Day of Discovery: 7 Earth-Size Planets

This illustration shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses, and distances from the host star. Astronomers have named them the planets TRAPPIST-1a, TRAPPIST-1b, and so forth.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Newspapers around the world printed the discovery on their front pages: Astronomers had found that a red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 was home to a close-knit family of seven Earth-size planets. NASA announced the system Feb. 22, 2017.

Using telescopes on the ground and in space, scientists revealed one of the most unusual planetary systems yet found beyond our Sun and opened the tantalizing question: Are any of these worlds habitable—a suitable home for life?

Five years later, the planets are still enigmatic. Since the first announcement, subsequent studies have revealed that the TRAPPIST-1 planets are rocky, that they could be almost twice as old as our solar system, and that they are located 41 light-years from Earth.

But a real game-changer will be the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Larger and more powerful than any previous space telescope, Webb will look for signs of atmospheres on the TRAPPIST-1 planets.

"That folks are even able to ask the question about whether a planet around another star is habitable—that just boggles my mind," said Sean Carey, manager of the Exoplanet Science Institute at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Carey was part of the team that helped discover some of the TRAPPIST-1 planets using data from the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope.

A prime target for Webb is the fourth planet from the star, called TRAPPIST-1e. It's right smack in the middle of what scientists call the habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone. This is the orbital distance from a star where the amount of heating is right to allow liquid water on the surface of a planet.

Though the planets are tightly packed around TRAPPIST-1, the red dwarf star is not only far cooler than our Sun, it is less than 10% its size. (In fact, if the entire system were placed in our own solar system, it would fit within the orbit of our innermost planet, Mercury.)

Searching for Atmospheres

The habitable zone is just a first cut. A potentially habitable planet also would require a suitable atmosphere, and Webb, especially in its early observations, is likely to gain only a partial indication of whether an atmosphere is present.

"What is at stake here is the first atmosphere characterization of a terrestrial Earth-size planet in the habitable zone," said Michaël Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and the lead author of the study that revealed the seven sibling planets in 2017.

Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope added more information about habitability. While Hubble does not have the power to determine whether the planets possess potentially habitable atmospheres, it did find that at least three of the planets—d, e, and f—do not appear to have the puffy, hydrogen-dominated atmospheres of gas giants, such as Neptune, in our solar system. Such planets are thought to be less likely to support life.

That leaves open the possibility of "the atmospheres' potential to support liquid water on the surface," said Nikole Lewis, a planetary scientist at Cornell University.

Lewis is part of a science team that will use the Webb telescope, which will view the heavens in infrared light, to hunt for signs of an atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1e, the one with the Goldilocks perch in the habitable zone.

"The hope is that we see carbon dioxide, a really strong feature, right at the wavelengths [detectable by] Webb," she said. "Once we know where there are little things peaking up above the noise, we can go back and do a much higher resolution look in that area."

The size of the TRAPPIST-1 planets also might help to strengthen the case for habitability, though the research is far from conclusive.

They're comparable to Earth not just in diameter but mass. Narrowing down the mass of the planets was possible, thanks to their tight bunching around TRAPPIST-1: Packed shoulder to shoulder, they jostle one another, enabling scientists to compute their likely range of mass from those gravitational effects.

"We have gotten some really good information about their size—mass and radius," said Cornell's Lewis. "That means we know about their densities."

The densities suggest the planets might be composed of materials found in terrestrial planets like Earth.

Scientists use computer models of possible planetary atmosphere formation and evolution to try to narrow down their possible composition, and these will be critical for the TRAPPIST-1 planets, Lewis said.

"The great thing about the TRAPPIST system is that it is going to allow us to refine those models either way—whether they will end up being just barren rock or end up being potentially habitable worlds," she said.

For Gillon, another great thing about the system is the reach of the TRAPPIST-1 system. "I've seen TRAPPIST-1 included in some artistic works; I've seen it in music, sci-fi novels, comics," he said. "That's really something we have enjoyed during these five years. It's like this system has a life of its own."

• Explore further

  James Webb Space Telescope: A giant leap towards 'other Earths'?

{ https://phys.org/ }

24-02-2022 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

Here’s What China is Planning to do in Space for the Next 5 Years

Central planning is literately central to any communist country, though its history has mixed results.  As part of that planning, bureaucrats in all parts of the government are occasionally tasked with coming up with goals and milestones for their specific part of the government.  These usually take the form of a five or ten-year plan, which is what the China National Space Agency (CNSA) released on January 28th.

This is the 5th such report, with previous releases in 2000, 2006, 2011, and 2016, and the current plans for future space exploration build on the efforts of the past plans.  At over 7500 words, the document itself is hefty but still a relatively high-level overview of what the agency hopes to achieve.  Some main focal points include improving the sustainability of their rocket launches, improving their global position system, partnering with Russia on lunar exploration, maintaining and expanding the Tiangong space station, researching the underlying technology for a Mars sample return mission, and building a global partnership to build a research station on the moon.  

The Long March rocket is China’s workhorse rocket, and in the next five years, it should see an environmental improvement, making them pollution-free soon.  In addition, CNSA plans to develop an additional fleet of rockets that can respond to the “growing need for regular launches,” according to the white paper.  This would include reusable systems and upper stages that can reenter the atmosphere.

Launching above the atmosphere is key to any global positioning system, which CNSA also plans to improve dramatically in the next five years.  BeiDou is CNSA’s answer to GPS and includes satellites for remote sensing and environmental monitoring.  Improvements in its positioning accuracy and setting up communications relays are wrapped into the five-year plan. Pure scientific satellites will not be left behind, though, with plans to launch the Xuntian telescope in the next five years, with capabilities about equivalent to Hubble.

Scientific endeavors won’t be limited to space either.  Plenty of lunar exploration is in China’s future, with Chang’e 6, 7, and 8 undergoing development and eventually launching in the next five years.  With some help from Russia, CNSA hopes to complete another lunar return sample mission and research the lunar polar regions by “hopping” around them.  As part of the Sino-Russian Joint Data Center for Lunar and Deep-space Exploration, CNSA hopes to mutually develop plenty of lunar capabilities in the coming years.

It may go alone on other scientific endeavors, though, including the ongoing growth of the Tiangong space station.  Having successfully launched in April last year, the Tianhe Core module will join the Wentian and Mengtian Laboratory Cabin Modules over the next five years.  Expanding the station’s capabilities will play a significant role in the agency’s operations over the next five years. However, detailed descriptions of what they do will do with it were strangely absent from the white paper.

Very clearly described in the white paper is China’s desire to continue and expand its ability to explore the Red planet.  Over the next five years, CNSA plans to improve its infrastructural ability to support missions around Mars, including by strengthening deep-space communications and developing the underlying technology for a sample return mission.  That most likely won’t launch in the next five years, but even with that timeline, it could potentially be competing with NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission in a race to get the first material back to Earth from Mars.

Despite any hints at a second space race, CNSA also stressed the importance of collaborating with other countries as part of an international effort to build a research station on the moon, among other advancements.  An entire subsection of the white paper is devoted to international cooperation and stresses the need for global governance as a basis for continued national space exploration efforts.  

Our understanding as a species should benefit no matter who is exploring, so the scientific community will likely welcome any further investment in space exploration by China or any other country.  If CNSA successfully implements its latest five-year plan, not only will there be much more scientific data available, but the agency will be well placed to reach even further towards the stars in the next five years.

Learn More:

• CNSA – China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective
• News 9 – CNSA releases whitepaper detailing plans for next five years of Chinese spaceflight
• CNSA – SCIO briefing on white paper ‘China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective’
• Global Times – Lunar research station to be inked by China and Russia this year, operational by 2035: CNSA

Lead Image:

• Rendering of the Tiangong Space Station.
• Credit – Wikipedia User Shujianyang

The post Here’s What China is Planning to do in Space for the Next 5 Years appeared first on Universe Today.

Source: 

• https://www.universetoday.com/154672/heres-what-china-is-planning-to-do-in-space-for-the-next-5-years/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 23:45 geschreven door peter  

Colossal black holes locked in dance at heart of galaxy

by California Institute of Technology

24-02-2022 om 18:46 geschreven door peter  

One of the strangest things that revolves around the mysteries of Mars is that some of the enigmas on the planet’s surface seem to have an eerie way of seeing the future. Or, rather, the other way around. You’ll soon see what I mean by that. Located on a specific area of Mars called Cydonia Mensae are two huge, battered and bruised structures that, for decades, have intrigued and amazed the public, NASA scientists and engineers, the media, the CIA, and psychics. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most famous one of the two has become known as the “Face on Mars.” As for how NASA learned of the Face on Mars – something that directly led the rest of us to hear of it, and to finally see it, too – Mac Tonnies laid down the facts: “NASA itself discovered the Face, on July 25, 1976, and even showed it at a press conference, after it had been photographed by NASA’s Viking mission probe. Of course, it was written off as a curiosity. Scientific analysis would have to await independent researchers. The first two objects to attract attention were the Face and what has become known as the ‘D&M Pyramid.’ Both of them were unearthed by digital imaging specialists Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar [at the time, engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Center at Greenbelt, Maryland]. Shortly after, Face researcher Richard Hoagland pointed out a collection of features near the Face which he termed the ‘City.’ The ‘Fort,’ too.”

(NASA)

The Face on Mars”

Now, we get to the weird part of this: the other Face on Mars; one that was “created” back in the 1950s. In one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” situations, it’s now time to turn our attentions to the connection between the Face on Mars and a legendary comic-book artist; a man who turned out to be one of the key figures in the “superhero” genre. It’s to 1958 that we now have to turn our attentions. It was in that year that Harvey Comics published a three-part production that went by the title of Race for the Moon. Although Kirby is primarily known for his distinct, and easily recognizable, style of drawing, he wasn’t just the artist on two issues of Race for the Moon. He was the writer of the story, too. Of the three stories, it’s the second comic-book in the trilogy that, for us, is the most important one of all. And, just why might that be? Because it revolves around nothing less than a giant, carved, stone head that is found on the surface of the planet Mars. It’s even referred to as “the Face on Mars” in the comic-book itself. A strange, but wholly coincidental precursor for what was to come to the fore a couple of decades later? Maybe so. There’s no doubt that there are undeniable parallels between the Face on Mars as we know it today, and the creation of Jack Kirby’s fictional Face on Mars, back in the late 1950s. Coincidence? Such a thing is certainly not impossible. Or, did Kirby have a brief glimpse at what would be seen, decades later, in the 1970s?

(NASA)

A real-life Face-Hugger?

Now, let’s turn to 1979. That was the year in which the highly successful movie, Alien – starring Sigourney Weaver – hit the cinemas. One of the creepiest critters in the movie were the Face-Huggers. Now, consider the next part of the story. Taken in July 2015 by NASA’s Curiosity Rover, one photo appears to show a strange creature that looks astonishingly like the monstrous face-invading creatures that appear in the phenomenally successful series of Alien movies. The story broke in early August 2015. The headlines were predictably sensational. The U.K.’s Metro newspaper ran with the story and titled their feature as follows: “Crab-like alien ‘facehugger’ is seen crawling out of a cave on Mars.” Coincidence? Finally, let’s get to one of the most famous of all sci-fi movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

How about a look at one of Mars’ moons? Namely, Phobos? There’s a good reason why we should discuss this tiny moon in this particular article. In 1968, the acclaimed sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey – the work of producer and director, Stanley Kubrick – hit cinemas all around the world and raked in close to $200 Million. In the opening segment of the movie we see a tribe of primitive, early “ape-men” fighting for survival in the harsh landscape of what is now the continent of Africa – albeit in the film it plays out millions of years ago. One day the tribe awakes to find that overnight a strange, black-colored monolith has appeared in their very midst. In no time at all, the intelligence levels of the creatures are increased by, it appears, the monolith itself. The implication is that something of an extraterrestrial nature has kick-started human civilization into what will eventually be high gear. As amazing and as unbelievable as it may sound, a monolith has been photographed on the surface of Phobos. A case of fact eerily mirroring fiction? Well, that very much depends on one’s own opinion. It’s time now to address an issue as weird as those you’ve already seen.

(NASA)

Phobos: a moon of mysteries

We have a man named Efrain Palermo to thank for bringing the next incredible matter to light. As someone with a deep interest in Mars and its moons, he decided to make an extensive review of the many pictures that NASA had secured from its Mars Global Surveyor in 1998. Palermo was amazed by what he found. He said that while studying one particular image from Phobos “…my eye caught something sticking up out of the surface.” As to what that “something” was, Palermo added: “I downloaded it into Photoshop and zoomed into that area, and there it was, an apparent cylindrical shaped object casting a longish shadow and having a slanted roof.” Dr. Mark Carlotto, the author of The Martian Enigmas, and someone who has undertaken groundbreaking research into the controversies surrounding the Face on Mars and the Cydonia region, took an interest in the apparent monolith. Palermo explains that Carlotto “…referred me to Lan Fleming a NASA imaging specialist who has interest in Mars and other solar system anomalies. Lan looked at it and upon further examination and study concluded as did I, that this was a physical anomaly on the surface of Phobos.” Not only was this just an anomaly; it also strangely mirrored the opening parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey – namely, a mysterious monolith. Past and present blending together, and in a very strange – almost supernatural – fashion? Maybe, that’s exactly what it was.

• Note: NASA is an arm of the U.S. Government. Photos taken by NASA are considered to be in the public domain  

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

24-02-2022 om 18:23 geschreven door peter  

A couple of days ago, I shared with you a very eerie case – from the 1950s – of a Woman in Black and an Alien Big Cat. I thought that, today, I would expand on this eerie issue of the WIB and share with you what the Women in Black phenomenon is really like. Within the world of UFO research, the Men in Black are about as legendary as they are feared. These pale-faced, ghoulish entities have for decades terrorized into silence both witnesses to, and researchers of, UFO encounters. Theories for who or what the MIB might be are legion. They include: extraterrestrials, government agents, demonic creatures, vampires, time-travelers from the future, and inter-dimensional beings from realms that co-exist with ours. There may very well be more than one explanation for the unsettling phenomenon. While much has been written on the sinister and occasionally deadly actions of the MIB, very little has been penned on the subject of their equally bone-chilling companions: the Women in Black. Make no mistake: the WIB are all too real. And they are as ominous, predatory and dangerous as their male counterparts. In the same way that the Men in Black don’t always wear black, but sometimes wear military uniforms or specifically beige-colored outfits, so do the WIB, who are also quite partial to white costumes. In that sense, “WIB” is, just like “MIB,” a term that is somewhat flexible in terms of actual nature and description.

