The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
14-04-2022
NASA's X-59 Aircraft Seen Along Arizona Road, April 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
NASA's X-59 Aircraft Seen Along Arizona Road, April 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 9, 2022
Location of sighting: Arizona, USA
Now this is interesting. The Arizona Department of Transportation tweeted this photo of an unknown object on a flatbed trailer pulled by a semi truck parked along the road along I-10 on Citrus Road. The object does look to be UFO shaped, like a triangle craft. However the tail does give it away. They figured out that its NASA's X-59 aircraft that is experimental and is capable of breaking the sound barrier without a sonic boom. Sure UFOs can also do the same thing, and I believe that this NASA design was inspired by alien craft. The US go has many crashed UFOs in their possession and often try to integrate the alien tech from the UFOs into todays modern craft to evolve them one step into the future. So...this might not be an alien craft, but it sure as hell was inspired by them and contains alien tech within.
NASA's X-59 Aircraft Seen Along Arizona Road, April 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
NASA's X-59 Aircraft Seen Along Arizona Road, April 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 9, 2022
Location of sighting: Arizona, USA
Now this is interesting. The Arizona Department of Transportation tweeted this photo of an unknown object on a flatbed trailer pulled by a semi truck parked along the road along I-10 on Citrus Road. The object does look to be UFO shaped, like a triangle craft. However the tail does give it away. They figured out that its NASA's X-59 aircraft that is experimental and is capable of breaking the sound barrier without a sonic boom. Sure UFOs can also do the same thing, and I believe that this NASA design was inspired by alien craft. The US go has many crashed UFOs in their possession and often try to integrate the alien tech from the UFOs into todays modern craft to evolve them one step into the future. So...this might not be an alien craft, but it sure as hell was inspired by them and contains alien tech within.
Check this out. An eyewitness was looking at the Arizona cams and reported a dust storm in the area of San Simon. Right above the dust storm is a long UFO which is causing the dust and wind to kick up in order to help hide itself from the drivers along the freeway. Alien are in constant fear of getting seen, so they take every measure to hide from us. Here is just such an occurrence.
UFOs are often seen around natural disasters like the Fukashima, Japan Tsunami and earthquake, tornadoes in central US and even in the Ukraine war near explosions. Its clear that UFOs can deliberately cause these disasters to occur in order to hide the spacecraft from human eyes or to use humans as test lab animals for their experiments.
Classified data prevented scientists from verifying their discovery for 3 years.
A fireball that flared over Earth in 2014 was actually a rock from another star system
(Image credit: Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock)
A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC).
The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint databasearXiv.
That 2019 study argued that the wee meteor's speed, along with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99% certainty that the object had originated far beyond our solar system — possibly "from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy," the authors wrote. But despite their near certainty, the team's paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations was considered classified by the U.S. government, according to Vice.
Now, USSC scientists have officially confirmed the team's findings. In a memo dated March 1 and shared on Twitter on April 6, Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the USSC, wrote that the 2019 analysis of the fireball was "sufficiently accurate to confirm an interstellar trajectory."
This confirmation retroactively makes the 2014 meteor the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system, the memo added. The object's detection predates the discovery of 'Oumuamua — a now-infamous, cigar-shaped object that is also moving far too fast to have originated in our solar system — by three years, according to the USSC memo. (Unlike the 2014 meteor, 'Oumuamua was detected far from Earth and is already speeding out of the solar system, according to NASA.)
Amir Siraj, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University and the lead author of the 2019 paper, told Vice that he still intends to get the original study published, so that the scientific community can pick up where he and his colleagues left off. Because the meteorite ignited over the South Pacific Ocean, it's possible that shards of the object landed in the water and have since nestled on the seafloor, he added.
While locating these scraps of interstellar debris might be a nigh-impossible task, Siraj said he is already consulting with experts about the possibility of mounting an expedition to recover them.
"The possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," Siraj told Vice.
Bizarre cloud formation over Alaska's Lazy Mountain prompts police investigation as witnesses fear it was a plane crash, a UFO or top secret Russian weapon
Bizarre cloud formation over Alaska's Lazy Mountain prompts police investigation as witnesses fear it was a plane crash, a UFO or top secret Russian weapon
A strange, worm-like cloud was pictured over Alaska's Lazy Mountain, sparked conspiracy theories ranging from a UFO crash to weapons tests
On Thursday at around 7 am, photos of the incident show a massive cloud plume, with social media left scratching their heads over what it could be
Some explanations given for it include a meteor, a crashed UFO, an eruption, or even a Russian weapon connected to the conflict in Ukraine
The cloud garnered so much attention that Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center began investigating for a possible plane crash
However, officials eventually offered a far more tame explanation for the bizarre cloud, claiming it was a contrail from a commercial jet
Photos of a strange, worm-like cloud taken over Alaska's Lazy Mountain prompted an investigation by Alaska State Troopers amid fears it could be a plane crash, a UFO or top secret Russian weapon.
Pictures posted to Facebook of the incident show a massive cloud plume on Thursday.
The photos sparked debate online as people questioned whether it could be a meteor, a crashed UFO or satellite, an eruption, and even a Russian weapon connected to the conflict in Ukraine.
The cloud garnered so much attention that Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center began investigating for a possible plane crash.
'There have been no reports of overdue aircraft or ELT activations indicating an aircraft crash,' Alaska State Troopers reported in a release.
A rescue team on a helicopter flew a mission around the Lazy Mountain area this morning and located nothing suspicious and there were no signs of crashed aircraft.'
A strange, worm-like cloud, pictured, was photographed over Alaska's Lazy Mountain, triggering talks of conspiracy theories ranging from the likes of a UFO crash and weapons tests
The unidentified cloud and Alaska's Lazy Mountains in the foreground
Online, theories ran wild.
'We saw this on the way to school this morning as well. Very eerie!' Christy Hronkin Swift wrote on the Palmer Alaska Buzz Facebook page.
'Looks like a meteor. I wonder where it landed,' Cassi Joi posted.
'Could it be a satellite? It’s so strange,' Shannon Del Vecchio Watson said.
Some explanations given for it include a meteor, a crashed UFO, an eruption, or even a Russian weapon connected to the conflict in Ukraine
On Thursday at around 7 am, photos of the incident show a massive cloud plume were posted to social media
Officials eventually offered a far more tame explanation for the bizarre cloud, claiming it was a contrail from a commercial jet
However, officials eventually offered a far more tame explanation for the bizarre cloud, claiming it was a contrail from a commercial jet.
'Further investigation revealed that a large commercial jet was flying in that area around the time that the photos and video were taken,' officials said.
'The aircraft was contacted and reported normal flight operations on its way to JFK airport in New York.'
'Troopers believe that the photos and videos showed a contrail from the commercial jet combined with the rising sun which together caused the unique atmospheric sight.'
US intelligence officials have evidence that UFO sightings can lead to adverse health effects including radiation burns, according to a study released this week. Above, a photo of a UFO taken by navy pilots in 2020
In May, a video was released that appeared to show a UFO buzz a US stealth ship near San Diego before diving under the water back in July 2019
The photos emerged a day after news energed hundreds of military officers reporting injuries, including brain damage and burns, after encounters with UFOs, a top brain expert and former CIA officer revealed.
Detroit Professor Christopher Green was commissioned around 2010 by a secret $22 million defense program monitoring UFOs, to write a paper on injuries from close encounters with 'anomalous' craft.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com the forensic neuroimaging expert, who has worked with the CIA since the 1960s, said he dealt with 'hundreds of patients' including special forces officers and other military personnel hurt after interacting with unidentified craft, some of whom later died.
Some of the injuries resembled the mysterious 'Havana Syndrome', which intelligence agencies believe could be a series of clandestine attacks on US diplomats by a foreign power using targeted microwaves.
