DID PRESIDENT EISENHOWER MEET WITH ALIENS AT HOLLOMAN AIR FORCE BASE?

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The Sun Is Spitting Out 'Lava Lamp Blobs' 500 Times the Size of Earth

By Brandon Specktor 

Massive blasts of plasma can launch forth when the sun's magnetic field lines tangle, break and recombine.

(Image: © NASA/GSFC/Solar Dynamics Observatory)

The sun's corona constantly breathes wispy strings of hot, charged particles into space — a phenomenon we call the solar wind. Every now and then, however, those breaths become full-blown burps.

Perhaps as often as once every hour or two, according to a study in the February issue of the journal JGR: Space Physics, the plasma underlying the solar wind grows significantly hotter, becomes noticeably denser, and it pops out of the sun in rapid-fire orbs of goo capable of engulfing entire planets for minutes or hours at a time. Officially, these solar burps are called periodic density structures, but astronomers have nicknamed them "the blobs." Take a look at images of themstreaming off of the sun's atmosphere, and you'll see why. [The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe]

"They look like the blobs in a lava lamp," Nicholeen Viall, a research astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and co-author of the recent study, told Live Science. "Only they are hundreds of times larger than the Earth."

While astronomers have known about the blobs for nearly two decades, the origin and impact of these regular solar weather events remain largely mysterious. Until recently, the only observations of the blobs have come from Earth-bound satellites, which can detect when a train of blobs bears down on Earth's magnetic field; however, these satellites can't account for the myriad ways the blobs have changed during their 4-day, 93-million-mile (150 million kilometers) journey from the sun.

Now, for the first time, Viall and her colleagues have observed the blobs as they appear in their own neighborhood. In their new study, the astronomers found evidence of the blobs in 40-year-old data. Those observations confirmed that the blobs are incredibly hot when they leave the sun — sometimes twice as hot as the average solar wind around them — and might bubble out of the corona every 90 minutes or less.

"Even when it's a quiet space weather day, in terms of explosive solar storms, there's this base level of weather always happening on the sun," Viall said. "And those little dynamics are driving dynamics on Earth, too."

The blobs that swallow the world

Since the solar blobs were first studied in the early 2000s, scientists have known that they are big — initially measuring between 50 and 500 times the size of Earth, and growing ever larger as they propagate into space, Viall said — and they are dense, potentially packed with twice as many charged particles as ordinary solar wind.

This corrected-color image shows yellow 'blobs' (marked with white arrows) ejecting from the sun over the course of 5 and a half hours. NASA researcher Nicholeen Viall says these structures look similar to 'lava lamp blobs,' but enormous.

(Image: © Viall and Vourlidas)

Magnetic field readings show that when these gargantuan blobs of plasma ooze over Earth, they can actually compress the planet's magnetic field and interfere with communication signals for minutes or hours at a time. Still, those readings leave a lot of open questions, Viall said, because the blobs almost certainly evolve and cool as they wobble through space for the 4 days it takes solar wind to reach Earth. So, Viall and her colleagues decided to study the blobs much closer to their source.

In the new study, the researchers took a fresh look at historical data from Helios 1 and Helios 2, a pair of solar probes launched by NASA and the German Aerospace Center in 1974 and 1976, respectively. The twin probes orbited the sun for nearly a decade, making a closest approach of 27 million miles, or 43 million km (closer than the orbit of Mercury) while studying the temperature and magnetism of the solar wind that gushed past.

If either of the probes had been engulfed by a train of gargantuan lava-lamp blobs, the encounter should be reflected in these readings, Viall said. The researchers looked for one data pattern in particular — sudden bursts of hot, dense plasma punctuated by periods of cooler, flimsier wind — and found five instances that fit the bill.

The data from these events showed that the blobs bubbled out of the sun every 90 minutes or so, supporting visible light observations of the blobs made decades later. The results also provided the first real, space-based evidence that the blobs are indeed much hotter and denser than normal solar wind, Viall said.

Burning questions

As to why the blobs form in the first place, the jury is still out. But, based on magnetic field readings taken near Earth, it's likely that the blobs form in the same sort of explosions that create solar storms — massive blasts of plasma that launch forth when the sun's magnetic field linestangle, break and recombine.

"We think a similar process is creating the blobs on a much smaller scale — ambient little bursts as opposed to giant explosions," Viall said.

Results from NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which launched in August 2018 and is now about 15 million miles from the sun (24 million km), could soon confirm these suspicions. In addition to the 40-odd years of technological advancement that Parker has over the Helios probes, the Parker mission also ranges far closer to the sun — coming within just 4 million miles (6.4 million km) of our local star at its closest approach. From this sizzling vantage point, the probe should be able to observe the blobs "right after they're born," Viall said.

• Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind
• 15 Amazing Images of Stars
• Satellites Gallery: Science From Above

Originally published on Live Science.

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3 Huge Questions the Black Hole Image Didn't Answer

By Rafi Letzter 

An international network of radio telescopes has produced the first-ever close-up image of a black hole's shadow, which scientists revealed this morning (April 10). The collaboration, called the Event Horizon Telescope, confirmed decades of predictions of how light would behave around these dark objects, and set the stage for a new era of black hole astronomy.