 (Nick Redfern)

The creepy companions of the Men in Black

The WIB may not have achieved the iconic status of the MIB – until now – but these fearsome females, and their collective role in silencing those that immerse themselves in the UFO puzzle, as well as in the domains of the occult and the world of the paranormal, are all too terrifyingly real. Not only that: the WIB have a long and twisted history.  Years before they plagued and tormented flying saucer seekers, the Women in Black roamed the landscape by night, stealing babies and young children, and plaguing the good folk of 19^th century United States and United Kingdom. They were also up to their infernal tricks in the 1920s. A definitive WIB surfaced in nothing less than a piece of publicity-based footage for a Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, which was made in 1928. The footage, undeniably genuine and shown not to have been tampered with, reveals what appears to be an old, short lady, wearing a long black coat and a black hat pulled low over her face, while walking through Los Angeles in west coast heat. If that was not strange enough, she is clearly holding to her ear what appears to be a cellphone and is talking into it as she walks. Weirder still, the Woman in Black sports an enormous pair of black shoes, which look most out of place, given her short stature. She also seems to be taking careful steps to avoid her face being seen clearly. Might she have been some kind of time-traveling Woman in Black, working hard – but spectacularly failing – to blend in with the people of Los Angeles, all those years ago?

Fifteen years later, a terrifying WIB haunted the Bender family of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It so happens that a certain Albert Bender, of that very clan began the Men in Black mystery. In the early 1950s, Bender, after establishing the International Flying Saucer Bureau, was visited and threatened with nothing less than death by a trio of pale, skinny, fedora-wearing MIB. They were visits which firmly set the scene for the decades of MIB-themed horror and mayhem that followed. Bender’s visitors were not secret-agents of government, however. He said they materialized in his bedroom – a converted attic in a creepy old house of Psycho proportions – amid an overpowering stench of sulfur. They were shadowy beings with demon-like, glowing eyes. We surely cannot blame the CIA, the FBI, or even the all-powerful NSA, for that! In 1956, UFO sleuth Gray Barker penned a book on Bender’s confrontations with the Men in Black. It was titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and became a classic. Six years later, Bender penned his very own book on his encounters with the MIB: Flying Saucers and the Three Men. It was these two books that brought the MIB into the minds and homes of flying saucer enthusiasts across the world. After which, Bender dropped each and every one of his ties to Ufology. He was careful to avoid speaking about the subject ever again, and, thereon, focused his time on running the appreciation-society of composer Max Steiner.

Back in the 1930s, however, the Bender family had a black-garbed woman in its midst that tormented both young and old in the dead of night. Predating Albert Bender’s own experience with the MIB by years, the hideous silencer in black haunted the Benders near-endlessly. For the Bender family, long before the MIB there was a Woman in Black. In the 1960s, the emotionless, evil-eyed WIB turned up in the small, doom-filled town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. And right around the time that sightings of the legendary flying monster known as Mothman were at their height. Claiming to be “census-takers,” these pale-faced, staring-eyed WIB practically forced their way into the homes of frightened witnesses to Mothman. What began as seemingly normal questions about the number of people in the house, of the average income of the family, and of the number of rooms in the relevant property, soon mutated into something much stranger: persistent and intrusive questions about strange dreams, about unusual telephone interference, and about beliefs regarding the world of all-things of a paranormal nature soon followed.

(Nick Redfern)

Women in Black and Mothman, a strange connection

One of the WIB that put in an appearance at Point Pleasant claimed to have been the secretary of acclaimed author on all-things paranormal, John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies. Just like her male counterparts, she turned up on doorsteps late at night, waiting to be invited in, before grilling mystified and scared souls about their UFO and Mothman encounters. Then vanishing into the night after carefully instilling feelings of distinct fear in the interviewees. Only when dozens of such stories got back to Keel did he realize the sheer, incredible, scale of the dark ruse that was afoot. Keel had to break the unsettling news to each and every one of the frightened souls who contacted him: “I have no secretary.” In the 1970s, wig-wearing and anemic-looking WIB made life hell for more than a few people who were unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Something similar occurred in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 1980s: a weird wave of encounters with “phantom social workers” hit the UK. They were out of the blue encounters that eerily paralleled the incidents involving WIB-based “census-takers” that manifested in West Virginia back in the 1960s.

In early 1987, Bruce Lee, a book-editor for Morrow, had an experience with a WIB-type character in an uptown New York bookstore. Lee’s attention to the curious woman – short, wrapped in a wool hat and a long scarf, and wearing large black sunglasses behind which could be seen huge, “mad dog” eyes – was prompted by something strange and synchronistic. She and her odd partner were speed-reading the pages of the then-newly-published UFO-themed book, Communion, by Whitley Strieber. It was a book published by the very company Lee was working for. Lee quickly exited the store, shaken to the core by the appearance and hostile air that the peculiar pair oozed in his presence. Both 2012 and 2014 saw incredible and frightening encounters with the Women in Black across the United States. And, as you will now learn, the above-accounts amount to the mere tip of what is a gigantic, much under-appreciated iceberg. When paranormal activity occurs, when UFOs intrude upon the lives of petrified people, and when researchers of all things paranormal get too close to the truth for their own good, the WIB are ready to strike. They dwell within darkness, they surface when the landscape is black and shadowy, and they spread terror and negativity wherever they walk. Or, on occasion, silently glide. They are the Women in Black. Fear them. Keep away from them. And never, ever, let them in the house.

 (Nick Redfern)

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

24-02-2022 om 18:05 geschreven door peter  

On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker claim they were fishing off a pier on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi when they saw a UFO, were abducted by aliens, taken on their ship, subjected to experiments, and then returned to the ground. The incident has become one of the best-known and most researched alien abduction cases. Recently, Calvin Parker, who was 19 in 1973, has revealed something new – he has been experiencing visions since the alleged abduction and he’s now fearful because some of the visions are coming true

“My time here on earth is almost over, having had a lot of health problems. I would not want to leave here knowing there could be something I could do to help someone. So I will tell what I was shown that day onboard the UFO and I will try to go into as much detail as I can remember. There is a plague going on now, of course there has always been some kind of plague since the beginning of time but from what I saw this on gets even worse.”

In an interview with The Mirror, Parker, now 68, says he had a near-death experience during the abduction which has affected his health ever since. Charles Hickson was always the more revealing witness (he died in 2011), while Parker never really opened up until his book, Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story, was published in 2018. Parker’s first revelation to The Mirror is about a massive plague – it’s easy to assume he’s equating it to the current COVID-19 pandemic with references to killing millions, “family against family, friend against friend” and not trusting anyone. Sound familiar?

