Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
25-02-2019
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Warns It Could Literally Tear The Guts Out Of The USA
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Warns It Could Literally Tear The Guts Out Of The USA
Scientists assure us that one day the absolutely massive Yellowstone supervolcano will once again experience a Category 8 eruption, and if it happened today it would “literally tear the guts out of the United States of America”. That is why what has been happening at Yellowstone in recent months is so alarming. We know that the ground has been rising and that “a 465-mile-long piece of molten rock” is moving upwards directly under Yellowstone.
Buurtschap Heukelom bij Oisterwijk wordt getroffen door een serie eigenaardige gebeurtenissen. ‘Een vreemd, groen licht in de duisternis en een met zwarte cirkels bekleed weiland zorgen voor beroering onder de inwoners,’ zo vermeld weekblad De Schakel. Wat is er aan de hand!?
Een vreemd licht in de lucht
Het eerste incident deed zich een week of vier geleden voor, op dinsdagavond 8 januari, toen de Heukelomse Lobke van Rijsewijk en haar bandleden zich verzamelden voor hun wekelijkse repetitie. Buiten op de parkeerplaats aan Hoog Heukelom viel hun oog op een voor hen onbekend groen licht, schijnend boven de weilanden in de donkere hemel. ‘Het was niet zomaar een lichtje, zoals dat van een vliegtuig of lampion’, vertelt Lobke de Schakel. ‘Het waren de plotselinge en snelle bewegingen die we niet konden thuisbrengen.’
Unidentified Flying Object Wat doe je vandaag de dag als een brainstormsessie van vier knappe koppen onvoldoende antwoorden biedt? Dan benut je de wisdom of the crowd. De volgende ochtend nog plaatste Lobke daarom een berichtje op Facebook, vergezeld door een filmpje van de onverklaarbare gebeurtenis. Daarop kreeg de Heukelomse een berg aan reacties. ‘Of het misschien een drone was geweest? Dat lijkt me onwaarschijnlijk: een drone maakt geluid en verplaatst zich bovendien niet op zo’n schichtige manier.’ Daarbij kwam dat zelfs de Heukelomse boerderijdieren waren getroffen; zijn koeien gedroegen zich die avond opvallend onrustig, zo liet een koeienboer weten. Maar een verklaring voor het Unidentified Flying Object kwam er niet.
Zwart gras
Cirkels in het gras
Bijna twee weken na het incident werd Heukelom opnieuw geconfronteerd met een geheimzinnig verschijnsel. Inwoonster Anneke Vugs vertelt: ‘Ik was net wakker en keek uit mijn badkamerraam. Daar ontdekte ik tot mijn verbazing twee grote, zwarte kringen in het midden van onze wei.’ Met het voorval van het groene licht nog vers in haar geheugen besloot ook Anneke haar Facebook-contacten in te schakelen. ‘Een van mijn vrienden opperde dat het gras door iemand kon zijn aangestoken, als kwajongensstreek. Meteen ben ik gaan kijken, maar nee, verbrand waren de kringen niet. Het gras leek uit zichzelf donker te zijn geworden.’ ‘Iets voor Hart van Nederland?’, reageerde een ander.
Sabine Doevendans van Weekblad De Schakel noteerde bovenstaande bijzonderheden, en is met haar redactie op zoek naar informatie. Haar verzoek is vooral uw oren en ogen open te houden, en wie weet, lossen we zo samen het mysterie van Heukelom op!
Een UFO en cirkels in het gras bij Oisterwijk. Wat is hier aan de hand?
Een UFO en cirkels in het gras bij Oisterwijk. Wat is hier aan de hand?
In Heukelom nabij Oisterwijk hebben zich een aantal vreemde gebeurtenissen voorgedaan. Zo werd ’s avonds een vreemd, groen licht gespot en verschenen er zwarte cirkels in een weiland.
Op 8 januari zag Lobke van Rijsewijk uit Heukelom een onbekend groen licht boven de weilanden.
“Het was niet zomaar een lichtje, zoals dat van een vliegtuig of lampion,” zei Lobke. “Het waren de plotselinge en snelle bewegingen die we niet konden thuisbrengen.”
Onrustig
De volgende ochtend plaatste Lobke een bericht op Facebook met daarbij een filmpje van de onverklaarbare gebeurtenis.
Sommigen dachten dat het een drone was. “Dat lijkt me onwaarschijnlijk: een drone maakt geluid en verplaatst zich bovendien niet op zo’n schichtige manier.”
Daarnaast liet een boer weten dat zijn koeien zich op de avond van de waarneming opvallend onrustig gedroegen.
Zwarte kringen
Een verklaring voor de UFO kwam er niet.
Bijna twee weken later gebeurde er in Heukelom opnieuw iets vreemds. Inwoonster Anneke Vugs zag twee grote, zwarte kringen in het midden van haar wei.
De kringen waren niet verbrand en het gras leek uit zichzelf donker te zijn geworden. Er wordt inmiddels al gesproken van ‘het mysterie van Heukelom’.
NASA Happily Reports The Earth Is Greener, With More Trees Than 20 Years Ago Thanks To China & India
NASA Happily Reports The Earth Is Greener, With More Trees Than 20 Years Ago Thanks To China & India
IN BRIEF
The Facts:
Thanks to China and India, human-induced 'greening' has increased by 5% across the earth!
Reflect On:
Why are we only getting the 'bad news' stories about the climate all the time? Is it politically convenient? Does it fit narratives? Is it always true? Are we only being told one side? Are we meant to remain in fear?
Amidst the climate alarmism that is sometimes misplaced, there are stories that paint a different picture.
Like the study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate showing that climate models exaggerate global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%.
Or the study in the journal Nature Geoscience that found that climate models were faulty. As one of the authors put it, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”
How about the findings from the University of Alabama-Huntsville showing that the Earth’s atmosphere appears to be less sensitive to changing CO2 levels than previously assumed?