"From a scale of zero to amazing, it was amazing," said Erin Bonning, an astrophysicist and black hole researcher at Emory University who was not involved in the imaging effort.

"That said, it was what I expected," she told Live Science.

The announcement, teased for about a week and a half in advance, managed to be both incredibly exciting and almost completely devoid of surprising details or new physics. Physics didn't break down. No unexpected features of black holes were revealed. The image itself was almost a perfect match for illustrations of black holes we're used to seeing in science and pop culture. The big difference is that it's a whole lot blurrier. [9 Weird Facts About Black Holes]

There were several important questions related to black holes that remained unresolved, however, Bonning said.

1. How do black holes produce their enormous jets of hot, fast matter?

On the left, an image taken using the CHANDRA X-Ray Telescope at the same time as the Event Horizons Telescope made its picture shows a relatavistic jet crossing the Virga A galaxy. On the right is the image of the black hole shadow from the Event Horizons Telescope.

(Image: © Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen; Radio: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

All supermassive black holes have the ability to chew up nearby matter, absorb most of it past their event horizons, and spit the remainder out into space at near light speed in blazing towers astrophysicists call "relativistic jets."

And the black hole at the center of Virgo A (also called Messier 87) is notorious for its impressive jets, spewing matter and radiation all over space. Its relativistic jets are so huge that they can fully escape the surrounding galaxy.

A 1998 Hubble image shows the relatavistic jet escaping Virgo A.

(Image: © J. A. Biretta et al., Hubble Heritage Team (STScI /AURA), NASA)

And physicists know the broad strokes of how this happens: The material accelerates to extreme speeds as it falls into the black hole's gravity well, then some of it escapes while retaining that inertia. But scientists disagree about the details of how this happens. This image and the associated papers don't yet offer any details.

Figuring that out, Bonning said, will be a matter of linking up Event Horizons Telescope observations — which cover a fairly small amount of space — with the much bigger images of relativistic jets.

While physicists don't yet have answers, she said, there's a good chance that they'll come soon — especially once the collaboration produces images of its second target: the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of our own galaxy, which doesn't produce jets like Virgo A's. Comparing the two images, she said, might offer some clarity.

2. How do general relativity and quantum mechanics fit together?

Whenever physicists get together to talk about a really exciting new discovery, you can expect to hear someone suggest that it might help explain "quantum gravity."

That's because quantum gravity is the great unknown in physics. For about a century, physicists have worked using two different sets of rules: General relativity, which covers very big things like gravity, and quantum mechanics, which covers very small things. The problem is, those two rulebooks directly contradict one another. Quantum mechanics can't explain gravity, and relativity can't explain quantum behavior.

Someday, physicists hope to link the two together in a grand unified theory, likely involving some sort of quantum gravity.

And before the announcement today, there was speculation that it might include some breakthrough on the subject. (If general relativity's predictions hadn't been borne out in the image, that would have moved the ball forward.) During a news briefing from the National Science Foundation, Avery Broderick, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a collaborator on the project, suggested those sorts of answers might be coming.

But Bonning was skeptical of that claim. This image was entirely unsurprising from a general relativity perspective, so it offered no new physics that might close the gap between the two fields, Bonning said.

Still, it's not crazy that people hope for answers from this sort of observation, she said, because the edge of a black hole's shadow brings relativistic forces into tiny, quantum-size spaces.

"We would expect to see quantum gravity very, very close to the event horizon or very, very early in the early universe [when everything was packed into a tiny space]," she said.

But at the still-blurry resolution of Event Horizons Telescope, she said, we aren't likely to find those sorts of effects, even with planned upgrades incoming.

3. Were Stephen Hawking's theories as correct as Einstein's?

The physicist Stephen Hawking's greatest early-career contribution to physics was the idea of "Hawking radiation" — that black holes aren't actually black, but emit small amounts of radiation over time. The result was hugely important, because it showed that once a black hole stops growing, it will start to very slowly shrink from the energy loss.

But the Event Horizons Telescope didn't confirm or deny this theory, Bonning said, not that anyone expected it to.

Giant black holes like the one in Virgo A, she said, emit only minimal amounts of Hawking radiation compared to their overall size. While our most advanced instruments can now detect the bright lights of their event horizons, there's little chance that they will ever tease out the ultra-dim glow of a supermassive black hole's surface.

Those results, she said, will likely come from the tiniest black holes — theoretical, short-lived objects so small that you might enclose their whole event horizon in your hand. With the opportunity for up-close observations, and much more radiation available compared to their overall size, humans might eventually figure out how to produce or find one and detect its radiation.

So what did we actually learn from this image?

First, physicists learned that Einstein was right, once again. The edge of the shadow, as far as the Event Horizons Telescope can see, is a perfect circle, just as physicists in the 20th century working with Einstein's equations of general relativity predicted.

"I don't think anyone should be surprised when yet another test of general relativity passes," Bonning said. "If they had walked on stage and said that general relativity had broken, I would have fallen off my chair."

The result with more immediate, practical implications, she said, was that the image enabled scientists to precisely measure the mass of this supermassive black hole, which sits 55 million light-years away at the heart of the Virgo A galaxy. It's 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun.