“Then there is going to be a great war that one side blames the other. In my vision I have seen people’s skin melt off their body. I don’t know if it’s a nuclear war or not but it puts nation against nation. There will not be a nation on Earth that is not touched by this war.”

Parker’s second vision of a “great war” comes on the heels of the escalation of the border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Coincidence? He predicts food shortages, crop failures and water supplies being cut off as a result of this war. Both of these were caused by humans and “God is going to teach us a lesson and stay out of it before he steps back in.” That last comment may be a sign of what might really be going on in Calvin Parker’s mind – his own mortality, due to cancer and the abduction event, and his frustration with current U.S. politics.

“My personal opinion is that they [politicians] are a bunch of idiots that overlook what is best for our planet and the entire human race.”

While he says these “visions” came from his abduction, Parker makes a U-turn and doesn’t call them inevitable events – instead, he says humanity will change for the better and begin to heal “slowly but surely.” What happened to the plague and the war? He then presents the visions either as a “curse” he was given that ruined his life or as a message he’s supposed to reveal “to help save our planet or mankind.”

Something happened in 1973 that changed the life of Calvin Parker. Was it an alien abduction or a manmade event? Is Calvin Parker trying to make things right for the world … or for himself?

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

24-02-2022 om 17:55 geschreven door peter  

Ancient Alien Statue, Boot, Face On Mars In Newest NASA Photo! Feb 24, 2022, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Feb 24, 2022

Location of discovery: Mars

NASA Photo:

• https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/NLF_0360_0698908105_433ECM_N0101114NCAM03360_01_195J

Hey I was looking though some recent and came across some ancient alien artifacts. One was an old boot, heavy, military grade. Another item was a statue of a person in a sitting position, with her hair up. And there was a face half buried in the dirt not far from another piece of machinery. All these items are very close to the Mars Rover. The newest rover NASA has...the Perseverance. You can even see part of the rover in the actual photograph below. Its 100% proof that NASA is hiding the facts from the public, keeping us all in the dark. Why? So we wont call them liars! Thats NASAs real fear. That would cause everyone to doubt everything that NASA has said since its creation 50 years ago. Yes, thats right! NASA was created to hide the lie...and that is the truth they don't want you to know. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

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

24-02-2022 om 16:49 geschreven door peter  

Plane passenger captures UFO on camera on flight out of city, Feb 17, 2022, UFO Sighting News.

ABOVE SCREENSHOT, I ADDED LIGHT TO REMOVE THE CLOUDS IT WAS HIDING IN AND YOU CAN SEE THE UFO AT THE FRONT REVEALED. 

 

Date of sighting: Feb 17, 2022
Location of sighting: Glasgow, Scotland, UK

News source:

• https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-plane-passenger-captures-ufo-23187143

 

This UFO was caught over Scotland this week. The woman was a passenger on a plane, looked out the window and noticed a mysterious object hovering in the sky. The photo she took is dramatic evidence, since the craft has not wings, no tail, no windows, no paint, no jet trails, and most of all...no aircraft lights. The craft looks to be about 10 meters across. That would easily hold six or more passengers. the craft does look like a dark disk. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

News states: 

The sighting took place on a flight which departed from Glasgow Airport last Thursday morning. One passenger was able to take some clear snaps of the unidentified object. Passengers on a flight from Glasgow were left startled by the sight of what appeared to be a UFO flying near to their plane. The sighting took place on a flight which departed from Glasgow Airport last Thursday morning (February 17). One passenger was able to take some clear snaps of the unidentified object, which appears to be large and oblong shaped. The photos were taken by a passenger sitting on the right hand side of the plane as it cruised at high altitude above the clouds. 

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

24-02-2022 om 16:30 geschreven door peter  

The out-of-this-world ice cloud images were captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover and were published as a pair of GIFs by the space agency. 

The plumes of carbon dioxide floated above the Martian surface at a height of around 80km, with NASA concluding they were more likely to be ‘composed of carbon dioxide ice as opposed to water.’ 

The space agency’s icy galactic cloud GIFs certainly offer a cool insight into observing the sky overhead from the Red Planet at ground level. 

In one clip, shadows from the clouds can be seen drifting across the terrain, while the other captures the clouds in the sky directly above Curiosity.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 16:15 geschreven door peter  

NEW: Now The US Government Covered Up The Roswell Incident

A retelling of the first hours of the Roswell incident being made public, from the perspective of the 1st Lieutenant Walter Haut.

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

24-02-2022 om 14:58 geschreven door peter  

Sensor breakthrough paves way for groundbreaking map of world under Earth surface

by University of Birmingham

24-02-2022 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

This 9-Gigapixel Image Of the Milky Way Shows 84 Million Stars

This 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way reminds us just how small we truly are!

The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. If printed with the resolution of a typical book, it is so large that it would be 9 meters long and 7 meters tall.

You probably can’t even fathom how big the universe is until you observe an image showing a miniature, tiny, small, insignificant part of space, home to 84 million galaxies.

And yeah, that may sound as much. However, it’s only a small part of the stars and galaxies in the universe.

The jaw-dropping image published by the European South Observatory features 85 million stars and shows a view of the cosmos as observed by the VISTA telescope.

The VISTA telescope can peer through dust fields that usually obscure an optical telescope’s view thanks to three separate infrared filters.

A mind-boggling view

The image you see here below is just a small version of the original image, which has a resolution of 108,500×81,500 pixels.

In other words, it is a 9-gigapixel image of cosmic beauty that reminds us of just how small we are.

If you want to go ahead and download the original, zoomable image and explore the wonders of the cosmos, you can do so by clicking here.

But if you want to take a peek and zoom into the 84 million stars visible in the Vista image, click here.

The image is too large to be viewed at full resolution, so we suggest using the featured zoom tool to observe the image entirely.

As noted in a 2012 photo release from ESO, “this massive dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. If printed with the resolution of a typical book, it is so large that it would be meters long and 7 meters tall.”

The image seen here covers around 315 square degrees of the sky (a bit less than 1% of the entire sky).

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

How Could the Big Bang Arise From Nothing?

READER QUESTION: My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing. For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available. Now my question: Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material? Peter, 80, Australia.

“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. Space will expand ever outwards until even that dim light becomes too spread out to interact. Activity will cease.

Or will it? Strangely enough, some cosmologists believe a previous, cold dark empty universe like the one which lies in our far future could have been the source of our very own Big Bang.

The First Matter

But before we get to that, let’s take a look at how “material”—physical matter—first came about. If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang—nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards. We do in fact have a pretty detailed understanding of how the first atoms formed out of simpler particles once conditions cooled down enough for complex matter to be stable, and how these atoms were later fused into heavier elements inside stars. But that understanding doesn’t address the question of whether something came from nothing.

So let’s think further back. The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus. These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. Before that point, there was really no material in any familiar sense of the word. But physics lets us keep on tracing the timeline backwards—to physical processes which predate any stable matter.

