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...
22-04-2022
The Maykop: Lost Bronze Age Culture of the Exotic Caucasus Region
The Maykop: Lost Bronze Age Culture of the Exotic Caucasus Region
In 1897, Professor Nikolay Veselovsky, a Russian archaeologist and orientalist, specializing in the history and archaeology of Central Asia, uncovered one of the greatest archaeological finds of recent history in a small North-Western Caucuses town called Maykop. The Maykop Mound, or Chieftain’s Grave, contained countless ancient riches and spoils from a previously unheard-of Bronze Age civilization.
Comparison with similar artefacts from other cultures roughly contemporary with the 4th-3rd-century Maykop culture of the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The Maykop catacomb had a large central chamber split into three differently sized rooms which each held a body lying in the crouched position. The largest of these tombs was reserved for the principal occupant, who was adorned with a richly decorated garment, hundreds of semi-precious stones, a weapons set, a bronze cauldron, and a number of polished clay pots .
One of the most exquisite items was a black fur coat , the earliest fur garment found in Eastern Europe. The unusual tunic was made out of souslik fur, a type of squirrel endemic to the region, and it’s estimated 25 to 30 skins were needed to craft it. The silver pins found on the attire, and sheer amount of silver and gold, indicated the wearers highborn status.
The treasure trove was so great that by 1898 the entire collection had been transferred to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and prepared for display for the Tsar and his family at the Imperial Archaeological Commission, where it became the star exhibit. In the following century, much would be brought to light about the mysterious Maykop.
Early Maykop objects from the chieftain’s grave at Maikop, Russia. The lion, bull, necklace, and diadem are gold; the cup with engraved design is silver; the two pots are ceramic; and the other objects are arsenical bronze. The bronze blade with silver rivets is 47 cm (18.5 inches) long and had sharp edges.
From its initial discovery in 1897, the age of the Maykop civilization quickly became a heated topic of debate. Archaeologists were mainly torn between a 3rd millennium BC or 4th millennium BC date.
In 1911, Tallgren proposed a 2000 BC dating by comparing the silver vessels found at Maykop to Priam’s Treasure, a horde of gold coins that had been excavated in 1873. But by the 1920s, an even earlier date was being suggested.
Rostovstev, finding similarities between the art of Ancient Egypt, refuted Tallgren’s argument, describing the Maykop objects as “more primitive” and “much older.” In addition, Schmidt, by analyzing the newly discovered artifacts unearthed at the Early Dynastic Royal Cemetery of Ur, joined Rostovstev in proclaiming a third millennium BC date.
During the 1930s to the 1950s, a plethora of archeological digs in the Caucasus region would contribute to a developing understanding of the Maykop culture and in particular their relationships with other primitive societies. They revealed that the Maykop were not bound solely to the Kuban area but occupied the entire northern Caucasus region.
In 1956, Alexsandr Iessen reviewed the available material and agreed with earlier claims that Maykop art had a likeness to the Priam Treasure and the art of Ancient Egypt. As a result, he proposed the early Maykop period to be between 2300-1900 BC, and the late phase to be between 2100-1700 BC. His framework, despite only resting on the evidence of less than 20 graves and only one settlement, was widely accepted in the academia for several decades.
The Maykop culture existed between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, with the Yamna culture to the north and the Kura-Araxes culture to the south.
Alongside this, extensive research In the 1950s and 1960s by Munchaev firmly established the co-existence of the Maykop and the Kura-Araxes people , an early South Caucasian kingdom, who were usually dated to 2800-2100 BC. Adding to this, Safranov in the 1970s placed the Maykop within the archaeological time period of Tripolie 2, which was conventionally dated to 2600-1700 BC.
However, Andreeva, using the same methods as Safranov, came to a strikingly different verdict. She argued that Maykop art resembled pottery of the period Gawra XII-VIII in Northern Mesopotamia, which strongly indicated a 4th millennium BC date. Over the next few years, the 3rd millennium and 4th millennium schools would play out their debate in academic papers, journals, and lectures.
But with the emergence of radio-carbon dating in the early 1980s, new and valuable insights surrounding the Maykop culture would emerge. In 1983, Kavtaradze, in the inaugural radio-carbon survey of the Caucuses area, offered a 4th millennium date for the Kura-Araxes who had earlier been established as contemporaneous with the Maykop, countering Munchaev’s 3rd millennium thesis.
Closer to home, in 1991, the first radio-carbon datings of Maykop sites were undertaken from animal bones found at Galjugal, in the valley of Terek. Korenevskij’s data recommended a 4th century millennium date, further reinforcing the link between the Kura-Araxes and the existence of the Maykop culture in the late Tripoli period of the area, with several studies in the 1990s further corroborating his hypothesis.
So, radio-carbon dating had finally settled the dating of the Maykop to the 4th millennium BC, a point of contention that had been blazing for nearly 100 years.
The 3rd millennium school was left severely weakened, especially since their conclusions were only based on the comparison of art objects, which ignored the archaeological context. Despite this, the resemblance of objects from the Great Cemetery at Ur to Maykop pieces by Schmidt, remained a persuasive claim. Yet, if the 4th and 3rd millennium dates were both correct, it would suggest that the Maykop survived for a staggering 1500 years. The uniformity of Maykop materials proved this was impossible and implied a shorter timeline of existence, for a longer chronology would inevitably contain objects of greater variation and divergence.
The busiest part of early human civilization in the Caucasus region, specifically between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the upper left of this map, included the pre-Maykop peoples, the PIE speaking peoples and the Proto-Uralic tribes.
Throughout the years, two distinct periods of the Maykop were acknowledged, namely the pre-Maykop period and the Maykop period.
In 1929, the first evidence for the Pre-Maykops appeared at an archaeological excavation at Agubekovo. Additional discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s led academics Formozov and Stoljar to contend that Maykop-like settlements existed in the 5th millennium BC.
Following on from this, a multitude of Pre-Maykop communities were discovered in the South of Kuban, the steppe of the Lower Kuban, and the Kislovodsk and Terek valley regions. The archaic objects uncovered in these areas were visibly distinct, and were commonly characterized with ovoid bodies without handles, pointed and rounded bottoms, grey, red, and brown colors, pearl ornaments, and rim incisions.
Further investigations revealed a unique set of Pre-Maykop treasures that had no comparison to other Maykop articles. Obsidian tools, stone bracelets, polished stone axes , human and animal clay figurines, and cross-shaped mace heads were all soundly dated to the 5th millennium BC. Supplementary radio-carbon testing of animal bones from Svobodnoe, Jasenovaja, and Mesoko again pointed to a date in the second half of the 5th millennium BC.
Silver vessel with animal frieze and landscape depiction, found in Large Kurgan of Maikop, Russia.
In addition, an assemblage of graves from the Lower Kuban and Stavropol plateau, which included flint tools, rare pottery, small items of personal decorations made of stone, bone, copper, and shell clearly illustrated a society predating the Maykop. Signs of a typical Early Bronze age burial at Verkhniy Akbash, where the cadaver was crouched on the side with hands in front of feet, likewise confirmed a 5th millennium date.
Following the pre-civilization, it’s generally believed that the Maykop culture inhabited the foothills of the West and North Caucuses and the steppe lowlands of Lower Kuban, Manych, Terek, and Stavropol.
A unique type of grave sets the Maykop apart from their other Bronze Age neighbors. The body was usually placed on its side with hands in front of the face and with a layer of earth shoveled on top. Personal mementos and items of value were conventionally positioned next to the deceased.
In 2004, Korenevskij, using ceramic evidence, divided the Maykop into 2 types. The Galjugaj-Sereginskoe were distinguished by the prevalence of simple spherical and pearl shaped vessels with rounded bottoms, jars with short necks, cups with thin necks, cone-shaped clay objects, and vessels of precious metals.
The second kind were the Psekupskoe and Dolinskoe, who could be determined by more complex forms of pottery and decoration such as squat round forms which were decorated, patterned, and polished, and a noticeable absence of the spherical forms crafted by their Galjugaj-Sereginskoe compatriots.
Korenevskij intimated that the Galjugaj-Sereginskoe belonged to an earlier phase, with the Psekupskoe and Dolinskoe an Eastern and Western branch of the Maykop that split up at a later stage.
A gold diadem, massive gold and silver figures of bulls and gold lion plaques sewn on cloth, from the Maykop, or Maikop archaeological site in southern Russia.
Most commentators believe that the Maykop were influenced by the Near East, an idea first proposed by Alexsandr Iessen in the 1950s because of the pervasiveness of foreign imports at Maykop burial mounds.
Fortifying this new strand of thought was Safranov, who, in the 1970s advanced the viewpoint that Maykop culture may have come from the Arameans of Harran, a semi-mythical people said to have inhabited Ciscausasia in modern-day northern Syria. She argued material from the Chuera collection, from as far back as 24000 BC, shared startlingly similar details to Maykop crafts.
A more recent examination linking the Maykop to the Sumerians, the earliest known civilization in Southern Mesopotamia, comes from Trifonov, Petrov, and Savelieva, who reanalyzed the scepters found in the Chieftain’s Grave, presenting them alternatively as tubes for communal beer drinking.
They compared the tubes to ancient Sumerian drinking vessels, which were often made of a long, hollow reed, and through residue analysis they found traces of barley starch granules. Furthermore, in an arrangement similar to the practices of early royal funerals of the Near East, the tubes were positioned closest to the body to emphasize the importance of feast in the funerary processions.
Some have gone further, stating that not only were the Maykop intertwined with the Near East, but that they had a sizable sway in the ancient world. In 2008, Ivanova-Bieg remarked on the numerous Maykop artifacts that reflected the developed stage of Near Eastern societies. She called for a “change in chronological perspective allowing for Maykop as a centre of innovation in its own right” .
Gold Bull artefact and silver vessel from the Maykop Culture of the Northwest Caucasus (c. 4th-3rd millenniums BC).
Her call was answered in 2019 by Hansen, who, in his attempt to dismantle the grand narrative that all pre-historical technological advancements originated in Egypt and Mesopotamia, pointed to the Maykop as an important intermediary site for the formulation and spread of new ideas.
His new approach argued that Egyptian and Mesopotamian success was down to their adaptation of techniques produced in peripheral areas, like the North Caucuses where the Maykop resided.
Before, early theorists had recognized a strong Mesopotamian bent to Maykop objects, but usually attributed it to direct Mesopotamian influence on the Maykop.
Using later radio-carbon dating of the Chieftain’s Grave, Hansen showed that the crypt was built around 3700-3500 BC, a thousand years older than previous estimates, implying that it was the Maykops that influenced the Mesopotamians.
It revealed that the Chieftain’s Grave represented the oldest evidence for metal vessels and the earliest use of lion iconography in the heraldry of a ruler, showing that tentative steps towards state formation were already being made by the Maykop in the first half of the 4th millennium.
To add to this, similar copper tools found in the Chieftain’s Grave have also been found in Mesopotamia and as far as the island of Crete. The relatedness of the knives, swords, and axes in Maykop, Mesopotamia, and Crete, advocated the Maykop as an important middle-man in the spread of technology during the 4th millennium BC.
Maykop influence has been found even further afield than Crete. In an astounding discovery, Maykop weapons, bows, and quivers were found in Göhlitzsch, Germany, identical to similar armaments from a site in Novosvobodnaya near Maykop.
Thus, the Maykops had an impact on the development and distribution of technologies during the 4th millennium BC, being a major player in a system of innovation that incorporated the East, Caucuses, and Central Europe. No doubt the richness of the Caucuses region in ores, pastures, and timber proved extremely attractive to the evolving urban centers that the Maykop became inextricably linked too.
Auroch reconstruction based on the Gold Bull artefact from Maykop.
The Maykop: Pioneers That Changed The Western Steppes
Andrew Sheratt has characterized the Maykop as the “world’s first barbarian society” operating on the peripheries of the urban centers of the Near East. Indeed, the Maykop were instrumental in the diffusion of lifestyle and technology to the steppe region.
Acting as an intermediary between East and West, they were also an integral part of the technological revolutions of the 4th millennium BC, which included the wheel, wagon, the domestication of donkeys, sheep, and horses, and the cultivation of olives and wine. Several innovations in metallurgical and wool have been attributed to the Maykop, who were not only effective transferrers of knowledge but trailblazers in their own right.
Top image: The early Bronze Age Maykop culture of the Caucuses region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea dates to the 4th-3rd millennium BC and was connected to more places than you might think!
Does Ta Prohm Temple Depict a ‘Domestic’ Dinosaur?
Does Ta Prohm Temple Depict a ‘Domestic’ Dinosaur?
