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.
ON 06/06/2024 MORE THAN 2.056.610
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
27-04-2020
American President Ronald Reagan Tried Many Times To Leak The Existence Of Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
American President Ronald Reagan Tried Many Times To Leak The Existence Of Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of speeches: Sept 16, 1983 Location of speech: United Nations Below is a video, of US President Reagan speaking at three different engagements, and in each...he tries to leak the truth...that aliens exist. He really tried hard to inform the public, even when he knew it was against national security to do so. On Sept 16, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan gave a memorable speech in front of the United Nations. In it, he subtly suggests that aliens exist and that all of humanity could be lost if they decide to attack. President Reagan states: Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. Of course President Reagan had inside information from the CIA and NASA and was told that aliens do exist. But he couldn't just come out and say so without breaking national security rules. So instead...he subtly hinted to the rest of the world leaders about what he had learned from the CIA and NASA. He also knows that a small percentage of the other presidents at the United Nations meeting also knew about the existence of aliens. He even hints at one other president...he talked to the General Secretary Gorbachov...who then later became Russian president. Now pondering about world peace is nice...but I feel that President Reagan felt a weight on his shoulders...a burden of carrying this knowledge of the existence of aliens. Remember its was the 1980s and back they the technology was very inferior to today tech marvels. It must have been very frightening for him to know that aliens existed, but to have so few people he could sit down and talk about this subject openly. Watch the video below and see. He is trying to tell the world the truth...that aliens exist. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Astronomers discover mysterious red planet that never existed?
Astronomers discover mysterious red planet that never existed?
What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system has now seemingly vanished from sight, suggesting that what was heralded as one of the first exoplanets to ever be discovered with direct imaging likely never existed.
According to Physorg. two University of Arizona astronomers conclude that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was instead looking at an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies that smashed into each other. Hubble came along too late to witness the suspected collision but may have captured its aftermath. The missing-in-action planet was last seen orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light years away.
The suspected exoplanet, named Fomalhaut b, was first announced in 2008, based on data from 2004 and 2006.
The object was bright in visible light—highly unusual for an exoplanet, which is simply too small to reflect enough light from its host star to be seen from Earth. At the same time, it did not have any detectable infrared heat signature again, highly unusual, as a planet should be warm enough to shine in the infrared.
Astronomers conjectured that the added brightness came from a huge shell or ring of dust encircling the planet that may have been collision-related.
Data analysis of Hubble images taken in 2014 showed the object had vanished, to their disbelief. Adding to the mystery, earlier images showed the object to continuously fade over time, they say.
The astronomers said that Fomalhaut b was doing things a bona fide planet should not be doing.
Indeed, very mysterious, maybe it was not an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies at all but a huge mothership or something like the infamous red planet Nibiru?
Triangle UFO filmed over Statue of Liberty, NY 5-Mar-2020
Triangle UFO filmed over Statue of Liberty, NY 5-Mar-2020
This amazing video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It show some kind of a triangular-shaped craft maneuvering in the sky above the Statue of Liberty in New York. This happened on 5th March 2020.
What do you think this is? Please leave your comments below!
Founder of the Center for UFO Physical Trace Research, Ted Phillips Has Died
Founder of the Center for UFO Physical Trace Research, Ted Phillips Has Died
A young Ted Phillips
Ted Phillips, the founder and director of the Center for Physical Trace Research died, on March 10, 2020. Phillips was born in 1942 and spent his life in Missouri.
He began investigating UFOs in 1964 and met Dr.J. Allen Hynek during the investigation of the Socorro UFO landing. Phillips was trained as an engineer and was a professional photographer. He was involved in the Vanguard Satellite Program and was a field engineer on the Minuteman Missile Project. He was also employed as an inspector for the Missouri State Highway Department, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and made presentations at the MUFON Symposiums.
By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 3-11-20
It was Hynek who suggested that Phillips concentrate on UFO physical trace cases. Phillips and his team investigated more than 4000 physical trace cases in more than 90 countries. Phillips once said that if you told him the physical markings left be the UFO, he would be able to describe the craft that left them.
Ted Phillips at the Illinois conference
With Hynek, Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. David Saunders, Phillips participated in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Sciences meetings. He was also participated as a member of a small group who met with the United Nations Secretary-General. Phillips made presentations to a wide variety of groups and was a participant in several television programs and documentaries dedicated to UFOs.
In recent years he was involved in the investigation of strange lights seen in the Marley Woods in far southern Missouri. I met him in Illinois when he made a presentation about those lights at a UFO conference there. I had hoped to talk to Phillips about this while at the conference but there never seemed to be a couple of moments when the two of us crossed paths, with one exception. I told him it was my impression, from his presentation, that he wasn’t looking toward the extraterrestrial on this. He confirmed that he had thought it was some sort of terrestrial manifestation but he didn’t know what it might be. For those interested, there is more about Phillips’ presentation here.
In the 1970s, he provided a “position statement” for Ron Story’s Encyclopedia of UFOs that said:
The available facts are mostly statistical, but by taking a large number of reports, we can begin to develop a fairly clear picture of the objects observed and the traces left behind. Obviously, a report involving a landed object is of much greater value than a nocturnal light case. The landed object immediately eliminates a number of possibilities. One would not expect a balloon to land, leave unusual traces, and then ascend vertically at high speed. Stars and planets do not appear at ground level between witnesses and a line of trees. When several witnesses observe a disk-shaped object with a metallic surface, no wings and no sound, landing, ascending vertically, they have, with their descriptions, eliminated most of the natural or conventional explanations. When these objects then leave traces at the landing site, we have something tangible to examine I believe, after thirteen years of investigation, the data indicates a nonterrestrial origin.
Ted Philips, truly one of the pioneers in scientific UFO research and a dedicated investigator is dead at 78.
Modern plate tectonics may have gotten under way as early as 3.2 billion years ago, about 400 million years earlier than scientists thought. That, in turn, suggests that the movement of large pieces of Earth’s crust could have played a role in making the planet more hospitable to life.