Or the fact that Polar Bear populations are increasing?
“According to data collected by the federal government, polar bears along the entire west coast of Baffin Island are ‘stable.’ On the southeastern side of the island (around the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit) polar bears have even experienced a ‘likely increase.’ It’s only on the island’s northeastern corner — in a management area that meets Greenland — that polar bears are suspected to be in decline.”
And here, the topic of this article, our world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago according to data from NASA satellites. The cause of the greenery? Human-induced activity in China and India.
My point in all I wrote above is what we hear in the media is typically only one side of the picture, and it does not give us an accurate representation of what’s going on. For years now, we have been reporting on environmental issues from a grounded perspective here at CE. Looking at data, looking beyond the politics and simply at what’s happening. This approach shows you things are troubling in certain areas like pollution, air quality, EMF exposure and so forth, but the number one climate story we always hear about, C02 warming the atmosphere, simply does not hold water from the perspectives of many scientists and it hasn’t for the 10 years we have been reporting on it.
I recall a conversation I had with Gregg Braden where we were discussing research about the climate and what the data is TRULY showing. Amidst all the C02 alarmism I asked “Gregg… it appears to me that it’s more likely we’re headed into a global cooling period than a warming period.” He responded with “that’s precisely what the data shows, and it appears humanity is suffering from amnesia when it comes to the cycles of climate.”
The bottom line is, the majority don’t know the truth and the news is actually a lot better than what we’re being told. The challenge is, it’s more beneficial for power structures and business to keep us in fear.
NASA’s study will come as a surprise to many as we have not been told a balanced perspective on what’s going on with our climate for some time. To reiterate, yes, there are challenges we need to address, mainly pollution of water, land, air and the issues of animal agriculture.
The countries with the world’s biggest populations, China and India, are leading the improvement of ‘greening’ Earth’s land. In 2017 alone, India broke its own world record for the most trees planted after volunteers gathered together to plant 66 million saplings in just 12 hours! This is how fast change can happen!
In the mid 1990s, satellite data began to paint a greener picture, leading to the question as to whether or not human activity was actually helping to green the planet.
After 20 years of data collection from a NASA instrument orbiting the Earth on two satellites called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), we know that Earth’s green coverage has increased by 5% over the last two decades. This works out to an extra two million square miles.
“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation – a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation,” said Chi Chen of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University and lead author of the study.
MODIS has captured as many as four shots of every place on Earth, every day for the last 20 years.
“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the new work. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance. Now, with the MODIS data that lets us understand the phenomenon at really small scales, we see that humans are also contributing.”
Although all of the planting in China and India does not entirely make up for the damage we’re seeing through the clear cutting in Brazil and Indonesia, a good message still emerges here. When we recognize there is an issue, we tend to do something about it.
“Once people realize there’s a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 70s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss wasn’t good; in the 90s, people realized it; and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”
The Takeaway
Yes, we are still clear-cutting in ways we should be reflecting on, but this is happening due to a state of global consciousness that puts profits first. From this state of consciousness, we also give power to the government, put responsibility on others, blindly trust government and don’t see ourselves as part of a global community.
When the reference above points to ‘not being totally out of the weeds yet’ this is in reference to the belief that C02 is having a detrimental warming effect, which as we discussed, remains unfounded.
Remaining in a balanced heart centred state of being, we are better equipped to navigate information from a non-emotional state. When we get caught up in alarmism and panic, we tend not to see things clearly. The CE Protocol, that we have been sharing for a while now, was designed to help people not only navigate information but shift their perspective and consciousness such that we can change our world and take action from a NEW state of consciousness instead of the old.
NASA bevestigt dat de aarde een stuk groener is geworden. Deze twee onverwachte landen leiden de opmars
NASA bevestigt dat de aarde een stuk groener is geworden. Deze twee onverwachte landen leiden de opmars
De aarde is in vergelijking met 20 jaar geleden een stuk groener geworden, vooral dankzij twee onverwachte landen: India en China. Dat blijkt na bijna twee decennia uitgegevens die zijn verzamelddoor de NASA.
Vooral in China en India is meer groen waargenomen. De landen zijn verantwoordelijk voor een derde van de vergroening, terwijl ze maar negen procent van het groen op aarde bezitten.
China is bezig met ambitieuze programma’s om bossen te behouden en verder uit te breiden.
Wereldrecord
In India werden in 2017 door vrijwilligers 66 miljoen bomen geplant in 12 uur tijd: een wereldrecord.
De bebossing in China is met meer dan 10 procent toegenomen en in India met meer dan zes procent. Het wereldwijde gemiddelde bedroeg 2,3 procent.
De NASA is al bijna 20 jaar bezig om het groen op aarde te monitoren. Twee satellieten maken iedere dag vier foto’s van elk gebied op aarde.
De mens
Sinds 2000 is de planeet vijf procent groener geworden, wat gelijk staat aan alle bomen en planten in de Amazone.
Daar verdwijnt nog altijd veel bos, maar de cijfers uit China en India laten zien dat de ontbossing wel teruggedraaid kan worden.
De NASA dacht in eerste instantie dat de vergroening het gevolg was van klimaatverandering, maar nu is duidelijk geworden dat de mens verantwoordelijk is voor deze trend.
Al sinds 1998 geen sprake meer van global warming. Professor getuigt voor Amerikaans Congres
Al sinds 1998 geen sprake meer van global warming. Professor getuigt voor Amerikaans Congres
Professor Don Easterbrook van de Western Washington University getuigde enkele jaren geleden voor het Amerikaanse Congres dat klimaatverandering cyclisch van aard is.
Easterbrook heeft meer dan 50 jaar onderzoek gedaan en spreekt zich al sinds 1998 uit tegen theorieën over de door de mens gedreven klimaatverandering.
