Strange Dark Matter Findings Could Rewrite the Universe's History

In November, astronomers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijng published a paper identifying 19 galaxies which might violate the most fundamental theory of how the universe first formed.

They had been searching the sky for yet-undiscovered galaxies which seem to be lacking the usual dark matter component, aiming to add more evidence to a baffling phenomenon scientists had begun observing last year. And they claimed to have found a whole group of them.

Until recently, it was almost unanimously assumed that huge amounts of invisible dark matter was the key to galaxy formation; the gravitational effects experienced and induced by clumps of dark matter in the universe produced swirling disks of gas clouds, stars and dark matter. Dark matter had to make up the majority of matter in these galaxies, according to standard models of the universe, otherwise they would never have formed.

But since 2016, researchers keep stumbling upon galaxies that don’t seem to be dominated by dark matter. Some calculations imply that these galaxies lack dark matter entirely. Either way, galaxies which have far less dark matter than expected would give physicists a lot of explaining to do: why are they lacking dark matter, and how did they form in the first place?

Galaxies without dark matter could rewrite the history of the universe

Unlike the researchers in Beijing, Yale professor Pieter van Dokkum wasn’t trying to find anomalies among the "ultra diffuse" galaxies he studies—those with very few stars. After all, before van Dokkum made a chance discovery in 2018, there was very little reason to expect to find any galaxies which had formed and continued to exist without dark matter.

In fact, van Dokkum and his team expected to find dark matter everywhere they looked. Unlike our own star-packed Milky Way, where dark matter is only on the periphery, ultra-diffuse galaxies should be densely filled with dark matter. Their analysis instead identified, for the first time, a galaxy without any dark matter at all.

“The way the stars move should be entirely dominated by the amount of dark matter,” he says. “The fact we found this deficit was not a subtle result.”

Though van Dokkum's findings were and remain controversial, new analysis of galaxies observed through giant telescopes keeps poking holes in accepted theories. If nothing else, the latest study by researchers in Beijing highlights still-open questions about the shape and structure of galaxies.

Attempts to explain the apparent lack of dark matter in the identified dwarf galaxies fall into two broad categories: theories about how and why galaxies may have been stripped of the dark matter they once had, and theories which postulate the formation of galaxies without dark matter at all.

In the first group, researchers such as Go Ogiya at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France are exploring a phenomenon called "tidal stripping" in which matter is pulled away from a galaxy due to tidal forces that arise when it is interacting with the gravitational field of another galaxy. Even before van Dokkum reported his observations of two dark-matter-deficient galaxies, there was evidence that tidal stripping would disproportionately affect dark matter, which is less tightly bound than visible or “baryonic” matter (i.e. stars) in the centre of the galaxy.

“Whether the baryonic matter is stripped from the satellite galaxy depends on its structure: the distribution of stars determines their resilience to the tidal force,” Ogiya wrote in an email. “In my numerical simulations...stars are hardly stripped from the satellite galaxy while its size doubles as a result of dark matter stripping.”

Ogiya also suggests a process by which galaxies might form without ever containing dark matter. So-called “tidal dwarf galaxies” could form when dark matter and baryonic matter is “ejected” from an existing galaxy due to tidal forces, but the dark matter component evaporates due to its higher velocity, leaving only stars and gas to form a new galaxy.

However, the theories with game-changing potential are those which rewrite the history of the early universe, around 13 billion years ago, long before the “heyday of galaxy formation” when tidal stripping might have taken place. Though he says he's agnostic about proposed explanations of dark-matter-deficiency, van Dokkum favours a theory suggesting that dark matter and gas interacted just after the Big Bang in ways which are not currently predicted. This could cause gas clumps which would separate from the dark matter and then later form galaxies made up only of gas and stars.

“That would be really cool because then we would learn something about the conditions of the early universe and probe the epoch when galaxy formation was not yet underway,” he says.

Dark matter deficiency, or miscalculation?

Some scientists believe that van Dokkum's result, while striking, may not be reliable. Since dark matter can’t be seen, how much of it is present in a galaxy has to be inferred from the behaviour of stars in the galaxy, which can be seen. Calculating this behaviour (for instance, velocity of the stars), depends on other galactic traits, like the shape of the galaxy and its distance away from us.

Ignacio Trujillo, a scientist specializing in Extragalactic Astronomy at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, has shown that the strange behaviour of these ultra-diffuse galaxies can be explained away by measuring how far away they are using alternative methods. If the anomalous galaxies are in fact much closer to Earth than the distance used for van Dokkum’s calculations, then calculating their dark matter components gives results within the expected range.

"You find yourself in this strange regime where you have to ask yourself: how strange a hypothesis can I accommodate which is still less strange than finding no dark matter?"

According to Trujillo, it is indeed possible for very tiny galaxies to form without the presence of dark matter, but not the way galaxies were formed just after the Big Bang. Rather than gas and stars clumping together due to gravitational effects, these galaxies form when an existing galaxy collides with another and residual matter stripped from the colliding galaxies forms a new galaxy—all without any dark matter. In contrast to galaxies formed by the tidal-stripping effects Ogiya studies, these galaxies would live for a relatively short time by cosmic standards: a few hundred years. Examples have already been identified for decades, he says, but these aren’t the sort of dark-matter-deficient galaxies that challenge the current understanding of our universe.

“People have already found things they have called galaxies without dark matter, but they are transient features which then disappear,” he says. “The novelty would be to find a galaxy which was formed originally in the early universe without dark matter, and I don’t think we have any strong candidates yet.”

Already, Trujillo’s colleagues say they have also found issues with the research published last month identifying 19 possible galaxies lacking dark matter. This week the American Astronomical Society published a research note authored by Jorge Sanchez Almeida which argued that the dark matter calculations for the 19 galaxies failed to account for true shape of dwarf galaxies, simplifying them as being “disk-like” instead of elliptical 3D shapes.

For van Dokkum, questions on both sides of the debate are very much still open. The two anomalous galaxies he’s identified as being dark-matter-deficient are strange in a number of ways, by anyone’s standards, he says. If they do in fact contain dark matter, contrary to his own hypothesis, other assumptions about the distribution of dark matter, as well as the shape and orientation of the galaxies and their history will need to be revised.

“You can come up with unlikely scenarios in which these galaxies do contain dark matter,” he says. “And unlikely is relative in this case to the hypothesis that there is no dark matter.”

“You find yourself in this strange regime where you have to ask yourself: how strange a hypothesis can I accommodate which is still less strange than finding no dark matter?”

Future research

The “fun thing” about the ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxies van Dokkum and others are studying is that they are “nearby and bright," van Dokkum said, which makes it relatively easy to investigate their behaviour.

With the powerful telescopes available today, van Dokkum hopes not only to make more accurate measurements of galaxy velocities and distance, but also identify the epoch in which the galaxies formed, using new data from the Hubble telescope. This empirical evidence would rule out a whole class of explanations for the apparent dark matter deficiency, one way or another.

Nicolas Martin, a researcher at the Observatory Astronomical De Strasbourg in France, believes that the observations needed to drive research forward are just beyond the limits of what is possible with the best apparatus around at the moment. Emailing while on location at one such cutting-edge telescope, he said that the research community would likely have to wait for two next-generation telescopes, currently planned or under construction in Chile and Hawaii, before they could generate even more precise measurements of the velocity of stars in the dwarf galaxies.

In the meantime, Martin, van Dokkum, Ogiya, and others will all be searching the sky to determine how many other strange dark-matter-deficient galaxies might be out there.

“If they are very common, then they need to be naturally produced by our models of galaxy formation,” Martin says. “If they are not common, then maybe they are just weirdos, coming from environments that are poorly understood corner cases, which is less problematic overall.”

{ https://www.vice.com/en_us }

06-01-2020 om 23:13 geschreven door peter  

Ontmoet Bruie, de kleine NASA robot die op zoek gaat naar buitenaards leven op maan van Jupiter - HLN.be

Bron: NASA, NYT

Geen simpele opdracht want het oppervlak van Europa bestaat uit een dikke ijslaag die tot wel dertig kilometer dik kan zijn. Daaronder een diepe oceaan. De robot moet dus eerst zijn weg zien te banen doorheen de dikke ijslaag voordat hij de “vijandige oceaan” kan verkennen.

Lees ook

File op Mars

“De ijsmassa’s zouden op die manen het leven in de oceanen kunnen helpen voeden”, aldus Kevin Hand, hoofdwetenschapper van het Bruie-project. De NASA-wetenschapper gelooft dat Europa dankzij de dikke bevroren massa een van de beste locaties is om te zoeken naar buitenaards leven.

Antarctica

Dan blijft de vraag hoe NASA het voor elkaar zal krijgen om de robot doorheen de dikke ijslaag te sturen. “Antarctica benadert het dichtst de zeeën van een maan”, aldus Hand. Dus bezocht Bruie Antarctica afgelopen november.

Daar was het spannend afwachten voor de wetenschappers. De robot bleef iets meer dan 42 uur onder het ijs en werd daar blootgesteld aan de sterke stromingen van het water. Daardoor kost het de robot veel energie om zijn positie te behouden waardoor zijn batterij onvoldoende reserves overhoudt om langer dan gepland actief te blijven. Als de rover crasht, gaat zijn positie sowieso verloren.  

Ondanks de grootte van de uitdaging, wist de robot die tot een goed einde te brengen. Traag maar zeker bewoog hij zich voort onder het ijs. En dankzij een ingebouwde camera konden de wetenschappers meegenieten van het bijzondere uitzicht, dat er al behoorlijk buitenaards uitzag.

Bezoek aan Europa

Bruie is ongeveer een meter lang en uitgerust met twee wielen die elk zo groot zijn als een pizza. Dankzij de wielen kan de robot zich voortbewegen onder een dikke ijslaag. De Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration werd in 2017 ontwikkeld door technici van Jet Propulsion Laboratory van NASA in Pasadena en doorstond in 2019 zijn eerste succesvolle test in Antarctica. Wanneer hij Europa zal bezoeken, is vooralsnog onduidelijk.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

06-01-2020 om 22:38 geschreven door peter  

According to a new study, there may still be active volcanoes on Venus and they could have erupted very recently. If this is correct, this would be a significant discovery as the only other known place in our Solar System (besides Earth) that contains active volcanoes that spew lava is Jupiter’s moon Io. Mars, as well as our own moon, had active volcanoes at one time, but they all died out a very long time ago.

Around a decade ago, scientists were studying data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe that orbited the planet from 2006 to 2014 and found that lava flowed on the planet less than 2.5 million years ago and perhaps even as recently as 250,000 years ago. In fact, back in 2010, visible to near-infrared light was emitting from certain areas on Venus which indicated recent lava flows. But how recent the lava flows occurred remains unknown as it’s still unclear as to how the volcanic rocks react to Venus’ severely harsh atmosphere.

However, with traces of sulfurous gases in Venus’ atmosphere, it seems as though there are still active volcanoes on the planet.

In order to find out for sure how recent the lava flows occurred, researchers conducted an experiment using crystals of olivine, which are green minerals that are found in volcanic rocks. They studied how the crystals would be affected in conditions that are similar to Venus’ surface.

The researchers heated the olivine, as well as Earth air, inside of a furnace with temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately a month. They discovered that within days, the olivine was coated with a red-black mineral hematite which causes some of the crystal’s features to become hard to detect.

Since signs of olivine were detected from space, this suggests that there were volcanic eruptions on Venus quite recently or else they wouldn’t have been detected if the eruptions happened a long time ago.

Researchers then conducted another experiment with different volcanic minerals heated with air containing carbon dioxide and sulfur – more similar to the atmosphere on Venus. “The results with those are pretty much the same,” Justin Filiberto, who is a planetary scientist at the Universities Space Research Association’s Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told Space.com. He went on to say, “This is the first time we may have seen active volcanism on another planet.”

The scientists’ findings were published in the journal Science Advances and can be read in full here.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-01-2020 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

Top UFO stories of 2019

2019 was a big year for UFO coverage, ranging from the U.S. Navy acknowledging for the first time that leaked videos were real to former and current politicians weighing in on what the military knows, and a wave of people attempting to "storm Area 51."

No one can say for certain whether life exists outside of this planet, but the public's interest levels in the subject have likely never been higher.

FIRST QUARTER

January saw the release of newly declassified documents from the Pentagon that revealed the Department of Defense funded projects that investigated UFOs, wormholes, alternate dimensions and a host of other subjects that are often the topics of conspiracy theorists.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released 38 research titles on Jan. 18, following a Freedom of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. The research was funded by the Department of Defense under its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

• MAN WHO EXPOSED 'AREA 51 UFO TESTS' CLAIMS US GOVERNMENT STILL MONITORS HIM 30 YEARS LATER

The existence of AATIP was initially described by The New York Times and Politico in 2017. It was subsequently reported by Fox News and a number of other news outlets that the Pentagon had secretly set up a program to investigate UFOs at the request of former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

A Pentagon spokesman said the UFO program ended in 2012, though The New York Times said the Defense Department still investigates potential episodes of unidentified flying objects.

SECOND QUARTER

Several months later, the U.S. Navy announced it was drafting new guidelines for pilots and other employees to report encounters with "unidentified aircraft."

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in an April statement to Politico, which first reported the move.

"For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report."

"As part of this effort," it told Politico, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

The Navy also said it's taking a more proactive approach in briefing lawmakers, including several senators who were briefed in June.

One month later, the Pentagon admitted that it was still investigating UFOs as part of the AATIP.

“The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland,” spokesman Christopher Sherwood told the New York Post in May. “The department will continue to investigate, through normal procedures, reports of unidentified aircraft encountered by US military aviators in order to ensure defense of the homeland and protection against strategic surprise by our nation’s adversaries.”

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon told Fox & Friends in May the Navy has a right to be concerned about the unexplained sightings.

"We know that UFOs exist. This is no longer an issue," said Mellon, who has written on the topic and is associated with the History Channel series, 'Unidentified,' at the time. "The issue is why are they here? Where are they coming from and what is the technology behind these devices that we are observing?"

There are indications, Mellon said, that the objects reported by Navy pilots in 2014 and 2015 and mentioned in the New York Times report were doing things that aren't possible in this physical realm.

• ALIENS? HARVARD PROFESSOR DEFENDS CLAIM MYSTERIOUS INTERSTELLAR OBJECT COULD BE EXTRATERRESTRIAL PROBE

The speeds that were reported (about 5,000 miles per hour, according to Mellon) were only sustainable for about an hour by an aircraft in the air, and these objects would be flying around all day long, the pilots said.

"Pilots observing these craft are absolutely mystified and that comes through clearly in their public statements," Mellon continued.

In June 2019, Reid, now retired, expressed his desire for lawmakers to hold public hearings into what the military knows.

"They would be surprised how the American public would accept it," he said during a wide-ranging interview with a Nevada radio station. "People from their individual states would accept it."

THIRD QUARTER

What started as an internet joke in July to "see them aliens,"  turned into the headline-grabbing "Storm Area 51" event in September.

Although more than 2 million people signed up on Facebook saying they would attend the viral phenomenon event, a motley group of about 100 “alien-chasers” converged on the back gate of the secret site early Sept. 20, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Only a few people were arrested, Fox News previously reported.

People came from all over the U.S. to attend the viral event, which generated security concerns and garnered global attention.

"We figure Mars needs women, so we're here if they want to beam us up," one woman told Fox News in September.

• FORMER US DEFENSE OFFICIAL: WE KNOW UFOS ARE REAL - HERE'S WHY THAT'S CONCERNING

FOURTH QUARTER

Americans said in a September Gallup poll they are becoming increasingly skeptical that the government knows more than it is letting on as it pertains to UFOs and an ex-punk rocker may be the one who opens the proverbial pandora's box.

A spokesperson for To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA), co-founded by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, told The New York Times in September that it "certainly" had obtained "exotic material samples from UFOs," but no further details were given at the time.

Later that month, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that three UFO videos that were released by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge and published by The New York Times are of real "unidentified" objects.

“The Navy considers the phenomena contained/depicted in those three videos as unidentified," Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault, a website dedicated to declassified government documents.

• BLINK-182 FOUNDER'S UFO HUNTING GROUP CLINCHES DEAL WITH ARMY TO STUDY 'EXOTIC MATERIAL'

Gradisher added that “the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ terminology is used because it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.”

The videos in question, known as "FLIR1,” “Gimbal” and “GoFast,” were originally released to the New York Times and to the TTSA.

The first video of the unidentified object was taken on Nov. 14, 2004, and shot by an F-18's gun camera. The second video was taken on Jan. 21, 2015, and shows another aerial vehicle with pilots commenting on how strange it is. The third video was also taken on Jan. 21, 2015, but it is unclear whether the third video was of the same object or a different one.

In October, the TTSA  signed a deal with the U.S. Army to study its purported extraterrestrial "discoveries."

November saw the publication of an explosive report that detailed the involvement of two "unknown individuals" who told several Naval officers who witnessed the 2004 event, known as the USS Nimitz UFO incident, to delete evidence.

Earlier this month, Chris Rutkowski, a Canadian science writer and ufologist, donated his collection of more than 20,000 UFO reports filed over the past three decades, plus another 10,000 UFO-related documents from the Canadian government, including the so-called Falcon Lake incident, which Rutkowski said "beats even Roswell."

{ https://www.foxnews.com/ }

06-01-2020 om 21:17 geschreven door peter  

Whatever else you might say about the year 2019, it was certainly not boring, and this is doubly so when it comes to the UFO subject.

Richard and Tracey make the case that this could well be a year of historical importance.

All ten stories on this list were significant, and the #1 story will probably surprise many - until they stop and reflect on it.

Enjoy the countdown with Richard and Tracey.

  

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

06-01-2020 om 20:53 geschreven door peter  

Klobuchar Teases UFO Docs Declassification If Americans Elect Her President

The 2020 US presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar suggested recently that she would allow journalists to look into classified stuff on UFO sightings if she won president.

Klobuchar spoke about her optimism towards the presidential race, telling that she thinks she’s well-positioned to win against President Donald Trump. The Minnesota senator also talked about unidentified flying objects (UFOs), specifically on the story of the Navy fighter pilot David Fraser about chasing a UFO in 2014 on the West Coast.

She said that we don’t know enough and she doesn’t know what’s occurred, not just with that sighting, but with others. And she believes one of the things a leader of the nation could do is to look into what is there in regards to what does the science say and what does our military say.

She added that the exciting part of that answer is that some of this is old before suggested that some of this information could be released to the public for journalists to look into and get the bottom of the truth.

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

06-01-2020 om 20:28 geschreven door peter  

Somewhere in the mid 1800s, novelist and columnist and columnist Fanny Fern (real name Sara Wills) coined the adage: “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. While still popular today, the year 2020 may bring to the national lexicon a different one: “The way to full UFO and ET disclosure is through New Hampshire.” That’s because an intrepid reporter with The Conway Daily Sun has been putting tough questions about recent UFO sightings by military personnel to every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate to pass through the state which hosts the first presidential primary election (not a caucus) on February 11. On January 3rd, it was South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg’s turn in reporter Daymond Steer’s UFO hotseat and the former US Navy lieutenant showed why the key to electing a president willing to open the X-files to the public might be a military background.

Pete Buttigieg

“Well, strange things happen out there.”

In response to Steer’s UFO question about the USS Nimitz UFO incident in 2004 witnessed by New Hampshire’s own fighter pilot David Fravor, Buttigieg immediately defended the right and responsibility of military personnel to be able to report strange incidents like that without fear of ridicule or reprisal. He then tells a personal story from his childhood. On a New Mexico trip past a military base, he saw a strange-looking blimp under heavy security. Twenty years later when he was deployed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Buttigieg looks up and saw the blimp doing surveillance to protect the base and its troops. Does this mean he thinks all UFOs are secret military test aircraft?

“It’s very unlikely we’re alone in the universe.”

Buttigieg takes the safe approach in saying we’re not the only life forms around, but he doesn’t think we’ll see “concrete evidence” of it on Earth. However, that doesn’t mean we should stop watching the skies.

“As a curious species, we should always be looking at what’s going on around us.”

Mayor Pete is obviously a very curious guy. But is he openminded enough to accept the idea that “what’s going on around us” — or went on around us in the past with evidence stored in secret files — could indeed be visitors from another planet or galaxy if presented with proof?

“Unimaginably strange things often happened in the grand sweep of American and world history and we should never fail to be on the lookout for what’s happening around us.”

“Unimaginably strange things.” Could they be too unimaginably strange to reveal to the American public? If Pete Buttigieg were elected president, would he accept that it was because a majority of voters are part of his “curious species” and want to know “what’s going on around us” too?

An unimaginable strange thing that became a reality?

Pete Buttigieg was one of the most open to the UFO questions of the candidates sitting down for the Sun Editorial board meetings and the inevitable questions from reporter Daymond Steer. (You can watch the full clip here.) However, if Mayor Pete is too young for your taste in presidents, longshot candidate Joe Stesak, a retired three-star Navy admiral who commanded an aircraft battle group in Afghanistan and Iraq before serving two terms in Congress representing Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, had an admiral-like blunt answer to the same question about what Fravor saw. (Stesak dropped out of the race last month but he can still be a write-in.)

“If you’re an F-18 pilot, you’re nobody’s fool.”

The New Hampshire primary isn’t until February 11th and more candidates will be in the hotseat. Stay tuned.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-01-2020 om 12:15 geschreven door peter  

One of the most dramatic and harrowing supposed UFO encounters in not only Canadian history, but that of anywhere else, began in 1967 in the remote wilderness of a place called Falcon Lake, Manitoba, located just about 150 kilometers east of the city of Winnipeg. It was here in this peaceful wilderness where on May 20, 1967, industrial mechanic and Polish immigrant Stefan Michalak was out prospecting for mineral deposits. At one point he seemed to have found what he was looking for, a rich vein of quartz, but as he was getting ready to try and go about staking a claim on it a very bizarre sequence of events would unfold that would change his life forever, and would go on to become one of the most intriguing cases of a purported UFO attack ever.

As he scoped out the area, Michalak was startled by a gaggle of geese suddenly alighting into the sky with some commotion, which he followed skyward until his eyes fell upon an otherworldly sight hovering above. He says that the geese passed in front of two large, oval or cigar-shaped objects in the air surrounded by a reddish glow, and that one of these began to descend as he looked on in awe to land on a nearby flat shelf of rock, where it seemed to morph into a disc-like shape right before his startled eyes. As the strange object did this, the other craft allegedly ascended into the sky to disappear, leaving Michalak alone with the glowing disc that had landed only about 45 meters away from him.

The witness would claim that he had warily approached the curious sight, and as he did so a hatch would open on the side of the object as the glow subsided to reveal a metallic surface. He claimed that the opening belched forth a smell not unlike sulphur, and that a motorized whirring noise could be heard emanating from within, as well as the glare from a bright light. He still crept closer, and says that he could hear what sounded vaguely like voices echoing about within. Michalak allegedly called out to whoever it was, but there was no reply. The multilingual Michalak even tried calling out in Polish, Russian, and German, thinking that this was a manmade craft, but met with only that unearthly machine hum each time. Where as most people would have probably called it a day and gotten out of there with haste, Michalak was so curious that he moved ever closer to the craft, each call out to the occupants unanswered, until he was purportedly standing right at the portal that had opened in the craft, and it was here where things would get truly bizarre.

After taking a peek within to see various flashing lights, panels of some sort, all bathed in a purplish glow, he reached out to touch the side of the object to find it extremely hot to the touch, causing him to withdraw his hand in surprise. Inspecting his glove, he apparently found that it had been actually melted, and as he stared at his hand in bafflement the whole of the craft then began to rattle and shake. As this was happening, the now frightened man says he was struck in the chest by what felt like a stream of very hot air emitted from within the craft, which sent him sprawling back away from the disc. The bizarre craft then began to lift off the ground to hover over him, before shooting off over the trees into the sky to leave Michalak feeling nauseous to the point that he vomited where he stood. In his head he could feel an intense pain building, as well as an intense burning in his chest area, and he knew that something was very wrong. Wrapping himself close with his jacket, he meandered off towards the road and towards civilization, constantly vomiting along the way and eventually stumbling into the the parking lot of the Falcon Motor Hotel.

When hotel staff found him, he was delirious and rambling, disheveled and wild-eyed and still vomiting, and it was at first thought that he was just very drunk. Michalak managed to make it on his own on a bus back to Winnipeg, where he was whisked off to the hospital and things would get even stranger still. When examined it was revealed that he had a series of burn marks that formed a grid-like pattern over his chest, as well as signs of what appeared to be radiation sickness, the causes unknown. Michalak’s son, Stan Michalak, would later say of seeing his father in this state:

I recalled seeing him in bed. He didn’t look good at all. He looked pale, haggard. When I walked into the bedroom there was a huge stink in the room, like a real horrible aroma of sulphur and burnt motor. It was all around and it was coming out of his pores. It was bad. I was very afraid. My dad had been injured and I didn’t know anything about it.

Stefan Michalak after the incident

As soon as the man was lucid enough to give his version of events, the story hit the news and a UFO sensation was born. Apparently there was quite a lot of interest from the military and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Royal Canadian Air Force at he time, with numerous alleged searches of the area of the incident using tracker dogs and aircraft, and even Michalak himself was recruited to join in the sweep when he was feeling better. They apparently found the remains of Michalak’s scorched and melted glove, as well as some of his tools and allegedly a circular area on the rock that was strangely devoid of moss or any vegetation and which possessed soil high in radiation readings and some odd pieces of melted metal within the cracks of the rock, also radioactive in nature.

In the meantime the tale was really launching itself into local legend, and there was by many accounts a pronounced military presence in the area for weeks, with helicopters hovering above at all hours. There was also a deluge of reporters and curiosity seekers gravitating towards the Michalak home, and in the meantime there was also an intense investigation going on into the claims he had made. There were some efforts at the time to discredit Michalak, trying to paint him as a town drunk who had hallucinated the whole thing or completely fabricated it, but this didn’t stick and seems to have been wholly invented just to make him look crazy. He had been a military policeman in his former years and was known as an honest and responsible upstanding citizen, with no history of telling tall tales, by all accounts not someone who would be making these kinds of stories up or showing up stumbling about ranting about flying saucers. There was also the physical evidence left behind, which could not be easily explained and which was confirmed by doctors. UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski, who has written the definitive book on the whole incident, When They Appeared: Falcon Lake 1967: The inside story of a close encounter, has said of this:

Michalak certainly wasn’t an alcoholic. He didn’t drink to excess but he drank socially. To suggest that having a few drinks or even three or four drinks the night before his experience would make him imagine something to the point where he would be physically burned and leave radioactive debris behind is, I think, quite a quantum leap.

We have a witness who was judged by a psychiatrist to not fabricate stories. A person who was a good member of society holding a good job, a background in the military himself, and no reason to perpetrate such a hoax at all. He maintained until he died that this is what happened to him. He did not have a history of seeing aliens around every corner, like so many contactees and abductees maintain these days in their own stories. This was a very unusual experience that happened to him and he was as puzzled as anyone. Whether it was something from outer space or a military vehicle… there’s no question something happened. It’s a mystery. It’s quite fascinating. I knew the family quite well, and he wasn’t the type of guy to make up stories like this.

Michalak’s son would agree, having said, “If Dad hoaxed this — remember we’re talking about a blue-collar, industrial mechanic — if he hoaxed it then he was a freakin’ genius.” There were also the findings of official investigators and civilian researchers, who came to the conclusion that there was no explanation for the incident, the radiation, or what happened to Michalak, and to this day the Canadian Department of National Defence considers the case to be officially unsolved. Michalak himself would adamantly stand by his story right up until his death in 1999, so what happened to him? Was this just all some sort of elaborate hoax or something else, and if so, what? One idea is that he saw not aliens or extraterrestrials, but rather some sort of terrestrial experimental aircraft, and indeed Michalak himself thought this could be the case, never really specifically insisting that what he saw was aliens. His son Stan has said of this:

If you asked him what it was he saw, he could describe it in intimate detail but he would never say, ‘Oh, it was definitely extraterrestrials,’ because there was no evidence to prove that. He might ask, ‘What do you think I saw?’ but right up until he died, his story never changed one iota — nothing about it or how he told it. I’m not so close-minded that I can’t entertain the possibility that it’s otherworldly. I can’t discount that. But without specific evidence to show me that it is, I don’t know. What I can tell you is that I’m an aviation fanatic, a huge aviation buff, and I am very familiar with how aviation technology has advanced in the past 50 years. And there was nothing even close to that in the works anywhere at that time.

What are we dealing with here? Was this an extraterrestrial presence? Was it some type of top secret military craft? Was it all a tall tale, and if so how did he fake the injuries and the physical evidence that was allegedly found at the site? Or was it something else altogether? What caused those grid-like burns on his chest and was this some sort of attack directed at him? These are questions we still don’t have the answers to, and the case of the Falcon Lake Incident has become one of the great mysteries of the landscape of UFO lore.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-01-2020 om 12:07 geschreven door peter  

In a new article at his website titled “Codename Rendlesham,” Dr. David Clarke addresses the matter of the famous Rendlesham Forest UFO landing of December 1980. As Dave notes: “Next Christmas marks the 40th anniversary of the story that began on Boxing Day morning, 26 December 1980.” He also says: “As the legend moves into its fourth decade there is an ever growing cast of story-tellers and alleged experiencers, all armed with rival versions of the story. Each personality has their own group of followers ready to engage in flame-wars to win the credibility battle with rival story-tellers.” The main thrust of Dave’s article, however, is a forthcoming documentary on the still-mysterious affair: Codename Rendlesham. Dave says of this production: “It avoids the more sensational tropes that have emerged more recently, particularly those concerning alleged cover-ups and contactee stories. Instead, it concentrates on the how the story first emerged and how it developed, placing factual evidence under a withering examination.”

With that all said,  and the fact that in less than one year from now we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the incident, I figured I would get the wheels moving. It’s time to share certain data with you that perhaps will be expanded upon by someone as Rendlesham gets closer and closer to forty. It was right around Christmas 1980 when one of the most significant of all UFO encounters occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England – adjacent to the twin-Royal Air Force Bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters. A memo prepared the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Charles Halt reveals the astonishing facts:

“Early in the morning of 27 Dec 80 (approximately 0300L) two USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.” The notable encounter remains unresolved to this day.

In case you may not know, an equally controversial affair occurred just two nights after the Rendlesham events went down – and on the other side of the world, specifically Texas, USA. When, shortly before 9:00 p.m., Vickie Landrum, her grandson, Colby, and Betty Cash exited the restaurant where they had just eaten, they couldn’t imagine what was just around the corner. As they headed towards the town of Huffman, they were terrified by the sudden sight of an unknown object in the sky. Worse, it was descending on a flight-path guaranteed to ensure it landed on the road they were on. As they got closer, they could see the aerial thing appeared to be in flames and shaped not unlike a diamond. It reached a perilously low level of around twenty-five feet, something which ensured a screeching of brakes and the car brought to a shuddering standstill. The interior temperature of the car suddenly reached intolerable levels. The three jumped out of the vehicle and could only stare in awe and fear. Then, out of the blue, around two dozen, double-rotor helicopters were on the scene, clearly intent on correlating the UFO. Or, perhaps they were escorting it. Cash was sure they were CH-47 Chinooks. They watched as both the UFO and the helicopters left the area and were finally lost from sight.

Within days, all three fell sick: nausea and vomiting were at the forefront. Betty Cash was the one affected most of all – which may be explainable by the fact that she was the one member of the group who got closest to the object. Her hair started to fall out, her skin was covered with pustules and blisters, and the nausea got worse. Despite attempts to force the U.S. government to come clean on what went down, there was nothing but denial after denial from the authorities. The case is a puzzling one, with some UFO researchers believing the three encountered a real UFO, while others suspect they were unfortunate enough to cross paths with a top secret, nuclear-powered, prototype aircraft that was in deep trouble.

It’s interesting to note that the witnesses at Huffman reported seeing multiple helicopters surrounding the craft. It just so happens that RAF Woodbridge had an interesting helicopter-based connection attached to it. As Captain John E. Boyle of the U.S. Air Force revealed to me in 1988: “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron stationed at RAF Woodbridge [provided] standby rescue coverage for the American space flights. Of course, they were never needed to provide emergency rescue actions, but at the time, the unit was trained and available to rescue astronauts with their HH-53 and HC-130 aircraft. In early 1988, the 67th ARRS was re-designated as part of the 39th Special Operations Wing, their primary mission changing from that of rescue to supporting U.S. Special Operations forces. Their secondary mission remains that of search and rescue and they would provide any assistance necessary in future space missions.”

So, we have two near-legendary UFO-themed events, which, time-wise, were very closer to each other. Also, the ARRS was still in place when the Rendlesham incident occurred. This brings us to the possibility of a Soviet connection. Ian Ridpath notes: “At 21.07 on the evening of 1980 December 25 (i.e. a mere six hours before the supposed UFO landing in Rendlesham Forest) the Russian Cosmos 749 rocket re-entered over north-west Europe and was widely reported as a UFO.” Was something Russian secretly retrieved in the forest? Let’s see what Jenny Randles, who has written a number of books on the Rendlesham case, has to say about this. In her 1998 book, UFO Crash Landing? Friend or Foe?, Randles says: “It seems inconceivable that if a Soviet nuclear motor was retrieved from Rendlesham Forest several days earlier it would have been ferried across the Texas countryside in this way. However, the links between the cases are stunning. The shape is very like that described by Burroughs and Penniston. Then there is the radiation.” And as Randles is careful to note: “The NASA-trained Aerospace Rescue and Recovery squadron at Woodbridge links with the main NASA HQ near Huffman [italics mine].”

Perhaps, someone reading this article will feel up to the challenge and pursue this theory – and the intriguing threads – to a much greater degree, in time for the 40th anniversary in December 2020. It’s time to get moving; there’s a little less than twelve months to go.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-01-2020 om 11:59 geschreven door peter  

100% Proof That Aliens Once Lived On Mars Surface, UFO Sighting News.

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/219270

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

06-01-2020 om 11:37 geschreven door peter  

Devastated dairy farmer Craig Calvert, who spent 13 hours fighting fires threatening his property in Victoria, has shared an eerie image of the blaze which depicts "a big devil face" in the billowing smoke.

The picture was taken in the Gippsland fires near Sarsfield, Victoria. The demonic apparition in right hand corner of the blaze can’t be unseen.

Craig Calvert told Sunrise: "I'm not really into hokey pokey spooky stuff but there's a big devil face right in the fire".

  

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

06-01-2020 om 11:13 geschreven door peter  

Contactee Claims That Our Moon Is Artificial And Brought Here By Aliens From Other Galaxy

Alex Collier is one of the most famous characters who claim to have made contact with an alien race. And his statements do not end here.

Alex claims that the Moon is an artificial construction and was brought to orbit around Earth by the gray aliens at the order of the reptilian masters.

In case you didn’t already know, the reptilians are supposed to be our ancestors.

I mean the creators of the human race. Alex Collier and Job Robinson claim that they have come into contact with an alien civilization.

In the video below you can see widely the statements of the two and the conversations, they had with this alien race.

Watch the following video and see for yourself:

{ https://trueblog.net/ }

05-01-2020 om 23:19 geschreven door peter  

Former Air Force medic: there are extraterrestrial labs all over the world

05-01-2020 om 23:08 geschreven door peter  

The asteroid belt is a region of our solar system – between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – in which many small bodies orbit our sun. Here’s a good basic introduction.

Here is the inner part of our solar system, from the sun to the 5th planet, Jupiter. In this illustration, the asteroid belt is the white donut-shaped cloud.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Meet the asteroid belt, a place in our solar system where small bodies – mostly rocky and some metallic – orbit the sun. These little worlds are also sometimes called minor planets. They move mostly between the orbits of the fourth planet Mars and fifth planet Jupiter. Astronomers once thought they were all that was left of a rocky planet, long ago torn apart by Jupiter’s gravity. Now, most astronomers now think the asteroid belt is just rubble that Jupiter’s gravity prevented from ever coalescing into a planet. Thus the asterids are likely simply leftovers from the ordinary processes that created our solar system, 4.6 billion years ago.

Their name, asteroid, means starlike. They got this name because – in the early 1800s, when the first asteroids were discovered – astronomers thought they looked like stars. And yet their movement in front of the star background, caused by their nearness to us, showed them to be something other than stars.

Measurements of the amount of material in the asteroid belt suggest it contains about enough material – combined together – to form a body smaller than Earth’s moon.

Comprising an estimated one to two million asteroids more than half a mile (about a km) across, plus untold millions of smaller ones, the asteroid belt contains objects which vary wildly in size. The smallest are probably no bigger than pebbles. The biggest object in the asteroid belt was also the first one to be discovered, in the year 1801. It is 1 Ceres, which measures some 587 miles (945 km). Ceres is now classified as a dwarf planet, by the way, by the International Astronomical Union.

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This orthographic projection shows the largest body in the asteroid belt – 1 Ceres, discovered in 1801 – now categorized as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union. Ceres is one of several main-belt objects visited by spacecraft. This composite image is from the Dawn spacecraft, still the only earthly spacecraft to have orbited first one body in our solar system (Vesta, 2011 to 2012), then gone on to orbit a second (Ceres, arrived 2015). See the 2 bright spots in Occator Crater? They spawned speculation about alien life on Ceres, but turned out to be salt deposits. This image is made from views Dawn took during its low-altitude mapping orbit, at about 240 miles (385 km) above the surface.

Image via NASA.

Outer space is vast. And thus, despite there being many millions (possibly billions) of objects in the asteroid belt, the average distance between them is 600,000 miles (about a million km). This means that spacecraft can fly through the asteroid belt without colliding with any asteroids, although, obviously, a chance collision can never be ruled out completely. The asteroid belt is certainly nothing like the densely-packed asteroid fields depicted in fantasies like “Star Wars” and its ilk.

Standing on any asteroid in the belt, you would likely be unable to see any other asteroids, because of their distance.

The asteroid belt lies between 2.2 and 3.2 astronomical units (AU) from our sun. One AU is the distance between the Earth and sun. So the width of the asteroid belt is roughly 1 AU, or 92 million miles (150 million km).

Its thickness is similarly about 1 AU thick.

Here’s asteroid 4 Vesta – discovered in 1807 – the 2nd-biggest asteroid after Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. A towering mountain at this asteroid’s south pole – more than twice the height of Mount Everest – is visible at the bottom of the image. The set of three craters known as the “snowman” can be seen at the top left.

Image via NASA.

The asteroid belt is often referred to as the “main” belt to distinguish it from other, smaller groups of asteroids in the solar system such as the Lagrangians (for example, Trojan asteroids orbiting in Jupiter’s orbit around the sun) and Centaurs in the outer solar system.

What was thought to be a homogeneous belt is now known to be slightly more complicated. There are different and distinct zones within the main belt asteroids, especially at its peripheries, where astronomers now recognize the Hungaria group at the inner edge and the Cybele asteroids at the outer. Toward the middle of the belt there is the highly-inclined Phocaea family.

In addition, astronomers have established that the age of asteroids in the main belt also varies. They’ve now classified several asteroid groupings by their age including the Karin family, a group of about 90 main-belt asteroids that share an orbit and are thought to have come from a single object an estimated 5.7 million years ago. And there is the Veritas family, from an estimated 8.3 million years ago. A very recent group is the Datura family, dating from just 530,000 years ago from a collision.

• Read on Wikipedia about asteroid families.
• Read on Wikipedia about asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft

In order to be round, a body in space has to have enough internal mass to have strong-enough gravity to have pulled itself into the shape of a ball. Most asteroids don’t accomplish this, and thus they come in all sorts of shapes. Here is asteroid 433 Eros – discovered in 1898 – now famous as the 1st asteroid ever to be orbited by a spacecraft, NEAR Shoemaker, in 1998. This object is considered a main-belt asteroid: although its orbit crosses that of Mars, it doesn’t quite reach that of Earth. Yet it’s also considered a near-Earth asteroid … a subject for another day!

Image via NASA.

• Bottom line: The asteroid belt is a region of our solar system – between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – in which many small bodies orbit our sun.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

05-01-2020 om 22:51 geschreven door peter  

Parker Solar Probe – now in its 4th orbit around the sun – can endure heat and radiation like no previous mission. This week, 4 new studies in Nature reveal new insights about the sun’s mysterious corona and solar wind.

Scientists who study the sun are buzzing this week about four new papers published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on December 4, 2019. The papers are based on data collected by the record-setting Parker Solar Probe mission – launched in 2018 – during the spacecraft’s first two close sweeps past our parent star (late 2018 and early 2019). These early studies, the scientists say, have provided insights into the two fundamental questions the Parker Solar Probe mission was designed to answer. First, defying all logic, why does the sun’s outer atmosphere – or corona – become much, much hotter the farther it stretches from the sun’s surface? Second, what accelerates the solar wind – a supersonic stream of protons, electrons and other particles – emanating from the corona and permeating the entire solar system?

A December 4, 2019, statement from scientists at the University of Michigan – who work with one of the instruments aboard the Parker Solar Probe – explained:

Both questions have ramifications for how we predict, detect and prepare for solar storms and coronal mass ejections that can have dramatic impacts on Earth’s power grid and on astronauts.

Nour E. Raouafi, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which built and manages the mission for NASA, added in a separate December 4 statement:

The sun has fascinated humanity for our entire existence. We’ve learned a great deal about our star in the past several decades, but we really needed a mission like Parker Solar Probe to go into the sun’s atmosphere. It’s only there that we can really learn the details of these complex solar processes.

And what we’ve learned in just these three solar orbits alone has changed a lot of what we know about the sun.

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Isn’t this beautiful? It’s an illustration of our sun – our local star – and its outer atmosphere, or corona, extending into space. Mysteriously, the corona is hotter than the sun’s surface. It releases the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that sometimes affects earthly satellites and power grids. Space scientists launched the Parker Solar Probe to study both the corona and solar wind.

Image via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Lisa Poje/Genna Duberstein.

Justin Kasper of the University of Michigan, who serves as principal investigator for Parker’s Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument suite. He led one of the new studies and is co-author of two others. In their statement, these scientists said that the Parker Solar Probe revealed that the sun’s rotation or spin on its axis – completing a single spin only once every 27 days at its equator – has an impact on the solar wind much farther away than previously thought. They already knew that – near the sun – the sun’s magnetic field pulls the solar wind in the same direction that the sun spins. Farther from the sun, at the distance the spacecraft measured in these first encounters, they had expected to see, at most, a weak signature of that rotation. However, Kasper said:

To our great surprise, as we neared the sun, we’ve already detected large rotational flows – 10 to 20 times greater than what standard models of the sun predict.

So we are missing something fundamental about the sun, and how the solar wind escapes.

This has huge implications. Space weather forecasting will need to account for these flows if we are going to be able to predict whether a coronal mass ejection will strike Earth, or astronauts heading to the moon or Mars.

• See a video: How does the solar wind affect Earth?

Parker Solar Probe’s location with respect to Mercury, Venus and Earth on December 3, 2019. The craft completed its 3rd orbit around the sun on November 15. Its next milestone will be a Venus flyby on December 26.

Image via NASA/JHUAPL/Where is Parker Solar Probe?

Parker Solar Probe’s findings regarding the sun’s magnetic field – which is believed to play a role in the coronal heating mystery – were equally surprising, the scientists said. The new findings relate to what called Alfvén waves, which are waves that occur in a plasma (the sun is so hot that most of its gas exists in plasma form). Alfvén waves were detected in the solar wind long ago. Some researchers though they might be remnants of whatever mechanism is causing the mysterious heating of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. Parker researchers were on the lookout for indications that might be the case, but found something unexpected. Kasper explained:

When you get closer to the sun, you start seeing these ‘rogue’ Alfvén waves that have four times the energy than the regular waves around them. They feature 300,000 mph velocity spikes that are so strong, they actually flip the direction of the magnetic field.

According to these scientists:

Those polarity-reversing velocity spikes offer another potential candidate for what may cause the corona to get hotter moving away from the sun.

That’s clearly an early result, but it gives space scientists something to be watching for as – aided by breakthrough technologies that let the craft endure heat and radiation like no previous mission – Parker Solar Probe continues to sweep closer and closer to the sun.

Image via Johns Hopkins University.

And sweeping close to the sun is, in fact, Parker Solar Probe’s job. It’ll ultimately come within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface.

The probe launched on August 12, 2018. On October 29 of that year, it broke its first record, coming closer to the sun than any other human-made object (passing within the previous record of 26.55 million miles from the sun’s surface, set by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976).

As the Parker Solar Probe mission has progressed, the spacecraft has repeatedly broken its own records, coming closer and closer to the sun. Its most recent perihelion (closet point to sun) – perihelion #3 – was September 1, 2019. The next one – perihelion #4 – will be January 29, 2020. In 2024, the craft is expected to come within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface (3.83 million miles, or 6.1 million km). Click here for a timeline showing upcoming perihelions in the mission.

Data collected during the spacecraft’s first two solar orbits was released on November 12. This week, these four new papers are causing a stir.

And the Michigan scientists aren’t the only ones excited about the data from the Parker Solar Probe. Heliophysicists around the globe have a reason to be excited. For example, Joe Giacalone of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona – team member for another instrument aboard the probe (Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun) – commented to Jasmine Demers in an article in the Arizona Daily Star on December 2, 2019:

This is an exciting time to be a heliophysicist.

The data that is now publicly available comes from a region of space we have never sampled previously. With many brilliant scientists now poring through this amazing data set, new discoveries about our star are soon coming.

Artist’s concept of the Parker Solar Probe sweeping close to the sun. At its closest to the sun – toward the end of its 7-year prime mission – Parker Solar Probe will come well within the mysterious solar corona, or outermost atmosphere, within 3.83 million miles of the solar surface.

Image via NASA: 10 Things to Know about Parker Solar Probe.

• Bottom line: Parker Solar Probe – launched in 2018 and now in its 4th orbit around our local star – is designed to endure the sun’s heat and radiation like no previous mission. This week, 4 new studies in Nature – related to the solar wind and corona – have space scientists buzzing.
  • Source: Highly structured slow solar wind emerging from an equatorial coronal hole
  • Source: Probing the energetic particle environment near the sun
  • Source: Alfvénic velocity spikes and rotational flows in the near-sun solar wind
  • Source: Near-sun observations of an F-corona decrease and K-corona fine structure
  • Via University of Michigan
  • Via NASA

{ https://earthsky.org/  }

05-01-2020 om 22:24 geschreven door peter  

NASA's Sun-Kissing Parker Solar Probe Is Lifting the Veil on Our Closest Star

By Mike Wall 

The first results from the daring mission are in

An artist's depiction of NASA's Parker Solar Probe gathering data about the sun.

(Image: © Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

The sun is starting to give up some of its most closely guarded secrets.

The first science results are in from NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP), which has flown faster and closer to the sun than any other human-made object in history. 

The initial PSP returns, which are reported in four papers published online today (Dec. 4) in the journal Nature, begin to lift the veil on Earth's star, which has remained surprisingly mysterious despite forever being the brightest light in our sky.

• Related: NASA's Parker Solar Probe Mission to the Sun in Pictures

"These four papers show that, by going into an unexplored region of the solar system, the PSP has already made great discoveries," Daniel Verscharen, a researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, wrote in an accompanying "News and Views" piece in the same issue of Nature. Verscharen was not involved in any of the new studies.

Kissing the sun

The PSP launched in August 2018, on a $1.5 billion mission to help researchers better understand the inner workings of the sun. 

Mission scientists are particularly interested in solving two long-standing puzzles: how the stream of particles flowing continuously from the sun, known as the solar wind, is accelerated to its tremendous velocities; and why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface. (Corona temperatures can top 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.1 million degrees Celsius. The solar surface is downright temperate by comparison, at 11,000 F, or 6,000 C.)

The PSP is tackling these questions by brazenly barreling into the corona itself. Once every five months or so, the probe zooms through the sun's sizzling atmosphere, getting unprecedented up-close looks at our star.  

These closest approaches, or perihelion passages, have taken the PSP within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the solar surface to date. Before this mission, the closest a probe had ever gotten to the sun was 26.55 million miles (42.73 million km) — a feat pulled off in 1976 by the Helios 2 craft, a joint effort of the United States and the former West Germany.

Related: The Greatest Missions to the Sun of All Time

Helios 2 also set the record for the fastest speed relative to the sun, at 153,454 mph (246,960 km/h). This mark was broken by NASA's Juno Jupiter orbiter, which reached 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) during its arrival at the gas giant in July 2016. But the PSP is now the speed king: During the spacecraft's first perihelion pass, on Nov. 6, 2018, the sun's powerful gravity accelerated the PSP to a top speed of 213,243 mph (343,181 km/h).

Conditions in the corona are extreme, of course, so the PSP is equipped with some heavy-duty armor:  a 4.5-inch-thick (11.4 centimeters) carbon-composite shield, which protects the craft and its four science instruments from intense heat and radiation. 

Those instruments are the Fields Experiment (Fields), which is measuring electric and magnetic fields and waves, among other things; the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (ISoIS), which is characterizing the electrons, protons and heavy ions that are accelerated to high speeds in the sun's atmosphere and beyond; the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), a set of telescopes imaging the corona and environs; and the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) investigation, which is studying the most abundant constituents in the solar wind (electrons, protons and helium ions).

The four new papers report what these instruments observed during the PSP's first two perihelion passes, which occurred in November 2018 and April 2019.

• Related: NASA's Parker Solar Probe Sun Mission Explained (Infographic)

• Click here for more Space.com videos...

Tracing the "slow" solar wind to its source

One of the studies, for example, found that Fields is starting to get the goods on the "slow" solar wind, a component of the stream that never exceeds about 1.1 million mph (1.8 million km/h). "Slow" is a relative term here; the "fast" solar wind zips along at about twice that velocity.

Scientists already knew that the fast solar wind originates in large coronal "holes" — patches where the outer atmosphere is considerably cooler and thinner than normal — near the sun's poles. And the data from Fields suggest that the slow wind is coming from coronal holes as well, but from smaller ones near the solar equator.

Fields also observed surprising reversals in the solar magnetic field flowing past the spacecraft: The field sometimes flipped its orientation 180 degrees and then, within seconds or minutes, flipped back again.

"These switchbacks are probably associated with some kind of plasma jets," study lead author and Fields principal investigator Stuart Bale, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "My own feeling is that these switchbacks, or jets, are central to the solar wind heating problem."

Data from SWEAP, meanwhile, indicate that such reversals are "travelling S-shaped bends in the field lines coming from the sun," as Verscharen put it, and that the flips are boosting the speed of the solar wind. 

Findings from ISoIS help flesh out this emerging picture. The instrument's data show that it takes energetic solar particles longer than previously expected to reach the PSP, perhaps because they're traveling along the surprisingly S-shaped field lines. 

ISoIS has also detected multiple particle bursts that aren't dramatic enough to be noticed by instruments here on Earth.

"It's amazing — even at solar minimum conditions, the sun produces many more tiny energetic particle events than we ever thought," David McComas of Princeton University, ISoIS principal investigator and lead author of one of the new studies, said in a statement. (Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle, and our star is currently in a relatively inactive phase.) 

"These measurements will help us unravel the sources, acceleration, and transport of solar energetic particles and ultimately better protect satellites and astronauts in the future," McComas added.

And WISPR is giving scientists a clearer picture of the sun, the corona and the complex, roiling region immediately surrounding our star. WISPR's images help put the information collected by the other instruments into proper context and also yield insights in their own right. 

For example, the fourth new study reports, WISPR photos provide some evidence for a dust-free zone near the sun, which has been postulated but not yet directly detected. "The detailed images from the PSP also show spatial variations in the solar wind that are consistent with variations in the sun's magnetic field on its surface, and reveal small blobs of plasma that are ejected from the sun and form part of the young solar wind," Verscharen wrote.

• Related: What's Inside the Sun? A Star Tour from the Inside Out

The best is yet to come

The solar-wind answer is a partial one at the moment, and it's still unclear how exactly the corona is heated so dramatically (though the new results provide some intriguing clues). But the PSP team has plenty of time to fill in the blanks, for these newly published results are just the beginning. The spacecraft is designed to continue studying the sun through 2025, and its perihelion passages will keep getting closer and closer, thanks to trajectory-sculpting flybys of Venus.

The PSP's final science orbit, for example, will take it within just 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) of the solar surface and feature top speeds of about 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h). 

And these future close approaches will become more frequent, because the PSP's path around the sun will shrink. The probe's orbital period is currently about 150 Earth days but will be 88 days by mission's end.

The length of that mission will allow the PSP team to study the sun at diverse stages of its 11-year activity cycle. So, the sun-kissing spacecraft should gather reams of interesting data that keep researchers busy for a long time to come.

"It is expected that PSP data will guide our understanding of the sun and the solar wind for many years," Verscharen wrote. "New models and theories will be motivated by the spacecraft’s discoveries, and this knowledge will be transferable to other stars and astrophysical plasmas throughout the universe."

• Here's What Earth Looks Like When You're Heading to the Sun 
• Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know Our Sun?
• Launch Photos! NASA's Parker Solar Probe Blasts Off to Touch the Sun

• This story was updated at 2 p.m. EST to include a statement from David McComas.

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{https://www.space.com/ }

05-01-2020 om 18:35 geschreven door peter  

The Oldest Copy of the First Illustrated Book Has Been Discovered in Egypt

Detail from one of the coffins of Gua, chief physician of Djehutyhotep, governor of Bersha. The paintings recall drawings from the Book of Two Ways. 

Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

It’s always exciting when some kind of human civilizational first is discovered or unearthed by experts, as evidenced by the thrill generated by a recent discovery of cave paintings, thought to be the earliest example of pictorial storytelling, which were uncovered Indonesia. Now, a new study covered this week by the New York Times reports that the oldest copy of the first illustrated book has been found in Egypt by researchers working under the direction of University of Leuven Egyptologist Harco Willems.

Called the Book of Two Ways, the extraordinary narrative told in the tome is about what happens to the soul after death. It’s been dated to be approximately 4,000 years old and at least 4 decades older than any of the other known copies, of which there are approximately two dozen. The text was discovered in a village on the eastern side of the Nile river after Willems’ decision in 2012 to reopen and study the contents of a burial shaft once looted and long abandoned. A detailed report of the findings were published in The Journal of Egyptian Archeology’s September edition.

• SEE ALSO: Caribbean Treasures Long Hidden in Caves Go on View in ‘Arte del Mar’ at the Met

The fragments of the text were discovered within a tomb, atop the coffin of a woman named Ankh. The cemetery in which the tomb was found is a necropolis and quarry called Deir el-Bersha. Ancient Egyptians have always been famously known for their extensive preoccupations with the afterlife, as evidenced by the text The Book of the Dead, which provides readers with incantations and instructions about how to successfully navigate an underworld ruled by the god Osiris and ultimately become a god themselves.

05-01-2020 om 18:06 geschreven door peter  

New research confirms that volcanoes might be erupting on Venus even now. This image shows Idunn Mons, a volcanic peak on Venus, long suspected of being active. The colored overlay shows heat patterns derived from surface brightness data collected via ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft from May 2006 to the end of 2007.

Image via ESA/ NASA/ USRA.

Earth is one of several worlds in our solar system known to have active volcanoes. Now, a new study from Universities Space Research Association (USRA) confirms that – as has been conjectured before – cloud-covered Venus appears to be volcanically active as well.

It’s been known since the early 1990s that Venus has many volcanic features. NASA’s Magellan spacecraft found extensive lava flows beneath the perpetually cloudy atmosphere of Venus, but how old are they? That’s the unanswered question.

Thus, as yet, there’s still no smoking gun to prove that any Venus volcanoes are still active.

USRA announced its intriguing new findings on January 3, 2019. They come not from Venus, but from an earthly laboratory. The peer-reviewed paper was published the same day in Science Advances.

The new evidence stems from spacecraft data on lava flows on the surface of Venus, some of which, the researchers now estimate, may be no more than a few years old. The Venus Express orbiter – launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2005 – continuously sent back science data from its polar orbit around Venus until 2014. It studied lava flows on Venus by measuring the amount of infrared light emitted from Venus’ surface during nighttime.

The data obtained were good enough to distinguish between fresher and older/altered lava flows, but the actual ages of the flows still weren’t well understood.

Justin Filiberto is the study’s lead author and a USRA staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. To learn more about the ages of lava flows on Venus, he and his colleagues simulated conditions in the intensely hot and corrosive atmosphere of Venus in a laboratory. They wanted to see how different minerals might react and change over time, under these conditions, on Venus’ surface.

It turned out that olivine – abundant in basalt rock, which makes up about 90% of Venus’ surface – reacted very rapidly. Within only weeks, it became oxidized, that is, coated with two iron oxide minerals, magnetite and hematite. From the paper:

We obtained VNIR [visible to near-infrared] reflectance spectra of natural olivine that was altered and oxidized in the laboratory. We show that olivine becomes coated, within days, with alteration products, primarily hematite … Our results indicate that lava flows lacking VNIR features due to hematite are no more than several years old.

Therefore, Venus is volcanically active now.

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! Nearly sold out. Order now!

Maat Mons, a 5-mile-high (8-km-high) volcano on Venus, with lava flows. This perspective view is based on radar images from the Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus in the 1990s.

Image via NASA/ JPL/ Wikipedia.

Absolute confirmation of active volcanoes on Venus would be a major discovery. After all, Venus is the world next-inward in orbit around the sun. It’s very similar to Earth in size and density. If it doesn’t have active volcanoes, and Earth does, the question would be, why not?

But if it does have active volcanoes, then this discovery is extremely significant in studies of all the terrestrial rocky planets – not just Venus and Earth, but also Mercury and Mars – in our solar system. Filiberto commented in a statement:

If Venus is indeed active today, it would make a great place to visit to better understand the interiors of planets. For example, we could study how planets cool and why the Earth and Venus have active volcanism, but Mars does not.

Radar image from Magellan of lava channels in the Lo Shen Valles region of Venus.

Image via NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center/ Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Previous studies have also made the case for active volcanoes on Venus, including this one, published on June 28, 2015, in Geophysical Research Letters. According to James Head, a geologist at Brown University and one of the 2015 study’s co-authors:

We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today. This is a major finding that helps us understand the evolution of planets like our own.

Another clue was the previous detection of upticks in sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the atmosphere of Venus in the 1970s and 1980s by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter. From the paper:

The behavior of SO2 and polar haze can be plausibly explained by episodic injection of SO2 into the cloud top regions, for example, by active volcanism.

This was also noted in the new paper:

This active volcanism is consistent with episodic spikes of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere measured by both the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Venus Express, which could have been produced by the same eruption that formed the young lava flows.

Justin Filiberto of Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the lead author of the new study.

Image via LPI.

Thus the new study now builds on earlier ones, and the case for active volcanoes on Venus becomes stronger and stronger. What will need to happen to confirm active volcanoes on Venus with absolute certainty? Filiberto said:

Future missions [to Venus] should be able to see … flows and changes in the surface and provide concrete evidence of its activity.

Future missions to Venus are currently on the drawing board and advocated by many researchers. They could provide more detailed data on the volcanoes, helping scientists learn their similarities to, and differences from, those on Earth.

Studies have suggested that Venus used to be more Earth-like, billions of years ago. Why did the two worlds diverge so radically, so that Earth is now livable, while Venus is perpetually cloud-enshrouded, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead?

It’s hoped that data from future spacecraft will help scientists understand why Venus and Earth evolved so differently.

Olivine crystals before and after alteration and oxidation, as seen in laboratory experiments duplicating Venus’ atmosphere. The rapid reaction suggests that similar lava flows on Venus are only a few years old.

Image via Science Advances.

Bottom line: A study by scientists at USRA provides new evidence that Venus is still volcanically active.

• Source: Present-day volcanism on Venus as evidenced from weathering rates of olivine
• Via USRA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

05-01-2020 om 17:15 geschreven door peter  

Secret Space Whistleblower On Trump Space Force Secret Projects

COAST TO COAST AM – Pioneer in the development of ‘Exopolitics’, Michael Salla, shared evidence that the US Navy began its initial development work on a secret space program in the 1940s, signs that the Trump administration may be more open about secret space programs, as well as assorted whistleblower revelations on the ET presence.

Donald Trump doesn’t take the conventional route, he remarked, and as a businessman he may look at the information he’s exposed to regarding covert technologies, and try to maximize their potential in terms of putting Americans back to work.

Does President Donald Trump Know About Secret Projects in Outer Space?

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

05-01-2020 om 15:00 geschreven door peter  

Russian KGB Secret Files of Alien Races

“Many people have had prophetic warnings about the coming false rapture/alien invasion, I have had several myself. From what I have seen many millions are going to fall for it when it happens. This video shows a record of Alien Races from a KGB agent.

The KGB, translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its break-up in 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, the committee was attached to the Council of Ministers.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

05-01-2020 om 14:41 geschreven door peter