The 2-billion-year-old nuclear reactors in Africa baffle researchers!

BY AVIS LEE

In 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi and a team of workers built what they thought was the first nuclear reactor in a Chicago racket ball court. Unfortunately, nature had beaten them to the punch — by eons.

Truth be told, self-sustaining nuclear power reactor was invented in Africa, 2 billion years ago! It’s a 100-kilowatt nuclear plant that produced pulses of power every three hours for a period of about 150,000 years.

Contents  ▴ 

I. The discovery of the prehistoric Oklo nuclear plant

II. The advanced process self-sustaining fission

III. It needs the pure natural water

IV. The radioactive rock samples

V. The incredible hypotheses

The discovery of the prehistoric Oklo nuclear plant

On June 2, 1972, a French nuclear fuel reprocessing plant discovered that 200 kg of uranium from a uranium mine in the Oklo region of Gabon Republic had been refined. Fearing that someone (or a secret organization) would build a nuclear bomb, the French Atomic Energy Commission immediately opened an investigation.

Finally, researchers and scientists from all over the world, after conducting detailed investigation, came to the conclusion that, six large nuclear reactors as old as 2 billion years old are located near Gabon’s uranium mine, and has been active for at least 150,000 years!

The advanced process self-sustaining fission

The ancient nuclear reactors use surface water and groundwater to modulate and reflect sequenced fission neutrons, its operation is much more advanced than that of modern nuclear reactors. Moreover, scientists found geological evidence that uranium in lens-shaped veins of uranium ore had undergone self-sustaining fission chain reactions, generating intense heat.

In this process, subatomic neutrons released by radioactive decay of uranium atoms induce decay of other uranium atoms, leading to a cascade of nuclear fission and substantial release of energy as heat. This is what modern nuclear reactors use to produce power.

The puzzle, however, is why the Oklo reactors didn’t plunge straight into a runaway chain reaction, leading to meltdown of the veins or even to an explosion. In nuclear plants the reaction is kept under control by using ‘moderators’. These are substances that either slow down the chain reaction by absorbing some of the fission neutrons or encourage it by adjusting the neutron energies.

It needs the pure natural water

Former head of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Nobel laureate Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg points out: For uranium to continue to “burn”, all conditions must be completely free of bias. The water involved in the nuclear reaction must be very pure, a few parts per million of pollutants will create a “toxic” reaction that causes the reactor to stop working. Nowhere in the world is there such pure natural water.

The radioactive rock samples

In April 2018, two rock samples recovered during drilling campaigns in Oklo were donated to the Vienna Natural History Museum. The donation (and ceremony) was made possible with funding from nuclear fuel company Orano and France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The French Permanent Mission to the UN in Vienna supported the effort.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which helped monitor radioactivity levels and handling of those samples, the two samples emit a radiation of about 40 microsieverts per hour “if you stand 5 centimetres away from them, which roughly compares to the amount of cosmic radiation a passenger would receive on an eight-hour flight from Vienna to New York.”

The incredible hypotheses

The Oklo nuclear reactor in Gabon has been operating for 1500,00 years. How to produce water of such high purity has become another unsolved mystery. The rationality of the structural design of prehistoric nuclear reactors is absolutely baffling to experts.

Some scientists and theorists believe that the reactor is extremely advanced, suggesting that highly intelligent beings existed 2 billion years ago. While another hypothesis is that it was constructed by prehistoric human civilization (like described in the Silurian Hypothesis by NASA scientists) using techniques that were lost to subsequent humans.

However, most of the mainstream researchers believe that Oklo is the world’s only identified naturally occurring reactor which was created by accident. As scientists Norman Schwers and John A. Miller from Sandia National Laboratories explain in a 2017 paper, the concept of a naturally occurring reactor was originally documented in 1956 using reactor theory or the infinite multiplication constants.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriesrunsolved.com/ }

07-08-2022 om 17:57 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Successfully Sent A Particle Back in Time Using A Quantum Computer

Time travel was fiction before Einstein, but his calculations took us into the quantum world and we were introduced to a more complex picture of time. Einstein’s equations permitted time travel into the past, as Kurt Gödel discovered. The issue? None of the hypothesized time travel systems were ever physically feasible.

So, before sending a particle back through time, Argonne National Laboratory, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and ETH Zurich scientists wondered, “Why stick to physical grounds?

Many physics laws treat the future and the past as continuous. A closed system progresses from order to disorder according to the second rule of thermodynamics (or entropy). If you scramble an egg to produce an omelet, you’ve added a lot of chaos to the closed system that was the egg.

The arrow of time is an essential consequence of the second law. A process that develops entropy, like whisking an egg, is irreversible. An omelet won’t turn back into an egg, and billiard balls won’t spontaneously reassemble a triangle. Entropy, like an arrow, goes in one direction, and we see it as time.

The second rule of thermodynamics holds us captive, but an international team of scientists sought to test it in the quantum world. Since nature cannot do such a test, scientists utilized an IBM quantum computer.

Ordinary computers, such as the one you’re reading this on, work with bits of data. A bit is either a 1 or a 0. A qubit is a fundamental unit of information used by quantum computers. A qubit may be both a 1 and a 0, allowing the system to process data considerably quicker.

The researchers used qubits to simulate subatomic particles in a four-step experiment. They entangled the qubits first, such that whatever occurred to one affected the others. Then they utilized microwave radio pulses to evolve the quantum computer’s initial order into a more sophisticated state.

A specific algorithm changes the quantum computer to bring order out of chaos. They’re zapped by another microwave pulse, but this time they go back to their old selves. That is, they are de-aged by a millionth of a second.

Argonne National Laboratory researcher Valerii M. Vinokur compares it to pushing against a pond’s waves to restore them to their source.

Success was not guaranteed since quantum mechanics is about probability. In a two-qubit quantum computer, however, the algorithm accomplished a time leap 85 percent of the time. With three qubits, the success rate decreased to around 50%, which the scientists blamed on flaws in current quantum computers.

• The findings were just reported in Scientific Reports.

The results are exciting but don’t go buying flux capacitors just yet. This experiment also illustrates that manipulating even a simulated particle in time is difficult. Our ability to produce such an external force to influence even one quantum wave is limited.

To time-reverse even ONE quantum particle is impossible for nature alone, says research author Vinokur.  “The system comprising two particles is even more irreversible, let alone the eggs — comprising billions of particles — we break to prepare an omelette.”

A press release from the Department of Energy notes that the “timeline required for [an external force] to spontaneously appear and properly manipulate the quantum waves” to appear in nature and unscramble an egg “would extend longer than that of the universe itself.” In other words, this tech specifically binds to quantum computation.

But the study isn’t just a high-tech exercise. While the approach won’t help us build real-world time machines, it will improve quantum computation.

Einstein’s equations don’t prohibit time travel, but they make it a difficult task, as Kurt Gödel demonstrated.

Reference(s):

• The New York Times | For a Split Second, a Quantum Computer Made History Go Backward
• Nature.com | Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer

{https://Fastronomystars.vercel. }

07-08-2022 om 17:17 geschreven door peter  

New claims in film by the ‘lad who photographed flying saucers’

Alex Birch whose photographs of UFOs puzzled experts on both sides of the Atlantic has released a film about his experiences – that he claims included meetings with the British royal family and a phone conversation with JFK.

In Beyond Perception Sheffield-born Alex says he attended private meetings with Prince Philip, who died age 99 in 2021 and Lord Mountbatten of Burma who asked the then 14-year-old Alex to call him Dickie. Both men were known for their fascination with the UFO mystery at that time.

But in the new film Alex, now 74, also claims he took part in a transatlantic telephone conversation with President John F Kennedy in 1962 after his photo of a fleet of flying saucers made news headlines across the world.

In the 30-minute film Alex says a military car collected him and his father from their home near Sheffield from where they were taken to a US military base. On arrival they met USAF officials and the base commander. During the visit he was taken to an adjoining room where he was put through to a man he believes was JFK.

The man quizzed Alex ‘asking if there was any visible markings on the objects, also how high were the objects and how big they were and many other questions’. He says Kennedy was concerned the Russians had ‘secret weapons and were already exploring space’. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 after launching NASA’s Apollo space programme that put the first men on the moon.

Shortly before the call Alex, then 14 years old, had travelled to London with his father where his black and white photograph and Box Brownie camera were examined by officials at the Air Ministry. A MoD file documenting the meeting was released at The National Archives in the 1990s.

After the media furore surrounding this photograph Alex faded from the public eye. But flying saucers, and UFOlogists, continued to haunt him. He was taunted at school and everywhere he went he was known as ‘the lad who had photographed flying saucers.’

So in 1972, when he was 24 years old, he contacted the Daily Express and confessed it was a hoax. He even appeared on TV with the pane of glass on which the ‘saucers’ had been painted. For ten years he had fooled his family, friends and even the Air Ministry who had them tagged as ‘ice crystals’.

The ruse, for according to Alex it was a ruse, worked. Alex says he knew the photo was genuine but his manipulation of the media removed the heat; interest in him diminished and he was able to concentrate on building a career and supporting a family. But his interest in photography remained and over the years he became an accomplished practitioner, entering and wining numerous competitions.

Meanwhile his iconic flying saucer photograph continued to be reproduced in books and magazines worldwide. In 1998 Alex, who no longer possessed a copy of the original negative, decided to step back into the public spotlight to reclaim his own copyright on the image. He also wanted the world to know the truth: he really did see, and photograph, flying saucers in 1962.

After a short flurry of media and UFOlogical interest, his U-turn was again quickly forgotten. Alex didn’t care who believed him and, now a grandfather, he believed his adventures in UFOlogy were now a thing of the past.

Until Tuesday, 27 January 2004. On that evening Alex, now 55, was sitting in his bungalow watching TV with his wife when it began snowing heavily. At the time Alex was trying to think of a suitable photograph to enter in his local photographic society’s competition and this unexpected snowfall made him think he might get an unusual night time shot.

Leaving the house at 9.15 pm, without even telling his wife, Alex drove through heavy snow to the market town of Retford, in rural Nottinghamshire, where he parked in the square. The thick snow and the relatively late hour meant the square was completely deserted and silent. Alex spent some time taking a variety of photographs of the square, road and buildings that were covered in snow and reflecting lights from lampposts and buildings. He was using 35mm Fujia Sensia 200ASA reversal film (a slide film).

After using the roll of thirty six frames Alex returned home and shortly afterwards sent the film for processing. When the slides were returned he spent some time looking at them on a small battery operated viewer, trying to identify a suitable slide for entry in his local photography club’s competition. He found three shots that were perfect and then noticed an odd image on one of the slides. To his amazement when he looked closer he saw a UFO, a saucer shaped UFO at that, just to the side of Retford Town Hall. The Town Hall clock fixes the image in time at 23.08.

Alex was naturally keen to tell us about his new photograph. We were, naturally, skeptical. After all, the chances of someone taking a photograph of a genuinely anomalous UFO once are massive. To do so twice in a lifetime would be, well, Fortean. We recalled the furore over Alex’s 1962 photograph, his 1972 confession and his subsequent revelation that it was genuine after all. What was going on?

Alex wasn’t going to let the problems which plagued his 1962 photograph affect this new one and he decided to eschew any publicity. He just wanted to know what he had caught on film. The first time we saw the new UFO image was on a copy of a slide he sent to us.

We thought it was obviously a lens flare; there are numerous lights on lamps and buildings and even though we couldn’t prove it, a lens flare of some kind seemed to be the only logical conclusion. Most tellingly Alex did not see the object whilst taking the photographs and it is axiomatic that an image which is noticed only after processing is almost always a bird, lens flare, camera or film fault. Alex disagreed and told us he firmly believed the image on the film was of an object in the sky:  a real UFO.

Despite the prospect of fresh media attention and money from this photograph Alex wasn’t interested. He wanted to get to the bottom of it privately and, rather than trust the photograph to the care of the UFO community, of whom he has a profound mistrust, he set about investigating it himself.

Sheffield University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy ruled out any celestial or astronomical phenomena and local airfields confirmed there were no aircraft over Retford that night. He then took the slide to the Kodak Laboratories in Lincoln. Their technical analysis ruled out any possibility of lens flare, double exposure, drying stains, re-touching or a host of other possibilities. Indeed, the Kodak analysis found that the UFO image had the same density pattern, colour and grain as the surrounding picture. This suggested to the Kodak analysts that whatever ‘it’ was, it was in the sky when photographed. Robert Smith of Kodak’s labs went so far as to write on the back of the photograph, ‘This image has not been altered or manipulated in any way.’

Then he tried his old bete noir, the Ministry of Defence. After several phone calls to the MoD’sWhitehall building Alex made an appointment to see the UFO desk officer, Linda Unwin. She suggested a meeting and told Alex that ‘defence experts’ would be interested in viewing the slide.

A meeting was duly arranged for 9 March 2004 and Alex asked Andy Roberts to accompany him. It is highly unusual for a UFO witness to be interviewed by MoD personnel and even more unusual for them to be invited to visit the MoD Main Building. The last time this had happened was in 1962 when Alex, then a schoolboy, visited the Air Ministry with his father and allowed experts to examine his Box Brownie camera and his other picture of ‘flying saucers.’

The 2004 visit did not go to plan. Alex and Andy were met in the reception area by Linda Unwin and a colleague, who seemed to be unaware of the promised ‘meeting’ or the possibility of defence experts viewing the slide. She was happy to take a copy for analysis, but Alex and Andy got no further than the ornate reception area. Alex believes the meeting was cancelled because he had not told them he was bringing guests (his son in law was also present).

In a follow-up letter Unwin asked for a copy of the negative for scrutiny by a ‘defence imagery analyst.’ Using the Freedom of Information Act we discovered that a copy of the slide was sent by Unwin’s branch to the MoD’s Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency (DGIA), based at RAF Brampton in Cambridgeshire. Experts there analyse aerial photographs and other military-sourced images for intelligence purposes. In this case, Alex was told that UFO photographs are ‘not within the normal course of work’ for the imagery experts ‘but [they] have agreed to fit this in around essential defence work.’

The Graphics and Digital Imaging Section completed their assessment on 2 August 2004. A scan at 2,400dpi allowed them to investigate ‘at greater magnification the structure of the anomaly’ but found no indication of reflections or lens flares. The brief report ends with these words: ‘No definitive conclusions can be gathered from evidence submitted, however, it may be coincidental that the illuminated plane of the object passes through the centre of the frame, indicating a possible lens anomaly e.g. a droplet of moisture.’

Alex claims he has subsequently had other meetings and conversations with MoD personnel, but maintains that neither he nor they are any closer to resolving what he has captured on film. When we visited Alex in the spring of 2007 he was enthusiastic about his new photograph and remained convinced that, based on the evidence from Kodak and other experts, he had captured an unknown aerial object on film.

But now there was more. Alex had previously told us that he had, over the years, been subject to what can only be described as psychic phenomena. He had been plagued by poltergeists and bizarre audio and electromagnetic anomalies. Lights in the sky appeared to follow him around and on one occasion he had been struck by lightning. These phenomena had been witnessed by other members of his family who were happy to confirm it to us.

Alex was now telling us that there was something else unusual about his second saucer photograph. He had experienced flashbacks to that snowy night in Retford; flashbacks involving visions of a gigantic saucer hovering over the square. He also suspected there may have been a period of missing time.

What to make of all this? Is Alex a complete fantasist who has repeatedly tried to fool the media, UFO investigators and possibly his family for over 45 years? The simple fact is, we just don’t know. It would be easy to dismiss Alex as a hoaxer and a fantasist, partly because everyone ‘knows’ real UFOs don’t exist and partly because of his (later retracted) admission that he had hoaxed the 1962 photograph.

But no-one could prove exactly how – if – his original photo was hoaxed and no-one, not even the MoD’s imagery experts can say with certainty what is on the photograph he took on 27 January 2004.

Alex has thought long and hard before allowing his second photograph to be revealed to a wider audience. He is not interested in public exposure or in financial gain, although this does not rule him out as a hoaxer. He is only concerned that his stories are told factually and objectively. As skeptical forteans we have known Alex for more than 20 years and find him and his family to be completely normal, open and honest. We are perplexed. But there has to be an answer, now matter how prosaic or extraordinary. So what is it?

Speaking after the release of his film on YouTube and Vimeo, Alex told us:

‘Its basically a documentary which explains what happened within my life from early childhood regarding UFO’s and the paranormal. Although the doc only scratches the surface and there is much more to tell. I had to think long and hard about publishing certain things within the documentary film. I am now hardened towards the remarks of skeptics, trolls, and those who seek a living from defaming people, when in reality they know absolutely zero about me.’

Text copyright David Clarke and Andy Roberts 2022

{ https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/ }

07-08-2022 om 17:00 geschreven door peter  

Employees examine Artemis I mission patches to be included in the Official Flight Kit.

{ https://www.nasa.gov/ }

07-08-2022 om 01:31 geschreven door peter  

We found some strange radio sources in a distant galaxy cluster. They're making us rethink what we thought we knew.

06-08-2022 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

We found some strange radio sources in a distant galaxy cluster. They're making us rethink what we thought we knew.

06-08-2022 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

Hidden companions shape the final days of dying stars

Observations and computer models are now pointing to an explanation that would have seemed outlandish 30 years ago: Most red giants have a much smaller companion star hiding in their gravitational embrace. This second star shapes the transformation into a planetary nebula, much as a potter shapes a vessel on a potter’s wheel.

NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope has revealed extraordinary details in the Southern Ring Nebula, a planetary nebula that lies around 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Vela. On the left, a near-infrared image shows spectacular concentric shells of gas, which chronicle the history of the dying star’s outbursts. On the right, a mid-infrared image easily distinguishes the dying star at the nebula’s center (red) from its companion star (blue). All of the gas and dust in the nebula was expelled by the red star.

NASA, ESA, CSA, AND STSCI

The dominant theory of planetary nebula formation previously involved only a single star — the red giant itself. With only a weak gravitational hold on its outer layers, it sheds mass very rapidly near the end of its life, losing as much as 1 percent per century. It also churns like a boiling pot of water underneath the surface, causing the outer layers to pulse in and out. Astronomers theorized that these pulsations produce shock waves that blast gas and dust into space, creating what’s called a stellar wind. Yet it takes a great deal of energy to expel this material completely without having it fall back into the star. It cannot be any gentle zephyr, this wind; it needs to have the strength of a rocket blast.

After the star’s outer layer has escaped, the much smaller inner layer collapses into a white dwarf. This star, which is hotter and brighter than the red giant it came from, illuminates and warms the escaped gas, until the gas starts glowing by itself — and we see a planetary nebula. The whole process is very fast by astronomical standards but slow by human standards, typically taking centuries to millennia.

Until the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990, “we were pretty sure we were on the right track” toward understanding the process, says Bruce Balick, an astronomer at the University of Washington. Then he and his colleague Adam Frank, of the University of Rochester in New York, were at a conference in Austria and saw Hubble’s first photos of planetary nebulae. “We went out to get coffee, saw the pictures and we knew that the game had changed,” Balick says.

Astronomers had assumed that red giants were spherically symmetrical, and a round star should produce a round planetary nebula. But that’s not what Hubble saw — not even close. “It became obvious that many planetary nebulae have exotic axisymmetric structures,” says Joel Kastner, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Hubble revealed fantastic lobes, wings and other structures that weren’t round but were symmetric around the nebula’s main axis, as if turned on that potter’s wheel.

In early photos from ground-based observatories, the Southern Crab Nebula appeared to have four curved “legs” like a crab. But detailed images from the Hubble Space Telescope show that these legs are the sides of two bubbles that roughly form an hourglass shape. In the center of the bubbles are two jets of gas, with “knots” that may light up when they encounter the gas between the stars. The Southern Crab, located several thousand light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, appears to have had two gas-releasing events. One around 5,500 years ago created the outer “hourglass,” and a similar event 2,300 years ago created the inner, much smaller one.

ADAPTED FROM NASA, ESA, AND A. FEILD (STSCI)

A 2002 article by Balick and Frank in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics captured the debate at the time over the origin of these structures. Some scientists proposed that the axial symmetry stemmed from how the red giant star rotated or how its magnetic fields behaved, but both ideas failed some fundamental tests. Both rotation and magnetic fields should get weaker as the star grows larger, yet the mass-loss rate of red giants accelerates at the end of their lifetimes.

The other option was that most planetary nebulae are formed not by one star, but by a pair of stars — what Orsola De Marco, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney, named the “binary hypothesis.” In this scenario, the second star is much smaller and thousands of times fainter than the red giant, and it might be as far away as Jupiter is from the Sun. That would allow it to disrupt the red giant while being distant enough to not be swallowed up. (Other possibilities also exist, such as a dive-bombing orbit in which the second star would approach the red giant every few hundred years, peeling off layers from it.)

The binary hypothesis accounts very well for the first stage of metamorphosis of a dying star. As the companion pulls dust and gases away from the primary star, they do not immediately get sucked into the companion, but form a swirling disk of material known as an accretion disk in the orbital plane of the companion. That accretion disk is the potter’s wheel. If the disk has a magnetic field, it will propel any charged gases out of the plane of the disk and toward the axis of rotation. But even without a magnetic field, the material in the disk impedes the outward flow of gases in the orbital plane, so the gas will take on a bilobed structure, with faster flow toward the poles. And that’s just what Hubble saw in its images of planetary nebulae. “Why look for a really complicated explanation when a companion star explains it really well?” says De Marco.

Left: The Twin Jet Nebula, 2,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, shows off an hourglass shape, with two jets of rapidly moving gas streaming poleward. The gas was probably ejected by the central star about 1,200 years ago. Right: The Cat’s Eye Nebula, 3,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco, exhibits 11 concentric rings of dust, which astronomers estimate were released at 1,500-year intervals. The process by which the complicated inner structure formed is still anybody’s guess. “The Cat’s Eye is weird. I don’t know if I can explain it,” says astronomer Adam Frank of the University of Rochester.

ESA / HUBBLE & NASA, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: JUDY SCHMIDT (LEFT); NASA, ESA, HUBBLE LEGACY ARCHIVE, CHANDRA X-RAY OBS., PROCESSING & COPYRIGHT: RUDY POHL (RIGHT)

Nevertheless, the idea of undetectable companion stars didn’t sit well with some astronomers. As recently as 2020, writes Leen Decin, an astronomer at KU Leuven in Belgium, a famous astrophysicist told her “You know, Leen, it all looks so fantastic, the observations are so fascinating, the current state-of-the-art models seem to do a pretty good job for interpreting the data, but in the end, shouldn’t we only believe what we can actually see?”

But over the last 10 to 15 years, the tide has steadily turned. New and innovative telescopes have revealed that some red giants are surrounded by spiral structures and accretion disks before they turn into planetary nebulae — just as expected if there were a second star pulling material off the red giant. In a couple of cases, astronomers may have even spotted the companion star itself.

06-08-2022 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

06-08-2022 om 21:56 geschreven door peter  

Sparkling Orange UFO Ball over Albuquerque, NM 2022

Check out this interesting UFO sighting video filmed over Albuquerque, Mexico on 31st July 2022.

Let me know your opinion about this footage in the comments!

Witness report: 

Driving north in our car, came to intersection & stopped at stop sign. Time was twilight. Noticed a low flying orange ball of light that appeared to be *sparkling”. Light was neither ascending or descending. Seemed to be above treeline, but not as high as a helicopter or small plane. Normal aviation lights were not present. Object was traveling at a constant, slow speed. Turned north about a minute after we viewed it, then disappeared ahead of us.

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

06-08-2022 om 21:09 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers catch a super-energetic collision of dead stars

By Keith Cooper

The stellar smash produced a short gamma-ray burst that could provide important context for understanding similar blasts.

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova.  Show less 

W.M. KECK OBSERVATORY/ADAM MAKARENKO

A distant neutron-star merger unleashed one of the most powerful short gamma-ray bursts (GRB) ever seen, according to new observations by ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

Neutron stars are the super-dense stellar cores left after massive stars explode, and when, say, two neutron stars collide, the result is a dramatic explosion, the light of which is referred to as a kilonova. The mergers also release gravitational waves and a brief blast of gamma-ray radiation in two tight jets shooting opposite directions into space.

On Nov. 6 2021, a short gamma-ray burst was detected by the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL X-ray and gamma-ray observatory, which sent out an instant alert that triggered NASA's Swift satellite, among others, to follow up. The burst, cataloged as GRB 211106A, lasted less than two seconds, but the afterglow from the kilonova shone for far longer as the jet of particles released by the merger excited the surrounding gas. 

"This short gamma-ray burst was the first time we tried to observe such an event with ALMA," Wen-Fai Fong, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement. "Afterglows for short bursts are very difficult to come by, so it was spectacular to catch this shining so brightly."

Related: 

• Gamma-ray bursts might be much rarer than we thought, study suggests

Detecting the afterglow from the merger in the millimeter-wavelength light that ALMA is tuned to gives astronomers an advantage when it comes to understanding these titanic explosions.

"Millimeter wavelengths can tell us about the density of the environment around the GRB," Genevieve Schroeder, also of Northwestern University, said in the same statement. "And, when combined with the X-rays, [the millimeter-wave light] can tell us about the true energy of the explosion."

As the GRB's jets, which move at nearly the speed of light, smash through the surrounding gas, the shockwaves accelerate electrons. The energy of the radiation from those electrons peaks at millimeter wavelengths, and therefore can tell astronomers about the total energy of the explosion.

ALMA's measurements suggest that GRB 211106A released a total energy between 2 x 10^50 ergs and 6 x 10^51 ergs, which places it among the most powerful short GRBs ever detected. (One erg is equal to 10^–7 joules; for comparison, the sun releases just 3.8 x 10^33 ergs per second.)  

It's particularly impressive that GRB 211106A was so bright, relatively speaking, since the merger happened sometime between 6.3 and 9.1 billion years ago, and the galaxy in which the merger took place is now approximately 20 billion light-years from Earth due to cosmic expansion. At this distance, the gravitational waves released by the merger were too feeble to detect.

Another advantage to come from observing with ALMA is that the afterglow at millimeter wavelengths lasts longer than in, say, X-rays. This gives astronomers more time to study the GRB jet, which begins as a narrow stream, then gradually opens out, like a laser pointer that makes a larger spot on a wall than the laser's base.

Fong and Schroeder's team calculated the opening angle of the jet to be 16 degrees, which is the widest ever measured for a short GRB. This is important because we only see a GRB when the jet is pointed toward us, so the wider the jet, the higher chance we have of seeing it.

And the odds matter: Astronomers calculate the rate of neutron-star mergers in the universe based on how many short GRBs we see and estimates of their jet's opening angles. If more short GRBs have jets with wider opening angles, scientists may have overestimated how many neutron-star mergers are taking place.

The rate at which neutron stars merge isn't just an astrophysical curiosity — it has repercussions for cosmic chemistry. The conditions during neutron-star mergers are so intense that some of the universe's heaviest and most precious elements, such as gold, platinum and silver, are forged by these collisions. Indeed, scientists have estimated that a single neutron-star merger can produce between 3 and 13 Earth masses worth of gold. Hence the cosmic abundance of such elements is heavily dependent upon the rate at which neutron-star mergers take place. 

RELATED STORIES:

• Astronomers catch fizzled-out gamma-ray burst from supernova
• Weird nearby gamma-ray burst defies expectations
• 'Castaway' gamma-ray bursts come from distant early galaxies 

While the collision is an act of cosmic alchemy, enriching the surrounding region with atomic treasure, the discovery has offered astronomers a whole new arena for studying short GRBs and their afterglows. "After a decade of observing short GRBs, it is truly amazing to witness the power of using these new technologies to unwrap surprise gifts from the universe," Fong said.

A paper describing the findings is set to be published in a forthcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters; a preprint version was posted on Monday (Aug. 1).

• Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.space.com/ }

06-08-2022 om 18:41 geschreven door peter  

Europe's troubled Mars rover still vital in the search for life on the Red Planet

06-08-2022 om 18:06 geschreven door peter  

Rogue planets nearly double in number with new discovery

Astronomers announced on December 22, 2021, that they’ve found somewhere between 70 and 170 rogue, or free-floating, planets; that is, planets not currently in orbit around a star. This mass of unattached planets, each approximately the size of Jupiter, lies in a region of the Milky Way known as the Upper Scorpius OB stellar association. These newly found free-floating planets nearly double the total number of rogue planets already known.

The peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy published the rogue planet discovery on December 22, 2021.

Location of the rogue planets

The team of astronomers used observations and archival data from telescopes around the world and in space to make their discoveries. They sifted through 80,000 wide-field images taken over 20 years. Núria Miret-Roig and Hervé Bouy at the University of Bordeaux in France took a census of all the stars, brown dwarfs and rogue planets greater than four Jupiter masses in the Upper Scorpius region.

This region of sky, the Upper Scorpius OB association, lies 420 light-years away from Earth. Amateur astronomers might be familiar with this region of sky because it contains favorite targets for astrophotographers, including the colorful region around Rho Ophiuchi plus dark nebulae such as the Pipe Nebula, Barnard 68 and the Coalsack.

A new rogue planet detection method

Previously, astronomers discovered free-floating planets with microlensing surveys. With this method, astronomers witness a brief chance alignment between a rogue planet and a background star. The drawback is that the scientists can’t make follow-up observations with these one-time microlensing events.

In the new study, scientists looked for rogue planets that were still young, within a few million years of their formation. Normally, a planet that is not near its parent star wouldn’t be visible to astronomers without a source to illuminate it. But these young planets are still hot enough to glow. So Miret-Roig and her team looked for direct images of them with sensitive cameras on large telescopes. They measured the points of light in optical and near-infrared wavelengths in the Upper Scorpius region and combined the measurements with the movement they detected. Miret-Roig said:

We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky. These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region.

The origin of the rogue planets

The scientists also wonder how these rogue planets came to be. Were they ejected from a solar system like our own? Or did they form from the collapse of a gas cloud that was too small to create a star? (Which also brings up the as-yet-unanswered question, if the rogue planet doesn’t orbit a star or didn’t originally form around a star, is it still, by definition, a planet?)

If the origin of rogue planets was due to ejection from a stellar system, it suggests there could be an abundance of Earth-sized free-floating planets out there. As Miret-Roig explained:

The free-floating Jupiter-mass planets are the most difficult to eject, meaning that there might even be more free-floating Earth-mass planets wandering the galaxy.

An inexact number of free-floating planets

Sean Raymond, also of the University of Bordeaux and one of the authors on the paper, explained on Twitter why the number of planets is in a range between 70 and 170:

This star-forming region of space – the Upper Scorpius region – is from 3 to 10 million years old. If the star-forming region is younger and closer to the 3 million year age, then the objects the scientists singled out are more likely young, hot planets. If the star-forming region is older, then the candidates are also older, and their brightness comes from a larger size, not youth. In this case, some of them may therefore be brown dwarfs (failed stars).

Could rogue planets have life?

What are these rogue planets like, and would they be suitable for life? Well, for one, they might have moons. As Raymond said on Twitter:

Some ejected gas giants hold onto their moons! We can speculate that tidal heating might maintain not-too-frigid temperatures in the interiors of such moons.

Which, of course, sounds rather conducive to the existence of life. What about Earth-like planets and water, aka, life as we know it? Raymond also tweeted:

The scientists hope to answer some of their many questions in the years to come. With the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory coming online, they’ll likely find many more free-floating planets.

• Bottom line: Astronomers have nearly doubled the number of known rogue planets with a recent discovery using archive images from the Upper Scorpius region.

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06-08-2022 om 17:34 geschreven door peter  

Wide view of early universe hints at galaxy among earliest ever detected

by University of Texas at Austin

The team has identified one particularly exciting object—dubbed Maisie's galaxy in honor of project head Steven Finkelstein's daughter—that they estimate is being observed as it was just 290 million years after the Big Bang (astronomers refer to this as a redshift of z=14).

The finding has been published on the preprint server arXiv and is awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If the finding is confirmed, it would be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed, and its presence would indicate that galaxies started forming much earlier than many astronomers previously thought.

The unprecedentedly sharp images reveal a flurry of complex galaxies evolving over time—some elegantly mature pinwheels, others blobby toddlers, still others gauzy swirls of do-si-doing neighbors. The images, which took about 24 hours to collect, are from a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper, a constellation formally named Ursa Major. This same area of sky was observed previously by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in the Extended Groth Strip.

"It's amazing to see a point of light from Hubble turn into a whole, beautifully shaped galaxy in these new James Webb images, and other galaxies just pop up out of nowhere," said Finkelstein, associate professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin and the principal investigator for the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), from which these images were taken.

An image taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope from a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper. This is one of the first images obtained by the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) collaboration.

Credit: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/G. Yang./C. Papovich/Z. Levay

The CEERS collaboration is composed of 18 co-investigators from 12 Institutions and more than 100 collaborators from the U.S. and nine other countries. CEERS researchers are studying how some of the earliest galaxies formed when the universe was less than 5% of its current age, during a period known as reionization.

Before the actual telescope data came in, Micaela Bagley, a postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin and one of the CEERS imaging leads, created simulated images to help the team develop methods for processing and analyzing the new imagery. Bagley led a group processing the real images so the data could be analyzed by the whole team.

The large image is a mosaic of 690 individual frames that took about 24 hours to collect using the telescope's main imager, called the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). This new image covers an area of the sky about eight times as large as Webb's First Deep Field image, although it is not quite as deep. Researchers used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for the initial image processing: Stampede2 was used to remove background noise and artifacts, and Frontera, the world's most powerful supercomputer at a U.S. university, was used to stitch together the images to form a single mosaic.

"High-performance computing power made it possible to combine myriad images and hold the frames in memory at once for processing, resulting in a single beautiful image," Finkelstein said.

The other image was taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Compared with NIRcam, MIRI has a smaller field of view but operates at much higher spatial resolution than previous mid-infrared telescopes. MIRI detects longer wavelengths than NIRCam, allowing astronomers to see cosmic dust glowing from star-forming galaxies and black holes at modestly large distances, and see light from older stars at very large distances.

• Explore further

  The record for the farthest galaxy was just broken again, now just 250 million years after the Big Bang

{ https://phys.org/ }

06-08-2022 om 17:03 geschreven door peter  

US submarines detect “very high speed ships” underwater

US Navy submarines have detected mysterious objects moving hundreds of knots underwater as the Pentagon prepares to release its report on UFO sightings.

The Navy has collected sonar data showing mysterious fast-moving underwater objects that experts or current technology cannot explain.

Tom Rogan of the Washington Examiner said the US Navy “has the data” to prove the strange encounters.

Some of these encounters could be included in the US government working group that is preparing to report back to Congress on its UFO findings next month.

Speaking with Tucker Carlson of Fox News about the new footage, Rogan said: “One area that we will learn more about in relation to this video is the interaction between Navy submarines that pick up sonar contact from things moving hundreds knots under water ”.

“There is an underwater dimension to this, in addition to what the pilots are seeing above the water.”

Mr. Carlson replied, “Hundreds of knots under water? I don’t think people can even digest that. “

Mr. Rogan added: “That is what I have heard from very good sources and that the United States Navy has the data.”

Last month, Corbell shared a video of another mysterious triangular craft flying near another US Navy ship.

He said, “Whether this being is worldly or otherworldly, we don’t know. It is just part of a much larger series of events that we are going to learn from. “

Last week, video showed a dark spherical object moving across the sky near a Navy ship , before suddenly veering into the water and disappearing.

Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, said that some of the UAPs that have been seen defy physics as we know it.

“They have no signs of propulsion, no wings, and yet they can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That is precisely what we are seeing ”.

{ https://mysteriousociety.com/  }

06-08-2022 om 01:54 geschreven door peter  

Time travel is possible… but only to parallel universes?

Zack White

From HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” to the “Back to the Future” franchise, time travel has been a hallmark of science fiction for more than a century.

Part of its appeal has been that famous physicists like Albert Einstein have come up with theories that explain weather phenomena in ways that don’t rule out the possibility of time travel.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity proposes that time moves relative to an observer and is an illusion.

In his 1905 theory, space and time combined into a singular entity known as “space-time”, which physicists have been able to verify.

However, in an article published in The Conversation , Barak Shoshany, an assistant professor of physics at Brock University in Canada, wrote about the possibility of time travel, but with certain conditions.

One of the biggest obstacles to time travel is the practical requirement of “exotic matter,” which is matter with negative energy, as opposed to the matter around us, which consists of positive energy.

However, Professor Shoshany adds that there is no evidence that it is impossible to create exotic matter in sufficient quantities.

“In addition, other equations can be discovered that allow time travel without requiring exotic matter,” explains Professor Shoshany.

Another hurdle is the possibility of time paradoxes, where an action done in the past could have ripple effects in the present that undo the need for time travel.

A classic example of this is the famous “ grandfather paradox ”, where pundits ponder whether a time traveler would cease to exist if he went back in time to kill his grandfather when he was young.

“In physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen, it is a purely theoretical concept that points to an inconsistency in the theory itself,” adds the Canadian physicist.

“In other words, the paradoxes of consistency not only imply that time travel is a dangerous endeavor, but that it simply cannot be possible.”

Theoretical physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov attempted to solve the problem of time travel paradoxes with a self-consistency conjecture, which essentially states that you can travel to the past, but you cannot change it.

But Professor Shoshany, along with his students Jacob Hauser and Jared Wogan studied time travel, and in a recent study they discovered that there are time travel paradoxes that the Novikov conjecture cannot resolve.

“We show that allowing for multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can resolve paradoxes that the Novikov conjecture cannot,” Shoshany writes.

“In fact, it can solve any paradox you throw at it.”

According to his theory, when a person steps out of a time machine, they arrive in a different timeline, where they can do whatever they want, including destroying their time machine five minutes before they were supposed to use it.

In this theory, changes to this new timeline would have no effect on the original timeline.

“After working on time travel paradoxes for the past three years, I have become increasingly convinced that time travel might be possible, but only if our universe can allow multiple histories to coexist,” he continues. explaining the physical

The team of researchers now seeks to formulate a concrete theory of time travel that complies with the law of general relativity.

Professor Shoshany adds that even if they do manage to find such a theory, this would not be enough to prove that time travel is possible, but it would at least mean that time travel is not ruled out by consistency paradoxes.

In short: multiple timelines would allow you to travel to a different timeline and kill your grandparents, let’s ignore the ‘why’ for the sake of debate, without causing a paradox.

Of course, once this happens, there is no reason to believe that that Universe will continue exactly as ours has.

It is likely that the “butterfly effect” of your arrival has changed it, it is also likely that you have selected a limited number of similarities, no matter how great they are.

Still, this would be a (still extremely far-fetched) way to experience the past, without affecting the present or creating paradoxes.

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{ https://mysteriousociety.com/  }

06-08-2022 om 01:39 geschreven door peter  

Artist's illustration of a protogalaxy. This is not real, it's just a colorful image generated by Midjourney AI.

“It’s amazing to have found such a distant galaxy candidate already with Webb given that this is just the first set of data,” says Mr. Callum Donnan, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and lead author of the study. “It is important to note that to be certain of the redshift, the galaxy will need follow up observations using spectroscopy. This is why we refer to it as a galaxy candidate.”

The study determined that CEERS-93316 can’t be a low-mass star or unobstructed active galactic nucleus based on imaging data from NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera), which is JWST’s primary imager. Since CEERS-93316 is could be only 250 million years old, one goal for cosmologists is to know what’s happening in galaxies that young, and so soon after the Big Bang.

“After the Big Bang the Universe entered a period known as the dark ages, a time before any stars had been born,” explains Dr. Bowler. “The observations of this galaxy push observations back to the time when we think the first galaxies ever to exist were being formed.  Already we’ve found more galaxies in the very early Universe than computer simulations predicted, so there is clearly a lot of open questions about how and when the first stars and galaxies formed.”

Given this incredible finding in just the first set of data from JWST, it’s intriguing to think how much father back in the universe this record-shattering space telescope can see, and whether it can see the Big Bang itself.

“In principle JWST can detect galaxies at redshifts greater than 20, less than 200 million years after the Big Bang,” explains Bowler. “These galaxies will likely be extremely hard to find, but the detection of CERRS 93316 gives us hope that they may exist. Watch this space!”

“The most distant phenomenon observed is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which is the ‘afterglow’ of the Big Bang,” explains Donnan. “The light from the CMB comes from approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang and has been observed by various instruments over the years – most notably the Planck satellite which launched in 2009. Webb won’t be able to see as far back as that, but it is able to probe the earliest stages of galaxy formation.”

While Donnan and Bowler both stated there are no further observations planned for CEERS-93316, they are hopeful that there will be in the future.

Redshift is part of what’s known as the Doppler effect, which astronomers use to measure distances in the universe. A frequent example to demonstrate the Doppler effect is the change in sound wave pitch as a loud object travels towards you then travels away from you, often by an ambulance or other first responder vehicle. The sound waves as the object travels towards you is known as blueshift, while the opposite is called redshift. This new study setting a new redshift record means scientists have measured the farthest object in the universe to date.

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

06-08-2022 om 00:53 geschreven door peter  

Sun is Older Than The Earth But The Water You Drink is Older Than The Sun

Consider this the next time you pick up a “fresh” glass of water: some of the molecules in that water are billions of years old – much older than the solar system itself.

This seems impossible at first: how could water on Earth predate the solar system in which it exists? However, recent peer-reviewed research published in the journal Science confirms this.

Astronomers arrived at this conclusion by proving that water in our solar system had to have been produced inside the thick cloud of gas and dust that preceded and was required for the formation of the star we know as the Sun. This means that the water that finally made its way to Earth through “wet rocks” such as asteroids or comets existed before the Sun exploded into a star.

Ted Bergin, an astronomy professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and one of the study’s authors, describes the discovery as “extraordinary.” “If you look back 4.6 billion years ago, there’s an incredible story to be told,” he says.

Earth was formed from microscopic particles little larger than the width of a human hair. Astronomers — who, Bergin says, are “very imaginative souls,” — call this “dust.”

These dust particles would collect so much energy from the Sun at their distance from it that they would become too hot for water to condense on them as ice. “This means that when the Earth was born, it was dry,” Bergin says. “So that’s an interesting problem: Where did the water come from?”

If we consider the matter more generally, Bergin asserts, we must ask: Where did all the water in the cosmos originate from? “The universe isn’t made of water, it’s made of atoms,” he explains. “So, at someplace, at some time, those atoms came together in the universe, via chemistry, to form water.”

Fortunately, astronomers can investigate that chemistry in Earth-based laboratories. They are capable of reproducing the circumstances that result in the formation of water. They do this using a process known as isotopic fingerprinting.

They do this using a process known as isotopic fingerprinting. The second kind is deuterium. These elements coexist in a more-or-less stable ratio throughout the solar system: for every deuterium atom, there are around 100,000 hydrogen atoms. Water has around this amount of hydrogen and deuterium.

“But chemistry tells us that under very specific conditions there can be an excess of deuterium,” says Bergin. “That’s what we call a ‘isotopic fingerprint.’ Earth contains a surplus of deuterium, as do comets and asteroids.”

The isotopic fingerprint appears only at very low temperatures, between 10 and 20 degrees above absolute zero (-441 degrees Fahrenheit). “So, because the Earth has this excess of deuterium,” Bergin explains, “we know one thing already: that whatever the source of the water was, it was really, really cold. So now we have to look at star and planet formation and ask, ‘Where is it that cold?’”

When a star starts to develop, temperatures may get so low in just two locations inside the enormous, violent system: within the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the protostar, or within the accretion disc that begins to form around it. However, there is one more twist: water is also created by a chemical process called ionization. The researchers established that the disc is incapable of powering this chemical reaction by examining a comprehensive model of it.

“This tells you that, of the two potential sources to make the water — the disc and the cloud of gas and dust — the disc can’t do it,” Bergin explains. Therefore, the water with the isotopic fingerprint could only have emerged from the gas and dust — about a million years before the formation of the sun.

Nonetheless, this begs the issue of how this water reached Earth. According to Bergin, planets are generated from the same cloud of gas and dust that collapses and ignites to form a star. Within the cloud, rocks were thrown into space and collided with the particles that eventually created Earth. Although some of them lacked water, they collided with the Earth and amalgamated with it. Additional boulders were flung our way from a greater distance, and these rocks were chilly enough to contain water.

“So as the Earth was being born, these rocks from greater distances supplied the water,” Bergin says. “The water became part of the rocks, and it just out-gassed via volcanoes, and that created the oceans and the atmosphere, and this wonderful planet that we have today.”

Reference(s): 

• Peer-reviewed research paper, 
• Space.com

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06-08-2022 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

As NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover turns 10, scientists and workers celebrate fond memories and lessons of the Red Planet mission

• On August 5, 2012 the Mars Curiosity Rover slowly eased its way onto the surface of the Red Planet and began its journey 

• 'It plays a special role in NASA's Mars exploration program,' said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist Ashwin Vasavada

• JPL systems engineer Sophia Mitchell spoke about her job as a 'space Uber driver,' as she pilots the Curiosity rover from over 100 million miles away 

• 'We're looking forward to seeing you on Mars one day. I can tell you that Curiosity is going to help protect you,' Vasavada told a child who asked a question

By ADAM KOVAC FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Happy landiversary to one of NASA’s proudest accomplishments.

On August 5, 2012 the Mars Curiosity Rover eased its way onto the surface of the Red Planet and began a journey that has gone on eight years longer than planned, collecting valuable data about whether life can be supported there - and if those conditions existed in the past.

As part of the celebration, scientists and mission members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as the United States Geological Survey took part in a Twitter Space - basically a chat room of sorts - where they shared fond memories and lessons of the historic mission to the fourth rock from the sun.

Scroll down for video 

On August 5, 2012 the Mars Curiosity Rover slowly eased its way onto the surface of the Red Planet. The rover used the camera at the end of its arm in April and May 2014 to take dozens of component images combined into this self-portrait where the rover drilled into a sandstone target called 'Windjana'

'It plays a special role in NASA's Mars exploration program,' said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist Ashwin Vasavada. 'The ultimate goal is to figure out if life ever evolved on Mars, if it existed in the past or even today.'

To do so, Curiosity was launched on November 26, 2011 from Cape Canaveral. After its months-long journey through space, the 2,000 pound, car-sized rover touched down inside the 3.7 billion-year-old, 100-mile long Gale crater and began its methodical exploration of Mars’ surface.

JPL systems engineer Sophia Mitchell spoke about her job as a 'space Uber driver,' as she pilots the Curiosity rover from over 100 million miles away.  

'It’s definitely a dream job,' she said. 'I'm an aerospace engineer and but I really think of myself as an explorer and so the ultimate exploration job in my mind is getting to drive a massive science robot around on a different planet.'

'It plays a special role in NASA's Mars exploration program,' said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist Ashwin Vasavada. 'The ultimate goal is to figure out if life ever evolved on Mars, if it existed in the past or even today.' The Red Planet is pictured above in a handout from NASA

NASA scientists say that now-dusty Mars was once covered in bodies of water – an indication that this barren planet may have once been host to some form of life, or at least had the capacity to do so. The Mars Curiosity Rover snapped this panorama (above) of the Red Planet

What the rover learned has helped scientists paint a picture of what the planet likely looked like billions of years ago. The answer is that now-dusty Mars was once covered in bodies of water – an indication that this barren planet may have once been host to some form of life, or at least had the capacity to do so. 

That possibility was reinforced by Curiosity’s discovery of organic molecules found while drilling into shallow parts of the planet’s surface. The team spoke excitedly of future missions, such as the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, which will be able to dig deeper than Curiosity’s tools allowed.

While the past decade has been filled with discovery, it’s also been fraught with challenges. What was supposed to be a two-year mission has been extended indefinitely and Curiosity has started to show its age, with wear-and-tear on the wheels and a drill that doesn’t operate the way it once did. 

As Mitchell noted, when something breaks on Mars, 'We can’t send someone there to repair it. We just have to figure out how to use what we have to still be able to do what we want.'

Though robots have visited our closest celestial neighbor, that’s a trip that no human has yet been able to take. 

The team enthusiastically endorsed the possibility of mankind one day making it to Mars, a trip that will be aided by vital data on radiation being collected by Curiosity - and probably with the help of Elon Musk's Starship, after it successfully conducts a orbital launch test and brings people to the moon first. 

'I can just say I hope you go to Mars,' Vasavada told one curious child who was picked to ask a question. 'We're looking forward to seeing you on Mars one day and I can tell you that Curiosity is going to help protect you.' 

As Mitchell noted, when something breaks on Mars, 'We can’t send someone there to repair it. We just have to figure out how to use what we have to still be able to do what we want.' This is an artist's concept of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft approaching Mars

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{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

06-08-2022 om 00:17 geschreven door peter  

The Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars for 10 years. Here's what we've learned.

Related: 

• Celebrate 10 years of NASA's Curiosity rover with these incredible images (gallery)

In order to find these key signatures of habitability on Mars, Curiosity carries with it tools to drill into the surface of the planet and spectrometers like the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) that can analyze the resulting samples. Within the rover's first few years on the planet, it had already discovered key requirements for life.

"So we found, one, Mars was habitable, and two, that those habitable environments persisted for tens of millions of years, most likely, maybe even hundreds of millions of years, which was surprising and exciting," Fraeman said.

The rover's research into the rock and soil of Mars also yielded new information about groundwater cycles on Mars. "All of the rocks that we've driven through show not only the signature of water when they were originally deposited, but this later overprinting of one or two or dozens of cycles of groundwater circulating through the rocks," Fraeman said. "And so it really emphasized the importance of subsurface water on Mars, which is something that would have been a really important process."

But in a decade of exploration, Curiosity has discovered much more than the building blocks of life. "One of the types of science that doesn't get mentioned a whole lot, but is really important and really interesting, is the environmental science we've been doing," Fraeman said.

Curiosity has radiation detectors and environmental and atmospheric sensors that have been put to good use on Mars. For instance, throughout its wanderings, when Curiosity approached geological formations like cliffs and buttes, the rover's instruments detected that the rocks blocked radiation from reaching it. "We can now use that for models for future astronauts. For example, can you use natural terrain as shielding?" Fraeman said.

She's also enthralled by Curiosity's study of Martian weather, noting that just last year, Curiosity photographed beautiful clouds known as noctilucent clouds, which appear at sunset during winter.

Although Curiosity's original mission timeline lasted just under two Earth years, a decade out the rover continues to be in relatively good health — good enough to continue its work. "We do have a little bit of arthritis, a little bit of aches and pains in the joints," Fraeman said. Its wheels, for instance, have developed quite a few holes after some 17.5 miles (28 kilometers) of travel with a 2,000-foot (600 meters) elevation gain. But Fraeman noted that the wheels are accumulating damage at a relatively slow rate, allowing Curiosity to continue moving.

"I think what's most remarkable to me is all the science instruments are basically working as well as they did when we landed," she said. "We're still able to do the same quality and breadth of science that we were 10 years ago, and that's pretty extraordinary."

Next up for Curiosity is an investigation into what happened to the once-habitable climate of Mars and how long the region remained habitable as the water began to dry up. While the rover spent the past decade exploring lake environments — most recently, a region where sand dunes formed as lakes disappeared — the team is now sending the explorer even higher up Mount Sharp.

"We're so close to reaching what we call the Layered-Sulfate unit, which is a completely different portion of Mount Sharp," Fraeman said. "We see from orbit that it has a different texture, a different mineralogy, and we think this is going to represent a very different environmental time on Mars. We're excited to see just what this environmental change was, how it's reflected in the rock record, and what that means for habitability."

But before Curiosity gets to all that, the team is going to spend a little time celebrating the anniversary. "Those of us who are local in Pasadena, we're going to have a party. We're going to get some Thai food, we'll have a raffle," Fraeman said. "I think it'll just be a joyous occasion to celebrate the accomplishments and hopefully look forward to more fun science.

• Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

05-08-2022 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists

05-08-2022 om 23:21 geschreven door peter