That's a big deal, Bonning said, because it could change the way physicists weigh the supermassive black holes at the hearts of other, more distant or smaller galaxies.

Right now, physicists have a pretty precise measurement of the mass of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Bonning said, because they can watch how its gravity moves individual stars in its neighborhood.

Robert McNees@mcnees

Good morning. Here are a bunch of stars orbiting the Milky Way's central black hole over a period of about 20 years. The star near the center passes within 20 billion km of the bh and reaches speeds of ~3% of the speed of light
Image: ESO/MPE (doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05825-3)

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But in other galaxies, our telescopes can't see the movements of individual stars, she said. So physicists are stuck with rougher measurements: How the black hole's mass influences light coming from different layers of stars in the galaxy, or how its mass influences light coming from different layers of free-floating gas in the galaxy.

But those calculations are imperfect, she said.

"You have to model a very complex system," she said.

And the two methods end up producing somewhat different results in every galaxy physicists observe. But at least for the black hole in Virgo A, we now know that one method is correct.

"Our determination of 6.5 billion solar masses ends up landing right on top of the heavier mass determination from [the light coming from stars]," Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist from the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator on the project said in the news briefing.

That doesn't mean that physicists will just move wholesale to that approach for measuring black hole masses, Bonning said. But it does offer an important data point for refining future calculations.

• The Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics
• The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe
• Stephen Hawking's Most Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Experts Predict a Long, Deep Solar Minimum

{ https://spaceweatherarchive.com/ }

Heeft Elon Musk gelijk en leven we allemaal in een computersimulatie? Deze wetenschapper denkt van wel - HLN.be

Bron: Digital Trends, Vox

Technologische vooruitgang

Rizwan Virk onderzocht de hypothese voor zijn boek The Simulation Hypothesis. Een van de redenen waarom de theorie de laatste jaren zo aan populariteit wint, is de enorme technologische vooruitgang op vlak van computerspelletjes, zegt Virk. “In de jaren ’80 en ’90 waren computers niet krachtig genoeg om een wereld zoals World of Warcraft of Fortnite te renderen.”

Daarnaast wijst Virk, zelf een ontwikkelaar van videospelletjes, op het statistische argument waarmee Oxford-professor Nick Bostrom al in 2003 op de proppen kwam. Hij vertrok van de veronderstelling dat een samenleving op een bepaald moment erg realistische “vooroudersimulaties” begint te creëren. Aangezien elke server miljoenen of triljoenen gesimuleerde wezens bevat, zal het aantal gesimuleerde wezens daarom veel groter zijn dan het aantal biologische wezens. 

“Als slechts één samenleving ooit met dergelijke simulaties begint, dan is het waarschijnlijker dat je een gesimuleerd wezen bent, omdat er veel meer gesimuleerde wezens dan biologische wezens bestaan”, aldus Virk, die schat dat onze samenleving zelf over uiterlijk een honderdtal jaren met dergelijke simulaties zal aanvangen.

Rizwan wijst op grote vraagstukken uit de fysica die op dit ogenblik beter verklaard kunnen worden door de simulatiehypothese dan door de ‘aardse’ hypotheses die momenteel voorhanden zijn. “Als de wereld niet echt fysiek is, maar gebaseerd is op informatie, dan zou ik zeggen dat het een eenvoudigere verklaring kan zijn dat we leven in een simulatie die gebaseerd is op computerwetenschap en informatie”, stelt hij.

Voorspellingen

Waarom zou iemand al die energie stoppen in het creëren van een gesimuleerde samenleving, kan je je afvragen. “Het is best mogelijk dat wie onze simulatie creëert, wil te weten komen hoe het met een beschaving, die zelf keuzes kan maken, zal aflopen. Zouden we onszelf vernietigen? Zouden we kernwapens creëren? Zouden we onze eigen simulatie creëren?”, licht Virk toe. 

“Ik denk niet noodzakelijk dat we in een simulatie leven die slechts één doel heeft, zoals kijken hoe we de klimaatverandering kunnen aanpakken. In de plaats daarvan, net zoals in een videospel met meerdere spelers, heeft elk personage zijn persoonlijke doelstellingen en de keuzevrijheid om te beslissen wat er gaat gebeuren.” Op die manier is ieder personage een experiment op zichzelf, stelt hij.

Na zijn onderzoek is Virk geneigd om zich bij de stelling van Elon Musk aan te sluiten. Hij schat de kans dat we in een simulatie leven tussen de 50 en de 100 procent. “Ik denk dat het waarschijnlijker is dat we in een simulatie leven, dan niet.”

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Since at least 1967, reports have surfaced throughout the United States of animals – but, chiefly, cattle – slaughtered in bizarre fashion. Organs are taken and significant amounts of blood are found to be missing. In some cases, the limbs of the cattle are broken, suggesting they have been dropped to the ground from a significant height. Evidence of extreme heat, to slice into the skin of the animals, has been found at mutilation sites. Eyes are removed, tongues are sliced off, and, typically, the sexual organs are gone. While the answers to the puzzle remain frustratingly outside of the public arena, theories abound. They include extraterrestrials, engaged in nightmarish experimentation of the genetic kind; military programs involving the testing of new bio-warfare weapons; occult-based groups that sacrifice the cattle in ritualistic fashion; and government agencies secretly monitoring the food-chain, fearful that something worse than “Mad Cow Disease” may have infected the U.S. cattle herd – and, possibly, as a result, the human population, too. Cattle mutilations are a favorite topic of UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists. From the mid-1970s to the dawning of the 1980s, however, the phenomenon was of varying degrees of concern to another body: the FBI. But, how and why did the FBI get involved? It’s an important question that requires an answer.

From January to March 1973, the state of Iowa was hit hard by cattle mutilations. Not only that, many of the ranchers who lost animals reported seeing strange lights and black-colored helicopters in the direct vicinity of the attacks. That the FBI took keen notice of all this is demonstrated by the fact that, as the Freedom of Information Act has shown, it collected and filed numerous media reports on the cattle-mutes in Iowa. The next piece of data dates from early September 1974. That’s when the FBI’s director, Clarence M. Kelley, was contacted by Senator Carl T. Curtis, who wished to inform the Bureau of a wave of baffling attacks on livestock in Nebraska – the state in which Curtis resided and represented. At the time, the FBI declined to get involved, as Director Kelley informed the senator: “It appears that no Federal Law within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI has been violated, inasmuch as there is no indication of interstate transportation of the maimed animals.”

One year later, in August 1975, Senator Floyd K. Haskell, of Colorado, made his voice known to the FBI, on the growing cattle mutilation controversy: “For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occurred for the last two years in nine states. The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.”

The senator had much more to say, too: “In Colorado’s Morgan County area there has [sic] also been reports that a helicopter was used by those who mutilated the carcasses of the cattle, and several persons have reported being chased by a similar helicopter. Because I am gravely concerned by this situation, I am asking that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enter the case. Although the CBI has been investigating the incidents, and local officials also have been involved, the lack of a central unified direction has frustrated the investigation. It seems to have progressed little, except for the recognition at long last that the incidents must be taken seriously. Now it appears that ranchers are arming themselves to protect their livestock, as well as their families and themselves, because they are frustrated by the unsuccessful investigation. Clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt.”

Again, the FBI declined to get involved in the investigation of the phenomenon. It was a stance the FBI stuck to (despite collecting numerous, nationwide newspaper and magazine articles on the subject) until 1978. That was when the FBI learned of an astonishing number of horse and cattle mutilations in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico – mutilations which actually dated back to 1976. They had all been scrupulously investigated and documented by Police Officer Gabe Valdez of Espanola. It was when the FBI was contacted by New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmitt (also the twelfth person to set foot on the Moon – in December 1972), who implored the FBI to get involved, that action was finally taken. In March 1979, Assistant Attorney General Heymann prepared a summary on the New Mexico cases for the FBI, and – for good measure – photocopied all of Officer Valdez’s files to the Bureau’s director. Things were about to be taken to a new level, files were about to be scrutinized, and investigations were soon to follow. And, for the FBI, that’s pretty much how it all began.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

People are a lot more predictable than we like to pretend. Sociologists have a set of laws they use to predict how large groups of people will behave—how populations shift, how likely two people are to become friends, how population distribution between cities in a given country will shake out. One such law is called Zipf’s law which predicts the populations of cities in a given country with spooky accuracy. Zipf’s law says that populations of cities will be inversely proportional to the city’s rank. If the most populous city in a country has 10 million people, the second most populated city will have a population of 10 million divided by two, the third most populous city will have a population of 10 million divided by three, and so on and so on until you get to the city ranked 10 millionth on the list which is just a dude in a treehouse.

Zipf’s law has been accepted as true by sociologists, but until now there was no theoretical framework for why. It was simply based off what sociologists have observed. Well, now there’s a potential answer for why: it was written in the stars.

Or, more accurately, galaxies. A recent paper by Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge proposes that there is a grand, unifying principal behind all scaling laws—like Zipf’s law—based on the way galaxies formed at the beginning of the universe. They write:

“We treat the population density as the fundamental quantity, thinking of cities as objects that form when the population density exceeds a critical threshold. The situation is therefore conceptually and mathematically analogous to the formation of galaxies in the universe.”

This is just a big old space-city.

Using publicly available population data and the decades of cosmological work done studying galaxies, Lin and Loeb showed that the models that determine the spread and makeup of galaxies can be used to predict human population scaling. Each time they used their galaxy-based model to predict population changes, they came to the exact equations that were already present in sociologists’ scaling laws.

And it wasn’t just city size. They found a galactic explanation for the laws governing whether two people become friends, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and other complex human interactions. They write:

”We derive a simple statistical model that explains all of these scaling laws based on a single unifying principle involving the random spatial growth of clusters of people on all scales.”

And this is just a little people-galaxy.

It’s pretty wild, but it’s hard to be surprised by it. After all, we’re made of star stuff, and whether you’re a person or a galaxy, math is math. And while this is hard science, it’s a principal that’s been espoused for very long time by people that don’t really understand what they’re saying: as above, so below. The math that governs galaxies is the same math that governs human populations. I don’t know if I’m awe-struck by that, or depressed. Maybe a little bit of both.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A new study conducted by Tel Aviv University proposes that Neanderthals and woolly mammoths shared the same climate adaptation traits. The elephant-like animals from around 600,000 years ago and the early humans from approximately 400,000 years ago seem to have the same molecular characteristics that helped them adapt to cold environments.

The relationship between the ancient Neanderthals and woolly mammoths from the Pleistocene epoch is that they shared the same living environments in Europe during the Ice Age. Ran Barkai and Meidad Kislev from TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures led the study.

“Neanderthals and mammoths lived together in Europe during the Ice Age. The evidence suggests that Neanderthals hunted and ate mammoths for tens of thousands of years and were actually physically dependent on calories extracted from mammoths for their successful adaptation,” explained Barkai, adding, “Neanderthals depended on mammoths for their very existence. They say you are what you eat. This was especially true of Neanderthals; they ate mammoths but were apparently also genetically similar to mammoths.”

In order to determine just how genetically similar they were, archaeologists studied three case studies of gene variants and alleles that are connected to the adaptation of cold climates and that were found in the genomes of both Neanderthals and woolly mammoths.

The first case study showed that they had the same appearance of the LEPR gene which is connected to thermogenesis as well as the fat storage and adipose tissue regulation in their bodies. Keratin protein genes in the species were examined in the second case study, while their skin and hair pigmentations in the MC1R and SLC7A11 genes were studied in the third case.

Kislev explained the studies, “Our observations present the likelihood of resemblance between numerous molecular variants that resulted in similar cold-adapted epigenetic traits of two species, both of which evolved in Eurasia from an African ancestor.” He went on to say, “These remarkable findings offer supporting evidence for the contention regarding the nature of convergent evolution through molecular resemblance, in which similarities in genetic variants between adapted species are present.”

The research also suggested that both species more than likely came from ancestors who left Africa to go to Europe and had to adapt to the frigid cold temperatures during the Ice Age. They also became extinct around the same time period.

Barkai offered a new theory about the connection between the two species, “Are there genetic similarities between evolutionary adaptation paths in Neanderthals and mammoths? The answer seems to be yes. This idea alone opens endless avenues for new research in evolution, archaeology and other disciplines.” He then added, “At a time when proboscideans are under threat of disappearance from the world due to the ugly human greed for ivory, highlighting our shared history and similarities with elephants and mammoths might be a point worth taking into consideration.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Astronomers have unveiled the first ever image of a black hole

A group of astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope have unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole.

The major announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo as the European Commission, European Research Council, and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project detailed the findings of their mission.

They explained that they surveyed the Messier 87 galaxy in an effort to be able to picture the “supermassive black hole and its core.” This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth. 

  

Despite their enormous mass black holes are extraordinarily difficult to observe. It is impossible to photograph a black hole’s interior, as light that gets too close to its gravitational pull is lost. This point is known as the event horizon.

• READ MORE: One giant leap for meme-kind: Twitter pokes fun at humanity’s 1st-ever image of black hole

"This is a huge day in astrophysics," said US National Science Foundation Director France Córdova. "We're seeing the unseeable."

Dr Shep Doeleman explained that they surveyed the Messier 87 galaxy in an effort to be able to picture the “supermassive black hole and its core.” This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth.

“We are delighted to be able to report to you today, we have seen .. we have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,”  Doeleman said. “Here it is”.

View image on Twitter

Event Horizon 'Scope@ehtelescope

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

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“What you are seeing is evidence of an event horizon,” he explained. “It is the strongest evidence that we have to date of the existence of black holes.”

Doeleman added that the milestone has “verified Einstein’s theory of gravity in this most extreme laboratory”.

© Event Horizon Telescope

"We could have seen a blob... We saw something so true, that really had a ring to it, if you can use that turn of phrase, and it was just astonishment and wonder,” he said.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is made up of dozens of observatories that scan the area around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A*, and the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.

The mission sought to capture the first ever image of a black hole’s silhouette. Until now, all that we have been able to see are artists’ impressions.

© Event Horizon Telescope

Astrophysicist Monika Moscibrodzka explained why the circle around the shadow of the black hole "is not really a full ring,” and is brighter at the bottom.  

"Our models told us immediately that this kind of structure could only be formed if something in the source was rotating,” she said, adding, “It could be the black hole, or the matter around it, or both could be rotating.” The images are not yet sharp enough to work out the speed of the black hole rotation.

© Event Horizon Telescope

The scientists gathered the first data in April 2017 using telescopes in the US, Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the global network. The global network of telescopes has essentially created a planet-sized observational dish.

Source: https://www.rt.com/

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

SECRET MOON BASE USA HAD DESTROYED; Wikileaks Cable Confirms! April 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of Wikileaks cable: January 11, 1979
Wikilinks: 

• https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P790005-1028_e.html

I was going through Wikileaks and found this info pertaining to a secret moon base that the United States had destroyed back in the late 1970s. The cable has only the document details, but not the full document because it was hand written and was never put onto digital format. 

How would the US destroy an alien base on Earths moon without anyone suspecting? Thats easy. Do you remember the Apollo missions? Well there were suppose to be more 20 such missions to the moon, however NASA suddenly stopped at Apollo 17, so that they could do some covert black ops missions that involved alien tech recovery and reconnaissance of alien structures and ships and to detect any possible threats to America. 

Actual photo of the alien base that was destroyed, credit to Apollo 20 astronaut William Rutledge. 

I met a man named William Rutledge back in 2011 on Youtube when he uploaded a half dozen videos of the Apollo 20 mission that he took part in. Its was a US-Russia shared mission to the moon near Delporte Crater. William and the other astronaut recorded on film their activities on the moon. Including exploring a cigar ship in Delporte crater through a hole already cut in the side of the ship. Inside they found glass tubes along the walls with tiny bipedal skeletons (a few inches tall) inside the tubes. They also found a female pilot with hoses attached to her nose and she was in a coma state and appeared to be physically and mentally connected to the ship. She never did wake, but was taken back to Earth. He also recorded a beautiful but damaged alien city on the moon. I believe this is the alien base that was destroyed by the US. They  probably destroyed it on a later mission after they had recovered all the possible alien tech that the could bring back. 

Why would America destroy the alien base? To keep it out of the hands of other countries of the world. Imagine what would happen if Israel landed a probe on the moon and found the base, publicly claiming it and all its contents to be Isreali owned. It would suddenly make Israel a world power over night. America does not want to lose that title nor do they want to deal with the competition of other countries beating them to alien cities, worlds and exploring the universe. Although the US did share those covert Apollo missions with Russia at the time. 

Apparently William Rutledge never leaned about the NASA destroying the alien base on the moon that he had once recorded. It would have broken his heart. He told me he was old, in his late 70s at the time I spoke to him. He said that he had some of the films converted into digital video so he could share it before he passed away. He was old and wanted to get this secret off his chest. 

I will place a few of his video below for you to explore, but mind you, his channel was attacked by the NSA/CIA and they deleted all but one of his videos. He got scared and left Youtube never to return. He went by the Youtube name RetiredAFB and can still be found there. But he has disappeared in his old age. Probably passed away by now in his wifes home country of Rwanda. 
Scott C. Waring

There videos below were given to me by William Rutledge. They are 100% authentic. After he told me about the cigar ship in Delporte crater I began searching for photos of the crater. It took two weeks but I finally found it and the photo confirms Williams story. The cigar UFO is in Delporte crater. I shared the photos with him and he was amazed by what I found and thanked me for believing in him and trusting him. He was surprised that NASA accidentally released those photos (below) with the cigar ship he explored in it. Clearly they were top secret and were not meant to be released to the public. 

Here is the NASA links I found as proof: 

1. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS15-P-9630
2. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS15-P-9625

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

Old Ship Wreak Found Near Bermuda On Google Earth Map, April 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Google coordinates: 25°26'26.99"N 78° 0'28.46"W

I was deep in the Wikileaks docs and found a statement about how weather planes flying off Miami, Florida would sometimes photograph UFOs rising out of the ocean. So I was using Google Earth free online map for searching for the alien base in that area, but instead I found this ship wreak. The total length of the ship is about 55-65 meters. One half of the ship is upside-down while the other half is rightside-up. 

I made a short video of it, so you can find the shipwreck. 

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

DARPA THINKS TARDIGRADES COULD HELP SCIENTISTS 'FREEZE' INJURED SOLDIERS IN TIME

The Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Field Has Greatly Accelerated; That Could Have Apocalyptic Implications For All of Us

By Michael Synder / Economic Collapse

Earth’s magnetic field is getting significantly weaker, the magnetic north pole is shifting at an accelerating pace, and scientists readily admit that a sudden pole shift could potentially cause “trillions of dollars” in damage.  Today, most of us take the protection provided by Earth’s magnetic field completely for granted.  It is essentially a colossal force field which surrounds our planet and makes life possible.  And even with such protection, a giant solar storm could still potentially hit our planet and completely fry our power grid.  But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic.  And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems.  As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive.

Previously, scientists had told us that the magnetic field was weakening by about 5 percent every 100 years.

But now we are being told that data collected from the SWARM satellite indicate that the rate of decay is now 5 percent per decade…

It’s well established that in modern times, the axial dipole component of Earth’s main magnetic field is decreasing by approximately 5% per century. Recently, scientists using the SWARM satellite announced that their data indicate a decay rate ten times faster, or 5% per decade.

In case you didn’t quite get that, 5 percent per decade is 10 times faster than 5 percent per century.

If the rate of decay continues at this pace, or if it speeds up even more, we could be looking at a mass extinction event that is beyond what most people would dare to imagine.

As more solar radiation reaches Earth, we would expect to see a rise in cancer rates, and this is something that even National Geographic has acknowledged…

However, if the magnetic field gets substantially weaker and stays that way for an appreciable amount of time Earth will be less protected from the oodles of high-energy particles that are constantly flying around in space. This means that everything on the planet will be exposed to higher levels of radiation, which over time could produce an increase in diseases like cancer, as well as harm delicate spacecraft and power grids on Earth.

Of course we are already seeing this.  Cancer rates have been rising all over the world, and if you live in the United States there is a one in three chance that you will get cancer in your lifetime.

But as the magnetic field continues to weaken, things will get worse.

A lot worse.

The weaker the magnetic field gets, the amount of solar radiation that will reach us will rise, and eventually it would get so bad that the entire human race would be in jeopardy.  The following comes from Futurism…

Radiation and cosmic rays are a real concern for NASA, especially when it comes to long-term spaceflight.  Astronauts on a mission to Mars could undergo up to 1000 times the exposure to radiation and cosmic rays that they would get on Earth.  If Earth’s magnetic field disappeared, the entire human race – and all of life, in fact –  would be in serious danger.  Cosmic rays would bombard our bodies and could even damage our DNA, increasing worldwide risk of cancer and other illnesses.  The flashes of light visible when we close our eyes would be the least of our problems.

And even if some of us found a way to survive underground for a while, we still wouldn’t be able to survive because solar winds would strip away our planet’s atmosphere and oceans…

Without Earth’s magnetic field, solar winds — streams of electrically charged particles that flow from the sun — would strip away the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. As such, Earth’s magnetic field helped to make life on the planet possible, researchers have said.

So could such a scenario actually happen?

Well,  some scientists are saying that our magnetic field “could be gone in as little as 500 years”, but they are telling us not to worry because Earth’s magnetic poles will “flip” and things will eventually return to normal…

The magnetic field surrounding Earth is weakening, and scientists say it could be gone in as little as 500 years.

The result? Earth’s magnetic poles could, literally, flip upside down.

Of course most scientists believe that a pole flip takes hundreds or thousands of years to happen, but they don’t actually know because they have never seen one take place.

They also believe that we would potentially be facing “trillions of dollars in damage”to our power grid and electrical infrastructure because the magnetic field would be so weak during a flip…

Storms far less powerful than these could cause much more damage if they happened to hit while Earth’s magnetic field was in the midst of a reversal, Roberts said. The result would likely be trillions of dollars in damage to our electrical infrastructure, and right now, there’s no plan for dealing with an event of that magnitude.

“Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage,” Roberts concluded. Keep your fingers (but not your magnetic-field lines) crossed.

Most of the experts also believe that a pole flip is still a long way off, but what everybody agrees on is that the magnetic north pole is moving toward Russia at an accelerating pace…

But what’s really catching attention is the acceleration in movement. Around the mid-1990s, the pole suddenly sped up its movements from just over 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to 34 miles (55 kilometers) annually. As of last year, the pole careened over the international date line toward the Eastern Hemisphere.

And earlier this year, authorities had to issue an emergency update to global positioning systems because “the magnetic field is changing so rapidly”…

The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. “The error is increasing all the time,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information.

I know that I must sound like a broken record by now, but this is important.  Our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and we are seeing things happen that we have never seen before.

Everyone agrees that the Earth’s magnetic field is rapidly getting weaker, and that is making us more vulnerable with each passing day.

Most of the experts are trying to put a happy face on things and are assuring us that everything is going to be okay.

Hopefully they are right, but I wouldn’t count on it.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The Endand Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

• http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-weakening-of-earths-magnetic-field-has-greatly-accelerated-and-that-could-have-apocalyptic-implications-for-all-of-us

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

Crash and Burn: Israel’s Moon Shot Ends in Disaster.

With the settler state more divided than ever, and tensions between the native Palestinians as high as ever, this event was meant to be Israel’s “unifying moment” that would bring all Israelis (but not its Arab residents) and globally Jewry together with a shared purpose for one glorious moment. 

The attempted moon landing by the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet was broadcast live last night, on the side of the spacecraft read the slogan, “Small country, big dreams.”

However, the Jewish state’s lunar dream crashed and burned, in spectacular fashion, as one of the craft’s main engines blew up on its final descent, crashing into the Moon.

The explosion is said to have marked the end of Israel’s fledgling satellite industry, effectively denying the Jewish state a seat in the elite global club of countries who’ve executed successful lunar landings.

The timing of this grand process – culminating at the exact moment when the Israeli election results were announced – was perhaps too much a coincidence for even the most ardent non-skeptic. Somewhat poetically, Israel’s shallow 2019 election campaign ended as it deserved: A farce.

Noa Landau from Haaretz summed the irony up as follows:

“This is why the loss of communications with the spacecraft, just a moment before the anticipated landing, and just a moment before the announcement of the final election vote results, which at the very last moment went awry – exactly like the landing – felt like one big metaphor. Like the country that could have been, but we have missed out on. In the high-tech superpower filled with traffic jams and embarassing trains, where it’s impossible to receive a package in the mail, and votes can’t be correctly counted, everything is so close, but not quite.” 

RT International reports…

Beresheet’s engine stopped working around 10 kilometers from the surface, with the vehicle crashing into the Moon at a speed of over 130 meters per second.

View image on Twitter

Everyday Astronaut@Erdayastronaut

It looks like the #beresheet lander (the first private lander trying to land on the moon) hit the surface going 134 m/s (wayyyyyy too fast) after its main engine cut out around 10 km in altitude

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The blunder occurred on a live feed in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, who arrived at the control center for the occasion.

View image on Twitter

Elad Ratson 

✔@EladRatson

Just received from SpaceIL communication team what appears to be the last image #Beresheet spacecraft managed to beam to earth before it crashed on the moons surface

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However, the space explorers didn’t seem shaken by the setback as they all chanted a solemn song to show that getting so close to the goal was an achievement in itself.

Netanyahu has already promised that an Israeli spacecraft will be back to the Moon in the next two or three years.

View image on Twitter

Israel To The Moon@TeamSpaceIL

22 kilometers from the Moon! #IsraelToTheMoon #SpaceIL #Beresheet

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Beresheet, which is Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning,” could have also become the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon. It was constructed by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defense contractor Israel Aerospace Industries. The $100 million needed for the ambitious project came from private investors.

Only Russia, the US, and China have so far managed to perform controlled “soft” landings on the lunar surface.

• READ MORE SPACE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Space Files

{ https://21stcenturywire.com/ }

It’s time for the latest edition of “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”, the game show that pits seemingly unethical science against potentially catastrophic predictions. In today’s competition, scientists in China (one point already for the catastrophic team) announce they used gene-editing to place human brain genes in rhesus macaque monkeys and it made their brains smarter. Cue the music from every “Planet of the Apes” movie and let the game begin!

“The presented data represents the first attempt to experimentally interrogate the genetic basis of human brain origin using a transgenic monkey model, and it values the use of nonhuman primates in understanding human unique traits.”

If the opening paragraph of the new study, “Transgenic rhesus monkeys carrying the human MCPH1 gene copies show human-like neoteny of brain development,” published recently in the journal National Science Review, is any indication, scientists are learning from lawyers how to protect their clients/experiments by hiding them in clouds of big, confusing words and phrases. Experimentally interrogate?

This is interesting.

China Daily reports that researchers from the Beijing-based National Science Review, the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of North Carolina (that’s in the U.S. – looks like it’s playing for the Seemingly Unethicals) edited human MCPH1 genes – a gene that is critical in fetal brain development because it controls brain size and rate of growth – and created 11 transgenic (a cloud word meaning “artificially carrying DNA from an unrelated organism”) monkeys. Eight of those monkeys were first-generation and three were second-generation, obliterating the ‘artificial’ part of ‘transgenic’ by getting their human genes from their monkey parents.

“According to the research article, brain imaging and tissue section analysis showed an altered pattern of neuron differentiation and a delayed maturation of the neural system, which is similar to the developmental delay (neoteny) in humans.”

In other words, the monkeys showed the human trait of slow brain development (neoteny) rather than the rapid growth of normal monkey brains. What was the benefit of this slow growth?

“The study also found that the transgenic monkeys exhibited better short-term memory and shorter reaction time compared to wild rhesus monkeys in the control group.”

To put it bluntly — even the monkeys could understand the results because the human genes made them smarter!

Ding-ding-ding! That bell means it’s time to play the lightning “What could possibly go wrong?” round.

Time-out called by the Potentially Catastrophics. In a shocking and somewhat honorable display of conscience, Martin Styner, a University of North Carolina computer scientist and coauthor of the Chinese report, told the MIT Technology Review that his role was merely to train Chinese student on how to extract brain volume data from MRI images and, after learning the true purpose, considered removing his name from the paper, which he claims could not find a publisher in the West. Styner then throws his “What could possibly go wrong?” pitch:

“I don’t think that is a good direction. Now we have created this animal which is different than it is supposed to be. When we do experiments, we have to have a good understanding of what we are trying to learn, to help society, and that is not the case here.”

Is this going to be a sequel to Planet of the Apes or Flowers for Algernon?

Unfortunately, that pitch didn’t strike out Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the research. He told the MIT Technology Review he is planning to create more smart monkeys and is planning to test another gene — SRGAP2C – which has been called the “humanity switch” and the “missing genetic link” because it appeared about two million years ago when Australopithecus (the Southern Ape) was being replaced by the smarter Homo habilis.

Putting the “humanity switch” in a monkey? What could possibly go wrong? This game isn’t over … it’s barely starting. Is this progress … or an unethical march down the field to unforeseen consequences?

If we’ve learned anything from “Planet of the Apes,” it’s that if this game goes into overtime, it won’t be a sudden death.

But not everyone is on board.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In the summer of 1997, one of the most controversial UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title was The Day After Roswell. It was written by William Birnes (the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters) and Philip Corso (the subject of the book). Specifically, he was Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? That, quite possibly, was the biggest and most important question of all. While some in the field of Ufology firmly embraced the story, many certainly did not, preferring instead to view the book as either government disinformation – intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947 – or nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious hoax designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.

According to Corso, in near-singlehanded fashion he spearheaded a top secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509^th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this wholly clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials found on the ranch. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that I’m focusing my attentions on. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.

Contrary to what the UFommunity said or assumed at the time and since, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso repeatedly maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was personally aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens, only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones that are so well known in the field of Ufology. As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.”

Corso expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”

Today, more than two decades after The Day After Roswellsurfaced, the undeniably strange story of Colonel Corsocontinues to divide the UFO research field. It probably always will. Me? I’m sticking to the scenario laid out in my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Surprise! Sun's Magnetic Field Is Stronger Than We Thought