Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
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...
15-04-2022
Is the Universe infinite?
Is the Universe infinite?
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
This geometrical structure of a torus is an example of a spatially flat surface, with neither positive nor negative curvature across it, that nevertheless is finite in extent. If your space is torus-like in nature, you could eventually return to your starting point if you traveled in a straight line forever.
The limits to which we can observe the Universe are set by three things: the rate of expansion, the time since the Big Bang, and the speed of light.
But beyond our visibility limit, there ought to be more Universe out there, and no one knows how far it goes on for.
Is it finite or is it infinite? Although we don't know for certain, many have their suspicions, and scientists are working to find out as much as possible.
13.8 billion years ago, what we know as our Universe began with the hot Big Bang. The Universe was filled with matter, antimatter, radiation, and existed in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense, but expanding-and-cooling state. By today, the volume containing our observable Universe has expanded to be 46 billion light years in radius, with the light that’s first arriving at our eyes today corresponding to the limit of what we can measure.
Although that’s a huge distance, it’s not infinitely large; it’s merely the limits of what we can observe. What lies beyond that? What about the unobservable Universe? Is there any way to use what we know and measure about the Universe we inhabit to answer the question of whether it’s finite or infinite; about whether what we know of as “the Universe” goes on forever, or whether there’s some limit to what’s out there? Let’s look at the full suite of what we know today, right up to the limits of what our measurements tell us, and see what we can learn from it.
Every time we look out at the night sky, we’re seeing a specific field-of-view, which means we’re probing a certain amount of area on the sky. Objects that are nearby, at intermediate distances, and even at very great distances can all appear in the same image, and just how faint and far back we see is limited only by the quality of our observations.
As we look to greater distances, we also wind up looking back in time. The nearest galaxy, some 2.5 million light years away, appears to us as it was 2.5 million years ago, because the light requires that much time to journey to our eyes from when it was emitted. More distant galaxies appear as they were tens of millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. As we look ever farther away in space, the light we see from the Universe comes from its progressively younger days. Therefore, as we look back in terms of distance, we can also measure how the Universe evolved over its history.
The Universe is cold and clumpy today, but it’s also expanding and gravitating. When we look to greater and greater distances, we find that the Universe was less cold, less clumpy, and more uniform. With less time having passed for gravitation to form large, complicated structures, the Universe had less massive clumps of matter early on. Similarly, the early, distant Universe was also hotter. The expanding Universe causes all the light that travels through the Universe to stretch in wavelength. As the wavelength stretches, it loses energy, and becomes cooler. This means the Universe was hotter in the distant past, a fact we’ve confirmed through observations of distant features in the Universe.
The observational evidence that probes the temperature of the cosmic microwave background at different epochs in the Universe, including at present (red star), in the relatively nearby Universe (blue points), and in the distant Universe (red points) all shows that the Universe was hotter in the past, and has cooled as it’s expanded exactly as predicted.
(Credit: P. Noterdaeme et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2011)
We can measure the temperature of the Universe as it is today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, by looking at the leftover radiation from that hot, dense, early state. Today, this shows up in the microwave portion of the spectrum and is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background. Coming in with a blackbody spectrum and a temperature of 2.725 K, it’s easy to confirm that these observations match, with an incredible precision, the predictions that arise from the Big Bang model of our Universe.
Moreover, we know how this radiation evolves in energy as the Universe expands. A photon’s energy is directly proportional to the inverse of its wavelength. When the Universe was half its size, the photons from the Big Bang had double the energy, while when the Universe was 10% of its current size, those photons had ten times the energy. If we’re willing to go back to when the Universe was just 0.092% its present size, we’ll find a Universe that’s 1089 times hotter than it is today: around 3000 K. At these temperatures, the Universe is hot enough to ionize all the atoms in it. Instead of solid, liquid, or gas, all the matter in the entire Universe was in the form of an ionized plasma.
