UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

En dat met een instrument dat daar eigenlijk niet eens voor ontworpen is!

In de afgelopen zes jaar hebben onderzoekers met behulp van de Dark Energy Camera (DECam) op de Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chili onder meer 300 miljoen sterrenstelsels bestudeerd en jacht gemaakt op supernovae en andere tijdelijke verschijnselen in het universum. En dat met maar één doel: meer inzicht krijgen in donkere energie (de mysterieuze drijvende kracht achter de versnelde uitdijing van het heelal).

Ontdekkingen in ons eigen zonnestelsel
Maar de observaties van DECam bleken niet alleen heel geschikt voor het ontrafelen van één van de grootste mysterieus in de kosmologie. De beelden die de camera maakte, bleken onderzoekers ook in staat te stellen om jacht te maken op ons nog onbekende objecten in ons eigen zonnestelsel. Zo werd recent dankzij DECam nog een indrukwekkende komeet ontdekt: C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein. De komeet gaat met een omvang van zo’n 100 kilometer de boeken in als de grootste komeet die mensen ooit hebben gespot.

817 ontdekkingen in totaal..
En de komeet is lang niet het enige object dat dankzij DECam is ontdekt. In dit onderzoeksartikel maken onderzoekers nu DECam na zes jaar gestopt is met observeren, de balans op. En wat blijkt? De camera heeft in zes jaar tijd 815 Transneptunische objecten, 1 Centaur-planetoïde en 1 Oortwolkkomeet ontdekt.

..waarvan er 416 nog niet eerder beschreven zijn
De ontdekking van veel van die objecten – zoals C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein – is eerder al publiekelijk gemaakt en dus niet echt nieuws. Maar dat geldt niet voor alle 817 objecten die DECam in de afgelopen zes jaar heeft ontdekt. In hun paper presenteren de onderzoekers namelijk 416 recent op beelden van DECam aangetroffen objecten waarvan de ontdekking nog niet bekend is gemaakt.

De ontdekkingstocht
Aan de ontdekking van al die objecten is een behoorlijk arbeidsintensief proces voorafgegaan. Want in de wetenschap geldt: één waarneming is geen waarneming. Dus voor elk potentieel nieuw zonnestelselobject moest er gezocht worden naar aanvullend beeldmateriaal waarop datzelfde object acte de présence gaf. “We hebben een speciaal, extreem tijdrovend proces dat erop gericht is om deze objecten te vinden en waarbij we – onder honderd miljoen potentiële detecties – enkele tientallen detecties proberen aan te wijzen die bij één en hetzelfde object horen,” legde onderzoeker Pedro Bernardinelli (ontdekker van de naar hem vernoemde reuzenkomeet) eerder al aan Scientias.nl uit. Hoe arbeidsintensief dat proces is, wordt wel duidelijk als we Bernardinelli nog eens benaderen en vragen hoeveel tijd het hem gekost heeft om die laatste 416 objecten te vinden. “Ik denk dat het me een jaar gekost heeft,” zo vertelt hij. De meeste tijd ging daarbij zitten in het vinden van aanvullende beelden die de oorspronkelijke detectie konden bevestigen. “Dat duurde zo’n 9 maanden en vereiste 15 tot 20 miljoen computeruren. Gedurende die 9 maanden gebruikte ik nonstop meer dan 100 computers.”

Fantastisch resultaat
Met de 416 nieuwe objecten komt het totale aantal door DECam ontdekte objecten dus op 817. Een fantastisch resultaat, zeker als je bedenkt dat DECam helemaal niet ontworpen is om nieuwe objecten in het zonnestelsel aan te wijzen. “Na de eerste verwerking van de beelden hoopten we voorzichtig dat we in totaal zo’n 500 objecten in het zonnestelsel zouden ontdekken. Dat zou al heel indrukwekkend zijn geweest.” Maar het werden er meer dan 800. “De laatste resultaten hebben ons aangenaam verrast.”

De grens is bereikt
DECam is niet langer operationeel, maar zou het kunnen dat in de enorme dataset die deze heeft achtergelaten toch nog meer ons onbekende objecten schuilgaan? We vroegen het Bernardinelli. “Wij denken dat we de grens van wat met deze data mogelijk was, wel bereikt hebben en daar zijn we trots op.”

