Filer’s Files #46 -2016 Vatican and UFOs - PART II

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Geschreven door peter om 16:30 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

We Talked to a Controversial Quebec Professor About His Search for Aliens

We Talked to a Controversial Quebec Professor About His Search for Aliens

By Patrick Lejtenyi

Photo via Pixabay user photovision

Ermanno Borra thinks that aliens just may be winking at us from across the void—that they're trying to make contact using a method that even we primitive earthlings might grasp, and that they come (or perhaps will come, eventually) in peace.

The Université Laval astronomer realizes it's a bold claim, and will be rigorously challenged by his peers. But he's adamant that it's not a preposterous one.

"The search for extraterrestrial life is a very legitimate scientific endeavour," he says. "It's not something crazy."

In a peer-reviewed paper published in this month's Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Borra and grad student Eric Trottier wrote that an analysis of the spectra—the intensity of the light as a function of many wavelengths—of 2.5 million stars found minuscule but highly peculiar modulations from 234 of them. Like, really tiny: the separations detected were 10-9 to 10-15 seconds apart.

The pair examined the stars catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a 3D map of the universe that over the past 16 years catalogued over three million astronomical objects. They found that the 234 stars were also in the same spectral range as our Sun's (for the record, the F2 to K1 spectra range). With instrumental or calculation error and other possibilities accounted for and eliminated as possible sources of the readings, Borra and Trottier suggest that the signals may possibly have come from extraterrestrial intelligence trying to alert humans to their existence.

He speculates that it would be possible for an alien life form to shine a laser into outer space, superposing its light over that of its host star. The signal could be detected in the spectrum of the star, containing as it does the light of both the star and the laser.

The paper, excitingly titled "Discovery of Peculiar Periodic Spectral Modulations in a Small Fraction of Solar-type Stars," has already generated a lot of media coverage and controversy. It hasn't helped that overzealous and click-hungry headline writers use phrases like "probably from aliens" when discussing the work. An investigation bySnopes.com debunked the "probably" part, making it clear neither scientist was willing to use the word in a formal academic paper—something that likely would have resulted in the pair being pilloried by their colleagues.

Several scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) have been either cautious or dismissive of their claims. Snopes notes that Breakthrough Listen, a search venture funded by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and backed by Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, isn't popping champagne corks yet; neither is theSETI Research Center at UC Berkeley.

But Borra, a professor of physics at Laval who received his PhD from the University of Western Ontario, certainly doesn't come across as a charlatan or a fool. And he knows that he needs a whole lot more evidence to back up his hypothesis. The scientific method is built on testing hypotheses and poking holes in them, so he never makes the claim that the signals are definitively from aliens. He merely carefully suggested that it's possible that they are. He suspects that those who dismiss his paper outright probably didn't read it in detail. The same would apply to those who jump to conclusions that aliens are definitely reaching out to us, based on his curious finding.

"The ETI hypothesis is a strange one, so it's normal to be skeptical," he says. "But it's not something crazy. Again, it's a field of very legitimate scientific research."

One that doesn't come cheap: for instance, the SETI Institute-operated Allen Telescope Array in northern California has burned through $50 million in about a decade, half of which came from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Breakthrough Listen project's 10-year, $100 million funding is courtesy of Russian tycoon Yuri Milner. Even the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was mostly funded via the philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. No government is seriously investing in the search for ETI (although President-elect Trump has said he will make space exploration great again, without offering any details). Still, there seems to be enough curiosity about our new frontiers and new life forms--whether they be in deep space or in the deep ocean—to spur individuals to generously fund scientific research alongside governments.

Borra says that if—and he admits it's a big if—his hypothesis is supported by enough solid evidence that it can be assumed that the source of these infinitesimal changes in the light pulses' intensity is indeed the result of extraterrestrial communication, he says it would be "one of the most important things ever done on Earth."

The method of communication is also flexible enough that the source—a hypothetical alien civilization—could also include vital information about themselves, including pictures.

This isn't the first time Borra has speculated that a specific kind of light pulse might have originated with ETI. A 2012 paper he authored predicted that the signals grad student Trottier found in the reams of data were consistent with what he believed an ETI signal would look like. Basically, light pulses are an easy way to send signals and have them seen by a distant recipient. The paper's abstract reads: "Theory, confirmed by published experiments, shows that periodic signals in spectra can be easily generated by sending light pulses separated by constant time intervals.... [T]echnology now available on Earth could be used to send signals having the required energy to be detected at a target located 1000 lt-yr away. Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) could use these signals to make us aware of their existence."

Borra is the first to admit that more work—a lot more work—is needed before we can be sure that something out there is reaching out to us. But any civilization trying to make contact likely wouldn't be interested in Earth as a target for conquest, enslavement or nourishment. He believes any such species would "certainly have technology far more advanced than we do," and that they would very likely be peaceful.

The theory is, if aliens can get it together enough to be able to create technology that looks to life beyond their solar system, they have advanced enough as a species to put their primitive, warlike impulses behind them. They don't need to slaughter or enslave us. It's a nice thought, but unfortunately, wholly speculative.

He further suspects that spectral modulations may be just one method aliens are using to reach out across the galaxy. There may be others that are beyond our comprehension, using technologies we haven't yet grasped.

The pace at which our technology has advanced in just the last 50 or 60 years gives Borra some perspective on what is feasible in terms of communications. From postage-stamped letters to Skype, the leap has been immense. Borra doesn't know where or how it will ever stop advancing, and that, he says, is encouraging in the long run.

"Intuitively, I suspect that civilizations that are more advanced are peaceful," he says. "So anyone trying to contact us would be very nice people, for obvious reasons."

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

{ http://www.vice.com/en_ca/ }

Geschreven door peter om 16:15 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?

Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.

BY CALEB SCHARF

ILLUSTRATION BY TIANHUA

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.