A Universe where electrons and protons are free and collide with photons transitions to a neutral one that’s transparent to photons as the Universe expands and cools. Shown here is the ionized plasma (L) before the CMB is emitted, followed by the transition to a neutral Universe (R) thatâs transparent to photons. If there is an electric charge imbalance, signatures would lead to anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
(Credit: Amanda Yoho for Starts With A Bang)
One of the remarkable properties about the Universe, at this early stage, was how almost perfectly uniform it was. Yes, some regions within it are more or less dense than average, but the amounts that the densest (corresponding to the coldest observed temperatures) or least dense (i.e., hottest) regions depart from the average is tiny: about 1-part-in-30,000. That’s enough to grow into the stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and cosmic voids we see today. Seeing the Universe as it was back then, as well as how it is today, allows us to understand how it grew from that early state into the one we inhabit today.
The way we arrive at the size of the visible Universe today is through understanding three things in tandem:
how quickly the Universe is expanding today, something we can measure via a number of methods,
how hot the Universe is today, which we know from looking at the radiation of the Cosmic Microwave Background,
and what the Universe is made out of, including matter, radiation, neutrinos, antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and more.
By taking the Universe we have today, we can extrapolate back to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, and arrive at a figure for both the age and the size of the Universe together.
The size of the Universe (y-axis) versus the age of the Universe (x-axis) on logarithmic scales. Some size and time milestones are marked, as appropriate. One can continue to extrapolate this forwards and backwards in time, but only so long as the components of energy that exist today didnât have transitional points.
(Credit: E. Siegel)
From the full suite of observations available, including the cosmic microwave background but also including supernova data, large-scale structure surveys, and baryon acoustic oscillations, among others, we get our Universe. 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, it’s now 46.1 billion light years in radius. That’s the limit of what’s observable. Any farther than that, and even something moving at the speed of light since the moment of the hot Big Bang will not have had sufficient time to reach us. As time goes on, the age and the size of the Universe will increase, but there will always be a limit to what we can observe.
So what can we say about the part of the Universe that’s beyond the limits of our observations? We can only make inferences based on the laws of physics as we know them, and the things we can measure within our observable Universe. If space were positively curved, like we lived on the surface of a 4D sphere, distant light rays would converge. If space were negatively curved, like the surface of a 4D saddle, distant light rays would diverge. Instead, distant light rays move in their original direction, with the fluctuations we have indicating perfect flatness.
The magnitudes of the hot and cold spots, as well as their scales, indicate the curvature and expansion history of the Universe. To the best of our capabilities, we measure it to be perfectly flat, but there’s a degeneracy between the sizes of the fluctuations we see and changes in the expansion history compared with what types of energy were present in the early Universe.
Our best measurements indicate that the Universe is spatially flat on the largest scales: it’s neither positively nor negatively curved, to a precision of 0.25%, or about 1-part-in-400. Because we live in three dimensions, 400 times the radius means (400)3 times the volume, or more than 64 million times as much space. If we assume that our current laws of physics are correct, we can set limits on how large, at least, the Universe must be before it curves back on itself.
But, big as that is, it still isn’t infinite. A lower bound of the Universe being at least 18 trillion light-years in all directions is tremendous, but it’s still finite. Assuming that the Universe contains no topological weirdness, like curving back on itself while still being spatially flat (like having a geometry akin to a hypertorus), observations of the cosmic microwave background and the large-scale structure tell us that the unobservable part of the Universe must be at least 37 trillion light-years in diameter.
Exponential expansion, which takes place during inflation, is so powerful because it is relentless. With every ~10^-35 seconds (or so) that passes, the volume of any particular region of space doubles in each direction, causing any particles or radiation to dilute and causing any curvature to quickly become indistinguishable from flat.
(Credit: E. Siegel (L); Ned Wright’s Cosmology Tutorial (R))
However, there are good theoretical reasons to believe that our entire Universe, whether finite or infinite, is even larger than that. The hot Big Bang might mark the beginning of the observable Universe as we know it, but it doesn’t mark the birth of space and time itself. Before the Big Bang, the Universe underwent a period of cosmic inflation. Instead of being filled with matter and radiation, and instead of being hot, the Universe was:
filled with energy inherent to space itself,
expanding at a constant, exponential rate,
and creating new space so quickly that the smallest physical length scale, the Planck length, would be stretched to the size of the presently observable Universe every 10-32 seconds.
