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...
29-05-2020
Secret Space U.S. Fleet Being Built In Utah... ET Experiences and Advanced Technology!
Secret Space U.S. Fleet Being Built In Utah... ET Experiences and Advanced Technology!
Secret Space U.S. Fleet Being Built In Utah… ET Experiences and Advanced Technology!
The evidence of an extraterrestrial presence is forever growing, with new information coming forward in regards to dramatic engagements between these strange beings and the United States military and naval forces. Are we obtaining advanced technology from them? Information is now coming forward in regards to the huge construction of space craft built by human hands in Utah.
Highly Top Secret! Presented by Frank Chille Filmed by MUFON PA All content on this channel is licensed, and or produced by Zohar Entertainment Group/Awakening Expo/Phenomena Magazine.
New Earth Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri, Our Closet Neighbor Star
New Earth Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri, Our Closet Neighbor Star
The existence of a planet the size of Earth around the closest star in the solar system, Proxima Centauri, has been confirmed by an international team of scientists including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The results, which you can read all about in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveal that the planet in question, Proxima b, has a mass of 1.17 earth masses and is located in the habitable zone of its star, which it orbits in 11.2 days.
This artist’s impression shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System.
This breakthrough has been possible thanks to radial velocity measurements of unprecedented precision using ESPRESSO, the Swiss-manufactured spectrograph – the most accurate currently in operation – which is installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Proxima b was first detected four years ago by means of an older spectrograph, HARPS – also developed by the Geneva-based team – which measured a low disturbance in the star’s speed, suggesting the presence of a companion.
The ESPRESSO spectrograph has performed radial velocity measurements on the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from the Sun, with an accuracy of 30 centimetres a second (cm/s) or about three times more precise than that obtained with HARPS, the same type of instrument but from the previous generation.
“We were already very happy with the performance of HARPS, which has been responsible for discovering hundreds of exoplanets over the last 17 years”, begins Francesco Pepe, a professor in the Astronomy Department in UNIGE’s Faculty of Science and the man in charge of ESPRESSO. “We’re really pleased that ESPRESSO can produce even better measurements, and it’s gratifying and just reward for the teamwork lasting nearly 10 years.”
Credit: Hubble Space Telescope/ESA
Shining brightly in this Hubble image is our closest stellar neighbour: Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri lies in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), just over four light-years from Earth. Although it looks bright through the eye of Hubble, as you might expect from the nearest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri is not visible to the naked eye.
Alejandro Suarez Mascareño, the article’s main author, adds: “Confirming the existence of Proxima b was an important task, and it’s one of the most interesting planets known in the solar neighbourhood.”
The measurements performed by ESPRESSO have clarified that the minimum mass of Proxima b is 1.17 earth masses (the previous estimate was 1.3) and that it orbits around its star in only 11.2 days.
Artist’s impression of the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b shown as of a arid (but not completely water-free) rocky Super-Earth. This appearance is one of several possible outcomes of current theories regarding the development of this exoplanet, while the actual look and structure of the planet is known in no ways at this time. Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to the Sun and also the closest potentially habitable exoplanet as well. It orbits Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf with a surface temperature of 3040 K (thus hotter than light bulbs and therefore whiter, as depicted here). The Alpha Centauri binary system is shown in the background.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
“ESPRESSO has made it possible to measure the mass of the planet with a precision of over one-tenth of the mass of Earth”, says Michel Mayor, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019, honorary professor in the Faculty of Science and the ‘architect’ of all ESPRESSO-type instruments. “It’s completely unheard of.”
And what about life in all this?
Although Proxima b is about 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, it receives comparable energy, so that its surface temperature could mean that water (if there is any) is in liquid form in places and might, therefore, harbour life.
Having said that, although Proxima b is an ideal candidate for biomarker research, there is still a long way to go before we can suggest that life has been able to develop on its surface. In fact, the Proxima star is an active red dwarf that bombards its planet with X rays, receiving about 400 times more than the Earth.
“Is there an atmosphere that protects the planet from these deadly rays?” asks Christophe Lovis, a researcher in UNIGE’s Astronomy Department and responsible for ESPRESSO’s scientific performance and data processing. “And if this atmosphere exists, does it contain the chemical elements that promote the development of life (oxygen, for example)? How long have these favourable conditions existed? We’re going to tackle all these questions, especially with the help of future instruments like the RISTRETTO spectrometer, which we’re going to build specially to detect the light emitted by Proxima b, and HIRES, which will be installed on the future ELT 39 m giant telescope that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is building in Chile.”
Surprise: is there a second planet?
In the meantime, the precision of the measurements made by ESPRESSO could result in another surprise. The team has found evidence of a second signal in the data, without being able to establish the definitive cause behind it. “If the signal was planetary in origin, this potential other planet accompanying Proxima b would have a mass less than one third of the mass of the Earth. It would then be the smallest planet ever measured using the radial velocity method”, adds Professor Pepe.
It should be noted that ESPRESSO, which became operational in 2017, is in its infancy and these initial results are already opening up undreamt of opportunities. The road has been travelled at breakneck pace since the first extrasolar planet was discovered by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, both from UNIGE’s Astronomy Department. In 1995, the 51Peg b gas giant planet was detected using the ELODIE spectrograph with an accuracy of 10 meters per second (m/s). Today ESPRESSO, with its 30 cm/s (and soon 10 after the latest adjustments) will perhaps make it possible to explore worlds that remind us of the Earth.
What Did Steven Spielberg and U.S. Presidents Really Know About The UFO Phenomena?
What Did Steven Spielberg and U.S. Presidents Really Know About The UFO Phenomena?
It has been speculated that director Steven Spielberg had obtained inside information pertaining to UFOs and E.T.s from high ranking government officials. Stories of secret meetings with other worldly beings had taken place and even U.S. presidents were involved with signing agreements with them in hope of obtaining advanced technology, but could we really trust them?
Biblical Passages Found on the Walls of Ancient Egyptian Temples are Mystifying
Biblical Passages Found on the Walls of Ancient Egyptian Temples are Mystifying
Biblical Passages Found on the Walls of Ancient Egyptian Temples are Mystifying
Strange markings on the walls of ancient temples continue to mystify the world. Did the ancient Egyptians have an insight into the future and what other wonders lie within ancient sites around the world?
Welcome to Unusual Anomalies & Discoveries Official YouTube Channel. Here you will find interviews, lectures and documentaries on archaeological findings and alternative viewpoints and explanations of science, archaeology, mythology, religion, paranormal, supernatural and history from around the world. Some of the content on this channel are from an archived collection, and all programming showcased is licensed.
Anunnaki Pole Shift History! The Earth’s Magnetic Field is Weakening Rapidly...Could The Unthinkable Happen?
Anunnaki Pole Shift History! The Earth’s Magnetic Field is Weakening Rapidly... Could The Unthinkable Happen?
Exploring and exposing deep knowledge that has been hidden from most of humanity. Beyond his personal story, we explore the origins of humanity at the hand of the Annunaki, how to protect ourselves from a diminished magnetic atmosphere, and the mysteries of space-faring civilizations.
The Anunnaki are a group of deities who appear in the mythological traditions of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. Descriptions of how many Anunnaki there were and what role they fulfilled are inconsistent and often contradictory.
Pilot And Crew’s Alien Craft Encounter Over Alaska
Pilot And Crew’s Alien Craft Encounter Over Alaska
NOVEMBER 16, 1986 ……FLIGHT FROM PARIS TO ALASKA
It was just a routine flight. Well, not exactly routine… It was a special Japan Air Lines 747 cargo flight to carry a load of French wine from Paris to Tokyo.
The flight plan would carry flight 1628 from Paris to Reykjavik, Iceland, across the North Atlantic and Greenland, then across Canada to Anchorage, Alaska, and finally across the Pacific to Tokyo.
The crew consisted of veteran Captain Kenju Terauchi, co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji, and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba.
On November 16, 1986, laden with wine, JAL1628 took off from Paris and flew the first leg of the trip, to Reykjavik. The next day, they continued, flying over Greenland and then across northern Canada without event.
Just after they crossed into Alaska, at 5:09 PM local time, Anchorage Air Traffic Control contacted them on the radio to report initial radar contact. The Anchorage flight controller asked them to turn 15 degrees to the left and head for a point known as Talkeetna on a heading of 215 degrees. They were at 35,000 feet and traveling at a ground speed of about 600 mph.
At about 5:11 PM local time, Captain Terauchi noticed the lights of some sort of aircraft about 2000 feet below and 30 degrees to the left front of them. He decided that the aircraft was probably an American jet fighter from nearby Eielson or Elmendorf Air Force Bases patrolling Alaskan airspace, so he ignored them at first.
However, after a few minutes, he noticed that the lights were keeping pace with his own aircraft, which would be an unusual thing for patrolling jets to do.
It was about seven or so minutes since we began paying attention to the lights (when), most unexpectedly, two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face.
Terauchi said that it was his impression that the two objects he had seen below them minutes before had suddenly jumped in from of him. The craft, one above the other, kept pace with the 747 for several minutes, moving in unison with an odd rocking motion.
After about seven minutes, they changed to a side-by-side arrangement.
Terauchi said that the “amber and whitish” lights were like flames coming out of multiple rocket exhaust ports arranged in two rectangular rows on the craft. He felt that they fired in a particular sequence to stabilize the craft, much like the small maneuvering thrusters on the Space Shuttle.
He also reported seeing sparks like a fire when using gasoline or carbon fuel.
Co-pilot Tamefuji described the lights as “Christmas assorted” lights with a “salmon” color. He said: I remember red or orange, and white landing light, just like a landing light. And weak green, ah, blinking. He also described the lights as pulsating slowly. They became stronger, became weaker., became stronger, became weaker, different from strobe lights.
The lights were “swinging” in unison as if there were “very good formation flight… close” of two aircraft side by side.
He described the appearance of the lights as similar to seeing “night flight head-on traffic,” where it is only possible to see the lights on an approaching aircraft and “we cannot see the total shape.”
He said, I’m sure I saw something. It was clear enough to make me believe that there was an oncoming aircraft.
Flight engineer Tsukuba, who sat behind the copilot, did not have as good a view of the lights. He first saw them “through the L1 window at the 11 o’clock position,” and he saw “clusters of lights undulating.”
These clusters were “made of two parts… shaped like windows of an airplane.”
He emphasized that “the lights in front of us were different from town lights.”
He described the colors as white or amber.
Tamefuji decided to call Anchorage Air Traffic Control, and for the next thirty minutes the 747 and AARTCC were in constant contact regarding the UFO.
During this time, Captain Terauchi asked Tskububa to hand him a camera so that he could attempt to take a photograph of the lights. However, Terauchi was unfamiliar with the camera and could not get it to operate. Tsukuba also could not get his camera to operate due to problems with the auto-focus and finally gave up trying to take a photo.
At this point they began experiencing some radio interference and were asked by Anchorage to change frequencies. Terauchi later said that Anchorage kept asking him about clouds in the immediate area:
They asked us several times if there were clouds near our altitude. We saw thin and spotty clouds near the mountain below us, no clouds in mid-to-upper air, and the air current was steady.
Soon after the exchanges about clouds, the objects flew off to the left. Terauchi said later: “There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, moving in a line along with us, in the same direction and same speed and at the same altitude as we were.”
Terauchi decided to see whether they could see anything on the 747’s own radar:
“I thought it would be impossible to find anything on an aircraft radar if a large ground radar did not show anything, but I judged the distance of the object visually and it was not very far.
“I set the digital weather radar distance to 20 (nautical) miles, radar angle to horizon (i.e., no depression angle). There it was on the screen. A large green and round object had appeared at 7 or 8 miles (13 km to 15 km) away, where the direction of the object was.
” We reported to Anchorage center that our radar caught the object within 7 or 8 miles in the 10 o’clock position. We asked them if they could catch it on ground radar, but it did not seem they could catch it at all.”
At 5:25:45, after spending two minutes looking, the military radar at Elmendorf Regional Operational Control Center also picked up something. The ROCC radar controller reported back to the AARTCC that he was getting some “surge primary return.” By this he meant an occasional radar echo unaccompanied by a transponder signal.
