Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
25-02-2020
SCIENTISTS REVEAL 3 STEPS TO DEFEND EARTH FROM CATASTROPHIC ASTEROID IMPACTS
SCIENTISTS REVEAL 3 STEPS TO DEFEND EARTH FROM CATASTROPHIC ASTEROID IMPACTS
t is time to get serious about our plans to save the world.
In 1998's Armageddon, humanity’s only chance of survival hung on Bruce Willis blowing up an asteroid in space, seconds before it collided with Earth and ended the human race. Unfortunately, back in the real world and more than two decades on, the real-life plans to deflect any potential asteroid on a collision course with Earth are not much more advanced — and Bruce Willis tends to get lucky.
Now, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed three strategies that could help save Earth — and our species — from a devastating asteroid impact. And here's the thing: One of them might actually work.
Armageddon may be fiction, but the fact is we have good reason to worry about asteroid impacts. Some 65 million years ago, a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. It could happen again — and, if it does, it would have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. Teams of scientists monitor the skies for these giant asteroids, tracking the objects that zip through our Solar System and their chances of collision with Earth.
Current deflection methods rest on a one shot, one-opportunity style strategy that bets life as we know it on the success of a first, and only, try. But in a new study, the MIT researchers advocate scrapping this all-or-nothing approach and outline three steps that could help deflect asteroids bound for Earth.
THEY ARE:
A remote-sensing orbiter to characterize the asteroid's shape, mass distribution, surface properties, and materials.
A sensor to measure its trajectory.
An impactor (i.e. a missile of some kind) to nudge the asteroid off course and back out into space.
“Most of the research in understanding and deflecting asteroids that could threaten the Earth, this goes under the heading of planetary defense,” Olivier de Weck, professor at MIT and lead author of the new study, tells Inverse.
“Most everything you will find there is predicated on the idea of a one shot. You get one shot at this and that is it. That is what we wanted to challenge, no you don’t just get one shot at it,” he says.
The new guidelines are detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Acta Astronautica.
3-STEP PLAN
Rather than relying on the success of one, all-or-nothing mission, the ideal asteroid deflection mission is instead a three-step process, the researchers say.
“If you have enough time and you want a high probability of success, what you do is you send three missions,” de Weck says.
MISSION ONE: CHARACTERIZE
The first mission would involve a preliminary remote-sensing orbiter to characterize the asteroid's shape, mass distribution, surface properties, and the material that it’s made of.
This initial step would be similar to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which launched in 2016 and is currently orbiting around Bennu, a potentially hazardous asteroid that could one day threaten Earth. OSIRIS-REx is designed to map the asteroid and bring back a sample from its surface to Earth for scientists to study.
OSIRIS REx is orbiting around asteroid Bennu to characterize this threatening rock.NASA
Once the orbiter characterizes the asteroid, step two begins.
MISSION TWO: TRAJECTORY
The next step involves a small impact mission designed to hit the asteroid just enough to measure its trajectory — this impact would not be powerful enough to actually deflect the asteroid or change its course.
These two first steps are crucial before the final step to fully deflect the asteroid. Together, they will help scientists account for different variables and uncertainties, the researchers say.
“Nobody has really seriously looked at the impact of uncertainty, what if you don’t know the asteroid really well?” de Weck says.
“You could actually make things worse instead of making them better.”
In the worst case scenario, he compares the asteroid to an apple getting shot by a bullet. The bullet would go straight through, and have very little impact on the apple itself.
In the best case scenario, scientists would know enough about the asteroid ahead of time to enable phase three — the impact.
An artist's impression of the 3-step plan to defend Earth from asteroids in action.MIT
MISSION THREE: IMPACT
Once steps one and two are complete, step three is to launch a counter defense. The ideal impactor is a basic kinetic impactor, the researchers say, which works by shooting a projectile into space to nudge the asteroid in a different direction.
This would essentially be a missile capable of creating a large enough impact on the asteroid that it would not blow through it, but instead would throw it off course and back out into space.
This last and final phase will hopefully rescue the fate of humanity and not lead to our fiery deaths by asteroid (or by accident).
But this strategy still depends on how much time you have before collision.
WARNING TIME
The researchers based the new 3-step plan on two asteroids, Bennu and Apophis.
Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that stretches 370 meters in diameter. Named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, the asteroid caused panic in December 2014, when scientists estimated a 2.7 percent chance that it might hit Earth in 2029.
This animation shows how close Apophis will get to Earth during its 2029 approach.NASA, JPL
These fears rested on the idea that Apophis would pass through a gravitational keyhole — an area in Earth’s gravitational field that would essentially tug on the asteroid’s trajectory.
Once an asteroid goes through a keyhole, that means it is almost guaranteed that it will collide with Earth during its next orbit around the Sun. Which, in the case of Apophis, would be the year 2036.
“The optimal strategy depends on how much warning time you have before keyhole passage,” says de Weck.
Thankfully, subsequent observations have put these fears to rest — Apophis is not on a collision course with Earth. But six years ago, the odds of a collision were 1 in 300 — worryingly close, if you ask us.
If there is ample time, the biggest hurdle would be to change the general attitude around space missions, de Weck says.
Planetary defense research is a young field, spanning just the last two decades, he says. As a result, it is not that far advanced. More time means more hard science to base any Earth-saving missions on — and a higher chance of success.
At the same time, there is a cultural problem in how we conceive of space missions — we tend to send out only one spacecraft at a time, wait for the results, and then send a follow-up mission. This one-by-one approach may hold scientists back in the event of an emergency.
“Part of the work here is to change the thinking and basically think about it with a campaign approach, where you are sending multiple satellites to accomplish a goal that a single satellite couldn’t accomplish,” de Weck says.
“As soon as you think of it as a campaign, you have a lot more degrees of freedom, there’s a lot more possibilities on how you can solve a problem.”
The first official science results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal a regularly roiled world.
"We've finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet," InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said during a teleconference with reporters Thursday (Feb. 20).
Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, Banerdt added.
"In fact, it's probably close to the kind of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the [tectonic] plate boundaries on Earth and away from highly deformed areas," he said.
Probing the Martian subsurface
InSight touched down near the Martian equator in November 2018, kicking off a two-year, $850 million mission to probe the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail.
The stationary lander carries two main science instruments to do this work: a supersensitive suite of seismometers and a burrowing heat probe dubbed "the mole," which is designed to get at least 10 feet (3 meters) below the Red Planet's surface.
Analyses of marsquake and heat-transport measurements will allow the mission team to construct a detailed, 3D map of the Martian interior, NASA officials have said. In addition, InSight scientists are using radio signals beamed from the lander to track how much Mars wobbles on its axis over time. This information will help researchers determine how big and dense the planet's core is. (The mission's full name — Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — references these various lines of investigation.)
Overall, InSight's observations will help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars, Earth and Venus form and evolve, mission team members have said.
The mission's initial science returns, which were published today (Feb. 21) in six papers in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications, show that InSight is on track to meet that long-term goal, Banerdt said. (We have gotten a taste of these results over the past year or so, however, as mission team members have released some findings in dribs and drabs.)
The new studies cover the first 10 months of InSight's tenure on Mars, during which the lander detected 174 seismic events.
These quakes came in two flavors. One hundred and fifty of them were shallow, small-magnitude tremors whose vibrations propagated through the Martian crust. The other 24 were a bit stronger and deeper, with origins at various locales in the mantle, InSight team members said. (But even those bigger quakes weren't that powerful; they landed in the magnitude 3 to 4 range. Here on Earth, quakes generally must be at least magnitude 5.5 to damage buildings.)
