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...
07-08-2022
Plane Buzzes UFO Over Airport, El Paso, Texas, Aug 4, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Plane Buzzes UFO Over Airport, El Paso, Texas, Aug 4, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Aug 4, 2022 Location of sighting: El Paso, Texas, USA
Here is an interesting video from Texas, one of the top 3 UFO hotspots of America. Someone caught a UFO over the airport during sunset, then the UFO flew closer and began to pass over the neighborhood. He even said when he went to start his truck...it just would not start and had to leave it till morning. This has all the signs of a real UFO.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
Hovered over mountain not moving, plane went by, started moving south along the mountain, stopped again, descended until visual was lost. My truck didn’t turn on after. Left it over night, it started in the morning.
Here is a rare report of some unknown objects falling into the mountains of Australia. This same week, at the time of this falling, reports of Chinese space debris falling to earth were reported world wide. I believe this is not SpaceX but the Chinese space debris. No reports of SpaceX debris were reported...until they found the objects. This is 100% proof that China is trying to pass USA in the space program, and may one day succeed.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
News states:
About three weeks ago, residents in the Snowy Mountains reported hearing a mysterious loud boom. Others saw debris falling from the sky. Now, two farmers have found the likely cause — large and rare pieces of space junk that landed on their properties. It's thought to be debris from a SpaceX capsule, and has excited experts in the field who say it's an extremely unusual event.
Producer James Fox and his team travel the globe, interviewing eyewitnesses and high-ranking military & government personnel about their UFO knowledge and experiences. As narrator, actor Peter Coyote guides the viewer through these interviews and through new and historic film footage & information related to the UFO Phenomenon.
A condensed version of an ancient Egyptian legend goes as follows: the wise servant tells his master how he survived the shipwreck and came ashore on a mysterious island where he met a great talking serpent who called himself the Lord of Punt. All good things were on the island and the sailor and the snake converse until a ship is hailed and he can return to Egypt.
A number of the myth’s fragments lead to some interesting reflections. The size of the enigmatic reptile is the first thing that strikes you as astonishing. The surviving sailor recounts his misadventures in this manner:
“The trees were cracking, the ground was shaking. When I opened my face, I saw that the serpent was approaching me. Its length is thirty cubits. His beard is more than two cubits long. His scales are of gold, his eyebrows are of lapis lazuli, his body is curved upwards.”
This myth’s serpent is quite fascinating. Signs point to him having a beard and eyebrows thick enough to resemble the legendary golden Chinese dragons of Chinese mythology. However, a little beard was occasionally depicted on sacred snakes in Egypt. Ancient Egyptian and East Asian traditions about enormous reptiles appear to be derived from the same source.
The second unusual thing you notice is that, there is a reference made in the legend to a particular star that was responsible for the death of the entire serpent family. This is what the last serpent told the man:
“Now since you have survived this accident, let me tell you of a tale of calamity that befell me. I once lived on this island with my family – 75 serpents in all without counting an orphan girl who was brought to me by chance and who was dear to my heart. One night a star came crashing down from heaven and they all went up in flames. It happened when I wasn’t there – I wasn’t among them. Only I was spared, and behold, here I am, utterly alone.”
What kind of star was it that burnt down seventy-five enormous creatures all at once? – let’s remember the size of the serpent. What an accurate and effective hit and what a powerful striking factor!
Let us recall another myth from ancient Egypt, in which Sekhmet, the dreadful eye of the deity Ra, is said to have severed the head of a giant snake or serpent Apep (also known as Apophis). Apep was viewed as the greatest enemy of Ra, and thus was given the title Enemy of Ra, and also “the Lord of Chaos”.
In this particular instance — the tale of Serpent Island — this destruction of serpents by a star resembles a real celestial punishment, in the literal sense of the word!
Let’s take a step back from the myth for a moment and concentrate on the specifics. The last surviving sailor describes waves of eight cubits, and he estimates the length of the snake to be thirty cubits. These are key comparative measurements that can be used to estimate the scale:
“And now the wind is getting stronger, and the waves are eight cubits high. And then the mast fell into the wave, and the ship was lost, and no one survived except me.”
In other words, based on the narrative, there can be no doubt regarding the size; the waves are big, and the snakes are at least three times larger than the waves. And with one swift strike from a certain “star,” all of this enormous “snake pit” of the seventy-five giant serpents is eradicated. It is clear that the explosion had a significant amount of power.
What struck the intelligent serpents? Somehow, it is difficult to accept a “crazy” asteroid hitting at random.
There is no doubt that ancient sources that tell about the history of peoples often include fictional tales in their folklore. We believe that this story parallels the ancient mythology of peoples that lived a long way from Egypt, where gods or heroes fought with reptiles or dragons in ancient stories. Why were such myths popular among ancient cultures?
