Project Doorway Revealed! Aliens Operate Within The Visual Spectrum 'We Cannot See'

Non-Human Operate Within The Visual Spectrum ‘We Cannot See’ The new study program known as ‘Project Doorway’ is revealing information for the very first time which can be disturbing for some people. Do we need to re-address the extraterrestrial hypothesis?

We have been manipulated for thousands of years by a phenomena that has many masks. But now we are starting to find fascinating information in regards ‘their’ capabilities and metaphysics. They have always been here will us, right under our very noses!

Presented by Steve Mera and Barry Fitzgerald All content on this channel is licensed, and or produced by Zohar Entertainment Group/Awakening Expo/Phenomena Magazine.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/  }

31-05-2020 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Secret Space Interplanetary Defense & Reaction Forces... The Most Sensitive Program!

Specialised training was involved in how to react to the sight of large reptilian type aliens beings. Plans and agreements had to be drawn up because our moon was already occupied. Now with bases on the planet Mars, there are new challenges. Incredible disclosure on a space program far beyond secret!

Host – Jay Weidner
Guest – Jason Rice 

All content on this channel is licensed, and or produced by Zohar Entertainment Group/Awakening Expo/Phenomena Magazine.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/  }

31-05-2020 om 22:57 geschreven door peter  

Lost Antarctica Ancient Humans - 5 Most Mysterious Discoveries Made To Blow Your Mind

Lost Antarctica Ancient Humans – 5 Most Mysterious Discoveries Made To Blow Your Mind

5 most mysterious discoveries made in Antarctica to blow your mind. Today, we take a look at these 5 most mysterious discoveries made in Antarctica.

Seen as one of the last unexplored landmasses on the planet Earth, Antarctica holds a wide number of secrets that research scientists are still attempting to uncover in the modern day.

Thank you for watching!

Thank you to CO.AG for the background music!

OTHER VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

31-05-2020 om 22:28 geschreven door peter  

2 new crop circles found in Wiltshire, UK – May 2020

These two crop circle were found in Wiltshire, United Kingdom on 28th and 30 May 2020. Crop circles are counted among the most weirdest and inexplicable phenomena that have ever challenged the great minds of humans. For those of you who don’t know what a crop circle is, it is a mysterious phenomena that happens overnight and is an extremely giant geometric pattern of flattened crops.

Every known crop circle is distinct from one another and what makes them strange is that nobody knows where the crop circles come from and who draws them and that too overnight. In a recent sighting , two crop circles were recorded in UK. Crop circles have been directly perceived as and related to alien invasion for centuries. They happen to form when a spaceship lands on a crop field and the shape of the base of the spaceship is embedded on the field, cutting the crops in an unrecognisable pattern. One theory states that the crop circle patterns denote some secret message the aliens leave for the interpretation of the denizens of earth.

Check the video below for more images!

Other videos, crop circles  in Wiltshire, selected by peter2011

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

31-05-2020 om 20:52 geschreven door peter  

Multiple UFOs filmed during SpaceX launch yesterday!

These three videos of unidentified flying objects were filmed in during SpaceX launch on 30th May 2020 when a rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s company lifted off with two astronauts on a history-making flight to ISS.

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

31-05-2020 om 20:02 geschreven door peter  

NASA Astronaut Recalls Fearing For His Life After Spotting ‘Five Bright Lights’ While On A Spacewalk

PIXABAY

As if we needed more proof that aliens exist, we’ve got it anyway because here comes a harrowing tale from NASA astronaut Dr. Leroy Chiao, who in his last mission for NASA in 2005 had experienced some a very scary moments while working on the International Space Station.

During an episode of Science Channel’s NASA’s Unexplained Files, Chiao recounted how as a part of one experiment being conducted on the International Space Station he had to go outside the ISS for a spacewalk.

It was during this spacewalk that Chiao says he found himself in a situation he never expected, nor knew exactly how to handle.

“It’s clearly not a natural phenomenon,” recalled Chiao.

“He said, ‘I saw some really weird stuff down there flying past,'” added former NASA engineer James Oberg.

“At this point in the mission, this is kind of a shock,” said aerospace historian Chris Orwoll.

“You’re very aware, hyper-aware when you’re doing a spacewalk because you are in a pretty dangerous situation. It’s exciting on many levels and also stressful too because you don’t want to mess up your last one. That’s what they all remember you for,” Chiao continued. “If tethers become undone, you are just going to float away from the station and it’s pretty much curtains.”

PIXABAY

“Suddenly, I look up and I see these five lights and they seem to fly by,” Chiao explained.

“And he reports, ‘Wow, I’ve just had echelon formation of five lights,'” said Oberg.

“And there were four in a line…” Chiao continued.

“But one of them is slightly off-set from the others,” said Orwoll.

“My heart just leapt up into my throat and and they kind of go flying by, you know, by the station, and, you know, what are these lights?” Chiao added.

It was at that point that Chiao contacted Mission Control and spoke to Oberg about what he’d just seen.

“When you see something in space, the possibility always that it can bite you. Your life might be on the line,” recalled Oberg.

For years, the mystery of the fight lights remained unsolved until NASA engineer James Smith decided to take a look at satellite images from around the time of Chiao’s sighting.

It turned out that those images confirmed what Chiao claims to have seen.

After finding no record of satellite paths or military Air Force exercises, Smith finally settled on an explanation for the lights: South America commercial fishing fleets who use lights that are so bright they can be seen from space in an effort to attract cuttlefish and other kinds of squid.

“And so they were deployed in a line up the coast and it was the rotation of Earth that made it appear that they were flying,” said Chiao.

Chiao says he accepts that theory as an explanation for what he saw, but he also added, “I have no doubt there is other life in the universe, but what I doubt is I don’t think we’ve found each other yet.”

Or have we?

FOX

Previous UFO and alien news and evidence…

• Fleet of UFOs spotted underwater off the coast of Greece on Google Earth by expert alien hunter
• Did this ‘alien’ craft spotted over Australia get misidentified as space debris? Expert says it did
• ‘Cloaked’ UFO caught on video by infared security camera before disappearing into the California sky
• ‘Ancient alien city’ discovered on Mercury in NASA mission image: ‘100% proof of life’ says expert
• The U.S. Navy has finally released eight new UFO incident reports submitted by pilots
• ‘Alien base entrance’ discovered on island in Indonesia in Google Earth image by UFO expert
• UFO expert puts forth ‘absolute proof’ aliens were monitoring NASA’s Apollo 7 mission in 1968
• Former NASA Director warns the next killer supervirus could be alien in nature
• UFO entering a ‘secret alien base’ in Oregon’s Mount Hood caught on video by airplane pilot
• ‘Thousands of mushrooms’ and an ‘alien life form’ spotted on Mars in NASA rover pics
• UFO caught on camera in deep space near the sun in images from NASA’s SOHO satellite
• Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admits Congress used a ‘black budget’ for studying UFOs
• Japan now suddenly planning to ‘establish procedures’ for handling UFO encounters due to Pentagon videos
• Fleet of UFOs passing by the moon caught on camera in image from NASA’s Apollo 9 mission, says expert
• Alien base and pyramids discovered in Mars Curiosity Rover photo: ‘NASA kept it a secret’ says expert
• UFO expert says he has ‘100% indisputable proof’ alien cities exist on the Earth’s moon
• UFO spotted on NASA live stream as cylindrical craft ‘uncloaks’ near International Space Station
• UFO spotted exiting a Mexican volcano is ‘100 percent proof’ of alien existence on Eart
•  Three different UFO sightings reported in three different cities in the same night sparks speculation
• Former French Director of Intelligence says he believes UFOs may come from parallel worlds
• UFO expert believes he has found evidence of alien life on Mars in image ‘deleted by NASA’
• UFO spotted on NASA live stream video outside the International Space Station is ‘absolutely real’
•  Scientist claims coronavirus was brought to Earth by a meteroite that hit China in 2019
• Mysterious UFO sighting during the day in northern Siberia leaves top Russian scientists baffled
• Expert claims triangle UFO spotted on an Antarctic island is 100% ‘proof of ancient aliens’
• Mass UFO sighting in the skies above Detroit and Cleveland on consecutive nights has people shook
• UFO expert Tom DeLonge shares strange video of a huge ‘fiery orange’ orb dancing about the sky over California
• Flurry of UFO sightings, including a ‘Tic Tac’ spotted by a pilot over Mexico, sparks more speculation
• Top quantum physicist believes USS Nimitz UFO used ‘metamaterial’ and time-traveled to reach 19,000 mph
• Time-lapse video showing mysterious ‘red trails’ reignites debate about UFOs over North Carolina
• Former UK Ministry Of Defence UFO investigator says we are completely unprepared for an alien invasion
• ‘Black Triangle’ UFO spotted orbiting the sun on NASA video: ‘This is an alien space station’
• UFO sighting is ‘absolute proof’ a Mexican volcano is being used as a secret alien base of operations
• Satellite photos spot mysterious objects emerging from top secret Area 51 experimental air base
• Secret Area 51 tunnel openings discovered on Google Earth, are they UFO hangar entrances?
• Google Earth shows ‘an example of an alien abduction taking place’ near Fiji, says UFO expert
• NASA live cam catches UFO flying near International Space Station on video
• USS Nimitz technician technician allegedly forced to sign NDA after witnessing Tic-Tac UFO from Navy spy plane 
• ‘Fleet of UFOs’ hovering over Arizona captured on video
• Darting UFO recorded on NASA live stream shows ‘proof’ the International Space Station is being watched
• Mind-blowing new book puts forth theory that UFOs may actually be crafts piloted by time-traveling humans
• UFO hunters claim they are behind the unexplained group of Colorado drones, mystery remains unsolved
• Ominous black ring cloud hovers in the sky above Pakistan
• Glowing UFO spotted on NASA live stream of the Space Station sparks more claims aliens are real
• Newly declassified CIA intelligence report reveals new info about 1973 UFO sighting at ‘Site 7’ in Russia
• Navy admits it has additional ‘top secret’ footage of USS Nimitz UFO encounter but won’t release it
• UFO sighting? Mysterious object leaving a fiery trail in the sky spotted by multiple people in Florida
• Navy pilot who filmed USS Nimitz UFO encounter breaks his silence after 15 years – Tic Tac craft broke laws of physics
• UFO that ‘nearly hits’ a SpaceX satellite during live stream is ‘100% proof aliens are watching,’ says exper
• Top researchers claim U.S. military is covering up their own super advanced aircraft by making people believe it is a UFO
• Mysterious hovering orbs over Mesa have many believing they spotted a glowing UFO
• UFO seen by 100+ people hovering in the California sky for five minutes sparks alien concerns
• A stationary UFO recorded in the South Carolina sky sparks secret government surveillance theory
• Former head of MI6, who’s allegedly part of a secret global conspiracy on UFOs, says he believes aliens do exist
• UFO expert claims ISS video is ‘100% proof’ NASA, Russia know aliens visit the space station
• Bug expert declares there are insects on Mars and then suddenly deletes research after backlash
• UFO expert claims to have video proof of a fleet of alien spaceships passing by our moon
• 5 Navy veterans and new anonymous source who witnessed the USS Nimitz UFO incident come forward to reveal what they saw
• Retired Air Force Major says a space alien was shot and killed at a base in 1978, government covered it up
• US Navy pilot David Fravor who claims to have witnessed a UFO says the tapes of the encounter have disappeared
• Eyewitnesses spot identical fleet of UFOs in the sky over Utah and North Carolina in the same day
• UFO expert says he has ‘100% proof’ that aliens currently live in a ‘city’ on our moon
• Red triangular craft recorded hovering in the Texas sky is perhaps the ‘clearest UFO footage’ ever
• Top Gun Navy pilot describes his incredible UFO encounter on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’
• A strange ‘fleet’ of 14 glowing UFOs was spotted and caught on camera off the coast of North Carolina

[Daily Express]

31-05-2020 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

Panic in Brazil for the presence of hundreds of mysterious spheres in the skies

Something really strange is happening during the coronavirus pandemic and it is impossible to hide it. Thousands of people are already witnessing the presence of strange objects in our skies. They are not about drones, planes or helicopters, and so far there is no explanation. Even these sightings have been seen in full news, As we already published in MEP, on May 8 during the news of the Spanish television channel Telecinco , a luminous object in the form of a disc appeared passing over the Roman monument Castillo de Sant ‘ Angelo, located on the right bank of the Tiber River.

Generally, this type of evidence is not mentioned by the media involved, but in this particular case it was discredited a few days later by the television network itself due to the stir caused on social networks. According to the journalist’s explanation that was in the place, the strange object was simply a seagull, although he did not even see it since at that time it was on its back. This is simply one of the large number of sightings being seen during the pandemic and around the world. But it seems that “something” is about to happen, since having seen a single unidentified flying object we have passed hundreds, and in the same country.

Strange spheres on Magé

Brazilians in the Magé municipality, just north of Rio de Janeiro, reported seeing mysterious light objects in the night sky on Wednesday. Social networks were filled with dozens of videos of the strange objects, causing panic and all kinds of reactions to the presence of UFOs. Magé became trending on Twitter Wednesday morning when several people began sharing videos of bright lights in the sky. The images showed blue, red, and yellow orbs moving around the sky, even the lights in a triangular formation.

While the videos themselves are truly impressive, the real controversy started after the posts inexplicably disappeared , including the hashtag #MageUFO. On the other hand, in the Reddit category on UFOs, the publications of the Brazilian videos also began to disappear. Users accused Twitter and Reddit moderators of censorship. Twitter also declined to give any explanation.

While the Brazilian press reports that no one reported these objects to local authorities, there were many who said they had heard loud explosions and gunshots , in addition to witnessing how the military cordoned off the aurea and arrested anyone who tried to approach the place where the strangers appeared. lights.

The truth is that more and more UFOs are being seen around the world, but the recent event is the most puzzling to date. It must also be said that Brazil is considered an important point for UFO activity . In 1957, journalist Ibrahim Sued received an envelope containing small pieces of metal from an anonymous source claiming that they were remnants of Ubatuba, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, where an UFO had allegedly crashed. Although they were of extraterrestrial origin, the fragments were very pure magnesium.

It is unclear where the metal came from and it remains a mystery. The “UFO alert” Colares 1977 made headlines when residents on the island of Colares began to report strange objects in the sky and mysterious injuries on their bodies. According to researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, the objects witnessed on the island allegedly killed several people. Reports of radiation and thermal burns, as well as strange scars, filled the Brazilian government’s file on the incident.

After an official investigation, the government concluded that it found no evidence of unusual phenomena. But one of the strangest cases occurred in 1996 when several people claimed to have witnessed a strange alien creature wandering the streets of the city of Varginha. Described as the “devil” the 1.5-meter-long, big-skinned, brown-skinned being was first seen by three women on a January afternoon. Several other sightings were reported, and even the US Wall Street Journal reported the story.

While this latest UFO incident from Brazil will likely add to the countless mysteries that haunt the skies of South America, skeptics say the lights on Magé were simply paratroopers equipped with pyrotechnics, Chinese lanterns, or drones. But many of us feel that “something” is about to happen , and the pandemic is simply a “smokescreen.”

What do you think about the strange lights on Magé? Are you one of those who feel that something is about to happen?

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/category/aliens-ufo-space }

30-05-2020 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

International Space Station Records Thousands Of Alien Spacecrafts Leaving Earth

On May 18, 2020, a camera from the International Space Station (ISS) recorded something really unusual, thousands of strange objects that simultaneously shoot out from the surface of our planet and fly into outer space.

This can be seen in the original video published on the project channel “High Definition Earth Visualization (HDEV)” on the Ustream platform or below we have posted the part of the video showing the alien spacecraft, the objects seem to take off at high speed and the remains are not the remains of liquid fuel rockets.

Skeptics believe that these are ice particles that detach from the ISS and that are reflected in the camera thanks to sunlight.

But for experts in the field there is no doubt about it, it is the massive evacuation of thousands of UFOs leaving our planet.

Skeptics believe that these are ice particles that detach from the ISS and that are reflected in the camera thanks to sunlight. But for experts in the field there is no doubt about it, it is the massive evacuation of thousands of UFOs leaving our planet.

For them the images show that aliens have been very present on our planet since ancient times. This civilization or civilizations of other worlds have their own underground and submarine bases on Earth, but the question some ask is, what has led them to evade Earth massively?

They consider that this strategy can only be carried out if our planet is doomed and it is very dangerous to be on it. But the threat would not be the coronavirus pandemic, as some have suggested, rather it would be from our closest star. NASA scientists have confirmed that the solar minimum they predicted three years ago has been met.

And scientists have warned that the Dalton minimum, one of the most extreme weather periods in history, will repeat itself. It lasted more than three solar cycles, from 1790-1830, and resulted in heavy snowfall, deep frost, and general cooling worldwide, in addition to drastic weather changes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and famine. It was hell on Earth.

And if the worst predictions are unfortunately fulfilled, perhaps we would find ourselves facing a mass extinction, just as happened with dinosaurs. The truth is that we do not know if this will be the case, but all the events that are happening in the last months seem to indicate that something will happen on our planet. And this video may be evidence that there isn’t much time left.