This takes us to the so-called “grand unified epoch.” By now, we are well into the realm of speculative physics, as we can’t produce enough energy in our experiments to probe the sort of processes that were going on at the time. But a plausible hypothesis is that the physical world was made up of a soup of short-lived elementary particles, including quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. There was both matter and “antimatter” in roughly equal quantities: each type of matter particle, such as the quark, has an antimatter “mirror image” companion, which is near identical to itself, differing only in one aspect. However, matter and antimatter annihilate in a flash of energy when they meet, meaning these particles were constantly created and destroyed.

But how did these particles come to exist in the first place? Quantum field theory tells us that even a vacuum, supposedly corresponding to empty spacetime, is full of physical activity in the form of energy fluctuations. These fluctuations can give rise to particles popping out, only to be disappear shortly after. This may sound like a mathematical quirk rather than real physics, but such particles have been spotted in countless experiments.

The spacetime vacuum state is seething with particles constantly being created and destroyed, apparently “out of nothing.” But perhaps all this really tells us is that the quantum vacuum is (despite its name) a something rather than a nothing. The philosopher David Albert has memorably criticized accounts of the Big Bang which promise to get something from nothing in this way.

Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient “Planck epoch”—a period so early in the universe’s history that our best theories of physics break down. This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations. Physicists ordinarily work separately with quantum mechanics, which rules the microworld of particles, and with general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales. But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.

We still don’t have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts, like string theory and loop quantum gravity. In these attempts, ordinary space and time are typically seen as emergent, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean. What we experience as space and time are the product of quantum processes operating at a deeper, microscopic level – processes that don’t make much sense to us as creatures rooted in the macroscopic world.

In the Planck epoch, our ordinary understanding of space and time breaks down, so we can’t any longer rely on our ordinary understanding of cause and effect either. Despite this, all candidate theories of quantum gravity describe something physical that was going on in the Planck epoch—some quantum precursor of ordinary space and time. But where did that come from?

Even if causality no longer applies in any ordinary fashion, it might still be possible to explain one component of the Planck-epoch universe in terms of another. Unfortunately, by now even our best physics fails completely to provide answers. Until we make further progress towards a “theory of everything,” we won’t be able to give any definitive answer. The most we can say with confidence at this stage is that physics has so far found no confirmed instances of something arising from nothing.

Cycles From Almost Nothing

To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer. But other candidate explanations remain within the realm of physics—such as a multiverse, which contains an infinite number of parallel universes, or cyclical models of the universe, being born and reborn again.

The 2020 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose has proposed one intriguing but controversial model for a cyclical universe dubbed “conformal cyclic cosmology.” Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the universe—as it was at the Big Bang—and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the universe—as it will be in the far future. His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits. Paradoxical though it might seem, a total absence of matter might have managed to give rise to all the matter we see around us in our universe.

In this view, the Big Bang arises from an almost nothing. That’s what’s left over when all the matter in a universe has been consumed into black holes, which have in turn boiled away into photons—lost in a void. The whole universe thus arises from something that, viewed from another physical perspective, is as close as one can get to nothing at all. But that nothing is still a kind of something. It is still a physical universe, however empty.

How can the very same state be a cold, empty universe from one perspective and a hot dense universe from another? The answer lies in a complex mathematical procedure called “conformal rescaling,” a geometrical transformation which in effect alters the size of an object but leaves its shape unchanged.

Penrose showed how the cold dense state and the hot dense state could be related by such rescaling so that they match with respect to the shapes of their spacetimes—although not to their sizes. It is, admittedly, difficult to grasp how two objects can be identical in this way when they have different sizes—but Penrose argues size as a concept ceases to make sense in such extreme physical environments.

In conformal cyclic cosmology, the direction of explanation goes from old and cold to young and hot: the hot dense state exists because of the cold empty state. But this “because” is not the familiar one—of a cause followed in time by its effect. It is not only size that ceases to be relevant in these extreme states: time does too. The cold dense state and the hot dense state are in effect located on different timelines. The cold empty state would continue on forever from the perspective of an observer in its own temporal geometry, but the hot dense state it gives rise to effectively inhabits a new timeline all its own.

It may help to understand the hot dense state as produced from the cold empty state in some non-causal way. Perhaps we should say that the hot dense state emerges from, or is grounded in, or realized by the cold, empty state. These are distinctively metaphysical ideas which have been explored by philosophers of science extensively, especially in the context of quantum gravity where ordinary cause and effect seem to break down. At the limits of our knowledge, physics and philosophy become hard to disentangle.

Experimental Evidence?

Conformal cyclic cosmology offers some detailed, albeit speculative, answers to the question of where our Big Bang came from. But even if Penrose’s vision is vindicated by the future progress of cosmology, we might think that we still wouldn’t have answered a deeper philosophical question—a question about where physical reality itself came from. How did the whole system of cycles come about? Then we finally end up with the pure question of why there is something rather than nothing—one of the biggest questions of metaphysics.

But our focus here is on explanations which remain within the realm of physics. There are three broad options to the deeper question of how the cycles began. It could have no physical explanation at all. Or there could be endlessly repeating cycles, each a universe in its own right, with the initial quantum state of each universe explained by some feature of the universe before. Or there could be one single cycle, and one single repeating universe, with the beginning of that cycle explained by some feature of its own end. The latter two approaches avoid the need for any uncaused events—and this gives them a distinctive appeal. Nothing would be left unexplained by physics.

Penrose envisages a sequence of endless new cycles for reasons partly linked to his own preferred interpretation of quantum theory. In quantum mechanics, a physical system exists in a superposition of many different states at the same time, and only “picks one” randomly, when we measure it. For Penrose, each cycle involves random quantum events turning out a different way—meaning each cycle will differ from those before and after it. This is actually good news for experimental physicists, because it might allow us to glimpse the old universe that gave rise to ours through faint traces, or anomalies, in the leftover radiation from the Big Bang seen by the Planck satellite.

Penrose and his collaborators believe they may have spotted these traces already, attributing patterns in the Planck data to radiation from supermassive black holes in the previous universe. However, their claimed observations have been challenged by other physicists and the jury remains out.

Endless new cycles are key to Penrose’s own vision. But there is a natural way to convert conformal cyclic cosmology from a multi-cycle to a one-cycle form. Then physical reality consists in a single cycling around through the Big Bang to a maximally empty state in the far future—and then around again to the very same Big Bang, giving rise to the very same universe all over again.

This latter possibility is consistent with another interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the many-worlds interpretation. The many-worlds interpretation tells us that each time we measure a system that is in superposition, this measurement doesn’t randomly select a state. Instead, the measurement result we see is just one possibility—the one that plays out in our own universe. The other measurement results all play out in other universes in a multiverse, effectively cut off from our own. So no matter how small the chance of something occurring, if it has a non-zero chance then it occurs in some quantum parallel world. There are people just like you out there in other worlds who have won the lottery, or have been swept up into the clouds by a freak typhoon, or have spontaneously ignited, or have done all three simultaneously.

Some people believe such parallel universes may also be observable in cosmological data, as imprints caused by another universe colliding with ours.

Many-worlds quantum theory gives a new twist on conformal cyclic cosmology, though not one that Penrose agrees with. Our Big Bang might be the rebirth of one single quantum multiverse, containing infinitely many different universes all occurring together. Everything possible happens—then it happens again and again and again.

