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

Every once in a while, a stellar cataclysm occurs in our Universe, bringing the life of a star to an end. The most common type of cataclysm is a core-collapse supernova, where a massive star’s interior implodes, leading to a runaway fusion reaction and a tremendous explosion, where the energy emitted by the star can briefly shine billions of times brighter than a typical star. And yet, it’s the rarer types of stellar cataclysms — superluminous supernovae, hypernovae, tidal disruptions events, and even more exotic explosions — that can shine brighter than anything else we have observed.

In 2018, a new class of explosions was seen for the first time: the “Cow” class. Detected automatically by a facility that monitors the sky for unexpected brightening (or faintening) events, its randomly generated name came out at AT2018cow, where the last three letters happened to spell an actual word. Today, it’s the prototype for a novel class of explosions that occur throughout the Universe. Another event in the same “Cow” class of objects was recently discovered: the first one detected not by its visible light signatures, but by its spectacular X-ray brightening. Known as AT2020mrf, it literally bathed the Universe in X-rays for billions of light-years, including us.

Here’s the science behind what happened.

This cutaway showcases the various regions of the surface and interior of the Sun, including the core, which is where nuclear fusion occurs. As time goes on, the region of the core where nuclear fusion takes place expands, causing the Sun’s energy output to increase. A similar process occurs in the interior of all stars.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons/KelvinSong)

As they go through their life cycles, stars transform mass into energy through the process of nuclear fusion. By smashing light atomic nuclei together under tremendous pressures and temperatures, they can trigger the formation of heavier atomic nuclei. If you were to put the total masses of the pre-fusion nuclei and the post-fusion nuclei on a scale, you’d find that the ones produced by fusion were slightly less massive than the ones that went into the reaction.

Where did that mass go? It gets transformed into energy through Einstein’s most famous equation: E = mc².

When AT2018cow was first seen, it appeared simply as a rapidly brightening, high-temperature event: like a supernova, but with some unusual features to it. Some of those features include:

the copious detection of iron
an extremely luminous brightening in ultraviolet wavelengths
approximately ten times the intrinsic brightness of a normal supernova
brightness across all wavelengths of light, from X-ray down to the radio
evidence that it was surrounded by very dense material, with a tremendously fast shockwave moving through it

For quite a while, this was puzzlingly difficult to explain.

supernova x-ray

The one explanation for the event AT2018cow that ticks all the boxes is a cocooned supernova that undergoes a shock breakout. Although many details remain to be worked out in this scenario, the same explanation remains consistent with all five known Cow-like events.

(Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

However, by synthesizing a wide variety of observations from many different observatories, a consistent picture began to emerge. One candidate explanation was that it came from a tidal disruption event, where stars are torn apart through gravitational interactions with a massive yet compact object. However, the long-term nature of the X-rays suggested that a remnant was left behind to power it, eliminating that as a potential explanation. Instead, perhaps it was a supernova after all — albeit one that was in an unusual environment, shrouded by a dense cocoon-like structure of gas.

With that realization, the pieces fell into place. If there were a cocoon of gas surrounding a star that was reaching the end of its life, then:

an initial supernova would shock the surrounding cocoon
the material would heat to exceedingly high temperatures
the injected energy would cause a “breakout” event, creating the extreme brightness, the rapid increase in luminosity, and the ultra-fast shock wave
the remnant of the supernova, like a neutron star, would continue to inject energy for long periods of time after the initial explosion

This new class of objects are now known not exclusively as “Cow” class objects, but rather as FBOTs: Fast Blue Optical Transients.

This image shows the supernova remnant of SN 1987a in six different wavelengths of light. Even though it’s been 35 years since this explosion occurred, and even though it’s right here in our own backyard, the material around the central engine has not cleared enough to expose the stellar remnant. For contrast, Cow-like objects have their cores exposed almost immediately.

(Credit: Alak Ray, Nature Astronomy, 2017; ACTA/ALMA/ESO/Hubble/Chandra composite)

What makes an explosion a Fast Blue Optical Transient? There must be a rapid increase in brightness; that’s the “fast” part. You have to have lots of energy in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum; that’s the “blue” part. It has to have a large brightness increase in the visible light portion of the spectrum; that’s the “optical” part. And it needs to have a time variation in its overall energy output, where it rises, increases to a maximum, and then decreases and fades away; that’s the “transient” part.

