It’s an ancient idea, which only increases its resonance for some. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was the first to propose it. He coined the term ‘panspermia’ and said that the Universe was full of life and that some of it fell to Earth. It remains on the fringe of science because it can’t explain how life started, and it’s not testable. But it is enduring.

Oumuamua’s appearance sparked renewed interest in Panspermia. After the object came and went rapidly in 2017, scientists attempted to determine what it actually was. Maybe it was a comet, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was a chunk of frozen hydrogen. Many hypotheses were presented. Now, we simply call it an interstellar object, or ISO.

From the perspective of panspermia, Oumuamua’s classification isn’t the most pressing concern. It was a visitor to our Solar System from elsewhere, and that’s the most salient point.

In a new paper, a trio of researchers examine how many of these types of objects might exist and what properties they’d need to protect and transport life throughout the galaxy. The paper is titled “The Implications of ‘Oumuamua on Panspermia.” The lead author is David Cao, a high school student who also served as an intern at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“Panspermia is the hypothesis that life originated on Earth from the bombardment of foreign interstellar ejecta harbouring polyextremophile microorganisms,” the authors write. “By utilizing ‘Oumuamua’s properties as an anchor, we estimate the mass and number density of ejecta in the ISM.”

Throughout their work, they acknowledge that “panspermia is an extraordinarily difficult theory to quantitatively model and assess.” But it’s still worth an attempt because of Oumuamua. “The recently discovered ‘Oumuamua merits a reexamination for the possibility of panspermia, the hypothesis that life seeded on Earth from the bombardment of life-bearing interstellar ejecta and that life can be transferred from one celestial body to another.”

The trio determined the minimum size of ejecta needed to protect extremophiles from radiation, especially from supernovae. Intense gamma rays can sterilize ejecta if they’re not large enough for extremophiles to survive in their interiors, shielded by rock or water ice. Ejecta also needs to be large enough to protect any lifeforms from impact with another body. But the size depends on the nature of the ejecta.

“We consider the four most common elemental compositions of asteroids (chondritic, stony and metallic) and comets (water-ice) in our own Solar System: silicate, nickel, iron, and water-ice,” they write. Nickel has the highest attenuation and the smallest minimum size needed to shelter life. Water-ice requires the maximum size.

The authors explain, “We make an assumption that the number density abundances and varying compositions of interstellar ejecta mirror the content of minor bodies in our own Solar System.” Based on that, they settled on a minimum size of 6.6 meters.

They also tried to determine the likelihood that extremophiles could have seeded Earth, though they acknowledge that many of the factors involved are poorly understood and poorly constrained. In order to seed life, an ejecta carrying extremophiles had to have arrived at Earth early, before the earliest evidence of fossilized life. “Second, we estimate the total number of impact events on Earth after its formation and prior to the emergence of life (? 0.8 Gyr).”

They calculate impact rates for objects of different sizes. For objects at least 10 meters in diameter, they calculate that about 40,000 of them could’ve impacted Earth in its first 800,000 years.

Existing estimates of the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way are available. Based on those, here’s what it all adds up to, keeping in mind all of the poorly constrained factors involved. “However, we find that panspermia is a plausible potential life-seeding mechanism for (optimistically) potentially up to ~ 10⁵ (100,000) of the ~ 10⁹ (one billion) Earth-sized habitable zone worlds in our Galaxy,” the authors write.

But the prospects that Earth itself was seeded by panspermia are very weak. “For the Earth in particular, we conclude that, independent of other hypotheses for the origins of life on Earth, panspermia remains improbable (< 0.001%).” In a way, it’s more of a thought experiment. The authors say that “the true relative probability for panspermia remains unknown.”

The panspermia idea will not disappear. It’s simply too compelling to discard, even though it cannot be tested.

Another way of looking at it is that Earth could be a source of panspermia rather than a receiver.

“The fraction of these rocky planets that possess magnetic fields, atmospheres, and liquid surface water capable of supporting life is currently unconstrained and unknown, but our work implies as many as 10⁴ of these worlds in our Galaxy could be populated with life today via panspermia under the most optimistic assumptions that all of these worlds are capable of supporting ejecta-transported life, with Earth as one of the potential source planets.” The number could rise to 10⁴ under the most optimistic conditions.

There are other factors to consider. We’re only beginning to determine the number of rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs). As we learn more about them and their abundance, the panspermia hypothesis will change. “The discovery of rogue-free floating planets (FFPs) suggests a significantly higher ISM ejecta number density than expected for large objects,” the authors explain.

Also, the number of ejecta and their mass haven’t been constant. For example, during the hypothesized Late Heavy Bombardment, a much larger number of objects were crashing into the Earth and the other Solar System bodies. How would that have affected panspermia?

“~4 Gyr ago, the Earth is thought to have experienced an unprecedented number of impact events
that consequently ejected matter into the ISM, the era of Late Heavy Bombardment,” the authors write. The rate of bombardment was between 100 to 500 times greater than the present rate. If other solar systems experienced similar events, there would be substantially more potential for panspermia.

The star formation rate also plays a role. “As more stars are formed, more mass will be ejected into the ISM in star formation regions, increasing the production of ISM ejecta number density,” the authors explain.

There are so many unknowns and so much conjecture that many scientists avoid the panspermia theory completely. But more and more data will keep coming our way, and as it does, the idea will be revised and reconsidered.

The Rubin Observatory Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will hopefully see its long-anticipated first light in early 2025. That telescope will undoubtedly detect many more ISOs and FFPs, filling in important gaps in our knowledge.

As that data comes in, expect more attention to be focused on the panspermia theory

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 01:45 geschreven door peter  

Being trapped in space sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Astronauts on board the International Space Station have on occasion, had their return delayed by weather or equipment malfunction. We find ourselves again, watching and waiting as two astronauts; Juni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stuck for months instead of their week long mission. The delays came as the Starliner system required fixes to be implemented. NASA successfully fired up 27 of its 28 thrusters in a hot-firing test and now, ground teams are preparing finally, to bring them home.

The Boeing Starliner spacecraft is officially known as the CST-100 Starliner. It was developed by Boeing as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Its purpose is to transport astronauts to the International Space Station and other low orbit craft. Starliner hit the headlines with its reusable design aimed at reducing costs and increasing launch frequency. It was first launched on 20 December 2019 as an uncrewed test flight to demonstrate docking capability with ISS. 

Since 2019 Starliner has had issues along the way but has largely seen a successful progression to becoming a key part of NASA’s launch capability. Just recently however there have been issues with the manoeuvring jets used to adjust the attitude. Engineering teams at NASA and Boeing have been working on and running tests with Mexico a new configuration. Part of the thruster system controls the flow of helium, these are the helium manifolds and they were opened to allow engineers to monitor any helium supply issues and leaks. 

The team ran a hot fire test of the reaction control system jets on 27 July to see if there were any problems with the propulsion system. They test fired 27 out of 28 jets while astronauts Wilmore and Williams sat inside the docked Starliner. The tests involved firing the jets for short bursts, one at a time. They revealed that all thrusters were back to performing well and the helium manifolds were within operational margins that were needed for a return trip from ISS. The engineering teams closed the manifolds ahead of undocking and returning the astronauts home. 

The work is not over for the engineering teams however as they are now reviewing data from the tests and from ground based testing at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. Once the review of data is complete, NASA and Boeing will identify a date to return the astronauts. 

Meanwhile back on board the ISS Wilmore and Williams wait. They have been checking other Starliner systems in preparation for return, working with other Boeing teams to prepare and have been undertaking pressure tests of their space suits. They have been working alongside Expedition 71 members and have recently helped setup the BioServe centrifuge in the Harmony Module. The centrifuge supports a wide range of biological, physical and materials science projects. Facilitating the separation of substances with different densities it can work with cell cultures, DNA, protein, blood and sedimentary samples.

Source : 

• NASA, Boeing Complete Second Docked Starliner Hot Fire Test

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 01:36 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers have recently spotted signs of an extended disk of dust and gas, whirling in orbit around a distant star.

While this phenomenon is a normal stage in the development of a star and its planetary system, what makes this find so spectacular is that it's the first one we've seen around a star in a whole other galaxy, outside of our own.

The feature was spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy some 179,000 light-years away from the Milky Way. And, although it might seem like common sense to suppose that star formation processes are universal, we've not been able to observe their vagaries outside of our home galaxy before.

"When I first saw evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data I could not believe that we had detected the first extragalactic accretion disc, it was a special moment," said astronomer Anna McLeod of Durham University in the UK, when the findings were published in November.

"We know discs are vital to forming stars and planets in our galaxy, and here, for the first time, we're seeing direct evidence for this in another galaxy."

Stars are born from dense clumps in clouds of molecular gas and dust that hang out in interstellar space. When a clump grows dense enough, it collapses under gravity; spinning, it starts to draw in more material from the cloud around it. This material doesn't just fall onto the protostar any old how, though; it arranges into a disk around the star's equator, and falls down onto it in a more controlled, steady stream, like water down a drain.

Once the star is done forming, what remains of the disk stays there, clumping together to form all the other elements of a planetary system: the planets, the asteroids and meteors, the comets, the dust. That's why the Solar System's planets are more or less orbiting the Sun in a flat plane. We ourselves are like the sentient mold that grew on the leftovers of the Sun's breakfast.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful radio telescope, has imaged quite a few such disks throughout the Milky Way, in various stages of development; some have clear gaps that are thought to be cleared by planets clumping together as they orbit. But the farther away something is, the harder it is to resolve, even with a powerful telescope.

McLeod and her colleagues embarked on their campaign to find an extragalactic stellar disk when data obtained by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope revealed signs of a jet, in a system named HH 1177.

These, too, are a signature of star formation: some of the material swirling around the forming star gets whisked away along its magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is launched into space in the form of a powerful jet.

The researchers wanted to see if they could spot the disk in the dusty heart of star formation, so they used ALMA to look for signs of rotation. This can be seen in the way wavelengths of light are shortened as the source is pushed towards us, and lengthened as they are pulled away.

"The frequency of light changes depending on how fast the gas emitting the light is moving towards or away from us," explained astronomer Jonathan Henshaw of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. "This is precisely the same phenomenon that occurs when the pitch of an ambulance siren changes as it passes you and the frequency of the sound goes from higher to lower."

Interestingly, the ALMA data showed clear signs of this rotation. The star, the team's analysis revealed, is very young and massive, still feeding from the disk around it. This is pretty normal. But there was a difference between it and the protostellar disks found in the Milky Way: the HH 1177 disk can be seen in optical wavelengths.

This, the researchers explain, has to do with the interstellar environment in the Large Magellanic Cloud. There is much less dust there; so the HH 1177 star is not as shrouded in a curtain of material as young, massive Milky Way stars usually are.

This makes the discovery an important one for studying, not just how stars form in different environments, but the limits those environments can place on star formation in general.

"We are in an era of rapid technological advancement when it comes to astronomical facilities," McLeod said. "Being able to study how stars form at such incredible distances and in a different galaxy is very exciting."

• The research has been published in Nature.
• A version of this article was first published in December 2023.

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/channel/topic/Science/ }

01-08-2024 om 22:46 geschreven door peter  

01-08-2024 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

Where Did Life Come From, Exactly? The Answer Is Out There

The latest research shows lightning, meteors, and far-off nebulae all played a role in assembling the ingredients for life on early Earth.