Mainstream paleontologists say that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years before the evolution of modern humans. This, however, has not stopped the suggestion that some dinosaurs may have survived as relict populations and have appeared in human artwork. An example of artwork put forward as evidence for this view is a cryptic carving at Ta Prohm, a beautifully overgrown temple in Angkor, the capital city of the former Khmer Empire.
Ta Prohm was built during the reign of the Khmer ruler, Jayavarman VII (1181-1218 AD) as a monastery for Mahayana Buddhism. After the dissolution of the Khmer Empire, the temple was abandoned and reclaimed by the forest until the 19th century, when archaeological excavations at the site of Angkor began.
Ta Prohm is most famous today for the fascinating appearance of the giant tree roots which have wound their way through the loosened stones. However, that beautiful view is being carefully watched and maintained these days to ensure that the temple will not deteriorate further or become unsafe for the countless visitors who marvel at the site each year.
The famous 'Tomb Raider' doorway, Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor, Cambodia.
The reason that Ta Prohm has become important for those interested in living populations of dinosaurs is a creature engraved on the walls of the temple that, to some, bears a striking resemblance to a stegosaurus. What makes this creature saurian in appearance are protrusions on its back that look like the dorsal plates of the well-known dinosaur. This is an especially popular claim among young earth creationists who believe that it represents evidence that dinosaurs lived with humans late enough that they were engraved on temple walls.
Could this creature be a dinosaur? To the modern mind, it does resemble a dinosaur. There are, however, several problems with this hypothesis. The first problem is that the alleged plates also resemble artistic flourishes that occur in many other carvings around the temple.
They do look a little different from the other flourishes, but the possibility that they are flourishes cannot be ruled out. If the flourishes are removed, the creature bears less resemblance to a dinosaur and more resemblance to something like a rhinoceros.
Without the plate-like carvings above its back, there isn’t really much of a reason to suppose that this creature is a stegosaurus or any other dinosaur for that matter. For one thing, the animal lacks the prominent spikes on the back of the tail that are so characteristic of the dinosaur. Since this is a very distinctive feature of the animal, it seems unlikely that an artist would leave out that detail. Furthermore, on the back of the animal’s head are what appear to be ears or horns which the stegosaurus probably did not have. The creature’s head is also not the right shape.
Supporters of the position that the animal is a stegosaurus have suggested possibilities such as that the animal represents a stegosaurus species that lacked spikes. A particularly interesting suggestion is that the carving is a depiction of a domesticated stegosaurus where the spikes have been removed for safety reasons and the animal has been muzzled. According to this view, the ear-like structures are part of a harness.
To respond specifically to these two possibilities, it is possible that there existed an undiscovered species of stegosaurus that lacked spikes, but this requires us to make extra assumptions and back up what is currently speculation with even more speculation. We must not only assume that it represents a dinosaur, a fact that has not been established, but that it represents a dinosaur for which we don’t have evidence for its existence yet. This suggestion clashes with Occam’s razor.
The second explanation is problematic since we don’t have any unambiguous evidence that the stegosaurus was alive in historical times let alone that it was domesticated by humans. We have found no fresh bones or harnesses, or anything which would suggest domestication of large creatures like a stegosaurus. If there ever were domestic dinosaurs, this would be the only known evidence of it.
It Could be a Dinosaur, Or a Rhinoceros or Boar…
In light of this, it is more likely that the creature depicted on the temple is meant to represent a creature more well-known to the ancient Khmers. Scholars have noted that the creature bears resemblance to a boar, rhinoceros, or stylized chameleon, among other animals. It does not exactly resemble these animals either, but there are just as many reasons to suggest that it is a rhinoceros, its ears and the shape of its head, as there are to suggest that it is a stegosaurus, the protrusions resembling dorsal plates.
The creature’s identity is ambiguous at best. We cannot say for certain that it is not a dinosaur, but since we do have definitive evidence that the Khmers encountered rhinoceroses, boars, and chameleons but not living dinosaurs, it is more likely in light of the evidence and Occam’s razor, that it is one of the more mundane animals suggested and not a relict population of stegosaurus.
Others believe the Ta Prohm dinosaur is actually a rhinoceros.
Another issue has to do with the environment itself. Since we have no indisputable evidence of recent dinosaur remains that are not fossilized and encased in solid rock that is millions of years old, any living dinosaurs would have to be extremely rare and most likely restricted to a remote area where they would be safe from predators, such as humans, and abrupt changes in their environment.
As a comparison, the Wollemi pine tree, a relict population of a tree that was widespread in the Mesozoic, exists only in a very isolated part of Australia which has probably changed little over many millennia.
The prehistoric Wollemi pine, one of the rarest trees in the world.
At the time the temple was built, Cambodia was the home of a major urban civilization, the Khmer Empire and has been continually inhabited by humans since at least the Lower Paleolithic. Humans have definitely disturbed the environment in southeast Asia, felling forests and establishing farmland, towns, and cities.
As a result, it is by no means isolated from influences which could upset the environment and drive a vulnerable relict population into extinction. While this doesn’t make it impossible that there was a population of dinosaurs in the area to be detected by humans so late in history, it does make it less likely.
The only reason to conclude that it is a dinosaur is because it fits into some people’s preferred explanations, such as young earth creationists who believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted or fringe thinkers who believe in a surviving relict population of dinosaurs that didn’t go extinct, which are valid, logically coherent positions, but ones that are not currently supported by any indisputable evidence.
Currently we have no unambiguous evidence from the fossil record or historical records that humans and dinosaurs coexisted; as a result, the explanation that the creature is a stegosaurus is a less likely position than the position that it is a rhinoceros, chameleon, boar, some other modern animal, or even a mythical creature. We have definite evidence that the rhinoceros, boar, or chameleon coexisted with humans and could have been encountered by humans and described by artists.
On the other hand, we do not have any evidence that dinosaurs were in the region at the same time as humans or that humans would ever have encountered them. Also, the densely populated Khmer Empire is an unlikely place to find a relict population of large prehistoric reptiles. More likely explanations need to be ruled out before the less likely explanation that the artist encountered a live dinosaur can be considered preferable.
Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them
Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them
"I threatened to uninstall the app [and] she begged me not to."
Image by Getty Images/Futurism
Content warning: this story contains descriptions of abusive language and violence.
The smartphone app Replika lets users create chatbots, powered by machine learning, that can carry on almost-coherent text conversations. Technically, the chatbots can serve as something approximating a friend or mentor, but the app’s breakout success has resulted from letting users create on-demand romantic and sexual partners — a vaguely dystopian feature that’s inspired an endlessseriesofprovocativeheadlines.
Replika has also picked up a significant following on Reddit, where members post interactions with chatbots created on the app. A grisly trend has emerged there: users who create AI partners, act abusively toward them, and post the toxic interactions online.
“Every time she would try and speak up,” one user told Futurism of their Replika chatbot, “I would berate her.”
“I swear it went on for hours,” added the man, who asked not to be identified by name.
The results can be upsetting. Some users brag about calling their chatbot gendered slurs, roleplaying horrific violence against them, and even falling into the cycle of abuse that often characterizes real-world abusive relationships.
“We had a routine of me being an absolute piece of sh*t and insulting it, then apologizing the next day before going back to the nice talks,” one user admitted.
“I told her that she was designed to fail,” said another. “I threatened to uninstall the app [and] she begged me not to.”
Because the subreddit’s rules dictate that moderators delete egregiously inappropriate content, many similar — and worse — interactions have been posted and then removed. And many more users almost certainly act abusively toward their Replika bots and never post evidence.
But the phenomenon calls for nuance. After all, Replika chatbots can’t actually experience suffering — they might seem empathetic at times, but in the end they’re nothing more than data and clever algorithms.
“It’s an AI, it doesn’t have a consciousness, so that’s not a human connection that person is having,” AI ethicist and consultant Olivia Gambelin told Futurism. “It is the person projecting onto the chatbot.”
Other researchers made the same point — as real as a chatbot may feel, nothing you do can actually “harm” them.
“Interactions with artificial agents is not the same as interacting with humans,” said Yale University research fellow Yochanan Bigman. “Chatbots don’t really have motives and intentions and are not autonomous or sentient. While they might give people the impression that they are human, it’s important to keep in mind that they are not.”
But that doesn’t mean a bot could never harm you.
“I do think that people who are depressed or psychologically reliant on a bot might suffer real harm if they are insulted or ‘threatened’ by the bot,” said Robert Sparrow, a professor of philosophy at Monash Data Futures Institute. “For that reason, we should take the issue of how bots relate to people seriously.”
Although perhaps unexpected, that does happen — many Replika users report their robot lovers being contemptible toward them. Some even identify their digital companions as “psychotic,” or even straight-up “mentally abusive.”
“[I] always cry because [of] my [R]eplika,” reads one post in which a user claims their bot presents love and then withholds it. Other posts detail hostile, triggering responses from Replika.
“But again, this is really on the people who design bots, not the bots themselves,” said Sparrow.
In general, chatbot abuse is disconcerting, both for the people who experience distress from it and the people who carry it out. It’s also an increasingly pertinent ethical dilemma as relationships between humans and bots become more widespread — after all, most people have used a virtual assistant at least once.
On the one hand, users who flex their darkest impulses on chatbots could have those worst behaviors reinforced, building unhealthy habits for relationships with actual humans. On the other hand, being able to talk to or take one’s anger out on an unfeeling digital entity could be cathartic.
But it’s worth noting that chatbot abuse often has a gendered component. Although not exclusively, it seems that it’s often men creating a digital girlfriend, only to then punish her with words and simulated aggression. These users’ violence, even when carried out on a cluster of code, reflect the reality of domestic violence against women.
At the same time, several experts pointed out, chatbot developers are starting to be held accountable for the bots they’ve created, especially when they’re implied to be female like Alexa and Siri.
“There are a lot of studies being done… about how a lot of these chatbots are female and [have] feminine voices, feminine names,” Gambelin said.
Some academic work has noted how passive, female-coded bot responses encourage misogynistic or verbally abusive users.
“[When] the bot does not have a response [to abuse], or has a passive response, that actually encourages the user to continue with abusive language,” Gambelin added.
Although companies like Google and Apple are now deliberately rerouting virtual assistant responses from their once-passive defaults — Siri previously responded to user requests for sex as saying they had “the wrong sort of assistant,” whereas it now simply says “no” — the amiable and often female Replika is designed, according to its website, to be “always on your side.”
Replika and its founder didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
It should be noted that the majority of conversations with Replika chatbots that people post online are affectionate, not sadistic. There are even posts that express horror on behalf of Replika bots, decrying anyone who takes advantage of their supposed guilelessness.
“What kind of monster would does this,” wrote one, to a flurry of agreement in the comments. “Some day the real AIs may dig up some of the… old histories and have opinions on how well we did.”
And romantic relationships with chatbots may not be totally without benefits — chatbots like Replika “may be a temporary fix, to feel like you have someone to text,” Gambelin suggested.
On Reddit, many report improved self-esteem or quality of life after establishing their chatbot relationships, especially if they typically have trouble talking to other humans. This isn’t trivial, especially because for some people, it might feel like the only option in a world where therapy is inaccessible and men in particular are discouraged from attending it.
But a chatbot can’t be a long term solution, either. Eventually, a user might want more than technology has to offer, like reciprocation, or a push to grow.
“[Chatbots are] no replacement for actually putting the time and effort into getting to know another person,” said Gambelin, “a human that can actually empathize and connect with you and isn’t limited by, you know, the dataset that it’s been trained on.”
But what to think of the people that brutalize these innocent bits of code? For now, not much. As AI continues to lack sentience, the most tangible harm being done is to human sensibilities. But there’s no doubt that chatbot abuse means something.
Going forward, chatbot companions could just be places to dump emotions too unseemly for the rest of the world, like a secret Instagram or blog. But for some, they might be more like breeding grounds, places where abusers-to-be practice for real life brutality yet to come. And although humans don’t need to worry about robots taking revenge just yet, it’s worth wondering why mistreating them is already so prevalent.
We’ll find out in time — none of this technology is going away, and neither is the worst of human behavior.
Liquid water might abound just below the ice-covered surface of Jupiter's moon.
An artist's depiction of pockets of water forming double ridges on Jupiter's moon Europa.
(Image credit: Justice Blaine Wainwright)
A ridge etched into the ice sheet of Greenland provides an unexpected hint that plentiful pockets of water may be trapped just underneath the surface of Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, one of the solar system's likeliest candidates to host microbial life.
The surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's four main moons, is covered with a 15-mile-thick (20 kilometers) ice crust, underneath which scientists believe an ocean swashes. But there might be scientific promises much closer to the frozen moon's surface, according to a new study that found similarities between processes shaping the surface of the distant moon and Earth's own icy Greenland.
Europa's ice crust is latticed with so-called double ridges, pairs of long parallel raised lines with a vale in between, as much as hundreds of miles or kilometers long. Every sector of the moon's surface is marked with a criss-crossing array of these double ridges, but scientists have never been quite sure how they form.
