Speed of universe’s expansion remains elusive

Unless you are a recent arrival from another universe, you’ve no doubt heard that this one is expanding. It’s getting bigger all the time. What’s more, its growth rate is accelerating. Every day, the universe expands a little bit faster than it did the day before.

Those day-to-day differences are negligible, though, for astronomers trying to measure the universe’s expansion rate. They want to know how fast it is expanding “today,” meaning the current epoch of cosmic history. That rate is important for understanding how the universe works, knowing what its ultimate fate will be and even what it is made of. After all, the prime mission of the Hubble Space Telescope when it was launched in 1990 was to help determine that expansion rate (known, not coincidentally, as the Hubble constant, named for the astronomer Edwin Hubble).

Since then evidence from Hubble (the telescope) and other research projects has established a reasonably precise answer for the Hubble constant: 73, in the units commonly used for this purpose. (It means that two independent astronomical bodies separated by 3.26 million light-years will appear to be moving away from each other at 73 kilometers per second.) Sure, there’s a margin of error, but not much. The latest analysis from one team, led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess, puts the Hubble constant in the range of 72–75, as reported in a paper posted online January 3. Considering that as late as the 1980s astronomers argued about whether the Hubble constant was closer to 40 or 90, that’s quite an improvement in precision.

But there’s a snag in this success. Current knowledge of the universe suggests a way to predict what the Hubble constant ought to be. And that prediction gives a probable range of only 66–68. The two methods don’t match.

“This is very surprising, I think, and very interesting,” Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a talk January 9 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

It’s surprising because astrophysicists and cosmologists thought they had pretty much figured the universe out. It’s made up of a little bit of ordinary matter, a lot of some exotic “dark matter” of unknown identity, and even more of a mysterious energy permeating the vacuum of space, exerting gravitational repulsion. Remember that acceleration of the expansion rate? It implies the existence of such energy. Because nobody knows what it is, people call it “dark energy,” while suspecting that its real name is lambda, the Greek letter that stands for “cosmological constant.” (It’s called a constant because any part of space should possess the same amount of vacuum energy.) Dark energy contributes something like 70 percent of the total mass-energy content of the universe, various lines of evidence indicate.

If all that’s right, then it’s not all that hard to infer how fast the universe should be expanding today. You just take the recipe of matter, dark matter and dark energy and add some ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Then you carefully measure the temperature of deep space, where the only heat is the faint glow remaining from the Big Bang. That glow, the cosmic microwave background radiation, varies slightly in temperature from point to point. From the size of those variations, you can calculate how far the radiation from the Big Bang has been traveling to reach our telescopes. Combine that with the universe’s mass-energy recipe, and you can calculate how fast the universe is expanding. (You can, in fact, do this calculation at home with the proper mathematical utensils.)

An international team’s project using cosmic microwave background data inferred a Hubble constant of 67, substantially less than the 73 or 74 based on actually measuring the expansion (by analyzing how the light from distant supernova explosions has dimmed over time).

When this discrepancy first showed up a few years ago, many experts believed it was just a mirage that would fade with more precise measurement. But it hasn’t.

“This starts to get pretty serious,” Riess said at the astronomy meeting. “In both cases these are very mature measurements. This is not the first time around for either of these projects.”

One commonly proposed explanation contends that the supernova studies are measuring the local value of the Hubble constant. Perhaps we live in a bubble, with much less matter than average, skewing expansion measurements. In that case, the cosmic microwave background data might provide a better picture of the “global” expansion rate for the whole universe. But supernovas observed by the Hubble telescope extend far enough out to refute that possibility, Riess said.

“Even if you thought we lived in a void…, you still are basically stuck with the same problem.”

Consequently it seems most likely that something is wrong with the matter-energy recipe for the universe (technically, the cosmological standard model) used in making the expansion rate prediction. Maybe the vacuum energy driving cosmic acceleration is not a cosmological constant after all, but some other sort of field filling space. Such a field could vary in strength over time and throw off the calculations based on a constant vacuum energy. But Riess pointed out that the evidence is growing stronger and stronger that the vacuum energy is just the cosmological constant. “I would say there we have less and less wiggle room.”

Another possibility, appealing to many theorists, is the existence of a new particle, perhaps a fourth neutrino or some other relativistic (moving very rapidly) particle zipping around in the early universe.

“Relativistic particles — theorists have no trouble inventing new ones, ones that don’t violate anything else,” Riess said. “Many of them are quite giddy about the prospect of some evidence for that. So that would not be a long reach.”

Other assumptions built into the current cosmological standard model might also need to be revised. Dark matter, for example, is presumed to be very aloof from other forms of matter and energy. But if it interacted with radiation in the early universe, it could have an effect similar to that of relativistic particles, changing how the energy in the early universe is divided up among its components. Such a change in energy balance would alter how much the universe expands at early times, corrupting the calibrations needed to infer the current expansion rate.

It’s not the first time that determining the Hubble constant has provoked controversy. Edwin Hubble himself initially (in the 1930s) vastly overestimated the expansion rate. Using his rate, calculations indicated that the universe was much younger than the Earth, an obvious contradiction. Even by the 1990s, some Hubble constant estimates suggested an age for the universe of under 10 billion years, whereas many stars appeared to be several billion years older than that.

Hubble’s original error could be traced to lack of astronomical knowledge. His early overestimates turned out to be signals of a previously unknown distinction between different generations of stars, some younger and some older, Riess pointed out. That threw off distance estimates to some stars that Hubble used to estimate the expansion rate. Similarly, in the 1990s the expansion rate implied too young a universe because dark energy was not then known to exist and therefore was not taken into account when calculating the universe’s age.

So the current discrepancy, Riess suggested, might also be a signal of some astronomical unknown, whether a new particle, new interactions of matter and radiation, or a phenomenon even more surprising — something that would really astound a visitor from another universe.

Follow me on Twitter: @tom_siegfried

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Hubble telescope ramps up search for Europa’s watery plumes

Observations in the next 8 months aim to confirm that Jupiter’s icy moon spews water from its south pole

BY 

LISA GROSSMAN 

 

LITTLE MOON, BIG WORLD  Watching the tiny ice moon Europa cross in front of Jupiter helped astronomers reveal Europa’s watery plumes. This artist’s impression superimposes real visible images of Jupiter and Europa with ultraviolet data from the Hubble Space Telescope showing the plumes (blue).

OXON HILL, Md. — Astronomers may soon know for sure if Europa is spouting off. After finding signs that Jupiter’s icy moon emits repeating plumes of water near its southern pole, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope hope to detect more evidence of the geysers.

“The statistical significance is starting to look pretty good,” astronomer William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore says. He presented preliminary results on the hunt for the plumes at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 9.

Sparks’ team started observing Europa on January 5, hoping to catch it passing in front of Jupiter 30 times before September. Hubble can detect active plumes silhouetted against background light from Jupiter. If the plume repeats as often as it seems to, “it’s essentially a certainty we’ll see it again if it’s real,” Sparks said.

Europa hosts a vast saltwater ocean buried under a thick icy shell. In 2012, astronomers using Hubble spotted high concentrations of hydrogen and oxygen over Europa’s southern hemisphere — signs that Europa was spitting water into space (SN: 1/25/14, p. 6). Later efforts to find those signs using the same technique yielded nothing.

But using Jupiter as a backdrop for the plumes, Sparks and his colleagues spotted several eruptions (SN Online: 9/26/16) — once in March 2014, again in February 2016 and possibly also in March 2017, Sparks said.

Bull’s eye

The spot where Europa’s plumes appear to originate (left, with the green oval showing the 2014 occurrence and the blue oval showing the 2016 occurrence) is also the warmest spot on the icy moon’s surface, shown in a heat map from the Galileo spacecraft (right, with lighter yellow contours showing relatively warmer regions).

W.B. SPARKS ET AL/ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS 2017

Maps of Europa’s heat and ionosphere made by the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s show the plumes’ location was warmer than the surrounding ice. It also had an unusually high concentration of charged particles, perhaps the result of water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen. Both observations support the idea that some ocean is escaping at that spot.

“If it’s a coincidence, it’s a hell of a coincidence,” Sparks says.

Citations

• W.B. Sparks et al. Evidence of plumes on Europa from far-ultraviolet observations with HST. 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Oxon Hill, Md., January 9, 2018.
• W.B. Sparks et al. Active cryovolcanism on Europa? Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 839, Published April 13, 2017. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aa67f8
• M.A. McGrath and W.B. Sparks. Galileo ionosphere profile coincident with repeat plume detection location at Europa. Research Notes of the AAS, published online November 9, 2017. doi: 10.3847/2515-5172/aa988e.

Further Reading

• C. Crockett. Europa spouting off again. Science News Online, September 26, 2016.
• A. Grant. Europa vents water, Hubble data suggest. Science News, Vol. 185, January 25, 2014, p. 6. 

