Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
23-08-2020
MUFON Canada UFO Primer: Interview with Victor Viggiani
MUFON Canada UFO Primer: Interview with Victor Viggiani
MufonCanada has launched a new Podcast feature on our YouTube channel. These will feature interviews with Ufologists from around the world, witness interviews from our cases files and other exciting news as we follow the US Navy Intelligence UAP Task Force. Listen now to the first of many to come.
Victor Viggiani is currently the News Director of ZlandCommunications an international news service. His study of anomalous aerial phenomenon, research and analysis of Extraterrestrial issues spans over 30 years. His experience involves UFO sightings report investigation, academic and radio journalism with a primary focus on UFO/ET government Disclosure. Victor has addressed the media and audiences in Sydney and Brisbane Australia, Washington D.C., at the Washington D.C. National Press Club, Rochester NY, CBC and CTV Toronto television news programs and at Convocation Hall University of Toronto. Victor is a co-host on the Richard Syrett Show on AM 740 Radio in Toronto.
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Unknown flashing object over Cleveland, Ohio 19-Aug-2020
Unknown flashing object over Cleveland, Ohio 19-Aug-2020
This bright UFO was seen and recorded in the sky above Cleveland, OH on August 19, 2020.
Witness report:
On 08/19/20 at approximately 10:00 hours I was assigned to assist with traffic in downtown Cleveland. There were 4 other parties assigned to the intersection of E.9th & Bolivar to repair telephone lines. During our time at the intersection I was discussing the buildings surrounding area. We began discussing the cable that was stabilizing a communication tower and the insulator in the middle which we thought was odd. In the video you can see the insulator, which can be mistaken for a hovering object. At 10:23 hours I noticed an object fly out from behind one of the buildings. The crew I was working with had also noticed it. I took out my phone and attempted to capture video of the object. In the video, we can all be heard acknowledging the object. The object appeared to have an erratic flight path. It flew to my left and flashed a few times and then moved to my right and flashed a few times then shot off into the sky. I believe I found one view of it. As it was flashing and moving so quickly it was almost impossible to capture.
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It was a strange interstellar comet, it was a stranger spaceship, it was an interstellar asteroid, it was something else, and the latest — it’s a frozen hydrogen-sicle. And now, the cigar-shaped unknown space object from another solar system is back to being a spaceship … or at least a piece of alien technology. That’s the latest from two leading astrophysicists who have been watching and commenting on ‘Oumuamua ever since it showed up unannounced in 2017 and has been inspiring debates, exploration suggestions and occasional concern ever since.
“The first interstellar object observed in our solar system, 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua), exhibited a number of peculiar properties, including extreme elongation and acceleration excess. Recently, Seligman & Laughlin proposed that the object was made out of molecular hydrogen (H2) ice. The question is whether H2 objects could survive their travel from the birth sites to the solar system.”
Like this, only hyrdrogen?
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, and Thiem Hoang, an astrophysicist at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, sprang into action as soon as astrophysicists Darryl Seligman, University of Chicago, and Greg Laughlin, Yale University, released their research paper in May 2020 proposing that ‘Oumuamua was formed in a giant molecular cloud (GMC) and is composed of molecular hydrogen ice – a giant cigar-shaped interstellar hydrogen iceberg. Seligman and Laughlin tied their theory to the idea that outgassing or evaporating hydrogen ice wouldn’t be visible from Earth — explaining the mystery of how ‘Oumuamua could be a comet if it didn’t have a tail, especially when it accelerated out of the solar system.
“Assuming that H2 objects could somehow form in the densest regions of GMCs, we found that sublimation by collisional heating inside the GMC would destroy the objects before their escape into the ISM [interstellar medium]. We also studied various destruction mechanisms of H2 ice in the ISM. In particular, we found that H2 objects are heated by the average interstellar radiation, so that they cannot survive beyond a sublimation time of tsub ~ 10 Myr for R = 300 m (see Figure 1). Only H2 objects larger than 5 km could survive.”
“Not so fast!” said Loeb and Hoang. In their response, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they point out that the closest GMC is too far away for a hydrogen iceberg to survive the trip (due to the heat generated by cosmic collisions) and would probably not even survive an exit from a GNC. Loeb admits that, while this knocks ‘hydrogen iceberg’ off the “What’ is ‘Oumuamua?” list, we still don’t know for certain what it is. Fortunately, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO) is scheduled to become operational next year and he believes it will detect “one ‘Oumuamua-like object per month.” If they can’t figure out what it is with that kind of data, they need to turn in their astrophysicist club membership cards.
‘Oumuamua as alien technology disguised in a crust of space debris – proposed by Loeb in 2019 – was never disproved, just pushed down on the list of possibilities. With hydrogen iceberg joining the “Nope” list, it can move up again until the VRO collects more data or a human spaceship launched in time to catch ‘Oumuamua before it leaves the solar system.
Place your bets on your favorite now.
All related videos, selected and posted by peter2011
Hey guys, hope you all are having a great weekend. I'm just chilling at my computer and found a few things that seem significant to me and hopefully it will be significant to you too. I found a structure on Mars. There is a window in it, even a doorway if you add much more light, but the door is only about 15% visible. Near the structure is a face wearing a Aztec animal like mask. I've seen this before in faces on Mars, its nothing new. The thing that made me excited was the white fungus seen growing under the rock. Its round and tube-like...a plant stemming out to find more space to grow. People say its impossible to discover life or evidence of life on other planets...but its what I do on a daily basis. Everything seems impossible until you put forth a little effort into it. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Drone caught Fastwalker speeding over Entre Ríos Province, Argentina
Drone caught Fastwalker speeding over Entre Ríos Province, Argentina
Anew drone footage shows one of the mysterious fastwalkers flying through our skies without we seeing them with the naked eye. The drone camera accidentally recorded the fastwalker moving at an incredible speed over Villa Valle María, Entre Ríos Province, Argentina on August 22, 2020.
The drone at that time was 400 meters high.and the video has been shot by Alan Gerstner in 1080p (Full HD) at 50 frames per second.
“Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.
The fastwalker is marked with a yellow circle, in slow motion and in the last part of the video with zoom. The right image above has been edited and shows specific details of the fastwalker.
Nearly 4,000 light-years away, there’s a star called VY Canis Majoris. It is, in a word, huge. It’s 270,000 times as bright as the Sun, and if you plunked it down in the middle of our solar system, it would burn Saturn.
VY Canis Majoris is a hypergiant star. And perhaps it is no surprise that there’s a tech startup humbly eponymizing it: Hypergiant Industries, a company that aims, its website explains, to be “the guiding light that solves humanity’s most challenging problems.”
Hypergiant was founded just two years ago, in 2018, but the company has already worked with the likes of Booz Allen Hamilton, Shell, NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Department of Homeland Security. The company spun up so quickly in part because it didn’t just build from scratch. It fused already-extant elements: buying image-analysis companies, investing in AI developers, and scooping up space technology, in the service of delivering on its slogan: “Tomorrowing today.”
That all sounds pretty legit: Serious government agencies, serious firms, serious fortune, and Fortune 500. And that clout is probably part of why Hypergiant’s R&D division can, without risking too much blowback, now take a risk on something farther-out: UFO research. This may actually be more grounded, and profitable, than it sounds.
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Hypergiant was founded by CEO Ben Lamm, a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous companies to big names like Zynga and Accenture. This company, though, he intends to hang on to.
Once Lamm decided he wanted to start Hypergiant, he said in an interview, he and his team started brainstorming where AI could still make a big difference. They settled on three main areas: infrastructure, like supply chains and logistics; defense; and space.
On the list of those projects on the company’s website, though, the new UFO endeavor isn’t listed. The company’s website does list some projects as “redacted,” however.
But Lamm does talk about UFOs, though he calls them UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It’s the term insiders and the government have introduced to ditch the baggage that the decades-old “UFO” has amassed. If you look at the intersections Hypergiant’s three main interests, says Lamm, “UAPs are the X at the cross center.”