That was the tremor tally through September 2019. InSight has been busy since then as well; its total quake count now stands at about 450, Banerdt said. And all of this shaking does indeed originate from Mars itself, he added; as far as the team can tell, none of the vibrations were caused by meteorites hitting the Red Planet. So, there's a lot going on beneath the planet's surface.
But that activity is quite different from what we're used to on Earth, where most quakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding against, over or under each other. Mars doesn't have active plate tectonics, the researchers said, so both types of quakes are caused by the long-term cooling of the planet since its formation 4.5 billion years ago.
"As the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture in order to sort of maintain themselves on the surface," Banerdt said. "That's kind of the long-term source of stresses."
And some Martian locales are more stressed than others. One particularly active region is the Cerberus Fossae fracture system, which lies about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) east of InSight's Elysium Planitia landing site.
The mission team traced two of the largest detected marsquakes to Cerberus Fossae, which "contains faults, volcanic flows and liquid water outflow channels with ages as recent as 2-10 Ma [million years ago], and possibly younger from impact crater counts," Banerdt and his colleagues wrote in one of the new studies.
"So, it's possible that there's actual magma at depth that's cooling," InSight deputy principal investigator Sue Smrekar, also of JPL, said during Thursday's teleconference. That cooling would lead to the contraction of the magma chamber, causing deformation of the crust, she added.
But Smrekar stressed that this is a hypothesis, not a definitive determination of what's going on at Cerberus Fossae. Indeed, though mission team members think they understand Martian seismicity in broad strokes, they're still trying to nail down how it works in detail.
A wealth of information can be gleaned from InSight's quake measurements. For example, analyses of how the seismic waves move through the Martian crust suggest there are small amounts of water mixed in with the rock, mission team members said.
"Our data is consistent with a crust which has some moisture in it, but we can't say one way or the other whether there [are] large underground reservoirs of water at this point," Banerdt said.
The new papers report a variety of other discoveries as well. For example, InSight is the first mission ever to tote a magnetometer to the Martian surface, and that instrument detected a local magnetic field about 10 times stronger than would be expected based on orbital measurements. (Mars lost its global magnetic field billions of years ago, however. This allowed solar particles to strip away the once-thick Martian atmosphere, which spurred the planet's transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold desert it is today.)
InSight is also taking a wealth of weather data, measuring pressure many times per second and temperature once every few seconds, Banerdt said. This information helps the mission team better understand environmental noise that could complicate interpretations of the seismic observations, but it also has considerable stand-alone value.
"This is really going to, I think, revolutionize our understanding of the interaction of the atmosphere with the surface of Mars," Banerdt said. "That's one of the things that's really going to open up a whole new window of research on Mars."
Mole update
Not everything has gone smoothly for InSight, however. Notably, the mole has been unable to get down to its prescribed depth because the Martian dirt is proving more slippery than mission team members had anticipated. (The mole's self-hammering burrowing system requires a certain amount of friction to work.)
The mission team has tried several strategies to get the mole moving, including pressing on the side of the probe with InSight's robotic arm to generate the required friction. This latter tactic has generated some halting success, but the mole remains stranded too close to the surface.
So, in the next six to eight weeks, mission team members aim to try a modification of the arm-pressing strategy, in which they'll push on the mole's back rather than its side. The goal is to get the mole about 16 inches (40 centimeters) down, at which point it will hopefully be able to start digging on its own, Banerdt said.
The InSight team would also like a bit more cooperation from Mars on the seismic side of things, if possible. The lander has not yet spotted any truly big quakes, which have the potential to paint a clearer picture of the planet's deep interior for mission scientists.
The lack of powerful quakes is no surprise, Banerdt stressed; big tremors are much rarer than their smaller counterparts here on Earth, after all. So, the team may have to wait a while to get one.
But such issues aren't derailing the mission; the team is excited about how things have gone thus far, Banerdt said.
"I think we're well on our way to getting most, if not all, of the goals that we set for ourselves 10 years ago when we started this mission," he said.
Just like any small child, a tiny star had a huge yet unexpected temper tantrum.
The little star, which is only about 8% of the sun's mass, belched a huge "superflare" of X-rays. It's a strange thing to observe for astronomers, who thought a star that small couldn't create such a large emission in that wavelength of light.
This star is very diminutive by cosmic standards. Known as J0331-27, the star is an L dwarf, the category of star so small that each star's mass is just barely enough to allow for nuclear fusion. ("Failed stars" that don't meet the mass threshold are called brown dwarfs.)
The strange flare also went unnoticed for more than a decade after it happened on July 5, 2008. It was caught by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, but lay in an archive until a search turned up the event. It was quite the event, too, since the little star sent out more than 10 times the energy of the most intense flare sent out by our own sun.
"This is the most interesting scientific part of the discovery, because we did not expect L-dwarf stars to store enough energy in their magnetic fields to give rise to such outbursts," Beate Stelzer, a co-author on a new paper describing the event and an astrophysicist at Germany's Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and at Italy's Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, said in an ESA statement.
Scientists don't really understand how this flare could have arisen. L dwarfs only have a surface temperature of about 3,320 degrees Fahrenheit (1,830 degrees Celsius). That's about a third of the sun's surface temperature of 10,340 F (5,730 C). At the lower temperatures of an L dwarf, astronomers' models suggested that there isn't enough energy to fuel a star's magnetic field, which would govern the flare. "We just don't know — nobody knows," Stelzer said of why the event happened.
But the astronomers did point out that XMM-Newton observed the star for 40 days and only saw the one flare, which suggests that an L dwarf takes a longer time to build up energy than the sun does — perhaps contributing to the size of the flare.
"A number of similar stars had been seen to emit super flares in the optical part of the spectrum, but this is the first unambiguous detection of such an eruption at X-ray wavelengths," ESA added in the same statement. "The wavelength is significant because it signals which part of the atmosphere the super flare is coming from: optical light comes from deeper in the star's atmosphere, near its visible surface, whereas X-rays come from higher up in the atmosphere."
Over 100 Stars Are Missing! Sky Quakes, Artificial Dimensions, Machine Elves & Ghosts
Over 100 Stars Are Missing! Sky Quakes, Artificial Dimensions, Machine Elves & Ghosts
Anyone looking for something to binge watch? Here’s some MIND BLOWING stuff! Full version of a new 5 part series… Where are the stars going? Does Time exist? The 33rd Parallel, Megaliths, Missing stars, New Constellations, 13th sign of the zodiac, Strange sounds in the sky,
A.I. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine elves, deepDream machine art, chakras, dimensions, New Age Horoscopes, light workers and energy workers, bad trips, the “trip” gatekeeper… and so much MORE! (Please stick around to the end… saved the best for last
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts... Experts Are Still Trying to Explain These Relics
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts... Experts Are Still Trying to Explain These Relics
One of the world’s leading experts on ancient Artifacts shares his unique collection of relics from long lost civilizations that appear to have been more advanced than we thought.
This information is amazing , where did you find this guy he’s a gift from the gods.I never realized how many private collectors are out there hording our history , the same history that has been hidden from us for thousands of years , but i’m glad they do because they preserve it instead of the establishment destroying it! Tim O’Ney
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts…Experts Are Still Trying To Explain These Relics
Black Disk Shoots Past Moon While Youtube Livestreams! Feb 10, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black Disk Shoots Past Moon While Youtube Livestreams! Feb 10, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 10, 2020
Location of sighting: Earths moon
This was brought to my attention by a Youtuber named Willease. He posted this video of a persons live streaming...where a UFO suddenly appears for a split second. The UFO is oval shaped and looks like a disk. Its only visible for a second so you have to watch the video carefully. Stop the video at 57 sec mark to see the UFO well. An awesome example of a disk. This is not a satellite, because it has no antennas or solar panels, its not the space station, because its totally the wrong shape...wow, just wow!
UFO On The Coast Of Denia, Spain 2018-08-03, UFO Sighting News.
UFO On The Coast Of Denia, Spain 2018-08-03, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 8-3-2018 Location of sighting:Denia, Spain Source: MUFON 106337 Here is a great UFO video. Why is it great? I was taken in the daytime with a high quality camera and has an excellent eyewitness description to go with it. Three things I really like. This person was at the beach in Spain and noticed a flying object in the sky. Its whitish silver and highly reflective as it changes its shape. The shape and the movement of the object reminds me of some UFO videos released by the military in infrared. These are drones...able to change shapes at whim. Sent by aliens to record and retrieve data...and they record everything...ocean temps, pollutants, animals, insects wind speed...everything. So don't think we are so important they are here for us all the time...because there are other things on earth too they are highly interested in learning about. This drone was heading out into the ocean, probably towards the location of an under the ocean alien base not far off the coast of Spain. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
My wife, my son (7 years old at that time) and I were on the beach in Denia (38°51'02.3"N 0°05'59.5"E) having a relaxing afternoon while on holidays, when at around 17:30, my wife noticed on her right-hand side, a bright object cruising slowly just around above the Castle of Denia (38°50'50.6"N 0°06'49.0"E) towards our position, following the coastline in a South-East North-west path (38°53'53.9"N 0°03'54.0"E). In the beginning, we thought it was just a drone, but the object seemed too big and too bright from the distance to be just a drone, despite the sun could well reflect on metallic objects depending on the angle and position.
As the object was approaching, the brightness didn't seem to change but rather pulsate, which we started to think about something unusual. A commercial flight was around at that time but it was at a much further and a higher altitude and didn't interfere in any way with the object. I decided to get my phone and record it. I was a bit frustrated because in previous years I bring my camcorder with me for holidays and I like to record events and fun times. That particular year I decided not to get the camcorder and rely on solely on my smartphone. With the camcorder, I could have used the powerful optical zoom and better quality image to record the event.
The object was travelling on a steady speed and steady path position (The object didn't move on the sky up and down, it was me trying to steady my phone). I estimate the object was travelling in between 100-200 miles/h and an altitude of around 3000 feet or possibly less, with an angle with respect of the horizon of around 35 degrees. The object seemed to be pulsating and was really quickly intermittently disappearing and appearing with black shades in contrast with its brightness.
As the sky was so clear cloudless, there is no appreciation of the object moving. Only at 2:21 in the video, I did a quick shot of the beach as a point of reference because I didn't want to lose track of it. It took my attention that while we were on the beach, no one noticed anything or no one noticed that we were very excited looking and filming this object in the sky like they weren't aware that we were there.
There was a couple just sitting 4 meters in front of us, facing nearly our direction and they didn't seem to care about our excitement or our finding in the sky.... They didn't even bother to look at what was going on in the sky... Weird! In fact, no one on the beach, and there were quite a few people, seemed to notice the strange event. We believe we sighted a very good case of an unknown object of unknown origin but you can prove us wrong of course. The object seemed to be flickering even more as it was disappearing in the distance towards Valencia. At one point we couldn't see it anymore.
This is an old UFO footage recorded on 3rd August 2018 but it was just now submitted to MUFON. This happened in Denia, Spain.
Witness report:
Unknown Orb/Light object travelling at steady speed along the coast of Denia, Spain. My wife, my son (7 years old at that time) and I were on the beach in Denia (38°51’02.3″N 0°05’59.5″E) having a relaxing afternoon while on holidays, when at around 17:30, my wife noticed on her right-hand side, a bright object cruising slowly just around above the Castle of Denia (38°50’50.6″N 0°06’49.0″E) towards our position, following the coastline in a South-East North-west path (38°53’53.9″N 0°03’54.0″E). In the beginning, we thought it was just a drone, but the object seemed too big and too bright from the distance to be just a drone, despite the sun could well reflect on metallic objects depending on the angle and position. As the object was approaching, the brightness didn’t seem to change but rather pulsate, which we started to think about something unusual. A commercial flight was around at that time but it was at a much further and a higher altitude and didn’t interfere in any way with the object. I decided to get my phone and record it. I was a bit frustrated because in previous years I bring my camcorder with me for holidays and I like to record events and fun times. That particular year I decided not to get the camcorder and rely on solely on my smartphone. With the camcorder, I could have used the powerful optical zoom and better quality image to record the event.
The object was travelling on a steady speed and steady path position (The object didn’t move on the sky up and down, it was me trying to steady my phone). I estimate the object was travelling in between 100-200 miles/h and an altitude of around 3000 feet or possibly less, with an angle with respect of the horizon of around 35 degrees.
The object seemed to be pulsating and was really quickly intermittently disappearing and appearing with black shades in contrast with its brightness.
As the sky was so clear cloudless, there is no appreciation of the object moving. Only at 2:21 in the video, I did a quick shot of the beach as a point of reference because I didn’t want to lose track of it.
It took my attention that while we were on the beach, no one noticed anything or no one noticed that we were very excited looking and filming this object in the sky like they weren’t aware that we were there. There was a couple just sitting 4 meters in front of us, facing nearly our direction and they didn’t seem to care about our excitement or our finding in the sky…. They didn’t even bother to look at what was going on in the sky… Weird! In fact, no one on the beach, and there were quite a few people, seemed to notice the strange event.
We believe we sighted a very good case of an unknown object of unknown origin but you can prove us wrong of course.
The object seemed to be flickering even more as it was disappearing in the distance towards Valencia. At one point we couldn’t see it anymore.
What is dark matter? Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE | February 23, 2020 Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe it and dark
What is dark matter?
Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe it and dark energy make up most of the mass of the cosmos. What dark matter is, and what it isn’t. here.
Since the 1930s, astrophysicists have been trying to explain why the visible material in galaxies can’t account for how galaxies are shaped, or how they behave. They believe a form of dark or invisible matter pervades our universe, but they still don’t know what this dark matter might be.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to compose perhaps about 27% of the makeup of the universe. What is it? It’s a bit easier to say what it isn’t.
It isn’t ordinary atoms – the building blocks of our own bodies and all we see around us – because atoms make up only somewhere around 5% of the universe, according to a cosmological model called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model (aka the Lambda-CDM model, or sometimes just the Standard Model).
Dark matter isn’t the same thing as dark energy, which makes up some 68% of the universe, according to the Standard Model.
Dark matter is invisible; it doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light or any type of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays or radio waves. Thus, dark matter is undetectable directly, as all of our observations of the universe, apart from the detection of gravitational waves, involve capturing electromagnetic radiation in our telescopes.
Yet dark matter does interact with ordinary matter. It exhibits measurable gravitational effects on large structures in the universe such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Because of this, astronomers are able to make maps of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, even though they cannot see it directly.
They do this by measuring the effect dark matter has on ordinary matter, through gravity.
This all-sky image – released in 2013 – shows the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the universe as seen projected on the sky. It’s based on data collected with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Dark blue areas represent regions that are denser than their surroundings. Bright areas represent less dense regions. The gray portions of the image correspond to patches of the sky where foreground emission, mainly from the Milky Way but also from nearby galaxies, prevents cosmologists from seeing clearly.
There is currently a huge international effort to identify the nature of dark matter. Bringing an armory of advanced technology to bear on the problem, astronomers have designed ever-more complex and sensitive detectors to tease out the identity of this mysterious substance.
