Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Dinsdag 31 maart 2020
What is dark matter?
What is dark matter?
Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe that it and dark energy make up most of the mass of the cosmos. What dark matter is, and what it isn’t. here.
Since the 1930s, astrophysicists have been trying to explain why the visible material in galaxies can’t account for how galaxies are shaped, or how they behave. They believe a form of dark or invisible matter pervades our universe, but they still don’t know what this dark matter might be.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to compose perhaps about 27% of the makeup of the universe. What is it? It’s a bit easier to say what it isn’t.
It isn’t ordinary atoms – the building blocks of our own bodies and all we see around us – because atoms make up only somewhere around 5% of the universe, according to a cosmological model called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model (aka the Lambda-CDM model, or sometimes just the Standard Model).
Dark matter isn’t the same thing as dark energy, which makes up some 68% of the universe, according to the Standard Model.
Dark matter is invisible; it doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light or any type of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays or radio waves. Thus, dark matter is undetectable directly, as all of our observations of the universe, apart from the detection of gravitational waves, involve capturing electromagnetic radiation in our telescopes.
Yet dark matter does interact with ordinary matter. It exhibits measurable gravitational effects on large structures in the universe such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Because of this, astronomers are able to make maps of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, even though they cannot see it directly.
They do this by measuring the effect dark matter has on ordinary matter, through gravity.
This all-sky image – released in 2013 – shows the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the universe as seen projected on the sky. It’s based on data collected with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Dark blue areas represent regions that are denser than their surroundings. Bright areas represent less dense regions. The gray portions of the image correspond to patches of the sky where foreground emission, mainly from the Milky Way but also from nearby galaxies, prevents cosmologists from seeing clearly.
There is currently a huge international effort to identify the nature of dark matter. Bringing an armory of advanced technology to bear on the problem, astronomers have designed ever-more complex and sensitive detectors to tease out the identity of this mysterious substance.
Dark matter might consist of an as yet unidentified subatomic particle of a type completely different from what scientists call baryonic matter – that’s just ordinary matter, the stuff we see all around us – which is made of ordinary atoms built of protons and neutrons.
The list of candidate subatomic particles breaks down into a few groups: there are the WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), a class of particles thought to have been produced in the early universe. Astronomers believe that WIMPs might self-annihilate when colliding with each other, so they have searched the skies for telltale traces of events such as the release of neutrinos or gamma rays. So far, they’ve found nothing. In addition, although a theory called supersymmetry predicts the existence of particles with the same properties as WIMPs, repeated searches to find the particles directly have also found nothing, and experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to detect the expected presence of supersymmetry have completely failed to find it.
Several different types of detector have been used to detect WIMPs. The general idea is that very occasionally, a WIMP might collide with an ordinary atom and release a faint flash of light, which can be detected. The most sensitive detector built to date is XENON1T, which consists of a 10-meter cylinder containing 3.2 tons of liquid xenon, surrounded by photomultipliers to detect and amplify the incredibly faint flashes from these rare interactions. As of July 2019, when the detector was decommissioned to pave the way for a more sensitive instrument, the XENONnT, no collisions between WIMPs and the xenon atoms had been seen.
Although WIMPs have long been the favored candidate for dark matter, they’re not the only candidates. The failure to find WIMPs, and the attendant frustration with not being able to account for a significant percentage of the universe’s mass, has led many scientists to look at possible alternatives.
At the moment, a hypothetical particle called the axion is receiving much attention. As well as being a strong candidate for dark matter, the existence of axions is also thought to provide the answers to a few other persistent questions in physics such as the Strong CP Problem.
Astronomer Fritz Zwicky first predicted the existence of dark matter in the 1930s following his observations of the Coma galaxy cluster.
The idea that there might be things in the universe which are invisible to us, that emit no light, has a long history going back hundreds of years to the days of Newton. With the discovery of so-called “dark nebulae” – clouds of interstellar dust blocking the light from background stars – and Pierre Laplace’s 18th-century speculations about objects which might swallow light, later to become known as black holes, astronomers came to accept the existence of a so-called “dark universe.”
But in modern times, it was astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, who made the first observations of what we now call dark matter. His 1933 observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies seemed to indicated it has a mass 500 times more than that previously calculated by Edwin Hubble. Furthermore, this extra mass seemed to be completely invisible. Although Zwicky’s observations were initially met with much skepticism, they were later confirmed by other groups of astronomers.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
Vera Rubin, following Zwicky, postulated that the missing structure in galaxies is dark matter. Her ideas were met with much resistance from the astronomical community, but her observations have been confirmed and are seen today as pivotal proof of the existence of dark matter. In honor of this crucial and historic piece of detective work toward establishing the existence of dark matter, the revolutionary Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to see first light next year, was recently renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin (1928-2016). This image – taken at Lowell Observatory – is from 1965.
Some astronomers have tried to negate the need the existence of dark matter altogether by postulating something called Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). The idea behind this is that gravity behaves differently over long distances to what it does locally, and this difference of behavior explains phenomena such as galaxy rotation curves which we attribute to dark matter. Although MOND has its supporters, while it can account for the rotation curve of an individual galaxy, current versions of MOND simply cannot account for the behavior and movement of matter in large structures such as galaxy clusters and, in its current form, is thought unable to completely account for the existence of dark matter. That is to say, gravity does behave in the same way at all scales of distance. Most versions of MOND, on the other hand, have two versions of gravity, the weaker one occurring in regions of low mass concentration such as in the outskirts of galaxies. However, it is not inconceivable that some new version of MOND in the future might yet account for dark matter.
Although some astronomers believe we will establish the nature of dark matter in the near future, the search so far has proved fruitless, and we know that the universe often springs surprises on us so that nothing can be taken for granted.
The approach astronomers are taking is to eliminate those particles which cannot be dark matter, in the hope we will be left with the one which is.
It remains to be seen if this approach is the correct one.
Bottom line: Dark matter makes up some 27% of the universe according to astronomical theories. It cannot be seen or detected directly via the existing tools of astronomers, but its effect can be measured via its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.
Dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology. It’s now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe.
Illustration showing snapshots from a simulation by astrophysicist Volker Springel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It represents the growth of cosmic structure (galaxies and voids) when the universe was 0.9 billion, 3.2 billion and 13.7 billion years old (now).
Dark energy is the name given to the mysterious force that’s causing the rate of expansion of our universe to accelerate over time, rather than to slow down. That’s contrary to what one might expect from a universe that began in a Big Bang. Astronomers in the 20th century learned the universe is expanding. They thought the expansion might continue forever, or eventually – if the universe had enough mass and therefore enough self-gravity – reverse and cause a Big Crunch. Now, in early 21st century cosmology, that idea has evolved. The universe is seen as expanding faster today than billions of years ago. What could be causing the rate of expansion to increase? Astronomers now sometimes speak of a repulsive force as a possible way to understand it.
Up until the late 1990s, most cosmologists believed the universe did not have enough mass to cause a Big Crunch. In particular, data acquired by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey seemed to confirm the universe would expand forever, albeit at an ever-slowing rate as the universe’s own mass and own gravity tried to pull it back.
The first indication of something revolutionary about to be discovered came in 1998 during a survey of Type 1A supernovae. These massive explosions of dying giant stars are extremely useful to astronomers because they always output the same amount of light, and can therefore be used as so-called “standard candles” to calculate distances in the cosmos. This is a very simple idea. Think of fireflies at night: they all shine with the same instrinsic brightness. By measuring how bright they are from where you are, you can calculate their distance.
The 1998 survey was being carried out by two international group of astronomers including Americans Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt in Australia. Using eight telescopes worldwide, their aim was to use the distance of Type 1A supernovae to calculate the expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble Constant (although in reality, as the rate of expansion of the universe varies with time, it is technically not a constant).
The results of the survey were astonishing. Distant supernovae which exploded when the universe was only 2/3 of its current age were much fainter than they should have been, and were thus much further away. The implication of this was that the universe had expanded much faster than it should have done, if current ideas were correct.
This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe’s birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart at a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force: dark energy.
Met with much skepticism in the astronomical community when these results were revealed, the observations were soon replicated by other teams and other methods. By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming clear that the expansion of the universe is not, as was commonly believed, slowing down. It is actually accelerating.
Even more strangely, the expansion had been deaccelerating, as one would expect, until seven or eight billion years after the Big Bang. But then, for reasons completely unknown, a mysterious “anti-gravity force” started to dominate, overcoming the brake that gravity was placing on the expansion, which then reversed its slowdown and started to accelerate.
You can imagine how shocking this revelation was to astronomers and cosmologists.
The force responsible for this acceleration was dubbed dark energy by scientists. In this case, dark means unknown rather than literally dark, as is the case with dark matter. It should be noted that dark energy and dark matter are completely unrelated phenomena. Read more: What is dark matter?
To add to the mystery, the properties of this strange dark energy seem to match Einstein’s cosmological constant, sometimes called his fudge factor and later described by Einstein himself as the greatest professional blunder of his life. Einstein detested the idea of an expanding universe, preferring the static one postulated by steady-state cosmology, which was popular in the early 20th century. He invented an anti-gravity force, of undefined origin, to counteract the observed expansion of the universe, which would result in a non-expanding universe. However, Einstein later retracted this idea, which was not supported by observations.
Dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology. It is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe, with normal, so-called “baryonic” matter – every bit of matter we can actually see – comprising a mere 5%, with the rest consisting of dark matter, another huge cosmic mystery.
Dark energy does behave like Einstein’s anti-gravity force, but its nature and origin remain unknown. One of its greatest mysteries is why dark energy started to dominate the rate of expansion of the universe at a particular point in time billions of years after the Big Bang. If it exists now, why wasn’t it there all along?
The physics of dark energy are highly speculative. One idea which has gained ground in recent years is that dark energy resembles a force known as “quintessence,” which is a relative of the Higgs Field. But as yet there is no observational evidence to support or discount this.
Cosmologists also have no idea if dark energy will continue to accelerate the universe’s expansion forever, leading to a scenario, far in the future, where the acceleration will overcome the forces that hold the universe together and literally tear all matter in the cosmos apart, in a nightmare scenario known as the Big Rip.
There are several current and future space missions and ground-based surveys which will investigate the nature of dark energy, including NASA’s orbiting WFIRST telescope and the international Dark Energy Survey, based in Chile.
It is hoped that soon we will arrive at a greater understanding of this mysterious force, which is having such an influence over the future of the cosmos, but to gain that understanding we need to sketch out a far more complete history of the universe. However, the archaeology of 13.7 billion years is extremely difficult and time-consuming, with so many ancient strata in that history missing or indistinct, so we cannot expect any sudden revelations.
Bottom line: The universe is expanding faster than older theories predicted. Dark energy, one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology, may cause its accelerating expansion. Dark energy is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe.
An international team of scientists has identified three new species of toothed pterosaurs – flying reptiles of the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago – that lived in an ancient river ecosystem in the African Sahara.
The new pterosaurs, described in a study published in the February 19, 2020, in the journal Cretaceous Research, were identified from chunks of jaws and teeth found in a geological formation in Morocco called the Kem Kem Beds. University of Portsmouth paleontologist David Martill is a study co-author. He told The Guardian:
These flying predators soared above a world dominated by predators, including crocodile-like hunters and carnivorous dinosaurs. Interestingly, herbivores such as sauropods and ornithischian dinosaurs are rare.
Many of the predators, including the toothed pterosaurs, preyed on a superabundance of fish.
For such large animals, they would have weighed very little. Their wingspans were around 10 to 13 feet [3 to 4 meters], with their bones almost paper-thin and full of air, very similar to birds. This allowed these awesome creatures to reach incredible sizes and still be able to take off and soar the skies.
Pterosaurs hunted from the air, using a set of large spike-like teeth to grab their prey. Large pterosaurs such as these would have been able to forage over hundreds of miles, with fossil evidence suggesting they flew between South America and Africa, similar to present-day birds such as condors and albatrosses, the researchers said.
Bottom line: Three new species of pterosaurs – flying reptiles – discovered.
For decades, numerous nations, all around the world, have done their utmost to try and harness the mysterious powers of the mind and utilize them as tools of nothing less than espionage. Sometimes, as we shall soon see, digging into matters of the mind can get one killed. Extra-sensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance, precognition, and astral-projection have all been utilized by the CIA, the KGB, and British Intelligence on more than a few occasions. As astonishing as it may sound, the world of psychic 007’s is all too real. It’s a subject that has been researched, with varying degrees of success, for decades. The earliest indications of serious interest on the part of the U.S. Government in the field of psychic phenomena are described in a formerly classified CIA document written in 1977 by Dr. Kenneth A. Kress – then an engineer with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services – and titled Parapsychology in Intelligence.
According to Kress:
“Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception capabilities have reached U.S. national security agencies at least since World War II, when Hitler was said to rely on astrologers and seers. Suggestions for military applications of ESP continued to be received after World War II. In 1952, the Department of Defense was lectured on the possible usefulness of extrasensory perception in psychological warfare. In 1961, the CIA’s Office of Technical Services became interested in the claims of ESP. Technical project officers soon contacted Stephen I. Abrams, the Director of the Parapsychological Laboratory, Oxford University, England. Under the auspices of Project ULTRA, Abrams prepared a review article which claimed ESP was demonstrated but not understood or controllable.” Kress added: “The report was read with interest but produced no further action for another decade.”
Indeed, it was in the early 1970s that the research began in earnest (although, the FBI got involved in a strange affair in the 1950s). In April 1972, Dr. Russell Targ, a laser physicist with a personal interest in parapsychology and the power of the human mind, met with CIA personnel from the Office of Strategic Intelligence, specifically to discuss paranormal phenomena. Of paramount concern to the CIA was the fact that Targ informed them that the Soviet Union was deeply involved in researching psychic phenomena, mental telepathy and ESP. It did not take the CIA long to realize that the purpose of the Soviet research was to determine if ESP could be used as a tool of espionage. It was this realization that galvanized the CIA into action. As the Kress report stated, in 1973: “The Office of Technical Services funded a $50,000 expanded effort in parapsychology.”
The initial studies utilized a variety of people who were carefully and secretly brought into the project, and who demonstrated a whole range of seemingly paranormal skills. Those same skills could not be reliably replicated on every occasion, however. As evidence of this, Kenneth Kress informed his superiors that, “One subject, by mental effort, apparently caused an increase in temperature; the action could not be duplicated by the second subject. The second subject was able to reproduce, with impressive accuracy, information inside sealed envelopes. Under identical conditions, the first subject could reproduce nothing.” Similarly, some government-sponsored psychics in the period from 1973 to 1974 located secret missile installations in the Soviet Union, found terrorist groups in the Middle East, and successfully remote viewed the interior of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Others, meanwhile, provided data that was sketchy and, at times, simply wrong. And it was the continuing rate of success versus the frequency of failure that led to heated debate within the CIA about the overall relevancy and validity of the project.
In Parapsychology in Intelligence, Kenneth Kress confirmed this. After the CIA’s remote viewing team attempted to broaden the range of its operation and secure extra funding in mid-1973, said Kress: “I was told not to increase the scope of the project and not to anticipate any follow-on in this area. The project was too sensitive and potentially embarrassing.” Despite this, the CIA’s research continued, with many of its advances due to a skilled remote-viewer named Pat Price, who had achieved a number of extraordinary successes in the field of ESP, including successfully remotely viewing a sensitive installation that fell under the auspices of the National Security Agency and psychically penetrating missile sites in Libya. Price’s sudden and untimely death from a heart attack in 1975 indirectly led the CIA – according to the official story, at least – to minimize its research into psychic espionage.
Tim Rifat, who has deeply studied the world of top secret, governmental research into psychic spying, says of Pat Price’s death: “It was alleged at the time that the Soviets poisoned Price. It would have been a top priority for the KGB to eliminate Price as his phenomenal remote-viewing abilities would have posed a significant danger to the USSR’s paranormal warfare buildup. He may also have been the victim of an elite group of Russian psi-warriors trained to remotely kill enemies of the Soviet Union.” Murder or just a heart-attack? Who knows?
It gets weirder: In his 1997 book Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel told the story of the U.S. Intelligence community’s involvement in the controversial issue of psychic spying that largely began in the early-to-mid 1970s. Commenting on the skills of a talented remote-viewer in relation to matters of a UFO nature, one Pat Price, Schnabel noted Price was of the opinion that “…Alaska’s Mount Hayes, the jewel of a glacial range northeast of Anchorage, housed one of the aliens’ largest bases.” According to Pat Price, the aliens that lived deep inside Mount Hayes were very human looking, differing only in their heart, lungs, blood, and eyes. Ominously, he added that the aliens use “thought transfer for motor control of us.” Price added: “The site has also been responsible for strange activity and malfunction of U.S. and Soviet space objects.”
They say that breaking up is hard to do (OK, Neil Sedaka said it) but apparently it’s not so for what was believed to be a hardy comet known as 2I/Borisov which traveled to our solar system all the way from another one and did a flyby of the Sun in December 2019. Polish astronomers tracking the interstellar comet noticed two unexpected bursts of light from 2I/Borisov this month and are afraid it means the little space rock that could may be on its last leg … or tail … and could break up soon. Was it something we said?
“The total brightness increase is thus about 0.7 mag in 5 days between UT 2020 March 4.3 and 9.3. This behavior is strongly indicative of an ongoing nucleus fragmentation.”
2I/Borisov in its better days.
(NASA)
Sounding like car mechanics trying to baffle you with BS when what they really mean is that your Buick is in a bad way, astronomers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw wrote in The Astronomer’s Telegram that they’re seeing evidence that 2I/Borisov is disintegrating and may not make it out of the solar system, let alone back home or to another star. They are part of the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) project which searches for extrasolar planets, dark matter and galactic anomalies and is considered to be Poland’s greatest contribution to the field of astronomy since Copernicus.
“For Solar System comets, it is known that dynamically new comets are 10 times more likely to disintegrate than short-period comets, presumably due to their pristine state and weaker structural strength.”
According to Science Alert, the breakup isn’t exactly a surprise. 2I/Borisov acts like long-period or dynamically new comets from the Oort cloud, which travel much farther than the short-period comets from the Kuiper belt. Apparently, making those short 200-year orbits around the Sun toughen up these short-term comets, allowing them to do a tight turn around the Sun and live to tell the other Kuiper belt comets about it. Of course, being astronomers, the Polish 2I/Borisov team sees a silver lining in this comet’s cloud of cosmic dust and melting ice.
“As the comet disintegrates, observations of its spectrum will reveal its internal chemistry, including its nucleus. It’s an excellent opportunity to study the comet’s guts, and compare it to our Solar System comets, to see how similar or different they are.”
One last look.
As with all relationships, there’s always something to learn from the breakup. It’s the comet’s fault, not ours. Even if there wasn’t a breakup, it’s still gone for good, so there’s no sense in being blue or begging for it to stay. There’s always another one coming soon.
Not much of an inspiration for a song, but Neil didn’t have many hits after “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” either.
EUROPEAN Space Agency (ESA) researchers have discovered that urine could be key to creating liveable human habitats on the Moon.
If humans want to live on the lunar surface they'll need shelter but will likely rely on local resources to make it.
The substance relies on a component called urea, found in urineCredit: CNSA
Space agencies across the globe have their sights set on colonising the Moon.
Scientists at the ESA have found that urea, a component of urine, could help them do this.
They found that when urea is mixed with lunar material, a kind of 'Moon concrete' is formed.
The researchers used a 3D printer to create cylinders of the new substances.
Space agencies have their sights set on colonising the MoonCredit: CNSA
After several tests they found that their urea-based 'Moon concrete' could support heavy weight and even got stronger over time.
This meant that it was able to stay in the desired shape.
The samples also remained fairly stable once heated to 80°C (176.0 °F).
Resistance was tested during eight freeze-thaw cycles, similar to those that occur on the Moon.
3D printing
Study researcher Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena in Spain, said: "To make the geopolymer concrete that will be used on the Moon, the idea is to use what is there: regolith [loose material from the Moon’s surface] and the water from the ice present in some areas.
"But moreover, with this study we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used.
"The two main components of this body fluid are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures."
Researcher Lena Kjøniksen added: "We have not yet investigated how the urea would be extracted from the urine, as we are assessing whether this would really be necessary, because perhaps its other components could also be used to form the geopolymer concrete.
"The actual water in the urine could be used for the mixture, together with that which can be obtained on the Moon, or a combination of both."
Nasa plans to send its next astronauts to the Moon by 2024.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Nasa scientists are working on a bizarre mushroom Moon and Mars base project.
This could see lunar homes for astronauts being built onsite out of living fungi.
The researchers have been conducting tests to determine if they could successfully grow mycelia fungus in outer space soil.
If the research goes to plan, future astronauts may be growing their own out of this world homes without the need to carry heavy and expensive building materials.
This could make it much easier and cheaper to colonise the Moon and even Mars.
The scientists have listed other advantages of using mushroom for structures including the fact it can grow and repair itself, is fire retardant and a good insulator.
Nasa also said that the fungi has higher bend strength than reinforced concrete so would be good for moulding into solid designs.
The Moon – our closest neighbour explained
Here's what you need to know...
The Moon is a natural satellite – a space-faring body that orbits a planet
It's Earth's only natural satellite, and is the fifth biggest in the Solar System
The Moon measures 2,158 miles across, roughly 0.27 times the diameter of Earth
Temperatures on the Moon range from minus 173 degrees Celcius to 260 degrees Celcius
Experts assumed the Moon was another planet, until Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his theory about our Solar System in 1543
It was eventually assigned to a "class" after Galileo discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610
The Moon is believed to have formed around 4.51billion years ago
The strength of its gravitational field is about a sixth of Earth's gravity
Earth and the Moon have "synchronous rotation", which means we always see the same side of the Moon – hence the phrase "dark side of the Moon"
The Moon's surface is actually dark, but appears bright in the sky due to its reflective ground
During a solar eclipse, the Moon covers the Sun almost completely. Both objects appear a similar size in the sky because the Sun is both 400 times larger and farther
The first spacecraft to reach the Moon was in 1959, as part of the Soviet Union's Lunar program
The first manned orbital mission was Nasa's Apollo 8 in 1968
And the first manned lunar landing was in 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission
In other space news, Space Force has successfully launched its first mission since its establishment as a US military service.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed new data about what may be the most powerful cosmic storm in the universe.
Here is a cool photo from NASA of the asteroid Eros. On it is a rectangular structure. The funny thing about it is that even NASA noticed this alien structure on the asteroid, but still didnt have the realization of what it actually was...an alien structure. NASA states: The large, rectangular boulder at the upper right is 45 meters (148 feet) across. So you see, NASA saw it but just didn't realize what it was at the time. Not sure how this slipped past them, but sure it wont last long if they find out. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
From February through the first week of May, countless strange space anomalies and formations of UFOs appeared on the ISS live feed camera while passing the Earth.
Now, after three weeks, the ISS live feed has captured a second wave of these anomalies, clusters of UFOs and debris of unknown origin.
About these UFOs, the images show that these UFOs fly in large coordinated groups.
It is noteworthy that this second wave also follows the same flight path as the first wave, indicating that something is going on in deep space that forces all of these UFOs to flee to other locations.
You can watch this formation of UFOs live while they pass the earth (Starts at about 50 minutes into the video) at: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/126204272
There are 2 major places that report of UFO sightings in Russia. The first is the M-triangle. Located at a distance of 600 miles from Moscow, the place is also known as Russia’s Area 51. The second one is Sochi. Alien space crafts and flying saucers have been regularly spotted by the locals. According to some people the Bythka Mountain in the area is a UFO base that serves as an airport for aliens between worlds.
This place is said to be landing – spot of space ships, coming from other Galaxies. Nearly everyone who visited this place experienced something unknown, enigmatic, some presence of miracle forces. Nearly everyone felt a unique comfort of soul. After first trip to M-zone people come back again.
The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t caused UFOs to stay home and that’s good news for those going stir-crazy in areas where their businesses and schools are closed and just want to go outside for some fresh air and a look upward. There’s been an increased number of UFO encounters of the orb kind, whose numbers have been fewer lately because of the infatuation with the Tic Tac UFOs. These recent sightings are literally all over the globe and figuratively all over the map when it comes to descriptions.
The first comes from Seattle in Washington State where YouTube user Denispin captured three orbs moving, changing positions and changing colors as they crossed the sky on March 20th, eventually being joined by a fourth. The UFOs started out as white orbs, then changed to red before going white again over the three minute phone video. (Watch the video here.)
As some commenters pointed out, this was just three days after another similar sighting over El Paso, Texas. Those seemed to stay in the same relative position in the sky. El Paso is home to the enormous Fort Bliss U.S. Army base and those orbs were most likely flares. Similarly, Seattle and sister city Tacoma are home to a number of U.S. military bases, including a couple of Air Force bases, and is a strategic West Coast defense location. While these orbs could be military planes or helicopters, their slow movement suggests drones (especially with the changing colors) or flares. However, they’re still open for speculation since there have been no official explanations as of this writing.
Another cause of UFO sightings
“Airline Pilot with 29 years service filmed a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO over Mexico”
A UFO sighting that might have a connection to the El Paso sightings just by way of proximity is this one over Monterrey in the Northern Mexico state of Nuevo Leon, which is roughly equidistant from both El Paso and San Antonio. (Watch it here.) Dated March 28th, most of the YouTube descriptions refer to the pilot’s experience and call it a “Tic Tic” UFO, although what appears to be the pilot’s description doesn’t make that connection.
“I have never in my life been witness to such phenomena however my first officer and i were in complete awe. i have multiple still photos and 4 videos that i would love to share with your network and with the world. forgive a slight delay in the submission as i had my doubts about reporting such occurrences but have no doubts as to what was witnessed. forgive some of the chatter and expletives but this was other worldly. i have still photos as well.”
Unfortunately, the identity of the pilot is not revealed so his claimed experience can’t be checked. Pilot sightings are generally given more credence that those ground-based, especially since they can better identify UFOs (which this one couldn’t) and pick them up on radar (which this one didn’t), leading the pilot to call it “an unidentified flying object, bro.” Based on the video and the comments, this doesn’t appear to be a ‘Tic Tac’ of the Nimitz kind since it’s not zipping around at unbelievable speeds and doesn’t appear on radar. Without any more to go on, this one is still an open-and-not-shut case of unidentified flying object … bro.
None of these UFO sightings appear to be lens flares like this one
The final video was alleged to have been taken on the evening of March 25 of one UFO flying over St. Petersburg in western Russia which then seemed to drop three more. (Watch it here.) The dropped orbs makes this appear to be a drone or plane dropping flares, and indeed those three objects eventually fall to the ground. At that point, the witness zooms in on the single orb and it appears to be three lights, which suggests it could be a triangular plane, although its slow movement still points to a drone. With St. Petersburg being such a strategic location in Western Russia, some military cause of these orbs is highly likely.
While the coronavirus shutdowns are obviously driving people outdoors to look at the sky, increasing their chances of seeing UFOs, are these orb sightings an indication of militaries stepping up their defenses (or offenses) in anticipation of things getting worse on an international scale?
There are some people in history who just seem to attract mysterious tales. Our story here revolves around a Russian scientist by the name of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig, who was supposedly also an architect, philosopher, and a scholar of ancient languages. He was also apparently very at odds with the Stalin regime, which landed him in trouble on more than one occasion, and he was also known for his extensive knowledge of the occult and for his considerable esoteric knowledge. He had a vast knowledge of ancient Sumerian and Etruscan civilizations, and also of medicinal herbs. During World War II he was purportedly designer of military technology and also an invaluable pioneer of architectural plans for military bases in marshy environments. Yet, a very curious chapter of this mysterious man’s life was the time when he was allegedly allowed access to the secret Vatican archives and purportedly found all manner of evidence of ancient aliens within.
It is perhaps first important to understand just what the Vatican secret archives actually are. Comprised of approximately 53 miles of labyrinthine aisles of shelving harboring rows upon countless rows of texts, books, and scrolls ranging from the more modern to fragile, time-worn manuscripts reaching back 12 centuries into the shadows of time, the Vatican Archives, officially known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum, was originally constructed in 1612 by Pope Paul V and is a truly a huge treasure trove of information collected by the Church over hundreds of years. This vast repository of knowledge holds state papers, Holy See paperwork, papal correspondence and personal letters, and countless historical records, documents and texts accumulated by the Vatican from every corner of the known world that date back to the 8th century, all housed within a massive, carefully climate-controlled structure adjacent to the Vatican Library that is designed more like a fortress than a library, replete with impenetrable underground bunkers and with only one known heavily guarded entrance.
The list of known contents of the archives is far too long to completely cover here, but includes a wealth of historical documents including handwritten letters to the Pope from such important figures such as Mary Queen of Scotts asking for a pardon before her execution, King Henry VIII, Michelangelo asking to be paid for his work on the Sistine Chapel, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Grand Empress Dowager Helena Wang of China in the 17th century, one written on birch bark by the Canadian Ojibwe tribe in 1887, and many, many others. Here there are official edicts by Popes through the centuries, including excommunications such as that of German religious heretic and founder of Lutheranism Martin Luther, official papal decrees such as the one made in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI that split the entire known world among Spain and Portugal, as well as personal communications from popes throughout history. Here one can also find such gems as a nearly 200-foot long scroll containing details of the trials of the Knights Templar for heresy and blasphemy dating to 1307, as well as a handwritten transcript detailing the trial of astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 17th century, as well as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which states that Mary was conceived without sin, scrawled out on a piece of parchment dating to 1854.
The Vatican Archives are often referred to as the Vatican Secret Archives, mostly due to a mistranslation of the Latin word secretum, which is actually closer in meaning to “personal” or “private” rather than “secret” or “confidential” as many think, but it could also have to do with the archive’s history of strict inaccessibility and reclusiveness from the outside world. They had been for centuries practically completely forbidden and closed off from nearly everyone, even Church officials, with not even Cardinals allowed access to their treasure trove of information, and it was not until 1881 that Pope Leo XIII allowed limited access to outsiders, yet this does little to dispel the secrecy surrounding the archives and it is still no small feat to enter this inner sanctum of all of the Vatican’s knowledge.
To gain access to these isolated archives and islands of knowledge one must be a qualified, recognized scholar or researcher who has been thoroughly vetted by the Holy See, a process which can take years. Amateur historians, journalists, students, or armchair researchers need not apply and are strictly forbidden. If one is lucky enough to be granted access they enter through the sole entrance, the well-guarded Porta Sant’Anna, after which they are required to state exactly what it is they are looking for among the voluminous collection. Once entering the rows of dusty old texts there is no browsing allowed, and you can only retrieve three documents listed in one of the thick, intimidatingly massive catalogs that are meticulously handwritten in Latin or Italian. If you cannot decide what you want to look at within a set amount of time under strict supervision you are ushered out of the archives and must wait until the following day to try again. Even if you do know what you want to look at there are still oppressive limitations on what is available for perusal. All materials in the archives are only released for public viewing after a full 75 years have passed, meaning newer documents are restricted, and even then there are large swaths of archived content that are totally off limits and probably forever will be.
In other words, this isn’t a library open to just anyone, yet in the 1920s, Ludvig was somehow granted access for reasons still left unclear. While there he supposedly was free to peruse the vast stores of manuscripts on offer, and came across some very bizarre things indeed. He would claim to have come across numerous texts on alchemy and ancient codes, and even stranger still manuscripts on UFOs and ancient aliens. According to Ludvig, there were texts outlining in detail how aliens had visited Earth many millennia ago and had managed to influence ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Mesopotamians. Some of the information he claimed to have gotten was about how the Egyptian pyramids were ancient energy machines, and he even said he had found historical records on nuclear weapons being used in ancient times, which had resulted in the melting of the fortress walls of Babylon, as well as plans for alien spacecraft.
None of this was allowed out of the Vatican archives, but Ludvig would apparently somehow get his hands on photographs of some of these documents, and the rest he would commit to memory and later write out as much as he could remember. He would show these too his own students, and apparently this was enough to get him accused of being a Vatican spy and imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1938. He would eventually be released and continue his work throughout World War II, keeping most of what he had seen in the Vatican to himself during these years, before taking most of it with him to his grave in 1973.
The story of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig might have very well been forgotten and confined to the mists of time forever if it had not been discussed by Soviet mathematician Matest M. Agrest in the 1950s, and then later mentioned in the Russian publication Sovershenno Sekretno, in an article by writer and journalist Vladimir Kucharyants. It has since been picked up and much discussed among UFOlogists and ancient astronaut theorists, but one is left to wonder just how real any of this is. It is certain that he indeed was a real person, and was indeed an architect and occultist, but that is about all we know for sure. There is little corroborating evidence and very few sources available on his life, so who was Ludvig really, and did he really gain access to the secret Vatican archives and find all of this amazing information? If so, how did he manage to get photographs out of this veritable fortress of secrecy? One does not just waltz in to this place and take photographs of these secretive tomes. How much of this is true and how much is possibly urban legend? There has certainly been some skepticism of the claims, and skeptic Jason Colavito has said of it all:
Ludvig doesn’t seem to actually have been an ancient astronaut theorist in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, the article talks about his belief in lost civilizations (the Sumerians, he said, were like a book whose first pages had been pulled out) and that ancient monuments had esoteric spiritual energy. The Pyramids, he said, could be activated with meditation. He spoke of astral projection and ascending to meet God in the spheres beyond earth. In other words, he sounds more like a Theosophist rather than a nuts-and-bolts ancient astronaut theorist, much like his contemporary, the émigré occultist Nicholas Roerich.
The only evidence that he believed in spacemen or that there was a nuclear bombing of Babylon comes from one of his former students, who recalled Ludvig talking of such issues much, much later—in the 1960s, the height of the Soviet ancient astronaut craze, when Matest M. Agrest, Alexander Kasantsev, and I. S. Shklovskii had popularized the idea. So, if I take the evidence at face value, it sounds like Ludvig had typical Theosophical-style esoteric ideas about ancient history in the 1930s and later converted to ancient astronaut beliefs in the 1960s, like many of his generation who saw parallels between the esoteric and ancient astronauts. As for the Vatican material, that is probably a combination of exaggeration, secondhand memory, and wishful thinking based on “interpretations” that the Russian scholar imposed on the source materials—source materials that are conveniently not cited by the only person to claim they existed, a student of his 50 years ago.
He does make a good point, and considering there are precious few sources for this story and it mostly revolves around the recollections of that one guy, it is left open to speculation as to whether Ludvig ever did make it into the catacombs of the Vatican archives and if so what he really found there. It is all rather mysterious, and although both the man and the archives are wreathed in myth and legend it is hard to know on this one where reality and fantasy lie and at what point they merge. It is all a rather interesting tale nevertheless, and with a lack of any further information will probably remain lost to history.
30 years later, we still don't know what really happened during the Belgian UFO wave
JevaLange
At first, the witnesses claimed, all you noticed were the lights.
They were so bright you could read by them, so brilliant that a policeman described them as "like lights on a huge football field." Only gradually did you notice the object they emitted from — a hulking triangular shape, with three enormous spotlights pointed toward the ground, and a red, flashing light at its center. "The whole thing," recalled the policeman, as if barely able to believe it himself, "was floating in the air."
It was a clear November night in 1989, near the town of Eupen, Belgium, which sits some seven miles from the German border. Heinrich Nicoll, the policeman, and his partner, Hubert Von Montigny, called their dispatcher to report the object they'd stumbled on while on a routine patrol. "Suddenly, they told me they were seeing a strange object in the sky," Albert Creutz, who was on the receiving end, told Unsolved Mysteries in a 1992 episode. "It made no noise. We joked about it and said it might be Santa Claus trying to land."
But by the time the evening was over, at least 30 different groups and three separate pairs of police officers would allege to have seen the unidentified flying object. And they wouldn't be the last. Belgium's months-long "UFO wave" culminated 30 years ago today — on March 30, 1990 — in a physics-defying chase through the skies over Europe as two Belgian Air Force F-16s pursued mysterious objects on their radars that they couldn't even see.
But, okay okay, did aliens really visit Belgium? It certainly seems deeply, deeply unlikely. Yet three decades later, it's still hard to entirely dismiss the 2,000-odd sightings that took place in the country between November 1989 and April 1990. As Patrick Ferryn, the president of the Belgian committee for the study of space phenomena, SOBEPS, told The Telegraph, "You must know that most of these sightings will have the most banal explanation but there is a residue, which we simply can't explain. And of those, there may be two or three where we may have questions over where they came from."
Lots can be ruled out, though. For example, a classic photograph of the triangle-shaped aircraft, known as the "Petit-Rechain picture," is without a doubt a hoax — the forger admitted as much when he came forward in 2011. "We made the model with polystyrene, we painted it, and then we started sticking things to it, then we suspended it in the air ... then we took the photo," the prankster confessed to Reuters. Brian Dunning, the writer and producer of the podcast Skeptoid, also refutes a number of the sightings, arguing that the November apparitions were in fact a helicopter, and that the police officers were interviewed by a biased ufologist. Conflicting information, published by Reuters, claims instead that the lights over Eupen were from "a Soviet satellite breaking up."
Regardless, where things really start to get strange is in March 1990. At that point, there had been months of sporadic sightings throughout Belgium, including by an army colonel, André Amond, who claimed to have seen the lights while driving in his car with his wife in December. The Belgian military, needless to say, was well aware of the descriptions pouring in from across the country, and it had little in the way of answers.
Then-Chief of Operations of the Air Staff, General Wilfried De Brouwer — who offered his account to investigative reporter Leslie Kean for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record — said that his initial belief was that the American military must have been testing some sort of experimental aircraft over his country. He went as far as to file inquiries with the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, prompting the Americans to create a memo, dryly titled "Belgium and the UFO Issue," which confirmed that "no USAF stealth aircrafts were operating in the... area during the periods in question."
The reports were credible enough, though, that Belgium's Air Force, federal aviation authorities, and police devised a plan to try to catch one of the unidentified intruders in action by preparing F-16s to quickly take off if a sighting was ever reported by both the police and a radar station at the same time. Sure enough, as De Brouwer recounts in UFOs, that night came on March 30, when "several policemen" and "two military radar stations" spotted an unknown object. "Once aloft, the [Belgian] pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity," De Brouwer writes.
But frustratingly, the pilots never managed to see the object they were pursuing. After analysis of the aircraft's readings, "the Air Force's decision was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that there were real crafts in the air on that occasion," De Brouwer reports. Still, throughout 1990, the Air Force was asked — and could never specifically account for — the sightings, which, all told, numbered in the thousands by the time they quietly started going away again in April.
Three decades later, explanations are still in short supply, although some scientists now consider the event to be an example of mass hysteria. Dunning, quoting UFO skeptic Philip Klass, writes, "Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs."
But De Brouwer still believes otherwise. "I can conclude with confidence that the observations during what is now known as the Belgian wave were not caused by mass hysteria," he says in UFOs. "The witnesses interviewed by investigators were sincere and honest. They did not previously know each other. Many were surprised by what they saw and today ... they are still prepared to confirm their unusual experience."
What we do know for certain is that there is a lot we don't yet understand about our universe. Even the U.S. Army has multiple stories of chasing strange, impossible objects through the sky. While the Belgian UFO wave likely wasn't a visitation by little green men, it remains without a satisfying answer even all these decades and technological advances later. "Today there is not yet any explanation!" Amond, the colonel who saw the lights with his wife, told Kean. "That is a pity, because I want to know before dying. Give me a correct explanation of my sighting; that is all I can ask."
YouTube conspiracy channel Disclose Screen posted the video in a round-up of UFO sightings on March 28.
One viewer suggested: “I think one or two of these are the army and the police playing with their new toys.”
Another ridiculously claimed the coronavirus quarantine was part of the conspiracy, saying: “So I guess I'm not the only one questioning why they are keeping people in.”
In the past, conspiracy theorists have come up with numerous outlandish suggestions for what triangular UFOs are.
Some believe they are an example of a top-secret government fleet of craft known as the TR-3B.
The TR-3 Black Manta is the name of a supposed surveillance plane of the United States Air Force, speculated to have been developed under a black project.
It is said to be a supersonic stealth spy plane with a triangular design although has never been officially confirmed.
But others have more realistic views, previously offering suggestions of Chinese lanterns, drones or simply passenger planes.
(Credit: Charles Carter/Keck Institute for Space Studies via NASA)
On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.
The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.
They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.
The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.
These are all long shots (not entirely crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft used ion propulsion to explore Ceres. Future missions could take the tech even further.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Rocket Reactions
For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.
Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.
What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.
Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.
But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.
An orbiting laser system could power an ion propulsion vehicle through the solar system, and prove reusable.
(Credit: Jay Smith/Discover)
Ion the Prize
While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.
Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.
There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.
As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.
At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.
“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”
Only the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, leaving the sun’s influence. New probes may one day study the interstellar medium lying beyond.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Interstellar Medium Well
After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.
Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”
Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.
“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”
The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.
Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.
“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.
It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”
How a solar gravitational lens works.
(Credits: Courtesy of Slava Turyshev; The Aerospace Corp.; Jim Deluca/Jimiticus via YouYube (2); Jay Smith)
Catch A Glimpse
Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a virtual mission to another star.
Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.
If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.
I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.
“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.
Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,
or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.
“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.
A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.
10 reasons why Aliens likely exist (however won’t visit us at any point in the near future)
It’s a numbers game, and likelihood proposes outsiders are out there
Most researchers concur that outsider life in all likelihood exists known to mankind some place. Our universe contains in the locale of 300 billion stars, and we’re presently finding planets going around these stars. The more we look, and the more innovation we put out there, the a greater amount of these exoplanets we find. Until now, we have distinguished around 4,000 – and that is simply in our system. In the event that we take a gander at the universe overall, at that point there are roughly 200 billion cosmic systems. For what reason would life simply happen here? “We’re quite persuaded it’s out there,” says space researcher Maggie Aderin-Pocock. “It is absolutely a numbers game. It is likelihood.”
We definitely know about many conceivably livable planets
We can gauge the airs of these exoplanets utilizing a method called spectroscopy. This is the place starlight goes through the environment of the exoplanet, permitting us to do a concoction examination. On the off chance that we recognize the sort of substances we find in Earth’s climate, it wouldn’t really affirm such there’s reality out there – yet it’s a solid sign that it’s conceivable. “We are aware of many possibly tenable planets,” says Professor Tim O’Brien. “We’re in all likelihood – inside the following decade or somewhere in the vicinity – going to discover a planet that may well even show potential proof forever.”
We’ve discovered life on earth in places that we didn’t figure life might exist
At the point when we’re mulling over the presence of life past our planet, it merits thinking about that we’ve found organisms occupying spaces on Earth where the possibility of endurance was already incomprehensible. These lifeforms depend on well-known DNA – so it’s life as we probably am aware it – yet they exist in the profound channels of our seas, far away from daylight. Previously, we accepted life could just exist on a planet, a specific good ways from its neighborhood star (so it has the correct degrees of radiation). Discovering life on Earth flourishing where we didn’t think it potential has made us fully aware of the idea that there may be moons ready to help life as well.
The existence that is out there may not be canny life
Most researchers are certain about the odds of life existing known to mankind. What we don’t know is if there’s clever life. “For the greater part of the historical backdrop of life on Earth it was straightforward life. It was bacterial life for billions of years truth be told,” says Tim. Furthermore, it was a progression of chance occasions that prompted the advancement of even multicellular life on our planet. For outsider life to reach, it should be genuinely – and mechanically – progressed.
Insightful lifeforms might be living in conditions that make correspondence troublesome
With 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, numerous with heavenly bodies, and ten billion years or more in which a civilisation could have emerged right now, is hard to accept that no lifeform ever arrived at where it could traverse interstellar separations. As the incomparable Italian physicist Enrico Fermi stated, it’s difficult to clarify why outsiders haven’t made it to Earth. In any case, there are methods for clarifying why this hasn’t occurred, says Maggie: “Our most serious issue is we just have one case of life, and such is reality on this planet.”
We need to break new ground. For instance, she says, “In the event that you live by a star which is very dynamic, you may live beneath the ground… It doesn’t imply that shrewd life isn’t out there however you probably won’t have the methods for transmitting since you live underneath the surface.”
Or on the other hand we might be attempting to convey to one another utilizing contradicting techniques
When enormous telescopes like the one at Jodrell Bank Observatory were fabricated, researchers understood that if there was a civilisation out there with a comparable piece of innovation, we may have the option to get signals sent from one to the next. “We’ve currently utilized radio telescopes to tune in out for signals from extra-earthly civilisations since around 1960,” says Tim who is Director of Jodrell Bank. Be that as it may, there are such a significant number of various manners by which a lifeform may impart signs, we could spend our lives searching for them and get no place. It’s conceivable that we simply haven’t hit upon the correct strategy.
Stars are so far away, it could take a large number of years for an extra-earthbound message to contact us
Just as technique for correspondence, separation represents an enormous deterrent. For another undertaking called Breakthrough Listen, researchers are looking through a million of the closest stars, but at the same time they’re taking a gander at stars that are in our Milky Way, 25,000 light years away. A message sent from one of these stars would need to go in the area of 25,000 years before it even contacted us. On the off chance that outsider life is out there, it could take a huge number of years before we hear a peep from it.
To reach, our civilisation and an outsider civilisation need to exist simultaneously
An outsider civilisation additionally needs to exist simultaneously as people. It’s conceivable that extra-terrestrials have reached Earth – even visited – yet it was path back in the Jurassic time, when dinosaurs meandered the earth, thus we basically don’t think about it. “On the off chance that our civilisations don’t cover,” says Maggie, “at that point we will never meet the outsiders.” Perhaps they came quite a while prior, or they’ll come later on, long after human life has terminated.
Long separation space travel isn’t yet workable for us – and may not be for them
It’s at present past our capacities to send an enormous shuttle between the stars. As things stand, we can send radio waves at the speed of light – however that is only a radio wave, going through the vacuum of room. In the event that we need to send physical mass out into the ether, as tests or individuals, at that point it gets much all the more testing.
Leap forward Starshot, a task supported by Stephen Hawking before he kicked the bucket, is investigating the choice of utilizing a sun based sail – a sheet of metallised plastic that sits in space – to transmit objects into our nearby planetary group. It would include an immense bank of lasers shooting photons up to hit the sun based sail, move their force, and send the sun oriented sail quickening off at up to a fifth of the speed of light. As energizing as this may be, it would at present take a hundred years to arrive at a planet 20 light years away – and current innovation implies we can’t send anything heavier than one gram in weight. People unquestionably won’t get out there at any point in the near future! What’s more, it’s exceptionally conceivable that any outsiders haven’t broke intergalactic space travel either.
Extraterrestrials need to really need to visit us
Regardless of whether lifeforms with innovation unmistakably further developed than our own exist, they need to need to reach. Any outsiders out there may feel emotionless about us Earthlings! Also, they may not be excessively excited about going between the stars for a huge number of years so as to find a good pace individual. This could likewise clarify why we’ve never had extraterrestrial appearances – they’re essentially upbeat where they are.
Geologists say the worm-like creature – about the size of a grain of rice – is the 1st ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
Geologists say they have discovered a fossil of the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans. The fossil of the extinct worm-like creature was discovered in deposits in Nilpena in South Australia belonging to the Ediacaran Period, an interval of geological time ranging 635 to 541 million years ago.
The tiny creature, called Ikaria wariootia, lived about 555 million years ago and was about the size of a grain of rice. According to the study, published March 23, 2020, in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.
The development of bilateral symmetry, scientists say, was a critical step in the evolution of animal life, giving organisms the ability to move purposefully and a common, yet successful, way to organize their bodies. A multitude of animals, from worms to insects to dinosaurs to humans, are organized around this same basic bilaterian body plan.
For the new research, University of California/Riverside scientists Scott Evans and Mary Droser used a 3-D laser scanner to analyze miniscule oval impressions near fossilized burrows found in 555 million-year-old Ediacaran Period deposits in Nilpena, South Australia. Their research revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters (up to about a quarter of an inch) long and about 1-2.5 millimeters (up to about a tenth of an inch) wide, just the right size to have made the burrows. Evans said in a statement:
We thought these animals should have existed during this interval, but always understood they would be difficult to recognize. Once we had the 3-D scans, we knew that we had made an important discovery.
A 3-D laser scan of an Ikaria wariootia impression.
In spite of its relatively simple shape, Ikaria was complex compared to other fossils from this period. It burrowed in thin layers of well-oxygenated sand on the ocean floor in search of organic matter, indicating rudimentary sensory abilities. The depth and curvature of Ikaria represent clearly distinct front and rear ends, supporting the directed movement found in the burrows.
The burrows also preserve crosswise, “V”-shaped ridges, suggesting Ikaria moved by contracting muscles across its body like a worm, known as peristaltic locomotion. Evidence of sediment displacement in the burrows and signs the organism fed on buried organic matter reveal Ikaria probably had a mouth, anus, and gut.
Bottom line: Geologists have discovered the fossil of a worm-like creature that they say is the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
There are at least two bright spots in these strange times: Telescopes are still studying distant galaxies and penguins are still pooping across Antarctica. In both cases, if you're looking for new ways to pass the time while you stay home, you can help out scientists studying these phenomena.
Citizen science is nothing new, but it's a particularly appealing option as the spreading coronavirus prompts containment measures around the world. So if you'd like to take your mind off current events for a while, consider chipping in on a research project.
"I think where we can tap into people's enthusiasm through their computer, that kind of captures the zeitgeist of coronavirus: what can we do when we're all trapped at home," Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Space.com.
Lynch is affiliated with two different citizen-science projects aimed at better understanding penguins, which, listen, we know are not in space. One of those projects, called Penguin Watch and accessible here, enlists people to identify the birds in photographs taken automatically near their colonies. But the other relies on satellite imagery to identify such colonies.
Penguins are so, hmm, productive, that biologists find the birds by combing through satellite imagery looking for swaths of their poop, which scientists call guano. "So we can map out how much area is covered in guano, and that gives us a really good estimate of how many penguins were actually at the colony at that particular location," Lynch said.
Such estimates are valuable data that's otherwise difficult to acquire, she said. "Even though penguins are the most charismatic and maybe the most obvious wildlife to survey in Antarctica, until recently, we knew relatively little about how many penguins there were in Antarctica and how their abundance was distributed because surveying Antarctica is so difficult."
That's where the satellites come into play. Lynch and her colleagues use data gathered by a few different types of orbital systems. Commercial satellites offer data that is quite detailed, NASA's Landsat program offers a 40-year perspective on penguin activities and Google Earth pulls in publicly accessible satellite data that citizen scientists can comb through.
Satellite imagery of the Danger Islands, where scientists discovered previously unknown Adelie penguin colonies. (Image credit: NASA)
It's that data that supports Lynch's Mapping Application for Penguin Populations and Projected Dynamics project. The main goal of the initiative is to provide Antarctic policymakers with more comprehensive data about penguin populations in one place. But the scientists need help locating all those birds, and for that, they enlist what they call penguin detectives.
"The citizen science part of this comes in because there's just so much of Antarctica," Lynch said. "The way that we find penguin colonies is by and large through manual searching of imagery: image after image, foot by foot, scanning the coastline for evidence of penguin guano."
And the uncooperative buggers sometimes relocate without bothering to tell the scientists looking for them. "Every time we think that we've found all the penguin colonies," Lynch said, "we soon discover that we find more, or that new colonies are being established over time, because of climate change, for example."
And maintaining an accurate map of penguin colonies is crucial if humans want to enact policies that keep the tuxedoed birds safe. For example, Lynch and her colleagues surveying Landsat imagery spotted some colonies of Adelie penguins on what's called the Danger Island archipelago.
When they visited the area to follow up on those observations, they found more penguins than they had ever imagined, even though they thought they'd found all the Adelie colonies in Antarctica. "In fact, these were some of the biggest Adelie penguins colonies in the world," Lynch said. "It was this sort of undiscovered hotspot of Adelie penguins."
That discovery has been passed along to policymakers who are deciding where to draw the borders of a marine protected area in the region. "It was exactly that kind of impact that we want to have," Lynch said.
But if penguin poop, even penguin poop from space, doesn't sound like your thing, here's an alternative: check out some weird-looking galaxies. You can do that through another citizen-science project, called Galaxy Zoo.
The program has been around for more than a decade, enlisting volunteers to classify the shapes of galaxies. That's the sort of task that anyone can do. "You don't even need to know what a galaxy is," Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, told Space.com. And although the shape isn't difficult to determine, it is valuable information to have.
"The shape of a galaxy tells you about its history: it tells you about when it accreted material, when it collided with other galaxies, when it formed stars and all sorts of other things," Lintott said. "But astronomers are quite good at getting images of galaxies and less good at sorting through the data." Hence, turning to the public. After a brief training session, volunteers are turned loose on the scientists' supply of images.
"We don't need people to spend hours contemplating a particular system unless they want to, just a guess and you get another galaxy," Lintott said. "Many people describe it as a bit like eating a packet of chips. You take one, you take another, you take another, and you can surf your way through the universe that way."
And recently, the project instituted a new twist that ensures things stay interesting. Although the Galaxy Zoo project was born of the premise that humans were better at classifying galaxies than computers, 12 years has changed the game a bit. Now, the project has added an algorithm, which takes care of the galaxies that are easiest to classify and saves the stranger ones for participants.
Galaxies come in a host of shapes, which can tell scientists about the history of these structures. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, J. DePasquale, F. Summers, and Z. Levay (STScI))
Identifications made by Galaxy Zoo volunteers have recently allowed scientists to determine that black holes at the center of galaxies grow steadily, not through collisions of the structures around them.
Having humans involved in the process is valuable, Lintott said, because of their willingness to notice things an algorithm might not. "People get distracted, and they're distracted along the way by the unexpected and the unusual," Lintott said. "We've found new types of galaxy and new sorts of things in the sky because somebody who was taking part in the project did a very human thing and just said, 'This is unusual. I don't know what this is.'"
And because the program pulls data automatically from observatory programs, bringing fresh images to the site, there's always something new to see. "You might well be the first person ever to see that galaxy," Lintott said. "Just by logging onto the website, you can literally see something that no one has ever seen before."
A next-generation crew spacecraft that China is preparing for a flight test this spring appears to be capable of docking with the International Space Station (ISS).
An image posted by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) shows the new spacecraft’s docking system, which appears compatible with the International Docking System Standard (IDSS).
NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia's federal space agency, known as Roscosmos, use IDSS-compatible systems or adapters. These are in use on the ISS to facilitate rendezvous and docking with spacecraft.
The new spacecraft is designed to boost China's capabilities in sending humans into orbit, reduce costs through partial reusability and allow astronauts to survive the radiation environment and high-speed reentries of deep-space missions.
The as-yet-unnamed spacecraft is 28.9 feet (8.8 meters) long with a mass at liftoff of 23.8 tons (21.6 metric tons). It will be capable of carrying six astronauts, or three astronauts and 1,100 lbs. (500 kilograms) of cargo to China’s planned space station.
A prototype of the next-gen crewed spacecraft is being prepared for a test flight at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. Launch on a Long March 5B rocket is expected in mid- to late April.
The IDSS docking mechanism is androgynous. A first such system was developed and used for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, meaning neither the U.S. nor Soviet spacecraft had "male" or "female" mechanisms.
China has demonstrated rendezvous and docking capabilities with Shenzhou crewed spacecraft and the Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 space labs, as well as with the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft.
The rendezvous systems on spacecraft, which facilitate the maneuvering and matching of vectors and velocities for close approaches, may, however, need to be adapted to be compatible.
But even if the new Chinese crewed spacecraft can technically rendezvous and dock with the ISS, it is currently not possible politically.
While China cooperates with ESA and Russia, the United States has effectively excluded China from the ISS project. The US government in 2011 introduced text into legislation, referred to as the "Wolf Amendment," that severely restricts opportunities for NASA and other agencies from bilateral cooperation with entities linked to the Chinese government.
The test flight of the new spacecraft will also test China's Long March 5B launch vehicle. If successful, the new rocket will subsequently be used to launch the 20-metric-ton modules of the Chinese Space Station.
Meer van UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
What is dark matter?
![During the month of March, 2020, the three outer naked-eye planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, all... [+] clustered together in the pre-sunrise skies. On March 18, they were joined by the waning crescent Moon. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fdam%2Fimageserve%2F1213217329%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale)
![On March 04, 2020, the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars all appeared in an equally spaced line.... [+] Throughout the month, both Saturn and Jupiter have experienced relative apparent motion in our skies, but Mars has moved the fastest from west to east, passing between Jupiter and Saturn and eventually moving even eastward of Saturn.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-04-1200x713.jpg)
![By March 26, 2020, Mars had moved a total of approximately 12 degrees in the sky relative to its... [+] March 4 position, continuing its eastward migration and placing it roughly mid-way between Saturn and Jupiter.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-26-1200x585.jpg)
![The heliocentric model of the Solar System (R), along with Kepler's/Newton's laws, predicts that... [+] inner planets will orbit at faster speeds than progressively outer planets, explaining their apparent motions through the sky. The fact that planets are at different distances and move at different relative speeds with respect to Earth explains why these apparent celestial motions occur.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2F1-12-Geocentric-Heliocentric-1200x759.jpg)
![When we place the known objects in the Solar System in order, four inner, rocky worlds and four,... [+] outer, giant worlds stand out. While fast-moving Mercury, the innermost world, takes just 88 Earth days to complete a revolution around the Sun at its speed of 47 km/s, outermost Neptune takes over 160 years, moving at just 5.4 km/s.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F05%2Fshot.jpg)
![An accurate model of how the planets orbit the Sun, which then moves through the galaxy in a... [+] different direction-of-motion. Note that the planets are all in the same plane, and are not dragging behind the Sun or forming a wake of any type. The planets change position relative to one another, making them change their apparent positions and brightnesses in the sky as seen from Earth.](https://blogs-images.forbes.com/startswithabang/files/2020/03/not-vortex-small.gif)
![In the pre-dawn hours on the morning of March 31, 2020, Mars and Saturn will make a very close... [+] approach to one another, coming within 0.9 degrees of each other, while Jupiter remains farther away at about 6 degrees separation from the close pair.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-31-1200x683.jpg)
![Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can often be seen together in the night sky, but only rarely do all three... [+] of these worlds cluster together. They also vary in brightness by large amounts. In March of 2020, Jupiter will be much brighter than either Mars or Saturn, which are somewhat comparable to one another, in contrast to this 2018 image, where Mars (at left) and Jupiter (at right) were both very bright, but Saturn (near the center) was much fainter. (VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fdam%2Fimageserve%2F1134061926%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale)
![The seven extraterrestrial planets of the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,... [+] Uranus, Neptune. Photographed in 2019 with a Maksutov telescope from Mannheim and Stockach in Germany. The angular sizes and colors shown are accurate, but the brightnesses are not: Venus is some 63,000 times brighter than Neptune, or 12 astronomical magnitudes; the same difference as between the full Moon and a typical bright star like Vega or Capella.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2Fexterrestrial-planets.jpg)
![If you were to hold up your little finger at arm's length on the morning of March 31, 2020, Mars and... [+] Saturn will be separated by merely the width of your pinkie's fingernail, the closest approach of these two worlds since 2008.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FClose-conjunction-1200x720.jpg)
![On the night of December 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will appear so close to one another, just 0.1... [+] degrees apart, that these two worlds and many of their moons will be visible in the same field-of-view of a relatively high magnification telescope. This will be one of the most spectacular astronomical events of the decade.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FGreat-Conjunction-all-time.jpg)