He’s interested in finding out whether those UAP come from here, or out there. “The question of whether we’re alone in the universe is kind of like ‘Is the Earth flat?’” he says (“no” being the answer to both, in his mind).
The US government has recently vocalized its interest in UFOs: the Navy has crafted new guidelines for soldiers to report sightings; Congresspeople have gotten classified briefings; officials speak of strange stuff in the sky as an imposing national-security threat.
Notably, there’s no evidence that directly supports the interpretation that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin. In fact, signs point in a different direction: the Navy has said that UAP sightings are on the rise “consistent with the wide proliferation and availability of inexpensive unmanned aerial systems,” which are just cheap drones. Military definitions of “UAP” include objects that are simply unauthorized, not necessarily unidentified.
Lamm accepts that the phenomena might just be earthly technology, and he wants Hypergiant to help find whatever truth is out there.
“If this is a brilliant lady and guy who build insane technology in a garage in Iowa, we should know about that,” he says. “Regardless of what the UAP is and whether it has a terrestrial origin or not, I think it’s important for people’s safety.”
Hypergiant’s research trajectory homes in on exactly what UAP investigators have never nabbed: hard data collected in a systematic way. In this case, data largely from Earth-watching satellites.
The company plans to scrutinize that data with software it’s developing called CONTACT: Contextually Organized Non Terrestrial Active Capture Tool. Although it’s still in early stages, it will, the company hopes, burrito together adapted versions of Hypergiant’s existing tools, like the Disaster Mapping System, and new ones, to parse orbital and aerial images in search of Anomalies.
In its future final form, CONTACT will analyze 3-dimensional satellite data. Or ”volumetric” information, that reveals not just where a craft is in terms of its latitude, longitude, and altitude. CONTACT will spot the differences between satellite images and throw up a flag if, say, a mothership flies into a field of view at noon when it wasn’t there yesterday, and then determine whether it’s actually just a jet at a weird angle.
For that task, the team is developing a neural network that can recognize known aircraft. “This is xyz helicopter,” says Lamm. “This is xyz Raptor. This is a Boeing 737.” Those go in the digital trash.
To help train these aircraft-spotting algorithms, Hypergiant is creating a siphon that sucks up public information about creepy sky sightings that people think are unidentified and tags them with locations and times. The software will then dive into satellite and drone archives, gather images of the right regions and hours, and use computer vision to find fliers. After comparing whatever it finds against known airline flight paths, and screening out all the Boeings, the researchers will use what’s left as training data, to help AI identify UAP in future observations.
Hypergiant positions CONTACT as a way to investigate cosmic mysteries: to toss out terrestrial knowns in search of possible extraterrestrial unknowns. But the tool would be equally adept at identifying terrestrial unknowns: experimental drones, and advanced military aircraft tests, for example. Because of this, Lamm believes that CONTACT would be of keen interest to officials with extremely earthly concerns. “It’s highly valuable to big defense contractors, the Air Force, radar operators,” says Lamm.
If things go well, which they often don’t in space, Hypergiant engineers will start gathering their own data. On a rocket scheduled to launch in March, Hypergiant will send up its first instrument that can take 3-D observations, in the form of a payload piggybacked on a larger satellite. Data should start to rain down in April or May.
Assuming that works, the first satellite of Lamm’s 30+ orbiter constellation will go up in the fall, on the Cygnus NG-14 and SpaceX SpX-21 missions. And then, presumably, the other 29 or so. And then, perhaps, the startup will data that will illuminate what we talk about when we talk about UAP, UFOs, or whatever acronyms someone comes up with later. To see whether or not all of that happens, we’ll have to wait till today becomes tomorrow.
Luis Elizondo, former head head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), will join us to talk about recent developments. We’ll discuss the Department Of Defense’s announcement of the creation of a UAP Task Force, his History channel show Unidentified, the history of inaccurate statements made about him by the DoD and more.
Has the Biblical Moses Been Identified in Secular Egyptian Records? READ LATER
Has the Biblical Moses Been Identified in Secular Egyptian Records?
Moses was a prophet and a leader according to Abrahamic religions, but many scholars view him as a legendary figure rather than a real historic person. They do concede that a Moses-like figure could have existed in history, so is it possible to track this person down through historic records? It is the view of this writer that this is very possible and that in fact the Moses figure can be traced as that of the primary confidant of none other than Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. The trail begins with Th Exodus.
The Exodus and Moses Birth
What is the date of the Exodus ? To find Moses in the Egyptian records, the first requirement is to fix the date of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt.
If we use the Bible as our primary source, we know that this occurred during the ‘ New Kingdom ’ period of Egypt, when the powerful Egyptian families of the south reasserted themselves and drove out the Hyksos invaders , who had been entrenched in the power centers of northern Egypt for over 100 years.
The Hyksos’ stay in Egypt is known in history as the ‘Second Intermediate Period’. However, there is a difference of opinion among biblical scholars as to when, during the New Kingdom, the Exodus occurred. So, can we find anything to help us pin it down?
If one accepts the biblical dating of Solomon’s time , we know that he started building his famous temple in 960 BC, and the text of 1 Kings 6 v1 states that this was 480 years since the Exodus . Thus, we can fix a date for the Exodus of 1440 BC, when Moses was 80 years old. This would mean that he was born around 1520 BC and is an adult in the court between 1500 and 1480 BC.
Where Does the Name Moses Come From?
1500 – 1480 BC is the time of the pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut, and she had a close confidant, described by the well-known Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley in her book on Hatshepsut, as the ‘Greatest of the Great’.
The father of Hatshepsut was Thutmose l , and his name means ‘son of Thoth’, the god of wisdom, ‘mose’ meaning ‘son’. This is a common use of the word ‘mose’ as in ‘Ra meeses’, son of the sun god Ra, etc.
The biblical text tells us that it was the pharaoh’s daughter who named Moses. Exodus 2 v 10 states that, “she called him Moses because she said, ‘I drew him out of the water’”.
But we will not find a Prince Moses in the court in Egypt because another bible reference, Hebrews 11 v 24, states that “ Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter”.
Instead, we find that the close confidant of the queen is a man called ‘ Senenmut’. This appears to be a unique name, and one of its meanings is ‘mother’s brother’. Hatshepsut was born in the early 1530s, so they were close in age, so such a name makes sense.
Why Would the Royal Heiress Adopt a Slave Child?
If Hatshepsut is the woman who rescued and adopted Moses, what would make a woman of such high standing adopt a slave child? After her mother, Hatshepsut was the highest woman in the land, and such a woman would not consider saving the life of a slave child, let alone adopt him as her son. But when we look at the past, it is hard for us to remember that the people we are observing are just like us. They have thoughts and feelings like us, and Hatshepsut, at the time she found the abandoned baby in the basket, was a little girl, with the instincts to protect the helpless that we see so often in children. The text of Exodus 2 v 6 says “she saw the child, he was crying, and she took pity on him”.
Hatshepsut knew that he was a Hebrew child, as the rest of the verse tells us. But she was too young to look ahead and understand the enormity of her action. Almost immediately she must have formed an attachment to him, and as he grew the attachment grew, and her loyalty to him would alter the course of her life.
So, What Do We Know of Hatshepsut?
We know that Hatshepsut married her brother, Thutmose II, becoming his ‘Great Royal Wife’, his principal queen. She bears him two daughters but no sons and, following his death after a reign of only 13 years, his son by a harem woman is made the pharaoh, becoming Thutmose III .
This new pharaoh is an infant and Hatshepsut is made regent. She is effectively the ruler of the land, holding all the power already, and so it seems odd to Egyptologists that after just two years she makes herself pharaoh.
Did she have ambitions to put her adopted son on the throne? This she could do if she were pharaoh, but not if she were only regent. She reigns as the senior pharaoh, jointly with Thutmose III for 22 successful years, until her death.