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/category/aliens-ufo-space }

30-05-2020 om 23:01 geschreven door peter  

The Discovery of the 12,000-Years-Old Mountain Sized Statue Lady of Mali

No doubt about it, this is one of the greatest time periods to live in if you’re a fan of ancient architectural wonders. Every day we find more and more of these behemoths of ancient civilization simply lying around. Today we will be focusing mostly on a peculiar stone that was first discovered by professor Angelo Pitoni in Sierra Leone, West Africa, in a diamond mine back in 1990.

Upon discovery he rightfully so named it the sky stone, and upon further research specialists came to the conclusion that there is no other explanation for its composition other than that it is made out of pure oxygen which was given color by an unknown agent. This agent is a complete mystery to this day, regardless if you believe the oxygen theory or not what is indisputable is the fact that it is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Angelo Pitoni was a man of many talents, he was an agronomist, a botanist, but most of all he was a geologist. He had made many discoveries in his time, emeralds, gold mines and more were all part of his life at that point already, but he had never expected to come into contact with such an incredible mystery regardless.

Unfortunately though, he did not live to find out everything that there was to this discovery since he passed away back in 2009, and with him all of the secrets that he spoke of having finally gotten the answers to were buried off with him. Video:

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/category/mystery }

30-05-2020 om 22:50 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX Explosion Haunted by 2016 UFO Incident

SpaceX Raptor Engine Explodes In Texas Day Before Scheduled Manned Launch

“It Felt Like An Earthquake”: SpaceX Prototype Starship Blows Up In Massive Explosion Day Ahead Of Manned Launch.  The Raptor engine in SpaceX’s Starship SN4 prototype blew up on its test stand in Boca Chica, Texas.  “SpaceX just experienced the biggest explosion yet at its Texas site, where it’s testing prototypes for a Mars rocket,” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren reported Friday afternoon.  “A resident who lives nearby — just 2 miles away — said it felt like an earthquake,” she added. Koren noted that at this point it doesn’t appear anyone in the surrounding community was hurt in the massive blast which shook the area for miles.  https://bit.ly/3eDzNSJ

Was SpaceX Rocket Destroyed by UFO (2016)

Note that the explosion occurs near the top of the rocket, where there aren’t any fuel tanks, the explosion is also far hotter than would be caused by rocket fuel – note the bright white blob on the video bright enough to cause a lens flare (the four diagonal streaks). The rocket fuel burning comes several frames later and is quite different looking – the colours are reds and oranges with black and grey smoke, this is a secondary explosion where the rocket fuel was ignited by the primary explosion further up the rocket.

Now for the really shocking bit – the craft responsible for this destruction was caught in the video – a small spherical object that flies from right to left on the screen and appears to have fired some kind of laser or beam weapon at the rocket.

So now the big question is this: Just what had the Israelis built into that satellite that someone decided had to be destroyed before it could be placed in orbit? Our working theory is that it was some kind of weapon, quite possibly a laser as we received intelligence some time ago that a space based laser had been used to cause several mysterious explosions in Iran.

Source, Veterans Today Archive -  https://bit.ly/36QJaM3

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

30-05-2020 om 21:06 geschreven door peter  

The search for alien life has been one of the last great frontiers. We push out into the dark reaches of space desperately seeking any sign that we are not a lone rock with the only life in the universe. There has been much discussion of what form they would take, what their intentions would be, and how we would communicate with these creatures. Yet, what if they are not creatures at all, but rather highly advanced, sophisticated robots?

There are several possible forms that robotic aliens could take. A much-discussed possibility is that they might be essentially drones sent by their extraterrestrial masters. This makes a lot of sense, as we ourselves use probes to explore the reaches of our solar system and beyond, places where it is not practical or possible to send manned missions. If aliens simply wanted to check us out or scout our planet, why go through all of the trouble, resources, and danger of traversing light years of space with a living crew when you can just basically send a drone instead? This idea has been toyed with in UFO circles and one idea is that they are already here, and that UFOs themselves could really be just drones sent from across the sea of stars. As to their intentions, they might be here to take samples or collect scientific data, study our kind, or perhaps even be used as a way to make contact with us. After this, perhaps the operators of the drones might decide to pay a visit themselves, and one can only hope it is for friendly reasons.

Another possibility is that these robots could be the aliens themselves, and this could play out in a few ways. In one scenario they could be AI intelligences that either coexist with or have usurped their biological creators. This could be due to what is often referred to as a technological singularity, which is basically a hypothetical point in time when technological growth reaches a point of no return, uncontrollable and exploding at a rate faster than we can keep up with, disrupting society as we know it in ways we may not even be fully able to predict. In the case of AI, this accelerating growth could spawn a superintelligence that would upgrade and improve itself at an astronomical rate, beyond that of its creators’ ability to monitor or control, quite likely gaining self awareness in the process. Such an intelligence could very well self-replicate and spawn others, a race of AIs eventually turning against their biological originators to destroy them and continue on, possibly for millions of years to the point that the original species of their planet is a faded memory relegated to fossils and history books. It makes sense, as it would be the next step up in evolution from the confines of biology, and robots would be perfect for the rigors of space and the vast distances involved with travelling to other worlds.

Looking at how fast technology is progressing here on Earth, there are many futurists and writers who believe that not only is such a singularity possible, but that it is inevitable. Some of the leading minds in AI and the future of the planet, such as Nick Bostrom, Vincent C. Müller, and Elon Musk, predict that this will happen for us within the next few decades, and great minds like Musk and the renowned Stephen Hawking have long told of how the rise of artificial intelligence will most likely lead to our downfall. If this hypothetical situation is an inexorable byproduct of technological advancement, it could even mean that robotic civilizations that have gotten to the stage of travel across the stars could significantly outnumber biological ones and be the dominant type of civilization in the universe. Even more frightening than this, perhaps technologically advanced biological races reach this singularity or destroy themselves before they ever have time to reach the stars to any appreciable degree, essentially leaving all space faring intelligent races to be robotic artificial intelligences. One Professor Susan Schneider from the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton thinks that this would be the norm, and that such robotic alien civilizations could feasibly be even billions of years old, and has said:

I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be post-biological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence. Other civilizations may be vastly older than us – earthlings are galactic babies. All lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.

Even if such AI intelligences did not violently overthrow their masters and cause a robotic apocalypse or seek to replace them like in a science fiction movie, it is possible that they could at least outlast them. Planetary cataclysms, changing climates or environments, drought, famine, and diseases would all mean nothing to them. Their makers could wither away and die or kill themselves in war to fade into history as their robotic creations went on to inherit the planet and become a spacefaring civilization of its own, again perhaps even forgetting over the eons that there were ever even biological creators at all. They could very well believe that they are the original life, and have lost all sense of ever having had other intelligences come before them. To them their original creators could be mere myths and legends.

Yet another possibility is that the robots are, in a sense, their own creators. The idea here is that the original species that designed these robots have merely downloaded their own consciousnesses into these new forms. It is not a new idea, thrown around in science fiction for quite some time now, and looking ever more possible as our technology makes leaps and bounds. It seems only a matter of time before someone on Earth attempts this, so it is not completely far-fetched to think that a super advanced race would have already perfected the process. They may have decided to take on a robotic form from a desire to be immortal, to escape harsh conditions on their planet, to move on to the next evolutionary step, or any number of other reasons we will probably never understand. They may even do it specifically for space travel, downloading into robotic bodies for these excursions to withstand the rigors of covering such vast distances and eliminating the need to operate life support systems, sort of like a super advanced spacesuit, while their physical bodies remain behind in stasis. In the end, the idea here is that these are just robots in physical form, with the minds of living entities inside them.

If aliens were actually AI robots, it poses a few potential problems if we ever met them. Our way of thinking and interacting with the world around us is heavily influenced by our biological processes, needs and our physiology, so how would a self-aware robot with none of these biological cues think? Would we even be able to comprehend what they are saying to us or what their thought processes are? This would also affect their intentions towards us, as what would a race of robots think of intelligent biological organisms and how would they react to us? If they were purely, coldly logical it might make sense for them to just wipe us out, unless they wanted to study us for some reason. This poses the question of why they would even want to come here in the first place, and with a purely robotic intelligence this might be hard to fathom. Whatever their motivations are, we could only hope that after millions or even billions of years of self-awareness they might have developed a sense of empathy and altruism, but this seems it would be far less likely with robots than it would for biological organisms, because again, altruism and empathy are often seen as traits that at the heart of it evolved at least in part from biological needs. Would a race unfettered from these have a need for such things? Who knows?

There is also the problem of communication with these robots. Besides the fact that their thought processes would be far different than ours, would we be able to communicate with them in any conventional sense? We already have a lot of possible hurdles to overcome with communicating with aliens, but with robots would it even be possible at all? They could be so far beyond the usual biological communication methods and have minds that work so amazingly fast and are so far beyond our own capabilities that we might not even comprehend them. Perhaps mathematics could provide some common ground, but if their minds were so advanced it still might be hard to find a way to relate to each other.

In the end, this is of course all speculation, but based on current trends in technology on our planet and our own increasing use of robotics, it seems more than plausible that other intelligent civilizations should do the same. What happens after hundreds, millions, or even billions of years of this inexorable progress? We can only guess, and wonder if, instead of alien creatures we might run into the robots they have made, or have even been replaced by.

Videos, selected by peter2011

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2020 om 20:23 geschreven door peter  

Alien Artifacts Found On Mars, Pyramid, Spindle, Face And More, UFO Sighting News.

• http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/13476/gigapans/198064

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

30-05-2020 om 19:19 geschreven door peter  

Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of 17 miniature and small-scale stenciled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. 

The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. 

What stands out is a strange human-like figure, a huge face next to the human-like figure and an alien face at the bottom left of the image.

Image left: Alien Face - Image center: Human-like figure - Image right: Face.

Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifs were created with a previously undocumented stenciling technique using miniature models sculpted from beeswax. 

The results suggest that beeswax and other malleable and adhesive resins may have played a more significant role in creating stenciled motifs than previously thought.

The report published by cambridge.org does not describe who made these figures but it seems like the creators have been in contact with an alien race.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

30-05-2020 om 18:14 geschreven door peter  

2 ORBS filmed over Frankfort, New York 27-May-2020

These two orbs were seen and recorded flying across the sky above Frankfort in New York. Witness said there was strange sound coming from the orbs.

This sighting was filmed on Wednesday, 27th April 2020.

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

30-05-2020 om 17:52 geschreven door peter  

What do intelligent aliens look like?

Extraterrestrials, Aliens, life from other worlds. Creatures that have evolved or been engineered on planets with completely different atmospheres and dare I say ecosystems to those found here on earth.

Many have speculated as to what unusual forms these planets could produce. I want to limit this idea to the highest evolved intelligence that could have originated from different planets to detail a complete ecosystem of an alien world would take way too long, this thenLeaving us with the question   

What do super-intelligent aliens look like?

Extraterrestrials have been depicted across cultures and countries for thousands of years, appearing in different shapes and sizes as people understanding and beliefs change. From the little green men of the fifties to today's Greys and the idea that the gods of old were from another world.

In ancient times these ETs were often shown to be human-like in their appearance but said to possess incredible powers.The gods of ancient Greece and Egypt being a perfect example of this belief and something I have looked at before.

These gods displayed abilities that were far beyond humans and could point to the use of advanced technology or biological abilities that could have come to be from them originating in another part of the universe. The immense strength and invulnerability which the Gods displayed may have come from an advanced, possible engineered immune system and cells.This would allow them to heal rapidly, as well as defend against harmful things such as radiation and gravity, problems faced when a biological being travels to space.This need to survive the perils of deep space travel would call for some bodily modification even the use of artificial bodies and the possible transmission of a Consciousness into artificial bodies.The possibilities of creating an artificial or biological body for space travel means that there could be an endless number of shapes and forms utilized by being from other worlds.We have been somewhat programmed by Movies and television to think that aliens would look somewhat like us. The differences being a large head, green skin, and giant almond eyes. For the moment at least, the only planet we can look to for answers is our own. The earth offers a huge range of biodiversity from single-celled organisms to the blue whale, life comes in an almost immeasurable range of shapes and sizes and displays such a wide range of abilities that if we were on the outside looking in, we may say the life on this planet sounded like the work of a science fiction writer.

Again we have to focus on intelligence as a measure, one thing that seems to be true so far is that brain size dictates intelligence. Remember that intelligence can be measured in several different ways, it does not necessarily mean beings which create technology some may say that shows a level of unintelligence, as it often harms the environment but that for another time. To evolve a level of advanced brain function some other adaptions are thought to be needed.

Firstly some kind of appendage that can manipulate the environment around the alien species. It doesn't have to be a hand and fingers tentacles could easily fit the bill or even a body that could morph into the shapes needed by the creature to accomplish its goal thought up by the prerequisite large brain.

They would most likely need some kind of visual organ or organs again taking into mind that we only see in a narrow part of the light spectrum they could see in another or many others. The same would be likely for the senses of smell hearing and taste.

All of these senses would be developed or engineered to reflect the environment in which these aliens were from, and possibly modified for the space travel which would bring them to our world.

To helps us narrow down the body formsLet's stick with some of the principles that the majority of life on this planet follows and apply them to these extraterrestrials. The first is that the body pattern will more than likely be symmetrical.Everything we know of that grows follows a symmetrical pattern. Cut a tree in half lengthwise, the branches and roots on one side would be fairly similar to the other. The same applies to humans and all living growth, even inorganic growth such as crystals and galaxies.

Next up is when things begin to vary depending on factors such as gravity the density of matter and the availability of energy.

The size of an alien would be dictated by these outside factors, here on earth we see how the shapes and sizes of lifeforms change. Deep-sea creatures being very different from their surface-dwelling cousins. Aliens from worlds with higher gravity being shorter and stouter with high bone density to resist the gravitational forces. The opposite applies to life on planets with less gravity they would be tall and of a lighter build.

This is where those that believe in convergent evolution say ultimately the alien body form would evolve into a pattern similar to our own, bipedal with two arms and two legs being the most biological efficient design.

But as we know here on Earth many lifeforms do not follow this pattern, if an organism like them continued to evolve and become intelligence why would they need to morph so greatly from a body type which leads them to be successful in their environment.Bilateral symmetry is not the ultimate design for a body.Having two sides the same does provide a level of redundancy but wouldn't several different types of body parts also be of an advantage?

Multiple eyes that surround ahead, maybe more than one head, why have only arms and hands when you could have arms hands tentacles or some other type of limb for manipulating the world around you.

After all the old saying is "many hands make light work"Of course the more body parts there are to control the bigger the brain and sense needed to control them are, so we can also see the effects of energy here.

If there is easy access to energy to support a more complex body type there is no reason for it not to exist after all it would seem that natural law favours efficient body design.All life on Earth is carbon-based, but that wouldn't be the case elsewhere. Life forms could be silicon-based or iron-based or anything else at all. This would mean how energy is obtained could vary widely. Most life on this planet consumes its energy by eating other biological matter, but without some kind of producer's "botanical life" converting energy the ecosystem would come crashing down.

Alien life may be like the former, and as with plants absorb energy from light or another source.

There is even the possibility that they have evolved without physical form or with no fixed form—perhaps there are extraterrestrials that are nothing more than sentient clouds, or who have mutable bodies that can alter to suit the needs of the moment.

On this planet, we have an animal that already does this, the octopus.Octopuses make for a good alien analogue they are surprisingly intelligent, some have claimed they may even be as intelligent as us!

Evolution has gifted them with a form which can change to size shape and colour if we weren't so used to seeing them these abilities would seem alien to us. We are used to having a fixed form this coming from our evolutionary path, a path which is said to have separated from that of the Octopus around 800 million years ago. And yet in an example of parallel evolution in nature, the eye of the octopus is identical to that of a human being.

We have gone onto develop technology whereas the octopus has remained in their watery abode, maybe having no need or drive to advance.

If we use technology as a measure of intelligence then another path is opened up, as with natural evolution technology must also evolve and thus shares some steps that it must go through to reach certain markers.This also points to the need for the entity building the technology to have the physical means to do so Hands with fingers for delicate, precise manipulation of detailed objects. A form of locomotion that leaves limbs free to touch hold and move things in the environment.

The need for at a minimum binocular vision to judge distance these Eyes being close to the brain to reduce the time delay and degradation of the visual signal.Also, the other four senses that are needed for survival- used to detect food, mates, and predators, the development of extra senses adding to the basic senses needed to be successful, like dolphins and bats who have evolved echolocation.

Or a sense that has developed to replace one which is not needed think of animals that live in dark caves or the ocean depths that can light up or exude chemicals to communicate.

There is no reason to think that advanced alien intelligence may not have these senses.

These senses may even go as far as allowing these aliens to be shape-shifters, beings that have consciousness control of their body to a molecular level.

This control would mean instant adaptation to new environments, the possibility to ingest any type of other molecular structure as sustenance.

If they had control of these building blocks we could assume that their technology would bridge the artificial with the biological and would be far ahead of our own. We see something similar on this planet with the gears found in planthoppers' legs.

The idea of biology and evolution already using cogs leads one to wonder what else might exist. Maybe something like naturally evolved silicon circuitry?

Some speculate that if aliens had or have evolved to have a civilization similar to ours they would have a similar body form.

All of the focus thus far has been purely on the physical characteristics but what would play an equally important part of any alien-human interaction would be the psychological.

What would alien behaviour be like?

We as a species find it almost impossible to communicate with intelligent animals here on our planet, heck we have a hard enough time talking to one another sometimes.

We are left with questions. What will an alien encounter be like?

How will an interaction go?

What will they be like, will they be solitary, a part of a herd or arrive in small bands?

What do think these aliens will look and behave like, do we already know because they have been here all along let me know what you think in the comments below. 

VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

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30-05-2020 om 01:30 geschreven door peter  

By Alejandro Rojas

The other two videos are referred to as the “GIMBAL” and “GO FAST” videos. They were both captured in 2015 by the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group. Like the Nimitz, the Roosevelt Strike Force encountered unknown objects during training exercises, this time off the east coast, from Virginia to Florida.

The New York Times included the “FLIR” and “GIMBAL” videos in the December 2017 article. “GO FAST” was released by TTSA a few months after. 

30-05-2020 om 01:03 geschreven door peter  

Scientists in Europe have found that some features on Mars that were thought to be lava flows may actually have been flows of muddy water.

We know that Mars used to be volcanically active in the past. The planet is dotted with enormous now-dormant volcanoes, and the remains of old lava flows can still be seen today. Now, it seems, some of those lava flows weren’t composed of lava at all, but rather mud, according to researchers in Europe. The finding is evidence for what are called sedimentary volcanism, where liquid mud – water-rich sediments – ruptured from Mars’ subsurface, flowing like lava before refreezing. These features have often been seen on Earth, in association with smaller conical hills that resemble mud volcanoes.

The intriguing peer-reviewed results were published in the journal Nature Geoscience on May 20, 2020.

A possible mud volcano on Mars, just one of thousands. Ancient flows from such features and other volcanic spots had previously been assumed to be lava, but a new study suggests that at least in some cases, it was mud instead. That would mean these landforms really are mud volcanoes, not smaller magmatic volcanoes.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona/ DLR.

From the paper:

Large outflow channels on ancient terrains of Mars have been interpreted as the products of catastrophic flood events. The rapid burial of water-rich sediments after such flooding could have led to sedimentary volcanism, in which mixtures of sediment and water (mud) erupt to the surface.

Tens of thousands of volcano-like landforms populate the northern lowlands … on Mars. However, it is difficult to determine whether the edifices are related to igneous or mud extrusions …

Here we investigate the mechanisms of mud propagation on Mars using experiments performed inside a low-pressure chamber at cold temperatures. We found that low viscosity mud under Martian conditions propagates differently from that on Earth, because of a rapid freezing and the formation of an icy crust. Instead, the experimental mud flows propagate like terrestrial pahoehoe lava flows, with liquid mud spilling from ruptures in the frozen crust, and then refreezing to form a new flow lobe.

We suggest that mud volcanism can explain the formation of some lava-like flow morphologies on Mars, and that similar processes may apply to cryovolcanic extrusions on icy bodies in the solar system.

The low-pressure vacuum chamber used in the experiments.

Image via CAS/ Petr Bro¸/ CC BY-SA 4.0/ DLR.

An example of mud frozen in simulated Mars conditions. The mud froze on the outside but remained liquid on the inside, and formed cavities and shapes similar to lava on Earth.

Image via Bro¸ et al./ Nature Geoscience/ CNRS.

The new study was led by researchers from the Institute of Geophysics at the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). It involved Lancaster University, the Open University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the U.K., CNRS in France, DLR and Münster University in Germany, and CEED in Norway.

Ernst Hauber of the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof said in a statement:

We have long been aware that in the early history of Mars, several billion years ago, large amounts of water were released over a short period of time, eroding very large valleys in the landscape, which have long since dried up. Extensively eroded masses of fragmented rock were transported through these outflow channels and into the northern lowlands of the planet, where they were quickly deposited. Later, these rocky masses were covered by younger sediments and volcanic rocks.

An active mud volcano in Azerbaijan.

Image via CAS/ Petr Bro¸/ CC BY-SA 4.0/ DLR.

Many of the mud flows are found in locations where massive channels were carved by water a few billion years ago. These floods were huge, comparable to the largest floods known on Earth. Water would then seep back into the subsurface, where it could then re-emerge as mud.

How did the researchers determine that some of the lava flows were not really lava, but mud? Lionel Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Lancaster University, explained:

We performed experiments in a vacuum chamber to simulate the release of mud on Mars. This is of interest because we see many flow-like features on Mars in spacecraft images, but they have not yet been visited by any of the roving vehicles on the surface and there is some ambiguity about whether they are flows of lava or mud.

What they found was quite interesting. Flowing mud on Mars didn’t behave at all like flowing mud on Earth, due to the very thin atmosphere and cold temperatures. The vacuum chamber re-created current Martian conditions. The flowing mud on Mars would freeze quickly and form an icy crust. In the vacuum chamber, the mud flows formed shapes similar to pahoehoe lava, which is common in Hawaii and Iceland. After the mud spilled out of ruptures in the ground, it refroze and formed smooth, undulating surfaces. The outer surface of the mud would freeze on contact with the air, while the inner core remained liquid. This liquid can break the frozen crust to form a new flow lobe that then refreezes.

More conical hills thought to be mud volcanoes, in Coprates Chasma on Mars.

Image via Petr Bro¸/ Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter/ NASA/ JPL/ University of Arizona/ The Conversation.

Rock slab called Old Soaker, found by the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on Mars, which is covered with what are thought to be mud cracks from when a layer of mud dried out about 3 billion years ago.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS.

In another test where the atmospheric pressure was the same as Earth’s, the mud did not form those shapes, even though it was just as cold in the vacuum chamber. Petr Bro¸, lead author of the new study, said:

Under the low atmospheric pressure of Mars, the mud flows behave in much the same way as pahoehoe, or ‘ropy’, lava, which is familiar from large volcanoes on Hawaii and Iceland. Our experiments show that even a process as apparently simple as the flow of mud – something that many of us have experienced for ourselves since we were children – would be very different on Mars.

Hauber added:

However, the impact of this familiar effect on mud has never been investigated in an experiment before. Once again, it turns out that different physical conditions must always be taken into account when looking at apparently simple surface features on other planets. We now know that we need to consider both mud and lava when analyzing certain flow phenomena.

There are tens of thousands of small conical hills in the northern highlands of Mars that may be mud volcanoes. It isn’t clear whether any of them may still be pumping out mud today, but the findings overall show that mud and wet sediments were common on the planet, at least in the past. In Gale Crater, the Curiosity rover has also found cracked, dried rock slabs that look exactly like dried out mud from the bottom of the lake that used to exist there.

Petr Bro¸ of the Czech Academy of Sciences, lead author of the new study.

Image via CAS.

Mars isn’t the only place where this kind of sedimentary volcanism is thought to occur. There is also evidence for a similar process on the dwarf planet Ceres, which may have once had a muddy ocean beneath its outer icy crust. According to Bro¸:

We suggest that mud volcanism can explain the formation of some lava-like flow morphologies on Mars, and that similar processes may apply to eruptions of mud on icy bodies in the outer solar system, like on Ceres.

Last year it was reported that Ceres likely had subsurface salty muddy meltwater reservoirs that lasted millions of years. The bright spots on Ceres’ surface are now thought to be salt deposits left over from when cryovolcanoes – ice volcanoes – erupted, with the water quickly sublimating away due to the almost complete lack of an atmosphere. Similar features thought to be cryovolcanoes were also discovered on Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, and on Saturn’s moon Titan by Cassini. If the flows and conical hills on Mars are really also related to Martian mud, then that would show such processes are common in our solar system (including Earth of course), and could potentially provide valuable clues as to how life originated and evolved on our own planet.

• Bottom line: Some features on Mars that were thought to be lava flows may actually be mud flows, according to a new study.
• Source: Experimental evidence for lava-like mud flows under Martian surface conditions
• Via Lancaster University
• Via DLR

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29-05-2020 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

Scientists studying data from the Curiosity rover have found evidence for an ancient ice-covered lake in Gale Crater on Mars. The findings support the theory of alternating warmer and colder climates on early Mars.

Artist’s concept of Gale Crater when it was filled by a lake a few billion years ago. The Curiosity rover had previous evidence for the lake or series of lakes over time. Now a new study suggests that the lake could have been covered by ice during colder climate periods.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin/ MSSS.

A few billion years ago, Gale Crater on Mars held a lake or series of lakes. There was even a river that once fed into this lake. That’s the conclusion of scientists working with data from NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars, which landed inside Gale Crater in August 2012 and has been exploring the region ever since. Now, a new study of Curiosity data by NASA scientists has added more pieces to the puzzle of what conditions on ancient Mars were like.

NASA announced the study on May 19, 2020. The peer-reviewed paper detailing these findings was published on January 27 in the journal Nature.

The results come from a comprehensive analysis of data from a multi-year experiment onboard the rover, in a chemistry lab called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). SAM has been analyzing the chemistry and minerals in rock samples, including organic compounds – the building blocks of life – to determine the habitability of this part of Mars early in its history. This testing has previously confirmed abundant liquid water in the past, as well as a variety of organic molecules preserved in Martian rocks.

Diagram of the proposed carbon cycle on Mars. With little water and no abundant surface life on the planet, the cycle is quite different from the one on Earth.

Image via Lance Hayashida/ Caltech/ NASA.

The SAM instrument at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), before it was placed on Curiosity for the trip to Mars.

Image via NASA/ GSFC.

The latest analysis has found evidence for a previous ice-covered lake in Gale Crater, thought to have possibly existed in a colder period between two warmer periods of time. Heather Franz, a geochemist at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) who led the new study, said in a statement:

At some point, Mars’ surface environment must have experienced a transition from being warm and humid to being cold and dry, as it is now, but exactly when and how that occurred is still a mystery.

The evidence supports the idea that Mars’ climate alternated between warmer and colder before finally becoming permanently cold and dry as we see it today. Changes in the axial tilt of the planet and volcanic activity could have played a major part in that instability. Indeed, chemical and mineralogical changes in Martian rocks also show this, with some rock layers being formed in warmer conditions, but others in colder climates.

The Quisquiro salt flat in Altiplano, South America. Scientists think this may be similar to the lake(s) that once existed in Gale Crater on Mars.

Image via Maksym Bocharov/ NASA.

So how did Franz and her team find the evidence for an ice-covered lake?

Over five years, Curiosity collected 13 rock and dust samples. From these, the gases carbon dioxide and oxygen were extracted inside SAM. Each sample was heated to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius), in order to liberate the trapped gases. The temperatures of the SAM oven at the time provided clues as to the kinds of minerals the gases were coming from. This provided insight into Mars’ carbon cycle, where the gas is exchanged between Mars’ subsurface, surface rocks, polar caps, water and atmosphere. While Mars still has a carbon cycle today, it is a lot different than Earth’s, since it has little water and no abundant surface life. As Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator on SAM, explained:

Nevertheless, the carbon cycling is still happening and is still important because it’s not only helping reveal information about Mars’ ancient climate. It’s also showing us that Mars is a dynamic planet that’s circulating elements that are the buildings blocks of life as we know it.

Mars doesn’t seem to have a lot of carbonates left – minerals composed of carbon and oxygen – which would be evidence for Mars once having a much thicker atmosphere, probably mostly carbon dioxide like today. Such an atmosphere would be needed to help explain how the planet could have once had long-lasting lakes and rivers. But, even though the carbonates may be sparse where Curiosity landed, the ones it has found so far have provided valuable clues about the ancient Martian climate.

Comparison of a carbonate molecule and an oxalate molecule.

Image via James Tralie/ NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center.

By examining the isotopes of the oxygen and carbon dioxide – versions of each element with different molecular masses – scientists can learn what chemical processes were involved in the formation of the rocks, including whether any biological activity might have been involved, as happens on Earth. The analysis showed that in some of the carbonates, the oxygen isotopes were lighter than those found in the Martian atmosphere.

Why is that significant? It suggests the carbonates formed in a cold, likely ice-covered lake. If the carbonates had formed in a warmer lake, then the isotopes should have actually been slightly heavier than the ones from the air. The researchers say that the ice might have sucked up the heavy oxygen isotopes, leaving behind the lighter ones that would eventually be found in the carbonates.

This is puzzling though, because it might mean the atmosphere was still thinner than thought. But without a thicker, warmer atmosphere, how could there have been lakes, rivers and maybe even a northern hemisphere ocean back then, as other other studies have shown?

The answer may be in the form of minerals called oxalates. Franz and her team suggest that some of the carbon may have been stored in oxalates rather than carbonates. The temperatures at which the carbon dioxide was released from some samples inside SAM was too low for carbonates, but just right for oxalates. The ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes found also support this hypothesis.

Heather Franz at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the new study.

Image via NASA/ GSFC.

If it could be proven that oxalates were involved, that would be intriguing, since they are the most common mineral produced by plant life on Earth, synthesized by the incomplete oxidation of carbohydrates. That in itself wouldn’t prove life on early Mars, however, since they can also be produced by the interaction of carbon dioxide with surface minerals (inorganic or organic catalysts), water and sunlight. This is a process that “mocks” photosynthesis, called abiotic photosynthesis. It may even have paved the way for actual photosynthesis to be used by microbes on Earth.

Additional analysis of these and future SAM samples will be necessary to further figure out what role oxalates played, if any. The upcoming Perseverance rover mission to  Jezero Crater, scheduled to launch this summer, should be able to shed more light on the Curiosity findings. Jezero Crater is similar to Gale Crater in that it also used to contain a lake, and an ancient delta is still clearly visible where a river once emptied into the lake. Perseverance is designed to specifically look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, so it will be very interesting to see what it finds.

• Bottom line: A new study of results from the Curiosity rover provides evidence for an ice-covered lake once existing in Gale Crater on Mars.
• Source: Indigenous and exogenous organics and surface–atmosphere cycling inferred from carbon and oxygen isotopes at Gale crater
• Via NASA

This animation demonstrates the salty ponds and streams that scientists think may have been left behind as Gale Crater dried out over time. The bottom of the image is the floor of Gale Crater, with the peak being the side of Mount Sharp.

Credit:ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development (KED), Michael Northrop > Download larger gif

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

29-05-2020 om 23:33 geschreven door peter  

Why SpaceX has to wait until Saturday for its next try to launch astronauts for NASA

By Mike Wall 

Blame orbital dynamics.

This SpaceX diagram shows the many steps it takes to get Crew Dragon to the International Space Station on the Demo-2 mission.

(Image: © SpaceX)

If you're frustrated that you now have to wait until Saturday (May 30) to see SpaceX's first crewed launch, you can blame Mother Nature and orbital mechanics.

Elon Musk's company was poised Wednesday afternoon (May 27) to launch Demo-2, a crucial test mission that will send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. But the weather didn't cooperate, forcing SpaceX to cancel Crew Dragon's planned liftoff atop a Falcon 9 rocket with less than 20 minutes left in the countdown.

The next available launch opportunity doesn't come until Saturday, at 3:22 p.m. EDT (1922 GMT). That's when the space station will be in the desired place relative to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Demo-2's launch site, explained Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance.

• Full coverage: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 astronaut launch explained

"The two days in between — it's just a matter of phasing and how the orbital mechanics work out," Koenigsmann said during a news conference on Monday (May 25). "And there are some other factors that play into that, too — traffic on the station, and so on and so forth." 

The weather looked like it was clearing up in the late stages of the countdown Wednesday, and the mission likely could have gotten off the ground if the launch team had about 10 more minutes to work with, SpaceX representatives said. But such leeway isn't available for Demo-2, which has an instantaneous launch window. 

"We do the flight analysis assuming that the temperatures of the propellants are below a certain amount, so that we know how much performance is available to the rocket — how much margin we're going to have," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during Wednesday's launch webcast. 

"Once you get into propellant loading at T-35 minutes, you have to go as soon as you get to zero," Insprucker said.

Even waiting for a few minutes past T-0 would cause propellant temperatures to rise slightly, he added, "and that changes how much performance you get carrying into orbit. And we don't want to cut into those margins."

You probably don't want to contemplate yet another scrub, but there's good news if that does indeed come to pass: The next launch opportunity after Saturday is Sunday (May 31), at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT). 

Whenever Demo-2 launches, you can watch it here at Space.com.

Demo-2 will be the first crewed orbital flight to launch from the U.S. since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded in 2011. Since then, American astronauts have flown to and from the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the only available option.

NASA, SpaceX and Boeing have been working for years to end that dependence. In 2014, the two companies signed multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA's Commercial Crew Program to finish development of their astronaut taxis and fly six operational crewed missions to and from the orbiting lab.

SpaceX will be able to start flying those contracted missions after Demo-2 is in the books. Boeing has a bit more work to do, however; the company's CST-100 Starliner capsule still needs to ace an uncrewed mission to the ISS, a milestone Crew Dragon notched in March 2019.

Starliner launched on such a mission this past December but suffered a glitch with its onboard timing system and ended up stranded in an orbit too low to meet up with the space station. Starliner will refly the uncrewed ISS flight before taking astronauts aboard.

.Visit Space.com for complete coverage of SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 flight. 

• Meet the NASA astronauts launching on SpaceX's historic Crew Dragon test flight 
• Here's what SpaceX's 1st spaceship to carry astronauts looks like from space (satellite photos)
• SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-1 test flight in pictures

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-05-2020 om 23:08 geschreven door peter  

Meteor that blasted millions of trees in Siberia only 'grazed' Earth, new research says

A mysterious blast in 1908, thought to have been caused by a meteor, flattened a Siberian taiga forest. This photo was taken in 1938, during an expedition by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, investigating the event.

(Image: © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky above Siberia flared so bright and hot that a witness standing dozens of kilometers from the site thought that his shirt had caught fire, said Vladimir Pariev, co-author of the new Tunguska study and a researcher with the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. 

Following the bright light, which lasted for about 1 minute, was an explosion that smashed windows and knocked people off their feet in a town more than 35 miles (60 km) away, the BBC reported. "The sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire," another witness said in a testimonial. Energy released by the blast was later estimated by scientists to be 185 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to NASA.

Initial explanations for the blast included volcanic eruptions and mining accidents, according to NASA, but those claims were not supported by physical evidence. Other later suggestions were more far-fetched, such as a crashed UFO or a black hole collision with Earth — a study describing the black hole hypothesis was published in the journal Nature in 1973 (and was soundly debunked in another Nature study published just a few months later).

The most widely accepted scientific explanation is that a rocky asteroid or comet entered Earth's atmosphere and then disintegrated with a bang about 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km) above the ground, Pariev told Live Science in an email. But such an explosion should have strewn the ground with rocky debris, which no one has ever found. By comparison, a meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013 broke into fragments that were discovered within a week, Pariev said.

What if, the researchers questioned, the Tunguska meteor were made of iron rather than rock? Could a massive iron meteor "graze" Earth's atmosphere, approaching close enough to generate a powerful shock wave, then yank free of the planet's gravitational pull and escape without fragmenting?

• Related: Top 10 ways to destroy Earth

To test that hypothesis, the scientists calculated meteor paths using computer models. They looked at objects that were as small as 164 feet (50 meters) across and as large as 656 feet (200 m) in diameter. Objects were made of rock, ice or iron, and approached in a trajectory that brought them within 6 to 10 miles (10 to 15 km) of Earth's surface. 

The scientists' calculations showed that space bodies made of rock and ice would completely disintegrate under the enormous pressures generated by their passage through the tropospheric altitudes. "Only asteroids made of iron larger than 100 m [328 feet] in diameter can survive and not get cracked and fragmented into many separate pieces," they said. 

The researchers estimated that the Tunguska meteor likely measured between 328 and 656 feet (100 and 200 m) in diameter, and hurtled through Earth's atmosphere at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h). During its fiery passage, the meteor would lose some of its mass. But iron shed by a meteor traveling at such speeds would have escaped as gas and plasma, oxidized in the atmosphere and then dispersed on the ground, becoming nearly indistinguishable from terrestrial iron oxides, according to the study.

Prior studies have calculated the power of shock waves produced by meteors based on the object entering Earth's atmosphere at a very steep angle "and either hitting the ground or exploding in midair," Pariev said. 

In the case of the Tunguska meteor, the iron-rich space object could have entered Earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle — about 9 to 12 degrees tangential to the surface. It then would have grazed through the atmosphere, creating a shock wave at an altitude of around 6 to 10 miles (10 to 15 km) above the ground, capable of flattening trees for hundreds of kilometers and scorching the surface. But because of the meteor's mass and momentum, it didn't break up; it then exited the atmosphere and returned to space, the researchers reported.

• Related: Space-y Tales: The 5 strangest meteorites

Boslough, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that if an object "skimmed through the atmosphere" and didn't blow up, the resulting shock wave would be significantly weaker than an explosion's blast wave.

"An object that survived such a transit through the atmosphere could not have descended close enough to the surface for a sonic boom to do the kind of damage that was observed at Tunguska," Boslough said. 

What's more, the pattern of felled trees at the site is radial — emanating from a single point of tremendous energy release, he said. That's something you'd expect to see after an explosion rather than a sonic boom, "even if it had been strong enough to blow trees over." Boslough added that eyewitness accounts at the time of the incident "are consistent with an object that was descending toward the surface before it exploded." 

While the study authors didn't numerically calculate the impact of a shock wave that a "grazing" iron meteor of this size could produce, their estimates still suggest that such a wave would be powerful enough to flatten trees and damage the ground as the Tunguska event did, Pariev said in the email.

"Detailed calculations of the shock waves from a grazing asteroid is the subject of our ongoing research," he added.

The findings were published online in the March issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

• Fallen stars: A gallery of famous meteorites
• In photos: The impact craters of North America
• When space attacks: The 6 craziest meteor impacts

Originally published on Live Science.

Videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-05-2020 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

6 wild things we spotted during SpaceX's 1st astronaut launch attempt

By Chelsea Gohd

A small stuffed animal hitched a ride on the Demo-2 mission, strapped in next to NASA astronaut Bob Behnken on May 27, 2020.

(Image: © NASA TV)

We spotted some wild and wacky details leading up to SpaceX's now-delayed Demo-2 test flight today (May 27).

Today's mission scrubbed and was delayed for this Saturday at 3:22 p.m. EDT (1922 GMT). However, today's events, which served as a sort of "wet dress rehearsal" for the actual launch, had some interesting highlights. From the minute that veteran NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley arrived this morning, ready to strap into their spacesuits and launch to the International Space Station, to the moment the launch was called off, today's events were chock-full of excitement. 

Full coverage: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 astronaut launch explained

1. A hearty breakfast

During a preflight news conference Monday (May 26), it was revealed that no one knew yet what the astronauts would eat for breakfast before the launch. Since the earliest days of human spaceflight, the preflight breakfast has been a tradition, with the Apollo astronauts famously eating steak and eggs before lifting off. 

The internet lit up with guesses as to what the astronauts would eat before launching and, starting out early in the morning on launch day, Hurley put this mystery to rest: "Steak and eggs. Question answered!" he tweeted. 

2. Kelly Clarkson

Pop stardom and spaceflight collided on launch day as Grammy award-winning pop artist Kelly Clarkson sang the national anthem. Her gorgeous belt rang clear and true, even though she wasn't actually at NASA to sing. That's right, like many things right now, Clarkson's performance was conducted virtually through a live video broadcast. 

Still, while she may not have been on-site for the launch, her voice was a perfect note to start the day off on. 

3. Tesla to the launch pad

After breakfast and in their spacesuits, the pair of astronauts said goodbye to their families and hopped into a Tesla Model X, modified with NASA's iconic Worm logo. But, as many people noticed online, the logo, plastered across the back of the vehicle, wasn't the only space touch. 

The vehicle's license plate read "ISSBND," or ISS (International Space Station) bound. The plate is a cheeky nod to the fact that the astronauts are set to launch from Florida to the space station. 

4. Rock out with AC/DC

Now, this drive to the launch pad wasn't some silent, stoic drive. The astronauts had a perfectly curated playlist to amp them up as they rode to board Crew Dragon, which was placed high atop the Falcon 9 rocket. 

According to SpaceX commentator Lauren Lyons during May 27 live launch coverage, the pair started their drive off with AC/DC's classic song "Back in Black." She shared that the reason they chose to start off their drive with this song is that "they are back," on launch pad 39A, which the astronauts haven't launched from since the end of NASA's space shuttle program in 2011. 

Following the heavy metal tune, the pair listened to "the elevator music from the Blues Brothers film," Lyons shared, the song "The Girl from Ipanema," a Brazilian bossa nova standard written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes in 1962. 

Rounding out their playlist, the astronauts blasted (it can only be assumed) the Star-Spangled Banner, "the army French horns version," Lyons said, adding that this is "for very obvious reasons," because astronauts both served in the U.S. military.

5. May I have your autograph?

Once at the launch pad, before strapping into Crew Dragon, the pair started a brand new tradition: They signed their names on the walls of the white room with a sharpie. 

The white room, which was painted white and nicknamed as such during NASA's Gemini program, is the last place that the astronauts visit before entering the spacecraft for launch. 

"Yeah, we didn't do that," retired NASA astronaut Leland Melvin said during live commentary.

6. Hitchhiking dino

The fun didn't stop once the astronauts strapped into Crew Dragon. The capsule can fit up to four passengers but because this is the craft's first crewed test flight, only two astronauts will fly aboard this mission. However, if you looked close enough, you might've spotted a third crew member buckled into the capsule.

The astronauts brought along a small stuffed animal that appears to be a plush dinosaur (or maybe dragon? how fitting), which they buckled into one of the astronaut passenger seats. This fuzzy little astronaut isn't just for fun, however. Astronauts typically bring up items, like this plush dino, as a measure to show the effects of zero gravity to signify that the astronauts have reached space. 

• SpaceX Crew Dragon reaches launch pad for historic NASA astronaut launch
• See the Evolution of SpaceX's Rockets in Pictures
• In photos: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 test flight with astronauts

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-05-2020 om 22:23 geschreven door peter  

Many people, even those who nothing about the paranormal or New Age beliefs, are probably aware of the concepts of auras. They are supposedly extensions of our spiritual energy that surrounds us with a glow that people who are attuned to such things claim they can see. These auras can be different colors depending on one’s mood or personality, and this is sometimes referred to as one’s “life color,” with common colors for adults being blue or violet. Then, in the 1970s a psychic claimed to have discovered a new color of aura, which it was believed marked someone as a highly evolved soul with amazing mental abilities and in some cases paranormal powers.

It began in the mid-1970s, when a psychic specializing in reading auras by the name of Nancy Ann Toppe began to claim that she was finding more and more children with auras that were Indigo in coloration, a color that she had never seen before. She believed that these “Indigo Children” were special souls who had been perfected and reborn on Earth at the time in order to help the earth and start a spiritual evolution in human beings to lead them to enlightenment and expand their consciousness. These Indigo Children displayed numerous exceptional personality traits, and heightened psychic abilities including telepathy, clairvoyance, and astral projection, as well as superior intellect and creativity, and Toppe predicted that, considering the rate in which she was noticing this new color of aura, Indigo Children would become the new norm with just a few generations. The idea was pretty fringe and obscure at the time, but it was picked up and dusted off by authors and self-help lecturers Lee Carroll and Jan Tober, with a little help from a channeled spirit they call Kyron, who wrote a popular book on it in 1998 called The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived, and another book followed in the 2000s by a famous psychic Doreen Virtue, The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children, further propelling it into the mainstream and gained it a good deal of popularity.

So, you might be wondering just what traits an Indigo Child has, and it is a bit complicated as their traits and abilities have undergone changes from author to author in the many books and articles written on them since, but there are a few tendencies that remain fairly standard. One of their main characteristics is their extreme capacity for empathy, sensitivity, curiosity, and creativity, as well as their very strong will. They are also fiercely independent, proud, and highly intelligent, quite often wise beyond their years, leading them to often be described as “old souls.” They have very good, sometimes photographic memories, are supposedly very intuitive, and are very good at figuring out ways to do things and thinking outside of the box. They are very often described as having at least some sort of psychic abilities or the potential for it.

Indigo Children supposedly have quite a few negative traits as well. They are often described as self-important and self-absorbed. They are often rebellious against authority, impatient, easily bored and easily frustrated. Indigo Children are also usually seen as eccentric loners, and do not make friends easily, with antisocial tendencies, although they easily bond with animals. They have an inflated sense of self-worth and can often be narcissistic. Their self-sufficiency and clear sense of purpose can also make them very stubborn and headstrong, and they are often resistant to change. A lot of these negative aspects are said to be direct side effects of their gifts in other areas, for instance they are often frustrated and annoyed that other normal people can’t keep up with their sharp minds and different ways of thinking, which can also make them seem arrogant. Authority bothers them because they often truly believe they have a better way of doing things, and their unconventional views of how things work alienate them from others who are not on the same page.

The whole concept of Indigo Children has really taken off in the mainstream and in popular culture, with numerous books, articles, and even films made about the phenomena, and it is common for celebrities to claim they have an Inigo Child or claim to be one themselves. Despite there being no real evidence of Indigo Children actually existing, the notion has become such a popular New Age belief that it is sometimes labelled as being almost like a religious movement, but of course there is much skepticism in the idea of spiritually awakened people that are presented as the next step of human evolution.

One of the most popular ideas is that this is simply a misdiagnosis of a mental disability such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism. After all, back when the term “Indigo Child” was first coined there was very little understanding of these disorders, and as the movement grew it would be seen by most parents as better to view their child as a special chosen one with magical powers rather than suffering from a disability and a neuro-biological condition. They are not suffering a disorder; they are gifted and special. Belief in the Indigo Child phenomenon could even be making things worse, since making this claim robs the kid of a proper diagnosis and medication, leaving them without the help they really need and raised with a false sense of security. Are these people really just misunderstood people with behavioral defects that have been marked as something more? Or are the Indigo Children actually real? Either way, it is a concept that has really caught on, and will likely be discussed for some time to come.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/}

29-05-2020 om 21:56 geschreven door peter  

At the time of this writing, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket had not yet launched humans into space, but even a successful mission probably won’t quell the wrath of the head of Russia’s space agency. No, he’s not just mad about losing the business of taking astronauts to the ISS and back – it’s much worse than that.

“We understand that one thing stands behind all this demagogy: this is a cover for deployment of nuclear weapons in space. We see such attempts, we consider them unacceptable and we will oppose them as much as we can.”

In an interview on the YouTube podcast “Solovyov LIVE” (watch it here in Russian), Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian state space agency Roscosmos, told host Vladimir Solovyov that he believes Musk is serious about detonating 10,000 nuclear warheads on Mars to terraform the planet into one with an atmosphere and climate that can support humans, and Musk’s SpaceX partnership with NASA is proof that the U.S. government approves of it.

“We have commented on each and every such anti-Russian attack which are all nothing but the United States’ attempt to divert public attention from real threats in space and to justify its moves to deploy weapons in outer space and obtain extra financing for such causes.”

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS last month that Russia is not happy with the Space Force, especially with its announcement of the unveiling of its first weapon (a satellite jammer) and its first mission with the mysterious X-37B space plane – both occurring within the past month. And now … SpaceX and its CEO and founder’s grandiose nuclear plans for Mars, with no denunciation by NASA or the U.S. government. In fact, President Trump had this to say about Elon Musk back in February:

“He likes rockets. And he does good at rockets, too, by the way.”

So does Roscosmos, which has managed to shuttle crews and cargo reliably to the ISS ever since NASA shut down the space shuttle program. Roscosmos has announced that it is lowering its costs for launches, which are already less that SpaceX, so it knows this escalation of a Cold War in space is not about money.

“We see such attempts, we consider them unacceptable and we will hinder this to the greatest extent possible.”

“Hinder” … what could that entail? Deploying its own space weapons – both known and secret? Cyberwarfare? Accelerating Russia’s own plans to send humans to Mars? For now, it’s a battle of words where Russia is taking the human rights side for a change.

“It is absolutely obvious that the idea to bomb Mars with nuclear charges is absolutely abhorrent from a humanitarian standpoint. Who gave him right to destroy a planet?”

That’s a good question, Dmitry Rogozin. Does Earth money talk on Mars?

If the first launch of humans by SpaceX is successful, we may soon find out

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-05-2020 om 21:30 geschreven door peter  

Asteroids Ryugu and Bennu that both orbit between Earth and Mars may be chunks of the same giant space rock that was smashed apart in a collision

• Mathematical modelling suggests a possible relationship between the asteroids
• Astronomers at University of Arizona and Laboratoire Lagrange made prediction
• But tests on samples from both rocks will be needed in order to confirm this

By LUKE ANDREWS FOR MAILONLINE

The asteroids Ryugu and Bennu which orbit between Earth and Mars formed after a much larger rock was split apart, scientists have claimed.

Mathematical modelling suggests the pair - measuring 3,280-foot and 1,610-foot in diameter - formed after two centres of gravity were created.

But rock pulled from both will need to be tested to confirm the theory.

Samples from Ryugu are already onboard Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and expected to touchdown on Earth in late 2020.

And NASA's OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to land on its suspected-sister by October 20, to collect further samples which will also be flown to Earth.

Mathematical modelling revealed Ryugu (left) and Bennu (right) may have formed from a larger asteroid that broke apart

The model showed after an asteroid shattered its pieces came together at two points

It was based on observations of asteroids in the Mars-Jupiter belt, where Bennu and Ryugu may have originated

Astronomers at the University of Arizona and Laboratoire Lagrange, Ivory Coast, modelled collisions in the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt before making the proposal.

Their study, published in Nature Communications, showed fragments are ejected but then re-accumulate into a spinning-top shape - like that of both asteroids. 

They also noted a difference in hydration between the possible-siblings, but said this did not discount the proposed relationship.

The team hopes to be able to measure the composition and age of formation of the samples from both asteroids to confirm their theory.

OSIRIS-REx has beamed images of Bennu's rocky surface back to Earth, revealing the barren lunar surface.

The pictures show its chosen landing site - dubbed 'Nightingale' - which is located in a crater high up the asteroids northern hemisphere.

The spacecraft will cut chunks 0.8 inches in diameter from the asteroid before beginning the journey home. 

NASA has sent pictures of Bennu back to Earth. The image above shows the proposed landing site on the asteroid for its spacecraft OSIRIS-REx

OSIRIS-REx will collect small (less than 0.8 inches in diameter) rocks from the surface before beginning the journey back to Earth.

(Artists impression)

Hayabusa2, not to be outdone, sent images of Ryugu's lunar-surface back to Earth in February.

Its pictures revealed reddening in some of the rocks, leading scientists at the University of Tokyo to conclude that it once passed much closer to the sun.

'Immediately after touchdown, Hayabusa2’s thrusters disturbed dark, fine grains that originate from the redder materials,' wrote planetary scientist Tomokatsu Morota of the University of Tokyo and colleagues in their paper,

'The stratigraphic relationship between identified craters and the redder material indicates that surface reddening occurred over a short period of time.'

'We suggest that Ryugu previously experienced an orbital excursion near the Sun.'  

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has captured this picture of Ryugu's surface. It revealed reddened rocks, which suggests at one point the asteroid may have passed near the Sun

Ryugu

Wikipedia Privacy Policy

Scientific number: 162173

Discovery date: 10 May 1999 by astronomers in Socorro, New Mexico

Name: It refers to a magical underwater palace in Japanese folklore

Size: 3,280-foot in diameter

Shape: Spinning-top 

Orbit: Around the sun between Earth and Mars once every 16 months

Danger to Earth: Not at present 

Visited?: Yes

Visit description: Hayabusa2 arrived in June 2018. It has now left and is returning to Earth 

 Bennu

Wikipedia Privacy Policy

Scientific number: 101955

Discovery date: 11 September 1999 by astronomers in Socorro, New Mexico

Name: Bird in Egyptian myth linked to the sun, creation and re-birth

Size: 1,610-foot in diameter

Shape: Spinning-top

Orbit: Around the sun between Earth and Mars

Danger to Earth?: Yes. Crosses our planet's orbit. Eight potential Earth impacts are predicted between 2169 and 2199. It will pass near Earth in 2060.

Visited?: No

Visits planned?: Yes. OSIRIS-REx is expected to touch down this month. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

29-05-2020 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers are convinced that asteroids Bennu and Ryugu came from the same much bigger space rock that split apart. Both of these asteroids, which orbit between Earth and Mars, are believed to have been formed following the creation of two centers of gravity.

Bennu was discovered in September of 1999 by astronomers in Socorro, New Mexico. The asteroid measures 1,610 feet in diameter. Astronomers in Socorro also discovered Ryugu a few months before in May of 1999 and that asteroid measures 3,280 feet in diameter.

Rock samples from both of these asteroids will need to be analyzed in order to know for sure if they came from the same space rock. Samples have already been taken from Ryugu and are currently on their way back to Earth on Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft which is scheduled to return to our planet later this year.

Bennu

No samples have been taken yet from Bennu, although NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is expected to land on the asteroid on October 20^th of this year to collect the specimens. The spacecraft will land on a site called “Nightingale” located in the northern hemisphere of the asteroid and it will then collect samples about 0.8 inches in diameter.

Astronomers from the University of Arizona and Laboratoire Lagrange, Ivory Coast, simulated different collisions that could have taken place in the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt. In their models, they found that pieces of asteroids would be ejected from the rock but would assemble back together in a spinning-top shape which is similar to both Bennu and Ryugu.

Even though the asteroids are different in regards to their hydration levels, they could very well still be from the same space rock. Once the samples from both asteroids come back to Earth, experts will be able to verify for certain if they’re related by determining their age as well as what they are composed of. Pictures of both asteroids can be seen here.

Ryugu

A really interesting fact about the pictures that Hayabusa2 took of Ryugu is that some of the rocks on its surface are reddish in color, suggesting that at some point it traveled pretty close to the sun.

In their paper, planetary scientist Tomokatsu Morota from the University of Tokyo as well as his colleagues wrote in part, “Immediately after touchdown, Hayabusa2’s thrusters disturbed dark, fine grains that originate from the redder materials.” They went on to say, “The stratigraphic relationship between identified craters and the redder material indicates that surface reddening occurred over a short period of time,” adding, “We suggest that Ryugu previously experienced an orbital excursion near the Sun.” The study was published in Nature Communications and can be read here in full here.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-05-2020 om 21:06 geschreven door peter  

I Found A Plane Crash Using Google Earth Map, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: May 28, 2020
Location of  discovery: Yukatan
Google Coordinates:  20°58'18.24"N   90°17'0.13"W

I was using Google Earth to look for UFOs and alien bases, when I accidentally came across this plane crash. One wing is partly buried under the trees but its clear that its a plane. The plane measures 20 meters from nose to tail and 28 meters from wing tip to wing tip. The plane appears to be whole and could probably fly again if it was retrieved and repaired. However I do believe that the pilot may be dead in side since it hit the trees and branches may have broken through the cockpit windows. I don't see any trials going in or out of that area, so I believe this crash to be unknown or undiscovered until now. 

Its not the only plane crash I have discovered. I found flight MH370 under 3 meters of water off the coast of Cape of Good Hope, South Africa on Google Earth Map. I reported it to the Airline that lost it, but they didn't respond, probably because if the flight is found, they will be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the families. If its not found, they they only pay a tiny sum. Therefore they don't wont to find it. 
Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

29-05-2020 om 20:33 geschreven door peter  

Triangle-shaped craft over Lemoore, California

This triangle-shaped craft was filmed in the night sky above Lemoore, California back in June 2019. What do you think about this footage?

Witness report: 

My girlfriends family were driving from Lemoore and started recording as soon as they seen the craft. It flew away and then made a turn, and hovered right over the car. The car was shaking a lot and was very scary lol. The craft didn’t even make loud noise which was very strange.

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

29-05-2020 om 20:23 geschreven door peter  

Niet meteorietinslag, maar klimaatverandering aan de basis van massa-extinctie 359 miljoen jaar geleden - HLN.be

Bron: BGR, Science Advances

De bekendste massa-extinctie in de geschiedenis van de aarde is die van 66 miljoen jaar geleden, toen de dinosauriërs werden uitgeroeid. De minder gekende Laat-Devonische massa-extinctie vond veel vroeger plaats: de belangrijkste uitsterving toen gebeurde vlak voor de Devoon-Carboon-grens, ongeveer 359 miljoen jaar geleden. De Laat-Devonische massa-extinctie had vooral fatale gevolgen voor dieren die in het water leefden en voor planten.

Lees ook

Bot van zeldzame dinosaurus zonder tanden opgegraven in Australië

Meestal wordt uitgegaan van een meteorietinslag die net voor de overgang van het Devoon naar het Carboon de enorme extinctie van heel wat mariene en plantensoorten veroorzaakte. Maar sommige microscopisch kleine sporen (voortplantingscellen) van varenachtige planten, ontdekt in gesteenten uit het oosten van Groenland, bleken misvormd te zijn, zo stelt het nieuwe onderzoek dat gepubliceerd is in Science Advances. Volgens de wetenschappers bewijst de beschadiging van het DNA van de planten dat “de hele ozonbescherming verdwenen was”. De verhoogde UV-B-straling wijst immers op een snelle en dramatische verdunning van de ozonlaag, de laag die het leven op aarde beschermt tegen schadelijke stralingen van de zon, zoals tegen UV-straling. Door het wegvallen van die beschermende ozonlaag werd het leven op onze planeet blootgesteld aan een explosie van ultraviolette straling die mutaties veroorzaakte.

Wetenschappers gaan doorgaans uit van twee mogelijke oorzaken van uitroeiingsgebeurtenissen: enorme vulkaanuitbarstingen of meteorietinslagen. Uit kwikgegevens leidt de nieuwe studie af dat er in dit geval geen vulkaanuitbarstingen op planetaire schaal plaatsvonden, in tegenstelling tot bij andere massa-extincties. De massa-extinctie van 359 miljoen jaar geleden zou wél te maken hebben gehad met de grote klimaatopwarming, die een einde maakte aan de intense laatste ijstijdcyclus in het Devoon. De onderzoekers waarschuwen dan ook voor mogelijk gelijkaardige, dramatische gevolgen van de huidige snelle klimaatverandering, waarvoor de mens zélf verantwoordelijk is. “Ozonverlies tijdens de snelle opwarming van de aarde is een proces dat inherent is aan het systeem, met de onvermijdelijke conclusie dat we alert moeten zijn voor zo’n gebeurtenis in de toekomst van onze opwarmende wereld”, klinkt het.

• Lees ook: Nu de mensenwereld stilstaat, leeft de natuur wereldwijd op (+)

Video's, gekozen door peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

29-05-2020 om 18:03 geschreven door peter  

Unieke gebeurtenis: Europese zonneverkenner vliegt door staarten van komeet ATLAS - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

De Solar Orbiter werd gelanceerd op 10 februari. Sindsdien hebben wetenschappers en ingenieurs, met uitzondering van een korte onderbreking als gevolg van de coronapandemie, een reeks tests en opstellingsroutines uitgevoerd die bekendstaan als ‘ingebruikname’.

Lees ook

Tot zaterdag wachten op een nieuwe lanceerpoging, test hier alvast je kennis over de ruimtevaart

Onverwachte ontmoeting

De einddatum voor deze fase is 15 juni, zodat het ruimtetuig twee dagen later volledig functioneel kan zijn tijdens zijn eerste passage vlakbij de zon ofwel perihelium. De ontdekking van deze onverwachte ontmoeting met de komeet maakte de zaken echter dringender.

Rustig vliegen door de staart van een komeet is volgens ESA een zeldzame gebeurtenis voor een ruimtemissie, iets waarvan wetenschappers weten dat het nog maar zes keer eerder is gebeurd voor missies die niet specifiek op kometen jagen. Al deze ontmoetingen zijn pas achteraf ontdekt met behulp van de data van het ruimtetuig. De aankomende doorsteek van Solar Orbiter is de eerste die van tevoren wordt voorspeld. 

De eigenlijke missie van de Solar Orbiter is nieuwe informatie te vergaren over de zon, onder meer door beelden te maken van de noord- en zuidpool van die ster. Vermoed wordt dat die polen een rol spelen in het ontstaan van zonnevlammen, die de elektronica hier op Aarde kunnen verstoren. 

Het gaat om een gezamenlijk project van de NASA en het Europese ruimtevaartagentschap ESA, waarbij ook een prominente rol is weggelegd voor de Koninklijke Sterrenwacht van België. De sonde omvat immers de EUI-telescoop van de Koninklijke Belgische Sterrenwacht en het Centre spatial de Liège.

• Lees ook: Belgisch getinte ruimtevaartmissie naar kant van de zon die we nog nooit zagen (+)
• Bekijk ook:

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

29-05-2020 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

In Planet Formation, It's Location, Location, Location

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are finding that planets have a tough time forming in the rough-and-tumble central region of the massive, crowded star cluster Westerlund 2. Located 20,000 light-years away, Westerlund 2 is a unique laboratory to study stellar evolutionary processes because it’s relatively nearby, quite young, and contains a large stellar population.

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resembles a glittering fireworks display in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The sparkling centerpiece of this fireworks show is a giant cluster of thousands of stars called Westerlund 2. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 pierced through the dusty veil shrouding the stellar nursery in near-infrared light, giving astronomers a clear view of the nebula and the dense concentration of stars in the central cluster. The cluster measures between six light-years and 13 light-years across.

Credits: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI) and the Westerlund 2 Science Team

A three-year Hubble study of stars in Westerlund 2 revealed that the precursors to planet-forming disks encircling stars near the cluster’s center are mysteriously devoid of large, dense clouds of dust that in a few million years could become planets.

However, the observations show that stars on the cluster’s periphery do have the immense planet-forming dust clouds embedded in their disks. Researchers think our solar system followed this recipe when it formed 4.6 billion years ago.

So why do some stars in Westerlund 2 have a difficult time forming planets while others do not? It seems that planet formation depends on location, location, location. The most massive and brightest stars in the cluster congregate in the core, which is verified by observations of other star-forming regions. The cluster’s center contains at least 30 extremely massive stars, some weighing up to 80 times the mass of the Sun. Their blistering ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds of charged particles blowtorch disks around neighboring lower-mass stars, dispersing the giant dust clouds.

“Basically, if you have monster stars, their energy is going to alter the properties of the disks around nearby, less massive stars,” explained Elena Sabbi, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and lead researcher of the Hubble study. “You may still have a disk, but the stars change the composition of the dust in the disks, so it’s harder to create stable structures that will eventually lead to planets. We think the dust either evaporates away in 1 million years, or it changes in composition and size so dramatically that planets don’t have the building blocks to form.”

The Hubble observations represent the first time that astronomers analyzed an extremely dense star cluster to study which environments are favorable to planet formation. Scientists, however, are still debating whether bulky stars are born in the center or whether they migrate there. Westerlund 2 already has massive stars in its core, even though it is a comparatively young, 2-million-year-old system.

Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, the researchers found that of the nearly 5,000 stars in Westerlund 2 with masses between 0.1 to 5 times the Sun’s mass, 1,500 of them show fluctuations in their light as the stars accrete material from their disks. Orbiting material clumped within the disk would temporarily block some of the starlight, causing brightness fluctuations.

However, Hubble detected the signature of such orbiting material only around stars outside the cluster’s packed central region. The telescope witnessed large drops in brightness for as much as 10 to 20 days around 5% of the stars before they returned to normal brightness. They did not detect these dips in brightness in stars residing within four light-years of the center. These fluctuations could be caused by large clumps of dust passing in front of the star. The clumps would be in a disk tilted nearly edge-on to the view from Earth. “We think they are planetesimals or structures in formation,” Sabbi explained. “These could be the seeds that eventually lead to planets in more evolved systems. These are the systems we don’t see close to very massive stars. We see them only in systems outside the center.”

Thanks to Hubble, astronomers can now see how stars are accreting in environments that are like the early universe, where clusters were dominated by monster stars. So far, the best known nearby stellar environment that contains massive stars is the starbirth region in the Orion Nebula. However, Westerlund 2 is a richer target because of its larger stellar population.

“Hubble’s observations of Westerlund 2 give us a much better sense of how stars of different masses change over time, and how powerful winds and radiation from very massive stars affect nearby lower-mass stars and their disks,” Sabbi said. “We see, for example, that lower-mass stars, like our Sun, that are near extremely massive stars in the cluster still have disks and still can accrete material as they grow. But the structure of their disks (and thus their planet-forming capability) seems to be very different from that of disks around stars forming in a calmer environment farther away from the cluster core. This information is important for building models of planet formation and stellar evolution.”

This cluster will be an excellent laboratory for follow-up observations with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared observatory. Hubble has helped astronomers identify the stars that have possible planetary structures. With Webb, researchers can study which disks around stars are not accreting material and which disks still have material that could build up into planets. This information on 1,500 stars will allow astronomers to map a path on how star systems grow and evolve. Webb also can study the chemistry of the disks in different evolutionary phases and watch how they change, and help astronomers determine what influence environment plays in their evolution.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another planned infrared observatory, will be able to perform Sabbi’s study on a much larger area.​ Westerlund 2 is just a small slice of an immense star-formation region. These vast regions contain clusters of stars with different ages and different densities. Astronomers could use Roman Space Telescope observations to start to build up statistics on how a star’s characteristics, like its mass or outflows, affect its own evolution or the nature of stars that form nearby. The observations could also provide more information on how planets form in tough environments.

Sabbi’s team’s results appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

Contacts and sources:

• Claire Andreoli
  NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
• Donna Weaver / Ray Villard
  Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore
• Elena Sabbi
• Space Telescope Science InstitutePublication: Time-domain Study of the Young Massive Cluster Westerlund 2 with the Hubble Space Telescope The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 891, Number 2
  http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab7372

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29-05-2020 om 16:47 geschreven door peter  

Secret Space U.S. Fleet Being Built In Utah... ET Experiences and Advanced Technology!

Secret Space U.S. Fleet Being Built In Utah… ET Experiences and Advanced Technology!

The evidence of an extraterrestrial presence is forever growing, with new information coming forward in regards to dramatic engagements between these strange beings and the United States military and naval forces. Are we obtaining advanced technology from them? Information is now coming forward in regards to the huge construction of space craft built by human hands in Utah.

Highly Top Secret! Presented by Frank Chille Filmed by MUFON PA All content on this channel is licensed, and or produced by Zohar Entertainment Group/Awakening Expo/Phenomena Magazine.

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29-05-2020 om 16:23 geschreven door peter  

New Earth Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri, Our Closet Neighbor Star

The existence of a planet the size of Earth around the closest star in the solar system, Proxima Centauri, has been confirmed by an international team of scientists including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The results, which you can read all about in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveal that the planet in question, Proxima b, has a mass of 1.17 earth masses and is located in the habitable zone of its star, which it orbits in 11.2 days. 

Artist’s impression of the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b shown as of a arid (but not completely water-free) rocky Super-Earth. This appearance is one of several possible outcomes of current theories regarding the development of this exoplanet, while the actual look and structure of the planet is known in no ways at this time. Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to the Sun and also the closest potentially habitable exoplanet as well. It orbits Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf with a surface temperature of 3040 K (thus hotter than light bulbs and therefore whiter, as depicted here). The Alpha Centauri binary system is shown in the background.

In the meantime, the precision of the measurements made by ESPRESSO could result in another surprise. The team has found evidence of a second signal in the data, without being able to establish the definitive cause behind it. “If the signal was planetary in origin, this potential other planet accompanying Proxima b would have a mass less than one third of the mass of the Earth. It would then be the smallest planet ever measured using the radial velocity method”, adds Professor Pepe.

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29-05-2020 om 16:06 geschreven door peter  

What Did Steven Spielberg and U.S. Presidents Really Know About The UFO Phenomena?

It has been speculated that director Steven Spielberg had obtained inside information pertaining to UFOs and E.T.s from high ranking government officials. Stories of secret meetings with other worldly beings had taken place and even U.S. presidents were involved with signing agreements with them in hope of obtaining advanced technology, but could we really trust them?

Film by Steve Mera, Phenomena Magazine

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29-05-2020 om 15:36 geschreven door peter  

Biblical Passages Found on the Walls of Ancient Egyptian Temples are Mystifying

Biblical Passages Found on the Walls of Ancient Egyptian Temples are Mystifying

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29-05-2020 om 15:20 geschreven door peter  

Anunnaki Pole Shift History! The Earth’s Magnetic Field is Weakening Rapidly... Could The Unthinkable Happen?

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29-05-2020 om 15:11 geschreven door peter  

On November 16, 1986, laden with wine, JAL1628 took off from Paris and flew the first leg of the trip, to Reykjavik. The next day, they continued, flying over Greenland and then across northern Canada without event.

Just after they crossed into Alaska, at 5:09 PM local time, Anchorage Air Traffic Control contacted them on the radio to report initial radar contact. The Anchorage flight controller asked them to turn 15 degrees to the left and head for a point known as Talkeetna on a heading of 215 degrees. They were at 35,000 feet and traveling at a ground speed of about 600 mph.

At about 5:11 PM local time, Captain Terauchi noticed the lights of some sort of aircraft about 2000 feet below and 30 degrees to the left front of them. He decided that the aircraft was probably an American jet fighter from nearby Eielson or Elmendorf Air Force Bases patrolling Alaskan airspace, so he ignored them at first.

However, after a few minutes, he noticed that the lights were keeping pace with his own aircraft, which would be an unusual thing for patrolling jets to do.

It was about seven or so minutes since we began paying attention to the lights (when), most unexpectedly, two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face.

Terauchi said that it was his impression that the two objects he had seen below them minutes before had suddenly jumped in from of him. The craft, one above the other, kept pace with the 747 for several minutes, moving in unison with an odd rocking motion.

After about seven minutes, they changed to a side-by-side arrangement.

Terauchi said that the “amber and whitish” lights were like flames coming out of multiple rocket exhaust ports arranged in two rectangular rows on the craft. He felt that they fired in a particular sequence to stabilize the craft, much like the small maneuvering thrusters on the Space Shuttle.

He also reported seeing sparks like a fire when using gasoline or carbon fuel.

Co-pilot Tamefuji described the lights as “Christmas assorted” lights with a “salmon” color. He said: I remember red or orange, and white landing light, just like a landing light. And weak green, ah, blinking. He also described the lights as pulsating slowly. They became stronger, became weaker., became stronger, became weaker, different from strobe lights.

The lights were “swinging” in unison as if there were “very good formation flight… close” of two aircraft side by side.

He described the appearance of the lights as similar to seeing “night flight head-on traffic,” where it is only possible to see the lights on an approaching aircraft and “we cannot see the total shape.”

He said, I’m sure I saw something. It was clear enough to make me believe that there was an oncoming aircraft.

Flight engineer Tsukuba, who sat behind the copilot, did not have as good a view of the lights. He first saw them “through the L1 window at the 11 o’clock position,” and he saw “clusters of lights undulating.”

These clusters were “made of two parts… shaped like windows of an airplane.”

He emphasized that “the lights in front of us were different from town lights.”

He described the colors as white or amber.

Tamefuji decided to call Anchorage Air Traffic Control, and for the next thirty minutes the 747 and AARTCC were in constant contact regarding the UFO.

During this time, Captain Terauchi asked Tskububa to hand him a camera so that he could attempt to take a photograph of the lights. However, Terauchi was unfamiliar with the camera and could not get it to operate. Tsukuba also could not get his camera to operate due to problems with the auto-focus and finally gave up trying to take a photo.

At this point they began experiencing some radio interference and were asked by Anchorage to change frequencies. Terauchi later said that Anchorage kept asking him about clouds in the immediate area:

They asked us several times if there were clouds near our altitude. We saw thin and spotty clouds near the mountain below us, no clouds in mid-to-upper air, and the air current was steady.

Soon after the exchanges about clouds, the objects flew off to the left. Terauchi said later: “There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, moving in a line along with us, in the same direction and same speed and at the same altitude as we were.”

Terauchi decided to see whether they could see anything on the 747’s own radar:

“I thought it would be impossible to find anything on an aircraft radar if a large ground radar did not show anything, but I judged the distance of the object visually and it was not very far.

“I set the digital weather radar distance to 20 (nautical) miles, radar angle to horizon (i.e., no depression angle). There it was on the screen. A large green and round object had appeared at 7 or 8 miles (13 km to 15 km) away, where the direction of the object was.

” We reported to Anchorage center that our radar caught the object within 7 or 8 miles in the 10 o’clock position. We asked them if they could catch it on ground radar, but it did not seem they could catch it at all.”

At 5:25:45, after spending two minutes looking, the military radar at Elmendorf Regional Operational Control Center also picked up something. The ROCC radar controller reported back to the AARTCC that he was getting some “surge primary return.” By this he meant an occasional radar echo unaccompanied by a transponder signal.

As the 747 neared Fairbanks:

“The lights (of the city) were extremely bright to eyes that were used to the dark. (The cockpit lights had been turned off to eliminate window reflections of internal lights.) We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us.

” Alas! There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship.

“We must run away quickly! Anchorage Center.”

The JAL1628 is requesting a change of course to right 45 degrees.” It felt like a long time before we received permission.”

Just after the plane turned to the right, the AARTCC controller called the Fairbanks Approach Radar controller to find out whether or not the short-range radar had a target near the JAL. The approach radar reported no target other than JAL1628.

The plane came out of the turn and flew toward Talkeetna at an altitude of 31,000 ft, with the object still following.

At about 5:40, a United Airlines passenger jet took off from Anchorage and headed north to Fairbanks. The AARTCC controller decided to ask the UA pilot to try to see the object that was following the JAL flight.

The UA pilot said he would look when he got closer. The controller asked the JAL flight to stay at 31,000 ft, and the UA flight to stay at 29,000 ft. He then directed the UA flight to turn some more so that the planes would pass within five miles of one another.

As the United Airlines jet got closer, the UFO apparently dropped behind, allowing the JAL plane to get far ahead. The United pilot asked the AARTCC to have the JAL pilot flash the headlights on the JAL aircraft so he could locate the plane.

At 5:49:45 the JAL pilot did that. At this point the planes were about 25 miles apart.

When the planes were about 12 miles apart, the UA plane reported seeing the JAL plane and nothing else. But by this time the UFO had apparently disappeared, not being seen by JAL1628, either.

At about 5:51, the AARTCC requested that a military TOTEM flight in the area also fly toward the JAL plane for a look. During the next several minutes TOTEM viewed the JAL plane, but couldn’t see any other traffic. JAL1628 proceeded to Anchorage and landed at 6:20 PM. NOTE: The above image is CGI.

KEN PFEIFER WORLD UFO PHOTOS AND NEWS

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29-05-2020 om 12:15 geschreven door peter  

Strange Discoveries on Mars Really Do Deserve An Explanation... It's Littered with Anomalies!

Since man first saw Mars through telescopes they have pondered strange formations. In more modern times with the aid of satellite probes we have managed to get much more clarity of images, but this caused even further strange things to be found. Was Mars once occupied and what is scattered all across its surface?

All Content on this channel is fully licensed, and or produced in-house at our studios in UK, Europe and USA.

This channel in managed by Zohar Entertainment Group UK, Zohar Entertainment Group International Inc, USA and AdRev, USA.

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29-05-2020 om 12:00 geschreven door peter  

Yesterday, NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX were forced to abort their Falcon 9 rocket launch just 16 minutes before the planned blast off, because of looming tropical storms near Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

But was the SpaceX Dragon aborted due to bad weather conditions? According to Florida Maquis, the thunderstorms ended in the early evening, and the weather actually cleared up a short time after the mission was aborted. 

Indeed the launch was aborted because of weather issues and it would have been fixed in 10 minutes, but the lift off could not wait, because the fast-changing position of the ISS meant the rocket would have missed the target even leaving just seconds after the scheduled launch.

Nevertheless, Florida Maquis goes on and states that he noticed on the live feed, a strange anomaly near the International Space Station and suggested that maybe NASA aborted the launch due to this unidentified object speculating that it could have been the Black Knight Satellite.

When zooming in onto the black object we see that it is not just a speck on the lens, it clearly has a triangular shape but if it could have been the Black Knight Satellite is hard to say.

Videos, selected by peter2011

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29-05-2020 om 11:23 geschreven door peter  

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29-05-2020 om 01:44 geschreven door peter  

Scientists studying the ancient Martian Tissint meteorite say they’ve found new evidence that Mars was volcanically active a few hundred million years ago … and may still be today.

Orbital view from Mars Express of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano on Mars, stretching some 13.6 miles (22 km, 72,000 feet) above the red Martian plains. Olympus Mons is 2 1/2 times taller than Mount Everest!

Image via ESA/ Justin Cowart.

Is Mars still volcanically active? At first glance, it wouldn’t seem to be, since no eruptions have ever been observed from any of the numerous volcanoes dotting its desert surface. Recent findings from NASA’s InSight lander have shown that there’s still at least some residual geologic activity underground, however, in the form of marsquakes. Now, a newly announced study of a Martian meteorite has provided the first evidence of what scientists call magma convection on Mars – a rising and falling of currents in molten material beneath Mars’ surface – that took place in the planet’s mantle a few hundred million years ago. Perhaps this slow roiling of magma beneath Mars’ crust still occurs today.

• The new peer-reviewed findings were published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science on May 7, 2020.

The intriguing results – reported in ScienceAlert by Michelle Star on May 11, 2020 – come from a new study of the Tissint Martian meteorite. A Martian meteorite is a rock ejected from Mars, likely via an impact event, which traversed interplanetary space and ultimately landed on Earth. Found in Morocco on July 18, 2011, the Tissint meteorite originated from deep within Mars. Tissint has been the subject of much study already, but this time, the researchers found something surprising. The meteorite contained crystals of olivine, rock-forming minerals commonly found in Earth’s crust.

When those crystals were examined more closely, it was found that they could have only formed in changing temperatures within currents of magma convection.

Mars’ internal structure: core, mantle, crust and atmosphere.

Image via IPGP/ David Ducros/ SEIS.

Diagram of a possible magma chamber on ancient Mars. The Tissint meteorite may have originated from a place like this, beneath Mars’ surface.

Image via Mari et al./ Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2020/ ScienceAlert.

The crystals are an estimated 674 to 582 million years old, fairly young geologically speaking, so the implication is that Mars was still volcanically active at that time. Planetary geologist Nicola Mari of the University of Glasgow told ScienceAlert:

There was no previous evidence of convection on Mars, but the question ‘Is Mars a still volcanically active planet?’ was previously investigated using different methods. However, this is the first study that proves activity in the Mars interior from a purely chemical point of view, on real Martian samples.

The olivine crystals would have formed inside a magma chamber deep underground. Olivine is common in Earth’s mantle, and even in meteorites. But the researchers noticed something odd about the olivine crystals in Tissint. They had irregularly-spaced bands composed of phosphorus. It’s a known process on Earth, called solute trapping, where, during rapid solidification, solute (the substance dissolved in a solution) may be incorporated into the solid phase at a concentration significantly different from that predicted by equilibrium thermodynamics.

The Tissint meteorite.

Image via Alain Herzog/ EPFL.

Mari explained:

This occurs when the rate of crystal growth exceeds the rate at which phosphorus can diffuse through the melt, thus the phosphorus is obliged to enter the crystal structure instead of ‘swimming’ in the liquid magma. In the magma chamber that generated the lava that I studied, the convection was so vigorous that the olivines were moved from the bottom of the chamber (hotter) to the top (cooler) very rapidly, to be precise, this likely generated cooling rates of 15-30 degrees Celsius per hour [about 27-55 degrees Fahrenheit] for the olivines.

From the paper:

The Tissint martian meteorite is an unusual depleted olivine-phyric shergottite, reportedly sourced from a mantle-derived melt within a deep magma chamber. Here, we report major and trace element data for Tissint olivine and pyroxene, and use these data to provide new insights into the dynamics of the Tissint magma chamber. The presence of irregularly spaced oscillatory phosphorous (P)-rich bands in olivine, along with geochemical evidence indicative of a closed magmatic system, implies that the olivine grains were subject to solute trapping caused by vigorous crystal convection within the Tissint magma chamber.

Calculated equilibration temperatures for the earliest crystallizing (antecrystic) olivine cores suggest a Tissint magma source temperature of 1680 degrees Celsius [3056 degrees Fahrenheit], and a local martian mantle temperature of 1560 degrees Celsius [2840 degrees F] during the Late Amazonian, the latter being consistent with the ambient mantle temperature of Archean Earth.

How do the researchers know the meteorite came originally from deep under Mars’ crust? The larger olivine crystals contained traces of nickel and cobalt. This, along with previous evidence, shows that the meteorite must have once been part of rock 25 to 50 miles (40 to 80 kilometers) beneath the surface.

False color x-ray images of 2 thin sections of the Tissint meteorite. Embedded olivine crystals are marked OI.

Image via Mari et al./ Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2020/ Wiley Online Library.

With all of this data, the researchers could estimate the temperatures in the Martian mantle at the time when the crystals first formed. They came up with 1,560 degrees Celsius (2840 degrees F) during the Martian Late Amazonian period. That’s a lot hotter than had been previously thought, almost as hot as 1,650 degrees Celsius (3002 F) during the Archean Eon on Earth, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago. This is recent enough, geologically, to suggest that Mars may still have active magma convection even today. Mari said:

I really think that Mars could be a still volcanically active world today, and these new results point toward this. We may not see a volcanic eruption on Mars for the next 5 million years, but this doesn’t mean that the planet is inactive. It could just mean that the timing between eruptions between Mars and Earth is different, and instead of seeing one or more eruptions per day (as on Earth) we could see a Martian eruption every n-millions of years.

So Mars may still be volcanically active today – as in recent geological time – but eruptions are spaced far apart, by a few million years, according to the researchers. It would be amazing to see a volcanic eruption on Mars, since the planet’s largest volcanoes are much larger than ones on Earth. Olympus Mons, the biggest of them all, is taller than Mount Everest!

Nicola Mari of the University of Glasgow, lead author of the new study.

Image via Twitter.

In 2014, it was reported that the Tissint meteorite might contain traces of ancient microbial activity. According to Philippe Gillet, director of École Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) Earth and Planetary Sciences Laboratory:

Insisting on certainty is unwise, particularly on such a sensitive topic. I’m completely open to the possibility that other studies might contradict our findings. However, our conclusions are such that they will rekindle the debate as to the possible existence of biological activity on Mars – at least in the past. So far, there is no other theory that we find more compelling.

While the jury is still out on the possible life traces, Tissint has shown, at the very least, that Mars was once much more active geologically than it is now.

• Bottom line: A new study of an ancient Martian meteorite suggests that Mars was more volcanically active a few hundred million years ago than previously thought, and may even still be active today.
• Source: Convective activity in a Martian magma chamber recorded by P-zoning in Tissint olivine
• Via ScienceAlert

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

29-05-2020 om 01:30 geschreven door peter  

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29-05-2020 om 01:08 geschreven door peter  

Mammatus clouds may seem ominous. But they have a magnificent beauty of their own.

View larger at EarthSky Community Photos. | Adelina Bathorja in Tirane, Albania, captured these clouds on May 14, 2020. Adelina wrote: “For the first time ever I see mammatus clouds. Just, wow! It was a spectacular view of cellular and jellyfish patterns.”

Mammatus clouds are pouch-like protrusions hanging from the undersides of clouds, usually thunderstorm anvil clouds but other types of clouds as well. Composed primarily of ice, these cloud pouches can extend hundreds of miles in any direction, remaining visible in your sky for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

People associate them with severe weather, and it’s true they can appear around, before or after a storm. Contrary to myth, they don’t continue extending downward to form tornados, but they are interesting in part because they’re formed by sinking air. Most clouds are formed by rising air. Mammatus clouds can appear ominous. But, in a way that’s so common in nature, their dangerous aspect goes hand in hand with a magnificent beauty.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Marlane Burns captured this image on May 15, 2020, near Robert Lee, Texas. She said: “Mammatus clouds preceding a northern thunderstorm that came out of nowhere! The wind blew the flies away and the rain settled the dust!”

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Peter Lowenstein captured these spectacular mammatus clouds in Mutare, Zimbabwe, on March 23, 2020. He wrote: “I took an early morning walk up to the Murambi High Level Water Tanks in the hope of catching a glimpse of the very thin old moon rising. Instead there was a surprise appearance of mammatus clouds on the underside of a sunrise-illuminated band of altostratus cloud above.”

Stephanie Tilden Dorr in Wichita, Kansas, caught these clouds in June 2018. She wrote: “Mammatus clouds appearing exactly one hour after a hailstorm passed over. Twenty-five years in Kansas and I’ve only seen mammatus clouds this vivid one other time, years ago. So exciting!”

Mammatus clouds over New Jersey, via Phil Chillemi.

Mammatus clouds via Andrew Hill in Gloucestershire, U.K.

Crystal Kolb caught these mammatus clouds from Essex, Maryland – near Baltimore – after a bad storm.

Mammatus clouds at sunset from Andrew Ashton in Nampa, Idaho.

Josh Blash caught these mammatus clouds illuminated by lightning over Rye, New Hampshire.

From Lorrie Wy, who wrote in May 2014, “Bubbly clouds over central Alberta, approximately 9:20 p.m. Temp approximately plus 12. Winds cold and light from northwest. These clouds just rolled right over.”

Berit Roaldseth in Trondheim, Norway, saw these mammatus clouds after an April rain shower.

Mammatus clouds over Fayetteville, Arkansas, just before sunset.

Image via Mike Price.

Mammatus clouds over Fort Worth, Texas, in May 2013 – the day a tornado struck near Oklahoma City.

Photo via Sundog Art Photography.

Pam Rice Phillips caught the same mammatus clouds as in the image above, on May 20, 2013, the day a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma. She was in Granbury, Texas, which is southwest of Fort Worth.

Mammatus clouds over Tynemouth, England, via Colin Cooper.

Mammatus clouds over Salt Lake City, Utah, from Shanna Dennis.

Mammatus clouds over Denver in 2012 via Larry Sessions.

Mammatus clouds over Half Dome in Yosemite National Park in June 2013 by Kristal Leonard.

• Bottom line: A spectacular collection of photos of mammatus clouds.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

29-05-2020 om 00:39 geschreven door peter  

David Hambling - Contributor - Aerospace & Defense

I'm a South London-based technology journalist, consultant and author

The U.S. Navy has patented technology to create mid-air images to fool infrared and other sensors. This builds on many years of laser-plasma research and offers a game-changing method of protecting aircraft from heat-seeking missiles. It may also provide a clue about the source of some recent UFO sightings by military aircraft.

The U.S. developed the first Sidewinder heat-seeking missile back in the 1950’s, and the latest AIM-9X version is still in frontline service around the world. This type of sensor works so well because hot jet engines exhausts shine out like beacons in the infrared, making them easy targets. Pilots under attack can eject decoy flares to lure a missile away from the launch aircraft, but these only provide a few seconds protection. More recently laser infrared countermeasures have been fielded which dazzle the infrared seeker.

A sufficiently intense laser pulse can ionize producing a burst of glowing plasma. The Laser Induced Plasma Effects program uses single plasma bursts as flash-bang stun grenades; a rapid series of such pluses can even be modulated to transmit a spoken message (video here). In 2011 Japanese company Burton Inc demonstrated a rudimentary system that created moving 3D images in mid-air with a series of rapidly-generated plasma dots (video here).

1:34 minutes video ‘Talking lasers and endless flashbangs: Pentagon develops plasma tech’ (‘Military Times’ YouTube)

1:53 minute video ‘True 3D Display in the Mid-Air Using Laser Plasma Technology’ (‘Deepak Gupta’ YouTube)

A more sophisticated approach uses an intense, ultra-short, self-focusing laser pulse to create a glowing filament or channel of plasma, an effect discovered in the 1990s. Known as laser-induced plasma filaments (LIPF) these can be created at some distance from the laser for tens or hundreds of meters. Because LIPFs conduct electricity, they have been investigated as a means of triggering lightning or creating a lightning gun

US Army 'lighting gun' experiment with laser-generated plasma channel

US ARMY

One of the interesting things about LIPFs is that with suitable tuning they can emit light of any wavelength: visible, infrared, ultraviolet or even terahertz waves. This technology underlies the Navy project, which uses LIPFs to create phantom images with infrared emissions to fool heat-seeking missiles.

The Navy declined to discuss the project, but the work is described in a 2018 patent: “wherein a laser source is mounted on the back of the air vehicle, and wherein the laser source is configured to create a laser-induced plasma, and wherein the laser-induced plasma acts as a decoy for an incoming threat to the air vehicle.”

The patent goes on to explain that the laser creates a series of mid-air plasma columns, which form a 2D or 3D image by a process of raster scanning, similar to the way old-style cathode ray TVs sets display a picture.

A single decoy halves the chances of an incoming missile picking the right target, but there is no reason to stop at one : “There can be multiple laser systems mounted on the back of the air vehicle with each laser system generating a ‘ghost image’ such that there would appear to be multiple air vehicles present.”

Unlike flares, the LIPF decoy can be created instantly at any desired distance from the aircraft, and can be moved around at will. Equally importantly, moves with the aircraft, rather than dropping away rapidly like a flare, providing protection for as long as needed.

The aircraft carrying the laser projector could also project decoys to cover other targets: “The potential applications of this LIP flare/decoy can be expanded, such as using a helicopter deploying flares to protect a battleship, or using this method to cover and protect a whole battle-group of ships, a military base or an entire city.”

The lead researcher in the patent is Alexandru Hening. A 2017 piece in the Navy’s own IT magazine says that Dr. Hening has been working on laser-induced plasma at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific since 2012.

“If you have a very short pulse you can generate a filament, and in the air that can propagate for hundreds of meters, and maybe with the next generation of lasers you could produce a filament of even a mile,” Dr. Henning told the magazine, indicating that it should be possible to create phantoms at considerable distances.

Phantom aircraft that can move around at high speed and appear on thermal imagers may ring some bells. After months of debate, in April the Navy officially released infra-red videos of UFOs encountered by their pilots, although the Pentagon prefers to call them “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The objects in the videos appear to make sudden movements impossible for physical aircraft, rotate mid-air and zip along at phenomenal speed: all maneuvers which would be easy to reproduce with a phantom projected image.

It is unlikely the Pentagon would release videos of their own secret weapon in a bizarre double bluff. But other nations may have their own version. In the early 1990s the Russians claimed that they could produce glowing ‘plasmoids’ at high altitude using high-power microwave or laser beams; these were intended to disrupt the flight of ballistic missiles, an answer to the planned American ‘Star Wars’. Nothing came of the project, but the technology may have been refined for other applications in the subsequent decades.

Heat-seeking missiles will no doubt evolve ways to distinguish the plasma ghosts from real jets, leading to further refinement of the decoy technology, and so on. Whether humans also get smart enough to recognize such fakes remains to be seen.

• Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. 

{ https://www.forbes.com/ }

29-05-2020 om 00:22 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious “Black Goo” Of Egyptian Burials Demystified

Dr Kate Fulcher is a Research Assistant in the British Museum's Department of Scientific Research, and she led the new research project searching for answers as to what this “black goo” used in Egyptian burials is, and what it might reveal about ancient Egyptian funerary practices and rituals.

An article on the British Museum’s website opens by describing the burial of Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh, an ancient Egyptian high priest who served as the “Opener of the Doors of Heaven” at the Temple of Amun at Karnak almost 3,000 years ago. This title means he was the gatekeeper of the temple sanctuary shrine in which the cult image of the god resided and according to Dodson and Hilton’s 2004 book The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh was wrapped in linen cloths, mummified and buried in Deir el-Bahari , a complex of mortuary temples and tombs located on the west bank of the Egyptian Nile, opposite the city of Luxor.

Technicolor Black

The high priest’s face was covered in gold leaf and his mummy case was painted in bright colors before it was placed into its coffin, then carried to the tomb. British Museum scientists describe “several liters of warm black goo” being poured all over the mummy case, cementing it into the coffin before the lid was placed, allowing the priest to journey into the underworld in a ‘hermetically-sealed' container (see what I did there?).

Mummy of Djedkhonsiufankh. The mummy, when acquired, was in a gilded cartonnage mummy-case and wooden coffin with a gilded face and inlaid glass

(© The Trustees of the British Museum / CC BY NC-SA 4.0 )

Black Goo Depended On Imported Plant Materials

The mysterious ‘black goo’ has been found in a number of ancient Egyptian burials but now over 100 samples from twelve coffins and mummy cases, dating to the 22nd Dynasty (c. 900–750 BC), have been chemically analyzed in the British Museum science labs located beneath the museum in London. The method of analysis in this instance was Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry in which vaporized goo samples were forced into a mass spectrometer which separates them according to their mass to charge ratio, revealing the types and amount of molecules present in the samples.

Testing determined the goo was a composition of “plant oils, animal fats, tree resins, beeswax and bitumen (crude oil)” and the museum scientists think other materials may have been present in the goo but that they have vanished over the last 3,000 years.

The researchers said that some of these ingredients “only naturally occur outside of Egypt,” indicating they had been imported and they said the two tree resins were from conifer trees and pistacia, the later of which grows around the Mediterranean, from Greece to Western Asia.

• Over 20,000 Have Petitioned to Drink the ‘Pharaoh Punch’ of the Black Sarcophagus
• Sarcophagus of Egyptian High Priest Unearthed with Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Scenes of Offerings
• Coffin Pieced Together Reveals Egyptian Princess Face

The wooden coffin was also covered in black goo. 

(© The Trustees of the British Museum / CC BY NC-SA 4.0 )

Examining the bitumen biomarkers in the goo samples revealed it had been imported from the Dead Sea , which the researchers says makes sense because ancient Greek texts refer to “solid blocks of bitumen floating to the surface of the Dead Sea” and they record sailors rowing out to collect it for selling in Egypt.

Spiritual Goo For The Elites That Could Afford it

What then was this mysterious black goo’s practical purpose, or spiritual meaning? The museum scientists are currently unclear about this but they say previous analyses of mummification balms shows it was made of the same ingredients as the black goo. This means it was applied at different points in the burial process, from the ritual preparation of the dead body to when it was poured onto the mummy cases and coffins. And the researchers suggest the color of the goo, black, represented the dead taking on a form of Osiris, the god death and rebirth known as “the black one.” What’s more, according to the museum scientists black is also the color associated with the alluvial silt deposited on the banks of the River Nile after the annual flood receded which was believed to be “inherently magical and regenerative.”

The scientists’ study also demonstrated that black goo was reserved for the burial of social elites which is apparent in that most of the earliest goo samples were found in royal burials, for example, Tutankhamun’s innermost gold coffin was cemented into the middle coffin with “bucketfulls of black goo”. Examples of the use of black goo are more common in the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1069 BC–c. 664 BC), which the researchers think either relates to changes in funerary practices, or perhaps because more recovered coffins from this time are in good states of preservation.

• Top image: The black go used in Egyptian burials has been analyzed.       Source: ©The Trustees of the British Museum / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

28-05-2020 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

In the search for the hypothetical 9th planet in our solar system, these scientists may have uncovered another explanation for the patterns in the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects.

An artist’s concept of a hypothetical planet with a distant sun.

Image via Shutterstock/ The Conversation.

by Samantha Lawler, University of Regina

Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system.

The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.

But does Planet Nine actually exist?

Discoveries at the edge of our solar system

The Kuiper Belt is a collection of small, icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, at distances larger than 30 AU (one astronomical unit or AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun). These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) range in size from large boulders to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) across. KBOs are leftover small bits of planetary material that were never incorporated into planets, similar to the asteroid belt.

After Pluto, the second Kuiper Belt Object – 1992 QB1 – was discovered in 1992 by American astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu using the 2.2-m telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Image via NASA.

The discoveries from the most successful Kuiper Belt survey to date, the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), suggest a sneakier explanation for the orbits we see. Many of these KBOs have been discovered to have very elliptical and tilted orbits, like Pluto.

Mathematical calculations and detailed computer simulations have shown that the orbits we see in the Kuiper Belt can only have been created if Neptune originally formed a few AU closer to the sun, and migrated outward to its present orbit. Neptune’s migration explains the pervasiveness of highly elliptical orbits in the Kuiper Belt, and can explain all the KBO orbits we’ve observed, except for a handful of KBOs on extreme orbits that always stay at least 10 AU beyond Neptune.

Proof of Planet Nine?

These extreme orbits have provided the strongest evidence for Planet Nine. The first few that were discovered were all confined to one quadrant of the solar system. Astronomers expect to observe orbits at all different orientations, unless there is an outside force confining them. Finding several extreme KBOs on orbits pointed in the same direction was a hint that something was going on. Two separate groups of researchers calculated that only a large, very distant planet could keep all the orbits confined to part of the solar system, and the theory of Planet Nine was born.

Planet Nine is theorized to be five to 10 times as massive as Earth, with an orbit ranging between 300-700 AU. There have been several published predictions for its location in the solar system, but none of the search teams have yet discovered it. After more than four years of searching, there is still only indirect evidence in favor of Planet Nine.

The search for KBOs

Searching for KBOs requires careful planning, precise calculations and meticulous followup. I am part of the OSSOS, a collaboration of 40 astronomers from eight countries. We used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope over five years to discover and track more than 800 new KBOs, nearly doubling the number of known KBOs with well-measured orbits. The KBOs discovered by OSSOS range in size from a few kilometers to over 100 km (60 miles), and range in discovery distance from a few AU to over 100 AU, with the majority at 40-42 AU in the main Kuiper Belt.

KBOs do not emit their own light: these small, icy bodies only reflect light from the sun. Thus, the biases against detection at larger distances are extreme: if you move a KBO 10 times farther away, it will become 10,000 times fainter. And because of the laws of physics, KBOs on elliptical orbits will spend most of their time at the most distant parts of their orbits. So, while it is easy to find KBOs on elliptical orbits when they are close to the sun and bright, these KBOs spend most time being much fainter and harder to detect.

This means that the KBOs on elliptical orbits are particularly hard to discover, especially the extreme ones that always stay relatively far from the sun. Only a few of these have been found to date and, with current telescopes, we can only discover them when they are near pericenter – the closest point to the sun in their orbit.

This leads to another observation bias that has historically been ignored by many KBO surveys: KBOs in each part of the solar system can only be discovered at certain times of year. Ground-based telescopes are additionally limited by seasonal weather, with discoveries less likely to happen during when cloudy, rainy or windy conditions are more frequent. Discoveries of KBOs are also much less likely near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars make it difficult to find the faint, icy wanderers in telescopic images.

What makes OSSOS unique is that we are very public about these biases in discoveries. And because we understand our biases so well, we can use computer simulations to reconstruct the true shape of the Kuiper Belt after removing these biases.

Adjusting for biases

OSSOS discovered a handful of new extreme KBOs, half of which are outside the confined region, and are statistically consistent with a uniform distribution. A new study (currently in review) corroborates the non-clustered discoveries of OSSOS. A team of astronomers using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) found over 300 new KBOs with no clustering of orbits. So now two independent surveys – both of which carefully tracked and reported their observational biases in discovering independent sets of extreme KBOs – have found no evidence for clustered orbits.

All known KBOs with orbits larger than 250 AU. The orbits of KBOs discovered by OSSOS and DES are in many directions; previous surveys with unknown biases discovered them in the same direction. This image was produced using public data from the Minor Planet Center Database.

Image via Samantha Lawler/ The Conversation.

All of the extreme KBOs that had been discovered prior to OSSOS and DES were from surveys that did not fully report their directional biases. So we do not know if all these KBOs were discovered in the same quadrant of the solar system because they are actually confined, or because no surveys searched deep enough in the other quadrants. We performed additional simulations that showed that if observations are made only in one season from one telescope, extreme KBOs will naturally only be discovered in one quadrant of the solar system.

Further testing the Planet Nine theory, we looked in detail at the orbits of all known “extreme” KBOs and found that all but the two highest pericenter KBOs can be explained by known physical effects. These two KBOs are outliers, but our previous detailed computer simulations of the Kuiper Belt, which included gravitational effects from Planet Nine, produced a set of “extreme” KBOs with pericenters smoothly ranging from 40 to over 100 AU.

These simulations predict that there should be many KBOs with pericenters as large as the two outliers, but also many KBOs with smaller pericenters, which should be much easier to detect. Why don’t the orbit discoveries match the predictions? The answer may be that the Planet Nine theory does not hold up to detailed observations.

Our observations with a careful survey have discovered KBOs that are not confined by Planet Nine, and our simulations show that the Kuiper Belt should contain different orbits than we observe if Planet Nine exists. Other theories must be invoked to explain the high-pericenter extreme KBOs, but there is no lack of proposed theories in the scientific literature.

Many beautiful and surprising objects remain to be discovered in the mysterious outer solar system, but I don’t believe that Planet Nine is one of them.

Samantha Lawler, Assistant professor of astronomy, University of Regina

• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
• Bottom line: Astronomers think there might not be a Planet Nine.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

28-05-2020 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

Cults have always hovered out on the fringes of religion. There are always those for which established doctrines don’t answer all of the questions for us, or solve the many mysteries of the universe that taunt us. Sometimes these cults take a sharp right turn into bizarreness, embracing beliefs that many might find questionable at best, and it all gets quite a bit darker when there are deaths involved. Here we will take a look at a rather infamous UFO cult, which took things to the extreme to leave many dead and many unanswered questions behind.

The whole morass of weirdness all began with a rather unsual chance meeting. In 1972, a man by the name of Marshall Applewhite had found himself unemployed from his job as a teacher at the University of Thomas, in Houston, Texas, due to a dalliance with a male student, and was a little down on his luck, confused and aimless. One day he went to meet a sick friend at a hospital, where he met a nurse by the name of Bonnie Nettles, and whether this was a pick-up line or not, he told Nettles that he was convinced they had met in a past life. Far from put off by this, Nettles would take it even further into the weird when she said she had been told by extraterrestrials that they would meet, and that they had a divine mission together. It was basically love at first sight.

In the coming days, Applewhite would claim to have vivid dreams and visions, and Nettles took this as a sign of the prophecy that had been foretold to her by the aliens. The fact that Nettles was married at the time does not seem to have deterred her at all when she then embarked on a 6-month-long retreat with Applewhite, during which time they read extensively on theology, philosophy, and extraterrestrials, as well as praying and engaging in long bouts of intense meditation. Through their studies they became convinced that they were a higher level of humanity than others, and that they were actually the two witnesses spoken of in the Book of Revelation, who were described as prophets who died, were resurrected, and were taken up into heaven upon a cloud. Nettles and Applewhite had their own unique spin on all of this, in that they believed that the cloud spoken of in the Bible was actually an alien spaceship, and that they were destined to also die and be brought aboard to be whisked away by their extraterrestrial saviors in an event they called “The Demonstration.” In addition to this, they believed that God was in fact an advanced, super-evolved alien, that life had been seeded on Earth by these very same aliens, and that we were basically an extraterrestrial garden that would be harvested when the time was right.

Marshall Applewhite

Despite the raised eyebrows this all brought them from pretty much everyone, they were undeterred, and went about making plans to actually carry out their plan and try to contact these higher aliens. Their first step was to gather a group of followers, and they really went full stop with their bizarre claims to those who came to see them. Applewhite and Nettles told potential members that they were the spokespeople for aliens, who could take them away to a place far away in the cosmos basically associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. According to them, the Earth was set to be harvested and then basically reset, and that the only way to avoid being wiped out was to join the extraterrestrials aboard their ship and effectively be taken to “Heaven,” which they called “The Next Level,” where they would become perfected entities. Followers were told that if they embraced the group’s teachings, they would become eligible for this transport off Earth, to essentially become immortal. It seems to have been a good pitch, because they began to attract a decent following of believers, steadily accruing members, attracting a broad spectrum of ages and from different religious backgrounds and walks of life, including people in high positions such the Republican politician John Craig, who joined in 1975 as he was running for the Colorado House of Representatives.

Upon entering the group, followers were required to take on an extremely ascetic lifestyle. They gave up all earthly possessions and connections, including their money, jobs, and families, as well as eschewing their more human tendencies, such as sexuality and their very individuality. Many males, including Applewhite himself, intentionally had themselves castrated in order to escape the binds of sexuality. They believed that this was the only way to condition themselves for the arduous journey they would eventually make, and it was seen as essentially helping them to “graduate” to ever more perfected levels, with the final stage being to leave Earth entirely. Through all of this they believed that there were sinister entities on Earth that sought to deceive and mislead humans through the use of lies and advanced technology such as holograms, and that all other religions had fallen victim to these devious creatures. Over time, the group’s belief’s evolved and were refined to include several New Age concepts, such as the idea that aliens could inhabit human bodies similar to a spiritual “walk-in,” basically a type of possession, as well as astral travel and others. Applewhite and Nettles, who called each other aliases such as “Bo and Peep” and “Do and Ti,” also tweaked their own stories, later claiming that they were not merely the earthly representatives of the aliens, but actually harbored the souls of the extraterrestrials themselves, much in the same way they believed had happened to Jesus Christ. Indeed, Applewhite would begin to proclaim himself as an actual successor to Jesus.

In 1975, the group suddenly sort of vanished off the public radar, going underground, moving covertly across the country camping out and evading the media so effectively that it had seemed as if they had just vanished off the face of the earth. It was all part of their plan to reach a higher level of existence, and to more fully metamorphose into superior beings. Nettles would die in 1985, which spurred a few more changes in the doctrine they had been preaching. Up until that point they had believed that they would physically be brought up into space aboard a UFO, but when Nettles died of cancer and that obviously didn’t happen, it was changed to the idea that only the soul or consciousness was beamed aboard, leaving the empty vessel of the physical body behind. This worked well with the idea of spiritual walk-ins, and so the cult trudged on, later funding the operation partly through a website called “Higher Source,” and indeed the group was heavily involved in using computers and the Internet to spread their ideology and pull in money, leading to their reputation as a sort of “cybercult.”

In September of 1996, the group, which now called itself “Heaven’s Gate,” made its headquarters in a sprawling, 9,200 square feet (850 m2) mansion in the upscale area of Rancho Santa Fe, just outside of San Diego, California. They also began buying up “alien abduction insurance,” which not only surprisingly is a thing, but also cost them ludicrous amounts of money. It was at this time that the approaching Comet Hale–Bopp started to be seen as having some sort of deep significance for them, and was seen as a sign. They became increasingly convinced that in the trail of the comet was a spaceship that was coming to finally pick them up, and that this was the moment they had been dreaming of for over two decades. Applewhite convinced his followers that this was so, that they were being presented a chance to join the Next Level, but how were they to go ride aboard it? In Applewhite’s view it was simple, they just had to leave their corporeal forms behind and be beamed aboard as the comet passed.

Now suicide had long been against the cult’s beliefs, but Applewhite found a way to twist this around. In his mind, since their human bodies were only vessels for their alien souls, then by choosing not to join their brethren aboard the UFO was the real “suicide,” as it would be denying their best chance to evolve to the next stage. This rationale seems to have been perfectly logical and reasonable to his followers, because they then started making arrangements to go about carrying out a series of ritual suicides that would allow them to leave their physical vessels to join the comet’s spacecraft. The website would give the chilling last message:

Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate … Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion—’graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.

The members then videotaped farewells to the friends and family they had long ago abandoned in their twisted faith, and in March of 1997 began their final journey. A total of 39 members of the group dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, with armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” and then took a concoction of an epilepsy medication called phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding, which they then washed down with vodka. They then wrapped plastic bags around their heads for good measure, and as each one died their body was placed in a bed. The entire ritual was carried out over three days, between approximately March 22 and March 26, with three different groups, with some staying behind to tend to the bodies and send out videotaped farewells. Applewhite was among the last to die, and in the end, only a handful of the members remained to tell the tale.

On March 26, 1997, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department would find the bodies and it immediately hit the media to shock the entire nation. It was one of the worst mass suicides in history, made all the more chilling by the cheerful, hopeful demeanors of the final taped farewells, which showed that they really believed what they were preaching. Bizarrely, there would follow more suicides, including three of the cult’s remaining members and a copy cat suicide carried out by a 58-year-old man with no known connection to the cult, who left behind a note reading, “I’m going on the spaceship with Hale–Bopp to be with those who have gone before me.” The news was all so shocking and tragic, that even the co-discoverer of the comet, Alan Hale, spoke out to admonish what had happened and the belief systems and cultish techniques of isolation and indoctrination that had led to it. Despite the shockwaves of horror and revulsion the mass suicide caused, unbelievably the Heaven’s Gate website remained operational, run by two of the group’s surviving members.

The tale of the Heaven’s Gate cult is a bizarre, terrifying, and yet at times fascinating look into the belief system that cults can use to enslave the minds of their followers. That such a large group of perfectly sane individuals can be so absorbed into an aberrant belief system and truly embrace it to the point that they happily give their own lives is chilling at best. In the end 39 people are dead by their own choosing, looking to join the aliens they so desperately took as being real, and whether they really did find their ultimate goal or not, they leave a legacy of an ominous UFO cult, strangeness, and a dark peek into the human mind that will probably never be fully understood for most of us.

Videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-05-2020 om 23:19 geschreven door peter  

Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

If something is referred to as an anomaly, you already expect it to be strange and mysterious. If it’s called an anomaly by respected scientists, that complicates things … and makes it scarier. If those same scientists say this anomaly is breaking apart and forming more anomalies, that starts trending towards terrifying … and confusing. Is an anomaly an anomaly to another anomaly? That would be a predicament, which should be the subject of a different study.

“Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa – indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.”

The South Atlantic Anomaly

The scientists in this case are from the European Space Agency and the anomaly is the South Atlantic Anomaly. We’re all interested in the health of Earth’s magnetic field because it protects us from solar wind and cosmic rays. The ESA and NASA are concerned about it because it protects astronauts and, more importantly, their moneymakers … satellites. The South Atlantic Anomaly was discovered in 1958 and, once its danger was determined, has forced satellites, spacecraft and observatories to be shielded in order to pass through safely. That hasn’t always worked – the South Atlantic Anomaly was blamed for the sudden destruction of Japan’s Hitomi space observatory in 2016. And now, the anomaly itself is breaking apart. What could possibly be worse?

“It has been speculated whether the current weakening of the field is a sign that Earth is heading for an eminent pole reversal – in which the north and south magnetic poles switch places.”

There goes your GPS … and that of planes, ships and everything else depending on the poles being in the their proper north and south locations. The North Pole has already been drifting into Siberia and scientists still aren’t sure why, so studying if the South Atlantic Anomaly is a possible influence can’t hurt. In fact, the anomaly itself has been drifting westward at a rate of 20 km (12 miles) per year as well as growing in size … and that’s the real problem here. The South Atlantic Anomaly is growing like an amoeba about to spit, with a second nucleus forming on the African side – the side which may have caused the anomaly in the first place. That’s the location of the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, a so-called “slab graveyard” of ancient slabs or plates sliding under each other to form a gigantic solid formation.

The South Atlantic Anomaly breaking up

(credit: ESA)

What does something under the ocean have to do with the magnetic field?

Good question. The magnetic field is continually created and refreshed by the constant churning of the Earth’s molten iron core. The “slab graveyard” anomalies (there’s also one in the Pacific) may be blocking the force creating the field. The Atlantic anomaly causes more problems, which is why the mysterious breakup is cause for alarm. Will it form two equally powerful anomalies?

“The mystery of the origin of the South Atlantic Anomaly has yet to be solved. However, one thing is certain: magnetic field observations from Swarm are providing exciting new insights into the scarcely understood processes of Earth’s interior.”

The European Space Agency has no idea what’s going to happen, so it took the opportunity to end its press release with a plug for its Swarm constellation — three satellites in two different polar orbits at different altitudes studying Earth’s magnetic field. While they’ve made a number of discoveries, including the weakening of the field over the anomaly, they don’t have the answer … yet. All it takes is time.

Do we have enough left? That’s a quandary from an anomaly.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-05-2020 om 22:13 geschreven door peter  

One of the most profound questions we face is that of if we are alone in the universe. In 1950, influential and notable physicist Enrico Fermi was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and suggested almost half jokingly that if there were space-faring civilizations were out there in the cosmos we should have probably heard from them by now. He famously asked “Where is everybody?” and we still don’t really have an answer to that. Fermi was puzzled by the fact that, if such civilizations existed, they hadn’t visited or found us yet. In his opinion, if they were out there, they would have exponentially broken their barriers and moved out into the galaxy, colonizing new worlds, and we would have surely known about them by now, and it is a good question. Where are they? There are a lot of proposed reasons for why we haven’t found anyone, which I have covered before, but recently there has been talk of yet another reason. Perhaps the answer to the question of where all of the aliens are is that they are all buried under miles of ice, far from our prying eyes and efforts to find them.

Perhaps one of the problems with finding life in the universe besides our own is that we are simply not looking in the right places. There has been much effort directed by scientists at looking for “Earth-like planets,” that is, planets that are much like our own and which we deem to be the most habitable and welcoming to us. These are the planets that sit just the right distance from their star, called the “Goldilocks Zone,” to have a habitable temperature, an atmosphere conducive to life, with plentiful oxygen and organic molecules, and most important of all liquid water. These are the basic ingredients we have proclaimed to be crucial for life as we know it, and it makes sense that we should deem planets similar to our own to be the best candidates for life and try to find them. After all, the only life we truly know of in the universe, that of our own world, developed in these conditions. But what if alien life is somewhere else, not on the surface, but beneath it?

While all of this effort is being made to find second Earths, and several have been indeed located, a far more common type of planet is thought to be frozen worlds and moons encased in rock and ice, but harboring vast liquid oceans below. In fact, it is widely believed that such watery worlds are perhaps 1,000 times more common than rocky, earth-type planets. To give an idea of just how common this type of world is, we need only look to our own solar system, which holds many examples. For instance, Jupiter’s moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa are all thought to have liquid oceans buried by miles of ice and rock, as are Saturn’s moons Titan, Dione, and Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, all with these oceans kept in their liquid state through geothermal activity and the affects of tides and gravitational forces. Not only do such worlds have liquid water in plentiful supply, but through geothermal activity they hold the chance of having habitable conditions and the necessary nutrients and ingredients for life even outside of the magic Goldilocks Zone. Indeed, even planets within our own star’s Goldilocks Zone aren’t really habitable, such as Mars and Venus, so maybe this is a key, and looking at these subsurface oceans potentially opens up the doors to further planets we can search for life on.

In addition, these types of habitats hold other advantages as well, because since they are located so far under, hazardous surface conditions wouldn’t necessarily affect them. One NASA physicist Alan Stern has said of this, “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter.” Another group of scientists who think so are Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, who have written a whole study on this called Subsurface Exolife. Lingham has said of the benefits of a subsurface existence in these alien oceans:

The conventional notion of planetary habitability is the habitable zone (HZ), namely the concept that the “planet” must be situated at the right distance from the star such that it may be capable of having liquid water on its surface. However, this definition assumes that life is: (a) surface-based, (b) on a planet orbiting a star, and (c) based on liquid water (as the solvent) and carbon compounds. In contrast, our work relaxes assumptions (a) and (b), although we still retain (c). One major advantage that icy worlds have is that the subsurface oceans are mostly sealed off from the surface. Hence, UV radiation and cosmic rays (energetic particles), which are typically detrimental to surface-based life in high doses, are unlikely to affect putative life in these subsurface oceans.

We have seen whole sophisticated ecosystems around hydrothermal vents on Earth in areas previously thought to be hostile for life, so it is a promising idea. Yet, there are still some drawbacks to the notion, as Lingham has said:

On the negative side, the absence of sunlight as a plentiful energy source could lead to a biosphere that has far less organisms (per unit volume) than Earth. In addition, most organisms in these biospheres are likely to be microbial, and the probability of complex life evolving may be low compared to Earth. Another issue is the potential availability of nutrients (e.g. phosphorus) necessary for life; we suggest that these nutrients might be available only in lower concentrations than Earth on these worlds.

Nevertheless, such icy worlds are coming to be seen as more and more promising as a potential candidate for alien life, and such biospheres are even thought to very plausibly be able to spawn highly intelligent life. Yet, if these vast oceans did produce intelligent life comparable to or beyond human intelligence, the main problem would be even knowing they are there at all. Some of these worlds have miles and miles of rock or ice between the surface and the water, meaning that communication with radio signals might not be an option. Stern has explained, “If they have technology, and let’s say they’re broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can’t see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency.” There would also be a lack of biosignatures on the surface to give a clue as to any life that might lie below, as the surface could be completely forbidding and barren. It seems that really the only way to know if they exist is if they contacted us or if we physically went and drilled down to them. Professor Loeb has said of these challenges:

It is very difficult to detect sub-surface life remotely (from a large distance) using telescopes. One could search for excess heat but that can result from natural sources, such as volcanos. The most reliable way to find sub-surface life is to land on such a planet or moon and drill through the surface ice sheet. This is the approach contemplated for a future NASA mission to Europa in the solar system.

Adding to this is that even if there are highly intelligent civilizations under the ice, living in such an environment would not be conducive to space travel, as they would have to bore through all of that surface, and water would be a very heavy and difficult medium to transport into orbit and over very long distances. It has even been suggested by scientists like Stern that they might not even be aware that there is space out there over their heads at all, with the universe perhaps all effectively ending for them with the impenetrable wall above them. There has also been speculation that intelligent life would need a mastery of fire to really develop machines and technology, which would be impossible in their watery realm. For instance, dolphins and octopuses have in recent years been speculated as being possibly of human-level intelligence, but their biome makes development of any sophisticated technology a challenge. Could that be happening here? There is no way to know.

What we do know is that these icy planets and moons do exist, along with ample water and quite probably the elements necessary for life. We also know that they are likely far more common than rocky, earth-like worlds. Is it at least possible that if there has evolved intelligent life outside of our own it had done so in one of these environments? If so, what does that mean for our efforts to search out and contact such life? Due to their extreme circumstances is it likely we will ever detect them or meet them? Whatever the case may be, it poses an interesting possibility for the Fermi Paradox, and at the very least truly expands the locales we should be looking at for life in the universe besides our own.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-05-2020 om 22:03 geschreven door peter  

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