What Became of the Coneheads?

Throughout history, many cultures have artificially deformed the skulls of babies in order to achieve a flattened or elongated shape which was often associated with the ruling, or elite classes. Examples of artificial cranial deformation have been uncovered in Australia, the Middle East, Europe, Russia and the Americas in ancient times, as well as Oceanic and African tribes in modern times. When examined, most of these skulls exhibit features common to modern skulls, such as 3 cranial plates and sutures as well as a brain size of around 1200-1400 ccm.

On the other hand, some of the large elongated skulls unearthed from a cemetery in Paracas, Peru , possess other anomalous anatomical features such only 2 cranial plates and sutures, as well as a brain capacity of over 1500 cm, which is larger than many skulls today. These skulls, which are between 1500 and 3000 years old, have been described by some alternative researchers as evidence of extra-terrestrial aliens. While recent DNA results indicate they are entirely human, their genetic origin has yielded surprising results.

A case of skulls from the Andean Paracas culture, as seen in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú in Lima.

( CC BY SA 3.0 )

Peru

Cone headed/elongated (dolichocephalic) skulls were first mentioned in 1851 in the book ‘Peruvian Antiquities’ by Mariano Rivero and John James von Tschudi. Dr. Tschudi, with credentials in philosophy, medicine and surgery, described dolichocephalism in two distinct Peruvian races which existed before the Incas; the Aymares and Huancas. The Huancas had the most pronounced dolichocephalic traits, although Tschudi had little historical data on them. The Aymares had intermediate dolichocephaly.

Even at that time scientists, influenced by Samuel Morton who had a huge collection of Amerindian skulls, were proclaiming that the skulls had been artificially elongated by head binding , a belief which remains the dominant paradigm encompassing the Paracas skulls, the Australian Kow Swamp 5 and Cohuna skulls and dozens of crania from Europe. However, as far back as 1851 Dr. Tschudi observed, “Two crania (both of children scarcely a year old), had in all respects, the same form as those of adults. We ourselves have observed the same fact in many mummies of children of tender age…The same formation of the head presents itself in children yet unborn, and of this truth we have had convincing proof in sight of a foetus enclosed in the womb of a mummy of a pregnant woman…aged 7 months!”

• The Story Of Elongated Skulls And The Denied History Of Ancient People: An Interview With Mark Laplume
• Elongated Skulls in utero: A Farewell to the Artificial Cranial Deformation Paradigm?

Possible methods used by the Collagua people to shape a child's head.

( Public Domain )

Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello excavated a large and elaborate graveyard on the Paracas peninsula from 1922 to 1925, and discovered family tombs containing 429 mummies which were individually wrapped in coloured woven cloth. At least 90 of these bodies exhibited large, elongated skulls, some larger than modern skulls!

These extraordinary skulls remained relatively unknown to the world until filmmaker Robert Connolly produced a CD of them in 1995 titled ‘The Search for Ancient Wisdom.’ Researcher Lumir Janku studied these photos of the anomalous skulls and divided them into 3 types; pre-modern, Conehead 1,2 and 3 and a large skull he named the ‘J’ skull. The ‘pre-modern’ skull has some archaic features such as pronounced brow ridges, a robust lower jaw and an occipital ridge on the bottom back of the skull. Its massive cranial arch, to Janku, suggests “that the skull belongs to a representative of an unknown premodern or humanoid type.” However, this classification creates problems because pre-modern hominins are not recognised in the ancient Americas by mainstream archaeologists.

His illustration indicates that the brain of the ‘premodern’ was of a similar capacity to modern humans but lacking in developed frontal lobes, despite its extreme elongation.

Proto Nazca deformed skull, c 200-100 BC.

( CC BY SA 4.0 )

The Coneheads, as evidenced from three different specimens, C1, 2 and 3 may have developed from the ‘pre-modern’ type but exhibit a much larger brain. Many also possess a pronounced bump above the frontal lobes. They may have belonged to hominins of a larger stature than modern populations.

Janku also identified a ‘J’ type of skull which has an enormous cranial vault ranging from 2600 ccm to 3200 ccm, and eye sockets which are about 15% larger than in modern populations. Whether he was able to measure these skulls or merely made an educated guess from observing the photos, is unknown.

A “cone-head” type of skull.

( Lumir G. Janku )

Ignored by anthropologists who consider all elongated  skulls to be the result of head binding, the phenomenon was highlighted in the 2012 book by researchers David Childress and Brien Foerster, ‘The Enigma of Cranial Deformation.’ Childress and Foerster were careful to avoid sensationalizing the skulls by calling them a separate or alien species, but their research has raised many questions about the origins and purpose of cranial deformation . Their suggestion that an elite race of elongated skull people once roamed the planet would also account for the large number of skulls around the world which were artificially deformed by people who wanted to emulate their ‘gods’.

In 2014, Juan Navarro, owner of the Museo Arequeologico Paracas, which houses 35 unique skulls, allowed a team of researchers led by Brien Foerster and L.A. Mazulli to facilitate preliminary DNA testing of five of them. Initial reports from an unnamed geneticist in Texas claimed that the skulls have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far….a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans…I’m not sure it will even fit into the known evolutionary tree.” Unfortunately, numerous alternative websites proclaimed that the skulls were from aliens or Nephilim, the giants mentioned in the book of Genesis, which negatively impacted the research.

After complaints from archaeologists that the original samples were contaminated, a second round of DNA testing in 2016 involved samples taken from three of the skulls, including an infant. These skulls were dated from 2,000 to 800 years old. The samples, taken from hair and bone powder, were sent to three different labs with no mention of their origin. The results were surprising , showing a strong link between Mesopotamian and Eastern European populations. Three hair samples all showed Haplogroup H2A which is most frequently found in Eastern Europe, while the bone powder from the most elongated skull came back as T2B, which originates in Syria. Many of the Paracas skulls still contain traces of red hair which is not found in South American populations. Foerster exclaimed, “No academics as far as we can tell can explain why some of the skulls that still have hair are red or even blond. The idea that this is from time or bleaching has now been disproven by 2 hair experts. For the ancient Paracas people, at least, they had blonde to reddish hair that is 30% thinner than NATIVE American hair. It is GENETIC!”

He also commented , “We are likely looking at a sub-species of humanity as regards to the Paracas. It seems to be a lot of DNA evidence from extreme eastern Europe and extreme western Asia. More specifically, I’m talking about the area in between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea where ancient elongated skull people lived about 3,000 years ago…It appears that the largest elongated skulls on the planet have been found A in Paracas, Peru and B in the Caucasus area between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea.”

Independent ancient researcher and filmmaker, L.A. Marzulli, describes other anomalies of the Paracas skulls.

The foramen magnum “is completely different than a normal human being, it is also smaller, which lends itself to our theory that this is not cradle head boarding, it is genetic.”

Some of the skulls have a pronounced zygomatic arch (cheek bone).

Many skulls have no sagittal suture, a connective tissue joint between the two parietal bones of the skull. However, this fusing of the sagittal suture may be a direct result of head binding or an indication of advanced age of the individuals

They have unusual eye sockets.

Left: Modern skull foramen. Right: L.A Mazulli points out foramen magnum on Paracas skull.

( soul-guidance.com)

Mexico

An ancient Mexican burial site near the village of Onavas in Sonora in 1999 has yielded 25 skulls, 13 of which are elongated. Seventeen of the skulls belonged to children and only one was female. The steep angle of the forehead indicates childhood head binding.

Malta

Dolichocephalic skulls have also been discovered in some of the earliest Old-World cultures of Malta and Iraq.

Discoveries in the Maltese temple tombs at Tarxien, Ggantja and Hal Saflieni have yielded three classes of skull anomalies. Much of the research on Maltese skulls comes from the Italian writer Adriano Forgione who classified three types:

1. Highly dolichocephalic, “above all, strange lengthened skull, bigger and more peculiar than the others, lacking of the median knitting or suture, linking bones in the roof of the skull.”
2. Skulls which were more ‘natural’ in appearance yet “still presented pronounced, natural dolichocephalous’ shapes ‘distinctive of an actual race.’
3.  Many of the 7,000 skeletons dug out of the Hypogeum exhibit “artificially performed deformities.”

• Mummified Head of Newborn Baby with Extremely Elongated Skull Found in Peru
• Skeleton with Elongated Skull Discovered in Russia

Maltese archaeologists Dr. Mark Mifsud and Anthony Buonanno told Forgione, “They are another race although C14 or DNA exams haven’t yet been performed.”

Forgione complained that the skulls had been removed from display at the Maltese Archaeological Museum of Valletta in 1985. About 15 years later he was given permission when Michael Refalo, the Minister for Tourism, accompanied him to the museum and obtained the director’s cooperation. A few days later the Museum’s archaeologist Mark Anthony Mifsud placed the skulls before Forgione, some with pronounced dolichocephalism. They also lacked a median sagitta which is highly anomalous.

In an article for Atlantis Rising Magazine called ‘Mystery of Malta’s Long-Headed Skulls’, Forgione postulated, “The long head and Drawn features must have given an almost serpent-like appearance , stretching the eyes and skin. Lacking the lower part we can only speculate, but the hypothesis seems plausible.  Such deformities would certainly have created walking problems, forcing him almost to slither! The lack of the cranium’s medium knitting and therefore, the impossibility of the brain’s consistent, radial expansion in the skullcap must have caused terrible agony from infancy.”

Two of Malta’s mysterious skulls, the dolichocephalous (long-headed) one below.

( Adriano Forgione )

The other skulls also showed anomalies, including mild dolichocephalism, suggesting that a separate race, distinct from the native populations of Malta and Gozo, existed about 5,000 years ago. They also showed signs of trepanning and artificially performed deformations, such as cranial bondage.

Iraq

In 1933, Max Mallowan excavated Neolithic graves at Tell Arpachiyah in Iraq dated from 4600 BC to 4300 BC (Halaf and Ubaid periods). He reported the discovery of skulls having a “marked degree of deliberate, artificial deformation”, leading to an “elongated skull.”

A 1996 monograph on Mallowan’s discoveries by Stuart Campbell remarked, “Skull deformation at Arpachiyah appears, on current (1995) knowledge, striking…Skull deformation seems to occur with regularity at other sites of this general period over a very wide area…Jericho, Chalcolithic Byblos, Ganj Dareh, and Ali Kesh.”

Dolichocephaloids also appeared in predynastic Egypt and in the art of the New Kingdom Armana period which covered the era of King Akhenaton. Professor Walter Emery excavated Saqqara in the 1930s and discovered amongst other skeletons a dolichocephalic skull larger than the others. He postulated it was from a different ethnic group which wasn’t indigenous to Egypt but had performed priestly and government roles. He associated them with Shemsu Hor, ‘the disciples of Horus’.

Forgione believes that the skulls originated with a race who settled in Mesopotamia about 7,000 years ago. In urbanized centres such as Jarmo, the mother goddesses were represented as divinities with the faces of vipers and lengthened heads. They are also associated with the ‘Nephilim’ of Genesis and eventually settled Egypt in predynastic times. They reached Malta in about 2500 BC and survived a millennium later in the mysterious pharaoh of Akhenaton who was always depicted with an extremely elongated skull.

An elongated skull

( gerasimov174 / Adobe Stock)

Russia

Numerous elongated skulls have been unearthed in the Caucasus area of Russia, which is significant considering the DNA results of the Paracas skeletons.

Pravda News reported on October 6, 2005, that extremely dolichocephalic heads had been discovered in the Caucasus. The Pyatigorsk skull was found near Kislovodsk and dates from between the 3 ^rd and 5 ^th century AD. “Researchers have repeatedly proved that the skulls had been deformed on purpose,” said Dr. Kuznestov. "Ropes or special blocks were tied tightly round the heads of infants, over the temples. The custom went out of fashion by 17th century. The reason behind the deformation phenomenon is still unknown. It is hard to say whether the methods worked effectively or not since nobody ever conducted scientific experiments regarding the binding of the infants' heads.”

In January 2009, it was reported on digitaljournal.com that extreme dolichocephalic skulls had been dug up in Omsk, Siberia by Russian archaeologists which were dated to 400 AD.

Igor Skandakov, director of the Omsk Museum of History and Culture said that the skulls have marks which could be evidence of artificial deformation of a normal skull. He claimed that the skull was kept away from the public because of its unusual shape which shocked and frightened people.

Archaeologist Alexi Matveyev felt that the deformation was carried out as a status symbol of belonging to the elite of society, or as a way to enhance brain function.  “It’s unlikely that the ancients knew much about neuro-surgery. But it’s possible that somehow they were able to develop exceptional brain capabilities.”

Another elongated skull dated to 300 AD was discovered at a cemetery in Arkaim, in the southern Urals in 2015. It is believed the female belonged to the Sarmati tribe in what is now modern-day Ukraine.

The remains of a one-year old boy with a large elongated skull were found in a Crimean village called Yakovenkovo. According to the Archeology Fund, the grave of the boy dates back to the second century AD.

Top: Yakovenkovo infant ( archaeology & arts ). Bottom: Kislovodsk skulls. ( soul-guidance.com)

Germany

Various elongated skulls from the early Medieval period have been discovered in Germany and particularly in the Bavarian region. Some, which have been DNA, tested belonged to women from Bulgaria and Romania. Other skulls have been excavated from Dossenheim, Stuttgart, Altenerding and Franconia.                    

An elongated skull found in Germany.

( soul-guidance.com)

Carpathia

Elongated skulls in the Carpathian region of eastern Europe date from the late Iron Age until early medieval times and were found in both Goths and Huns, as the recreation on the right shows. More than 200 skulls have been found in this region which are probably related to the Hun invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries AD.

An article in JNS ‘Artificially deformed crania from the Hun-Germanic period (5th-6th AD) in north-eastern Hungary’ historical and morphological analysis’ (2014) concludes that the custom spread from east to west in 6 phases up to 4,000 years ago, beginning in Central Asia, before expanding through the Caucasus to the Danube basin in central Europe. From there it split into three distinct regions in France, Germany and Switzerland, and died out in early Medieval times.

What a Hun woman looked like.

( Marcel Nyffenegger )

However, the authors fail to explain why so many groups deliberately deformed their skulls. Nor did they look at the genetic link between the Paracas people and those from the Black Sea area. The implications of large-scale migration from Eurasia to South America via the Persian Gulf in ancient times are huge and threaten to rewrite the history books.

China

In 2019, scientists announced that a site called Houtaomuga has yielded 25 skeletons dating to between 12,000 to 5,000 years ago. Eleven of these skulls have ‘artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head’ according to team members Quanchao Zang and Qian Wang. One of the four males was found in a tomb dating to between 13,000 to 11,000 years ago while another sediment layer with skulls was dated to between 6,300 and 5,000 years ago. A 3-year-old child with an elongated head was also buried with large amounts of pottery and artifacts.

• Unravelling the Genetics of Elongated Skulls - Transcript of Interview with Brien Foerster
• Elongated Skulls Increased Kudos in Ancient Peru

Homo Sapiens Sapiens Paracas?

As more elongated skulls come to light around the world, serious research needs to differentiate the cranially deformed skulls from the genetically dolichocephalic skulls which can be seen in babies and foetuses in the Paracas population. If a new species such as the Denisovans can be assigned on the basis of a finger bone, why have the Paracas people with enormous skulls lacking vital cranial sutures and  displaced foramina magna been ignored by anthropologists?

The designation of a new South American hominin species or subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens paracas would challenge several cherished theories:. 1. There were no pre-Homo sapiens populations in the Americas. 2. No unknown hominin species existed less than 2,000 years ago.

On the other hand, DNA evidence shatters the long-held belief that East Asia was the sole homeland of the earliest migrants to the Americas across the now sunken land bridge of Beringia. Scientists will not only have to trace migration routes from Eurasia to the Americas during the ice age, but consider the possibility that such migrations were occurring well into the common era.

Rivero and Tschudi's fetus with naturally elongated head from their 1851 "Antigüedades peruanas".

( Public Domain )

• Top Image: The cemetery is about 1,000 years old and the skulls were studied in more detail in 2012. ( Cristina García / INAH )By Karen Mutton

This article is an extract from ‘Scattered Skeletons’ the updated version of Scattered Skeletons In Our Closet ’ by Karen Mutton, and is available on email request from kazganymede@yahoo.com.au.

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/general }

03-09-2020 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

The moon is getting rusty due to oxygen stripped from Earth’s atmosphere

An oxidised form of iron was surprisingly common the moon, which may reveal insights about Earth's atmospheric history.

 by Tibi Puiu

With a virtually non-existent atmosphere and no liquid water, you’d think the moon would be the last place you’d find hematite — basically rusted iron that requires the presence of both iron and water. But that’s exactly what researchers have recently discovered at high latitudes on the moon.

The reddish dust we all know as rust is essentially a chemical product of the reaction between iron and oxygen. It’s very common on Earth (you can find iron oxides almost everywhere) but since there is no oxygen on the moon, you wouldn’t really expect any hematite. In fact, sample return missions during the Apollo era and subsequent satellite observations have only been able to find pristine metallic iron devoid of any sign of rust.

However, when planetary scientist Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii at Manoa was examining spectral data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), as well as from the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, he noticed signatures typical of hematite.

“This discovery will reshape our knowledge about the Moon’s polar regions,” said Li. “Earth may have played an important role on the evolution of the Moon’s surface.”

• The findings appeared in the journal Science Advances.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 21:51 geschreven door peter  

What do we make of Tom DeLonge … former Blink-182 front man and current proponent of UFO research and disclosure? It’s true that his fame has propelled attention to UFOs and ufology to levels never seen before and his involvement in the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TSAAS) has resulted in the release of UFO videos and Pentagon admission of their legitimacy. Yet the hype seems to exceed the reality with DeLonge, as he has made many promises and few truly blockbuster revelations. Will that change with his latest hints?

“Would I leave rock and roll just to go do something that there’s no data for and it’s just, like, pie in the sky and we’re just imagining things? No! Why would I? I mean, that’s insane.”

Tom knows what you’re thinking. In an exclusive interview with Sky News, he admits people had a hard time understanding why he left the world of rock for the world of UFOs, although it’s telling that he’s still addressing the question 5 years later.

“I’ve been brought into a group of people and I’m a big part of a mechanism that is absolutely profound and [has] already started changing the world. And it’s going to do a lot more.”

That’s true, although his initial involvement seemed to lean towards creating UFO-related entertainment rather than research and revelations. That changed with the release of the Nimitiz UFO recordings and the involvement with Luis Elizondo, a bona fide former government insider involved with the formerly secret government UFO investigation group (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)). Elizondo was in on the Zoom interview with Sky News, which was promoting “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” now entering its second on the History Channel.

Promoting the show? Will they really tell Sky News anything new or will they save it for the show?

Good question. The show hasn’t really made any big revelations or disclosures to date. That seems strange, since DeLonge told Sky News there’s plenty to tell.

“I personally have seen enormous amounts of data.”

And?

“I’ve been brought into a group of people and I’m a big part of a mechanism that is absolutely profound and [has] already started changing the world. And it’s going to do a lot more.”