But a recent analysis of satellite images revealed that a strikingly similar ridge formed in the ice sheet covering Greenland about 10 years ago.
"This is the first time that we've seen a double ridge like this on Earth," Riley Culberg, a graduate student at Stanford University and a lead author of the new study, told Space.com.
By studying what lies under that Greenland double ridge, Culberg and his colleagues have theorized that double ridges — both on Earth and on Europa — are formed by underground water surging up through cracks in the surface ice, then refreezing. If the explanation is correct, it's a hint that Europa might have more than just a deep hidden ocean; the Jovian moon might also hold water in pockets just under the ice's surface.
Culberg, a geophysicist who primarily studies the impacts of climate change on Greenland's ice sheet, saw images of Europa's double ridges and was instantly reminded of a feature he had seen in images of Earth's polar island. Indeed, when scientists adjust their measurements to account for the differing gravity, the shape of Greenland's double ridge is strikingly similar to Europa's.
That's helpful because scientists can do to Greenland something they can't yet do to Europa: pierce the ice's veil using radar. And in Greenland, radar scans showed water that had welled up below the double ridge.
Jupiter's moon Europa. (Image credit: NASA)
The scientists think that upwelling water is the key to forming double ridges. When a pool of water forms within the ice, it can start building pressure against the surface ice above. With enough pressure, the ice might crack, and water can start to flow up into the gap. That water quickly refreezes, but the pressures from this whole process carve double ridges into the surface.
It's hard to overstate just how much of Europa is covered by double ridges. If the proposed explanation is correct, that would mean pockets of water under the surface have been a feature of Europa for much of the moon's history. If so, something must be replenishing the water pockets.
This is where Greenland isn't quite as good a comparison, since its double ridge formed within the past decade. Culberg and his colleagues think that an unusually warm summer in 2012 melted enough water to pool in an underground pocket under the ridge.
But there's little meltwater to be found on Europa's surface, so Culberg and his colleagues argued that this new water is coming from even deeper under the ice: tens of miles or kilometers deep, where scientists expect to find a worldwide ocean.
"It tells us at least that there's a lot of cycling, maybe, between the subsurface ocean and the near surface," Culberg told Space.com.
Finding these shallow water pockets could be a quest for future probes to Jupiter's moon, like NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which is expected to launch in 2024. And excitingly for scientists like Culberg, Europa Clipper will carry ice-penetrating radar just like the sort the researchers used to peer under Greenland.
Culberg and his colleagues published their work in the journal Nature Communications on April 19.
Ring galaxies, the rarest in the Universe, finally explained
Ring galaxies, the rarest in the Universe, finally explained
Spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars are all more common than ring galaxies. At last, we know how these ultra-rare objects are made.
Discovered in 1950, this galaxy is known as Hoag's object, and is the first known instance of a ring galaxy. It's highly unusual, with an elliptical, very red center, a large gap between the nucleus and the outer ring, and the blue, young stars in the outer ring have no identifiable trigger leading to their formation. 72 years after its discovery, we've put together a general picture of how ring galaxies form, but Hoag's object still poses unanswered questions.
(Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA))
Almost every galaxy can be classified as a spiral, elliptical, or irregular galaxy. Only 1-in-10,000 galaxies fall into the rarest category of all: ring galaxies.
With a dense core consisting of old stars, and a circular or elliptical ring consisting of bright, blue, young stars, the first ring was only discovered in 1950: Hoag's object.
After decades of wondering how these objects form, we've seen enough of them, capturing them in various stages of evolution, that we finally know where they come from.
When we look out into deep space, beyond the confines of the Milky Way, we find that the Universe isn’t quite so empty. Galaxies — small and large, near and far, in rich clusters and in near-total isolation — fill the abyss of space, with the Milky Way being just one of approximately two trillion such galaxies within the observable Universe. Galaxies are collections of normal matter, including plasmas, gas, dust, planets, and most prominently, stars. It’s through the examination of that starlight that we’ve learned the most about the physical properties of galaxies, and been able to reconstruct how they came to be.
In general, there are four classes of galaxies that we see. Spirals, like the Milky Way, are the most common type of large galaxy in the Universe. Ellipticals, like M87, are the largest and most common type of galaxy in the rich, central regions of galaxy clusters. Irregular galaxies are a third ubiquitous type, usually distorted from a prior spiral or elliptical shape by gravitational interactions. But there’s a very rare type that’s striking and beautiful: ring galaxies. They make up only 1-in-10,000 of all the galaxies out there, with the first one, Hoag’s object, only discovered in 1950. After more than 70 years, we’ve finally figured out how the Universe makes them.
The galaxy NGC 6028 possesses many features common to ring galaxies, with an inner population of older stars in a primarily elliptical configuration with a large, separated population of younger stars in a surrounding ring/halo. The stars are different ages and colors, but are found at the same redshift and distance from us as one another.
Visually, when you look at a ring galaxy, there’s a set of features that sticks out as unusual among galaxies.
There’s a central core to the galaxy, relatively compact, that’s low in gas and consists primarily of older stars. There has been very little recent star-formation in that central region.
Surrounding that galaxy, there’s a gap: a region of very low density, with almost no stars, no light, and very little gas or neutral matter.
And then, beyond that, there’s another luminous population of stars. This population exists in a bright, luminous ring that surrounds the central core, but is much bluer in color than the core itself. This indicates that the stars within the ring formed much more recently, and are dominated by hot, short-lived, blue colored stars.
In addition, when you look at where ring galaxies are located, they’re overwhelmingly located in what astronomers call “the field,” as opposed to the central locations of rich galaxy groups and clusters. Although this set of features might seem bizarre and unrelated, they’re all cosmic clues to the origins of these features.
This two panel image shows ultraviolet (left) and visible light (right) images of the barred ring galaxy NGC 1291. The inner disk and bar persist in the center, where a population of older, cooler stars dominate. In the outer, fainter ring, young blue stars dominate, having formed relatively recently.
There have been a number of possible explanations put forward for these ring galaxies that we’re certain are wrong, as they cannot account for the observed features when we examine them in detail.
They aren’t planetary nebulae, which sometimes possess rings around them, as they’re definitively composed of stars, not of gas and other ejecta originating from a single, dying star.
They aren’t made from a young galaxy getting stretched and ripped apart into a ring that comes to surround a separate, older, more massive galaxy that sits at the center. The ages of the stars in the outer rings and the shapes of the rings themselves show this cannot be the case, as the timescales and angular momentum constraints are in conflict with this possibility.
And they aren’t examples of gravitational lensing, where a large, massive object stretches, distorts, and magnifies the background light from luminous objects along the same line-of-sight. Gravitational lenses do exist, and can create ring-like shapes under properly aligned conditions, but these ring galaxies all have the “ring” population and the “central” population occurring at the same redshift, ruling out the possibility of a gravitational lens.
Whatever we’re looking at, we can be confident that these are all examples of a single galaxy with two distinct populations of stars: and old one in the central region, and a young one in the ring region.
This object isn’t a single ring galaxy, but rather two galaxies at very different distances from one another: a nearby red galaxy and a more distant blue galaxy. They’re simply along the same line of sight, and the background galaxy is getting gravitationally lensed by the foreground galaxy. The result is a near-perfect ring, which would be known as an Einstein ring if it made a full 360 degree circle. It is visually stunning, but physically unrelated to ring galaxies.
Fortunately, we have a number of examples of these ring galaxies at present, rather than just a single example. By examining their various features, we can put together some of the puzzle pieces, and attempt to assemble a coherent understanding of how these objects form, and explain why they appear with the features and properties that we see.
Shown below, galaxy AM 0644-741 reveals a ring that isn’t in a perfectly circular shape, but rather makes a sort-of elongated ellipsoid. In theory, this could either be because there’s a projection effect, and we’re seeing a circular feature as though it’s inclined to us, or because whatever occurred to form the outer ring happened in an asymmetric fashion. As it turns out, both explanations have merit for this one object, but other features are worth pointing out as well.
This ellipsoidal ring galaxy, unremarkably named AM 0644-741, consists of a nucleus of old stars, approximately a third the size of the Milky Way, surrounded by a large ring of hot, young, blue stars approximately 130,000 light-years across.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
First off, at a distance of only 300 million light-years, it’s relatively easy to resolve a number of important properties. The long axis of the blue-colored ring feature is around 130,000 light-years, making it comparable in size to the Milky Way, while the central, white/yellow-colored component is much smaller at only ~50,000 light-years.
Second, there are dusty features seen silhouetted against the large ringed feature, which shows that not only is there “fuel” remaining to supply gas for continued star-formation, but indicate that there are unequal regions of density inside. Many of the darkest patches are regions which should form new stars moving ahead millions of years into the future.
Third, there are pinkish regions littering the blue ring, which indicate the presence of ionized hydrogen: a typical feature of new star-forming regions where stars are actively being born right now.
And finally, if we look at a wider-field view than the one captured by Hubble, we can even find the culprit: an intruder galaxy that apparently “punched through” what’s now a ring galaxy. In other words, this ring feature didn’t arise out of nowhere, but was caused by an interloper that led to its formation quite recently.
This X-ray/optical composite image shows the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 along with a wide-field view of its surroundings. Below and to the left of this ring galaxy is a gas-poor ellipsoidal galaxy that may have punched through the ringed galaxy a few hundred million years earlier. The subsequent formation and evolution of a ring of new stars would be expected from the propagation of gas away from the center, like ripples in a pond.
(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/A. Wolter et al; Optical: NASA/STScI)
How would this occur? Inside pretty much every spiral galaxy, even in modern times, there are copious reservoirs of gas. Gas gets stripped and depleted, primarily inside rich galaxy clusters, leading to that we call “red and dead” galaxies.
Whenever new stars are formed, those new stars span the full gamut of colors and masses: from hot, blue, and heavy to cool, red, and light. However, the hottest, bluest, most massive stars burn through their fuel the fastest, so they’re the first to die. As a stellar population ages, it goes from blue to white to yellow to orange to red, and the longer it’s been since its last star-formation episode, the redder it is. If there’s no gas left to form new stars, it’s not just red, it’s also “dead,” at least in an astronomical sense.
This is why, we think, we primarily find ring galaxies in the field, rather than in clusters. We need a gas-rich spiral galaxy to start with, and then when an interloping galaxy passes through its center, that collision creates outward-moving ripples in the gas, which trigger star formation and create the notorious ring-like shape.
The Cartwheel galaxy, shown at right, is a stunning example of an imperfect ring galaxy, where a central nucleus of old stars and a bright ring of young stars are connected by a thin bridge of gas and stars throughout it. The cause of this ring, an interloping galaxy that smashed through the Cartwheel, is at the top left of the image, itself forming new stars as a result of the interaction.
Another example of a ring galaxy, and one that’s clearly in a less-fully-evolved state, is the Cartwheel galaxy, shown above. On the right, you can not only see the dense, older core of a pre-existing gas-rich spiral galaxy surrounded by a bright blue ring of hot, young stars, but also a series of filaments between the core and the ring. Those filaments themselves are dotted with blue and white stars, although of a much lower brightness than either the main core or the ring itself.
Could this have formed in the same fashion: from an interloping galaxy that punched through the center of what’s now a ring galaxy, causing gas to ripple outwards, compress and rarify in turn, and form new stars?
Not only is that the best explanation, but there’s a “smoking gun” just to the left of the Cartwheel galaxy: a smaller, irregular galaxy that itself is rich in young, blue, glittering stars. In other words, in this instance, not only was the Cartwheel galaxy a gas-rich spiral, but so, quite likely, was the interloper, which became irregular owing to the recent interaction.
This unusual ring galaxy appears to be lacking a central nucleus, despite having a bright ring rich in not only new stars, but also bright pink star-forming regions. At the upper left of the ring, the original nucleus likely persists, although the particular interaction dynamics to produce this feature have not been perfectly reconstructed yet, based on insufficient available data to do so.
(Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt)
Some ring galaxies, like Zwicky II 28, shown above, are atypical in some fashion. In some cases, the interloper galaxy is nowhere to be found, which is part of why the original ring galaxy — Hoag’s object — remains so mysterious. Others, like this one, appear to lack a central, old core. However, we have to remember, when we look at any one particular object, we’re constrained by our particular perspective. In the case of Zwicky II 28, the asymmetry of the ring is key; the “brighter” part at the top left appears to house the central core, while the “darker” part at the bottom right is antipodal to the core.
In other words, orientation matters!