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For example, only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and stars also hints at unseen mass.

Cosmologists usually assume that dark matter has no microstructure. They think it consists of subatomic particles that interact only via gravity and the weak nuclear force and therefore slump into tenuous, featureless swathes. They have arguments to support this point of view, but of course we don’t really know for sure. Some astronomers, noting subtle mismatches between observations and models, have suggested that dark matter has a richer inner life. At least some component may comprise particles that interact with one another via long-range forces. It may seem dark to us, but have its own version of light that our eyes cannot see.

In that case, dark matter could contain real complexity, and perhaps it is where all technologically advanced life ends up or where most life has always been. What better way to escape the nasty vagaries of supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune to electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real estate on the dark side and be done with it.

If you’re a civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being artificially manipulated.

Or to take this a step further, perhaps the behavior of normal cosmic matter that we attribute to dark matter is brought on by something else altogether: a living state that manipulates luminous matter for its own purposes. Consider that at present we have neither identified the dark-matter particles nor come up with a compelling alternative to our laws of physics that would account for the behavior of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Would an explanation in terms of life be any less plausible than a failure of established laws?

Part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence.

The universe does other funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy. But cosmologists don’t know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life—an anthropic argument. The dark energy didn’t become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth. For many cosmologists, that means our universe must be part of a vast multiverse where the strength of dark energy varies from place to place. We live in one of the places suitable for life like us. Elsewhere, dark energy is stronger and blows the universe apart too quickly for cosmic structures to form and life to take root.

But perhaps there is another reason for the timing coincidence: that dark energy is related to the activities of living things. After all, any very early life in the universe would have already experienced 8 billion years of evolutionary time by the time expansion began to accelerate. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion.

There are even possible motivations for that action. Life absorbs low-entropy energy (such as visible light from the sun), does useful work with that energy, and dumps higher-entropy energy back into the universe as waste heat. But if the surrounding universe ever got too warm—too filled with thermal refuse—things would stagnate. Luckily we live in an expanding and constantly cooling cosmos. What better long-term investment by some hypothetical life 5 billion years ago than to get the universe to cool even faster? To be sure, it may come to rue its decision: Hundreds of billions of years later the accelerating expansion would dilute matter so quickly that civilizations would run out of fresh sources of energy. Also, an accelerating universe does not cool forever, but eventually approaches a floor in temperature.

One idea for the mechanism of an accelerating cosmic expansion is called quintessence, a relative of the Higgs field that permeates the cosmos. Perhaps some clever life 5 billion years ago figured out how to activate that field. How? Beats me, but it’s a thought-provoking idea, and it echoes some of the thinking of cosmologist Freeman Dyson’s famous 1979 paper “Time Without End,” where he looked at life’s ability in the far, far future to act on an astrophysical scale.

Once we start proposing that life could be part of the solution to cosmic mysteries, there’s no end to the fun possibilities. Although dark-matter life is a pretty exotic idea, it’s still conceivable that we might recognize what it is, even capturing it in our labs one day (or being captured by it). We can take a tumble down a different rabbit hole by considering that we don’t recognize advanced life because it forms an integral and unsuspicious part of what we’ve considered to be the natural world.

Life’s desire to avoid trouble points to some options. If it has a choice, life always looks for ways to lower its existential risk. You don’t build your nest on the weakest branch or produce trillions of single-celled clones unless you build in some variation and backup.

Maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos.

A species can mitigate risk by spreading, decentralizing, and seeding as much real estate as possible. In this context, hyper-advanced life is going to look for ways to get rid of physical locality and to maximize redundancy and flexibility. The quantum realm offers good options. The cosmos is already packed with electromagnetic energy. Today, at any instant, about 400 photons of cosmic microwave radiation are streaming through any cubic centimeter of free space. They collectively have less energy than ordinary particles such as protons and electrons, but vastly outnumber them. That’s a lot of potential data carriers. Furthermore, we could imagine that these photons are cleverly quantum-mechanically entangled to help with error control.

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules. The science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem put forward a similar idea, involving neutrinos rather than photons, in the novel His Master’s Voice.

That’s one way that life could disappear into ordinary physics. But even these ideas skirt the most disquieting extrapolations.

Toward the end of Carl Sagan’s 1985 science-fiction novel Contact, the protagonist follows the suggestion of an extraterrestrial to study transcendental numbers. After computing to 10²⁰ places, she finds a clearly artificial message embedded in the digits of this fundamental number. In other words, part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself.

It’s a great mind-bending twist for a book. Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.

In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations.

Caleb Scharf is an astrophysicist, the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University in New York, and a founder of yhousenyc.org, an institute that studies human and machine consciousness. His latest book is The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities.

This article was originally published on Nautilus Cosmos, in November 2016.

{http://nautil.us/ }

Geschreven door peter om 15:59 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Wordt het heelal aangestuurd door een buitenaardse beschaving?

Wordt het heelal aangestuurd door een buitenaardse beschaving?

De mensheid zoekt in het heelal al eeuwenlang naar nieuwe sterrenstelsels en kijkt hierbij zo diep mogelijk in de ruimte.

We hebben een hoop ontdekt, maar alles wat we tot nog toe hebben gezien, beslaat slechts vijf procent van het heelal. Naar de rest zoekt men nog.

Een astrofysicus van de Columbia-universiteit heeft nu gezegd dat het universum mogelijk wordt aangestuurd door de intelligentie van een buitenaardse beschaving.

Overal om ons heen

Deze beschaving is zo hoogontwikkeld dat hij bestaat in het kwantumrijk en voor ons niet zichtbaar is, schrijft Caleb Scharf voor Nautilus.

Een intelligentie die niet te onderscheiden is van de structuur van het universum zou veel mysteries in één klap oplossen.

