Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
23-07-2021
The Plight of the “Hummers”: This Mysterious Low-Frequency Hum Has Rattled Eardrums for Decades
The Plight of the “Hummers”: This Mysterious Low-Frequency Hum Has Rattled Eardrums for Decades
For decades, there have been people in various locations around the world who claim to be able to perceive a strange, low-frequency throbbing noise of undetermined origin.
The debate over the cause of the sound—as well as whether it exists at all—had at one time been an item of frequent debate in the scientific community. One of the earliest instances involving the curious phenomenon had been reported in the English Sunday Mirror in 1977, which began with a single account of a UK resident who claimed to be annoyed almost constantly by such a low humming sound. After the account was published, hundreds of letters in response began to flood the offices of the Mirror, with additional accounts from people who said that they also could hear this maddening humming sound at all hours of the day.
The widespread public response resulted in doctors examining some of the individuals, which did lend to the possibility that some of the sounds people claimed to hear might have internal origins, which might involve afflictions like tinnitus. While tinnitus sufferers often hear an almost whining, high-pitched sound, several of the people that doctors spoke to described hearing something much different: this was described as a low-pitched droning hum, which many believed to have an external source. The doctors agreed, attributing the roughly 40 Hz hum, modulated at 1.6 kHz, to be the result of industrial noise; yet despite this, there was never any actual industrial source determined.
A variety of other possible sources that had been suggested ranged from jet stream noises to sounds emanating from the ocean. Another novel idea involved that small percentages of the population suffered from an unusually acute ability to perceive sounds at around 40 Hz! Soon, similar accounts from other places around the world that included the United States would also begin to surface, with descriptions of the anomalous low-frequency sound being popularly associated with areas like Taos, New Mexico, among other locations.
Welcome sign at Taos New Mexico, location of an unusual hum reported by residents for decades
(Billy Hawthorn / Wikimedia Commons 3.0)
The ongoing complaints about these unusual sounds resulted in an investigation into their possible causes in the 1990s, funded by the UK Department of Energy. “The move is seen as an acknowledgment that some sufferers at least are not imagining the noise which causes them so much misery,” New Scientist reported following the DoE’s announcement that it would fund the research.
Even prior to the DoE-funded studies in the 1990s, a physicist at Chelsea College in London had been investigating the similar phenomenon afflicting UK residents and found data on the phenomenon that dated all the way back to 1973, in which a university study had identified at least 50 individuals who had experienced similar problems with hearing ongoing humming noises.
As early as 1988, the DoE had already commissioned the University of Salford to begin collecting information about the hum that so many residents claimed to be troubled by. With an estimated 500 individuals complaining about the noise on an annual basis, in 1989 the Low-Frequency Noise Sufferers Association was formed, an organization of both the afflicted and those lobbying on their behalf, which began to place additional pressure on the DoE to take action and get to the bottom of whatever had been causing the unusual sounds.
Throughout the 1990s, a range of purported causes was explored, which ranged from the existing theories about industrial noise to vehicular noise emanating from highways, and even underground pipes used to pump gas from high power turbines, which it was suggested might be capable of causing pipe organ-like sounds (interestingly, unidentified sounds reported in a variety of locales over the years have been likened to almost “ethereal” organ music, which appears to arise from someplace underground).
Aerial view of Taos, New Mexico
( Billy Hawthorn / Wikimedia Commons 3.0)
Around the same time that UK studies were underway, similar investigations into the hum reported by residents near Taos, New Mexico were undertaken, which produced very similar results. Among the takeaways had been that around two percent of the population in either location claimed to be “hummers”, the name given to those in the UK who could hear the noise. Equal percentages of male and female sufferers were reported, and the phenomenon appeared to be most prevalent among middle-aged people. The noises appeared to occur at frequencies anywhere from 32 Hz to around 80 Hz, modulated from 0.5 to 2 Hz. In the case of the Taos hum, some residents claimed that they were able to move away from the source of the hum, stating that they could no longer hear it at a distance of more than 30 miles from Taos.
Since the studies that were undertaken in the 1990s, a few additional possible explanations for the strange humming sounds have been offered. One suggests that the movement of deep ocean currents may actually be the source of the noises, which are naturally “amplified” in certain regions, making these otherwise unnoticeable sounds evident at locations like Taos and in the UK.
However, to date, there is no single proposed solution that seems to fully account for the ongoing mystery of “hummers” around the world, or the unusual—and very annoying—audible plight they suffer from.
This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, shows wide (left) and close-up (right) views of the moon-forming disc surrounding PDS 70c, a young Jupiter-like planet nearly 400 light-years away. The close-up view shows PDS 70c and its circumplanetary disc centre-front, with the larger circumstellar ring-like disc taking up most of the right-hand side of the image. The star PDS 70 is at the centre of the wide-view image on the left.Two planets have been found in the system, PDS 70c and PDS 70b, the latter not being visible in this image. They have carved a cavity in the circumstellar disc as they gobbled up material from the disc itself, growing in size. In this process, PDS 70c acquired its own circumplanetary disc, which contributes to the growth of the planet and where moons can form. This circumplanetary disc is as large as the Sun-Earth distance and has enough mass to form up to three satellites the size of the Moon. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.
Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disk around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
"Our work presents a clear detection of a disk in which satellites could be forming," says Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble, France, and at the University of Chile, who led the new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disk is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time," she adds.
The disk in question, called a circumplanetary disk, surrounds the exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two giant, Jupiter-like planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light-years away. Astronomers had found hints of a "moon-forming" disk around this exoplanet before but, since they could not clearly tell the disk apart from its surrounding environment, they could not confirm its detection—until now.
In addition, with the help of ALMA, Benisty and her team found that the disk has about the same diameter as the distance from our Sun to the Earth and enough mass to form up to three satellites the size of the Moon.
But the results are not only key to finding out how moons arise. "These new observations are also extremely important to prove theories of planet formation that could not be tested until now," says Jaehan Bae, a researcher from the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science, U.S., and author on the study.
Planets form in dusty disks around young stars, carving out cavities as they gobble up material from this circumstellar disk to grow. In this process, a planet can acquire its own circumplanetary disk, which contributes to the growth of the planet by regulating the amount of material falling onto it. At the same time, the gas and dust in the circumplanetary disk can come together into progressively larger bodies through multiple collisions, ultimately leading to the birth of moons.
But astronomers do not yet fully understand the details of these processes. "In short, it is still unclear when, where, and how planets and moons form," explains ESO Research Fellow Stefano Facchini, also involved in the research.
"More than 4000 exoplanets have been found until now, but all of them were detected in mature systems. PDS 70b and PDS 70c, which form a system reminiscent of the Jupiter-Saturn pair, are the only two exoplanets detected so far that are still in the process of being formed," explains Miriam Keppler, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and one of the co-authors of the study.
"This system therefore offers us a unique opportunity to observe and study the processes of planet and satellite formation," Facchini adds.
PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets making up the system, were first discovered using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2018 and 2019 respectively, and their unique nature means they have been observed with other telescopes and instruments many times since.
The latest high resolution ALMA observations have now allowed astronomers to gain further insights into the system. In addition to confirming the detection of the circumplanetary disk around PDS 70c and studying its size and mass, they found that PDS 70b does not show clear evidence of such a disk, indicating that it was starved of dust material from its birth environment by PDS 70c.
An even deeper understanding of the planetary system will be achieved with ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama desert. "The ELT will be key for this research since, with its much higher resolution, we will be able to map the system in great detail," says co-author Richard Teague, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, U.S.. In particular, by using the ELT's Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (METIS), the team will be able to look at the gas motions surrounding PDS 70c to get a full 3D picture of the system.
This research was presented in the paper "A Circumplanetary Disk Around PDS 70c" to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
UFOs sighted over Buckinghamshire, England on July 21, 2021
STATEMENT : Spotted just now over Buckinghamshire.. 4 ufos spotted.. All flying different speeds
credit : Sam Pearcey
UFO / TR3B Sighted Over New York ( July 20, 2021 )
STATEMENT : Is this the UFO video we all were looking for ???
Oh! This is not a Chinese lantern. In fact this is no lantern at all! This is not a weather balloon. Nor the Loon. This is not swamp Gas. This is not the ISS. And this is not a passenger aircraft landing at Heathrow. It's not a military flare and it's not a reflection. Oh ! You can hear the sound of an aircraft ? Wow ! Good for you. This is an Unidentified Flying Object. Okay that we can use the abbreviation now ? U.... F....O....! Okay... So this is an actual UFO captured on video by a New Yorker. Should this not be on major news headlines around the world ? Anybody want details ??? What are we waiting for ? Oh... the new Project Deep Blue hard cover book ? Oh! That's obsolete ? Gosh ! I didn't know! What's that ??? It's now the Pentagorphological report on the UAPs is it ??? Eh!?? Really ? WTF!!! A government agency investigation report on ... What ? UAP ? What's that now ??? No more UFO ? But this is a video of a UFO !!! Okay... I will calm down! I promise!!! But... wasn't the last investigative purpose by a government led million dollar project actually a state planned initiative to debunk genuine sightings and encounters according to the ... Mmmm ... Australian government? Oh! So what exactly do we do with this video now ?
credit : P.R.E.T
UFOs Sighted Over Spain ( July 20, 2021 )
Impressive display of UFOs were sighted over the skies of Spain from a field on July 20, 2021, Similar to the UFOs over England on July 8, 2021
credit : U.S.F
Intraterrestrial Being Sighted In Waterfall in Brazil ( July 19, 2021 )
Strange Creature Sighted In Waterfall in Brazil on July 19, 2021 is this a Alien
STATEMENT : Será um ser intraterreno?
Will it be an Intraterrestrial being? (ufology) Any of a race of sapient beings who live inside the Earth and operate UFOs. microbiology) Which lives deep underground.
MUFON CASE : 117004 Holiday, Florida ( July 21, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : I think we saw an unidentified aircraft.
Long Description of Sighting Report
I think we saw an UFO in the evening sky. It was dusk, so there were no stars visible, the moon was not visible yet. I have photos and videos. I'm not sure what I saw
Giant Black Triangle On Suns Surface 1/5 The Size Of Earth! July 21, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
Giant Black Triangle On Suns Surface 1/5 The Size Of Earth! July 21, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 21, 2021
Location of sighting: Earths Sun Source: Helioviewer.org
I first reported this black triangle UFO about 2 years ago. It's still there today, but moves from one place to another. Its location about 5 years ago was in the upper left corner of the sun. Then suddenly it disappeared and reappeared in the lower right corner of the sun just 2 years ago. Since then...I have been watching it, asking about it in emails to astronomical organizations worldwide, yet have never once received a response.
This huge object appears to be a large black triangle craft. It stays black which means its has resistance against the heat of the sun. Normally if it was burning material from the sun, it would also be burning, but not this. It remains black 24/7.
Look at the Helioviewer earth sample next to it to measure the size of the triangle. Its 1/5 the size of Earth...and yet no astronomers have ever mentioned it. No scientific organization has ever acknowledged its existence. There is clearly someone of power trying to keep this knowledge out of the hands of the public. Perhaps someone so powerful, so rich that they themselves own the ship and left it there for a quick getaway one day. Got anyone in mind? Any billionaires getting your attention impressing you lately? I got a few on my mind...Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and of course...Jeff Bezos. At least one of them is an alien, but maybe more. In time we will find out the truth.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Cosmic, Earth and Underworld symbolism at ancient rock chambers in Hittite Yazilikaya, Turkey
Cosmic, Earth and Underworld symbolism at ancient rock chambers in Hittite Yazilikaya, Turkey
For almost two hundred years, archaeologists have been looking for a plausible explanation for the ancient rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya in Central Turkey.
Over 3,200 years ago, stonemasons artfully cut more than 90 reliefs of deities, animals, and chimaeras into the limestone bedrock.
An international team of researchers now presents an interpretation that for the first time suggests a coherent context for all of the figures.
Accordingly, the stone-carved reliefs in two rock chambers symbolize the cosmos: the underworld, the earth, and the sky, as well as the recurring cycles of the seasons, the phases of the moon, and day and night.
Richard Dolan’s UFO Chronicles YouTube TV Series Announcement
Richard Dolan’s UFO Chronicles YouTube TV Series Announcement
Richard Dolan, presents the most concise and up to date examination of the UFO subject, in a brand new 32 part mini television series ‘Richard Dolan’s UFO Chronicles Ahead of premiere screening, Richard interviewed Steve Mera, the executive producer of the series.
View larger. | An image of a full moon, made entirely of words. They are the transcripts of the onboard voice transmissions of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
Voices of Apollo 11
As we celebrate the 52nd anniversary of the first human footsteps on the moon – which took place on July 20, 1969 – we’d like to bring some new astronomy art to your attention. Finnish astronomy artist J-P Metsavainio collected all the Apollo 11 transmissions and used them to construct an image of a full moon. He did this as a tribute to lunar astronaut Michael Collins, who died this year, on April 28, 2021. Metsavainio described his new image on his blog.
He wrote:
I downloaded NASA’s original full transcript of Apollo 11’s onboard voice conversations. The idea was to turn this text into an image of the moon. After a few weeks of intense work at a feverish pace, my tribute was ready. Now the moon is made up entirely of Apollo 11 voice transcription letters.
This is also a tribute to the entire Apollo 11 team: CommanderNeil A. Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin E. [Buzz] Aldrin Jr.
Michael Collins died just nine days after tweeting about a previous work by Metsavainio (an incredible Milky Way image that took 12 years to make). Metsavainio recounted:
I was most gratified and deeply moved when Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 and Gemini 10 astronaut, author, explorer and artist – tweeted […] about my work on April 19, 2021. The news of his passing, just nine days later, hit me all the harder. It was a very emotional moment for me. Out of the blue, I got inspired to create this artwork. I absolutely had to do it right away, which I did.
Michael Collins was also an artist. His iconic photos made from moon orbit are true art and part of mankind’s greatest cultural heritage treasure.
View full image. | A close-up of the image of a full moon, made of words spoken by Apollo 11 astronauts while visiting the moon in 1969. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
The loneliest man in history
At the same time Neil Armstrong was making history as the first human to set foot on the moon, Michael Collins was all alone aboard a spacecraft orbiting the moon. He was the astronaut who stayed behind on the command module, Columbia, while his two crew mates were testing out the moon’s surface in person.
And that’s why many affectionately called Michael Collins the loneliest man in history.
When he flew solo behind the moon, he was without radio contact with anyone. Meanwhile, his colleagues, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, were making history with their first steps on the moon.
So, here at EarthSky, we think that this is a fitting image to celebrate the July 20 moon landing. Like most astronomical images, it is not only a beautiful image, but full of information. Apart from the Apollo 11 communications, Metsavainio also pointed out the landing site. If you zoom into the image far enough at the right spot, you can find it marked by two letters in red.
View larger. | Two red letters mark the spot where the Apollo 11 lander touched down on lunar soil. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
The Eagle as it has left the moon and is approaching Columbia. Image via M. Collins/ NASA.
Working in solitude
Metsavainio recounts how he connected to Collins’ lonely and otherworldly experience as he was working:
A similar solitude gripped me while I was creating this tribute image. For being an astronomical photographer and a visual artist often is a very lonely job. Especially this time as I was deeply emotional throughout my creative process for this artwork. Even though I never met him personally, the end of his Earthly mission meant more to me than I was prepared for. I needed to make this photo-based artwork to process the inner storm of my thoughts and feelings.
View larger. | A close-up of the artwork shows how the image is made up entirely of only letters, letters from the transcription of Apollo 11’s Command Module recorder data. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
Bottom line:Astronomy artist J-P Metsavainio has created an image of the moon, using all the words spoken to Earth by Apollo 11 astronauts, while on the moon. The image serves as a tribute to Michaels Collins, who died in April, 2021, as well as the entire Apollo 11 crew on this the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.
View larger. | An image of a full moon, made entirely of words. They are the transcripts of the onboard voice transmissions of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
Voices of Apollo 11
As we celebrate the 52nd anniversary of the first human footsteps on the moon – which took place on July 20, 1969 – we’d like to bring some new astronomy art to your attention. Finnish astronomy artist J-P Metsavainio collected all the Apollo 11 transmissions and used them to construct an image of a full moon. He did this as a tribute to lunar astronaut Michael Collins, who died this year, on April 28, 2021. Metsavainio described his new image on his blog.
He wrote:
I downloaded NASA’s original full transcript of Apollo 11’s onboard voice conversations. The idea was to turn this text into an image of the moon. After a few weeks of intense work at a feverish pace, my tribute was ready. Now the moon is made up entirely of Apollo 11 voice transcription letters.
This is also a tribute to the entire Apollo 11 team: CommanderNeil A. Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin E. [Buzz] Aldrin Jr.
Michael Collins died just nine days after tweeting about a previous work by Metsavainio (an incredible Milky Way image that took 12 years to make). Metsavainio recounted:
I was most gratified and deeply moved when Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 and Gemini 10 astronaut, author, explorer and artist – tweeted […] about my work on April 19, 2021. The news of his passing, just nine days later, hit me all the harder. It was a very emotional moment for me. Out of the blue, I got inspired to create this artwork. I absolutely had to do it right away, which I did.
Michael Collins was also an artist. His iconic photos made from moon orbit are true art and part of mankind’s greatest cultural heritage treasure.
View full image. | A close-up of the image of a full moon, made of words spoken by Apollo 11 astronauts while visiting the moon in 1969. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
The loneliest man in history
At the same time Neil Armstrong was making history as the first human to set foot on the moon, Michael Collins was all alone aboard a spacecraft orbiting the moon. He was the astronaut who stayed behind on the command module, Columbia, while his two crew mates were testing out the moon’s surface in person.
And that’s why many affectionately called Michael Collins the loneliest man in history.
When he flew solo behind the moon, he was without radio contact with anyone. Meanwhile, his colleagues, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, were making history with their first steps on the moon.
So, here at EarthSky, we think that this is a fitting image to celebrate the July 20 moon landing. Like most astronomical images, it is not only a beautiful image, but full of information. Apart from the Apollo 11 communications, Metsavainio also pointed out the landing site. If you zoom into the image far enough at the right spot, you can find it marked by two letters in red.
View larger. | Two red letters mark the spot where the Apollo 11 lander touched down on lunar soil. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
The Eagle as it has left the moon and is approaching Columbia. Image via M. Collins/ NASA.
Working in solitude
Metsavainio recounts how he connected to Collins’ lonely and otherworldly experience as he was working:
A similar solitude gripped me while I was creating this tribute image. For being an astronomical photographer and a visual artist often is a very lonely job. Especially this time as I was deeply emotional throughout my creative process for this artwork. Even though I never met him personally, the end of his Earthly mission meant more to me than I was prepared for. I needed to make this photo-based artwork to process the inner storm of my thoughts and feelings.
View larger. | A close-up of the artwork shows how the image is made up entirely of only letters, letters from the transcription of Apollo 11’s Command Module recorder data. Image via J-P Metsavainio.
Bottom line:Astronomy artist J-P Metsavainio has created an image of the moon, using all the words spoken to Earth by Apollo 11 astronauts, while on the moon. The image serves as a tribute to Michaels Collins, who died in April, 2021, as well as the entire Apollo 11 crew on this the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.
“The stellar universe, as we know it … is a flattened, watch-shaped organization of stars and nebulae,” astronomer Harlow Shapley wrote in Science News Bulletin, the earliest version of Science News, in August 1921 (SN: 8/8/1921, p. 3). That sparkling pocket watch was the Milky Way, and at the time Shapley wrote this, astronomers were just beginning to conceive that anything at all might lie beyond it.
Today, spacecraft have flown by every one of the solar system’s planets, taking close-ups of their wildly alien faces. The solar system, it turns out, contains a cornucopia of small rocky and icy bodies that have challenged the very definition of a planet. Thousands of planets have been spotted orbiting other stars, some of which may have the right conditions for life to thrive. And the Milky Way, we now know, is just one of billions of galaxies.
The last 100 years have brought a series of revolutions in astronomy, each one kicking Earth a bit farther from the center of things. Along the way, people have not exactly been receptive to these blows to our home planet’s centrality. In 1920, the question of whether there could be other “island universes” — galaxies — was the subject of the Great Debate between two astronomers. In the 1970s, when Mars was shown to have a pink sky, not blue, reporters booed. Their reaction “reflects our wish for Mars to be just like the Earth,” said astronomer Carl Sagan afterward. And in the 1990s, astronomers almost missed extrasolar planets hiding in their data because they had tailored their search techniques to find planets more like those in our own solar system.
But turning our focus from Earth has opened our minds to new possibilities, new universes, new places where life might exist. The next century of astronomy could bring better views of our cosmic origins and new strategies for finding worlds that other creatures call home.
The misperceptions of decades past suggest scientists should be careful when predicting just what we’ll find in the future.
“You learn a lot of humility in this business,” says planetary scientist Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute, based in Tucson. “You always learn a lot more when you’re wrong than when you’re right.”
More than the Milky Way
At the turn of the 20th century, conventional wisdom held that the Milky Way stood alone. It contained stars, sometimes organized in clusters, and fuzzy patches of light known as nebulae. That was about it.
Some nebulae had spiral structures, “appearing in the telescope like vast Fourth-of-July pinwheels,” as Science News Letter, the predecessor of Science News, described them in 1924. In the 18th century, German philosopher Immanuel Kant had described nebulae as “higher universes,” or, “so to speak, Milky Ways.” But by the early 1900s, most astronomers thought that drawing that parallel was ridiculous.
“No competent thinker,” wrote historian of astronomy Agnes Clerke in 1890, can “maintain any single nebula to be a star system of coordinate rank with the Milky Way.”
By the 1920s, though, that view was already being challenged. As early as 1914, astronomer Heber Curtis of Lick Observatory in California argued that spiral nebulae are not part of the Milky Way, but rather “inconceivably distant galaxies of stars or separate stellar universes so remote that an entire galaxy becomes but an unresolved haze of light.”
Around the same time, Shapley, of Mount Wilson Observatory in California, began to prove that the Milky Way itself was inconceivably vast.
Shapley built on work by Henrietta Leavitt, one of a group of women “computers” at Harvard University who pored over photographic plates capturing the night sky. In studying photographs of the Magellanic Clouds, which we now know are two small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, Leavitt noticed that certain stars varied in brightness over time, some of them in a peculiar way. “It is worthy of notice,” she wrote in 1908, that “the brighter variables have the longer periods.” In other words, brighter stars twinkled more slowly.
In the early 1900s, astronomer Henrietta Leavitt discovered a feature of certain stars, called Cepheid variables, that helped other astronomers measure cosmic distances. Those stars ultimately helped prove that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.PHOTO BY MARGARET HARWOOD, COURTESY OF AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES, PHYSICS TODAY COLLECTION, SHAPLEY COLLECTION
That meant that these variable stars, called Cepheids, could be used to estimate cosmic distances. It’s hard to tell how far away a cosmic object truly is — bright-looking stars could be intrinsically dim but close, while faint-looking stars could be intrinsically bright but distant. But all the Cepheids within the same cloud should be roughly the same distance from Earth. That meant “their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light,” Leavitt wrote in 1912. To figure out any Cepheid’s true brightness, all an astronomer had to do was measure its twinkling speed. It was a short step from there to figuring out its distance.
Shapley put this fact to use just a few years later, measuring distances to Cepheids within globular clusters of stars to figure out the sun’s position in the Milky Way. To his surprise, the sun was not in the center of the galaxy but off to one side. The Milky Way’s starry disk was also about 10 times wider than previous astronomers had assumed: about 300,000 light-years across, according to his calculations. (He overshot a bit; modern astronomers think it’s somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 light-years.)
He and Curtis took their opposing views to the public at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., in April 1920, in an event that became known as the Great Debate. Each had 40 minutes to present their views on whether there is only one or several universes — what we now think of as galaxies.
Shapley, who was in his 30s and considered a rising star in the field, went first. A former journalist who reportedly was uncomfortable speaking to crowds, he read his argument from a typewritten script. He barely touched on the question of other universes, focusing instead on his new measurements of the Milky Way’s size. The implication was that the Milky Way was too large for other galaxies to make sense.
Curtis was an older, well-respected authority on spiral nebulae, as well as a gifted speaker. He argued for the then-standard view that the Milky Way was much smaller than Shapley supposed. But even a large Milky Way shouldn’t negate the possibility of other, equally large galaxies, he argued. The spectra of light coming from spiral nebulae was similar enough to that of the Milky Way that they could be similar objects, he maintained.
Both astronomers were partly right, and partly wrong.
Galaxies come into view
The Great Debate was resolved by a young astronomer named Edwin Hubble working at Mount Wilson. Hubble also used Leavitt’s Cepheid variable technique to measure cosmic distances, this time by finding the variable stars in the spiral nebulae themselves.
Hubble started observing the Andromeda nebula, one of the brightest nebulae on the sky, in the fall of 1923. He used Mount Wilson’s 60-inch telescope and its 100-inch telescope, then the world’s largest. Over the next year or so, he studied 35 Cepheids in Andromeda and a different nebula called Triangulum. Their periods were long enough that the nebulae had to be on the order of a million light-years away for the stars to appear so faint. (We now know it’s more like 2.5 million light-years to Andromeda and 2.7 million to Triangulum.)
Astronomer Edwin Hubble, shown here holding a drawing of a galaxy, proved that there are other galaxies outside of the Milky Way.HALE OBSERVATORIES, COURTESY OF AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES
“Measuring the distance to Andromeda was a big deal because it was the first evidence that there are galaxies beyond our own,” says astronomer Emily Levesque of the University of Washington in Seattle. “It changed what we thought of as the shape of our universe.”
A few hints that the Milky Way was not alone had cropped up before that, but Hubble’s finding clinched it. Even if the Milky Way was as big as Shapley claimed, Andromeda lay outside its borders. When Shapley received Hubble’s paper, he reportedly said, “Here is the letter that destroyed my universe.”
“It seems probable that many of the smaller spiral nebulae are still more remote and appear smaller on this account,” the story quotes Hubble as saying. “The portion of the universe within the range of our investigation consists of vast numbers of stellar galaxies comparable to our own, scattered about through nearly empty space and separated from one another by distances of inconceivable magnitude.” Here at last was the modern view of the universe.
By the end of the decade, Hubble had not only shown that the spiral nebulae were “island universes,” he also had begun to classify different galaxy types and think about how they evolved over time. What’s more, he showed that galaxies were flying away from each other at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the universe was expanding.
“Instead of these blurry blobs from even the best mountaintop observatories on our planet,” says planetary scientist Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe, “all of a sudden the entire realm of solar system, galaxy, extragalactic … was opened up by getting above the atmosphere.”
NASA named the telescope after the scientist who opened astronomers’ minds to the existence of such a universe: the Hubble Space Telescope.
The images it has captured over 30 years of operations — star clusters, galaxies and nebulae — are so iconic they are printed on everything from socks and coffee mugs to high fashion runway designs. The telescope itself was recently immortalized in Lego form.
“It’s the one that literally everyone has heard of,” says Levesque. Most people today think Hubble was “the guy who built the telescope.”
One image from early on in the space telescope’s tenure stands out. In December 1995, the telescope’s director, Robert Williams, decided to train the observatory on a tiny, dark patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper for 10 consecutive days. The resulting portrait of this featureless bit of sky revealed thousands of previously unknown galaxies sending their light from farther away than astronomers had ever seen before (SN: 1/20/96, p. 36). The universe as Edwin Hubble had imagined it, chock-full of island universes, was captured in one hard look.
As for Henrietta Leavitt, she missed out on the recognition she deserved for helping knock the Milky Way from its central perch. A Swedish mathematician wrote to her in 1925 saying that her work “has impressed me so deeply that I feel seriously inclined to nominate you to the Nobel Prize in physics for 1926.” He received a reply from Shapley, by then director of the Harvard College Observatory: Leavitt had died four years earlier.
Bizarre beauties
In the 1960s, astronomer Halton Arp proposed that researchers use the weirdest-looking galaxies as natural experiments to learn what gives a galaxy its shape. To help researchers figure out what makes a galaxy spiral, blobby or some other shape, Arp published the 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a compilation of 338 galaxies sorted by appearance.
Arp’s categories were spiral, elliptical, neither spiral nor elliptical, double and none of the above. At the time, some of the galaxies had no names or designations, and are still best known by their Arp numbers, like Arp 273 and Arp 147.
Despite their diversity, most of the peculiar galaxies are now thought to be going through a merger or interacting with another galaxy. But Arp never bought that explanation. He claimed for years that galaxies’ shapes come from material ejected from their luminous cores. Here are six of the most beautiful and bizarre galaxies, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and others, which offer much greater detail than Arp had access to half a century ago. — Lisa Grossman
Tap images to enlarge
The blue ring galaxy on the right of this image of Arp 247 probably became ringshaped after the galaxy on the left passed through it. The collision created a density wave that propagated outward, like ripples through a pond. The pileup of gas produced by the wave helped spark the blue ring of star formation. The reddish knot at the bottom left of the ring may mark the galaxy’s original core.
NASA, ESA, M. LIVIO/STSCI
Arp 273 is an interacting pair of galaxies. The larger of these tangoing partners, UGC1810, is being distorted into a shape reminiscent of a rose by its companion, UGC1813, which makes the flower’s stem. A bridge of material connects the two galaxies across tens of thousands of light years.
NASA, ESA, THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM/STSCI AND AURA
Looking like a backward comma, Arp 244 is a pair of colliding galaxies in the constellation Corvus that began interacting a few hundred million years ago. The yellowish blobs are the cores of the original galaxies, blue marks star-forming regions and pink is glowing hydrogen gas.
HUBBLE/ESA AND NASA
The spiral galaxy NGC2276 is forming bright new stars along its upper right edge. That starburst could have been triggered by a previous collision, or by the galaxy’s motion through the hot gas that lies within galaxy clusters.
NASA, ESA, STSCI, PAUL SELL/UNIV. OF FLORIDA
NGC1569 is a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis that is undergoing a burst of star formation. Over the last 100 million years, it has formed stars at a rate 100 times that of the Milky Way. All that star formation eventually produced supernovas, whose strong stellar winds also sculpted the galaxy.
NASA, ESA, THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM/STSCI AND AURA
M51 is a classic spiral, with two curving arms of young blue stars reaching out from a yellowish central core of older stars. Some astronomers think the Whirlpool’s arms are so prominent because of the small galaxy at the tip of one of the arms, NGC5195 (yellow blob at right of image). Despite how close the galaxies look, NGC5195 has actually been passing behind the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years. Shock waves from the smaller galaxy’s passage may help sculpt the larger’s distinctive shape.
NASA, ESA, S. BECKWITH/STSCI, THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM/STSCI AND AURA
Steps to Mars
The first liquid-fueled rockets, precursors to the ones that later carried robots and people into space, launched in the 1920s. A century later, robots have flown past, orbited or landed on every planetary body that was known in 1920, and a few that weren’t. People have walked on the moon and have lived in space for more than a year at a time. And serious talks about sending people to Mars are in the works.
NASA used to explore other worlds in a clear order, first observing with telescopes and then carrying out increasingly complex missions: flybys, orbiters, landers, rovers, then people and sample returns. “We’ve taken that entire progression on the moon, in [the last] century,” Bell says. “Sometime in this new century, we’ll add Mars to that list. All the rest of the solar system, we’ve got large chunks of that matrix checked off.”
After the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, space launches came fast and furious. Many were demonstrations of political and military might. But a lot of them had scientific merit, too. The Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft photographed the farside of the moon in 1959 — shortly after NASA’s founding. Spacecraft flew past Venus and Mars in the 1960s, sending back the first closeup data on their alien atmospheres and surfaces.
That same decade, humans landed on the moon and brought back rocks, opening a wide and detailed window into the history of the solar system. The lunar samples from the Apollo missions gave scientists a way to figure out how old planetary surfaces are around the solar system, taught us that the entire inner solar system was bombarded with impacts in its youth and gave us an origin story for the moon (SN: 7/6/19 & 7/20/19, p. 18).
“Until we started the space program, we really had no idea what the geology was on other places,” says Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute. “Early in the century, they were still debating whether the craters on the moon were impact craters or volcanic calderas. Even right there in our own backyard, we didn’t know what was going on.”
And extraterrestrial geology was surprising. Without meaning to, planetary scientists had based a lot of their expectations for other worlds on the Earth. The cover of Science News from June 1976, the month before NASA’s Viking 1 lander became the first long-lived spacecraft to land softly on Mars, showed Mars with a Cheez Whiz–colored desert under a clear blue sky. In the sleep-deprived rush to release the first color images sent back by Viking 1, scientists processed the image to produce a blue sky there, too.
Before NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft landed on Mars in July 1976, Science News and others envisioned the Red Planet with a blue sky. Mars’ sky is actually a dusty yellowish-pink.
But the day after the landing, James Pollack of the imaging team told reporters that the Martian sky was actually pink, probably thanks to scattered light from dust particles suspended in the air.
“When we found the sky of Mars to be a kind of pinkish-yellow rather than the blue which had erroneously first been reported, the announcement was greeted by a chorus of good-natured boos from the assembled reporters,” Sagan later wrote in the introduction to his popular book Cosmos. “They wanted Mars to be, even in this respect, like the Earth.”
Still, the Viking 1 and 2 landings brought Mars down to Earth, so to speak. “Mars had become a place,” Viking project scientist Gerald Soffen said in an interview for a NASA historical project published in 1984. “It went from a word, an abstract thought, to a real place.”
In some ways, the Viking landers’ views of Mars were disappointing. The mission’s central goal was explicitly to search for microbial life. It was “a long shot,” journalist Janet L. Hopson wrote in Science News in June 1976 (SN: 6/5/76, p. 374). But “even if no signs of life appear, [biologists] stand to gain their first real perspective on terrestrial biochemistry, life origins and evolution.”
The results of the Viking mission’s life-detection experiments were inconclusive, a finding almost worse than a true negative.
NASA subsequently pulled back from seeking life directly. The next 45 years of Mars missions searched for signs of past water, potentially habitable environments and organic molecules, instead of living organisms. All of those features turned up in data from the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers in the 2000s and 2010s.
Now, NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February 2021, is hunting for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will cache rock samples that a future mission will bring back to Earth. And the joint Russian and European space agencies’ ExoMars rover — named Rosalind Franklin, after the chemist whose work was central to discovering DNA’s structure — aims to seek molecular signatures of life on Mars and just below the surface after it launches in 2022.
Sagan predicted in 1973 that if he had been born 50 years in the future, the search for life on Mars would have already been completed. Today, 48 years later, we’re still looking.
The first image taken on the surface of Mars, in July 1976, shows the footpad of NASA’s Viking 1 lander and the rocks of a basin called Chryse Planitia.NASA
Almost 45 years later, the small helicopter Ingenuity landed with the Perseverance rover and became the first robot to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Its blades span 1.2 meters.JPL-CALTECH/NASA, ARIZONA STATE UNIV.
Exotic moons
The year after the Vikings landed on Mars, another pair of spacecraft launched to check almost the entire rest of the solar system off scientists’ must-see list. Astronomers realized that in 1977, the planets would line up in such a way that a spacecraft launched that year could reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune one by one, stealing a little angular momentum from each world as it went along. The mission was dubbed Voyager (SN: 8/27/77, p. 132).
“There’s never been anything like it, and there never will be again,” says Bell, of Arizona State. “It was comparable to the voyages of Magellan or Darwin or Lewis and Clark. Just an absolutely profound mission of discovery that completely changed the landscape of planetary science in this century.”
Voyager’s views of the outer solar system forced scientists to think outside of the “Earth box,” says Hansen, who worked on the mission. “The Voyager imaging team, bless their hearts, they would make predictions and then they’d be wrong,” she says. “And we would learn something.”
Hansen recalls chatting with a member of the imaging team when the spacecraft was approaching Jupiter and its dozens of moons. “He said, ‘Candy, we will see craters on [moons] Io and Europa, because we know from the density that those are rocky worlds. But not on Ganymede and Callisto, because those are ice,’ ” she recalls. Instead, the images showed Ganymede and Callisto were covered in craters. “That was an aha moment — ice is going to act like rock at those temperatures.” Meanwhile, ocean-swathed Europa and molten Io had almost no craters.
The moons of Jupiter presented “a whole, previously unimagined family of exotic worlds, each radically different not only from its companions, but also from everything else in the planet-watcher’s experience,” journalist Jonathan Eberhart wrote in Science News in April 1980 (SN: 4/19/80, p. 251).
Before 1979, Earth was the only geologically active, rocky world scientists knew about. But Voyager changed that view, too. A member of Voyager’s optical navigation team, Linda Morabito, spotted an odd, mushroom-shaped feature extending off the edge of Io while she was trying to plot the spacecraft’s position on March 9, 1979. She consulted with the science team, and they soon realized they were looking at a gigantic volcanic plume. Io was erupting in real time.
Three planetary scientists had predicted Io’s fire before the plumes were discovered. The three suggested the moon was heated by a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and one or two of its other moons, Europa and Ganymede.
But most of the planetary science community was stunned. “We take gravity for granted here. It keeps our feet on the ground,” Hansen says. “But gravity molds and shapes so many things in so many unexpected ways.”
Voyager and subsequent missions to the outer planets, like Galileo at Jupiter in the 1990s and Cassini at Saturn in the 2000s, transformed our view of the solar system in another profound way. They revealed several surprising parts of the solar system where life might exist today.
Voyager hinted that Europa might have a liquid water ocean beneath an icy shell. Galileo strengthened that idea, and suggested the ocean might be salty and have contact with the moon’s rocky core, which could provide chemical nutrients for microbial life. NASA is now developing a mission to fly past Europa. “I will not be surprised if life is somehow discovered on Europa in my lifetime, or in this century,” Bell says.
Spacecraft have revealed that some moons let their insides out. Jupiter’s moon Io (left) spurts plumes of magma as high as 390 kilometers into the air. Jupiter’s moon Europa (center) and Saturn’s moon Enceladus (right) both host subsurface seas and may vent water into space.FROM LEFT: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, UNIV. OF ARIZONA; JPL-CALTECH/NASA, SETI INSTITUTE; JPL-CALTECH/NASA, SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
Shortly after the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, scientists realized that the tiny moon Enceladus vents dramatic plumes of water vapor, dust and ice crystals into space from a hidden subsurface sea. That moon also looks like a good place for life.
If the last century of exploring the solar system was about coming to grips with alien geology, Hansen says, this coming century is going to be about oceanography — getting a grip on the strange seas in our own solar system.
“I think that’s going to shape a lot of the research going forward,” Hansen says. Now that it’s clear these moons have oceans, researchers will ask if they are habitable, and eventually, if they are inhabited.
Exoplanets detected
The first planet spotted outside our solar system — an exoplanet — was so different from anything in our solar system that astronomers weren’t hunting for anything like it.
“Knowing that there are actually planets around other stars now seems so trivial to say,” says exoplanet observer Debra Fischer of Yale University. “But we had arguments in 1995 about whether other stars have planets.”
So when astronomer Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory turned his spectrograph on the sky in April 1994, he kept quiet about his hopes of finding true exoplanets. He was more likely to find brown dwarfs, failed stars that never grew massive enough to burn hydrogen.
His instrument used a clever new way to hunt for other worlds, called the radial velocity technique. Previous exoplanet hunters had looked directly for a star’s motion in response to the gravity of an orbiting planet, watching to see if the star would move back and forth in the sky. That technique had led to several planetary claims, even dating back to 1855, but none of them had held up. Those motions are tiny; Jupiter’s influence moves the sun by just 12 meters per second.
Astronomers have hunted exoplanets with several techniques, some better than others. The earliest claimed exoplanet detections used the astrometry method, but almost none of them held up. Success came with the radial velocity method in the 1990s. But the transit method has proved most prolific.
Method
Description
Planets discovered
Transit
When a planet passes directly between its star and an observer, it dims the star’s light by a measurable amount.
3,343
Radial velocity
Orbiting planets cause stars to wobble in space, leading to an observable shift in the color of the star’s light.
866
Gravitational microlensing
Light from a distant star is bent and focused by a planet’s gravity as the planet passes between the star and Earth.
108
Direct imaging
Astronomers can take pictures of an exoplanet by removing the overwhelming glare of the star it orbits.
53
Astrometry
The orbit of a planet can cause a star to move visibly on the sky.
1
SOURCE: NASA
Instead, Mayor and others studied a shift in the wavelength of starlight as a star moved to and fro. As a star approaches us, the light shifts to shorter, or bluer, wavelengths; as it moves away, the light grows redder. Calculating the velocity of a star’s back-and-forth motion, astronomers could figure out the minimum mass and length of the year of whatever was tugging that star.
The shifts Mayor was looking for were still minuscule. The search was considered futile, and fringe — like looking for little green men. So astronomers who explicitly claimed to be searching for planets had a hard time scheduling observations at telescopes. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, were considered legitimate science, and would be easier to detect.
So the world was astounded when, in October 1995, Mayor and his student Didier Queloz reported strong evidence not of a brown dwarf, but of a true planet orbiting the sunlike star 51 Pegasi, about 50 light-years from our solar system.
The new planet was weird. It seemed to be about half the mass of Jupiter, too puny to be a brown dwarf. But it orbited the star once every 4.23 Earth days, putting it incredibly close to its star. There’s nothing like that in our solar system, and astronomers had no idea how it could exist.
“The news flashed through the astronomical community like a lightning bolt,” wrote journalist Ron Cowen in Science News, in the first of threestories on the new planet he would write within a month (SN: 10/21/95, p. 260).
51 Peg b, as it came to be known, launched a new era. “It means planets exist around other sunlike stars, we can find them, and they might be the exciting ones,” says Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri, who has studied how astronomers create worlds out of pixels and spectra. “Firsts are exciting because they promise there will be seconds and thirds and fourths.”
Big surprise
The first planet found orbiting a star similar to our sun fit nobody’s mold. Dubbed a “hot Jupiter,” 51 Pegasi b is bigger than Jupiter, but 20 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun (Earth is one astronomical unit, AU, or 150 million kilometers from the sun). 51 Pegasi b circles its star in four days; Earth’s orbit is a lengthier 365 days.
A tight orbit for a large planet
C. CHANG
SOURCE: M. MAYOR AND D. QUELOZ/NATURE 1995
The search was on. A group from San Francisco quickly found two more planets hiding in data the researchers hadn’t finished analyzing yet. Those next two planets, 70 Vir b and 47 UMa b, were also more massive and closer to their stars than expected.
The existence of these three worlds, which were named hot Jupiters because their close-in orbits should make them sizzle, upended the paradigm for what a planet could be like. Clearly, our solar system was not the template for the universe.
Yet for a few years after 51 Peg b was announced, astronomers debated whether the planet was really there. Maybe the star’s apparent back-and-forth was just its outer atmosphere breathing in and out. Those debates waned as more planets were discovered, but it took a new technique to really convince everyone.
Astronomers had predicted at least back to the 1850s that some planets would pass in front of their stars from the perspective of Earth. As it crossed, or transited, the face of its star, a planet could reveal its presence by blocking a little bit of the star’s light.
But if other solar systems are like ours, transits would be incredibly difficult to detect. Our planets are too small and too far from the sun to cast a large shadow. Hot Jupiters, on the other hand, should block way more of a star’s light than any planets in our solar system. With the discovery of 51 Peg b, transits seemed not only possible to detect, but almost easy.
The first transiting extrasolar planet revealed itself in 1999, when then-Harvard graduate student David Charbonneau drove to Colorado to do his thesis work with astronomer Tim Brown. Brown had built a tiny telescope on a friend’s farm north of Boulder, setting up the computers in a repurposed turkey coop, to search for transiting planets. By the time Charbonneau arrived, however, the farm had been sold and the telescope relocated to a lab site.
To practice the technique, Charbonneau aimed Brown’s telescope at a star, called HD 209458, that already had a suspected planet. The star’s light dimmed by about 1 percent, and then it shone bright again. That was a clear sign of a planet about 32 percent wider than Jupiter.
That discovery ended all doubts about the existence of exoplanets, says Fischer, who had worked with the exoplanet-hunting group in San Francisco. “It happened like that,” Fischer says, with a finger snap. The combined size and mass of the planet unambiguously ruled out brown dwarfs or other exotic explanations. “It walks like a Jupiter, talks like a Jupiter, it’s a Jupiter.”
There was another advantage to the transit method: It can show the composition of a planet’s atmosphere. Planets detected by the wobble technique were “little more than phantoms,” Cowen wrote in Science News in 2007. They were too small to be seen, and too close to the star to be photographed directly.
“Everyone had assumed that if you wanted to [detect] the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, you’d have to image it,” Charbonneau told Science News. But starlight filtering through a transiting planet’s sky could reveal what gases surround the alien world without the need for a snapshot.
Hunt for habitable planets
Transits soon overtook wobbles as the most fruitful planet-finding strategy. That was mostly thanks to the launch of NASA’s Kepler space telescope in March 2009.
Kepler’s mission was explicitly about finding other Earths. For nearly four years, the telescope stared at 170,000 stars in a single patch of sky to catch as many transiting planets as it could. In particular, its operators were hoping for Earth-sized planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars — places where life could conceivably exist.
The years that followed were a boom time for planet finders. By the end of its nearly 10-year run, Kepler had confirmed almost 2,700 planets and thousands more potential planets. Findings went beyond the hot Jupiters to worlds the size of Earth and planets in the “habitable zone,” where temperatures could be right for liquid water.
Discoveries came so quickly that a single new world stopped being a news story. Kepler’s data shifted from revealing new worlds one by one to taking an exoplanet census. It showed that hot Jupiters are not actually the most common type of planet; they were just the easiest ones to spot. The most common type makes no appearance in our solar system: worlds between the size of Earth and Neptune, which may be rocky super-Earths or gaseous mini-Neptunes.
And Kepler revealed that there are more planets in the galaxy than stars. Every one of the billions and billions of stars in the Milky Way should have at least one world in its orbit.
But the telescope never really achieved the goal of finding another Earth. Kepler required three transits to confirm a world’s existence. That means the telescope had to stare for at least three years to find a planet orbiting at Earth’s exact distance.
By 2013, after four years of observing, half of Kepler’s stabilizing reaction wheels had failed. The telescope couldn’t maintain its unblinking view of the same part of the sky. Mission scientists cleverly reprogrammed the telescope to look at other stars for shorter spans of time. But most of the planets found there orbited closer to their stars than Earth does, meaning they couldn’t be Earth twins.
Messeri recalls an exoplanet conference at MIT in 2011 where a lot of the conversation was about finding a twin of Earth.
“It was a peak of excitement — maybe we’re going to find this planet in the next three years, or five years. It felt close,” she says. “What’s interesting is, in the 10 years since then, it still feels that close.”
But astronomers had already realized they might not need a true Earth analog to find a planet where life could exist. Rocky worlds orbiting smaller, dimmer stars than the sun are easier to find, and might be just as friendly to life.
Charbonneau again was ahead of the curve, having started a program called MEarth in 2008 to hunt for habitable planets around puny M dwarf stars using eight small telescopes in Arizona (plus another eight in Chile that were added in 2014). Within six months, Charbonneau and colleagues had found a super-Earth dubbed GJ 1214b that is probably a water world — maybe a bit too wet for life.
The European Southern Observatory started the TRAPPIST, for TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, survey from La Silla, Chile, in 2010. Another telescope, at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco, came online to search for planets orbiting Northern Hemisphere stars in 2016. Among that survey’s discoveries is the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single M dwarf star, three of which might be in the habitable zone (SN: 3/18/17, p. 6).
The star TRAPPIST-1 hosts seven planets (shown in an artist’s illustration) that all probably have a rocky composition. At least three of the planets could have temperatures that are good for life.JPL-CALTECH/NASA
NASA’s successor to Kepler, TESS, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, has been scanning the entire sky since April 2018 for small planets orbiting bright nearby stars, including M dwarfs. It spotted more than 2,200 potential planets in its first full-sky scan, scientists announced in March 2021.
These days, astronomers are joining up with scientists across disciplines, from planetary scientists who study hypothetical exoplanet geology to microbiologists and chemists who think about what kinds of aliens could live on those planets and how to detect those life-forms. That’s a big shift from even 10 years ago, Messeri says. In the early 2010s, no one was talking about life.
“You weren’t allowed to say that,” she says. “Astronomers would whisper it to me during fieldwork, but this was not a search for aliens.”
Exoplanet astronomy is on firmer ground now. Its leading figures have won MacArthur “genius” grants. Pioneer planet finders Mayor and Queloz won the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics. The work is no longer hidden away in conferences that are actually about stars. “It doesn’t have to legitimize itself anymore,” Messeri says. “It’s a real science.”
The promise that transiting planets can reveal the contents of their alien atmospheres may soon be fulfilled. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may launch this year, after many years of delays. One of its first tasks will be to probe the atmospheres of transiting planets, including those of TRAPPIST-1.
If anything is alive on those absolutely alien, unearthly worlds, maybe the next century will bring it to light.
Chinese Company Claims to be Working on a Starship-Like Rocket
Chinese Company Claims to be Working on a Starship-Like Rocket
Last weekend (April 24th), China celebrated its sixth “National Space Day” (aka. Aerospace Industry Achievement Exhibition) in Nanjing, an event that highlights advances China has made in space. Similar to Space Day that is held each year on the first Thursday in May (this year, it will be held on May 7th), the goal is to foster interest in space exploration and the STEMS so as to inspire the next generation of astronauts and aerospace engineers.
This year, the festivities focused on the Chang’e-5 mission (which showcased some of the lunar samples it brought back), and the name of China’s first Mars rover (Zhurong) – which will be landing on the Red Planet later this month. But another interesting snippet was a video presented by one of China’s main rocket manufacturers that showed demonstrated that they are working on a rocket similar to the Starship.
The animation was recorded and uploaded to the Chinese social network Weibo (video above), which was accompanied by the following description (translated directly from Mandarin):
“The promotional animation of “One-Hour Global Arrival in Space Transportation System” of the First Academy of Aerospace Engineering, compare? This afternoon was recorded from [2021 Chinese Astronomy Day] Booth of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology at the Aerospace Industry Achievement Exhibition. If you want to make an appointment to visit Lunar Land, please go to the bottom of this blog.”
In the video, we can see two different concepts for achieving suborbital passenger flights that could be operational by the 2040s. The video came to the attention of Eric Berger at Ars Technica, which mirrored it on Youtube so that it could reach a wider audience. The animation begins by showing a spaceport with several launch pads nearby. On each, we see two-stage vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rockets that look strikingly similar to the Starship and Super Heavy
Also similar to the Starship is the way the first stage booster returns to Earth after separation, indicating that it is a totally reusable system. We then see passengers scening views of Earth and experiencing temporary weightlessness before the spacecraft begins making a powered descent. The flight ends with the spacecraft landing in a major city clearly several time zones away (since it’s nighttime where they land).
In addition to its appearance and configuration, the animation is also similar to the “Earth to Earth” concept video released by SpaceX in September of 2017 (shown below). In that animation, a Starship ferries passengers from a platform at sea off the coast of New York and land on a similar platform off the coast of Shanghai in just 34 minutes.
The second point-to-point concept in the Chinese animation shows a horizontal takeoff and landing (HTOL) vehicle being launched via an electromagnetic rail. Once this “spaceplane” is catapulted into the air, it engages what appears to be a hybrid-propellant rocket engine to accelerate from Mach 2 to Mach 15 (supersonic to hypersonic) and achieve suborbital flight.
Both of these concepts incorporate technology and ideas that are widely popular right now with both space agencies and commercial space. Between NASA, the ESA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, Reaction Engines, and other federal and private programs, multiple reusable rocket and spaceplane concepts are currently under development.
What’s more, both are consistent with China’s long-term aim to become the world’s leading space power by 2045. According to the roadmap released by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation in 2017, China hopes to develop a “suborbital carrier vehicle” by 2025 that will eventually grow into a fleet, one which is capable of delivering cargo anywhere in the world by 2035 and passengers by 2045.
China’s HTOL spaceplane concept, presented at the . Credit: CALT/Eric Berger
However, the clear resemblance between CALT’s rocket concept and the Starship is also in keeping with the way China has monitored SpaceX’s progress practically from inception. As Eric Berger noted in his recently-published book Liftoff – which recounts the early struggles of SpaceX – a Chinese spy boat was stationed off the coast of Omelek Island (part of the Marshall Islands, South Pacific) in 2006 to watch the inaugural flight of the Falcon 1.
More recent examples include the incorporation of “grid fins” to the Long March 2C rocket (similar to the Falcon 9) for the sake of future reusability, as well as developing the Long March 8 to land on sea platforms. China’s long-term plan for the Long March 9 – which will be the country’s most powerful heavy-lift system once it is in service (slated for the 2030s) – includes making it partly reusable.
In the meantime, it is not clear if China plans to develop a Starship-like rocket would include equipping it for missions to the Moon and Mars (in addition to point-to-point suborbital flights). But since regular missions to the Moon and Mars were also part of the roadmap, it’s entirely possible China intends to adopt the Starship design and mission profile in its entirety.
One thing is for certain: China intends to be the superpower in space by the mid-21st century, and not merely one of several. While they have some catch-up to do before that can happen, their rate of growth is unparalleled.
Former worker reveals secrets about Area 51, aliens and “StarGate”
Former worker reveals secrets about Area 51, aliens and “StarGate”
A former Area 51 worker has released a wealth of revealing information about aliens, time machines, the plans of the elite, and a possible extinction of humanity.
Dan Burisch revealed all the secrets of Area 51.
Dan Burisch, is a Former Worker in the United States Military Forces . He has a doctorate in microbiology and was in the secret facilities of Area 51, where he was able to observe amazing things.
In 1986, Burisch received an unexpected visitor while at the University of Las Vegas. His visitor was the well-known “secret” government. They offered him to work on a classified project where he should put all his knowledge into practice.
The secret projects of the American government and Area 51
The following year, Burisch began working in a Nevada State Government office . It was related to the probation of inmates.
In 1989, tissue samples began to arrive , which he examined in a separate location and reported where they came from.
In 1994, Burisch was moved to an underground base known as ” Fourth Century ,” which was part of Area 51. The “Aquarium Project” began there .
It was there that he discovered that the government had spacecraft and extraterrestrial beings. In one of the departments there was information on a race known as ” Orions, ” from the Z Reticuli star system .
He was also able to read a copy of the treatise made by Eisenhower with beings known as P-50 and the Orions.
He learned that in a place called ” Galileo’s Bay “, there were different spaceships. One of them was the one described by Bob Lazar and the one that crashed in Roswell .
According to Burisch’s information, the concept of aliens is totally wrong . Aliens and aliens are not the same . The aliens are beings coming from other worlds, while the aliens are humans who come in the future.
The latter are the evolution of the human race over thousands of years.
Aliens: Humans of the Future
These aliens are divided into four groups and are classified with the letter P, which means ” present “, plus the years that take us into the future .
As an example, the Roswells are known as P-24 , which means ” present plus 24,000 years .” The others are known as J ROD P-45, J ROD P-52 and P-54.
The “J RODs” suffer from a very painful disease and he was a participant in the project trying to find a cure. He assured that he took blood samples from a female of this breed and that he worked on it for 2 years.
According to Burisch, the aliens are actually time travel masters.
He says that, during that time, he managed to establish a friendly relationship with her and that, in an act that violated all security protocols, that being hugged him.
At that time he telepathically transmitted much information about the future of humanity and a nuclear catastrophe .
In this event many people died, another part of humanity hid underground in order to survive. 24,000 years later, the most advanced beings on the planet had mastered time travel . It was for that reason that they traveled to Roswell.
Civilizations in our Galaxy
From this event, it was also learned that a part of the survivors settled on the Moon, Mars and Orion . From there come the P-52 or Orions that, despite having been terrestrial, came to colonize other worlds.
P-45s are hostile beings. They are responsible for the nuclear disaster and they are also the ones who do most of the abductions .
Eisenhower’s meeting was with these beings in an attempt to prevent the nuclear disaster from repeating itself. They were diplomatic pacts and the famous Abductions agreement in exchange for technology.
The Orions presented the president with a cube three inches long and wide that was able to predict the future . This instrument continues on Earth and is used by the most powerful.
Majestic 12 and the StarGates
Burish also made a statement that he worked under the Majestic 12. In this context, he also spoke of the ” StarGate “; devices built on Earth, but based on alien technology .
According to their statements, the instructions for its manufacture are found in the Sumerian tables. They were used to communicate with other civilizations outside of our Solar System. Through them a wormhole could also be made.
In this way, people or objects were teleported to other points in our universe instantly.
However, Burisch assures that these experiments are not very reliable, since he saw a person die . This device was also called “Looking Glass” since it was used to observe the probabilities of future events.
In this way they were able to verify that there was a high probability that the nuclear catastrophe occurred due to the StarGates. Currently, he assures that there are around 50 of these devices, although they have been disassembled.
It all looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but Dan Burisch has offered such detailed evidence and arguments that, at least, they cast doubt on what governments are hiding from us.
Jongste astronaut Oliver (18) in de wolken na ruimtetrip van 10 minuten: “Elke seconde van deze vlucht was onbeschrijfelijk intens”
Jongste astronaut Oliver (18) in de wolken na ruimtetrip van 10 minuten: “Elke seconde van deze vlucht was onbeschrijfelijk intens”
Oliver Daemen (18) mag zich sinds gisteren de jongste astronaut ooit noemen. De Nederlandse student bemachtigde een plek aan boord bij de ruimtevlucht van Amazonoprichter Jeff Bezos. De lancering in Texas vond plaats om 15.14 uur Belgische tijd, tien minuten later landde de capsule weer veilig terug op aarde. “Het was geweldig”, reageerde Daemen euforisch na de trip.
Daemen is vanaf nu dus de jongste astronaut ooit. De ruimtereis verliep zonder problemen, hangend aan parachutes landde de capsule met daarin de bemanning op Texaanse aarde. “Heel erg bedankt, het was geweldig!”, riep de Nederlander vanuit het vaartuig. Daemen werd tijdens de vlucht van het ruimtevaartbedrijf van Bezos (Blue Origin) vergezeld door drie anderen. Jeff Bezos zelf, diens broer Mark en de 82-jarige Amerikaanse Wally Funk, de oudste astronaut ter wereld. Hun raket haalde een topsnelheid van 3595 kilometer per uur.
In een latere verklaring noemde Daemen de vlucht een ervaring die zijn leven verandert. “Elke seconde van deze vlucht was onbeschrijfelijk intens. Het machtige effect van de G-krachten op je gestel, het epische moment dat je de dampkring verlaat. De blik op de aarde vanuit de ruimte is onvergetelijk. Terug op de grond besef je pas goed hoe enorm kwetsbaar onze planeet is in het onmetelijke sterrenstelsel. Ik realiseer me nu beter dan ooit dat we extreem zuinig moeten zijn op de aarde. Daar wil ik intensief aan bijdragen.”
100 kilometer boven de aarde
Het feit dat Bezos de oudste én jongste astronaut mee kon nemen op zijn eerste commerciële ruimtevlucht was doorslaggevend in de keuze voor de Nederlander. Daarnaast legde de steenrijke vader van Oliver vermoedelijk een bedrag van zeker zes nullen neer voor de ‘ruimtecheque’.
Het vaartuig passeerde de grens van 100 kilometer boven de aarde, volgens Bezos begint daar de ruimte pas. Na afloop viel de 18-jarige zijn vader in de armen. Ook de rest van de crew was door het dolle heen en noemde de vlucht een van de mooiste momenten van hun leven.
Het was de eerste bemande vlucht van het ruimtevaartbedrijf van Bezos, Blue Origin. Dat wil toeristische vluchten naar de rand van de dampkring verkopen. Bezos is verwikkeld in een hevige concurrentiestrijd met andere multimiljardairs als Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) en Elon Musk (SpaceX), die zich ook op ruimtetoerisme hebben gestort. Zij proberen elkaar af te troeven. Eerder deze maand vloog Branson met zijn eigen ruimtevliegtuig naar ongeveer 86 kilometer hoogte.
Met de eerste vlucht wilde Bezos de aandacht op zichzelf en zijn bedrijf vestigen. Daarom zat Bezos ook zelf aan boord. Blue Origin verkocht het laatste plekje aan boord aan de hoogste bieder. Een onbekend persoon betaalde zo’n 28 miljoen dollar (ruim 23 miljoen euro) voor de reis, maar bleek niet te kunnen. Hij of zij gaat mee op een latere ruimtevlucht. Daarop mocht Daemen mee. Zijn vader, een belegger, had ook een bod op de vlucht uitgebracht. Blue Origin noemt Daemen “de eerste betalende klant”, maar het is dus niet bekend hoeveel de familie heeft betaald.
Reactie Kuipers
De Nederlandse ruimtevaarder André Kuipers vindt het mooi om te zien hoe de 18-jarige Oliver “na zo’n tien jaar dromen van de ruimte (heel herkenbaar) heeft genoten van het uitzicht en het zweven”, zo schreef hij op Twitter.
Kuipers was zelf twee keer in de ruimte. In 2004 en van 2011 tot 2012 verbleef hij in het ruimtestation ISS, zo’n 400 kilometer boven het oppervlak van de aarde. Daarmee was hij, tot gisteren, de laatste Nederlander die in de ruimte is geweest.
Daemen, die als kind Kuipers ontmoette, kwam tot 107 kilometer hoogte. De Brabander verliet daarmee de dampkring. en geldt nu als de jongste astronaut ooit. Hij wil in september in Utrecht natuurkunde gaan studeren.
People have described bizarre extraterrestrial encounters that take place in a dreamlike state.
Scientists guided lucid dreamers to emulate encounters with aliens and UFOs during REM sleep.
(Image credit: David Wall/Getty Images)
Lucid dreaming, in which people are partially aware and can control their dreams during sleep, could explain so-called alien abduction stories, a study suggests.
Claims of such abductions date to the 19th century; the circumstances of the kidnappings often sound dreamlike and trigger feelings of terror and paralysis. Certain dream states are also known to produce such feelings, leading Russian researchers to wonder if dream experiments could provide clues about alleged extraterrestrial experiences. The scientists prompted lucid dreamers to dream about encounters with aliens or unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and found that a number of sleepers reported dreams that resembled actual descriptions of alleged alien abductions.
During lucid dreams, sleepers are aware they are dreaming and can then use that awareness to manipulate what happens in the dream. About 55% of people experience lucid dreaming once or more in their lifetimes, and 23% have lucid dreams at least once a month, according to a 2016 study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition that analyzed five decades' worth of sleep research.
Recently, researchers with the Phase Research Center (PRC), a private facility in Moscow that researches lucid dreaming, conducted experiments with 152 adults who self-identified as lucid dreamers, instructing them to "find or summon aliens or UFOs" during a lucid dream, the scientists reported July 2 in the International Journal of Dream Research.
The researchers found that 114 of the participants reported dreaming about having some type of successful interaction with an extraterrestrial. Of those, about 61% described meeting "aliens" that resembled extraterrestrials from science-fiction novels and films, while 19% met aliens that "looked like ordinary people," according to the study.
Little blue men
One female participant spoke of seeing "little men" with blue skin, oversize heads "and huge, bulging eyes," the study authors reported. When the aliens invited her onto their spaceship, "I was blinded by a very bright light, like from a searchlight," she said. "My vision was gone, and I felt dizzy and light."
Another participant said that he dreamed he was lying in his bed when he felt as though he were being "dragged somewhere," ending up in a room with a white silhouette that reached into his chest and started "doing something inside with tools," the researchers wrote.
Conversations with dream aliens took place in 26% of the encounters, and 12% of the participants spoke with aliens in their dreams and interacted with them physically. UFOs showed up in 28% of the meetings, and 10% of the dreamers who saw UFOs described being brought inside an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Of those who described their encounters as "realistic," 24% also experienced sleep paralysis and intense fear. Such emotions often accompany reports of supposed alien abductions, and though individuals who describe being kidnapped by aliens might truly believe that what they experienced was real, these people were likely experiencing an extraterrestrial meeting while in a lucid dream, the study authors reported.
Feelings of paralysis, fear and helplessness in vivid dreams can be so powerful that they blur the line between dreams and reality, so it's no wonder that people who may have unknowingly been dreaming instead insist that they actually met with aliens who stole them away and transported them to UFOs, said PRC head researcher and founder Michael Raduga.
For these unknowing dreamers, "abductions are real," Raduga told Live Science in an email. "They just don't know how to explain it."
note : welcome new Secureteam subs. Please send my kind regards to Tyler : I do not watch but is this his music ? : make you feel at home lol
UFO Sighted Over Hästveda, Sweden ( July 18, 2021 )
STATEMENT : UFO over "Hästveda" Northeastern Scania (18/07/2021) (06:42) Cylindrical UFO over the village of "Hästveda" in Northeastern Scania (18/07/2021) (06:42) This was the second of five cylindrical UFOs we saw that night between circa 05:30 to 09:30 We will try to get better footage if it returns tonight with multiple camera angles.
The image of Wrinkle ridge in Elysium Planitia on Mars was taken by the HiRISE camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft on April 2, 2008.
The image shows what looks like two hatches fixed to the surface of Mars.
The sun reflects off the first rectangular hatch, which may be metallic, while the opposite side shows a dark rectangular shadow where the sun's light is blocked by the second hatch.
The hatches of about 7 x 12 meters are slightly open. This is a doorway that gives access to an underground basement?
Suppose it's not about something natural but artificially, we may wonder, other than who built it, what was it used for?
Google Mars coordinates: 8°50'17.09"N 150°36'32.13"E
Researcher affirms that “UFOs come from the Moon” (Video)
Researcher affirms that “UFOs come from the Moon” (Video)
A “sky watcher” captured on video a surprising formation of UFOs on the Moon. Are they coming from our satellite?
We have learned that the Earth, from our perspective of smallness, seems flat, but, everything seems to indicate that it is round or at least that is what we were taught.
From there it is the starting point to come to understand that the universe is so big and vast that we cannot assure that we are alone in it.
Everything matches, when unknown objects appear in the sky.
The UFO phenomenon continues to speak, thus a construction of rational thought is being created, to elucidate and found spaces to try to know what we are watching happen in the sky.
The images in the video (below) show three flying objects in an apparently triangular formation, and gliding at a high speed so that later 2 more appear following the same trajectory.
“A trajectory that points to the earth if you can fix the exact moment well.”
Given the speed of the objects, it is unlikely that they are satellites, especially because of the movements they make and the loss of formation before disappearing into the darkness of space.
An organism adapted for this situation, since sudden movements would be impossible for our race, due to the gravitational forces that we can force.
As is known, the human body cannot support flights beyond a certain speed limit, which, in space, can be 32 thousand kilometers.
This is a very small limit for the evolutions made by these flying objects, which practically disappear very quickly.
Once the formation of the three objects or UFOs is located and recorded , after about 10 seconds later a fourth object appears on the screen, at 35 seconds a fifth UFO enters the scene in the same direction after the previous formation.
An impressive recording to which we would ask ourselves a question about it. Are they ships of another civilization from the moon? Or .. are they from the terrestrial space fleet?
A new study on DNA has revealed that people living today are only between 1.5% and 7% modern humans. No, this doesn’t mean that we’re over 90% alien (or are we…?), but it does indicate that we have very old DNA belonging to our ancient ancestors.
According to the study, only a very small percentage of our genome is uniquely human. Researchers extracted DNA belonging to skeletal remains of Neanderthals and Denisovans as well as from 279 people living in different parts of the world today. Then the experts took that information regarding sequenced genomes and developed a family tree for Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
They found two important factors that really stood out: the first bombshell was that between 1.5 and 7% of our genome is unique to our species which means that at least 93% of our genome is a result of a mixture between Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The second discovery was that in the past 600,000 years, there were numerous bursts of genetic adaptations regarding brain development and function of humans.
By creating the evolutionary trees, the team of researchers were able to find very important times in history when Homo sapiens adapted and separated from our ancient ancestors. In order to find out how closely related we actually are to Neanderthals and Denisovans, experts had to study both the genes as well as when the genes were turned into proteins.
In an interview with Inverse, Nathan Schaefer, who is a bioinformatician at the University of California, San Francisco, explained this in further detail, “When you ask that question, we are very similar to Neanderthals.” “We have, you know, around 20,000 genes, and somewhere around 40 of them have these actual coding differences that all humans have one version, and the Neanderthals have the other version.” “That’s already like, ‘Wow, we’re really, really close to them.”
Fernando Villanea, who is a population geneticist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, but wasn’t involved with the study, told Inverse, “Their results support the most exciting new views on the interactions between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.” He went on to talk about the human brain development over the past several hundred thousand years, “These adaptation events which define our species possibly happened around [600,000] and [200,000] years ago in Africa.”
In other words, this new study seems to indicate that the most genetically unique difference between modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans is our cognitive development over the past several hundred thousand years as explained by University of California, Santa Cruz computational biologist Richard Green, “We can tell those regions of the genome are highly enriched for genes that have to do with neural development and brain function.”
As for the researchers’ next steps regarding their studies, Schaefer stated, “What I’m interested in doing now is trying to learn more about how genes work and what these genes do.” The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
