UFO Near Space Station On Live Cam, Dec 7, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 6, 2020

Location of sighting: Space station

 

You all know I started the UFO watch over ten years ago on the space station live cam. I even organized people to protest NASA taking them down about 5 years ago and we won. But today I want to share with you something strange I caught while watching the live cam last night. 

 

The object is golden in color and shaped unlike anything I have ever seen before. The UFO was not cloaked or invisible, but instead was hiding in the darkness not far from the space station. When the light over the earth began to hit the space station...the light also hit the UFO, causing it to become visible from the darkness below. I have explained that some aliens are extremely advanced and are equally lazy at manual labor...so they grow their ships...not all species but many. Biomechanical ships, living, but made to serve. The shape of this UFO off the bow of the space station makes me think it too...had been grown. This is 100% proof that aliens are watching humanity's activities in space...very closely...about 70 meters away to be exact. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

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

UFO Cloaked In Cloud Flying Low Over Indonesia, Dec 1, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 1, 2020
Location of sighting: Indonesia 

 

A person was lucky enough to catch a UFO cloaked in a cloud over Indonesia this week. The UFO was creating a cloud around it...which takes on the form of the UFO itself, but much larger. The cloud around it is about 75% larger than the UFO. The raw footage is only 14 seconds long, but really gives us some idea of what it looked like and how much in awe it leaves us all. This is 100% proof that aliens fly low over cities worldwide!

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

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

Cloud Orbs Caught In Cloudless Sky, Nov 28, 2020, Turkey, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Nov 28, 2020
Location of sighting: Turkey

 

A man in Turkey was looking up at the sky above his home and noticed some white UFOs moving around slowly. He recorded a few 25 seconds of footage of the confusing objects to show his family later, but then decided to share it on Youtube to get others opinions. 

 

The object are cloud orbs. They are bigger than a soft ball, but smaller than a bowling ball. They are alien probes that look white far away, but up close the surface is smooth and slowly swirling colors like that of mother of pearl. (Yes once saw one 2 meters from me so yes...I know first hand.) They hide in clouds, however the video shows the sky is clear and blue, so there are no white clouds for the orbs to hide inside...and the blue makes it easy to see the white small spheres moving about. 100% proof that aliens exist. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

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

Black Bell UFO Seen Over Winterthur, Switzerland, Hovering Sept 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Sept 2020
Location of sighting: Winterthur, Switzerland 

Here is a black Bell shaped cylinder UFO hovering over the city of Winterthur, Switzerland last month. It's thiner on its top, giving it a bell shape. It was seen on Sept 2020, but reported at end of Nov. The object is standing upright and moving slowly across the area. What gets me is that compared to the apartments below it...this UFO is huge! It's about the size of a semi truck. The focus of the UFO is equal to that of the apartments below it, so I know its real. The black surface of the UFO is visible because of the light reflecting off it it. So we get some detail...or not...of its curved cylinder skin. 

 

This looks similar to the old Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO incident from Dec 1965. The UFO was similar but wider on the bottom like a bell or acorn nut and slimly brown tint to it. 

 

Wow, very cool and mysterious. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

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

Submitting on behalf of my friend, who's also a trainee pilot and his partner. Weird wedge/triangular object spotted by his partner first, who thought there's something burning, then thought its a moon, but excluded that possibility after observing moon on a different spot in the sky on December 7, 2020. 

then reappeared again with its twin (actually, there were two of them at the same time for a brief moment) then the two objects seems to merge before flying away. Mufon.

  

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

Triangle UFO filmed Piotrków, Poland 7-Dec-2020

Bright triangle-shaped was caught on tape in the sky above Piotrków, Poland on 7th December 2020.

Witness report: 

Submitting on behalf of my friend, who’s also a trainee pilot and his partner. Object spotted by his partner first, who thought there’s something burning, then thought its a moon, but excluded that possibility after observing moon on a different spot in the sky. Object hovered for a long time, pulsating slightly. At some point blinked and disappeared. then reappeared again with its twin for a moment (there were two of them at the same time for a brief moment) and just disappeared for good after another 20 min or so of hovering there. Aerial map of the spot attached.

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

What is Jupiter made of and does it have a solid core?

The Juno mission has revealed surprising new things about Jupiter’s structure and atmosphere.

 by Tibi Puiu

Jupiter is sometimes called a ‘failed star’ for good reason. The gas giant is the largest planet in the solar system by a large margin and is primarily composed of hydrogen and helium — just like the sun. But despite the fact it’s 318 times bigger than Earth, Jupiter isn’t massive enough for gravity to trigger nuclear fusion, which would have elevated it to stellar status.

The fifth planet from the sun has an atmosphere composed of about 90% hydrogen and about 10% helium, with trace amounts of other gases. These include water vapor, methane, hydrogen sulfide, neon, oxygen, phosphine, carbon, ethane, sulfur, and ammonia crystals, according to spectral analyses of the planet.

The atmosphere is not uniform with the gases being piled on top of one another, forming multiple layers extending downward, including a layer of supercritical hydrogen (the point where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist).

These layers aren’t necessarily linked to Jupiter’s famous stripes. These are actually the result of a combination of a fast rotation of the planet and dramatic differences in temperature in various regions. Earth rotates once in 24 hours, whereas Jupiter rotates once in about 9.5 hours. However, the surface of Earth at the equator is rotating at about 1000 miles per hour, while Jupiter’s equatorial cloud-tops are moving nearly 28,000 miles per hour. Jupiter’s equator is also more intensely heated than at the poles. The physics responsible for Jupiter’s stripes is actually quite similar to that responsible for trade winds near the equator and jet streams near the poles on Earth.

But unlike Earth, Jupiter doesn’t have a solid surface, so a visitor traveling through the Jovian atmosphere in a spacecraft would simply plow through like a knife through the mist. However, for practical purposes, scientists consider Jupiter’s surface the geodesic line where the atmospheric pressure is equal to that of Earth at sea level — at this point, gravity is 2.5 times more powerful than on Earth.

However, this hypothetical spacecraft wouldn’t just end up on the other side of the planet if it kept zipping through in a straight line — at some point, it would crash into Jupiter’s core, estimated to be about 35,000 degrees Celsius (63,000 degrees Fahrenheit).

Does Jupiter have a solid core?

Scientists still aren’t sure what this core looks like since the dense and swirling clouds obstruct observations. But there are reasons to believe Jupiter has a dense rocky center enveloped in a layer of metallic hydrogen (a phase of hydrogen in which it behaves like an electrical conductor), with another layer of molecular hydrogen (regular H2, dihydrogen gas) on top.

The presence of a rocky core is also supported by models of planetary formation which show that a rocky core, or at the very least an icy one, would have been necessary at some point in the gas giant’s history.

According to a 1997 study, which performed gravitational measurements, Jupiter’s core could have a mass of 12 to 45 times the mass of planet Earth — that’s 4% to 14% of Jupiter’s total mass.

Another school of thought concerning Jupiter’s core suggests that the gas giant lacks a rocky core. Instead, when the planet formed billions of years ago, a pocket of gas simply collapsed in on itself, creating a more-or-less pure hydrogen-helium world.

But this latter hypothesis has since been dispelled by the Juno mission. Launched in August 2011, the spacecraft named after Jupiter’s wife in Roman mythology has revealed numerous secrets about Jupiter.

By measuring how the spacecraft’s velocity was ramped up or slowed down by the planet’s gravitational field, scientists could deduce how mass is distributed in Jupiter’s depths. Although there’s no way to peer through Jupiter’s swirling dense clouds, this clever method confirmed that Jupiter does indeed have a core, scientists wrote in the journal Nature. What’s more, rather than being a compact ball, the analysis showed that the core is more like a fuzzy sphere spread across nearly half of Jupiter’s diameter.

Scientists don’t actually know why Jupiter has such an atypical core, but whatever the explanation may be, it’s telling of how the planet formed. One possible explanation is that early Jupiter was stirred up by the impact with another huge proto-planetary body. Another explanation would be that Jupiter changed orbit and added more planetesimals early in its history.

Nevertheless, this insight showed that we still don’t know much about giant gas planets. Besides overturning assumptions about Jupiter’s core, the Juno mission also showed that the strange clusters of cyclones raging around the planet’s north and south poles are more chaotic than previously thought. Another surprise was Jupiter’s magnetic field, which turned out to be twice as strong than scientists assumed.

As Juno continues its mission exploring Jupiter and its moons, NASA scientists hope to uncover strange new things about Jupiter.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ )

We sent a signal to make contact with aliens on a distant ‘Super Earth’ — here’s what we said

Humanity’s first contact with aliens could be a breezy 24 years away. We sent a signal to an Earth-like planet that may host life – and we sent them a mixtape. 

The project, called “Sónar Calling GJ 273b,” is a team effort led by the Sónar music festival in collaboration with METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) International and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia in Spain. Following is a transcript of the video.

Humans just tried to contact intelligent aliens.

On Oct. 16, 17, and 18 a team of musicians and scientists sent a message to aliens. They sent the message via radio waves and transmitted it 9 different times. This helps ensure that all the information reaches its destination

What’s in the message?

Thirty-three musical pieces, each 10 seconds long, a tutorial on how humans keep time, and when we will be listening for a response.

The message is headed for a nearby exoplanet named GJ 273b. GJ 273b is what astronomers call a “Super Earth”.
It’s slightly more massive than Earth and is within its star’s habitable zone. GJ 273b is a good candidate for alien life.

This is the first radio message of its kind designed for a direct response at a specific time. GJ 273b lives in another star system 12 light years away.

That means if intelligent life responds we could make first contact in just 24 years.

Source

• www.businessinsider.com

ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

 { https://verytopsecret.info/ }

The last week a massive 'angelic UFO' has been spotted in the vicinity of our sun as well as several other unknown bright anomalies shooting past the sun at the speed of light. 

The appearance of these strange space objects occurred before, during and after the sun fired off its biggest solar flare in more than 3 years. 

 

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

NIEUWE KAART VAN DE ZUIDELIJKE NACHTELIJKE HEMEL ONTHULT MILJOENEN (!) NIEUWE STERRENSTELSELS

Vivian Lammerse

Dankzij de nieuwe hemelkaart ontwikkelen onderzoekers in recordtempo een soort ‘Google Maps’ van de ruimte, die vele eeuwenoude vragen over het heelal moet oplossen.

Onderzoekers hebben een nieuwe hemelkaart gemaakt die gebaseerd is op waarnemingen van de toonaangevende ASKAP-radiotelescoop. De telescoop kamde in recordbrekend tempo en in ongekend detail vrijwel de gehele zuidelijke hemel uit. Het leidde tot een prachtige nieuwe kaart van het heelal, waar bovendien een aantal heel interessante ontdekkingen uit rolt. Bijvoorbeeld de ontdekking van miljoenen nog nooit eerder waargenomen sterrenstelsels.

Meer over ASKAP
ASKAP staat voor Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder en is ontwikkeld en beheerd door het Australische nationale wetenschappelijke bureau CSIRO. Het belangrijkste kenmerk van de telescoop is het brede gezichtsveld; zo heeft de telescoop zicht op zo’n zes graden van de hemel, wat overeenkomt met twaalf keer de grootte van de maan. Hierdoor is ASKAP in staat om in verbazingwekkend detail panoramische foto’s van de nachtelijke hemel te maken. Maar de radiotelescoop is nog tot veel grotere dingen in staat. De meest opwindende ontdekking van ASKAP zijn namelijk de nog altijd raadselachtige snelle radioflitsen (FRB’s). Tot voor kort was de precieze locatie van snelle radioflitsen – dus waar ze zich precies aan de nachtelijke hemel bevonden – niet bekend. Maar ASKAP is erin geslaagd om hun precieze locatie te bepalen. Bovendien is de radiotelescoop ingezet in de zoektocht naar buitenaards leven. De telescoop luisterde naar talloze sterren in de hoop op een signaal van een buitenaardse beschaving te stuiten.

Met behulp van de ASKAP-telescoop observeerde de onderzoeksgroep 83 procent van de hemel. Dit resulteerde in een nieuwe hemelkaart die bestaat uit ‘slechts’ 903 verschillende afbeeldingen; aanzienlijk minder dan de vaak tienduizenden afbeeldingen die veel andere grote wereldtelescopen nodig hebben om een soortgelijke kaart te vervaardigen. De nieuwe hemelkaart onthult bovendien miljoenen sterren die allemaal verre sterrenstelsels vertegenwoordigen.

Recordtempo
De radiotelescoop liet er overigens geen gras over groeien. Want door vijftien luttele minuten naar de nachtelijke hemel te turen, kan ASKAP een afbeelding vervaardigen waarin 3000 sterrenstelsels pronken. En in slechts 300 uur bracht de radiotelescoop zo’n drie miljoen sterrenstelsels in kaart; een recordtempo. “Van deze drie miljoen sterrenstelsels, zien we nu een miljoen sterrenstelsels voor het eerst,” vertelt onderzoeksleider David McConnell in een interview met Scientias.nl. “Deze nieuw gevonden sterrenstelsels zijn allemaal vrij zwak, vandaar dat ze ook nog niet in eerdere studies aan het licht zijn gebracht.” Met de nieuwe gegevens kunnen astronomen statistische analyses van grote populaties sterrenstelsels uitvoeren, vergelijkbaar met onderzoekers die informatie uit een nationale volkstelling halen. Daarnaast zijn astronomen met name geïnteresseerd in de meest afgelegen stelsels. “Deze kunnen waardevolle informatie opleveren over de jonge jaren van het heelal, toen de eerste sterrenstelsels geboren werden,” aldus McConnell.

Google Maps
Dankzij de nieuwe kaart ontwikkelen astronomen eigenlijk een soort Google Maps van de ruimte, waarmee ze door het omvangrijke universum kunnen navigeren. “Net als landkaarten hebben astronomische hemelonderzoeken veel verschillende toepassingen,” legt McConnell uit. “Ze bieden nieuwe inzichten die gebruikt kunnen worden in statistische studies over bijvoorbeeld de populatie en distributie van bepaalde klasse hemellichamen. Maar het kan ook nieuwe informatie verschaffen over een bepaald object dat al bestudeerd wordt. Over het algemeen vullen studies zoals deze, eerdere onderzoeken die gebruik maakten van optisch licht of röntgenstraling aan. Veel astrofysisch onderzoek is gericht op de vorming, ontwikkeling en evolutie van sterrenstelsels. En veel sterrenstelsels – ook die op grote afstanden – hebben actieve centra die goed met radiotelescopen gedetecteerd kunnen worden. Daarom kunnen onderzoeken met radiotelescopen sterrenstelsels aan het licht brengen die anders gemakkelijk over het hoofd zouden worden gezien. Deze kunnen we vervolgens weer in meer detail bestuderen, om te begrijpen hoe sterrenstelsels zich in de loop van de tijd hebben ontwikkeld.”

Foto van een ASKAP-radiotelescoop.

Afbeelding: CSIRO/Cherney

In totaal genereerde de ASKAP-telescoop een slordige 13,5 exabyte (ofwel 13.500.000.000.000.000.000 bytes in het SI-prefix) aan onbewerkte gegevens. Dit onnoemelijk hoge aantal werd vervolgens met behulp van hardware en software die speciaal op maat zijn gemaakt, verwerkt. De ‘Galaxy’ supercomputer van het Pawsey Supercomputing Centre zette de gegevens om in 2D-radiobeelden met in totaal 70 miljard pixels. De uiteindelijke 903 afbeeldingen en ondersteundende informatie, zijn samen goed voor zo’n 26 terabyte (26.000.000.000.000 bytes) aan gegevens.

Vragen
De onderzoekers hopen dat ze dankzij de nieuwe hemelkaart eeuwenoude vragen over het heelal kunnen oplossen. “Deze telling van het heelal zal door astronomen over de hele wereld gebruikt worden om het onbekende te verkennen,” stelt McConnell. “We kunnen alles bestuderen; van stervorming tot hoe sterrenstelsels en hun superzware zwarte gaten evolueren en een wisselwerking met elkaar aangaan.” Het betekent dat mogelijk al binnenkort grote mysteries over het universum ontraadseld kunnen worden.

Bovendien bewijzen de recordbrekende resultaten dat een volledige hemelkaart in slechts weken in plaats van jaren gemaakt kan worden. “Voor het eerst heeft ASKAP met een recordsnelheid een kaart van het heelal vervaardigd in meer detail dan ooit tevoren,” gaat McConnell verder. En dat is veelbelovend. Het onderzoek laat daarom zien dat we klaar zijn om een grote sprong voorwaarts te maken op het gebied van radioastronomie. “We verwachten in toekomstige onderzoeken nog tientallen miljoenen nieuwe sterrenstelsels boven tafel te krijgen,” besluit McConnell.

Bronmateriaal:

• "The Google Maps of space? Australian telescope creates a new atlas of the Universe" - Scimex
• interview met David McConnell
• Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: CSIRO

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

China’s New Submersible Reaches Earth’s Deepest Ocean Trench with 3 Men on Board

By: Nidhi Goyal 

{ https://www.industrytap.com/ }

ESA Signs €86 Million Contract with ClearSpace to Clean Up Space Debris

By: Nidhi Goyal 

{ https://www.industrytap.com/ }

Have the tools used to build ancient monuments been staring us in the face all along?

One main reason why we remain fascinated by ancient structures today is the mystery of how often massive stones were cut and fitted together with inexplicable precision. Using your own eyes, a definite flaw in the mainstream narrative becomes glaringly apparent.

Traditional explanations suggest that ordinary, primitive tools combined with extraordinary feats of human exertion made it all possible. There is no good explanation for why building techniques and designs share so many similarities across the planet as the big picture emerges.

Missing links

Apart from the mystery of construction, there is another missing link: What happened to the tools? Also, why don’t we see recorded information explaining these astounding construction methods?

Were these methods purposefully kept a secret, or have the answers been staring us in the face all along? Is the reason we haven’t found clear evidence of tools because one of the tools is ephemeral sound and vibrations? And, is another reason because we have misunderstood the tools used?

The ‘Sailing Stones of Egypt’

One ancient account from an ancient Arab historian and geographer suggests that the Egyptians used sound to transport huge blocks of stone. Known as the Herodotus of the Arabs, he recorded a centuries-old legend by 947 AD.

According to Mysterious Universe, the legend goes like this:

“When building the pyramids, their creators carefully positioned what was described as magical papyrus underneath the edges of the mighty stones that were to be used in the construction process. Then, one by one, the stones were struck by what was curiously, and rather enigmatically, described only as a rod of metal. Lo and behold, the stones then slowly began to rise into the air, and – like dutiful soldiers unquestioningly following orders – proceeded in slow, methodical, single-file fashion a number of feet above a paved pathway surrounded on both sides by similar, mysterious metal rods.”

The Was-sceptre

We’ve all seen Egyptian deities like Anubis, standing with a strange rod in his hand like the picture above. However, not many people know what that object is. It’s called a Was-sceptre, a staff with a forked base and topped with a pronged head shaped like a stylized canine or another animal. The rod is thin and perfectly straight and associated with other mysterious objects like the Ankh and the Djed. Were they merely symbolic, or could they have been tools of some kind?

Ankh, Djed & Was by Kyera Giannini (CC BY 2.0)

Djed by Mark Cartwright (CC-BY-NC-SA)

According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, these objects are symbols representing royal power and dominion.

“The three most important symbols, often appearing in all manner of Egyptian artwork from amulets to architecture, were the ankh, the djed, and the was scepter. These were frequently combined in inscriptions and often appear on sarcophagi together in a group or separately. In the case of each of these, the form represents the eternal value of the concept: the ankh represented life; the djed stability; the was power.”

In some depictions, Was-sceptres are seen upholding the roof of a shrine as Horus looks on. Similarly, the Djed is seen on temple lintels appearing to hold up the sky in the complex at Djoser in Saqqara.

A video from Ancient Architects explores this idea, showing examples of tuning forks used by the Egyptians. Narrator Matthew Sibson from the UK raises some fascinating ideas about how the Egyptians may have used objects like the Was-sceptre and tuning forks to cut through the hardest stones using the power of sound and vibrations. (see video below)

A depiction of tuning forks is seen on a statue of Isis and Anubis, each holding a rod. Between the deities, a carving shows two tuning forks that seem to be connected by wires. Beneath the forks, a rounded object with four prongs is centered, and it almost appears like an arrow points upward.

In the video, Sibson brings up an interesting but unverified email on the website KeelyNet.com from 1997. The email suggests that Egyptologists have found ancient tuning forks and may have labeled them “anomalous” when they couldn’t imagine what their purpose was.

“Some years ago an American friend picked the lock of a door leading to an Egyptian museum store-room measuring approx 8 feet x ten feet. Inside she found ‘hundreds’ of what she described as ‘tuning forks.’

These ranged in size from approx 8 inches to approx 8 or 9 feet overall length and resembled catapults, but with a taut wire stretched between the tines of the ‘fork.’ She insists, incidentally, that these were definitely not non-ferrous, but ‘steel.’

These objects resembled a letter ‘U’ with a handle (a bit like a pitchfork) and, when the wire was plucked, they vibrated for a prolonged period.

It occurs to me to wonder if these devices might have had hardened tool bits attached to the bottom of their handles and if they might have been used for cutting or engraving stone, once they had been set vibrating.”

Although the email is only anecdotal evidence at best, it does seem to confirm the hieroglyph of tuning forks on the statue of Isis and Anubis, with wire stretched between the tines.

Next, we see a much older Sumerian Cylinder seal showing a figure holding what appears to be a tuning fork. As you see more, it seems that ancient people knew much more about the effects of sound and vibration than we currently understand.

Today, we are learning new ways to look at ancient structures. Archaeoaccoustics is revealing how sound played a vital role in the construction of sites all over the world. Meanwhile, the study of cymatics reveals how vibrations alter the geometry of matter in intricate and unexplainable ways. In addition, the mysteries of Quantum mechanics are unfurling as we find new particles and use artificial intelligence algorithms to discover how matter itself works.

Could we finally be reaching the stage where we will begin to understand exactly how the ancient people of the world created massive monuments worldwide?

• Featured image: Was, Djed, Ankh from Old Egypt, public domain with screenshots via YouTube

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Nabta Playa: The world's first astronomical site was built in Africa and is older than Stonehenge

"This was the dawn of observational astronomy," he adds. "What in the world did they think about it? Did they imagine these stars were gods? And what kinds of connections did they have with the stars and the stones?”

The statue of Ramses the Great at the Great Temple of Abu Simbel is moved during the construction of the Aswan Dam.

Wikimedia Commons

The Discovery of Nabta Playa

In the 1960s, Egypt was planning a major dam project along the Nile River that was going to flood important ancient archaeological sites. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), stepped in with funding to help relocate famous structures, as well as scour the area for new sites before they were lost forever.

But a prominent American archaeologist named Fred Wendorf saw another opportunity. He wanted to search for the ancient origins of Pharaonic Egypt, away from the Nile River. 

“While everyone was looking at temples, [Wendorf] decided he would look at the desert,” says Malville. “He opened up the era of predynastic Egypt and the ancient kingdom.”

By luck, in 1973, a Bedouin — or nomadic Arab — guide named Eide Mariff came across a group of what looked like large, stone megaliths while crossing the Sahara. Mariff took Wendorf, who he had worked with since the 1960s, out to the site, which sits some 60 miles away from the Nile. However, Romuald Schild, Wendorf's longtime friend and collaborator, remembers the discovery story differently. He says the entire team was driving across this stretch of desert in 1973 when they stopped for a bathroom break. It was then that they spotted evidence of the megalithic remains. 

At first Wendorf thought they were natural formations. But he soon realized that the site was once a large lakebed that would have destroyed any such rocks. He would return many times over the course of decades. Then, during excavations in the early 1990s, Wendorf and a team of excavators, including Polish archaeologist Romuald Schild, uncovered a circle of stones that seemed to be aligned with the stars in some mysterious way.

The approximate location of Nabta Playa.

Wikimedia Commons

The first astronomers

After seven years without being able to crack their mystery, Wendorf called in Malville, an expert on archaeoastronomy of the American Southwest. 

Malville says he too was puzzled when he first looked at maps of the ancient site. He knew he had to travel there in person to get a sense of the place, as well as its creators and celestial significance. 

They drove across the flat, sandy landscape until they reached a large sand dune beside a dry lake bed, where views stretched out to the horizon. There, they pitched their tents and set up camp. And while Malville sat in the sand beside the stones, he says he experienced “an epiphany.”

“I discovered that these stones were part of an alignment that radiated out from a major tumulus [burial mound],” Malville says. “A pile of these megaliths formed the covering of a tomb, and it turned out that every one of the megaliths that we found buried in sediment formed a line, like spokes in a wheel radiating out.”

The team had already performed radiocarbon dating on the site by taking samples from fire hearths and tamarisk roofing material found inside the stone circle.

“It was like a zen experience to see how this fit together,” he says. “Knowing the dates, I could calculate when these stones would have been in alignment with the brightest stars of the northern sky.” 

Eide Mariff, a Bedouin guide and excavator who worked with archaeologists for decades in southern Egypt, works with a crew from his tribe to remove megalithic stones at Nabta Playa.

J. McKim Malville

He discovered that the stone circle once aligned to Arcturus, Sirius and Alpha Centauri. There were also stones that seemed to correspond to the constellation Orion. By tracing back Arcturus’ movements across the night sky, they proposed that the star would have matched up with Nabta Playa’s stone circle around 4800 B.C.

“That makes it the oldest astronomical site we've ever discovered,” Malville says. Their analysis was published in the journal Nature in 1998, drawing global headlines about a “Stonehenge in the Sahara.”

In the decades since then, archaeologists have continued to unravel the mystery of the ancient people of Nabta Playa, who used their summer home to observe the stars.

Reconstruction of the calendar circle at Nabta Playa.

Malville et al., 2007

Cattle cult

More than 10,000 years ago, Northern Africa shifted away from a cold, dry Ice Age climate that had persisted for tens of thousands of years. With the shift, African monsoons migrated north relatively quickly, filling up seasonal lakes, or playa, that provided short-lived oases for life.

For the nomadic people who lived in the area, these summer rains were likely sacred. During this era before agriculture had spread across the globe, these nomads survived primarily off of wild resources. But somewhere around the same time in the same region, people began domesticating goats, as well as an ancient kind of cattle called aurochs.

Cattle were a central part of Nabta Playa’s culture. When Wendorf’s team excavated the site's central tomb, they hoped to find human remains. Instead, they dug up cattle bones and an enormous rock seemingly carved into the shape of a cow.

An archaeological excavation found this cow-shaped megalithic rock sculpture buried at Nabta Playa in the Sahara Desert near the border of Egypt and Sudan. Scientists think the people who lived here worshiped a cow diety, a trend that appears later in Pharaonic Egypt.

J. McKim Malville

The people of Nabta Playa would travel across the often-featureless Sahara from seasonal lake to seasonal lake, bringing their livestock along to graze and drink.

“Their experience was rather similar to Polynesian navigators who had to sail from one place to another,” Malville says he suspects. “They used the stars to travel across the desert to locate small watering holes like Nabta Playa, which had water about four months of the year, probably, starting with the summer monsoon.”

There was no north star at the time, so the people navigated using bright stars and the circular motion of the heavens. 

Wendorf himself had a powerful experience that cemented his belief in this idea. One day, while working at Nabta Playa, the team had lost track of time and had to drive back across the sand at night. Mariff, the Bedouin man who initially discovered Nabta Playa, took the wheel, navigating across the Sahara by sticking his head out the window to use the stars as his guide. 

This kind of celestial navigation would have made Nabta Playa's stone circle a powerful symbol to the ancient nomadic people. The stones feet would have been covered by seasonal water, and would have been visible from the western lakeshore.

“You would watch the reflection of the stars off the dark waters of the lake, and you could see the stones partly submerged in the water, lining up with the reflection of the stars on the horizon,” he says.

A man holds up sorghum grains.

Abby Wendle/Wikimedia Commons

Ancient breadbasket

Practically speaking, the megaliths would have also helped the people of Nabta Playa time the rainy season, which only became more important as the society developed over thousands of years. The summer solstice would have coincided with the arrival of the annual monsoons. So tracking the Sun’s location could have tipped them off to the coming wet season.

The first strong evidence for people at Nabta Playa appears around the year 9000 BC. At the time, the Sahara was a wetter, more pleasant place to live. Eventually, there was enough water that people could even dig wells and build homes around them. One site excavated at Nabta Playa revealed rows of huts with hearths, storage pits, and wells that were spread out over several thousand square feet. The team of archaeologists called it a “well-organized village.” 

But between 5000 B.C. and 3000 B.C., thousands of years after the stone circle was built at Nabta Playa, the region dried out again. Some researchers think this environmental stress could have forced the people of Nabta Playa to develop a complex society, which most scholars thought depended on the development of agriculture.

The ancient society studied the constellations and understood the movements of the night sky. They made sacrifices and worshiped gods. They made jewelry out of cow bones. They ground up pigments for body painting. Researchers even discovered fish carvings at the site that suggest the nomads traded as far away as the Red Sea. Finally, the stone slabs at the site — some of which stand nine feet tall — had to be dragged from more than a mile away.

However, this complex culture seems to have fallen somewhere in between nomadic and agrarian. In addition to the oldest astronomical site, Nabta Playa is also home to the oldest known remains of sorghum, a crop first domesticated in Africa that’s now one of the world’s most important foods, especially in the tropics.

Hundreds of sorghum seeds were found at Nabta Playa, and they appear to be more closely related to domestic sorghum than wild varieties. Millet, another crop critical to the global agricultural history, was also domesticated in the region. And excavations at Nabta Playa also turned up storage pits for grass seeds, tubers, legumes and fruits. 

The nomadic people likely ate wild foods, but also planted some semi-domesticated crops along lakeshores at the beginning of each wet season. They then moved on after the harvest, Malville says. 

The African sorghum and millet seeds domesticated in this area would eventually spread along a trade route stretching through the Red Sea and into India — where they arrived some 4,000 years ago and went on to play an important role in the development of numerous civilizations.

"Black genesis"

By that time, the people who first grew the seeds were gone. Some 1,500 years earlier, the region had dried out, becoming what is now Earth’s hottest desert, the Sahara. Here, many areas don't see rain for years.

That changing local climate forced the people of Nabta Playa to disperse. Some archaeologists think these people likely traveled south into Nubia, or modern day Sudan, as well as north into Egypt. And their migration would have taken place in the years just before the first pharaohs rose to power.  

This timing had led some scholars to suggest the event sparked a “black genesis” for the cultural development in Egypt. However, the idea is controversial. Human remains at Nabta Playa seemed to be from people of both Central African and Mediterranean descent. However, some consider an ancient Egyptian cow goddess named Hathor, a goddess of fertility, to be the smoking gun for this origin story. 

If these cattle-raising nomads did help establish the Nile Valley's first civilization, Wendorf once told Discover, "it could explain the religious significance that Egyptians attached to the cow and cattle in the Old Kingdom."

This idea has legitimate proponents, including Malville, who says that many Egypt scholars he’s talked to also like the idea of the Egyptian culture emerging out of Africa, rather than from the so-called “Fertile Crescent,” as others suggest. However, some conspiracy theorists have also run with the idea, adding a strange new layer. One theory — which has been debunked — suggested that the arms of Nabta Playa’s stone circle describe the distances to the stars they aligned with, and that the rock slab beneath the megalith is a map of our Milky Way galaxy. 

For Malville, and Wendorf as well, who died in 2015, there’s no need to invent such stories for Nabta Playa to be fascinating. In many years spent exploring the Sahara, Wendorf and other archaeologists found a number of other stone circles, but they never again found anything remotely like Nabta Playa. 

And now that there’s detailed photography of Earth’s entire surface, Malville says its only growing less likely that older or more complex astronomical sites are still hiding.

Stonehenge's enormous size and prominent modern location help make it the most famous of humanity's many stone circles.

Wikimedia Commons

New looks at the Neolithic 

So why have so few people heard of Nabta Playa?

Gail Higginbottom, an archaeologist at University of Adelaide and expert on stone circles, says that Stonehenge still reigns supreme in the minds of Western Civilization. After all, its stones are so big that they were never buried, and it’s long been easily accessible. That means Europeans have known of nearby Stonehenge for much of its 5,000 year history. But one leading megalith researcher contacted for this story said they weren’t even familiar with Nabta Playa.

Malville agrees with Higginbottom. He says Nabta Playa might not get as much attention as Stonehenge because it is significantly smaller, and up until a few decades ago, it was buried in sand in a remote region of Africa.

Trends in research also come and go. Egyptian archaeology was en vogue throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries.

“People used to be obsessed with pyramids and the historic cultures in North Africa,” Higginbottom tells Astronomy. But that fascination has waned over time. “However," she adds, "I think this has had a big turn around in the last couple of decades with the Neolithic and earlier periods becoming more researched.”

Unfortunately, most of the popular coverage of Egyptian archaeology now fixates on pseudoscience and ancient aliens. And according to Malville, the extra attention Nabta Playa has gotten over the years hasn’t been good for the site, either.

After their study was published in 1998, tourists located the stone circle by plucking the latitude and longitude from the research paper. Soon, visitors were defacing the megaliths and standing up nearby stones that changed the site’s alignment.

“They ended up messing up the area, which had been pristine for 5,000 years,” Malville says.

In response, the government eventually moved all the stones — including the cow sculpture — to a museum in the region, where they’re remain on display for tourists to safely view.

ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

A 'tsunami' for astrophysics: New Gaia data reveals the best map of our galaxy yet

Scientists just mapped 1 million new galaxies, in 300 hours

By Brandon Specktor 

All-sky surveys usually take years. This one took weeks.

The ASKAP radio telescope array, located in the Australian outback, just mapped 3 million galaxies in less than a month.

(Image: © CSIRO)

Astronomers in Australia have just mapped 83% of the observable universe, in just 300 hours.

This new sky survey, which Australia's national science agency (CSIRO) described in a statement as a "Google map of the universe" , marks the completion of a big test for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope –- a network of 36 antennas rooted in the remote Western Australia Outback. While astronomers have been using ASKAP to scour the sky for radio signatures (including mysterious fast radio bursts) since 2012, the telescope's full array of antennas has never been used in a single sky survey –- until now.

By harnessing the telescope's full potential, researchers mapped roughly 3 million galaxies in the southern sky, according to a paper published Nov. 30 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. As many as 1 million of these distant galaxies may be previously unknown to astronomy, the researchers wrote, and that's likely just the beginning. With the success of this first survey, CSIRO scientists are already planning even more in-depth observations in the coming years.

Related: 

• Scientists unveil largest 3D map of the universe ever

"For the first time, ASKAP has flexed its full muscles, building a map of the universe in greater detail than ever before, and at record speed," lead study author David McConnell, a CSIRO astronomer, said in a statement. "We expect to find tens of millions of new galaxies in future surveys."

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• The 15 weirdest galaxies in our universe
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Many all-sky surveys can take months, even years, to complete. CSIRO's new effort, which they've labeled the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey, only took a few weeks of stargazing. While each of the telescope's 36 receivers took vast, panoramic pictures of the sky, a dedicated network of supercomputers worked double-time to combine them. The resulting map, which covers 83% of the sky, is a combination of 903 individual images, each containing 70 billion pixels. (For comparison, the highest-definition cameras for sale snap a few hundred million pixels per image).

Each of these images will be made publicly available through CSIRO's Data Access Portal, as scientists analyze the results and plan for their next sky-charting adventures.

• Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

ARECIBO COLLAPSE: SCIENTISTS HOLD BACK THE TEARS AS AN ICON CRUMBLES

JORGE SANTIAGO-ORTIZ HAD BEEN HOLDING BACK TEARS all Tuesday morning after hearing of the collapse of the instrument platform of the Arecibo Observatory.

"It's heartbreaking," Santiago-Ortiz tells Inverse. "It's really sad because it means so much."

On Tuesday, the instrument platform of the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory fell after a cable snapped, at approximately 7:55 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time. The event caused damage to the dish and the surrounding facilities. It was the latest blow to the historic observatory, that has served as an essential lookout onto the skies for 57 years.

Santiago-Ortiz, a scientist in the field of gene therapy, grew up an hour's drive away from the observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and recalls going on a school field trip to visit the observatory when he was in middle school. The trip introduced him to local scientists and inspired him to go into the field of science himself.

"Growing up, I wasn't familiar with how science worked," Santiago-Ortiz says. "But to know that groundbreaking science was taking place less than an hour away from me made me believe I could become a scientist one day."

FOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, the Arecibo Observatory has looked out into the cosmos in search of potentially hazardous asteroids, and potentially habitable planets. It's tracked strange radio phenomena and potentially hazardous space weather.

This aerial view shows the damage at the Arecibo Observatory after one of the main cables holding the receiver broke in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on December 1, 2020.  RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP/Getty Images

Constructed in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory was the world's largest telescope of its kind. Its reign only ended years later in 2016 when China built the FAST radio telescope:

Nestled in a rural, basin region in China’s Guizhou Province, the record-breaking telescope — the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope — has made China a leader in the hunt for alien life. The “Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope”, or FAST, is a 1,640 feet scientific marvel that nearly doubles the capabilities of Arecibo. Xinhua News Agency/Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

The radio telescope was also quite popular as it was featured in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, the 1995 Bond movie Goldeneye, and an image of pulse waves captured by Arecibo made the album cover for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

Arecibo has a 1,000-foot long dish that spans over 20 acres in the municipality of Arecibo in Puerto Rico and its sheer size makes for more accurate, sensitive observations of the universe.

 { https://www.inverse.com/ }