Like what?

“Over time, as science moves and it evolves and we’re starting to take these things more seriously and understand some of the other parameters about it, I just think that we’re gonna find – I assume, I don’t know – but my gut is that we’re going to find out there’s a lot more to this.”

Sigh. Spoken like the producer of a TV show, not a true investigator and whistleblower. And not even a good PR person either. I assume? I don’t know? My gut? Tom, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to divulge something serious … good or bad … ratings be damned. Otherwise, you’ll still be “Remember that guy who left Blink-182? Wonder what he’s doing now? He’s what? Are you serious?” You can’t live on the fame of Blink-182 and you can’t live on the fame of the Nimitz recordings.

It’s time to step up to the mic, Tom, and then give us a ‘drop the mic’ announcement.

Related videos, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-09-2020 om 20:51 geschreven door peter  

UFO encounters happen all over the world and come in a variety of forms. Our story here begins on the evening of May 18, 1946, when a 28-year-old ice hockey player by the name of Gösta Carlsson was walking along through a forested area of Kronoskogen, Sweden, near a place called Ängelholm, on his way back from a trip to a beach called Skälderviken where he had gone to do some birdwatching. As he hiked through the peaceful forest taking in the sounds of the night, a bright light through the trees caught his attention as he passed over a hill. It was a strange thing to find out there in the darkened woods, and he decided to hike down to investigate and came to a clearing at a place that would later be known as Kronoskogen. Sat within that clearing was a brilliantly illuminated, vaguely disc-shaped object that he at first took to be a lit up carnival carousel until he realized how unlikely that was out there in the middle of nowhere.

Carlsson would describe the object in quite a lot of detail to the Swedish UFOlogist Clas Svahn as follows:

The object has a shape that is somewhat similar to a disc and it rests partly on a strong fin in the direction of the furan, partly on two telescopic supports, all distributed so that it seems as if these supports are placed at equal distances from each other on the circular craft. Directly in front of the fin on the lower part of the vessel is a hatch lowered with a ladder and ladders similar to those seen on boats. The hatch is one and a half meters above the ground and I see how light flows out of the cabin. I make an attempt to look into the craft but the angle is too narrow. All that is visible is the strong light. On the upper side of the vessel is a streamlined cabin that I estimate to be about eight meters in diameter. At about one meter intervals I see oval windows, maybe half a meter long and about 30 centimeters high. While I look at the craft, I cannot help but think that someone is trying to joke with me. One thought that goes through my mind is that it may be German pilots who have fled from some camp. But deep down, I do not believe in it myself.

On top of the cabin is a telescopic mast, almost like a periscope on a submarine. The height is about the same as the pine and I estimate the thickness of the vessel in the middle to be about four meters, at the sides to almost one meter and the height of the mast should be about five meters. At the top, it is divided into four parts. A bit down I discover the lamp that emitted the strange violet glow that I discovered from the path. It is directed downwards and covers the entire craft like a cheese dome with a few meters to spare outside. The light cone itself pulsates from the lamp almost like the water from a fountain. And strangest of all: in this way the light has a curved path. Where it hits the ground or the grass, it disappears with a spark phenomenon similar to that caused by sparklers. An odor that of ozone spreads through the air. It is as if an electric curtain has sunk over the craft. The hull and cabin appear to be made in one piece. You can neither see joints nor rivets anywhere. Around the lower edge of the vessel’s circumference there are a number of holes, not different from those found on turbines, directed downwards and provided with dampers.

The startled man looked upon this outlandish site, things got even more bizarre when he noticed what appeared to be the figure of a man standing outside the circle of light the craft was projecting. This mysterious stranger was apparently dressed in a skintight white suit with no visible buttons, zippers or other fasteners, with black boots and belt and what looked almost like a camera hanging from his neck. He then noticed that there were other figures around the ship, including both men and women, the women with light colored hair, and he says of the completely surreal scene that unfolded:

Up on the craft by one of the windows are three more men, apparently busy with some work. Just below, I see two more assisting and inside the circle of light, facing me, stand three girls. Everyone is dressed in the same way, in the same all-cast white aviator suit, with the same color on boots and waist belt. Everyone inside the circle of light has the transparent hood folded back in the neck. The strange thing was that everyone turned to me when I entered the clearing. It was as if I was expected but not wanted …The man standing outside the circle of light – and who I now understand afterwards served as some kind of guard – makes a perfect stop sign with one hand raised. It is an event that cannot be misunderstood and I will stay too. The guard turns his black bellows camera-like thing towards me and I get the impression that it is to take some kind of picture. I’m about to go a few steps closer to him, but he immediately raises his hand and at the same time I think I hear a click from my headlamp. I stand still and at the same time the guard makes a turn around the craft, all the time on the outside of the circle of light. The two men and girls return to work at the cabin window. It is possible that there are two guards with one placed on the back of the vessel. This might explain why there is always a man against the side where I stand.

I kind of feel like a wild animal has to do outside the circle of light that safari hunters usually make in Africa. Then suddenly a dark-haired girl comes down the stairs of the cabin under the craft. In her hand she has something resembling a bag and she hands out cups to both men and women. Everyone quits their jobs and drinks from these cups. Then I suddenly feel like walking up to them and talking a little, but as soon as I have taken a step, the guard stands in front of me again with his hand raised to the stop sign and everyone looks at me seriously. The guard also looks serious, like a determined policeman – here but no longer! He does not let go of his gaze for a second. It is as if the “cheese hive” of light shields the craft from the surroundings and that the sentry is placed outside to ensure that no one tries to enter. Maybe I would have been hurt if I tried to pass the light. When I take a step back, everyone continues with their job and I feel a little flattened. Two of the girls smile so beautifully at me and I see their sparkling white teeth. I can boast that I am not usually afraid of anything, and I have spent enough time in the woods and on the ground to believe neither the devil nor the trolls. But this is still too strange.

Carlsson decided that he had seen enough and left the meadow in order to head back to the beach from which he had come in order to regain his composure and get his heads straight. At this point he was under the impression that he had been hallucinating, and he thought that calming down would make that unearthly scene with the spaceship and its occupants go away. He waded through the cold water, sat upon a dune for some time, and then noticed a red light through the trees back the way he had come. He would explain of what happened next:

At first I think it’s the moon that is rising but then I see that this is not the case. Slowly and majestically, the heavy craft rises, which I can now see clearly. It’s almost like a balloon rising. Only a whistling sound heard from a vacuum cleaner motor. Higher and higher it rises with a wreath of red light from the turbine holes. At an altitude of 400-500 meters, it slows down a bit, oscillates a little sideways, and I can now see that the antenna is pulled down and that the fin and landing sites are probably also recessed.

It’s a bit hazy but the whole maneuver is clearly visible and the whole craft radiates light from the force field and the cabin windows. Then it skews so that it is at an angle to the bright night sky. The red light becomes more intense and then it begins to shoot violently. After a while, the red glow turns purple and now it seems to move at almost the same speed as a sun cat. It oscillates a bit, just as if it were looking for something. Then the glow begins to turn reddish, the craft slows down for a moment, then the violet light comes again and the same terrible speed. Three times I see the craft do this maneuver before it definitely disappears over Ängelholm. I stay on the dunes for a while and am quite overwhelmed and shaken by what I have seen.

Carlsson managed to make it back to his home without further incident, and the next morning he went back out to that clearing he had found the night before. He claims that he found evidence of the landed craft such as impressions in the ground and browned grass. He also would say that he had found some strange objects the crew had seemingly left behind forgotten, including two mugs containing a yellowish-white, fragrant liquid, a gold ring and a transparent crystal rod with rune-like characters engraved into it. He would later go on to exhibit these objects, although he never let anyone get too close to them or give them any sort of analysis. He also claims that he later had the site tested and found that there was a high amount of radiation present there in the clearing.

In 1963, a concrete monument in the shape of the spaceship Carlsson claimed to have seen would be erected in the very same clearing outside Ängelholm in which it had originally appeared. The monument has become a popular tourist attraction and it is often visited by those passing through to go bird watching at the nearby bird sanctuary. In later years Carlsson become a wealthy CEO of pharmaceutical companies Cernelle and Allergon, partially built from what he said were secret medicinal recipes he had learned from the aliens. He would also come into contact with the Swedish UFOlogist and chairman of chairman of UFO-Sweden Clas Svahn, who worked closely with him and spent years interviewing Carlsson and investigating the case, culminating in his book on his 1995 book on the matter titled The Meeting in the Glade.

The UFO monument

Carlsson and Svahn actually formed a close friendship, although they had different takes on the whole UFO affair. While originally very intrigued and lending the story credibility, over time Svahn came to the conclusion that Carlsson’s tale had too many problems with it and had to be taken with a grain of salt. Svahn would lament that the witness’ story over the years lacked consistency, details would change or contradict each other, and many of the “facts” that Carlsson cited often turned out to be false or unverifiable, for instance, he was never able to prove that radiation had ever been detected in the clearing and gave references to people who could not be confirmed to be who he said they were. Most suspicious of all was that Svahn and his team were never able to get a good look at the alleged artifacts left behind by the aliens, nor did he allow access to his own personal documents on the matter. Svahn would say:

As early as 1995, Gösta promised that UFO-Sweden would be allowed to analyze the staff at an independent laboratory, a promise he repeated on the radio during our National Assembly and exhibition in Ängelholm in 1996. He also promised that I would receive it when everything was ready. But the promises never materialized. Maybe because he understood that an analysis would not strengthen his story. Nor did I get to see the papers he kept in his archive in the basement and which later when Gösta was taken into a retirement home in Strövelstorp were moved to another room inside Ängelholm. Although I explained to him how important it was to be able to take part in the analysis that he himself once had done, to be able to read the letters from all those who must have written to him over the years or to see original notes from the years after the event met I constantly of half promises and evasions. I actually managed to get a few original documents, but considering how much more there was, it was a quiet gutter.

Svahn would come to the conclusion that it was unlikely that the event had happened as Carlsson had described it, if at all. Carlsson would end up passing away in 2003 of a stroke, and take any secrets he had to the grave with him. We are left to wonder just how real any of this really was, and just what happened to those amazing artifacts the witness claimed to have found. Is there anything to this, or is it just the ramblings of a delusional mind? There is no way to really know, but the incident has gone on to become one of the most famous UFO encounters in Swedish history.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-09-2020 om 20:34 geschreven door peter  

An Unexpected Origin Story for a Lopsided Black Hole Merger

The merger was first detected on April 12, 2019 as a gravitational wave that arrived at the detectors of both LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), and its Italian counterpart, Virgo. Scientists labeled the signal as GW190412 and determined that it emanated from a clash between two David-and-Goliath black holes, one three times more massive than the other. The signal marked the first detection of a merger between two black holes of very different sizes.

Now the new study, published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that this lopsided merger may have originated through a very different process compared to how most mergers, or binaries, are thought to form.

It’s likely that the more massive of the two black holes was itself a product of a prior merger between two parent black holes. The Goliath that spun out of that first collision may have then ricocheted around a densely packed “nuclear cluster” before merging with the second, smaller black hole — a raucous event that sent gravitational waves rippling across space.

GW190412 may then be a second generation, or “hierarchical” merger, standing apart from other first-generation mergers that LIGO and Virgo have so far detected.

“This event is an oddball the universe has thrown at us — it was something we didn’t see coming,” says study coauthor Salvatore Vitale, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and a LIGO member. “But nothing happens just once in the universe. And something like this, though rare, we will see again, and we’ll be able to say more about the universe.”

Vitale’s coauthors are Davide Gerosa of the University of Birmingham and Emanuele Berti of Johns Hopkins University.

A struggle to explain

There are two main ways in which black hole mergers are thought to form. The first is known as a common envelope process, where two neighboring stars, after billions of years, explode to form two neighboring black holes that eventually share a common envelope, or disk of gas. After another few billion years, the black holes spiral in and merge.

“You can think of this like a couple being together all their lives,” Vitale says. “This process is suspected to happen in the disc of galaxies like our own.”

The other common path by which black hole mergers form is via dynamical interactions. Imagine, in place of a monogamous environment, a galactic rave, where thousands of black holes are crammed into a small, dense region of the universe. When two black holes start to partner up, a third may knock the couple apart in a dynamical interaction that can repeat many times over, before a pair of black holes finally merges.

In both the common envelope process and the dynamical interaction scenario, the merging black holes should have roughly the same mass, unlike the lopsided mass ratio of GW190412. They should also have relatively no spin, whereas GW190412 has a surprisingly high spin.

“The bottom line is, both these scenarios, which people traditionally think are ideal nurseries for black hole binaries in the universe, struggle to explain the mass ratio and spin of this event,” Vitale says.

Black hole tracker

In their new paper, the researchers used two models to show that it is very unlikely that GW190412 came from either a common envelope process or a dynamical interaction.

They first modeled the evolution of a typical galaxy using STAR TRACK, a simulation that tracks galaxies over billions of years, starting with the coalescing of gas and proceeding to the way stars take shape and explode, and then collapse into black holes that eventually merge. The second model simulates random, dynamical encounters in globular clusters — dense concentrations of stars around most galaxies.

The team ran both simulations multiple times, tuning the parameters and studying the properties of the black hole mergers that emerged. For those mergers that formed through a common envelope process, a merger like GW190412 was very rare, cropping up only after a few million events. Dynamical interactions were slightly more likely to produce such an event, after a few thousand mergers.

However, GW190412 was detected by LIGO and Virgo after only 50 other detections, suggesting that it likely arose through some other process.

“No matter what we do, we cannot easily produce this event in these more common formation channels,” Vitale says.

The process of hierarchical merging may better explain the GW190412’s lopsided mass and its high spin. If one black hole was a product of a previous pairing of two parent black holes of similar mass, it would itself be more massive than either parent, and later significantly overshadow its first-generation partner, creating a high mass ratio in the final merger.

A hierarchical process could also generate a merger with a high spin: The parent black holes, in their chaotic merging, would spin up the resulting black hole, which would then carry this spin into its own ultimate collision.

“You do the math, and it turns out the leftover black hole would have a spin which is very close to the total spin of this merger,” Vitale explains.

No escape

If GW190412 indeed formed through hierarchical merging, Vitale says the event could also shed light on the environment in which it formed. The team found that if the larger of the two black holes formed from a previous collision, that collision likely generated a huge amount of energy that not only spun out a new black hole, but kicked it across some distance.

“If it’s kicked too hard, it would just leave the cluster and go into the empty interstellar medium, and not be able to merge again,” Vitale says.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 18:36 geschreven door peter  

Has Earth’s Oxygen Rusted The Moon For Billions Of Years?

Enhanced map of hematite (red) on Moon using a spheric projection (nearside only).

Photo credit: Shuai Li 

 

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Publication:

• Widespread hematite at high latitudes of the Moon.
  Shuai Li, Paul G. Lucey, Abigail A. Fraeman, Andrew R. Poppe, Vivian Z. Sun, Dana M. Hurley and Peter H. Schultz. Science Advances, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba1940

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

A “Bang” in LIGO and Virgo Detectors Signals Most Massive Gravitational-Wave Source Yet

A binary black hole merger likely produced gravitational waves equal to the energy of eight suns.

For all its vast emptiness, the universe is humming with activity in the form of gravitational waves. Produced by extreme astrophysical phenomena, these reverberations ripple forth and shake the fabric of space-time, like the clang of a cosmic bell.

Now researchers have detected a signal from what may be the most massive black hole merger yet observed in gravitational waves. The product of the merger is the first clear detection of an “intermediate-mass” black hole, with a mass between 100 and 1,000 times that of the sun.

Numerical simulation of two black holes that inspiral and merge, emitting gravitational waves. The black holes have large and nearly equal masses, with one only 3% more massive than the other. The simulated gravitational wave signal is consistent with the observation made by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors on May 21st, 2019 (GW190521).

Credits:Credit: N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration

Almost every confirmed gravitational-wave signal to date has been from a binary merger, either between two black holes or two neutron stars. This newest merger appears to be the most massive yet, involving two inspiraling black holes with masses about 85 and 66 times the mass of the sun.

The LIGO-Virgo team has also measured each black hole’s spin and discovered that as the black holes were circling ever closer together, they could have been spinning about their own axes, at angles that were out of alignment with the axis of their orbit. The black holes’ misaligned spins likely caused their orbits to wobble, or “precess,” as the two Goliaths spiraled toward each other.

The new signal likely represents the instant that the two black holes merged. The merger created an even more massive black hole, of about 142 solar masses, and released an enormous amount of energy, equivalent to around 8 solar masses, spread across the universe in the form of gravitational waves.

This artist's concept illustrates a hierarchical scheme for merging black holes. L

“This doesn’t look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect,” says Virgo member Nelson Christensen, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), comparing the signal to LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. “This is more like something that goes ‘bang,’ and it’s the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen.”

The international team of scientists, who make up the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration, have reported their findings in two papers published today. One, appearing in Physical Review Letters, details the discovery, and the other, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, discusses the signal’s physical properties and astrophysical implications.

“LIGO once again surprises us not just with the detection of black holes in sizes that are difficult to explain, but doing it using techniques that were not designed specifically for stellar mergers,” says Pedro Marronetti, program director for gravitational physics at the National Science Foundation. “This is of tremendous importance since it showcases the instrument’s ability to detect signals from completely unforeseen astrophysical events. LIGO shows that it can also observe the unexpected.”

Related videos, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 18:16 geschreven door peter  

You Will Be Shocked to See These Creepy Looking Deep Sea Ocean Creatures

There’s enough to be frightened about in this green earth from Pandemics to global warming, not forgetting killer bugs and venomous reptiles from around the globe. Now there’s a whole segment of creatures living down under which will make your skin tingle. This underwater creatures rarely comes into contact with humans but that said they all have one thing in common they reside in the deep blue sea. Here are 15 scary-looking and fear inducing creatures.

Related videos selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/  }

03-09-2020 om 17:58 geschreven door peter  

UFO Flying Near Military Base, Newport Virginia, Aug 25, 2020, MUFON, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: August 25, 2020
Location of sighting: Newport, Virginia, USA
Source: MUFON #111258

This UFO was recorded flying over Newport, Virginia last week. There is a military base there and the eyewitness often sees millard craft, but this surprised him. This object in the video tilts for a few seconds (3 screenshots below) and at that moment it looks like a thick disk. But then it tilts and we see it from its side looking thin. Very odd craft. Old Project Blue Book reports have reported dozens of alien craft near US military bases. It looks like aliens are worried and want to show the military they can do as they want, when they want and even shut down nuclear missiles. For aliens do do this they probably predicted that in the near future an armed conflict with China is about to occur. 100% alien and proof aliens still watch over humanities safety. 
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, the moon was out and it was daylight outside. I like looking at the moon during the day. I looked down and then back up at the moon and saw this. I have lived near military bases for over a decade. I frequently see F22s and all manner of commercial and military aircraft.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

Witness went outside for a cigarette and filmed a UFO! Newport News, Virginia 25-Aug-2020

Some kind of cigar-shaped object was caught on tape by a witness in Newport News, Virginia. This happened on 25th August 2020.

Witness report:

 I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, the moon was out and it was daylight outside. I like looking at the moon during the day. I looked down and then back up at the moon and saw this. I have lived near military bases for over a decade.I frequently see F22s and all manner of commercial and military aircraft.

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

03-09-2020 om 16:52 geschreven door peter  

Researchers Create Laser-Activated Walking Microrobots

A team of scientists from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania has developed a new class of microscopic robots that incorporate semiconductor components, allowing them to be controlled — and made to walk — with standard electronic signals.

The new walking robots are about 5 microns thick, 40 microns wide and between 40 and 70 microns in length.

Each consists of a simple circuit made from silicon photovoltaics that essentially functions as the torso and brain and four electrochemical actuators that function as legs.

The robots operate with low voltage (200 millivolts) and low power (10 nanowatts), and remain strong and robust for their size.

“In the context of the robot’s brains, there’s a sense in which we’re just taking existing semiconductor technology and making it small and releasable,” said co-lead author Professor Paul McEuen, of Cornell University.

“But the legs did not exist before. There were no small, electrically activatable actuators that you could use. So we had to invent those and then combine them with the electronics.”

The robots developed by Miskin et al are roughly the same size as microorganisms like Paramecium.

Image credit: Miskin et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2626-9.

Using atomic layer deposition and lithography, Professor McEuen and colleagues constructed the legs from strips of platinum only a few dozen atoms thick, capped on one side by a thin layer of inert titanium.

Upon applying a positive electric charge to the platinum, negatively charged ions adsorb onto the exposed surface from the surrounding solution to neutralize the charge.

These ions force the exposed platinum to expand, making the strip bend.

The ultra-thinness of the strips enables the material to bend sharply without breaking.

To help control the 3D limb motion, the scientists patterned rigid polymer panels on top of the strips.

The gaps between the panels function like a knee or ankle, allowing the legs to bend in a controlled manner and thus generate motion.

The authors control the robots by flashing laser pulses at different photovoltaics, each of which charges up a separate set of legs.

By toggling the laser back and forth between the front and back photovoltaics, the robot walks.

“While these robots are primitive in their function — they’re not very fast, they don’t have a lot of computational capability — the innovations that we made to make them compatible with standard microchip fabrication open the door to making these microscopic robots smart, fast and mass producible,” said co-lead author Professor Itai Cohen, also from Cornell University.

“This is really just the first shot across the bow that, hey, we can do electronic integration on a tiny robot.”

The team is exploring ways to soup up the robots with more complicated electronics and onboard computation — improvements that could one day result in swarms of microscopic robots crawling through and restructuring materials, or suturing blood vessels, or being dispatched en masse to probe large swaths of the human brain.

“Controlling a tiny robot is maybe as close as you can come to shrinking yourself down,” said lead author Dr. Marc Miskin, from the University of Pennsylvania.

“I think machines like these are going to take us into all kinds of amazing worlds that are too small to see.”

• The team’s work was published in the journal Nature.

_____

• M.Z. Miskin et al. 2020. Electronically integrated, mass-manufactured, microscopic robots. Nature 584, 557-561; doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2626-9
• This article is based on a press-release provided by Cornell University.

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers Witness Birth of Intermediate-Mass Black Hole

Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have detected gravitational waves from the most massive binary black hole merger ever discovered. The two spinning black holes merged when the Universe was only about 7 billion years old, which is roughly half its present age, and formed a larger black hole weighing a whopping 142 times the mass of the Sun — a so-called intermediate-mass black hole.

Astronomers know that stellar-mass black holes — black holes ranging from 10 times to 100 times the Sun’s mass — are the remnants of dying stars, and that supermassive black holes, more than 1,000,000 times the mass of the Sun, inhabit the centers of most galaxies.

But scattered across the Universe are a few apparent black holes of a more mysterious type. Ranging from 100 to 10,000 solar masses, these intermediate-mass black holes are so hard to measure that even their existence is sometimes disputed.

The final 142-solar-mass black hole produced by the newly-discovered merger lies within this intermediate mass range between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes.

“Right from the beginning, this signal, which is only a tenth of a second long, challenged us in identifying its origin,” said Professor Alessandra Buonanno, a researcher at the University of Maryland and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

“But, despite its short duration, we were able to match the signal to one expected of black-hole mergers, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and we realized we had witnessed, for the first time, the birth of an intermediate-mass black hole from a black-hole parent that most probably was born from an earlier binary merger.”

Dubbed GW190521, the gravitational-wave signal was detected on May 21, 2019 at 03:02:29 UTC.

It came from two black holes weighing in at 85 and 66 times the mass of the Sun, respectively.

The larger of the two black holes is considered ‘impossible.’ Astronomers predict that stars between 65 and 130 solar masses undergo a process called pair instability, resulting in the star being blown apart, leaving nothing behind.

“The mass of the larger black hole in the pair puts it into the range where it’s unexpected from regular astrophysics processes,” said Professor Peter Shawhan, a scientist at the University of Maryland.

“It seems too massive to have been formed from a collapsed star, which is where black holes generally come from.”

“The ‘impossible’ black hole formed by the collision lies in the black hole desert between 100 and 1,000 times the mass of the Sun,” added Professor Susan Scott, a researcher in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at the Australian National University.

“We are very excited to have achieved the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole in this mass range.”

“We also saw how it formed, confirming that intermediate-mass black holes can be produced through the merger of two smaller black holes.”

The GW190521 signal, resembling about four short wiggles, was extremely brief in duration, lasting less than one-tenth of a second.

From what the researchers can tell, it was generated by a source that is roughly 5 Gpc away, when the Universe was about half its current age, meaning that the signal traveled across space for 7 billion years before reaching Earth.

GW190521’s source is the most distant gravitational-wave source detected so far.

“This doesn’t look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect,” said Dr. Nelson Christensen, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“This is more like something that goes ‘bang,’ and it’s the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen.”

Using the Zwicky Transient Facility, the astronomers may have spotted a light flare from the GW190521 collision. This is surprising, as black holes and their mergers are normally dark to telescopes.

One theory is the system may have been orbiting a supermassive black hole.

The newly-formed black hole may’ve received a kick from the collision, shooting off in a new direction and surging through the disk of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole, causing it to light up.

“There are a number of different environments in which this system of two black holes could have formed, and the disk of gas surrounding a supermassive black hole is certainly one of them,” said Dr. Vaishali Adya, a postdoctoral researcher in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at the Australian National University.

“But it is also possible that this system consisted of two primordial black holes that formed in the early Universe.”

“Every observation we make of two black holes colliding gives us new and surprising information about the lives of black holes throughout the Universe.”

“We are beginning to populate the black hole mass gaps previously thought to exist, with ‘impossible’ black holes that have been revealed through our detections.”

• The findings were published in two papers in the journal Physical Review Letters and the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

_____

• R. Abbott et al (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). 2020. GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150  MSun. Phys. Rev. Lett 125 (10): 101102; doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.101102
• R. Abbott et al (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). 2020. Properties and Astrophysical Implications of the 150 M Sun Binary Black Hole Merger GW190521. ApJL 900, L13; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aba493

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 01:30 geschreven door peter  

A witness from Flintshire told how one of the objects was spinning and had 'two black crosses underneath it'

By Lydia Morris - Daily Post Reporter

Lynn Murphy claims to have witnessed two UFOs hovering next to her Flintshire home in July 

(Image: Lynn Murphy)

A woman claims to have witnessed two UFOs hovering next to her Flintshire home moments after her friend saw the same thing 20 miles away.

Lynn Murphy told how one of the objects was spinning and looked similar to a “white tic tac” that had “two black crossed underneath it”.

Next to it was a “very clear orange circle” that was like nothing she had ever seen before.

The 60-year-old from Connah’s Quay claims she saw them both through her bedroom window after waking at 2.41am on July 21.

After noticing a friend from Prestatyn had shared some images on Facebook minutes earlier of some strange objects in the sky, she was shocked when she could see exactly the same thing above the house opposite her window.

"At first I thought it looked like a giant star that was out of place, it was massive and looked like it shouldn’t have been there," Ms Murphy said.

“It wasn’t the space station or a satellite, it wasn’t an airplane or a drone - it wasn’t anything I know of, it was just this bright light turning quickly."

Around two weeks later, her neighbour claimed to have also witnessed the same thing that night.

“There were four witnesses to that that I know of,” she added.

“It’s very intriguing. There was no noise so it couldn’t have been a helicopter."

However, it wasn’t the first time Ms Murphy experienced something she believed to be extraterrestrial.

Several unidentified flying objects have appeared right before her eyes over the year, she says.

The most bizarre was in the early hours of the morning in April 2011, during a camping trip to Cardigan.

Ms Murphy said when she stepped outside the tent after being woken in the night by the sound of “screaming sheep”, she witnessed a “massive horse shoe shaped object” in the sky.

“The sheep sounded like they were being tortured,” she said.

“I walked to the end of the field to see if I could see any sheep but there was nothing.

“As I looked over the valley, I saw this great big massive horse shoe shaped object.

“It had nine lights that were rhythmic with each other and were changing from white to red.

“It was nothing I had ever seen before.”

She added a red ball of red light then came over a hill, swooped down the valley and settled next to the bizarre object.

“They were both in rhythm together, and the next thing, they slotted in together and the whole area went silent” she said.

“It never moved, so I just ran as fast as I could back to the tent.

“My heart was bouncing off the floor, I was terrified.”

Ms Murphy believes her first “experience” was around late November in 1978, when she was living in Connah’s Quay.

“I woke up about 1.30am and I felt something strange and overpowering, and there was a sort of humming noise,” she said.

“I looked out the window and there was nothing there.

“I knew it wasn’t right because it was scaring me so I got the boys and put them in bed with me.

“My eldest son was 16 months and my other son was six weeks old.

“The terror I felt was bad, my heart was pounding out of my chest.

“After about 10 minutes, the feeling went but it felt as though there was something above the house.

“I was too scared to look, so I just stayed in bed with the babies.”

Some years later in the early 90s, she claims to have had more “overwhelming experiences”, similar to the first.

“Every now and again, I could feel this energy,” she said.

“One night, it must have been around 11.30pm, and my husband at the time told me to come outside.

“He wasn’t the kind of person to believe in all this kind of thing.

“I looked up and there was a giant black triangle above the street - it must have been the size of two football pitches - it was giant.

“There was no vibration or sound, it was silent and just floating.

“On each of its corners, there was a white glowing light and it had a round, dull orange light on the bottom.

“We just stood there and watched it, and it eventually started gliding away and then it just shot off towards the estuary.”

Over the years, she’s also heard of several reports of UFO sightings by the River Dee estuary and out of the sea near Rhyl towards the Clwydian Range.

“I can’t really explain any of it, all I know is what I’ve seen and I know I haven’t imagined any of it.

“As soon as you start talking about this stuff, people straight away ridicule you.

“But I can’t help what I’ve experienced and what I’ve seen.”

{ https://www.dailypost.co.uk/ }

03-09-2020 om 01:10 geschreven door peter  

NASA’s 56-year-old satellite that weighs more than 1,000 POUNDS is set to fall into the South Pacific this weekend – but experts say it will burn up before hitting the ocean

• One of NASA's satellites is set to fall back to Earth on Saturday at 5:01pm ET
• Orbiting Geophysical Observatory 1 has been in space for 56 years
• The satellite has succumb to Earth's gravity and will meet its end 
• However, experts say it will break up and burn in the atmosphere in re-entry 

By STACY LIBERATORE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

After spending over five decades in space, NASA’s Orbiting Geophysical Observatory 1 (OGO-1) spacecraft is set to retire.

New data shows that the 1,070-pound satellite has fallen victim to Earth’s gravity and will descend back to our planet over the South Pacific this weekend – ending its life in a blaze of fire.

Details of OGO-1’s demise surfaced when astronomers observed a very small object that appeared to be on an impact trajectory with Earth.

The violent death of the craft is set for Saturday, August 29 around 5:00pm ET, however, experts say the satellite to break up in the atmosphere and poses no threat.

Scroll down for video 

Details of OGO-1’s demise surfaced when astronomers observed a very small object that appeared to be on an impact trajectory with Earth

NASA launched OGO-1 September of 1964 as part of a mission with Goddard Space Flight Center to study Earth's atmosphere, magnetosphere, and the space between the our planet and Moon.

The craft was the first of six other satellites to journey into space – all tasked with understanding Earth.

OGO-1 was launched into an eccentric orbit around Earth that took the spacecraft approximately two days to complete one orbit and allowed the spacecraft to sweep through Earth’s radiation belts to study our planet’s magnetosphere—the region of space surrounding Earth that is controlled by Earth’s magnetic field.

The craft operated and returned scientific data for five years until 1969, after which point the spacecraft was placed in standby mode when scientists were unable to return any more data.

After spending over five decades in space, NASA’s Orbiting Geophysical Observatory 1 (OGO-1) spacecraft is set to retire

The violent death of the craft is set for Saturday, August 29 around 5:00pm ET, however, experts say the satellite to break up in the atmosphere and poses no threat

And in 1971, all support for the mission was terminated.

Although OGO-1 was the first to launch, the satellite will be the last to retire – the others have all decayed and fell into Earth’s atmosphere.

Astronomers at the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), funded by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office notified the American space agency of the object heading to Earth. 

The team first speculated that it may be an asteroid, but following a further investigation the object was confirmed to be the aging satellite. 

‘OGO-1 is predicted to reenter on one of its next three perigees, the points in the spacecraft’s orbit closest to our plant, and current estimates have OGO-1 re-entering Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, August 29th, 2020, at about 5:10 pm EDT, over the South Pacific approximately halfway between Tahiti and the Cook Islands,’ NASA shared in statement.

NASA launched OGO-1 September of 1964 as part of a mission with Goddard Space Flight Center to study Earth's atmosphere, magnetosphere, and the space between the our planet and Moon

‘The spacecraft will break up in the atmosphere and poses no threat to our planet—or anyone on it—and this is a normal final operational occurrence for retired spacecraft.’

OGO-1 may be moving towards Earth’s atmosphere but there are many satellites that are dead and still floating around our planet – adding to the millions of pieces of junk in space. 

There are an estimated 170 million pieces of so-called 'space junk' - left behind after missions that can be as big as spent rocket stages or as small as paint flakes - in orbit alongside some US$700 billion of space infrastructure.

But only 20,000 are tracked, which are mostly from Russia and the US.

WHAT IS SPACE JUNK? MORE THAN 170 MILLION PIECES OF DEAD SATELLITES, SPENT ROCKETS AND FLAKES OF PAINT POSE 'THREAT' TO SPACE INDUSTRY

There are an estimated 170 million pieces of so-called 'space junk' - left behind after missions that can be as big as spent rocket stages or as small as paint flakes - in orbit alongside some US$700 billion (£555bn) of space infrastructure.

But only 22,000 are tracked, and with the fragments able to travel at speeds above 16,777 mph (27,000kmh), even tiny pieces could seriously damage or destroy satellites.

However, traditional gripping methods don't work in space, as suction cups do not function in a vacuum and temperatures are too cold for substances like tape and glue.

Grippers based around magnets are useless because most of the debris in orbit around Earth is not magnetic.

Around 500,000 pieces of human-made debris (artist's impression) currently orbit our planet, made up of disused satellites, bits of spacecraft and spent rockets

Most proposed solutions, including debris harpoons, either require or cause forceful interaction with the debris, which could push those objects in unintended, unpredictable directions.

Scientists point to two events that have badly worsened the problem of space junk.

The first was in February 2009, when an Iridium telecoms satellite and Kosmos-2251, a Russian military satellite, accidentally collided.

The second was in January 2007, when China tested an anti-satellite weapon on an old Fengyun weather satellite.

Experts also pointed to two sites that have become worryingly cluttered.

One is low Earth orbit which is used by satnav satellites, the ISS, China's manned missions and the Hubble telescope, among others.

The other is in geostationary orbit, and is used by communications, weather and surveillance satellites that must maintain a fixed position relative to Earth.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

03-09-2020 om 00:48 geschreven door peter  

Planetary defenses spot ‘UFO’ on collision course with Earth, turns out to be a NASA relic (VIDEO)

The sighting was corroborated by the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. 

After crunching some numbers, and consulting ancient tomes from the 1960s, the specialists had cracked the case. The UFO was, in fact, NASA’s Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 (OGO-1), headed home after 56 years in space.

Having arrived in orbit in September 1964, the satellite burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere, raining down fiery debris over the Pacific Ocean some 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Tahiti, in French Polynesia on Saturday, August 26 at 20:44 UTC according to NASA.

OGO-1, along with five other satellites, was launched to chart and study the Earth’s magnetosphere, atmosphere, the Earth’s relationship with the Moon and the impact of the Sun’s rays on the space immediately surrounding our planet. 

Its function began diminishing after five years in space at which point the decision was made to place it in standby mode in November 1969, before being decommissioned two years later.

At this point, the 487-kilogram (1,074-pound) satellite joined the thousands of other fragments of space junk clogging up Earth’s backyard. 

It then proceeded to fall ever so slowly back down to Earth thanks to its eccentric orbit, which brought it just close enough for Earth’s gravity to convince it to come back down in a blaze of glory this past week. 

Despite being the first of six OGO satellites launched, it was the last to come back down, the other five burned up upon reentry between 1972 and 2011, their debris falling harmlessly into the ocean.

{ https://www.rt.com/ }

03-09-2020 om 00:27 geschreven door peter  

Ethan Siegel - Senior Contributor

Starts With A Bang

Contributor Group Science

The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

When two black holes merge, a significant portion of their mass can get converted into energy in one... [+]

NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Last week, NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory made history by announcing the most energetic explosive event ever discovered in the Universe. In a galaxy cluster some 390 million light-years away, a supermassive black hole emitted a jet that created an enormous cavity in the intergalactic space of that galaxy cluster. The total amount of energy required to create this observed phenomenon? 5 × 10⁵⁴ J: more energy than any event seen since the Big Bang.

But there's another class of event that definitely exists in the Universe that can output even more energy in a shorter amount of time: the merger of two supermassive black holes. Although we've never seen such an event, it's only a matter of time and technology until one reveals itself to us. When it does, the old record-holder will be shattered, possibly by an enormous amount. Here's how.

This simulation shows two stills from the merger of two supermassive black holes in a realistic,... [+]

ESA

There are lots of events that can be considered either explosions or cataclysms in the natural Universe, where a large amount of energy is released over a short period of time. A very massive star that reaches the end of its life will explode in a cataclysmic type II supernova, creating either a black hole or neutron star as a stellar corpse. Over the final few seconds of its life, it will release some ~10⁴⁴ J of energy, with hypernovae (or superluminous supernovae) reaching up to 100 times that amount.

For a long time, supernovae were used as the standard by which all other cataclysms were measured. As the brightest electromagnetic events in the sky, they could outshine entire galaxies, dependent on their individual brightnesses and the overall mass of the galaxy in question.

This illustration of superluminous supernova SN 1000+0216, the most distant supernova ever observed... [+]

ADRIAN MALEC AND MARIE MARTIG (SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY)

The only things that rivaled or exceeded the energy released in a supernova were gamma-ray bursts or larger-scale, extended events such as merging galaxies or galaxy clusters, or supermassive black holes feeding on enormous amounts of matter. During the 2010s, we uncovered the origin of at least some gamma-ray bursts: kilonovae, or the merging of two neutron stars. Between gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, a significant amount of mass — about ~10²⁹ kilograms worth — gets converted into pure energy, leading to an energy release of about 10⁴⁶ J.

On the other extreme, active galaxies and quasars can be even more energetic. Enormous amounts of mass, perhaps millions or even billions of solar masses worth, can get funneled into a central, supermassive black hole, where it gets torn apart, accreted, and accelerated. The matter and radiation emitted can reach a total of ~10⁵⁴ J of energy, although it's emitted over about a million years (or more) in time.

An annotated version of the X-ray/radio composite image of Pictor A, showing the counterjet, the Hot... [+]

X-RAY: NASA/CXC/UNIV OF HERTFORDSHIRE/M.HARDCASTLE ET AL., RADIO: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA

But the Universe gives us a way to emit even larger amounts of energy, and to do so on much shorter timescales. The key to unlocking this came last decade, when the NSF's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) direct detected the first gravitational wave event: from two merging black holes. For the very first one ever seen, two black holes of two different masses (36 and 29 Suns' worth, respectively) merged together to produce a final-state black hole of a lesser (62 Suns' worth) mass.

This was an enormously big deal, netting a number of scientists the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves. Over the subsequent years, many more black hole-black hole mergers and merger candidates have been detected, with approximately 50 known so far (to date). In all cases, the same bizarre and fascinating behavior has been observed: large amounts of mass are converted into pure energy over a timescale of just a few milliseconds.

Illustration of two black holes merging, of comparable mass to what LIGO first saw. At the centers... [+]

SXS, THE SIMULATING EXTREME SPACETIMES (SXS) PROJECT (HTTP://WWW.BLACK-HOLES.ORG)

Two points, in particular, are extremely interesting about these black hole-black hole mergers.

1. In all cases, the peak power that was emitted, or energy-per-time, was about the same. They all outshone all the stars in the Universe, combined, for a tiny fraction-of-a-second, but the more massive mergers had their peak power output occur over longer periods of time, emitting more total energy.
2. You can make a very simple approximation for the total amount of energy released in gravitational waves in a black hole-black hole merger: about 10% of the mass of the lower-mass black hole gets converted into pure energy, via Einstein's E = mc².

For the first black hole-black hole merger ever discovered, the total amount of energy emitted was ~10⁴⁷ J, and that occurred over a time interval that spanned just 200 milliseconds or so, leading to a fascinating possibility.

The messy cores of these colliding galaxies hide the final stage of two merging galactic nuclei. The... [+]

M. KOSS (EUREKA SCIENTIFIC, INC.)/NASA/ESA;KECK IMAGES: M. KOSS (EUREKA SCIENTIFIC, INC.)/W.M. KECK OBSERVATORY; PAN-STARRS IMAGES: M. KOSS (EUREKA SCIENTIFIC, INC.)/PANORAMIC SURVEY TELESCOPE AND RAPID RESPONSE SYSTEM

Instead of two "stellar mass" black holes merging together, where the masses of each black hole range from a few to a few dozen solar masses, we could look to the most massive black holes in the Universe: the supermassive ones found at the centers of galaxies. When they merge together, a series of events will unfold, resulting in the largest release of energy that — at least theoretically — should ever occur in our post-Big Bang Universe.

In particular:

• when two galaxies merge, their black holes will preferentially sink towards the new mutual center, due to gravitational interactions between other masses.
• Interactions with gas and other normal matter will dominate for a time, leading to a relatively tight, short-period orbit for these black holes.
• In the final merger stages, lasting ~25 million years, gravitational waves will dominate, resulting in a scaled-up inspiral and merger scenario, albeit one that's far beyond the reach of detectors like LIGO.

The most massive pair of black holes in the known Universe is OJ 287, whose gravitational waves will... [+]

RAMON NAVES OF OBSERVATORIO MONTCABRER

When two black holes merge together, their mutual inspiral causes the deformation of space, and their motion through that deformed space leads to the emission of gravitational radiation, which carries energy away from the black hole-black hole system and out to the Universe beyond. Given that we know of black holes that are many billions of times the mass of our Sun, the merger of black holes that are hundreds of millions of solar masses with multi-billion solar mass black holes is an inevitability.

One system in particular, OJ 287, consists of a 150 million solar mass black hole in close orbit around an ~18 billion solar mass black hole. When they merge, ~3 × 10⁵⁴ J of energy will be released over a timespan of just a few hours. The frequency will be all wrong for LIGO or even LISA to detect, unfortunately. But in the lead-up to a merger, a different technique — one based on pulsar timing — could reveal a large merger like this, especially if the two masses were closer to one another in magnitude, after all.

This illustration shows how many pulsars monitored in a timing array could detect a gravitational... [+]

DAVID CHAMPION / MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY

The first supermassive black holes that are inspiraling, according to our best modern estimates, should be detectable this decade by advanced pulsar timing arrays such as NANOGrav, the European Pulsar Timing Array and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. As these supermassive black holes inspiral, they should emit gravitational waves with a large enough amplitude and at a predictable, observable frequency that means — if we understand how to model the frequency and population of these supermassive binary black holes — the 2020s should see us detect our first one.

When we detected our first black hole-black hole merger, there was a brief time period lasting under 200 milliseconds where that merger produced more energy than all the stars in the Universe combined. If we can find a supermassive black hole merger where the smaller mass is more than 500 million solar masses, not only will it emit more energy than all the stars in the Universe for about a week, but it will become the most energetic event since the Big Bang, emitting more than ~10⁵⁵ J over that time interval.

This illustration maps out the various stages of a supermassive black hole merger, and the expected... [+]

ESA – S. POLETTI

But it's eminently plausible that there are many examples, particularly in rich galaxy clusters, where two black holes of billions or even tens-of-billions of solar masses will merge together. In the Coma Cluster for example, the two most massive galaxies are NGC 4889, with a 21 billion solar mass black hole, and NGC 4874, which looks to be more massive and possesses twice as many globular clusters, but its black hole is of an unknown mass.

We won't have merely gravitational waves to look for when two supermassive black hole-containing galaxies merge, either. They ought to emit telltale signs of electromagnetic radiation, particularly in the X-ray, which should offer the potential to study these mega-events in gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals simultaneously, even before they merge. With ESA's Athena and NASA's Lynx potentially coming to augment our X-ray astronomy arsenal, we might finally discover the prototypical example of what promises to be the Universe's most energetic event of all.

When two supermassive black holes orbit one another, they not only perturb and accelerate the matter... [+]

MARTIN KRAUSE / THE CONVERSATION

One of the most remarkable facts about merging black holes is that the maximum rate of emitted gravitational wave energy isn't dependent on their mass at all, but rather is determined by the fundamental constants of the Universe. The heavier your black holes are, the more energy they emit, but they do so over a longer period of time, rather than in a greater-magnitude burst. They should still represent the most energetic events in all the Universe, but the most massive ones of all should have their most energetic signals spread out over the final years or even decades, rather than emitted all in a few milliseconds.

With an ever-improving suite of instruments, detectors, and new techniques, the first hints of a supermassive binary black hole merger might appear later this decade, which would be an incredible development for gravitational wave astronomy, a science that only saw its first success less than 5 years ago. Supermassive binary black hole mergers are, undoubtedly, the most energetic single event in the entire post-Big Bang Universe. For the first time, they may be finally within our detectable reach.

---

The author thanks Drs. Chiara Mingarelli, Leo Stein, Joey Neilsen, Bernard Kelly and Karan Jani for graciously providing detailed facts about merging black holes that were used in constructing this article.

Related videos, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.forbes.com/ }

02-09-2020 om 23:31 geschreven door peter  

A team of astronomers have spotted what they claim is the most massive collision of two black holes ever observed.

Prior to the gigantic collision, at least one of the massive colossal space objects had the mass of 85 Suns. The collision itself created a black hole about 150 solar masses — putting it into a mass range previously thought to be possible — and ejected the equivalent of eight solar masses in the form of energy in the form of gravitational waves, as detailed in papers published today in the journals Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Everything about this discovery is mindboggling,” Simon Portegies Zwart, a computational astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research, said in a Nature statement.

The size of the black holes involved in the merger would make them more massive than a regular star, but lighter than the supermassive black holes often found at the center of galaxies.

The event, which occurred approximately seven billion light years away, was observed in May 2019 using the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Antenna (LIGO) detectors in the US and the smaller Virgo observatory in Italy.

The researchers made the discovery by observing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that can give away these galactic events. The relatively new technique has allowed scientists to make discoveries of dozens of other black hole collisions like it.

But even by the epic standards of black hole collisions, this one takes the cake.

“This doesn’t look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect,” Virgo member Nelson Christensen, researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who compared the new results to the first detection of gravitational waves using LIGO dating back to 2015, said in an MIT press release.

“This is more like something that goes ‘bang,’ and it’s the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen,” Christensen added.

The masses of the two merging black holes are highly unusual as there is a “mass gap,” roughly between 65 and 135 solar masses, where black holes aren’t expected to exist. That’s because at those sizes, stars theoretically tend to be ripped apart and disintegrated by the explosive fusion of oxygen nuclei, a process known as “pair instability.”

“This is quite neatly in the range one would expect the pair-instability mass gap should be,” LIGO astrophysicist Christopher Berry of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said in the Nature statement.