Het zou verklaren waarom er nog geen intelligente beschavingen buiten de aarde zijn ontdekt. “Misschien is hypergeavanceerd leven niet extern,” schrijft Scharf.

“Misschien bestaat het overal om ons heen,” vervolgt hij. “Verankerd in de natuurkunde zelf.”

Gemanipuleerd

Het is volgens Scharf ook mogelijk dat buitenaardse intelligentie zich verschuilt in donkere materie.

Dat onze astronomische modellen niet altijd overeenkomen met waarnemingen, komt misschien doordat donkere materie kunstmatig wordt gemanipuleerd, aldus Scharf.

Deze intelligentie kan ook het gedrag van normale kosmische materie beïnvloeden, legt hij uit.

Niet herkennen

De versnelde uitdijing van het heelal vijf miljard jaar geleden wordt in verband gebracht met donkere energie, maar volgens Scharf kan intelligent leven hier ook een rol bij hebben gespeeld.

“Voordat de uitdijing begon te versnellen had leven acht miljard jaar de tijd om zich te ontwikkelen,” schrijft hij.

“Misschien wordt de kosmos beïnvloedt door het leven zelf of besloten hoogontwikkelde aliens invloed uit te oefenen op de expansie,” vervolgt hij.

Het is zelfs mogelijk dat we geavanceerd leven niet herkennen omdat het een integraal onderdeel is van wat wij zien als de natuurlijke wereld, besluit de astrofysicus.

[Nautilus]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

Geschreven door peter om 15:46 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

VIDEO: NASA schakelt livestream uit nadat ‘mysterieus ruimteschip’ verschijnt

VIDEO: NASA schakelt livestream uit nadat ‘mysterieus ruimteschip’ verschijnt

Bij het internationale ruimtestation ISS is een onbekend vliegend object vastgelegd op video. Vlak na de waarneming ging het beeld op zwart, meldt de Daily Mail.

Volgens complottheoretici houdt de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA bewust bewijzen van buitenaards leven achter.

Livebeelden van het ISS tonen een object dat razendsnel voorbij vliegt. Het ‘ruimteschip’ werd opgemerkt door YouTube-gebruiker ColdPyro.

Onder het tapijt

Vlak voordat het mysterieuze object uit beeld verdwijnt, schakelt NASA de livebeelden uit en verschijnt een mededeling dat er technische problemen zijn opgetreden.

Complottheoretici zien er bewijs in dat de NASA bewijs van buitenaards leven onder het tapijt veegt.

UFO-jagers zijn ervan overtuigd dat camera’s van het ISS voor het eerst een mysterieus ruimteschip hebben vastgelegd.

Blauw licht

In september en oktober werden ook al vreemde objecten bij het ruimtestation gespot. Afgelopen maand verscheen er een blauw licht bij het ISS.

In september werden in de buurt van een Progress-bevoorradingscapsule twee UFO’s vastgelegd op camera.

[Nieuwsblad]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

Geschreven door peter om 15:41 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Chinese taikonauten terug op aarde na lange ruimtereis

Chinese taikonauten terug op aarde na lange ruimtereis

Tim Kraaijvanger

De Shenzhou-11 taikonauten Jing Haipeng en Chen Dong zijn terug op aarde. Dit meldt het Chinese staatsmedium Xinhua.

De capsule landde vanochtend om 07:15 uur Nederlandse tijd in het noorden van China in Binnen-Mongolië, een autonome regio grenzend aan Mongolië en Rusland. De landing van de SHenzhou-11 was live te volgen via Periscope. Voor China – een land waar veel achter gesloten deuren plaatsvindt – is dat zeer bijzonder.

Shenzhou-11 was de langste bemande Chinese ruimtevlucht ooit. Haipeng en Dong verbleven dertig dagen buiten de aardse atmosfeer in het ruimtelab Tiangong-2. “Als de plannen voor de Tiangong-2 succesvol zijn, komt China op het niveau dat alleen de VS en Rusland hebben bereikt: een bemand ruimtelaboratorium,” vertelt natuurkundige Merlin Kole aan Scientias.nl. Hij was in september aanwezig bij de lancering van de Tiangong-2. “Het bouwen van een eigen station betekent dat China qua ruimtevaart op hetzelfde niveau zit als de VS en Rusland en dat in een zeer korte tijd heeft weten te bereiken. Van daaruit zullen de Chinezen waarschijnlijk de hoge ambities doorzetten en wellicht de VS inhalen.” China hoopt in 2022 een permanent ruimtestation in een baan om de aarde te hebben, waardoor het land de rol van het ISS kan overnemen.

Hoe gaat het met de taikonauten?
Het is nog onduidelijk hoe het met de taikonauten is. Op Twitter gaan geruchten rond dat er mogelijk iets aan de hand is met met taikonaut Chen Dong, maar het Chinese staatsmedium Xinhua meldt dat de astronauten er goed aan toe zijn. Toch is het opmerkelijk dat er nog geen citaat het wereldwijde web op is geslingerd, terwijl de taikonauten tijdens het verschijnen van dit artikel al drie uur op aarde zijn.

Zodra er meer bekend is over het lot van de taikonauten, wordt dit artikel bijgewerkt.

Bronmateriaal:

"Shenzhou-11 astronauts land safely" - Xinhua
Tweet via @ThijsHofmans van GoForLaunch.nl

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 10:56 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Leven in aardse bodem is ouder dan we denken

Leven in aardse bodem is ouder dan we denken

Tim Kraaijvanger

mount-goldsworthy-australia.jpg?resize=768%2C450&ssl=1

Wetenschappers hebben veel microfossielen aangetroffen in drie miljard jaar oude Australische stenen. De vondst van deze microfossielen laat zien dat leven in de bodem ouder is dan we denken.