Hij stelde dat er in de afgelopen eeuw twee warmere en twee koudere periodes zijn geweest en dat die precies overeenkomen met het langetermijnpatroon.
Zonnevariatie
Tussen 1880 en 1915 was het kouder dan gemiddeld en tussen 1915 tot 1945 was er sprake van een warmere periode.
Tussen 1945 en 1977 was het weer kouder dan gemiddeld en tussen 1977 en 1998 warmer. Sinds 1998 koelt de aarde weer af.
Deze periodes kunnen in verband worden gebracht met de zonnevariatie sinds de Kleine IJstijd 400 jaar geleden, aldus Easterbrook.
Global cooling
Er is genoeg bewijs dat we hier te maken hebben met een natuurlijk fenomeen. Politici die zich zorgen maken over global warming, zijn vooral uit op het geld van de belastingbetaler.
De vraag is volgens Easterbrook niet hoe we de concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer het beste kunnen terugdringen om global warming een halt toe te roepen, maar hoe we ons het beste kunnen voorbereiden op 30 jaar global cooling.
Neptune’s smallest moon no longer has to go by its previous names of “Neptune XIV” and “S/2004 N1” as it’s now officially known as “Hippocamp”. A team that was led by Mark Showalter of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, confirmed the existence of the small moon back in 2013 after studying photographs that were captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope from 2004 to 2009.
Studies showed that the moon is located approximately 65,400 miles from Neptune and it takes around 23 hours to complete one full orbit. To better understand the proximity of Hippocamp to Neptune, our own moon orbits Earth at a distance averaging 239,000 miles.
Neptune’s size compared to Earth
Out of Neptune’s 14 known moons, Hippocamp is the smallest, as it was thought to have a diameter of no more than 12 miles. However, a new study suggests that it may be slightly larger with a diameter of around 21 miles. That would make it around the same size as the distant object, Ultima Thule. It’s hard to imagine a moon that tiny, as our own moon measures 2,160 miles wide.
As for its name, Hippocamp is a fish-tailed, horse-headed creature in Greek mythology, adding to the Greco-Roman mythology and the sea for the names of the Neptune system. In addition, the name Neptune means the Roman God of the sea which is comparable to the Greek Poseidon.
It’s incredible how the researchers found the small moon in the first place. They took eight five-minute Hubble exposures in sequence of the Neptune system and then they readjusted the pixels in order to stack the photographs on top of each other and that’s how they discovered the tiny moon. “We came really close to missing it entirely,” Showalter said, “It’s too faint to see in a single Hubble [exposure].” The team also used transformation-stacking to locate another one of Neptune’s moons called Naiad which hadn’t been seen since 1989.
Hippocamp is located in the same area as the six moons that were discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 and it’s only 7,450 miles interior to Proteus which is the outermost and biggest of the six moons, measuring at 260 miles wide.
Simulated diagram of Neptune and Proteus
It is thought that Hippocamp was more than likely located next to Proteus around 4 billion years ago. In fact, Showalter and his colleagues believe that Hippocamp is younger than Proteus and that perhaps it was created from pieces that were sent into space after the larger moon collided with a comet. It could even be connected to the Pharos Crater that’s located on Proteus from a once huge impact. “This is the first really great example of a moon that got created as a result of an impact,” Showalter suggested.
This is the earliest image of the Neptune moon Hippocamp, obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2004. Hippocamp is shown inside the red box, and an enlarged version is inset at upper right.
This is the image in which the tiny Neptune moon Hippocamp was discovered. Hippocamp is visible inside the red box; an enlarged version is inset at upper right.
Crystal Clear V-Shaped Alien Craft Photographed over Failsworth, GB
Crystal Clear V-Shaped Alien Craft Photographed over Failsworth, GB
A crystal clear image of a V-shaped alien craft has been photographed over Failsworth, GB. on October 22, 2018.
The photographer couldn’t believe what he saw, he looked down, rubbed his eyes and looked back up and it was still there, it slowly glided past him over his house.
According to photographer more people must have seen the UFO which started to materialize in the sky from being cloaked.
The photographer has long doubted whether he would make the remarkable photo public or not, on which he decided to send the photo to the Mutual UFO Network, last week.
Since the photo has been taken outdoors we can exclude that the object is a reflection in a window and though V-shaped UFOs have been previously photographed the clear image of this craft is truly amazing showing many details of the alien craft.
We may wonder whether these type of UFOs are responsible for the mystery booms and sounds heard around the world. Could it be that the mysterious booms and sounds are caused by air displacement when these kinds of UFOs arrive in our atmosphere?
I found an ancient sphinx on Mars in a gigapan photo today. Its so different and unlike what our human culture would make that I believe most people would actually deny this being real. Its a hard thing to accept that art could be anything other than what we want it to be. However even on earth, the art world is a little crazy and strange, leaving many onlookers wondering if its really art or something pulled off the ground and hung on the wall? Thats what we have here. An ancient monument created by a culture that never had our art schools, our books our TV shows or our Internet. This is truly a great example of how different alien cultures are to our own. I wonder, are humans really ready to mingle with a species so different?
This sphinx is about 30-35 meters across and 8-9 meters high. It has a back area I colored yellow, a horned helm area I colored green, and a facial area I colored pink. You can easily make out the eye, huge thick long nose, open mouth, strong chin and cheeks. Yes, it seems primitive in design, and yet it appears to stand the test of time...still standing after hundreds of thousands of years.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Australian Police Reveal a Video Showing a UFO In The Night Sky
Australian Police Reveal a Video Showing a UFO In The Night Sky
Police in a remote part of Australia have shared out of this world video of a mysterious bright light hovering in the sky.
Taken during a thunderstorm, the footage quickly created speculation on aliens including from the Broome Police themselves, who suggested the video might have shown a UFO.
The bright light shining in the sky looks like a flying saucer. The police’s official Twitter feed interestingly followed by a string of UFO emoji. The police say that it appears we are not alone after reviewing the CCTV at town beach catching the night’s storm.