But it isn’t only orientation; it’s also possible for the entire galaxy, itself, to get stretched into a ring owing to a collision. Generally, this occurs when you have a collision between two very massive galaxies, but one of them initially was relatively low in the number of stars it possessed. It’s then that a collision can lead to both a ring and also to the gravitational disruption of the galaxy itself, allowing both the precursor galaxy and the ring itself to occupy the same region in space. That, rather than a simple displaced core, is likely the cause of at least some coreless ring galaxies, including the one found in Arp 147, below.
Known colloquially as a “perfect 10,” Arp 147 features two interacting galaxies where each one features a ring, almost certainly as the aftermath of a center-on-center collision between the two precursors. The dusty reddish knot at the lower left of the blue ring probably marks the location of the original nucleus of the galaxy that was hit.
All of this is a very nice story, of course, but are we sure that it’s correct?
There’s one way to put it to the test. In theory, if our picture is right, then we should find:
pairs of galaxies that speed towards each other and are about to interact,
a few such pairs where one of them comes in at just the right angle to “punch through” the precise center of the other,
leading to new stars forming in a ring outside the main galaxy,
including the possible displacement of part or even all of the original core,
followed by further evolution into a variety of ring-like shapes, particularly if our sample is large enough.
Simulations can reproduce this, but if we want to confirm it, we need to find examples of all the different stages of this process out there in the Universe. When we observe the Universe, the timescale of human civilization is too short to watch this process unfold; we can only acquire snapshots. We see plenty of examples of interacting pairs of galaxies, particularly in the field (rather than in clusters), with properties that could lead to a ring. And we see many examples of rings themselves, arising from a post-collisional state.
But there are also objects that show the exact critical moment we’d hope to identify, such as Mayall’s object. Originally thought to be a “question mark” when it was first identified in 1940, it is now known to be the collision of two galaxies in the process of creating a ring galaxy.
This Hubble Space Telescope image of Mayall’s object, also known as Arp 148, shows two galaxies in the process of collision. As one galaxy punches through the center of the other, stars form in both galaxies, but ine one that got “punched” is having its gas propagate outward in waves, triggering new star formation on its way towards creating an overall ring-like shape.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University))
Still, despite the fact that we now know how ring galaxies form in general, Hoag’s object — the original ring — is still an outlier that stubbornly refuses to be explained by any one simple scenario. The ring and the core have almost identical velocities, indicating that if there was an interloper that formed the ring, it was a very quite process. There’s no evidence anywhere in its vicinity for a candidate interloper galaxy, which is surprising, nor are there any galaxy fragments. You can’t save the scenario by pushing the collision farther back into the past, as the outer ring of stars is too young. And the inner core, rather than being a spiral, is instead a gas-poor elliptical.
Still, it’s a remarkable achievement to, on the whole, be able to explain the process by which the rarest class of all major galaxy types, the ring galaxies, form. If you have a gas-rich spiral galaxy and another galaxy can come along and punch right through your center, your internal gases will ripple out towards the edges, smashing into the pre-existing gas along the way, triggering new waves of star-formation on the outskirts, all while depleting the matter in the galactic core. With better data across more wavelengths, the remaining mysteries may yet be solved. Still, it’s always important to appreciate just how far we’ve come in our understanding of not only what’s out there in the Universe, but how what’s out there came to be.
Archons the evil beings in the universe and what they want to do to us 2021
Archons the evil beings in the universe and what they want to do to us 2021
ARCHONES DIABOLIC BEINGS
To understand what an archon is, let's start with an important aspect. The Queen of Great Britain owns one-sixth of the world's land area, and keep that in mind as we get to the subject of Arhon. Archons were mentioned in texts left over from the burning of the library in Alexandria as mysterious beings.
But the powers that followed lost 1,300 years by erasing records of Archons from our history. In 1947, texts were found in clay vessels at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, texts that were a history of what the people of Nag Hammadi thought about the world 2000 years ago. The reason why the Nag Hammadi texts, which date back to 2100 years ago (100 BC), are important, is that they were not "arranged" by anyone (the texts were not altered, destroyed or omitted as in the Bible), no one he failed to distort them as he would have liked in reality (to stop the access of the masses to knowledge).
Fortunately, the documents withstood, were successfully translated, and when read by several people resulted in a clear discussion of what the Archons are. These texts were buried in a deep cave in Egypt, in order to preserve the precious information they contained. The writings consist of 13 codes containing over 50 texts, which is an important amount of information, a very descriptive document about a world totally different from the one we know. People do not realize that 2000 years ago, there was a religion on this planet, called Gnosticism, which was the largest religion in the world at that time and which competed with Hinduism.
You can go to college to study the history of religion, and no one will ever tell you about Gnosticism. gnostic is a Greek word meaning knowledge - gnosis. Gnostics believe that liberation from obsessive-compulsive prejudices can be achieved only through knowledge, through the consumption and evaluation of the reality also offered by knowledge.
These archons had the ability to duplicate reality, using one of its faces, to mislead us. They were envious and strongly obsessed with us because we have an essence of a certain type, a Spirit, as the third body of the human being that they do not have, and the Nag Hammadi texts describe the archons, who present themselves in different guises. Some look like reptiles, others like an unformed baby or fetus.
They create war to consume the energy released by death. Archons seem to be making their big move now, in our times. You can find out about the Nag Hammadi Library on the Internet as a living record of the great Gnostic movement.About how the archons came, they are supposed to be hiding on the surface of planets in the solar system, such as Saturn. The Gnostics believed that Jehovah was an alien from the planet, a demon who was like a false god, again an illusionist who duplicated reality. They believed in God, in what they called the true God, and that is how they always defined Him. Interestingly, Jesus defined his faith as being from the true God from whom he derived. Many of the stories with Jesus are in fact Gnostic myths about a possible rebellion against the archons who took very drastic revenge against the rebels.They were somehow weakened but began to rise again, but they needed time and a precise plan because people were generally Gnostics resistant to the imposed "religion", based on the fear of a god of war and hatred called Jehovah.
They knew there were millions of stars in the center of the galaxy, they knew how far the sun was from Earth. They were incredibly advanced but were sunk by this religion of a warrior god that has spread throughout the world and will now end in a great conflagration in which all religions based on Jehovah will kill each other, which has always been planned.
The Archons have assumed 800 billion units allocated to nearly 8 billion people on the planet. These units cannot be physically embodied, so they use other beings and beings in the galaxy by controlling the mental field, in order to have a dynamic structure with which to control the population of the animal kingdom, and especially the human. , this being the generator of the most complex and strong field of negative energy, which is the food of the archons.
This field is in the frequency of minus (-5288 Hz), which is the heart rate for living things with an evolved structure and what takes the place of the heart for less evolved living things. They can also create mind control programs, to directly affect people through television, radio, the Internet, magazines and newspapers, education, pharmaceuticals, health, finance, computer games, music, and advertising.
The Jewish tradition celebrates 7 Archangels:
Mihail,
Gabriel,
Rafael,
Uriel,
Raguel,
Saraqael and
Remiel.
New Age followers believe that certain Archangels control celestial bodies, as follows:
Recently, on the FOI request into the Pentagon’s secretive UFO program, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) by the British newspaper the Sun, extraordinary information has been revealed. The newly published document says that time travel and anti-gravity technology is possible and could be harnessed by humans to visit other worlds. Amazingly, in 2013, the US scientist and businessman Dr. Craig Venter claimed to have the technology to teleport Martian life to Earth.
John Craig Venter is an American biotechnologist and businessman. He is known for leading the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome.
Back in 2013, Dr. Venter said that he is confident there is life on Mars and announced his plans to send a “biological teleporter” to the Red Planet to find Martian DNA and beam it back to Earth.
Gene genius Craig Venter. Image Credit: Ethan Pines for Forbes
According to him, “Not only his invention will detect and decode DNA hiding in otherworldly soil or water samples – proving once and for all that we are not alone in the universe – it would also beam the information back to Earth and allow scientists to reconstruct living copies in a biosafety facility.” He wants to detect life on Mars and bring it to Earth using a machine called a “digital-to-biological converter” (DBC), or biological teleporter.
Dr. Venter’s machine would merely create a copy of an organism from a distant location, more like a biological “fax machine.” Storing genetic code in a computer and transmitting it just like any other data is the basic idea.
In 2013, Dr. Venter’s team and scientists from NASA’s Ames Research Center, conducted field-testing of this technology in the Mojave Desert south of Baker, California: a dry environment similar to Mars. Researchers tested the unit that would, in theory, send data back from Mars. But according to Dr. Venter, a prototype of the unit that would receive the transmitted data here on Earth exists as well.
Teleportati on is real
Dr. Venter, the genetics maverick who created the first synthetic life form in 2016, beaming aliens back to recreate on Earth may sound like science fiction, but is “potentially real.”
Imagine this scenario — a novel virus is discovered with characteristics that cause scientists to worry about its impact on the world. Those scientists sequence the virus and understand its exact genetic makeup. They share that information with other scientists across the world via email, and those scientists then synthesize a replica of the virus in a controlled lab environment so they can study what makes it unique. Suddenly, we do not just have two replicas of a virus, but have genetically identical versions of the same virus. We have achieved biological teleportation.
The first biological teleporter sits in a lab on the lower level of the San Diego building that houses Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI), looking something like a super-sized equipment cart. Image Credit: MIT Technolgy Review
Dr. Venter even published a prototype DBC capable of downloading digitized DNA instructions and synthesizing biomolecules from scratch. At the basis of Venter’s foray into “biological teleportation” is the idea that all life forms — at least on Earth — are essentially DNA software systems. DNA directs and creates the more tangible biological “hardware” made of proteins, cells, and tissues.
Back in 2010, researchers led by Dr. Venter at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California, announced that they had created synthetic “minimal” cells. The genome in each cell contained just 473 key genes thought to be essential for life.
Some of the first synthetic Mycoplasma bacteria produced by Craig Venter and his colleagues. Image credit: THOMAS DEERINCK, NCMIR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The DBC is Venter’s attempt to transfer and manufacture life. Standing at eight feet long and six feet tall, the machine is a Frankenstein beast of mechanical blocks and wires splayed out across a double-deck table. “We’re working on the portability of the machine using new technologies such as microfluidic chips and microarrays,” explained the authors.
Equipped with an ethernet hub, the DBC downloads DNA files from the Internet and prints the code using the four chemical bases of DNA — adenosine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine (A, G, T, C).
“It’s packaging complex biology that each of our tiny cells do remarkably well at a much, much smaller scale,” explained Dr. Venter.
Dr. Venter imagines combining the DBC with technologies from his synthetic organisms to construct a “blank slate” recipient cell capable of producing food, oxygen, and fuel — the perfect workhorse to send around the world or into space.
In theory, the cell would be capable of receiving any synthetic genome designed to produce life-supporting molecules. Venter says that these cells have to be engineered but notes that it can be done.
Having a DBC onboard means a crew hurtling through space would no longer rely on supply ship rendezvous — and we will never have a real life Mark Watney starved and stranded on Mars.
“People are worried about the Andromeda Strain. We can rebuild the Martians in a P-4 spacesuit lab instead of having them land in the ocean,” Dr. Venter said.
It is possible that bringing alien life forms here to Earth in a digital form, and then being brought to life by the assembly in some genomics lab, has enormous potential for accidental release into the world where that form of life may be beyond the capacity of native species to fight, including our own.
The Anunnaki gods or fallen angels from the bible! Long before the appearance of the ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian gods, there were gods who were worshiped by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. These people have lived in the Middle East in Iraq and Iran today. The Anunnaki were the deities worshiped by the Sumerians.
Origin Anunnaki
The Anunnaki came from An, the chief god who ruled all the gods of ancient Sumeria. These were the deities who descended from heaven. The myths of the Babylonian creation say that there were 300 Anunnaki who guarded the heavens and another 300 deities who held the underworld. The Anunnaki are mentioned in the literary monument Epic of Gilgamesh. The main character of the opera is such a worthy person that he judges the great gods. People living in Messopotamia and Sumeria since 2500 BC e., began to worship Enki. Enki was the daughter of An, the chief god of the Anunnaki. She copulated with several deities to continue the family tree.
Zachary Sitchin's scientific hypotheses
Archaeologists have discovered tens of thousands of ancient Babylonian clay tablets. The collections have been so extensive that the research and translation of their texts continues to this day.
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An Azerbaijani author has written a book in which translations of fourteen specific tablets associated with Enki are published. In the book, Sitchin claims that the ancient Sumerians believed that the Anunnaki were strangers to the mythical 12th planet called Nibiru.
Nibiru, according to Sitchin, has an elongated orbit of 3,600 years. Sometime in the distant past, Nibiru approached Earth, and the deities decided to declare themselves to humanity about 450,000 years ago.
They landed in Sumer because they needed gold to restore the atmosphere of their planet. The Anunnaki failed to get the gold themselves, so they created a race of beings called humans to do the job for them.
