What are Transmedium Objects? Avi Loeb, Ph.D. on the possibility of life beyond Earth

Are we alone in this universe? Congress seems to think not. One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development. 

According to Vice, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins. After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist? 

Despite Congress now asking the Pentagon to focus only on those objects that haven’t been designed by human hands we must ask ourselves whether it could be another distraction in an attempt to hide the truth about the existence of extraterrestrial UFOs and intelligent life beyond Earth. 

Avi Loeb, Ph. D., an astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University, joined Morning in America to discuss the possibility of life beyond Earth.

  

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The true story behind Carl Sagan’s cult classic, Contact

Jill Tarter is Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. She served as Project Scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to secure private funding to continue the exploratory science. Her astronomical work was illustrated in Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact.” The character largely based on Tarter, “Ellie Arroway,” was portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 film version of “Contact.”

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

Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images

Scientists at SLAC are applying powerful X-ray technology to Confucian texts and the Gutenburg Bible to reveal their chemical history.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Travel back in time with us to Korea in 1442, during the Choson Dynasty. That’s when the Royal Government Publications Office used an early version of the printing press to mass-produce the writings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius for the first time. Their press featured moveable type — the letters could be shifted and reconfigured as individual stamps.

Then in Germany around 1448, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg built his legendary printing press. Historians credit it as the trigger for all the innovations that propelled Europe out of the Medieval era and into the Renaissance and beyond.

Gutenberg’s invention, which also featured moveable type, allowed for the first mass production of the Bible. Suddenly, monks didn’t have to painstakingly copy scripture by hand. In its first decade of use, the Gutenberg press printer 180 Gutenberg Bibles — about 49 of these survive today.

PRESSED FOR ANSWERS

But there’s a twist: The Confucian texts and the Gutenberg Bibles may have been printed a mere decade apart, but the Korean government used methods that had existed for at least 70 years that had originated in modern-day China. So while Gutenberg is the name the West remembers, Asian peoples were likely the first to ever use a printing press with moveable type to produce books and texts.

It’s also unclear whether the two printing press technologies emerged independently — or if Gutenberg took inspiration from Asia. To find out if Gutenberg was a true pioneer, a team of scientists from the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Menlo Park, California, trained powerful X-ray beams on the sacred texts to reveal the secrets within.

To solve the nearly 600-year-old mystery, researchers might compare the construction of Gutenberg’s press with the one used by the Korean government. Both used metal letters, and it’s possible that Gutenberg knew of the Korean machine and built one using similar metal alloys, like nickel and copper.

He also may have concocted ink using a similar technique to the ink used in Korea, which was typically composed of burnt vegetable oil and glue. But since none of these ancient presses remain, the researchers can’t perform that kind of in-depth examination.

“WE CAN’T REALLY SAY ONE AFFECTED THE OTHER.”

“All we have to go on are some paintings, but we don't know if those paintings were portraits of the printing press or interpretations,” Minhal Gardezi, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student who works on the project at SLAC, tells Inverse.

To extract the crucial clues hidden in the ink and metal residues, a powerful X-ray at SLAC called the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source can carefully scan original copies of the Korean documents and a surviving copy of the Gutenberg Bible. They haven’t yet published results of their research, but have already encountered some clues.

“On comparing some of the Western versus some of the Korean documents,” Gardezi says, “we've seen different types of metal appear, like totally different types of metal, which is very interesting.”

The scientists have also noticed differences in the sorts of ink and stamps used. But at this point in the analysis, we can’t conclude whether the presses are a case of convergent technological evolution — two strikingly similar technologies with similar-ish materials sprouting up within a century of each other yet with no clear relationship. Yet.

Jiyoung Noh is a program specialist at the Research and Development Division of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and has collaborated with SLAC on the project since its inception.

“We can't really say one affected the other,” Noh notes. But the SLAC may soon change that.

The Gutenberg Press is considered a revolutionary technology because it enabled mass literacy, according to the Western-centric narrative that also claims the printing press first popped up in the 1450s in Germany.

But the oldest known moveable type printing press was developed by Chinese artisan Bi Sheng as early as 1040. This contraption used ceramic characters on an iron plate to press down ink on paper — printing the same document repeatedly. Bi Sheng’s documents and press were lost to time, so what we know of his accomplishments comes from secondhand sources.