Dark matter might consist of an as yet unidentified subatomic particle of a type completely different from what scientists call baryonic matter – that’s just ordinary matter, the stuff we see all around us – which is made of ordinary atoms built of protons and neutrons.
The list of candidate subatomic particles breaks down into a few groups: there are the WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), a class of particles thought to have been produced in the early universe. Astronomers believe that WIMPs might self-annihilate when colliding with each other, so they have searched the skies for telltale traces of events such as the release of neutrinos or gamma rays. So far, they’ve found nothing. In addition, although a theory called supersymmetry predicts the existence of particles with the same properties as WIMPs, repeated searches to find the particles directly have also found nothing, and experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to detect the expected presence of supersymmetry have completely failed to find it.
Several different types of detector have been used to detect WIMPs. The general idea is that very occasionally, a WIMP might collide with an ordinary atom and release a faint flash of light, which can be detected. The most sensitive detector built to date is XENON1T, which consists of a 10-meter cylinder containing 3.2 tons of liquid xenon, surrounded by photomultipliers to detect and amplify the incredibly faint flashes from these rare interactions. As of July 2019, when the detector was decommissioned to pave the way for a more sensitive instrument, the XENONnT, no collisions between WIMPs and the xenon atoms had been seen.
Although WIMPs have long been the favored candidate for dark matter, they’re not the only candidates. The failure to find WIMPs, and the attendant frustration with not being able to account for a significant percentage of the universe’s mass, has led many scientists to look at possible alternatives.
At the moment, a hypothetical particle called the axion is receiving much attention. As well as being a strong candidate for dark matter, the existence of axions is also thought to provide the answers to a few other persistent questions in physics such as the Strong CP Problem.
Astronomer Fritz Zwicky first predicted the existence of dark matter in the 1930s following his observations of the Coma galaxy cluster.
The idea that there might be things in the universe which are invisible to us, that emit no light, has a long history going back hundreds of years to the days of Newton. With the discovery of so-called “dark nebulae” – clouds of interstellar dust blocking the light from background stars – and Pierre Laplace’s 18th-century speculations about objects which might swallow light, later to become known as black holes, astronomers came to accept the existence of a so-called “dark universe.”
But in modern times, it was astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, who made the first observations of what we now call dark matter. His 1933 observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies seemed to indicated it has a mass 500 times more than that previously calculated by Edwin Hubble. Furthermore, this extra mass seemed to be completely invisible. Although Zwicky’s observations were initially met with much skepticism, they were later confirmed by other groups of astronomers.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
Vera Rubin, following Zwicky, postulated that the missing structure in galaxies is dark matter. Her ideas were met with much resistance from the astronomical community, but her observations have been confirmed and are seen today as pivotal proof of the existence of dark matter. In honor of this crucial and historic piece of detective work toward establishing the existence of dark matter, the revolutionary Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to see first light next year, was recently renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin (1928-2016). This image – taken at Lowell Observatory – is from 1965.
Some astronomers have tried to negate the need the existence of dark matter altogether by postulating something called Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). The idea behind this is that gravity behaves differently over long distances to what it does locally, and this difference of behavior explains phenomena such as galaxy rotation curves which we attribute to dark matter. Although MOND has its supporters, while it can account for the rotation curve of an individual galaxy, current versions of MOND simply cannot account for the behavior and movement of matter in large structures such as galaxy clusters and, in its current form, is thought unable to completely account for the existence of dark matter. That is to say, gravity does behave in the same way at all scales of distance. Most versions of MOND, on the other hand, have two versions of gravity, the weaker one occurring in regions of low mass concentration such as in the outskirts of galaxies. However, it is not inconceivable that some new version of MOND in the future might yet account for dark matter.
Although some astronomers believe we will establish the nature of dark matter in the near future, the search so far has proved fruitless, and we know that the universe often springs surprises on us so that nothing can be taken for granted.
The approach astronomers are taking is to eliminate those particles which cannot be dark matter, in the hope we will be left with the one which is.
It remains to be seen if this approach is the correct one.
Bottom line: Dark matter makes up some 27% of the universe according to astronomical theories. It cannot be seen or detected directly via the existing tools of astronomers, but its effect can be measured via its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.
Molecular oxygen has been spotted beyond the Milky Way for the first time
Molecular oxygen has been spotted beyond the Milky Way for the first time
The elusive molecule turned up in a quasar more than half a billion light-years from Earth
Astronomers finally found molecular oxygen beyond the Milky Way, but they had to look at a galaxy far, far away: the quasar Markarian 231, shown here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA, ESA, THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI/AURA)-ESA/HUBBLE COLLABORATION, AND A. EVANS (UVA/NRAO/STONY BROOK UNI.)
For the first time, astronomers have found molecular oxygen — the same gas humans need to breathe — in a galaxy outside the Milky Way.
Oxygen is the third most common element in the cosmos, after hydrogen and helium. So astronomers once thought molecular oxygen, O2, would be common in the space between the stars. But despite repeated searches, no one had ever seen molecular oxygen beyond our galaxy — until now.
Junzhi Wang, an astronomer at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, and his colleagues spotted the molecule’s calling card in a galaxy named Markarian 231. Lying 560 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, Markarian 231 is the nearest galaxy to Earth that contains a quasar, where gas whirls around a supermassive black hole and gets so hot that it glows brilliantly. (SN: 8/31/15).
Using radio telescopes in Spain and France, the astronomers saw radiation at a wavelength of 2.52 millimeters, a signature of O2’s presence, the team reports in the Feb. 1 Astrophysical Journal. “This is the first detection of molecular oxygen in an extragalactic object,” Wang says.
It’s also the most molecular oxygen ever seen outside the solar system. Previously, astronomers had seen the molecule in just two star-forming clouds within the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula and the Rho Ophiuchi cloud (SN: 1/28/20). Astronomers think the shortage of interstellar O2 is due to oxygen atoms and water molecules freezing onto dust grains, locking up the oxygen. In these stellar nurseries, though, shocks from bright newborn stars can rip water ice from the dust, freeing oxygen atoms to find each other and form molecules.
But even in the Orion Nebula, molecular oxygen is rare, with hydrogen molecules outnumbering oxygen molecules a million to one. Hydrogen also dominates in Markarian 231. But molecular oxygen spans the outskirts of the galactic disk at abundances more than 100 times greater than in the Orion Nebula.
That’s “very high,” says Gary Melnick, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the work. “There is no known explanation for an abundance of molecular oxygen that high.” To confirm that the radiation really arises from O2, Melnick says the observers should look for a second wavelength from the molecule.
That won’t be easy, Wang says, because other molecules also emit radiation at those wavelengths. To shore up the case for O2, the scientists went through the many molecules that give off wavelengths similar to the one detected and found that nobody had ever seen any of those molecules in space — except for O2. “It is guilt by elimination, if you will,” says team member Paul Goldsmith, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. One possible explanation for all the O2 is that Markarian 231 goes through a more vigorous version of the Orion Nebula’s oxygen-forming process. The galaxy is a prolific star factory, spawning new stars 100 times as fast as the Milky Way and spewing out 700 solar masses of gas per year. High-speed gas from the galaxy’s center may slam into gas in the disk, shaking water ice from dust grains so that molecular oxygen can form.
In turn, that oxygen could keep the galaxy hyperactive: Radiation the molecule emits helps cool the gas so that some of it can collapse and create even more new stars in the galaxy.