SETI, as a modern astronomical endeavor, dating to 1959 (first paper) and 1960 (first observation). Modern UFO sightings date to the late 1940s. Though superficially similar, the two fields in practice have had virtually nothing to do with one another. SETI usually requires a graduate degree in astronomy, and its scientists tend to disdain UFOers for requiring nothing more than a camera that takes blurry photos and a butterfly net in case a little green man appears.
However, the two camps may be moving closer together.
In the classic SETI paradigm, stars are observed for artificial signals. But this communication strategy has severe drawbacks from ET’s point of view. In order for it to succeed, ET would have to target each of potentially millions of promising nearby stars (including ours) continuously, and do so over potentially billions of years. Additionally, it would need to maintain a dedicated receiver for each target star to be certain not to miss a return message if and when it arrives. The cost of this strategy to ET in time, energy and materials would be immeasurable. Further, by announcing its presence to so many stars, it invites disaster should any civilization prove aggressive. Added to this is the problem of communicating with a target civilization of which it would know nothing. Perhaps the transmitting civilization communicates in color oscillations like a cuttlefish, while the recipient only understands bee-like waggles.
Building on the work of others, I have hypothesized that aliens would be better served by sending robotic probes. Relatively simple flyby probes might intermittently surveil nascent solar systems, for example, at 200-million-year intervals. Star systems with biogenic planets might be surveilled more often. Highly capable probes might be placed permanently in the vicinity of planets that have achieved multicellularity as indicated by their oxygen-rich atmospheres or other biosignatures.
Once a permanently placed probe had detected artificial electromagnetic leakage, indicating that one multicellular species had become technologically intelligent, it would attempt to decode the species. Using Sesame Street, Khan Academy and YouTube, and even granted its enormous onboard AI capabilities, it would still take time for it to decode Homo sapiens’ languages, science, math and culture. After many decades of work by E.O. Wilson and others, we now know a little something about ant communication but are still far from a complete decoding. How very much more difficult would it be for ET to decode humans? Even if it has been watching episodes of I Love Lucy that have been leaking out into space since that show was first broadcast, it may still not understand them.
The local probe might need to send data back to its home base for deeper analysis and/or instructions on how to proceed. If the probe began transmitting data to its home in 1950 after its detection of early television signals, and if that home base were located at the modest distance of 150 light-years, then the earliest year in which the probe might receive instructions to make contact with Earth would be 2250.
However, when we do finally hear from a local probe, after it has decoded us, its transmissions may be in a terrestrial language. The ensuing dialogue will take place in near real time, as opposed to the painfully slow dialogue between ourselves and an alien civilization transmitting from a star at hundreds or thousands of light years distance. An alien probe need not reveal the location of its home base, obviating any danger to the progenitor civilization. A fully autonomous probe would be able to communicate with us even if its progenitor civilization is long extinct.
Provided that a probe does belong to an existing civilization or network of civilizations, there remains the problem of how it might communicate with them. To do so directly would require an enormous transmitter. The better solution would be to string communication nodes at close proximity to one another, perhaps one in orbit around every star, and perhaps located at a sufficient distance from the star to enable the use of it as a gravity lens, per Einstein’s theory of general relativity. For the sun, that focal point begins at 550 Earth-sun distances (AU) at which point the node would achieve signal gain of approximately a billion.
Large numbers of ET civilization might contribute to this nodal system, and the store of information would only grow with time regardless of whether the contributing civilizations persist or have gone extinct. We might contribute Aristotle, Shakespeare, Beethoven and Monet to this Encyclopedia Galactica. However, we will not be in a position to barter our culture; having surveilled our TV and internet for at least 70 years, ET has probably already uploaded all it wants. Nonetheless, ET may wish to recruit us into the galactic club so that we might manufacture probes and nodes, and otherwise take responsibility for the maintenance of the interstellar communication system within our immediate stellar neighborhood. That would be our bargaining chip.
SETI stellar observations presume a very faint signal that would require Earth’s most powerful telescopes to detect. However, highly sensitive telescopes have very small fields of view. Detecting a local robotic probe requires the opposite strategy. Because of a probe’s close proximity to Earth, its signal would be much brighter than an interstellar beacon, even under the conservative assumption that its transmission will be on the order of only a few watts. Consequently, SETI’s best strategy would be to sacrifice great sensitivity in favor of a wide a field of view or, better yet, all-sky-all-the-time observing. Such systems are being built now or planned.
Purported sightings by military pilots of objects that defy all known aerodynamics in their sudden and steep accelerations may be delusions, hoaxes or optical illusions. Nevertheless, many SETI scientists now agree with UFOers that the first alien detection plausibly could occur within our own solar system. Both UFOers and SETI scientists should also agree that if some UFO sightings are genuine sightings of aliens, then they must be of robotic probes rather than vessels crewed by biological beings. If nothing else, such beings would be crushed by the g-forces of their purported, very large, accelerations.
The evidence is still lacking that would fully unify UFOers and SETI scientists—and yet the space between these two groups may not be so far vast after all.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
13-04-2022
CYBERTRUCK PROTOTYPE MOCKED FOR LOOKING EXTREMELY JANKY
CYBERTRUCK PROTOTYPE MOCKED FOR LOOKING EXTREMELY JANKY
WHY WOULD THEY CHOOSE TO SHOW THIS OFF TO THE PUBLIC?
CYBER OWNERS
Afterthought
All eyes were on Tesla late last week.
After hyping up the company’s brand new factory in Texas, Musk took some time on stage to show off the latest prototype of his company’s brutalist Cybertruck.
But after years of delays, Tesla still doesn’t have an awful lot to show off — and the prototype displayed last week leaves a lot to be desired.
Unfinished
Sure, from a distance, it looked like a Cybertruck. But attendees of the “Cyber Rodeo” event got a much closer look as well.
And up close, the prototype looked downright bad, almost like an afterthought, as seen in footage uploaded to YouTube by Cyber Owners.
We’re not talking just panel gaps here, as has been customary for the brand in the past. The prototype looks unfinished, as if Tesla was caught off guard by the gigantic party it was hosting.
The doors aren’t even the same color as the rest of the vehicle.
“Everything is bowed, bent at strange angles, leaving room for massive panel gaps,” Jalopnik‘s keen-eyed Steve DaSilva wrote. “Hopefully they don’t leak.”
Where’s My Truck?
None of that is exactly reassuring, considering that the Cybertruck has already been delayed a number of times.
At the event, Musk revealed that the vehicle is now slated to go into production next year, a middling consolation prize for those who preordered their trucks well over two years ago.
The company’s latest showing doesn’t instill any more confidence — we still have yet to see a production ready version of Musk’s passion project, despite the CEO’s many promises.
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The red color of Mars is only inches deep
The red color of Mars is only inches deep
The surface and atmosphere is colored by ferric oxides. Beneath a very thin layer, mere millimeters deep in places, it's not red anymore.
This sand dune, known as Dingo Gap, was crossed by Mars Curiosity in 2014. This image has been slightly 'white balanced' as opposed to being shown in true color, which enables the differences in the compositions and intrinsic colors of the features and rocks on the surface to be seen more clearly.
Mars has a red surface and a red atmosphere, allowing its true color to be seen from space.
Various forms of ferric oxides are responsible for this color, but even rover tracks show the red color doesn't last for long.
Beneath an extremely thin layer, as thin as millimeters and no deeper than meters anywhere, it isn't red any longer.
When we look out at our planet Earth from space, we see a myriad of diverse colors. The sky itself is blue, as the atmosphere preferentially scatters shorter-wavelength blue light in all directions, giving our atmosphere it’s characteristic color. The oceans themselves are blue, as water molecules are better at absorbing longer-wavelength red light than they are blue light. Meanwhile, the continents appear brown or green, dependent on the vegetation (or lack thereof) growing there, while the icecaps and clouds always appear white.
But on Mars, one color dominates: red. The ground is red: red everywhere. The lowlands are red; the highlands are red; the dried-up riverbeds are red; the sand dunes are red; it’s all red. The atmosphere itself is also red in every location we can measure it. The lone exception appears to be the icecaps and clouds, which are white, albeit with a reddish hue as observed from Earth. Yet quite surprisingly, the “redness” of Mars is incredibly shallow; if you dug just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, the redness vanishes. Here’s the scientific story behind just what makes the red planet so red.
Mars, along with its thin atmosphere, as photographed from the Viking orbiter in the 1970s. The bright red atmosphere is due to the presence of Martian dust in the atmosphere, and the composition of Mars rocks was first discovered by the Viking landers.
(Credit: NASA/Viking 1)
From space, there’s no denying the red appearance of Mars. For all of recorded history in a wide variety of languages, the redness of Mars has been its most prominent feature. Mangala, the Sanskrit word for Mars, is red. Har decher, its ancient name in Egyptian, literally means “red one.” And as we’ve progressed into the space age, photos that distinguish the surface from the atmosphere clearly show that the air above Mars itself has an intrinsically red color.
In Earth’s atmosphere, Rayleigh scattering dominates, casting blue light in all directions while the red light travels relatively undisturbed. However, the atmosphere of Mars is only 0.7% as thick as Earth’s, rendering Rayleigh scattering from the gas molecules in Mars’s atmosphere a negligible effect. Instead, dust particles in the Martian atmosphere dominate in (likely) two ways:
greater absorption at short optical wavelengths (400-600 nm) than at longer (600+ nm) wavelengths,
and that larger dust particles (~3 microns and larger) scatter longer-wavelength light more efficiently than atmospheric gas particles scatter shorter-wavelength light from Rayleigh scattering.
Compared to the irradiance received at Earth’s surface, the light received on Mars’s surface is severely suppressed in shorter (bluer) wavelengths. This is consistent with small hematite dust particles suspended in the Martian atmosphere, with the opacity increasing with increased dust density.
(Credit: J.F. Bell III, D. Savransky, & M.J. Wolff, JGR PLANETS, 2006)
If you look at the suspended atmospheric dust in detail on Mars, and ask, “what is it like,” the answer is incredibly informative. Just from looking at its spectral properties — or “how it affects the light” — we can see that the dust is very similar to the regions on Mars that:
are high in reflectivity,
represent bright soil deposits,
and are rich in iron: i.e., containing large amounts of ferric oxides.
When we look at the dust in detail, particularly with the OMEGA instrument on ESA’s Mars Express mission, we find that the most common type of dust comes from nanocrystalline red hematite, which has the chemical formula α-Fe2O3. The particles that make up this hematite are small: between about 3 and 45 microns in diameter. That’s the right size and composition so that the rapid Martian winds, which typically blow at speeds close to ~100 km/hr, continuously sweep large amounts of dust up into the atmosphere, where it remains fairly well-mixed, even when there are no dust storms.
The same panoramic composite image, taken by Opportunity, shown with two different color assignments. Top image is in âtrue color,â as human eyes would see Mars, while the bottom is in false-color enhanced for color contrast.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State U.)
When we look at the Martian surface itself, however, the story gets far more interesting. Ever since we began examining the Martian surface in detail — first from orbiting missions and, later, landers and rovers — we noticed that surface features would change over time. In particular, we’d notice that there were darker areas and brighter areas, and that the dark areas would evolve in a particular pattern:
they’d begin dark,
they would get covered in dust that wesuspect was from the brighter areas,
and then they would go back to being dark once again.
For a long time, we didn’t know why, until we started noticing that the dark areas that change all had a few things in common, particularly when compared to the dark areas that didn’t change. In particular, the dark areas that changed over time had relatively lower elevations and smaller slopes, and were surrounded by brighter areas. By contrast, the higher-elevation, steeper-sloped, and very large dark areas didn’t change in this way over time.
On Mars, bare-rock structures hold onto heat far better than sand-like structures do, meaning they will appear brighter at night, when viewed in the infrared. A variety of rock types and colors can be seen, as dust clings to some surfaces much better than others. From up close, it’s very clear that Mars is not a uniform planet.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, Mars Curiosity Rover)
It was a duo of scientists — one of whom was Carl Sagan — who puzzled out the solution: Mars is covered with a layer of this thin, sandy dust that’s driven by winds all across the Martian surface. This sand gets blown from area to area, but it’s easiest for that dust to:
travel short distances,
travel either from higher to lower elevations or to comparable elevations, rather than up to much higher elevations,
and to get blown off of areas with steeper slopes, as opposed to areas with shallower slopes.
In other words, the red dust that dominates the color palette of Mars is only skin deep. That’s not even a poetic turn of phrase in this case: most of Mars is covered by a layer of dust that’s only a few millimeters thick! Even in the region where the dust is thickest — the large plateau known as the Tharsis region, consisting of three very large volcanoes just offset from Olympus Mons (which appears to the plateau’s northwest) — it’s estimated to be a meager 2 meters (~7 feet) thick.
Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) colorized topographic map of the western hemisphere of Mars, showing the Tharsis and Valles Marineris regions. The impact basin Argyre is at lower right, with the lowland Chryse Planitia to the right (east) of the Tharsis region.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State U.)
You might look at these facts, then, and wonder the following: do we have a topographic map of Mars and a map of the ferric oxides on Mars, and do these maps correlate with one another in any way?
It’s a smart thought, and one that we’ll take a look at in just a second, but “ferric oxide” doesn’t necessarily mean “red Mars dust” the way you might think. First off, ferric oxides are present everywhere on the planet:
within the crust,
found in lava outflows,
and in the Martian dust that’s been oxidized by reactions with the atmosphere.
Given that the atmosphere, even today, contains significant quantities of both carbon dioxide and water, there’s a readily available source of oxygen to oxidize any iron-rich material that makes it to the surface: where it contacts the atmosphere.
As a result, when we look at a ferric oxide map of Mars — again, made by the fabulous OMEGA instrument aboard ESA’s Mars Express — we find that yes, the ferric oxides are everywhere, but the abundances are highest across the northern and mid-latitudes, and lowest across the southern latitudes.
This map, by the OMEGA instrument on ESAâs Mars Express, plots the distribution of ferric oxides, a mineral phase of iron, across the surface of Mars. Ferric oxides (an oxide of iron) are present everywhere on the planet: within the bulk crust, lava outflows and the dust oxidised by chemical reactions with the martian atmosphere. Bluer colors represent lower abundances of ferric oxide; redder colors are higher.
(Credit: ESA/CNES/CNRS/IAS/Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay; Background: NASA MOLA)
On the other hand, the topography of Mars shows that the elevation of the red planet varies in an interesting way across its surface, and in a way that’s only partially correlated with the abundance of ferric oxides. The southern hemisphere, predominantly, is at a much higher elevation than the lowlands in the north. The greatest elevations occur in the ferric oxide-rich Tharsis region, but in the lowlands to the east of it, the abundances of ferric oxides plummets.
What you have to realize is that the red hematite form of ferric oxide, which is possibly the culprit for the “redness” of Mars, isn’t the only form of ferric oxide. There is also magnetite: Fe3O4, which is black in color instead of red. Although the global topography of Mars appears to play a role in the abundances of ferric oxide, it clearly isn’t the only factor at play, and might not even be the primary factor in determining Mars’s color.
