Two Interesting Cases from the MUFON Case Management System Currently being Investigated
Two Interesting Cases from the MUFON Case Management System Currently being Investigated
By Bob Spearing
Singapore is an island, a city and a country in Asia bordering Malaysia at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Itis a highly industrialized city with Air Force Bases, Commercial Airports and a variety of industrial complexes all crammed onto the tiny island.
MUFON had seen this type of phenomenon before. It looked very similar to the flame usually associated with an oil refinery burning off excess gas at refineries. The logical thing to do was to check if any oil refineries were within a reasonable distance of the witness.
Our investigation showed that Jurong Island, 15 miles southeast of the witness housed a massive EXXON Oil Refinery. The witness stated he was looking east.
Mauritius is an island country in East Africa in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar and Reunion Islandwhich is a hotbed of UFO activity. The case is being investigated by our National Director there Johnathan Hague. The witness narrative is as follows:
“The first time I saw it, it was about 100m with light. The next day I saw it again, I was scared but I approached it. It was landed near foot of the mountain. I runaway to my home. The third time was after two days. Again, it landed but this time I approach the maximum I can but hiding also. The thing that Itook attention was I saw symbol of triangle and circle. When I made all around the object, I saw two window glass. It was something like dark glass, then I saw two things like humanoid. They were lonwith big head like helmet of cyclist. After that I felt like I was unconscious. When I wake up, they were gone. After maybe 3 months, I saw them again. Some people who have cattle, said that 4 or 5 animals are missing.”
What the reader should note is that cyclist helmeted beings are quite common in UFO reports. A cattle mutilation in the middle of the Indian Ocean is extremely rare. But more reports of logos of triangles within circles are widely documented.
In the first of two correlating reports, the first from Renton Washington in 2005, 2 short grotesque entities with lightbulb shaped heads and slits for mouths abduct a woman. They are no taller than 5 feet with very long arms and only 4 fingers. They are wearing blue grey metallic uniforms and had an insignia on their chest of an isosceles triangle in a white circle.
At Mount Pleasant, Michigan on March 8, 2015, the witness awoke sensing someone was in his house and spied two small beings. He is levitated through his wall to a star. In a sort of pseudo-sexual abduction, the witness awakes next to an entity. The entity named ZETA informs him he has made a child for the future of Earth. ZETA was wearing a shiny spandex outfit with a triangle and circle insignia on it.
What that symbol means is still not understood.
When several reports of similar symbols and insignia are found in the UFO literature, it creates a basis for a pattern even if these reports are years apart and thousands of miles away from each other. With the advent Artificial Intelligence at our doorstep, perhaps the near future will provide MUFON and other researchers with the tools to finally analyze these patterns in a meaningful way. John Keel would be pleased! He had the right idea but was decades too early to see it come to fruition.
How Does NASA Plan to Keep Samples From Mars Safe From Contamination (and Contaminating) Earth?
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission is inching closer and closer. The overall mission architecture just hit a new milestone when Perseverance collected the first sample that will be sent back. But what happens once that sample actually gets here? NASA and its partner, ESA, are still working on that, but recently they released a fact sheet that covers what will happen during the first stage of that process – returning to the ground.
That return will take place in the middle of the desert in the western US, in an area called the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). While this may seem like an obscure place to land such an important mission, it does have several things going for it.
First, it’s in the continental US. That gives it relatively easy access to advanced laboratory equipment available throughout the country. NASA is the most likely candidate to be able to marshal all the resources necessary to quarantine the sample to keep it separate from the wider Earth environment, which would help eliminate the (admittedly unlikely) event of a Martian superbug getting on the loose.
UT video describing the MSR mission.
Secure containment is one of the reasons the agency is foregoing a water landing. Doing so would lessen the impact on the samples, but it also would have a slight chance that the capsule could sink into the ocean and the tiny bits of Mars within it could be lost to the sea. Avoiding that would be nice, so it’s better to land on land.
But that land has to be isolated, another advantage of the UTTR. Not only is it not near any roads, but it is also already restricted air space, as it is the site of plenty of rocket and plane testing. Being isolated also means that the capsule is less likely to impact anything important if something goes wrong with the trajectory.