“Je hebt een microscoop nodig om deze piepkleine fossielen te zien”, zegt paleontoloog Gregory Retallack van de universiteit van Oregon. 4,6 miljard jaar geleden is de aarde ontstaan in stofschijf rondom de zon. “Als we tweederde terug gaan in de geschiedenis van de aarde was er al volop leven aanwezig in de aardse bodem.”

microben

Rijk microbioom
De onderzoekers hebben een microbioom ontdekt met minimaal vijf verschillende microfossielen. Deze microfossielen verschillen onderling van elkaar als het gaat om grootte, vorm en isotopische samenstelling.

De grootste microfossielen zijn spindelvormige, holle structuren gevormd door schimmelachtige straalzwammen (Actinobacteria). Deze symbiotische bacteriën leven vandaag de dag bijvoorbeeld in de knolletjes aan de wortels van elzen. Zij zorgen ervoor dat deze loofboom voldoende stikstof krijgt. De karakteristieke aardse geur van tuingrond wordt ook veroorzaakt door deze straalzwam.

Daarnaast zijn er bolvormige fossielen aangetroffen die lijken op paarse zwavelbacteriën.

Geen verdwaalde cellen
“Met een dichtheid van meer dan duizend cellen per kubieke millimeter vormden de microfossielen toentertijd al een goed functionerend ecosysteem”, vervolgt Retallack. “Het zijn dus niet een paar verdwaalde cellen.” Volgens de onderzoeker is er bewijs dat leven in de grond een belangrijke rol speelde in de cyclus van koolstof, fosfor, zwavel en stikstof.

Ging leven eerder van zee naar land?
De vondst is belangrijk, omdat veel onderzoekers denken dat het leven 3,7 miljard jaar geleden ontstond in de vorm van cyanobacteriën. Zij zijn verantwoordelijk voor de vorming van stromatolieten. Eerder dit jaar werden op Groenland fossiele stromatolieten gevonden met een recordouderdom van 3,7 miljard jaar, waardoor de datum waarop het leven op aarde verscheen 200 miljoen jaar opschoof.

Onderzoekers denken dat het leven vanuit de zee naar het land verspreidde, maar dat dit wel lang duurde. “Oceanen waren broedplaatsen van leven, terwijl het op land nog een droge bedoening was”, schreef geobioloog Hope Jahren eerder dit jaar. “Er is namelijk geen duidelijk bewijs dat leven op het vasteland voorkwam.” Dit bewijs is er nu dan eindelijk, schrijven de onderzoekers van de universiteit van Oregon.

Buitenaards leven
Opvallend genoeg lijken de zoutafzettingen en de microfossielen op structuren die Marsrover Curiosity op Mars heeft gevonden. Retallack: “Misschien kunnen we deze fossielen gebruiken om microscopisch leven op andere planeten te identificeren.”

Bronmateriaal:

"Archean coastal-plain paleosols and life on land" - Gondwana Research

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 10:45 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Leven in aardse bodem is ouder dan we denken

Leven in aardse bodem is ouder dan we denken

Tim Kraaijvanger

Wetenschappers hebben veel microfossielen aangetroffen in drie miljard jaar oude Australische stenen. De vondst van deze microfossielen laat zien dat leven in de bodem ouder is dan we denken.

microben

Daarnaast zijn er bolvormige fossielen aangetroffen die lijken op paarse zwavelbacteriën.

Bronmateriaal:

"Archean coastal-plain paleosols and life on land" - Gondwana Research

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 10:45 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Prachtig bewaard gebleven mummie ontdekt in Egypte

Prachtig bewaard gebleven mummie ontdekt in Egypte

Caroline Kraaijvanger

De tand des tijds lijkt nauwelijks grip te hebben gekregen op deze mummie en de rijkversierde sarcofaag waarin deze ter ruste werd gelegd.

Spaanse archeologen ontdekten de tombe met daarin de mummie nabij een tempel die stamt uit de tijd van farao Toetmosis III. Deze farao regeerde tussen 1479 en 1425 voor Christus over Egypte. De tombe stamt niet uit de tijd van farao Toetmosis, maar is iets jonger. Onderzoekers schatten dat deze uit het begin van de Derde Tussenperiode (ongeveer 1070 tot 712 voor Christus) stamt.

In de tombe stuitten de onderzoekers op een prachtige, rijkversierde sarcofaag. En in die sarcofaag bevindt zich een mummie. Waarschijnlijk gaat het om de resten van een edelman – Amenrenef genaamd – die werkzaam was aan het koninklijk hof.

De sarcofaag.

Afbeelding: Egyptische Ministerie van Oudheden.

De mummie is versierd met allerlei symbolen die de edelman waarschijnlijk moesten beschermen. Zo staan de godinnen Isis en Nephthys en de vier zonen van Horus afgebeeld.

De mummie.

Afbeelding: Thutmosis III Temple Project.

Onderzoekers gaan de mummie en sarcofaag nader bestuderen. En uiteindelijk hopen ze zo meer zekerheid te krijgen over de identiteit van de overledene en de rituele gebruiken uit die tijd.

Bronmateriaal:

Egyptische Ministerie van Oudheden

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 10:39 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Why Martian Settlers Will Eat Potatoes, Insects, Algae and Mushrooms

Why Martian Settlers Will Eat Potatoes, Insects, Algae and Mushrooms

Written by ANDREW RADER

From the bottom of our gravity well on the Earth’s surface, getting anything into space is difficult and expensive, and that's even more true for travel to Mars.

On the International Space Station, for example, although some air and water is recycled, astronauts are ultimately reliant on Earth for everything. Given the challenges of distance, time, and energy required for the transit, this will have to change for Mars. 3D printing will provide some degree of self-sustenance (especially if we use local building materials where possible), but bulk consumables would have to be transported or generated in situ.

Luckily, Mars has both water in the form of ice, and a thin but useful atmosphere of carbon dioxide that can be processed into oxygen, and methane to power vehicles or rockets.

Being able to produce our own water and oxygen on Mars will be essential to sustaining human life there, but that's only about half the solution (and half the mass). We'd need to send around 2,000 pounds of food per Martian settler per year—and that assumes entirely freeze-dried food, which may not be the healthiest or most palatable option. A Martian settlement of six people would depend on a grocery run of more than fifteen Curiosity Rovers’ worth of dry food every 26-month Earth-to-Mars launch window.

Cooking on Mars.

Video: Andrew Rader/YouTube

Any food we can grow on Mars is food we don’t have to ship from Earth. Since we can get water there, we want to focus any Martian agricultural ventures on high-density bulk calories, high nutrition, or fresh morale-boosting foods that are easy to grow in a small space, while we continue to ship freeze-dried foods and vitamins from Earth.

Livestock is mostly out of the question, except perhaps if the animals are very small. Crickets are one of the best options. They eat discarded plant matter, are easy to raise in small spaces in a matter of weeks, and use hardly any water. They’re healthier than beef, with more protein, and include omega-3s, vitamins like iron and magnesium, and less fat.

Other small animals like snails could be on the menu. They may have been one of the first animals cultivated by humans for food. Aquaculture of mussels, crustaceans, and spirulina blue-green algae might round out a Martian diet.

What about plants and fungi? Mushrooms are packed with vitamins and grow without the need for light. As featured in The Martian, potatoes are also a good choice, and they’ve even been grown in simulated Martian soil in experiments in a greenhouse on Earth. They’re packed with vitamins, and contain some protein. You could live on them exclusively for a year or more, although you’d eventually suffer from a lack of fats, vitamins A and D, and B-12.

Cooking on Mars - Potatoes.

Video: Andrew Rader/YouTube

Even so, potatoes could contribute the bulk calories to a diet, as they have in many cultures on Earth throughout history. Sprinkle a few crickets on top of your potato pancakes and pop a vitamin pill and you’ve got a pretty balanced diet.

Or take a page from the 19th century Irish and combine potatoes with milk: in this case, dried milk shipped from Earth, preferably the full fat variety. By a strange quirk, potatoes and milk balance each other remarkably well, each providing the nutrients that the other lacks and forming about the best two-food diet a Martian settler could ask for.

Of course, ideally you’re rounding it out with at least a few other foods, if for nothing else than to avoid the monotony of endless cream of potato soup.

A Mars settlement will be dependent on Earth for the foreseeable future, but anything we can do to reduce the supplies we’d have to send brings it that much closer to reality. Changing the way we eat and learning how to grow our own food is going to be a big part of the solution.

Aerospace engineer Andrew Rader is a competitor in the Mars Generation’s annual Potato Challenge, held Thursday Nov. 17, to raise awareness and scholarship funding for the future of Science and Space Education. His latest kid’s science book, Mars Rover Rescue, is on Kickstarter at www.rover-rescue.com.

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Geschreven door peter om 10:19 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

The Fact and Fiction of the NASA EmDrive Paper Leak

The Fact and Fiction of the NASA EmDrive Paper Leak

Written by DANIEL OBERHAUS - CONTRIBUTOR

If humanity ever wants to truly explore the outer reaches of our solar system or travel to other stars, we’re going to have to build a better engine for our spacecraft. In fact, this engine will have to be so good that it will be capable of generating thrust without consuming propellant. That’s right: If we ever want a four-hour trip to the moon or a two-month trip to Mars, we’re going to need a rocket engine that doesn’t need rocket fuel.

This is the idea behind the radio frequency resonant cavity thruster—otherwise known as EmDrive—a theoretical reactionless engine powered by turning electricity into microwaves and bouncing them around a closed metal funnel.

The EmDrive has been dismissed as “impossible” on more than one occasion because it appears to violate Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But if a leaked NASA paper posted online last Saturday is to be believed, then not only are NASA scientists pursuing an EmDrive, but they actually made one that works.

As detailed in the paper, a team of NASA physicists led by Harold “Sonny” White and Paul March—both leading figures in exotic propulsion systems—was able to generate thrust in a “tapered RF test article” (read: EmDrive prototype) during a series of tests at NASA’s Eagleworks Labs at Johnson Space Center in the fall of 2015.

In essence, the NASA EmDrive in the paper consists of a closed copper cone, the inside of which is being bombarded with microwaves. To test the EmDrive, the researchers powered it with 40, 60, and 80 watts and found that it generated up to 58, 128, and 119 micronewtons of thrust, respectively. Given that this “anomaly” was still observed by White and his colleagues after accounting for error, this suggests that the results of the experiment show an EmDrive is indeed possible.

Based on these results, the researchers estimated that their contraption would be capable of generating approximately 1.2 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt were they to scale up the power input. To put this in perspective, the Hall thruster—one of the most powerful in development and powered by ejecting plasma—generates about 60 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt.

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The EmDrive described in the leaked NASA paper. Image: White, et al./NASA

“The issue involved here is whether the experiment is seeing something real or not,” Jim Woodward, a physicist at California State-Fullerton, told Motherboard. “I know Paul [March] does clean work and to be honest, I suspect there may really be something there. But the result they're seeing can't actually be explained in terms of the theory they're proposing. So the question is: what is causing it?”

Per Newton, if you want to propel a rocket through space, you’re going to have to eject some material in the opposite direction of the rocket’s travel. But an EmDrive appears to generate a reaction without any action—so what gives?

A number of theories have been floated attempting to explain this ostensible violation of the bedrock of physics. White has been a proponent of the quantum vacuum explanation, which posits that the EmDrive is able to generate thrust by acting on virtual particle pairs that are generated by fluctuations in the quantum vacuum (in this theory, these vacuum fluctuations are created by the electromagnetic field generated by the EmDrive). In essence, the microwaves would be ‘pushing off’ of these virtual particles within the EmDrive cavity to generate the thrust that has been observed by White and his colleagues in EmDrive experiments.