In fact, there are entire observatories that specialize in making observations of transient objects, where they image the same part of the sky over and over again. They then perform, in an automated fashion, a differential calculation, only looking for changes in the sky from one moment to the next. Only if something has brightened, faintened, newly appeared, newly disappeared, or has otherwise changed somehow — in position or color, for instance — is it “flagged” as a candidate for a transient event. Almost all of our automated transient searches, however, are restricted to being performed in visible light.

The 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Mt. Palomar is where the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) takes its data from. Even though it’s only a 48″ (1.3 meter) telescope, its wide field of view and rapid observing speed allows it to discover optical changes in the night sky that practically every other observatory cannot find.

(Credit: Palomar/Caltech)

That’s part of what makes this newest event, AT2020mrf, so spectacular. It was first found in July of 2020 not by any of the transient facilities explicitly built and designed to find these optical events, but rather by a completely different type of observatory: an X-ray telescope known as the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) telescope. This X-ray telescope is unique among all the X-ray observatories we have operating today for numerous reasons, but the most spectacular is that it is the only one that plans on imaging the entire sky numerous times over.

The Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma telescope completed its first full survey of the sky in June 2020, and quickly embarked on its second sweep — of a planned eight — immediately thereafter. The whole point of surveying the sky over and over again is, once again, to look for changes, as they signify an astronomical event of interest. In July 2020, right at the start of that second sweep, something fascinating emerged; an entirely new source of X-ray light — where none had been previously just six months prior — had not only emerged, but was incredibly bright.

The location of AT2020mrf is seen here in images from the eROSITA X-ray telescope. The right panel shows the detection of a new source between July 21 and July 24, 2020. The left panel shows that the source was not there six months earlier.

(Credit: Pavel Medvedev, SRG/eROSITA)

How bright was it? The original “Cow” event, AT2018cow had a large and significant X-ray brightness for a supernova. That of AT2020mrf was 20 times brighter in that X-ray light. In addition, both of these events had a substantial but erratic variability in their X-ray brightness, varying rapidly on timescales of less than a day.

It was enough to make the astronomers studying it wonder: Was it possible that this new event was also a FBOT? If so, there should have been an optical transient at precisely the same location. They combed back through the data of the Zwicky Transient Facility to see what was there.

Sure enough, 35 days before the SRG telescope found the remarkable X-ray brightening, an optical brightening had occurred, just as it had for other FBOT events, including the Cow. It possessed other features that made it a remarkably interesting object in its own right, including:

a very high temperature of around 20,000 K
significant emission features that indicate a very high speed, of around 10% the speed of light (much faster than a normal supernova’s of 2-3% the speed of light)
a bright set of radio emissions

Perhaps most interestingly, the fact that it belongs to a very small, low-mass, dwarf galaxy: one with a mass of only 100 million stars, or less than 0.1% the mass of our Milky Way.

This graph shows the masses and star formation rates of the host galaxies where all five FBOT events that have been recorded were discovered. All of them are much lower in both mass and brightness than our own Milky Way.

(Credit: Y. Yao et al., ApJ submitted, 2021; arXiv:2112.00751)

This event, AT2020mrf, is now the fifth event to meet all the criteria for an FBOT, and somehow all five of them have occurred in dwarf galaxies that are forming new stars. This is one of those observed phenomena that make astronomers collectively scratch their heads and note, “that’s funny,” because we have no modern explanation for it.

So, what do you do if you’re a scientist presented with a mystery that you can’t explain, from an object located about 2 billion light-years away?

You take the most sensitive telescopes you can in whatever wavelengths of light you think might hold interesting information and you continue to observe the event, hoping to learn more about its nature and its origins from the clues that reveal themselves over long periods of time. Armed with the knowledge that they had discovered a potentially unique Fast Blue Optical Transient, a team of scientists led by first author Yuhan Yao of Caltech applied for, and received, observing time on NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope to follow-up on this object. Even though that time didn’t arrive until June 2021, it was well worth the wait.

supernova X-ray

The X-ray emissions of the newest and most powerful Cow-like event, AT2020mrf, is shown with red stars. The first observation was taken with the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma observatory, while the latter two were taken with the Chandra X-ray observatory. Note how much greater these energies are than all the other Cow-like events, in black, orange, and purple, this event has proven to be.