It’s true that in our region of the Universe, inflation came to an end. But there are three questions we don’t know the answer to that have a tremendous influence on how big the Universe truly is, and whether it’s infinite or not.
The size of our visible Universe (yellow), along with the amount we can reach (magenta). The limit of the visible Universe is 46.1 billion light-years, as that’s the limit of how far away an object that emitted light that would just be reaching us today would be after expanding away from us for 13.8 billion years. However, beyond about 18 billion light-years, we can never access a galaxy even if we traveled towards it at the speed of light. Beyond the limits of the observable Universe lies more Universe, up until the limits imposed by wherever inflation didn’t end at the same time it did where our hot Big Bang occurred. That limit, if it exists, has not been discovered.
(Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin and Frederic Michel, Wikimedia Commons; Annotations: E. Siegel)
1.) How big was the region of the Universe, post-inflation, that created our hot Big Bang?
Looking at our Universe today, at how uniform the Big Bang’s leftover glow is, at how flat the Universe is, at the fluctuations stretched across the Universe on all scales, etc., there’s quite a bit we can learn. We can learn the upper limit to the energy scale at which inflation occurred; we can learn how much the Universe must have inflated; we can learn a lower limit for how long inflation must have gone on.
But the pocket of the inflating Universe that gave rise to us could be much, much bigger than that lower limit! It could be hundreds, or millions, or googols of times larger than what we can observe… or even truly infinite. But without being able to observe more of the Universe than we can presently access, we don’t have enough information to decide.
Wherever inflation occurs (blue cubes), it gives rise to exponentially more regions of space with each step forward in time. Even if there are many cubes where inflation ends (red Xs), there are far more regions where inflation will continue on into the future. The fact that this never comes to an end is what makes inflation ‘eternal’ once it begins, and where our modern notion of a multiverse comes from.
2.) Is the idea of “eternal inflation,” where the Universe inflates eternally into the future in at least some regions, correct?
If you consider that inflation must be a quantum field, then at any given point during that phase of exponential expansion, there’s a probability that inflation will end, resulting in a Big Bang, and a probability that inflation will continue, creating more and more space. These are calculations we know how to do (given certain assumptions), and they lead to an inevitable conclusion: if you want enough inflation to occur to produce the Universe we see, then inflation will always create more space that continues to inflate compared to the regions that end and produce Big Bangs.
While our observable Universe may have come about from inflation ending in our region of space some 13.8 billion years ago, there are regions where inflation continues — creating more and more space and giving rise to more Big Bangs — continuing to the present day. This idea is known as eternal inflation, and is generally accepted by the theoretical physics community. How big, then, is the entire unobservable Universe by now?7
From a pre-existing state, inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space.
3.) And, finally, how long did inflation go on prior to its end and the resultant hot Big Bang?
We can only see the observable Universe created by inflation’s end and our hot Big Bang. We know that inflation must have occurred for at least some ~10-32 seconds or so, but it likely went on for longer. But how much longer? For seconds? Years? Billions of years? Or even an arbitrary, infinite amount of time? Has the Universe always been inflating? Did inflation have a beginning? Did it arise from a previous state that was around eternally? Or, perhaps, did all of space and time emerge from nothingness a finite amount of time ago? These are all possibilities, and yet the answer is untestable and elusive at present.
From our best observations, we know that the Universe is an awful lot bigger than the part we can observe. Beyond what we can see, we strongly suspect that there’s plenty more Universe out there just like ours, with the same laws of physics, the same types of physical, cosmic structures, and the same chances at complex life. But as inconceivably large as that entire Universe — or Multiverse, if you prefer — may be, it might not be infinite. In fact, unless inflation went on for a truly infinite amount of time, or the Universe was born infinitely large, the Universe ought to be finite in extent.
We can imagine a very large number of possible outcomes that could have resulted from the conditions our Universe was born with, and a very large number of possible outcomes that could have occurred over our cosmic history as particles interact and time passes. If there were enough possible Universes out there, it would also be possible that the same set of outcomes happened in multiple places, leading to the scenario of “infinite parallel Universes.” Unfortunately, we only have the one Universe we inhabit to observe.
The biggest problem of all, though? It’s that we don’t have enough information to definitively answer the question. We only know how to access the information available inside our observable Universe: those 46 billion light years in all directions. The answer to the biggest of all questions, of whether the Universe is finite or infinite, might be encoded in the Universe itself, but we can’t access enough of it to know. Until we either figure it out, or come up with a clever scheme to expand what we know physics is capable of, all we’ll have are the possibilities.
PLANETARY SCIENTIST’S VIDEO SHOWS HOW SLOW LIGHT SPEED REALLY IS
PLANETARY SCIENTIST’S VIDEO SHOWS HOW SLOW LIGHT SPEED REALLY IS
EVEN AT THE UNIVERSE'S THEORETICAL SPEED LIMIT, A TRIP TO MARS SEEMS TEDIOUS.
TAG HARTMAN-SIMKINS FOR FUTURISM
Slow Motion
To us Earth-dwelling humans, the speed of light is so fast that it appears instantaneous.
But zoom out a bit and it becomes clear how even at the speed of light — the theoretical speed limit of the universe, which our spacecraft can’t even begin to approach — a journey through the cosmos becomes a snail-paced slog.
That crawl is what James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows in a cool new animation.
Take Two
O’Donoghue has shared similar visualizations in the past.
In January 2019, when he was working for NASA, he released a trio of speed of light animations that show how much slower light travels on a cosmic scale.
Mars Sprint
In the new animation, O’Donoghue started by showing how quickly light blinks past the Earth: a pulse of light emanating from the planet travels off-screen in under a second.
But then he zooms out to show how that same light takes a brief moment to reach the Moon. Zooming out even farther, he then subjects us to about three mind-numbing minutes of waiting for those same pulses of light to reach Mars. Thankfully, he doesn’t take us any farther.
The sun's activity has been increasing far faster than scientists forecasted.
Mercury transiting the sun on Nov. 11, 2019.
(Image credit: NASA/SDO/HMI/AIA)
A gigantic plasma wave that launched from the sun smashed into Mercury Tuesday (April 12), likely triggering a geomagnetic storm and scouring material from the planet's surface.
The powerful eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), was seen emanating from the sun's far side on the evening of April 11 and took less than a day to strike the closest planet to our star, where it may have created a temporary atmosphere and even added material to Mercury's comet-like tail, according to spaceweather.com.
The plasma wave came from a sunspot — areas on the outside of the sun where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electric charges, get knotted up before suddenly snapping. The energy from this snapping process is released in the form of radiation bursts called solar flares or as waves of plasma (CMEs).
On planets that have strong magnetic fields, like Earth, CMEs are absorbed and trigger powerful geomagnetic storms. During these storms, Earth's magnetic field gets compressed slightly by the waves of highly energetic particles, which trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras in the night sky. The movements of these electrically charged particles can induce magnetic fields powerful enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, Live Science previously reported, and scientists have warned that these geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.
Unlike Earth, however, Mercury doesn't have a very strong magnetic field. This fact, coupled with its close proximity to our star's plasma ejections, means it has long been stripped of any permanent atmosphere. The atoms that remain on Mercury are constantly being lost to space, forming a comet-like tail of ejected material behind the planet.
But the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles, nuclei of elements such as helium, carbon, nitrogen, neon and magnesium from the sun — and tidal waves of particles from CMEs constantly replenish Mercury's tiny quantities of atoms, giving it a fluctuating, thin layer of atmosphere.
Previously, scientists were unsure if Mercury's magnetic field was strong enough to induce geomagnetic storms. However, research published in two papers in the journals Nature Communications and Science China Technological Sciences in February has proved that the magnetic field is, indeed, strong enough. The first paper showed that Mercury has a ring current, a doughnut-shaped stream of charged particles flowing around a field line between the planet's poles, and the second paper pointed to this ring current being capable of triggering geomagnetic storms.
"The processes are quite similar to here on Earth," Hui Zhang, a co-author of both studies and a space physics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, said in a statement. "The main differences are the size of the planet and Mercury has a weak magnetic field and virtually no atmosphere."
The sun's activity has been increasing far faster than past official forecasts predicted, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. The sun moves between highs and lows of activity across a rough 11-year cycle, but because the mechanism that drives this solar cycle isn't well understood, it's challenging for scientists to predict its exact length and strength.
Enough rare earth minerals have been found off Japan to last centuries
Rare earths are important materials for green technology, as well as medicine and manufacturing
Where would we be without all of our rare-earth magnets?
Rare earth elements are a set of 17 metals that are integral to our modern lifestyle and efforts to produce ever-greener technologies. The “rare” designation is a bit of a misnomer: It’s not that they’re not plentiful, but rather that they’re found in small concentrations, and are especially difficult to successfully extract since they blend in with and resemble other minerals in the ground. China currently produces over 90% of the world’s supply of rare metals, with seven other countries mining the rest. So though they’re not precisely “rare,” they are scarce. In 2010, the U.S. Department of energy issued a report that warned of a critical shortage of five of the elements. Now, however, Japan has found a massive deposit of rare earths sufficient to supply the world’s needs for hundreds of years.
The rare earth metals can be mostly found in the second row from the bottom in the Table of Elements. According to the Rare Earth Technology Alliance, due to the “unique magnetic, luminescent, and electrochemical properties, these elements help make many technologies perform with reduced weight, reduced emissions, and energy consumption; or give them greater efficiency, performance, miniaturization, speed, durability, and thermal stability.”
In order of atomic number, the rare earths are:
Scandium or Sc (21) — This is used in TVs and energy-saving lamps.
Yttrium or Y (39) — Yttrium is important in the medical world, used in cancer drugs, rheumatoid arthritis medications, and surgical supplies. It’s also used in superconductors and lasers.
Lanthanum or La (57) — Lanthanum finds use in camera/telescope lenses, special optical glasses, and infrared absorbing glass.
Cerium or Ce (58) — Cerium is found in catalytic converters, and is used for precision glass-polishing. It’s also found in alloys, magnets, electrodes, and carbon-arc lighting.
Praseodymium or Pr (59) — This is used in magnets and high-strength metals.
Neodymium or Nd (60) — Many of the magnets around you have neodymium in them: speakers and headphones, microphones, computer storage, and magnets in your car. It’s also found in high-powered industrial and military lasers. The mineral is especially important for green tech. Each Prius motor, for example, requires 2.2 lbs of neodymium, and its battery another 22-33 lbs. Wind turbine magnets require 43.2 kilograms of neodymium per megawatt of power.
Promethium or Pm (61) — This is used in pacemakers, watches, and research.
Samarium or Sm (62) — This mineral is used in magnets in addition to intravenous cancer radiation treatments and nuclear reactor control rods.
Europium or Eu (63) — Europium is used in color displays and compact fluorescent light bulbs.
Gadolinium or Gd (64) — It’s important for nuclear reactor shielding, cancer radiation treatments, as well as x-ray and bone-density diagnostic equipment.
Terbium or Tb (65) — Terbium has similar uses to Europium, though it’s also soft and thus possesses unique shaping capabilities .
Dysprosium or Dy (66) — This is added to other rare-earth magnets to help them work at high temperatures. It’s used for computer storage, in nuclear reactors, and in energy-efficient vehicles.
Holmium or Ho (67) — Holmium is used in nuclear control rods, microwaves, and magnetic flux concentrators.
Erbium or Er (68) — This is used in fiber-optic communication networks and lasers.
Thulium or Tm (69) — Thulium is another laser rare earth.
Ytterbium or Yb (70) — This mineral is used in cancer treatments, in stainless steel, and in seismic detection devices.
Lutetium or Lu (71) — Lutetium can target certain cancers, and is used in petroleum refining and positron emission tomography.
Minimatori Torishima Island
(Chief Master Sergeant Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force)
Japan located the rare earths about 1,850 kilometers off the shore of Minamitori Island. Engineers located the minerals in 10-meter-deep cores taken from sea floor sediment. Mapping the cores revealed and area of approximately 2,500 square kilometers containing rare earths.
Japan’s engineers estimate there’s 16 million tons of rare earths down there. That’s five times the amount of the rare earth elements ever mined since 1900. According to Business Insider, there’s “enough yttrium to meet the global demand for 780 years, dysprosium for 730 years, europium for 620 years, and terbium for 420 years.”
The bad news, of course, is that Japan has to figure out how to extract the minerals from 6-12 feet under the seabed four miles beneath the ocean surface — that’s the next step for the country’s engineers. The good news is that the location sits squarely within Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone, so their rights to the lucrative discovery will be undisputed.
A first-of-its-kind 'missing link' object detected in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest supermassive black holes in existence, scientists say.
The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, aligns with theoretical predictions of what an 'ancestor' to supermassive black holes might look like – and while it's something we've never seen before, there could be many more like it.
"It's unlikely that discovering GNz7q … was just 'dumb luck'," says astronomer Gabriel Brammer from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
"The prevalence of such sources may in fact be significantly higher than previously thought."
(NASA et al., full caption and credit below)
Above: GNz7q, the red dot in the center of the inset, in the Hubble GOODS-North field. (NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth [UC Santa Cruz], Pascal Oesch [UC Santa Cruz, Yale], Rychard Bouwens [LEI], I. Labbe [LEI], Cosmic Dawn Center/Niels Bohr Institute/University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
The period GNz7q dates from is known as the Cosmic Dawn – the epoch spanning from around 50 million years after the Big Bang to around 1 billion years, when the earliest celestial objects were forming, including baby stars and fledgling galaxies.
At some point in these nascent phases of Universe evolution, supermassive black holes also turned up. But when and how remain open questions in astrophysics.
Last year, scientists announced the discovery of J0313–1806, the most distant quasar on record at over 13 billion light-years from Earth, signifying the oldest supermassive black hole ever found.
But where does something like J0313–1806 come from? Or rather, what kind of objects were the evolutionary precursors to supermassive black holes in the early stretches of the Universe?
Theoretically speaking, scientists have some ideas.
"Simulations indicate an evolutionary sequence of dust-reddened quasars emerging from heavily dust-obscured starbursts that then transition to unobscured luminous quasars by expelling gas and dust," researchers explain in a new study, led by first author and astronomer Seiji Fujimoto, also from the University of Copenhagen.
"Although the last phase has been identified out to a redshift of 7.6 [referring to J0313–1806], a transitioning quasar has not been found."
Until now, that is. Fujimoto, Brammer, and colleagues identified GNz7q in an analysis of archival observation data captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object looks to be the elusive ancestor scientists have been trying to track down.
Surprisingly, this 'missing link' black hole was found in a comprehensively studied region of the night sky – as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) – but only now has a spectral analysis identified what GNz7q's luminosity likely represents.
"Our analysis suggests that GNz7q is the first example of a rapidly growing black hole in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy at an epoch close to the earliest supermassive black hole known in the Universe," Fujimoto says.
"The object's properties across the electromagnetic spectrum are in excellent agreement with predictions from theoretical simulations."
According to the researchers, the host galaxy of GNz7q is incredibly active, forming around 1,600 solar masses of stars per year – or at least it was around 13 billion years ago, when this ancient light was emitted.
The signature of GNz7q's light emission fits the transitional black hole profile due to its brightness in ultraviolet wavelengths (representing emission from the outer part of the black hole's accretion disk) coinciding with an absence of X-ray emission (which would be generated at the core of the disk, but shrouded by the ongoing dusty conditions of the early starburst galaxy from which GNz7q evolved).
As the researchers explain, those characteristics are a perfect match for a black hole destined for supermassive things.
"Its properties are in excellent agreement with the transition phase of the evolutionary paradigm of supermassive black holes," the team explains in their paper. "A low-luminosity, dust-obscured quasar emerging in a vigorously star-bursting host."
In other words, this is what we predicted a supermassive black hole precursor would look like about 13 billion years ago, once its light finally reached us, having traveled some 13 billion light-years to make the trip.
Due to the phenomenon of the Universe expanding, GNz7q – in whatever ultimate, supermassive form it now takes – would be about twice as far away from us today, at a distance of around 25 billion light-years.
Earliest Maya Calendar Fragment Found in Guatemala
Earliest Maya Calendar Fragment Found in Guatemala
A new study published in the journal Science Advances has announced the discovery of the earliest known use of the Maya calendar. This discovery of the glyph “7 Deer” on mural fragments from deep inside a pyramid at the San Bartolo archaeological site in the jungles of northern Guatemala indicates that the calendar was in use even as far back as between 300 and 200 BC. Until now the earliest evidence of its use found elsewhere in Guatemalawas dated to the first century BC, according to a Reuters report.
The mural fragment containing “7 Deer”, at top.
(Karl Taube / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun)
Maya Calendar Glyph Amongst 7,000-Piece “Jigsaw”
The San Bartolo archaeological site shot into news in 2001 for the discovery of a new semi-hidden Maya city, reports the newspaper El Pais . The San Bartolo complex contained a pyramid that consisted of a series of temples, each larger than the last, built one atop the other till the structure eventually reached a height of about 100 feet (30 m).
The pyramid found in San Bartolo was named Las Pinturas (meaning “the paintings”) after the still intact murals depicting scenes from Maya mythology found in the topmost chamber. It is from the center of the pyramid that the team encountered over 7,000 mural fragments from an earlier era. In fact, radiocarbon dating has concluded that these fragments date back to between 300 and 200 BC.
Mural fragment depicting Maya calendar glyph and illustration showing the visible “7 Deer” day sign.
(Heather Hurst & David Stuart / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun)
Some of the fragments are as small as a fingernail and others measure up to 8-by-16 inches (20-by-40 cm). They have been dubbed by anthropology professor and study co-author Heather Hurst of Skidmore College in New York state as a “a giant jigsaw puzzle.”
After 10 years of trying to fit together the pieces of the 7,000-piece jigsaw, the researchers have now discovered that two of the fragments add up to the “7 Deer” glyph of the Maya 260-day Tzolk’in divinatory calendar , according to the website Gizmodo.
University of Texas professor of Mesoamerican art and writing David Stuart, who is lead author of the research, described the fragments as “two small pieces of white plaster that would fit in your hand, that were once attached to a stone wall,” according to Reuters. “The two pieces fit together and have black painted calligraphy, opening with the date ‘7 Deer.’ The rest is hard to read,” he went on to say.
The deliberate knocking down of older structures and building newer ones atop them was once a pretty widely prevalent Maya construction practice. “When a new structure is made, they bury the old one. It doesn't just break and is thrown away, it's something sacred, as if they were burying the family,” Boris Beltrán, co-director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project is quoted as saying by El Pais .
“When painting an image, the Mayans believed that the act of painting brought the figure to life,” explained his colleague Heather Hurst. “So when the end of its use came, they had to remove it with respect.”
7 Deer: Project members publish a mural fragment that bears earliest datable evidence of the 260-day Maya calendar in Science Advances today!
— Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo-Xultun (@SbxProject) April 13, 2022
Understanding the Sacred Maya Calendar
The 260-day Tzolk’in calendar is one of many inter-related ways that the advanced Mesoamerican Maya civilization structured time. There was also a 365-day solar year, a larger system called the “Long Count” and a lunar year. The 260-day Tzolk’in calendar is a sacred calendar that is still followed by some indigenous communities today, according to Science Alert .
There are no months in this calendar and days are named from 1 to 20 in a set order and are represented by glyphs. They repeat 13 times a year in a cyclical fashion. Some of the other days are named 8 Stars, 9 Jade/Water, 10 Dogs and 11 Monkeys. “This calendar system has lasted for at least 2,200 years, maintained by the Maya during times of incredible change, stress and tragedy,” Stuart said, reports Reuters.
The Mayan writing system consisted of 800 glyphs and the earliest evidence of its use so far also comes from San Bartolo. The glyphic notations found on 11 of the 7,000 mural fragments suggest that well-developed writing and artistic systems were already in place among the Maya by this time and the calendar had been in use for several years.
“The scribal tradition represented in these 11 fragments is diverse, expressive, their technology for paint preparation and calligraphic fluidity is impressive – this was a well-established tradition of writing and art,” Reuters quotes Hurst as saying. She also said that other sites should provide more examples, perhaps even earlier examples.
The Maya were an astonishingly advanced people who built temples, observatories, palaces and pyramids and had sophisticated farming without using metal tools or the wheel. San Bartolo dates to the Maya Preclassic period from 400 BC to AD 250. The Preclassic period was followed by the Classic period when Mayan culture flourished and cities like Tikal in Guatemala, Palenque in Mexico and Copan in Honduras were created.
Before the San Bartolo “7 Deer” discovery, the calendar system of 260 days was believed to have originated elsewhere, in Oaxaca. But the new evidence is just as old and throws open the question of place of origin. Experts hope that the San Bartolo site will open a window to further understanding of the development of ancient Maya astronomical and writing traditions and it will therefore continue to be researched for many years to come.
Top image:Left; Maya Calendar representation ( Niciak/ Adobe Stock), Right; Mural fragment depicting Maya calendar glyph and illustration showing the visible “7 Deer” day sign. Source: Heather Hurst & David Stuart / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun
In today’s video Dolores Cannon talks about the beginning of life on earth. The seeding of our planet earth. This video is based on two books written by Dolores Cannon, Keepers of the Garden and the Custodians. In keepers of the garden a young man who is very depressed and on the verge of suicide turns to Dolores Cannon for past-life regression.
The long series of sessions with Dolores reveal a vastly different story of our planet earth and the beginning of the human race.
Thank you Coast to Coast AM with George Noory for sharing this enlightening interview with Dolores Cannon speaking about ‘the seeding of Earth’ and many other topics.
There is so much misinformation out there on the topic of ETs and our origin. Dolores Cannon has done a wonderful job in accumulating this information and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand.
This object was sighted on April 9, 2022 over Medellín the capital of Colombia’s mountainous Antioquia province. This is one great footage of this saucer shaped craft and witnessed by several people but what makes this footage stand out is the fact that we get a glimpse of this UFO landing which is seldom seen yet captured on film...
Thanks to John Vargas Fotografia for allow me the use of his footage and to view the original:
NOTE PETER2011: With these videos below I want to show that these diamond-shaped UFOs have been captured in Columbia for years. Is it the same images that keep coming back or is it a specific type of UFO that is previously observed in Columbia?Judge yourself!
Hey I found an Earth size planet using World Wide Telescope program that is free to use. Are you surprised? You shouldn't be since its Earth size...its really hard to hide. Anyways, we all know that the Drake Equation comes to the conclusion that there are 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky way galaxy alone...let's not even try to estimate the whole universe. Well, here I found a perfectly symmetrical spaceship on a scale like no other. This ship is not round, which would waste the interior space if not hollowed out. Instead its flat and they can utilize many levels of inner and outer areas. Not everyone wants a sphere UFO. Is your car the same as your neighbor? The same as your friend? No! Because you want to be different, you pride yourself on being unique...and so do these alien species.
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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)
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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