Another leading explanation is that the EmDrive’s thrust is generated by radiation pressure, a position held by its inventor Roger Shawyer. On this view, when the microwave radiation enters the copper cavity, the radiation pushes against the walls of the EmDrive and generates thrust.

Yet, according to Woodward, both of these theories are unlikely to be correct for a simple reason: Physics doesn’t allow them.

By way of example, Woodward likened explaining the results seen at NASA purely in terms of microwave pressure to arguing that you can accelerate a car by getting in the driver’s seat and pushing on the windshield.

“Can any disposition of microwaves inside the cavity produce thrust?” said Woodward. “There's a simple answer to that question: No, it cannot. Conservation of momentum dictates that any purely electromagnetic system that is enclosed cannot produce thrust. This is for both quantum theory and classical electrodynamics. It's physically impossible.”

This is what led White to his quantum-vacuum theory: If the microwaves can’t push against the inside walls in the copper cone to generate thrust, then they must be pushing off of something else within the cone—like virtual particle/anti-particle pairs that exist in the quantum vacuum. The problem is that while the existence of the quantum vacuum has been experimentally proven to exist, physicists are in pretty strong agreement that it can’t be used as a medium to generate thrust.

Although White’s quantum vacuum theory is referenced as the theoretical explanation of the thrust observed in both the recently leaked NASA paper and the first NASA EmDrive paper from 2014, it has been debunked time and time again by leading physicists within the community.

EmDrive inventor Roger Shawyer demonstrates why he thinks radiation pressure explains the EmDrive thrust

“A theoretical construct related to the quantum vacuum is nonsense,” said Woodward. “There is no experimental evidence that suggests anything remotely like [White’s theory] is a reasonable way to view the vacuum. It's something that no serious quantum field theorist takes seriously as far as I know.”

Instead, Woodward thinks that the results of NASA’s EmDrive experiments can be explained without having to overturn the basic laws of physics.

“The Mach effect is the only possible way to explain this,” said Woodward. “If they are looking at a real anomalous signal, and you want to try to explain it with physics that is not nonsense, then that seems to be the only way to approach this.”

As the first person to theorize about Mach effects in 1990, Woodward should know. According to Woodward’s Mach effect theory, when a body of mass is accelerated, some of the force applied to that body does not result in kinetic energy but is stored as potential energy in the body. While the acceleration is changing the internal energy of the body changes as well, which manifests itself as a change in the resting mass of that body.

The accelerating body is essentially being squished between the force being applied in the direction of its acceleration and the pushback from the rest of the material in the universe via a gravitational field. These two oppositional forces change the internal energy of the accelerating body and no physical laws are being broken: Momentum is conserved, but small amounts of it are being temporarily “stored” in the accelerating body.

According to Woodward, this mass fluctuation effect could account for the thrust observed at the NASA Eagleworks lab. If the microwaves propagating in the EmDrive cone are applying force to the material that the cone is made of, then you might explain the thrust generated this way by the Mach effect outlined by Woodward.

Woodward has spent the last two decades building devices which have successfully demonstrated the Mach effect, although his theory is still far from mainstream within the physics community. Still, it is gaining ground as more successful experiments confirm his theory. March, for one, has worked with Woodward on a number of successful Mach effect experiments over the last decade, and, at September’s Exotic Propulsion conference in Estes Park, Colorado, three physicists besides Woodward claimed to have experimentally reproduced Woodward’s Mach effect results.

“In my view, it’s the only physics that I know and trust to not involve wishful thinking and magical fields,” said Woodward.

For now, all we know is that the paper leaked on Saturday is in fact legitimate—it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in the AIAA’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, where it is slated to appear in the December issue. What is unclear is how much the peer-reviewed version will have changed from the early release version leaked online.

According to Woodward, who saw a copy of the paper shortly after it had been accepted for peer review, the main difference between the accepted copy and the leaked early release is that the latter has way more theory trying to explain the results. Supposedly the AIAA would only accept the paper if White and his colleagues ditched the quantum vacuum theory and just published the results of their research without trying to explain it.

What remains to be seen is whether others can use Woodward’s Mach effect theory to reproduce the results seen in the NASA Eagleworks lab and thereby offer a compelling explanation for what White and his colleagues observed.

“Absent a convincing physical explanation that doesn't fly in the face of well-known principles of physics, you should hold in abeyance any judgment as to whether or not [the NASA results are] real,” said Woodward. “This stuff is much harder to do and get right than almost anybody who has not actually been in the trenches doing it really appreciates. The odds against anything being real in this business are very high.”

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Geschreven door peter om 10:08 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Expert: Brandstofvrije EmDrive ‘is niet onmogelijk’, stelt voor raadsels

Expert: Brandstofvrije EmDrive 'is niet onmogelijk', maar stelt wel voor raadsels

Expert: Brandstofvrije EmDrive ‘is niet onmogelijk’, stelt voor raadsels

Er is de laatste tijd veel te doen rond de EmDrive, een brandstofvrije motor die in strijd lijkt te zijn met de natuurkundige wetten.

Deze ‘onmogelijke’ motor zou mensen in slechts 10 weken tijd naar Mars kunnen brengen.

Hoewel velen twijfelen of de EmDrive echt kan werken, zeggen experts dat de motor niet onmogelijk is, al begrijpen ze niet goed hoe het apparaat precies werkt.

Het zou allemaal draaien om het Mach-effect, schrijft Motherboard. “Waar het hier om gaat is of er tijdens de experimenten echt iets gebeurt of niet,” zei natuurkundige Jim Woodward.

Iets op het spoor

“Ik ken Paul March [één van de mensen die onderzoek doet naar de EmDrive] en hij doet goed werk, dus ik denk dat ze echt iets op het spoor zijn,” vervolgde hij.