She rules the country well. She sets up trading expeditions with the lands south of Egypt. She keeps a firm grip on Nubia, Egypt’s southern neighbor from which vast resources are acquired, including gold, cattle, slaves, and soldiers. She carries out extensive building works, both in Waset, the ancient name for Luxor, and around the country.
Life-sized statue of Hatshepsut. She is shown wearing the nemes-headcloth and shendyt-kilt, which are both traditional for an Egyptian king. The statue is more feminine, given the body structure.
She extends the Temple of Amun in Waset, erecting 4 huge obelisks in his honor, two of which are still there, one still standing. It bears engravings as clear as they were when it was erected 3,500 years ago, reading – “Raised for the glory my father Amun that I may be given life”. She builds a magnificent mortuary temple for herself , where the gods are honored, known as the Temple of Deir el Bahri, which still stands and is visited by thousands of tourists every year.
What Happened to Hatshepsut’s Memory After Her Death?
Hatshepsut ruled her country well and was buried honorably, probably with her father Thutmose l in tomb KV 20, a tomb she had built for a double burial.
After the death of his stepmother, Thutmose III continued his long reign of over 50 years, spending much of that time campaigning in the Levant, defeating the power of the Hittites to the northwest and the Mittani to the northeast and bringing the wealthy city states of Canaan firmly under Egyptian control. He is known as the ‘Napoleon of Egypt’ for his success as a military man.
But 30 years after her death, all records of Hatshepsut came under attack. Her statues were removed from the temples, smashed and buried in a pit, and her reliefs were excised from the walls of the temples. In subsequent years, Hatshepsut’s name was omitted from the King Lists , a thing done to no other pharaoh except the great heretic pharaoh Akenaten but not to the one previous female pharaoh Sobekneferu who reigned briefly at the end of the 12th Dynasty.
Removing all record of Hatshepsut’s name was intended, by the Egyptians, as the ultimate punishment, known as ‘damnatio memoriae’. All records of a person removed from history as if they had never lived resulted in the death of their soul for eternity. This effectively removed Hatshepsut from Egyptian history until all memory of her and why she had been so hated was lost.
She was forgotten for over 1,000 years, until vague references to her were found by the priest Manetho in 300 BC when he was asked by the Greeks in power at that time to search out and list the pharaohs of Egyptian history. He found references to a female pharaoh called Amensis, who was identified by later Egyptologists as Hatshepsut, and recorded her as the fifth pharaoh of the New Kingdom Dynasty, but nothing more was known of her.
It was thought that Hatshepsut’s mummy had been lost, but it has recently been identified lying abandoned in the tomb of her royal nurse Sitre, tomb KV 60. It was identified by a tooth fragment known to belong to Hatshepsut, and the mummy appeared to have been left without ceremony, perhaps in haste to hide it from those who would have destroyed it. The Egyptians believed that the preservation of the body was essential to survival in the afterlife, hence the lengths they went to, to preserve them. It was the ultimate punishment to destroy a person’s body.
So, Who Would Have Tried to Remove Hatshepsut From History?
The action against Hatshepsut’s (and Senemut’s) memory occurs either late in the reign of Thutmose III, when his son Amenhotep II was sharing the throne, or after Thutmose’s death, when Amenhotep II was reigning alone. It seems therefore to be Amenhotep II who is responsible for this destruction.
He would be at the correct time to see the return of Moses demanding the release of the Hebrew slaves. The story of the Exodus describes great hardship for Egypt, and one can understand Amenhotep’s fury against both Hatshepsut and Senenmut and wishing to destroy their memory. Being wiped out of history for the Egyptians was tantamount to eternal damnation.
When Were Hatshepsut’s Statues Discovered and What Did They Reveal?
During the 1800s, wealthy gentlemen such as James Breasted went to Egypt specifically with the hope of finding evidence to prove the biblical record . These men effectively established the science of Egyptology.
But at that time, the statues of Hatshepsut still lay buried in the pit where they were thrown 30 years after her death. They remained there undiscovered until found by Herbert Winlock an American Egyptologist employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Boston, United States in 1927, by which time the world at large was no longer interested in trying to prove the Bible. But not only was a hoard of statues of Hatshepsut discovered just east of the first court of her mortuary temple at Deir el Bahri. Another pit was found, containing over 20 hard stone statues of Senenmut, a huge number for a non-royal. In fact, to date, 26 hard stone statues of Senenmut have been identified which causes Egyptologists to wonder what was it about this man that he was given such status.
Kneeling statue of Senenmut, Chief Steward of Queen Hatshepsut.
The first thing to confront us when looking at the records of Senenmut are the many beautiful statues of him as a young lad holding Hatshepsut’s elder daughter, the Princess Neferure . She is there wrapped in his cloak as a baby as he sits on the ground.
He is holding her in his arms the way a woman would hold a child. In some examples he sits on a chair holding her on his lap. Some are of him standing holding Neferure as a toddler, but altogether they show a level of intimacy between the two of them, as we would have in photos taken of our children together.
He is said to be the tutor to Neferure, but statues of a royal child being held like this had never been made before this date. And this is breaking protocol because a non-royal is not allowed to touch a royal child in this way.
And we know that Senenmut is not royal because he names his parents in one of his tombs, and they have no titles at all, showing that they are of humble origin. But the extraordinary thing about Senenmut is that he is treated as a royal.
He has two beautiful tombs built for himself, one, TT 353 has the oldest known star chart, a work of great expertise, on the ceiling. And this tomb is actually within the sacred precinct of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple. This is a sacred space and to have Senenmut’s tomb in such a place, sacred in itself, but also the personal space of the pharaoh, shows a degree of closeness between them that is shocking, unless there is an explanation for it.
The other tomb TT 71 has decorations described by the Egyptologist Peter Dorman in the book ‘ Hatshepsut from Queen to Pharaoh’ , page 131 as being clearly done “by artists from the royal ateliers”. Dorman also dismisses the suggestion that Senenmut may have been Hatshepsut’s lover. In this tomb TT 71, a sarcophagus belonging to Senenmut was found. It is made of quartzite, a material only allowed to be used by the royals.
We know that Moses neither dies nor is buried in Egypt. And Senenmut is not buried in either of his tombs but disappears from Egyptian records.
Besides the statues of Senenmut holding the infant princess, there are many statues made of him making offerings to the gods. These statues were made to stand in the presence of the gods, and again, it is not permitted for a non-royal to enter the presence of the gods; having your statue there was the equivalent of you being there in person.
Here again he is treated as a royal. And all these statues are of a very young man, so it must be Hatshepsut who ordered these statues to be made. To be in the presence of the gods was a very favored position, because you would receive the continual blessings of the gods.
We also find a number of reliefs carved in the most sacred space of all in the Deir el Bahri Temple, in the sanctuary of Amun itself. One is even carved in the back wall of the sanctuary, where the ceremonial boat which carried the idol of Amun was placed overnight before its return journey to Waset. For the images of a common citizen to be placed in such a sacred space, breaks every rule in the book, but Hatshepsut must have done this, and done it because Senenmut was the son she had adopted, and she was ambitious for him to rise high in Egypt.
During the course of his years at the court of Hatshepsut, Senenmut is acknowledged by experts in Egyptology, to have held many of the highest titles in the land, showing that he truly was the ‘Greatest of the Great’, in Hatshepsut’s court.
Senemut’s high standing in the court during the reign of Hatshepsut, coupled with him being wiped from the Egyptian historical narrative, and the correlation between the biblical and Egyptian dating, would suggest therefore that he was the person we know from the Bible as Moses.
Having discovered the story of Hatshepsut and Senenmut, I decided to present it as an historical novel. It was published in October 2018 by Mirador. It is called ‘ The King and her children’ and is available from Waterstones and Amazon.
Top image: Moses crossing the Red Sea. Source: Davy Cheng / Adobe Stock.