The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument, part of Mars Global Surveyor, collected over 200 million laser altimeter measurements in constructing this topographic map of Mars. The Tharsis region, at center-left, is the highest elevation region on the planet, while the lowlands appear in blue. Note the much lower elevation of the northern hemisphere compared to the southern.
(Credit: Mars Global Surveyor MOLA Team)
What we think is occurring — and this has been a consistent picture for many years — is that there is a bright, globally distributed, globally homogeneous set of dust that gets swept up into the atmosphere and remains there. That dust is basically suspended in the thin Martian atmosphere, and although events like dust storms can increase the concentration, it never drops to a negligibly low value. Mars’s atmosphere is always rich with this dust; that dust provides the atmosphere’s color; but the color features of Mars’s surface aren’t uniform at all.
The “settling of atmospheric dust” is only one factor in determining the surface color of various regions of Mars. This is something we’ve learned very well from our landers and rovers: Mars isn’t a uniform red color at all. In fact, the surface itself is more of an orangey shade of butterscotch overall, and that various rocky objects and deposits on the surface appear to have a variety of colors: brown, golden, tan, and even greenish or yellow, depending on what minerals make up those deposits.
This image, taken by Mars Pathfinder of its Sojourner rover, shows a variety of colors. The rover’s wheels are reddish due to the Martian hematite; the disturbed soil is much darker underneath. Rocks of a variety of intrinsic colors can be seen, but also the role that the sunlight’s angle plays can be clearly seen as well.
(Credit: NASA/Mars Pathfinder)
One question that’s still under investigation is the exact mechanism by which these red hematite particles form. Although there are many ideas that involve molecular oxygen, it’s only found in tiny, trace amounts from the photodissociation of water. Reactions involving water or high temperatures are possible, but those are thermodynamically disfavored.
My two favorite possibilities are reactions involving hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), which occurs naturally on Mars in low abundances, but is a very strong oxidant. The fact that we see large amounts of α-Fe2O3 but no hydrated ferric iron minerals could be an indication of this pathway.
Alternatively, we might get hematite simply from a purely physical process: erosion. If you mix together magnetite powder, quartz sand, and quartz dust together and tumble it in a flask, some of the magnetite converts to hematite. In particular, a “black” mixture (dominated by magnetite) will appear red, as the quartz gets fractured, exposing oxygen atoms, which attach to the broken magnetite bonds, forming hematite. Perhaps the notion of “water is responsible for ferric oxides” is a literal red herring after all.
The start of the 2018 dust storm that led to the demise of NASA’s Opportunity rover. Even from this coarse map, it’s clear that the dust is red in color, and severely reddens the atmosphere as greater proportions of dust become suspended in the Martian atmosphere.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
So, all in all, Mars is red because of hematite, which is a red form of ferric oxide. Although ferric oxides are found in many places, only the hematite is largely responsible for the red color, and the small dust particles that are suspended in the atmosphere and that coat the top few millimeters-to-meters of Mars’s surface are wholly responsible for the red color we see.
If we could somehow calm the atmosphere for long periods of time and let the Martian dust settle out, you might expect that Rayleigh scattering would dominate like it does on Earth, turning the skies blue. This is only partly correct, though; because the Martian atmosphere is so thin and tenuous, the sky would appear very dark: almost completely black, with a slight bluish tint to it. If you could successfully block out the brightness coming from the planet’s surface, you would likely be able to see some stars and up to six planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and sometimes Uranus — even during the daytime.
Mars might be the red planet, but only a tiny, minuscule amount of it is actually red. Fortunately for us, that red part is the outermost layer of its surface, pervasive in the Martian atmosphere, and that accounts for the color we actually perceive.
(This article is re-run from earlier in 2021 as part of a “best of 2021” series that will run from Christmas Eve until the New Year. Happy holidays, everyone.)
NASA's Artemis 1 Space Launch System moon rocket stands atop Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida during a fueling test on April 4, 2022.
(Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)
The White House's generosity has NASA poised to do big things in 2023 and beyond, according to the space agency's deputy chief.
"The $26 billion fiscal year 2023 budget request is 8% more than enacted federal spending levels for fiscal year 2022, affirming the importance of civil space to the Biden-Harris administration and to the strategic future of the United States," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said last week at the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
"It represents the largest overall request in current dollars for NASA and the largest request for science funding in agency history," she added.
Melroy emphasized the budget's potential positive impact on NASA's Artemis program, the agency's plan to return astronauts to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. (Reminder: The budget request remains just that at the moment, a request; it still must be approved by Congress.)
She called the recent rollout of the Artemis 1 moon mission to its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida "very emotional and very historic." She also acknowledged the expansion of lunar science programs to prepare for further human exploration of the moon, including the VIPER rover that will map the location of water ice near the moon's south pole.
"We never forget we are standing on the shoulders of giants, the men who landed on the moon and the women who did the math," Melroy quipped, stressing that the accomplishments of the Apollo generation inspired her own foray into the space program. (Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, served as a NASA astronaut and was one of two female space shuttle commanders.)
Melroy also reiterated NASA's commitment to Earth science, particularly regarding climate change; this year will see the initiation of the agency's Earth System Observatory constellation of satellites.
"We will continue to integrate our climate efforts across the agency for maximum synergy, and we will initiate the Earth Information Center, an effort to bring together our space-based climate data, along with data from our interagency and international partners into one place," she said.
"This will help make it more accessible to scientists, yes, but we really intend to make it more accessible to decision-makers, and also all citizens, especially in our communities that are most affected by climate change," Melroy added.
Along those lines, Melroy announced NASA's prioritization of aeronautical innovation in green aerospace. For example, the agency's X-57 all-electric aircraft is scheduled to begin flight tests this year, with further X-planes planned.
"The 2023 budget enables us to begin planning for the next X-plane through the Sustainable Flight National Partnership, which will demonstrate flight efficiency capabilities that can transition directly to narrowbody civil aviation," Melroy said. "We also continue enthusiastically in the X-plane business with the X-59 later this year, which will demonstrate how we can mitigate sonic booms and, we hope, lead to persistent supersonic commercial flight."
Finally, Melroy praised NASA's commercial partners, from commercial crew to commercial cargo to commercial science. The Biden administration's budget request includes $220 million for commercial destinations in low Earth orbit, with which NASA hopes to promote a new space economy.
"I believe history will look back and say that we are in the golden age of commercial space, and it's pretty exciting to be living in it," she said.
During a research expedition that sounds indistinguishable from the first act of a horror movie, a team of intrepid scientists have discovered dozens of ancient, never-before-seen viruses within a sample of Tibetan ice.
The Ohio State University researchers behind the work are curious about how viruses have changed in response to shifting climates, according to a university press release. Of the 33 viruses they found in the ice, 28 are brand new to science, according to research published in the journal Microbiome on Tuesday — and probing their genetic codes could help explain the secrets of how life can survive extreme conditions both elsewhere on Earth and potentially even in places like Mars.
Let’s just hope that none of them infect anybody.
Veggie Viruses
Fortunately, the new viruses appear to have made their homes in ancient plants and soil-dwelling organisms rather than humans or animals before they froze abut 15,000 years ago. And the survivors seem to have fared so well all this time because they thrive in the harsh colds, not in spite of them.
“We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there,” senior study author and Ohio State earth scientist Lonnie Thompson said in the release. “The documentation and understanding of that is extremely important: How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?”
To that end, the researchers hope that the ancient viruses will help them piece together a sort of fossil record for the area — by peering at the viruses that lived farther back in time, they hope they’ll be able to paint a better picture of what the environment was like than ever before.
4 billion-year-old relic from early solar system heading our way
4 billion-year-old relic from early solar system heading our way
An enormous comet—approximately 80 miles across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island—is heading our way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than 1 billion miles from the sun, which is slightly farther from Earth than Saturn; that will be in 2031.