The discovery was made by scientists from the Siberian Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences (СО РАН) conducted radiocarbon analyses of reindeer antler fragments found at the Kushevat Paleolithic site in the Lower Ob region.
In addition to the antler bones, scientists also examined a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a steppe bison (Bison Priscus), Elk (Alces alces), deer (Cervus elephus sibiricus), and, potentially, a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus). Analyses of the bones dated them back to a series of 20 different radiocarbon dates, all ranging from the period between 20 and 40 thousand years ago.
Although this finding solely points to animals, and not humans, inhibiting the Arctic region 40,000 years back, the discovery has now become the basis of further analyses, which currently date human activity in the Ob region back to 40,000 years ago. This is because two reindeer antlers held traces of human activity amongst this group of bones, which have only recently been analyzed.
The question of the initial settlement of the Arctic and Subarctic by an ancient man of the modern type (Homo sapiens sapiens) has long been of interest to scientists. The valley of the Ob River is often considered a potential migration route for Paleolithic man. It is believed that modern man came to Europe and Asia 50,000-60,000 thousand years ago.
What is still unclear is where the modern man lived before and how he crossed the Urals? For a long time, the hypothesis prevailed that 12,000-30,000 years ago, the north of Western Siberia was covered by a large glacier (just like the north of America and Europe). To the south of this glacier was a dammed basin reaching 130 meters.
For this reason, it was believed that looking for archaeological sites dating back to the period of 30-40 thousand years ago in the north was pointless. It was confirmed by the almost complete absence of finds (tools, sites, organic matter).
Thanks to the international research program using AMS dating and optical-stimulating luminescence, researchers from Europe and Russia proved that there was no ice cover in the north of Western Siberia 12,000-30,000 years ago. It was much earlier: 90,000-60,000 years ago north of Salekhard. The level of the ice-dammed basin in the Ob valley did not exceed 60 meters.
This is an entirely different paleogeographic picture. For thirty years, I was convinced that in the north of Western Siberia, there were all the conditions for the existence of an ancient person. Now we had the opportunity to try to prove it: to find traces of Homo sapiens in the north of the Ob 30,000-50,000 years ago, – the project manager, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after V.I. V.S commented in a press statement.
As reported by the Barents Observer“the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens and not only Neanderthals inhabited the Arctic Circle in the Upper Paleolithic age. About two decades ago, it was only certain that Neanderthals, and not Homo sapiens, were occupants in the region during the period.”
This was discovered by radiocarbon dating a set of bones unearthed in 2001 at the Yakutia site. The radiocarbon analysis suggested that the Neanderthals had found themselves in the region approximately 28,500-27,000 years ago.
The new AMS analysis has hence provided two major breakthroughs. The first one is that Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals, inhabited the Arctic circle during the Paleolithic Age, and the second finding is that Homo sapiens lived north of the Arctic circle already 40,000 years ago.
The discovery was made by scientists from the Siberian Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences (СО РАН) conducted radiocarbon analyses of reindeer antler fragments found at the Kushevat Paleolithic site in the Lower Ob region.
In addition to the antler bones, scientists also examined a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a steppe bison (Bison Priscus), Elk (Alces alces), deer (Cervus elephus sibiricus), and, potentially, a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus). Analyses of the bones dated them back to a series of 20 different radiocarbon dates, all ranging from the period between 20 and 40 thousand years ago.
Although this finding solely points to animals, and not humans, inhibiting the Arctic region 40,000 years back, the discovery has now become the basis of further analyses, which currently date human activity in the Ob region back to 40,000 years ago. This is because two reindeer antlers held traces of human activity amongst this group of bones, which have only recently been analyzed.
The question of the initial settlement of the Arctic and Subarctic by an ancient man of the modern type (Homo sapiens sapiens) has long been of interest to scientists. The valley of the Ob River is often considered a potential migration route for Paleolithic man. It is believed that modern man came to Europe and Asia 50,000-60,000 thousand years ago.
What is still unclear is where the modern man lived before and how he crossed the Urals? For a long time, the hypothesis prevailed that 12,000-30,000 years ago, the north of Western Siberia was covered by a large glacier (just like the north of America and Europe). To the south of this glacier was a dammed basin reaching 130 meters.
For this reason, it was believed that looking for archaeological sites dating back to the period of 30-40 thousand years ago in the north was pointless. It was confirmed by the almost complete absence of finds (tools, sites, organic matter).
Thanks to the international research program using AMS dating and optical-stimulating luminescence, researchers from Europe and Russia proved that there was no ice cover in the north of Western Siberia 12,000-30,000 years ago. It was much earlier: 90,000-60,000 years ago north of Salekhard. The level of the ice-dammed basin in the Ob valley did not exceed 60 meters.
This is an entirely different paleogeographic picture. For thirty years, I was convinced that in the north of Western Siberia, there were all the conditions for the existence of an ancient person. Now we had the opportunity to try to prove it: to find traces of Homo sapiens in the north of the Ob 30,000-50,000 years ago, – the project manager, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after V.I. V.S commented in a press statement.
As reported by the Barents Observer“the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens and not only Neanderthals inhabited the Arctic Circle in the Upper Paleolithic age. About two decades ago, it was only certain that Neanderthals, and not Homo sapiens, were occupants in the region during the period.”
This was discovered by radiocarbon dating a set of bones unearthed in 2001 at the Yakutia site. The radiocarbon analysis suggested that the Neanderthals had found themselves in the region approximately 28,500-27,000 years ago.
The new AMS analysis has hence provided two major breakthroughs. The first one is that Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals, inhabited the Arctic circle during the Paleolithic Age, and the second finding is that Homo sapiens lived north of the Arctic circle already 40,000 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scientists Successfully Sent A Particle Back in Time Using A Quantum Computer
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 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.
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.
Alex Birch’s photo showing a fleet of UFOs over Mosborough, near Sheffield, in March 1962 (Copyright A. Birch)
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.
Daily Express, 6 October 1972
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.
UFO? Retford, Nottinghamshire, 27 January 2004 (Copyright A Birch)
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.’
The News of the World, 2 September 1962
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.’
A page from the DGIA (JARIC) report on analysis of the Retford photograph (Crown Copyright)
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.
Alex with his 1962 photo and Box Brownie camera (Copyright David Clarke)
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.’
Artemis I Becomes Cultural, Educational Time Capsule for Trip Around Moon
Artemis I Becomes Cultural, Educational Time Capsule for Trip Around Moon
When NASA’s Orion spacecraft travels beyond the Moon duringArtemis I, boosted by the Space Launch System rocket on its maiden voyage, the spacecraft will carry a host of mementos for educational engagement and posterity in the Official Flight Kit.
NASA spacecraft, both crewed and uncrewed, have carried mementos from Earth since the 1960s. NASA’s Voyager probe carried with it a gold record with Earth sounds, and the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars included a microchip with 10.9 million names that people submitted for inclusion in the journey. The agency flew metal on the last space shuttle mission that was later melted down and made into awards for employees.
A small Moon rock from Apollo 11 that also was aboard the final space shuttle flight will fly aboard Orion, marking the significance of the return of a spacecraft built for humans to the Moon. The National Air and Space Museum is lending an Apollo 8 commemorative medallion, a bolt from the Apollo 11 mission, and an Apollo 11 mission patch to the kit. The Apollo items contributed by the museum will be displayed in an exhibit after they are returned to Earth.
The bolt from one of Apollo 11’s F-1 engines that is included in the Artemis I Official Flight Kit.
Credits: Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
Many of the items included in the flight kit are symbols of cultural significance or NASA’s collaborative efforts with STEM-focused organizations. The agency and the Girl Scouts of the USA collaborated to include space science badges to inspire scientific and career exploration in the STEM fields. Four LEGO minifigures also will catch a ride on the flight – NASA and the LEGO Group have partnered on collaborative efforts over the past two decades to engage children and adults alike in STEM and space exploration, including a free online Artemis I “Build to Launch” lesson series.
Digitized entries from NASA’s Artemis Moon Pod essay contest, in recognition of students’ efforts and contributions, as well as pledges from teachers to educate students about space exploration will also be included in the flight kit. Around 100 miniature Artemis I patches will be included and given after the flight for team recognitions to some participants in Artemis Student Challenges, an annual series of engineering challenges for middle school through undergraduate students. A variety of tree seeds will fly and will be distributed to educational organizations and teachers as a learning opportunity after the mission. Tree seeds were flown aboard the Apollo 14 mission and were germinated and grown into “Moon Trees” after being returned to Earth as an experiment to understand the effects of deep space on seeds.
Employees examine Artemis I mission patches to be included in the Official Flight Kit.
A pen nib from the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, will make the trek on Artemis I. NASA has shared an association with Schulz and his American icon Snoopy since Apollo missions began in the 1960s. Schulz created comic strips depicting Snoopy on the Moon, illustrating public excitement about America’s achievements in space. NASA renewed its relationship with Snoopy in 2019, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 10. The nib, used by Schulz himself, will be wrapped in a space themed comic strip.
NASA has a strong history of international collaboration and is extending many of its international partnerships to Artemis. Several items from other space agencies will be included in the flight kit. ESA (European Space Agency), which is providing the service module that powers and fuels Orion around the Moon and on its way home, will fly Shaun the Sheep, a small animal from the children’s television series spinoff from “Wallace and Gromit” that was broadcast in 180 countries. ESA has a long-standing partnership and Shaun the Sheep has flown on its parabolic flight campaign to generate awareness of space.
A 3D-printed replica of the Greek goddess Artemis will fly for later display in the Acropolis Museum in Greece. The Israel Space Agency is contributing a pebble from the shore of the Dead Sea, the lowest dry land surface area on Earth, to symbolize humanity’s continuing drive for exploration. The German Space Agency will fly digitized versions of student visions of lunar exploration as part of a nationwide educational activity.
The kit will also include a variety of flags, patches, and pins to be distributed after the mission to stakeholders and employees who contributed to the flight.
The colliding cluster Abell 3266 as seen across the electromagnetic spectrum, using data from ASKAP and the ATCA (red/orange/yellow colours), XMM-Newton (blue) and the Dark Energy Survey (background map). (Image credit: Christopher Riseley (Università di Bologna),)
Christopher Riseley(opens in new tab), Research Fellow, Università di Bologna Tessa Vernstrom(opens in new tab), Senior research fellow, The University of Western Australia
The universe is littered with galaxy clusters — huge structures piled up at the intersections of the cosmic web(opens in new tab). A single cluster can span millions of light-years across and be made up of hundreds, or even thousands, of galaxies.
However, these galaxies represent only a few percent of a cluster's total mass. About 80% of it is dark matter, and the rest is a hot plasma "soup": gas heated to above 10,000,000 degrees Celsius and interwoven with weak magnetic fields.
We and our international team of colleagues have identified a series of rarely observed radio objects — a radio relic, a radio halo and fossil radio emission — within a particularly dynamic galaxy cluster called Abell 3266. They defy existing theories about both the origins of such objects and their characteristics.
Relics, haloes and fossils
Galaxy clusters allow us to study a broad range of rich processes — including magnetism and plasma physics — in environments we can't recreate in our labs.
When clusters collide with each other, huge amounts of energy are put into the particles of the hot plasma, generating radio emission. And this emission comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.
"Radio relics" are one example. They are arc-shaped and sit towards a cluster's outskirts, powered by shockwaves travelling through the plasma, which cause a jump in density or pressure, and energize the particles. An example of a shockwave on Earth is the sonic boom that happens when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.
"Radio haloes" are irregular sources that lie towards the cluster's center. They're powered by turbulence in the hot plasma, which gives energy to the particles. We know both haloes and relics are generated by collisions between galaxy clusters — yet many of their gritty details remain elusive.
Then there are "fossil" radio sources. These are the radio leftovers from the death of a supermassive black hole at the center of a radio galaxy.
When they're in action, black holes shoot huge jets of plasma(opens in new tab) far out beyond the galaxy itself. As they run out of fuel and shut off, the jets begin to dissipate. The remnants are what we detect as radio fossils.
Abell 3266
Our new paper(opens in new tab), published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, presents a highly detailed study of a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266.
This is a particularly dynamic and messy colliding system around 800 million light-years away. It has all the hallmarks of a system that should be host to relics and haloes — yet none had been detected until recently.
Our data paint a complex picture. You can see this in the lead image: yellow colors show features where energy input is active. The blue haze represents the hot plasma, captured at X-ray wavelengths.
Redder colors show features that are only visible at lower frequencies. This means these objects are older and have less energy. Either they have lost a lot of energy over time, or they never had much to begin with.
The radio relic is visible in red near the bottom of the image (see below for a zoom). And our data here reveal particular features that have never been seen before in a relic.
The 'wrong-way' relic in Abell 3266 is shown here with yellow/orange/red colours representing the radio brightness. (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, ATCA, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey))
Its concave shape is also unusual, earning it the catchy moniker of a "wrong-way" relic. Overall, our data break our understanding of how relics are generated, and we’re still working to decipher the complex physics behind these radio objects.
Ancient remnants of a supermassive black hole
The radio fossil, seen towards the upper right of the lead image (and also below), is very faint and red, indicating it is ancient. We believe this radio emission originally came from the galaxy at the lower left, with a central black hole that has long been switched off.
The radio fossil in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colors and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colors showing the hot plasma. The cyan arrow points to the galaxy we think once powered the fossil (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey)
Our best physical models simply can’t fit the data. This reveals gaps in our understanding of how these sources evolve — gaps that we're working to fill.
Finally, using a clever algorithm, we de-focused the lead image to look for very faint emission that's invisible at high resolution, unearthing the first detection of a radio halo in Abell 3266 (see below).
The radio halo in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colors and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colors showing the hot plasma. The dashed cyan curve marks the outer limits of the radio halo. (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey)
Toward the future
This is the beginning of the road towards understanding Abell 3266. We have uncovered a wealth of new and detailed information, but our study has raised yet more questions.
The telescopes we used are laying the foundations for revolutionary science from the Square Kilometre Array(opens in new tab) project. Studies like ours allow astronomers to figure out what we don’t know — but you can be sure we’re going to find out.
We acknowledge the Gomeroi people as the traditional owners of the site where ATCA is located, and the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory site, where ASKAP and the Murchison Widefield Array are located.
This article is republished from The Conversation(opens in new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article(opens in new tab).
The colliding cluster Abell 3266 as seen across the electromagnetic spectrum, using data from ASKAP and the ATCA (red/orange/yellow colours), XMM-Newton (blue) and the Dark Energy Survey (background map). (Image credit: Christopher Riseley (Università di Bologna),)
Christopher Riseley(opens in new tab), Research Fellow, Università di Bologna Tessa Vernstrom(opens in new tab), Senior research fellow, The University of Western Australia
The universe is littered with galaxy clusters — huge structures piled up at the intersections of the cosmic web(opens in new tab). A single cluster can span millions of light-years across and be made up of hundreds, or even thousands, of galaxies.
However, these galaxies represent only a few percent of a cluster's total mass. About 80% of it is dark matter, and the rest is a hot plasma "soup": gas heated to above 10,000,000 degrees Celsius and interwoven with weak magnetic fields.
We and our international team of colleagues have identified a series of rarely observed radio objects — a radio relic, a radio halo and fossil radio emission — within a particularly dynamic galaxy cluster called Abell 3266. They defy existing theories about both the origins of such objects and their characteristics.
Relics, haloes and fossils
Galaxy clusters allow us to study a broad range of rich processes — including magnetism and plasma physics — in environments we can't recreate in our labs.
When clusters collide with each other, huge amounts of energy are put into the particles of the hot plasma, generating radio emission. And this emission comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.
"Radio relics" are one example. They are arc-shaped and sit towards a cluster's outskirts, powered by shockwaves travelling through the plasma, which cause a jump in density or pressure, and energize the particles. An example of a shockwave on Earth is the sonic boom that happens when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.
"Radio haloes" are irregular sources that lie towards the cluster's center. They're powered by turbulence in the hot plasma, which gives energy to the particles. We know both haloes and relics are generated by collisions between galaxy clusters — yet many of their gritty details remain elusive.
Then there are "fossil" radio sources. These are the radio leftovers from the death of a supermassive black hole at the center of a radio galaxy.
When they're in action, black holes shoot huge jets of plasma(opens in new tab) far out beyond the galaxy itself. As they run out of fuel and shut off, the jets begin to dissipate. The remnants are what we detect as radio fossils.
Abell 3266
Our new paper(opens in new tab), published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, presents a highly detailed study of a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266.
This is a particularly dynamic and messy colliding system around 800 million light-years away. It has all the hallmarks of a system that should be host to relics and haloes — yet none had been detected until recently.
Our data paint a complex picture. You can see this in the lead image: yellow colors show features where energy input is active. The blue haze represents the hot plasma, captured at X-ray wavelengths.
Redder colors show features that are only visible at lower frequencies. This means these objects are older and have less energy. Either they have lost a lot of energy over time, or they never had much to begin with.
The radio relic is visible in red near the bottom of the image (see below for a zoom). And our data here reveal particular features that have never been seen before in a relic.
The 'wrong-way' relic in Abell 3266 is shown here with yellow/orange/red colours representing the radio brightness. (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, ATCA, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey))
Its concave shape is also unusual, earning it the catchy moniker of a "wrong-way" relic. Overall, our data break our understanding of how relics are generated, and we’re still working to decipher the complex physics behind these radio objects.
Ancient remnants of a supermassive black hole
The radio fossil, seen towards the upper right of the lead image (and also below), is very faint and red, indicating it is ancient. We believe this radio emission originally came from the galaxy at the lower left, with a central black hole that has long been switched off.
The radio fossil in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colors and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colors showing the hot plasma. The cyan arrow points to the galaxy we think once powered the fossil (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey)
Our best physical models simply can’t fit the data. This reveals gaps in our understanding of how these sources evolve — gaps that we're working to fill.
Finally, using a clever algorithm, we de-focused the lead image to look for very faint emission that's invisible at high resolution, unearthing the first detection of a radio halo in Abell 3266 (see below).
The radio halo in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colors and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colors showing the hot plasma. The dashed cyan curve marks the outer limits of the radio halo. (Image credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey)
Toward the future
This is the beginning of the road towards understanding Abell 3266. We have uncovered a wealth of new and detailed information, but our study has raised yet more questions.
The telescopes we used are laying the foundations for revolutionary science from the Square Kilometre Array(opens in new tab) project. Studies like ours allow astronomers to figure out what we don’t know — but you can be sure we’re going to find out.
We acknowledge the Gomeroi people as the traditional owners of the site where ATCA is located, and the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory site, where ASKAP and the Murchison Widefield Array are located.
This article is republished from The Conversation(opens in new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article(opens in new tab).
The Butterfly Nebula, located just under 4,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, is a striking example of a planetary nebula, the end stage in the evolution of a small to medium-sized star. The butterfly’s diaphanous “wings” consist of gas and dust that have been expelled from the dying star and illuminated from within by the star’s remaining core. The nebula’s symmetrical, double-lobed shape is a telltale sign that a companion star helped shape the outflowing gases. Both the primary star and its companion are hidden by the shroud of dust in the nebula’s center.
NASA/ESA/HUBBLE
Billions of years from now, as our Sun approaches the end of its life and helium nuclei begin to fuse in its core, it will bloat dramatically and turn into what’s known as a red giant star. After swallowing Mercury, Venus and Earth with hardly a burp, it will grow so large that it can no longer hold onto its outermost layers of gas and dust.
In a glorious denouement, it will eject these layers into space to form a beautiful veil of light, which will glow like a neon sign for thousands of years before fading.
The galaxy is studded with thousands of these jewel-like memorials, known as planetary nebulae. They are the normal end stage for stars that range from half the Sun’s mass up to eight times its mass. (More massive stars have a much more violent end, an explosion called a supernova.) Planetary nebulae come in a stunning variety of shapes, as suggested by names like the Southern Crab, the Cat’s Eye and the Butterfly. But as beautiful as they are, they have also been a riddle to astronomers. How does a cosmic butterfly emerge from the seemingly featureless, round cocoon of a red giant star?
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.
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.
Decin and her colleagues have especially relied upon the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, which came online in 2011. ALMA consists of 66 radio telescopes that work together to produce images of astronomical objects. “It gives us high spatial and spectral resolution that are important if you want to understand dynamics and velocity,” Decin says. Velocity is an important part of the puzzle for scientists to map stellar winds and accretion disks.
ALMA has seen spiral-shaped or arc-shaped structures around more than a dozen red giant stars, almost certainly a sign that matter is being shed from the red giant and spiraling toward its companion. The spirals closely match computer simulations and are impossible to explain with the old stellar-wind model. Decin reported the initial findings in 2020 in Science and expanded on them the following year in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
In addition, Decin’s group may have spotted the previously undetectable companions of two red giants, p1 Gruis and L2 Puppis, in ALMA images. To make sure, she needs to monitor them over a period of time to see if the newly detected objects are moving around the primary star. “If they move, I’m sure that we have companions,” says Decin. Perhaps this discovery will win over the last skeptics.
Like crime scene investigators, astronomers now have “before” and “after” snapshots of the creation of a planetary nebula. The one thing they lack is the equivalent of CCTV footage of the event itself. Is there any hope that astronomers can catch a red giant in the act of turning into a planetary nebula?
So far, computer models are the only way to “watch” the centuries-long process unfold from beginning to end. They have helped astronomers home in on one dramatic scenario, in which the companion star plunges into the primary after a prolonged period of orbiting it and losing distance due to tidal forces. As it spirals toward the red giant’s core, the companion sheds “an insane amount of gravitational energy,” says Frank. The computer models show that this hugely accelerates the process through which the star lets go of its outer layers, to just one to 10 years. If this is correct, and if astronomers knew where to look, they could witness the death of a star and birth of a planetary nebula in real time.
A hydrodynamic simulation of a small companion star (white dot) orbiting a red giant star (white circle) shows that the outflowing stellar wind forms a spiral, consistent with what has been seen in the ALMA telescope images.
L. DECIN / *AR ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS* 2021
One candidate to keep an eye on is called V Hydrae. This very active red giant star ejects bullet-like clumps of plasma toward its poles every 8.5 years, and it also has coughed out six large rings in its equatorial plane over the last 2,100 years. Raghvendra Sahai, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who published the discovery of the rings in April, believes that the red giant has not one but two companion stars. A nearby companion may already be grazing the red giant’s envelope and producing the plasma ejections, while a distant companion in a dive-bombing orbit controls the ejection of the rings. If so, V Hydrae may be close to swallowing up its closer companion.
Finally, what about our Sun? Studies of binary stars might seem to have little relevance for our star’s fate, because it is a singleton. Stars with companions lose mass about six to 10 times faster than those without, Decin estimates, because it’s much more efficient for a companion star to pull off a red giant’s shell than for the red giant to push off its own shell.
This means that data on stars with companions cannot reliably predict the fate of stars without companions, like the Sun. Roughly half of the stars that are the Sun’s size have companions of some sort. According to Decin, the companion will always affect the shape of the stellar wind, and it will significantly affect the mass-loss rate if the companion is close enough. The Sun will most likely eject its outer layer more slowly than those stars and will stay in its red-giant phase several times longer.
But a great deal is still unknown about the Sun’s last act. For example, even though Jupiter is not a star, it could still be hefty enough to attract material from the Sun and power up an accretion disk. “I think we’ll have a very small spiral created by Jupiter,” Decin says. “Even in our simulations, you can see its impact on the solar wind.” If so, then our Sun too might be in line for a showy grand finale.
Gods, Extraterrestrials and Religion: From Ancient Atlantis to Today via Michael Salla
Gods, Extraterrestrials and Religion: From Ancient Atlantis to Today via Michael Salla
Dr.Michael E. Salla, is a pioneer in the development of ‘Exopolitics’, the political study of the key actors, institutions and processes associated with extraterrestrial life.
Ancient records and religious texts describe multiple “Gods” (aka extraterrestrials) creating humanity in a series of genetic experiments and warring among themselves over who would be dominant in influencing Earth’s future. The world’s oldest known creation story, Sumer’s Enuma Elish, and other ancient texts introduce the different creator Gods and how they formed grand assemblies to resolve their differences over the destiny of humanity.
This new video is the official trailer/short film for the “World Religions and Extraterrestrial Contact” webinar to be held on August 13. In addition to the above issues, the trailer discusses the rise and fall of Atlantis in relation to creator Gods/extraterrestrials alarmed over humanity’s rapid technological development. Finally, this short film covers the return of the creator Gods (Elohim/Anunnaki) to our solar system and what this means for us today.
Sparkling Orange UFO Ball over Albuquerque, NM 2022
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.
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 leastsome 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."
An artist's impression of a neutron-star merger (on the left) that produces a relativistic jet of particles that interacts with gas in the surrounding environment, producing an afterglow. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. Weiss (NRAO/AUI/NSF))
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.)
An artist's depiction of two neutron stars before they collide. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
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.
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 uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.
The aging vehicle can still have a big role in answering whether there has ever been life on Mars.
The European ExoMars rover, conceived in 2004, might arrive on Mars in 2028.
(Image credit: ESA/ATG Media Lab)
The stars have not been aligned for Europe's first Martian rover ExoMars, but scientists still think the aging vehicle can play a big role in answering one of the biggest questions in Mars exploration: has there ever been life on the Red Planet?
The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover is probably the most high-profile space industry casualty of Russia's war in Ukraine. Originally expected to launch in 2018, the rover was finally declared ready to go (after several delays) for a launch in September this year atop Russia's Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine put a stop to these plans.
ESA officially terminated cooperation on the ExoMars mission with Russia in July, leaving the rover, conceived in 2004, once again in limbo, and more importantly, without a landing platform to place it on the surface of Mars. (That landing platform was built by Russia, who joined the ExoMars program in 2012 following the withdrawal of the original partner, NASA, in 2012.)
ESA has yet to decide on the mission's fate. Having spent $1.3 billion on the program already, it will have to choose between scrapping the rover altogether or forking out another substantial sum to replace the Russian bits.
In the case of the latter option, the most optimistic estimates see the ExoMars rover leaving Earth in 2028. For many European scientists, scrapping the mission should not be an option at all, and not just because of the investment. Even though NASA's Perseverance has been smashing its sample collection targets, and plans for a mission that would bring those samples to Earth are already underway, there is a lot the aging ExoMars rover can contribute to our understanding of Mars, they say. And some of those questions, in fact, cannot be answered by the stellar Perseverance.
"[The rover's instruments] are going to get a bit old," John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at Leicester University in the U.K., told Space.com. "But as long as the maintenance can be done, it doesn't actually bother me too much that we're not using the most cutting-edge technology. Even if we're going by bicycle rather than by the newest car, it doesn't really matter, as long as we get there."
The promise of the drill
The biggest strength, and scientific promise, of the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover is its 6.6-foot (2 meters) drill, which, according to some astrobiologists, may have a higher chance of finding traces of past or present Martian life on Mars than the agile Perseverance.
"The rock pieces that Perseverance collects are from the immediate surface [of Mars]," Susanne Schwenzer, an astrobiologist at Open University in the U.K., who is also an interdisciplinary scientist on the ExoMars mission and a member of the science teams of NASA's Curiosity and the Mars Sample Return missions, told Space.com. "And this immediate surface is bombarded by galactic cosmic rays, and the UV rays [from the sun], which destroy organic materials."
The European ExoMars rover carries a suite of instruments designed to find traces of life in Martian soil.(Image credit: ESA)
Unlike Earth, Mars has no protective magnetic field and a very thin atmosphere, so there is nothing to filter this sterilizing radiation, some of which can penetrate several meters deep into the Martian rocks.
"[The effects of the radiation] diminish exponentially, so the first centimeters [inches] are the worst hit," Schwenzer said.
That doesn't mean that Perseverance cannot find traces of life, just that detecting the organic molecules in the burnt surface layers might require a more challenging scientific analysis, Schwenzer added.
"The advantage of the return samples is that we will have them in our labs over here," Schwenzer said. "If we find something that we can't answer with the instruments that we have, we can wait for the right technology to be developed. It took until the late 1990s to find water in the Apollo samples because they didn't have the right instrumentation at that time."