Geologist Alec Brenner of Harvard University and his colleagues measured the magnetic orientations of iron-bearing minerals in the Honeyeater Basalt, a layer of rock that formed between 3.19 billion and 3.18 billion years ago. The basalt is part of the East Pilbara Craton, an ancient bit of continent in Western Australia that includes rocks as old as 3.5 billion years.
This craton, the researchers found, was on the move between 3.35 billion and 3.18 billion years ago, drifting around the planet at a rate of at least 2.5 centimeters per year. That’s a speed comparable to modern plate motions, the team reports April 22 in Science Advances.
The basalt layer, which burbled up as lava and hardened during the journey, contains iron-bearing minerals that can act as tiny signposts pointing the way toward Earth’s magnetic poles. While the lava was still molten, the minerals rotated, orienting themselves to align with either the north or south magnetic pole. By tracking the changes in orientation within the lava as more basalt formed during the journey, the researchers were able to determine how quickly the craton was moving.
Scientists have long used such preserved magnetic signposts to reconstruct plate motions, retracing the steps of drifting bits of continent. But the constant grinding and shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates over the last few billion years have reworked Earth’s surface many times over, leaving few outcrops that are older than 3 billion years.
The Honeyeater Basalt, however, is a rare site, both ancient and relatively unworked by metamorphism, the heat and pressure from which could have altered the minerals and reset their magnetic orientation. The team examined 235 samples of the basalt using an instrument called a quantum diamond microscope that can detect traces of magnetism at the micrometer scale. From these analyses, the researchers created a high-resolution map of magnetic orientations within the rock.
Based on the map, the team estimates that about 3.2 billion years ago, the East Pilbara Craton was at a latitude of about 45°, but whether north or south isn’t certain, Brenner said April 21 in a video news conference. That’s because researchers aren’t sure whether Earth’s magnetic poles at the time were in their current orientation or reversed. Either way, this bit of ancient crust moved in a gradual, steady motion — a hallmark of modern plate tectonics, the researchers say. Today, the craton is located at about 21° S, just north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Plate tectonics is generally thought to have become a well-established global process on Earth no earlier than around 2.8 billion years ago. Before that, Earth’s interior was considered to be too hot for cold, rigid plates to form at the surface, or for deep subduction to occur, in which one crustal plate dives beneath another.
An earlier start to plate tectonics would have implications for the evolution of life on Earth, Brenner told reporters. Whether the process was in operation when the first single-celled organisms emerged, currently thought to be at least 3.45 billion years ago, isn’t clear, he said (SN: 10/17/18).
But it is clear that plate tectonics is currently closely tied to the biosphere, he added. It promotes chemical reactions between once-buried rocks and the atmosphere that can modulate the planet’s climate over millions to billions of years. “So if [plate tectonics] happened on the early Earth, these processes were likely playing a part in the evolution of life,” Brenner said.
Active, modern-style plate tectonics is the most likely explanation for the data, the researchers say. But they acknowledge other possible explanations can’t yet be ruled out, including an early, episodic, fit-and-start style of plate tectonics.
Some researchers have proposed that, during the Archean Eon that lasted from about 4 billion to about 2.5 billion years ago, there was a proto-plate tectonics process in which bits of crust moved in fits and starts as the planet began to cool after its formation (SN: 4/9/12). Sediment eroded from Earth’s earliest continents may also have helped grease the wheels, setting the stage for modern plate tectonics (SN: 6/5/19).
The researchers’ data could support episodic rather than gradual plate motion, perhaps as a precursor to modern plate tectonics, says Michael Brown, a geologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Those data suggest that after its initial burst of speed, the Honeyeater Basalt’s progress slowed considerably, from 2.5 centimeters per year to 0.37 centimeters per year, he says.
It’s still unclear how similar proto-plate tectonics may have been to the modern process. “We know too little to answer this question with confidence,” says geophysicist Stephan Sobolev of the University of Potsdam in Germany. Sobolev has suggested previously that, for about a billion years during the Archean, plate tectonics occurred regionally: Plates could have been broken apart by large meteorite impacts or powerful plumes rising from the mantle, generating regional cells in which ancient continents formed and small blocks of crust subducted.
Such a regional cell may have formed the East Pilbara Craton in Australia, Sobolev suggests. But for that bit of ancient continent to have traveled so far so quickly, he says, “large-scale subduction must have been involved” — a surprising possibility for early Earth’s history.
Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life.
Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking.
But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis.
In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were enough stars with habitable planets in the universe at the time to allow complexity to arise. His results, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature, show the betting odds for life emerging are not good, at least for the observable universe.
RNA is made up of a chain of nitrogen-based molecules called nucleotides. Researchers think that in order for RNA to perform its essential function of copying itself, it needs to be composed of a chain of nucleotides longer than 40 to 60 nucleotides.
So, how would these RNA molecules made up of at least 40 to 60 nucleotides have popped up on their own? Nucleotides have been shown experimentally to randomly organize into RNA given enough time and under the right conditions. But these experiments show that the abundance of RNA rapidly decreases with the length of their chains and none of the experiments could consistently produce strands longer than 10 monomers.
"It has been experimentally confirmed that RNA polymerization can occur by a basic random process," Totani said. "Some experiments claimed that more than 50 (monomer long) RNA were produced, but these are not reproducible. One problem is that aggregates are easily mistaken for a long RNA polymer."
Totani's model uses the most conservative method of RNA polymerization, where each monomer is attached randomly one-by-one until a chain of monomers is formed. Scientists have suggested that polymers (each made up of multiple monomers) could attach to each other to speed up the process, but Totani said such a process is "highly speculative and hypothetical."
Life as we know it
Scientists think life emerged on Earth around 500 million years after the planet formed. Given that there are an estimated 10 sextillion (10^22) stars in the observable universe, it may seem that the odds of life popping up in the universe should be good. But researchers have found that the random formation of RNA with a length greater than 40 is incredibly unlikely given the number of stars — with habitable planets — in our cosmic neighborhood. There are too few stars with habitable planets in the observable universe for abiogenesis to occur within the timeframe of life emerging on Earth.
"However, there is more to the universe than the observable," Totani said in a statement. "In contemporary cosmology, it is agreed the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation, producing a vast region of expansion beyond the horizon of what we can directly observe. Factoring this greater volume [of stars with habitable planets] into models of abiogenesis hugely increases the chances of life occurring."