Comets, among the oldest objects in the solar system, are icy bodies that were unceremoniously tossed out of the solar system in a gravitational pinball game among the massive outer planets, said David Jewitt. The UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy co-authored a new study of the comet in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The evicted comets took up residence in the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of far-flung comets encircling the solar system out to many billions of miles into deep space, he said.
A typical comet's spectacular multimillion-mile-long tail, which makes it look like a skyrocket, belies the fact that the source at the heart of the fireworks is a solid nucleus of ice mixed with dust—essentially a dirty snowball. This huge one, called Comet C/2014 UN271 and discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, could be as large as 85 miles across.
"This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the solar system," Jewitt said. "We've always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is."
This comet has the largest nucleus ever seen in a comet by astronomers. Jewitt and his colleagues determined the size of its nucleus using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Its nucleus is about 50 times larger than those of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the sun.
"This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it's still so far from the sun," said lead author Man-To Hui, who earned his doctorate from UCLA in 2019 and is now with the Macau University of Science and Technology in Taipa, Macau. "We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this."
So the researchers used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on Jan. 8, 2022, and incorporated radio observations of the comet into their analysis.
The comet is now less than 2 billion miles from the sun and in a few million years will loop back to its nesting ground in the Oort cloud, Jewitt said.
Comet C/2014 UN271 was first serendipitously observed in 2010, when it was 3 billion miles from the sun. Since then, it has been intensively studied by ground and space-based telescopes.
The challenge in measuring this comet was how to determine the solid nucleus from the huge dusty coma—the cloud of dust and gas—enveloping it. The comet is currently too far away for its nucleus to be visually resolved by Hubble. Instead, the Hubble data show a bright spike of light at the nucleus' location. Hui and his colleagues next made a computer model of the surrounding coma and adjusted it to fit the Hubble images. Then, they subtracted the glow of the coma, leaving behind the nucleus.
Hui and his team compared the brightness of the nucleus to earlier radio observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. The new Hubble measurements are close to the earlier size estimates from ALMA, but convincingly suggest a darker nucleus surface than previously thought.
"It's big and it's blacker than coal," Jewitt said.
The comet has been falling toward the sun for well over 1 million years. The Oort cloud is thought to be the nesting ground for trillions of comets. Jewitt thinks the Oort cloud extends from a few hundred times the distance between the sun and the Earth to at least a quarter of the way out to the distance of the nearest stars to our sun, in the Alpha Centauri system.
The Oort cloud's comets were tossed out of the solar system billions of years ago by the gravitation of the massive outer planets, according to Jewitt. The far-flung comets travel back toward the sun and planets only if their orbits are disturbed by the gravitational tug of a passing star, the professor said.
First hypothesized in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, the Oort cloud still remains a theory because the comets that make it up are too faint and distant to be directly observed. This means the solar system's largest structure is all but invisible, Jewitt said.
Reference:
Man-To Hui et al, Hubble Space Telescope Detection of the Nucleus of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli–Bernstein), The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2022). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac626a
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WE GAAN DEZE HERFST EVENTUELE ALIENS OP TRAPPIST-1 LASTIGVALLEN MET RUSSISCHE MUZIEK (EN ONZE KLIMAATPROBLEMEN)
WE GAAN DEZE HERFST EVENTUELE ALIENS OP TRAPPIST-1 LASTIGVALLEN MET RUSSISCHE MUZIEK (EN ONZE KLIMAATPROBLEMEN)
Vivian Lammerse
In een poging het eerste contact te leggen én het bewustzijn over de klimaatcrisis te vergroten, zullen er door wetenschappers en muzikanten krachtige radioberichten verzonden worden.
In 2016 maakten astronomen bekend dat er rond de dwergster TRAPPIST-1 maar liefst zeven planeten cirkelen. Drie ervan zijn met name interessant en zouden zomaar eens leefbaar kunnen zijn. Direct werd er natuurlijk druk gespeculeerd: zouden zich hier aliens kunnen ophouden? Als dat het geval is, zullen zij binnenkort mogelijk van ons bestaan afweten. Want deze herfst nog, zullen er muziekfragmenten en wetenschappelijke gegevens naar het sterrenstelsel verzonden worden.
Meer over TRAPPIST-1 TRAPPIST-1 is een ultrakoele dwergster die zich op een slordige 39 lichtjaar van de aarde bevindt. Rond de ster cirkelen zoals gezegd zeven planeten. En sinds de ontdekking daarvan, zijn de verwachtingen hoog gespannen. Drie van deze planeten bevinden zich namelijk in de leefbare zone, wat betekent dat ze mogelijk vloeibaar water herbergen op hun oppervlak.
De radioberichten zullen op 4 oktober 2022 naar TRAPPIST-1 verstuurd worden. De uitzendingen zullen plaatsvinden vanaf het Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station; de thuisbasis van ‘s werelds eerste commerciële deep space-netwerk, gelegen in Zuid-Engeland. De hoop is dat de berichten een reactie uit zullen lokken en dat er zo een gesprek op gang komt met een nog onbekende geavanceerde buitenaardse intelligentie.
Inhoud Wat er verzonden zal worden? De berichten zullen zowel muziek als wetenschappelijke informatie bevatten. Het muziekgedeelte zal bestaan uit korte muziekfragmenten van vijftien seconden, onder andere aangeleverd door muzikanten die meedoen aan het Oezbeekse Stihia festival dat in het leven is geroepen om stil te staan bij de milieu-impact van het krimpende Aralmeer. Daarnaast zal ook het lied ‘Beauty of the Earth’ van de Sovjet-componist Eduard Artemyev en ‘Journey Through the Asteroid Belt’ van de Londense band The Comet Is Coming de ruimte in worden geslingerd. In samenwerking met het Oezbeekse instituut voor Astronomie, zal het wetenschappelijke onderdeel onder andere de coördinaten van de sterren uit de sterrencatalogus van de Oezbeekse astronoom en wiskundige Ulug Bey bevatten.
Klimaatcrisis Het doel van de radiotransmissie is niet alleen om het eerste contact te leggen met een eventuele andere beschaving, maar ook het bewustzijn over de klimaatcrisis te vergroten. “Onze berichten zullen langlevende beschavingen eraan herinneren hoe het was toen ze nog worstelden om een duurzame samenleving te worden,” zegt Douglas Vakoch van METI, de organisatie die zich toelegt op het verzenden van opzettelijke signalen naar buitenaardse beschavingen.
Stihia festival Daarnaast is het ook niet voor niets dat muzikanten van het Stihia festival de gelegenheid krijgen om hun muziek naar TRAPPIST-1 te versturen. “Het Stihia-muziekfestival vindt plaats in Muynak, waar ooit een bloeiende visserij-industrie was gevestigd aan de kust van het Aralmeer,” zegt Otabek Suleimanov, hoofdproducent van het festival. “Nu is die zee slechts een schaduw van zijn oorspronkelijke grootte vanwege tal van omgevingsfactoren en het rampzalige katoencampagnebeleid tijdens het Sovjettijdperk. De toekomstige watervoorziening van Muynak vanuit de met sneeuw bedekte bergen van de Himalaya wordt steeds meer bedreigd door de opwarming van de aarde.”
TRAPPIST-1 Overigens valt het te betwijfelen of de planeten in het TRAPPIST-1-systeem daadwerkelijk leefbaar zijn. Hoewel het aanlokkelijk is om aan te nemen dat deze planeten bewoond zijn, trekken sommige astronomen dat sterk in twijfel. Zo bleek uit een eerdere studie dat de ster extreem actief is en enorme hoeveelheden hoge energetische protonen uitzendt – dezelfde deeltjes die het noorderlicht op aarde veroorzaken. Het betekent dat de planeten mogelijk bekogeld worden met hoog-energetische deeltjes. En dat maakt het een stukje onwaarschijnlijker dat er leven op de planeten voorkomt.
Mochten er wél aliens leven, dan kan het tientallen jaren duren voordat signalen die zij uitzenden op de aarde arriveren. Een extra motivatie om de klimaatcrisis aan te pakken, vindt Vakoch. “Om ervoor te zorgen dat de mensheid lang genoeg in de buurt is om een antwoord van TRAPPIST-1 te ontvangen, moeten we de huidige klimaatcrisis het hoofd bieden,” besluit hij.
The James Webb Space Telescope Is Going to Stare Straight Into Jupiter
The James Webb Space Telescope Is Going to Stare Straight Into Jupiter
There's a lot we know about Jupiter. But even more we don't.
Image by NASA
After launching late last year, NASA’s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is finally getting ready to fixate its numerous golden mirrors on distant targets.
Intriguingly, though, one of its 13 early targets isn’t so distant at all — at least in the grand scheme of things. It’ll be looking at Jupiter, the iconic gas giant in our own star system. Of course, we already know quite a bit about the planet already— so why investigate it using the JWST if it can have a closer look at far more distant objects?
“We’ve been there with several spacecraft and have observed the planet with Hubble and many ground-based telescopes at wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum (from the UV to meters wavelengths),” Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater, leader of the Jupiter observation team, told Digital Trends, “so we’ve learned a tremendous amount about Jupiter itself, its atmosphere, interior, and about its moons and rings.”
“But every time you learn more there are things you don’t yet understand — so you always need more data,” she added.
For instance, we still don’t know how an awful lot about the gas giant’s atmosphere, with massive storms roiling on its surface. The planet’s Great Red Spot, in particular, has fascinated astronomers since its discovery in 1830. It’s a storm so massive, in fact, that you could easily fit the Earth in the area it takes up.
“We’ll be looking for signatures of any chemical compounds that are unique to the [Great Red Spot]… which could be responsible for the red chromophores,” Leigh Fletcher, senior research fellow in planetary science at the University of Leicester in the UK, said in a 2018 NASA statement about the project, referring to particles responsible for the storm’s unusually red color.
“If we don’t see any unexpected chemistry or aerosol signatures… then the mystery of that red color may remain unresolved,” Fletcher added.
The JSWT will also take a closer look at Jupiter’s moons Io and Ganymede, the latter being the only known moon that has its own magnetosphere.
The space telescope is the ideal candidate for the job.
“The biggest advantage is at the mid-infrared wavelengths,” de Pater told Digital Trends. “We can observe at some of these wavelengths from the ground, but the Earth’s atmosphere is so turbulent that what we get on the ground, we can’t calibrate the observations very well.”
Right now, the JSWT is still busy aligning its mirrors — but soon, it’ll finally be prime time.
“In the first year of science operations, we expect Webb to write entirely new chapters in the history of our origins — the formation of stars and planets,” Klaus Pontoppidan, the Space Telescope Science Institute project scientist for Webb, said in a recent NASA blog post.
Before gazing at Jupiter, the observatory’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) will have to be cooled to about 7 Kelvin, or about -447 Fahrenheit, to adjust to its frosty surroundings in deep space.
But once it’s ready, astronomers are already excited about what it will be able to see.
“The imager promises to reveal astronomical targets ranging from nearby nebulae to distant interacting galaxies with a clarity and sensitivity far beyond what we’ve seen before,” Alistair Glasse, Webb-MIRI Instrument Scientist at the Astronomy Technology Center in the UK, said in a recent post.
And considering it’s proximity, Jupiter should be child’s play for the JWST.
Updated to correct an error in the temperature the James Webb’s MIRI instrument will eventually be cooled to.
Jupiter’s Twin: NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope Delivers New Planetary Discovery From the Grave
Jupiter’s Twin: NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope Delivers New Planetary Discovery From the Grave
ByUNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Artist’s conception of the Kepler Space Telescope observing planets transiting a distant star. On October 30, 2018, NASA announced that Kepler ran out of fuel and would be retired within its current and safe orbit, away from Earth. Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 exoplanet discoveries.
Credit: NASA Ames/W Stenzel
A new study by an international team of astrophysicists, led by the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics has presented the amazing new discovery of a near-identical twin of Jupiter orbiting a star at a colossal distance of 17,000 light years from Earth.
The exoplanet, K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, is almost identical to Jupiter in terms of its mass and its distance from its sun was discovered using data obtained in 2016 by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The exoplanetary system is twice as distant as any seen previously by Kepler, which found over 2,700 confirmed planets before ceasing operations in 2018.
The system was found using gravitational microlensing, a prediction of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and is the first planet to be discovered from space in this way. The study has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The view of the region close to the Galactic Centre centered where the planet was found. The two images show the region as seen by Kepler (left) and by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) from the ground. The planet is not visible but its gravity affected the light observed from a faint star at the center of the image (circled). Kepler’s very pixelated view of the sky required specialized techniques to recover the planet signal.
Credit: University of Manchester
PhD student, David Specht from The University of Manchester is the lead author on the new research. To find an exoplanet using the microlensing effect the team searched through Kepler data collected between April and July 2016 when it regularly monitored millions of stars close to the center of the Galaxy. The aim was to look for evidence of an exoplanet and its host star temporarily bending and magnifying the light from a background star as it passes by the line of sight.
“To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star,” said Dr. Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant that funded the work. Dr. Kerins adds: “The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against. But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the center of our Galaxy. So Kepler just sat and watched them for three months.”
“To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star. The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against. But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the center of our Galaxy. So Kepler just sat and watched them for three months.”
— Dr. Eamonn Kerins
Following the development of specialized analysis methods, candidate signals were finally uncovered last year using a new search algorithm presented in a study led by Dr. Iain McDonald, at the time an STFC-funded postdoctoral researcher, working with Dr Kerins. Among five new candidate microlensing signals uncovered in that analysis, one showed clear indications of an anomaly consistent with the presence of an orbiting exoplanet.
An animation of the gravitational lensing signal from Jupiter twin K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb. The local star field around the system is shown using real color imaging obtained with the ground-based Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope by the K2C9-CFHT Multi-Color Microlensing Survey team. The star indicated by the pink lines is animated to show the magnification signal observed by Kepler from space. The trace of this signal with time is shown in the lower right panel. On the left is the derived model for the lensing signal, involving multiple images of the star caused by the gravitational field of the planetary system. The system itself is not directly visible.
Credit: University of Manchester
Five international ground-based surveys also looked at the same area of sky at the same time as Kepler. At a distance of around 135 million km from Earth, Kepler saw the anomaly slightly earlier, and for longer, than the teams observing from Earth. The new study exhaustively models the combined datasets showing, conclusively, that the signal is caused by a distant exoplanet.
“The difference in vantage point between Kepler and observers here on Earth allowed us to triangulate where along our sight line the planetary system is located”, says Dr. Kerins.
“Kepler was also able to observe uninterrupted by weather or daylight, allowing us to determine precisely the mass of the exoplanet and its orbital distance from its host star. It is basically Jupiter’s identical twin in terms of its mass and its position from its Sun, which is about 60% of the mass of our own Sun.”
Later this decade NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope. Roman will find potentially thousands of distant planets using the microlensing method. The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, due to launch next year, could also undertake a microlensing exoplanet search as an additional science activity.
Dr. Kerins is Deputy Lead for the ESA Euclid Exoplanet Science Working Group. “Kepler was never designed to find planets using microlensing so, in many ways, it’s amazing that it has done so. Roman and Euclid, on the other hand, will be optimized for this kind of work. They will be able to complete the planet census started by Kepler,” he said.
“We’ll learn how typical the architecture of our own solar system is. The data will also allow us to test our ideas of how planets form. This is the start of a new exciting chapter in our search for other worlds.”
Reference:
“Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing” by D. Specht, R. Poleski, M.T. Penny, E. Kerins, I. McDonald, Chung-Uk Lee, A. Udalski, I.A. Bond, Y. Shvartzvald, Weicheng Zang, R.A. Street, D.W. Hogg, B.S. Gaudi, T. Barclay, G. Barentsen, S.B. Howell, F. Mullally, C.B. Henderson, S.T. Bryson, D.A. Caldwell, M.R. Haas, J.E. Van Cleve, K. Larson, K. McCalmont, C. Peterson, D. Putnam, S. Ross, M. Packard, L. Reedy, Michael D. Albrow, Sun-Ju Chung, Youn Kil Jung, Andrew Gould, Cheongho Han, Kyu-Ha Hwang, Yoon-Hyun Ryu, In-Gu Shin, Hongjing Yang, Jennifer C. Yee, Sang-Mok Cha, Dong-Jin Kim, Seung-Lee Kim, Dong-Joo Lee, Yongseok Lee, Byeong-Gon Park, Richard W. Pogge, M.K. Szymański, I. Soszyński, K. Ulaczyk, P. Pietrukowicz, Sz. Kozlowski, J. Skowron, P. Mróz, Shude Mao, Pascal Fouqué, Wei Zhu, F. Abe, R. Barry, D.P. Bennett, A. Bhattacharya, A. Fukui, H. Fujii, Y. Hirao, Y. Itow, R. Kirikawa, I. Kondo, N. Koshimoto, Y. Matsubara, S. Matsumoto, S. Miyazaki, Y. Muraki, G. Olmschenk, C. Ranc, A. Okamura, N.J. Rattenbury, Y. Satoh, T. Sumi, D. Suzuki, S.I. Silva, T. Toda, P.J. Tristram, A. Vandorou, H. Yama, C. Beichman, G. Bryden and S. Calchi Novati, Submitted, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. arXiv:2203.16959
New findings in astronomy are making some astronomers doubt our basic model of the universe.
Alignments of celestial objects suggest that they may be embedded in large-scale structures.
Galaxies too far apart to be influencing each other are moving through space together.
Solidity is a function of magnification. We know that anything we experience as solid is actually a structure of atoms packed closely enough that to our eyes they appear to be a single solid thing. If we were small enough, we’d see the spaces between them; if we were even smaller, those spaces might seem vast. Likewise, in 1989 Margaret Geller and John Huchra, analyzing redraft survey data, discovered the immense “Great Wall,” a “sheet” formed from galaxies many light years apart. That first large-scale structure is 500 million light-years long, 200 million light years wide, and with a thickness of 15 million light years.
Other gigantic large-scale structures been discovered since — sheets, filaments, and knots, with bubble-like voids intersperse among them. They appear to be connected by clouds and filaments of hydrogen gas and dark matter. Though the bodies that comprise the structures are not gravitationally bound to each other — the distances between them are too great — evidence is piling up that they are linked by something.
Recent observations indicate that galaxies far, far apart are somehow synchronously moving. Something appears to be binding large-scale structures, many light years apart, together after all. Is the currently accepted view of the universe as various clumps of material simply expanding outward from the Big Bang and gravitationally pulling on each other wrong?
The large-scale structures revealed in one segment of sky
The existence and mechanics of large-scale structures are a tantalizing puzzle with obviously major implications for our understanding of the universe. As Noam Libeskind, of the Leibniz-Institut for Astrophysics (AIP) in Germany tells VICE, “That’s actually the reason why everybody is always studying these large-scale structures. It’s a way of probing and constraining the laws of gravity and the nature of matter, dark matter, dark energy, and the universe.”
The identification and study of large-scale structures is a product of analyzing and modeling simulations of redshift survey for specific regions of the sky that visually reveal these immense structures.
Several pieces of research are causing interest in these large-scale structures to heat up. The most mind-blowingly distant synchronized motion was reported in 2014, when the rotation axes of 19 super-massive black holes at the centers of quasars — out of 100 quasars studied — were found to be in alignment, billions of light years apart. According to the study’s lead author, astronomer Damien Hutsemékers of the University of Liège in Belgium, “Galaxy spin axes are known to align with large-scale structures such as cosmic filaments but this occurs on smaller scales. However, there is currently no explanation why the axes of quasars are aligned with the axis of the large group in which they are embedded.”
Astronomer Joon Hyeop Lee of the Korea Astronomy and Space Institute is the lead author of “Mysterious Coherence in Several-megaparsec Scales between Galaxy Rotation and Neighbor Motion,” published in October of this year in Astrophysical Journal. Comparing data from two catalogs of redshift survey data — the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) and NASA-Sloan Atlas (NSA) catalogs — the researchers’ analysis of 445 galaxies revealed, surprisingly, that galaxies six meparsecs, or 20 million light years, apart were moving in the same way. Those observed, for example, a galaxy moving toward the Earth was mirrored by other distant galaxies moving in the same direction.
“This discovery is quite new and unexpected,” according to Lee, “I have never seen any previous report of observations or any prediction from numerical simulations, exactly related to this phenomenon.”
Since the galaxies are too distant for their gravitational fields to be influencing each other, Lee poses another explanation: That the linked galaxies are both embedded within the same, large-scale structure.
FLATNESS
Another puzzle suggesting the influence of large-scale structures has become clear over recent years. It’s been observed that galaxies surrounding our own Milky Way are weirdly arranged in a single, flat plane. Big-Bang thinking would suggest that they should be circling us at all different sorts of angles. Obviously, for adherents of that way of viewing the galaxy — known as the ΛCDM model — this at the very least a troubling anomaly.
The hope that it was an anomaly weakened with the discovery of the same thing occurring around the Andromeda galaxy, and then again around Centaurus A in 2015. By the time “A whirling plane of satellite galaxies around Centaurus A challenges cold dark matter cosmology” was published in 2018, the phenomenon was starting to seem quite common, and possibly universal. The idea that the satellite galaxies might part of a large-scale structure had become even worthier of serious consideration.
JUST THE BEGINNING
As more astronomers embrace the notion of large-scale structures and related research accelerates, we can only hope that these perplexingly oddball movements and associations are eventually made clear. Certainly, imagining a vast arrangement of utterly gigantic structures in which galaxies are embedded paints a very different picture of the universe, and one that makes one wonder if these structures are themselves embedded in something even larger. In this mid-boggling case, we are indeed small enough to see only the space between objects — in this case galaxies. We’ve been no more aware of them than whatever it is that may be living between our own atoms.
After 404 Days on Mars, Perseverance Has Finally Spotted Its Parachute
NANCY ATKINSON, UNIVERSE TODAY
More than 13 months after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars (on 18 February 2021), the rover's cameras have finally spotted some of the parts of the Mars 2020 landing system that got the rover safely to the ground.
The parachute and backshell were imaged by Perseverance's MastCam-Z, seen off in the distance, just south of the rover's current location. The image was taken on Sol 404, or 6 April 2022 on Earth.
Normally, the rover might have taken a brief side-trip early on in the mission to take images of the remains of the landing system. But Perseverance had to drive around some hazardous terrain to get to a large area of Jezero Crater that the science team wanted to study, called South Séítah.
That was near the area where the parachute landed, and the rover finally got there. The parachute was jettisoned during the landing sequence so the Skycrane could lower the rover down to the surface on its wheels.