An Ancient Myth

For a philosopher of science, Penrose’s vision is fascinating. It opens up new possibilities for explaining the Big Bang, taking our explanations beyond ordinary cause and effect. It is therefore a great test case for exploring the different ways physics can explain our world. It deserves more attention from philosophers.

For a lover of myth, Penrose’s vision is beautiful. In Penrose’s preferred multi-cycle form, it promises endless new worlds born from the ashes of their ancestors. In its one-cycle form, it is a striking modern re-invocation of the ancient idea of the ouroboros, or world-serpent. In Norse mythology, the serpent Jörmungandr is a child of Loki, a clever trickster, and the giant Angrboda. Jörmungandr consumes its own tail, and the circle created sustains the balance of the world. But the ouroboros myth has been documented all over the world— including as far back as ancient Egypt.

The ouroboros of the one cyclic universe is majestic indeed. It contains within its belly our own universe, as well as every one of the weird and wonderful alternative possible universes allowed by quantum physics—and at the point where its head meets its tail, it is completely empty yet also coursing with energy at temperatures of a hundred thousand million billion trillion degrees Celsius. Even Loki, the shapeshifter, would be impressed.

• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
• Image Credit: NASA

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://singularityhub.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 00:13 geschreven door peter  

CHINA SAYS ROVER DISCOVERED GLASS SPHERES ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

"THE GLOBULES SIMPLY BLOW OUR MIND..."

CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRATION

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

23-02-2022 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

De 87-jarige man werd opgenomen in het Vancouver General Hospital in Canada, om zijn epilepsiestoornis te behandelen. Tijdens zijn EEG of hersenscan kreeg hij plots een dodelijke hartaanval. Daardoor kregen artsen de unieke kans om te zien wat er zich in de hersenen afspeelt als iemand sterft.

Lees ook

• 

  Neuralink bevestigt dat apen gestorven zijn na proeven met ingeplante chip, maar ontkent dierenmishandeling

Het resultaat is verrassend: voor en na de laatste hartslag, werd er een toename van gammagolven gemeten. Deze hersengolven worden geassocieerd met cognitieve functies, en zijn vooral actief als we ons concentreren, dromen, mediteren en als we herinneringen ophalen.

“We kunnen hieruit leren dat als onze dierbaren hun ogen gesloten hebben en klaar zijn om te rusten, nog even de mooiste momenten uit hun leven kunnen afspelen”, zegt neurochirurg Ajmal Zemmar. “Bovendien daagt het ons uit om opnieuw na te denken over wanneer ons leven precies eindigt. Ook kunnen we ons vragen stellen over bijvoorbeeld de timing van orgaandonatie.”

Wetenschappers benadrukken wel dat het brein van 87-jarige man al beschadigd was door epilepsie. Er is dus nog verder onderzoek nodig om zeker te zijn van de theorie.  

Lees ook

• Neemt angst je leven (soms) over? Met deze simpele oefening herprogrammeer je je hersenen (+)

• Oorzaak van progressie ziekte van Alzheimer in hersenen ontdekt

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:37 geschreven door peter  

Our lives really DO flash before us: Scientists record the brain activity of an 87-year-old man at the moment he died, revealing a rapid 'memory retrieval' process

• Researchers recorded brain activity of 87-year-old as he died from a heart attack

• Brain waves indicated rapid memory retrieval process occurred at time of death

• Findings suggest our life does flash before our eyes through 'memory retrieval'  

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

What happens in the brain as we die has been a source of mystery for centuries, but a new study suggests our lives really do flash before our eyes in our final moments. 

Neuroscientists inadvertently recorded a dying brain while they were using electroencephalography (EEG) to detect and treat seizures in an 87-year-old man, and he suffered a cardiac arrest.

It was the first time ever that scientists had recorded the activity of a dying human brain, according to the team. 

Rhythmic brain wave patterns were observed to be similar to those occurring during memory retrieval, as well as dreaming and meditation.  

This supports a theory known as 'life recall' – that we relive our entire life in the space of seconds like a flash of lightning just prior to death. 

In fact, the brain may remain active and coordinated during and after the transition to death, and may even be programmed to 'orchestrate the whole ordeal', according to the researchers. 

The team recorded a dying brain while they were using electroencephalography (EEG) to detect and treat seizures in an 87-year-old man and the patient suffered a heart attack. Pictured is EEG output over a 900 second period encompassing a seizure (S), suppression of left cerebral hemisphere activity (LS), suppression of bilateral cerebral hemisphere activity (BS), and cardiac arrest (CA). Point of death is CA, coinciding with changes in EEG patterns. FP1, F7, T3 and so on refer to different electrodes of the EEG which are attached or contact different regions on the scalp of the patient. Left indicates left brain hemisphere, right indicates right brain hemisphere

Scientists have recorded the brain activity of a 87-year-old male epilepsy patient while he was dying from a heart attack. Pictured are CT scans of the patient, whose identity was not disclosed. A and B show effects of subdural hematoma - a serious condition where blood collects between the skull and the surface of the brain - with a larger mass effect on the left side. C and D show the same scan sequences after decompressive craniotomy - a surgery to treat the condition

The patient, who is unnamed, was admitted to the Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia, where neurosurgeon Dr Ajmal Zemmar was working at the time.  

The researchers took EEG recordings from his brain before he eventually underwent a fatal cardiac arrest. 

EEG is a method of recording electrical activity of the brain that involves electrodes placed along the scalp. 

'We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,' said Dr Zemmar, now based at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

'Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.'

Brain oscillations (more commonly known as 'brain waves') are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. 

The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.

'Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,' Zemmar said. 

'These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.'

While this study is the first of its kind to measure live brain activity during the process of dying in humans, similar changes in gamma oscillations have been previously observed in rats kept in controlled environments.

This means it is possible that, during death, the brain organises and executes a biological response that could be conserved across species.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method of recording electrical activity of the brain that involves electrodes placed along the scalp

(file photo)

These measurements are, however, based on a single case and stem from the brain of a patient who had suffered injury, seizures and swelling.

This complicates the interpretation of the data, although Dr Zemmar said he hopes to investigate more cases in future.  

'As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members,' he said.

'Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.'  

The study has been published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. 

ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY (EEG) EXPLAINED

Read more:

• Frontiers | Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain | Aging Neuroscience

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:23 geschreven door peter  

he Biggest 3D Map of the Milky Way is Here and it’s Ridiculously Stunning

Our planet isn't flat, and guess what? Neither is our galaxy.

An international team of scientists has created a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the largest to date, and the results have been published in the journal  Science.

By measuring the distance from our Sun to thousands of pulsating stars scattered throughout our galaxy, researchers have managed to produce a 3D map that reveals the S-shaped structure of the combined star disk of the Milky Way galaxy, our cosmic address.

Earth isn’t flat, and the Milky Way isn’t either.

“Our map shows that the Milky Way disk is not flat. Instead, it is deformed and twisted in shape,” revealed study co-author Przemek Mróz of the University of Warsaw in Poland.

“This is the first time we can use individual objects to display it in three dimensions,” he added.