Scientists suspect that at least one of the black holes may not have formed from a collapsing star — the more conventional way smaller black holes are formed.

Another scenario is that smaller black holes could have merged together over time, accumulating into the one involved in this collision. Yet such a theory is hard to back up as we still haven’t found any other intermediate black holes.

“That’s why astronomers have been looking for these extensively, because they would help in solving this puzzle,” Salvatore Vitale, an assistant professor at the LIGO Lab of MIT, told The Verge.

“LIGO once again surprises us not just with the detection of black holes in sizes that are difficult to explain, but doing it using techniques that were not designed specifically for stellar mergers,” Pedro Marronetti, program director for gravitational physics at the National Science Foundation, said in the MIT press release.

“This is of tremendous importance since it showcases the instrument’s ability to detect signals from completely unforeseen astrophysical events,” he added. “LIGO shows that it can also observe the unexpected.”

• READ MORE: Astronomers say they’ve detected the most massive merger of two black holes ever discovered [The Verge]
• More on black holes: Cornell Scientists Say “Strange Metals” Are Similar to Black Holes

This simulation shows two stills from the merger of two supermassive black holes in a realistic,... [+]

ESA

{ https://futurism.com/ }

02-09-2020 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

There can be no doubt that one of the creepiest phenomena to have surfaced in the last two decades is that of what have become infamously known as the Black-Eyed Children. It would be overly simplistic to suggest they are merely the offspring of the Men in Black and the Women in Black, who will surface later in this book. Admittedly, though, there are deep similarities, as will soon become apparent. And, also like the MIB and the WIB, the BEC are definitive drainers of energy. Before we get to this aspect of the story, let’s first take a look at how, and under what specific circumstances, the Black-Eyed Children came to prominence. We’ll also take a look at a few classic cases. None of them are particularly heartwarming. As if you really needed to be told that. Although, today, we have people who claim to have seen the BEC in the period from the 1930s to the present day, the very first reported case didn’t surface until January 1998. The location was the Lone Star State, specifically the city of Abilene. The story revolves around a man named Brian Bethel, a journalist who works for the Abilene Reporter News. It was late one night when Bethel’s life was changed and he came to realize that there are dangerous, supernatural entities in our midst.

It was close to 10:00 p.m. when Bethel had the kind of close encounter that one never, ever forgets. He had pulled up at a mall not too far from his home, to deposit a check in a mail-box. All was quiet and dark. Bethel, using the lights of the mall to illuminate the interior of his vehicle, was writing the check when he was rudely interrupted. He jumped with surprise at the sight of a couple of kids who were standing next to the car, on the driver’s side. But, there was something about these kids that rang alarm bells in Bethel’s head. In fact, as Bethel would imminently learn, things were wrong in the extreme.

Bethel stared at the pair and couldn’t fail to see just how incredibly pale the face of one of the boys was. The other had what Bethel described as olive-colored skin. Both boys were around ten to fourteen years of age, Bethel estimated, and both were dressed in pullovers. Only one of the two boys spoke – he claimed that they wanted to see a movie, Mortal Kombat, at the local cinema. But, there was a problem: they had left their money at home. Could Bethel take them to their homes to get some cash? Bethel near-instantly realized that this whole situation had an air of dark and disturbing theater about it. There was an undeniably unsettling agenda at work, and it had absolutely zero to do with movies.

Bethel awkwardly hemmed and hawed for a few moments, something which caused the talkative boy to become ever more insistent that Bethel let them in the car. Then, things became downright eerie and chilling: Bethel found himself almost mind-manipulated, to the point where, to his horror, he could see that his hand was heading to the driver’s-side door – with the intent of opening it, but without his control. Bethel, fortunately, broke the enchanting spell and didn’t open the door, after all. This clearly incensed the talkative boy, who amped up the pleas to allow them into Bethel’s car. It was then, for the first time, that Bethel finally got a good look at their eyes. In his own words – referenced in Pararational’s May 16, 2013 article titled “Brian Bethel – The Black Eyed Kids”” – Bethel stated: “They were coal black. No pupil. No iris.”

The two boys realized that, by now, they were losing the battle to be permitted to get into Bethel’s car. On this very point, Bethel himself said that the boy who did all of the talking “wore a mask of anger.” The boy, now displaying a look on his face which was part-frustration and part-anger, almost shouted: “We can’t come in unless you tell us it’s okay. Let us in!” Bethel, terrified, did nothing of the sort. What he did do was to slam the car into reverse and head for home, completely panicked by the whole thing. Oddly, as he drove away, Bethel looked back, only to see that the boys were nowhere in sight. In what was clearly and impossibly quick time, they had vanished.  And, thus was quickly born a legend. It’s a legend that shows no signs of stopping. It’s only getting worse.

Related videos, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

02-09-2020 om 22:50 geschreven door peter  

The most powerful nuclear bomb in history was dropped by the Soviet Union above a remote island in October of 1961 that was felt hundreds of miles away. The bomb, which was called RDS-220 or “Tsar Bomba”, was detonated about 2.5 miles above the Novaya Zemlya islands, north of the Arctic Circle.

An aerial bomber brought the 27-ton, 26-foot-long weapon over the islands before dropping it by a parachute. When the bomb detonated, the explosion was so strong that it caused the plane to drop 3,000 feet before the pilot could steady it.

Even though it was detonated a couple of miles above the ground, the island was still left flat and bare. The flash from the bomb was seen for over 600 miles and its massive heat was felt up to 160 miles away, capable of causing third degree burns as far as 62 miles from the detonation site.

(Not Tsar Bomba)

Even the huge mushroom cloud stretched so high up that it almost reached the edge of space (it reached an altitude of 210,000 feet). Incredibly, nobody died from the detonation.

In July of 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the bomb. He had initially ordered a 100-megaton nuclear weapon, but the engineers gave him a 50-megaton weapon instead. To put this into better perspective, the “Tsar Bomba” was thousands of times more powerful than the nukes that were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Another jaw-dropping comparison was that the United States’ extremely powerful nuclear weapon that was tested in 1954 called “Castle Bravo” was 15 megatons.

No bomb even close to being as powerful as “Tsar Bomba” has ever been tested again. Although, a lot of that probably has to do with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the Soviet  Union, Great Britain, and United States all signed in August of 1963. According to the treaty, nuclear weapons were not allowed to be tested in outer space, in the atmosphere, or underwater.

(Not Tsar Bomba)

There have, however, been several atomic tests that have occurred underground with one example being North Korea who conducted such a powerful test in 2018 that a mountain near the testing site (Mount Mantap) actually moved and compressed after the explosion.

Now, getting back to the Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba”, Russia’s state atomic agency called Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation declassified a 40-minute video of the bomb – from the manufacturing process, to being dropped via a parachute and the gigantic mushroom cloud. The video can be seen here on YouTube with the countdown to the bomb being detonated starting at around the 22:20 mark.

Related videos, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

02-09-2020 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

Enorme schokgolf door samengesmolten zwarte gaten schiet langs de aarde - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

De trilling bestond uit vier golfjes, die in totaal maar een tiende van een seconde duurden, maar de schok was uitzonderlijk. “Dit lijkt niet op de ‘tsjirp’ die we meestal meten. Dit is ‘bam’, het is het grootste signaal dat we hebben gezien”, aldus onderzoeker Nelson Christensen.

Lees ook

Astronomen zien hoe een zwart gat botst met iets wat eigenlijk niet kan bestaan

De schokgolf is veroorzaakt door twee zwarte gaten die ongeveer 7 miljard jaar geleden zijn samengesmolten, toen het heelal half zo oud was als nu. Een van de twee zwarte gaten was ongeveer 85 keer zo zwaar als onze zon, het andere ongeveer 66 keer zo zwaar. Die zijn zelf zo groot, dat ze misschien ook ooit door fusies zijn ontstaan. Door de samensmelting ontstond een nieuw zwart gat met ongeveer 142 keer de massa van onze zon. Ongeveer acht zonnemassa’s aan energie werd weggeslingerd door het heelal, en dat zijn de zwaartekrachtgolven die nu zijn gemeten, de rimpels in een vijver wanneer iemand daar een steen in laat vallen.

Tot nu toe kenden wetenschappers twee soorten zwarte gaten. Als grote sterren sterven, ontstaat een gat dat hooguit enkele tientallen keren zo zwaar is als onze zon. In het midden van onze Melkweg staat daarentegen een ‘superzwaar zwart gat’, en zulke objecten kunnen miljarden keren zo zwaar als de zon zijn. Het zwarte gat dat bij deze fusie ontstond, is het eerste dat daar tussenin valt, te groot voor het servet en te klein voor het tafellaken. “Deze gebeurtenis roept meer vragen op dan ze beantwoordt”, aldus onderzoeker Alan Weinstein.

Albert Einstein stelde meer dan een eeuw geleden dat het heelal bestaat uit ruimte en tijd. Die vormden volgens hem één geheel, dat hij ruimtetijd noemde. Deze is de ruggengraat van het heelal. Bij een grote gebeurtenis kan ruimtetijd iets uitrekken of krimpen, en die golf trekt het hele heelal door. Dat gebeurt bijvoorbeeld als zwarte gaten of neutronensterren botsen. Pas nu kunnen extreem gevoelige detectoren die trillingen meten. In Italië en de Verenigde Staten schijnen laserstralen door kilometerslange armen. Als een zwaartekrachtgolf langs de aarde trekt, verschuift de straal een miljoenste van een miljoenste van een miljoenste van een meter. In 2015 werd zo voor het eerst een zwaartekrachtgolf waargenomen. 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

02-09-2020 om 22:11 geschreven door peter