By the 12th century, the first printing press with metal type had emerged in what’s now China. The early presses were used to produce currency and official documents, but later, they were also used to print other texts.

“THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, THAT IS WHAT WE KNOW IS THE EARLIEST HUMAN PRINTED DOCUMENT.”

By the 13th century, movable type presses had reached Korea, where they were employed by the Goryeo dynasty. While none of the early documents survived, we do have the Jikji text, a collection of Buddhist teachings printed on a bronze-based moveable type press in 1377. Unfortunately, the only remaining volume of Jikji is cached deep within the National Library of France, and is largely inaccessible.

So the SLAC decided to scan a contemporary copy of the 1442 Spring and Autumn Annals of Confucius, which were created using similar methods as the Jikji.

“This big overall project is called Jikji to Gutenberg, because the Jikji is the Buddhist book that was believed to be printed in Cheonju, Korea, 70-plus years before the Gutenberg Bible, so throughout the world, that is what we know is the earliest human printed document,” Gardezi says.

THE BEAMS HAVE IT

So, how does a linear accelerator enable researchers to decipher thousands-year-old documents? It turns out that the light generated at the SLAC can be harnessed to produce X-rays powerful enough to reveal ancient secrets.

IF THE METAL ALLOYS IN THE DOCUMENTS ARE STRIKINGLY SIMILAR, IT MAY MEAN THAT GUTENBERG ADAPTED THE EAST ASIAN CONCEPT.

The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source works a little something like this: It accelerates a stream of powerful electrons around a donut-like structure. When passing through the magnets surrounding the structure, the electrons generate synchrotron radiation, or fine beams of intense X-rays.

When one of these beams strikes the centuries-old paper, it creates an X-ray fluorescence spectrum of many frequencies. These frequencies correspond to the chemicals once punched onto the paper by a metal printing press.

The composition matters because the metal residues can offer clues as to whether Gutenberg was working with a blueprint or not. If the metal alloys in each set of documents are strikingly similar, it may mean that Gutenberg essentially re-envisioned the East Asian concept and adapted the technology to the West. But as mentioned by Gardezi, the evidence so far doesn’t seem to incriminate the German inventor.

ON THE HORIZON…

Firing intense X-ray beams at priceless and ancient documents may sound like an odd pursuit, but each page is exposed to the fine beam only for a few milliseconds and so the X-Ray doesn’t get a chance to damage the paper.

The scanning also takes place inside a radiation-proof room. Inside, a rig scans pages held upright, and a bright light travels across each page like a narrow-beam flashlight as a camera watches. Meanwhile, the SLAC scientists sit just outside the room, intently watching the scans arrive on a computer.

As the equipment processes the data, it color-codes certain chemicals on a screen. The text is indecipherable at this point. But the letters don’t matter so much as their chemical residue.

“I think some more chemical analysis is needed to understand if there really are any strong ties.”

“IT'LL BE MESMERIZING TO FIND SUCH A DISCOVERY. EVERYBODY'S GOING TO BE VERY SURPRISED.”

Concentrations of nickel show up as red splotches against the other chemical residue, which all appear blue — a generic assemblage of the other chemicals in the paper. It shows that nickel was part of the fabrication process of the individual letters in the moveable type developed by Gutenberg.

Finding different metal traces on the two historical texts could disprove a direct link between Eastern and Western moveable type innovations. But it could also result from differences in the machines’ fabrication or the availability of certain ingredients on the two continents.

“I think some more chemical analysis is needed to understand if there really are any strong ties,” Gardezi says.

Yet if they can prove a link, then the project could reveal a printing trade network using the Silk Road, in which artisans exchanged metal characters and inks in lieu of spices and fabric. That’s what UNESCO researcher Noh hopes for, although time will have to tell.

“It'll be mesmerizing to find such a discovery,” she says. “Everybody's going to be very surprised.”

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

A New Study Reveals How Stars Like The Sun Consumes Planets Around Their Orbits

The Universe is made up of billions of Galaxies including our Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists have discovered that the Milky Way Galaxies also house hundreds of billions of stars and planets. But out of these numerous stars, only about 4.1 billion of them are Stars like the Sun.

However, almost the stars like the Sun have something in common. They all have billions of billions of hydrogen atoms that fuse to produce Helium. This process is generally referred to as nuclear fusion. But as the Sun continues to undergo the nuclear fusion process, a time will reach when its brightness and size will expand.

As Stars like the Sun begin to run out of hydrogen atoms in their core, they slowly grow into red giants and take a shape that is ten times greater than their original size. A star undergoing such a process is generally referred to as a dying star.

Scientists clearly understand that the Stars like the Sun will surely turn into red dwarfs and even expand someday into the future to eat up planets around their orbit. However, scientists conducted a new study to improve their knowledge of how the Sun will expand and engulf neighboring planets. Scientists conducted this study deploying a method known as hydrodynamical simulations.

While conducting the research, the hydrodynamical simulations give an insight into the future scenarios of the Solar system. The scientists modeled the research to display scenarios where stars engulf planets to gain more knowledge on how the sun will expand in the future.

While making a statement about the discovery, Ricardo Yarza, the lead author of the study, stated, “Evolved stars can be hundreds or even thousands of times larger than their planets, and this disparity of scales makes it difficult to perform simulations that accurately model the physical processes occurring at each scale. Instead, we simulate a small section of the star centered on the planet to understand the flow around the planet and measure the drag forces acting on it.”

From these findings, scientists learned how the Sun will engulf its planets about 5 billion years from now and also gained more insightful knowledge about recently discovered planets orbiting white dwarfs. They also learned that some planets within the solar system may likely survive during the end stages of the Sun.

The study suggests that the closest planets to the sun which are Mercury and Jupiter will be eaten by the red giant. However, the Sun may survive the Massive sun. But even if Earth survives being consumed by the sun, it will become inhabitable for living species.

Planets with extremely cold temperatures like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus with their moons will lose their ices and develop a more life-friendly environment. Scientists that conducted these studies later published them in the Astrophysical Journal. You can access it from HERE.

What do you think about this fascinating discovery about the future of Stars like the Sun?

{ https://www.futurespaceworld.com/ }

The Sombrero Galaxy by Hubble aka Messier 104 NGC4594

There are approx. 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Now look at this galaxy. It has 200 to 300 billion stars. Now….there are billions of galaxies! With billions of stars and that is just what we can observe with the current technology.

A billion billion is a Quintillion and there is about 400 billion x a quintillion stars in the known universe. Something to the power of 10 to the 24th. It blows my mind .....What gets me isn't just the number of stars, and the enormous scale and size and distance. It's the amount of time. That each galaxy is 31 million light years away.

The amount of time it took for the light from that picture to reach us, entire species could evolve on planets and develop into a space faring galactic civilization; empires could rise and fall, then fade into dust, and be lost in the sands of time, without us ever knowing. And that's just the 31 million years it took for that light, which is a drop in the bucket of time that this galaxy has had to create life over many many billions of years.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope makes first ever detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system

• NASA's new telescope has detected carbon dioxide on an exoplanet for first time
• It bodes well for future James Webb studies of rocky exoplanets similar to Earth 
• WASP-39 b is a hot gas giant which has mass roughly one-quarter that of Jupiter
• Past studies by Hubble and Spitzer had detected water vapour on WASP-39 b

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

NASA's James Webb telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time.

The discovery is important because it suggests the $10 billion (£7.4 billion) observatory may be able to detect and measure the gas in the thinner atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets that could host life.

WASP-39 b is a hot gas giant orbiting a sun-like star 700 light-years away from Earth.

It has a mass roughly one-quarter that of Jupiter – about the same as Saturn – and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter's.

The exoplanet's extreme puffiness is related in part to its high temperature, which is about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, or 900 degrees Celsius.

Discovery: NASA's James Webb telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time. This illustration shows what exoplanet WASP-39 b could look like

A transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-39 b captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) revealed the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system

Unlike the cooler, more compact gas giants in our solar system, WASP-39 b orbits very close to its star – only about one-eighth the distance between the sun and Mercury – completing one circuit in just over four Earth days. 

The planet's discovery, reported in 2011, was made based on ground-based detections of the subtle, periodic dimming of light from its host star as the planet transits, or passes in front of the star. 

Previous observations from other telescopes, including NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, revealed the presence of water vapour, sodium, and potassium in the planet's atmosphere. 

Webb's unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.

Transiting planets like WASP-39 b, whose orbits we observe edge-on rather than from above, can provide researchers with ideal opportunities to probe planetary atmospheres.

During a transit, some of the starlight is eclipsed by the planet completely – causing the overall dimming – and some is transmitted through the planet's atmosphere. 

Because different gases absorb different combinations of colours, researchers can analyse small differences in brightness of the transmitted light across a spectrum of wavelengths to determine exactly what an atmosphere is made of. 

With its combination of inflated atmosphere and frequent transits, WASP-39 b is an ideal target for transmission spectroscopy. 

The research team used Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) for its observations of WASP-39 b. 

In the resulting spectrum of the exoplanet's atmosphere, a small hill between 4.1 and 4.6 microns presents the first clear, detailed evidence for carbon dioxide ever detected in a planet outside the solar system.

'As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,' said Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which undertook this investigation. 

'It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences.'

No observatory has ever measured such subtle differences in brightness of so many individual colours across the 3- to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum before. 

Access to this part of the spectrum is crucial for measuring abundances of gases like water and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many different types of exoplanets.

The discovery is important because it suggests the $10 billion (£7.4 billion) observatory (pictured) may be able to detect and measure the gas in the thinner atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets that could host life

A series of light curves from Webb's NIRSpec shows the change in brightness of three different wavelengths, or colours of light from the WASP-39 star system over time as the planet transited the star in July

Webb's infrared capabilities allow it to 'see back in time' to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago. Light waves move extremely fast, about 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second, every second. The further away an object is, the further back in time we are looking. This is because of the time it takes light to travel from the object to us

'Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial-sized planets,' said Natalie Batalha of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who leads the team. 

Understanding the composition of a planet's atmosphere is important because it tells us something about the origin of the planet and how it evolved. 

'Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,' said Mike Line of Arizona State University, another member of this research team. 

'By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet.

'In the coming decade, JWST will make this measurement for a variety of planets, providing insight into the details of how planets form and the uniqueness of our own solar system.'

The discovery has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature.

The James Webb Telescope: NASA's $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a 'time machine' that could help unravel the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

The vast telescope, which has already cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is considered a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of roughly 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).

It is the world's biggest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of peering back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work in tandem for a while. 

The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude. 

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Het transmissiespectrum van de hete gasreus WASP-39b, vastgelegd door Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) op 10 juli 2022. Dit is het eerste duidelijke bewijs voor de aanwezigheid van koolstofdioxide op een planeet buiten ons zonnestelsel.  © NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Deze illustratie laat zien hoe exoplaneet WASP-39 b eruit zou kunnen zien, gebaseerd op de huidige kennis van de planeet. Deze illustratie is gebaseerd op indirecte doorvoerwaarnemingen van Webb en andere telescopen in de ruimte en op de grond. Webb heeft geen direct beeld van deze planeet gemaakt.

NASA, ESA, CSA, JOSEPH OLMSTED

Een reeks lichtkrommen van Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) toont de verandering in helderheid van drie verschillende golflengten (kleuren) van het licht van het WASP-39-sterrenstelsel in de loop van de tijd toen de planeet op 10 juli 2022 door de ster ging. transit vindt plaats wanneer een in een baan om de aarde draaiende planeet tussen de ster en de telescoop beweegt en een deel van het licht van de ster blokkeert.

ILLUSTRATIE: NASA, ESA, CSA, LEAH HUSTAK (STSCI), JOSEPH OLMSTED (STSCI)

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Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note — one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new sonification — that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound — is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year. 

In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. 

A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel. 

In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. 

Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions. 

In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

   

NASA shared the sound of a black hole on social media and it went super viral

“The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through,” NASA continued. “A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.”

NASA also explained, “The sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.)”

The black hole sound clip shared by NASA on Sunday has now been listened to almost 14 million times with numerous people being completely creeped out by the horror movie vibe the sound gives off.

“Good news. Black holes sound exactly as terrifying as you might have guessed,” one person replied to NASA.

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

DISAPPEARING ALIEN PORTALS Found In Night Vision Images? | The Mystery at Magic Mesa

The Mystery at Magic Mesa research continues. Now utilizing military grade night vision optics to debunk the disappearing lights phenomenon in the valley. Is it headlights or something natural, or portals into another dimension?

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

Scientists blast atoms with Fibonacci laser to make an 'extra' dimension of time

Scientists have produced a brand-new, bizarre phase of matter that acts as like it has two dimensions of time by directing a Fibonacci laser beam at atoms within a quantum computer.

The new phase of matter, which was produced by rhythmically jiggling a strand of 10 ytterbium ions with lasers, allows researchers to store information in a way that is significantly more error-protected, paving the way for quantum computers that can retain data for a very long time without becoming jumbled. In a report published on July 20 in the journal Nature, the researchers presented their findings in detail.

The inclusion of a theoretical "extra" time dimension "is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter," lead author Philipp Dumitrescu, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City, said in a statement. "I've been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting."

The physicists weren't trying to invent a phase with a hypothetical extra time dimension, and they weren't seeking for a way to improve quantum data storage either. Instead, they sought to develop a new phase of matter, one that went beyond the conventional solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states.

They set about building the new phase in the quantum computer company Quantinuum's H1 quantum processor, which consists of 10 ytterbium ions in a vacuum chamber that are precisely controlled by lasers in a device known as an ion trap. 

Ordinary computers use bits, or 0s and 1s, to form the basis of all calculations. Quantum computers are designed to use qubits, which can also exist in a state of 0 or 1. But that's just about where the similarities end. Thanks to the bizarre laws of the quantum world, qubits can exist in a combination, or superposition, of both the 0 and 1 states until the moment they are measured, upon which they randomly collapse into either a 0 or a 1. 

This strange behavior is the key to the power of quantum computing, as it allows qubits to link together through quantum entanglement, a process that Albert Einstein dubbed "spooky action at a distance." Entanglement couples two or more qubits to each other, connecting their properties so that any change in one particle will cause a change in the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. This gives quantum computers the ability to perform multiple calculations simultaneously, exponentially boosting their processing power over that of classical devices.

But the development of quantum computers is held back by a big flaw: Qubits don't just interact and get entangled with each other; because they cannot be perfectly isolated from the environment outside the quantum computer, they also interact with the outside environment, thus causing them to lose their quantum properties, and the information they carry, in a process called decoherence.

"Even if you keep all the atoms under tight control, they can lose their 'quantumness' by talking to their environment, heating up or interacting with things in ways you didn't plan," Dumitrescu said.

To get around these pesky decoherence effects and create a new, stable phase, the physicists looked to a special set of phases called topological phases. Quantum entanglement doesn't just enable quantum devices to encode information across the singular, static positions of qubits, but also to weave them into the dynamic motions and interactions of the entire material — in the very shape, or topology, of the material's entangled states. This creates a "topological" qubit that encodes information in the shape formed by multiple parts rather than one part alone, making the phase much less likely to lose its information.

A key hallmark of moving from one phase to another is the breaking of physical symmetries — the idea that the laws of physics are the same for an object at any point in time or space. As a liquid, the molecules in water follow the same physical laws at every point in space and in every direction. But if you cool water enough so that it transforms into ice, its molecules will pick regular points along a crystal structure, or lattice, to arrange themselves across. Suddenly, the water molecules have preferred points in space to occupy, and they leave the other points empty; the spatial symmetry of the water has been spontaneously broken.

Creating a new topological phase inside a quantum computer also relies on symmetry breaking, but with this new phase, the symmetry is not being broken across space, but time. 

By giving each ion in the chain a periodic jolt with the lasers, the physicists wanted to break the continuous time symmetry of the ions at rest and impose their own time symmetry — where the qubits remain the same across certain intervals in time — that would create a rhythmic topological phase across the material.

But the experiment failed. Instead of inducing a topological phase that was immune to decoherence effects, the regular laser pulses amplified the noise from outside the system, destroying it less than 1.5 seconds after it was switched on. 

After reconsidering the experiment, the researchers realized that to create a more robust topological phase, they would need to knot more than one time symmetry into the ion strand to decrease the odds of the system getting scrambled. To do this, they settled on finding a pulse pattern that did not repeat simply and regularly but nonetheless showed some kind of higher symmetry across time. 

This led them to the Fibonacci sequence, in which the next number of the sequence is created by adding the previous two. Whereas a simple periodic laser pulse might just alternate between two laser sources (A, B, A, B, A, B, and so on), their new pulse train instead ran by combining the two pulses that came before (A, AB, ABA, ABAAB, ABAABABA, etc.).

This Fibonacci pulsing created a time symmetry that, just like a quasicrystal in space, was ordered without ever repeating. And just like a quasicrystal, the Fibonacci pulses also squish a higher dimensional pattern onto a lower dimensional surface. In the case of a spatial quasicrystal such as Penrose tiling, a slice of a five-dimensional lattice is projected onto a two-dimensional surface. When looking at the Fibonacci pulse pattern, we see two theoretical time symmetries get flattened into a single physical one.

"The system essentially gets a bonus symmetry from a nonexistent extra time dimension," the researchers wrote in the statement. The system appears as a material that exists in some higher dimension with two dimensions of time — even if this may be physically impossible in reality. 

When the team tested it, the new quasiperiodic Fibonacci pulse created a topographic phase that protected the system from data loss across the entire 5.5 seconds of the test. Indeed, they had created a phase that was immune to decoherence for much longer than others.

"With this quasi-periodic sequence, there's a complicated evolution that cancels out all the errors that live on the edge," Dumitrescu said. "Because of that, the edge stays quantum-mechanically coherent much, much longer than you'd expect."

Although the physicists achieved their aim, one hurdle remains to making their phase a useful tool for quantum programmers: integrating it with the computational side of quantum computing so that it can be input with calculations.

"We have this direct, tantalizing application, but we need to find a way to hook it into the calculations," Dumitrescu said. "That's an open problem we're working on."

Reference(s):

•  Nature

{ https://www.thespaceacademy.org/ }

An Unknown Force Is Pulling The Milky Way And Other Galaxies Towards It At 12 Million Mph

We don't know why a hundred thousand galaxies, including our own, are being dragged into a region of space we can't see. Astronomers refer to this as a "Gravity Anomaly."

{ http://amazingastronomy.thespaceacademy.org/ }

The Record for the Farthest Galaxy just got Broken Again, now just 250 million years after the Big Bang

In a recent study that was submitted to MNRAS, a collaborative research team made use of the first batch of data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to identify a galaxy candidate, CEERS-93316, that formed roughly 250 million years after the Big Bang and that also set a new redshift record of z = 16.7. This discovery is really exciting since it shows the strength of JWST, which has only recently started returning its first round of data. Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CEERS, was developed especially for imaging with JWST.

“The past few weeks have been surreal, watching all the records that stood for a long time with Hubble be broken by JWST,” says Dr. Rebecca Bowler, who is an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Manchester, and a co-author on the study. “Finding a z = 16.7 galaxy candidate is an amazing feeling – it wasn’t something we were expecting from the early data.”

This new study references a dozen previous studies that have measured objects up to redshifts z ? 10 using a mixture of ground-based observations and with the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.

“It’s amazing to have found such a distant galaxy candidate already with Webb given that this is just the first set of data,” says Mr. Callum Donnan, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and lead author of the study. “It is important to note that to be certain of the redshift, the galaxy will need follow up observations using spectroscopy. This is why we refer to it as a galaxy candidate.”

The study determined that CEERS-93316 can’t be a low-mass star or unobstructed active galactic nucleus based on imaging data from NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera), which is JWST’s primary imager. Since CEERS-93316 is could be only 250 million years old, one goal for cosmologists is to know what’s happening in galaxies that young, and so soon after the Big Bang.

“After the Big Bang the Universe entered a period known as the dark ages, a time before any stars had been born,” explains Dr. Bowler. “The observations of this galaxy push observations back to the time when we think the first galaxies ever to exist were being formed.  Already we’ve found more galaxies in the very early Universe than computer simulations predicted, so there is clearly a lot of open questions about how and when the first stars and galaxies formed.”

Given this incredible finding in just the first set of data from JWST, it’s intriguing to think how much father back in the universe this record-shattering space telescope can see, and whether it can see the Big Bang itself.

“In principle JWST can detect galaxies at redshifts greater than 20, less than 200 million years after the Big Bang,” explains Bowler. “These galaxies will likely be extremely hard to find, but the detection of CERRS 93316 gives us hope that they may exist. Watch this space!”

“The most distant phenomenon observed is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which is the ‘afterglow’ of the Big Bang,” explains Donnan. “The light from the CMB comes from approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang and has been observed by various instruments over the years – most notably the Planck satellite which launched in 2009. Webb won’t be able to see as far back as that, but it is able to probe the earliest stages of galaxy formation.”

While Donnan and Bowler both stated there are no further observations planned for CEERS-93316, they are hopeful that there will be in the future.

Redshift is part of what’s known as the Doppler effect, which astronomers use to measure distances in the universe. A frequent example to demonstrate the Doppler effect is the change in sound wave pitch as a loud object travels towards you then travels away from you, often by an ambulance or other first responder vehicle. The sound waves as the object travels towards you is known as blueshift, while the opposite is called redshift. This new study setting a new redshift record means scientists have measured the farthest object in the universe to date.

Reference(s): 

• MNRAS and 
• Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey.

{ https://www.thespaceacademy.org/ }

the Calvine UFO event 

Actual 8-Second Film Of UFO Landing At Holloman AFB Used In 1974 Documentary

By Vicky Verma

As the UFO encounters and sightings by military aircrews have increased tremendously, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence rebrands UFOs as “unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.” Expanding the definition to include objects in space and under the oceans significantly broadens the scope of investigating UFOs. Interestingly, few remember the UFO/Alien controversy surrounding Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, when one of three UFOs allegedly landed on the base early in May 1971.

However, as it is so often in such cases, instead of the government releasing a film of the entire incident to author/filmmaker Robert Emenegger as promised, it only released 8 seconds of this special footage that ultimately made it into the film. Holloman Air Force Base is the United States Air Force base established in 1942 and located six miles southwest of the central business district of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

It all began in 1971 when Emenegger and producer/director Allan Sandler were invited by the US intelligence (either the United States Air Force or Department of Defence) to Norton Air Force Base in California to discuss the major UFO phenomenon that had happened before and create a documentary film on it.

Robert Emenegger

There is no official record of the reason why the US government allowed to give secret UFO footage for a documentary film. It is believed that the administration of President Nixon did it to look strong in the science field for the upcoming 1972 re-election campaign.

Emenegger said that he was promised by the USAF officials to get the authentic UFO landing footage that happened at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1971. It showed the alien visitors emerging out of the craft that met with the US military. Even though Emenegger was skeptical about it, the Air Force assured him that the footage was authentic.

One of the military’s officials named Paul Shartle, who was in charge of the audio-video department, said in a 1988 national television broadcast with Mike Farrell that he had watched the 16mm film of three disc-shaped craft. One of them landed and the others flew away.

“I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts one of the crafts landed and two of them went away. It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods, a sliding door open a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens. They were human-sized. They had an odd gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight-fitting jumpsuits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and their hands in their hands they held a translator I was told.”

High Speed Test Track at Holloman Air Force Base

According to Emenegger, he even visited the landing site and checked the place where the alien vehicle was kept. The alien visitors and the US army personnel had meetings for several days.

Emenegger and his production team were provided access to top-secret files into DoD facilities and were even allowed to take help from the military officials who had been into the UFO matters, including Col. William Coleman from Project Blue Book and Col. George Weinbrenner, who was the head of Foreign Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

Emenegger said that the landing took place at 6 a.m. The alien visitors had eyes with a vertical slit, and their mouths were thin and slitlike, with no chins. He was promised by the USAF to get 3200 feet film of UFO landing but at the last moment, they refused to use it due to the “Watergate Scandal.” Despite it, Emenegger and Sandler were asked to describe the Holloman episode as something hypothetical, which might happen in the future.

After months of research and film production, Emenegger felt cheated as the permission of using real footage was withdrawn. Anyway, he released his Golden Globe-nominated documentary, “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future” in 1974. It turned out to be groundbreaking due to the information provided by the DoD. The USAF forced Emenegger to add the animated footage of the alleged Holloman UFO landing.

As per Emenegger, the alleged real landing footage was not fully missing from the frames. He said some frames from the original footage were used in the reconstruction during the editing stage, which was authorized by the USAF. The viewers spotted a genuine bright disc coming down slowly in the distance against the backdrop of Holloman’s surrounding landscape.

At the Alien Cosmic Expo in Toronto in 2017, UFO researcher and author Grant Cameron held an interview in his hotel room to discuss (among many subjects) a film from 1974 at Holloman Air Force Base, which contained footage of a UFO landing.

Here is the transcript of key points Mr. Cameron said in an interview:

“I was involved in one of the key stories that confirms that they’re not covering up and that was the story of the holloman air force base film this is one of the stories I put on the book.

In 1973, they [Pentagon] go to Emenegger and Alan Sandler, two producers in Los Angeles. They ask them to do a UFO documentary. Emenegger who was a total ufo skeptic said what do you mean this is for real and at that point, the security manager Paul Shartle at Norton Air Force base said what would you say if I told you that we had an alien ship landed at air force base six o’clock in the morning in May of 1971 and we filmed it from three different vantage points two on the ground one in a helicopter and we will allow you to use the film for your documentary.”

“Then they put the documentary out and then I find out that there was eight seconds of the Holloman air force base UFO film in the documentary.” Mr. Cameron then called Emenegger, telling him about the 8-second of the film.

He [Emenegger] said: “But it didn’t show anything. You don’t see when the alien gets out that’s the classified part.” Mr. Cameron further said that the government allowed Emenegger to use the small clip to hint that the Holloman UFO incident happened, but the classified part was removed.

The film was re-released in 1979 after adding more UFO sightings and new information that included cattle mutilations. Jacques Vallée added 30 minutes of new narration into the film, talking about ancient astronaut theory.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

NASA Just Saw Something Come Out Of A Black Hole For The First Time Ever

µ

You don’t need to be an expert in science to understand that black holes often pull things in rather than spit them out. However, NASA has just discovered something quite weird around the supermassive black hole Markarian 335.

Two NASA satellite telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), witnessed a black hole’s corona being “launched” away from a supermassive black hole. Then a huge burst of X-ray energy emitted. So, what precisely happened? That is what scientists are currently trying to understand.

“This is the first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare,” Dan Wilkins, of Saint Mary’s University, said. “This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe.”

Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR’s primary investigator, stated that the nature of the energy source is a “mystery,” but that the ability to actually capture the event should offer some indications about the black hole’s size and structure, as well as (hopefully) some new insight into how black holes work. This black hole, fortunately for us, is still 324 million light-years distant.

So, whatever bizarre things it does, it shouldn’t have any influence on our little part of the cosmos.

{ https:// astronomyscience.vercel. }

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Spinachtig stervormingsgebied in beeld gebracht

Op zo’n 170.000 lichtjaar bevindt zich de Tarantulanevel: een van de grootste stervormingsgebieden in het lokale heelal.

Govert Schilling

Meer artikels van deze auteur

Dit is een artikel van:
Eos Wetenschap

{ https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/ }

Voor het eerst gaat native American vrouw de ruimte in

Op 29 september is het eindelijk zover. Dan vertrekt NASA-astronaute Nicole Aunapu Mann naar het internationale ruimtestation ISS. Mann zal dan de eerste inheems-Amerikaanse vrouw ooit zijn die de ruimte ingaat.

Nog maar 75 vrouwen gingen Nicole Mann voor, volgens NASA, terwijl ruimtevluchten nu al zo’n zestig jaar worden uitgevoerd. Maar het duurde even voor ook vrouwen aan de beurt kwamen als astronauten. Pas in 2013 studeerden er evenveel vrouwen als mannen af als astronaut. Onder de vier vrouwen toen, ook Nicole Aunapu Mann. Zij zal eind september de eerste native American vrouw worden in de ruimte.

Nicole Aunapu Mann behoort tot de Wailaki, een indianenstam uit het reservaat Round Valley in Californië. Ze volgde de opleiding van mechanisch ingenieur aan de gerenommeerde universiteit van Stanford. Ze vloog met gevechtsvliegtuigen voor het Marinekorps. Ze diende in Irak en in Afghanistan en verzamelde zes medailles. En eind volgende maand zal ze samen met drie collega’s in het ruimtevaartuig Crew Dragon van SpaceX kruipen om naar het ISS te vliegen. Mann voert het commando van de missie. Het wordt haar eerste ruimtereis.

De volledige crew die op 29 september naar het ISS vliegt: Anna Kikina, Josh Cassada, Nicole Mann en Koichi Wakata.  © Photo News

De allereerste Amerikaanse vrouw in de ruimte was LGBTQ-astronaute Sally Ride op 18 juni 1983. Ze was toen 32 en is daarmee vandaag nog altijd de jongste Amerikaan ooit in de ruimte. De eerste native American NASA-astronaut in de ruimte was John Herrington, lid van de Chickasaw Nation, in 2002.

Mann mag maar 1,5 kilogram aan persoonlijke spullen met zich meenemen in de ruimte. Daar zou alvast een dromenvanger bij zijn, een heilig voorwerp in de spirituele cultuur van de inheemse bevolking.

Nicole Mann werd in 2020 gekozen als onderdeel van het Artemis-team van elite NASA-astronauten die in aanmerking komen voor selectie voor vroege maanmissies. Van de duizenden kandidaten krijgt Mann misschien de kans om op de maan te stappen. Maar eerste halte is het ISS.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }