In the autumn of the year of 1944, Slovak military commander Antonín Horák was performing military operations somewhere in the Tatra mountains during the Slovak National uprising, which was a concerted guerrilla military movement organized by the Slovak resistance movement insurrectionists in an attempt to resist occupying German troops and drive them away. This was a dangerous time, when the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany were patrolling the wilds, and indeed Horák’s unit was ambushed by one such unit as they were hiding in a trench to escape detection. The skirmish did not end well for the Slovaks, with nearly all of his men being slaughtered, and he himself was shot and left for dead. This would pave the way for a strange discovery made out in the wilds of Slovakia, which has captured the imagination and stirred speculation ever since.

When he awoke, Horák was lying in the trench in a pool of mud and his own blood, surrounded by the corpses of his fallen comrades. He at first thought that he was the only one who had survived, and it was only through the help of two local villagers that he did not join them in death. Two villagers carried him away on a makeshift stretcher, and it would become clear that two of the other Slovak soldiers had also survived, although all of them were wounded and immobile. The villagers told them that they were being brought to a secluded, secret cave out in the wilds where they would be able to hide away and recover. However, once they reached this cave, Horák knew that it wasn’t just a typical cave. He was immediately suspicious when one of the villagers told him not to wander too deep into the recesses of this place, as it was considered to be possibly haunted and there were many steep drops within. It seemed as if the villagers were hiding something, and Horák made a mental note to explore it when he had the chance.

He had his chance when in the morning the chief villager, named Slávek, said some prayers while facing the murk within and then informed the soldiers that he would be back later in the afternoon. When he was gone, Horák peered into the gloom and felt curiosity getting the better of him. He was weak and unable to walk so well, but he was able to get up and hobble about, using a light to pierce through the darkness as he felt his way along. It soon became clear that the walls of the cave were not the typical rough rock that one would expect, but rather polished to a mirror sheen, as if formed of glass, and of a bluish black coloration. He then decided to go even deeper yet, finding a small vent in the floor after penetrating into the cave for around 90 minutes. Taking this vent deposited him within a huge chamber and grotto with white stalactites covered in a strange, enamel-like substance, and sitting within this cavern was a very curious sight, indeed.

There within the grotto was a sort of huge, cylindrical object or shaft set within the rock, described as dark, metallic, and completely smooth like the walls of the cave, only here there could be seen strange symbols like hieroglyphics etched into the surface. He warily approached the anomalous structure, and rapping on its side with his pickaxe produced a slight echo that suggested it was hollow inside. The material it was fashioned of looked almost like a shiny onyx, but when he took a few experimental swings at it with his pickaxe he found that he was unable to leave any chip or scratch upon it. Some reports say that he even tried to fire upon it with his pistol, and even that did not scathe it. He decided to crawl back through the cave and fetch some things he felt he would need to further explore this curiosity. He did not tell his wounded fellow soldiers what he had seen, but rather since the weather was getting worse and it was apparent that the villagers would not be able to return, he told them he needed their belts and some rope to help him capture any animals he could find for food.

Armed with this new equipment he went back to the mysterious object several times over the next few days, and used the belts and rope to climb down within it through a large, diamond-shaped crack at its top. The interior was covered in what appeared to be clay and limestone, and the sounds in there were said to be unnaturally amplified. The whole of it was said to actually be in the shape of a crescent moon, and as he explored, he came across the remains of what seemed to be a cave bear, a long extinct species that he surmised had fallen to its death within the structure eons ago. He then tried again to shoot at the walls, but this only produced “green sparks” and smoke. There were found to be some sort of horizontal grooves in the walls of the cylindrical chamber, which seemed warm to the touch. No other entrance into the strange cave was found, and so Horák decided to make a note of its location and then conceal the vent that led to this place.

The villagers returned and on of his fellow soldiers would pass during the night, making it impossible for him to make any further excursions into that mysterious cave, but he wrote about it and made sketches in his diary. He eventually was rescued and able to make it home, but that bizarre cave and its cylinder occupied his thoughts for years. On many occasions he meant to go back and find it once again, but it was too dangerous and so it was mostly just an oddity that only he knew of. It was not until 1965 that Horák would publish an excerpt from his diary concerning the finding in in the National Speleological Society News, and from there the place he called the “Moonshaft” or also “Mooncave” began to capture the imagination of adventurers, geologists, spelunkers, and mystery seekers from all over the world.

Sketch of the entrance leading to the mysterious chamber

One of the problems with going in to actually check out if any of it was true or not is that the political climate in the former Czechoslovakia was not exactly conducive to exploration expeditions, and the area was considered mostly off-limits. In the meantime, Horák, who had since emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States, was interviewed by numerous researchers and even Dr. J. Allen Hynek, of Project Blue Book fame. However, it would not be until by Czech explorers Ivan Mackerle and Michal Brumlík ventured into the region in 1980 that any actual follow up field work would be done on the matter. Other expeditions would trickle in, but none of them were able to locate the mysterious cave. One of the main problems is that Horák’s diary is very vague about the actual location, merely mentioning that it is in the Tatra Mountains and in the vicinity of the villages of ´diar, Lubochňa and Plaveč, but considering the sprawling, isolated wilderness of the region that could be anywhere. To this day there are occasional claims that the cave has been found, but no proof offered, leaving us to speculate about what it could all mean.

What did Antonín Horák found out in that wilderness? Theories have included that it was a geological anomaly, ancient copper mine, an entrance to some underground world, the remnants of a lost civilization, or a crashed alien spaceship embedded within the rock, but no one knows for sure and we probably never will. The only person who knows for sure, Antonín Horák, would in later years just sort of vanish, taking whatever secrets he had with him and leaving behind only some scattered diary entries and sketches of what he claimed to have found. We are left to wonder just what it is that he found out there, and what still might be buried beneath the Slovakian wilderness. Ancient civilization, alien spaceship, or just a very strange cave? We may never know for sure.

According to a new study, some people alive today carry genes from an ancient ancestor that has yet to be identified. In fact, this unknown species may have been around as far back as a million years ago.

According to the study, sometime between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, ancient humans mated with Neanderthals – quite a long time before Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe approximately 50,000 years ago. Adam Siepel, who is a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of the paper, explained to Live Science, “Our best conjecture is that an early group of anatomically modern humans left Africa then encountered and interbred with Neanderthals, perhaps in the Middle East,” adding, “This lineage [of humans] would then have been lost — either gone extinct, or absorbed by the Neanderthals, or migrated back to Africa.”

Understanding the complex history of our ancient ancestors is no easy task. It’s been known for a long time that humans and Neanderthals mated while they were both living in Europe and prior to Neanderthals going extinct about 40,000 years ago.

And despite being extinct for tens of thousands of years, some humans today still carry Neanderthal genes. In fact, according to a 2010 study, researchers found that between 1% and 4% of the genes found in people currently living in Asia, Europe, and Oceania belonged to their Neanderthal ancestors. In a more recent 2014 study, at least 20% of DNA found in today’s humans could be from Neanderthals.

And we can’t forget about Denisovans who, up until around 15,000 years ago, shared caves and mated with early humans. In fact, about 1% of the Denisovan genomes came from an unknown ancestor which points to interbreeding. Additionally, around 15% of the interbreeding sequences that the researchers located in Denisovan DNA have also been found in today’s humans.

As for this mysterious DNA that some humans carry today, it would have originated when Neanderthals mated with the unknown species, and then carried it along to when they mated with early humans and through the evolutionary line right down to today’s population. Siepel added that this mysterious ancestor could have belonged to Homo erectus, but since they have no DNA from that species to compare it to, it’s just a theory for now.

Based on this new information, interbreeding surely wasn’t a rare event. Siepel finished off by stating, “A picture is emerging of a series of distinct but related populations moving around the globe and frequently interacting with one another, with occasional interbreeding events that produced hybrid offspring.” “These hybrid offspring might in some cases have suffered from reduced fitness — this is an area of controversy — but apparently many of them were healthy enough to survive and reproduce, leaving a patchwork of archaic and modern human DNA in Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans.”

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Some people say that Mars gets all of the attention these days because that’s where some book once said men are from there … and that argument probably carries a little weight. However, it wasn’t that long ago that Venus was the center of attention, especially within the space program of the former Soviet Union which had a lander program that sent probes into the swirling hot and dense atmosphere laden with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. (It’s no wonder author John Gray gave Mars to men.) That didn’t stop the Japanese space program from sending orbiters to Venus, and it’s data from the Akatsuki spacecraft that has revealed something ominous on the planet’s hidden surface – a giant unidentified wave plowing across the planet every 4.9 days at over 200 miles per hour (328 km per hour). Is this another reason women should wish they wrote their own damn book first?

“If this happened on Earth, this would be a frontal surface at the scale of the planet, and that’s incredible.”

In a press release by the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) announcing the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, co-author Pedro Machado describes the unexplained cloud wall which is the first disturbance of this magnitude to be discovered in the lower atmosphere of Venus. Machado notes that the images from Akatsuki orbiter were confirmed by astronomers (including himself) using the Galileo National Telescope (TNG) in Canary Islands and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii. Going back to other past observations, the team now can recognize indicators which show the wave has been speeding around Venus since at least 1983.

“This planet-wide cloud discontinuity can sometimes extend as far as 7500 kilometres, across the equator, from 30º north to 40º south, and happens at the lower cloud level, at altitudes between 47.5 and 56.5 kilometres.”

Based on what they pulled together from observations made by other missions and telescopes, combined with computer simulations, the team concluded that these mysterious planet-sweeping waves are cause by … something they’ve never seen before on any other planets.

Throw in the facts that Venus rotates in the opposite direction of Earth (and almost all of the other planets in our solar system) at a snail’s pace of one rotation every 243 Earth days, while its atmosphere flows at 60 times faster than Earth’s (the normal wind speed relative to the surface is about 360 km/h or 224 mph), its density is 93 times that of Earth’s and pressure is about 92 times Earth’s (don’t forget it’s loaded with sulfuric acid) and you can see why researchers want to know more about these waves. Unfortunately, almost all of the future missions to Venus are still in the proposed or conceptual stages.

What Venus needs is a woman billionaire to champion Venus like Elon Musk has championed Mars.

Or a new book.

Thunderstorms on Jupiter are so violent and strong that ammonia-rich hail called “mushballs” could rain down from the sky. Apparently ammonia works similar to anti-freeze when it’s mixed with ice crystals which makes them melt and ultimately creates huge storms.

This new information was collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft which arrived at Jupiter in July of 2016 and orbits the planet every 53 days. It studies the planet’s atmosphere in order to get a better understanding of Jupiter’s meteorology.

The mission has so far shown rotating white clouds full of ammonia in the upper atmosphere of the planet that measures over 2,000 square miles. These ammonia-rich clouds are located about 10 miles above other clouds and they cause flashes of lighting in addition to casting huge shadows on Jupiter.

Swirling “Pearl” storm on Jupiter.

Thunderstorms on Jupiter are similar to those that occur here on Earth as they both move around water within the atmosphere. One huge difference, however, is that the thunderstorms on the Gas Giant begin to form approximately 31 miles beneath the storm bands. The temperatures where the storms are formed are around the freezing point which means that if a storm is strong enough, it can move the ice into the upper portion of the atmosphere where it will then melt.

Tristan Guillot, who is a planetary scientist at the Côte d’Azur University in Nice, France, and an author of the papers, explained this further, “On Jupiter as on Earth, a mixture of two thirds water and one third ammonia will remain liquid down to a temperature of -100°C [-148°F],” adding, “The ice crystals which have been lifted high into Jupiter’s atmosphere are melted by ammonia — forming a liquid — and become the seeds for exotic hailstones, or “mushballs”.”

He went on to say, “The mushballs, being heavier, then fall deeper into the atmosphere until they reach a point where they evaporate. This mechanism drags ammonia and water down to very deep levels in the planet’s atmosphere.” “This can potentially explain Juno measurements that Jupiter’s ammonia abundance is variable until at least 100 miles below the visible clouds.”

There are even auroras on Jupiter.

Guillot went into further details about the storms, “During Jupiter’s violent storms, hailstones form from this liquid, similar to the process in terrestrial storms where hail forms in the presence of super-cooled liquid water.” “Growth of the hailstones creates a slush-like substance surrounded by a layer of ice, and these “mushballs” fall, evaporate and continue sinking further in the planet’s deep atmosphere.”

According to the data collected by Juno, there is more ammonia found near the equator on Jupiter although the exact amount is currently unclear.

In a second study, a team of international experts created models that indicated that the “mushballs” and storms on Jupiter “dry out” the atmosphere of its ammonia, while a third study detailed the flashes of lightning on the planet. The three papers can be read in full here, here, and here.

Some things about planets are constants. Most of them form around stars and stay in their orbit. Some get cut loose for a variety of reasons and become rogues. A few get too close to black holes and get sucked into the abyss. Then there’s blanets. What are blanets? Get ready to meet the bravest planets in the universe.

“In Wada, Tsukamoto, and Kokubo (2019), we proposed for the first time that a new class of planets, blanets (i.e., black hole planets), can be formed around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the galactic center. Here, we investigate the dust coagulation  processes and physical conditions of the blanet formation outside the snowline in more  detail, especially considering the effect of the radial advection of the dust aggregates.”

Keiichi Wada, Yusuke Tsukamoto and Eiichiro Kokubo are Japanese space researchers and university professors who have updated their 2019 paper on stuff that is seen around supermassive black holes with a new study submitted to The Astrophysical Journal detailing what they’re calling a new class of exoplanets – the blanet. In particular, they have been studying the supermassive black holes found at the center of most galaxies which are usually very active, with a disc of accretion dust and gas circling around it and avoiding consumption in a game of supermassive cat and mouse. While they originally thought planets in these accretion discs had been rogue exoplanets or planets orbiting stars captured by the black hole, this new study proposes that they actually form in the disc in somewhat the same way planets form around young stars.

“Our results suggest that blanets could be formed around relatively low-luminosity active galactic nuclei during their lifetime (100 million years). The gaseous envelope of a blanet should be negligibly small compared with the blanet mass. Therefore, the system of blanets are extraordinarily different from the standard Earth-type planets in the exoplanet systems.”

By “extraordinarily different,” the team means they grow much faster into much, much more massive than star-based planets. While the growth of planets in star-orbiting accretion discs are slowed by collisions, the black hole accretion discs have a lower viscosity – i.e., less traffic – that reduces the risk of collision. Because the viscosity is even lower at the outer edges of the disc, planets out there can grow quickly to masses that are 20 to 3,000 Earth masses, reaching what is considered the upper limit of planet size but not quite large enough to become a small star instead.

“The dynamical stability of such a system around a SMBH (supermassive black hole) may be an interesting subject for future studies.”

As you may have expected, these blanets can’t be seen – the study was done using models of supermassive black hole behavior. The team thinks all of this is “interesting” enough for future studies, provided they can find the grant money.

Could life exist on one of these blanets? A better question is: Why would life want to live so close to a supermassive black hole?

Because it’s there?

Mars was full of liquid water; Mars never had liquid water. It’s an ever changing theory with no end in sight. Back in May of this year, I wrote an article on how astronomers found the first evidence of a river that once flowed for more than 100,000 years on the Red Planet. That study strongly suggested that around 3.7 billion years ago, the planet would have had an atmosphere that supported large amounts of liquid water and perhaps even life. (The article can be read here.)

Now, scientists have changed their tune again as they’re saying that Mars may not have been the warm, wet, potentially habitable planet that they once thought was possible. Experts analyzed information from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that collected data from 1997 to 2001. They studied over 10,000 valleys on the Red Planet in order to find out what it looked like during its first billion years of existence. They compared their Martian data to Devon Island in the Arctic and they found that the valleys on Mars could have been created in a similar way to those found below the island here on Earth.

Devon Island

Anna Grau Galofre, who is a geophysicist at Arizona State University and the lead author of the study, said in a statement, “If you look at Earth from a satellite, you see a lot of valleys: some of them made by rivers, some made by glaciers, some made by other processes, and each type has a distinctive shape,” adding, “Mars is similar, in that valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.”

They found that the majority of the valleys on Mars had a better chance of being formed by melt-water that flowed between an ice sheet and the ground instead of by a flowing river on the surface.

They studied six characteristics from each of the 10,000+ valley segments and then compared them to four types of formations. Their results indicated that 22 of 66 valleys were created by melt-water that ran underneath glaciers; 9 others were formed by only glaciers; and 14 were created by rivers. The rest of them didn’t have enough information in order for scientists to make a conclusion on how they were formed. Another interesting fact was that while the valleys that could have been created by melt-water were located in different areas across the planet, the ones that may have been formed by flowing rivers were in one specific area close to Arabia Terra.

“For the last 40 years, since Mars’ valleys were first discovered, the assumption was that rivers once flowed on Mars, eroding and originating all of these valleys,” Grau Galofre stated, adding, “We tried to put everything together and bring up a hypothesis that hadn’t really been considered.”

With this new research, it seems as though Mars may not have been full of liquid water and may have been covered mostly in ice. The mystery and uncertainty about the atmosphere and temperatures on ancient Mars continues…