After our universe flashed into existence some 13.8 billion years ago during the Big Bang, it underwent a period of rapid expansion that continues today. If we think of the universe as a loaf of bread baking in the oven, our observable universe is like a bubble of air trapped in the dough, where the walls of the bubble are the farthest distance light can travel since the Big Bang. As the loaf rises (inflation), our bubble grows while other pockets of air within the bread get farther away. Our observable bubble of air is all that we can see, even though the rest of the loaf is out there.
It is estimated that the whole universe could contain more than 1 googol (10^100) stars. When Totani factored in this new abundance of stars, he found that the emergence of life was no longer improbable, but very likely.
This may be good news for the RNA world hypothesis, though it could also mean that the search for life in the universe is a hopeless pursuit.
If life first got its start in RNA, "life on Earth was created by a very rare chance of producing a long RNA polymer," said Totani. "Most likely, Earth is the only planet harboring life in the observable universe. I predict that future observations or explorations of extraterrestrial life will yield no positive results.
If by chance, life is discovered elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood, Totani believes it would likely be of the same origin as life on Earth. Life may have hitched a ride from comets and asteroids across interplanetary or interstellar space, seeding the local universe with life from a single origin event.
Totani's work is far from an answer to one of science's most existential questions but it may guide further research on the origins of life. Whether we are alone in the universe still remains unanswered, but if Totani's numbers tell us anything, you shouldn't bet on it.
Tiny, levitating "nanocardboard" flyers could one day explore the dusty red surface of Mars.
This summer, NASAwill launch its newest Mars rover, Perseverance, and a helicopter that will fly over the planet's surface as part of a "high-risk, high-reward" experiment. But even before its launch, researchers are designing much more ambitious aircraft for Mars as well.
Of particular interest are flying aircraft that could, with less risk, more effectively observe and study Mars' surface. In a new study, researchers have demonstrated the abilities of a unique fleet of aircraft that could thrive on Mars: tiny "nanocardboard" flying vehicles. These aircraft each weigh about a third of a milligram, or less than a fruit fly, and have no moving parts. Instead of flying with wings or rotating blades, they actually levitate.
"The Mars Helicopter is very exciting, but it's still a single, complicated machine," lead author Igor Bargatin of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, who is not involved in the Mars Helicopter, said in a statement. "If anything goes wrong, your experiment is over, since there's no way of fixing it. We're proposing an entirely different approach that doesn't put all of your eggs in one basket."
Each tiny flyer is a plate of "nanocardboard," which is inspired by paper cardboard's corrugations, or ridges. Plates of "nanocardboard" are hollow aluminum oxide a few nanometers thick with ridges made by a pattern of micro-channels on the plates that keep them stiff and unbroken.
The micro-channels in the "nanocardboard" plates are actually the secret behind their unique method of flight, according to the statement: The channels create a temperature gradient that pushes air through the hollow plates and allows them to float.
This strange method of flight would be particularly advantageous on Mars because the planet's thin atmosphere and weaker gravity would allow the plates to lift more weight and travel over much longer distances than here on Earth.
In this study, the researchers tested "nanocardboard" vehicles in a Mars-like environment in a lab environment. They tested the vehicles in a low-pressure test chamber and experimented with mock payloads by having the little floating plates carry silicone rings.
Additionally, Bargatin is working with other researchers to develop new, tinier chemical sensors that could collect important data and detect substances like methane and water on other planets, according to the statement.
"In addition to carrying sensors," Bargatin said, "our flyers could simply land and have grains of dust or sand passively stick to them, then transport them back to the rover so it doesn't need to travel as far."
Bargatin also suggested in the statement that fleets of these tiny flyers could be used to study our own planet's atmosphere — specifically, the mesosphere.
"The Earth's mesosphere is pretty similar to the Martian atmosphere in terms of density, and we currently don't have anything that flies there, since it is too low for space satellites but too high for airplanes and balloons," Bargatin said. "Ideally, you'd like to have some sensors up there as well. The more knowledge you have about the movement of the atmosphere at that level, the better predictions you can make about Earth's climate and even weather."
As far as odd couples go, this is one for the record books.
The ripples in spacetime stirred up by two distant, merging black holes suggest that one of the pair was much bigger than the other. It’s the first definitively mismatched black hole pair spotted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, which search for the gravitational waves emitted in the cosmic encounters of black holes. The collision, detected on April 12, 2019, occurred about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.
For all previous such black hole mergers, the two partners have been of similar size. But in this case, the bigger black hole had a mass about 30 times that of the sun, while the smaller was about eight times the mass of the sun, researchers with the LIGO and Virgo collaborations reported April 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to this result, scientists did not know if such lopsided partnerships existed, or how rare they might be. “This one event represents a big step forward in our understanding,” astrophysicist Maya Fishbach of the University of Chicago said in a talk at the meeting.
Understanding what types of black holes partner up could eventually help answer the question of how the duos form (SN: 6/19/16). The black holes might partner up within a dense star cluster, or when two stars are born together as twins and both collapse into black holes. Both possibilities could occasionally create unequal mass partnerships.
The researchers also tested whether Einstein’s theory of gravity still held up in this new type of black hole collision. Surprise, surprise: Einstein was right again.
The detectors of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the United States and Virgo in Italy are currently shut down, in an early end to operations that was hastened by COVID-19. They’re scheduled to once again start observing the heavens in 2022.
Summary: In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC.
In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. According to their traditions, the star Sirius has a companion star which is invisible to the human eye. This companion star has a 50 year elliptical orbit around the visible Sirius and is extremely heavy. It also rotates on its axis.
This legend might be of little interest to anybody but the two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen, who recorded it from four Dogon priests in the 1930's. Of little interest except that it is exactly true. How did a people who lacked any kind of astronomical devices know so much about an invisible star? The star, which scientists call Sirius B, wasn't even photographed until it was done by a large telescope in 1970.
The Dogon stories explain that also. According to their oral traditions, a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. They also appear in Babylonian, Accadian, and Sumerian myths. The Egyptian Goddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is also linked with the star Sirius.
