02-04-2020 om 22:02 geschreven door peter  

Two Alien Bases On Google Mars Map, High Detail, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: April 2, 2020

Location of discovery: Mars

Source:

• https://www.google.com/mars/

I was looking over the Mars Google online map when I discovered some structures.  This one is not downloaded and it has better detail in the infrared photo. The first structure is a long tall building that enters the side of a crater like an arrow hitting a target. At its end it has a small tower on its slope. The other structure is a four sided pyramid with a huge six sided doorway in its side. This doorway is big enough for ships to enter and exit. But what looks like a door may be a tinted window for a city that may exist inside this pyramid. The pyramid is about 5km across and 4km wide. The long structure is closer to 10km long. Watch the video for more details.

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

02-04-2020 om 21:21 geschreven door peter  

UFO Disk Seen During Daytime Over Colorado, Feb 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: February 7, 2020

Location of sighting: Colorado, Montezuma County, USA

Source: email report. 

 

I was going through my email and received a photo from a person in Colorado that saw a UFO shaped cloud coming over the mountains. He stated, this thing was hiding in plain sight. I have to agree, when UFOs create clouds and hide in them, they do assume that humans are not intelligent enough to know the difference, but we are learning fast. The dark disk outline on the bottom of the cloud really gives it away. Also notice that far above are some waves in the cloud ceiling above it...possible disturbed from the alien craft moving through it not long ago. From the looks of it, I would estimate it to be 1.5 to 2km across. 

Scott C. Waring 

 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

02-04-2020 om 21:11 geschreven door peter  

Alien Craft Seen Over Fairview, Texas Road During Day, March 31, 2020 Photos, UFO Sighting News.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

02-04-2020 om 21:05 geschreven door peter  

With the on going UFO activity above earth captured on the ISS live feed for the last two months, now Gina Colvin Hill from Salem, Indiana wants to share some images taken on March 24, 2020 showing numerous ufo ships in the sky.

Gina has used different filters to capture these ships otherwise you don't see them since most of them are cloaked.

Check out the next video, the images say it all.

  

Other videos, peter2011

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

02-04-2020 om 20:50 geschreven door peter  

Netizens Baffled After Watching UFO With Wings in the Sky Above Arizona

Netizens were out of words to describe a UFO with wings hovering in the skies above Arizona. YouTube user Ballee18 posted the UFO sighting video to YouTube on 22 March. According to the video uploader, the sighting happened near Ahwatukee urban village in Phoenix. Conspiracy channel mavi777 shared the video, and it eventually went viral.

The sighting comes after multiple UFOs were observed in different areas of the US. In one such event, YouTube username Denspion caught video of three red orbs hovering over Washington.

Social media users have made various explanations, with some saying that the so-called UFO in the sky could be a human who’s practicing extreme social or physical distancing to avoid contracting the COVID-19. Other netizens suggesting the video shows a flying human-made possible with a jet pack.

However, other social media users believed that the hovering human figure could be a sign of space alien life. A few users thought it was an alien drone, but many others thought it was some kind of hovering craft, suggesting that we’re not alone.

What do you think of the mysterious hovering figure? A kite, jetpack, or extreme social distancing? Let us know in the comment section.

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

02-04-2020 om 18:37 geschreven door peter  

For NASA's next sun mission, 6 tiny spacecraft will work as one massive telescope

By Meghan Bartels

An artist's depiction of a solar particle storm flinging plasma off the sun.

(Image: © NASA)

Want to build the largest radio telescope to fly in space? Here's an easier technique: Design six tiny satellites to fly in formation and work together.

That's the approach of a NASA's new Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) mission, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than July 2023. SunRISE aims to help scientists understand the complex relationship between the sun's activity and a host of dangerous phenomena around Earth called space weather. The mission selection comes amid a burst of solar science and an emphasis on missions that incorporate space-weather prediction into plans for human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit.

"We are so pleased to add a new mission to our fleet of spacecraft that help us better understand the sun, as well as how our star influences the space environment between planets," Nicky Fox, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, said in a NASA statement. "The more we know about how the sun erupts with space weather events, the more we can mitigate their effects on spacecraft and astronauts."

• Related: Our sun will never look the same again thanks to two solar probes and one giant telescope

Scientists have watched the sun fling energy and material toward Earth in outbursts, and they have also seen the impacts that such events can have on orbiting satellites, particularly on communication and navigation instruments. But scientists don't yet understand the nitty-gritty details of the connection between solar outbursts and space weather phenomena well enough to predict space weather.

If all goes well, the $63-million SunRISE mission should help to bridge that gap. 

The six telescopes that make up the mission are tailored to study the radio waves that the sun ejects during solar particle outbursts. In particular, SunRISE will target outbursts called coronal mass ejections, which can throw massive amounts of plasma, the soup of charged particles that makes up the sun, across the solar system.

