul Harmans:

Heb jij de video van Tyler van Secureteam van een paar dagen geleden gezien? De video was na een dag weer verwijderd, ik vermoed door Tyler zelf.

Als je hem niet hebt gezien: Tyler vertelde dat hij al een tijd wordt lastiggevallen en gesommeerd te stoppen met zijn activiteiten. Dat weigerde hij en sinds die tijd is het serieuzer geworden. Hij vertelde dat hij vlak voordat hij de video maakte thuiskwam van een week gevangenisstraf, opgepakt omdat 'iemand' de politie had gebeld met de melding dat hij zijn vrouw had geslagen. Toen de politie bij hem aanbelde wist Tyler van niets en ook zijn vrouw verklaarde dat het niet waar was, ze was niet geslagen. Maar de Amerikaanse politie is resoluut in dat soort zaken en dus arresteerden ze Tyler en voerden hem in handboeien af.

Hij verdween voor een week de cel in en hij vertelde dat hij gedurende die week regelmatig door bewakers in elkaar werd gemept met de boodschap te stoppen met zijn openbaringen. Tyler vertelde in de video dat hij niet stopt en doorgaat. Hij heeft advocaten in de arm genomen en zal inmiddels wel blut zijn. Als ze willen dat hij stopt vinden ze honderden manieren om dat door te zetten en zullen hem net zo lang voor de rechter slepen totdat hij grote schulden heeft.

Ik wilde de video nog downloaden, maar was te laat. Wellicht dat Tyler de video alleen voor een dag op Youtube heeft gezet om zijn volgers even te laten weten wat er speelt.

Tot zover Paul Harmans.

Dit is natuurlijk een heftig verhaal en toont voor de zoveelste keer aan dat het brengen van de waarheid een gevaarlijke bezigheid is. En als je kijkt op het Youtubekanaal van Tyler, dan is de video waar Paul het over heeft inderdaad verdwenen.

Gelukkig zijn wij niet voor één gat te vangen en hebben de bewuste video van Tyler weten op te duikelen.

Hier volgt zijn nogal angstaanjagende boodschap:

https://vk.com/video516205560_456239051

Wat hem niet duidelijk is gemaakt door zijn belagers is wat nu precies hetgeen is dat dit alles heeft getriggerd. Echter, aangezien hij al eerder waarschuwingen en dreigementen heeft ontvangen is het waarschijnlijk dat het gaat om het totaal van zijn berichten.

Het interview met Bob Lazar, de man die aan buitenaardse ruimteschepen heeft gewerkt, ook mede aanleiding zijn. In een artikel dat wij eind vorig jaar hierover schreven komt zo ongeveer alles aan bod waardoor de befaamde Men in Black op je stoep zou kunnen verwachten en daarom hier nogmaals het grootste deel van dat artikel met aan het einde ervan het bewuste interview met Bob Lazar.

Voor de "normale" wereld bestaat buitenaards leven dan ook nog steeds niet, maar voor de machthebbers achter de schermen is het een ander verhaal. Zij beschikken niet alleen over contacten met buitenaardsen, maar ook over hun techniek. Deze vorm van de buitenaardsen overgenomen techniek heet "reverse engineering" en vormt de basis voor wat wij noemen de geheime ruimtevloot van de Bilderbergers. 

Het bestaan van een dergelijke vloot is ook aangetoond door hacker Gary McKinnon die wist in te breken in systemen van de Amerikaanse overheid en daar lijsten met namen aantrof van buitenaardse officieren.

Al met al betekent dit dat het voor ons gewone mensen heel verwarrend is, omdat we nooit met zekerheid weten of waargenomen UFO's nu echt buitenaards zijn of onderdeel vormen van de geheime ruimtevloot. Beiden bestaan en dat maakt het zo moeilijk om ze precies te identificeren.

Om het nog een beetje gecompliceerder te maken weten we van de voormalig Nazi en later Amerikaanse raketwetenschapper Wernher von Braun, dat de machthebbers achter de schermen op een gegeven moment een nep buitenaardse invasie zullen uitvoeren, om er zo voor te zorgen dat de mensheid zich unaniem wil verenigen in een wereldverbond/-regering om zo de dreigingen van buiten de aarde het hoofd te kunnen bieden.

Voorzetten voor dit spektakel dat nog moet plaatsvinden werden destijds al gemaakt door de voormalige Amerikaanse president Ronald Reagan.

{ https://niburu.co/ }

31-12-2019 om 16:32 geschreven door peter  

Many Witnessed Alien Craft Encounter In The Yukon Territory

1996…….YUKON TERRITORY CANADA

Investigated by Martin Jasek, M.Sc., P. Eng.

The following is as brief a summary that could be made from a complex 22-witness event and still retain a good portion of the impact and scope of what had occurred. More detailed descriptions and vivid quotes from the witnesses can be found in the individual witness testimonies.