BY KIONA SMITH

 

Abdulaziz Alghmdi / 500px/500px/Getty Images

RIDE THE LIGHTNING

Nitrogen is an essential ingredient for life — an element that is found in proteins, amino acids, and DNA. But not just any nitrogen will do. Most of the time, nitrogen atoms are locked together in close-knit pairs, held together by very strong chemical bonds, which means neither atom is available for chemical reactions. So it needs a little jolt to shake it loose.

Harvard University chemist Hahui Jiang and her colleagues’ recent experiments showed that lightning, especially if it struck wet soil near rivers or lakes, can break these bonds, splitting the coupled-up nitrogen into free atoms. That, in turn, could have set the stage for chemical reactions that produced more complex molecules — including important ingredients for living cells and the nutrients they crave.

Jiang and her colleagues published their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but Sasselov tells Inverse that it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Exactly where the chemical building blocks of life came from is a puzzle that chemists, astronomers, and biologists are still trying to solve. The answer could help explain our own origins, but it also could help us figure out how likely it is that we’re not alone in the universe.

A 1952 experiment by scientists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller found that lightning can jumpstart chemical reactions that, eventually lead to organic chemistry: the types of molecules that eventually become the building blocks of life. But the story of how a planet full of inert chemicals turned into a planet teeming with life, is a lot more complicated than Urey and Miller ever imagined.

“The origin of life question is more of a puzzle, consisting of multiple pieces that need to fit together, rather than a single breakthrough,” Harvard University astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, a coauthor of the recent study, tells Inverse.

IT’S ALIVE!

Some of the chemical ingredients for life form around deep-sea vents where water and rock meet, and where intense heat provides the energy for chemical reactions. Others can be found in erupting volcanoes. More of the chemistry of life probably happens anytime ultraviolet light hits water, according to another recent study. And most astrobiologists also assume comets and meteors delivered some of the ingredients for life to early Earth.

But some of the stuff cells are made of — including some of the most complex chemical compounds on the ingredients list — may have been part of the starter pack for our newly-formed Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomers have spotted the telltale spectrum of light emitted by an animo acid called tryptophan in a nearby cloud of interstellar gas and dust, and a chemical called ethanolamine, which is a key part of cell membranes, formed in a cold, dark interstellar cloud more than 100,000 light years away. Other organic chemistry — like the ring-shaped molecule benzene, on which most other organic chemistry is based — has been spotted forming in the cloud of gas and dust around a pair of newborn stars, in chemical reactions powered by shock waves.

The reality is that the chemicals that made up the earliest life on Earth may have take a little from column A and a little from column B — a mixture of deep space feedstock and home-grown biochemistry.

“We cannot limit ourselves to think that the answer to the origin of life comes from a single source,” Arhaus University astronomer Sergio Ioppolo, one of the researchers whose team discovered ethanolamine in deep space last year, tells Inverse. “We should also consider that lightning-induced electrochemistry alone cannot explain the onset of life on the early Earth. It is likely that our planet got the building blocks of life by multiple endogenic [local] as well as exogenic [from space] routes.”

RAW MATERIALS ABOUND

Sasselov says that even if the Solar System formed with a starting supply of building blocks — amino acids, ethanolamine, and more — those building blocks couldn’t just assemble themselves into working cells. Instead, according to Sasselov, those complex molecules probably got provided things like phosphorus and carbon to the early Earth.

But even a starting supply of several tons of, say, amino acids, delivered by meteors or baked into Earths’ crust, wouldn’t be enough to sustain organic chemistry long enough for life to emerge. Whatever amino acids and benzene rings found their way to early Earth from deep space, they were more useful for their raw materials than as preassembled components for cells. That’s because the chemistry that led to life needed a constant supply of things like carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, and nitrogren.

“[Those molecules] themselves cannot be directly incorporated into the cells which produce life,” says Sasselov, adding, “We now know that some of those chemical reactions which happen in interstellar space are very different from the ones which can sustainably occur on the surface of the Earth later on.”

So the ethanolamine in your cell membranes probably didn’t form on the surface of a distant bit of interstellar dust, but the ingredients were likely there — being carried through the universe to do their thing on the petri dish that is Earth.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

“The work of Jiang and her colleagues is one of the many pieces of the puzzle which we should build on,” says Ioppolo.

And the particular piece of the puzzle Jiang and her colleagues were interested in was small but vital: how early Earth got enough nitrogen, in a usable form, to fuel the chemical machinery that eventually produced — and sustained — life. They found that lightning was the solution to that particular piece of the puzzle, especially when it struck water or wet soil, where a wider selection of minerals could get in on the resulting chemical reactions. (In contrast, Urey and Miller just studied the effects of lightning in midair back in 1952, because that’s easier to simulate in a lab.)

Sasselov emphasizes that we shouldn’t picture a single lightning strike spawning life here on Earth. It took a very long time, and a lot of small events adding up, before life finally arose.

“The origin of life is not a single event, or a number of single events, in which the chemistry happened once, almost miraculously, somewhere on the surface of the planet, and then everything went on afterwards,” says Sasselov. “That kind of scenario doesn't work.”

Because the story of life’s origins is so complex, it takes scientists from a wide range of disciplines to put the whole puzzle together.

“In my view, our only chance to address the fundamental question of the origin of life is to put different scientific communities together and tackle the issue from many different perspectives including astronomy, astrochemistry, astrobiology, planetary science, volcanology, and biology,” says Ioppolo.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

01-08-2024 om 22:27 geschreven door peter  

An Underwater Drone Helped Scientists Explore the Final Glacial Frontier

Peeking beneath ice shelves is key for predicting sea level rise.

BY LAUREN LEFFER

 

Anna Wåhlin

Ice shelves are often hundreds of meters thick. Through satellite data and radar measurements of the surface, glaciologists can make inferences and estimates about shifts in sea ice behavior unfolding under climate change. Yet a new perspective can offer a whole lot more information, as demonstrated in a study published July 31 in the journal Science Advances. A team of scientists deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to explore beneath Dotson ice shelf, on the western side of Antarctica.

The unmanned submarine traveled more than 600 miles over 27 days, collecting ocean temperature, salinity, and current data while also scanning the bottom of the ice shelf using sonar for the first time. The resulting, detailed measurements allowed the researchers to construct the most detailed maps of the Dotson ever, revealing exactly how the shelf is changing and even new types of ice-shelf formations never seen before.

“It's a bit like seeing the back of the moon,” said Anna Wåhlin, lead study author and a professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, in a press statement.

The Dotson shelf is an outflow of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the continent’s largest contributor to sea level rise (and second only worldwide to the Greenland Ice Sheet, when it comes to melt volume). Though ice shelves don’t directly contribute to sea level rise, as they’re already floating, ice shelf losses contribute to ice loss on land, as glacial flow moves outward and the shelves and sheets fail to recover under ever-warmer conditions. Shrinking marine ice shelves can destabilize sheets on land.

As climate change progresses, Antarctica is set to become an even larger factor in globally rising tides. Understanding ice sheets is key to improving our predictions of how that melt is likely to unfold, and its subsequent impacts. And the new work offers a deeper understanding of Dotson than scientists have ever had before. The observations could help inform not only how glaciologists assess this one ice shelf but every Antarctic ice shelf.

Past estimates of ice loss have failed to meet reality. This new information, combined with a wave of other recent analyses, will hopefully make for clearer, more accurate forecasts. “These new observations will help the community of ice modelers to reduce the large uncertainties in future sea level,” said Karen Heywood, a study co-author and professor of oceanography at the University of East Anglia in England in the news release.

This is not the first study to use an unmanned submarine to make measurements beneath an ice shelf; the method has been deployed for a few years. However, these are the first sub-shelf AUV data on Dotson, and it’s one of relatively few expeditions to have occurred in a growing field. For now, every mission below an Antarctic ice shelf is notable, and brings new information. Many of the new observations confirmed estimates from surface analyses: Researchers had inferred that the western portion of Dotson is thinning faster than the eastern and central sections. Data collected on currents also bolsters previous hypotheses about why that is. Water is flowing faster beneath the western part of the shelf. Yet some of the observations were totally novel.

Per the AUV scans, the underside of the eastern and central regions of the Dotson Ice Shelf is characterized by large, flat terrace-like topography, bordered by steep walls. The researchers note this melt pattern is likely the result of periodic intrusions of sea water below the ice shelf’s grounding line. In contrast, the western side of the shelf is mostly smooth on the bottom with shallow, odd features like swirling, teardrop-shaped imprints.

“There were cracks and swirls in the ice that we weren’t expecting. It looked more like art,” said Heywood. Initially, the scientists had no idea what was causing these patterns, but they’ve homed in on one hypothesis related to a known ocean current phenomenon called the Ekman spiral.

Yet still, there’s much more to uncover in the massive trove of data compiled by the solo sub. These initial maps are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Unfortunately, to make future observations, the researchers will need a new AUV. The marine drone the expedition had been using, dubbed Ran, disappeared below the ice during another expedition, cut woefully short. The observations on Dotson are a final transmission from a lost ship.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

01-08-2024 om 22:20 geschreven door peter  

Getty/Photo Illustration Popular Mechanics Staff

UFO Sightings Are Spiking. This Man Has Unraveled the Truth Behind Hundreds of Them

ON A CLEAR, SUNNY DAY IN JULY, Mick West, a former video game programmer, was flying from his home in Sacramento, California, down to Pasadena. From the aircraft, he spied a small, white, elongated object that seemed to be passing over the mountains. Intrigued, he took a short video with his phone. Though he assumed the anomaly was just another airplane, West just couldn’t help himself; he needed to investigate.

When he got to his hotel room, West did what he so often does: a bit of digital sleuthing. First, he uploaded the raw footage to Photoshop to drill down into the image until it resembled a mosaic of zoomed-in pixels. “You have to be very careful about what you’re looking at … for me, that’s the very first step in investigating a case,” he explains. He also downloaded the GPS routes of his plane and a few nearby ones from FlightAware.com, a real-time worldwide flight tracker.

West is a longtime UFO debunker. Retired from the gaming industry in the early 2000s, he’s dealt with about 1,000 UFO cases over nearly a decade, ultimately completing a deeper analysis of about 100 on a pro-bono basis. He examines scoops from official and leaked government reports, sightings trending on social media, emails people send to him, and anomalies posted on popular UFO databases like Enigma and MUFON. He’s even appeared on a History Channel show, The Proof Is Out There, as a forensic video analyst.

He’s found that most skyward curiosities have a logical explanation. No aliens required.

And yet, reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)—a term the U.S. government’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 established to replace the term “UFO”—are on the rise, according to data from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established in 2022. West believes in using logic and common sense while investigating such claims. That means following the clues and cross-referencing them with simultaneous events such as flights, weather phenomena like saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, ground camera images, and satellite data from companies like Starlink.

That may not necessarily lead to thrilling discoveries of alien encounters, but for West, chipping away at the puzzle to reveal the truth is enormously satisfying.

WEST USES A THOUGHTFUL, methodical process every time he investigates a UAP. His investigation of the white mystery object spotted during his flight to Southern California is the perfect example.

First, he pulled data from the original video. To do so, West used programs like Invisor, an app that displays and compares technical information about video, audio, and photo files. “You drag in the video and you get all this information, things like the original date it was recorded, the resolution, the frame rates … sometimes you get location as well,” he explains, sharing his screen via Zoom, displaying a long column of dozens of datasets.

Understanding the physical perspective of the camera shot is crucial, too. Since West’s video was taken from an airplane, he consulted the free online tool FlightRadar24. A green and brown map depicting U.S. physical features popped up, dotted with dozens of tiny yellow airplane symbols. “You can figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,” West explains.

