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!!!
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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...
15-04-2022
Two White Triangles Over Luton UK On April 2, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Two White Triangles Over Luton UK On April 2, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 2, 2022
Location of sighting: Luton, UK
An eyewitness in Luton, UK caught sight of two triangular white objects in the sky. The white craft were traveling together, following the same path. There is only a few seconds of video, but it really tells us a lot already. The shape is more triangle than anything else. The object is bright white. It has a haze around it and travels slowly. It was seen in the daytime which is much more helpful in giving us information about it compared to night sightings which give us very little. The eyewitness says its not a plane or balloon. He is correct. The objects look very high up and may be the famous Dudley Dorito we have all heard about over the years. But with two triangles...and seen during the day...it makes me wonder if this is some new colaboration between the USAF and UK military to create a fleet of TR3B triangle space craft?
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
UFO? I don't know what it is, but its not a balloon or a plane.
Revealing Footage Of UFOs Watching A Suspected Weapons Test
Revealing Footage Of UFOs Watching A Suspected Weapons Test
Ufologist Dave Rosenfeld shares the video footage and photographs that he took of what appears to be advanced weapons testing, which he believes was reverse-engineered from alien technology.
Officials at the Pentagon have been forced to release an explosive report about the physical effects experienced by people claiming to have had UFO encounters under freedom of information laws.
The new documents lift the lid on a top-secret intelligence program which was run by the United States Defence Force and employed more than 50 agents.
See the full interview with Jeremy Corbell in the video above
Watch Sunrise on Channel 7 and stream it for free on 7plus >>
The report says UFO sightings left alleged witness with burns, nausea and nerve damage.
“The secret UFO study was called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program,” Jeremy Corbell, an Investigative filmmaker who specialises in UFOs, told Sunrise.
A secret UFO study has revealed health impacts on witnesses.Credit: Sunrise
“They generated over 200 reports, but 38 of these reports were technical documents and one of those documents really stands out.
“That document talks about the biological effects of human beings who come into close proximity with the UFO, and there’s a lot of negative health effects that have now been revealed by the secret government UFO program - the biggest program of all time.
“This includes radiation burns, cellular degradation, as well as cognitive damage to people.”
Officials at the Pentagon have been forced to release an explosive new report about the physical effects experienced by people claiming to have had UFO encounters under freedom of information laws. File image. Credit: Ray Massey/Getty Images
“If people don’t know that UFOs are real yet, then they haven’t been paying attention,” Corbell said.
“Our (US) government, including your (Australian) government has admitted that there are machines in our skies that outpaced outmanoeuvre and outperform anything of our advanced weaponry.
“It is something that the defence intelligence agency, our government, your government, they’re all studying because it’s perplexing who made these machines: what are they doing? What is the intent? Who’s operating them?
“UFOs are as real as the nose on your face.”
‘Just an aircraft’?
Corbell also dismissed the notion that UFOs could be foreign aircraft or missiles from another country.
“UFOs have been engaging humanity since the beginning of recorded human history - this isn’t a new phenomenon,” he said.
“Our government is studying them and they’ve actually looked into that, they’ve said it’s not ours, it’s not Russian, it’s not Chinese, It’s not Australian, it’s no technological nation that we know.
“These machines are so far advanced to anything that we can even conceive of.”
The Pentagon has confirmed the authenticity of leaked ‘UFO’ videos.Credit: Supplied
‘Rare occurrence’
However, Corbell said be believed the ill effects identified on alleged witnesses were not intentional.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of concern ... it’s a rare occurrence,” he said.
“Typically this does not look like an overt hostility, this seems to be an interaction with whatever the propulsion system is - the method that these things move and fly.
“So there’s some interaction with human biology that seems to occur when you come into close proximity.
“It’s nothing to fear but it’s definitely something that needs to be studied from a global and national security point of view.”
Watch the 7NEWS Spotlight documentary The UFO Phenomenon below
Shock result in particle experiment could spark physics revolution
Shock result in particle experiment could spark physics revolution
By Pallab Ghosh - Science correspondent
IMAGE SOURCE,FERMILAB
Image caption,
The Fermilab Collider Detector obtained a result that could transform the current theory of physics
Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.
The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics.
The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted.
The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Toback, who is the project co-spokesperson.
The discovery could lead to the development of a new, more complete theory of how the Universe works.
"If the results are verified by other experiments, the world is going to look different." he told BBC News. "There has to be a paradigm shift. The hope is that maybe this result is going to be the one that breaks the dam.
"The famous astronomer Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. We believe we have that."
The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.
CDF's other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.
"No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong." But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.
The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.
Scientists say they have found "strong evidence" for the existence of a new force of nature
Physicists have known for some time that the theory needs to be updated. It can't explain the presence of invisible material in space, called Dark Matter, nor the continued accelerating expansion of the Universe by a force called Dark Energy. Nor can it explain gravity.
Dr Mitesh Patel of Imperial College, who works at the LHC, believes that if the Fermilab result is confirmed, it could be the first of many new results that could herald the biggest shift in our understanding of the Universe since Einstein's theories of relativity more than a hundred years ago.
"The hope is that these cracks will turn into chasms and eventually we will see some spectacular signature that not only confirms that the Standard Model has broken down as a description of nature, but also give us a new direction to help us understand what we are seeing and what the new physics theory looks like.
"If this holds, there have to be new particles and new forces to explain how to make these data consistent".
IMAGE SOURCE,FERMILAB
Image caption,
Based on a 2,700-hectare site near Chicago, Fermilab is America's premier particle physics lab
But the excitement in the physics community is tempered with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements from two separate experiments which are in line with the Standard Model.
"This will ruffle some feathers", says Prof Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.
"We need to know what is going on with the measurement. The fact that we have two other experiments that agree with each other and the Standard Model and strongly disagree with this experiment is worrying to me".
IMAGE SOURCE,CERN
All eyes are now on the Large Hadron Collider which is due to restart its experiments after a three-year upgrade. The hope is that these will provide the results which will lay the foundations for a new more complete theory of physics.
"Most scientists will be a little bit cautious," says Dr Patel.
"We've been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books."
Scientists may have discovered the origins of ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object that was spotted visiting our Solar System.The reddish, dry, and strangely-elongated ‘Oumuamua, known to move in unexpected ways, has been a subject of much speculation. Some have, of course, brought up the idea it might an extraterrestrial spacecraft, possibly a probe. Now, scientists propose that tidal forces, gravitational interactions similar to those on Earth, are responsible for its existence and unusual behavior.
The cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua is 400 meters (1,300 feet) in length and was first discovered on October 19, 2017 by the Hawaii-based Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1). Scientists and armchair astronomers the world over have since wondered about where it came from, especially in light of factors like its acceleration away from the Sun in a trajectory that is not explainable simply by the effects of gravity.
Simulation showing the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua as a collection of fragments in an elongated shape.
Credit: ZHANG Yun/background by ESO/M. Kornmesser
The new study, which was carried out by by Zhang Yun from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Douglas N. C. Lin from University of California, Santa Cruz, says the object of mystery is natural. Clues pointing to that include the space body’s colors and the lack of any radio emissions coming from it.
While scientists expect an interstellar visitor to be icy, like a comet, Oumuamua is dry and has a rocky body like an asteroid, leading the researchers to conclude that there are more such rocky objects flying in between solar systems than they previously considered.
How did such an object come into existence? Zhang and Lin believe it’s a piece ripped off of another space body by a larger object. They conducted computer simulations, focusing on the example of the tidal disruption imposed by Jupiter on the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1992 to show that when a star is involved in such a fly-by, an outcome is possible that could create the elongated fragment like ‘Oumuamua’s.
The effects of a tidal disruption by a star on a space object.
Credit: NAOC/Y. Zhang
The researchers showed that after a space body is pulled apart by the star’s tidal forces, its fragments would melt and stretch into a cigar-shaped arrangement. The resulting parts would cool off as the object moves away from the star, hardening into a crust. It is subsequently propelled farther into space.
The scientists also have an explanation for the acceleration of an object like this, proposing that the Sun’s heating up of water ice under its surface can result in a release of gas that would act as a propellant.
"The tidal fragmentation scenario not only provides a way to form one single ‘Oumuamua, but also accounts for the vast population of rocky interstellar objects,” said Zhang. He thinks that all types of space objects, like long-period comets, debris disks, and possibly even planets, can be turned into ‘Oumuamua-size bodies upon getting close to a star.
“‘Oumuamua is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Lin, adding “We anticipate many more interstellar visitors with similar traits will be discovered by future observation with the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory.”
How To Tell The World You’ve Found An Extraterrestrial Civilisation
How To Tell The World You’ve Found An Extraterrestrial Civilisation
Duncan Forgan, University of St Andrews Research Fellow
You’d think that after innumerable hypothetical scenarios of humans establishing contact with alien civilizations, we’d be ready to actually find one. Finding sentient life beyond Earth, on the other hand, is definitely going to be one of the most seismic events in our species’ history.
So, if you’ve just discovered an alien civilization, how do you break the news to the rest of the world? This is a monumental task, and I’ve been involved in the development of some guidelines for scientists working on extraterrestrial life searches. The findings will be published in the Acta Astronautica journal.
Some think that it is just a matter of time until we encounter intelligent life, given the millions of dollars presently being poured in efforts like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Personally, I’m not convinced, but skepticism alone isn’t enough to call off a search. Regardless of our initial preconceptions, the scientific method encourages us to examine our theories via observation and experiment.
I don’t think it’ll be a message from an extraterrestrial civilization or a landing party if we ever locate traces of sentient life.
It’ll more likely be something more mundane, like traces of manmade pollution in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. It might potentially take the shape of massive buildings constructed into the ground to collect energy and offer dwellings
We should be able to spot such megastructures in planetary transit data, such as that acquired by the Kepler Space Telescope, as I demonstrated in a paper a few years ago.
True, Kepler did see strange objects like Tabby’s Star, KIC 8426582, that had characteristics that were predicted to come from artificial structures. But, like most scientists, I’m still skeptical – a swarm of comets around Tabby’s Star, causing extraordinary brightness variations, is the most logical explanation.
What’s particularly promising about this is that it demonstrates that SETI can be done “on the cheap,” using publicly available astronomical data to look for aliens. This appears to be a lot more appropriate method for a pessimist like me.
The explosion of the online activity surrounding Tabby’s star – blogs, tweets, news reports, and a Kickstarter drive to encourage the public to sponsor more observations – exemplifies how different the world has become since SETI began roughly 60 years ago.
A world that is hyper-connected
What should the discoverers do if proof of alien life ever arrived to us from the stars? Astrobiologists have been debating this for decades.
A group of SETI scientists even drafted a set of post-detection guidelines in 1989 to help scientists navigate the processes following discovery.
These procedures involve confirming the discovery with your colleagues and contacting “relevant national authorities” (I’m not sure what this means), then the scientific community, and finally the general public via a press release.
This set of standards, however, was developed before the internet. We used to get our news from the newspaper or the television. Even 24-hour news was still in its infancy at the time.
Nowadays, the news world is a fragmented realm of items shared by our friends and family and presented on our devices and in our feeds via a number of social media channels. Data travels at a breakneck speed and is readily amplified and distorted.
That’s why my colleague Alexander Scholz and I decided to revisit the topic, wondering how SETI’s post-detection methods might evolve to fit our hyper-connected world.
We immediately recognized that scientists require instruction even before they begin an experiment, let alone after they have made a discovery. It is now standard practice for new scientific initiatives to create a blog to document their progress, and SETI will be no exception.
A precise description of what a particular project will accomplish, as well as the criteria for a successful detection, a false positive, and no detection, should be included in the blog. This would make it easier for journalists and the general public to understand the findings correctly.
Individuals engaged must be trustworthy communicators of their work, thus establishing a strong digital presence early on is critical. We also advise them to update their security settings to protect themselves from malicious persons broadcasting their personal information, which is, unfortunately, a genuine threat these days.