The video shows an odd object in the sky after a flash of bright lightning. The apparent UFO stays there as each flash in the sky seems to lit it. It then moves away and comes back again.
The police posted the video on Twitter and Facebook, and it has since received a lot of suggestions from the public.
Some believe it is a lens flare, but many others suggest that extraterrestrials are behind the bizarre activity in the night sky.
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all.
We have a problem. In a 10-billion-year-old galaxy there should have been ample opportunity for at least one species to escape its own mess, and to spread across the stars, filling every niche. That this species doesn’t seem to have come calling leads to Fermi’s Paradox – if life isn’t impossibly rare, then where is everyone? Efforts to scan the skies for signs of intelligent life have come up blank too, adding to the puzzle. Perhaps the vast gulfs of interstellar space and the narrow windows of time for communicative species to exist within shouting distance of each other are to blame. Intelligences might be like small ships passing in the night in a vast ocean. Actual close encounters of any kind could be exceedingly unusual.
Another explanation for the great silence of the galaxy is that any surviving intelligence out there is so different from us, so radically evolved, that we can’t even conceive of its forms or behaviours. As a consequence, actually detecting and recognising it could be next to impossible. That’s a bit of a downer.
But there is also a possibility that lies between such extremes and it might be the most probable of all. When our first encounter or detection finally occurs, it could be a machine intelligence that appears in our sights.
The idea is not truly new. Back in the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann explored the possibilities of non-biological, self-replicating systems steeped in computation but requiring no operating minds. Later on, in the 1980s, others expanded on this concept by considering the real engineering needs for autonomous, replicating, space-faring devices; these machines would be able to roam the Universe, finding raw materials to build more and more of themselves, creating the infrastructure for energy from space or human settlement among the stars.
It would require a more complex mission still for such devices to have true artificial intelligence (AI). What would that purpose be, and what kind of AI is such a machine likely to have? An encounter with an alien machine could help us unravel this puzzle.
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all.
One possibility is that this machine is super-capable, exceeding our human capacity for cognitive or analytical tasks. Such an AI might be exceedingly hard to understand, either in terms of its underlying motivation or because of practical barriers of communication bandwidth. For this device, talking to us might be like talking to an infant. Or trying to discuss the collected works of Shakespeare using pictographs. An alien system optimised for processing vast data streams might not even be able to downgrade its pace enough to notice that we’re trying to talk, whether we use technology or not.
An extraterrestrial (ET) AI could also be seriously intimidating and scary simply because of its machine nature: a thing animated from non-living pieces, just like the classic tale of the golem moulded from clay or mud. By comparison, while a biological alien might be shocking, it would surely have some traits in common with us. We could convince ourselves that evolution leads to recognisable, even sympathetic behaviours and intentions. An artificial entity need not follow all of those evolutionary rules, taking alienness to a whole other level.
Encountering an alien AI would not only point to our own possible future, but also prompt a curious shift in our worldview. When Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in the 1500s that the Earth was not central in any way to the Universe, he set in motion the development of a critical scientific idea: that there is nothing cosmically special or significant about us. But meeting an ET-AI could turn that realisation on its head: if the only intelligence we meet is machine in nature, then we would be special, after all.
If we do meet an AI in our cosmological jaunt, it probably won’t be conscious in the full sense of the word. In fact, I think we’d find ourselves facing something akin to a ‘savant’ intelligence – a whiz at specific tasks, but otherwise extremely limited in its capacities.
A recent example right here on Earth is Google’s AlphaGo Master, a system that plays the board game Go, and learns some of its skills by exposure to vast catalogues of human-played games. Within a year of its inception, it began outdoing the world’s highest-ranking human Go players. Next came an evolved system called AlphaGo Zero. In 40 days of training, without recourse to data from historical games, this new AI made itself better than its silicon ancestor, and better than any living human. Now, yet another variant, AlphaZero, has taken a mere 24 hours to train itself and beat a modestly trained iteration of AlphaGo Zero – as well as topping other systems at playing both chess and Shogi, sometimes known as Japanese chess. If you read interviews with expert players, you’ll see that these machines don’t even play like humans, their strategies are alien and seemingly unfathomable.
These Alphas are the epitome of a savant machine. Such AIs will help us answer a host of scientific problems that are presently on the hairy edge of tractability. The researchers behind the Alpha systems are already talking about the puzzle of protein-folding – how chains of amino acids twist, gyrate and fold into structures with essential biological utility. The underlying molecular rules are understood but predicting what a particular recipe will give you is currently extremely difficult. It certainly sounds like a job for some future AlphaFold Zero.
Or take other pieces of modern science. Cosmological simulations or climate and weather predictions are all driven by physics phenomena such as gravitation, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Computer codes digitise these phenomena, calculating billions of iterations of forces and movements. But these computations are still hemmed in by processor speeds and precision. Deep-learning self-taught AIs might turn out to do better as quantitative soothsayers than those intense numerical simulations – presently bounded by their comparatively plodding, systematic approaches. A machine’s savant intuition might be able to skip across compute cycles, ‘seeing’ what the answer will be in a probabilistic sense, rather than painstakingly reproducing a pixelated version of it. Similarly, a machine’s savant intuition might be applied to the root process of scientific deduction and discovery itself. The possibilities are yet to be much explored, but they could be extraordinary. Savant machines could turn out to be simply so useful, so revolutionary in expanding our capacity for discovery and exploration, that there’s little initial motivation to seek anything fancier.
A cosmos filled with worlds offers millions, billions, even trillions of natural test tubes.