(Credit: Y. Yao et al., ApJ submitted, 2021; arXiv:2112.00751)

Some 328 days after the explosion began, NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope pointed its eyes at this object ~2 billion light-years away. Remarkably, within its first six hours of observation, Chandra saw 29 individual X-ray photons coming from this one object: a remarkably large number. Over a second six-hour observation window, it discovered another 10 X-ray photons. Those two observations, taken nearly a year after the initial explosion occurred, indicate a number of remarkable facts:

The X-ray flux coming from this object must be absolutely enormous; some 200 times as luminous in X-ray light as AT2018cow was at a comparable time in its evolution.
The X-rays make it, by far, the most luminous Cow-like supernova ever seen in the X-ray.
It demonstrates the diversity of Fast Blue Optical Transients, while still supporting the cocooned-supernova breakout model of FBOTs.
It shows that even a full year after the supposed supernova first occurred, the rapid X-ray variability on a timescale of ~1 day or less still remains.
The only way the X-ray flux could remain this large this long after a supernova explosion is if it’s powered by a still-active central engine, which the authors have speculated might be either an accreting black hole or an extremely rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star: a millisecond magnetar.

This artistâs impression shows a supernova and associated gamma-ray burst driven by a rapidly spinning neutron star with a very strong magnetic field â an exotic object known as a magnetar. It’s thought that Cow-like events, or fast blue optical transients, are also powered by either an accreting black hole or a millisecond magnetar like this one, but don’t produce gamma-ray bursts, but rather X-rays, along with them.

(Credit: ESO)

Even with all of this, we have to lament what we’re lacking: the ability to monitor events like this continuously, across the sky, in a variety of wavelengths, with high resolution. We only have a series of measurements of its optical brightness at low resolution and low sensitivity, as the drawback of large-area transient surveys is that it trades sensitivity and resolution for speed. We have no X-ray data from the initial brightening, as we only happened to observe this region some 35 to 37 days after the initial brightness peaked, and we don’t have data in between the SRG observation and the Chandra X-ray observations: a gap of nearly 300 days.

We know that the X-ray emissions have dropped off but we don’t know how they decayed. We know that there was both hydrogen and helium in the AT2018cow event but we don’t know whether hydrogen and helium were present or absent in this one, as it’s already too late to make those critical follow-up observations. And we don’t know whether the substantial, record-breaking X-ray emissions that were first seen by SRG — again, more than a month after the optical brightness peaked — actually represents the true peak of emissions or was truly an even brighter event than we were able to observe.

In a normal supernova, at left, there’s plenty of surrounding material preventing the core from becoming exposed, even years or decades after the explosion first occurs. However, with a Cow-like supernova, the copious material surrounding the stellar core is broken apart, exposing the core in short order.

(Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

At the end of the day, this newfound object seems to raise more questions than it answers. In Yao’s own words:

“When I saw the Chandra data, I didn’t believe the analysis at first. I reran the analysis several times. This is the brightest Cow supernova seen to date in X-rays. […] In Cow-like events, we still don’t know why the central engine is so active, but it probably has something to do with the type of the progenitor star being different from normal explosions.”

Normally, when stars are on the path to going supernova, they expel large amounts of material and then, when the core implodes, the injected energy has to propagate through that material, shocking it, rebounding, etc., delaying the arrival of the initial light by hours. But with these FBOTs, or Cow-like events, the central cores of those ripped-apart stars are rapidly exposed with the surrounding debris cleared away. Nobody knows why. They’re only found in star-forming regions around dwarf galaxies and we don’t understand why that’s the case. And even though AT2020mrf looks very similar to the original Cow, AT2018cow, in optical wavelengths, it’s scores to hundreds of times intrinsically brighter in the X-rays.

Interview between Dr. Ethan Siegel and then-PhD candidate and now-doctor Anna Ho, one of the scientists who first discovered, analyzed, and characterized the first such event in this new class: AT2018cow.

(Credit: E. Siegel)

Whatever the resolution to this puzzle is, the only way we’ll uncover it is by discovering and more thoroughly examining even more of these events. With more advanced all-sky X-ray surveys on the way, our best bet, as always, is by conducting a more comprehensive suite of scientific investigations. That’s the only way we can truly, reliably learn precisely what’s out there in the Universe.

{ https://bigthink.com/ }

The French astronomer, computer scientist, and UFO researcher Jacques Fabrice Vallée is one of the important figures in the study of unidentified flying objects, long a proponent of pushing the legitimacy of ufology as a viable scientific pursuit. A legendary icon in the field, he not only increased the legitimacy of the study of UFOs, but also pushed at its boundaries, introducing many ideas that were considered groundbreaking in their time, notably the idea of extraterrestrials as interdimensional travelers. He is so important that he was the inspiration for one of the main characters in Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and his contributions to the field are innumerable. He is also known for uncovering a mysterious lost top-secret document that pointed at a grand conspiracy of the government controlling, twisting, and even fabricating the output of information on the UFO phenomenon.

Pentacle Memorandum

In the summer of 1967, Vallée was living in the United States, and at the time was tasked with helping astronomer J. Allen Hynek get his documents in order. This is notable in that Hynek was then one of the most recognizable authorities on the UFO subject, and had been the top scientific advisor to three UFO studies carried out by the U.S. Air Force, with those being Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1951) and Project Blue Book, which he was then overseeing. Indeed, the documents that Vallée was helping to organize were composed of UFO reports under investigation by Project Blue Book. It was apparently quite the task, since Hynek was notoriously disorganized with his files, something Vallée complained about profusely. One day, he unloaded some boxes of Hynek’s files, and as he went through them trying to make some sense of the chaotic mess, he came across a document that was dated 9 January 1953, stamped in red ink “SECRET – Security Information” and signed by a person he would later only refer to as “Pentacle.” What he would find within would change his whole outlook on the UFO phenomenon, shake him to his core, and inspire debate and discussion that has continued to this day.

Jacques Vallée

Among the many revelations allegedly held within what would be called “The Pentacle Memorandum,” perhaps the most shocking had to do with what was called the Robertson Panel. Headed by Howard P. Robertson, a physicist from California Institute of Technology, and organized in response to a recommendation to the Intelligence Advisory Committee following the Central Intelligence Agency’s own review of Project Blue Book, the Robertson Panel was convened in January, 1953, by a committee of expert scientists who had been asked to consider the UFO phenomenon for the purpose of weighing the threat that such objects might present to national security. These experts included Luis Alvarez, Nobel prize in physics; Lloyd Berkner, space scientist; Sam Goudsmit, nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Thornton Page, astronomer Although the Robertson Panel was meant to be an impartial, open discussion on the matter that considered all angles and held nothing back, and this was what the public had been told about it, what Vallée supposedly discovered in this mysterious file cast a sinister light on it all.

Jacques Vallee (right) and J. Allen Hynek, who collaborated for years as advisors to the USAF Project Blue Book, and efforts toward bringing a resolution to the UFO problem.

According to the Pentacle Memorandum, which was addressed to a Miles E. Coll at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and meant for transmittal to Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the panel of scientists convening for the Robertson Panel were being manipulated and not told the whole story. Not only had a secret study of thousands of UFO reports carried out on behalf of the United States government by the Battelle Memorial Institute been withheld from them, but under what was referred to as “Project Stork” they were also told in no uncertain terms that, far from an impartial discussion, there were certain things they were not allowed to talk about. This was basically cherry picking and preselecting evidence, which would guide the conclusion the scientists would reach, and they even suggested postponing the Robertson Panel until it could be decided how much information would be made available to the committee. Vallée would write of this to UFO researcher Barry Greenwood:

The greatest implication, which is perhaps not obvious on first reading but which amounts to a scandal of major proportion in the eyes of any scientist, has to do with the outright manipulation of the Robertson panel. Here is a special meeting of the five most eminent scientists in the land, assembled by the government to discuss a matter of national security. Not only are they not made aware of all the data, but another group has already decided “what can and cannot be discussed (Pentacle’s own words!)” when they meet. Dr. Hynek categorically stated to me that the panel was not briefed about the Pentacle proposals.

Vallée found that this mysterious Project Stork extended beyond merely manipulating and guiding the Robertson Panel. There was also referenced a plan to exploit areas of supposed high UFO activity in order to carry out an experiment to secretly and purposefully manufacture UFO phenomena in order to gather reliable physical data on eyewitness testimony, essentially creating what Vallée would call “a carefully calibrated and monitored simulation of an entire UFO wave.” A portion of the document explains of this project:

We expect that our analysis will show that certain areas in the United States have had an abnormally high number of reported incidents of unidentified flying objects. Assuming that, from our analysis, several definite areas productive of reports can be selected, we recommend that one or two of theses areas be set up as experimental areas. This area, or areas, should have observation posts with complete visual skywatch, with radar and photographic coverage, plus all other instruments necessary or helpful in obtaining positive and reliable data on everything in the air over the area. A very complete record of the weather should also be kept during the time of the experiment. Coverage should be so complete that any object in the air could be tracked, and information as to its altitude, velocity, size, shape, color, time of day, etc. could be recorded. All balloon releases or known balloon paths, aircraft flights, and flights of rockets in the test area should be known to those in charge of the experiment. Many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled within the area. We recognize that this proposed experiment would amount to a large-scale military maneuver, or operation, and that it would require extensive preparation and fine coordination, plus maximum security. Although it would be a major operation, and expensive, there are many extra benefits to be derived besides the data on unidentified aerial objects.