Event Summary

Witnesses FOX2 and FOX3 were driving together from Whitehorse to Carmacks in two separate vehicles. As they were travelling northbound on the Klondike Highway adjacent to Fox Lake, they spotted a huge UFO out over the frozen lake.

Fox Lake is on the west side of the highway. Both of them slammed on the brakes stopping about 570 metres (1870 ft) apart from each other. FOX2 got out of his vehicle for a better observation.

The UFO proceeded to slowly drift towards FOX2 and after a few minutes he found himself almost directly underneath the object! FOX3 continued to observe his cousin FOX2; both men were in complete awe!.

The UFO continued to move slowly across the highway and out over the hill to the east and eventually disappeared behind it. Immediately after the sigthing, FOX3 noted that the time was 8:30 pm. Both FOX2 and FOX3 could discern that the lights were attached to a smooth and solid object.

At the very same time that FOX2 and FOX3 were observing the UFO move across the lake, FOX4 and FOX5 were approaching the southern tip of Fox Lake also heading northbound.

What they observed was a huge row, or rows, of lights slowly moving across the lake. There were other lights on and around the UFO as well. Their first thought was that it was a large truck in the distance, but it couldn’t be, it was out over the lake. Their next thought was that a Boeing 747 was crash landing. But that couldn’t be either, it was moving much too slowly to be an aircraft.

It took them about 2 seconds to process these thoughts when they realized that it must be a UFO! They got very concerned. They had a two-year-old son in the back seat and they were travelling towards this thing! After some debate they decided to continue their journey.

After all, they could no longer see the UFO as they approached a hill that obscured their view plus there was some traffic ahead of them. FOX5 looked at the car clock, it was 8:23 pm. None of the witnesses heard any sound coming from the object.

A few minutes later, when FOX4 and FOX5 were passing the Fox Lake campground, they passed by two vehicles that were pulled over with two men outside looking up at the sky. They turned around and pulled over to talk to them.

It was FOX2 and FOX3 carrying on a lively discussion, “What the ‘heck’ was that?”

After a few minutes FOX4 and FOX5 left and eventually stopped at Braeburn Lodge about 34 km (21 miles) further up the highway. FOX4 walked into the lodge and said to Steve Watson, the lodge owner “Steve, I really need a coffee!” Steve replied “Oh, you must have seen what FOX1 saw?” In fact FOX4 recalled seeing FOX1 leaving Braeburn Lodge just as they got there.

About half an hour before the sighting described above (about 8:00 pm) FOX1 was driving along Fox Lake and had noticed a light in the distance which should not have been there. He did not think too much of it but as he got closer to the light, he could tell that it was illuminating a long smooth curved surface.

He then passed some traffic and after his eyes readjusted to the darkness, the curved surface and the light were gone. However, his eye caught a group of rectangular lights moving over and behind a hill to the east.

At this point he got an “exhilarating feeling” and sped up in order to reach a less obscured location in the valley so that he would have a chance to see the UFO again.

He pulled over and got out of his vehicle but didn’t see anything more unusual. He continued his journey and pulled into Braeburn Lodge where he gave Steve a description of what he saw and also made drawings for him. FOX2 and FOX3 eventually pulled into Braeburn Lodge and gave their description to Steve as well.

There was also a 6th witness to the Fox Lake sighting but it is unclear what time she had driven through the area. FOX6 was driving in the vicinity of Fox Lake when she noticed a glow on her dashboard that could not be accounted for by the interior illumination of her vehicle.

She leaned forward to look up through her windshield and observed a large arrangement of multi colored lights.

The interior lights in her car started to go dim and the music from her tape deck slowed down.

At around the same time, between 8:30 and 9:00 pm, the Village of Pelly Crossing (about a 2 hours drive to the north of Fox Lake) was experiencing its own truly incredible UFO sighting. PEL1 was tending his trapline northeast of Pelly when he observed in the distance to the southwest a long row of lights slowly moving over the hills. At first he thought it was a large aircraft coming down. But it was moving much too slowly.

“It’s a UFO!”

As he was walking his flashlight happened to point in the direction of the UFO. As if reacting to his flashlight, the UFO started speeding rapidly toward him.

He instinctively cupped the end of his flashlight. As soon as he completed this gesture, the UFO stopped in its track.

In a matter of less than a second, it was hovering an estimated 300 yards (275 metres) in front of him! PEL1 had to turn his head from one side to the other to take it all in.

Again there was no sound at all coming from the object.

A beam of light emanating from the bottom of the UFO swooped the ground once directly underneath the object. Was it a search beam? Looking for him? The UFO then drifted slowly to the right. There were other beams emanating from the craft as well; a greenish phosphorescent color beam shone horizontally out the front (right); two beams at the back (left) rotated slowly to a horizontal position.

All the beams could be seen clearly as there were ice crystals in the air. PEL1 turned away from the UFO momentarily and ran across a small clearing. When he turned back to look at it, it was gone.