If this pattern of machine development is happening for us, it could represent a pattern that happens across the cosmos to influence the nature of cosmic exploration itself. Savant AIs would become the ultimate tools for allowing biological life to reach across interstellar distances: more robust than biology, and not smart enough to raise ethical concerns about being sent off to roam the cosmos according to our scientific whims. Propelling millions of these investigators into space would be an inevitable step. They could be sent to other stars and planetary systems, and designed to recognise the most interesting characteristics of these places, from astrophysics to the presence of life. These machines would reflect the motivations of their biological creators; perhaps simple curiosity, perhaps something more.
Another compelling reason for savant machines to be roaming the cosmos arises from thinking about how to build more general, more powerful AIs. It might be that a general AI system can be built out of lots of smaller savant AIs, each taking on some specific, difficult cognitive task, but linked together. That linkage could be very localised or quite spread out like the architecture of biological neural circuits. There’s the face-recognising savant, the natural-language savant, the calculus-savant, the tax-evading savant. One could then imagine an AI whose job is to learn how to combine savant AIs into something akin to a general intelligence – establishing a nursery for machine consciousness run from on-high.
The most challenging task for a nursery-room AI would be how to expose its collective of savants to the complexity of the real-world environment. Nature isn’t just about meeting fixed goals; it’s full of noise, randomness and trillions upon trillions of interacting pieces. For example, from the very instant an embryo forms, it is exposed to constant variation. First just a few cells, it senses the world purely from a molecular point of view. As the embryo develops organs to register light, sound, touch and smell, the portals to experience – and their complexity – expand.
In short, the way for a species to make a better AI is to let that AI and its components explore the messy Universe. As complex and nourishing as a single planet can be, a cosmos filled with worlds offers millions, billions, even trillions of natural test tubes, each with its own tale of natural selection and chance. Spreading savant AI pieces across the stars offers a way to exploit these endless natural experiments and sensory inputs.
The path towards better AI might parallel biological evolution only in superficial ways. Consider the raw development of a human brain. The core process appears to be a one-shot effort. It starts with stem cells racing up an initial structure called a neural tube at a rate of 15 million every hour and hooking together in a developing embryo. That prodigious assembly of the brain is followed by learning – the brain is shaped and pruned as experience creates our unique path through life. Although we’re incredibly flexible, and capable of absorbing and mastering all sorts of skills and knowledge, as individuals we are also, sadly, constrained by whatever genetic hand we were dealt. And, in truth, while we can all keep learning and changing, we seldom develop any miraculous new talents during our lifetimes.
A machine might not be as constrained, especially if critical pieces are out exploring the cosmos and have been designed to evolve into something new. Savant components of a larger intelligence might come and go in an ever-changing pick-and-mix. Some cognitive skills might be useful in certain contexts but could simply get in the way in other situations. In other words, machine-based intelligence could be highly fluid, changeable and, most of all, rapidly evolvable. As a consequence, what could be lurking out there in the cosmos is a vast and diverse zoo of AIs.
We might be incapable of registering the presence of billion-year-old machine savants.
In a sense, such AIs parallel the microbial machines that are at the core of life on Earth – forming the smallest units of intelligence to traverse the Universe, and ultimately combining together, as the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis posed, to create multicellular creatures, larger entities and consciousness itself. In fact, long after a biological species has faded away amid the relentless torrent of natural selection, or self-destruction, this type of machine will remain.
AI beyond Earth might be hard to recognise. Just as someone living on the steppe in 12th-century Mongolia would find a self-driving car both magical and meaningless, we might be quite incapable of registering or interpreting the presence of billion-year-old machine savants. Equally, savant machines might not be actively seeking to talk to us, or any other intelligences.
But a recognisable encounter with even one savant machine would indeed change everything. It would tell us that the galaxy is awash with intelligence, and could suggest that our future might be one of a vestigial, fading biological presence. Most of all, this discovery would tell us that we might currently be the only natural minds consciously aware of these facts. That’s because the biology that could produce AI explorers would likely evolve or go extinct on timescales far shorter than the persistence of these interstellar machines, and we already live in a galaxy that is 10 billion years old.
Finding an AI-ET could unlock our own cosmic exploration by lighting a path forward. It might also offer insight into the nature of its creators, those ancestral intelligences, presumably in biological form. Exactly what this investigative process would look like is extremely hard to imagine. Even a single savant AI might not come in one physical package but rather a swarm of tinier components incredibly hard to digest. However, let’s assume that by interrogation or literal disassembly we eventually solve the mystery of the AI-ET’s origins. We might find evidence of an organic species like us – or we might discover only machines all the way down.
Caleb Scharf is director of astrobiology at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology (2009), which won the Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award. His latest book is The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing (2017).
Why a data scienWhy a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveriestist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
Why a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
Data-mining algorithms aren’t good at communicating uncertainty in results, Genevera Allen says
MACHINE EUREKA It’s risky to take scientific discoveries made by AI at face value until these computer programs get better at assessing their own uncertainty, says data scientist Genevera Allen.
DMYTRO VIKARCHUK/SHUTTERSTOCK
WASHINGTON — We live in a golden age of scientific data, with larger stockpiles of genetic information, medical images and astronomical observations than ever before. Artificial intelligence can pore over these troves to uncover potential new scientific discoveries much quicker than people ever could. But we should not blindly trust AI’s scientific insights, argues data scientist Genevera Allen, until these computer programs can better gauge how certain they are in their own results.
AI systems that use machine learning — programs that learn what to do by studying data rather than following explicit instructions — can be entrusted with some decisions, says Allen, of Rice University in Houston. Namely, AI is reliable for making decisions in areas where humans can easily check their work, like counting craters on the moon or predicting earthquake aftershocks (SN: 12/22/18, p. 25).
But more exploratory algorithms that poke around large datasets to identify previously unknown patterns or relationships between various features “are very hard to verify,” Allen said February 15 at a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Deferring judgment to such autonomous, data-probing systems may lead to faulty conclusions, she warned.
SELF-CONSCIOUS SYSTEMS Genevera Allen (pictured) and her colleagues are devising new uncertainty-measuring schemes to help AI programs estimate the accuracy and reproducibility of their discoveries.