The question of just what would be accomplished by the proposed experiment occurs. Just how could the problem of these unidentified objects be solved? From this test area, during the time of the experiment, it can be assumed that there would be a steady flow of reports from ordinary civilian observers, in addition to those by military or other official observers. It should be possible by such a controlled experiment to prove the identity of all objects reported, or to determine positively that there were objects present of unknown identity. Any hoaxes under a set-up such as this could almost certainly be exposed, perhaps not publicly, but at least to the military. In addition, by having resulting data from the controlled experiment, reports for the last five years could be re-evaluated, in the light of similar but positive information. This should make possible reasonably certain conclusions concerning the importance of the problem of “flying saucers”. Results of an experiment such as described could assist the Air Force to determine how much attention to pay to future situations when, as in the past summer, there were thousands of sightings reported. In the future, then, the Air Force should be able to make positive statements, reassuring to the public, and to the effect that everything is well under control.

Vallée saw all of this as an insidious government plan to spread misinformation and manipulate the truth, to obfuscate the honest search for true answers and mislead the public. He also wondered whether this was just one small part of a greater conspiracy to obfuscate the truth and construct just what the public knew about UFOs. In his opinion, this revelation potentially posed the threat of causing huge shockwaves in the UFO field and beyond into society itself. Vallée was quite alarmed by all of this, and would write:

Perhaps the Pentacle memo only proves that scientific studies of UFOs (and even their classified components) have been manipulated since the fifties. But it also suggests several avenues of research which are vital to the future of this field: why were Pentacle’s proposals kept from the panel? Were his plans for a secret simulation of UFO waves implemented? If so, when, where and how? What was discovered as a result? Are these simulations still going on? Hynek once assured me that if it ever turned out that a secret study had been conducted, the American public would raise an unbelievable stink against the military and Intelligence community. It would be an outrage, he said, an insult to the whole country, not to mention a violation of the most cherished American principles of democracy. There would be an uproar in Congress, editorials in major scientific magazines, immediate demands for sanctions.

Making it all even more ominous was that when Hynek found about the document, he had known nothing of any of this, meaning that Project Bluebook itself was being manipulated. Hynek went to directly confront members of the Battelle study about it, to which their reaction was quite volatile. Vallée would say of the incident, “The man I have called Pentacle snatched his notes away and told him in no uncertain terms that the contents of the memo were not to be discussed, under any circumstances. Why should Pentacle worry so much about a simple letter written fifteen years ago?” Indeed, why would they have such a reaction and what did this mean? All of this disturbed Vallée greatly, and he would later say of the document’s profound effect on him:

The discovery of the Pentacle document had a major impact on me. It gave me an uncomfortable insight into the practices of government agencies and the high-powered consultants who serve them. It was the main raison for my return to Europe in 1967. It made obvious some unsavoury aspects of scientific policy at the highest level. It provided quite an education for an idealistic young astronomer.

It would not be until 1992 that word of this secret document came to light, with the release of Valee’s four-volume series titled Forbidden Science. Not long after this, a purported leaked copy of the Pentacle Memorandum came into the possession of UFO researchers, and Vallee would confirm that this was the very same document he had seen back in 1967. The document would end up hitting the public with a whimper, not creating nearly the sort of uproar that Vallée had been expecting. Most people just didn’t really seem to care all that much. Even within UFO circles it got a mixed response, with some sharing Vallée’s alarmist and paranoid interpretation, while others said the document was not particularly significant in the grand scheme of things. Still others took the more extreme stance that the document “proved” that the government was behind the whole UFO phenomena, and that there were no aliens or spaceships, just a large-scale psi-ops scheme. All of these various interpretations have managed to make the Pentacle Memorandum a controversial and much debated document tight up to the present, with no general agreement on what it all means or what implications it might have. It remains an odd footnote in the history of ufology that we may never truly understand for certain, its implications unknown to us.