The earliest known hominid interbreeding occurred 700,000 years ago
The earliest known hominid interbreeding occurred 700,000 years ago
Neandertal-Denisovan ancestors migrating to Eurasia heralded hookups with a resident Homo group
A Homo erectus skull dating to around 1.8 million years ago, found at the Dmanisi site in the nation of Georgia, may come from a population that later interbred with ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans, researchers say.
Ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans left Africa for Eurasia around 700,000 years ago and then interbred with a Homo population that had exited Africa long before, according to a new genetic study. The finding reveals the oldest known case of interbreeding among members of the genus that includes people today, Homo sapiens.
Evidence of genetic exchanges between distinct hominid populations roughly 400,000 years before H. sapiens evolved highlights a role for interbreeding in Homo evolution long before ancient people occasionally mated with Neandertals and Denisovans.
The scenario begins with an early Homo species making its way into Eurasia roughly 1.9 million years ago, in what was probably the first Homo migration out of Africa, scientists report February 20 in Science Advances. Those now-extinct travelers may have been members of Homo erectus, a species that includes Eurasian fossils dating to about 1.8 million years ago (SN: 10/17/13), or Homo antecessor, a controversial species designation based on 1.2-million- to 1.1-million-year-old fossils found in Spain (SN: 3/26/08). Or they could have been part of another Homo population unknown from any fossils.
Then ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans trekked out of Africa about 700,000 years ago, say the researchers, led by anthropologist and population geneticist Alan Rogers of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That timing would also have allowed for the evolution of Neandertals or their direct ancestors in what’s now northern Spain around 430,000 years ago (SN: 3/14/16). Some previous research had suggested that Neandertals originated roughly 300,000 years ago, raising questions about the evolutionary identity of older, Neandertal-like fossils in Spain.
Rogers refers to ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans as “neandersovans.” That genetically distinct population existed for a brief period of perhaps 15,000 years, Rogers estimates. Neandersovans’ numbers declined sharply after they left Africa around 700,000 years ago, he suspects. Survivors interbred with members of the Homo population that had long inhabited Eurasia, before largely replacing them and separating into eastern and western populations — Denisovans and Neandertals, respectively. Neandersovans inherited at least 2 percent of their DNA from the older Eurasian Homo population, Rogers calculates.
“It’s interesting that signals of interbreeding that far back can be seen in our genomes,” says UCLA geneticist Sriram Sankararaman. Further research needs to look for genetic links between members of that probable first Homo departure from Africa, identified in Rogers’ study, and a previously unknown Homo population that lived 1 million years ago or more and left a genetic mark on present-day West Africans, Sankararaman suggests (SN: 2/12/20). A genetic analysis by the UCLA researcher’s team identified the latter Homo group.
The new findings rest on a novel analysis of particular sets of gene variants found in people today, as well as in Neandertal and Denisovan fossils. Rogers previously determined that these gene forms had not undergone recent changes and thus could be traced back to ancient populations. A software program compared frequencies of the gene variants in DNA from three modern West African Yorubans, five French individuals, two English people, a Neandertal from Croatia’s Vindija Cave, a Neandertal from Siberia’s Denisova Cave and a Denisovan from the same Siberian site.
The researchers identified the best of eight simulations of how ancient interbreeding could have produced the shared genetic variants observed in both the modern and ancient individuals. Estimates of the rate at which genetic mutations accumulate enabled the scientists to gauge the timing of the ancient African departures.
While the newly proposed timing of interbreeding around 700,000 years ago seems reasonable, Rogers’ genetic data deserve closer scrutiny with alternative statistical techniques, says zoologist and evolutionary geneticist Peter Waddell of the Ronin Institute, a nonprofit research center in Montclair, N.J. Waddell previously found signs of a small amount of ancestry in Denisovan DNA from a much older Homo species, possibly H. erectus.
Rogers and his colleagues also suggest that a third major expansion out of Africa, involving H. sapiens, occurred around 50,000 years ago. As with the neandersovan expansion, the genetic evidence is consistent with H. sapiens arriving in Eurasia and then interbreeding with resident Neandertals and Denisovans before replacing those populations, the scientists say. Other fossil and ancient DNA studies, though, indicate that some H. sapiens reached Southeast Asian islands more than 60,000 years ago (SN: 8/9/17).
There was a lot of activity in the skies this past week, including some which directly affected our own planet, so let’s check things out and see if we need to open a metal umbrella.
“Empirical evidence indicates that at least one supernova has rained heavy elements on Earth in the past. Supernovae are known to release significant quantities of dust at sub-relativistic speeds. We also see evidence of clumpiness or ‘bullets’ in supernova ejecta.”
That astronomer-speak comes from astronomer Amir Sira, co-author of the paper (submitted to the submitted to the Astrophysical Journal) “Observational Signatures of Sub-Relativistic Meteors” with Abraham Loeb, who’s made a name for himself recently with his theories on extraterrestrial life forms, alien space ships and more. Sira and Loeb’s latest theory is that Earth’s atmosphere is being bombarded by large meteors – 1 mm to 10 cm (0.04 to 4 inches) – that are traveling at a tremendous speed – up to 1% of the speed of light or 100 times faster than most meteors.
Sira and Loeb refer to clumps of them with a scary “bullets” description and proposed a way to detect them with a global network of 600 infrasound microphones and optical-infrared instruments to detect the acoustic signature and optical flashes and physical explosions created by these “bullets” as they enter our atmosphere. Are we in any danger? Only of learning more about our solar system and universe. Kudos to Sira and Loeb for promoting more ways to entice kids to become astronomers and create jobs for them.
Moving on to the colliding black holes …
Astronomers who study colliding galaxies refer to something known as the “final parsec problem.” While they can see the massive physical destruction of the merger, they are unclear about what happens when the central black holes of each galaxy are within one parsec (3.26 light-years) of each other. The good news (maybe) is, they may find out in April. Scientific American interviews astrophysicists Daniel D’Orazio and Rosanne Di Stefano who in 2017 predicted that the black holes entering the area of the final parsec would produce a flare that could be detected by gravitational lensing if the black holes line up with earth as one passes in front of the other, thus distorting and magnifying the light of the black hole in the rear. A 2018 study of Kepler space telescope data found an active galactic nuclei (AGN) called KIC 11606854 that appears to be a pair of merging black holes. The astronomers were so excited, they called it “Spikey.”
It gets better. According to their preprint paper, “Spikey” may flare again in April 2020, so the astronomers have reserved NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to watch it. Are we in any danger? Only of disappointment should Spikey not live up to its name. On the other hand, a flare will push the theory closer to fact and give future space telescope missions better data to work with and more likely locations to point to.
Then there’s the mysterious Milky Way gas …
“The absence of stellar counterparts indicates that the point-like object may be a quiescent black hole. This discovery adds another intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the central region of our Galaxy.”
Astrophysicist Shunya Takekawa of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and colleagues were studying the motion of a high-velocity gas cloud in the center of the Milky Way called HCN-0.085-0.094 when they noticed that one of the three clumps that made up the cloud appeared to be swirling around a black hole. Its actions suggested this is an unusual quiet black hole, but its size is what got them excited — 100 to 100,000 solar masses. That would make it an intermediate-mass black hole, something that has been theorized but never actually proven or seen. In this case, that’s because it’s quiescent – giving off no detectable radiation because it’s not feeding. As they write in their preprint paper, this is the closest potential intermediate black hole ever found and that discovery itself is amazing, considering the possible event horizon (outer boundary) of this black hole is only the size of Neptune or Uranus.
Yes indeed, it was a busy week for black holes, supernovas and astronomers.