The toaster-sized satellites will spread out across about 6 miles (10 kilometers), orbiting Earth at an altitude of 22,000 miles (35,000 km). That orbit will keep SunRISE well above the ionosphere, which blocks radio waves of the relevant frequencies from reaching Earth.

 

An artist's depiction of one of the SunRISE satellites.  (Image

credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From that perch, the flock of cubesats should be able to map the influence of the sun's magnetic field across space. They should also be able to gather the data scientists need to understand how different parts of a coronal mass ejection dramatically speed up and which such events are accompanied by bursts of radiation, which are vital clues for space-weather prediction.

"We can see a solar flare start, and a coronal mass ejection start lifting off from the sun, but we don't know if it is going to produce high energy particle radiation, and we don't know if that high energy particle radiation is going to reach Earth," Justin Kasper, a space scientist at the University of Michigan who leads the mission, said in a university statement. "One reason why is we can't see the particles being accelerated. We just see them when they arrive at the spacecraft, which isn't much of a warning."

That situation is inconvenient when it comes to satellites, but downright dangerous when it comes to humans venturing beyond the safety of Earth, hence the impetus to better understand space weather.

"Knowing which part of a coronal mass ejection is responsible for producing the particle radiation will help us understand how the acceleration happens," Kasper said. "It could also result in a unique warning system for whether an event will both produce radiation and release that radiation towards Earth or spacefaring astronauts."

•  How the sun's magnetic field works (infographic) 
•  World's largest solar telescope produces never-before-seen image of our star 
•  Scientists' favorite sun photos by Solar Dynamics Observatory (gallery) 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

02-04-2020 om 01:43 geschreven door peter  

Cosmos: Possible Worlds' brings the search for E.T. down to Earth

02-04-2020 om 01:25 geschreven door peter  

Mars Curiosity sends back one giant Martian panorama…and (maybe) a clue of past life

The Curiosity rover’s extended stay on Mars has proven to be one of NASA’s biggest recent success stories. More than seven years after its arrival at the Bradbury landing site on the Martian surface, Curiosity has just sent back the largest, most detailed panoramic image ever of the Red Planet’s landscape … along with an intriguing new discovery that could yield fresh insights into whether Mars has ever harbored microbial life.

Between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1 of last year, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory captured what the agency describes as the “highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface,” compositing more than 1,000 individual images taken by the telephoto zoom lens on Curiosity’s Mast Camera. The image below is actually the lower-resolution version of the two that NASA has made available; a higher-res version (which omits the rover from the picture, thanks to the extra zoom on the telephoto) is available as 2.43-gigabyte download on the NASA/JPL host page.

NASA also shared a super-informative video highlighting just how much landscape detail the new image contains, zooming in on deep-field features like the rim of the crater that Curiosity calls home; as well as the exposed remnants of the Greenheugh Pediment — “a vast sheet of rock draped over the side of a mountain.”

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Early chemical analysis of another Curiosity discovery — the presence in Martian soil of organic compounds called thiophenes — also has researchers speculating that the compounds could suggest that living bacteria once had a foothold on the Red Planet. According to Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze‑Makuch, part of an international team assessing the data, scientists typically associate thiophenes here on Earth with the breakdown of once-living organisms, though their presence on Mars may have other explanations that can’t yet be ruled out.

“We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof,” he explained. “If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.”

Researchers speculate that Mars’ warmer, wetter conditions 3 billion years ago may have harbored the conditions necessary for microbes to thrive, although they say the data are still insufficient to rule out other explanations for the thiophenes’ presence — including chemical reactions from past meteor impacts, or other super-hot events that might have caused the “thermochemical sulfate reduction” process required for the unique compounds to form.

While Curiosity’s data-collecting abilities limit researchers’ ability to pinpoint the still-elusive answer, this year’s scheduled launch of the Rosalind Franklin rover should end up offering more details. The new rover “will be carrying a Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer, or MOMA, which uses a less destructive analyzing method that will allow for the collection of larger molecules,” reports WSU News.

{ https://www.syfy.com/ }

02-04-2020 om 00:16 geschreven door peter  

Interview with HISTORY's Travis Taylor: The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

For the first time ever, HISTORY is gaining full, unprecedented access to one of the most infamous and secretive hotspots of paranormal and UFO-related activities on earth, Skinwalker Ranch, in a new one-hour nonfiction series, "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" premiering Tuesday, March 31 at 10PM ET/PT. Few have ever gained official access to Skinwalker Ranch, and none have ever been able to bring cameras onto the property for a television series, until now.

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Travis Taylor, the lead astrophysicist of "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" about his journey and his experience investigating the unexplained phenomena in Utah's Uinta Basin. Scientific research, tribal legends, and the unexplained converge at Skinwalker Ranch that you must see to believe.

Photo by History Copyright 2020

WATM: Why and how were you chosen for this project?