When he zoomed in on his own flight, West could see exactly where his plane was at the particular time he spotted the mysterious, white airborne object, as well as the positions of every other plane nearby. So, he connected the dots. “I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,” he says, moving his cursor over another nearby plane, “so this is a likely contender.” He could see that the plane had taken off from Los Angeles’ Van Nuys Airport shortly before his video and that it was ascending. “That matches what we see in the video,” he says.

Then, West turned to a tool he designed himself, called Sitrec. An organization that prefers to remain anonymous paid West to continue developing the app and to help make it freely and publicly available on his website, Metabunk.org, a hub for UAP news, forum discussions, and debunking resources. West simply dragged and dropped his video into Sitrec—a “situation recreation” tool which integrates flight data and video from any source—and used satellite imagery to recreate situations.

“I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,” he says. “This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.”

WEST USED TO CODE FOR Tony Hawk’s Pro Series™ skater video games, a billion-dollar franchise. He likes to joke that it was his “baptism by fire,” because he would sometimes “spend an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem. It can be very difficult to figure out … but you have no choice.”

It’s this passion and rigor that ignited his first foray into UAP investigations. That, and a fascination with conspiracy theories.

It all began with the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory that claims airplane vapor trails secretly contain chemical or biological agents meant to control people. To debunk that far-fetched idea, West launched the website ContrailScience.com. Eventually, he started debunking other conspiracy theories including those about 9/11, Earth being flat, and finally UFO alien sightings.

The most important element of maintaining accuracy is to hold on to reasonable—albeit mundane—explanations. “This is a big, big issue in UFO investigations. Instead of trying to eliminate something, you just move possibilities up and down the list,” West explains. Perhaps the list of possibilities for a UAP includes a bird, a weather balloon, an alien spaceship, a hallucination, or a camera glitch. “Which one’s the most important one? The most likely one,” West says. “If you eliminate something, you’ve thrown it away, and you might never get it back.”

That’s what happened during a UAP investigation in Chile—one that would permanently cement West’s interest in UAPs.

In 2014, the Chilean Navy caught video footage of overlapping mysterious black blobs leaving black streaks behind them. Chile’s military studied the recording for two years, but ruled out several different possibilities, leaving behind only the tantalizing chance of aliens. On Metabunk, you can watch West’s analysis of the recording. He discovered that the thermal camera responsible for the footage made the blobs appear hot. In reality, they were just hotter than the surrounding sky that day. Likewise, the streaks were also warmer than the surrounding sky. It’s the same effect as looking through a regular camera at an object with a very bright background, West says—the object appears black.

“It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong,]” he says. In fact, after removing the radiating heat effects around the object, the shape of a regular airplane emerges. The blobs were the four engines of an airplane, and the streaks its contrails.

Mick West

A screenshot from Mick West’s free online Sitrec tool showing the Chilean Navy UAP video, with a flight path analysis and additional information about the November 11, 2014 incident on the left-hand side of the screen.

Another aspect the original investigation got wrong was the blob’s flight path. The footage originated from a helicopter and seemed to indicate a UAP over a nearby bay. “They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right, here,” says West, pointing out the flight track path on the video via Sitrec. “In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from San Diego Airport.” As the plane looped around to gain height over the nearby mountains, it banked in such a way that it appeared to be over the bay and so—apparently—didn’t match any flight records. West was able to simulate the blob’s actual movements by accounting for the camera angle and the relative movement of the blob, and overlaid it successfully with official flight records, matching the paths.

DESPITE HIS DEDICATION, West does have a few unsolved cases on his list. Sometimes, there’s just not enough information to draw a conclusion. For example, in 2017, The New York Times published a video that appeared to depict a flying saucer. West deeply investigated it, checking out how the camera could have been moving, how the UFO could have matched the rotation of the camera, and how there could’ve been a glare in the camera lens. But the analysis took West a long time, and the case is still puzzling. Ideally, West needs the original radar data instead of the analysis the government actually released. The original would have allowed him to recreate the scenario in three dimensions.

“In most cases, what you really want is to have two videos from two different angles. Multiple sensor data is kind of the gold standard,” he explains.

Now that the National Defense Authorization Act requires the government to declassify many UAP documents, West hopes he can get his hands on more original evidence. So far, it’s been a slog, and until there’s fuller disclosure of past UAPs, some of those cases will likely remain open.

Not all of West’s investigations take place on a computer, though. Sometimes he needs to do a little detective work on the side. Once, when somebody reported to him that they’d seen mysterious lights in the sky, West followed his hunch that they might be searchlights and called the local town. He was right: a tree farm in the suspicious location had just installed attention-grabbing searchlights.

Even though West has solved many UAP analysis requests over the years, his conclusions—so far, always mundane—can be unwelcome. People want to believe extraterrestrial aliens are making contact with us. And in the rush to find answers, even other investigators often jump to the wrong conclusions, he says.

There’s also this fact: “The people who are into UFO investigations are so interested because they’re looking for something extraordinary,” West says. “I’m just looking to find out what something actually is, whether it’s extraordinary or not. I don’t have a preference.”

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

01-08-2024 om 22:12 geschreven door peter  

The real government conspiracy isn’t about UFOs

The authorities are just embarrassed to admit that they don't know if they are real

Earlier this year, following last summer’s congressional hearings on UFOs, the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) issued a 63-page report evaluating almost 80 years of evidence. Its conclusion — not altogether surprising, given the name of the office — can be summarized as follows: Not much to see here. Please move on.

The Senate Intelligence Committee isn’t buying it. The Intelligence Authorization Act, which it passed recently, among other things calls for review of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The bill would also limit research into what are now called UAPs (for unidentified anomalous phenomena) unless Congress is informed and add whistleblower protections for anyone who might wish to step forward and speak their minds.

Less plausible claims about UAPs have been achieving greater circulation in part because of the efforts of David Grusch, who testified before Congress last year about hidden alien bodies, crashed vehicles and secret conspiracies. Those claims, which primary witnesses have not corroborated, defy belief and the ensuing controversy has helped make concerns about UAPs appear silly.

Nonetheless, the truth remains that there are systematic sightings and sensor data of fast-moving entities that the government cannot explain. You don’t have to think they are space aliens to realize that they are threats to national security. At the very least, the mere fact that some experienced military pilots entertain the more speculative alien-linked hypotheses suggests that the military is not processing information effectively. Does it make anyone feel better when reports from pilots are dismissed as crazy?

UAPs will remain an issue as long as China and Russia (and possibly other nations) remain national security threats, because the U.S. military will always want to identify possible entrants to its airspace. No report or bureaucratic process can make those concerns go away. And so there is a kind of paralyzed equilibrium, where a very strong force — the desire to know — has met an immoveable object — a lack of knowledge.

In this sense, the frustration of the Senate Intelligence Committee — as expressed by its unanimous 17-0 vote — is understandable. The Pentagon’s report presents many of the weaker UAP allegations and notes that there is no serious evidence to back them up. And it simply dismisses some of the stronger UAP puzzles, such as the Nimitz or Gimbal incidents.

It is not until Page 26 that the report concedes: "A small percentage of cases have potentially anomalous characteristics or concerning characteristics. AARO has kept Congress fully and currently informed of its findings. AARO’s research continues on these cases.” Those sentences should have been on the first page and then the report should have presented the evidence about those cases. If this were an undergraduate term paper, I would have given it a D+.

The chatter among insiders, some of which surely reaches senators, is that some of the data is very hard to explain. Some people, such as John Brennan, former head of the CIA, have even speculated that the available evidence might imply contact with a nonhuman civilization. Agree or disagree, the admission is a marker of our ignorance.

The conspiracy, to the extent there is one, is not to suppress evidence of different life forms; it is to avoid admitting the embarrassing absence of any real answers. So at the very least, the Senate Intelligence Committee deserves credit for reopening the issue.

It can be hard to wrap your head around such huge questions. People are often more concerned with dismissing the possibility of alien life than with admitting the possibility of genuine uncertainty. And since even partial evidence of aliens might scare the public too much, there is an overriding incentive to keep matters under wraps.

When I think about all this, I try to keep two questions separate. First, is there a major puzzle to account for? And second, what is the best explanation for that puzzle? It helps to focus on the first question in isolation, since we can’t seem to keep our heads on straight when it comes to the second.

By admitting that there is a real puzzle to be solved, the Senate Intelligence Committee has moved decisively to answer the first question. Once we clarify exactly what the puzzle is, maybe we’ll be able to make some progress explaining it.

• Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog

{ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/ }

01-08-2024 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

Now, a new survey being conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom is asking the public for answers about people’s attitudes toward the idea that humans could one day contact intelligent extraterrestrials or even the controversial notion that some form of contact might have already occurred.

The survey, led by Professor Michael Bohlander, Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham Law School in the United Kingdom, along with Dr. Andreas Anton, also a Research Fellow at Durham Law School, in cooperation with Dr John Elliott, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, aims to gauge participants’ attitudes toward the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), as well as reports in recent years involving what the United States military now calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), or what have traditionally been known as UFOs.

Bohlander and the team hope to learn how participants would react to such a contact event and what its global societal implications would be for humankind.

While the idea of contact with extraterrestrials has long been an area of focus in both science fiction as well as astronomers’ ongoing search for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, Bohlander recently told The Debrief that he and his colleagues hope to learn more about the human side of the question of alien life: namely how people would likely react to such an event, and therefore how scientists can better prepare for what Bohlander and his colleagues view as the eventuality of some form of contact.

“Such an event would likely pose an existential risk to humanity, regardless of whether the contact were to be hostile or peaceful,” Bohlander said in an email to The Debrief. “In the words of former NASA chief historian Steven J. Dick, we need to work on a unilateral metalaw to determine by which principles humanity should be guided in the process.”

Bohlander says the survey aims to collect data that ranges from the ethical and moral to political, religious, and even legal perspectives from people in all parts of the world on questions related to the prospect of contact with extraterrestrials. Primarily, the questions contained within the survey will aim to inform what Bohlander describes as “the coming debate about the foundations for such a globally accepted metalaw.”

“It actively addresses the traditional geopolitical imbalance of the SETI and UAP debate,” Bohlander told The Debrief, “where the voices of the so-called Global South, or of Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere are not routinely heard.”

Unlike many past surveys that have looked at people’s attitudes or beliefs toward the possible existence of alien life, Bohlander and his colleagues also incorporated the recent interest in unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) into the questions they ask of participants, although he notes that they approach the topic from a slightly different angle than the standard questions involving whether we are alone in the universe.

“The UAP/UFO aspect is of a slightly different nature,” Bohlander explains. “Apart from all the recent controversies about cover-ups and conspiracies, about crash site retrievals or reverse engineering, as well as political and constitutional issues of the public’s right to disclosure versus national or indeed global security, UAP/UFOs represent a fait accompli.”

The revelation that some UAP sightings could be related to extraterrestrials, if ever proven, would mean that humankind could soon face an unexpected development of historic proportions. Currently, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) maintains there is still no evidence that is suggestive of any links between UAP and off-planet technologies, but for Bohlander and his team, the question alone is worthy of addressing from an academic perspective.

“If some of them are of extraterrestrial origin, then humanity is for all intents and purposes unprepared,” Bohlander told The Debrief. “This is especially the case given the apparent massive difference in technological capacities in some of the observed objects.”

Also, given the recent advancements in artificial intelligence that have seen a sudden surge in recent years, many researchers have begun to question whether intelligence from off-planet, if it were to be encountered, would necessarily even be biological life as we know it. For Bohlander, whatever the nature or form any prospective non-human intelligence may take, the biggest question for humanity has to do with its intentions.