The deep excavations that the ExoMars rover was built for can, in fact, help scientists understand Perseverance's rocks and the alteration they underwent due to the bombardment by radiation.
"[The ExoMars rover] will help us understand how the organics degrade with depth or do not degrade and are preserved at deeper layers," Schwenzer said.
Europe's wrong turn
Bridges agrees with Schwenzer. But there are other reasons why continuing with ExoMars should be the only option on the table, he thinks. A generation of European scientists has tied their careers with the mission, which may have always been a bit of a moonshot for Europe, ever since its inception in 2004.
"When we started ExoMars in 2004, it was way off the capabilities [of ESA and the European space industry] to do it," Bridges said. "So we got the Americans in to land it and when the Americans pulled out, ESA just looked around, and the Russians put up their hand, and it was done."
Bridges describes the partnership with Russia, hastily put together by ESA leadership under General Director Jean-Jacques Dordain in 2012, as "a strategic mistake."
"I think we should have hit the pause button back then and have a harder discussion across the European communities about what we were going to do," he said.
At that time, the onset of the conflict in Ukraine was still two years away, but Russia was already guilty of stirring a bloody war in Georgia(opens in new tab); its actions in the Caucasian country were overwhelmingly overlooked by the international community at that time.
"There's frustration and disappointment, because so much work has gone into ExoMars," Bridges said. "The instruments, the science teams. But we should probably still stick with it and try and recoup all that scientific investment, not just throw up our hands in disappointment and walk away from it.
ExoMars' landing site in Oxia Planum is an ancient area that could harbor traces of past life. (Image credit: ESA)
The call to confirm life on Mars
Schwenzer adds that to provide the ultimate answer to the big question, whether there has ever been life on Mars, scientists would want to review as much data as possible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," Schwenzer said, quoting famous astrobiologist Carl Sagan. "We can't just find one molecule that is usually produced by life on Earth and claim that we have found life on Mars. We can't make that claim unless we can absolutely exclude that anything else could have made that molecule. And in order to do that, we would need all the information that we can get, not just that from one mission."
ExoMars' projected landing site in Oxia Planum, an ancient clay-rich basin near Mars' northern tropic, was carefully selected by a pan-European scientific consortium as it offers the best conditions to harbor traces of life.
Formed about 4 billion years ago, the basin, covered with fine-grained sediments, has a catchment area of thousands of miles, Bridges said, where water in the past used to accumulate.
"It's a very different area to Jezero Crater [where Perseverance roams]," Bridges said. "But because we have seen one, that doesn't mean that it is not worth going to see the other. We have still only explored a tiny fraction of the Martian surface and we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming that we've seen that, done that."
Falling behind
The ExoMars conundrum, Bridges suggests, highlights weaknesses in ESA's strategy, and undermines the agency's aspiration to be the world-class player it desires to be.
ESA, a partnership of 22 European member states, was beaten to the surface of Mars by China, which only revealed its plans for the Zhurong rover in 2014. Chinese landers, including the famous Yutu rover, have dominated moon exploration in the past decade. Japan's space agency JAXA, in the meantime, has built a legacy of returning samples from asteroids.
"ESA has this problem that they can be left flapping in the breeze a bit," Bridges said. "If external factors change, they don't seem to quite have the size or strength to withstand being buffeted about. Part of that is because they haven't really decided what their strategy is, what they really want to be doing, compared to JAXA or China's National Space Administration, who know exactly what they want to do and they just get on and do it."
ESA is currently evaluating options for the ExoMars rover, which it will present to its member states later this year. Among the possibilities is a return to the original partner NASA, who could land the rover using its proven technologies, Bridges said, but with a substantial financial contribution from ESA.
Rogue planets nearly double in number with new discovery
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.
Scientists with the CEERS Collaboration have identified an object—dubbed Maisie’s galaxy in honor of project head Steven Finkelstein’s daughter—that may be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed. If its estimated redshift of 14 is confirmed with future observations, that would mean we’re seeing it as it was just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Credit: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay.
Two new images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope show what may be among the earliest galaxies ever observed. Both images include objects from more than 13 billion years ago, and one offers a much wider field of view than Webb's First Deep Field image, which was released amid great fanfare July 12. The images represent some of the first out of a major collaboration of astronomers and other academic researchers teaming with NASA and global partners to uncover new insights about the universe.
Members of the CEERS collaboration explore the first wide, deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope at the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Visualization Lab on the UT Austin campus on July 21, 2022.
Credit: Nolan Zunk/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.
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.
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![The Uranium-235 chain reaction that both leads to[-] a nuclear fission bomb, but also generates power inside a nuclear reactor, is powered by neutron absorption as its first step, resulting in the production of three additional free neutrons. E. SIEGEL, FASTFISSION / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS](https://mysteriesrunsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Nuclear-atomic-chain-reaction-Uranium-scaled.jpg)
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