Thunderstorms on Jupiter are so strong that ammonia-rich hail known as "mushballs" may fall from the sky.
New observations from NASA's Juno spacecraftat the gas giant planet could have implications for our understanding of giant planet atmospheres in general, which are largely made of gas and are subject to much higher pressures than what we are familiar with on Earth.
These observations also suggest that Jupiter has "shallow lightning", which happens in clouds containing ammonia and water. That's quite different than on Earth, where lightning originates in water clouds, according to a NASA statement.
This illustration uses data from NASA's Juno spacecraft to depict electrical storms on Jupiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Heidi N. Becker/Koji Kuramura)
"Juno's close flybys of the cloud tops allowed us to see something surprising – smaller, shallower flashes – originating at much higher altitudes in Jupiter's atmosphere than previously assumed possible," Heidi Becker, Juno's radiation monitoring investigation lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in the same statement. Becker is also lead author of a new paper in Nature, one of three new studies describing Juno's work.
Thunderstorms on Jupiter and Earth do have one thing in common: these natural phenomena move water about in the atmospheres of both planets. When NASA's Voyager spacecraft first spotted lightning at Jupiter in 1979, it was thought that both planets had similar kinds of lightning.
This infographic shows the evolutionary process of “shallow lightning” and "mushballs" on Jupiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/CNRS)
Voyager spotted lightning in Jupiter's cloud tops, which suggested the phenomenon originated in deep water clouds. Juno's new observations of nighttime flashes on Jupiter, however, reveal a more subtle story.
On Jupiter, the thunderstorms are thought to form about 31 miles (50 km) below the visible bands and storms on the planet, where temperatures are close to the freezing point of water. Some of these storms are so powerful that they whisk crystal water-ice into the planet's upper atmosphere.
"At these altitudes, the ammonia acts like an antifreeze, lowering the melting point of water ice and allowing the formation of a cloud with ammonia-water liquid," Becker added in the same statement. "In this new state, falling droplets of ammonia-water liquid can collide with the upgoing water-ice crystals and electrify the clouds. This was a big surprise, as ammonia-water clouds do not exist on Earth."
The shallow lightning may also show why ammonia appears to be missing (or depleted) from Jupiter's atmosphere, and why ammonia appears in different concentrations in Jupiter's atmosphere.
"Previously, scientists realized there were small pockets of missing ammonia, but no one realized how deep these pockets went or that they covered most of Jupiter," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in the same statement.
"We were struggling to explain the ammonia depletion with ammonia-water rain alone," Bolton added, "but the rain couldn't go deep enough to match the observations. I realized a solid, like a hailstone, might go deeper and take up more ammonia. When Heidi discovered shallow lightning, we realized we had evidence that ammonia mixes with water high in the atmosphere, and thus the lightning was a key piece of the puzzle."
The "mushballs" and depleted ammonia are described further in work published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets in two parts, available here and here. When ice crystals combine with ammonia (a plentiful substance in Jupiter's atmosphere), the ammonia creates an "antifreeze" effect and changes the ammonia from ice to liquid.
When the mushballs fall into Jupiter's lower atmosphere, they drag down ammonia and water with them before eventually evaporating in the warmer temperatures. "That explains why we don't see much of it in these places with Juno's microwave radiometer," Tristan Guillot, a Juno co-investigator from the University of Côte d'Azur in Nice, France, and lead author of the two-part paper on ammonia and the mushballs, said in the NASA statement.
"As it turned out, the ammonia isn't actually missing; it is just transported down while in disguise, having cloaked itself by mixing with water," Bolton added. "The solution is very simple and elegant with this theory: When the water and ammonia are in a liquid state, they are invisible to us until they reach a depth where they evaporate – and that is quite deep."
Juno arrived at Jupiter almost exactly four years ago, on July 4, 2016, to better understand the origin and evolution of the planet. Juno's findings not only inform our understanding of solar system planets but also gas giant exoplanets, especially those of a similar size and formation history to planets in our solar system.
Editor's Note:This article was updated with new information, video and images from NASA.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.
In space, nobody can hear you scream, but with the right equipment, it is possible to detect a roar. That's what scientists discovered back in 2006 when they began to look for distant signals in the universe using a complex instrument fixed to a huge balloon that was sent to space. The instrument was able to pick up radio waves from the heat of distant stars, but what came through that year was nothing short of astounding.
As the instrument listened from a height of about 23 miles (37 kilometers), it picked up a signal that was six-times louder than expected by cosmologists. Because it was too loud to be early stars and far greater than the predicted combined radio emission from distant galaxies, the powerful signal caused great puzzlement. And scientists still don't know what is causing it, even today. What's more, it could hamper efforts to search for signals from the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.
The mission's science goals — as ARCADE floated high above Earth's atmosphere, free of interference from our planet — were to find heat from the first generation of stars, search for particle physics relics from the Big Bang and observe the formation of the first stars and galaxies. It accomplished these goals by scanning 7% of the night sky for radio signals, since distant light becomes radio waves as it loses energy over distance.
ARCADE was able to make "absolutely calibrated zero-level" measurements, which means it was measuring the actual brightness of something in real physical terms rather than relative terms. This was different from typical radio telescopes, which observe and contrast two points in the sky. By looking at all of the "light" and comparing it to a blackbody source, ARCADE was able to see the combination of many dim sources. It was then that the intensity of one particular signal became apparent, albeit over many months.
"While it might make a good movie to see us surprised when we see the light meter pop over to a value six-times what was expected, we actually spent years getting ready for our balloon flight and a very busy night taking data," said NASA scientist Dale J. Fixsen. "It then took months of data analysis to first separate instrumental effects from the signal and then to separate galactic radiation from the signal. So the surprise was gradually revealed over months." That said, the impact was still huge.
Since then, scientists have looked to see where the radiation is coming from while looking to describe the properties of the signal. The latter became apparent rather quickly.
"It's a diffuse signal coming from all directions, so it is not caused by any one single object," said Al Kogut, who headed the ARCADE team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The signal also has a frequency spectrum, or 'color,' that is similar to radio emission from our own Milky Way galaxy."
Scientists call the signal "radio synchrotron background" — background being an emission from many individual sources and blending together into a diffuse glow. But because the "space roar" is caused by synchrotron radiation, a type of emission from high-energy charged particles in magnetic fields, and because every source has the same characteristic spectrum, pinpointing the origin of this intense signal is difficult.
"It has been known since the late 1960s that the combined radio emission from distant galaxies should form a diffuse radio background coming from all directions," Kogut told All About Space in an email. "The space roar is similar to this expected signal, but there doesn't seem to be six-times more galaxies in the distant universe to make up the difference, which could point to something new and exciting as the source."
The Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE) mission's balloon is inflated prior to launch (Image credit: NASA)
Is the space roar coming from the Milky Way?
Whether or not this source is inside or outside the Milky Way is under debate.
"There are good arguments why it cannot be coming from within the Milky Way, and good arguments for why it cannot be coming from outside the galaxy," Kogut said.
One reason it probably isn't coming from within our galaxy is because the roar doesn't seem to follow the spatial distribution of Milky Way radio emission. But nobody is saying for certain that the signal isn't from a source closer to home — only that the smart money is on it coming from elsewhere.
"I wouldn't quite say that scientists have largely ruled out the possibility of the radio synchrotron background originating from our galaxy," said Jack Singal, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Richmond in Virginia, who recently led a workshop on the matter. "However, I would say that this explanation does seem to be less likely.
"The primary reason is that it would make our galaxy completely unlike any similar spiral galaxy, which as far as we can tell do not exhibit the sort of giant, spherical, radio-emitting halo extending far beyond the galactic disk that would be required. There are other issues as well, such as that it would require a complete rethinking of our models of the galactic magnetic field."