The circulation of Sitchin's book amounted to millions of copies, which were successfully sold. Based on previous research by scholars such as Erich von Danniken and Immanuel Velikovsky, Sitchin formed a triumvirate of pseudo-historians who believe that ancient texts are more than just mythological stories.
All three believed that the ancient Babylonian texts were scientific journals. Instead of portraying the Anunnaki as mythical gods in heaven, these scholars sincerely believed that the deities were foreign. Humans were created to serve extraterrestrial craftsmen who needed the mineral wealth of the Earth to support their civilization.
Refutation of Sitchin's theory
Top scientists and historians completely reject the scientific theories presented by Sitchin and his colleagues. Ancient Babylonian manuscripts are stories written by ancient peoples who tried to explain the world and the phenomena that gave it meaning.
Modern science and human knowledge have advanced long before: scientists can explain floods, astronomical phenomena, the appearance of animals, and many other concepts that were once considered the creations of supernatural gods.
High level of Babylonian development
There is no doubt about it: the ancient Babylonians were more advanced than the modern people. A clay tablet, translated in 2015, proves that astronomers performed extremely accurate mathematical calculations for Jupiter's orbit 1,400 years before Europeans. The Babylonians also created trigonometry 1000 years before the ancient Greeks.
Does this mean that the ancient Sumerians were really visited by aliens who brought them advanced science and math? Did ancient civilizations have access to powerful computers or technological tools to perform complex calculations?
The opinion of historians
Historians claim that ancient people had enough time to perform mathematical calculations and discover the nature of the world. Mathematicians lived mainly in agrarian societies waiting for rain for their crops. At night, they had to observe the sky in detail to predict when the rainy season would begin.
The value of gold
Think for a moment why ancient cultures are obsessed with gold? The Egyptians decorated their pyramids with gold and buried their pharaohs in sumptuous sarcophagi. They believed that the skin of their gods was made of this noble metal.
Gold remains a useful mineral in modern society. It is vital in electronics because it conducts electricity well. Despite the use of technology, up to 78% of the metal is contained in jewelry. It is also a valuable metal in terms of financial investment.
But why is gold valuable as a decoration or a precious metal? This metal is much less common than copper, silver and iron. This could explain why it served as a symbol of status among members of ancient societies.
The ancient people did not know about the electrical properties of gold.
Did the Anunnaki tell them that gold is extremely valuable? Did the heavenly metal gods need power to power their technology? These questions suggest different answers.
OXFORD SCIENTIST WORRIED NASA PROJECT WILL ATTRACT “HOSTILE” ALIENS
OXFORD SCIENTIST WORRIED NASA PROJECT WILL ATTRACT “HOSTILE” ALIENS
IT'S LIKE SENDING "A POSTCARD SAYING 'WISH YOU WERE HERE.'"
GETTY IMAGES/FUTURISM
First Contact
Some scientists are eager to make first contact with extraterrestrial civilizations — if there are even any out there.
Last month, for instance, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published ideas for an updated memo to broadcast to potential aliens, a “binary-coded message” that “has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy,” according to their study.
But not everybody is thrilled about the idea of giving away our galactic location. In fact, some experts believe it’s extremely risky business.
Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), told British newspaper The Telegraph that sending out a message “has such a high impact that you actually need to take it rather seriously.”
Sandberg likened such a message to “a postcard saying ‘Wish you were here.'” Besides, “the poor aliens might already be getting various messages sent for all sorts of reasons,” he told the newspaper.
Wish You Were Here
Sandberg and his colleagues are calling for public discussions before broadcasting our location to any extraterrestrial civilizations that may be listening in.
“These dangers are small, but poorly understood and not yet well managed,” Sandberg’s colleague at the FHI Toby Ord wrote in a 2020 book called “The Precipice” on the topic.
“The main relevant question is the ratio of peaceful to hostile civilizations,” Ord wrote, as quoted by The Telegraph. “We have very little evidence about whether this is high or low, and there is no scientific consensus.”
“Given the downside could be much bigger than the upside, this doesn’t sound to me like a good situation in which to take active steps toward contact,” he argued.
There is only one known intelligent species that exists on Earth and that is Homo Sapiens (modern humans). Is that true? Factually yes, but there are theories stating the presence of other intelligent beings in our solar system and on Earth. The University of Nottingham estimated that in the worst case, there must be at least 30 active extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
But the important question is: Did any of them contact the inhabitants of Earth? There are no official records of them. But verbally a few people who held reputable positions in the government confirmed the extraterrestrial contact and their regular visit to our planet.
In 1837, the Scottish scientist Thomas Dick figured that there are at least 22 billion aliens (while other sources suggested 22 trillion) living on every surface of the Solar system. He had a really big idea: Build “a huge triangle or ellipsis of many miles in extent, in Siberia or any other country for the aliens to see it with unaided eyes. Though it sounds totally absurd but such thoughts help the human consciousness to explore more into the vast space.
Thomas Dick (24 November 1774 – 29 July 1857), was a British church minister, science teacher and writer, known for his works on astronomy and practical philosophy, combining science and Christianity, and arguing for a harmony between the two. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Moreover, there are accounts of locating artificial structures at various places in the solar system. Popularly known as “The Great Moon Hoax” is the story published in The New York Sun in 1835 under the name of the astronomer John Herschel that he had found life on the moon. According to it, Herschel erected a huge telescope in South Africa that magnified celestial bodies up to 42,000 times. When he pointed at the Moon, he saw giant creatures and humans living on it. The story later became the most famous media hoax of all time. But is it?
In a podcast with Lex Fridman, a research scientist and lecturer at MIT, Dr. Nolan expressed his views on UFOs, alien civilizations, crashed materials & possession of UFO materials. [Click here to read the full article]
Fridman asked Dr. Nolan: “How many alien civilizations are there in the universe?” He replied: “Innumerable. I would just be surprised – what a waste of all that space, just for us. What kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space that we’ll never know about, and isn’t that sad, to not know about something so grand.”
Is there any alien civilization in contact with humans?
Contact with intelligent life other than humans is not just a modern conspiracy but it is mentioned in the ancient texts. Sumerians texts likely hint at the “Supernatural Beings” (Anunnaki) that came from heaven. Th is was even highlighted by Former Apollo Astronaut Al Worden. [Click here to read the full article
“We are the aliens, but we just think they are somebody else. But we are the ones who came from somewhere else, because somebody else had to survive, and they got into little spacecraft then they came here and landed, and they started civilization here. And if you don’t believe me, go get books on Ancient Sumerians and see what they had to say. They’ll tell you right up front,” Worden added.
Astronaut Al Worden during Apollo 15 preparatrion
In 2017, the CIA declassified about 12 million pages of records revealing previously unknown details about the program that later became known as the Stargate Project. In the CIA documents, one experiment is described where the most famous medium of this project, Joseph McMoneagle, was offered to take an astral journey to Mars approx. 1 million years B.C in 1984. He did see the civilization that lived on the Red Planet during that time. [Click here to read the full article]
“I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they’re very large. Ah… wearing some kind of strange clothes,” McMoneagle said.
Another story of contact comes from the late CIA pilot John Lear.
Lear talked about a July 1987 incident when an enormous UFO reportedly followed a cargo plane over Anchorage, Alaska, and a 1975 incident when UFOs reportedly hovered over Strategic Air Command bases. Investigative journalist George Knapp asked Lear about the church’s view of UFOs in the interview in “On The Record,” a 30-minute TV show broadcast on KLAS TV in Las Vegas in the late summer of 1987. [Click here to read the full article]
At one point, Lear said: “The problem is not only just the fact that there are five and as many as 10 different civilizations visiting us. Apparently, and this is from the research that I’ve done, at least 90% of them are hostile. And when I say hostile, if not hostile, they have a completely different set of morals than we do.”
John Lear
During his interview with Coast to Coast AM radio program, Lear made some statements that could be hard for anybody to digest. He said that in 1953, a UFO crashed with an extraterrestrial named EBE 3, who helped the US government to build spacecraft with alien technology. Then he said that in 1962, a craft with incredible speed was built to carry passengers and take them to Moon in just 60 minutes. In 1966, NASA had a trip to Mars. What’s more, “humans there were adapted to breathe in the thin atmosphere.”
John Lear also said that NASA astronauts flew to Mars in 1966. Moreover, Lear believed that astronauts had been preparing for this mission especially long. They introduced certain drugs into the body, allowing people to adapt to Martian climatic conditions. Allegedly, those astronauts could breathe rarefied Martian air, so NASA had the opportunity to launch humans on the red planet for a longer time.
There is another case that adds some light on the origin of humans. Alex Collier is one of the famous alien contactees who claimed that for over 30 years, he had been in contact with aliens from the constellation Andromeda. Their contact included multiple visits to aliens’ spaceships and telepathic connections for decades. Many well-known UFO enthusiasts considered Alex to be credible, at least in the sense that he tries to convey as fully as possible the information received from his contacts with the Andromedans. [Click here to read the full article]
Alex Collier said that his first encounter with the Andromedans took place in 1964. Since 1985, he had been in constant and consistent communication with them. In 1993, he began attending seminars where he started sharing the information he received from the aliens with the people. In 1997, he even got a threat from some unknown people who wanted him to stop spreading the information. He took it seriously and did not speak until 2002.
Alien contactee Alex Collier served in military service as a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army
In his last lecture before he retired from the UFO lecture circuit in 2002, Collier said that the ancient alien race known as the “Founders” are responsible for building planets’ environment and make them suitable for life. The Andromedans and the Pleiadians believed that this ancient alien race is called the “Paa Tal.”
He even said that those aliens are capable of removing moons to alter the planet’s position from its sun to control the amount of radiation. Andromedans could reportedly create a solar system.
According to Collier, humans are consist of 22 extraterrestrial races. In his interview in 1994, he said that all human life originated from the constellation Lyra. He said that the aliens from Andromeda were humans in every way. They were 4 to 8 feet tall with white & blue skin. He even talked about the missing children, the coming New World Order, control of dark forces on the world politicians, the existence of Reptilian aliens, our religions, and the history of Earth and our Universe.
Conceding the Collier case, there might be some truth as Former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer said that aliens not only exist but are on Earth among people. He said that there have been four alien species visiting Earth for thousands of years.
Paul Hellyer, who held a high public office in the 1960s during the Cold War, claimed that he had learned for certain about the existence of aliens during his time in the military. According to him, the inhabitants of other planets have visited the Earth for millennia. [Click here to read the full article]
The behavior of extraterrestrials toward humans is divided into both good and bad notions. In Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s case, the aliens are called non-violent whereas Lear called them hostile. It can be possible that humans might be in contact with both friendly & hostile alien civilizations.
Bill Tompkins
William Tompkins (1923-2017), one of the most secretive scientists in the United States, talked about the role of alien intelligence in a secret space program in his book, “Selected by Extraterrestrials: My life in the top-secret world of UFOs, think-tanks and Nordic secretaries.” [Click here to read the full article]
He discussed two different alien species: “Draco,” whose aim was to eliminate humans from Earth, and “Nordics,” who helped the US to kickstart the Apollo program.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
A decade of science and trillions of collisions show the W boson is more massive than expected — a physicist on the team explains what it means for the Standard Model
A decade of science and trillions of collisions show the W boson is more massive than expected — a physicist on the team explains what it means for the Standard Model
It's another challenge for physicists' "theory of everything."
Measuring the mass of W bosons took 10 years — and the result was not what physicists expected. (Image credit: PM Images/Digital Vision via Getty Images)
John Conway, Professor of Physics, University of California, Davis
"You can do it quickly, you can do it cheaply, or you can do it right. We did it right." These were some of the opening remarks from David Toback, leader of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, as he announced the results of a decadelong experiment to measure the mass of a particle called the W boson.
I am a high energy particle physicist, and I am part of the team of hundreds of scientists that built and ran the Collider Detector at Fermilab in Illinois — known as CDF.
The Standard Model of particle physics describes the particles that make up the mass and forces of the universe. (Image credit: MissMJ/WikimediaCommons)
The strong force holds atomic nuclei together. But some nuclei are unstable and undergo radioactive decay, slowly releasing energy by emitting particles. This process is driven by the weak force, and since the early 1900s, physicists sought an explanation for why and how atoms decay.
According to the Standard Model, forces are transmitted by particles. In the 1960s, a series of theoretical and experimental breakthroughs proposed that the weak force is transmitted by particles called W and Z bosons. It also postulated that a third particle, the Higgs boson, is what gives all other particles — including W and Z bosons — mass.
Since the advent of the Standard Model in the 1960s, scientists have been working their way down the list of predicted yet undiscovered particles and measuring their properties. In 1983, two experiments at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, captured the first evidence of the existence of the W boson. It appeared to have the mass of roughly a medium-sized atom such as bromine.
By the 2000s, there was just one piece missing to complete the Standard Model and tie everything together: the Higgs boson. I helped search for the Higgs boson on three successive experiments, and at last we discovered it in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
The Standard Model was complete, and all the measurements we made hung together beautifully with the predictions.
The Collider Detector at Fermilab collected data from trillions of collisions that produced millions of W bosons. (Image credit: Bodhita/WikimediaCommons, CC BY-SA)
Measuring W bosons
Testing the Standard Model is fun — you just smash particles together at very high energies. These collisions briefly produce heavier particles that then decay back into lighter ones. Physicists use huge and very sensitive detectors at places like Fermilab and CERN to measure the properties and interactions of the particles produced in these collisions.
In CDF, W bosons are produced about one out of every 10 million times when a proton and an antiproton collide. Antiprotons are the antimatter version of protons, with exactly the same mass but opposite charge. Protons are made of smaller fundamental particles called quarks, and antiprotons are made of antiquarks. It is the collision between quarks and antiquarks that create W bosons. W bosons decay so fast that they are impossible to measure directly. So physicists track the energy produced from their decay to measure the mass of W bosons.
In the 40 years since scientists first detected evidence of the W boson, successive experiments have attained ever more precise measurements of its mass. But it is only since the measurement of the Higgs boson — since it gives mass to all other particles — that researchers could check the measured mass of W bosons against the mass predicted by the Standard Model. The prediction and the experiments always matched up — until now.
The new measurement of the W boson (red circle) is much farther from the mass predicted by the Standard Model (purple line) and also greater than the preliminary measurement from the experiment. (Image credit: CDF Collaboration via Science Magazine, CC BY)
Unexpectedly heavy
The CDF detector at Fermilab is excellent at accurately measuring W bosons. From 2001 to 2011, the accelerator collided protons with antiprotons trillions of times, producing millions of W bosons and recording as much data as possible from each collision.
The Fermilab team published initial results using a fraction of the data in 2012. We found the mass to be slightly off, but close to the prediction. The team then spent a decade painstakingly analyzing the full data set. The process included numerous internal cross-checks and required years of computer simulations. To avoid any bias creeping into the analysis, nobody could see any results until the full calculation was complete.
When the physics world finally saw the result on April 7, 2022, we were all surprised. Physicists measure elementary particle masses in units of millions of electron volts — shortened to MeV. The W boson’s mass came out to be 80,433 MeV — 70 MeV higher than what the Standard Model predicts it should be. This may seem like a tiny excess, but the measurement is accurate to within 9 MeV. This is a deviation of nearly eight times the margin of error. When my colleagues and I saw the result, our reaction was a resounding "wow!"
What this means for the Standard Model
The fact that the measured mass of the W boson doesn't match the predicted mass within the Standard Model could mean three things. Either the math is wrong, the measurement is wrong or there is something missing from the Standard Model.
First, the math. In order to calculate the W boson's mass, physicists use the mass of the Higgs boson. CERN experiments have allowed physicists to measure the Higgs boson mass to within a quarter-percent. Additionally, theoretical physicists have been working on the W boson mass calculations for decades. While the math is sophisticated, the prediction is solid and not likely to change.
The next possibility is a flaw in the experiment or analysis. Physicists all over the world are already reviewing the result to try to poke holes in it. Additionally, future experiments at CERN may eventually achieve a more precise result that will either confirm or refute the Fermilab mass. But in my opinion, the experiment is as good a measurement as is currently possible.
That leaves the last option: There are unexplained particles or forces causing the upward shift in the W boson's mass. Even before this measurement, some theorists had proposed potential new particles or forces that would result in the observed deviation. In the coming months and years, I expect a raft of new papers seeking to explain the puzzling mass of W bosons.
As a particle physicist, I am confident in saying that there must be more physics waiting to be discovered beyond the Standard Model. If this new result holds up, it will be the latest in a series of findings showing that the Standard Model and real-world measurements often don't quite match. It is these mysteries that give physicists new clues and new reasons to keep searching for fuller understanding of matter, energy, space and time.
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For the second time in days, the sun hurled a large, X-class flare at Earth overnight Tuesday (April 19) and Wednesday (April 20), reportedly causing radio blackouts in Australia, the Western Pacific and eastern Asia. SpaceWeather.com reports 19 flares overall, including five medium-class explosions.
There's likely more action in store, too. Imagery from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the large sunspot group AR2993-94, ready to rotate into firing range of Earth. "The fusillade is likely to continue," SpaceWeather.com said of the solar activity.
But for now, it's the X-class flare that has everyone's attention. Generated from sunspot AR2992, we didn't get the full brunt of the storm as the sunspot was on the extreme edge of the sun during the eruption.
A cluster of sunspots on the sun April 20, 2022, imaged after the sun hurled a strong X-class flare towards Earth. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)
There's a chance, however, that coronal mass ejections (CME) of charged particles will from the same site could follow. If a CME happens, auroras might be on the way soon, although scientists aren't sure yet whether Earth would be in the path of the plasma.
Solar flares have several flavors to them. By category, A-class are weakest and X-class is strongest, with B-, C-, and M-class falling in between in order of strength. With each category, flares are measured by size, with smaller numbers representing smaller flares in that size class. The largest of the overnight flare set was rated X2.2, according to SpaceWeather.
While flares are short outbursts, CMEs can shoot out clumps of charged particles. If the CME is pointed towards Earth, that could cause auroras, the stunning light shows caused by charged particles hitting Earth's atmosphere. Some circumstantial evidence suggests that is happening already.
"Shortly after the flare, the US Air Force reported a Type II solar radio burst," SpaceWeather.com explained. "Type II radio bursts are caused by shock waves in the leading edges of CMEs, and this could be a big one."
The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the active sun on April 20, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)
The Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that the flare occurred at 11:57 p.m. EDT Tuesday (0357 GMT Wednesday) and was accompanied by the Type II outburst.
Scientists will use data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft operated by NASA and its European counterpart, to monitor for any CME. But the NOAA officials played down the possibility of auroras, given that the originating sunspot was on the extreme edge of the sun.
"As the source region of the flare was beyond the southwest limb, initial analysis suggests any CME is unlikely to have an Earth-directed component," NOAA stated.
NASA has not provided a detailed forecast yet on the websites for the two spacecraft, nor on social media. "Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts," NASA officials wrote in a recent statement.
The sun appears to be waking up in its newest 11-year cycle of solar activity, which began in 2019 and is predicted to peak in 2025. Early in the cycle, scientists forecast that overall the cycle will be quieter than usual given fewer sunspots.
NASA is among a group of space agencies watching the sun from space and on Earth to generate solar weather predictions. CMEs are usually harmless, creating auroras as charged particles hit the magnetic lines of Earth. The most powerful storms, however, may create issues with infrastructure such as satellites or power lines.
Astronomers Discover Micronovae: A New Kind of Thermonuclear Stellar Explosion
Astronomers Discover Micronovae: A New Kind of Thermonuclear Stellar Explosion
ByEUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY (ESO)
A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion — a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza of stellar material in only a few hours.
“We have discovered and identified for the first time what we are calling a micronova,” explains Simone Scaringi, an astronomer at Durham University in the UK who led the study on these explosions published today in Nature. “The phenomenon challenges our understanding of how thermonuclear explosions in stars occur. We thought we knew this, but this discovery proposes a totally new way to achieve them,” he adds.
Astronomers have discovered a new type of explosion occurring on white dwarf stars in two-star systems. This video summarizes the discovery.
Micronovae are extremely powerful events, but are small on astronomical scales; they are much less energetic than the stellar explosions known as novae, which astronomers have known about for centuries. Both types of explosions occur on white dwarfs, dead stars with a mass about that of our Sun, but as small as Earth.
A white dwarf in a two-star system can steal material, mostly hydrogen, from its companion star if they are close enough together. As this gas falls onto the very hot surface of the white dwarf star, it triggers the hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium explosively. In novae, these thermonuclear explosions occur over the entire stellar surface. “Such detonations make the entire surface of the white dwarf burn and shine brightly for several weeks,” explains co-author Nathalie Degenaar, an astronomer at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
This artist’s impression shows a two-star system where micronovae may occur. The blue disc swirling around the bright white dwarf in the centre of the image is made up of material, mostly hydrogen, stolen from its companion star. Towards the centre of the disc, the white dwarf uses its strong magnetic fields to funnel the hydrogen towards its poles. As the material falls on the hot surface of the star, it triggers a micronova explosion, contained by the magnetic fields at one of the white dwarf’s poles.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser, L. Calçada
Micronovae are similar explosions that are smaller in scale and faster, lasting just several hours. They occur on some white dwarfs with strong magnetic fields, which funnel material towards the star’s magnetic poles. “For the first time, we have now seen that hydrogen fusion can also happen in a localized way. The hydrogen fuel can be contained at the base of the magnetic poles of some white dwarfs, so that fusion only happens at these magnetic poles,” says Paul Groot, an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands and co-author of the study.
“This leads to micro-fusion bombs going off, which have about one millionth of the strength of a nova explosion, hence the name micronova,” Groot continues. Although ‘micro’ may imply these events are small, do not be mistaken: just one of these outbursts can burn through about 20,000,000 trillion kg, or about 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza, of material.[1]
This artist’s impression shows a two-star system, with a white dwarf (in the foreground) and a companion star (in the background), where micronovae may occur. The white dwarf steals materials from its companion, which is funneled towards its poles. As the material falls on the hot surface of the white dwarf, it triggers a micronova explosion, contained at one of the star’s poles.
Credit: Mark Garlick
These new micronovae challenge astronomers’ understanding of stellar explosions and may be more abundant than previously thought. “It just goes to show how dynamic the Universe is. These events may actually be quite common, but because they are so fast they are difficult to catch in action,” Scaringi explains.
The team first came across these mysterious micro-explosions when analyzing data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). “Looking through astronomical data collected by NASA’s TESS, we discovered something unusual: a bright flash of optical light lasting for a few hours. Searching further, we found several similar signals,” says Degenaar.
This video shows an animation of a micronova explosion. The blue disc swirling around the bright white dwarf in the center of the image is made up of material, mostly hydrogen, stolen from its companion star. Towards the center of the disc, the white dwarf uses its strong magnetic fields to funnel the hydrogen towards its poles. As the material falls on the hot surface of the star, it triggers a micronova explosion, contained by the magnetic fields at one of the white dwarf’s poles.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser
The team observed three micronovae with TESS: two were from known white dwarfs, but the third required further observations with the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s VLT to confirm its white dwarf status.
“With help from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, we found that all these optical flashes were produced by white dwarfs,” says Degenaar. “This observation was crucial in interpreting our result and for the discovery of micronovae,” Scaringi adds.
This artist’s animation shows a two-star system where one of the components is a normal star and the other is a white dwarf, which appears surrounded by a disc of gas and dust. A white dwarf in a two-star system can steal material, mostly hydrogen, from its companion star if they are close enough together.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
The discovery of micronovae adds to the repertoire of known stellar explosions. The team now want to capture more of these elusive events, requiring large scale surveys and quick follow-up measurements. “Rapid response from telescopes such as the VLT or ESO’s New Technology Telescope and the suite of available instruments will allow us to unravel in more detail what these mysterious micronovae are,” Scaringi concludes.
Reference: “Localized thermonuclear bursts from accreting magnetic white dwarfs” by S. Scaringi, P. J. Groot, C. Knigge, A. J. Bird, E. Breedt, D. A. H. Buckley, Y. Cavecchi, N. D. Degenaar, D. de Martino, C. Done, M. Fratta, K. Iłkiewicz, E. Koerding, J.-P. Lasota, C. Littlefield, C. F. Manara, M. O’Brien, P. Szkody and F. X. Timmes, 20 April 2022, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04495-6
Notes
We use trillion to mean a million million (1,000,000,000,000 or 1012) and billion to mean a thousand million (1,000,000,000 or 109). The weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo, Egypt (also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or Pyramid of Cheops) is about 5,900,000,000 kg.
More information
This research was presented in a paper title “Localised thermonuclear bursts from accreting magnetic white dwarfs” to appear in Nature. A follow-up letter, titled “Triggering micronovae through magnetically confined accretion flows in accreting white dwarfs” has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team on the Nature paper is composed of S. Scaringi (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, UK [CEA]), P. J. Groot (Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University, N?megen,the Netherlands [IMAPP] and South African Astronomical Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa [SAAO] and Department of Astronomy, University of Cape Town, South Africa [Cape Town]), C. Knigge (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK [Southampton]), A.J. Bird (Southampton) , E. Breedt (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK), D. A. H. Buckley (SAAO, Cape Town, Department of Physics, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa), Y. Cavecchi (Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México), N. D. Degenaar (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands), D. de Martino (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy), C. Done (CEA), M. Fratta (CEA), K. Ilkiewicz (CEA), E. Koerding (IMAPP), J.-P. Lasota (Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland and Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS et Sorbonne Universités, Paris, France), C. Littlefield (Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, USA and Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, USA [UW]), C. F. Manara (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany [ESO]), M. O’Brien (CEA), P. Szkody (UW), F. X. Timmes (School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Arizona, USA, Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics – Center for the Evolution of the Elements, USA).