The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an "ark" that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B.
The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon's with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun. These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope.
The story of the Dogon and their legend was first brought to popular attention by Robert K.G. Temple in a book published in 1977 called The Sirius Mystery. Science writer Ian Ridpath and astronomer Carl Sagan made a reply to Temple's book, suggesting that this modern knowledge about Sirius must have come from Westerners who discussed astronomy with the Dogon priests. The priests then included this new information into the older traditions. This, in turn, mislead the anthropologists.
This is a possibility considering Sirius B's existence was suspected as early as 1844 and seen was through a telescope in 1862. It doesn't seem to explain a 400-year old Dogon artifact that apparently depicts the Sirius configuration nor the ceremonies held by the Dogon since the 13th century to celebrate the cycle of Sirius A and B. It also doesn't explain how the Dogons knew about the super-density of Sirius B, a fact only discovered a few years before the anthropologists recorded the Dogon stories.
It is also important to remember that although many parts of the Dogon legends seem to ring true, other portions are clearly mistaken. One of the Dogon's beliefs is that Sirius B occupied the place where our Sun is now. Physics clearly prohibits this. Also, if the Dogon believe that Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 50 years, why do they hold their celebrations every 60 years?
Sirius A is the brightest star in our sky and can easily be seen in the winter months in the northern hemisphere. Look for the constellation Orion. Orion's belt are the three bright stars in a row. Follow an imaginary line through the three stars to Sirius which is just above the horizon. It is bluish in color.
Sirius is only 8.6 light years from Earth. Astronomer W.Bessel was the first to suspect that Sirius had an invisible companion when he observed that the path of the star wobbled. In the 1920's it was determined that Sirius B, the companion of Sirius, was a "white dwarf" star. The pull of its gravity caused Sirius's wavy movement.
White dwarfs are small, dense stars that burn dimly. Sirius B is, in fact, smaller than the planet Earth. One teaspoon of Sirius B is so dense that it weighs 5 tons.
So did alien fish-men pay a visit to ancient Earth and give the Dogon their knowledge? Or was the Dogon's culture contaminated by western visitors? Or could the Dogon's have had ancient technical or non-technical means to find this information out? Or is the whole thing just a matter of coincidence?
The question maybe settled as larger and more powerful telescopes take a look at the Sirius system. According to the legend there is a third star: Sirius C, and it is around Sirius C that the home planet of the Nommos orbits. Most scientists do not consider any part of the Sirius system a prime candidate for life, though.
When Temple first issued his book in the 1970's there was no solid evidence of a Sirius C. In 1995, however, two French researchers, Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent, authored an article in the prestigious journal Astronomy and Astrophysics with the title Is Sirius a Triple Star? and suggested (based on observations of motions in the Sirius system) there is a small third star there. They thought the star was probably of a type known as a "red dwarf" and only had about .05 the mass of Sirius B.
So has the home star of the Nommos been discovered? Or is this just another strange coincidence?
EXPLORERS IN ANTARCTICA FIND THE FOSSILS OF A "TOTALLY UNEXPECTED" ANIMAL
EXPLORERS IN ANTARCTICA FIND THE FOSSILS OF A "TOTALLY UNEXPECTED" ANIMAL
Researchers were shocked to find 40-million-year-old remains.
The Earth's South Pole, known for being a land of penguins, is covered in ice. But it wasn't always this way: Tens of millions of years ago, Antarctica was lush and green — and full of very different creatures.
Recently, while exploring the frigid region for ancient fossils, researchers found the shockingly out-of-place remains of a helmeted frog. It's the oldest-ever discovery of an amphibian and demonstrates that 40 million years ago Antarctica was more similar to present-day South America.
Paleontologist Thomas Mörs and his team were on a mission to find fossils of mammals who inhabited Antarctica before the big freeze. They collected and sifted through samples of sediment from Seymour Island, a process that revealed the teeth and bones of a variety of mammals — including tiny marsupials.
While sorting through their findings, Mörs found something shocking: an ilium — a large hip bone — and an ornamented skull. Both are telltale signs of a HELMETED FROG.
"I first found the hip bone, and I directly realized that I found an Antarctic frog, the first!" Mörs tells Inverse. "It was a totally unexpected discovery under the microscope."
This finding was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
This discovery also indicates that Antarctica might have actually played a large role in the evolution of vertebrates, including amphibians, before the mass extinction event that happened at the end of the Eocene.
ANTARCTICA, KEY TO ANCIENT FROG HISTORY — The frozen continent at the Earth's South Pole may have been where some animals originated or dispersed, Mörs says, tens of millions of years ago.
The two fossilized frog bones are around 40 million years old. That helps pin down what the environment was like in Antarctica during that time — six million years before Antarctica froze over permanently.
But the ice was already coming: The researchers found evidence that some glaciers were already present during the days of the helmeted frogs. This suggests that the cold-blooded amphibians, and other vertebrates on the land, were able to survive even as the area became increasingly icy.
Mörs says the research helps to connect some dots about helmeted frogs, too.
Today, helmeted frogs live Australia, New Guinea, and South America, where they are sometimes called Southern Frogs. These are places with climates that are probably similar to what Antarctica once looked like.
This discovery is a sign that helmeted frogs likely formed a single population across Pangea, before the supercontinent split.
"We have now a fossil frog from Antarctica that links the living frogs of the other two continents," Mörs says.
Antarctica, then, may have been an important link — not only between the continents but also between various groups of ancient helmeted frogs.
Abstract:
Cenozoic ectothermic continental tetrapods (amphibians and reptiles) have not been documented previously from Antarctica, in contrast to all other continents. Here we report a fossil ilium and an ornamented skull bone that can be attributed to the Recent, South American, anuran family Calyptocephalellidae or helmeted frogs, representing the first modern amphibian found in Antarctica. The two bone fragments were recovered in Eocene, approximately 40 million years old, sediments on Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula. The record of hyperossifed calyptocephalellid frogs outside South America supports Gondwanan cosmopolitanism of the anuran clade Australobatrachia. Our results demonstrate that Eocene freshwater ecosystems in Antarctica provided habitats favourable for ectothermic vertebrates (with mean annual precipitation ≥900mm, coldest month mean temperature ≥3.75°C, and warmest month mean temperature ≥13.79°C), at a time when there were at least ephemeral ice sheets existing on the highlands within the interior of the continent.