TOMMY LAVERGNE/RICE UNIVERSITY
Take precision medicine, where researchers often aim to find groups of patients that are genetically similar to help tailor treatments. AI programs that sift through genetic data have successfully identified patient groups for some diseases, like breast cancer. But it hasn’t worked as well for many other conditions, like colorectal cancer. Algorithms examining different datasets have clustered together different, conflicting patient classifications. That leaves scientists to wonder which, if any, AI to trust.
These contradictions arise because data-mining algorithms are designed to follow a programmer’s exact instructions with no room for indecision, Allen explained. “If you tell a clustering algorithm, ‘Find groups in my dataset,’ it comes back and it says, ‘I found some groups.’ ” Tell it to find three groups, and it finds three. Request four, and it will give you four.
What AI should really do, Allen said, is report something like, “I really think that these groups of patients are really, really grouped similarly … but these others over here, I’m less certain about.”
Scientists are no strangers to dealing with uncertainty. But traditional uncertainty-measuring techniques are designed for cases where a scientist has analyzed data that was specifically collected to evaluate a predetermined hypothesis. That’s not how data-mining AI programs generally work. These systems have no guiding hypotheses, and they muddle through massive datasets that are generally collected for no single purpose. Researchers like Allen, however, are designing protocols to help next-generation AI estimate the accuracy and reproducibility of its discoveries.
One of these techniques relies on the idea that if an AI program has made a real discovery — like identifying a set of clinically meaningful patient groups — then that finding should hold up in other datasets. It’s generally too expensive for scientists to collect brand new, huge datasets to test what an AI has found. But, Allen said, “we can take the current data that we have, and we can perturb the data and randomize the data in a way that mimics [collecting] future datasets.” If the AI finds the same types of patient classifications over and over, for example, “you probably have a pretty good discovery on your hands,” she said.
Leaked video footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki?
Leaked video footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki?
The recently uploaded video allegedly shows “footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki God…” The tomb of the ‘Anunnaki’ is said to have been discovered by chance in 2008. If anyone has more info about it please let us know.
Before everyone goes crazy about the title and the video, please watch it and let us know what you think. If anyone has more information about the video, please let us know.
The video uploaded to YouTube by Temple Of Mystery states that the video footage is an actual (real) leaked video of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki.
The Ancient Anunnaki are probably the number one topic when it comes to the Ancient Alien theory and many people around the world remain skeptical when talking about the Anunnaki and their potential connection to the origins of mankind.
According to statements on the video, the footage „…Is real and they discovered it in Iran in 2008, but they move it to Israel“.
Users have rushed to YouTube to discuss the enigmatic video.
One user wrote on YouTube:
“…If you look at the depictions of the Annunaki in the art of the Sumerians, they are shown wearing what appear to be watches on their wrists. If this is not a hoax, then the years of reign by the Kings on the Sumerian Kings list is totally legit I would suppose. Seems to good to be true…”
Many others remain skeptical since there is little information about the origin of the video.
“…Looks a bit too good to be true, but we can dream that one day the truth will reveal. (like they said in Independence Day- I hope they bring back Elvis.)…”
Whether the video is real or not is something that will surely create an ongoing debate. While we cannot say for certain whether or not this is yet another hoax on the internet, it surely is a very interesting video worth to watch.
Based on numerous archaeological discoveries: artifacts, records and monuments found in the past by archaeologists and linguists, Sitchin indicates that the Anunnaki (Sumerian: “those who came down from the heavens), an extremely advanced civilization from an elusive planet in our solar system, came to Earth, landing in the Persian Gulf some 432,000 years ago. This advanced civilization colonized our planet, and their sole purpose was to mine large quantities of gold.
Approximately some 250,000 years ago, according to Sitchin, the ancient Anunnaki merged their Alien genes with that of Homo Erectus and created a species known as Homo Sapiens, obtaining. As a result, a genetically bicameral species. However, humans were a hybrid species and could not procreate. Since the demand for humans as workers became greater, the ancient Anunnaki once again manipulated ancient mankind so they could reproduce on their own.
In many depictions of the Anunnaki, we can see strange objects worn by “those who came from the stars,” one of the most interesting examples are “wrist watches” which appear in almost every single depiction of the Anunnaki.
Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe
Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe
Excavations being conducted at the ancient city of Göbeklitepe in Turkey have uncovered an ancient pictograph on an obelisk which researchers say could be the earliest known pictograph ever discovered.
A pictograph is an image that conveys meaning through its resemblance to a physical object. Such images are most commonly found in pictographic writing, such as hieroglyphics or other characters used by ancient Sumerian and Chinese civilizations. Some non-literate cultures in parts of Africa, South America and Oceania still use them.
“The scene on the obelisk unearthed in Göbeklitepe could be construed as the first pictograph because it depicts an event thematically” explained Director of the Şanlıurfa Museum, Müslüm Ercan, to the Hurriyet Daily News . Ercan is leading the excavation at Göbeklitepe. “It depicts a human head in the wing of a vulture and a headless human body under the stela. There are various figures like cranes and scorpions around this figure. This is the portrayal of a moment; it could be the first example of pictograph. They are not random figures. We see this type of thing portrayal on the walls in 6,000-5,000 B.C. in Çatalhöyük [in modern-day western Turkey].”
The ‘Vulture-Stone’.
Credit: Alistair Coombs
The artifacts discovered in the ancient city have provided information about ancient burial traditions in the area in which bodies were left in the open for raptors such as vultures to consume. According to Mr Ercan, this enabled the soul of the deceased to be carried into the sky. It was called “burial in the sky” and was depicted on the obelisks in Göbeklitepe. Such rituals were conducted in and around the city around 12,000 years ago. Many of the items discovered on the site have not been seen before anywhere else in the world and thus are the first of their kind to be discovered.
Göbeklitepe is situated on the top of a hill about 15 kilometres away from Sanliurfa in South-eastern Turkey. The city can be dated back to 10,000 BC and consists of a series of circular and oval shaped structures that were first excavated by Professor Klaus Schmidt supported by the German Archaeological Institute. Schmidt travelled to the site having heard about it from accounts of other previous visits by anthropologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University in the 1960’s. Both institutions ignored the site, believing it to be nothing more than a medieval graveyard.
Artifacts found on the site indicate that the city was intended for ritual use only and not as a domain for human occupation. Each of the 20 structures consists of a ring of walls surrounding two T-shaped monumental pillars between 3 metres (9 feet) and 6 metres high (19 feet) and weighing between 40 and 60 tons.
Enormous T-shaped pillars at Göbeklitepe.
Credit: Alistair Coombs
Archaeologists believe these pillars are stylised representations of human beings because of the human appendages carved into the stone. These images are accompanied by those of animals including foxes, snakes, wild boars, cranes and ducks.
The archaeologists believe Göbeklitepe was used as a religious centre. Geo-radar work has revealed evidence of 23 temple structures in the area. Two of the obelisks in the city were constructed in the form of a letter T and are positioned opposite each other within a circle of smaller, round obelisks.
Ercan said that the museum at Şanlıurfa contains a small sculpture of a pig that was discovered in front of the central stelas in the ‘C’ temple at Göbeklitepe. Such statues may have depicted sacred beings.
Work on the basic infrastructure of a roof to cover the site and help preserve its structures and artefacts has just been completed, ready for the construction of the roof itself. This is an EU project and the archaeologists aim to complete it in eight months’ time.
Featured image: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is the oldest known temple in the world. Photo source: Wikimedia
You might be aware of one of Uranus' complexities: It spins on its side, and its moons orbit on that same rotated plane. New evidence strengthens the case that Uranus was smashed in a giant collision, resulting in its sideways orientation to its orbital plane and perhaps explaining some of the planet's other mysteries.
A new paper performs a series of simulations on Uranus early in its history, taking note of what an early impact may have done to its rotation rate, atmosphere and internal structure. The impact could have left a clear signature still visible inside the planet we see today.
Uranus really is strange. Not only does it rotate on an axis that sits at a 98-degree angle to its orbital plane, but, unlike the other giant planets, it doesn't appear to release more heat than it receives from the Sun. Its magnetic field, too, appears warped compared to the Earth's.
An impact could perhaps help explain some of these strange traits.
Scientists have been simulating giant impacts into Uranus since the early 1990s, according to the new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.
This time around, researchers built a new simulation with the newest and best available data of the planet's composition. This allowed them to model how a giant impactor, perhaps one to three times the mass of Earth, would have deposited "material and energy inside Uranus", and how much debris would be left over from which moons could form.
"This study provides some great new insights into what might have happened all those billions of years ago, with material left over from the impact possibly even serving to trap some of that heat inside," Leigh Fletcher, Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, told Gizmodo.
But this is just a simulation, and like we always say: All models are flawed, but some are interesting. Models can't tell us exactly what happened; it will take a lot more data to fully understand Uranus' story.
"Of course, what we really need next is an ambitious robotic mission to explore Uranus and its diverse satellite system," said Fletcher. "Gravitational, atmospheric, and magnetic field mapping, following what we've done at Jupiter with Juno, and at Saturn with Cassini, could provide some new clues to better constrain these models, by unlocking the secrets of an ice giant interior for the first time."
Uranus is truly a mystery. Will humans finally take up the task to explore it?
Symmetrical streaks in Venus' lower-level clouds as seen by the Akatsuki spacecraft (left) and reconstructed through simulation. A strong downflow is denoted by brighter parts of the images.
Surprise! New pictures show two symmetrical streaks hiding in the sulfuric acid clouds close to the surface of Venus.
The Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft spotted the twin phenomena in Venus' northern and southern hemispheres. Each streak is roughly 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) across. That's more than double the distance between San Francisco and New York City.
Venus is close to Earth's size but orbits closer to the sun than our home does. Venus isn't habitable by life as we know it, not by any stretch of the imagination. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. It has clouds made of sulfuric acid. The planet is, in fact, fully enveloped in clouds, and you cannot see its surface with the naked eye. Underneath the clouds lies a world shaped by the runaway greenhouse effect and featuring oven-like temperatures, possible active volcanoes and bone-crushing pressures.
This is all old news to researchers — after all,Soviet Union landersbriefly survived this surface environment in the 1970s and 1980s — but the streaks were previously unknown. And they may be unique to Venus.
The story of their formation isn't too alien, though: The streaks are related to polar jet streams, researchers from Japan's Kobe University, which led the study, said in a statement. Polar jet streams are found on Earth, but their results are different on Venus.
At Earth's mid and high latitudes, dynamic winds can form cyclones, high-pressure systems and jet streams — and the same thing is probably happening at the high latitude of Venus, the university's analysis shows. But at lower latitudes on Venus, things get a little weird. Large-scale flows in the Venus atmosphere, coupled with that world's planetary rotation, create huge vortexes starting at the equator and stretching as far as 60 degrees latitude north and south. On Earth, the equivalent vortex would stretch well into Canada in the north — and as far south as the ocean near Antarctica.
The planetary-scale streaks on Venus form using the process above. From the statement, "The giant vortexes caused by Rossby waves (left) are tilted by the high-latitude jet streams and stretch (right). Within the stretched vortexes, the convergence zone of the streak structure is formed, a downflow occurs, and the lower clouds become thin. Venus rotates in a westward direction, so the jet streams also blow west."
"When jet streams are added to this phenomenon, the vortexes tilt and stretch, and the convergence zone between the north and south winds forms as a streak," researchers said in the statement. "The north-south wind that is pushed out by the convergence zone becomes a strong downward flow, resulting in the planetary-scale streak structure." Planetary rotation and atmospheric fluctuations over the equator keep the hemispheres symmetrical.