At about the same time, PEL2 and PEL3 were travelling northbound just south of Pelly Crossing. To the north they spotted a huge row of lights slowly moving from left to right.

They pulled over at a gravel pit just south of the Village to get a better look and got out of their vehicle. PEL2 noticed that the Big Dipper was just above the row of lights and compared the length of the lights to the width of the Big Dipper.

They were about the same length! This observation was very important since it established a well-referenced angular size of the UFO from PEL2 and PEL3’s perspective, important for a more accurate triangulation and calculation of UFO size.

The accounts of witnesses PEL1 through 3 were enough to complete a calculation of UFO size. The observations of witnesses PEL4, 5, 6 and 7 about the same time provided a second triangulation. The four women were taking an evening course at a small community college in Pelly Crossing (a satellite school of Yukon College).

They were out on a break on the front deck of the one story building looking towards the west when they too observed the row of lights. The row of lights was travelling slowly almost towards them and slightly towards the north. They recall the object being huge as well; there was no sound at all. It moved slowly over the hill to the north and disappeared behind it.

Then there was the UFO sighting near the Village of Carmacks seen by 9 witnesses. The UFO was observed by two groups of people. CRM1, 2, 3 and 4 were on the highway northbound in a pick-up truck just south of Carmacks; CRM5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 consisted of a husband, wife and their 3 children.

They were watching television when they spotted the row of lights out of their window.

The four men traveling together pulled over near the landfill at the southern edge of the Village to get a better look at the UFO. They watched the noiseless object move slowly to the northeast, curve around them to the south and head up a valley adjacent to the microwave tower south of the village where it just vanished.

At one point the UFO was partially obscured behind a nearby hill and one witness recalls the UFO slowly reappearing on the other side of it. He remembers waiting a long time for the last light to reappear from behind the hill; that’s how slow and large the object was!

The object took up about a 60 to 90 degree horizontal chunk of the sky. CRM1 recalls hearing about the Fox Lake UFO sighting on the radio the next day and surmised that they saw the UFO about an hour and a half earlier, about 7:00 pm.

The family is not exactly sure what time it was when they saw the UFO, just that it was in the evening. They observed the row of lights just to the northwest of them moving slowly to the northeast. The lights were just over the treeline and there was no noise at all.

The lights continued to move until they disappeared one by one behind what appeared to be an invisible wall. There was no mountain in that direction that could account for this.

With the UFO sighting occurring just two weeks prior to Christmas, the three children thought that it was Santa Claus and his reindeer in the sky.

An estimate of the UFO size by triangulation was not possible for the Carmacks UFO sighting, as the geometry of the witness locations in relation to the UFO was less than ideal.

Furthermore, it was unclear whether both the family and the group of four men in the truck observed the UFO at the same time. Perhaps the UFO made more than one pass by the Village that night.

There is also some evidence to suggest that this “sighting event” encompassed an even larger area as UFO reports were heard on CBC North radio the very next day mentioning sightings in the communities of Dawson, Mayo and Watson Lake.

No witnesses from these additional communities have thus far come forward or been identified. NOTE: The above image is CGI.

KEN PFEIFER WORLD UFO PHOTOS AND NEWS

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• http://worldufophotosandnews.org/?p=25734

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31-12-2019 om 15:34 geschreven door peter  

Astrange event happened in the sky over Rincon in Georgia when the witness saw a streak of light and a disc-shaped UFO moving in front of it.

Frankie Jackson was taking his wife to work on the early morning of December 30, 2019 around 5.30 am when he saw something streaking through the trees.

The moment he got out of the car he witnessed the strange event in the sky, tried to hurry and captured it with his phone.

There are disc-shaped flying saucer craft and stealth space stations that were jointly developed with the National Reconnaissance Office. More incredible are the “stargates” or traversable wormholes that have been secretly developed and used for decades according to Exopolitics.

Did he witnessed such a disc-shaped craft arriving through a traversable wormhole?

  

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

31-12-2019 om 15:06 geschreven door peter  

Water on Mars PICTURED: ESA shares incredible IMAGES of Martian ice crater

Budding future colonists hoping for a white Christmas on Mars will be somewhat disappointed as the ESA has confirmed that sitting in the Korolev crater is, in fact, a thick block of water ice, not snow. The enormous, 82-kilometer-wide, 2-kilometer-deep “ice trap” could still be good for ice skating though.

Even better, the 2,200 cubic kilometers of water ice – same as the volume of Canada’s Great Bear Lake – could be important for the survival of future colonists, and may even enable them to return back home, as water could be split into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel.

Plan view of Korolev crater © ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

The crater is found in the northern lowlands of Mars near the planet's north pole which is known as Olympia Undae for its wavy, dune-filled terrain. The crater's ice is protected by the topography and by a lair of cold air that shields it from the elements.

© ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

The composite image was taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and was actually formed from five different “strips,” with each strip gathered over a different orbit as the Mars Express probe flew overhead. The 2003-launched mission this month marks the 15-year anniversary of the probe’s orbit insertion at the Red Planet.

• ALSO ON RT.COMListen to the sky: NASA reveals the sound of wind on Mars (AUDIO)

The icy crater is named after chief rocket engineer and spacecraft designer Sergey Korolev, known as the father of Soviet space technology and the head of iconic space exploration missions including the Sputnik, Vostok, and Voskhod programs. A lesser known fact is that Korolev dreamt about a flight to Mars for decades and was actually working on a rocket that would have brought a man to the Red Planet – and who knows where this unfinished project might have ended if it wasn’t for the Soviet visionary’s untimely death in 1966.

• READ MORE: Sergey Korolev: Space exploration's No. 1 constructor & total enigma

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31-12-2019 om 02:01 geschreven door peter  

What Makes This Low-Mass White Dwarf So 'Impossible' to Behold?

By Nola Taylor Redd 

The discovery of a new, 'impossible' white dwarf suggests they may be more common than once thought.

An artist’s image of a white dwarf passing in front of a red dwarf star. As the white dwarf passes in front of its larger companion, it bends and magnifies the light of the background star.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Scientists have spotted an incredibly weird, 'impossible' white dwarf star in a discovery that suggests these objects are even more common than suspected — or that something even stranger is happening.

White dwarfs are stellar cores left behind by stars like our sun. As these stars run out of fuel, they shed their outer layers and leave behind a core that cools over billions of years. The mass of the white dwarf is based on that of the original star, which in turn reflects its age. 

Those relationships mean that researchers can use the mass of a white dwarf to calculate its age. And over the last decade, astronomers have discovered around 100 white dwarfs with masses so low they appear to be older than the 14.8-billion-year-old universe. 

• Related: How to Tell Star Types Apart (Infographic)

So far, astronomers have addressed that conundrum by noting that almost all of these objects occur with a companion star that could be siphoning off some of the white dwarf's mass, making it appear older than it actually is. But a very small handful of these extremely low-mass white dwarfs have no companions to blame for their change in mass, raising the question of how these objects can exist.

In new research, scientists describe finding an extremely low-mass white dwarf that does have a companion, but that star is distant enough that it shouldn't be able to steal the white dwarf's mass. Because the odds of spotting such a pair with the instrument scientists used are so low, the discovery could mean that  'impossible' white dwarfs are far more common than previously imagined.

"This finding suggests that there is something missing in our current understanding of low mass white dwarf formation and/or binary interactions," Kento Masuda, lead author on a new paper describing the research and an astronomer at Princeton University, told Space.com by email.

A white dwarf puzzle 

Masuda and his colleagues used data gathered by NASA's famous planet-hunting instrument, the Kepler space telescope. Scientists have found thousands of planets and exoplanet candidates in the data Kepler gathered over its nine-year primary and extended mission. The instrument spots planets as rhythmic dips in a star's brightness. The dimming is caused by the planet slipping between the star and Kepler, called a transit.

But the space telescope has produced a wealth of astronomical discoveries, as well. Last year, Masuda and his colleagues noticed that the G-type star KIC 8145411 brightened regularly, an unusual reversal of transit situations. If a pair of orbiting stars lines up with Earth, their light will change as one star passes in front of the other. Usually, the light dims, because the total light from the system is reduced while one star disappears on the back side.

However, if one of the stars is compact enough, like a white dwarf, it can bend the light of its companion star when it passes in front, acting as a lens to magnify the surface of the less-dense star. This phenomenon, dubbed self-microlensing when it occurs in a binary, would lead to pulses of brightness. 

Self-lensing systems have been predicted for some time, but scientists couldn't spot such a pair until Kepler could study thousands of star systems simultaneously over time. The first such system was discovered in 2014; since then, four more have been found, including KIC 8145411.

But the real surprise came when Masuda and his colleagues turned the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the 1.5-meter telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona on the newfound system.

Their follow-up observations revealed that the white dwarf was about one-fifth the mass of our sun, well within the class of extremely low-mass white dwarfs. But to the scientists' surprise, the companion star orbited too far from the white dwarf to have been able to filch its mass. Something else must be responsible for such a low apparent age for the white dwarf, the scientists concluded.

The big twist 

It's possible, they added, that the white dwarf isn't a white dwarf after all. The scientists were only able to determine the object's mass and that it is relatively small; the team doesn't have a firm size estimate. That uncertainty means that the object lensing the star could actually be a denser black hole or neutron star that packs the same mass into less space. There are two arguments against a more exotic origin for the small object, however.

First, white dwarfs are far more common than either black holes or neutron stars, making them statistically more likely to be the mysterious companion. Perhaps more troublingly, astrophysicists don't have a good explanation for how such a low-mass neutron star or black hole might form, Masuda said, and they haven't spotted any tiny examples either, unlike extremely low-mass white dwarfs.