As the 747 neared Fairbanks:
“The lights (of the city) were extremely bright to eyes that were used to the dark. (The cockpit lights had been turned off to eliminate window reflections of internal lights.) We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us.
” Alas! There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship.
“We must run away quickly! Anchorage Center.”
The JAL1628 is requesting a change of course to right 45 degrees.” It felt like a long time before we received permission.”
Just after the plane turned to the right, the AARTCC controller called the Fairbanks Approach Radar controller to find out whether or not the short-range radar had a target near the JAL. The approach radar reported no target other than JAL1628.
The plane came out of the turn and flew toward Talkeetna at an altitude of 31,000 ft, with the object still following.
At about 5:40, a United Airlines passenger jet took off from Anchorage and headed north to Fairbanks. The AARTCC controller decided to ask the UA pilot to try to see the object that was following the JAL flight.
The UA pilot said he would look when he got closer. The controller asked the JAL flight to stay at 31,000 ft, and the UA flight to stay at 29,000 ft. He then directed the UA flight to turn some more so that the planes would pass within five miles of one another.
As the United Airlines jet got closer, the UFO apparently dropped behind, allowing the JAL plane to get far ahead. The United pilot asked the AARTCC to have the JAL pilot flash the headlights on the JAL aircraft so he could locate the plane.
At 5:49:45 the JAL pilot did that. At this point the planes were about 25 miles apart.
When the planes were about 12 miles apart, the UA plane reported seeing the JAL plane and nothing else. But by this time the UFO had apparently disappeared, not being seen by JAL1628, either.
At about 5:51, the AARTCC requested that a military TOTEM flight in the area also fly toward the JAL plane for a look. During the next several minutes TOTEM viewed the JAL plane, but couldn’t see any other traffic. JAL1628 proceeded to Anchorage and landed at 6:20 PM. NOTE: The above image is CGI.
Strange Discoveries on Mars Really Do Deserve An Explanation... It's Littered with Anomalies!
Strange Discoveries on Mars Really Do Deserve An Explanation... It's Littered with Anomalies!
Since man first saw Mars through telescopes they have pondered strange formations. In more modern times with the aid of satellite probes we have managed to get much more clarity of images, but this caused even further strange things to be found. Was Mars once occupied and what is scattered all across its surface?
All Content on this channel is fully licensed, and or produced in-house at our studios in UK, Europe and USA.
This channel in managed by Zohar Entertainment Group UK, Zohar Entertainment Group International Inc, USA and AdRev, USA.
NASA cuts live feed after showing alleged Black Knight Satellite
NASA cuts live feed after showing alleged Black Knight Satellite
Yesterday, NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX were forced to abort theirFalcon 9 rocket launchjust 16 minutes before the planned blast off, because of looming tropical storms near Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
But was the SpaceX Dragon aborted due to bad weather conditions? According to Florida Maquis, the thunderstorms ended in the early evening, and the weather actually cleared up a short time after the mission was aborted.
Indeed the launch was aborted because of weather issues and it would have been fixed in 10 minutes, but the lift off could not wait, because the fast-changing position of the ISS meant the rocket would have missed the target even leaving just seconds after the scheduled launch.
Nevertheless, Florida Maquis goes on and states that he noticed on the live feed, a strange anomaly near the International Space Station and suggested that maybe NASA aborted the launch due to this unidentified object speculating that it could have been the Black Knight Satellite.
When zooming in onto the black object we see that it is not just a speck on the lens, it clearly has a triangular shape but if it could have been the Black Knight Satellite is hard to say.
At the end of April, the artificial intelligence development firm OpenAI released a new neural net, Jukebox, which can create mashups and original music in the style of over 9,000 bands and musicians.
Alongside it, OpenAI released a list of sample tracks generated with the algorithm that bend music into new genres or even reinterpret one artist’s song in another’s style — think a jazz-pop hybrid of Ella Fitzgerald and Céline Dion.