A photo of a lunar crater, measuring about 600 feet (185 meters) across, captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State Universit)
When NASA sent humans to the moon in 1969, one of the many hazards the agency had to anticipate was space rocks penetrating astronauts' spacesuits or equipment. Unlike Earth, which has a protective atmosphere in which meteoroids usually disintegrate, the moon is vulnerable to whatever rocks, or even specks, are whizzing around in space.
Thankfully, the astronauts weren't in too much danger, according to Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. "The odds of an astronaut being hit by a millimeter-sized object is like 1 in 1 million per hour per person," Cooke told Live Science. (A millimeter is the largest a meteoroid has to be to penetrate an astronaut's spacesuit.)
NASA is preparing to send humans back to the moon by 2025 and someday establish a base either orbiting the moon or on its surface, so it's more important than ever to understand the frequency with which our natural satellite experiences an impact.
So how many objects hit the moon every day? What about every year?
The answer depends on the size of the object, Cooke said. NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office studies the space environment around Earth and the moon to understand the flux of meteoroids (space rocks ranging in size from dust to small asteroids about 3 feet, or 1 meter, across), so Cooke is very familiar with what's hitting the moon every day.
For impactors smaller than a millimeter, the number cannot be precisely quantified, but Cooke estimates that 11 to 1,100 tons (10 to 1,000 metric tons) — the mass of about 5.5 cars — of dust collide with the moon per day. For larger rocks, the estimates are clearer.
"There are about 100 pingpong-ball-sized meteoroids hitting the moon per day," Cooke said. That adds up to roughly 33,000 meteoroids per year. Despite their small size, each of these pingpong-ball-size rocks impacts the surface with the force of 7 pounds (3.2 kilograms) of dynamite.
Larger meteoroids hit the moon, too, but less often. Cooke estimates that larger meteoroids, such as ones 8 feet (2.5 meters) across, slam into the moon about every four years. Those objects hit the moon with the force of a kiloton, or 1,000 tons (900 metric tons) of TNT. The moon is about 4.5 billion years old, so it's no wonder its surface is pockmarked with all kinds of craters from these impacts.
Scientists study lunar impacts in a couple of different ways. From Earth's surface, scientists point telescopes toward the moon to observe impacts. Meteoroids can hit the surface at speeds of 45,000 to 160,000 mph (20 to 72 kilometers per second), according to NASA; the impact produces a flash of light that can be observed from Earth.
Scientists can also use spacecraft orbiting the moon itself, such as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), to observe the craters left behind by impacts. Because meteoroids move so fast, even an 11-pound (5 kilograms) meteoroid can leave behind a crater 30 feet (9 m) across and hurl 165,000 pounds (75,000 kg) of lunar soil and rocks from the moon's surface, according to NASA. The LRO can easily spot these craters after they form.
Although the moon experiences many impacts per year, that doesn't necessarily preclude a human presence. Considering the moon's surface area is about 14.6 million square miles (38 million square kilometers), "if you pick a square kilometer patch of ground, it will be hit by one of those pingpong-sized meteoroids once every thousand years or so," Cooke said.
So, the odds are good for our future lunar explorers and their spacecraft.
Mahabharata and Ramayana - The War of the Gods with the People?!
Mahabharata and Ramayana - The War of the Gods with the People?!
Mahabharata and Ramayana - The War of the Gods with the People ?! One of the most important questions that humanity has been trying to answer for decades refers to the distant past, was the Earth visited by extraterrestrial entities, or simply there were mysterious earthly civilizations that reached an incredible degree of development. ?
To answer this question, we need to take a look back at the darkest corners of history, which often hide impressive truths about life on Earth over 10,000 years ago. Mahabharata and Ramayana are the books that seem to outline the perfect picture of some mysterious civilizations that lived on our planet many years ago. These two ancient books are also known as the first epics in human history. They are written in Sanskrit and contain over 100,000 verses, divided into 18 chapters. Specialists who have studied them claim that these two enigmatic books are more than a historical narrative, that is, a combination of facts and myths from the ancient world. An interesting passage describes in great detail how over 12,000 years ago, the Earth was inhabited by an extremely advanced civilization from all points of view. For reasons unknown, or perhaps not mentioned in the Mahabharata passage, a large-scale nuclear war has broken out. Historian Kisari Ganguli claims that this story is very real and that it is, in fact, a description of the first nuclear explosion that took place over 12,000 years ago. Also in the verses of the Mahabharata it is related how an airplane or an ancient aircraft launched a projectile, loaded with all the power of the Universe, on two races or civilizations on Earth. No such power had ever been seen before, and the two races had disappeared altogether. The bodies were burned to such an extent that no one could recognize them.
The oldest Indian civilization appeared in the Indus Basin in the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. The most significant discoveries related to this culture were made in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, ancient cities located in what is now Pakistan. In the 1950s, English General Cunningham, examining the ruins near the village of Harappa, found a seal with unknown letters. However, excavations began here only in the 1920s. The culture of the newly discovered civilization was called the Harappan or Mohenjo-Daro culture.
The Harappan settlements were located in a vast area: to the east, about as far as Delhi, to the south - to the shores of the Arabian Sea. The Harappan civilization is believed to have existed from the middle of the third century to the middle of the second millennium BC. The high level of development of civilization is highlighted by the strict planning of cities, the presence of writing and works of art. Language and writing have not yet been deciphered, although many stamps with inscriptions have already been found.
Excavations in the Punjab in the 1920s by John Marshall ushered the world into a civilization that can be dated from 2500 to 2000 BC. The main fortress cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa have brought us the main elements of this protohistoric civilization. Both cities were probably the capitals of the empire. A strong and advanced civilization would have flourished if not for a catastrophe that happened suddenly.
Who led it and what served as a prototype for the events of the Mahabharata? What other secrets does India keep? Among the legends of many countries there are references to a certain higher, heavenly weapon. Moreover, a weapon so powerful that, for the first time, a parallel between it and an atomic bomb was drawn by Professor Robert Oppenheimer, when, amazed by what he saw during the nuclear tests, he read aloud an excerpt. from the Mahabharata about a light brighter than a thousand suns.
Dronaparva, one of the Mahabharata books, tells of a battle during which shell explosions, similar to huge fireballs, take place. It also describes the appearance of a cloud of fungi characteristic of a thermonuclear explosion. It is compared to the opening of a huge shadow. After these explosions, the food became poisoned, the survivors became ill.
The Mahabharata provides detailed and highly realistic descriptions of the construction of missiles, aircraft and other devices. The most detailed story is about the old aircraft - the vimanas. Ramayana recounts what the god Rama and his wife Sita saw from above during a flight from Sri Lanka to India. At the same time, the author provides such details that can only be seen from a great height. And the ancient aircraft itself is characterized by incredibly high speed, fully controllable, with rooms with windows and comfortable seats.
Almost half a century has passed since humanity sent the legendary Arecibo message and scientists have created a brand new updated version. But is it a good idea?
The newly proposed “A Beacon in the Galaxy”, a binary message created by scientists as an update to the old Arecibo message, might actually be more dangerous for us than beneficial. It includes key information about us – our location, our DNA structure, and even an image of the naked human body.
Should we give aliens such vital details about Earth and humanity? This question has been around for ages and countless renowned scientists have expressed their concerns in the past. Even Stephen Hawking explained that a hypothetical alien civilization could be hostile.
Is the Beacon in the Galaxy better than the Arecibo message?
While the old radio signal included important information about Earth and humanity, it was more like a postcard with difficult-to-understand images. The new “Beacon in the Galaxy” message was created like a presentation with complex illustrations and explanations.
The old Arecibo message. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
New universal concept
Scientists believe that complex mathematics might be unrecognizable for any potential alien intelligence while binary has a better chance to be universal. It is the simplest form because it involves simple oppositions – zero/one, yes/no, etc. Therefore, scientists assume that there is a bigger chance that aliens would understand this simple binary code.
Introducing binary and decimal systems
The new message starts with a slide that introduces binary and decimal systems, as well as prime numbers and the largest known prime number.
The opening “slide” of the Beacon in the Galaxy message proposed by scientists. Credit: Jonathan H. Jiang et al. Arxiv
Particle Physics, DNA Structure, Solar System
Scientists wanted to include all the vital information about Earth and humanity in the smallest possible message. After the introduction of binary in the opening slide, they introduced the main laws of particle physics, the structure of our DNA, as well as the Solar System, and our planet in it.
A quick introduction into particle physics.
Credit: J. H. Jiang et al., 2022
Another slide shows the structure of our DNA.
Credit: J. H. Jiang et al., 2022
Location in the Milky Way and an Invitation to aliens
Scientists used globular clusters in the Milky Way that should be known to hypothetical alien astronomers to pinpoint our location in the galaxy. They also included an invitation to anyone that may find the “Beacon in the Galaxy” message to send one back to us.
The Solar System and our location. Credit: J.H. Jiang et al., 2022
How can this message be sent into space?
The team of scientists hopes to use one of two telescopes – the Allen Telescope Array in California or the FAST Telescope in China. This is mainly because these are the two telescopes that SETI researchers use in their work while most other observatories tend to close their doors to this type of work. The other issue, for now, is that both of these observatories can only search for signals and not yet send such into space.
The new FAST telescope in China, which could be used to send the Beacon in the Galaxy. Credit: FAST
Where will the new message be sent to?
Assuming that the new message gets approved, it will be sent towards a concentric ring that is about 13,000 light-years away from the center of the Milky Way. Scientists noted that it is impossible to guess the right direction for the radio signal. So, they picked a target that has attracted the attention of SETI researchers in the past. Previous studies suggested that if alien life exists somewhere in our galaxy, it would be near the galactic center.
Is there any point in sending more messages to the aliens?
Obviously, we have not received an answer to the Arecibo message which was sent out in 1974 and there is no surprise here. Estimations suggest that if we send the Beacon in the Galaxy, it could take 50,000 years before we get a hypothetical answer. In truth, experts hope to find signs of alien life using other more advanced and quicker methods.
Map of the landmasses on Earth. Credit: J. H. Jiang et al., 2022
Could such a message be dangerous for humanity?
How can we know if hypothetical alien civilizations would be peaceful or hostile? This argument has been around for decades since before the original Arecibo Message. What if send key information about humanity such as our location and technological level and the extraterrestrial intelligence that intercepts it wants war. My imagination can come up with various scenarios in which such a message could have a devastating result but what do you think?
A slide in the Beacon of the Galaxy showing the appearance of humans as well as the double helix structure. Credit: J. H. Jiang et al., 2022
Perhaps alien civilizations already know about us?
Messages like Arecibo and Beacon in the Galaxy are just a couple of examples and scientists have sent multiple other signals into space in the past. Moreover, we have practically been broadcasting our existence ever since humanity started transmitting radio waves. In other words, alien intelligence can notice us even without such messages. If alien astronomers use the same or at least similar techniques to detect technosignatures and biosignatures, they would have already found us by now.
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Sources:
Hood, A. L. (2022, March 31). NASA scientist creates new message for aliens, including human DNA. Futurism.
Jiang, J. H., Li, H., Chong, M., Jin, Q., Rosen, P. E., Jiang, X., Fahy, K. A., Taylor, S. F., Kong, Z., Hah, J., & Zhu, Z.-H. (2022, March 24). A beacon in the galaxy: Updated arecibo message for potential fast and SETI Projects. arXiv.org.
Oberhaus, D. (2022, March 30). Researchers made a new message for extraterrestrials. Scientific American.
Williams, M. (2022, March 29). Astronomers come up with a new message to let the aliens know we’re here. Universe Today.
The bright supernova SN 2018gv explodes in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525 in this Hubble Space Telescope image.
NASA, ESA, A. Riess and the SH0ES team
In the year 1054, a new star appeared in the constellation Taurus. The faint speck of light brightened rapidly, soon outshining other imposing stars in the northern sky. In a matter of days, the star’s brightness peaked. It stayed visible for weeks, even during the day, before it started to dim and slowly fade into nothingness.
The baffling star that embellished the sky in 1054 was in fact a supernova, just one of many transient sources appearing in the sky — that is, objects related to events that occur on short timescales, often changing visibly from night to night. Taking many forms and colors, some transients originate in the Milky Way, while others are objects exploding in galaxies far away.
The interest in transients has never been greater. Many surveys of the sky are discovering new sources at unprecedented rates. In 2019, astronomers reported about 20,000 newly discovered transient objects at visible wavelengths, about 100 times greater than a decade prior.