You can see the traverse map below, and below that is an image taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the location of the parachute and backshell, along with the rover and other items from the landing. This image was taken a day after Perseverance landed.
Screenshot of Perseverance's location map on Sol 405.
This HiRISE image of the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars also shows the many parts of the descent system. Each inset shows an area about 650 feet (200 meters) across.
The rover itself sits at the center of a blast pattern created by the hovering Skycrane (labeled as "descent stage") that lowered it there. The Skycrane flew off to crash as at a safe distance creating a V-shaped debris pattern.
And now, Perseverance is backtracking to reach the next target location for the mission's second science campaign, an area that looks like a large river delta. The choice to study South Séítah first was a choice the team made knowing they would have to backtrack later to reach the delta.
Perseverance is now in a drive campaign to reach the delta, going faster than any previous rover, although it is only going under a tenth of a mile per hour. Perseverance is using an auto-nav feature to 'make tracks,' and is making comparatively rapid progress by devoting several hours per day to driving on very smooth terrain.
Perseverance has now broken previous rovers' records for the distance traveled in one day by driving 319.8 meters on Sol 351.
Curiosity made a number of drives over 100 meters, but none over 200 meters. That was due in part to rockier terrain. Opportunity, which landed way back in 2004, had some very smooth patches of terrain, allowing it to travel up to 228 meters in one day using solar power just a year after its landing.
This great video by Dr Steve Ruff from Arizona State University explains the landing system and why Perseverance was able to find the various parts now.
UFO emits circular beam of light caught over Tokyo, Japan
UFO emits circular beam of light caught over Tokyo, Japan
Witness states: On April 1, 2022 I noticed a black UFO moving at high speed above Asakusa Kaminarimon, Tokyo, Japan.
If you look carefully then you see that the UFO emitted a circular beam of light, something like an energy field, around the craft, before it disappeared in a split second.
HOGERE DIMENSIE MAAKT BEREISBAAR WORMGAT EEN OPTIE
HOGERE DIMENSIE MAAKT BEREISBAAR WORMGAT EEN OPTIE
Jean-Paul Keulen
Een wormgat waar je daadwerkelijk doorheen kunt vliegen, is wel degelijk mogelijk, stellen Indiase wetenschappers. Tenminste: als we aannemen dat ons heelal een extra dimensie heeft.
In sciencefictionverhalen is het altijd fijn als je een snelle manier hebt om de enorme afstanden in ons heelal in korte tijd af te leggen. Eén populaire manier om dat te doen – zie bijvoorbeeld de films Contact en Interstellar – is een wormgat: een korte weg tussen twee punten in de ruimte.
Probleem is alleen: om daadwerkelijk door zo’n wormgat te kunnen reizen, is exotische materie nodig. En die materie is er voor zover we weten niet. Rikpratik Sengupta van de Aliah-universiteit in India en collega’s hebben nu een manier bedacht om dat soort materie overbodig te maken. Maar: daar moeten ze dan wel voor aannemen dat er een extra dimensie is.
Minuscuul effectje
Op zich zijn wormgaten toegestaan door de algemene relativiteitstheorie van Albert Einstein, onze huidige zwaartekrachtstheorie. Wat heet, Einstein schreef er zelf over, samen met zijn assistent Nathan Rosen, in 1935. Later bleek echter dat zo’n wormgat ‘dichtknijpt’ voordat er iets doorheen kan reizen. Dat leek het verschijnsel – waarvan toch al niet duidelijk is of het echt bestaat – te ontdoen van enig praktisch nut voor ruimtereizigers.
Fast forward naar de jaren tachtig, toen de beroemde sterrenkundige Carl Sagan voor zijn later verfilmde roman Contact een manier nodig had om zijn hoofdpersoon snel naar een andere plek in het heelal te brengen. Hij vroeg natuurkundige – en latere Nobelprijswinnaar – Kip Thorne om hulp. Thorne bedacht vervolgens dat je een wormgat wél open kunt houden als je de beschikking hebt over exotische materie. Dat wil zeggen: materie met een negatieve massa of energie.
Die oplossing was goed genoeg voor Sagans verhaal, maar niet erg bevredigend voor natuurkundigen. In principe is er namelijk helemaal geen materie met zulke eigenschappen. Ja, dankzij de quantummechanica is het mogelijk om op héél kleine schaal de energie negatief te krijgen. Maar hoe je dat minuscule effectje ‘op zou moeten blazen’ om er een heel wormgat mee te bouwen, is totaal onduidelijk.
Hogerdimensionale ruimte
Sengupta en collega’s gaan in hun artikel daarom niet uit van het bestaan van exotische materie. Wel maken ze gebruik van een theorie die minstens zo exotisch klinkt: het zogenoemde Randall-Sundrum II-model. Dat model veronderstelt dat ons heelal, dat drie ruimtelijke dimensies kent (plus tijd), niet het hele verhaal is. In plaats daarvan zweeft het rond in een ruimte met één dimensie meer.
Nu is dat niet zomaar een gek idee. Sowieso geldt dat de snaartheorie – waarin de natuur op de kleinste schaal uit snaartjes bestaat – meer dimensies vereist dan de dimensies die wij ervaren. Bovendien zou je ermee kunnen verklaren waarom de zwaartekracht zoveel zwakker is als andere krachten. Deze kracht is als enige niet gebonden aan ons heelal, zo valt uit de snaartheorie af te leiden, maar kan ook reizen door die hogerdimensionale ruimte. Daardoor raakt hij als het ware ‘verdund’.
Niet uit elkaar getrokken
Ben je bereid om aan te nemen dat het Randall-Sundrum II-model klopt? Dan kun je ineens een wormgat bouwen zónder exotische materie, laten Sengupta en zijn team zien in hun artikel. Feitelijk zorgt die hogere dimensie voor de benodigde negatieve energie, schrijven ze. Daar heb je dan dus geen gek spul meer voor nodig dat nergens te vinden en waarschijnlijk ook niet te maken is.
Nu heb je alsnog niets aan zo’n wormgat als je gelijk aan stukken wordt gescheurd als je erdoorheen probeert te reizen. Maar dat is hier niet het geval, schrijven de Indiase fysici. “De versnelling ten gevolge van getijdekrachten is klein genoeg in de hals van het wormgat om ervoor te zorgen dat een reiziger erdoorheen kan reizen zónder uit elkaar getrokken te worden.” Fijn.
Andere recepten
Nu zijn Sengupta en collega’s niet de eersten die hun toevlucht nemen tot het Randall-Sundrum II-model om een ‘realistisch’ wormgat te creëren. Eerder deden de natuurkundigen Juan Maldacena en Alexey Milekhin hetzelfde. Over die studie zegt Maldacena zelf: “Er is geen goede reden om aan te nemen dat juist dit model de natuur beschrijft. We hebben het alleen maar gebruikt omdat het a) wormgaten toelaat en b) niet is uitgesloten door experimenten.” Hij noemt zijn eerdere artikel dan ook “een theoretische exercitie”. Hetzelfde zou je met alle recht kunnen zeggen over het nieuwe artikel van Sengupta.
Toch lijken de Indiase fysici de mogelijkheid van een heelal dat rondzweeft in een ‘ruimte’ met een extra dimensie serieuzer te nemen dan Maldacena. “Als er ooit een wormgat wordt gevonden”, schrijven ze zelfs, “dan is de kans groot dat ons heelal een driedimensionaal object is, ingebed in hogere dimensies.”
Feitelijk zeggen ze daarmee: als wormgaten daadwerkelijk bestaan, dan móéten ze haast wel volgens ons recept tot stand zijn gekomen. Maar daar zullen de vele fysici die andere recepten voor wormgaten bedacht hebben, het ongetwijfeld niet zomaar mee eens zijn.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
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