If a team is fortunate enough to make even a speculative, unconfirmed discovery, they must be certain that they have nothing to conceal. Leaks are unavoidable and occur at an alarming rate. Nobody wants a narrative about “aliens discovered” that turns out to be bogus. The easiest approach to accomplish this is to disseminate data as soon as possible.
If it’s evident that the discovery is unverified, and natural or man-made causes can’t be ruled out, conspiracy theorists have no place to complain about the scientists’ complicity with the men in black (an accusation flung at me more than once). It also allows other scientists to review the study and confirm the discovery.
Of course, we’ve all seen some of the comments on YouTube or other media sites — numpties abound, and there appears to be no stopping decent scientific debate from devolving into incomprehensible diatribes and disgusting hate speech. As a result, the most crucial piece of advice for scientists is to participate in the dialogue.
If a widely reported discovery proves to be erroneous, the team should issue an urgent public statement stating that no aliens have been located and explaining why. If they have to, they should write a paper retracting it.
However, whoever discovers intelligent life should expect it to consume the rest of their lives — there won’t be much time for anything else. Instead, their new mission will be to assist mankind in accepting its new status as one of many sentient civilizations in the cosmos.
Monsterkomeet C/2014 UN271 is de grootste ooit gezien (én hij komt onze kant uit)
Nadat astronomen een jaar geleden komeet C/2014 UN271 ontdekten, hebben ze nu ook achterhaald hoe groot deze komeet is. Met behulp van de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop blijkt de kern wel 130 kilometer groot te zijn. Daarmee kroont de komeet zich tot grootste ooit gezien én hij komt onze kant uit, maar dat is niets om ons zorgen over te maken.
C/2014 UN271 - een komeet die met een snelheid van 35.000 kilometer per uur richting onze zon beweegt - heeft een kern met een diameter van 130 kilometer, zo berekenden Amerikaanse astronomen. 130 kilometer, dat is ongeveer even groot als de afstand tussen Antwerpen en Luik en zowat 50 keer groter dan de kern van andere bekende kometen. De vorige recordhouder heeft een diameter van 96 kilometer.
De komeet wordt daarbij nog omgeven door een grote stofwolk - coma genoemd in het vakjargon - die zorgt voor de typische staart vol kosmisch vuurwerk. Deze staart vol fijnstof, gesteente en bevroren gassen wordt niet meegeteld bij het berekenen van de grootte van een komeet. Maar het onderscheid maken tussen de staart en de kern is niet simpel. Komeet C/2014 UN271 bevindt zich immers op een immens grote afstand van de zon.
Ruimtetelescoop Hubble maakte in totaal vijf foto’s van de komeet. Dat gebeurde op 8 januari 2022. Daar gingen de Amerikaanse astronomen vervolgens mee aan de slag. Ze maakten een computermodel van de omringende coma en trokken deze uiteindelijk af van het geheel. Wat overblijft, is de kern. En die is 130 tot zelfs 137 kilometer groot. Daarnaast zou de komeet maar liefst 500 biljoen ton wegen, of 100.000 keer de massa van andere kometen.
Op dit moment bevindt de grootste komeet ooit zich op een (veilige) afstand van 3,2 miljard kilometer van onze zon. Naar schatting zal C/2014 UN271 in 2031 het dichtst bij onze zon en de aarde zijn, maar dat is niets om ons zorgen over te maken, zo verzekeren de astronomen. Vermoedelijk zal de komeet zelfs niet voorbij planeet Saturnus geraken. Dat betekent eveneens dat monsterkomeet C/2014 UN271, de grootste ooit ontdekt, nog steeds niet met het blote oog waarneembaar is als hij zich op het dichtste punt bij de aarde bevindt.
Herbekijk:
Een spectaculair hoogtepunt: hier kun je komeet Neowise in Nederland zien met het blote oog!
GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, uitgekozen en gepost door peter2011
Oudste verwijzing naar de beroemde Mayakalender teruggevonden in Guatemala
Onderzoekers hebben tijdens opgravingen in de oude piramide Las Pinturas in San Bartolo, een kleine Mayastad in Guatemala, een kalenderfragment ontdekt dat mogelijk dateert uit het Mayatijdperk. Het gaat om een eeuwenoud hiëroglief met de symbolen voor ‘Dag 7 Hert’, één van de 260 dagen op de Tzolkin, een befaamde Mayakalender.
De Maya’s hadden meerdere kalenders. Eén daarvan was de Tzolkin, een waarzegkalender in kringloopvorm. Deze kalender kent een periode van 260 dagen. De afzonderlijke dagen op deze kalender worden van één tot twintig in een vaste volgorde genoemd en ze herhalen zich dertien maal per jaar. De Tzolkin wordt beschouwd als de oudste en belangrijkste van alle kalendersystemen van de Maya’s. Onderzoekers geloven dus dat de hiëroglief die werd teruggevonden, deel uitmaakt van dit kalendersysteem.
Er werden eerder al historische vermeldingen van deze heilige kalender teruggevonden in Midden-Amerika, maar onderzoekers wisten deze niet met zekerheid te dateren. De onderzoekers zijn er vrij zeker van dat het nieuwe ontdekte fragment tussen 300 en 200 voor Christus is geschreven. Dat zou betekenen dat het gevonden hiëroglief de oudste verwijzing naar de befaamde Mayakalender is tot nu toe. De Tzolkinkalender zou mogelijk dus al veel langer in gebruik zijn geweest dan wetenschappers dachten. “De situatie zou wijzen op een nog vroegere oorsprong van de kalender ergens tijdens midden Pre-Klassiek (circa 2000 v.Chr. tot 250 n.Chr., red.), zo niet eerder, hoewel het bewijs indirect blijft”, stellen onderzoekers in de studie die werd gepubliceerd in ‘Science Advances’.
De piramide Las Pinturas, waar het fragment gevonden werd, herbergt verschillende lagen van de Mayageschiedenis, die teruggaan tot ongeveer 800 voor Christus. De piramide staat bekend om de muurschilderingen die de mythologie van de Maya’s uitbeelden. In 2005 brachten opgravingen onder de vijfde bouwlaag resten aan het licht van gipsen muren, beschilderd met hiërogliefen. Deze krabbels behoren tot de vroegste bewijzen van hiëroglyfisch schrift in het Mayagebied.
Nu hebben latere opgravingen in dezelfde laag mogelijk de vroegste bewijzen van een hiërogliefenkalender aan het licht gebracht. Het gaat om een hiëroglief die duidelijk de kop van een hert toont. Boven deze kop, die wordt omlijst door een eenvoudige achtergrond, staat het cijfer 7 met streepjes en stippen. Volgens de onderzoekers maakt dit dus deel uit van de Tzolkinkalender. Mogelijk wachten er nog vele andere bijzondere vondsten op ontdekking in de piramide Las Pinturas.
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Brrr. Webb’s MIRI has Reached 6.4 Kelvin, Just a few Degrees Above Absolute Zero
Brrr. Webb’s MIRI has Reached 6.4 Kelvin, Just a few Degrees Above Absolute Zero
The latest update on the James Webb Space Telescope literally sent a shiver down my spine! The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) has now reached its operating temperature of a chilly 7 kelvins (7 deg above absolute 0, or -266 degrees C,-447 degrees F).
MIRI has now been turned on and is undergoing initial checkouts.
This frigid temp is colder than JWST’s other three instruments need to be, since MIRI detects longer infrared wavelengths than the rest of the instruments. But still, all the instruments need to reach extremely low temperatures — less than 40 K (-223 degrees Celsius, -369.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — since this is an infrared telescope. Infrared light comes at wavelengths slightly longer than those that human eyes can see.
Overview of the MIRI instrument. The instrument is attached to the JWST Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) by the CFRP hexapod (triangular structure at left).Credit: University of Arizona.
Getting to the temperatures required for MIRI is not possible by passive means alone, so Webb carries an innovative cryocooler, dedicated to the task of cooling MIRI’s detectors so that it can see farther into the infrared than the other instruments.
Infrared light is basically thermal radiation, and the telescope itself has a certain temperature and continually radiates heat that would interfere with the measurements taken by the instrument’s sensors. Cooling down the entire telescope – including the four instruments’ detectors and the surrounding hardware — suppresses those infrared emissions. This allows the distant objects to be detected, without any interference from the other nearby sources.
Last week, the team passed a particularly challenging milestone called the “pinch point,” when the instrument goes from 15 kelvins (minus 433 F, or minus 258 C) to 6.4 kelvins (minus 448 F, or minus 267 C).
“The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point,” said Analyn Schneider, project manager for MIRI at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The team was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end it was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.”
NASA says that another reason Webb’s detectors need to be cold is to suppress something called dark current, or electric current created by the vibration of atoms in the detectors themselves. Dark current mimics a true signal in the detectors, giving the false impression that they have been hit by light from an external source. Those false signals can drown out the real signals astronomers want to find. Since temperature is a measurement of how fast the atoms in the detector are vibrating, reducing the temperature means less vibration, which in turn means less dark current.
The MIRI instrument, in silver, integrated into the JWST Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM).. Credit: NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center .
MIRI’s longer infrared detectors are more sensitive to dark current, so it needs to be colder than the other instruments to fully remove that effect. For every degree the instrument temperature goes up, the dark current goes up by a factor of about 10.
Scientists and engineers are now doing a series of checks to make sure the detectors are operating as expected. They are also sending commands to determine if it can execute tasks correctly.
“We spent years practicing for that moment, running through the commands and the checks that we did on MIRI,” said Mike Ressler, project scientist for MIRI at JPL. “It was kind of like a movie script: Everything we were supposed to do was written down and rehearsed. When the test data rolled in, I was ecstatic to see it looked exactly as expected and that we have a healthy instrument.”
Now, MIRI will take test images of stars and other known objects that can be used for calibration and to check the instrument’s operations and functionality. The team will conduct these preparations alongside calibration of the other three instruments, delivering Webb’s first science images this summer.
Can other planets have geomagnetic storms, even if their magnetosphere is weak and they don’t have an ionosphere like Earth? This question has now been answered, according to research done by a team of scientists in the United States, Canada, and China.
The research team found evidence that Mercury has a ring current, part of a magnetosphere, consisting of charged particles flowing laterally in a doughnut shape around the planet but that excludes the poles. This evidence came from data obtained from the Messenger space probe while it was dropping towards the planet at the end of its mission on April 14, 2015.
A magnetosphere is a system of magnetic fields that form a bubble around a planet that is created by the spinning, electrically charged inner core of a planet. For our planet, this bubble reaches 6 to 10 times the radius of the Earth with the side opposite the Sun extending out like a comet’s tail to 60 times the radius of Earth. It extends out like that because of the force of the solar wind interacting with it.
This magnetosphere helps protect the planet from particle radiation coming from the Sun and elsewhere, and also from the solar wind which is a steady stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. Our Sun often produces coronal mass ejections (CME), bursts of the Sun’s plasma which is a superheated gas of charged particles. The planets in our solar system, excluding Venus and Mars, have magnetospheres as well.
Earth’s magnetosphere isn’t a sphere at all. The solar wind deforms it into an asymmetrical shape. Image Credit: NASA
When a CME hits the magnetosphere it triggers a magnetic storm. According to professor Hui Zhang of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, “a magnetic storm is a major disturbance of the magnetic field in a planet’s magnetosphere.” Here on Earth, that storm causes the auroras borealis and australis, the Northern Lights and Southern Lights.
As the research team discovered from the data they collected, Mercury has magnetic storms as well. They found that Mercury’s ring current had been compressed from the CME of April 14, 2015, increasing the current’s energy. As stated in the source article, Hui Zhang says “the sudden intensification of a ring current causes the main phase of a magnetic storm.”
However, since Mercury has a very thin atmosphere no auroras are produced. Instead, the particles end up hitting the surface of the planet. Hui Zhang states that “only emissions at the X-ray and Gamma-Ray range from the surface of Mercury have been reported so far and we do not know whether there are emissions at other wavelength ranges (e.g., visible wavelengths).”
This finding may indicate that other planets, including exoplanets, with magnetospheres may also have magnetic storms. One of the research papers written about this, which was co-authored by Zhang, concludes: “The results obtained from Messenger provide a further fascinating insight into Mercury’s place in the evolution of the solar system following the discovery of its intrinsic planetary magnetic field.”
Header credit: MESSENGER image of Mercury from its third flyby (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Hubble Confirms Comet C/2014 UN271 is an Absolute Unit, Astronomically Speaking
Hubble Confirms Comet C/2014 UN271 is an Absolute Unit, Astronomically Speaking
It’s official. Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) has the largest nucleus ever seen in a comet. The gargantuan comet was discovered in the fall of 2021, and in January 2022, astronomers turned the Hubble Space Telescope to ascertain more details and determine the exact size.
NASA said a team of scientists has now estimated the diameter is approximately 129 km (80 miles) across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than other known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 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 Man-To Hui of the Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau, lead author on a new paper on the comet. “We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this.” So, his team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on January 8, 2022.
The comet was discovered Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, from the University of Pennsylvania. They were scouring through data from the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. They found data of this object that was originally collected from 2014–2018, which did not show a typical comet tail, and the object was therefore thought to be a dwarf planet.
But within a day of the announcement of its discovery via the Minor Planet Center, astronomers using the Las Cumbres Observatory network took new images which revealed that it has grown a coma in the past 3 years, and that it was rapidly moving rapidly through the Oort Cloud. The object was then officially classified as a comet.
Then astronomers then began studying this comet in earnest, taking data from all sorts of previous and recent observational sources, intensively studied by ground and space-based telescopes.
C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is moving in the direction towards the Sun from the outer Solar System at about 35,400 kilometers per hour (22,000 mph) But, astronomers say, don’t worry. It will never get closer than 1.6 billion km (1 billion miles) away from the Sun, slightly farther than the distance of the planet Saturn. And that won’t be until the year 2031. And still, only large telescopes will be able to see it – it likely won’t be visible to the naked eye.
This sequence shows how the nucleus of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was isolated from a vast shell of dust and gas surrounding the solid icy nucleus. On the left is a photo of the comet taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 on January 8, 2022. A model of the coma (middle panel) was obtained by means of fitting the surface brightness profile assembled from the observed image on the left. This allowed for the coma to be subtracted, unveiling the point-like glow from the nucleus.Credits: NASA, ESA, Man-To Hui (Macau University of Science and Technology), David Jewitt (UCLA); Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
As with any comet, the challenge comes in trying to measure the solid nucleus while it is enveloped in a huge dusty coma. While the comet is currently too far away for its nucleus to be visually resolved by Hubble, the data did show a bright spike of light at the nucleus’ location. Hui and his team next made a computer model of the surrounding coma and adjusted it to fit the Hubble images. Then, the glow of the coma was subtracted to leave behind the starlike nucleus.
The work of Hui and his team to constrain the diameter and reflectivity of the coma showed the actual measurements are quite close to the early estimates a size of 100-200 km, and low reflectivity. Astronomers described the nucleus as “blacker than coal.”
Previously, the largest comet ever measured was C/2002 VQ94, with a nucleus estimated to be 60 miles across. It was discovered in 2002 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project.
But there are probably more comets like this, with origins from the edge of the Solar System.
“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,” said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and co-author of the new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “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.”
Lead image caption:
This diagram compares the size of the icy, solid nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) to several other comets. The majority of comet nuclei observed are smaller than Halley’s comet. They are typically a mile across or less. Comet C/2014 UN271 is currently the record-holder for big comets. And, it may be just the tip of the iceberg. There could be many more monsters out there for astronomers to identify as sky surveys improve in sensitivity. Though astronomers know this comet must be big to be detected so far out to a distance of over 2 billion miles from Earth, only the Hubble Space Telescope has the sharpness and sensitivity to make a definitive estimate of nucleus size.
Credits: Illustration: NASA, ESA, Zena Levy (STScI)
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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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.)
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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.
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