“There is, however, still the question of how to deal with the intelligence behind them—biological or AI—once they reveal themselves,” Bohlander said. “Questions of negotiations and possibly armed response do remain,” he added.

Prospective participants can find the team’s survey, “Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence: A study of projected perceptions and reactions among the world’s societies,” available at the website of Durham University’s Durham Law School.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/uap/ }

01-08-2024 om 21:29 geschreven door peter  

Now, the Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organization that aims to unite academics and professionals who, according to its website, “are committed to advancing the study of the UAP through rigorous scholarly engagement,” will be hosting an online summer symposium that will address how professionals can help advance our understanding of these perplexing phenomena.

“The purpose of this is to organize a broad array of academic fields, perspectives, and discourses that are in various ways concerned with understanding—more deeply and more rigorously—the subject of UAP,” said Dr. Michael Cifone, a professor of philosophy and founder of the Society for UAP Studies, who also serves as its CEO and editor of its official publication, Limina -The Journal of UAP Studies.

According to Cifone, one of the society’s goals is to encourage interdisciplinary dialog between humanists and scientists who approach the UAP phenomenon in different ways and unite researchers on what he calls “the more metatheoretical questions of how to study the phenomenon.”

Despite the recent focus on scientific and military engagement with UAP, Cifone told The Debrief that the phenomenon presents challenges that also impact the humanities and political science, as well as the inquiries of historians, anthropologists, and professionals in a variety of other disciplines.

“With an event like this, we have an opportunity for more involvement from the humanities,” Cifone said, which he believes will provide an opportunity to learn ways those who work in this academic area can contribute to our growing knowledge of the topic.

Dr. Christian Peters, Managing Director at Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) and a member of the Society’s board of advisors, says another of the challenges of bringing the humanities more deeply into investigations of UAP involves not only identifying and characterizing UAP, but also to a degree the discipline’s own past challenges with self-identification.

“But you can look at disclosure from a more distant political theory perspective,” Peters told The Debrief, “and looking at that as being the play between the unveiling and the hiding in modern and in ancient statehood.”

“There’s a lot that needs to be said about these processes,” he added. In line with these perspectives, Peters will coordinate a workshop for the Society’s summer event with historian Greg Eghigian, which examines the UAP issue from the perspectives of history, political science, and political theory.

“There is a big movement going on with serious people working in different fields,” Peters told The Debrief. “I don’t think we’re going to find an interdisciplinary approach, but we will start to facilitate the discussion that needs to take place.”

Along with interdisciplinary dialogue, Eghigian told The Debrief that another aim of the Society’s event involves another of the subject’s most enduring problems.

“Speculation about UAP is often unmoored from any empirically sound and self-critical research,” Eghigian said. “The conference seeks to address this shortcoming by placing multidisciplinary scholarship about the subject center stage.”

Along with Peters and Eghigian’s workshop, several others that address various approaches toward studying UAP will be featured, including a session that focuses on the application of citizen science.

“The UAP Citizen Science Workshop is bringing together scientists from the UAP field and surveying the available resources and best practices for citizen science in general,” said Dan Williams, who coordinates the Society’s official Citizen Science Working Group.

Williams, who will lead the workshop, says such resources include SciStarter, Zooniverse, the NASA Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, commercial satellite Earth Observation imagery and analytics, ground-based instrumentation, smartphone apps, and self-supervised machine learning, or what he calls “needle-in-a-haystack” technologies.

“We hope the workshop participants can then author a paper on best practices and identify several citizen science projects of general interest. We have several members from the recent National Science Foundation’s ASTRO-ACCEL-sponsored UAP workshop participating, and we hope our workshop also advances their goal of forming a UAP citizen science working group,” Williams told The Debrief.

“The study of UAP deals with incomplete, inaccurate, and even at times deceptive information,” said Joshua Pierson, D.S.S., a career investigator who is also an advisor to the Society for UAP Studies. “The beauty of having a conference and an organization that focuses on bringing the social sciences and the humanities to bear is really where we start being able to assess what is inaccurate and incomplete,” Pierson said.

“Except now, instead of taking a practitioner’s approach, we have people who can think deeply on the subject to help inform some of the best models and methods to approach the information that we get on UAP,” Pierson told The Debrief.

Pierson says that in addition to applying the best models and research methods, a collective aim of academic groups like the Society for UAP Studies is also to define the phenomena more accurately. However, along with framing the phenomenon in academic terms, part of the aim of studying UAP from a humanities perspective also involves recognizing how people relate to UAP experiences and what overall impact the subject has on individuals, as well as at the societal level. 

“UAP have profound effects on the lives of those who witness them, and they also stimulate important questions about the nature of knowledge itself and the limitations of ourselves as knowers,” said Dr. Kim Engels, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Molloy University who is also on the Society’s Advisory Board. “Our conference is offering a space for philosophers and theologians to weigh in on these important dimensions of the UAP conversation.”

“One of the most important things I think the humanities supplies—at least the philosophy of science, my own tradition—is a sort of critical perspective on the ways in which people have come to interpret and study UAP,” Professor Cifone told The Debrief.

“I think we’re at an interesting moment here in terms of the science of UAP. There’s a kind of a turning point right here that I think we’re witnessing, and a science is forming out of a history of kind of abortive and failed attempts to bring to bear some kind of systematic scientific engagement with the question,” Cifone said.

If Cifone is correct, and the efforts by organizations like his, as well as those currently being undertaken by other academic groups and government agencies, are pointing to the emergence of a new area of study in the sciences, then groups like the Society may be some of the best-equipped to help guide the process.

“You know, there’s this in-between space that I think the humanities is really good at negotiating,” Cifone told The Debrief, adding that academics like those who will participate in the Society’s forthcoming conference could be particularly well suited to help the scientific community navigate the various challenges presented by such a complex field of study.

“This is, I think, where humanists can bring the scientists together,” Cifone said, “to discuss that kind of a difficult aspect to the phenomenon.”

The Society for UAP Studies will hold its online Summer Conference 2024, titled “Varieties and Trajectories of Contemporary UAP Studies,” from August 16 to August 18, 2024. Registration details and other information about the event can be found on the Society’s website.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/uap/ }

01-08-2024 om 21:19 geschreven door peter  

Milky Way’s Thin Disk Formed Less Than One Billion Years from Big Bang, New Study Suggests

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have found a large number of metal-poor stars older than 13 billion years on orbits similar to that of our Sun.

Rotational motion of young (blue) and old (red) stars similar to the Sun (orange).

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt / SSC / Caltech.

“The Milky Way Galaxy has a large halo, a central bulge and bar, a thick disk and a thin disk,” said Dr. Samir Nepal from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and colleagues.

“Most stars are located in the so-called thin disk of our Milky Way and follow an organised rotation around the Galactic center.”

“Middle-aged stars such as our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun belong to the thin disk, which was generally thought to have started forming around 8 to 10 billion years ago.”

Using the new Gaia dataset, the astronomers studied stars within around 3,200 light-years from the Sun.

They discovered a surprising number of very old stars in thin disk orbits; the majority of these are older than 10 billion years, some of them even older than 13 billion years.

These ancient stars show a wide range of metal compositions: some are very metal-poor (as expected), while others have twice the metal content of our much younger Sun, indicating that a rapid metal enrichment took place in the early phase of the Milky Way’s evolution.

“These ancient stars in the disk suggest that the formation of the Milky Way’s thin disk began much earlier than previously believed, by about 4-5 billion years,” Dr. Nepal said.

“This study also highlights that our Galaxy had an intense star formation at early epochs leading to very fast metal enrichment in the inner regions and the formation of the disk.”

“This discovery aligns the Milky Way’s disk formation timeline with those of high-redshift galaxies observed by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).”

“It indicates that cold disks can form and stabilize very early in the Universe’s history, providing new insights into the evolution of galaxies.”

“Our study suggests that the thin disk of the Milky Way may have formed much earlier than we had thought, and that its formation is strongly related to the early chemical enrichment of the innermost regions of our Galaxy,” said Dr. Cristina Chiappini, an astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.

“The combination of data from different sources and the application of advanced machine learning techniques have enabled us to increase the number of stars with high quality stellar parameters, a key step to lead our team to these new insights.”

• The paper will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
• Samir Nepal et al. 2024. Discovery of the local counterpart of disc galaxies at z > 4: The oldest thin disc of the Milky Way using Gaia-RVS. A&A, in press; arXiv: 2402.00561

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

01-08-2024 om 21:04 geschreven door peter  

Warp Drive Collapse Should Generate Gravitational Waves, Theoretical Astrophysicists Claim

The principle idea behind a warp drive is that instead of exceeding the speed of light directly in a local reference frame, a ‘warp bubble’ could traverse distances faster than the speed of light — as measured by some distant observer — by contracting spacetime in front of it and expanding spacetime behind it.

Clough et al. proposed a formalism for studying warp drive spacetimes dynamically and produced the first fully consistent numerical-relativity waveforms for the collapse of a warp drive bubble.

Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with University of Wales astrophysicist Miguel Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel.

Whilst there are numerous practical barriers to their implementation in real life, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy, computationally, one can simulate their evolution in time given an equation of state describing the matter.

In a new work, theoretical astrophysicists studied the signatures arising from a warp drive ‘containment failure.’

“Even though warp drives are purely theoretical, they have a well-defined description in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and so numerical simulations allow us to explore the impact they might have on spacetime in the form of gravitational waves,” said Dr. Katy Clough, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

“The results are fascinating. The collapsing warp drive generates a distinct burst of gravitational waves, a ripple in spacetime that could be detectable by gravitational wave detectors that normally target black hole and neutron star mergers.”

“Unlike the chirps from merging astrophysical objects, this signal would be a short, high-frequency burst, and so current detectors wouldn’t pick it up.”

“However, future higher-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have yet been funded, the technology to build them exists.”

“This raises the possibility of using these signals to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can’t build one ourselves.”

“In our study, the initial shape of the spacetime is the warp bubble described by Alcubierre,” said Dr. Sebastian Khan, a researcher at Cardiff University.

“While we were able to demonstrate that an observable signal could in principle be found by future detectors, given the speculative nature of the work this isn’t sufficient to drive instrument development.”

The authors also delve into the energy dynamics of the collapsing warp drive.

The process emits a wave of negative energy matter, followed by alternating positive and negative waves.

This complex dance results in a net increase in the overall energy of the system, and in principle could provide another signature of the collapse if the outgoing waves interacted with normal matter.

“It’s a reminder that theoretical ideas can push us to explore the Universe in new ways,” Dr. Clough said.

“Even though we are sceptical about the likelihood of seeing anything, I do think it is sufficiently interesting to be worth looking.”

“For me, the most important aspect of the study is the novelty of accurately modeling the dynamics of negative energy spacetimes, and the possibility of extending the techniques to physical situations that can help us better understand the evolution and origin of our Universe, or the processes at the centre of black holes,” said University of Potsdam’s Professor Tim Dietrich.

“Warp speed may be a long way off, but this research already pushes the boundaries of our understanding of exotic spacetimes and gravitational waves.”

“We plan to investigate how the signal changes with different warp drive models.”