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today.
Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be "very early" after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever.
Of course, before physicists decide to toss out the Big Bang in favor of a bang-bounce cycle, these theoretical predictions will need to survive an onslaught of observation tests.
Bouncing cosmologies
Scientists have a really good picture of the very early universe, something we know and love as the Big Bang theory. In this model, a long time ago the universe was far smaller, far hotter and far denser than it is today. In that early inferno 13.8 billion years ago, all the elements that make us what we are were formed in the span of about a dozen minutes.
Even earlier, this thinking goes, at some point our entire universe — all the stars, all the galaxies, all the everything — was the size of a peach and had a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees.
Amazingly, this fantastical story holds up to all current observations. Astronomers have done everything from observing the leftover electromagnetic radiation from the young universe to measuring the abundance of the lightest elements and found that they all line up with what the Big Bang predicts. As far as we can tell, this is an accurate portrait of our early universe.
But as good as it is, we know that the Big Bang picture is not complete — there's a puzzle piece missing, and that piece is the earliest moments of the universe itself.
The problem is that the physics that we use to understand the early universe (a wonderfully complicated mishmash of general relativity and high-energy particle physics) can take us only so far before breaking down. As we try to push deeper and deeper into the first moments of our cosmos, the math gets harder and harder to solve, all the way to the point where it just … quits.
The main sign that we have terrain yet to be explored is the presence of a "singularity," or a point of infinite density, at the beginning of the Big Bang. Taken at face value, this tells us that at one point, the universe was crammed into an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. This is obviously absurd, and what it really tells us is that we need new physics to solve this problem — our current toolkit just isn't good enough.
To save the day we need some new physics, something that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. And that's exactly what string theory claims to be: a model of physics that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. Which means that string theory claims it can explain the earliest moments of the universe.
One of the earliest string theory notions is the "ekpyrotic" universe, which comes from the Greek word for "conflagration," or fire. In this scenario, what we know as the Big Bang was sparked by something else happening before it — the Big Bang was not a beginning, but one part of a larger process.
Extending the ekpyrotic concept has led to a theory, again motivated by string theory, called cyclic cosmology. I suppose that, technically, the idea of the universe continually repeating itself is thousands of years old and predates physics, but string theory gave the idea firm mathematical grounding. The cyclic universe goes about exactly as you might imagine, continually bouncing between big bangs and big crunches, potentially for eternity back in time and for eternity into the future.
Before the beginning
As cool as this sounds, early versions of the cyclic model had difficulty matching observations — which is a major deal when you're trying to do science and not just telling stories around the campfire.
The main hurdle was agreeing with our observations of the cosmic microwave background, the fossil light leftover from when the universe was only 380,000 years old. While we can't see directly past that wall of light, if you start theoretically tinkering with the physics of the infant cosmos, you affect that afterglow light pattern.
And so, it seemed that a cyclic universe was a neat but incorrect idea.
But the ekpyrotic torch has been kept lit over the years, and a paper published in January to the arXiv database has explored the wrinkles in the mathematics and uncovered some previously missed opportunities. The physicists, Robert Brandenberger and Ziwei Wang of McGill University in Canada, found that in the moment of the "bounce," when our universe shrinks to an incredibly small point and returns to a Big Bang state, it's possible to line everything up to get the proper observationally tested result.
In other words, the complicated (and, admittedly, poorly understood) physics of this critical epoch may indeed allow for a radically revised view of our time and place in the cosmos.
But to fully test this model, we'll have to wait for a new generation of cosmology experiments, so let's wait to break out the ekpyrotic champagne.
The sun begins to rise along Nevada Highway 375, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway, just north of Groom Lake or 'Area 51.'
(Photo: Will Pedro/Shutterstock)
Behind every alleged unidentified flying object sighting, every creepy alien story and every first-contact theory, there's a person. An earthling who believes a little — or a lot — in the idea that aliens have visited Earth or are trying to.
So who are all these people? Writer Sarah Scoles was interested in finding out, and it's the people behind the science, philosophy and conspiracy theories of UFOs who she focuses on in her book, "They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers."
Belief in UFOs is currently at a high point, with a 2019 Gallup poll showing that 33% of Americans "believe that some UFO sightings over the years have in fact been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies." About 60% of Americans are skeptical and 7% aren't sure — but 16% of people who answered the poll said they have personally witnessed a UFO.
Why UFOs now?
Those numbers are on the rise again in recent years due, in part, to a bombshell of an article published in December 2017 by The New York Times. A front-page story detailed a five-year program at the Pentagon call the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). That program's findings included a number of reports of unidentified flying objects. In later interviews, key members of that program offered more detail.As MNN covered at the time, Luis Elizondo, the head of AATIP, told then-Defense Secretary James Mattis:
"In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt.' I hate to use the term UFO, but that’s what we’re looking at," said Elizondo. "I think it's pretty clear this is not us, and it's not anyone else, so one has to ask the question where they're from."
Contrary to what might be assumed, many in the UFO community were skeptical of this news, though author Scoles said this was interestingly divided by generation, with older people more skeptical and Millennials excited to hear confirmation, a divide that got Scoles interested in the group. She attended the UFO Congress — a huge annual meeting of the UFO-interested — held just a couple months after the Pentagon program's revelation. She talked to 22 people for her book, and what's interesting is how different they are from each other; this is no monolithic group.
She traveled to famous sites on the extraterrestrial map, including Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51, the UFO Congress, the Pentagon, Skinwalker ranch in Utah and even meetings of a local UFO group in Denver where she lives. As she dug deeper into UFO society, Scoles discovered there are different reasons and attitudes that get people thinking or obsessing about UFOs.
The moderate skeptics
Sheer curiosity — and a feeling that information is being withheld — is the drive that keeps many people engaged in the UFO conversation.
(Photo: Dean Clarke/Shutterstock)
"I was surprised to find the moderate types," says Scoles, pointing out that when you think about someone who spends a lot of time thinking about UFOs, you're unlikely to picture a science-minded person who thinks there are likely good explanations for UFO sightings. She was curious, "If you don't believe in this thing, why would you spend time or energy to figure this out?"
Scoles says this group is a "large minority" of UFO-interested people, and discovered that what drives them is probably similar to what drives a scientist: plain old curiosity. Like a good researcher, they're not out to "prove" a belief; instead they're focused on the question, and how to answer it. This group is focused on how they can use science to understand, explain, explore or disprove the idea of alien life.
Scoles says the people in this group reminded her of the SETI astronomers, who use giant telescopes to look for possible messages from beyond Earth. Many of those scientists don't think alien civilizations exist, but they're "interested in the question even if the answer isn't exciting," says Scoles.
The spiritualists and the hopefuls
A tall metal alien sculpture greets visitors to the Alien Research Center, an extraterrestrial-themed gift shop in Hiko, Nevada.
(Photo: BrianPIrwin/Shutterstock.com)
Another subset of UFO fans are those who treat the idea of extraterrestrials as a kind of secular religion. While there are some cultists (including those who see aliens as some kind of god or gods), many of those who see the possibility of advanced alien life regard it as a sign of hope. If they survived, then humanity may be able to overcome our current challenges and keep advancing to the stars. This idea is behind plenty of sci-fi franchises as well, especially "Star Trek," which directly addresses the idea that we live in perilous times and that there can be positive visions of humanity's future.
Thinking about how aliens may have overcome their own challenges can give us a hypothetical look at how aliens could be a model for us, says Scoles. "If there is [an alien civilization] it will be older, it will have survived energy and other crises. The idea that somebody else did it gives us a role model for ourselves."
But there's also a less practical spiritual take — the sweet allure of the unknown. Scoles writes of a friend who stopped in a small town south of Des Moines, Iowa, where "spook lights" had been seen. As soon as he sat down at a bar and asked about the lights, people opened up, excited to tell a stranger what they had seen. "There was some mystery and magic left here, after all. There still existed something, even in this tiny town, that felt unfamiliar," Scoles writes. "And maybe someday, when they weren't expecting it, they'd be lucky enough to experience that feeling first hand again."
The true believers and conspiracy theorists
There are some people who believe that, odds are, there is life in the universe outside Earth, and those life forms have have visited our planet. This group might overlap with the spiritualists, but not necessarily. After all, some people fear the idea of aliens: "There's people who talk about aliens and UFOs who see them as an existential threat," says Scoles.
But others look at the statistics around the number of stars and habitable planets and see the possibility of life having arisen on other planets as not just possible, but probable. They think first contact has already likely happened, or they believe enough of the conspiracy theories that their judgement says it's more likely than not that we've already had some alien contact.
Of course, there are those who believe in UFOs almost entirely due to their belief that it's been covered up for years, "whether they think the conspiracy is hiding aliens or their classified technology," says Scoles. Their belief is rooted in what they see as the "cover-up."
So with all these different groups of people interested in alien life and spacecrafts, is there anything that unites them?
"I think everybody across the whole UFO spectrum from skeptics to true believers is motivated by a sense of wonder, encountering a thing that they don’t know fully," says Scoles.
Hey everyone, I found some thought provoking things on Mars in a Curiosity Rover photo today. Two the objects are structures with doorways...both located next to one another.
The other thing is a giant sculpture head with a equally sized hand with four visible fingers (hi lighted in yellow)...near it is a dragon skull (highlighted in orange). This may be evidence of a giant species...turned into a giant fossil. But my be a statue, since the doorways were so small...one 1/3 a meter tall openings, compared to the hand of the giant...which appears to be 2 meters across.
There were also two pyramids...one still being carved from the local stone, the other finished but with a face on the top. All in all, it seems Mars was teaming with intelligent life and the evidence is all over the place. Hard to believe NASA kept the secret for so long.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Weird spherical object floating over General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile
Weird spherical object floating over General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile
It seems the Aysén region in Chile is a UFO hotspot. According to The Journal Of Hispanic UFOlogy, Ysaac Wichmann, a mountaineer with a good knowledge of the area in the Aysén region, Chile said that the UFO phenomena have always been visible in this region, in the mountain ranges or at sea, on islands, canals or archipelagos, and particularly in unpopulated, isolated, distant and hard-to-reach locations.
A member of his family who served years ago in the Chilean navy witnessed this phenomenon while approaching a small island in the Aysén region in a Navy ship. Their mission was to work on a lighthouse to provide orientation and navigation assistance to those transiting along those waters.
What they saw before reaching the lighthouse, an oval metallic object rose vertically and slowly near the lighthouse, until it reached a certain altitude. After a while, the object rose quickly into the air and vanished from sight.
In another case two black objects can be seen floating at a distance over the surface of General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile.
According to witnesses, who were aboard a boat during the observation on June 23, 2019, the objects appeared to hover over the water, sometimes appearing and disappearing mysteriously.
Another small grey spherical object also appeared out of nowhere beside these dark objects, along with an orb of light that appears to fly over the lake. Some claim the objects are buoys; however, buoys do not fly, disappear and reappear.
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
A Paris, France resident reported his UFO sighting a few weeks ago, which he recorded from his balcony during this lockdown. The video shows a sphere-like object hovering and appears watching over the city.
UFO sightings became more frequent over the past weeks. Many suggest that aliens may have been trying to figure out whether humans follow the rules of wearing face masks, physical distancing, and lockdowns or not.
Conspiracy theorists further speculate that aliens observing the Earth during the pandemic may have gathered information that would provide them a predictive model of what will bound to happen soon.
The video was published on YouTube and has gotten more than 25,000 views. Some observers rule out advertising balloons as a possible explanation because there are no customers and not weather balloons either as they typically fly at higher altitudes.
A few others believe that it’s just understandable UFO sightings are becoming more frequent this past couple of weeks as aliens pride themselves on their knowledge.
Others suggest it could be chemtrail, drone, or a blimp.
One commenter on the YouTube video pin hopes that if these are aliens, they are friendly.
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
A Paris, France resident reported his UFO sighting a few weeks ago, which he recorded from his balcony during this lockdown. The video shows a sphere-like object hovering and appears watching over the city.
UFO sightings became more frequent over the past weeks. Many suggest that aliens may have been trying to figure out whether humans follow the rules of wearing face masks, physical distancing, and lockdowns or not.
Conspiracy theorists further speculate that aliens observing the Earth during the pandemic may have gathered information that would provide them a predictive model of what will bound to happen soon.
The video was published on YouTube and has gotten more than 25,000 views. Some observers rule out advertising balloons as a possible explanation because there are no customers and not weather balloons either as they typically fly at higher altitudes.
A few others believe that it’s just understandable UFO sightings are becoming more frequent this past couple of weeks as aliens pride themselves on their knowledge.
Others suggest it could be chemtrail, drone, or a blimp.
One commenter on the YouTube video pin hopes that if these are aliens, they are friendly.
"It's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions."
A new map has provided the blueprints for the moon, revealing the true nature of Earth's rocky companion.
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute, have created the first-ever comprehensive geologic map of the moon. In this new digital map, titled the "Unified Geologic Map of the Moon," the entire lunar surface has been thoroughly charted and all of its features uniformly classified.
You can find the map, which shows an incredible amount of detail at a 1:5,000,000 scale, online here.
This map details exactly what makes up the beautiful variety of dark and light spots on the moon's surface. It is intended not only as a scientific and educational tool, but it could also be invaluable for future crewed missions to the moon.
"People have always been fascinated by the moon and when we might return," Jim Reilly, a former NASA astronaut and current director of the USGS, said in a statement. "So, it's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions."
This new digital map is so comprehensive, in part, because it uses data spanning the last five decades. The collaborative team behind the map used data from recent satellite missions to the moon, as well as data collected and maps created during NASA's Apollo missions to and around the moon.
Among the recent data are elevation measurements from stereo observations made by the Terrain Camera on JAXA's SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) mission and topography data from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
"This map is a culmination of a decades-long project," Corey Fortezzo, USGS geologist and lead author on this work, said in the same statement. "It provides vital information for new scientific studies by connecting the exploration of specific sites on the moon with the rest of the lunar surface."
These scientists merged the old and new datasets and updated the Apollo-era maps with the more recent data. Additionally, they developed a new, unified method for describing the moon's rock layers. Previously, moon maps have used a variety of names for the different types of rock and rock layers, and this new unified description method absolved that inconsistency.
You can read an abstract describing the work on this map here, published by the USGS.
You need a telescope to see it, but astronomers have been observing it already. Charts, tips, recent images, how to watch online here.
Radar image of asteroid 1998 OR2, acquired April 18, 2020 by astronomers at Arecibo Observatory. The radar data confirm that 1998 OR2 is at least 2 km in diameter [a little over a mile wide]. It is probably about 2 1/2 times that long. It rotates once every 4.1 hours.
Image via Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
A big – very big – asteroid will pass relatively close to Earth on April 29, 2020. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass at a safe distance, at some 4 million miles (6 million km), or about 16 times the Earth-moon distance. It’ll be the biggest asteroid to fly by Earth this year (that we know about so far); according to current estimates, it’s probably a bit over a mile wide (2 km) and maybe twice that long. Closest approach will be April 29 around 5:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:56 UTC; translate UTC to your time). Professional observatories have been pointing their telescopes at the huge space rock already. Amateur astronomers with smaller telescopes will also have an opportunity to see it as a slow-moving “star.” If that’s you, we give charts and tips for observers at the bottom of this post that should help.
The Virtual Telescope Project will present an online viewing of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on April 28, 2020. As the time approaches, check this page for more details.
No access to a telescope? No problem. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will host a free, online public viewing of the asteroid on April 28, 2020. See the poster above.
Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project also acquired 166 images of the asteroid – collected back to back – and assembled them to make the animated gif below. The animation shows you the asteroid’s motion in front of the stars. It was made with images from the Elena robotic unit of the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome, Italy. The asteroid is in the center of the image, visible as a sharp dot of light.
Asteroid 1998 OR2 was at about 7.5 million miles from us (about 12 million km) when astronomers acquired the images to make this animation. At its closest on April 29, the asteroid will be 4 million miles (6 million km) from us, or about 16 times the Earth-moon distance. The asteroid appears to move in front of the stars because it is so much closer to us than the stars.
Astronomers at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have been studying the asteroid since April 8, as it’s traveled through space at 19,461 miles per hour (31,320 km/h). The high-resolution radar images at the top of this post and below – from Arecibo – are some of the first glimpses of this large asteroid. In addition to confirming the asteroid’s size (about 2 km [1.25 mi] wide, and maybe twice that long), the images uniquely revealed the overall shape of the asteroid and some smaller-scale topographic features, such as hills and ridges. The team of observers working now at Acrecibo to observe this asteroids includes astronomers Anne Virkki, Flaviane Venditti, and Sean Marshall from UCF/Arecibo Planetary Group, Dr. Patrick Taylor (remotely) from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, and the Arecibo telescope operators Israel Cabrera, Elliot Gonzalez, and Daniel Padilla.
Radar image of asteroid 1998 OR2, acquired April 18, 2020.
Image via Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Let’s make it absolutely clear that there’s no chance of a collision between this asteroid and Earth. It’s true the object is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. The Center for Near Earth Objects defines such an object as one that comes as close to Earth as:
… 0.05 AU or less [about 19.5 lunar distances] and an absolute magnitude of 22.0 or less …
In other words, such objects are reasonably close and reasonably big. And do we need to say there are a bunch of objects like this? Wikipedia lists 22 of the largest here. Recent decades have revealed more and more asteroids orbiting the sun.
None of the 22 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids listed by Wikipedia is known to be on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeble future. In fact, none of the asteroids in the video above is known to be on a collision course. Likewise, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 isn’t on a collision course with Earth, not anytime soon. The orbit of this asteroid is well known for at least the next 200 years. Its closest approach to Earth in this century and the next will happen in 2079, when it’ll swoop to within about a million miles of Earth (still about four times farther away than the moon). That 2079 sweep past Earth will still be a big deal. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the largest known of all large Near-Earth Objects that’ll pass less than five times the Earth-moon distance over the next two centuries!
Astronomers with reasonably sized telescopes are already capturing images of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. This March 6, 2020, image of the asteroid comes from a single 30-second exposure, remotely taken with Elena, a 17-inch (43 cm) robotic telescope. At the imaging time, (52768) 1998 OR2 was about 22 million miles (36 million km) from Earth. At its closest in late April, it’ll be about 4 million miles (6.4 million km) away.
Orbit of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. It requires 3 years and 8 months to orbit the sun once. It gets nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter (about 5 times Earth’s distance from the sun).
Image via NASA/ JPL.
How to see asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 with a small telescope
During its April 2020 pass, this asteroid will at no time be bright enough to view with the unaided eye. However, it’s estimated to reach a visual magnitude of around 10 to 11, which means observers with at least 6-inch or 8-inch (15 to 20 cm) telescopes (the number indicates the size of the primary mirror) will see the asteroid (very slowly) moving in front of the stars!
Sky enthusiasts can initially use a wide-angle (32mm or 35mm) eyepiece to point the telescope to a reference star in the asteroid’s path (charts below). After being assured that the instrument is pointing at the correct patch of the sky, a 26mm or 27mm eyepiece is recommended to detect the asteroid’s slow motion. You will want to note the star field, and watch for the object that moves over a period of about 10 to 15 minutes. Yes, that’ll be the space rock.
Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is in our sky now, but it’s not visible to the eye alone. You need a telescope to see it. This illustration shows the asteroid’s location on the night of April 24, 2020, around 11:45 p.m. Central Daylight Time (04:45 Universal Time, April 25). As seen from central U.S., facing west-southwest.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 24, 2020, at 11:45 p.m. CDT (04:45 UT April 25) observers using small computerized telescopes can point their instruments at these reference stars to observe asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. Compare the views 10 or 15 minutes later to detect an apparent star that has changed position.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
There will be closer approaches of asteroids in the future, including Apophis, which – although smaller – will pass very close to Earth in 2029. Another, larger space rock – 2 miles (3 km) wide – designated as asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21 will pass slightly farther than (52768) 1998 OR2 in June 2024.
But the upcoming flyby in April 2020 of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the most significant close approach of an asteroid until 2027, when another huge asteroid known as (4953) 1990 MU will safely pass by Earth at 12 lunar distances.
Astronomers first discovered asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on July 24, 1998, from Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.
Have a Go-To Telescope? Point your instrument at star HIP 48674 on April 25, 2020, at 10 p.m. CDT (03:00 UTC April 26) to find the huge asteroid, which will appear as a slow-moving star. To see its movement, compare the views over about 10 to 15 minutes.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on the night of April 27, 2020. The space rock passes close to star HIP 50745 around 9:15 p.m. CDT April 27 (02:15 UTC April 28).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 around the nights of closest approach (April 28-29, 2020). Facing south, as seen from the central U.S.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 29, 2020, around its closest approach to Earth, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass close to galaxy NGC 3463 and star HIP 53416. Around 9:30 p.m. CDT April 29 (02:30 UTC April 30), point your small computerized telescope to these reference objects. Compare the views 10 to 15 minutes later to detect the apparent “star” that changed position. That’s the asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 30, 2020, at 9:30 p.m. CDT (02:30 UTC May 1) asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is located close to stars HIP 54875 and 55201. Use a GoTo telescope to locate these reference stars to locate the slow moving asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Bottom line: The huge asteroid known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass closest to Earth on April 29, 2020. Observers peering through telescopes will see it as a slow-moving “star.” Charts, tips, how to watch online – plus some recent images – here.
China hasn’t been getting much good press lately due to the coronavirus pandemic and is probably hoping for some good news, even if it’s from 3500 years ago. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Archeologists digging in a major site dating back to the Shang Dynasty found an unusual ‘oracle’ bone in a very creepy tomb. It’s unusual because oracle bones – used by religious diviners to ask questions of the deities – are normally made from ox bones or turtle shells, while this one is a human bone. It’s creepy because this oracle bone was found in a grave where the skeletal remains indicated that the body was a human — a human sacrificed by beheading. Sorry, China … this is not your year.
“This well-preserved human bone is shaped like the oracle bone inscription of the character ‘Kan.'”
Proving that the Chinese media will cover bad news, China Daily interviewed Liang Fawei, head of the Chaizhuang site excavation project, about the recent find. Oracle bones were the key ingredient in the practice of pyromancy, where a diviner or oracle would etch a question on a large bone, then heat it with a hot metal rod until the bone cracked. The diviner would then interpret the cracks, determine the deity’s answer to the question and often scratch that onto the bone. This practice began in the Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE-1046 BCE) and continued into the Zhou Dynasty. Fawei notes that the question in this case was the primitive Chinese character ‘Kan’ from the ancient language Jiaguwen – one of the many hieroglyphics used to describe animal and human sacrifices.
“The bone remains found at the site suggest that the human sacrifice was beheaded, facing north and kneeling in the pit with his hands crossed in front of him.”
The Chaizhuang site covers 300,000 square meters and contains houses, wells, ash pits, roads, pottery, stones, bones, jade artifacts. other relics – and plenty of evidence of human sacrifices. Shang kings were often buried with hundreds of humans and evidence shows other sacrifices by this agrarian and warring culture were made to Di (the High God), the sun and mountains and various ancestors. While the ‘Kan’ message had been found on other oracle bones, this was the first discovered with the bones clearly indicating the human was beheading in a kneeling position rather than lying down. (Photos of the grave and oracle bone here.) The Google translation is a little confusing in that it seems to say both that the oracle bone was a human bone and that the character was on a human bone that matched those found on oracle bones.
A piece of oracle bone discovered at the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, Central China's Henan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
Bone remains suggest ancient human sacrifice at the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, Central China's Henan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
Whatever the case, the clear indication of a kneeling decapitation in a culture known for its human sacrifices means this story is well-deserving of headlines indicating that it was found in a “creepy tomb” or a “terrible tomb.” It’s both.
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.