Fixsen agrees wholeheartedly. "In other spiral galaxies there is a close relation between the infrared and radio emission, even in small sections of these others," he said. "So, if it is from a halo around our galaxy, it would make the Milky Way a weird galaxy, while in most other respects it seems like a 'normal' spiral galaxy."
For those reasons, experts think the signal is primarily extragalactic in origin. "It would make it the most interesting photon background in the sky at the moment because the source population is completely unknown," Singal said. But since the universe is so vast this doesn't exactly narrow things down that much, which is why scientists have been working hard to come up with multiple theories for the signal's source.
American physicist David Brown, for example, said the space roar could be "the first great empirical success of M-theory," a broad mathematical framework encompassing string theory. "There might be a Fredkin-Wolfram automaton spread across multitudes of alternate universes, yielding recurrent physical time with endless repetitions of all possible physical events," Brown wrote on the FQXi Community blog. What this supposes is that the early universe had much more real matter than today, accounting for the powerful radio signal.
The space roar could be "the first great empirical success of M-theory," a broad mathematical framework encompassing string theory.
- Physicist David Brown
But if that is too far out, there are other theories to get your teeth into. "Radio astronomers have looked at the sky and have identified a couple of types of synchrotron sources," Fixsen said.
Synchrotron radiation is easy to make, he said. "All you need is energetic particles and a magnetic field, and there are energetic particles everywhere, produced by supernovas, stellar winds, black holes, even OB stars," which are hot, massive stars of spectral type O or early-type B. "Intergalactic space seems to be filled with very hot gas, so if intergalactic magnetic fields were strong enough [stronger than predicted], they could generate smooth synchrotron radiation," he said.
It is also known that synchrotron radiation is associated with star production. "This also generates infrared radiation, hence the close correlation," Fixsen said. "But perhaps the first stars generated synchrotron radiation yet, before metals were produced, they did not generate very much infrared radiation. Or perhaps there is some process that we haven't thought of yet."
So what does this leave us with? "Possible sources include either diffuse large-scale mechanisms such as turbulently merging clusters of galaxies, or an entirely new class of heretofore unknown incredibly numerous individual sources of radio emission in the universe," Singal said. "But anything in that regard is highly speculative at the moment, and some suggestions that have been raised include annihilating dark matter, supernovae of the first generations of stars and many others."
Some scientists have suggested gases in large clusters of galaxies could be the source, although it's unlikely ARCADE's instruments would have been able to detect radiation from any of them. Similarly, there is a chance that the signal was detected from the earliest stars or that it is originating from lots of otherwise dim radio galaxies, the accumulative effect of which is being picked up. But if this was the case then they'd have to be packed incredibly tightly, to the point that there is no gap between them, which appears unlikely.
Could gases from large clusters of galaxies be the source of the space roar? (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS)
How the 13-year-old mystery will be solved
"Of course, there is also the possibility that there has been a coincidence of errors among ARCADE and the other measurements to date that have mismeasured the level of the radio synchrotron background," Singal said. "This does seem unlikely, given that these are very different instruments measuring in quite different frequency bands."
Whatever the signal is, it's also causing issues when it comes to detecting other space objects. As NASA has pointed out in the past, the earliest stars are hidden behind the space roar, and that is making them more difficult to detect. It's as if the universe is giving with one hand and taking with another, but to have uncovered something so unusual is immensely exciting. When you're ruling out an origin from primordial stars and known radio sources such as gas in the outermost halo of our galaxy, it's a mystery any scientist would savour with relish.
"Beyond that, I think we may need some brilliant new origin hypothesis that nobody has thought of yet."
- Astrophysicist Jack Singal
In order for scientists to finally resolve this 13-year conundrum, more research and evidence is sorely needed. As it stands, there is a debate over sending ARCADE back up given the advent of new technology, and given its precise set of instruments, immersed in more than 500 gallons of ultra-cold liquid helium to make them even more sensitive, there would certainly be no harm in doing so.
But there are also new projects emerging which could help. "One of them will use the 300-foot [91 meter] radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, to map the radio sky to higher precision than before," Kogut said. "Perhaps this will shed some light on the mystery."
Singal certainly hopes so. He is working on the Green Bank Telescope project, making use of the largest clear-aperture radio telescope in the world to measure the level of the background as a primary, rather than ancillary goal. It will do this using a definitive, purpose-built, absolutely calibrated zero-level measurement taken at the megahertz (MHz) frequencies where the radio sky is brightest. (A megahertz is equal to a million hertz.)
"This measurement is currently being developed by a team which I am on, utilizing custom instrumentation which will be mounted on the telescope," Singal explained. There is also going to be another measurement attempt, this one looking to measure or further limit the so-called "anisotropy," or variation of the radio synchrotron background, again at the MHz frequencies where it dominates.
"That is not its absolute level, but rather the small differences from place to place in the sky," Singal said. "With some collaborators, I am trying a first attempt at that using the Low-Frequency Array [LOFAR] in The Netherlands. Both of these measurements in concert can help nail down whether the radio synchrotron background is primarily galactic or extragalactic in origin. Beyond that, I think we may need some brilliant new origin hypothesis that nobody has thought of yet."
Additional resources:
Read more about the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE) mission from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Researchers have discovered a giant atmospheric wave-like phenomenon in Venus’ lower atmosphere, unlike anything else seen in the solar system. Evidence shows it has existed since at least 1983, but went completely undetected until now.
Sequence of infrared images of the lower clouds on Venus, showing a consistent pattern of a planetary-scale cloud discontinuity. This type of giant atmospheric wave has never been before on any other planets in our solar system.
Scientists have announced something new and unexpected: a giant atmospheric “wave” or disruption in Venus’ lower atmosphere. It’s unlike anything else seen in the solar system. The researchers say it has been rapidly moving at about 30 miles (50 km) above the planet’s surface for at least 35 years. It went completely undetected until now.
The amazing discovery is reported in a new peer-reviewed study, published May 27, 2020, in Geophysical Research Letters.
Venus is the planet next-inward to the sun from Earth. It’s completely covered by thick clouds. These clouds are so dense that we can’t peer beneath them to view Venus’ surface. For this reason, the lower atmosphere and surface of Venus have remained largely mysterious. We know the clouds of Venus consist mostly of carbon dioxide, with droplets of sulphuric acid. Strong wind patterns have been observed before in the atmosphere of Venus in ultraviolet and infrared light.
The new atmospheric feature – a giant wall of acidic clouds – is different from previous observations in part because it’s the first huge atmospheric wave found at the lower cloud level in Venus’ atmosphere, at altitudes between 29.5 and 35 miles (47.5 and 56.5 km). This wall of clouds is massive, extending as far as 4,700 miles (7,500 km) across the equator of Venus, from 30 degrees north to 40 degrees south.
According to the researchers, it rotates around the planet in five days, at about 204 miles per hour (328 kph). It’s been doing that since at least 1983.
The Japanese space agency JAXA’s Venus orbiter Akatsuki made the discovery. The phenomenon looked like an atmospheric wave, only much larger than what’s typically seen. It was found by Akatsuki as the spacecraft acquired detailed infrared images of Venus’ nightside, studying the mid and lower layers of the planet’s atmosphere.
Animation showing Venus’s lower clouds (about 30 miles/ 50 km above the surface) in infrared light. Bright clouds are more transparent to thermal radiation emitted from the ground than darker clouds.
Pedro Machado – of the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, part of the University of Lisbon in Portugal – said in a statement:
If this happened on Earth, this would be a frontal surface at the scale of the planet, and that’s incredible. Under the follow-up campaign, we went back to images I took in the infrared in 2012 with the Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands, and we found precisely the same disruption.
The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences has had a long-running research program studying Venus’ winds. It also contributed follow-up observations with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, coordinated with the new observations from Akatsuki.
Huge cloud patterns have been observed before in Venus’ atmosphere, such as the Y wave, a dark Y-shaped structure found in the upper atmosphere that covers nearly the whole planetary disk. It is only visible when observed in ultraviolet light. There is also a 6,200-mile-long (10,000-km-long) bow-shaped stationary wave, also in the upper clouds layers, thought to be caused by the planet’s huge mountain ranges.
Meanwhile, in visible light, Venus’ dense atmosphere looks very bland.
Example of undulations behind the atmospheric discontinuity on the night side of Venus on April 15, 2016.
Finding this phenomenon in the lower atmosphere is interesting, not only because it wasn’t noticed before, but also because this region in the atmosphere of Venus is thought to be responsible for the planet’s hellish greenhouse effect. This effect causes the heat of the sun to be retained near Venus’ surface. It keeps the surface at a sizzling temperature of 869 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead. The dynamics of Venus’ atmosphere are still not well understood overall, so planetary-scale waves such as this might help scientists better understand how the planet’s surface and atmosphere interact.
Since the disruption cannot be observed in the ultraviolet images sensing the top of the clouds at about 43-mile (70-km) height, confirming its wave nature is of critical importance. We would have finally found a wave transporting momentum and energy from the deep atmosphere and dissipating before arriving at the top of the clouds. It would therefore be depositing momentum precisely at the level where we observe the fastest winds of the so-called atmospheric super-rotation of Venus, whose mechanisms have been a long-time mystery.
Ultraviolet image of the Y wave in Venus’ upper atmosphere, from the Pioneer Venus Orbiter on February 26, 1979.
This newly discovered cloud front on Venus is essentially meteorological. Basically, we’re talking here about the weather on Venus. The feature appears to be unique; it’s never been seen before on any other planets in the solar system. It’s therefore difficult to know for certain what is happening, even though the researchers have devised computer simulations to try to mimic the cloud feature. The mechanisms that can create such a giant and long-lasting atmospheric wave are still unknown.
One possibility is that this atmospheric disruption may be a physical manifestation of a type of Kelvin wave, a class of atmospheric gravity wave that shares some important common features with this disruption. Kelvin waves can maintain their shape over long periods of time, and in this case, propagate in the same direction as Venus’ super-rotating winds. Kelvin waves can also interact with other types of atmospheric waves, such as Rossby waves, which naturally occur as a result of the rotation of the planet. Like Kelvin waves, they can be seen in both atmospheres and oceans. On Venus, they may transport energy from the super-rotation of the atmosphere – where the atmosphere rotates faster than the planet itself – to the equator.
The researchers looked at images of Venus going as far back as 1983. They were able to confirm the presence of the same features that were seen by Akatsuki. But how did this particular – and huge – wind formation go unnoticed for so long? According to Machado:
… we needed access to a large, growing and scattered collection of images of Venus gathered in the recent decades with different telescopes.
Javier Peralta, a team member of the Akatsuki mission who led the new study.
Finding such a large atmospheric phenomenon on Venus, after its being undetected for so long, was a big surprise for scientists. The discovery will help them learn more about the planet’s complex atmosphere and how it interacts with the planet itself.
Bottom line: Researchers have discovered a giant atmospheric wave-like phenomenon in Venus’ lower atmosphere, something not seen anywhere else in the solar system.
An astronaut is reporting a possible UFO sighting from the International Space Station. Plus, Finnish researchers claim they’ve found the elusive cure for a hangover. Richard Southern reports.
A new study suggests that distant stars in our Milky Way galaxy might be orbited by as many as 7 Earth-like planets, in the absence of a gas giant planet like Jupiter.
Artist’s concept of habitable zones – zones in which liquid water can exist – in our solar system in contrast to the Trappist-1 system, about 40 light-years away. The Trappist-1 system has 3 planets in its habitable zone (the green area). Our solar system has just 1, our Earth.
A new computer model developed by astrobiologists at University of California, Riverside suggests that – in the absence of a gas giant planet like Jupiter – some stars in our Milky Way galaxy could have as many as seven Earth-like planets. That’s in contrast to our solar system, which has a Jupiter and only one planet in its habitable zone, our own Earth.
So far, Earth is the only planet in the universe where we know for certain life exists. It’s only logical that life exists elsewhere, though. When astrobiologists talk about other worlds that might host life, they tend to focus on those in the habitable zone, the zone around a star where liquid water can exist. Astrobiologist Stephen Kane has been studying the nearby planetary system system Trappist-1, which caused a sensation when it was discovered this system has at least seven planets, including three Earth-like planets in its habitable zone. Kane said in a statement:
This made me wonder about the maximum number of habitable planets it’s possible for a star to have, and why our star only has one. It didn’t seem fair!
Kane’s team created a computer model simulating planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with each other over millions of years. The researchers found that it’s possible for some stars to support as many as seven planets in the habitable zone. Kane commented:
More than seven, and the planets become too close to each other and destabilize each other’s orbits.
This is Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft in April 2018. Does this giant world prevent our solar system from having more than one inhabited planet?
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Gerald Eichstad/ Sean Doran.
What determines this abundance of planets in a star’s habitable zone? The answer doesn’t lie within the star itself. These scientists said a star like our sun could potentially support six planets with liquid water. But it doesn’t. Why?
One factor is the shape of the planets’ orbits. It helps, these scientists explained, if the planets’ movements in orbit around their star are more circular than, for example, Earth’s orbit. Our planet’s orbit is very nearly circular, but still somewhat elliptical, like a circle someone sat down on. Earth’s elliptical orbit explains why our planet is closest to the sun in early January (Northern Hemisphere winter) and farthest from the sun in early July (Northern Hemisphere summer). A more circular orbit – rather than a more eccentric or irregular orbit – minimizes close contacts between planets in the system and helps maintain stable orbits, these scientists explained. And it makes sense that a stable orbit – a constant distance from a star – would be beneficial to life as it’s evolving. It wouldn’t do to have ice ages coming and going on timescales of hundreds of years, for example – rather than thousands as on our own planet – as you would have on a planet with a highly elliptical 100+-year orbit.
There’s also another big factor in our solar system that has kept more planets from being in our sun’s habitable zone. And that is our solar system’s biggest planet, giant Jupiter. Jupiter has a mass 2 1/2 times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined. Kane explained:
It has a big effect on the habitability of our solar system because it’s massive and disturbs other orbits.
These scientists are the first to point out that the Trappist-1 system is a rarity for earthly astronomers thus far; only a handful of stars are known to have multiple planets in their habitable zones. Moving forward, Kane plans to search for more stars like Trappist-1, surrounded entirely by smaller planets with no big gas giants like Jupiter. He said these stars will be prime targets for direct imaging with NASA telescopes like the one at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Habitable Exoplanet Observatory.
Kane’s study identified one such star – Beta Canum Venaticorum, aka Beta CVn – which is relatively close by at 27 light-years. Because it doesn’t have a Jupiter-like planet, it will be included as one of the stars checked for multiple habitable zone planets, these scientists said.
Bottom line:A new study suggests that some stars could have up to 7 planets in their habitable zones.
In a first, astronomers spotted a space rock turning into a comet
In a first, astronomers spotted a space rock turning into a comet
The process won’t be complete until 2063
Space rocks called centaurs could someday become brilliant comets, like the one shown in this artist’s illustration. Astronomers have spotted a centaur that is expected to become a comet in about four decades.
Like the mythical half-human, half-horse creatures, centaurs in the solar system are hybrids between asteroids and comets. Now, astronomers have caught one morphing from one type of space rock to the other, potentially giving scientists an unprecedented chance to watch a comet form in real time in the decades to come.
“We have an opportunity here to see the birth of a comet as it starts to become active,” says planetary scientist Kat Volk of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The object, called P/2019 LD2, was discovered by the ATLAS telescope in Hawaii in May. Its orbit suggests that it’s a centaur, a class of rocky and icy objects with unstable orbits. Because of that mixed composition and potential to move around the solar system, astronomers have long suspected that centaurs are a missing link between small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and comets that regularly visit the inner solar system (SN: 11/19/94).
These “short-period” comets, which are thought to originate from icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, orbit the sun once a decade or so, and make repeat appearances in Earth’s skies. (Long-period comets, like Halley’s Comet, which visits the inner solar system once a century, probably originate even farther from the sun, in the Oort cloud (SN: 10/25/13).)
All previously found short-period comets were spotted only after they had transitioned into comets (SN:8/6/14). But LD2 just came in from the Kuiper Belt recently and will become a comet in as little as 43 years, Volk and colleagues report August 10 at arXiv.org.
“It’s weird to think that this object should be becoming a comet when I’m retiring,” Volk says.
In 2019, she and colleagues showed that there’s a region of space just beyond Jupiter that they call the “Gateway”. In this area, small planetary objects hang out while warming up and transitioning from outer solar system ice balls to inner solar system comets with their long tails. It’s like a comet incubator, says planetary scientist Gal Sarid of the SETI Institute, who is based in Rockville, Md.
After hearing about LD2, Volk, Sarid and their colleagues simulated thousands of possible trajectories to see where the object had been and where it is going. LD2’s orbit probably took it near Saturn around 1850, and it entered its current orbit past Jupiter after a close encounter with the gas giant in 2017, the team found. The object will leave its present orbit and move in toward the sun in 2063, where heat from the sun will probably sublimate LD2’s volatile elements, giving it a bright cometary tail, the researchers say.
“This will be the first ever comet that we know its history, because we’ve seen it before being a comet,” Sarid says.
The fact that LD2 is fairly new to the inner reaches of the solar system suggests that it’s made of relatively pristine material that has been in the back of the solar system’s freezer for billions of years, unaltered by heat from the sun. That would make it a time capsule of the early solar system. Studying its composition could help planetary scientists learn what the first planets were made of.
The orbital analysis looks “very reasonable,” says Henry Hsieh, a planetary astronomer with the Planetary Science Institute who is based in Honolulu and was not involved in the study. But studying just one transition object is not enough to open the solar system time capsule.
“What we really need to do is study many of these,” he says. “Study this one first, and then study more of them, and figure out whether this object is an outlier or whether we see a consistent picture.” Future sky surveys, like the ones planned using the future Vera Rubin Observatory (SN: 1/10/20), should discover more balls of ice shifting into comets.
Sarid and colleagues think LD2 could be a good target for a spacecraft to visit. NASA has considered sending spacecraft to centaurs, although no missions have been selected for development yet. But considering that LD2 will become a comet in just a few decades, scientists don’t have much time to plan, build and launch a mission to visit it. “The windows are closing,” Sarid says. “We really need to be doing this now.”
August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell
Assyrian soldiers carry beheaded heads of their prisoners as depicted on a wall in the South-West Palace at Nineveh, during the “First” Fall of Neneveh.
Source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / CC BY-SA 4.0
August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell
On this day, 2,632 years ago, the ancient metropolis of Nineveh fell. “ ABC 3 ” is a historiographical text from ancient Babylonia which records August 10th 612 BC as the date of this dramatic occurrence. At that time, Nineveh was the largest city in the world and the capital of Assyria. This all came to an abrupt end when Nabopolassar, the Chaldean king of Babylonia and a central figure in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, siezed Nineveh. This marked what historians know as one of the most shocking events in ancient history: The “First” Fall of Nineveh. The “second” Fall of Nineveh occurred in 2015 with more destruction by ISIS.
The Discovery of Nineveh: A Unparalleled Archaeological Find
Ancient Mesopotamia was a cradle of civilization in the northern part of western Asia’s Fertile Crescent, corresponding to modern Iraq, Kuwait, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and areas along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. In 1839, Paul-Émile Botta of France excavated a series of mounds in the Iraqi desert that led to the incredible discovery of Nineveh, the vast ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia located on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq.
This discovery in mid-19th-century Europe was truly amazing, because it meant that at least one of the ancient cities and cultures mentioned in the Bible actually existed. This gave the Holy Bible a breath of newfound esteem at a time when scientists were demanding the empirical testing of supernatural claims, replacing time worn myths with logic and reason. The discovery of ancient Nineveh changed everything.
Ancient Nineveh: A Royal City Envied Far And Wide
The Assyrian Empire started to become unstable after the death of King Aššurbanipal in 631 BC when the Babylonians ended their independence. Around 627 AD the Babylonian general Nabopolassar defeated the Assyrians in a battle near Babylon and became king, marking the beginning of the Babylonian Empire which lasted until Nineveh was captured by the Persian Cyrus the Great in October 539 AD.
Assyrian military campaign in southern Mesopotamia, 640-620 BC, from an alabaster bas-relief located in the South-West Palace at Nineveh.
Although he had liberated Babylonia, Nabopolassar also wanted destroy its capital cities including the religious center at Aššur, the first Assyrian city, and the administrative center at Nineveh. To prevent this, which would have caused a major shift of power in the Near East, the Egyptians offered military support to Assyria. The Fall of Nineveh Chronicle says that on 25 July 616 AD Nabopolassar defeated an Assyrian force on the banks of the Euphrates to the south of Harran. However, soon after he retreated when an Egyptian army closed on his forces. By at the end of the following year, the Medes, a tribal federation living in modern Iran, seized the moment, amidst all the unrest, and had took control of Nineveh.
This image, taken in April 2017 during a UNESCO mission to Nineveh, which was heavily destroyed and excavated by ISIS in the "second" Fall of Nineveh in 2015.
Nabopolassar tactfully signed a treaty with the Medes king Umakištar (Cyaxares). The Babylonian crown prince Nabû-kudurru-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) is said to have married Amytis, who many historians hold to have been the daughter of Cyaxares' son Astyages. The joint Medes-Babylonian army invaded Nineveh in May 612 AD the city finally fell in July. According to an article on Livius after the suicide of King Sin-šar-iškun, “the looting of Nineveh continued until 10 August, when the Medes finally went home,” and that the fall of Nineveh “shocked the ancient world.” From distant Greece, the poet Phocylides of Miletus reported of the destruction of this ancient city
ISIS soldiers in the Museum of Mosul destroying ancient Nineveh artifacts with sledgehammers in 2015. (Aljazeera / Screenshot)
2015: The “Second” Fall of Nineveh By ISIS Destruction
While Nineveh fell for the first time over 2500 years ago, destruction of the ancient city continued in 2015 when a priceless Assyrian winged bull was demolished at the Nineveh site. An article in The Guardian discussing the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) described the destruction as a “war crime.” At the same time, the terrorist organization attempted to attract a sympathetic audience to gain new recruits in their homeland, while provoking reactions in the West.
A 2015 Aljazeera video shows the destruction of several 7th century artifacts from Nineveh on February 26 2015, when ISIS publicly destroyed the Mosul Museum. Many other artifacts were stolen and put up for sale in foreign markets. However in 2019, the BBC announced that since Iraqi troops recaptured Mosul in 2017, part of the Mosul Museum has been restored and reopened to exhibit contemporary art, while the rest of the museum remains closed “to protect what is left,” said the museum director. If the first Fall of Nineveh was incredible, the second fall of Nineveh was both tragic and disturbing.
Top image: Assyrian soldiers carry beheaded heads of their prisoners as depicted on a wall in the South-West Palace at Nineveh, during the “First” Fall of Neneveh.
Russian astronaut Ivan Vagner got on Twitter and posted a video from the space station. In it are five glowing objects of unknown origin. One leading and four lined up in military formation. Even Ivan states, "In the video, you will see something else, not only the aurora." Ivan give a subtle hint that its aliens...that what he recorded was a fleet of UFOs. He is correct. I made some close up screenshots and one was really focused. The UFOs are colorful, pink purple and green. All calming colors, meaning the aliens can identify the ships on sight. Absolutely amazing confession from a Russian Astronaut. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Fireball Breaks Into Three Over New York State, Aug 20, 2020, UFO Sighting News. MUFON Report.
Fireball Breaks Into Three Over New York State,Aug 20, 2020, UFO Sighting News. MUFON Report.
Date of sighting: August 20, 2020 Location of sighting: Utica, New York, USA Source: MUFON #111080 This bright bering fireball looks like a UFO caught on fire traveling into our atmosphere from space. The object...which is fall downward from the sky, is a single piece and then breaks into three equal parts. Its traveling at 1/10 the speed of a meteor so thats ruled out. Space junk would have been reported, but the Chinese do have a lot of stuff falling apart and burning up entering the atmosphere this year. But since NASA would have reported a warning about it...I would rule out that too. It looks like a UFO...damaged trying to make it back to its alien base to make repairs or it could be an alien ship trying to disguise as a meteor, but at 1/10 the speed...they failed. Aliens in New York...yep, kinda knew that already. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan Eyewitness states:
I'm not sure if these were ufo crafts or fireballs. At first they were all together then split into 3 and all sizes were the same. Recorded on Aug 20 2020 in Utica NY.
They Said it Will Hit on Sunday, September 20, 2020
They Said it Will Hit on Sunday, September 20, 2020
What would we do if we discovered a large asteroid on course to impact Earth? that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees at an Oct. 25, 2016NASA-FEMA tabletop exercise in El Segundo, California.
The drill simulated a possible impact four years from now -- a fictitious asteroid imagined to have been discovered this fall with a 2 percent probability of impact with Earth on Sept. 20, 2020.
The simulated asteroid was initially estimated to be between 300 and 800 feet (100 and 250 meters) in size, with a possibility of making impact anywhere along a long swath of Earth, including a narrow band of area that crossed the entire United States.
In the fictitious scenario, observers continued to track the asteroid for three months using ground-based telescope observations, and the probability of impact climbed to 65 percent.
Then the next observations had to wait until four months later, due to the asteroid's position relative to the sun.
Once observations could resume in May of 2017, the impact probability jumped to 100 percent. By November of 2017, it was simulated that the predicted impact would occur somewhere in a narrow band across Southern California or just off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.
Coincidence or not, but asteroids are getting very close to Earth lately. On August 16, 2020, a car-sized asteroid flew within 2,000 miles over the Pacific Ocean, far east of Australia,, the closest ever recorded.... but NASA missed it!
And what about asteroid called “2018 VP1“, which is about 6 feet diameter. this asteroid will pass within about 300 miles of our planet on November 2, 2020 which is one day before the presidential election.
Of course there are always a lot of speculations and doomsday scenarios on these kind of events, and although an asteroid named 2017 SL16 will pass Earth on September 20, probably nothing will happen that day, but we may wonder whether this so-called “drill” could go live like so many other exercises have in the past?
There's something very strange happening high above South America and the nearby Atlantic Ocean, and NASA is on the case.
Meet the South Atlantic Anomaly, a strange dent in Earth's magnetic field that is growing and splitting. It's been there for decades, but over time the anomaly has slowly changed. Although you'd never notice anything was wrong from the ground, for satellites, changes to the magnetic field that envelopes Earth can be a big deal — hence NASA's interest in the anomaly and its activities.
The connection comes because the magnetic field blocks charged particles spewed out by the sun from reaching Earth. But at the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field is dented, lowering the protective barrier above that part of Earth. The lower barrier means that more radiation bombards satellites as they fly over this region, triggering occasional shutdowns to avoid potential damage to the hardware, according to a NASA statement.
An artist's depiction of Earth's magnetic field, with the sun in the background. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
The International Space Station is one of the many spacecraft that fly through the anomaly, but it carries extra shielding to protect the astronauts who live and work in orbit from radiation. Other spacecraft that fly through the anomaly send NASA valuable observations about how the feature is changing, like the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), which the agency launched last year in part to monitor the weak spot in the field after the retirement of its Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) mission in 2012. Among other changes, those observations have shown that the "dent" is moving westward and splitting in two.
These observations are valuable because of the complexity of studying the magnetic field, which traces its roots to liquid metal moving within Earth's core, then is shaped by a range of phenomena as it ripples out from the center of the planet, according to NASA.
Those interactions mean that more data about changes in the magnetic field can lead to a host of valuable results — not just a better understanding of what the anomaly is doing now in order to warn approaching satellites, but also more nuanced models of what's happening deep inside the Earth, and of course, more accurate predictions of how the anomaly will change into the future.
"Even though the SAA [South Atlantic Anomaly] is slow-moving, it is going through some change in morphology, so it's also important that we keep observing it by having continued missions," Terry Sabaka, a geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. "Because that's what helps us make models and predictions."
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said this week that it has now been officially informed that its Hayabusa2 space capsule – carrying precious dust captured from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Ryugu – is approved for landing in Australia.
Artist’s concept of JAXA’s Hayabusa2 sweeping past Earth, as its sample-return capsule – carrying precious grains from the surface of asteroid Ryugu – plummets to Earth’s surface.
On February 22, 2019, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) touched down briefly on near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryuguand fired a bullet into the asteroid’s surface. The spacecraft collected a sample of dust puffed up during the maneuver, and now the spacecraft – carrying its precious cargo of an asteroid sample within a capsule on board – is headed back to Earth. The spacecraft will sweep past Earth, and the capsule will drop to Earth’s surface via parachute on December 6, 2020. JAXA said in an announcement on August 19, 2020, that it has now been officially informed that the capsule is approved for landing in Australia.
JAXA said:
The Hayabusa2 re-entry capsule will return to Earth in South Australia on December 6, 2020 (Japan Time and Australian Time). The landing site will be the Woomera Prohibited Area. The issuance of the AROLSO [Authorization of Return of Overseas-Launched Space Object] gave a major step forward for the capsule recovery.
Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa2 on June 26, 2018.
Image via JAXA/ University of Tokyo/ Kochi University/ Rikkyo University/ Nagoya University/ Chiba Institute of Technology/ Meiji University/ University of Aizu/ AIST.
Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft captured this image in February 2019, during its ascent after touchdown on asteroid Ryugu. You can see the shadow of Hayabusa2 and a region of the surface of the asteroid apparently discolored by the touchdown.
Replica of the Hayabusa2 sample-return capsule, which measures about 16 inches (40 cm) in diameter. The capsule is scheduled to land, via parachute, in Australia’s Woomera Prohibited Area on December 6, 2020.
Hayabusa2 was launched from Earth on December 3, 2014. The spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid Ryugu on June 27, 2018. The mission follows an earlier JAXA Hayabusa mission (the name means Peregrine falcon), which, in 2010, returned samples from asteroid 25143 Itokawa, the first-ever asteroid to be the target of a sample return mission and the only other mission so far to have returned asteroid samples to Earth.
Hayabusa2 surveyed Ryugu for a year and a half. It left the asteroid with the precious sample safe inside its capsule in November, 2019.
After Hayabusa2 flies past Earth to deliver its sample capsule in late 2020, it is expected to retain 30 kg (66 lb) of xenon propellant, which can be used to extend its service and to fly by new targets to explore. As of August 2020, there are two scenarios under consideration for a mission extension. First, a Venus flyby in 2024 would set up the spacecraft for a November 2029 encounter with a small, quickly spinning near-Earth asteroid called 2001 AV43. During the flyby, Hayabusa2 could also conduct infrared observations of Venus. Alternatively, the spacecraft could be sent toward a rendezvous with another near-Earth asteroid and another fast rotator – 1998 KY26 – in July 2031.
A live webcast showed Hayabusa2 scientists nervously monitoring Hayabusa2’s February 22, 2019 touchdown on distant asteroid Ryugu.
Bottom line: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said this week that it has now been officially informed that its Hayabusa2 space capsule – carrying precious dust from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Ryugu – is approved for landing in Australia. If returned safely as planned on December 6, 2020, this asteroid dust will be only the second asteroid sample ever returned to Earth.
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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.