Secret chamber found inside King Tut’s famous tomb may solve hunt for Nefertiti
Secret chamber found inside King Tut’s famous tomb may solve hunt for Nefertiti
Egyptologists are on the verge of solving one of history’s biggest mysteries — the location of Queen Nefertiti’s elusive tomb.
Jamie Seidel
Tantalising radar shadows have revived hopes that one of history’s most beautiful, and controversial, women — Queen Nefertiti — may indeed be buried in secret chambers within King Tut’s famous tomb.
British and Egyptian Egyptologists earlier this week conducted a three-day radar scan of the world-famous tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
Upon opening its still-sealed door, he declared he saw “wonderful things”. Everywhere was the glint of gold and priceless examples of some of history’s most exquisite art.
But, since then, the tomb has presented something of a mystery.
It was immediately odd that so many of the statues attributed as Pharoah Tutankhamun had hips and breasts. And more recent, closer, examination reveals a significant proportion of the artwork to have been rebadged, and repurposed, from previous rulers.
In 2015, a ground-penetrating scan of the 3300-year-old tomb was conducted by controversial radar technician Hirokatsu Watanabe. He declared he had detected, with “90 per cent certainty”, several hollow spaces along with “metallic” and “organic” objects.
The world erupted in excitement.
Could another extraordinary discovery be tantalisingly within reach?
Would one of Egypt’s greatest mysteries finally be solved?
Egyptologists were immediately doubtful. His radar scan images seemed uninterpretable — just a mass of blue lines with the occasional red dot. Nobody other than Watanabe seemed able to determine what the scans revealed.
So, the Egyptian Antiquities department organised a second scan — this time with the assistance of National Geographic — in 2016. It found … nothing.
“If we had a void, we should have a strong reflection,” geophysicist Dean Goodman of GPR-Slice software told National Geographic News. “But it just doesn’t exist.”
The locations of speculative chambers have been supported by infra-red and radar scans of Tut’s tomb.
Egyptian technicians from the Centre for Sound Vibration and Smart Structures at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, joined a team from the English Terravision Centre to scour the rock for any trace of hidden chambers.
It’s part of an assessment that is due to be completed by the end of the year.
Egyptian archaeologist Francis Amin told the Egypt Independent the most recent radar survey, conducted by the University of Turin, had revealed spaces behind the walls.
But the resolution of the images did not confirm if these were man-made or natural cavities in the rock.
“The results of previous radar surveys have found evidence of the existence of spaces and organic material behind the walls of the cemetery,” Amin said. He added that specialist chemists will need to help analyse the radar survey results.
BOY KING OR PR STUNT?
Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb doesn’t follow the well-established pattern applied to other Egyptian god-kings. It’s unusually small. And it is shaped more like a burial chamber intended for a queen. And why do so many of the statues and images attributed as King Tutankhamun have feminine hips and breasts?
Some have theorised Tutankhamun suffered from his royal inbreeding and had deformities such as breasts and female hips.
Source:Supplied
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves put these clues together, including the discovery of partially erased royal names, to suggest the tomb — and much of its contents — was initially intended for Tut’s stepmother, Nefertiti.
About the same time, a high-resolution 3D laser scan made to help preserve the tomb indicated there may be “hollows” hidden behind the tomb’s plasterwork and paintings. Were these sealed doors?
“The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb … and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment — that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, coregent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten,” Dr Reeves wrote.
While the evidence was circumstantial, it was enough to pique the interest of the Egyptian Antiquities department to invite Dr Reeves — and others — to examine the tomb more closely.
“Each piece of evidence on its own is not conclusive but put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid my conclusion,” Dr Reeves said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if I’m right, this is potentially the biggest archaeological discovery ever made.”
British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes the new chamber could be the last resting place of Queen Nefertiti, King Tut's mother-in-law.
Source:Supplied
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Dr Reeves has been chasing Nefertiti’s ghost for almost two decades.
In 2000, Dr Reeves led a radar examination of the ground around Tutankhamun’s tomb in a search for Nefertiti’s burial. He reported finding a “void”. But digs failed to locate anything.
His continued enthusiasm, however, has proven contagious.
In 2016, Egypt’s tourism minister enthused: “We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures … It will be a ‘Big Bang’ — the discovery of the 21st century.”
An interior view of the King Tutankhamun burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
Source:AAP
So far, the Big Bang hasn’t happened.
And Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany has insisted no invasive exploration would be allowed to damage the priceless tomb. “It is essential to perform more scans using other devices and more technical and scientific methods,” Mr El-Enany said.
The challenge has since been one of developing the technology capable of achieving that task.
Former Egyptian antiquities minister and high-profile archaeological personality Zahi Hawass has long been a sceptic of the hidden chamber theory.
“If there is any masonry or partition wall, the radar signal should show an image,” he reportedly told National Geographic News.
“We don’t have this, which means there is nothing there.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer. Continue the conversation @JamieSeidel
One of the great mysteries of ancient Egypt is the whereabouts of Nefertiti – she of the famous bust. Her tomb has never been found, leading to various theories that the sparse records of her time as a powerful partner in the reign of her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten, and her own reign as pharaoh may have been covered up for some reason. The small size of her stepson King Tut’s tomb have caused many to believe it has hidden chambers, resulting in many unsuccessful searches using various non-invasive methods, including an extensive search with ground-penetrating radar in 2018. However, it’s never say never with Nefertiti, so yet another search was just completed and this time they found a hidden chamber. Is this the big one?
Queen Nefertiti
“Clearly there is something on the other side of the north wall of the burial chamber.”
In a review by Nature of an unpublished report by archaeologist Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former Egyptian minister of antiquities, Ray Johnson, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute who wasn’t involved in the research, confirmed that the radar found something, but what that ‘something ‘ is will require further scans. So far, it looks like a corridor a few meters east of Tut’s burial chamber. The space is 2 meters (6.5 feet) high, 10 meters (33 feet) long and at the same depth and direction as the tomb’s actual entrance.
The depth and location of this new chamber suggest a number of things. Being parallel to the entrance tunnel and perpendicular to the main chamber puts in in the tomb’s orientation, which would indicate it’s a part of the tomb and not an extension of another tomb – nearby tombs generally don’t line up with each other. The depth reinforces that theory and implies that the chamber was (or perhaps still is) connected to the main chamber at one end. Which leads to the obvious question: what’s at the other end?
“If Nefertiti was buried as a pharaoh, it could be the biggest archaeological discovery ever.”
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves has long supported the idea that Tut’s tomb is bigger and Nefertiti is buried somewhere in it. However, he thought the location was north, not east. Could this mean there are hidden chambers all around KV62, the un-sexy Egyptological designation for Tut’s tomb? Eldamaty plans to find out, especially since his ground-penetrating radar search was more successful than previous scans from inside the tomb. Still smarting from being replaced as Minister of Antiquities by a cabinet reshuffling, he plans to test Reeves’ north chamber theory after failing on his previous attempt due to not a mummy’s curse but a modern curse — interference from nearby air-conditioning units.
As always, it’s important to note the tremendous effort the government of Egypt puts into preserving these historic tombs and their artifacts from destructive physical invasions by even the most careful archeologists. Let’s hope this continues without interference from those with money who want to make more money on these priceless historical locations. They should be preserved for all, not just for the rich.
Nefertiti would certainly approve of this message.
Some of the most remarkable UFO encounter reports are those that have left behind some sort of physical evidence for us to look at and try to make sense of. Such accounts have occurred all over the world, always leaving something behind, although this has not necessarily led to any concrete answers. One place that has its share of cases like this is the country of France, and here we will take a look at some of the more well-known perplexing cases of UFOs that not only baffled, but left something physical behind.
Our earliest report comes from the year 1954, at Quarouble, Nord, France. On the night of September 10, 1954, railroad worker Marius Dewilde was woken by his dog barking frantically at something in the night. Dewilde groggily got out of bed, grabbed his flashlight, and ventured outside to see what was going on, not really expecting to find much other than maybe a stray cat or some other animal running around. He decided to walk out towards the nearby railway tracks and that is when he would claim he saw something large resting on the ground not far away. Almost as soon as he noticed this anomalous object he heard footsteps behind him, which caused him to whip his flashlight around.
There, standing in the beam were allegedly two small humanoid beings only about 3 feet tall, which were wearing some sort of helmets on that reflected the light of the beam. Things would get intense when he says that the large landed object then suddenly emitted a beam that trained on him and seemed to paralyze his entire body. It was also noticed that his flashlight flickered out as if it’s batteries had been suddenly drained. He collapsed to the ground, but was able to witness the two figures make their way towards the craft and board it, after which the object changed colors and hot off into the sky. Shortly after, Dewilde would gain control of his limbs once again and make his way home to frantically tell his wife about what had happened. He would later lead police to the scene, but found that he was unable to approach the site, as he was overcome with an incapacitating nausea every time he tried to do so, although no one else experienced such symptoms.
They were nevertheless able to find some odd details, such as a deep indentation and small rocks under the site that were all carbonized on the depression. Spookily there were also later found cows in the area that had been killed and drained of blood. Dewilde himself would go on to suffer from myriad health problems such as respiratory problems and chronic headaches throughout his life, and it would later be found that other locals had seen something odd in the sky as well, and some even said they had seen the same strange entities wandering around. What are we to make of this odd case?
In July of 1965 a very weird series of events went down in the quaint region of Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. It all started near the small village of Valensole, and on July 1, 1965, a farmer by the name of Maurice Masse was taking a cigarette break before starting his morning chores. As he puffed out wisps of smoke into the air, something caught his attention through the haze of cigarette smoke, and he could see some sort of strange object descend from the sky to land in a field of lavender flowers not too far away. At this point he did not take it to be a UFO, thinking it instead to be a helicopter, but when he extinguished his smoke and took a look out across the field, his eyes met with an oval shaped object perched up on four leg-like apparatuses. Stranger still was that there appeared to be two humanoid figures standing in front of it.
The figures were described as standing approximately 4 feet high, and dressed in tight gray-green clothes, seemingly not human. Their heads were oversized and bald, holding within them large, almond shaped eyes and small, pointed chins, and they seemed to be making some sort of low grumbling noise. As the farmer stood there mouth agape in awe, one of these curious figures allegedly turned to him and raised into the air a device of some kind, which looked cylindrical and “pencil-like” in nature. Before Masse could even really register what was going on he says that the device projected some sort of beam that caused him to lose all control of his limbs and go crumpling to the ground in a heap. He would claim that as he lay there in a daze the figures boarded their craft and then flew off at great speed. It would later be found that the ground had a deep indentation in it and a hardened area like concrete. It would also be found that Masse was honest, very sincere, and was considered to be telling the truth.
A rather similarly weird alien encounter report would be made in 1967, with a 13-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister in Cussac, Cantal, France, who claimed that they had seen four small, black entities in a field measuring a mere 3 feet high. Above them was apparently a large disc hovering, towards which the mysterious figures floated up off the ground towards, disappearing within. The object then took off with great speed, and when the children brought back investigators it was found that the area was redolent with a “sulfur odor” and that the grass beneath was oddly all dried out for reasons that could not be explained.
Another famous French case supposedly occurred at Trans-en-Provence,Var, France, in January of 1981. Another farmer, this one by the name of Renato Nicolaï, who on January 8, 1981 at 5pm was at work on his property when an eerie whistling sound caught his attention. When he looked around to see what was going on he apparently witnessed a large, saucer-shaped craft come down to rest upon a parch of nearby field, before once again lifting off to fly away. The farmer would describe it as follows:
The device had the shape of two saucers, one inverted on top of the other. It must have measured about 1.5 meters in height. It was the color of lead. This device had a ridge all the way around its circumference. Under the machine I saw two kinds of pieces as it was lifting off. They could be reactors or feet. There were also two other circles which looked like trapdoors. The two reactors, or feet, extended about 20 cm (8 in) below the body of the machine.
When the area was later investigated it was found that the location where the mysterious craft had landed held within it strange scorch marks that could not be identified. It was also found by authorities that there was a patch of ground that had been heavily compressed by something weighing several tons, and had been heated to around 300 and 600 °C (572 and 1,112 °F). A two year investigation into the incident would fail to turn up any definitive answers, and the case remains unsolved.
The very following year, in 1982, one of the most famous UFO cases in French history would go down in the region of Nancy, France. On October 21, 1982, an anonymous cell biologist known only as “Mr. Henri” was with his wife in the modest garden of their home in the small town of Laxou, near Nancy in northeast France, on a clear day when a highly reflective, glinting ovoid object came floating down out of the sky. The object apparently headed straight toward them, causing them to step back warily, before it came to a hovering position right over their home. It was described as being very smooth and metallic, “similar to Beryllium,” as well as completely silent the entire time. Mr. Henri would claim that he had tried to take a photograph as it hovered there, but that something had caused the device to malfunction. The object would descend to just three feet over the ground and simply stay there for a full 20 minutes before ascending again to fly off into the distance, seeming to pull up the grass beneath it as it did so. The plants of the garden were then found to be dried up and withered as if some sort of force had affected them, with some of the fruit of the trees burst open and “cooked” as if by some high heat. Investigators at the scene would come to the conclusion that the vegetation had been affected by some sort of intense “electromagnetic wave of energy.” What was going on here? Who knows?
This has been just a selection at some of the stranger UFO reports to come out of France, and which are remarkable in that they all left behind some sort of physical evidence, although that that entails is largely open for debate. In the end we are merely left with more truly weird cases of possible brushes with things from beyond our understanding and possibly from beyond our world, adding to the mystique of the UFO phenomenon in general and still without solid answers.
UFO Abducts Plane Over Fiji Islands! Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Abducts Plane Over Fiji Islands! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Feb 22, 2020 Location of sighting: Fiji islands Google coordinates: 18° 3'22.84"S 178°41'8.51"E I was looking at Google Earth map when I found this mysterious glowing object in front of a plane. The objects color is what really stands out. It the back of the UFO its pinkish like a half circle and in the front its glowing white. I believe this is because the UFO has lowered part of its shield so that they could bring things in and out of the plane into the UFO. This may be a frozen in time event, a moment in time frozen because the aliens erase the memories of the people on board and then put them back hours later. This is an example of an alien abduction taking place over the ocean in a plane. 100% proof that aliens are abducting humans. Scott C. Waring
NASA tracks cone-shaped UFO before it disappears into deep space
NASA tracks cone-shaped UFO before it disappears into deep space
The ISS live feed cam captures a cone-shaped metallic object for about 22 minutes before it moves upwards and disappears into deep space.
The stunning footage, recorded on February 21, 2020, has led to many speculations about what the object could be.
While many people suggest that it is a real UFO, whether alien or a man-made spacecraft belonging to the space fleet, others say that the cone-shaped object is a satellite or a probe intended for experimental purposes in deep space, released by the ISS.
The Top Secret Area 51 Military Base with UFOs and Experimental Aircrafts
The Top Secret Area 51 Military Base with UFOs and Experimental Aircrafts
Area 51, secret U.S. Air Force military installation located at Groom Lake in southern Nevada. It is administered by Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. The installation has been the focus of numerous conspiracies involving extraterrestrial life, though its only confirmed use is as a flight testing facility.
For years there was speculation about the installation, especially amid growing reports of UFO sightings in the vicinity. The site became known as Area 51, which was its designation on maps of the Atomic Energy Commission. Conspiracy theories gained support in the late 1980s, when a man (Bob Lazar) alleging to have worked at the installation claimed that the government was examining recovered alien spacecraft.
Lenticular cloud over Mount Shasta. February 12, 2020.
Photo Credit: Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Unusual UFO-shaped formations were observed in the skies over Mount Shasta.
These were actually lenticular clouds that often look like lenses or flying saucers.
This volcano peak in California has long been the subject of conspiracy theories.
Mount Shasta in California has become a nexus of conspiracy theories and unusual events. The latest viral sensation from the area has been a UFO-shaped object that appeared in the skies above the potentially active volcano peak of 14,179 feet on the morning of February 12th.
Upon closer look, this was not an alien spaceship but a beautiful lenticular cloud, the kind that is often shaped like lentils or UFOs, depending on your perspective. It was so convincing, however, that the U.S. Forest Service had to deny its extraterrestrial origins in a statement.
The flying saucer or lens shape of these clouds is caused by their development along the downwind sides of mountains. When moist and stable air goes over a mountain, oscillating waves are created. The crest of the waves causes condensation of vapor, which evaporates through the troughs, explains Weather Underground. These evaporations take the form of lenses and spaceships, looking layered.
Mount Shasta, in particular, has seen its share of lenticular cloud sightings, leading to its status as a new focal point for alien hunters much like Roswell, New Mexico. The latest UFO cloud quickly became a social media sensation, as you can see in these posts of the enigmatic formations:
Mount Shasta has also seen other unusual happenings, with a mysterious side hole that appeared over 10 years ago becoming the subject of a documentary. Its sudden emergence connected with local legends about a lost continent of Lemuria supposedly hidden under the mountain. This mythical kingdom would be there along with its capital city Telos.
The first thought of the documentary filmmaker Elijah Sullivan about the giant hole was that it was from people trying to find Lemuria.
"You'll hear a lot of people talking about Lemuria, maybe even asking for directions," he told the news in 2018. "People make pilgrimages here — it's like a New Age mecca."
It is also known to be sacred to the Native American Winnemem Wintu tribe, indigenous to this area.
If you're in the mood to check out the stunning area for yourself and see some aliens in the skies above, you can come to the nearby town of McCloud for the "Meet the Venusians — We Are in Contact" conference from August 25-30 of this year. It promises to be a "tribute to honor of all the Venusians & Pleiadean's who have taken the time to present themselves" with a schedule of speakers and events focused on healing and consciousness.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
Tantalising radar shadows have revived hopes that one of history’s most beautiful, and controversial, women — Queen Nefertiti — may indeed be buried in secret chambers within King Tut’s famous tomb.
British and Egyptian Egyptologists earlier this week conducted a three-day radar scan of the world-famous tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
Upon opening its still-sealed door, he declared he saw “wonderful things”. Everywhere was the glint of gold and priceless examples of some of history’s most exquisite art.
But, since then, the tomb has presented something of a mystery.
It was immediately odd that so many of the statues attributed as Pharoah Tutankhamun had hips and breasts. And more recent, closer, examination reveals a significant proportion of the artwork to have been rebadged, and repurposed, from previous rulers.
And that includes his iconic burial mask.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
In 2015, a ground-penetrating scan of the 3300-year-old tomb was conducted by controversial radar technician Hirokatsu Watanabe. He declared he had detected, with “90 per cent certainty”, several hollow spaces along with “metallic” and “organic” objects.
The world erupted in excitement.
Could another extraordinary discovery be tantalisingly within reach?
Would one of Egypt’s greatest mysteries finally be solved?
Egyptologists were immediately doubtful. His radar scan images seemed uninterpretable — just a mass of blue lines with the occasional red dot. Nobody other than Watanabe seemed able to determine what the scans revealed.
So, the Egyptian Antiquities department organised a second scan — this time with the assistance of National Geographic — in 2016. It found … nothing.
“If we had a void, we should have a strong reflection,” geophysicist Dean Goodman of GPR-Slice software told National Geographic News. “But it just doesn’t exist.”
The locations of speculative chambers have been supported by infra-red and radar scans of Tut’s tomb.
Source:Getty Images
THIRD TIME LUCKY?
The Egypt Independent reports the latest scan of Tut’s tomb concluded on Wednesday.
Egyptian technicians from the Centre for Sound Vibration and Smart Structures at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, joined a team from the English Terravision Centre to scour the rock for any trace of hidden chambers.
It’s part of an assessment that is due to be completed by the end of the year.
Egyptian archaeologist Francis Amin told the Egypt Independent the most recent radar survey, conducted by the University of Turin, had revealed spaces behind the walls.
But the resolution of the images did not confirm if these were man-made or natural cavities in the rock.
“The results of previous radar surveys have found evidence of the existence of spaces and organic material behind the walls of the cemetery,” Amin said. He added that specialist chemists will need to help analyse the radar survey results.
BOY KING OR PR STUNT?
Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb doesn’t follow the well-established pattern applied to other Egyptian god-kings. It’s unusually small. And it is shaped more like a burial chamber intended for a queen. And why do so many of the statues and images attributed as King Tutankhamun have feminine hips and breasts?
Some have theorised Tutankhamun suffered from his royal inbreeding and had deformities such as breasts and female hips.
Source:Supplied
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves put these clues together, including the discovery of partially erased royal names, to suggest the tomb — and much of its contents — was initially intended for Tut’s stepmother, Nefertiti.
Dr Reeves’ 2015 academic paper The Burial of Nefertiti quickly grabbed international attention.
About the same time, a high-resolution 3D laser scan made to help preserve the tomb indicated there may be “hollows” hidden behind the tomb’s plasterwork and paintings. Were these sealed doors?
“The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb … and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment — that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, coregent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten,” Dr Reeves wrote.
While the evidence was circumstantial, it was enough to pique the interest of the Egyptian Antiquities department to invite Dr Reeves — and others — to examine the tomb more closely.
“Each piece of evidence on its own is not conclusive but put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid my conclusion,” Dr Reeves said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if I’m right, this is potentially the biggest archaeological discovery ever made.”
British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes the new chamber could be the last resting place of Queen Nefertiti, King Tut's mother-in-law.
Source:Supplied
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Dr Reeves has been chasing Nefertiti’s ghost for almost two decades.
In 2000, Dr Reeves led a radar examination of the ground around Tutankhamun’s tomb in a search for Nefertiti’s burial. He reported finding a “void”. But digs failed to locate anything.
His continued enthusiasm, however, has proven contagious.
In 2016, Egypt’s tourism minister enthused: “We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures … It will be a ‘Big Bang’ — the discovery of the 21st century.”
An interior view of the King Tutankhamun burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
Source:AAP
So far, the Big Bang hasn’t happened.
And Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany has insisted no invasive exploration would be allowed to damage the priceless tomb. “It is essential to perform more scans using other devices and more technical and scientific methods,” Mr El-Enany said.
The challenge has since been one of developing the technology capable of achieving that task.
Former Egyptian antiquities minister and high-profile archaeological personality Zahi Hawass has long been a sceptic of the hidden chamber theory.
“If there is any masonry or partition wall, the radar signal should show an image,” he reportedly told National Geographic News.
“We don’t have this, which means there is nothing there.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer. Continue the conversation @JamieSeidel