In de jacht op supernova-explosies maakte DECam tussen 2013 en 2019 elke week beelden van hetzelfde stukje van het heelal. Onderzoekers konden die beelden vervolgens naast elkaar leggen om te zoeken naar objecten buiten ons zonnestelsel waarvan de helderheid door de tijd heen verandert. Maar hoewel de focus op objecten buiten het zonnestelsel lag, was ook ons eigen zonnestelsel onderdeel van elke foto. En wanneer je maar genoeg beelden naast elkaar legt, moet het in principe mogelijk zijn om objecten te spotten die – terwijl ze hun baantjes om de zon trekken – door het gezichtsveld van DECam reizen. Zo kun je dus gewapend met beelden van DECam op jacht gaan naar nieuwe objecten aan de rand van het zonnestelsel. En hoewel die op de DECam-beelden in het gunstigste geval slechts vertegenwoordigd worden door enkele pixels licht kunnen onderzoekers daar al behoorlijk wat uit aflezen. “We kunnen de baan vaststellen,” vertelt Bernardinelli. “En uit de helderheid kunnen we aflezen hoeveel licht het object reflecteert, wat ons weer meer kan vertellen over de omvang. Ook maken we gebruik van meerdere filters, waardoor we licht in feite in verschillende kleuren zien en meer kunnen zeggen over de samenstelling van het oppervlak van deze objecten.”

Interessante exemplaren
Van de meer dan 800 objecten die in de DECam-data zijn boven komen drijven, is de reuzenkomeet C/2014 UN271 volgens Bernardinelli veruit het meest interessante object. “Maar er zijn nog een paar gekke objecten,” vertelt hij. “Zo hebben we een object ontdekt dat op een afstand van 79 AU staat (Neptunus staat op 30 AU) en dat is het verste object uit het laatste deel van onze zoektocht. Dit object heeft bovendien een perihelium van 54 AU.” Het perihelium is het punt in de omloopbaan waarop het object het verst van de zon verwijderd is. En er zijn maar weinig objecten waarbij dat punt 54 keer verder van de zon verwijderd is dan de aarde. “En dan is er nog een ander interessant object met een inclinatie van 62 graden.” Dat betekent dat het omloopvlak van dit object een hoek van 62 graden maakt met het omloopvlak waarin de grote planeten cirkelen. “Daarmee heeft het object een veel grotere inclinatie dan de meeste andere objecten.”

Ze mogen dan niet allemaal even interessant zijn; waardevol zijn de meer dan 800 objecten die DECam heeft helpen ontdekken, stuk voor stuk. “De objecten die zich voorbij Neptunus bevinden zijn in de beginjaren van het zonnestelsel ontstaan en kunnen ons vertellen hoe het zonnestelsel – en dan met name de gasreuzen – ontstaan zijn.” Bernardinelli merkt daarbij op dat de objecten ingedeeld kunnen worden in verschillende populaties met elk hun eigen ontstaansgeschiedenis. “En die moeten we goed begrijpen alvorens we de vorming van het zonnestelsel kunnen reconstrueren.”

Hoe meer objecten er van de verschillende populaties ontdekt worden, hoe beter het is. Voor DECam is het doek gevallen, maar er zitten een paar interessante nieuwe observatieprojecten in de pijplijn. “Het belangrijkste project is de Legacy Survey of Space and Time van het Vera Rubin Observatory dat in 2023 van start gaat,” vertelt Bernardinelli. “Dit project zal de ons bekende populatie Transneptunische Objecten naar verwachting met een factor tien uitbreiden.”

Reported by a large number of astronauts and cosmonauts, from the first person in space (Yuri Gagarin) right up through the most recent (Shatner), the sense of compassion and fragility for all of humanity, and perhaps even all life on Earth, is something that you have to experience for yourself to truly understand. While most of us will only get a sense of that feeling of going to space secondhand, through pictures and videos, it cannot reproduce the lived experience of those who’ve been there. At this crucial moment in human civilization, we should all be listening to the message brought back from those who’ve ventured beyond our planet’s boundaries.

overview effect

On Feb. 12, 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless ventured further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut had ever been. This space first was made possible by a nitrogen jet propelled backpack. The contrast between the safety and the life-giving nature of Earth and the lifeless abyss of deep space appears in stark relief in this image.

(Credit: NASA)

What is the overview effect?

Coined by Frank White in 1987, the overview effect describes what the spaceflight experience, for lack of a better term, awakens in those who venture into space and view Earth. As White writes:

“There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

There are some fundamental truths about our reality that we all intellectually know, but rarely experience. We tend to view Earth as divided into various distinct pieces. We do this so naturally that we rarely stop to think about it, but we frequently talk about:

oceans and land masses
the seven continents
the different countries, states, cities, and neighborhoods
people who are “like us” and “different from us”

We do all this despite the fact that we know that there is much, much more that unites us than divides. Earth is one interconnected system. What we do, both as individuals and as a human civilization, is deeply tied to all that transpires on our planet.

The first view with human eyes of the Earth rising over the limb of the Moon. The discovery of the Earth from space, with human eyes, remains one of the most iconic achievements in our species’ history. Apollo 8, which occurred during December of 1968, was one of the essential precursor missions to a successful Moon landing, and one of the most unifying achievements for all of humanity.

(Credit: NASA/Apollo 8)

Perhaps no photograph better encapsulates that feeling than the one above: the famous “Earthrise” photo from the Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed mission to reach and travel behind the moon. For about 45 minutes, the astronauts were cut off from all communications on Earth, as no radio signals could be either transmitted or received. And then, as the spacecraft reemerged from behind the moon, there it was, coming up over the limb of the moon: our own planet, Earth, tiny, distant, fragile, and blue, just hanging there in the abyss of space. For the first time, human eyes glimpsed our world from the perspective of another. The feeling the astronauts experienced was beyond breathtaking.

Three astronauts were aboard that flight: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. As Anders most famously put it, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” But it was Borman, the mission commander, who perhaps best described the overview effect, describing an internal feeling that most of us have never experienced for ourselves,

“When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.”

There are an enormous number of changes that occur in your perspective when you make that journey to space yourself. Upon launch, you feel yourself accelerated upwards with a force that significantly exceeds Earth’s gravity, similar to a roller coaster or a car accelerating from rest with the gas pedal pressed to the floor. Only, instead of lasting for just a few seconds, the acceleration continues, unabated, for minutes at a time. As you rise, higher and higher, the color of the sky begins to fade away, from cyan to blue to a deep, dark black: darker than any black you’ll experience peering up at Earth’s night sky. From above the Earth’s atmosphere, every star is a steady point of light; the stars will have ceased to twinkle.

And then, as described by so many, you see it. You look back at where you came from — back at planet Earth — and you get this grand perspective of our home planet. You witness the thin atmosphere, with a smattering of ever-changing clouds, above the blue oceans and the darker land masses. You recognize how interdependent everything that occurs on our world is on the environment, and how rare and precious that environment is. Most of all, you simultaneously feel both the insignificance and the great significance of existence. Our planet’s locations and properties, as well as the richness of life transpiring down below, may truly be unique in all the universe. There’s a sense of urgency that’s often described as well: if we don’t start taking proper care of the Earth, we will run the risk of pushing all that we hold dear and precious to a premature extinction.

overview effect

This view of the Earth was captured by the Apollo 17 crew: Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans. The photograph extends from the Mediterranean sea (at top) all the way down to the Antarctic polar cap (at bottom). In all the known universe, only Earth, thus far, is home to life.

(Credit: NASA / Apollo 17)

What have other astronauts experienced?

In 1961 — a full 60 years ago — Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Upon his return, many expected him to emerge with a message of pro-Soviet Union propaganda, but instead he began remarking on the beauty of Earth and the feelings in his heart. “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!”

In the decades since, across nationalities and time, those same sentiments have been echoed by so many who’ve left the bonds of Earth to briefly venture into the grand abyss of space.

Roger Chaffee, the Apollo 1 astronaut who tragically perished in a launchpad fire, dreamed of a future where everyone could share in the perspective gained by those who were fortunate enough to experience it for themselves. “The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way — the way God intended it to be — by giving everyone, eventually, that new perspective from out in space.”

After completing the first extra-vehicular activity on the lunar surface, what we more commonly refer to as a moonwalk, Neil Armstrong returned to the safety of the lunar module, where Buzz Aldrin took this picture of Neil with tears in his eyes, overcome with emotion.

(Credit: NASA/Apollo 11/Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.)

Almost every photo from the Apollo 11 mission was taken by Neil Armstrong, meaning that almost every photo of an astronaut on the moon from that mission is Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong. But this photo, above, shows Neil as he appeared after completing his first historic steps on the moon, with tears in his eyes. He remembered his time walking on the moon’s surface: “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

Astronauts also commonly describe a different visceral feeling that you might not expect: one of frustration and being called to action. As Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, recounted, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

This view of the Earth comes to us courtesy of NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which had to perform flybys of Earth and Venus in order to lose enough energy to reach its ultimate destination: Mercury. The round, rotating Earth and its features are undeniable.

(Credit: NASA/MESSENGER)

This set of feelings has been echoed by many, from moonwalkers to ISS and space shuttle astronauts to civilian space tourists. Some other astronaut perspectives include:

Michael Lopez-Algeria: “A…faceplate is all that separates our eyes from the void…I cannot imagine any other experience that could approach this one. Curiously, I found that when outside I was much more moved by nature and less drawn to particular places. The perspective is so much greater that zooming in on a city seems uninteresting.”
Nicole Stott: “It surprises you every time you look out, even if you are looking at the same place that you flew over before. This kind of very dynamic, ever-changing appearance of the place that gives it the appearance that it’s alive.”
Joseph Allen: “I’ve known every cosmonaut and every astronaut…without exception, every one of them cannot get over the beauty of seeing planet Earth. It just takes your breath away and… you just cannot take your eyes off the Earth. It just is so beautiful.”
Anousheh Ansari: “The actual experience exceeds all expectations and is something that’s hard to put to words … It sort of reduces things to a size that you think everything is manageable … All these things that may seem big and impossible … We can do this. Peace on Earth? No problem. It gives people that type of energy … that type of power, and I have experienced that.”
Ed White: “I’m coming back in… and it’s the saddest moment of my life.”

And yet, it’s perhaps up to William Shatner, the oldest person ever to travel to space at age 90, to put it in terms that most of us can viscerally relate to.

overview effect

William Shatner, upon returning to Earth from his October 13, 2021 flight into space, attempts to recount his experience and the feelings and awakening it inspired within him.

(Credit: Global News TV)

What can William Shatner’s experience teach us?

Being moved to tears is a common experience described by astronauts, going all the way back to Alan Shepard: the first American astronaut in space. Shatner, upon his return to Earth, recounted the following message of gratitude, hope, and the profoundly deep emotions he was feeling:

“Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see this. [It’s] unbelievable… To see the blue color rip by you and now you’re staring into blackness, that’s the thing… the covering of blue. This sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue we have around us, we say ‘oh, that’s blue sky,’ and then suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you rip the sheet off of you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness, and you look down and there’s the blue down there and the black up there … there is mother and Earth and comfort and there’s, is there death? I don’t know? Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whup! And it’s gone. It was so moving to me. This experience, it’s something unbelievable.”

Today, you can venture up high enough to photograph the Earth’s curvature for a cost of just $150 (and with a much better camera than was available in the 1940s) if you’re a DIY kind of person. The photograph here comes from a balloon-borne MIT student project from 2009, which didn’t cross the Karman line but still reveals the contrast of Earth’s ‘blue’ with space’s ‘black.’

(Credit: Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton, formerly of MIT)

The feelings he describes — of the fleetingness of being alive on Earth, of the preciousness of the time we have and the location we’re lucky enough to inhabit — go far beyond our terrestrial concerns. After describing the enormity and the suddenness, and the change in the color of the blackness of space compared with the blue that is our home, Shatner continued:

“I can’t even begin to express. What I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see the vulnerability of everything, it’s so small. This air, which is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have any. And when you think about… the oxygen, the 20% [of the atmosphere] that sustains our life, it’s so thin! To dirty it… I mean, that’s another whole… .”

“If everybody… it would be so important for everybody to have that experience through one means or another… we all hugged each other, you know you share, it’s like being in battle together, and there is this bonding of being in battle. But you’re also in battle inside yourself. Oh my goodness, I have had an experience.”

overview effect

From aboard the ISS, the various layers of our atmosphere, the transient clouds present within it, and the filtered light from our Sun passing through it make up one of the 16 sunrises and sunsets that astronauts on board experience daily. The atmosphere makes up less than 1% of the Earth, by radius.

(Credit: Fyodor Yurchikhin/Russian Space Agency)

On Earth, we often feel pressure to overfocus on the mundane concerns of everyday life. If we’re not careful, they can fill up all of our time, energy, and mental space, leaving us very little room to contemplate what’s truly, vitally important to ourselves in this world. Even something as fleeting as a 10-minute flight — taking the crew some 100 kilometers (62 miles) up — can be a life-changing experience, putting the minutiae of our experience into a context that flips our daily concerns on their heads.

As you can see from watching Shatner’s video yourself, he’s trying to communicate an experience that words cannot encapsulate. There’s a sensation, an emotion, a perspective, that perhaps is only accessible to people who’ve seen it and lived it for themselves: the preciousness, the rarity, the fragility of all that we have here, around us, and that life as we know it has only one home: Earth. Everywhere else seems to be a vast abyss of lifeless emptiness, except for right here. And perhaps, if we can bring ourselves to treat our home with the care that it requires, we’ll find a kind of fulfillment, contentment, and broad, long-term perspective that will bring about the civilization we’ve struggled to create for so long.

The takeaways from all of this are unambiguous. But we have to choose to listen to what the explorers who’ve gone before us have reported. When they talk about developing an instant global consciousness, they’re talking about having a set of epiphanies all at once. They experience the recognition that everything we view as borders or boundaries are artificial; there are no inherent geographical lines separating humans. They witness firsthand how unfamiliar the environment of space is, and how everything they’ve known, loved, or experienced exists “down there” on that tiny, isolated, and fragile blue ball.

The act of going to space is always a remarkable demonstration of our profound technological achievements as a species. However, the internal shift that happens in the perspective of everyone who gets to experience is perhaps the most profound thing of all: a change in your state of mind that compels you to recognize the oft-forgotten truth of our fragile existence. In all the universe, there is no other known world with both the diversity and the fragility of our planet. Just maybe, if more of us got to experience it for ourselves, we’d be compelled to take better care not only of one another, but of our cosmic home as well.