“De resultaten kunnen echter niet worden verklaard aan de hand van de theorie die ze hebben opgesteld,” legde hij uit. “De vraag is dus: wat veroorzaakt de aandrijving?”

Volgens Woodward kunnen microgolven in een vacuüm geen stuwkracht genereren. Dat is fysiek onmogelijk, aldus de natuurkundige.

Verklaard

Hij zegt dat de werking van de ogenschijnlijk onmogelijke EmDrive kan worden verklaard door het Mach-effect, zonder daarbij de natuurkundige wetten te overtreden.

Woodward theoretiseert dat een deel van de kracht die wordt uitgeoefend op een accelererende massa wordt opgeslagen als potentiële energie.

Hierdoor ontstaan fluctuaties in de rustende massa van het object en dit effect kan de stuwkracht genereren die tijdens experimenten is waargenomen.

Naar verluidt werken een aantal groepen momenteel met de technologie, waaronder de Eagleworks Laboratories van de NASA.

[Motherboard]

Geschreven door peter om 09:58 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

VREEMDE RUIMTESCHEPEN OP DE MAAN ( VIDEO )

VREEMDE RUIMTESCHEPEN OP DE MAAN ( VIDEO )

Omdat we de afgelopen dagen te maken hadden met een zogenaamde supermaan, waren er meer dan ooit telescopen die kant op gericht.

En daarom zijn er diverse mensen die zonder enige twijfel vreemde ruimteschepen boven het maanoppervlak hebben weten vast te leggen.

Dat er ruimteschepen op de maan waren, zoveel is zeker. Wat niet zeker is, is de oorsprong van deze UFO’s. Want dat zijn het tot op dit moment, aangezien niemand er nog in is geslaagd om de objecten te identificeren.

Er zijn verschillende opnames beschikbaar en hier volgt de eerste:

Een kenner kwam met het volgende commentaar:

Interessante waarneming, beide ufo's draaien om hun eigen as, dit is iets wat bij andere serieuze waarnemingen ook het geval is.

Een nog mooiere opname:

Dan worden er vervolgens opnames gemaakt van wat waarschijnlijk dezelfde UFO is, maar dan net boven het maanoppervlak.

xxx

Je kunt zien dat het object over het oppervlak van de maan vliegt, omdat het ook een schaduw werpt en als je goed kijkt, dan is zelfs te zien dat er een soort driehoek bovenop de UFO zit.

Vergeleken met het maanoppervlak heeft deze UFO een grootte van ergens tussen de twee en vijf kilometer, dus geen kleine jongen.

Hier volgen de bewegende beelden van dit object:

Ongetwijfeld zal niemand in Den Haag het de moeite waard vinden om hier vragen over te stellen. Daar houden ze zich liever bezig met wat DENK nu weer niet allemaal heeft bedacht.

{ http://niburu.co/ }

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Geschreven door peter om 09:46 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

Taiwan School System Puts UFO Sightings Daily Into Their Textbooks, Nov 2016, UFO Sighting News.

Taiwan School System Puts UFO Sightings Daily Into Their Textbooks, Nov 2016, UFO Sighting News.

Now, this is getting a bit strange. I have taught Jerry English since he was 4 years old, and sadly when he hit junior high, his family moved back to south of Taiwan to be closer to other family.

Today I received a text message from his mom with a photo (above) from his junior high textbook. The photo just blew my mind. To get into the educational systems textbooks is both odd and amazing.

Its nice that the Taiwan Educational system included such important information into the textbooks, so that students can learn a diverse menu of subjects.

I do have two degrees in education, BA in elementary education and a Masters in Counselling education, so it personally feels great to be taken seriously by the school system in my own country.
Scott C. Waring

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{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Geschreven door peter om 09:32 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

UFO Over Casino At Laughlin, Nevada Nov 13, 2016, UFO Sighting News.

UFO Over Casino At Laughlin, Nevada Nov 13, 2016, UFO Sighting News

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Date of sighting: November 13, 2016
Location of sighting: Laughlin, Nevada, USA
News source: MUFON #80486

I really like this witness account. It highly detailed and even includes a second witness account with it. This gives us a better perspective of what happened and what they saw. Nevada is a lower populated state, so UFOs will feel more comfortable to explore the area than say New York. With a total population of 7,323 its a perfect location to see a UFO more often than other locations.
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states:

We observed two dark objects pass over Riverside Casino as it was caught in lights shining up illuminating front of building.

Following the StarWorks UFO conference, Witness #2 (or W2) and I walked along the Colorado river front from the Aquarius Resort upriver to the Highway 163 bridge, along the river walk in front of the Laughlin casinos. We walked across the bridge and noticed the beautifully lit Riverfront casino and hotel. We were taking pictures of the scenery from the Arizona side of the river when W2 first noticed the object.

She first called my attention to the first object as we were looking across river toward casino with a "what's that?" and pointed toward the casino. I had been looking down at my iPhone, changing the settings on my camera app. I quickly looked up and saw a fleeting glimpse of the first object as it moved out of light beam.

We watched for a few moments more - about 10 seconds to a minute - when she said, "There's another one". At first I almost couldn't see it. Then I noticed same type of shape as the first one. Again, it was a fleeting glimpse, no more than a second or two.

Both objects were shadowy and indistinct, roughly crescent, boomerang or chevron shaped. I could only see the leading edge clearly, which was lighter in color and caught the hotel lights.

They traveled smoothly from N to S, over the Riverfront casino building, passing through the light beam.

Length of crescent was approximately half fingernail width at arm's length. There was no sound associated with the objects.

Second one moved same way as first, illuminated by hotel lights projecting up. It appeared to be passing directly over the building at approximately half-again the bldg height. (Using the Theodolite app on my iPhone, I measured it to be about 10 degrees elevation from horizontal).

I estimate the speed to be about twice to four times walking speed.