• The team’s paper was published online in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
• Katy Clough et al. 2024. What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse. Open Journal of Astrophysics 7; doi: 10.33232/001c.121868

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

01-08-2024 om 20:58 geschreven door peter  

At the end of 2017, The New York Times broke the story of a secretive Pentagon program with a budget of $22 million to investigate UFOs called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The man who exposed the existence of the program, Luis Elizondo, was the former head of the project. Elizondo’s ongoing efforts to investigate the UFO mystery with his new employer, the To the Stars Academy (TTSA), will be featured in a History Channel series premiering May 31 called Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

• https://youtu.be/MQqsHgK9yNw

However, what The New York Times apparently did not know when they published their story is that the program went by a different name at its inception, and the scope of the program was much broader than just UFOs. In fact, according to a senior manager on the project, the investigations included “bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light, animal and human injuries and much more.” 

It is unknown whether Unidentified will cover the paranormal aspects of the program. Although Elizondo did work with this paranormal project, he only worked in the UFO division. By the time he was the head of the entire program, the UFO division was all that was left. The rest of the program had been shut down, and you will never guess why. It wasn’t because people inside the Department of Defense (DoD) thought the program was too weird, although some did. It was shut down because of demonic forces. 

• read more: Former U.S. Intelligence Officials to Investigate UFOs In New History Channel Series

Don’t worry, demons didn’t attack the Pentagon, but apparently, some people inside the government were afraid the potentially paranormal incidents being investigated could be demonic, especially scary occurrences taking place at a ranch in Utah, and they wanted no part of it. They didn’t want the government messing with demons either, so they lobbied for the program to be ended and it was.

This may sound extremely odd, but according to those involved, it’s true.

The New York Times story that broke the Pentagon UFO program began when an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow “to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.”

That sounds innocent enough, but what the article did not cover is what Bigelow researched at this ranch in Utah. Bigelow was known for his interest in the paranormal and UFOs, and by the time the DIA official had approached him, Bigelow had already spent decades and large sums of money researching the paranormal. Bigelow’s first significant foray into the unknown was an organization created in 1995 called the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). Its purpose was to conduct scientific investigations of the paranormal.

The ranch the DIA official wanted to visit is nicknamed “Skinwalker Ranch,” and is the subject of the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah. Las Vegas investigative journalist George Knapp co-wrote the book with biochemist Dr. Colm Kelleher, NIDS’ lead scientist.

After hearing rumors about paranormal phenomena occurring in the Uintah Basin in Utah, primarily focused on Skinwalker Ranch, Bigelow bought the ranch in 1996. It was the perfect place to conduct NIDS investigations. The ranchers who owned the property stayed for a while but left because they did not feel comfortable there. If their stories are to be believed, they had good reason to go.

01-08-2024 om 20:51 geschreven door peter  

Belgium’s Flying Triangle Wave

 Antonio Huneeus

Thirty years ago, thousands of Belgian citizens reported mysterious platforms flying silently over rooftops. The Royal Belgian Air Force got involved and cooperated fully with civilian investigators. To this day, however, the origins of these craft remain unknown.

It’s hard to convey the excitement caused by the Belgian UFO wave if you were not following UFO news back in 1989 and the early 1990s. There was no shortage of UFO reports back then, and interest in the phenomenon was at a high. The sightings and photos from Gulf Breeze, Florida, dominated the American scene, wild UFO reports and stories coming out of the old Soviet Union received huge international media attention, and the Mexican video wave took off in 1991. Yet the Belgian wave seemed to top all of these stories for awhile. The reports out of this small country, headquarters of both the European Commission and NATO, received unprecedented coverage, making even the front page of the Wall Street Journal on October 10, 1990, with a story entitled, “Belgium Scientists Seriously Pursue A Triangular UFO.”

There were many reasons for the interest generated by the Belgian wave. One was the quality of the reports themselves, the bulk of which were registered in the French-speaking region of Wallonia. There were no landings or humanoid sightings but lots of detailed multiple-witness sightings of flying platforms moving slowly and silently above rooftops. Shapes varied, but the predominant form was triangular or delta-shaped crafts. Some of the descriptions were so precise that traditional explanations of misidentified natural phenomena or conventional aircraft were ruled out. Instead, stealth fighters and other U.S. secret military aircraft became the favorite explanations suggested by skeptics, but these were quickly ruled out by the Royal Belgian Air Force (RBAF). Another reason for the wave’s importance was that it was carefully investigated and documented by a local UFO organization called SOBEPS (Belgian society for the study of space phenomena).

SOBEPS was formed in 1971 by Lucien Clerebaut, Michel Bougard, and others, and built a small but highly dedicated cadre of field investigators. By the end of the wave in 1993, SOBEPS had collected over two thousand eyewitness reports comprising twenty thousand pages, four hundred hours of audio tapes, and six hundred full inquiries. Five hundred and forty cases remained unexplained. SOBEPS also had the assistance of top-notch scientists, including Léon Brenig, a nonlinear dynamics theorist at the Free University in Brussels, and Professor Auguste Meessen, a physicist from Catholic University at Louvain. Regarding his work with SOBEPS, Dr. Brenig has said, “here is an opportunity where we can apply the scientific method.” Brenig himself became a witness of the so-called Belgian triangle while driving in the Ardennes on March 18, 1990. The whole dossier was eventually published by SOPEPS in two massive volumes, five hundred pages each, entitled Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique (UFO Wave ver Belgium), published in 1991 and 1994 respectively. Due to financial difficulties, SOBEPS dissolved on December 31, 2007, but some of its members formed a new, smaller organization called COBEPS (Belgian committee for the study of space phenomena) to preserve the archives and work done for thirty-six years.

A final and key element in the credibility of the Belgian UFO wave was the participation and validation by the RBAF, which showed an unusual degree of openness. As the Belgian wave gained steam, the Belgian Ministry of Defence was deluged with queries from the public and the media. The task fell upon the chief of operations of the air force, Col. Wilfried De Brouwer, who was later promoted to major general and deputy chief of the RBAF. Now retired from the service, Gen. De Brouwer has continued to speak about the wave. He was one of the many international officials who spoke at the famous event at the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington, DC, in November 2007, organized by filmmaker James Fox and journalist Leslie Kean. “The Belgian UFO wave was exceptional and the air force could not identify the nature, origin and intentions of the reported phenomena,” said De Brouwer at the NPC. He also gave a detailed presentation on the wave at the MUFON International UFO Symposium in San Jose, California, in July 2008, and was one of five generals to write an essay in Leslie Kean’s new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record.

Although the RBAF scrambled jets on three occasions during the wave, Gen. De Brouwer has explained on various occasions that they didn’t have the manpower or resources to mount a full-fledged investigation of their own, so instead they took the unusual route of cooperating fully with SOBEPS. The radar data was turned to Prof. Meessen for analysis, and Gen. De Brouwer agreed to write the postface for SOBEPS’s first volume when he was still in the service. “I must acknowledge that I somewhat hesitated when SOBEPS asked me to contribute my share to this book,” he wrote. “Indeed, I am not a UFO specialist and, moreover, it is quite delicate for somebody who occupies an official function to put on paper his personal ideas on such a disputed issue. However, I estimate that I would not have been honest towards the SOBEPS if I had refused. The air force always played a fair game on this subject and I regard this postface as a complementary element to the exceptional file written by the people of SOBEPS.”

THE EUPEN INCIDENT

Although some sightings were reported in October 1989, the first important incident of the Belgian wave took place a month later on November 29 around the small town of Eupen, which is in a region of Belgium near the German border. This initial case put the so-called “Belgian triangle” on the map and led to the start of the RBAF’s involvement. There were both daytime and nighttime sightings, although the latter were lengthier and more detailed. Gen. De Brouwer explained in his essay for Leslie Kean’s book, “a total of seventy reported sightings made on November 29 were fully investigated and none of these sightings could be explained by conventional technology. The team of investigators and I estimate that approximately fifteen hundred people must have seen the phenomenon at more than seventy different locations from different angles during this afternoon and evening.” There were a total of thirteen gendarmes (policemen) who saw the UFO from eight different locations around Eupen. Prof. Meessen summarized the case in SOBEPS’s book:

On November 29, 1989, a large craft with triangular shape flew over the town of Eupen. The gendarmes von Montigny and Nicol found it near the road linking Aix-la-Chapelle and Eupen. It was stationary in the air, above a field which it illuminated with three powerful beams. The beams emanated from large circular surfaces near the triangle’s corners. In the center of the dark and flat understructure there was some kind of “red gyrating beacon.” The object did not make any noise. When it began to move, the gendarmes headed towards a small road in the area over which they expected the object to fly. Instead, it made a half-turn and continued slowly in the direction of Eupen, following the road at low altitude. It was seen by different witnesses as it flew above houses and near City Hall.

In his 2008 MUFON lecture, Gen. De Brouwer provided additional details on this sighting: “The UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon] emitted repeatedly and simultaneously two red light beams with a red light ball at the spearhead of the beam. Subsequently, the red balls returned to the craft.” There was also apparently a second triangular craft, which made “a forward tilting maneuver, exposing the upper side of the fuselage,” continued De Brouwer. “They [gendarmes] saw a dome with rectangular windows, lighted up at the inside. It then disappeared to the North.” Two more gendarmes saw one of the craft from a monastery nearby; “one is currently the head of the police in that area, he was scared like hell,” added De Brouwer.

The Eupen incident was followed by many other UFO sightings, including several reported on December 11, 1989. One of the witnesses that evening was a personal acquaintance of Gen. De Brouwer, Col. André Amond, a civil engineer in the Belgian Army. Col. Armond worked next door to Gen. De Brouwer and wrote a detailed report for the Ministry of Defence. Col. Armond was driving with his wife around 6:45 p.m., when they noticed a strange object with flashing red lights. They stopped the car and got out to see it better. “Suddenly, they saw a giant spotlight, about twice the size of the full moon, which approached them to an estimated distance of 100 meters,” wrote De Brouwer, adding that “the colonel’s wife was frightened and asked to leave.” In his report to the Ministry, Armond “ascertained that this craft was not a hologram, helicopter, military aircraft, balloon, motorized Ultra Light, or any other known aerial vehicle.”

Various shapes were reported throughout the wave, including round, rectangular, and cigar-shaped, but the majority were triangular objects. Gen. De Brouwer notes that the differences may also be due to the eyewitnesses’ viewing angles. Researcher Marc Valckenaers listed some of the characteristics of the UFOs in SOBEPS’s second volume about the wave, including: irregular displacement (zig-zag, instantaneous change of trajectory, etc.), displacement following the contours of the terrain; varying speeds of displacement (including very slow motion), stationary flight (hovering), overflight of urban and industrial centers, and sound effects (faint humming to total silence).

One of the strangest reports came from two factory workers from the town of Basècles, southwest of Brussels, who saw a huge trapezoid flying platform (330 x 200 feet) just before midnight on April 22, 1990. The object moved slowly and silently, covering the entire factory courtyard. In the SOBEPS report, the factory workers described the UFO as “an aircraft carrier turned upside down.” Despite the science-fiction quality of this sighting, an almost identical report was filed nearly a year later, on March 15, 1991, by an electronic engineer in Auderghem, near Brussels, who woke up in the middle of the night when he “heard a barely audible, high-frequency whistling tone. He looked out the window and saw a large rectangular craft at very low altitude with irregular structures on the bottom,” wrote Gen. De Brouwer.

THE F-16 SCRAMBLE EPISODE

If the Eupen multiple-witness sightings of November 1989 triggered the Belgian wave, the jet fighter scramble incident during the night of March 30, 1990 marked the peak of public interest and global media coverage. The Belgian Air Force had scrambled jets on two prior occasions without positive results. The December 5, 1989 scramble was unsuccessful; when the jet reached the sky, the UFO was gone. Additionally, the December 16, 1989 case turned out to be a false alarm; the authorities quickly determined that it was a laser projection reflected by a cloud layer. Following these two fiascos, the RBAF implemented a new policy that jets would be scrambled only when a sighting was detected on radar and was visually confirmed on the ground by the police.

As put in a preliminary report prepared by Major P. Lambrechts of the RBAF, entitled “Report Concerning the Observation of UFOs During the Night of March 30 to 31, 1990,” the incident began at 10:50 p.m. on March 30 when the gendarmerie telephoned the radar “master controller at Glons” to report “three unusual lights forming an equilateral triangle.” More gendarmes confirmed the lights. When the NATO facility at Semmerzake detected an unknown target at 11:49 p.m., a decision to scramble two F-16 fighters was made. The jets took off at 12:05 a.m. from Beauvechain, the nearest air base, and flew for just over an hour. According to Major Lambrechts’s report:

The aircraft had brief radar contacts on several occasions, [but the pilots]…at no time established visual contact with the UFOs…each time the pilots were able to secure a lock on one of the targets for a few seconds, there resulted a drastic change in the behavior of the detected targets…[During the first lock-on at 12:13 a.m.] their speed changed in a minimum of time from 150 to 970 knots [170 to 1,100 mph] and from 9,000 to 5,000 feet, returning then to 11,000 feet in order to change again to close to ground level.

When Col. De Brouwer showed the computerized radar images of the UFO tracked by the F-16 onboard radar system in a heavily attended press conference at the Ministry of Defence on July 11, 1990, the international media went into a frenzy. Transcripts of the radio communications between ace fighter pilots, Capt. Yves Meelbergs, Lt. Rudy Verrijt, and the Glons Control Reporting Center near Liege, were also released and provide some dramatic moments. The transcripts paint a picture of the jets chasing ghost radar echoes that appear and disappear and then reappear again, but at no time are the pilots able to establish visual contact with the supposed objects. Belgium’s Electronic War Center (EWC) eventually undertook a detailed technical analysis of the F-16 computerized radar tapes, completed by Col. Salmon and physicist M. Gilmard in 1992, and later reviewed by Prof. Meessen.

Although some aspects of this case still remain unexplained, Meessen and SOBEPS accepted the Gilmard-Salmon hypothesis that most of the radar contacts were really echoes caused by a rare meteorological phenomenon. This became evident in four lock-ons, explained Meessen, “where the object descended to the ground with calculations showing negative altitude…. It was evidently impossible that an object could penetrate the ground, but it was possible that the ground could act as a mirror.” Meessen explained how the high velocities measured by the Doppler radar of the F-16 fighters might result from interference effects. He pointed out, however, that there was another radar trace for which there is no explanation to date. As for the visual sightings of this event by the gendarmes and others, Meessen suggested that they could possibly have been caused by stars seen under conditions of “exceptional atmospheric refraction.”

In a 1995 telephone interview, Gen. De Brouwer summarized his reflections on this complex case: “We always look for possibilities which can cause errors in the radar systems. We can not exclude that there was electromagnetic interference, but of course we can not exclude the possibility that there were objects in the air. On at least one occasion there was a correlation between the radar contacts of one ground radar and one F-16 fighter. This weakens the theory that all radar contacts were caused by electromagnetic interference. If we add all the possibilities, the question is still open, so there is no final answer.” De Brouwer took a more detached view of the F-16 scramble episode, however, in his 2008 MUFON lecture and his 2010 essay included in Kean’s book: “The conclusion of the Air Force, therefore, was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that there were real crafts in the air on that occasion.”

THE PETIT-RECHAIN PHOTO

Seldom has the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words become more true than in the case of the extraordinary photograph of a flying triangle taken in the small town of Petit-Rechain in April 1990. This color slide became the emblematic symbol of the Belgian UFO wave. It has been published and broadcast in television programs all over the world, and it appears on the cover of the two SOBEPS volumes on the Belgian wave. It’s also one of the most analyzed UFO photos in the history of ufology. During my trip to Brussels in 1995, I had the opportunity to talk at length with Patrick Ferryn, the investigator who researched the case initially and wrote the chapter about it in the SOBEPS book. Ferryn gave me copies of the photo and samples of computer enhancements made by Marc Acheroy, professor of electricity at the Royal Military School, where the image was analyzed by the Signal Treatment Center. The details of how the photo was taken are fairly simple and straightforward.

The photographer, P.M. (who wants privacy, but has fully cooperated with SOBEPS), was a twenty-year-old factory worker, who lived in the small community of Petit-Rechain, near Verviers. He was at home with his girlfriend on the night of either April 4 or 7, 1990 (he can’t pin down the exact date), when his girlfriend first noticed the object between 11:00 and 11:30 p.m. as she took the dog to the courtyard. According to P.M.’s statement to Ferryn, he was alerted by his girlfriend, went outside, and “saw the object practically stationary towards the southwest, at about a forty-five-degree elevation. It consisted of three white round lights on a barely perceptible triangular surface. In the center there was a blinking spot of the same color, or maybe a bit more reddish than the other lights.” P.M. grabbed his camera, a Praktica model BX20 with a 55-200 mm zoom and a “Cokin” 1A 52 mm skylight filter. He shot the last two frames of a roll of 36-200 ASA Kodak color slide film. The UFO then moved slowly towards Petit-Rechain, until it was hidden by the roofs in the village. The entire episode took about five minutes.

The roll of film was sent by mail to a development house offering a special discount, and when P.M. received the slides, he noticed only frame #35 had captured the UFO; frame #36 was entirely black. Ferryn estimated that “the photo was probably taken with a focal distance between 55 and 200 mm, and with exposition time ranging from 1 to 2 seconds.” P.M. showed the photo to his factory coworkers (all of whom were later interviewed by Ferryn), but otherwise didn’t do anything to analyze or commercialize the picture. One of his coworkers knew a local photo-journalist from Verviers, Guy Mossay, who immediately saw the image’s potential value. P.M. sold the photo rights to Mossay for a small fee. Mossay then proceeded to copyright it with SOFAM (Belgium’s multimedia society for visual arts authors).

Skeptics have naturally pointed to the possibility of a hoax with profit motive. However, if that is the case, why did P.M. sell the rights to Mossay for a minor fee? Moreover, hoaxers never supply original slides or negatives for scientific analysis, as was done by P.M. Having checked his background, interviewed acquaintances, and so on, Ferryn noted that “the account of the main witnesses was coherent.” Gen. De Brouwer spent quite a bit of time explaining the details of this case during his MUFON lecture, saying of the witness that, “this guy is genuine, he is a guy who would not fake at all, I can assure you of that.” More importantly, the Petit-Rechain photo has been subjected to more scientific analysis than practically any other UFO photo in history.

The list of experts and institutions that have analyzed this photo include Prof. Acheroy of Belgium’s Royal Military Academy; Prof. François Louange, an expert in photo interpretation of satellite images for the French space agency, CNES; Dr. Richard Haines, a retired senior NASA scientist and respected UFO researcher; Belgium’s Royal Institute of Artistic Patrimony; and André Marion, a nuclear physicist with France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), who conducted an analysis in 2002 with improved technology. The technical details of these analyses are too numerous for this article, but suffice it to say that evidence of photographic trickery has never been found. Furthermore, of several efforts to duplicate the photo using a dark cardboard triangular model with holes and light bulbs, only one made by members of the Astrophysics Institute at Liege University somewhat resembled the Petit-Rechain photo. But the luminosity of the spots in the replica was uniform, while those in the original exhibited different shapes and spectral effects. The most recent CNRS study by Dr. Marion confirmed the previous analysis and found, as put by Gen. De Brouwer, a “halo around the craft with patterned structure,” which could have been caused by the object’s “propulsion system” of “magnetoplasma dynamic.” Marion also stated that “it would be extremely difficult to fake such a photograph.”

In the end, it’s almost impossible to guarantee the authenticity of a UFO image. There will always be a difference of opinions, but the verdict in the Petit-Rechain case appears highly favorable. Triangular UFOs were seen throughout Belgium during the early 1990s. Dozens of fuzzy videos and grainy photos were taken, but they were generally not impressive. Petit-Rechain was the great exception.

• Note: Since the writing of this article, the photo turned out to be an admitted hoax.

NO EVIDENCE OF SECRET AIRCRAFT

Due to the high credibility of most witnesses in the Belgian wave and their descriptions of a silent, triangular craft being so precise, trying to explain the wave in terms of hoaxes, misidentified natural phenomena, or conventional aircraft seemed fruitless. Therefore, a number of skeptics and aviation journalists focused on trying to prove the hypothesis of secret U.S. aircraft flying over Belgium. A series of candidates were proposed, from the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to secret airships, from the F-117A stealth fighter to some other revolutionary U.S. secret military aircraft such as the alleged TR-3A Black Manta. First, you have to ponder why the U.S. would conduct tests of their most-secret aircraft in such a highly populated area like Wallonia, which is not only a U.S. ally, but also headquarters of the NATO alliance. Gen. De Brouwer put it bluntly in a 1991 interview with the French magazine, OVNI Présence: “Why would the Americans conduct tests here in Europe, without permission and with the risk of having an accident that could create a diplomatic incident on a global scale? This doesn’t involve only Belgium, but NATO, where its concept itself could be put in question. I don’t believe that the Americans could take such a risk, it’s evident.”

Guy Coeme and Leo Delcroix, the two Belgian Ministers of Defence during the wave, denied emphatically the theory that the UFOs were actually U.S. aircraft and based their denial on official inquiries with the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. In a 1993 letter to French researcher Renaud Marhic, Minister Delcroix wrote: “Unfortunately, no explanation has been found to date. The nature and origin of the phenomenon remain unknown. One theory can, however, be definitely dismissed since the Belgian Armed Forces have been positively assured by American authorities that there has never been any sort of American aerial test flight.” A declassified 1990 document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) entitled, “Belgium and the UFO Issue,” supports Delcroix’s position. After describing the basic events of the wave that had transpired up to that point, the unnamed U.S. official wrote at the very end of this memo: “The [U.S. Air Force (USAF)] did confirm to the [Belgian Air Force] and Belgian [Ministry of Defence] that no USAF stealth aircraft were operating in the Ardennes area during the periods in question. This was released to the Belgian press and received wide dissemination.”

Thirty years have now passed since the Belgian UFO wave, and no new significant evidence has been produced to prove that the sightings were caused by secret military aircraft. The reported cases remain unexplained. It seems certain that something massive and technologically advanced flew over Belgian territory during the 1989-93 period. Why and who was behind it are questions that remain to be answered. A suitable conclusion, for now, is to repeat what Gen. De Brouwer wrote at the end of his famous postface to the SOBEPS’s first volume: “The day will come undoubtedly when the phenomenon will be observed with technological means of detection and collection that won’t leave a single doubt about its origin. This should lift a part of the veil that has covered the mystery for a long time. A mystery that continues thus present. But it exists, it is real, and that in itself is an important conclusion.”

• A version of this article originally appeared in Issue #5 (December/January 2011) of Open Minds UFO Magazine. Back issues can be found here.

{ https://openminds.tv/category/articles/ }

01-08-2024 om 20:24 geschreven door peter  

Deze robothond bestrijdt onkruid met een steekvlam: een nieuwe revolutie in de landbouw?

Door Janine

Dezhen Song et al. - 2024

Hoewel het op het eerste gezicht misschien niet zo lijkt, is onkruid een van de grootste problemen voor boeren over de hele wereld. Onkruid groeit snel en wordt traditioneel bestreden met onkruidverdelgers, die echter verschillende nadelen hebben, zoals verhoogde resistentie van planten en negatieve gevolgen voor het milieu. Juist daarom hebben een aantal onderzoekers een mogelijk revolutionaire oplossing getest: het gebruik van een robothond uitgerust met een brander om onkruid veiliger en effectiever te bestrijden. Zal dit de juiste oplossing zijn? Laten we het samen ontdekken!

Kan een robot echt het probleem van onkruid oplossen?

Om te begrijpen hoe belangrijk het is om het onkruidprobleem op te lossen, moet eerst worden erkend dat het toenemende gebruik van onkruidverdelgers heeft geleid tot een verhoogde resistentie van planten tegen deze bestrijdingsmethoden. In feite kan onkruid, zodra het aan dezelfde producten wordt blootgesteld, generatie na generatie resistentie beginnen te ontwikkelen. En dan hebben we het nog niet eens over de mogelijke gevolgen voor het milieu van de productie en het gebruik van deze herbiciden. Dus wat te doen?

Onderzoekers van de Texas A&M University hebben een project gepresenteerd dat het mogelijk maakt om Spot, de robothond van Boston Dynamics, te gebruiken om onkruid effectiever te bestrijden. Spot is speciaal aangepast en is nu uitgerust met een echte steekvlam. Daarnaast is de robot getraind om onkruid te identificeren en aan te pakken, met een effectiviteit van meer dan 95 procent. Maar hoe is dit mogelijk?

Robothond uitgerust met een steekvlam om onkruid te bestrijden

Ten eerste moeten we de voordelen van Spot erkennen in vergelijking met traditionele machines en robots op wielen. De robothond van Boston Dynamics is minder omvangrijk en wendbaarder en kan zich rustig voortbewegen in gecultiveerde velden, zelfs met een hoge gewasdichtheid. Nu zouden we in de verleiding kunnen komen om de hele effectiviteit van deze oplossing toe te schrijven aan de kracht van de steekvlam: wel kracht maar geen precisie, toch?

De werkelijkheid is anders, want de robot die de onderzoekers gebruiken, detecteert en verbrandt niet alleen onkruid, maar is ontworpen om het midden van de plant te verhitten. Op deze manier vertraagt hij de groei en kan het gewas zich ontwikkelen zonder op bepaalde obstakels te stuiten. Met een efficiëntie van 95% en een nauwkeurigheid die simpelweg onbereikbaar is voor andere methoden, belooft Spot een nieuwe revolutie in de landbouw. Een robotrevolutie, letterlijk.

Vooruitzichten en grenzen van het gebruik van robots in de landbouw

Spot is met een breedte van bijna 50 centimeter geschikt voor de onkruidbestrijding in even brede rijen. Katoen, broccoli, sla en aardappelen zijn allemaal gewassen die kunnen profiteren van de robothond van Boston Dynamics, zoals aangepast door onderzoekers. Tegelijkertijd moeten we echter ook rekening houden met de beperkingen van de technologie: Spot kan maar maximaal 40 minuten werken voordat hij weer moet worden opgeladen. Andere nadelen zijn de slechte werking in regenachtige omstandigheden en de onmogelijkheid om het te gebruiken in ondergelopen velden of met kruipend onkruid.

Aan de andere kant staan ​​we nog maar aan het begin van dit potentiële keerpunt in de landbouw en net als op elk ander gebied waarin robotica zich ontwikkelt, zal de toekomst zeer interessant zijn. Of ze nu worden gebruikt om onze dagelijkse activiteiten te ondersteunen of ons gewoon gezelschap te houden, de impact op ons leven lijkt niet te overzien. Om nog maar te zwijgen van die op onkruid.

{ https://www.curioctopus.nl/ }

01-08-2024 om 18:44 geschreven door peter  

Twee nieuw ontdekte gassen in de atmosfeer van Venus zouden kunnen wijzen op sporen van leven: de ontdekking

Door Janine

NASA/JPL

Venus, de tweede planeet van het zonnestelsel, lijkt qua omvang en massa sterk op de aarde, maar verder is het een van de meest onherbergzame plaatsen die we tot nu toe kennen. De atmosfeer, die bestaat uit gassen die giftig voor ons zijn, is het onderwerp geweest van recente ontdekkingen die de aanwezigheid lijken te suggereren van twee gassen die door levende organismen worden geproduceerd. Kunnen we daarom spreken van sporen van leven op Venus? Laten we het samen ontdekken!

Zoeken naar leven op andere planeten: het belang van biomarkers

Zoals we in de inleiding zeiden, is Venus een plek die net zo fascinerend is om te bestuderen als onherbergzaam, voor welke vorm van leven dan ook die ons bekend is. Het oppervlak bereikt temperaturen van 450°C, terwijl de atmosfeer ongeveer 90 keer dichter is dan die van de aarde. Een onherbergzame plek, waar echter leven zou kunnen voorkomen op hoogten van minstens 50 kilometer boven het oppervlak, waar de omstandigheden minder extreem zijn. Maar hoe kom je erachter of er organismen op Venus leven?

Een van de methoden die wetenschappers gebruiken, bestaat uit het analyseren van de chemische samenstelling van de planeten. Meestal is het inderdaad mogelijk om verbindingen te identificeren die geen verband houden met het leven, maar soms is het mogelijk om zogenaamde biomarkers te vinden, dat wil zeggen chemische verbindingen die op aarde door bepaalde organismen worden geproduceerd. En die zouden kunnen duiden op een soortgelijk proces op andere planeten of andere hemellichamen. Op Venus beweren sommige wetenschappers bijvoorbeeld sporen van fosfine en ammoniak te hebben gevonden. Maar wat betekent dat?

Fosfine en ammoniak in de atmosfeer van Venus: wat betekent het?

Unsplash - Not the actual photo

Er zijn twee specifieke biomarkers gedetecteerd in de atmosfeer van Venus, tijdens observaties die al een paar jaar duren en die, zo lijkt het, zijn bevestigd. De eerste biomarker is fosfine, een verbinding die op aarde door sommige microben wordt geproduceerd in zuurstofvrije omgevingen en in kleine hoeveelheden door vulkanen. Sommige wetenschappers beweren al jaren dat fosfine een teken van buitenaards leven op Venus zou kunnen vertegenwoordigen. In het bijzonder vestigde Dave Clements van Imperial College London in een onderzoek uit 2023 opnieuw de aandacht op de kwestie en ontdekte dat fosfine wordt vernietigd door de werking van de zon. Maar over zijn vorming is nog niets bekend: zou het leven kunnen zijn?

De tweede biomarker is ammoniak, onlangs geïdentificeerd door Jane Greaves van Cardiff University, die samen met Dave Clements een conferentie gaf op de National Astronomy Meeting 2024. Beiden betogen hoe de aanwezigheid van fosfine en ammoniak ons ​​kan helpen de atmosfeer van Venus beter te begrijpen en, waarom niet, ook de mogelijke aanwezigheid van leven.

Sporen van leven op Venus?

Veel geleerden zijn het erover eens dat Venus in het verleden mogelijk omstandigheden heeft gehad die meer leken op die op aarde, inclusief de mogelijkheid om leven te huisvesten. Het is echter moeilijker om de aanwezigheid van fosfine en ammoniak in de atmosfeer van de planeet te verklaren met bekende chemische processen. Hier op aarde worden de twee stoffen geproduceerd door biologische of hoogstens industriële processen, maar op Venus?

Het is duidelijk dat het te vroeg is om conclusies te trekken, maar het onderzoek van Clements en Greaves heeft tenminste de verdienste dat het met de vinger in de juiste richting wijst. Er zullen veel preciezere detecties nodig zijn door de James Clerk Maxwell-telescoop, gericht op Venus, en veel meer tijd. Tegelijkertijd is het normaal om verbaasd te zijn over de mogelijkheid om iets te ontdekken dat nog nooit eerder is gezien, ook al is het een klein organisme dat op 50 kilometer hoogte zweeft, op een verder onherbergzame planeet.

{ https://www.curioctopus.nl/ }

01-08-2024 om 18:37 geschreven door peter  

Rancher’s Nightmare: UFO Drains 10,000 Gallons of Water Overnight

In the early hours of September 30, 1980, George Blackwell, a ranch hand in Rosedale, Victoria, Australia, experienced an event that would leave him and his community puzzled and concerned. Awakened by the frantic noises of his livestock, Blackwell initially suspected cattle rustlers, a persistent threat in the region. However, what he encountered that night was far beyond any conventional explanation.

As Blackwell rushed to the source of the commotion, he was confronted with an extraordinary sight: a hovering object above a large water tank. This unidentified flying object (UFO) emitted a loud, piercing sound and deployed a black tube-like extension that appeared to be siphoning water from the tank. In a matter of moments, the UFO departed, leaving the previously full 10,000-gallon water tank completely empty.

The detailed description of the object provided by Blackwell included its substantial size, approximately 25 feet in diameter and 12 to 15 feet in height, with a distinct black band encircling its base. This was not an aircraft or helicopter as there were no wings, propellers, or any other recognizable features. The object’s advanced and unknown technology was evident in its ability to silently and efficiently drain the water.

In the immediate aftermath, Blackwell experienced severe physical symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea, and headaches, which were indicative of potential radiation exposure. Despite these alarming health effects, subsequent soil samples taken from the site revealed no signs of unnatural contamination, adding to the mystery.

This incident attracted the attention of both local and national investigators. The following day, it was discovered that a neighbor had seen a bright, colorful object in the sky around the same time as Blackwell’s sighting. This additional witness testimony lent further credibility to Blackwell’s account.

The physiological effects experienced by Blackwell, coupled with the complete drainage of a large water tank, make this case particularly significant. It suggests a level of interaction between the UFO and its environment that goes beyond mere observation. The implications of such technology and the motivations behind it remain subjects of intense speculation and concern.

• https://youtu.be/cBsGxX2fbTE

In the broader context of UFO sightings, the Rosedale incident stands out due to the detailed eyewitness account, the immediate physical effects on the environment and the witness, and the subsequent investigation. While many UFO sightings can be debunked or explained through conventional means, this case remains one of the few that defies simple explanation, adding to the 5% of UFO encounters that are categorized as truly unexplained.

The Rosedale UFO incident not only underscores the potential reality of advanced, non-human technology interacting with our world but also highlights the profound impact such encounters can have on individuals and communities. As investigations continue and more information comes to light, the hope is that one day, the mysteries of the skies will be fully understood.

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

01-08-2024 om 18:28 geschreven door peter  

Runaway Star Might Explain Mysterious Black Hole Disappearing Act

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

The telltale sign that the black hole was feeding vanished, perhaps when a star interrupted the feast. The event could lend new insight into these mysterious objects.

At the center of a far-off galaxy, a black hole is slowly consuming a disk of gas that swirls around it like water circling a drain. As a steady trickle of gas is pulled into the gaping maw, ultrahot particles gather close to the black hole, above and below the disk, generating a brilliant X-ray glow that can be seen 300 million light-years away on Earth. These collections of ultrahot gas, called black hole coronas, have been known to exhibit noticeable changes in their luminosity, brightening or dimming by up to 100 times as a black hole feeds.

But two years ago, astronomers watched in awe as X-rays from the black hole corona in a galaxy known as 1ES 1927+654 disappeared completely, fading by a factor of 10,000 in about 40 days. Almost immediately it began to rebound, and about 100 days later had become almost 20 times brighter than before the event.

The X-ray light from a black hole corona is a direct byproduct of the black hole’s feeding, so the disappearance of that light from 1ES 1927+654 likely means that its food supply had been cut off. In a new study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists hypothesize that a runaway star might have come too close to the black hole and been torn apart. If this was the case, fast-moving debris from the star could have crashed through part of the disk, briefly dispersing the gas.

This illustration shows the black hole after the debris from the star has dispersed some of the gas in the disk, causing the corona to disappear.

Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech

“We just don’t normally see variations like this in accreting black holes,” said Claudio Ricci, an assistant professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, and lead author of the study. “It was so strange that at first we thought maybe there was something wrong with the data. When we saw it was real, it was very exciting. But we also had no idea what we were dealing with; no one we talked to had seen anything like this.”

Nearly every galaxy in the universe may host a supermassive black hole at its center, like the one in 1ES 1927+654, with masses millions or billions of times greater than our Sun. They grow by consuming the gas encircling them, otherwise known as an accretion disk. Because black holes don’t emit or reflect light, they can’t be seen directly, but the light from their coronas and accretion disks offers a way to learn about these dark objects.

The authors’ star hypothesis is also supported by the fact that a few months before the X-ray signal disappeared, observatories on Earth saw the disk brighten considerably in visible-light wavelengths (those that can be seen by the human eye). This might have resulted from the initial collision of the stellar debris with the disk.

Digging Deeper

The disappearing event in 1ES 1927+654 is unique not only because of the dramatic change in brightness, but also because of how thoroughly astronomers were able to study it. The visible-light flare prompted Ricci and his colleagues to request follow-up monitoring of the black hole using NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. In total, NICER observed the system 265 times over 15 months. Additional X-ray monitoring was obtained with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — which also observed the system in ultraviolet light — as well as NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the ESA (the European Space Agency) XMM-Newton observatory (which has NASA involvement).

When the X-ray light from the corona disappeared, NICER and Swift observed lower-energy X-rays from the system so that, collectively, these observatories provided a continuous stream of information throughout the event.

Although a wayward star seems the most likely culprit, the authors note that there could be other explanations for the unprecedented event. One remarkable feature of the observations is that the overall drop in brightness wasn’t a smooth transition: Day to day, the low-energy X-rays NICER detected showed dramatic variation, sometimes changing in brightness by a factor of 100 in as little as eight hours. In extreme cases, black hole coronas have been known to become 100 times brighter or dimmer, but on much longer timescales. Such rapid changes occurring continuously for months was extraordinary.

“This dataset has a lot of puzzles in it,” said Erin Kara, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the new study. “But that’s exciting because it means we’re learning something new about the universe. We think the star hypothesis is a good one, but I also think we’re going to be analyzing this event for a long time.”

It’s possible that this kind of extreme variability is more common in black hole accretion disks than astronomers realized. Many operating and upcoming observatories are designed to search for short-term changes in cosmic phenomena, a practice known as “time domain astronomy,” which could reveal more events like this one.

“This new study is a great example of how flexibility in observation scheduling allows NASA and ESA missions to study objects that evolve relatively quickly and look for longer-term changes in their average behavior,” said Michael Loewenstein, a coauthor of the study and an astrophysicist for the NICER mission at the University of Maryland College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Will this feeding black hole return to the state it was in before the disruption event? Or has the system been fundamentally changed? We’re continuing our observations to find out.”

More About the Missions

NICER is an Astrophysics Mission of Opportunity within NASA’s Explorer program, which provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space utilizing innovative, streamlined, and efficient management approaches within the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas.

NuSTAR recently celebrated eight years in space, having launched on June 13, 2012. A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at GSFC. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory was launched in December 1999 from Kourou, French Guiana. NASA funded elements of the XMM-Newton instrument package and provides the NASA Guest Observer Facility at GSFC, which supports the use of the observatory by U.S. astronomers.

GSFC manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College London in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.

• Read Astronomers Watch a Black Hole’s Corona Mysteriously Disappear, Then Reappear for more on this research.
• Reference: “The Destruction and Recreation of the X-Ray Corona in a Changing-look Active Galactic Nucleus” by C. Ricci, E. Kara, M. Loewenstein, B. Trakhtenbrot, I. Arcavi, R. Remillard, A. C. Fabian, K. C. Gendreau, Z. Arzoumanian, R. Li, L. C. Ho, C. L. MacLeod, E. Cackett, D. Altamirano, P. Gandhi, P. Kosec, D. Pasham, J. Steiner and C.-H. Chan, 16 July 2020, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
  DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab91a1

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01-08-2024 om 01:47 geschreven door peter  

Runaway 'failed star' races through the cosmos at 1.2 million mph

CWISE J1249+3621,was originally discovered by citizen scientists working with the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, which uses data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to detect faint, moving objects relatively close to the sun.

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• Hubble Space Telescope discovers 'failed stars' are bad at relationships too

After several citizen scientists flagged the object, a team of astronomers followed up using the Keck I Telescope, one of two 10-meter twin telescopes located on the dormant volcano Maunakea, in Hawai'i.

"We discovered a very low-mass object, right on the star/brown dwarf mass boundary, that has an extreme velocity, moving fast enough that it may actually be unbound to the Milky Way galaxy," study team leader Adam Burgasser, of the University of California San Diego, told Space.com. "It joins a collection of 'hypervelocity' stars that have been found over the past few decades, most of which are thousands of light-years from the sun, whereas this source is a 'mere' 400 light-years away."

Burgasser added that the team's observations included an analysis of CWISE J1249+3621's atmosphere. This indicated that the potential brown dwarf also has an unusual chemical composition. The team aimed to use the information they gathered about the motion and composition of CWISE J1249+3621 to speculate on its possible origins.

"This discovery mainly opens up a new pathway to studying brown dwarfs that are in remote regions of the Milky Way, including its center, its halo and its various globular clusters and satellites," Burgasser said. "All of these systems are too far away to study brown dwarfs in detail directly, but if they get thrown at us, it's much easier!"

A young star, similar to the renegade star PG 1610+062, gets ejected from the Milky Way by a hungry black hole. So long! 

(Image credit: A. IRRGANG, FAU)

What is this rogue star running from?

Brown dwarfs form just like stars do — from giant clouds of gas and dust, called molecular clouds, that develop overly dense patches that collapse under the influence of their own gravity. However, unlike a regular star such as the sun, brown dwarfs fail to gather enough material from the remains of the cloud that birthed them to reach the mass needed to generate the pressures and temperatures in their cores that kickstart the fusion of hydrogen to helium. This is the process that defines a "main sequence" star. Hence, the "failed star" moniker foisted on brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs have masses ranging from around four times that of Jupiter to around 80 times that of the gas giant. (For comparison, the sun is 1,000 times more massive than Jupiter.) The mass of CWISE J1249+3621 is exciting because it puts it right at the hypothetical boundary between a star and a brown dwarf.

"The low mass is significant because it's by far the lowest-mass, high-velocity 'star' found to date. The original hypervelocity stars found about 20 years ago were massive O stars [around 50 times as massive as the sun] and B stars [up to 16 times as massive as the sun], a likely selection bias because these stars are rare and would need to be found at large distances," Burgasser said. "Our discovery indicates that whatever process (or processes) causes these stars to run away must operate at both high and low masses."

The UC San Diego researcher explained that the team is really excited to try to answer what sent this stellar body careening through the Milky Way.

"The star could have been kicked out of the center of Milky Way by our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, a process commonly used to explain the origins of other hypervelocity stars," Burgasser said. "Notably, our star is moving into the center, not away, but it might be on a return trip after being ejected previously."

He added that it is also possible that the brown dwarf is on the run from a "cosmic vampire." The rogue stellar body may have been part of a binary system with a white dwarf stellar corpse that was ripping material away from it. This gruesome feeding eventually causes the white dwarf to erupt in a cosmic explosion called a Type Ia supernova. This would destroy the white dwarf and provide the "kick" that sent this runaway racing through the Milky Way at incredible speeds.

"Another possibility is that the star was launched out of a globular cluster through dynamical interactions with black holes in the center of the cluster; recent simulations show that this should happen several times over the age of the Milky Way," Burgasser said. "Any of these processes above, given a fast enough kick, could have launched it out, or in the case of an 'extragalactic' star, it just happens to be passing through."

He added that, currently, the team can't rule out the possibility that this potential brown dwarf is an intruder in our galaxy that came from outside the Milky Way. But the fact that it's passing through the plane of our Milky Way makes that a less likely case.

"The orbit is certainly the most surprising aspect of this object; it is moving radially in and out of the center of the Milky Way and almost perfectly in the plane," Burgasser said. "Most of the high-velocity stars we see are on much more chaotic or inclined orbits. I think this is a real clue to its real origin."

Related: 

• Brown dwarfs: The coolest stars or the hottest planets?

Runaway brown dwarfs, if that is indeed what CWISE J1249+3621 is, appear to be rare, but this could be because of their cool and faint nature, which makes them difficult to detect. This means that the population of rogue brown dwarfs could be much larger than current detection rates indicate.

"These types of stars are exceedingly rare; only a few dozen have been found out of billions of stars examined, and, as noted, this is the first low-mass one. And this object in particular is difficult to see because it's a very cool and dim star, nearly 10,000 times fainter than the sun and emitting most of its light at infrared wavelengths," Burgasser said. "It's hard to say how common these bodies are, with only one found so far, but since this is so close, we speculate that there may be many more.

"That speculation is informed partly by the fact that the majority of stars in the Milky Way are low mass, and about one in five are brown dwarfs, and that these objects are the easiest to 'throw around' since they are so low mass."

The team now intends to follow up on the investigation of CWISE J1249+3621's atmosphere in greater detail to see if its chemical abundances reveal something about its origin. They will also attempt to discover more of these low-mass stellar runaways, a hunt in which citizen scientists will play an integral role.

"We definitely want to find more of these objects, and our citizen scientists have identified several more high-velocity candidates to follow up," Burgasser concluded. "Citizen scientists were absolutely essential to this study! They were the ones who identified this source as an interesting target worth investigating. Without them, we'd still have hundreds of thousands of faint little dots to sort through."

The team's research is discussed in a pre-peer-reviewed paper featured on the repository site arXiv.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

01-08-2024 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

World's largest telescope continues taking shape on Chilean mountain (photos)

Part of the dome will have large sliding doors, which will remain closed during the day and open at night, allowing the telescope to survey the sky. Once complete, the telescope will hunt for Earth-like exoplanets in search of signs of life outside of our own solar system and probe the early universe to study the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, among other tasks.

Assembly has begun on the beam structure for the sliding doors, which will help protect the telescope from the high daytime temperatures and dusty desert environment. 

Related: 

• The Milky Way's heart shines over construction site of world's largest telescope

Construction photos from June also show progress on the support structure in the center of the dome that will eventually hold the ELT's 128-foot-wide (39 meters) primary mirror (M1), which weighs a whopping 200 tons. The mirror will rest on the white lattice structure, which will allow M1 to move smoothly during observations and compensate for varying gravity loads, wind conditions, vibrations or changes in temperature. 

"Notice the cranes and vehicles at the bottom, which show off just how enormous the ELT is!" ESO officials said in a statement releasing the updated images. 

The primary mirror will be made up of 798 individual hexagonal segments, making it the largest segmented mirror ever built for a telescope. The ELT will have a total of five mirrors, all of which have different shapes, sizes and roles but will work together to observe the cosmos. 

The secondary mirror, M2, will hang above M1, reflecting the light collected by it to the tertiary mirror, M3. The hole in the middle of the white lattice structure will house the central tower, which will hold the M3, M4 and M5 mirrors.

{https://www.space.com/ }

01-08-2024 om 01:17 geschreven door peter