"I admit that this argument might not be totally convincing, given that we don't have a good explanation for how this white dwarf was formed anyway," he said.

If KIC 8145411 orbits with a white dwarf, it could prompt astronomers to take another look at what we think we know about how white dwarfs form and how they interact with companions.

"Single-star evolution cannot explain such an [extremely low-mass] white dwarf, so it's been assumed that interactions with a close binary play an important role," Masuda said. "But again, this binary interaction scenario fails to explain the observed orbit of the KIC 8145411 system, because the orbit is not so close as required for this scenario to work. So some parts of this story need to be modified — although we don't yet know which."

Masuda said he and his colleagues plan to continue the hunt for small white dwarfs in similar binaries to learn more about their properties.

"I hope they will help us to solve the puzzle presented by the KIC 8145411 system, and lead to [a] more complete understanding of white dwarfs in binaries," Masuda said.

• The research is described in a paper published Aug. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 
•  Einstein's Theory Helps ID First Exoplanets Outside Milky Way 
•  Gravitational Microlensing – How Planets are Found Using This Technique [VIDEO] 
•  The Sun Will Turn Into a Giant Crystal Ball After It Dies 

Follow Nola on Facebook and on Twitter at @NolaTRedd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.  

{ https://www.space.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

Lightning Bolts Create Glowing Auroral 'Elves' and Brilliant Gamma-Ray Flashes

By Yasemin Saplakoglu 

In 2015, astronaut Andreas Mogensen snapped this photo of a thunderstorm from the International Space Station.

(Image: © ESA)

Dark fluffy thunderclouds don't just fuel dramatic storms, they also produce some of the most energetic flashes of light on the planet —  and brilliant sky displays known as ultrasonic "elves." Now, new findings have painted a clearer picture of what's going on in the silent interludes of a stormy sky.

For a long time, scientists have been searching for gamma-ray flashes in the deep folds of the universe. In 1994, while peering out into space in search for these signals, a NASA instrument happened to pick up on gamma-ray flashes that were emitted from somewhere closer to home — earthly thunderclouds.

These flashes, the most energetic natural phenomena on our planet, became known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). They're created when a thunderstorms' strong electric field excites atmospheric particles, which then emit radiation. But not much was known about what causes this high-energy phenomenon. 

• Related: Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning

To figure this out, a group of researchers analyzed data from a European Space Agency instrument called the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) aboard the International Space Station. The ASIM is the first instrument to be used for the purpose of detecting TGFs, rather than their even brighter doppelgängers out in deep space, said Torsten Neubert, the head scientist of the ASIM and lead author of a study published Dec. 10 in the journal Science. 

Their measurements showed a very specific sequence of events, lasting only a couple of milliseconds long, during a lightning strike. First, they detected an increase in light, which corresponds to the birth of a lightning bolt. During that process, a cloud creates both an electric field and a leader — a path of ionized air. They then detected a big peak in X-rays and gamma-rays, which correspond to the TGF, and then a huge optical pulse, Neubert told Live Science. 

This optical pulse traveled up from the thundercloud to the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere some 50 to 600 miles (80 to 1,000 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The pulse was "so powerful that it excited the lower region of the ionosphere," which is approximately 100 kilometers far and wide, Neubert said. In other words, it excited free electrons in the ionosphere, which then began colliding with neutral nitrogen and then emitted radiation.

This radiation is defined by another weather phenomenon, similar to auroras, called "elves," in which millisecond-long bursts of visible light and ultraviolet radiation glow in an expanding ring around a lightning strike. These luminous celestial beings, however, are visible only with the most sensitive equipment. 

Prior to this study, elves were thought to be unrelated to thunderstorms. Their findings suggest that the same lightning bolt triggers both TGFs and elves, though it's not clear if TGFs have any role in producing the elves, Neubert said. It's also not clear if TGFs and elves happen every time lightning strikes, but it likely happens much more often than we can detect, he added.

Another recent finding, published Dec. 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, suggests that TGFs happen right before visible lightning. These brilliant flashes occur right before a pulse of electricity shoots through the charged cloud, becoming a lightning bolt, according to a statement. Both of these studies were presented this week at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco.

"A lot of stuff is happening within space observations for lightning," some for monitoring weather and some for understanding the phenomenon, Neubert said. "Taken together [there's a] truly magnificent couple of years that are coming up."

• Photos: Skydiver Sean MacCormac 'Surfs' on Thunderstorm Clouds
• Images: Amazing Shots of Storms Light Up Weather Photo Contest
• Dramatic Photos Show Wildfire Smoke Sucked Up by Storm

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

Moon FARSIDE: Lunar Astronomy Proposal Takes Aim at Cosmic Dark Ages and Exoplanets

By Leonard David 

An artist's depiction of the FARSIDE array.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/Jack Burns, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder)

The far side of the moon is an attention grabber for many reasons. A new mission idea capitalizes on those reasons in a project dubbed the Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets, shortened to this enlightened abbreviation: FARSIDE.

The concept would place a low-radio-frequency interferometric array on the far side of the moon. Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Boulder and Gregg Hallinan of the California Institute of Technology have sketched out a way to execute the mission in a NASA-funded report published last month.

• Related: The Moon: 10 Surprising Lunar Facts

According to those materials, FARSIDE would enable near-continuous monitoring of the nearest stellar systems, letting scientists search for coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events at other stars. The instrument would also be able to detect magnetospheres of the nearest exoplanets that could be habitable. FARSIDE would be able to characterize similar activity in our own solar system as well, from the sun to the outer planets, including the hypothetical Planet Nine.

• Related: Photo Shows Far Side of Moon Like Never Before

But those are just the highlights. The team explained that FARSIDE could also conduct a range of other tasks. Those applications might include sounding the lunar subsurface and characterizing the interstellar medium in the solar system neighborhood.

The FARSIDE idea encompasses the instrument itself, a deployment rover, the lander and a base station. FARSIDE relies on 128 dipole antennas deployed across 6 miles (10 kilometers) of the lunar landscape by a rover. Tethers connect the antennas to a base station for central processing, power and data transmission to the proposed NASA Lunar Gateway or an alternative relay satellite.

FARSIDE would require transportation to the lunar surface, likely on board a commercial lunar lander. The study report uses the Blue Origin Blue Moon lander as a reference for the design.

All told, the team estimated that the budget for FARSIDE, after applying NASA and JPL standard cost reserves of 30% during development and 15% during operations, would be roughly $1.3 billion.

"In the past decade, significant investments have been made by commercial companies to develop the capability to deliver payloads to the surface of the moon, with some companies now on the horizon of success" the team wrote in the report. "NASA shows strong support of these companies through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program (CLPS), which recently awarded the first contract to three companies for payload delivery with a launch target in 2021."

"The study report notes that, because "sky noise" is so limited on the lunar farside, it's the only location within the inner solar system from which observations can be carried out, using frequencies that would best fulfill the promise of FARSIDE."

This study may be of interest to the lunar science community, Burns said, since it describes "how the array of low frequency radio dipole antennas might also be used to probe the subsurface on the lunar farside and as stations for seismic activity."

• China's Chang'e-4 Rover Keeps Snapping Stunning Photos of the Moon's Far Side
• Amazing Moon Photos from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
• Photos from the Moon's Far Side! China's Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing in Pictures

Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 01:05 geschreven door peter  

UFO sighting video from Hot Spring, Arkansas 2019

This video was just submitted to me via our Facebook page. It was filmed over Hot Spring, Arkansas earlier in 2019.

Witness report: 

This was taken in hot springs Arkansas a few months back. I’ll have to see if I can get the exact date. I’ll send the full video to you in a bit. I cut it down to what you see this because this was really the best of the footage.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

31-12-2019 om 00:39 geschreven door peter  

Information teleported between two computer chips for the first time

By Michael Irving

Researchers have managed to quantum teleport information between two computer chips for the first time

nicholashan/Depositphotos

Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet.

This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can “communicate” over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no matter how much space separates the two of them. In essence, information is being teleported between them.

Hypothetically, there’s no limit to the distance over which quantum teleportation can operate – and that raises some strange implications that puzzled even Einstein himself. Our current understanding of physics says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and yet, with quantum teleportation, information appears to break that speed limit. Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.”

Harnessing this phenomenon could clearly be beneficial, and the new study helps bring that closer to reality. The team generated pairs of entangled photons on the chips, and then made a quantum measurement of one. This observation changes the state of the photon, and those changes are then instantly applied to the partner photon in the other chip.

“We were able to demonstrate a high-quality entanglement link across two chips in the lab, where photons on either chip share a single quantum state,” says Dan Llewellyn, co-author of the study. “Each chip was then fully programmed to perform a range of demonstrations which utilize the entanglement. The flagship demonstration was a two-chip teleportation experiment, whereby the individual quantum state of a particle is transmitted across the two chips after a quantum measurement is performed. This measurement utilizes the strange behavior of quantum physics, which simultaneously collapses the entanglement link and transfers the particle state to another particle already on the receiver chip.”

The team reported a teleportation success rate of 91 percent, and managed to perform some other functions that will be important for quantum computing. That includes entanglement swapping (where states can be passed between particles that have never directly interacted via a mediator), and entangling as many as four photons together.

Information has been teleported over much longer distances before – first across a room, then 25 km (15.5 mi), then 100 km (62 mi), and eventually over 1,200 km (746 mi) via satellite. It’s also been done between different parts of a single computer chip before, but teleporting between two different chips is a major breakthrough for quantum computing.

• The research was published in the journal Nature Physics.

Source: University of Bristol

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30-12-2019 om 22:23 geschreven door peter  

What's the Point of the James Webb Space Telescope?

By Paul Sutter

The oft-delayed space observatory will be worth the wait.

The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and “unitized pallet structures” (which fold up around the telescope for launch) are seen partially deployed to an open configuration to enable telescope installation.

(Image: © NASA/Chris Gunn)

• Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is (currently) scheduled to launch in March of 2021, after years of delays and billions of dollars spent over budget. While it's easy to argue that all that time and money has been wasted, this observatory will be the premiere and undisputed champion of infrared wavelengths, giving us unparalleled access to corners of the universe currently inaccessible. 

If we want to learn new things about everything from the first galaxies to the chance for life on other planets, the roughly $9.7 billion James Webb is our only hope.

• Related: Building the James Webb Space Telescope (Gallery)

No chill

While the James Webb Space Telescope ("JWST" to those in the know) is heralded as the "successor" to NASA's storied Hubble Space Telescope, it kind of isn't. The Hubble is primarily an optical telescope, capturing wavelengths of light similar to the range that the human eye does, and extending past that a little bit into the infrared and ultraviolet (UV) portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. In essence, the Hubble is a giant orbiting space eyeball, delivering stunning pictures that you would see, if your optic nerves were similarly equipped.

But the JWST is different. It will be observing entirely in the infrared, barely scratching the deepest possible reds that a human can see. In other words, the JWST will be studying a universe that is largely invisible to human experience.

One of the major reasons that the JWST is designed to be an infrared scope is that infrared astronomy is, in general, really hard to do from the surface of the Earth. Light pollution is the bane of astronomers, who need their skies crystal-clear and perfectly dark to do their detailed observations and measurements.

And infrared light pollution comes from many different places. Basically, anything warm. Which is, basically, everything. Human bodies generate 100 watts of infrared radiation. The Earth itself is pretty warm, glowing strongly in infrared bands. Even the telescope itself, if it's at room temperature, is aglow in the infrared.

It's not that we can't do infrared astronomy from the ground, it's just that it's frustratingly hard.

Hence, space.

Far from home

The JWST will operate about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from the Earth, to get it safely far away from our warm, infrared-glowing planet. But even still, there's the sun to contend with. Ever sit outside on a nice summer day, feeling the warmth of our sun on your skin? Yeah, that's infrared radiation, pumped out by the bucketful. And even a million miles away from the Earth, the sun is still a little bit toasty.

To combat this, designers of infrared space telescopes have a couple options. The most common choice is to use an active cooling system, chilling down the telescope to the temperatures needed to properly observe infrared wavelengths. This is great, and utilized by previous infrared space telescopes, but it does limit their lifespans. No more coolant = no more astronomy.

So instead the JWST will deploy a giant, expensive space umbrella, 72 feet (22 meters) long and 36 feet (11 m) wide, made of five layers of extremely reflective material, each layer thinner than a human hair. This massive "sunshield" will keep the telescope itself in constant shade, somewhere south of minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 223 degrees Celsius), which is ideal for the infrared wavelengths it will be studying.

Although, just for fun, one of the instruments onboard will be chilled with an active cooling system to below minus 433 Fahrenheit (minus 258 C ), which will allow it to access some even longer infrared wavelengths.

• Related: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Passes Vital Sun Shield Test

Behold the science

All in all, the JWST is massive. In fact, it's so big that it shouldn't be able to fit on a rocket. Besides the gargantuan sunshield, the primary mirror will be 21 feet (6.5 m) across, which is far wider than any rocket fairing currently in use. Duct-taping the mirror to the side of the rocket isn't exactly a workable solution, so instead the clever NASA engineers broke the mirror into 18 smaller hexagonal sections, which will be tucked and folded into the rocket (along with the folded-up sunshield and the rest of the telescope itself).

If everything goes right, just a few days after launch the JWST will head to its observing point, unfold, and start staring.

And what it will see will be — and I'm not using this word lightly — remarkable. One of its main targets will be the early universe, when our cosmos was just a few hundred million years old. The first stars and galaxies to appear on the cosmic scene blazed brightly in the visible spectrum, but over the course of the past 13 billion years the universe has expanded, stretching that light out of the visible range and down into the infrared — right in the sweet spot of the JWST's design parameters.

Since we have no images at all from the epoch of the first stars and galaxies (known colloquially as the "cosmic dawn") this will be our first-ever view into this important age in the history of the cosmos.

Closer to home, the JWST will study anything cool in the cosmos, from protoplanetary disks around newborn stars to molecular clouds, comets, Kuiper Belt objects and more.

And JWST will use a specialized device to block out light from some distant stars, enabling the observatory to snap pictures of any objects orbiting those stars — like exoplanets. Those planets will be glowing in the infrared, and the light from those planets will be modified by the chemicals and elements in their atmospheres, chemicals and elements which might be signs of life.

From ET hunter to cosmic-dawn revealer, the JWST will certainly be worth the wait. 

• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope: Hubble's Cosmic Successor
• House Spending Bill Fires Warning Shot at James Webb Space Telescope
• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Arrives in California for Final Assembly (Photos)

Learn more by listening to the episode "Is the James Webb worth the wait?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to @SethDSanders, @hhyech, White I., and Veljo U. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

30-12-2019 om 22:10 geschreven door peter  

BBC transfers HP Lovecraft drama to site of Rendlesham UFO incident

A podcast based on a 1930 American horror story has been relocated due to fresh inspiration from "rural English mythology" and an alleged UFO sighting.

The BBC Sounds podcast The Whisperer in Darkness features reports by US airmen who claimed to have seen a UFO in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk in 1980.

Writer Julian Simpson visited drama locations in Suffolk with actress Jana Carpenter before penning the series.

His version is loosely based on the novella set in Vermont by HP Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's story is about strange sightings in the New England area of the USA.

• Graphic novel to celebrate East Anglia's demon dog
• How home county inspired MR James
• Suffolk's history of witch trials

The new BBC drama tells the story of an investigation into witchcraft, the occult and secret government operations - centred on Rendlesham Forest, which was home to the US airbase of RAF Woodbridge when the alleged "Rendlesham Forest incident" occurred in December 1980.

Simpson said there were parallels between Lovecraft's story and the UFO incident - which has never been conclusively explained.

"The Lovecraft tale is about a guy who lives in the woods. He's being visited by something - a kind of cosmic horror," he said.

"You never find out what is watching him, but there is an inference it is somehow otherworldly.

"Lovecraft was reading people like Arthur Machen and MR James [who set a number of his ghost stories in East Anglia] and was taking in a lot of their rural English mythology and turning it into his own thing."

Jana Carpenter, who plays Kennedy Fisher - one of the two main characters, said: "Basically we just got in the car and drove around to all these places that we were thinking of using. We went to Woodbridge, Dunwich, Aldeburgh, Orford.

"You definitely get the sense that you're in a unique environment and it's not surprising that lots of mythologies can build up in this environment.

"It still feels disconnected, especially when you go to Orford, you have to drive through the forest to get to it."

HP Lovecraft

• Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a US horror writer who lived 1890-1937
• His fiction which included The Call of Cthulhu and The Rats in the Walls, has achieved cult status, but was admired only by a small circle of friends in his lifetime
• He favoured human contact by letter, rarely left his home, and even then, only at night, delighting to walk streets empty of people
• Artist HR Giger cited Lovecraft as an influence on his designs for the Alien series of movies
• Rock band Metallica released the instrumental Call of Ktulu on their second album
• A Scooby-Doo episode featured a misanthropic horror writer named HP Hatecraft

Source: BBC The Whisperer in Darkness and others

30-12-2019 om 21:52 geschreven door peter  

Magnetic Ropes Surround 'Whale Galaxy' 80,000 Light-Years Across

30-12-2019 om 21:41 geschreven door peter  

Chinese wetenschapper die genen van baby’s aanpaste de cel in - HLN.be

Bron: ANP

Een Chinese wetenschapper die genen van baby’s aanpaste, is veroordeeld tot een gevangenisstraf van drie jaar. Dat meldt het Chinese staatsmedium Xinhua. 

Vandaag werd de wetenschapper door een rechtbank in de miljoenenstad Shenzhen veroordeeld voor “het illegaal uitvoeren van genetische manipulatie bij embryo’s, met reproductie als doeleinde”, zegt Xinhua. Naast een celstraf van drie jaar, krijgt hij ook een boete van 3 miljoen yuan (ongeveer 380.000 euro).

Lees ook

Chinese ‘babymaker’ verschijnt voor het eerst in het openbaar na wereldwijde verontwaardiging: “Nog een vrouw zwanger van designbaby”

He Jiankui maakt in november 2018 bekend dat hij een gentechnologie genaamd CRISPR-Cas9 had gebruikt om de genen van embryo’s van een tweeling, Lulu en Nana, aan te passen. Door de aanpassing werden de twee meisjes resistent gemaakt tegen hiv, het virus waarmee hun vader besmet was. De Chinese overheid had daarop een onderzoek ingesteld.

“Ik voel een enorme verantwoordelijkheid om niet alleen de eerste te zijn, maar ook als voorbeeld te dienen”, zei hij later tijdens een congres. Over het al dan niet toelaten van de omstreden techniek zei hij: “Het is de maatschappij die zal beslissen over de volgende stappen.”

De bekendmaking van He zorgde voor verontwaardiging en afkeuring in de hele wereld. Hij werd kort hierna onder huisarrest geplaatst en ontslagen door zijn werkgever de universiteit in Shenzhen. Chinese autoriteiten lieten in 2018 al weten dat He alleen en op eigen initiatief heeft gehandeld en dat hij zijn eigen financiering regelde. Ook zou hij meerdere richtlijnen hebben overtreden.

VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

30-12-2019 om 20:54 geschreven door peter