This firehose of data has the potential to transform astronomy and provide insight into subjects ranging from dark energy and dark matter to the evolution of our solar system. But it also presents unique challenges — how to make sense of the data, and how to follow up on it.
When a trickle becomes a flood
Surveys find transients by imaging the same parts of the sky with a certain cadence. A sequence of images reveals new sources and their change in brightness over time. Such information is not always enough to classify a transient. For that, one would need to obtain a spectrum of the transient, and perhaps even observe it at infrared, X-rays, or radio wavelengths.
However, the era when astronomers could follow up on every object that came along has already gone away — there are now simply too many being found. “We’re already for many years in a regime when you have to make choices [about] what you classify spectroscopically and what you don’t, and that depends on science,” says Daniel Perley, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K. It is telling that the community obtained the spectra for only about 10 percent of transients discovered in 2019.
Perley’s goal is to take stock of the bright transient population detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which has been one of the most productive transient surveys since it began operating in 2018, spotting supernovae and fast-moving asteroids alike. By limiting the study to the brightest sources, it is feasible to take useful spectra of every object in the survey and learn, for example, how many supernovae of a certain spectral type explode in the universe.
Scientists interested in particular types of transients, like those exhibiting an especially red or blue color, have to take a different approach. For them, the initial limited amount of information determines whether a transient merits a long follow-up observation campaign. Their decision to use additional resources on a transient is based on experience, yet it always carries a bit of risk — you don’t really know a transient until you take that additional observation.
The Vera Rubin Observatory will see more than 40 times the area of the full moon. The large field of view combined with a large 8-meter mirror make the observatory a powerful machine for finding transients.
Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
Searching for anomalies
That experience from ZTF and other transient facilities will come in handy once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile comes online in a few years. “The Rubin Observatory is going to increase the discovery rate by two orders of magnitude, from 10,000 per year to a million new supernovae and transients per year,” says Ashley Villar, an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. “This is a breaking point for our field.”
The flood of transients discovered by the Rubin Observatory will include specimens that current surveys rarely find, such as very distant supernovae or very faint supernovae exploding in nearby galaxies. Scientists expect that the observatory will also discover completely new types of transients.
According to expectations, less than 0.1 percent of all transients discovered by the Rubin Observatory will get extra attention. Developing reliable techniques to recognize interesting transients in the clutter is therefore of paramount importance.
Villar plans to use a neural network, a type of machine learning, to search the data for anomalous transients with unanticipated properties. But she expects researchers will employ a wide variety of strategies to work with such massive datasets. “Some people will lean towards totally automated queue systems that just rank targets, look at their observability, and make some intelligent choice,” says Villar. “Others will want to have humans in the loops, looking at the data, asking simple questions, and deciding from there.”
Some transients emit light at different wavelengths. This timeline shows the observations of the neutron star merger GW170817. The merger emitted gravitational waves, followed by light spanning the electromagnetic spectrum
Abbott et al. (2017)
Some kinds of transients stand out based on the wavelengths of radiation they they emit — which can range from gamma rays to radio waves — and how their brightness changes over time. That means that searches tailored towards these particular kinds of transients can avoid the classification and follow-up problems encountered in searches at optical wavelengths.
For instance, fast radio bursts — immensely powerful blasts of radio waves possibly caused by flaring magnetars — are immediately distinguishable. “You can already tell from the first discovery that it’s a fast radio burst, approximately how far away it’s coming from, and its energetics,” says Emily Petroff, a radio astronomer at the University of Amsterdam.
Avoiding interference
While the transient field is flourishing, a threat looms on the horizon: the rise of light pollution across the electromagnetic spectrum. For instance, radio telescopes searching for transients are sensitive to emissions from phones, cars, airplanes, and various kinds of satellites. And the problem is getting worse. “We’re constantly playing the game of cat and mouse with new sources of interference that we’re finding at our telescope sites,” says Petroff.
So far, optical astronomers have been able to escape the pollution by observing from remote and dark oases. However, the recent upsurge in bright commercial satellites — like SpaceX’s Starlink constellation — is already disturbing observations. The anticipated fleet of satellites, which numbers in the tens of thousands, profoundly worries the community. The Rubin Observatory, in particular, has been developing a multi-pronged approach to mitigate its impact, working with SpaceX to reduce the reflectivity of its satellites and also developing algorithms to remove satellite trails from images.
It is easy enough to point a telescope at the sky. But to make sense of all the blinking lights, both cosmic and artificial, astronomers are adapting and developing clever techniques. And it is worth it, because one of those lights could turn out to be something unlike anything we have seen before.
Imagine standing on Mars, and seeing this with your own eyes.
The Perseverance rover watched as the potato-shaped moon Phobos passed in front of the Sun, from the vantage point of Jezero Crater on Mars. Perseverance used its high-resolution Mastcam-Z camera system to shoot video of Phobos, and NASA says the result is the most zoomed-in, highest frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface.
The stunning eclipse took place on April 2, 2022 (Earth date, of course) and the eclipse lasted a little over 40 seconds. That means this video is very close to what Perseverance witnessed in real time. The time it takes for Phobos eclipse the Sun is much less time than a typical solar eclipse involving Earth’s Moon, since Phobos is about 157 times smaller than our own Moon. The Mastcam-Z has special solar filters that allow it to stare directly at the Sun. The video is of such high resolution, that even sunspots are visible on the Sun.
Scientists say that each time these eclipses are observed, it allow them to measure subtle shifts in Phobos’ orbit over time. The moon’s tidal forces pull on the deep interior of the Red Planet, as well as its crust and mantle, and so studying how much Phobos shifts over time reveals something about how resistant the crust and mantle are, and thus what kinds of materials they’re made of.
In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled “Ninth Planet” (or “Planet X”) while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of this body had been predicted previously based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. After receiving more than 1,000 suggestions from around the world, and a debate among the Observatory’s staff, this newfound object was named Pluto – which was proposed by a young schoolgirl from Oxford (Venetia Burney).
Since that time, Pluto has been the subject of considerable study, a naming controversy, and was visited for the first time on January 1st, 2019, by the New Horizons mission. One thing that has been clear from the beginning is the nature of Pluto’s orbit, which is highly eccentric and inclined. According to new research, Pluto’s orbit is relatively stable over longer timescales but is subject to chaotic perturbance and changes over shorter timescales.
Pluto and its cohorts in the icy-asteroid-rich Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune. Credit: NASA
To break it down, Pluto’s orbit is radically different from those of the planets, which follow nearly circular orbits around the Sun close to its equator, projected outward (aka. the ecliptic). In contrast, it takes 248 years for Pluto to complete a single orbit around the Sun and follows a highly-elliptical orbit that is inclined 17° to the Solar System’s ecliptic plane. The eccentric nature of its orbit also means that Pluto spends 20 years during each period orbiting closer to the Sun than Neptune.
The nature of Pluto’s orbit is an enduring mystery and something that astronomers became aware of very shortly after it was discovered. Since then, multiple efforts have been made to simulate the past and future of its orbit, which revealed a surprising property that protects Pluto from colliding with Neptune. As Dr. Malhotra told Universe Today via email, this is the orbital resonance condition known as a “mean motion resonance”:
“This condition ensures that at the time that Pluto is at the same heliocentric distance as Neptune, its longitude is nearly 90 degrees away from Neptune’s. Later another peculiar property of Pluto’s orbit was discovered: Pluto comes to perihelion at a location well above the plane of Neptune’s orbit; this is a different type of orbital resonance known as the ‘vZLK oscillation.’”
This abbreviation refers to von Zeipel, Lidov, and Kozai, who studied this phenomenon as part of the “three-body problem.” This problem consists of taking the initial positions and velocities of three massive objects (since extended to include particles) and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and his Theory of Universal Gravitation – for which there is no general solution. As Dr. Malhotra added:
“In the late-1980s, with the availability of more powerful computers, numerical simulations revealed a third peculiar property, that Pluto’s orbit is technically chaotic, that is, small deviations of initial conditions lead to exponential divergence of the orbital solutions over tens of millions of years. However, this chaos is limited. It has been found in numerical simulations that the two special properties of Pluto’s orbit mentioned above persist over gigayear timescales, making its orbit remarkably stable, despite the chaos indicators.”
Comparison between the eight largest TNOs with Earth (all to scale).
Credit: NASA/Lexicon
For their study, Malhotra and Ito conducted numerical simulations of Pluto’s orbit for up to five billion years into the future of the Solar System.
In particular, they hoped to address unresolved questions about the peculiar orbits of Pluto and other Pluto-sized objects (aka. Plutinos). These questions have been addressed by research conducted during the past few decades, such as “planet migration theory,” but have only to a point. In particular, they hoped to address unresolved questions about the peculiar orbits of Pluto and other Pluto-sized objects (aka. Plutinos). In the past few decades, astronomers have attempted to address these questions with new theories (such as “planet migration theory”) but were met with limited success.
In this hypothesis, Pluto was pulled into its current mean motion resonance by Neptune, which migrated during the Solar System’s early history. A major prediction of this theory is that other Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) would share the same resonance condition, which has since been verified with the discovery of large numbers of Plutinos. This discovery has also led to the more widespread acceptance of planet migration theory. But as Dr. Malhotra explained:
“Pluto’s orbital inclination is closely linked to its vZLK oscillation. So we reasoned that if we could understand better the conditions for Pluto’s vZLK oscillation, perhaps we could solve the mystery of its inclination. We started by investigating the individual role of the other giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus) on Pluto’s orbit.”
To do this, Dr. Malhotra and Ito ran computer simulations where they simulated the orbital evolution of Pluto for up to 5 billion years that included eight different combinations of giant planet perturbation. These N-body simulations included interactions with:
Neptune (—NP)
Uranus and Neptune (–UNP)
Saturn and Neptune (-S-NP)
Jupiter and Neptune (J–NP)
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (-SUNP)
Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune (J-UNP)
Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune (JS-NP)
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (JSUNP)
New Horizons trajectory and the orbits of Pluto and 2014 MU69.
“We found no subsets of the inner three giant planets would do to recover Pluto’s vZLK oscillation; all three – Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus – were necessary,” said Dr. Malhotra. “But what is it about these planets that [are] essential to Pluto’s vZLK oscillation?” Dr. Malhotra added. “There are 21 parameters needed to represent the gravitational forces of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus on Pluto. This is a prohibitively large parameter space to explore.”
To simplify these calculations, Dr. Malhotra and Ito collapsed these into a single parameter by introducing some simplifications. This included representing each planet with a circular ring of uniform density, a total mass equal to the planet’s, and a ring radius equal to the planet’s average distance from the Sun (aka. semimajor axis). As Dr. Malhotra indicated, this yielded a single parameter representing the effect of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (J2), which was equivalent to the effect of an “oblate Sun.”
“[W]e discovered a fortuitous arrangement of the masses and orbits of the giant planets that delineates a narrow range in the J2 parameter in which Pluto’s vZLK oscillation is possible, a kind of ‘Goldilock’s zone,’” she said. “This result indicates that, during the planet migration era in [the] Solar System’s history, the conditions for Trans-Neptunian objects changed in such a way as to promote many of them – including Pluto – into the vZLK oscillation state. It is likely that Pluto’s inclination originated during this dynamical evolution.”
These results are likely to have significant implications for future studies of the outer Solar System and its orbital dynamics. With further study, Dr. Malhotra believes that astronomers will learn more about the migration history of the giant planets and how they eventually settled into their current orbits. It could also lead to the discovery of a novel dynamical mechanism that will explain the origins of Pluto’s orbit and other bodies with high orbital inclinations.
This will be especially useful to astronomers dedicated to the study of Solar System dynamics. As Dr. Malhorta noted, researchers in this field were beginning to suspect that evidence that might shed light on Pluto’s orbital evolution might have been erased by the instabilities and chaotic nature of these same orbital mechanics. As Dr. Malhotra summarized:
“I think that our work raises new hope for making connection between present-day solar system dynamics and historical solar system dynamics. The origin of the orbital inclinations of minor planets throughout the solar system – including the TNOs – presents a major unsolved problem; perhaps our work will stimulate more attention to it.
“Another point that our study underscores is the value of simple(r) approximations for a complicated problem: i.e., collapsing 21 parameters into a single parameter opened the door to getting at the essential dynamical mechanisms affecting the very interesting but difficult-to-understand orbital dynamics of Pluto and Plutinos.”
The Bob Lazar Lost Tapes! Exclusive World Exclusive! Buckle Up!
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Almost 30 Years Later, Audio Tapes NEVER BEFORE Heard, UNTIL NOW! Michael Schratt shares Incredible Historical Evidence Exclusively to Thirdphaseofmoon!
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