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Professor Stephen Hawking Reveals 3 Ways We Can Travel In Time

So… time travel is possible… at least theoretically.

Traveling in time has been one of the greatest fantasies of the human being for centuries. It is a popular trend in movies and science fiction series, and the idea has inspired novels from Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Tale, to Charlton Heston’s The Planet of the Apes masterpiece.

So… is time travel achievable? If we take a look at the last couple of years, we will notice quite a few scientific studies that have researched the idea of traveling in time.

We’ve written about the idea of time travel, and the studies which have looked into the possibility of traveling in time quite a few times in the past.

We covered an article that suggests how scientists found out that ‘mathematically’ time travel is possible.

“People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t do it,” said Ben Tippett, a physicist, and mathematician from the University of British Columbia, said in a UBC news release, adding “But, mathematically, it is possible.”

According to a number of scientists, there are ways by which we could travel in time.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

By using Einstein’s Theory of General relativity as the basis for a hypothetical device which they named a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS), scientists have come up with a mathematical model of a theoretical time machine box that has the ability to move back and forth through space and time.

Interesting comments about Time travel were made by Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel of Lewis & Clark College wrote the Forbes blog Starts With A Bang: “While we still haven’t discovered the conditions we need to travel back in time and find the necessary means by which we can create a large enough system for humans to do so, ‘nothing is forbidding it’ in the laws of theoretical physics.”

But perhaps the scientist who most embraces the idea of time travel as a possibility is astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking who suggests there are three ways we can travel in time.

According to the famous British astrophysicist, there are at least three (hypothetical) ways in which it would be possible to travel through time.

The first one would be to travel in time through a wormhole, a central figure of theoretical physics that quantumly represents a point in spacetime that connects with another. If we were to find a way to enter a Wormhole, we could then create a tunnel between two points in space-time.

The second theory according to Professor Hawking would only allow us to travel to the future, and it would mean the traveler would have to approach a black hole, capable of dramatically slowing down time, and then returning to Earth, where time would have passed normally.

Finally, the British scientist proposes that the most viable alternative to building a time machine would be to build a device capable of moving around the Earth at the speed of light, which would allow the life of its passengers on board to pass 7 thousand times faster than on Earth, allowing a shift to the future.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Gravitational-wave emission from a collapsing star, via Goethe University.

In 2016, when the twin LIGO detectors made their first historic observation of gravitational waves, astronomers heralded the news both as a confirmation of Einstein’s general relativity and also because, as they love to say, the detection:

… opened a new window on the cosmos.

And indeed that window has begun to crack. On January 16, 2018, astrophysicists at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany described how they used observations of gravitational waves to answer a question that’s plagued scientists since the 1960s, when they first discovered neutron stars, or stars composed predominantly of closely packed neutrons. By definition, a neutron star has a very small radius (about the diameter of an earthly city) and very high density (a teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about 10 million tons). A typical neutron star mass is about 1.4 suns.

Notice all the abouts in those last couple of sentences? Now, for the first time, astrophysicists are saying they’ve succeeded in putting more precision into those numbers, by calculating a strict upper limit for the maximum mass of neutron stars. They say that, with an accuracy of a few percent, the maximum mass of non-rotating neutron stars cannot exceed 2.16 solar masses.

The research results were published in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Letters, and, according to these scientists:

Just a few days later, research groups from the USA and Japan confirmed the findings, despite having so far followed different and independent approaches.

What happens to a neutron star that does exceed its mass limit? In that case, the neutron star collapses into an even more compressed and vastly more exotic object known as a black hole.

Physicist Luciano Rezzolla at Goethe University Frankfurt and his students Elias Most and Lukas Weih conducted the study. Their statement explained:

The basis for this result was the ‘universal relations’ approach [described here] developed in Frankfurt a few years ago. The existence of ‘universal relations’ implies that practically all neutron stars ‘look alike,’ meaning that their properties can be expressed in terms of dimensionless quantities. The researchers combined these ‘universal relations’ with data on gravitational-wave signals and the subsequent electromagnetic radiation (kilonova) obtained during the observation last yearof two merging neutron stars in the framework of the LIGO experiment.

In the near-term future, these scientists expect more observations via gravitational-wave astronomy, which will further reduce uncertainties about neutron stars’ maximum mass. In the meantime, they said, their result is a good example of the interaction between theoretical and experimental research. Rezzolla commented:

The beauty of theoretical research is that it can make predictions. Theory, however, desperately needs experiments to narrow down some of its uncertainties. It’s therefore quite remarkable that the observation of a single binary neutron star merger that occurred millions of light-years away – combined with the universal relations discovered through our theoretical work – have allowed us to solve a riddle that has seen so much speculation in the past.

Bottom line: Settling a long debate, astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt now say neutron stars can’t exceed the mass of 2.16 suns. Add more mass, and a neutron star becomes a black hole.

Source: Using Gravitational-wave Observations and Quasi-universal Relations to Constrain the Maximum Mass of Neutron Stars

Via Goethe University

{ http://earthsky.org/ }

Cape Town Is Set to Run Out of Water in Less Than One Hundred Days

Creative Commons

Dwindling Supplies

Over the past three years, a lot has changed for the city of Cape Town. Seated in a geologic bowl beneath Table Mountain and historically fed by heavy winter precipitation, the South African metropolis has been known as a haven of abundant natural water. This year, however, Cape Town may be the first major city in the world to run out of water.

A three-year drought in the region around Cape Town has caused levels in its water-supplying dams to drop dangerously low. Experts have predicted that the city will reach “day zero,” a point at which the dams drop below 13.5 percent of their combined capacity, on April 21.

If that happens, all non-emergency municipal water supplies will be turned off except in the poorest neighborhoods. Residents will be required to source their water from one of 200 available collection sites. Each resident will have access to 6.6 gallons per day, a maximum enforced by armed guards charged with keeping the peace.

For now, the city is working on water recycling projects and constructing three desalination plants, which they hope to have up and running by March. It is also enforcing a water limit of 23 gallons per person per day.

Time Magazine reports that the Cape Town drought has led to a backlog of orders for water storage tanks, and according to the publication, “unwashed hair is now a symbol of upright citizenship” in the city.

In a controversial move, Cape Town has even produced a live water-monitoring mapthat displays how much water properties are using in order to encourage — or shame — residents into matching their neighbors’ good habits.

“The potential water-saving benefit for all of Cape Town of making water consumption indicators publicly available outweighs any privacy issues at this stage of the crisis,” Zara Nicholson‚ spokesperson for Mayor Patricia de Lille, told Cape Town Etc. “This behavior-modification tool attempts to acknowledge good savers and encourage those who have yet to join the efforts.”

Climate Change, Today

If the situation caused by the Cape Town drought sounds like the beginning of a Mad Max-esque dystopia to you, you’re not alone.

Regional residents have expressed astonishment and fear over the coming crisis. Some have even protested what they believe was a failure by the Cape Town government to address the problem, all amidst a growing corruption scandalconcerning the Cape Town mayor.

Above all else, the Cape Town drought and its implications for residents may be a stark reminder that climate change is not a future concern — it’s a reality of our present, happening at this very moment.

As with any single weather or climate event, it’s difficult to blame the Cape Town drought solely on our dependence on fossil fuels. Climate change just isn’t that simple. Yet just as experts are making progress in connecting individual events, such as hurricanes, to climate change, analysis has shown that Cape Town’s regional drought was likely worsened by human actions.

Alex de Kock@Alex_CPT

The #Capewatercrisis continues, this is the latest photos of Theewaterskloof dam, its scary to see how barren it is, where there was once water is now dust and sand. #CapeDrought #87litres Hopefully winter 2018 comes to the party.

5:10 PM - Dec 26, 2017

•  11 Reply
•  77 Retweets
•  77 likes

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The chances of extreme drought are increasing in the Western Cape region overall. While wet and snowy years will still happen, the area is trending toward being dry and drought-prone. Local climate trends certainly have something to do with this, but so do globally increasing temperatures and shifting weather patterns.

Indeed, research has found that hotter, drier weather is becoming more common across the globe.

One study predicts that nearly 74 percent of global populations will be threatened by dangerous heatwaves by the close of the century, and we could even see record-high summer temperatures every other year as soon as 2030. In 2015, NASA satellite data found that one-third of global groundwater reservoirs were over-stressed by human use, suggesting a grim outcome if we do not learn to use water more sustainably.

Cape Town is just one example of these predictions spilling over into reality.

References: 

• Aljazeera, 
• BBC, 
• Time Magazine

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Orbital pollution might not enjoy the attention and awareness that other inevitable catastrophic disasters like climate change or asteroid impacts do, but it won’t be long before humanity will have to confront the fact that according to NASA estimates, over half a million pieces of debris are currently spinning around the Earth at speeds up to 17,500 mph. Most are smaller than a marble, but a few tens of thousands of objects are believed to be the size of a softball or larger. Given the scope of the orbital pollution problem, it’s kind of a miracle that orbital pollution has yet to cause a major catastrophe either in space or down here in gravity land. Space junk does occasionally fall to Earth unannounced, or even announced as in the case of the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station which is set to fall to Earth sometime soon wherever it happens to end up. Here’s hoping I don’t win that lottery.

Chinese space agencies aren’t sure when – or where – the space station will come down.

Speaking of Chinese space junk, scientists at China’s Air Force Engineering University have developed a new concept they believe could help clear up the increasingly cluttered zone of space surrounding our planet. The concept involves a satellite housing an incredibly powerful laser which could autonomously detect and hone in on individual pieces of space junk, obliterating them into dust or blowing them far out of Earth’s orbit.

A picture of orbital debris taken during the first mission to the ISS sparked a host of theories about an alien “black knight” satellite.

The technology hasn’t been tested yet, but the Chinese scientists have conducted simulations which serve as a proof of concept for their idea. According to their publication in The International Journal for Light and Electron Optics, the researchers believe their simulation “provides necessary theoretical basis for the deployment of space-based laser station and the further application of space debris removal by using space-based laser.” Hmm…space based laser you say…

What could go wrong?

While ridding the Earth of its orbital pollution problem sounds great and all, the concept isn’t without its critics. Military watchdogs have noted that China (as well as all the other superpowers) have been busy testing space weaponry designed to take out adversaries’ satellites in order to gain battlefield advantage by disrupting GPS or communications. Several satellites have also been destroyed or gone missing under mysterious circumstances lately, leading some to believe there might already be a shooting war in space. Could this “space junk laser” actually be a weapon in disguise? For that matter, what military technology isn’t a weapon in disguise?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

REVEALED: Shock truth about Pentagon UFO picture which convinced world aliens may exist

EXCLUSIVE: Express.co.uk today reveals the shocking truth about a "UFO picture" that played a key role in the staggering "Pentagon UFO" story that has convinced many people "we are not alone" and intelligent aliens may be flying advanced craft on Earth.

UFO believers got one thing right—here's what they get wrong

 by Seth Shostak, SETI Institute

Credit: SETI Institute

The past few weeks have been good for UFO believers. For decades they've clamored for "disclosure"—an admission by the government that it knows of galactic gatecrashers, and that aliens are irrefutably here. This always struck me as a classic argument from ignorance: We lack good evidence to prove our case because it's been hidden.

That wouldn't work in the courts or in science, but hey, it kind of sounds good.

Well, it turns out something was hidden. In 2007 Senator Harry Reid initiated a secret Pentagon program to investigate strange aerial phenomena. It ran for five years and cost $22 million. Finally, the skeptics—those who doubt that we're hosting extraterrestrial visitors—had been shown the error of their disbelieving ways.

Except that the Pentagon study seems to have found no good evidence for visitors. Yes, there was an intriguing military video purportedly showing a cluster of alien craft. But when I watched it, I noticed that the cluster was always in the center of the field of view—which suggests that these "craft" were actually caused by the instruments aboard the plane rather than something in the airspace in front of it. Experts will undoubtedly weigh in.

What would be good evidence of alien presence? Nearly every day I receive an email or phone call from someone who claims to have seen "something very important" (which I've learned from experience is code for "UFO"). They want to chat.

So what do I do? First off, I generally dismiss witness testimony, or, put another way, stories. It's not that I think people are lying. But if someone tells you he saw a ghost at the mall, you'll have a hard time doing much with that information unless ectoplasm hangs out there on a regular basis.

Witness testimony isn't terribly reliable in criminal court cases. It's even less useful for science.

So I ask about physical or photographic evidence. There never seems to be any of the former, but often there is imagery. Some folks won't send it, apparently afraid that I'll sell their pix and deprive them of a Nobel Prize or a photo royalty. The photos I do see tend to show obvious optical effects—often bright lights caused by internal reflections in the lens or color fringes resulting from the workings of the camera's chip. Other photos show diffraction patterns caused by "hunting" of the camera's autofocus system. Many people interpret these patterns as spacecraft markings.

A lot of the images are shot at night, making them particularly hard to interpret. Perhaps daylight is too dangerous for aliens, because then it might be possible to see detail in photos taken of them. I wonder if, when the sun is shining, they hang out underground like bats.

I'm also wary of anthropomorphic touches—for example, when someone says, "They seemed friendly and just want to establish contact" or "They're buzzing our missile silos." The latter is particularly goofy. Any aliens who come from the stars are way ahead of us. If you could visit America 150 years ago, would you spend time inspecting the Union Army's cannon-making factory at Pittsburgh's Allegheny Arsenal?

Hoaxes—and of course there are some—don't seem to be common. The people who contact me all sound pretty sincere. But the one UFO claim that has zero worth for me is: "I know what I saw." After all, if that's what someone asserts, there's no room for discussion.

More than anything, I ask myself if the extraterrestrial explanation is compelling—or merely possible. Is the evidence proof-positive or only puzzling? The latter isn't good enough.

Personally, I'm mystified by the stage illusions of David Copperfield. Did he really walk through that giant fan, or is that only a possibility? Just because I don't know what really happened is hardly reason to conclude that he can saunter through whirling metal blades without chopped Copperfield flying into the audience.

The Pentagon study is certainly interesting, but not because it proves alien visitation. Of course, you can be sure that the "disclosure" folks will soon be claiming that UFO evidence is still being covered up. Conspiracy theories never end.

In the era of Google Earth, when every square yard of the continents has been photographed and put online, it's hardly surprising that we have an unsatisfied craving to explore the unknown, to do what Columbus, Magellan, Cook, and others did a half-millennium ago.

Of course, in the 21st Century, a sailing vessel may no longer satisfy that need. A sailing saucer just might.

 Explore further: Revealed: the Pentagon's secret UFO-hunting program

{ https://phys.org/ }

'Surprising' UFO Sightings Are Skyrocketing in Italy—And These Government Files Back Them Up

{ https://www.outerplaces.com/ }

Stephen Hawking says the Earth will be a fireball by 2600

By Margi Murphy, The Sun

• APOCALYPSE ,  
• SPACE ,  
• STEPHEN HAWKING

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Longest underwater cave in the world found in Mexico

BY TIBI PUIU 

Not far from the beach resort of Tulum, Mexico, lies a cave system called Sac Actun — this may be the largest flooded cave in the world. The discovery was made by a team of divers who found a connection between two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico.

Credit: GAM.

Previously, Sac Actun was measured at 263 km but now, researchers working with the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM) — a project concerned with preserving subterranean waters in the Yucatan peninsula — say the cave system communicates with the 83-km-long Dos Ojos system. This would make the entire system a unitary 347-km-long (216-mile) cave.

The connection between the two cave systems was identified after speleologists spent months navigating the intricate maze of underwater channels.

Like the vast majority of the planet’s cave systems, Sac Actun lies in limestone rocks. This karst setting occurs when acidic water starts to break down the surface of bedrock, causing cracks and fissures. In time, these fissures start getting bigger and bigger, until they create sinkholes or caves. It’s amazing to think about it, but these incredible features were created by groundwater. Since in the Yucatan area, where the Sac Actun system is located, groundwater is portrayed as flowing in underground rivers, caves also tend to be quite lengthy.

Map of the connection area between Nohoch Nah Chich and Dos Ojos regions.

Cartography by Peter Sprouse.

GAM researchers underscore the importance of the finding in relation to the cultural heritage of the Maya civilization that dominated the area before the Spanish conquest.

Credit: GAM.

Many people are aware of the famous Mayan pyramids and other cultural landmarks. It’s a lesser known fact that the Mayan cities in which these relics were built drew upon an extensive network of sinkholes linked to subterranean waters known as cenotes. Some of these cenotes are known to have acquired a religious significance to the Maya, as well as their descendants.

“It allows us to appreciate much more clearly how the rituals, the pilgrimage sites and ultimately the great pre-Hispanic settlements that we know emerged,” Guillermo de Anda, director and underwater archaeologist on the Gran Acuifero Maya team, told Reuters.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Divers find 'amazing' underwater tunnel network that could unravel mysteries of Mayan civilisation

Samuel Osborne 

A team of divers have discovered what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet in eastern Mexico.

By connecting two underwater caverns, the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM) project identified the 216 mile (347km) cave after months of exploring a maze of underwater channels.

The project, which is dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula, said the discovery could shine new light on the ancient Mayan civilisation.

• READ MORE

Hidden passageway discovered under ancient Mayan temple

Near the beach resort of Tulum, the group found that the cave system known as Sac Actun, once measured at 163 miles (263km), communicated with the 52 mile (83km) Dos Ojos system, the GAM said in a statement. Because of this, Sac Actun has now absorbed Dos Ojos.

Guillermo de Anda, the director of GAM and an underwater archaeologist, said the “amazing” find would help to understand the development of the rich culture of the region, which was dominated by the Mayan civilisation before the Spanish conquest.

“It allows us to appreciate much more clearly how the rituals, the pilgrimage sites and ultimately the great pre-Hispanic settlements that we know emerged,” he told Reuters.

The finding has been described as ‘amazing’

(Reuters)

Mr de Anda and his team previously discovered what they believed was a hidden passageway beneath a 1,000-year-old Mayan temple. 

The experts thought the tunnel under the Kulkulcan pyramid, which is part of the Chichen Itza archaeological site in Yucatan, could lead to a natural sinkhole linked to subterranean waters, known as a cenote. 

The Yucatan peninsula is studded with monumental relics of the Mayan people, whose cities drew upon an extensive network cenotes.

The experts through the tunnel could lead to a natural sinkhole 

Reuters

Some cenotes acquired particular religious significance to the Mayans, whose descendents continue to inhabit the region.

Several are thought to have been used by the ancient Mayans for human sacrifices and previous expeditions have found human bones in cenotes beneath Chichen Itza.

More about: 

• Maya
• Yucatán peninsula
• Mexico

{ http://www.independent.co.uk/ }

Is America's Spy Plane Back — and Hypersonic?

Attempts to try and understand what happened in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980 have been thwarted by the fact that a sizeable number of official files on the case have been destroyed or have gone missing. Or, rather, that’s the story told to us. It wasn’t long after the events occurred that rumors began to circulate that on the second night of what were three nights of encounters, the U.K. planned to evacuate a very nearby prison HM Prison Highpoint North. Other stories surfaced, suggesting that Blundeston Prison and Hollesley Bay Youth Correctional Center were also primed for evacuation. Clearly, something of a deeply serious nature was going on at the height of the encounters.

One of those who took a deep interest in the Rendlesham Forest events was Lord Hill-Norton, who, from 1971 to 1973 was the Chief of the U.K.’s Defense Staff. He pressed for answers – not just on the case itself but on those evacuation orders too. Just like Roswell, the paperwork was gone. It was on January 23, 2001 that Lord Hill-Norton raised the evacuation issue with the Government’s House of Lords. Hill-Norton wanted answers to what he said were “instructions to prepare for a possible evacuation at some time between 25 and 30 December 1980.”

It didn’t take long for the government to get back to the by-then-retired Lord Hill-Norton. Available records from Blundeston Prison and Hollesley Bay Youth Correctional Center didn’t reveal anything odd at all. HM Prison Highpoint North, however, was quite another story. It turned out the December 1980 log-book from the base could not be found. Log-books for the other months were intact. When pushed for further information, the only thing that was offered by the government was the notion that the log-book had been mistakenly destroyed. Right.

Lord Hill-Norton didn’t stop there: he demanded access to the radar tapes of various military bases in the area, on the nights in question. Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean responded that all of the tapes had been routinely wiped clean: there was nothing to see. A trend was clearly developing.

What was certainly the most amazing – and suspicious – aspect of all this reared its head in May 2011. Freedom of Information Act documents on the Rendlesham Forest case surfaced that caught the attention of not just UFO researchers, by the U.K.’s media, too. The files were notable because of what they said about the case specifically. Rather, they were files which revealed that there was a massive gap in the Defense Intelligence papers where the Rendlesham papers should have been kept. Internal memos released via FOIA legislation showed that the Ministry of Defense suspected that “a deliberate attempt had been made to eradicate the records covering this incident.” Precisely who had done the eradicating was never proved. Like the Roswell files, though, the papers were gone and no-one had any kind of solid answer.

Further files were found to have been destroyed too, not just on Rendlesham but on other cases too. Film-footage of a UFO taken by a military pilot, in U.K. airspace, in 1956, was said by the government to have “probably” been destroyed. In 1999, the crew of a military vessel, the HMS Manchester, encountered a UFO during a naval operation in the North Sea. All aboard were unanimous that they had seen a large, circular-shaped craft flying in close proximity to the ship. I am not exaggerating when I say that the U.K. government failed to respond properly for data on the case because “an unusually strong gust of wind” below the ship’s log-book overboard!

Moving onto Australia, in the summer of 2011, the Australian Department of Defense admitted to having misplaced a UFO file that should have been packed with reports. Natalie Carpenter, of the nation’s Freedom of Information Office, responded to media inquiries by stating that, “The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost.”

UFO researcher-author Whitley Strieber made a very good observation, on June 6, 2011: “Last week, the Australian government announced that it has ‘lost’ its UFO files. Thus it joins the United States, which ‘lost’ all the files relating to the Roswell AFB dating from 1947 through 1952, and the United Kingdom, which recently announced that it has ‘lost’ all the files relating to the Rendlesham Forest UFO Case.”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

MAN FOTOGRAFEERT UFO EN COMMUNICEERT MET INZITTENDEN ( VIDEO )

Je hoort natuurlijk wel eens verhalen over mensen die zeggen dat ze telepathisch contact hebben gehad met buitenaardse wezens. 

Maar, wanneer er ook inderdaad foto's zijn om het verhaal te ondersteunen, dan wordt het ineens voor velen een stuk geloofwaardiger. 

Op 12 januari 2018 nam een man in de buurt van Orlando in Florida een aantal bijzondere foto's van een UFO, met daarbij een heel opmerkelijk verhaal. 

Niet alleen nam hij mooie foto's, maar zag hij via een raam in de UFO ook twee buitenaardsen, twee zogenaamde Nordic aliens, met wie hij telepathisch communiceerde. De man wil zijn identiteit niet helemaal prijsgeven en staat voorlopig bekend onder de initialen JP. 

Hij staat in contact met Dr. Michael Salla van Exopolitics, die deze man, ook gezien eerdere contacten, kwalificeert als een betrouwbare getuige, ook omdat er foto's zijn die het verhaal ondersteunen.

Op 12 januari rond zes uur 's avonds krijgt JP telepathisch een bericht door dat hij naar buiten moet gaan en naar de lucht kijken. Dit omdat ze zich dan aan hem zouden laten zien. JP vroeg toen eveneens telepathisch of hij foto's mocht nemen omdat dit toch wel een belangrijk element zou zijn om zijn verhaal later geloofwaardig te maken.

Klaarblijkelijk waren dit aliens waar JP al eerder contact mee had gehad in Brazilië. Dr. Salla bevestigt dat JP al in 2008 contact met hem had opgenomen over deze buitenaardse ontmoeting in Brazilië. Het schijnt dat deze buitenaardsen samenwerken met de Amerikaanse luchtmacht en dat ze missies uitvoeren in de buurt van Antarctica en in de ruimte. Hierdoor heeft ook de luchtmacht de beschikking over voor ons niet voor te stellen geavanceerde technologie.

De manier waarop ze reizen volgens JP en Dr. Salla is, zoals wij al heel lang berichten, door middel van wormholes, ook wel dimensieportalen genoemd. Met deze techniek geven ze de coördinaten van een planeet in, wordt er een dimensieportaal gecreëerd en vervolgens verdwijnt hun schip in het portaal als een soort bliksemflits zonder enig geluid. 

Een prachtig voorbeeld hiervan deed zich enkele jaren geleden voor in Mexico, waarover wij toen uitgebreid hebben geschreven:


Toen JP naar buiten liep, slaagde hij er inderdaad in om een aantal foto's te maken van het ruimteschip van de Nordics.

Via een tekening heeft hij geprobeerd duidelijk te maken waar de inzittenden te zien zijn in het ruimteschip. Die tekening ziet er als volgt uit.

En wanneer je zijn laatst genomen foto helemaal uitvergroot dan zie je de plek waar de aliens zich zouden bevinden.

Enkele uren na het bezoek van de Nordic aliens aan JP begon zijn dochter stuiptrekkingen te krijgen, werd heel erg blauw, koortsig en werd met spoed naar het ziekenhuis gebracht. 

{ http://www.niburu.co/ }

Security Guard Captures UFO Video Near China-Russia Border

Mysterious UFO hovering in the sky has surprised a security guard at remote border train station. In a video that was released, a dome-shaped object can be seen only for a few seconds before disappearing into the dark sky apparently over the border between China and Russia.

The security guard spotted a strange UFO moving in the sky at a remote train station.

The bizarre footage was recorded between China-Russia border. It shows a dome-shaped object for only a few seconds before vanishing in the night sky.

The unnamed guard was the only one on duty at the train station in Dayangqi Railway, located in north-eastern China.

On the border with southern Russia, the small town usually quiet at night. When the mysterious object came into view, it stood out and caught the attention of the guard.

According to the report of the guard, he saw something flashing in the distance at about 8:10 in the evening.

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