Akatsuki captured the streaks using an infrared camera that can measure wavelengths of 2 micrometers (a tiny fraction of a millimeter). This allows the spacecraft to spy on the construction of lower cloud banks only 31 miles (50 km) from the surface. Researchers modeled the atmosphere using a program called AFES-Venus, developed before Akatsuki arrived at Venus in 2015. (The probe was supposed to get there in 2010 but missed the opportunity; the second attempt worked.)
The researchers noted that it is difficult to observe Venus' surface and lower atmosphere, which could affect the accuracy of the simulations.
A study based on the research was published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications. The research was led by Hiroki Kashimura, a project assistant professor at Kobe.
This Ancient Map Challenges The Entire Human History
This Ancient Map Challenges The Entire Human History
The map of Piri Reis, which was made circa 1520, achieved a level of detail of American geography, which according to experts, would only be achievable using aerial photographs. This incredible map challenges every single thing we know about our past, yet history books have completely omitted this incredible ancient document.
There are a number of archeological discoveries that question our past, this is the case of the map which was found in 1929, during the restoration of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul Turkey, which describes in high detail the geography of the American Continent with such a precision that it looks as if it was put together with the aid of aerial photography. However, the map was made at a time when mainstream history tells us there were no flying vehicles on Earth and mankind’s technology was very limited. The map composed by Ottoman admiral Piri Ibn Haji Muhiddin Memmed, aka Piri Reis is in fact part of maritime navigation collection called Bahriye which is basically composed of 210 partial maps, dated around 1513 and 1528.
The perfection and details displayed on the map have been the subject of debate for years among scholars who cannot understand nor explain how this map even exists. Today, numerous enigmas remain about the Piri Reis map, especially in regards to Latin America and the Southern regions of our planet.
This Turkish Admiral did not only draw the outline of the nearly unexplored South American region, detailing rivers, mountains and lakes that were believed to be unknown at that time in history, but he managed to accurately depict the geography of Antarctica, a continent that wasn’t officially investigated until the twentieth century…
As a matter of a fact, the first exploratory navigation in search of Antarctica was led by British explorer James Cook, who launched the journey in 1772 and only managed to see snow and ice, 250 years after Pirir Reis had already drawn Antarctica on navigational charts. It wasn’t until 1819, when Fabián von Bellingshausen discovered the landmass of Antarctica for the first time, and it was in 1950 when American expedition Deep Freeze managed to “reveal” the geography of Antarctica.
So, how is it possible that Pirir Reis managed to accurately draw the geographical details of Antarctica in 1513? With details that were not discovered until 1952? But that isn’t even the most interesting part of the Piri Reis Map. Inexplicably, the Piri Reis map depicts Antarctica without Ice, yet the Antarctica has been frozen for at least 6000 years. How is it possible that Piri Reis drew Antarctica without Ice? Where did he obtain this level of details? No one has been able to answer the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic ancient map.
The only thing we can conclude is that, somehow, someone knew how our planet looked like thousands of years ago from the air… and the Turkish Admiral managed to obtain this information and create the most enigmatic map we have discovered to date, a map that challenges history as never before.
The Seventh Moon of Neptune Is Broken, it "Shouldn't Be There" Say Astronomers
Astronomers call it “the moon that shouldn’t be there.”
After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.
The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus. Normally, a moon like Proteus should have gravitationally swept aside or swallowed the smaller moon while clearing out its orbital path.
So why does the tiny moon exist? Hippocamp is likely a chipped-off piece of the larger moon that resulted from a collision with a comet billions of years ago. The diminutive moon, only 20 miles (about 34 kilometers) across, is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus (which is 260 miles [about 418 kilometers] across).
This is an artist’s concept of the tiny moon Hippocamp that was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. Only 20 miles across, it may actually be a broken-off fragment from a much larger neighboring moon, Proteus, seen as a smaller crescent in the upper right. This is the first evidence for a moon being an offshoot from a comet collision with a much larger parent body.
Credits: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)
“The first thing we realized was that you wouldn’t expect to find such a tiny moon right next to Neptune’s biggest inner moon,” said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “In the distant past, given the slow migration outward of the larger moon, Proteus was once where Hippocamp is now.”
This scenario is supported by Voyager 2 images from 1989 that show a large impact crater on Proteus, almost large enough to have shattered the moon. “In 1989, we thought the crater was the end of the story,” said Showalter. “With Hubble, now we know that a little piece of Proteus got left behind and we see it today as Hippocamp.” The orbits of the two moons are now 7,500 miles (about 12,070 kilometers) apart.
Neptune’s satellite system has a violent and tortured history. Many billions of years ago, Neptune captured the large moon Triton from the Kuiper Belt, a large region of icy and rocky objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Triton’s gravity would have torn up Neptune’s original satellite system. Triton settled into a circular orbit and the debris from shattered Neptunian moons re-coalesced into a second generation of natural satellites. However, comet bombardment continued to tear things up, leading to the birth of Hippocamp, which might be considered a third-generation satellite.
“Based on estimates of comet populations, we know that other moons in the outer solar system have been hit by comets, smashed apart, and re-accreted multiple times,” noted Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, a coauthor on the new research. “This pair of satellites provides a dramatic illustration that moons are sometimes broken apart by comets.”
Hippocamp is a half-horse half-fish from Greek mythology. The scientific name for the seahorse is Hippocampus, also the name of an important part of the human brain. The rules of the International Astronomical Union require that the moons of Neptune are named after Greek and Roman mythology of the undersea world.
The team of astronomers in this study consists of M. Showalter (SETI Institute, Mountain View, California), I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley, California), J. Lissauer (NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, California) and R. French (SETI Institute, Mountain View, California).
The paper will appear in the February 21 issue of the science journal Nature.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
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