We observed each object for about one to two seconds and lost sight of each when it passed out of hotel light beam.

We talked about it for a few moments, trying to decide what it was.
We waited about five to ten more minutes for another of the objects to appear. I had my iPhone camera set to video with maximum zoom, but unfortunately we didn't see any more of the objects. We gave up and decided to walk back across the bridge toward the Nevada side of the river.

We decided as we were walking back across the bridge, that we would each write down our descriptions of the sighting before we discussed it further. We jotted quick notes on the sighting as we ate dinner in the Mexican restaurant across the street from the Riverfront Casino. This is my description from my notes that night.

Witness 2 Description (copied from her notes)
Observed two objects passing over the Riverfront Hotel.

At the time of the sighting, we were about a half mile from the hotels standing on the sidewalk along St. hwy 163 near a stoplight just across the river on the Arizona side. We stopped to take photos of where we were staying.

After the StarworksUSA conference ended, around 5pm, W1 and I took a walk along the river walkway. The moon was full and the temperature was in the 50's. I wanted to see the small helicopter that was landed (displayed) along the river walk. The helicopter was not there but we decided to keep walking.

The path led to the State Hwy 163 bridge over the Colorado river and we decided to walk across it. On the bridge we passed a man on a bicycle who appeared to be homeless. After we crossed the bridge I turned around and noticed the nice view of the hotels, we stopped walking and took pictures. Then I noticed something moving above the Riverside hotel/casino in the light and pointed it out to W1. He saw it as well.

I saw a dark, curved boomerang shaped object. What appeared to be the back underside was clearly defined but I could not make out the far side of the object against the dark sky. The lights from the top of the hotel lit the underside and front edge as it moved down river. The edge was well defined and easy to see. Then as we watched, another one appeared a bit lower and moved in the same manner. There were no lights or sound.

We observed a helicopter landing at the airport about 2 miles away, 10 minutes prior, and also saw two shooting stars after seeing the objects. We later observed other air traffic but nothing was as low as what we saw.
Venus was also in the sky.

Note: There was a man in the riverside park below us walking his large dog, where we stopped to take photos. He may have seen the objects as well.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

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Geschreven door peter om 09:28 Stuur door

Vrijdag 18 november 2016

UFO Over Casino At Laughlin, Nevada Nov 13, 2016, UFO Sighting News.

UFO Over Casino At Laughlin, Nevada Nov 13, 2016, UFO Sighting News

Witness 2 Description (copied from her notes)
Observed two objects passing over the Riverfront Hotel.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

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Geschreven door peter om 09:28 Stuur door

Donderdag 17 november 2016

Supermassive Black Hole Hides Inside Its Own "Exhaust"

Artist's impression of the black hole at the center of Messier 77.

Supermassive Black Hole Hides Inside Its Own "Exhaust"

So this is why black holes are so shy.

Alasdair Wilkins

The galaxy Messier 77 is a lot like our Milky Way. Both are what’s known as barred spiral galaxies, meaning massive groups of stars are arranged in huge arms extending like spirals from the center. And at the center of both galaxies is a supermassive black hole a million or even a billion times more massive than the Sun.

The center of Messier 77 is what’s known as an active galactic nucleus. This means that the accretion disk — the accumulation of cold gas and other matter around the black hole — is the source of much higher than expected emissions from across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. These AGN are hugely useful in searching for ever more distant objects in the cosmos. Some of these AGN are hidden inside thick, donut-shaped clumps of gas known as a torus. Actually, it’s very possible that all AGN have a torus around them, but only some are hidden relative to our Earthbound perspective.

“We know from various observations that some AGN are hidden by colder dust clouds from our point of view on earth,” Jack Gallimore, an astrophysicist at Bucknell University, told Inverse. “The unifying model arose that all AGN are surrounded by a donut of cold gas. If the donut is viewed from the side, we see a ‘Type 2,’ or hidden, AGN. If our view looks down the hole, we see a ‘Type 1’ AGN, that is, we see the accretion disk directly.”

These donuts of cold gas provide a natural cloak for supermassive black holes to hide inside, yet it’s unclear how these naturally unstable clumps of gas remain as they do without changing shape or falling into the black hole.

“Nobody knew how the donut of cold, dust gas, or the torus, stayed puffed up,” said Gallimore. “Cold gas donuts are not stable: They should collapse to a flattened disk.”

We’re so used to thinking about black holes as gobbling up any matter that gets too close that it’s more than a little surprising to hear the answer Gallimore and his fellow researchers have found: The black holes themselves fling matter from their accretion disks back out toward the gas donut, like an engine giving off exhaust.

Gallimore and fellow researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in South America to detect clouds of carbon monoxide pulling away from the outer portion of the accretion disk around the Messier 77 black hole. The energies of the superheated inner accretion disk created magnetic fields that were then in turn able to accelerate these clouds to speeds much faster than would normally be expected — say from a normal top speed of 100 kilometers per second to a whopping 400. That’s quite a bit faster than the disk’s normal rotational speed, which lets the gases escape the disk and move further away from the black hole.

“We’re learning more about the accretion disk and how the accretion disk feeds the black hole,” Gallimore told Inverse, saying evidence of this feedback from black hole and its accretion disk to the rest of the galaxy could mean the black hole plays a more active role in the galaxy’s development than we thought. “We will also learn something about how the black hole might feedback to the host galaxy and affect its evolution, although we’re not there yet with this particular project.”

While this latest research has revealed the interactions between black hole, accretion disk, and surrounding gas torus, Gallimore is optimistic that more study from the telescope in Atacama will reveal still more surprises about the complicated lives of black holes.

“Stay tuned to ALMA,” he said. “There are many researchers pursuing this question about NGC 1068 and other AGNs. Looking at the molecular, cooler gas is going to reveal surprises.”

Photos via NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry / Skyworks

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }