The oldest material on Earth has been found in a meteorite

The strange objects were filmed near an army base in Yuma, Arizona, and conspiracy theorists are convinced it could be the Space Force in action

By Simon Green - Video News Editor

The Space Force has been caught on camera training its fleet, conspiracy theorists have claimed after seeing footage of strange lights appearing over Arizona.

Footage taken above Yuma shows six bright UFOs seemingly hovering in formation in the sky.

As the camera rolls, the lights start to disappear and after several minutes they are reduced to three in a triangle formation.

When the clip comes to an end there is just one object in the sky.

The mysterious footage was posted to YouTube by Devil_Travels on January 23, before being picked up by popular conspiracy channel MrMBB333.

Thousands of people have seen the clip, with many noting that a large base belonging to the US Marines is stationed in the same region.

The mysterious lights over Arizona 

(Image: YOUTUBE/DEVIL_TRAVELS)

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And the unusual trajectory and formation of the sights led many to suggest it could be evidence of the Space Force in action.

One commented: “It’s US Space Force training.”

The training theory went down well with fellow viewers, with another adding: “You’ve nailed it.”

An image of the Phoenix Lights

And a third added: “An example of Space Force.”

But there may be another explanation for the mystery lights.

A similar sight was captured off the coast of North Carolina last year which was also situated near an army base.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Our models of how things in the universe are supposed to work have a bad habit of turning out completely wrong. Recently astronomers tossed a few more models in the garbage after discovering an enormous, ancient galaxy, they’ve described as “the monster” due to its size, age and the incredible rate at which it formed stars—over 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way. But the confusing thing is that one day it just stopped making stars altogether. And astronomers have no idea what caused the death of this strange cosmic monstrosity.

The technical name for this galaxy is XMM-2599. It was discovered by astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory’s Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration, or MOSFIRE. Ben Forrest, postdoctoral researcher at UC Riverside, describes what makes this galaxy so strange and unique:

“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy. More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than one billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.”

When XMM-2599 was active, it was producing stars 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.

According to Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, galaxies this old and this massive are predicted to exist by the numerical models, although rarely. The numerical models, however, predict that such galaxies should still be actively forming stars. The mysterious death of XMM-2599 throws a wrench into those models. Wilson says:

“The mere existence of ultramassive galaxies like XMM-2599 proves quite a challenge to numerical models. Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them. The predicted galaxies, however, are expected to be actively forming stars. What makes XMM-2599 so interesting, unusual, and surprising is that it is no longer forming stars, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or its black hole began to turn on. Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies.”

The astronomers don’t know, however, what XMM-2599 will do in the future. Or, rather, the rest of the past. The weird thing about observing a galaxy like XMM-2599 is, due to its distance from Earth, they are looking at this galaxy as it was 11.7 billion years ago. Wilson says:

“We have caught XMM-2599 in its inactive phase. We do not know what it will turn into by the present day. We know it cannot lose mass. An interesting question is what happens around it. As time goes by, could it gravitationally attract nearby star-forming galaxies and become a bright city of galaxies?”

Artist’s impression of what the strange, early galaxies looked like.

(Credit: James Josephides/Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Christina Williams/University of Arizona, Ivo Labbe/Swinburne)

According to Michael Cooper, professor of astronomy at UC Irvine, and co-author of the new study describing XM-2599, this outcome is a strong possibility:

“Perhaps during the following 11.7 billion years of cosmic history, XMM-2599 will become the central member of one of the brightest and most massive clusters of galaxies in the local universe. Alternatively, it could continue to exist in isolation. Or we could have a scenario that lies between these two outcomes.”

Basically, it’s a weird one. It’s good to know that the universe can still get weird, though.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/  }

One of Russia’s top astronomers and the head of the SETI scientific and cultural center recently gave an extensive interview with RIA Novosti in which he shared some interesting observations, including that he believes one reason why we have not yet encountered extraterrestrials (in his opinion) is because they may be keeping us in a “reserve” where contact cannot interfere with our development – a kind of Russian version of the Star Trek “prime directive.” He also believes focusing on repeating fast radio bursts may be a mistake that could cause SETI researchers to miss other signals – signals that we may not yet recognize. Is he right?

“Of course we are not alone. The question is not whether they exist, but where they exist.”

Alexander Panov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow State University, head of the SETI scientific and cultural center under the Council on Astronomy of the RAS and chairman of the Life and Mind in the Universe section of the Council on Astronomy of the RAS (i.e. – someone who’s in the know) makes no bones about his believe in aliens. In fact, he says they’ve probably visited Earth before, although he doesn’t equate current UFO sightings to close encounters. Instead, he speculates that other intelligent civilizations, perhaps working together, keep Earth and its inhabitants in a “reserve.”

“It lies in the fact that highly humanized civilizations do not interfere in our development and have created a quarantine zone around us, a radio silence zone so as not to interfere with our independent development.”

However, Panov believes that this “radio silence zone” should not preclude us from searching for signals from other civilizations. One problem he has with current searches is their narrow focus. He is helping design the Russian space observatory Spektr-M, scheduled for launch in 2027, that will have a broad focus and mission – including looking for large artificial structures like Dyson spheres, black holes, cosmic rays, dark matter and laser signals rather than just fast radio bursts. He is also pushing for new technology which will allow telescopes to monitor the skies 24/7 and record and analyze what would then be ten-to-a-hundred times more data.

“Another method of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations is archaeoastronomy.”

Not content to look only in far corners of the universe for evidence of life, Panov supports searching closer – like on the Moon – for archeological evidence of advanced alien civilization that may have visited millions of years ago. He doesn’t believe that information of this kind has already been discovered and is being hidden from the public. If all of this sounds like pie-in-the sky, Panav agrees. He admits some of these projects could have been done before, but the driving force is budgets – not fear of alien contact.

“When you go outside, a brick may fall on your head, but this does not mean that you need to constantly stay at home. The potential benefits we can get from contacts are so great that they outweigh the risks. However, this does not mean that there is no need to think about possible risks. Scientists have defined a set of safety rules that must be followed if you received and decrypted the interstellar message. For example, if the algorithm for creating some device or computer program that we are offered to build and run is indicated there, then in no case should you do it without understanding. You never know, maybe this is something malicious. Safety rules must be observed, but not paranoid.”

Not paranoid?

“Observed but not paranoid.” Sounds like a good philosophy for a lot of things, not just SETI. And Alexander Panov sounds like an interesting person to invite over for dinner and conversation …. If he can pull himself away from searching for other life in the universe.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Does melting snow reveal an ancient settlement in Antarctica? Satellite images show unnatural looking markings in the snow which look manufactured by an advanced civilization.

These markings are clearly features of some sort of an ancient hexagon structure, which probably is the dome of a larger structure of building buried beneath the ice sheet and probably part of an underground ancient city. The dome is about 45 meters in diameter with visible walls of 8 meters high.

There are many artificial objects, structures and figures around the dome, a possible man-made entrance to the underground city and what looks like a military base or port in front of the dome, suggesting that the military and scientists already know this location which could mean that they are secretly exploring the underground city.

Click image to see the structure/dome in 1280x720 HD.

A quote taken from the book 'The Lost City of Antarctica, Civilizations of the Ancient World' reads as follows:

Satellite imaging shows evidence for the remains of an extensive Paleocene civilization existing under the ice of Antarctica, including “intelligently-made structures.

Also examines the ice-core derived, isotopic record from the Paleogene and Neogene geologic periods indicating that the infrastructure of an advanced civilization existed on the Antarctic continent approximately 55.5 million years ago, and may have been inhabited for 300,000 or more years.

 

Click image to see the structure/dome in 1280x720 HD.

Could the image of a dome leading to a possible underground city be proof that an advanced civilization or extraterrestrial race existed on the Antarctic continent millions of years ago?

 

Selection videos by peter2011

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

Very bizarre encounters with truly surreal and mysterious humanoids

Brent Swancer
Mysterious Universe

© Unknown

When looking at sightings reports of strange creatures and mysterious entities every so once in a while one comes across something that just seems to exist out in its own sphere of bizarreness, something so incredibly odd that it falls outside of any known category and which leaves us utterly baffled. I have covered extremely bizarre cryptids of all shapes and sizes here at Mysterious Universe before, on more than one occasion in fact, as well as very unusual entities that are thought to be aliens, but at other times there is just no real classification to put some reports in, and it is not immediately clear if we are supposed to be dealing with a mystery animal, a ghost, a demon, an inter dimensional being, or what. These cases swirl about there on the outer edges of strangeness, seeming to defy us and challenge us to try and make sense of them. Here I bring you a selection of truly out there reports concerning humanoid creatures that lie squarely entrenched in the realm of the truly unexplained. From deer-headed men, to bizarre stick figures, to other less definable things and more, here are some of the weirdest.

One very odd humanoid creature of some sort that has been reported is what appears to be some sort of deer men, with various truly bizarre sightings of such creatures from all over the United States. One account was made in northeast Ohio by a witness who claims that he was at his cousin’s house playing hide and seek outside one day when he was 14 years old. It was reportedly around dusk, and they were playing near a wooded creek when it was the witnesses turn to search, and as he did he claims that he heard the sound of leaves crackling under foot. He turned to look expecting to see his cousin, but instead saw a deer through the brush that appeared to be oddly standing up on its hind legs, unusual for a deer but which would prove to be even stranger than that. The report reads:

It was getting dark and I was the one searching. I heard leaves crumpling, and when I turned to look, I saw what looked like a deer on its hind legs. I clearly remember seeing “dog legs” running, but the rest of the body was straight up. And it ran with incredible speed, and I knew it wasn’t either of my cousins hiding. I ran as fast as I could back to the house, and my one of my cousins was running in too, he saw the same thing. It still creeps me out to this day, because my uncle always told us how he saw weird things on that property.

A sighting of a similar creature that appears to have also had the ability of shapeshifting was made in the state of Delaware in 1993. The witness claims that he was around 8 years old at the time and he had been staying with his family at his grandparents’ house in a rural, forested area near the town of Hockessin. One morning he says he woke to a clear day with the sun shining in through the window and also the surreal sight of the silhouette of a deer with a huge rack of antlers standing just outside. Things would get bizarre rapidly, and the witness says of what happened next thus:

It was RIGHT there, like almost pressed against the window in profile. I stared in awe.
And that is when it changed. In one smooth movement, it reared up on its hind legs and it was no longer a deer, but a man. There were only two men in the area, my grandfather and my dad, and it was clearly neither (not sure if that made it better or worse). Grandfather was very built for his age, dad had a gut. This silhouette was clearly younger, muscular but not in the “like a brick” way my grandfather was. It exuded strength. And scared the hell out of me. It stared to the side for a moment, and then strode off with purpose. Looking back, I want to tell myself it was just the imagination of a half-awake child, but I remember the awe and the utter fear I felt when the “deer” changed.

Yet another Deer Man sighting was made as recently as 2012, in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. In this account, a Kyle Heying claims that he was out at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in order to take photographs of the night sky there with a friend. On this evening at around 10 PM, the usual sounds of the forest suddenly became muted and the local wildlife started to display some decidedly bizarre and uncharacteristic behavior. First some elk came running by and then a herd of bison, which all came uncomfortably close before hurrying off, and it seemed almost as if these animals were trying to get away from something scaring them out in the dark forest beyond.

This was enough to spook the men into packing up their stuff and calling it a night, and as they did they allegedly felt a strange change in air pressure and all of the sounds of the woods just stopped to send a profound silence crashing down upon them. The two unsettled men then heard something rustling about out in some tall grass nearby, jarring in the otherwise void of silence that had blanketed the area, and it seemed like whatever it was was coming towards them. Heying claims that he and his friends had then picked up some rifles they had with them, wary of what was apparently approaching. They started the car and began to drive off when they saw something step out in front of the vehicle that they would never forget, a creature which Heying described as having a head like an elk but which stood upright on two human legs and which had two human arms and “dark red” eyes. As they passed it, the nightmarish creature lurched forward to hit the car, and Heying floored it away as fast as the vehicle would go until they were about 3 miles away, where they stopped their flight to regain their wits. Heying would say of what happened next thus:

We were scared shitless. Things got even quieter when we stayed there. While there we heard one ear-piercing screech or scream, almost a hunting screech of some sort that made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps even worse. With that we left the mountains completely, we felt as though we were not wanted there that night. The way the wildlife acted, the figure that we came across that the animals had to have ran from, and then the scream of which I can only find references to happens to be the Banshee. I cannot forget that figure we saw, as well as the scream. It was not human but it was not of any wildlife I am familiar with from out there.

What in the world could possibly account for what these witnesses saw? Just what kind of creature could these things possibly be and are any of these accounts connected in any way? No one knows. Deer men are not even the strangest of humanoid creatures to have been reported, and we’re just getting started. In summer of 2012 there was a head-scratching sighting near Washington Park, near Michigan City, Indiana, that is really hard to classify.

The witness claims that she had been staying at the beach house of a friend by Lake Michigan and that there had been a lightning storm at the time. At around 2 AM some of them went outside to smoke and watch the lightning, and that was when they noticed the beam of a flashlight scanning the tall grass by the shore nearby as if searching for something. Thinking this to be a bit odd, the group of friends watched on and saw that the beam had captured an elongated, grayish humanoid looking creature stretched out on the beach, and the witness would say:

The light sweeps by something in the grass, then it shines back onto it. What was illuminated was very strange. It appeared to be a naked guy crawling around on the grass. Although, it had elongated arms and legs. It was moving kinda fast crunched over. It only lasted a few seconds, long enough for all of us to see it. Then, after the thing ran off, the flashlight shines directly at us. It stayed pointing at us until it went out after a few seconds. Creepy.
So, we’re all like WTF was that, we asked what each other saw. We all seen a weird stretched out naked guy. The only explainable thing it could have possibly been was a drunk gangly naked guy. But, I don’t think so because it looked abnormally stretched, the light pointed at us, and it freaked everyone out. It was something strange. I can’t say what the height of it was accurately, maybe around 7ft tall. My husband said it looked like something from a Marilyn Manson music video.I wanted to go down there. I wanted to see if we could find it. But, no one would go and they were creeped out and wanted to go back inside.

What on earth was the outlandish thing they saw? What was with that flashlight and why did it train itself on the observers of this surreal scene? Who knows? In August of 2017 there was a series of sightings of a very strange humanoid figure on a farm near Boca Raton, Florida. The witness, who originally posted his experience on Reddit, says that on the 14th he saw something very unusual one evening at dusk as he was eating dinner and staring out over the property, which he would continue to see for the next two nights as well. He said that a very tall, grey colored humanoid that looked like the character “Gumby” lurched out of the tree line, took a few steps, and then went back into the forest lining the property. The witness says:

It was flat but its legs bended in a way that looked like a plank bending. Like how a piece of wood bows when weight is put on it but springs back up when the weight is taken off. Its body, from where I could see it, was rigid. It didn’t look flexible aside from the legs and the limbs were fairly wide
The next night, at the same time, the same exact thing happened except my parents were with me. It walked on two legs but it was more like lunges or arching steps than human walking.  I asked them if they saw that and they just said “saw what?”
Then it happened AGAIN the third night. So either my body is giving me random hallucinations in sync with my body’s time clock or there’s some weird Slendergumby demon living on the farm behind my house. I haven’t been home much recently so I haven’t been able to look for it again but if I’m able to. I haven’t seen whatever it was since those three times and was unable to get a photo of it due to how far away it was. This was in the middle of a very populated city so seeing something this outlandish in a human heavy area was quite strange.

If none of these are weird enough for you, then how about the disturbing number of reports of stick figures seen lurking in rural and deserted areas of the world? When I say stick figure I don’t mean simply something that is elongated and thin, but rather literally a stick figure, as if something a child might draw. This is what some people have apparently been sighting since at least 2008, and they are deeply bizarre to say the least. The Stick Figures are typically described as just that, tall and extremely thin dark beings with no discernible facial features and which move smoothly and fluidly, with some reports saying that they do not change dimensions no matter what angle they are observed from, as if they are actually 2D constructs, and others mentioning air pressure changes, static electricity, and a feeling of malevolence in their presence.

The tales of these creatures certainly have an urban legend vibe to them, but are nevertheless numerous enough across the Internet to deserve mention. One early account from a man named Simon Howes seems to originate from all the way back in 1982, when a witness says he was studying to be a nurse at Warley Hospital, Brentwood in Essex, England, where he saw what can only be described as a stick figure while he was walking home one night. The witness says:

I encountered a ‘stick person’ in the grounds of the Hospital as I was walking home one night. It lopped across the roadway having been, seemingly, pressed up against a wall. It stopped when it saw me and raised it’s arms in fright and quickly walked off into the undergrowth. It was very tall with very thin, extremely long arms and legs and a very small oval head. Totally black and no obvious clothing. I saw no face even though it emerged very near a street lamp and so was well illuminated. I was terrified and to this day, no-one believes me.

Another such report comes from a witness named Damien Castellione, who claims that his sister and cousin saw one of the creatures when she was a kid at their aunt’s funeral. The witness says:

You know my sister told me that she saw a stick man too when she was a kid. back then it was our aunt’s funeral and she was sitting outside the funeral when she noticed a strange “stick like person” walking back and forth above the electric wiring of the pole in front of the funeral that is (she is more or less 10 walking distance away from the pole). She got really frightened and she told our cousin to look at it, at first our cousin didn’t believe her but after a few minutes she saw the stick man too and both of them got terrified they told our cousin’s mom if she saw the stickman and she said no. it took several hours, it was noon – until dawn before it faded away. she told the story to me and I had doubts but when I saw this article I was like.. wow I never thought a lot of people saw a stickmen too from around the world.

Some of these unearthly creatures have even been apparently photographed, although the quality of this evidence leaves much to be desired. Such reports have actually pored in from all corners of the globe, and it seems to be a phenomenon for which there is no clear answer. Is this just an urban legend in the making? If these stick-like figures are actually real then what could they possibly be? Aliens? Inter-dimensional beings or ghosts? What? Whatever they are or aren’t, actual literal stick figures prowling darkened roads and woods at night have to rank right up there as among the oddest, most bizarre things anyone could expect to come across.

It seems that the world of strange sightings can often truly veer off into completely uncharted territory and things that seem unable to truly be classified, existing in their own fringe world of sheer, utter insanity. There they lurk in the dim confines of a realm we have no understanding of and of which many do not even know is there at all. These are things for which there is no easy way to classify, things which seem to have lurched out of some sort of horror story. What are these creatures, if anything? How can we explain these oddities and anomalies? If we can glean anything from this it is that these are some truly strange bizarre sightings out there that defy conventions, and which may never cease to puzzle.

COAST TO COAST AM -

Fortean and paranormal researcher Lon Strickler has written a number of books on unexplained, mysterious, and bizarre encounters. He discussed the 29 sightings this year in the Chicago area of a flying humanoid creature he calls the Chicago Phantom (view related map).

In 2011, there were three sightings of a bat-like Mothman creature, and then things died down, but starting in April of 2017, reports started to kick in. In the first case, a woman saw a 7 ft. tall creature with glowing red eyes. As she was watching, it shot straight up into the air, unfurled its wings and took off, he recounted.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Daytime UFO video from Naples, Florida 26-Jan-2020

White object was spotted and recorded in the sky above Naples, FL on 26th January 2020.

Witness report: 

White capsule shaped UAP sighted in daylight by two people in Naples, Florida.

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

Wetenschappers geïntrigeerd door mysterieus radiosignaal dat om de 16 dagen naar Aarde wordt gestuurd - HLN.be

Bron: CNN, The Independent

Een team ruimtewetenschappers in British Columbia (Canada) observeerde tussen 16 september 2018 en 30 oktober 2019 de radiogolven met behulp van een radiotelescoop. De astronomen kwamen tot de ontdekking dat de signalen - afkomstig van een spiraalvormig sterrenstelsel - een regelmatig ritme hadden: een cyclus van 16,35 dagen om precies te zijn.

Lees ook

Wetenschappers hebben herhaald radiosignaal opgevangen van diep in de ruimte (en niemand kan met zekerheid aliens uitsluiten)

De golven waren steeds vier dagen lang actief, waarna er een radiostilte kwam van 12 dagen, om vervolgens volgens hetzelfde patroon te herbeginnen. De ontdekking kan helpen om het mysterie van de radiosignalen verder te ontrafelen, hopen de wetenschappers. Hun bevindingen werden gepubliceerd in een paper waarover CNN bericht.

De bewuste radiosignalen, in het vakjargon ‘Fast Radio Burst’ (FRB) genoemd, werden voor het eerst in 2007 ontdekt en behoren tot een van de meest fascinerende fenomenen in het universum. Het gaat om snelle uitbarstingen die maar enkele milliseconden duren. Maar zij genereren meer energie dan vijfhonderd miljoenen zonnen.

Hoewel FRB’s al herhaaldelijk zijn waargenomen, gebeurt het zelden dat zij repetitief zijn - laat staan dat ze een bepaald patroon volgen. Door wat ze worden veroorzaakt, is nog altijd niet bekend. Kortom, er is nog heel wat werk aan de winkel om de ware toedracht te achterhalen. Het is aan de astronomen om met dit nieuwe puzzelstukje verder aan de slag te gaan.

Selectie van video's door peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Krijgen we binnenkort een adembenemend verschijnsel te zien? Gigantische ster Betelgeuse staat mogelijk op springen - HLN.be

Bron: space.com, Forbes, Science Alert

Astronomen schatten eerder dat Betelgeuse nog zo’n 100.000 jaar zou leven, een eeuwigheid voor ons maar een luttel moment voor het heelal. Maar intussen hebben wetenschappers bizar gedrag vastgesteld bij Betelgeuse. De snelheid waarmee de ster uitdooft, is plots hoger dan ooit tevoren. Dat betekent dat er mogelijk een supernova van ongeziene omvang zit aan te komen.

Lees ook

Belgisch getinte ruimtevaartmissie naar kant van de zon die we nog nooit zagen

Kloppend hart

Betelgeuse is een beetje te vergelijken met een kloppend hart: de ster dooft uit en wakkert weer aan in golvende bewegingen. Volgens nieuwe data van astronoom Edward Guinan van de Villanova University in de Amerikaanse staat Pennsylvania zit Betelgeuse mogelijk in een uitdoofperiode van 430 dagen. Op 21 februari loopt die periode af en zal Betelgeuse donkerder dan ooit tevoren zijn. Die dag wordt cruciaal, want als de ster daarna niet weer opwakkert en verder uitdooft, stevenen we mogelijk af op een supernova. Dan explodeert de ster.

Wat als Betelgeuse echt op springen staat?

Betelgeuse bevindt zich op 700 lichtjaren van de aarde. Ter vergelijking: onze zon ligt op ongeveer 8,3 lichtminuten van de aarde en dus bijna 5 miljoen keer dichter. Betelgeuse ligt dus ver genoeg om geen gevaar te vormen voor ons, maar wel dicht genoeg om de meest nabije supernova in 400 jaar te worden.

De kans blijft weliswaar gering dat wij Betelgeuse zien ontploffen. Betelgeuse is al vaak gedimd en de kans is klein dat het deze keer wel tot een supernova komt.

Mogelijk is Betelgeuse trouwens al lang ontploft, maar net omdat de ster zo ver van ons ligt, krijgen wij ze te zien zoals ze er 700 jaar geleden uitzag, want dat is de tijd die het licht nodig heeft om van Betelgeuse tot bij ons te geraken. Als wij de supernova ooit te zien krijgen, zal Betelgeuse al een eeuwigheid zijn uitgedoofd.

Hoe zal die explosie eruitzien?

Als Betelgeuse ontploft, krijgen we een prachtig spektakel te zien op aarde dat mogelijk tot enkele dagen kan duren. De supernova wordt zo helder dat hij zelfs overdag te zien zal zijn. Het licht wordt wellicht zelfs helderder dan dat van de Maan. De laatste keer dat mensen een vergelijkbaar fenomeen hebben meegemaakt, is ongeveer 400 jaar geleden.

Wetenschappers houden Betelgeuse nauwlettend in de gaten tot 21 februari, want dan weten we of de kans op een supernova echt groter wordt.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

UFO Caught At Space Station Using Infrared Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 7, 2020

Location of sighting: Space Station

Source: Live ISS Cam

 

This UFO was captured by a new UFO hunter on Youtube going by the name of UFOgent. He captured this orb on the space station live cam and its just mind blowing. The cam is in infrared at the moment. That is why its purplish pink in color. Nothing can escape infrared video, it cuts through cloaks, clouds, water and even reflections on water, windows and tinted glass. But you probably already know that. This orb is heading towards the space station. Probably some aliens deciding to take a closer look at what the astronauts on board are doing and thinking. Some might say this is the moon. That would come from an inexperienced person who has not used the live cam very much. I have used it for over 15 years...and me and Streetcap1 were the founding fathers at using this cam to find UFOs. The Russians killed him, so that just leaves me. So when I say this is not the moon, you can trust me. Its also too slow to be a meteor. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

61% Of People Want The U.S. Government To Make Information On UFOs Public

Andrii Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock

A majority of people want U.S. government information on UFOs to be made public.

According to a study from Piplsay, 61% of people want the government to release any information it might have on UFOs and aliens to the public. (RELATED: The Trailer For ‘Westworld‘ Season 3 Has Been Released. It’s Absolutely Insane)

The same study found that 58% of people think the government investigates UFOs and aliens, and 27% believe the sightings are real.

I’m all in on this. I’m all in! Release the files from Area 51 and elsewhere, folks! Let the information flow through the streets and into the minds of the people!

Ever since the Navy UFO videos of the “tic tac” became public, it seems like people are becoming more and more interested in UFOs.

Do I think aliens and UFOs are real? Not a clue. I don’t know anything more than you guys do. Of course, a UFO doesn’t naturally mean it’s an alien.

It just means it’s a flying object that can’t be identified. Now, is it a lot more fun to assume it’s an alien spacecraft? Sure, but that’s not what it means by default.

Either way, I say live on the edge and declassify everything. Embrace the chaos. If the aliens are here and we need to get into some “X-Files” kind of stuff, then so be it.

At least let us know!

Sound off in the comments if you want the government to release their info!

{ https://dailycaller.com/ }

Oddball sexaquark particles could be immortal, if they exist at all

By Paul Sutter - Astrophysicist 

These supremely stable particles could explain dark matter.

(Image: © Shutterstock)

After decades of poking around in the math behind the glue holding the innards of all matter together, physicists have found a strange hypothetical particle, one that has never appeared in any experiment. Called a sexaquark, the oddball is made up of a funky arrangement of six quarks of various flavors. 

Besides being a cool-sounding character, the sexaquark could eventually explain the ever-maddening mystery of dark matter. And physicists have found that if the sexaquark has a particular mass, the particle could live forever. 

• Related: 11 unanswered questions about dark matter

Quarks of nature

Almost everything you know and love is made of tiny particles known as quarks. There are six of them, given the names, for various nerdy reasons, of up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. The up and down varieties are the lightest of the bunch, which makes them by far the most common. (In particle physics, the heavier you are, the more likely you are to decay into smaller, stabler things.)

The protons and neutrons inside your body are all composed of trios of quarks; two ups and a down make a proton, and two downs and an up make a neutron. Indeed, due to the complicated nature of the strong force, quarks really enjoy hanging out in groups of three, and that is also by far the stablest and most common configuration.

Occasionally in our particle colliders, we create particles each consisting of a pair of quarks; these conglomerations are unstable and quickly decay into something else. Sometimes, when we try really hard, we can glue five quarks together and make them play nicely with each other — briefly — before they, too, decay into something else. 

And to date, those are all the combinations of quarks that we've been able to manufacture.

However, there may be something stranger.

• Related: Strange quarks and muons, oh my! Nature’s tiniest particles

The forge of the elements

After decades of poking around the mathematical corners of the strong nuclear force, physicists found a strange combination that has yet to appear in our experiments: an arrangement of six quarks, consisting of two ups, two downs and two stranges: the sexaquark.

Theories don't predict a mass for the sexaquark; this value would depend on the precise arrangement and interaction of the individual quarks inside that particle, so it's up to the experimental physicists to suss it out. And as for the sexaquark's stability? Calculations suggest that if its mass falls below a certain threshold, it would be absolutely stable forever, meaning it wouldn't ever decay. And if the mass is a little bigger than that, but still below a certain threshold, then the particle would decay, but over such long timescales that it might as well be stable forever.

So if it's stable, why haven't we ever seen it?

Curiously, the range of stable masses for the sexaquark falls below the threshold of what many particle collider experiments can create; these tools were designed to study much rarer, much heavier, much more fleeting particles. In other words, the sexaquark may be hiding in plain sight, having simply flown under the radar all these years.

But particle colliders aren't the only place to make sexaquarks. The earliest moments of the Big Bang were a frenetic hotbed of nuclear energies, with temperatures and pressures high enough to forge helium and hydrogen out of a raw soup of quarks. And that forge may have also flooded our cosmos with sexaquarks, along with all the more-familiar subatomic characters. 

Preliminary calculations suggest that if the sexaquark is a real thing within the right range of masses, it could have been produced in ridiculous abundance in the early universe. And it could have survived that youthful inferno. In fact, sexaquarks may still exist, not really interacting with anything, not really decaying into anything else — just existing, creating extra gravitational pulls wherever they collect, due to their mass.

An invisible particle that's flooding the universe and that interacts only through gravity? Bingo. That's dark matter.

A light in the dark

In order for the sexaquark to make up dark matter, it has to actually exist. That is currently a subject of debate, because the object has never been spotted in a particle collider experiment. But like we saw earlier, the sexaquark's relatively light mass may mean it's been able to slip by unnoticed, simply because we haven't been looking for it.

But that's beginning to change. The BaBar Detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California is really good at producing lots of combinations of quarks, including some really heavy ones that decay into stabler and more reasonable arrangements. BaBar should also produce a bumper crop of sexaquarks, if they exist. 

A paper published Jan. 2 to the arXiv database has reported the latest result: no sign of the sexaquark. But that finding is certain to a confidence level of only 90%. That means that if the more massive and less stable combinations of quarks do decay into stable sexaquarks, they do so very rarely, at a rate of only 1 decay in every 10 million. 

Does this rule out the sexquark as a dark matter candidate? Not quite. It could be that the conditions of the early universe allowed enough sexaquarks to be made that they could account for the amount of dark matter that we estimate is in the universe. But the new result does make it challenging to use the sexaquark to explain dark matter.

Nice try, sexaquark, but no cigar — at least, not yet.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

Originally published on Live Science.

• The biggest unanswered questions in physics
• What’s that? Your physics questions answered
• Cosmic record holders: The 12 biggest objects in the universe

{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

Will Humanity Achieve Interstellar Travel And Find Alien Life? - PART II

Live blog begins at 3:50 PM Pacific Time, with all timestamps below shown beginning from that starting point.

A representation of an alien invasion. This is not an actual extraterrestrial.

FLICKR USER PLAITS

4:00 PM: Aliens, on the other hand, are likely ubiquitous, based on what we know about the ingredients for life in the Universe, the workings of chemistry, and our measurements of exoplanets with the right conditions for life around other stars. We have literally billions and billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone, with similar conditions to early Earth. In many models, early Venus and Mars were similar to early Earth.

Are we supposed to believe that Earth, where life arose within the first ~3% of our planet's history, is somehow unique in that regard? Although winding up with something like human beings is a difficult proposition, winding up with no life at all, across billions and billions of other instances with similar initial conditions, seems far more unlikely, at least from a scientific perspective.

4:01 PM: Hooray for another on-time start, as Greg Dick, the executive director of Perimeter Institute, gets us started right on time with his introduction!

4:02 PM: Oh, before I forget, Bryan is Australian, so get ready for an accent, although his won't be the strongest Australian accent you hear by a long shot!

4:03 PM: And that's a pretty quick introduction! Here we go; curious what the scientific perspective holds, according to an astronomer/astrophysicist who isn't me!

4:05 PM: Spoilers: we don't have warp drive yet, and we haven't found the aliens yet. Love to hear this up-front, but I also love the optimism that he has that science can make pretty much all of our non-laws-of-physics-violating dreams come true. I think, at its best, this is the dream we all have for science.

4:07 PM: Bryan absolutely talks about an important aspect of being exposed to not just answers of what we do know, but what the frontiers of science are, what's unknown, at a young age. As a five year old, to discover that adults, parents, teachers, and even experts (libraries and encyclopedias) didn't know the answer to everything.

And that there are people who figure out the answers to those questions, and they're just ordinary people, and that he could be one of them.

Please note that this applies to everyone! You can do it, too, and you don't have to figure that out at age 5 to do it.

From inflation to the hot Big Bang, to the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and black holes, all... [+]

E. SIEGEL, WITH IMAGES DERIVED FROM ESA/PLANCK AND THE DOE/NASA/ NSF INTERAGENCY TASK FORCE ON CMB RESEARCH

4:10 PM: And this is a lot of fun, too: the fact that questions we didn't even know we needed to ask can be revealed by finding the answers to previous scientific questions. In the 1920s, we didn't know the Universe was expanding, but its discovery led to the idea of the Big Bang. In the 1960s, we didn't know that the Big Bang was true, but its confirmation led to questions about what came before it and what our Universe's ultimate fate would be.

And now, as you can see, we're talking about the mysteries of cosmic inflation and dark energy, which are where those frontiers now lie. And in any field, this is how it works: discovering an answer only reveals a deeper frontier that we haven't yet explored.

4:11 PM: I like Bryan's delineation between the difference between science and science fiction. Science is all about discovering and following the rules; science-fiction is about breaking those rules. I haven't explicitly thought about it in those terms, and I agree that this is pretty much how it usually works. I don't know that this is why I, personally, like or don't like various forms of science-fiction, but it's a new perspective to think about for me.

4:13 PM: We constantly have advancing technology, and science-fiction asks the question of how advancing technology will change our lives. He brings up the example of Westworld, which I like, but I really think he missed a golden opportunity to reference Black Mirror, which really highlights and elevates the dystopian aspects of our society in a new way in each episode.

An animation showing the path of the interstellar interloper now known as ʻOumuamua. The combination... [+]

NASA / JPL - CALTECH

4:15 PM: Alright, some science! Here we are, moving on to interstellar interloper 'Oumuamua, one of the things we've seen that wasn't particularly anticipated, even by science fiction. And yet, Bryan is correct to point out that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had a cigar-shaped alien asteroid in our own solar system.

It's not, of course, telling us to save the whales, and it's not a space probe, but it's remarkable that science fiction had this idea before astronomers or any scientists knew it was coming.

The Event Horizon Telescope's first released image achieved resolutions of 22.5 microarcseconds,... [+]

 EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION

4:18 PM: This one is a little bit less fair. When you're talking about older movies that talk about black holes, it's really unfair to talk about how "we knew what black holes would look like" in science-fiction, because black holes have been astrophysically theorized for decades, going back to the 60s, 50s, or even 1916 in the context of General Relativity, and even earlier (the late 18th century) in Newtonian gravity.

Sure, it's fascinating, but visualizations, based on a mix of science and artistic license, have been around for as long as we've even known enough about science to imagine what could realistically be. Also, side note, the "interstellar" black hole is probably not very likely to be what we see when we examine our realistic black holes in supreme accuracy; there's a lot of artistic license and some likely unphysical assumptions that were made for Insterstellar.

Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. Binary neutron star systems inspiral and merge... [+] 

NSF / LIGO / SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY / A. SIMONNET

4:22 PM: I also don't quite think it's fair to say "well, we simulated and visualized this astrophysical event," and then "we observed it," and "that's an example of science outstripping science fiction.

Yes, it's true that the entire Universe shook... but not every scientific event, including one that involves planet Earth "shaking" by less than an atom's width, makes for particularly good science fiction. He said earlier, remember, that science fiction was about investigating the human condition. It's hard to see how a tiny, subtle effect like that would make for a good sci-fi story.

The hyperdrive from Star Wars appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space,... [+]

JEDIMENTAT44 / FLICKR

4:25 PM: Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. Do you know why things like rockets and space shuttles have the shapes they do? That elongated, narrow-cone shape you're familiar with? It's because of atmospheric drag.

If you're going to build your ship in space, and fly it only in space, you don't need to factor in aerodynamic considerations at all! You'd be much, much smarter to build a structure with a good volume-to-surface-area ratio: a sphere. The Death Star, not the Millennium Falcon or an X-Wing, is going to be much more practical for structures we build in space!

The NEXIS Ion Thruster, at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, is a prototype for a long-term thruster that... [+]

NASA / JPL

4:28 PM: Ion drives are real, and they're very cool. But if you want to power a journey across large distances in a reasonable amount of time, ion drives won't get you far at all. They can take you ~6 billion kilometers over 11 years, as Bryan said, and can do so pretty efficiently. But if you factor that distance over that time as a "mean acceleration," you get something truly atrocious: 100 nanometers/second^2.

You're... not going to go very far very fast. ~100,000 years to the nearest star, same as conventional fuel. I'll pass, thank you.

Normally, structures like IKAROS, shown here, are viewed as potential sails in space. However, if a... [+]

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ANDRZEJ MIRECKI

4:30 PM: Hey, solar sails! Yes, if you accelerate with a solar sail, you can decelerate with a solar sail! The "fuel" is simply radiation provided by a star, so as long as you visit a star comparable to the Sun, you could decelerate the same way you accelerated.

Unfortunately, this technology is inferior to ion drives not only in terms of distance reached, but in terms of acceleration and control over your spacecraft. It's a nice idea, but it's an idea that's in its infancy, at best, despite being proposed more than 400 years ago by Johannes Kepler!

4:32 PM: 75 years?! That's... that's going to assume a very light payload and a very, very large and efficient over a distance of 1.8 kilometers. Can we do that for ~4 light years, or 20 trillion kilometers. That's... well, good luck is all I'll say.

The EmDrive device, as originally displayed by Roger Shawyer's company, SPR Limited.

SPR LIMITED

4:33 PM: Hey, don't be out of date, Bryan! The Em Drive was totally debunked a few years ago. Nice idea, but it's done.

Quantum teleportation, an effect (erroneously) touted as faster-than-light travel. In reality, no... [+]

AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY

4:36 PM: Remember, what "quantum teleportation" is doesn't involve teleporting a particle, it involves teleporting the quantum state of a particle. And Bryan gets that right, but this doesn't solve the problem of teleporting an inanimate object, much less a person.

4:38 PM: Yes, you need a lot of information to encode a human being. Remember that there are around ~10^28 atoms in the human body, and that means something like 10^29 or 10^30 quantum bits of information. As Bryan says, "I don't think we'll be teleporting anytime soon."

The travel time for a spacecraft to reach a destination if it accelerates at a constant rate of... [+]

P. FRAUNDORF AT WIKIPEDIA

4:40 PM: Hey, don't be mad at time dilation! Time dilation is what could get us to the stars in a human lifetime. If you wanted to go more than ~100 light-years, it would always take you more than ~100 years (a human lifetime, at the far end) to get there from the frame-of-reference of a person remaining on Earth.

But if you continue to accelerate at 1 g, or 9.8 m/s^2, you'll get to wherever you want to go in a much shorter timescale from your frame of reference, as you travel close to the speed of light. Time dilation rules!

An artist's conception of a starship making use of the Alcubierre drive to travel at apparently... [+]

NASA

4:42 PM: Okay, really? From long, long-term technologies like ion drives and solar sails straight to warp drive, with nothing in between? In terms of not using fuel, Bryan is correct. But in terms of not using energy... well, good luck transforming your spacetime, where (reminder) spacetime's curvature is based on matter-and-energy, without expending energy!

The DEEP laser-sail concept relies on a large laser array striking and accelerating a relatively... [+]

© 2016 UCSB EXPERIMENTAL COSMOLOGY GROUP

4:43 PM: Wait, he's going to finish this part of his talk now, talking about Breakthrough Starshot (and the laser sail technology and a "starchip" spaceship) which we mentioned earlier, and cover "aliens" in... what, 10-15 minutes? We'll see!

4:45 PM: Nope; we're not onto the "aliens" part yet; we're talking about femtosatellites, which are still quite large and weigh a few grams, which is still too much for Breakthrough Starshot.

Tiny particles known as micrometeoroids will strike whatever they encounter in space, causing... [+]

NASA; SECURE WORLD FOUNDATION

4:48 PM: Yesss! This is something I'm excited to hear, because it's something that I've brought up that few people talk about: when you travel through space at relativistic speeds, you are going to smash into stuff in the interstellar medium! And that stuff is going to erode your spacecraft really fast, and there's nothing that's going to protect your "starship" (even if it's a microchip) from smashing into that dust.

Remember that a little piece of nerf-like foam was all it took, at high speeds, to cause the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Remember that all of our spacecraft get hit by micrometeoroids. And remember that 20% the speed of light is about 100 times faster than our fastest spacecraft go, which means they have 10,000 times the kinetic energy from dust particle collisions. This is a harder problem to overcome than anyone has figured out a viable way to reckon with.

4:50 PM: Okay, it's onto the aliens part, and I have to disagree with what Bryan says. We don't want to go to planets around other stars to look for life; we want to find planets where life exists (or is likely) and then go there.

There are ~400 billion stars in our galaxy. Do you want to go on a wild goose chase, or do you want to know where you're going before you go on a decades-long journey across the great void of space?

(Pick the latter.)

When Hubble pointed at the system Kepler-1625, it found the initial transit of the main planet began... [+]

NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/SVS/KATRINA JACKSON

4:53 PM: Using the transit method, we can find out properties of the planets that orbit around the stars, and they come in enormous varieties, just like we'd expect if we didn't assume the rest of the Universe was just like our little corner. We've found the planets that are easiest to find, and that means the largest planets relative to their star in close-in orbits. This, unsurprisingly, has skewed the population of planets that we've found.

Although more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets are known, with more than half of them uncovered by... [+]

NASA/AMES RESEARCH CENTER/JESSIE DOTSON AND WENDY STENZEL; MISSING EARTH-LIKE WORLDS BY E. SIEGEL

4:55 PM: We have found waterworlds and lava worlds, but these are... well, likely not the best candidates for an "interesting" form of alien life. Nor are hot Jupiters (or any type of Jupiter), or any gas planet with a large hydrogen/helium envelope.

Just like in our own Solar System, most of the planets out there are not expected to have life on them.

4:56 PM: This is a totally unimportant point, but for an astronomer, it's a pet peeve for many.

The smallest stars in the Universe are red dwarfs. Always dwarfs, never dwarves. The plural of dwarf (for stars) is dwarfs; the plural of dwarf (for the fantasy race of short, stout, beard, axe-wielding characters) is dwarves.

If TOI 700d were a cloudless, dry-land planet with an atmosphere similar to modern Earth, there... [+]

ENGELMANN-SUISSA ET AL./NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

4:59 PM: This is also an important point: what's happening on a world around a red dwarf star isn't so much about the irradiance from the star and day/night temperatures and the border between them, but how the atmosphere circulates and what it's composed of.

We also have to be very careful in distinguishing between "biosignatures," which is going to be a slam-dunk signal that tells us, "wow, that's a living planet right there," and a "bio-hint," which is what Bryan's referring to, which is pretty much guaranteed to get you false positives, over and over, before you actually get it right.

This diagram shows the novel 5-mirror optical system of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).... [+]

ESO

5:01 PM: This is really true: the ELT will be humanity's best chance, in the 2020s, for directly imaging an Earth-like (or potentially inhabited) planet of any type. This could lead us to a revolution, where bio-hints and bio-signatures could be abundant. Right now, planet-finders like TESS are giving us the best candidate planets for direct imaging, and while we'll have to get lucky, this is the high-reward science most of us dream about!

In this artist's rendition, NASA's Clipper spacecraft makes one of its many dozen close passes to... [+]

NASA/JPL-CALTECH

5:04 PM: Of course, this is the third possibility I haven't discussed for finding life: it could be right here in our Solar System! Do we have life in a subsurface ocean on Europa or Enceladus? Do we have subterranean, potentially seasonally active/inactive life on Mars? Do the outer worlds, like Triton or Pluto, have anything on them of interest?

We have missions going to look, and hopefully in the 2020s, we'll start to get answers that teach us whether our fantastical interpretations of signals like seasonal methane or organic molecules really hold up. They could be biotic in nature, and we won't know until we do the appropriate tests!

A small section of the Karl Jansky Very Large Array, one of the world's largest and most powerful... [+]

JOHN FOWLER

5:06 PM: This is a fun fact: you must not use a walkie talkie around radio telescopes; the interference is atrocious! Remember that people didn't know what "fast radio bursts" were for much longer than we realized, because the microwave oven in the break room of a giant radio telescope was causing interference? That's a true story; don't use walkie talkies near radio telescopes!

5:07 PM: So I think this 1 hour talk has taught me how you talk about two topics when you spend the first 50 minutes on the first topic: just keep talking over your talk's time!

5:10 PM: The present and the near future are incredibly exciting, and you don't need warp drive or actual aliens to make it so. But, that said, it would be pretty cool to achieve interstellar travel or to find any true signatures (not just hints + wishful thinking) of alien life.

This is why we do science and why we develop technology; these are our sci-fi dreams and we're making them come true!

5:12 PM: Alright, talk's over and we're into the Q&A. Hey, and the first question is "how do we go from that light of an exoplanet transiting" to "how do we extract all that useful information?" And the two answers are:

1. transit spectroscopy, and
2. direct imaging.

Bryan is only giving the first answer, but both matter!

5:14 PM: No to aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. Good answer, Bryan. I like the snark of, "why come all this way just to dissect a cow?"

Alright, everyone, that's all the time I've budgeted for today's talk; hope you enjoyed the live blog and Bryan's talk! We might not have found aliens yet and we might still be quite far from reaching another star, but our technology has brought us quite an impressive way already, and we're headed towards something even more spectacular as the 2020s begin to unfold. Stay curious and please join me in looking forward to all the wondrous discoveries that this decade is sure to hold!

{ https://www.forbes.com/ }

Will Humanity Achieve Interstellar Travel And Find Alien Life? - PART I

Although our dreams of making contact with an alien civilization have traditionally been rooted in... [+]

DANIELLE FUTSELAAR

For as long as human beings have looked up at the stars in the sky, two questions have captured our collective imaginations: are there other life forms out there on any of their worlds, and will we ever realize the dream of traveling to one of them? Although both tasks appear to have enormously daunting technical challenges, recent advances in science suggest that not only might humanity be capable of overcoming them, but we might even do so later this century.

While faster-than-light travel and visitations from aliens ⁠— whether benign or malevolent ⁠— are staples of our science-fiction stories, it's plausible that our real-life scientific advances may legitimately be more profound than any fictional stories humans have dreamed up. On the edge of both frontiers, humanity may be on the cusp of achieving a dream as old as humanity itself.

A logarithmic chart of distances, showing the Voyager spacecraft, our Solar System and our nearest... [+]

NASA / JPL-CALTECH

The biggest problem with the idea of interstellar travel is scale. The distances to even the nearest stars are measured in light-years, with Proxima Centauri being our nearest neighbor at 4.24 light-years away, where one light-year is approximately 9 trillion kilometers: some 60,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. At the speed of the fastest space probes humanity has ever sent on their way out of the Solar System (the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft), covering the distance to the nearest star would take approximately 80,000 years.

But all of this is based on current technology, which uses chemical-based rocket fuel for propulsion. The biggest downside of rocket fuel is its inefficiency: one kilogram of fuel is capable of generating just milligrams' worth of energy, as measured by Einstein's E = mc2. Having to carry that fuel on board with you ⁠— and requiring that you accelerate both your payload and the remaining fuel with that energy ⁠— is what's hamstringing us right now.

Position and trajectory of Voyager 1 and the positions of the planets on 14 February 1990, the day... [+]

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / JOE HAYTHORNTHWAITE AND TOM RUEN

But there are two independent possibilities that don't require us to dream up Warp Drive-like technologies that would rely on new physics. Instead, we can pursue the routes of either using a more efficient fuel to power our journey, which could increase our range and speeds tremendously, or we can explore technologies where the thrust-providing source is independent of the payload that's going to be accelerated.

In terms of efficiency, there are three technologies that could vastly outperform chemical-based rocket fuel:

1. nuclear fission,
2. nuclear fusion,
3. and matter-antimatter propulsion.

Whereas chemical-based fuels convert a mere 0.0001% of their mass into energy that can be used for thrust, all of these ideas are far more efficient.

ll rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel. Whether a plasma engine, a matter/antimatter... [+]

NASA/MSFC

Fission converts approximately 0.1% of the mass of fissile materials into energy; approximately one kilogram of fissionable fuel yields about one gram's worth of energy, via E = mc². Nuclear fusion does a superior job; fusing hydrogen into helium, for example, is 0.7% efficient: one kilogram of fuel would yield 7 grams' worth of usable energy. But far-and-away the most efficient solution is matter-antimatter annihilation.

If we could create and control 0.5 kilograms of antimatter, we could annihilate it at will with 0.5 kilograms of normal matter, creating a 100% efficient reaction that produced a full kilogram's worth of energy. We could conceivably extract thousands or even a million times as much energy from the same amount of fuel, which could propel us to the stars on timescales of centuries (with fission) or even just decades (with fusion or antimatter).

An artist's rendition of a laser-driven sail shows how a large-area, light-weight spacecraft could... [+]

ADRIAN MANN / UCSB

On the other hand, we could work to achieve interstellar travel via a completely different route: by placing a large power source capable of accelerating a spacecraft in space. Recent advances in laser technology have led many to suggest that an enormous, sufficiently collimated array of lasers in space could be used to accelerate a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit to tremendous speeds. A highly reflective laser-sail, like a solar sail except specifically designed for lasers, could do the job.

If a large-enough, powerful-enough array of in-phase lasers were constructed, potentially reaching gigawatt power levels, it could not only impart momentum to a target spacecraft, but could do so for a long period of time. Based on calculations performed by Dr. Phil Lubin a few years ago, it's possible that speeds up to 20% the speed of light could be reached. While we don't yet have a plan for decelerating such a spacecraft, reaching the nearest star in a single human lifetime is within the realm of possibility.

The laser sail concept, for a starchip-style starship, does have the potential to accelerate a... [+]

BREAKTHROUGH STARSHOT

By the same token, the search for extraterrestrial life is no longer restricted to either waiting for an alien visit or searching the Universe with radio signals for intelligent aliens, although the latter is certainly still an active scientific field spearheaded by SETI. Although no signals have been found, this remains a stunning example of high-risk, high-reward science. If a positive detection is ever made, it will be a civilization-transforming event.

However, as exoplanet astronomy continues to advance, two techniques that have already been demonstrated could bring us our first signatures of life on other worlds: transit spectroscopy and direct imaging. Both of these involve using the light from a planet itself, with transit spectroscopy leveraging the light that filters through a planet's atmosphere and direct imaging taking advantage of the sunlight directly reflected off of the planet itself.

When a planet transits in front of its parent star, some of the light is not only blocked, but if an... [+]

ESA / DAVID SING

Transit spectroscopy relies on us having a serendipitous alignment of our observatory with both a target exoplanet and its parent star, but these alignments do occur. Whereas a small fraction of the star's light will get blocked by the transiting planet, an even smaller fraction of starlight will transmit through the planet's atmosphere, similar to the sunlight that gets transmitted through Earth's atmosphere and lights up the Moon (in red) during a total lunar eclipse.

This enables us, if our measurements are good enough, to decode what elements and molecules are present in the target planet's atmosphere. If we could discover biological signatures or even technosignatures  which could be an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, complex biomolecules, or even something like a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) molecule  we would immediately have a strong hint of a living world that would tantalizingly await confirmation.

Left, an image of Earth from the DSCOVR-EPIC camera. Right, the same image degraded to a resolution of 3 x 3 pixels, similar to what researchers will see in future exoplanet observations.

NOAA/NASA/STEPHEN KANE

Direct imaging could provide exactly that sort of confirmation. Although our first image of an Earth-sized exoplanet likely won't be very visually impressive, it will contain a ton of information that can be used to reveal indicators of life. Even if the planet itself is just one pixel in a detector, we could not only break its light apart into individual wavelengths, but can look for time-varying signatures that could reveal:

• clouds,
• continents,
• oceans,
• plant life greening with the seasons,
• icecaps,
• rotation rates,

and much more. If there are light-emitting signatures at night, just as planet Earth has our light that illuminate the world at night, we could conceivably even detect those as well. If there's a civilization out there on a nearby Earth-like planet, the next generation of telescopes might be able to find them.

The Earth at night emits electromagnetic signals, but it would take a telescope of incredible... [+]

NASA'S EARTH OBSERVATORY/NOAA/DOD

All of this, together, points to a picture where a spacecraft or even a crewed journey to the stars is technologically within our reach, and where the discovery of our first world beyond the solar system with possible life on it could occur in a decade or two. What was once solely in the realm of science-fiction is quickly becoming possible due to both technical and scientific advances and the thousands of scientists and engineers who work to apply these new technologies in practical ways.

On February 5 at 7 PM ET (4 PM PT), Dr. Bryan Gaensler, director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, will be delivering a public lecture at Perimeter Institute on exactly this topic. Titled Warp Drive and Aliens: The Scientific Perspective, it's available to watch from anywhere on Earth, and I'll be following along with a live-blog in real time, below.

How close is humanity to achieving this dream that's spanned innumerable generations? The answer is closer than you might think, so tune in here and follow along below (updates every 3-5 minutes) to find out what lies just beyond the known frontier. It could be the revolution we've all been hoping for!

An illustration of the warp field from Star Trek, which shortens the space in front of it while... [+]

TREKKY0623 OF ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA

 Okay, warp drive fans, here we go! The first thing you might be wondering is about whether warp drive itself is really feasible or not. And the answer, believe it or not, is maybe, but not unless we figure out a source of energy that goes well beyond anything we've got so far, including antimatter.

The reason is simple: to achieve warp drive, you need to bend the space in front of you so that it contracts, and that can only occur at the expense of expanding the space behind you. This takes an enormous amount of energy all localized in one spot, and you need to do it while still keeping the space where your spaceship will be not too severely bent, or you'll wind up destroying it with terrific gravitational tidal forces.

The Alcubierre solution to General Relativity, enabling motion similar to warp drive. This solution... [+]

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ALLENMCC

But if you can do it, and it is something allowed in General Relativity, this requires not only the matter-and-energy we know, but also some form of negative energy: either matter with negative mass or a form of anti-energy itself. If we could harness this, it would mean we could travel through the contracted space (slower than light), but we could do something like contract a 40 light-year journey down to 6 light-months.

Even if we only traveled through that now-contracted space at half the speed of light, we'd get there in 1 year, rather than 40. That's pretty impressive!

The warp drive system on the Star Trek starships was what made travel from star to star possible. If... [+]

ALISTAIR MCMILLAN / C.C.-BY-2.0

That doesn't mean, however, that the plot devices or treknobabble cooked up by Star Trek's writers, which includes things like:

• dilithium crystals,
• warp nacelles,
• Bussard ramjets
• warp cores,

or anything else we might immediately refer to has any relevance. Science fiction provides us with possible outcomes, but only very rarely gets the path to that technological solution correct. We know enough about physics, today, to be certain that Star Trek's "solution" to this problem is not feasible. But, then again, that's part of what makes science so wonderful: it can take a fictional idea and make it a reality. Or, if we're really lucky, surpass our sci-fi dreams!

{ https://www.forbes.com/ }

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