Much of the current knowledge of our galaxy’s spiral shape and structure is based on indirect measurements of celestial objects and inferences based on other distant galaxies in the Universe.

But as scientists have revealed, the galactic map produced by these limited observations is incomplete.

Like numerous distant lighthouses, the classical Cepheids (massive stars that burn hundreds, if not thousands, of times brighter than our Sun) pulse regularly and are visible through the vast interstellar dust clouds that often obscure less bright interstellar objects.

Warsaw University researcher Dorota Skowron, along with scientists from the Ohio State University in the United States and the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom, traced the distance to more than 2,400 cepheids along the Milky Way,  most of which were identified by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a project that helped double the number of known galactic classical cepheids.

By assigning coordinates to each distant pulsating star in relation to our Sun, the researchers managed to develop a three-dimensional model of the Milky Way of very high precision.

The result is a stunning, never-before-seen map of the Milky Way Galaxy.

A twisted, warped place

The study results have allowed astronomers to understand our cosmic neighborhood better and accurately illustrate the galaxy’s shape.

And it’s not flat, but it has a strange shape.

As noted by Space.com, “this new map helped reveal more details on distortions that astronomers had “previously detected in the shape of the Milky Way.”

It took scientists six years to produce the map, but as revealed by participating astronomers, “it was worth it.”

We’ve found that the galaxy’s disk is not flat at a distance of over 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. It is warped. This warping was possibly caused by the galaxy’s interactions with surrounding galaxies, intergalactic gas, or even dark matter.

“Warping of the galactic disk has been detected before, but this is the first time we can use individual objects to trace its shape in three dimensions,” explained Mróz in a statement.

The astronomers explained that the amount of ‘warping’ spotted in our galaxy was surprisingly pronounced.

“It is not some statistical fact available only to a scientist’s understanding,” Mróz said. “It is apparent by eye.”

Map of 1.8 Billion Stars From Gaia’s New Data Release

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:06 geschreven door peter  

Since time unremembered we have sought to penetrate out beyond what our maps show and trudge out over the horizon to explore and conquer the uncharted lands that lie beyond. It is an innate characteristic of the human spirit to wonder at what lies beyond what we know and to delve into the mysteries these wildernesses hold. For centuries explorers have gone out into the unknown and brought back information that has helped us to better understand our world and even our place within it. On occasion, these explorers have brought back some strange stories indeed. It seems only natural that the intrepid explorers who first step foot into new, unexplored realms that are strangers to civilization should come across things no one has ever seen before, and often this comes in the form of coming across creatures that seemingly should only inhabit the wilds of the imagination. One explorer who brought back myriad tales of strange beasts within his journals is an intrepid explorer of the South American jungles, who went out looking for a lost city and would come back with a whole list of weird creatures never seen before.

One of the most well-known explorers of the Amazon jungle is the famed explorer Percy Fawcett, who is most famous for his ambitious and ill-fated expedition in 1925 to find a lost city he was convinced existed in the forgotten, unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle, a journey during which he would vanish off the face of the earth to become one of the most baffling disappearances in history. I have written of Fawcett and his various expeditions, in particular that of his lost city, in much more depth here at Mysterious Universe before, but one of the more interesting and lesser discussed aspects of his adventures are all of the strange and mysterious creatures he allegedly encountered along the way in that maze of wilderness. Throughout his journeys, Fawcett kept rather detailed journals of his expeditions, and flipping through the normal, more mundane everyday trials and tribulations of the expedition, one can at times find some rather amazing, bizarre accounts involving myriad strange creatures that just seem to jump off the page. Indeed, Fawcett’s journals hold a veritable zoo of strange and bizarre beasts that have never really been identified or explained, and he once cryptically and eerily wrote of the Amazon as being:

A poisoned hell that could never be explored on foot, 60 foot anacondas capable of picking a man out of a canoe, savage ape men, an infested plain of deadly snakes, bats so big they looked like pterodactyls, ferocious black panthers, white Indian tribes, swarms of biting bees, fires in the distance.

Percy Fawcett

Some of the strange creatures that are mentioned in his journals, and which are obviously something not officially known, are frustratingly mentioned only briefly or in passing, as if they are just a part of everyday life for them, another one of the menagerie of poisonous snakes and spiders, vampire bats, giant anacondas, electric eels, ferocious piranhas, jungle cats, and other dangerous animals that all conspired to make the expedition members miserable. One of these was something he called the “sauba ants” which could apparently reduce clothing and bedding to threads in a single night, mentioned in passing but obviously no normal ants that we presently know of. There are also casual mentions made of millipedes that “squirt cyanide” and a type of gigantic spider larger than a dinner plate he calls the Apazauca Spider, which he says has poison that could kill a grown man nearly instantaneously and liked to enter tents at night. Another creature described in only passing detail is what is described as a cat-like canid with a double nose, and he also makes mention of a shark called the manguruyú, which he writes is “a freshwater shark, huge but toothless, said to attack men and swallow them if it gets a chance.” These are all strange in that they give such short shrift to these oddities, maddeningly brief and lacking in detail, which was a bit odd for Fawcett, who normally went to great lengths to take meticulous and detailed notes during his expeditions. Fawcett made another brief mention in his many notes of something very strange, large, and seemingly very much like a dinosaur in the wilds of Bolivia, of which he wrote:

Some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps – possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal – huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.

What was it? It is hard to say because he never mentions it again, although he at several points talks about hearing from natives of enormous, mysterious tracks along the Acre River, near where the borders of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil collide. Of the actual creature itself, no more is said of it, an afterthought in his otherwise sprawling details of the expedition. It is frustrating to say the least, and this is only just the beginning of tales of Fawcett’s encounters with mystery beasts in the remote rainforests of South America, but other reports get a bit more meat to them and are also at times quite a bit more spectacular. One of these is his expedition’s supposed encounters with a giant snake far larger than anything known, and also apparently more aggressive. Compared to the brief, matter-of-fact write-ups on the creatures already mentioned, Fawcett in this case goes into great detail about the team’s harrowing encounter with the serpent, writing:

We were drifting easily along in the sluggish current not far below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow of the boat there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to aim smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag. With great difficulty I persuaded the Indian crew to turn in shore-wards. They were so frightened that the whites showed all round their popping eyes, and in the moment of firing I had heard their terrified voices begging me not to shoot lest the monster destroy the boat and kill everyone on board, for not only do these creatures attack boats when injured, but also there is great danger from their mates.

We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water, and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet. Its body was not thick for such a colossal length-not more than 12 inches in diameter -but it had probably been long without food. I tried to cut a piece out of the skin, but the beast was by no means dead and the sudden upheavals rather scared us. A penetrating foetid odour emanated from the snake, probably its breath, which is believed to have a stupefying effect, first attracting and later paralysing its prey. Everything about this snake was repulsive. Such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing the one shot by me. The Brazilian Boundary Commission told me of one killed in the Rio Paraguay exceeding 80 feet in length!

That is certainly a really big snake, far beyond the size of anything known. Again, this is an isolated report in his journal, leaving the reader to decide what ever became of it. Besides giant snakes, Fawcett also wrote quite a lot on his encounters with a tribe of hairy, man-like beasts that he calls the Maricoxi, and which are mostly described as being little more than beastly hairy ape-like savages. By far his most detailed entry on these creatures is also the most sensational, in which Fawcett provides a blow by blow description of his expedition’s frightening encounter with these beasts as follows:

I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.  

The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!   A second time he raised the arrow at me and drew the bow back, and again I knew he would not shoot. It was just as the Maxubis told me it would be. Again he lowered the bow and continued his dance. Then for the third time he halted and began to bring up the arrow’s point. I knew he meant business this time, and drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man’s feet.   

The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ of the enraged braves.

What were these creatures? Considering they are only ever mentioned in Fawcett’s report in passing and there are no further details we will probably never know. Although it might be tempting to chalk some of these reports up to instances of Fawcett being a little imaginative and sprucing his journal up a bit, the thing is he was not really known for that at all. Fawcett was a respected explorer and naturalist, a consummate professional who kept very good and accurate journals for what he saw or witnessed, with no real hint that he was prone to just sudden flights of fancy or making things up, and these tales are also interspersed between totally normal accounts of mundane things and observations, so why would he do this in the first place? It seems to be unlikely he would have just made these stories up, and he was knowledgeable enough about the region and its wildlife that he likely would not have been making misidentifications that he spun into tall tales. In the end we are left to just wonder what was going on here, and they are all just more cryptic accounts brought back by explorers penetrating out into realms beyond our understanding.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-02-2022 om 22:03 geschreven door peter  

It’s a cliché that everyone has heard when person tells of being in danger or in a near-death experiences: “I saw my life flash before my eyes.” Could this really happen? An 87-year-old man with epilepsy was connected to a brain-scanning monitor tracking seizures when he suffered a heart attack and died … with the monitor recording his brain activity until it stopped. His doctors now had an image of his thoughts before death. What, if anything flashed before his eyes? Will it happen to all of us?

“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating. Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.”

In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, research leader Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, explains the unnamed man in Estonia was on a continuous electroencephalography (EEG) machine while doctors attempted to captures his brain waves during a seizure and attempt to diagnose and treat his problem. The sudden heart attack leading to death allowed them to inadvertently record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time. Those brain waves answered the question.

“Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.”

The man showed the same brain waves a person has during memory flashbacks. In addition, the waves showed signs of concentration, memory retrieval and information processing – exactly the activities a rain would perform when tasked with organizing the facts, images and memories of a person’s life. Zemmar sounds confident that’s when the EEG recorded.

“Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.”

This new information affects both the science and ethics of death. This brain activity impacts determining the moment of death for organ donations. It also impacts how family, hospice providers and others present at the deathbed react to what they are seeing – while the loved one may be still, their mind may be racing though many decades of memories, which would dictate a bedside manner that allows it to finish and perhaps even aids in the activity.

Will this happen to all of us eventually?

Before drawing any conclusions, the press release reminds us that this is a single case and the patient had an epileptic brain that was injured. Nonetheless, this type of activity has been observed in a controlled rodent study. Taken together, it “suggests that the brain may pass through a series of stereotyped activity patterns during death.” In other words … we may all see our lives pass before our eyes at the time of death.

Time to start working on a better life to watch?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-02-2022 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

NASA is Upping the Power on its Lunar Wattage Challenge!

For years, NASA has been gearing up for its long-awaited return to the Moon with the Artemis Program. Beginning in 2025, this program will send the first astronauts (“the first woman and first person of color”) to the Moon since the end of the Apollo Era. Beyond that, NASA plans to establish the necessary infrastructure to allow for a “sustained program of lunar exploration,” such as the Lunar Gateway and the Artemis Base Camp.

Beyond these facilities, several elements are essential to ensuring a long-term human presence on the Moon. These include shelter from the elements, food, air, water, and of course, power. To address this last element, NASA has teamed up with HeroX – the leading crowdsourcing platform – to launch the NASA Watts on the Moon Challenge. This competition is entering Phase II and will award an additional $4.5 million for innovative concepts that supply power to future lunar missions.

For this challenge, NASA is not seeking proposals for power generation but innovative engineering approaches for integrating power transmission and energy storage into lunar missions. Specifically, these solutions will need to support astronauts, hardware, and systems in the conditions prevalent in the South-Pole Aitken Basin. This permanently shadowed, cratered region is located around the Moon’s southern polar region and has large deposits of ice water.

In addition to NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and Roscosmos are all eying this region as a site for future bases. While these craters present numerous advantages (such as the availability of ice water), they also present several hazards. These environments are not subject to the extreme variations that occur around the equator, where temperatures range from -173 to 117 °C (-279 to 243 °F).

On the other hand, polar craters are permanently shadowed, and temperatures are perennially freezing, averaging -269 °C (-452 °F). Current proposals for lunar bases include placing solar arrays around the crater’s rim, but these are still limited by the extended periods of darkness and light around the poles – which last for 706 hours (or 29d 12h 44m 03s) at a time. As such, NASA and other space agencies are looking for options to provide power during extended periods of darkness.

The first phase of the competition ran from September 2020 to May 2021 and focused on theoretical approaches to energy management, distribution, and storage solutions. In the end, seven competitors were awarded a total of $500,000 in prize money for their approaches, which showed considerable promise. As a result, NASA and HeroX have launched Phase 2 to allow the winners to develop and demonstrate their proposals in simulated lunar conditions.

This phase of the competition will consist of three levels that will award up to 17 prizes in total. The specified requirements remain the same from Phase I, where teams chose one or more activities (collecting regolith, water production, and oxygen production) and offered solutions for energy distribution, management, and/or storage. For Phase Two, NASA has identified two specific areas that are need of improvement:

1. Power Transmission: that can deliver power from a remote generation source to critical mission operation loads where (1) power loads are frequently or permanently immersed in extreme cold and (2) there are large variations in average power loads versus peak power loads. NASA has significant interest in both wired and wireless transmission, and the Challenge seeks to incentivize and demonstrate both types of solutions.
2. Energy Storage: that can (1) power mission operation loads when intermittent power generation is not available and (2) survive and operate in extreme cold environments.

For this phase, NASA is looking for solutions that can be designed, built, and then tested in a simulated lunar environment with conditions mirroring the real thing (freezing cold, near-vacuum, and permanently shadowed). NASA also seeks solutions that can proceed toward flight readiness and future operation on the surface after the challenge is complete. It is also essential that these proposals work with ideas for power generation, which NASA is pursuing through many programs.

This includes the Fission Surface Power (FSP) system, a lightweight ten kilowatt (kW) nuclear reactor that emerged from the Kilopower project – which yielded the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Tech (KRUSTY) demonstrator. There’s also the novel “Light Bender” system that would use solar collectors and telescope optics to capture and distribute sunlight in shadowed craters on the Moon.

As always, the challenge is expected to advance similar technologies and have public and commercial applications here on Earth. As such, it is hoped that proposals for this competition could be adapted for power distribution and storage here at home. The competition is open to all residents in the U.S., individuals or teams, that are 18 years of age or older. Organizations must be incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the U.S. (some restrictions apply).

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

23-02-2022 om 21:21 geschreven door peter