That will be particularly important given the method of landing selected for the MSR capsule. It’s going to fall to the ground using only aero-braking – no parachute required. Therefore, it will be going significantly faster than the typical parachute-assisted capsule returns. But, according to NASA’s calculations, the samples and their containers should survive the impact. Not using a parachute will massively simplify the capsule’s design and lessen its weight, both of which are essential factors considering the capsule itself has to return from Mars.
Even so, the impact itself is going to make a nice dent in the landscape. NASA has already begun performing testing using a mock-up of the MSR’s sample return capsule. Doing so has created a series of 1.3-meter-wide craters in the landscape and ejected material 15 meters away from the crater.
Assuming the samples and capsule do survive, the next step would be safely transporting them to a laboratory where they can be properly studied. That is, after all, the whole purpose of the Mars Sample Return mission. So far, that part of the program hasn’t been defined yet, but knowing that the samples will end up in the middle of the Utah desert is at least a place to start.
Learn More:
Lead Image:
Map of the UTTR, with the planned landing spot for MSR in the red ellipse in the upper left corner.
Credit – NASA
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Something Strange Is Happening In Space! - Jason A Must VideoI find it interesting how JWST was supposed to “see into the early universe” by looking farther than any other telescope. We got the first couple of images of deep space and apparently they didn’t see what they expected to see. Now they are looking at planets, galaxies and nebula that are not in deep space. There is a lot of deep space to look at and it seems like they are afraid of what else they may find.
I don’t believe they can see out that far…. we have been lied to for time and memoriam!
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Orb Fleet Over Sacramento, California Sept 30, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Sacramento, California UFO Sighting: 4 UFOs headed east direction 2022
These bright unidentified flying object was seen and recorded in the night sky above Sacramento, California on 30th September 2022.
Witness report:
First headed towards the freeway, than hovered for a bit than traveling east. Full sighting lasted about 3 or 4 mins. Video taped about half way through.. Couldn’t pull over on semi busy highway 80. Sound was not applicable due to driving and wind. Crazy ufo sighting about 20 mins ag0. around 10:10pm, first it was two lights..perfectly spaced between each other..kinda tilted one belowthe other..than they seem to swivel and a third light “popped” on…i drove for another 5 seconds and that was when i realized i should record this .. so the video isn’t perfect, than a 3rd light just popped on, than a 4th light popped up. I wishi could have pulled over. I took the next exit, but lost site of the lights. It’s just crazy that they popped on. I was on highway 80, on the “causeway” these where over the rice fields, I was driving east into west Sacramento… it was crazy.
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Two “Super Mercury” Exoplanets Found in a Single System
There’s a star system out there with three super-Earth planets and two super-Mercuries. Super-Earths are fairly familiar types of exoplanets, but super-Mercuries are rare. Those are planets with the same composition as our own Mercury, but larger and denser. Yet, here’s HD 23472, showing off two of eight known super-Mercuries in the galaxy.
A team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco in Portugal discovered these two dense inner planets. Their study is focused on small exoplanets and their compositions, and how position, temperature, and the properties of their stars affect them. The team chose HD 23472 as a candidate to study exoplanets and the transition between having or not having an atmosphere. It could be related to the evaporation of an atmosphere by irradiation from the parent star.
The discovery of two super-Mercuries in the system was unexpected, according to team leader Susana Barros. “The team found that this system is composed of three super-Earths with a significant atmosphere and surprisingly, two Super-Mercuries, which are the closest planets to the star,” she said.
To get a handle on these rare planets, take a look at our own Mercury. It orbits closest to the Sun. So do these two planets. Structurally, it’s quite dense, as these super-Mercuries are. What we don’t know is their internal structure. If they’re like our Mercury, then they should each have a molten inner core as it does. In our Mercury, that core is surrounded by a solid iron sulfide outer core. A relatively thin crust made of silicate rocks lies at the top. Mercury also has a magnetic field. The temperature on its surface ranges up to 700 K (427 C), although the poles remain out of the sunlight and very cold.
Basically, it’s a small overheated planet. And, Mercury has no atmosphere but does have an “exosphere”. That’s a thin sheath of atoms of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, calcium, and others. It doesn’t hang around long and gets carried off by the solar wind, which also feeds the exosphere. Atoms of other elements come from the surface or are delivered by cometary impacts (in the case of water vapor).
Mercury’s desiccated, overheated appearance is due to its proximity to the Sun. It might have had a more substantial mantle and crust early in its history. But, that likely got blasted off by impacts. Mercury is a rarity even in our own solar system. And, scientists didn’t expect to see many of them around other stars. Yet, they’re out there. Do they have similar interior characteristics to our own Mercury? And, could their histories be similar? Those questions remain to be answered.
Barros’s team’s discovery of two super-Mercuries has some promising areas of research—and some puzzles. “For the first time we have discovered a system with two super-mercuries,” she said. “This allows us to obtain clues about how these planets were formed, which could help us exclude some possibilities. For example, if an impact large enough to create a Super-Mercury is already very unlikely, two giant impacts in the same system seem very improbable. We still don’t know how these planets are formed but it appears to be connected to the composition of the parent star. This new system can help us find out”.
All planets form in the clouds of gas and dust that orbit their newborn parent stars. Planet formation is a complex process, and each system has its own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Some of those quirks come from the composition of the parent star; others from the chemical composition and structure of the protoplanetary disk—the birth crêche—of the planets. It’s important to know more about how planets grow from tiny seeds to finished worlds within those clouds. Finally, scientists have to take into account interactions between planets in a forming system.
Team member Olivier Demangeon explained that understanding how two Super-Mercuries could form in the standard planet-crêche environment also requires more information about the composition of the finished worlds. “As these planets have radii smaller than the Earth, current instrumentation does not have the sensitivity to probe the composition of their surface or the existence and composition of a potential atmosphere,” he said. There’s still a great deal of information to gather about this system, including the birth stories of its two Super-Mercuries.
Here’s what the team does know. Of the five planets in the HD 23472 system, three have masses smaller than the Earth. These are among the lightest exoplanets whose masses were measured using the radial velocity method. That measurement was only possible due to the very high precision of the ESPRESSO instrument. That stands for Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations), installed in ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), in Chile. The presence of not one, but two super-mercuries in its data, left the team wanting to go further.
In the meantime, big questions remain: did the Super-Mercuries form in much the same way that our Mercury did? If so, what are the chances of multiple giant impacts transforming these worlds at HD 23472? Will exoplanet hunters find more of them out there?
The team hopes eventually to use the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and its first-generation high-resolution spectrograph to make the observations. Both instruments will have the sensitivity and precision to help characterize the composition of planets like those orbiting HD 23472.
NASA's Dragonfly Helicopter Will be Exploring This Region of TitanIn June 2027, NASA will launch the long-awaited Dragonfly mission toward Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. By 2034, the 450 kg (990-lbs) nuclear-powered quadcopter will touch down at its target landing site (the Selk crater region) and begin searching Titan’s surface and atmosphere to learn more about this curious satellite. In particular, the mission will investigate the moon’s prebiotic chemistry, active methane cycle, and organic environment. These goals underpin Dragonfly’s main objective, which is to search for possible signs of life (aka. “biosignatures”) on Titan.
For years, scientists have speculated if life could exist on Titan since it appears to possess all the necessary ingredients (though not for life as we know it). This curiosity has only deepened since the Cassini–Huygens mission, which spent thirteen years exploring Saturn and its system of moons (from 2004 and 2017). Recently, a team of Cornell researchers combined and analyzed radar images taken by Cassini to determine the properties of the surface. The result is a detailed map of the Dragonfly‘s landing site, revealing a landscape of sand dunes and broken-up icy ground.
The research was led by Léa Bonnefoy, a postdoctoral fellow with the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CCAPS), the Carl Sagan Institute, and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP). She was joined by multiple members from CCAPS and the IPGP, as well as researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), the Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales (LATMOS) at the University of Versailles, and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). The paper that describes their research and findings recently appeared in The Planetary Science Journal.
Bonnefoy was part of the research group led by Alex Hayes, an associate professor of astronomy and the Director of the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility, which specializes in identifying and characterizing potentially habitable environments across the Solar System. Their work has included data from the Cassini orbiter, the Perseverance, Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity rovers, and the upcoming Europa Clipper mission. As Bonnefoy explained in a recent Cornell Chronicle release, Dragonfly will be investigating one of the most promising environments to date:
“Dragonfly – the first flying machine for a world in the outer Solar System – is going to a scientifically remarkable area. Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan – a frigid, thick-atmosphere, hydrocarbon world. It rains liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth – where you have dunes, some little mountains and an impact crater.
“We’re looking closely at the landing site, its structure and surface. To do that, we’re examining radar images from the Cassini-Huygens mission, looking at how radar signal changes from different viewing angles. “The radar images we have of Titan through Cassini have a best-resolution of about 300 meters per pixel, about the size of a football field and we have only seen less than 10% of the surface at that scale. This means there are probably a lot of small rivers and landscapes that we couldn’t see.”
During its many orbits of Saturn, the Cassini orbiter took multiple radar images of Titan and its many larger moons. On Christmas Day, 2004, the orbiter released its partner mission – the Huygens lander – which began its descent into Titan’s dense atmosphere on January 14th. During its two-hour descent, the lander gathered data on Titan’s atmosphere to determine what aerosols and chemicals are present (and in what amounts). It also returned pictures of the surface that showed river valleys not visible in the orbiter’s radar images.
For their study, Bonnefoy and the group used radar reflectivity from the Cassini images and angled shadows to map six terrains in the Selk crater, characterizing the landscape and gauging the height of its rim. Knowing the crater’s shape will provide insight into the region’s geology and help mission planners identify scientific objectives for the Dragonfly mission. Titan’s rich prebiotic environment contains organic compounds in its atmosphere and on its surface, where they resemble sand and form dune-like features.
Titan’s dense atmosphere, which is largely composed of nitrogen (around 95%), methane (~5%), and other hydrocarbons, is about four times as dense as Earth’s atmosphere. Combined with Titan’s low gravity (13.8% that of Earth), this will enable Dragonfly to remain airborne and perform like a drone, researching Titan’s atmosphere, surface, and methane lakes to learn more about the planet’s composition and its potential to support life. Said Bonnefoy:
“Over the next several years, we are going to see a lot of attention paid to the Selk crater region. Lea’s work provides a solid foundation upon which to start building models and making predictions for Dragonfly to test when it explores the area in the mid-2030s. Dragonfly is going to finally show us what the region – and Titan – looks like.”
Since Titan’s environment today is believed to be similar to primordial Earth, the data obtained by Dragonfly could help scientists learn more about how life emerged on Earth. There’s also the prospect that life emerged on Titan and is still there today, most likely in microbial form. The discovery and study of these potential lifeforms could shed light on how and where life emerged in the Solar System, not to mention how the building blocks might have been distributed billions of years ago (aka. lithopanspermia).
Further Reading:
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A Dwarf Galaxy Passed Close to the Milky Way and Left Ripples in its Wake
When you imagine the collision of galaxies, you probably think of something violent and transformational. Spiral arms ripped apart, stars colliding, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. The reality is much less dramatic. As a recent study shows, our galaxy is in a collision right now.
Although the big collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy is still yet to come, our galaxy has undergone galactic collisions in the past. The most well-understood collision is that between the Milky Way and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. This small galaxy first impacted the Milky Way about 6 billion years ago and may have triggered the star-forming period that produced our Sun.
But collisions on a galactic scale are slow and tedious. Over billions of years, the core of the Sagittarius galaxy has struck the Milky Way a few times as it is gradually ripped apart. It can now be seen as arcs of stars encircling our galaxy. It stands to reason that such an ancient collision is long over, but this recent study shows it still has ripple effects on the Milky Way. Literally.
The team used data from the Gaia spacecraft and looked at the motion of stars near the outer edge of the Milky Way. The velocities of these stars showed a rippled distribution of motion, created by Sagittarius the way a dropped stone might trigger ripples on a pond. Overall the stars at the outer edge of the Milky Way are not in gravitational equilibrium, which is a fancy way of saying our galaxy is still feeling the effects of the collision.
The team was surprised by the level of detail the Gaia data provided. By measuring the positions of more than two billion stars, and the motions of more than 30 million, Gaia has given the team a kind of galactic seismology that can be used to trace the dynamic history and evolution of the Milky Way.
Galactic collisions are dramatic on cosmic scales. They are a central process of galactic evolution that can trigger star formation, black hole mergers, and the formation of large elliptical galaxies. But as this latest work shows, on a human scale, it’s all just another day for life on Earth.
Reference:
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Ring of lights over Post Falls, Idaho Sept 24, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black Oval Craft Over Leeds, Alabama On Sept 22, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Sept 22, 2022
Orbs Over Trees Near Cliffs, Teignmouth, UK 6-16-2022 Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 6-16-2022
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Congress claims that aliens are responsible for UFOs
Clear and precise definitions are crucial in Congress, where legislation is produced, discussed, and passed. Recently, politicians dramatically changed the definition of “UFO” in response to military aircrews encountering UFOs more frequently. The provocative suggestion that certain UFOs may not have human origins is crucial among them.
A draft law overwhelmingly passed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence renames UFOs as “unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena,” as was initially reported by researcher Douglas Johnson. The scope of a powerful new office charged by Congress with examining UFOs is dramatically widened by expanding the term to encompass objects in space and beneath the oceans.
According to MPs, “transmedium” objects that “transition among space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and waterbodies,” are now included in the amended definition of “UFO.”
Members of a significant body focusing on national security say that unidentified objects are showing astonishingly high technology by flitting between space, air, and water. The “transmedium dangers to U. S. national security are rising rapidly,” according to a study that accompanies the legislation.
It is difficult to accept that legislators would incorporate such remarkable language in public legislation absent strong justification. Members may have access to the top-secret sensor data that led the former director of national intelligence for President Trump to claim that UFOs use “technology that we don’t have and that we are not able to fight against.”
Most startlingly, “man-made” objects are not included in Congress’s revised definition of “UFO.”
Most UFO reports during the past seven decades have involved “man-made” items, including mistaken planes, balloons, satellites, or drones. However, “man-made” objects “should not be classified under the category as unexplained aerospace-undersea phenomena,” according to Congress.
Additionally, according to a legislative instruction, any objects the new UFO office identifies “as man-made” will be sent to the proper offices of the [Department of Defense and Intelligence Community] for additional investigation.
In other words, Congress is pressuring the government to concentrate on things that aren’t “man-made.”
Assume that the new UFO office spots a cutting-edge drone operating in a restricted area of the sky. According to the proposed legislation, the UFO office must immediately cease its investigation and turn the matter over to another government agency, regardless of whether the drone is Chinese, Russian, or from anywhere else.
This shows that there is a unanimity and bipartisan agreement among members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that certain UFOs are not made by humans. After all, Congress would not have established and given authority to a powerful new office to investigate non-“man-made” UFOs.
Make no mistake, the suggestion that UFOs may not have originated from humans by a part of the American government is a dangerous development.
Additionally, it is a part of a striking shift in government perceptions about UFOs.
Many high-ranking government officials thought that UFOs originated from “interplanetary” systems in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, a string of inexplicable meetings in the summer of 1952 gave rise to concerns about Cold War national security among the military and intelligence services. As a response, the American government launched a drive to “debunk” and refute all UFO reports, regardless of how reliable they were. Officials ridiculed any claims that UFOs originated from other planets for many years.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson has asserted in conversations and interviews that UFOs seen by military aircrews in recent years may have extraterrestrial origins.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence and America’s top spy, has not ruled out the possibility that UFOs had alien origins, despite the fact that Top Gun-trained pilots continue to believe they saw things that were “not of this world.”
In addition, when asked about UFOs, former President Clinton automatically brings up the high probability of extraterrestrial life existing in the cosmos. When questioned about recent military UFO sightings, former President Obama freely hypothesized about contact with alien species.
When the issue of “UFOs” was brought up, both Clinton and Obama assumed a somber, matter-of-fact approach after the normal chuckles and smirks subsided. A television audience was chastised by Clinton in particular for laughing when a broadcaster quizzed him on UFOs. It is noteworthy that previous presidents still receive the most exclusive intelligence briefings from the government.
Unsurprisingly, this amazing change in perceptions about UFOs is encouraging a more extensive and in-depth study of the topic.
For instance, political journalist and comedian Bill Maher recently proposed the theory that UFOs deliberately make themselves known to military pilots.
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He could have a point. The well-known 2015 UFO contact off the U.S. East Coast’s geometrically rebuilt flight path shows that the object reacted when a Navy fighter jet tried to sneak up behind it. The movement of the item was significant since it suggested curiosity about the aircrew instead of animosity, who finally “flew right up to the thing.”
A UFO connected to the now-famous 2004 “Tic Tac” episodes showed up on radar precisely where a meeting point that was only known to a select number of pilots and radar operators was located. Ten years later, a UFO was hovering at the precise position and height of the entrance to a military training range when two fighter aircraft almost crashed with it.
To Maher’s point, some UFOs seem to maneuver and position themselves in a way that alerts adjacent military aircrews to their existence.
This conduct is particularly noteworthy given that Congress has openly suggested that UFOs have extraterrestrial origins.
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2 linked UFO Orbs filmed over Teignmouth, UK 2022
This UFO sighting video was filmed in the sky above Teignmouth, a seaside town, fishing port and civil parish in the English county of Devon on 16th June 2022.
Witness report:
Me and a friend were fishing in the evening on June 16th, in Teignmouth just on the mouth of the estuary facing out at sea, when we both Spotted some bright lights in the sky that looked about 500 ft away from us. They made no sound at all. They were pulsating different colours and hovering through the air very slowly. They moved from the cliff side near the trees, south facing towards the pier side south east facing. The lights were reflecting off the sea water and the 2 orb like objects started to separate and move closer towards each other. It lasted about 2-3 minutes and soon both objects disappeared into the dark.
The Moon was Pummeled by Asteroids at the Same Time the Dinosaurs Died. Coincidence?
It only takes a quick look at the Moon to see its impact-beaten surface. There are craters everywhere. Some of those impact sites apparently date back to the same time some very large asteroids were whacking Earth. One of them formed Chixculub Crater under the Yucatan Peninsula. That impact set in motion catastrophic events that wiped out much of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
That’s the conclusion a group of Australian scientists came to after studying glass beads from the Moon. They outlined their findings in a paper about the science they performed on samples picked up from the Moon by the Chang’e 5 Lunar mission. The beads were created by the heat and pressure caused by meteoritic impacts on the Moon. The lead author of the paper, Professor Alexander Nemchin, from Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings imply that the timing and frequency of asteroid impacts on the Moon may have been mirrored on Earth. If so then the find tells us more about the history of the evolution of our own planet.
“We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modeling, and geological surveys to determine how these microscopic glass beads from the Moon were formed and when,” Professor Nemchin said. “We found that some of the age groups of the lunar glass beads coincide precisely with the ages of some of the largest terrestrial impact crater events, including the Chicxulub impact crater responsible for the dinosaur extinction event.”
Looking at the Earth/Moon Asteroid Bombardment Coincidence
The team looked at the idea that large impacts, such as the Chixculub event, were accompanied by smaller impacts. The event that led to Chixculub’s formation happened about 66 million years ago. If the “big one” aimed at Chixculub had company, then it’s a good idea to look at the Moon, too. The ages and frequencies of impacts on the Moon around the same time might give clues to bombardments on Earth and the other inner solar system planets.
The death of the dinosaurs is one of the most fascinating stories to spring from Earth’s ancient geological history. The story goes (and there’s geological evidence to back it up) that an impact was certainly part of the story. Some 65 million years ago, Earth was basking in the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs had been roaming the planet for about 165 million years. They still reigned across the globe along with some of the earliest mammals and other forms of life. However, the number of dinosaur species was starting to shrink. At the same time, some pretty severe volcanic eruptions were affecting Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
That Asteroid Likely Had Company
The asteroid that set off the extinction, not just of dinosaurs, but other species, left behind evidence. It’s in the form of a layer of iridium in geological strata around the world. That layer dates back to around 66 million years ago. Asteroids are rich in iridium. Finding it provided “smoking gun” evidence something from space helped hasten the demise of 75 percent of life on Earth way back then. At the same time the Chicxulub impactor hit, something excavated several other craters around the planet. This suggests that multiple impactors—possibly from the same parent asteroid—smacked into Earth, too. So, it’s not a big leap to find evidence of impacts on the Moon from objects in the same asteroid swarm.
Co-author Associate Professor Katarina Miljkovic, also from Curtin’s SSTC, said future comparative studies of the lunar samples could also add to our store of knowledge about the Moon’s geological history. “The next step would be to compare the data gleaned from these Chang’e-5 samples with other lunar soils and crater ages to be able to uncover other significant Moon-wide impact events which might, in turn, reveal new evidence about what impacts may have affected life on Earth,” she said.
So, the death of the dinosaurs and the mysterious glass beads are likely related. They both speak to a larger bombardment event that involved both Earth and the Moon.
A Computer Algorithm is 88% Accurate in Finding Gravitational Lenses
Astronomers have been assessing a new machine learning algorithm to determine how reliable it is for finding gravitational lenses hidden in images from all sky surveys. This type of AI was used to find about 5,000 potential gravitational lenses, which needed to be confirmed. Using spectroscopy for confirmation, the international team has now determined the technique has a whopping 88% success rate, which means this new tool could be used to find thousands more of these magical quirks of physics.
“These lenses are very small so if you have fuzzy images, you’re not going to really be able to detect them,” said Dr. Kim-Vy Tran, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3-Dimensions (ASTRO3D) and the University of NSW (UNSW), who led the study. “Our spectroscopy allowed us to map a 3D picture of the gravitational lenses to show they are genuine and not merely chance superposition.”
Scientists say that gravitational lenses could transform our ability to chart the evolution of galaxies since the Big Bang. This type of lensing occurs when light from a distant object is distorted by a closer massive object along the same line of sight. This distortion effectively creates a giant lens which magnifies the background light source, allowing astronomers to observe objects embedded within those lens-created arcs and rings that are otherwise be too far and too dim to see.
Gravitational lenses are a great tool for astronomy. Not only do gravitational lenses reveal distant objects like galaxies, but it can also provide information about how far away these galaxies are. Additionally, analyzing the nature of gravitational lensing patterns tells astronomers about the way dark matter is distributed within galaxies. It also provides a way to investigate both the development of structure in the universe and the expansion of the universe.
The machine learning algorithm was pioneered by Colin Jacobs at Swinburne University in Australia. He used the technique to sift through tens of millions of galaxy images to prune the sample down to 5,000. Other surveys, like dark energy surveys, have also been used to find lensing candidates.
Tran and colleagues assessed 77 of the 5,000 candidate lenses using the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i and Very Large Telescope in Chile. They confirmed that 68 out of the 77 are strong gravitational lenses spanning vast cosmic distances. This suggests that the algorithm is reliable enough to find thousands of new gravitational lenses. To date, gravitational lenses have been hard to find and only about a hundred are routinely used.
“Never did we dream that the success rate would be so high,” said professor Karl Glazebrook from Swinburne, and co-Science Lead on the paper, in a press release. “Now we are getting images of these lenses with the Hubble Space Telescope, they range from jaw-droopingly beautiful to extremely strange images that will take us considerable effort to figure out.”
The work is part of the ASTRO 3D Galaxy Evolution with Lenses (AGEL) survey. Tran said their goal now with AGEL is to spectroscopically confirm around 100 strong gravitational lenses that can be observed from both the northern and southern hemispheres throughout the year.
The team’s paper was published in the Astronomical Journal.
The post A Computer Algorithm is 88% Accurate in Finding Gravitational Lenses appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
UFO Chases Thunderbirds at Skyfest Airshow at Fairchild AFB, May 15, 2022, Video, Washington, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: May 15, 2022
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UFO sighting filmed from a plane over Los Angeles, CA 19-Sep-2022
Check out this interesting UFO footage that was filmed from a plane over Los Angeles in California on 19th September 2022.
Witness report:
Flying fro Houston to Los Angeles, California. While approaching LA (before cabin lights were turned on), I noticed two stacked red cubes, one on top the other, as I sat on the left side of plane in the window seat row 8. Nose of the plane pointing Towards the ocean. Thinking they were helicopters I did not pay much more attention to them. I did however think they were helicopters heading south/ southwest. Like I said, I did not think to much of it.
The announcement came over the intercom saying we’re we’re preparing to land and the cabin lights came on.
Looking out the window again I notice the lights again. Still bright red and still stacked. But this time I noticed they were still in the same spot!
Very curious now, I begin to rub on the window to make sure it was not an optical allusion. I also looked at it through upper , lower, left and right sides of the window to be sure that the double window pane was not causing an optical allusion. At this point we’re about 20 minutes from landing so I decided to begin Video with my I phone.
In the video I try to zoom in and out, trying to get the best picture but the cabin light causes problems as you will see in the first couple of minutes but last few seconds I captured the stacked two bright red cubes morphed into one bright red circular ball(I thought I saw yellow in there as well).
At this point I was amazed to se it fade into nothing. IT JUST DISAPPEARED!