Dr. Travis Taylor: Well, first of all for the why and the how I don't know what you know about me or how much you've read of my bio and that sort of thing. I have a PhD and a dual disciplinary degree in electrical engineering and physics called optical science of engineering - it's basically quantum physics. I have another PhD in aerospace engineering, building and designing spacecraft and rockets. I have a Master's degree in astronomy. I have a Master's degree in physics. I have a Master's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. I have a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Since I was 17, I'm 51 now, I've published about two dozen referee journal articles and well-respected peer review physics, and optics and military defense type journals.

As far as I know, I'm the only person besides my co-author of the book who has taken the idea seriously and written a textbook and a detailed examination on how we would defend the planet if we were actually invaded by aliens. Different types of invasions and what our military approach should and could be. In fact, I'm the only one who teaches from that text on the topic to the Air Force officer's space school at Maxwell Air Force base. Now, I do that pretty much yearly and have for a while.

My background has been building spacecraft, rockets and high-energy laser weapons and things like that for DOD for a long time. I also am a science fiction writer and have written twenty-something best-selling science fiction novels, mostly military hard science fiction. With that background in mind, I was invited to start doing TV shows in the early 2000s which led to the next TV show and the next TV show and so on. When HISTORY and Prometheus were approached by the new billionaire owner of the Ranch to do an investigation, they said, "Well you need someone who is an experimentalist and who also is experienced with talking on TV and we recommend this guy."

And that's how that happened.

WATM: What was the first thing that stuck out to you about this investigation when you joined the team of researchers?

Travis Taylor: Well, when the invitation came to me to become a part of the investigation team and to lead the experiment portion of the research, at first I was very skeptical of the phenomena on the ranch being real or being some natural phenomena that maybe causes hallucinations, or unnatural phenomena that causes actual phenomena like lights in the sky or maybe there was a classified defense project. At no time did I think that I was going to find strange, unexplainable physical phenomena at least from the start. That was my philosophy or my thought going into it. But I did have an open mind that, hey, what if I find something that is unexplainable?

WATM: How was evidence gathered of the phenomena at the Ranch?

Travis Taylor: The way we approached it is, we had scientific instrumentation and sensors -- as many as we could afford based on the budget we had -- spread about the ranch that were collecting data continuously, 24/7. We also had security cameras placed in certain locations to give us as much of a full view of the ranch as possible that were running 24/7. Plus we had game cameras placed in locations that we could move if we thought there was a need to move them. We collected all this information and we went through the video and data pretty much on a daily basis. Plus, there was also multiple cameramen, camera crews and camera sites set up continuously throughout the investigation.

Photo by History Copyright 2020

WATM: Based on the evidence that you have gathered, what are your thoughts on why this phenomena specifically happens at Skinwalker Ranch?

Dr. Travis Taylor: That is an excellent question and we ask ourselves this all the time. Now, the first thing that I will say is that when the team and I talk about this, in no way do we believe that our man-made farming fences along the border of the 500 acres is keeping out any super, you know, physics hyper paranormal -- whatever you guys want to call it, phenomenon within the borders of the ranch. In fact, people in the local in Fort Duchenne, Roosevelt and the other town that's nearby, are all the time reporting phenomena occurring outside of the boundaries of the ranch. Now, that being said, if you look at the Uintah Basin on Google Earth, to me it looks like an ancient meteor impact crater. It looks like it came from the east to the west at a low inclination. And that's what splattered the salt flats to the west of the Uintah Basin.

There's Gilsonite all around the Uintah Basin which typically is only found in a meteor impact crater, plus all of the petroleum that is underneath the Uintah Basin. There are a lot of geologists and natural physicists now beginning to think that impact craters cause a phenomena that creates petroleum. If you look at this impact crater, the ranch is dead center give or take but it's pretty much dead center. Perhaps [it has] something to do with the bowl shape of the basin or whatever caused the basin, made this the central or the nexus for whatever the activity might be.

Photo by History Copyright 2020

WATM: Would the government hide the evidence of extraterrestrials? What impact would that have on the population if they did or did not disclose evidence?

Dr. Travis Taylor: I honestly don't believe the Brookings Report. I don't think that people are going to go nuts. What does an invasion of something that's invisible do to society? Well guess what it makes it's all go hide in our houses and be afraid to touch anybody. That's exactly what's happening right now, as an alien invasion, with this COVID-19. Well I'm not saying the virus is from outer space.

What I'm saying is it's alien to us and we're having to defend it in the way that we figure out how to defend it. If there were an alien invasion, we'd have to figure out what type of invasion it were and then how to - what type it was and then go from there. It could be a bazillion possibilities on the type of invasion.

I don't believe in big conspiracies. There's no way that humans are adept enough and trust each other enough to create conspiracies so large it would take hundreds and hundreds of people to maintain it. Now there is the possibility that things have been classified for national security reasons.

At such time when it could be disclosed and not reveal a national security advantage, then I could see that taking place but what's it going to do to the general public? Most people, the general public, believe there are aliens anyway. I don't think it's going to do anything except assure them -- I'll tell you what it will do to politics: it will improve the funding for programs to do research like the AATIP program, or like advanced spacecraft technology or like advanced spacesuit technology. Why all of our soldiers don't have Iron Man suits I can't explain that. We should be - that should be one of the biggest defense projects we have.

But we don't spend any money on it. So that's the things that will change is where we're spending our money based on what we think the threats are. That's all I think disclosure will do. The everyday person, I think, they'll just say 'I knew it all along, I told you so.'

Photo by History Copyright 2020

WATM: Is it possible that the phenomena observed is man-made, such as Top Secret weapons testing?

Dr. Travis Taylor: So, as a person who does weapons testing for his day job, I can tell you that would be so highly crazy illegal [and] that it's nonsense. There would be people in jail. What I observed the first day on the ranch, we had a long discussion that if what we were observing was man-made. [What if] someone was violating federal laws and [what we would do] - we needed to alert the authorities if we could prove it was man-made. Then from that point on I realized what we were measuring was impossible even for mankind to make. At that point is when I dropped that line of discussion because I realized just flat out mankind was not doing what we are doing and it's probably a skeptics coping mechanism because I did it too.

The first conclusion to an odd strange thing is 'Oh that's a classified government program' and 'Oh they're doing human testing' honestly like, you know, there were programs that the CIA did back in the 60s and 70s that I don't think they're proud of and where people were involved in those experiments. [So, if] you look at it nowadays, we realize now that you can't do that and you won't get away with it forever and somebody will go to jail. I just am thoroughly convinced that this is not some top-secret weapons testing program on people or whatever. Number one: there's no site nearby that is doing that type of work and number two: they would eventually get caught and go to jail. There is oversight committees on classified programs in Congress and in the Senate. Eventually somebody would say, 'Wait a minute you all can't do that.'

Photo by History Copyright 2020

WATM: Okay, so now that we know that there isn't a government conspiracy or illegal weapons testing -- What is happening at Skinwalker Ranch?

Dr. Travis Taylor: So I'm not going to tell you what evidence was observed and what phenomena were observed because and, you know, it would be spoilers for the show. What I will tell you is yes, when you watch the show and you see the evidence we acquired that is scientifically verifiable, you're going to be blown away because I was. I'm still amazed to this day and still have a hard time believing what I saw.

You can watch the new one-hour nonfiction series "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" premiering Today, Tuesday, March 31 at 10PM ET/PT.

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{ https://www.wearethemighty.com/ }

01-04-2020 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

Antarctica Was a Lush Rainforest 90M Years Ago, Scientists Discover

An ancient sediment core revealed a shocking discovery: pollen and spores, indicating a long-lost rainforest that was shrouded in perpetual darkness for months at a time.

By Becky Ferreira

MODERN RAINFOREST. IMAGE: SAMUEL BUTLER/ EYEEM

Antarctica is the most remote and barren continent on Earth; a land where only the hardiest creatures can survive the punishing year-round conditions. But dial the clock back by 90 million years to the age of dinosaurs, and this icy landscape transforms into a lush temperate rainforest that somehow braved months of perpetual darkness.

The story of this ancient Antarctic rainforest is written in sediment buried 25 meters under the seafloor off Pine Island Glacier, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature. The fossils preserved in an ultra-rare core represent the first glimpse of Cretaceous ecosystems at latitudes this far south, just 500 miles from the South Pole.

“It is definitely the southernmost Cretaceous evidence ever recovered on the planet,” said lead author Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, in a call. “We were the first ones to ever drill there in that environment.”

Klages and his colleagues obtained the core during a 2017 expedition of the research vessel Polarstern, but the extraction process was not easy. The specialized drilling machine used to penetrate the seafloor required several days to pull out each new core, and all it seemed to be reaching was quartzitic sandstone layers bereft of fossils.

THE MEBO SEABED DRILLING SYSTEM ON RV POLARSTERN.

IMAGE: JP KLAGES, AWI

Meanwhile, ice sheets from the nearby island began advancing toward the sample site, threatening to slice the cord between the drill and the vessel. Before evacuating the area to prevent the loss of expensive equipment, Klages and his colleagues decided to take one last three-meter core.

Unlike the light-colored sandstone, this core was dark, suggesting it was rich in organic materials. “We immediately saw that something special was going on,” recalled Klages. “We saw these amazing, pristine, complete, dense networks of fossil roots in the core connected down to the core base.”

“If you go to the forest in front of your house, or somewhere, and you drill a hole, you would get something very similar,” he said. “It was full of pollen and spores and really diverse assemblages.”

Over the past three years, the team has meticulously examined the core and unraveled incredible new details about the rainforest that once blanketed Antarctica. The pristine condition of these plant fossils demonstrates that this was a swampy ecosystem of conifer trees that may have looked like the rainforests of modern New Zealand.

Based on comparisons with similar Cretaceous biomes found much farther north, dinosaurs may well have roamed through this biodiverse Antarctic landscape. “It’s very likely that there were insects and dinosaurs and all of that there too,” Klages said, “but we can’t say for sure because we did not find anything like that. We only can say a lot of stuff about the paleobotany that we found in the core.”

Remarkably, these forests were located at a southern latitude of 82°, which means they would have been plunged into total darkness for about four months of each year. Modern rainforests rely on perpetual sunlight to survive, but this bygone ecosystem had to switch to another source of energy for the long, black winter.

ARTIST CONCEPT OF ANCIENT RAINFOREST.

IMAGE: ALFRED-WEGENER-INSTITUT/J. MCKAY

That fuel may have been supplied by extraordinarily high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which could have staved the forests over until the return of the Sun. In fact, the discovery of this rainforest strongly suggests that CO2 levels in this era were higher than previously assumed, perhaps reaching 1,680 parts per million (ppm). For reference, our current CO2 levels are just above 400 ppm, though they are rapidly rising due to human activity.

These high CO2 levels imply that Cretaceous Earth was warmer than expected, and that no ice cover existed at the South Pole. Klages and his colleagues estimate that the mean annual temperature in the rainforest was about 12°C, with summer temperatures averaging around 19°C.

“It really was that warm,” Klages said. “That amazed us, of course, but also the climate modelers because no one expected such extreme values very close to the South Pole."

"We are quite confident now in saying that there was no ice present, that Antarctica was completely vegetated, and that we had very high CO2 concentrations.”

The research offers a rare chance to imagine this strange Antarctic forestland, but it also contains lessons for our modern warming world. For instance, Klages and his colleagues modelled what would happen if the current version of Earth had the same CO2 levels, and found that our planet’s polar ice cover reflects too much sunlight to result in the same high global temperatures.

“The presence of an ice sheet makes a huge difference, even if you have very high CO2 concentrations,” Klages said. “That is really important for us to know, and to think about how we can better preserve ice sheets.”

“We need to look into these extreme climates that happened on the planet already, because they show us what a greenhouse climate looks like,” he concluded. “We are definitely in an interesting time because if we continue what we’re doing right now, then it could lead into something that we can’t control anymore.”

{ https://www.vice.com/en_us}

01-04-2020 om 22:38 geschreven door peter  

Overblijfselen van regenwoud ontdekt bij West-Antarctica - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

“We waren heel verrast door de ontdekking”, zei de hoofdauteur van de studie, AWI-geoloog Johann Klages. Volgens de bevindingen lag de gemiddelde jaartemperatuur op Antarctica in die tijd rond de 12 graden Celsius. “Dit bevestigt dat Antarctica ijsvrij moet zijn geweest”, aldus Klages. Tot dusver was dit enkel een veronderstelling. “We weten enkel dat het Krijt een van de warmste periodes ooit was, maar we hadden geen bewijs van het gebied bij de Zuidpool.”

Lees ook

Eerste hittegolf op Antarctica

Uit analyses bleek dat de concentratie aan koolstofdioxide in de atmosfeer veel hoger was dan aanvankelijk verondersteld. “De studie illustreert het grote potentieel van het broeikasgas kooldioxide als energieleverancier en de afkoelende eigenschappen van de ijslagen van vandaag”, benadrukte Klages. Waarom het klimaat later afkoelde, trachten de vorsers nog uit te zoeken.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

01-04-2020 om 21:52 geschreven door peter  

A Lake Full Of Human Bones - Thats Pretty Scary

If there is one thing that anybody can assure you of, it is this. When it comes to travelling within India, you will never ever complain of boredom. This is one country that is filled to bursting with lots of fun experiences, some of which border on the bizarre! Yes, since India is steeped in superstition, there are a couple of things that may seem strange or bizarre to a non-residential citizen. However, there are other fun and unusual places in India things that you will see when you choose to travel across the country. The Taj Mahal and the Konark temple are all definite must-visits. But those are places everybody visits in India. So, why not veer off the beaten track sometimes?

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

01-04-2020 om 21:21 geschreven door peter  

Earlier in March, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that an asteroid would fly over Earth. This asteroid is referred to as large and potentially dangerous.

The asteroid named 2012 XA133 was set to pass Earth on Thursday March 26th (March 27th in Nigeria) at a speed of 53,000 mph. However, with a note of confirmation, NASA said the Earth would not be affected.

“When objects close to the Earth revolve around the sun, near-Earth objects can come close to Earth.

Note that the "astronomical" corridor can be very far away from a human point of view: millions or even tens of millions of kilometers.

However, the Nigerians in Akure were on alert in the early hours of March 28, after hearing a loud explosion which shook the entire town of Akure, which led to the destruction of over 100 buildings, school, churches in the city's Eleyowo community located 1 km from Accor airport.

Amid speculation about the noise, the governor said that it was a truck carrying explosives that exploded, but experts led by Adepelumi Adekunle, a professor of geophysics and earthquake engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University, said the explosion was caused by a natural phenomenon, possible a meteor or at least a part of an asteroid or meteor which impacted the location from “an angle of 43 degrees leaving a crater 21m diameter and 7.8m depth.

Adekunle added there was no evidence of a buried vehicle, buried ordinance or explosives from the site, and that “foreign rocks and strange metallic objects” were found within the crater.

The fact that' strange metallic objects' have also been found within the crater, the question arises whether it was indeed a meteor or something extraterrestrial.

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

01-04-2020 om 21:02 geschreven door peter  

DAYTIME VIDEO: UFO caught on tape over Sacramento, California 29-Mar-2020

Check out this amazing new footage of a bright unidentified flying object hovering in the sky above Sacramento, California. It was recorded on 29th March 2020 and submitted to us through our Facebook page.

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

01-04-2020 om 20:42 geschreven door peter  

Glowing orbs over Laguna beach, California 31-Mar-2020

Here’s one new footage of a bright orbs hovering in the sky above Laguna beach, California on 31st March 2020.

Witness report: 

set of four glowing orbs that became seven appeared in a straight line above the water offshore. Out walking our dogs on the streets of North Laguna Beach. Very quiet out with most observing the stay at home rules. Looked out to the water and notice 4 bright glowing objects above the water. The slowly the number increased one by one until at one point there were seven. Then they started to fade out one by one until there were none left. I thought at first that someone had shot some flares off from a boat but all the objects matinee a straight line. We observed them for around 10-15 minutes and then walked back home. We took pictures and have video.

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

01-04-2020 om 20:36 geschreven door peter  

Stratolaunch to launch hypersonic vehicles from world's biggest airplane

By Mike Wall 

Stratolaunch plans to provide hypersonic test flights for a variety of customers.

Stratolaunch's Talon-A, shown here in an artist's concept, is one of several new hypersonic vehicles to be launched from the company's massive carrier plane, the world's largest aircraft.

(Image: © Stratolaunch)

Stratolaunch has found another use for the biggest airplane ever built.

The company, which Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen established in 2011, originally planned to launch satellites using the aircraft, which has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). But Allen died in October 2018 and Stratolaunch was sold last year, raising questions about the company's future.

Some of those questions have now been answered. Stratolaunch's website now reveals that the company has reinvented itself as a builder, tester and operator of hypersonic vehicles — those that can travel at least five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5.

• Related: Stratolaunch test photos: the world's largest plane in action

"Our hypersonic testbeds will serve as a catalyst in sparking a renaissance in hypersonic technologies for our government, the commercial sector and academia," Stratolaunch CEO W. Jean Floyd said in a statement on the company website.

The huge plane is key to this new mission, hauling vehicles aloft to test various payloads in the extreme environments imposed by hypersonic flight. Those vehicles will include Stratolaunch's Talon-A, a 28-foot-long (8.5 m), 6,000-lb. (2,722 kilograms) reusable craft capable of reaching Mach 6.

Talon-A "will conduct long-duration flight at high Mach, and glide back for an autonomous, horizontal landing on a conventional runway," Stratolaunch's description of the craft states. "It will also be capable of autonomous takeoff, under its own power, via a conventional runway."

The huge dual-fuselage plane — which used to be called Roc, but is now apparently known as the Stratolaunch Carrier — will be able to haul three Talon-As aloft at a time, allowing the collection of lots of data, company representatives said.

Talon-A isn't the end of the envisioned road for Stratolaunch, however. The company is also developing the Talon-Z, about which it divulges little on the website, and another vehicle called Black Ice, which could end up flying some very interesting and ambitious missions, if everything goes according to Stratolaunch's plan.

"Black Ice is a fully reusable space plane that enables advanced on-orbit capabilities and cargo return," the company's website reads. "Initial designs optimized for cargo launch, with a follow-on variant capable of transporting crew."

Black Ice doesn't come completely out of left field. In August 2018, before Allen's death, Stratolaunch announced plans to use four different satellite-launching vehicles with the huge aircraft, including an orbital space plane.

The Stratolaunch Carrier has just one flight under its belt, a 2.5-hour test flight that took place in April 2019. 

• Stratolaunch images: Paul Allen's giant rocket-launching plane
• Stratolaunch: biggest aircraft in history to launch spaceships (infographic)
• Paul Allen: billionaire backer of private space ventures

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/news }

01-04-2020 om 01:23 geschreven door peter  

On Mars, deep-water diversity has stood the test of time, meteorites show

By Mike Wall 

The find suggests that a global magma ocean may not have covered the Red Planet long ago.

Mars as seen from orbit by NASA’s Viking mission.

(Image: © NASA/JPL)

The water buried deep within Mars likely came from at least two very different sources long ago, a new study suggests.

"These two different sources of water in Mars' interior might be telling us something about the kinds of objects that were available to coalesce into the inner, rocky planets," Jessica Barnes, an assistant professor of planetary sciences in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a statement.

"This context is also important for understanding the past habitability and astrobiology of Mars," Barnes added.

• Related: What is Mars made of?

Barnes and her colleagues analyzed two Mars meteorites: Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, also known as Black Beauty, and Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001), probably the most famous Red Planet rock of all time. In the mid-1990s, a team of researchers announced that they'd found compelling evidence of Martian life in ALH84001. Most other scientists were not convinced, and the claim remains controversial, and debated, to this day. 

Barnes and her team determined the hydrogen-isotope compositions of Black Beauty and ALH84001, which interacted with water in the Martian crust about 1.5 billion years ago and 3.9 billion years ago, respectively. 

Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. For example, the hydrogen in "normal" water has no neutrons in its nucleus, whereas the hydrogen in deuterium, or "heavy water," has one.

Studies of Mars meteorites over the years have found a wide variety of hydrogen-isotope ratios. But, in  the new study, which was published online Monday (March 30) in the journal Nature Geoscience, Barnes and her team found that Black Beauty and ALH84001 have very similar amounts of normal versus heavy hydrogen.

That ratio is roughly the same as that observed for much younger rocks, suggesting that not much has changed, hydrogen-isotope wise, for the past 4r billion years or so on Mars. In addition, the isotope ratio is about halfway between that seen in crustal rocks here on Earth and the ratio observed in the Martian atmosphere, which has a lot more heavy hydrogen.

The Martian atmosphere is so "fractionated" because charged particles from the sun have preferentially blown the lighter normal hydrogen into space, scientists say.

"We thought, OK, this is interesting, but also kind of weird," Barnes said of the new results. "How do we explain this dichotomy where the Martian atmosphere is being fractionated, but the crust is basically staying the same over geological time?"

Researchers have long thought that Mars' mantle — the thick rock layer beneath the thin crust — sports a similar hydrogen-isotope ratio to that of Earth. So, the variability in isotope ratios seen in Mars meteorites was chalked up to terrestrial contamination or alteration by the Red Planet's atmosphere as the rocks, blasted free by powerful impacts, barreled outward toward space, Barnes said. (Crustal rocks should be similar to mantle rocks, after all; the crust is made of material from the interior that made it to the surface, cooled and solidified.)

But the presumed mantle similarities between Mars and Earth are inferred from one study of a meteorite thought to originate in the Red Planet's mantle, the researchers said. And it may be time for a rethink.

"Martian meteorites basically plot all over the place, and so trying to figure out what these samples are actually telling us about water in the mantle of Mars has historically been a challenge," Barnes said. "The fact that our data for the crust was so different prompted us to go back through the scientific literature and scrutinize the data." 

This analysis revealed that two different types of Martian volcanic rocks, enriched shergottites and depleted shergottites, have different hydrogen-isotope ratios. These rocks probably represent different source material, the researchers said — different reservoirs of water in the Martian interior.

"Consequently, these features may have been inherited from the primary building blocks that constructed Mars, implying that the Martian mantle has almost always been heterogeneous because it was poorly mixed during accretion, differentiation and its subsequent thermochemical evolution," the researchers wrote in the new study.

If this is true, then, unlike Earth and the moon, Mars probably did not feature a global ocean of liquid rock shortly after its birth. A global magma ocean would have mixed everything together, erasing the distinct isotope signatures, the researchers said.

• Photo gallery: images of Martian meteorites
• Water on Mars: exploration and evidence
• Inside 3 Mars meteorites: a different path for 'building blocks of life'?

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. 

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

01-04-2020 om 00:57 geschreven door peter  

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.

Image via ScienceAlert.

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.

Image via ESA.

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.

Image via zwicky-stiftung.ch.

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.

Image via Carnegie Institute/ NPR.

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.
• Read more: What Is supersymmetry? from How Stuff Works
• Read more: Miraculous WIMPs, from Symmetry Magazine
• Read more: Modified Newtonian dynamics, from Physics World
• Read more: Vera Rubin and Dark Matter, from the American Museum of Natural History

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

31-03-2020 om 23:36 geschreven door peter  

Illustration showing snapshots from a simulation by astrophysicist Volker Springel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It represents the growth of cosmic structure (galaxies and voids) when the universe was 0.9 billion, 3.2 billion and 13.7 billion years old (now).

Image via Volker Springel/ MPE/Kavli Foundation.

Dark energy is the name given to the mysterious force that’s causing the rate of expansion of our universe to accelerate over time, rather than to slow down. That’s contrary to what one might expect from a universe that began in a Big Bang. Astronomers in the 20th century learned the universe is expanding. They thought the expansion might continue forever, or eventually – if the universe had enough mass and therefore enough self-gravity – reverse and cause a Big Crunch. Now, in early 21st century cosmology, that idea has evolved. The universe is seen as expanding faster today than billions of years ago. What could be causing the rate of expansion to increase? Astronomers now sometimes speak of a repulsive force as a possible way to understand it.

Up until the late 1990s, most cosmologists believed the universe did not have enough mass to cause a Big Crunch. In particular, data acquired by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey seemed to confirm the universe would expand forever, albeit at an ever-slowing rate as the universe’s own mass and own gravity tried to pull it back.

The first indication of something revolutionary about to be discovered came in 1998 during a survey of Type 1A supernovae. These massive explosions of dying giant stars are extremely useful to astronomers because they always output the same amount of light, and can therefore be used as so-called “standard candles” to calculate distances in the cosmos. This is a very simple idea. Think of fireflies at night: they all shine with the same instrinsic brightness. By measuring how bright they are from where you are, you can calculate their distance.

The 1998 survey was being carried out by two international group of astronomers including Americans Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt in Australia. Using eight telescopes worldwide, their aim was to use the distance of Type 1A supernovae to calculate the expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble Constant (although in reality, as the rate of expansion of the universe varies with time, it is technically not a constant).

The results of the survey were astonishing. Distant supernovae which exploded when the universe was only 2/3 of its current age were much fainter than they should have been, and were thus much further away. The implication of this was that the universe had expanded much faster than it should have done, if current ideas were correct.

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe’s birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart at a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force: dark energy.

Image via NASA/ STSci/ Ann Feild/ HubbleSite.

Met with much skepticism in the astronomical community when these results were revealed, the observations were soon replicated by other teams and other methods. By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming clear that the expansion of the universe is not, as was commonly believed, slowing down. It is actually accelerating.

Even more strangely, the expansion had been deaccelerating, as one would expect, until seven or eight billion years after the Big Bang. But then, for reasons completely unknown, a mysterious “anti-gravity force” started to dominate, overcoming the brake that gravity was placing on the expansion, which then reversed its slowdown and started to accelerate.

You can imagine how shocking this revelation was to astronomers and cosmologists.

The force responsible for this acceleration was dubbed dark energy by scientists. In this case, dark means unknown rather than literally dark, as is the case with dark matter. It should be noted that dark energy and dark matter are completely unrelated phenomena. Read more: What is dark matter?

To add to the mystery, the properties of this strange dark energy seem to match Einstein’s cosmological constant, sometimes called his fudge factor and later described by Einstein himself as the greatest professional blunder of his life. Einstein detested the idea of an expanding universe, preferring the static one postulated by steady-state cosmology, which was popular in the early 20th century. He invented an anti-gravity force, of undefined origin, to counteract the observed expansion of the universe, which would result in a non-expanding universe. However, Einstein later retracted this idea, which was not supported by observations.

Dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology. It is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe, with normal, so-called “baryonic” matter – every bit of matter we can actually see – comprising a mere 5%, with the rest consisting of dark matter, another huge cosmic mystery.

Dark energy does behave like Einstein’s anti-gravity force, but its nature and origin remain unknown. One of its greatest mysteries is why dark energy started to dominate the rate of expansion of the universe at a particular point in time billions of years after the Big Bang. If it exists now, why wasn’t it there all along?

The physics of dark energy are highly speculative. One idea which has gained ground in recent years is that dark energy resembles a force known as “quintessence,” which is a relative of the Higgs Field. But as yet there is no observational evidence to support or discount this.

Cosmologists also have no idea if dark energy will continue to accelerate the universe’s expansion forever, leading to a scenario, far in the future, where the acceleration will overcome the forces that hold the universe together and literally tear all matter in the cosmos apart, in a nightmare scenario known as the Big Rip.

There are several current and future space missions and ground-based surveys which will investigate the nature of dark energy, including NASA’s orbiting WFIRST telescope and the international Dark Energy Survey, based in Chile.

It is hoped that soon we will arrive at a greater understanding of this mysterious force, which is having such an influence over the future of the cosmos, but to gain that understanding we need to sketch out a far more complete history of the universe. However, the archaeology of 13.7 billion years is extremely difficult and time-consuming, with so many ancient strata in that history missing or indistinct, so we cannot expect any sudden revelations.

• Bottom line: The universe is expanding faster than older theories predicted. Dark energy, one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology, may cause its accelerating expansion. Dark energy is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

31-03-2020 om 23:08 geschreven door peter