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...
16-02-2022
Planet Found in the Habitable Zone of a White Dwarf
Planet Found in the Habitable Zone of a White Dwarf
Most stars will end their lives as white dwarfs. White dwarfs are the remnant cores of once-luminous stars like our Sun, but they’ve left their lives of fusion behind and no longer generate heat. They’re destined to glow with only their residual energy for billions of years before they eventually fade to black.
Could life eke out an existence on a planet huddled up to one of these fading spectres?
For life to exist around a white dwarf, the white dwarf would have to have planets in its slowly shrinking habitable zone. Astronomers have found what appear to be planets in the habitable zone of a white dwarf about 117 light-years away. The planet might be nestled in a protoplanetary disk of debris.
A new study led by researchers from the University College of London announces the findings. The title is “Relentless and complex transits from a planetesimal debris disc.” It’s published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the lead author is Professor Jay Farihi from the UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy.
“This is the first time astronomers have detected any kind of planetary body in the habitable zone of a white dwarf.”
Professor Jay Farihi, UCL Dep’t. of Physics and Astronomy.
The star’s name is WD1054–226. The researchers behind this work observed WD1054-226 for 18 nights with the ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT) at their La Silla Observatory, observing dips in starlight as something passed between us and the star. They used the NTT’s ULTRACAM high-speed camera to capture data images of the white dwarf. They also examined data on the same star from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS.)
The New Technology Telescope at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory. Image Credit: By Masteruk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3235044
What were the results of those observations?
The team found dips in light that they interpret as 65 clouds of planetary debris. The clouds are evenly spaced and orbit the white dwarf every 25 hours. What causes such regularity? The researchers say that a planet must be there, which forces these debris clouds into a precise orbital pattern. They say the planet is similar in size to rocky planets in our Solar System and that it’s only about 2.5 million km (1.55 million miles) from the star. That’s about 1.7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Alongside the regular dips in starlight is an ever-present obscuration that the team says is debris in a planetary disk around the star. These structures are in a region that would have been overcome when the white dwarf went through its preceding red giant phase. It’s doubtful that any of these structures could have survived the red giant phase, so they must have formed more recently in the aftermath. If there is a planet in the habitable zone, it can’t be a hold-over from the star’s previous life as a main-sequence star. If all of the circumstances lined up just right—and that’s an enormous if—life would potentially have about two billion years to do its thing on the purported planet, with one of those billions in the future.
“This is the first time astronomers have detected any kind of planetary body in the habitable zone of a white dwarf,” said Professor Farihi. The planet’s presence is inferred from the regular dips in the light of all the other objects in the system.
This figure from the study shows the first three nights of ULTRACAM observations of WD1054-226. The figure shows a notable and easily recognized recurring feature, the double-dip structure that recurs every 25.2 hours and occurs just before hours 2, 27, and 52. The authors say that “Using this structure as a visual anchor, the adjacent, antecedent, and subsequent transits can all be seen to have the same morphology over all three nights.”Image Credit: Farihi et al. 2022.
“An exciting possibility is that these bodies are kept in such an evenly-spaced orbital pattern because of the gravitational influence of a nearby major planet,” Professor Farihi said in a press release. “Without this influence, friction and collisions would cause the structures to disperse, losing the precise regularity that is observed. A precedent for this ‘shepherding’ is the way the gravitational pull of moons around Neptune and Saturn helps to create stable ring structures orbiting these planets.”
This image shows Titan in front of Saturn. Several of Saturn’s moons are shepherd moons that help keep the planet’s ring structure stable. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Not all of the team’s observational data repeats with predictable regularity. The researchers also found at least two transient drifters in the data. “At least two drifting transits may be seen to recur over three or more nights,” the team writes in their paper. The faster of the two has a period of about 22.9 hours, and the slower of the two has a period of about 25.5 hours.
This figure represents ULTRACAM data showing two transients. The more rapid of the two is on the left in blue, and the slower one is on the right in green. Image Credit: Farihi et al. 2022.
There are indications of other drifters, but their data gets progressively weaker. The team explains this in their paper: “There are a number of dips that are either transient or cannot be confidently shown to recur, which are thus challenging to quantify. It is important to note that the process … can only effectively remove recurring signals where multiple-night coverage is available at a given phase. Thus, some phases will suffer artifacts in this process, especially where coverage – either in the light curve or subtracted data – includes only a single night. Thus, not all light-curve residual structures are real.” Such are the ways of astronomy.
The 65 separate structures the astronomers found could be moons or nascent moons. But if they are, they’re nothing like the moons we’re accustomed to. “The moon-sized structures we have observed are irregular and dusty (e.g. comet-like) rather than solid, spherical bodies. Their absolute regularity is a mystery we cannot currently explain,” said lead author Farihi.
In their paper, the authors explain the 65 structures, saying that “There is no evidence for solid-body transits in any of the data, and the underlying transit sources are presumably relatively small but with extended comae of dust and gas.” That’s where their “comet-like” description comes from. “It cannot yet be determined what fraction of the stellar disc is constantly occluded, which could be significant,” they write. “However, the duration of the transit events provides clear indications that the occulting clouds are non-spherical.”
The data is intriguing, but the authors are the first to point out that any firm conclusions are premature. “The possibility of a major planet in the habitable zone is exciting and also unexpected; we were not looking for this. However, it is important to keep in mind that more evidence is necessary to confirm the presence of a planet. We cannot observe the planet directly, so confirmation may come by comparing computer models with further observations of the star and orbiting debris,” Professor Farihi said.
If there are indeed clouds of material orbiting the white dwarf, they’re likely outside the Roche limit. The authors say that debris clouds probably come from collisions or tidal disruption events. “From a dynamical and evolutionary perspective, the origin of the large occulting clouds is likely the result of tidal disruption or collisions in the vicinity of the Roche limit,” they write in their conclusion.
It’ll be up to further observations with the James Webb Space Telescope to provide better data. The JWST has the power to better define the debris disk and its components. But if there is a roughly Earth-sized rocky planet there, it’s an intriguing possibility with liquid water potential.
Marginally habitable situations may be relatively common in the Milky Way and the Universe. Life might arise countless times and never evolve the complexity that life on Earth has become. The Moons of our Solar System might harbour life for some time. Mars may have harboured life for some time.
Now, maybe, we can add white dwarf planets to that list.
SpaceX ‘destacks’ Starship and Super Heavy: what’s next?
SpaceX ‘destacks’ Starship and Super Heavy: what’s next?
On February 14th, a bit less than four days after the giant rocket was used as a backdrop for CEO Elon Musk’s first Starship presentation in years, SpaceX lifted Starship off of the Super Heavy booster and lowered the upper stage to the ground.
In early August 2021, the same pair – Booster 4 and Ship 20 – were stacked for the first time for what was described as a fit test. After briefly forming the largest rocket ever assembled, the stages were ‘destacked’ about an hour later and would ultimately return to the Starbase factory for finishing touches. Six months, one ship cryoproof, three booster cryoproofs, and three ship static fire tests later, Ship 20 and Booster 4 were once stacked to form a massive 119-meter-tall (390 ft) tall rocket
This time around, Starship S20 was stacked on top of Super Heavy B4 not with a giant crane but with a ‘launch and integration tower’ that had been outfitted with three giant arms in the interim. The tower’s main pair of arms – ‘chopsticks’ – lifted the ~100-ton (~220,000 lb) Starship almost 100 meters off the ground, swung it over Super Heavy, and then carefully lowered the stages until Super Heavy was able to latch on.
On its first true demonstration, the complex process went far smoother than anyone outside of SpaceX expected, taking the tower just four or so hours from the start of the lift to hard mate. On February 10th, shortly before Musk’s Starship update, SpaceX even opened the ‘chopsticks’ to their full breadth, leaving all of Starship S20’s weight on Super Heavy B4 and also demonstrating what the pad will likely look like moments before the first orbital Starship launch.
On February 14th, after about four days fully stacked, the tower arms reattached to Ship 20, detached from Super Heavy, and lowered the Starship back to the ground, where it was eventually installed on a transport stand. Later that night and early the next day, SpaceX then moved the ship to a small concrete pad adjacent to the launch tower that’s believed to be meant for cryogenic proof testing. It’s unclear why SpaceX didn’t tested the fully stacked Starship given that both ship and booster have already completed multiple cryogenic proof tests (or wet dress rehearsals with real propellant) over the last few months.
For the second time in half a year, Ship 20 has been removed from Booster 4.(Richard Angle)
It’s also unclear what more SpaceX can gain from testing Ship 20 on the ground, short of full-stack operations. On Sunday, February 13th, SpaceX did, however, begin filling the orbital launch site’s fuel tanks with liquid methane (LCH4) for the first time. It’s possible that instead of using Ship 20 to test any aspect of the relatively ancient Starship prototype, SpaceX will use Ship 20 to test the orbital tank farm – particularly the fuel side of the farm, which has yet to be tested. Perhaps after testing those systems on the ground, SpaceX will re-stack Ship 20 and Booster 4 and perform a similar wet dress rehearsal to test the tower’s plumbing, the ship-fueling arm, and the overall structural integrity of the fully-stacked rocket.
SpaceX has test windows tentatively scheduled on February 16th, 17th, and 18th.
This is a video by Terrys Theories channel on Youtube. Hes a friend who does some deep investigations into sightings and here he does it again. He got a mail in report about two glowing pink lights in the sky on his way home from work. the lights seem to be huge, about the size of a minivan and the objects shape is very similar to many others seen in past UFO reports. Are aliens looking over Ukraine...trying to prevent, help or just watch and record the future events with Russia? The pressure on Ukraine is huge right now...possible war with Russia may be taking place already as you read this. Aliens often are seen during such events, like the Foo Fighter glowing whit spheres during WWII. Mind boggling stuff.
UFO Flashes To Eyewitnesses At Beach In Brazil, Feb 2, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Flashes To Eyewitnesses At Beach In Brazil, Feb 2, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 2, 2022
Location of sighting: Brazil beach
The spectators watching this UFO over a beach in Brazil really excited the onlookers. You can hear them gasp and ask questions of what it could possibly be. This UFO flashes several times...because its trying to say hello to the people below in the only way its allowed. Every alien species has different contact rules about humans...this one has to keep a distance, but apparently there was no rule about deliberately flashing to catch humans attentions below. Awesome work around and goes to show...even aliens have rules, mandates, necessary things they need to follow. They seem a bit more like us now don't they?
Kid records unknown glowing object...another eyewitness in India UFO Sighting, Video, Feb 14, 2022.
Kid records unknown glowing object...another eyewitness in India UFO Sighting, Video, Feb 14, 2022.
Date of sighting: India Location of sighting: Feb 14, 2022
This is another video of the India event. A young boy recorded the UFO over his area. Since the eyewitness is a child...I didn't want to ask any more information so that his safety is kept. A childs' safety is always most important. But this is clearly the exact same glowing object seen in two earlier posts I made today. Absolutely breaking raw video. Seen over many different cities in India! Aliens are clearly trying to be noticed.
Man Walking On Beach Has First UFO Sighting, Auroville, India. Two Witness Video, News.
Man Walking On Beach Has First UFO Sighting, Auroville, India. Two Witness Video, News.
Date of sighting: Feb 14, 2022
Location of sighting:Auroville, India
This is a mind-blowing event that was seen by thousand of people in India so I'm expecting many videos of this event. I just did an earlier post about the same event, but different eyewitness. Here the eyewitness gives his account and shows raw footage of two eyewitnesses at two different locations. Aliens are really trying to get noticed so that they can make humans accustomed to the existence of other intelligent species...little by little. This is undeniable proof that aliens exist. However...I'm sure the India gov willl come up with some excuse to blame it on military exercises, Venus, swamp gas or some other lame excuse to try to keep the public in the dark about the truth.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
This eyewitness talks about his sighting that took place in India. He states,
"I was walking along the beach this morning. It was around 6 o'clock, and the sky was still dark. And I noticed a strange pattern of clouds. Which was really amazing. It was as if the cloud was painted in a very strange way. So I was standing and staring at the cloud, and I turned around and looked in the other direction and noticed this strange object. It was like a torch light. It stayed for a while and then disappeared." He then goes on to talk about calling up a friend in another city who also saw the same thing and they compared videos of the event.
Two UFOs Cause Community To Gasp In Awe, Bangalore, India, Feb 14, 2022, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Two UFOs Cause Community To Gasp In Awe, Bangalore, India, Feb 14, 2022, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Feb 14, 2022
Location of sighting: Electric City, Bangalore, India
An eyewitness recorded two short videos of some unknown sky phenomenon the both frightened and excited his community. The UFO left a glowing trail with it as well as it being escorted by a smaller glowing sphere behind it. You can hear the excitement and dismay as these UFOs pass overhead. I do not thing they are rockets or missiles. The India news doesn't have any mention of rockets this week at all. These two glowing objects are genuine UFOs. Even the eyewitness titles the video, "UFO spotted in Electronic city of Bangalore || Live footage captured on camera!" And this witness is 100% correct. He witnessed a rare and important event.
PHOENIX LIGHTS 2022?? UFOs multiplying over Phoenix, Arizona 14-Feb-2022
PHOENIX LIGHTS 2022?? UFOs multiplying over Phoenix, Arizona 14-Feb-2022
Strange lights were recorded in the sky above Phoenix in Arizona on 14th February 2022. Another episode of famousPhoenix lights?
Witness report:
With the binocs I could see they were flickering different colors like a juul in party mode when it goes all rainbowy. Some would move apart from the spot they were staying in and then come back. We drove to get closer and then it was just one light and that disappeared eventually. I’m skeptical and was just talking today about how skeptical I am of stuff people say they see in the sky and then this happened lol. Thought they might be lanterns till I saw through the binocs. I’d like to see the footage you got. It’d be cool to see that wheel drawing in the sky. This was recorded with an iPhone 13 zoomed into the horizon at night. We were south of Maricopa, Arizona facing north towards Maricopa and Phoenix at 7:51. The lights were flickering different colors and appearing and disappearing. Lasted about 20 minutes. I had binocs and could see them clearer than this video.
We've never seen a planet being formed in this much detail.
Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech
An international team of astronomers has managed to capture some extraordinarily rare images of planetary systems being born, hundreds of light-years away.
While we’ve seen images of “protoplanetary disks” before, we’ve never seen the process captured in such detail.
An team of astronomers has managed to take some extremely rare images of the process of planetary systems being born hundreds of light-years away. Kluska et al.
“In [earlier] pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels,” lead author Jacques Kluska, from KU Leuven in Belgium, said in a statement.
The images show the inner areas around young stars where planets start taking shape, accumulating matter from dust and gas. Dust grains build up into larger rocks, some of which eventually grow into entire rocky planets.
“We needed to visualize these details to be able to identify patterns that might betray planet formation and to characterize the properties of the disks,” Kluska said.
The researchers had to use a relatively new imaging technique called infrared interferometry at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to capture the images.
The technique doesn’t produce an image directly. Using mathematical models — not unlike the way the first-ever images of a black hole were created — the team was able to separate the disks from the light emitted by the star itself.
The level of detail of the new images is astonishing.
“Distinguishing details at the scale of the orbits of rocky planets like Earth or Jupiter (as you can see in the images) — a fraction of the Earth-Sun distance — is equivalent to being able to see a human on the Moon, or to distinguish a hair at a 10 km distance,” Jean-Philippe Berger, principal investigator from the Université Grenoble-Alpes, France, explained in the statement.
So what did they end up seeing in the new images? Brighter and darker spots of light could be a sign that “there could be instabilities in the disk that can lead to vortices where the disk accumulates grains of space dust that can grow and evolve into a planet,” according to Kluska.
NASA deelt voor het eerst beelden van mysterieuze planeet Venus
NASA deelt voor het eerst beelden van mysterieuze planeet Venus
NASA deelt voor het eerst beelden van de planeet Venus. Een reizende ruimtesonde toont een gedetailleerde kijk op het oppervlak. Door middel van een wide-field imager kan de sonde verschillende kenmerken waarnemen, zoals continentale regio’s, vlakken en plateaus. Volgens wetenschappers wijst het er zelfs op dat Venus ooit bewoonbaar is geweest.
Voor het eerst werden er beelden van het oppervlak van Venus in zichtbaar licht - het licht dat het menselijk oog kan zien - vanuit de ruimte vastgelegd. Het is een absolute mijlpaal voor het onderzoek naar de raadselachtige planeet die iedere nacht aan onze hemel schittert. Bekijk hierboven de beelden van de primeur.
De afbeeldingen kunnen aanwijzingen bevatten over het mysterieuze verleden van Venus.
Verbluffende beelden gemaakt door NASA's Parker Solar Probe. De allereerste zichtbare glimp van het gloeiend hete oppervlak van Venus gegeven, waardoor continenten, vlaktes en plateaus op de vulkanische wereld zichtbaar werden.
Terwijl ze onder de dikke en giftige Venus-wolken tuurden met het Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR)-instrument, zagen NASA-wetenschappers een hele reeks geologische kenmerken oplichten in de zwakke gloed van het nachtelijke oppervlak van Venus, naast een lichtgevende halo van zuurstof in de atmosfeer van de planeet.
This UFO Insight video featuring commentary from UFO and paranormal researcher, Marcus Lowth, looks at some of the best UFO sightings from the month of January 2022 where we examine the best videos and photographs that witnesses around the world have managed to secure and report.
Please leave any thoughts on any of the sightings in the comments section below and check out our sources in the credits.
Breakdown of sightings in this January 2022 video:
Orange Light Over Farmingdale, New York, 3rd Jan An orange-red orb was captured on film by a motorist driving in Farmingdale, New York… (Credit: UFO Sightings Daily – original video:
Glowing Object Over Alaska, 4th Jan A glowing object was witnessed over Alaska that appears to show a solid object moving overhead… (Credit: LUFOS – original video
Strange Disc-Shaped Object Over South Carolina, 6th Jan A disc-shaped object that was “pulsing with multicolored lights” was witnessed by a former USAF veteran over South Carolina… (Credit: UFO Sightings Daily – original video
Glowing White Object Over Polson, Montana, 17th Jan A local man witnessed a strange, glowing object while looking out of his kitchen window… (Credit: William Puckett – original video
Tablet-Shaped Object Filmed Over Corpus Christi, Texas 20th Jan A resident of Corpus Christi, Texas filmed a tablet-shaped UFO – an object that his friend could also see at the same from 20 miles away… (Credit: LUFOS – original video
UFO Being Escorted Over Connecticut, 21st Jan Footage that appears to show two Blackhawk military helicopters escorting an unknown object over Connecticut… (Credit: UFOGents – original video
Strange Object Near The Moon In Jakarta, 23rd Jan A resident of Jakarta in Indonesia captured a photograph of a spaceship-like object close to the full moon… (Credit: William Pucket
Strange Object Filmed Over Edwards Air Force Base, California, 24th January A local woman driving home witnessed and filmed a strange object in the sky that appeared to hover over or near Edwards Air Force Base… (Credit: LUFOS – original video
Orange Objects Filmed Over New York, 26th Jan Several college students managed to film two orange glowing lights that appeared overhead and then moved across the skies of New York… (Credit: LUFOS – original video
Aliens Create Heart In Sky Over Florida, Feb 14, 2016, UFO Sighting News.
Aliens Create Heart In Sky Over Florida, Feb 14, 2016, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Feb 14, 2016
Location of sighting: Florida, USA
Source: Twitter account @SaechemClouds
Although this photo is from six years ago, it's fitting for the day. Now this photo was posted to twitter by a young woman who works in a the Florida Cloud Appreciation Society. She calls herself a cloud spotter that that she surely is. She saw a heart shaped cloud in the sky. I quickly tweeted back to her saying, "fantastic catch, but also...what is that round object leaving the heart with a trail behind it? You saw them...and they...saw you." There is a UFO in the photo. The UFO is semi cloaked in a cloud sphere disguise and is moving away from the top of the heart. There is a cloud trail behind it. It looks like aliens have a heart too.
Hey, I found something in a Mars photo today that points to the existence of alien species similar to us. I found a fossilized upper, lower and hand. Also right above it is a the fossilized remains of a face. Half the face is eroded more than the other half, but it still gives us great detail of its chin, cheeks, nose, eyes and forehead. This clearly is important enough for NASA to turn the rover around and investigate it more closely. However, NASA likes to keep such things secret, not just from the public, but other countries as well. America doesnt want any competition in getting a colony living on Mars. First come, first claimed. That doesn't just mean the land and minerals, that also means the ancient alien technology, structures and spaceships they find.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Strange triangle UFO formation over Tennessee – February 2022
Strange triangle UFO formation over Tennessee – February 2022
This strange UFO video of orbs in triangular formation was filmed over Tennessee recently. What do you think about this sighting?
Witness report:
was in middle tennessee driving just before i had posted this, saw 3 orange lights above me. they were flying so close i could make out their details lol
Astronomers have created a 3D map of a cosmic structure so gigantic that it’s almost impossible to even comprehend.
The “South Pole Wall” is a flabbergasting 1.4 billion light years across and contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies, Live Science reports. That puts it on par with the Sloan Great Wall, the sixth largest cosmic structure ever discovered at 1.38 billion light-years across.
“The surprise for us is that this structure is as big as the Sloan Great Wall and twice as close, and remained unnoticed, being hidden in an obscured sector of the southern sky,” Daniel Pomarède from Paris-Saclay University and lead author of a paper about the research published in The Astrophysical Journal today, told The New York Times in an email.
“The discovery is a wonderful poster child for the power of visualizations in research,” co-lead Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii, told the Times.
To create their map of the South Pole Wall, the cosmographers had to use new sky surveys to peek past the “Zone of Galactic Obscuration,” an area in the southern part of the observable universe that’s obscured by the comparatively bright Milky Way.
The new research builds on a 2014 discovery by the same team of cosmographers of a supercluster of galaxies — with the Milky Way being one of approximately 100,000 galaxies contained within — called “Laniakea.”
To put the size of the South Pole Wall into perspective, our own Milky Way galaxy is a mere 52,850 light years across.
Counted in miles, the distance of the South Pole Wall end-to-end would end up have 21 zeroes attached to it. Estimates put the number of grains of sand on Earth at just 7.5 quintillion (18 zeros).
These gigantic structures are made up of countless clumps called “cosmic webs” floating inside enormous clouds of hydrogen gas. Outside these larger structures, there’s not a whole lot of stuff, as far as we know.
To make the discovery, the team came up with a new technique to measure the dizzying size of the South Pole Wall, which takes into account the velocity of galaxies as they exert gravitational forces on each other.
This new technique was even able to take dark matter into consideration, the mysterious stuff believed to make up approximately 85 percent of the matter in the universe. While dark matter remains a mystery, astronomers suggest it could be the scaffolding that determines the shape of these cosmic structures.
As of right now, the largest cosmic structure ever discovered is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which spans 10 billion light-years. Even then, the Wall accounts for only a tenth the size of the observable universe, which spans about 93 billion light years.
Fluoride (in yellow bucket) to be added to drinking water at a treatment plant in California.
Michael Macor/Hearst/SFC via Getty
Michael Connett had been preparing for this moment for four years. The California-based attorney was headed to court, where he would be suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Connett was slated to appear at the San Francisco federal courthouse on behalf of several individuals and advocacy groups. His contention: that supplemental water fluoridation is unsafe and should be halted. Immediately.
On the first day of the hearing, Connett woke up at 3.30 a.m. to put the finishing touches to his opening presentation. He downed a cup of coffee and an energy bar, then walked the two blocks from the hotel to his office, where he sat down, signed into Zoom and prepared to give his opening statement. The date was 8 June 2020, and the court had been closed to in-person business since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no bailiff, no audience sitting in the gallery. Instead of 50 onlookers in a physical courtroom, more than 500 people had signed in to view the virtual proceedings. They watched as Connett enumerated issues that have been bubbling up in the world of fluoride research.
The bulk of public opinion, based on decades of dental-health research, is against him — at least in the United States, where more than 63% of people have access to fluoridated water. One study after another, from the 1940s through to the 1970s, has pointed to fluoride as an important factor in preventing tooth decay, also known as caries. The mineral has become part of public-health lore, and has been hailed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the ten greatest public-health achievements of the twentieth century. Most people who live in areas with fluoridated water on tap take the benefits for granted and view with suspicion those who question the supplementation.
Part of Nature Outlook: Oral health
Yet research over the past 50 years has sown a seed of doubt. Rates of tooth decay in some high-income countries with no fluoridation have declined at a pace similar to that seen in fluoridated US communities. And an increasing number of studies are indicating that fluoride — which occurs naturally in soil and therefore also in groundwater — might be a developmental neurotoxin, even at the level that the US Public Health Service has declared optimal for fluoridation.
Some toxicologists and epidemiologists are now questioning whether even low doses of fluoride can have systemic effects, including causing a dip in IQ in children who were exposed to it in utero. The first indications of this came from studies that compared unfluoridated villages and communities with fluoridated ones (where fluoride is either naturally occurring or added to water), followed by better-controlled studies that measured fluoride in individuals. In the United States, each new study was met with extreme criticism, ridicule and anger that, at times, threatened the careers of those involved.
Many dentists, having seen what life was like before fluoridation, have no interest in returning to the pre-fluoridation era of widespread cavities, abscesses, dentures and people in pain. But toxicologists worry that dental-health gains have come at a cost. Today, despite a shared goal of protecting public health, researchers on opposing sides of the fluoridation debate have trouble finding common ground.
Landmark in oral health
Fluoride has, without doubt, improved oral health and decreased rates of dental caries. Community water fluoridation has its roots in the 1940s, when a handful of trials were conducted after it was noticed that some communities with naturally fluoridated groundwater had a lower-than-average incidence of tooth decay. The first of these trials began in Michigan, New York state and Ontario, Canada, in 1945. In Michigan, researchers compared rates of tooth decay in Grand Rapids, where fluoride was added to the community water supply, and in Muskegon, where it was not1. When the five-year data were analysed and formally reviewed, the results were so striking that Muskegon abandoned the trial and began adding the mineral to its water, too. Over the following five decades, fluoridation was introduced in communities around the United States.
The practice remains common not only in the United States but elsewhere, including Australia (where 90% of municipal water supplies are fluoridated), New Zealand (47%), and Canada (39%), and has strong proponents in the United Kingdom (10%), where many dentists and public-health officials have been exerting pressure to start fluoridating the water in more communities.
Dental practitioners who remember the time before fluoridation know well what impact it has had. “My first practice was on the border of Birmingham, which was fluoridated, and Sandwell, which wasn’t,” says Nigel Carter, a paediatric dentist and chief executive of the Oral Health Foundation in Rugby, UK. It was clear from their charts, he says, that children with extensive tooth decay were almost always from Sandwell. In 1987, Sandwell began fluoridating its water, making it one of the most recent UK communities to do so. “Within five years, it went from the bottom ten, in terms of oral health, to the top five, purely due to fluoride being introduced in the water,” Carter says.
A resident of Birmingham, UK, shown in 1964 lining up bottles so that they can be filled with unfluoridated water.
Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty
Yet as research pushed forward in the late 1970s and 1980s, it became clear that the common understanding of how fluoride works was wrong. For decades, it was thought that fluoride was most effective at strengthening teeth when it was consumed, and that this would benefit a fetus exposed to fluoride during gestation. But it turns out although fluoride is incorporated into developing teeth in utero, it is protective against dental caries only after the teeth have emerged from the gums2.
In the mouth, fluoride ions incorporate themselves into plaque, a biofilm on teeth. When the environment becomes too acidic, the ions are released from the plaque and help pull minerals from the saliva to remineralize enamel surfaces and slow down tooth decay3. Fluoride ions can get into the mouth either by applying them directly to the teeth — with topical products such as toothpaste and varnish — or by ingesting fluoridated water and foods. The latter results in a tiny amount being constantly secreted in saliva. About 50% of ingested fluoride is absorbed and retained in bones and teeth, and the rest is excreted in urine; ingesting too much causes weakened bones and joints, in a condition known as skeletal fluorosis.
As research showing that topical fluoride was at least as effective as systemic doses piled up4, fluoridated toothpastes flooded the market. Children in primary schools were given fluoride tablets and told to swish and spit. Dentists incorporated fluoride varnishes and lacquers into their patients’ twice-yearly cleanings. And the incidence of dental caries in the United States and around the world continued to fall5.
Despite widespread adoption of topical fluoride, tap-water fluoridation continued. If topical fluoride has proven so effective, and rates of dental caries around the world have dropped without water fluoridation, then why is fluoride still being added to water supplies, opponents ask. Connett thinks it shouldn’t be. Others say that the answer is not so simple, and point to knottier issues of health inequities and environmental justice.
First, do no harm
Most of the research into water fluoridation’s protective effects was done before 1975, meaning that few studies directly address whether the widespread use of fluoridated rinses and toothpastes has made systemic fluoride unnecessary. But there are some clues that suggest this might be the case. Even in countries with no water fluoridation, such as Denmark, tooth decay has declined at rates comparable to those seen in US communities with fluoridation. That alone is enough to convince some researchers that adding fluoride to water is not necessary for cavity prevention, at least in societies with comprehensive public-health measures in place.
“We’re talking about a simple, highly electronegative anion. That’s it. That’s all fluoride is,” says Pamela Den Besten, a paediatric dentist who studies fluorosis and enamel formation at the University of California, San Francisco.
Den Besten has spent her career trying to work out the systemic effects of swallowing this anion. The fact that fluoride can affect ameloblasts, the cells that produce and deposit tooth enamel, suggests that it could affect other cells of the body. In fact, she notes, studies in animals and humans show that, in addition to fluorosis, cellular effects of fluoride also include inflammation and altered neurodevelopment. That, in turn, suggests that it could make its way into the brain. Den Besten says that means researchers should be looking into whether fluoride has potential effects on the central nervous system. “It should be a high priority to answer these questions. And yet, it’s not.” These potential effects of fluoride are important for individuals at all ages, she says.
The possibility of neurological effects is part of what Connett is trying to draw attention to in his lawsuit against the EPA. The finding that has garnered the most attention is a 2019 study in JAMA Pediatrics6, in which researchers compared the IQ of children who were born to women living in fluoridated areas and non-fluoridated areas. The data, which came from 512 mother–child pairs in 6 cities in Canada, indicated that, depending on how fluoride intake was assessed, exposure during fetal development was associated with as much as a five-point drop in IQ. A second study, led by public-health physician and epidemiologist Howard Hu at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, found a correlation between increased maternal urinary fluoride and decreased IQ in children born in Mexico City7.
“It’s not disputed that fluoride is toxic at high levels,” says Christine Till, a neuropsychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and lead researcher of the JAMA Pediatrics study. But what happens at lower levels, such as the 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per litre recommended in US fluoridation, is contested. That’s what Till and her colleagues have been working to tease out. “You have some weaker studies saying there’s no effect. And then you have our study, and the Mexico study, that are high quality, saying there is an effect,” she says.
On the basis of these two studies, Philippe Grandjean, a physician and environmental medicine researcher at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, put together a benchmark-dose study on fluoride to document concentrations at which fluoride begins to have detectable adverse effects on IQ. According to the report, published in June8, that level is 0.2 milligrams per litre. That’s less than one-third of the recommended level for US water supplementation and one-twentieth of the US maximum allowable level of 4 mg l−1 (a level originally intended to prevent skeletal fluorosis). These numbers are just the beginning. More cohort studies are under way, and toxicologists and epidemiologists hope they’ll help to bring clarity to the fraught debate.
Earlier in his career, Grandjean had worked to prove the dangers of mercury exposure, and of lead exposure before that. Bruce Lanphear, an environmental neurotoxicologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was also involved in the lead toxicity studies and worked with Till on the Canadian fluoridation study. Both Lanphear and Grandjean testified during Connett’s lawsuit, noting that the data from their fluoride analyses are comparable to those used to limit the use of mercury and lead.
Over the past 30 years, researchers have shown that the developing brain is uniquely vulnerable to lead, mercury and other neurotoxins. “Low-level lead was contentious, but it doesn’t match up to fluoride,” Lanphear says. “I don’t think people have been sceptical enough about the benefits or the safety of [systemic] fluoride.”
Hard benefits
Some public-health dentists think the issue isn’t quite so clear cut. E. Angeles Martinez Mier, who studies dental public health at Indiana University’s School of Dentistry in Indianapolis, agrees that fluoride safety is worth investigating but says there’s not yet enough evidence to convince her that the risks outweigh the benefits. “Fluoridated water works for caries prevention,” says Martinez Mier, whose laboratory did the fluoride analysis on both the Canadian and Mexico cohorts, and who is an author of both papers.
But the magnitude of this benefit could be modest. Comparing fluoridated and non-fluoridated US communities, dentists see about one fewer cavity in baby teeth in fluoridated areas, and about 0.3 fewer cavities on average in adults9. “The size of the effect is not as much as people might think,” Till says.
Crystals of sodium fluoride.
Credit: NIH/SPL
Still, that benefit means something to those who can not afford dental care or to miss school or work because of poor oral health. “It’s not realistic, given the system that we have, that we’ll be able to reach every child with topical fluoride,” Martinez Mier says. “A lot of public-health dentists are adamant that fluoridated water is the only thing we have that reaches the public, regardless of access to care, regardless of public health.” If fluoridated water can help prevent so much hardship, public-health dentists argue, why wouldn’t people want it?
They also point out that although rates of tooth decay have gone down across the world, many of the countries studied have government-funded universal health-care programmes that educate citizens on the proper care of teeth and gums. The United States does not. “We are not Scandinavia. We are not Canada. Our public-health system, our infrastructure, is very different than those countries,” Martinez Mier says. “In Scandinavia, many countries have nurses who visit you at home, teach you how to brush, and you have access to fluoride through universal health care.” In the United States, she says, “it’s not realistic that we’ll be able to reach every child with topical fluoride.” Fluoridated water, however, reaches anyone who drinks or cooks with treated tap water. That’s insurance Martinez Mier is not yet willing to give up.
Hard questions
“If we’re looking at a practice that affects so many people, we want it to be scrutinized. We need transparency in the science,” says Brittany Seymour, a dentist who studies oral-health policy and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She thinks there are some who are so fixed in their views of fluoridation that they will not reassess their stance no matter what the latest research might show. But she also thinks that the questions Till, Lanphear and others are asking are important.
Seymour, who is also a spokesperson for the American Dental Association, studies online health misinformation and has seen all the ways in which fluoride has been demonized. For now, at least, she thinks it’s too early to consider revising a programme that has clearly made a difference to children’s oral health, especially when the data are limited to just a few cohorts. And while tooth decay might be down globally, she doesn’t think it’s because of fluoridated toothpaste alone. She points to two cities — Juneau in Alaska10, and Calgary in Canada11 — where the ending of water fluoridation seems to be directly correlated with a rise in dental caries. “If we remove something that we know has a protective benefit, we’re trading that for another problem,” she says.
Martinez Mier agrees. “It’s too early to be reactive and to cease water fluoridation without understanding the full scope of what that would mean for a community,” she says. If something designed to protect people’s oral health is removed, then new protective measures need to be put in place, she says.
It is difficult to ignore the importance of equity in these arguments. On the one hand, dentists think that fluoridated water most benefits those who lack access to dental services, oral-health education, or a steady supply of fluoridated toothpaste — the very people who are most susceptible to poor oral health and who experience the greatest financial hardship when dental problems strike. On the other hand, toxicologists worry about any impact of fluoridated water on IQ, especially in populations that are already vulnerable because of exposure to high rates of air pollution and elevated poverty rates, for example. And even if such populations are aware of the potential risks of fluoridation, they are least likely to be able to afford bottled water to use when formula-feeding infants, for instance.
“A couple of cavities and a couple of IQ points are both serious when you think about a population. If you’re in a place of privilege, and luck and environment is with you, and you have a child testing in the high percentile, a few IQ points may not be of great impact. But for others, in different conditions, it can be.” And, she says, “At a population level, it’s a big shift. Being in a disadvantaged position cuts across domains — health, economics, education, exposure. The most vulnerable populations are most vulnerable to a lot of things, not just dental caries and neurotoxicants.”
Back in the Zoom federal court, Connett closed his case. One scientist after another, specializing in epidemiology, toxicology and risk assessment, took to the virtual stand and testified that there was consistent evidence pointing to fluoride being a developmental neurotoxin. And Connett informed the judge of a draft report from the US National Toxicology Program (NTP), which reached the same conclusion in early 2019. Although the report wasn’t entered as evidence, Connett says, “its presence loomed large.” Today, the case is still open. Before the judge commits to a ruling, he wants to know the NTP’s conclusion — the third and final draft of the report is expected early in 2022.
Till is not holding her breath. “I don’t think they’ll ever come up with a consensus,” she says, noting that she doesn’t anticipate a scenario that will please dentists and toxicologists alike, at least not without the courts being involved. It has become a circular argument: The two groups can’t convince each other because they’re having different conversations, each siloed in their respective fields of study. “We’re in this odd situation where dental public health is in tension with environmental public health, and it’s really a dispute within the family,” Hu says.
Hu sees two big problems with how the dental public-health community has reacted. The first, he says, is that most of those in the dental community who are critiquing his and Till’s conclusions are doing so without a deep understanding of how they got them. “From the environmental epidemiology perspective, the methods employed in the most recent studies of prenatal fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment are exceptionally rigorous,” he says, and were put through stringent peer review. The second problem is a misplaced idea that decades of research on fluoride prove it is safe. “They are ignoring the fact that almost none of these ‘decades’ of research have focused on the very specific issue of prenatal fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment. The unfortunate result is that the two sides — environmental health and dental public health — keep talking past each other.” What they need, he says, is a neutral forum in which experts can dispassionately discuss and debate the evidence.
The other thing they need is more data. “There hasn’t been a single US study of fluoridation, prenatal exposure and natal development,” Hu says. He and his collaborators are starting one now, using data from past studies, and they aim to have answers in the next two years. Whether that study, or the anticipated revision of the NTP report, end up casting fluoride in a positive or negative light, their very existence will at least push the conversation forwards.
A new process for turning atmospheric carbon dioxide desorbed from an absorbent into dry ice reduces the energy input needed for carbon capture.
A new technology for capturing carbon dioxide from air, Cryo-DAC can use existing infrastructure at ports for ships that transport liquefied natural gas and infrastructure used to prepare city gas.
Carbon capture is playing an increasingly prominent role in plans to combat climate change. A new process for direct air capture, which involves capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, promises to greatly enhance the efficiency of the technology.
“Direct air capture has great potential for removing CO2 from the atmosphere on massive scales,” says Soichiro Masuda at the R&D/Digital Division of the Japanese energy-provider Toho Gas. “And it has evolved rapidly in the past several years.”
Direct air capture complements other technologies that capture carbon from industrial emissions, but the lower levels of CO2 in atmospheric air make it considerably more challenging. “Efficiency has continued to be a challenge for direct air capture, as the steps that isolate CO2 from atmospheric air require the input of energy,” says Masuda. “Burning fossil fuel to provide the energy input ends up creating more carbon emission for the sake of capturing carbon.”
“Direct air capture technology is a key part of our corporate strategy to reach carbon neutrality by 2050,” says Masuda. Now, Toho Gas and Nagoya University, have started research and development into realizing carbon neutrality and have devised a way to largely overcome the problem of capturing carbon with an improved direct air capture technology called Cryo-DAC.
Diagram depicting the carbon cycle (left) of Cryo-DAC (right), the direct air capture technology developed by researchers at Toho Gas and Nagoya University.
A key advantage of recycling carbon by Cryo-DAC is that it can use existing infrastructure such as ports for ships that transport liquefied natural gas, along with the associated infrastructure used to prepare city gas for industrial and household use. Natural gas is imported in liquefied form at about −162 degrees Celsius. Japan is one of the world’s major importers of liquefied natural gas, accounting for nearly 20% of global imports.
“Ever since Japan first imported natural gas in 1969, we’ve been exploring ways to exploit the cold energy of liquid natural gas,” explains Masuda. “We think we’ve finally found a solution.” Liquefied natural gas is vaporized by exchanging heat with seawater; the cold energy generated in this exchange is used for industrial purposes such as liquefying industrial gases. Large amounts of the cold energy, however, was wasted.
Cryo-DAC uses cold energy, thereby minimizing the thermal energy needed for the process. Of the various types of direct air capture being developed worldwide, Cryo-DAC employs a method that captures and isolates CO2 with chemical absorbents. “The scalability of the chemical absorption method is well suited for collecting massive amounts of CO2,” says Masuda. “This involves collecting atmospheric air, absorbing CO2 in a solvent, and then isolating the CO2 from the solvent. This last step, however, requires large amounts of heat, creating carbon emission.”
Using dry ice to create a vacuum
The research team designed a new process that has a chamber in which CO2is sublimated into dry ice by using the cold energy of liquid natural gas. The new chamber is connected to another in which CO2 is absorbed in solvent; the phase change from CO2 to dry ice lowers the pressure inside, which causes the solvent and CO2 to evaporate. “As a result, CO2 can be recovered from the solvent at near room temperature, minimizing the thermal energy needed,” explains Yoshito Umeda, a professor at Nagoya University.
Schematic diagram of the cryopump used in Cryo-DAC.
The output of Cryo-DAC is high-pressure CO2 gas. Toho Gas plans to use the captured CO2 as a raw material for city gases that the company provides to its customers. “High-pressure CO2 is needed to produce methane, the main component of city gas, that can be obtained by reacting CO2 and hydrogen. While CO2 for methanation is typically prepared with compressors, Cryo-DAC has the potential to separate CO2 from air and generate high-pressure CO2 at low cost. Although city gas leaves a carbon footprint when burned, direct air capture with Cryo-DAC could offset these emissions,” says Masuda. “The International Energy Agency predicts that the demand for natural gas will continue to increase until 2050, unlike other major fossil fuels like oil or coal. We thus see Cryo-DAC as a key part of future gas infrastructure with net-zero carbon emission.”
The research is now a part of Japan’s Moonshot Research and Development Program, the Cabinet Office’s initiative to fund high-risk, high-impact research projects. The team includes collaborators at Tokyo University of Science, Chukyo University and the University of Tokyo, who are enhancing the materials and processes used in Cryo-DAC. The group is currently developing a solvent with higher absorption capabilities, as well as trying to achieve a continuous flow from CO2 sublimation to the output of high-pressure CO2. The aim is to establish the core technology by 2022 so that the system can operate continuously with a capacity of 1 tonne of CO2 per year in 2024. The group also aspires to design equipment for commercial use, and create detailed plans for implementing the system in a real-world setting by 2029.
“By using existing infrastructure for gas-consuming appliances and pipelines, we expect to transition smoothly to carbon neutrality without imposing a significant burden on our customers or the wider society,” says Masuda.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Scientists Find Life-Friendly Exoplanet They Say Is Close Enough to Visit
Scientists Find Life-Friendly Exoplanet They Say Is Close Enough to Visit
"The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbor seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration."
Image by ESO
A team of astronomers have discovered evidence for yet another exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, our closest neighboring star just over four light-years away.
The planet, dubbed Proxima d, is the third planet detected in the system. It’s also pretty tiny, at only a quarter of the Earth’s mass, making it one of the lightest exoplanets ever discovered, according to a press release.
“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbor seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” said João Faria, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço in Portugal and lead author of the study published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, in the statement.
The tiny planet orbits its star at around 2.48 million miles, less than a tenth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun, completing a full rotation in just five days.
Even more excitingly, its orbit is also within the habitable zone of the Proxima Centauri system, the area where liquid water could exist on its surface.
In other words, Proxima d could theoretically harbor life as we know it.
Faria and his team used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument attached to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in the Chilean desert to make the discovery.
The team got first glimpses of Proxima d during 2020 observations, but the signal was too weak to confirm its existence, requiring follow up observations with the even more precise Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO).
“After obtaining new observations, we were able to confirm this signal as a new planet candidate,” Faria explained in the statement. “I was excited by the challenge of detecting such a small signal and, by doing so, discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth.”
The team was able to find evidence for the tiny planet’s existence by using the radial velocity technique, which involves detecting wobbles in the motion of a star caused by an orbiting planet’s gravitational pull.
The ESO’s instrument was accurate enough to pick up Proxima Centauri wobbling a mere 15 inches per second.
Experts are now excited to use the same technique to “unveil a population of light planets, like our own, that are expected to be the most abundant in our galaxy and that can potentially host life as we know it,” as Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO, put it in the statement.
Proxima Centauri is tantalizingly close — and we may only see whether it hosts life once we have a look for ourselves.
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
In a few weeks' time, a rocket launched in 2015 is expected to crash into the moon. The fast-moving piece of space junk is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which hoisted the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite off our planet. It has been chaotically looping around Earth and the moon ever since.
The booster is tumbling wildly as it travels, which adds some uncertainty to the timing and location of the predicted impact. It is likely to occur on the far side of the moon, so it won’t be visible from Earth.
Some astronomers say the collision is "not a big deal," but to a space archaeologist like me it's quite exciting. It will be the moon's newest archaeological site, joining more than 100 other locations that document human activity on the moon and in cislunar space.
A history of crash landing on the moon
The impact will leave a new crater on the dark side of the moon.
The very first human-made artifact to make contact with the moon was the Soviet Luna 2 in 1959 — an extraordinary feat, as it was only two years after the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite.
The mission consisted of a rocket, a probe, and three "bombs." One released a cloud of sodium gas to enable the crash to be seen from Earth. The USSR didn’t want the groundbreaking mission to be called a hoax.
The other two "bombs" were spheres of pentagonal medallions inscribed with the date and Soviet symbols. If they exploded as planned, they would have scattered 144 medallions over the lunar surface.
Other crashes have been missions gone wrong, like the Israeli Beresheet lander in 2019. This was especially controversial as the lander carried a secret cargo of dried tardigrades, tiny creatures that could be revived in the presence of water.
Various spacecraft have naturally decayed and fallen out of orbit, like the Japanese relay satellite Okina in 2009. Others have been intentionally crashed at the end of their mission life.
The NASA Ebb and Flow spacecraft were deliberately crashed into the lunar south pole in 2012, specifically to avoid any risk of damaging the Apollo landing sites. Impacting at a speed of 6,000km per hour, they left craters 6 meters across.
Many crashes have been used to collect seismic data. Observations from the controlled impact of Saturn third-stage boosters and ascent modules from the Apollo missions were particularly valuable, as timing, location and impact energy were known.
Environmental impacts
The Falcon 9 rocket stage is significantly larger than the tiny Ebb and Flow spacecraft and is traveling faster. The crash will make a much larger crater, which will kick up chunks of rock and dust. On this airless world, the dust could travel a fair way before settling down.
The only other spacecraft on the moon's far side are the US Ranger 4 probe, which crashed in 1962, and China's Chang'e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover. Yutu-2 is still trundling along the lunar surface on its six wheels.
Yutu's latest results show that "soil" on the far side may be stickier than the near side, and there is a higher density of small craters.
The rocket stage could potentially cause damage to these historic spacecraft, if it lands on or near them. However, this is statistically unlikely. Current predictions have it landing in Hertzsprung crater, a long way from the Aitken basin where the Chinese spacecraft are operating.
Although there are no cameras to observe the crash, at some point NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is likely to pass over and image the impact point.
We'll learn something about the geology of the location from the color differences and distribution of the ejected material. It's an opportunity to learn more about the moon's mysterious far side.
Changing attitudes to space junk
In the earlier Space Age, little thought was given to leaving what many call "trash" on the lunar surface.
The moon is sometimes considered a "dead" world because it has no life. The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Planetary Protection Policy does not require any special precautions for lunar activities.
But there is a growing awareness the moon has distinct environmental values of its own. The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon, created by a group of independent researchers, states the moon has "the right to exist, persist and continue its vital cycles unaltered, unharmed and unpolluted by human beings."
Canadian researchers Eytan Tepper and Christopher Whitehead have suggested the moon could be protected by giving it legal personhood, much like the Whanganui river in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The moon is struck by meteors all the time. In many ways, the Falcon 9 impact will be just another one. What makes it interesting is how it acts as a litmus test for changing public opinions about our responsibilities to the space environment.
The public is looking for accountability from space agencies and private corporations. As plans for lunar mining and habitation accelerate, hopefully it's a message that is ready to be heard.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
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.