It’s an incredible feat of technology, but Futurism’s editorial team was unsatisfied with the tracks OpenAI shared. To really kick the tires, we went to CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, the musicians and computer science experts behind the algorithmically-generatedmusic group DADABOTS, with a request: We wanted to hear Frank Sinatra sing Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”
And boy, they delivered.
An algorithm that can create original works of music in the style of existing bands and artists raises unexplored legal and creative questions. For instance, can the artists that Jukebox was trained on claim credit for the resulting tracks? Or are we experiencing the beginning of a brand-new era of music?
“There’s so much creativity to explore there,” Zukowski told Futurism.
Below is the resulting song, in all its AI-generated glory, followed by Futurism’s lightly-edited conversation with algorithmic musicians Carr and Zukowski.
Futurism: Thanks for taking the time to chat, CJ and Zack. Before we jump in, I’d love to learn a little bit more about both of you, and how you learned how to do all this. What sort of background do you have that lent itself to AI-generated music?
Zack Zukowski: I think we’re both pretty much musicians first, but also I’ve been involved in tech for quite a while. I approached my machine learning studies from an audio perspective: I wanted to extend what was already being doing with synthesis and music technology. It seemed like machine learning was obviously the path that was going to make the most gains, so I started learning about those types of algorithms. SampleRNN is the tool we most like to use — that’s one of our main tools that we’ve been using for our livestreams and our Bandcamp albums over the last couple years.
CJ Carr: Musician first, motivated in computer science to do new things with music. DADABOTS itself comes out of hackathon culture. I’ve done 65 hackathons, and Zack and I together have won 15 or so. That environment inspires people to push what they’re doing in some new way, to do something provocative. That’s the spirit DADABOTS came out of in 2012, and we’ve been pushing it further and further as the tech has progressed.
Why did you make the decision to step up from individual hackathons and stick with DADABOTS? Where did the idea come from for your various projects?
CJ: When we started it, we were both interns at Berklee College of Music working in music tech. When I met Zack — for some reason it felt like I’ve known Zack my whole life. It was a natural collaboration. Zack knew more about signal processing than I did, I knew more about programming, and now we have both brains.
What’s your typical approach? What’s going on behind the scenes?
CJ: SampleRNN has been our main tool. It’s really fast to train — we can train it in a day or two on a new artist. One of the main things we love to do is collaborating with artists, when an artist says “hey I’d love to do a bot album.” But recently, Jukebox trumped the state of the art in music generation. They did a really good job.
SampleRNN and Jukebox, they’re similar in that they’re both sequence generators. It’s reading a sequence of audio at 44.1k or 16k sample rate, and then it’s trying to predict what the next sample is going to be. This net is making a decision at a fraction of a millisecond to come up with the next sample. This is why it’s called neural synthesis. It’s not copying and pasting audio from the training data, it’s learning to synthesize.
What’s different about them is that SampleRNN uses “Long Short Term Memory” (LSTM) architecture, whereas the jukebox uses a transformer architecture. The transformer has attention. This is a relatively new thing that’s come to popularity in deep learning, after RNN, after LSTM. It especially took over for language models. I don’t know if you remember fake news generators like GPT-2 and Grover. They use transformer architecture. Many of the language researchers left LSTM behind. No one had really applied it to audio music yet — that’s the big enhancement for Jukebox. They’re taking a language architecture and applying it to music.
They’re also doing this extra thing, called a “Vector-Quantized Variational AutoEncoder” (VQ-VAE). They’re trying to turn audio into language. They train a model that creates a codebook, like an alphabet. And they take this alphabet, which is a discrete set of 2048 symbols — each symbol is something about music — and then they train their transformer models on it.”
What does that alphabet look like? What is that “something about music?”
CJ: They didn’t do that analysis at all. We’re really curious. For instance, can we compose with it?
Zack: we have these 2048 characters, and so we wonder which ones are commonly used. Like in the alphabet we don’t use Zs too much. But what are the “vowels?” Which symbols are used frequently? It would be really interesting to see what happens when you start getting rid of some of these symbols and see what the net can do with what remains. The way we have the language of music theory with chords and scales, maybe this is something that we can compose with beyond making deepfakes of an artist.
What can that language tell us about the underlying rules and components of music, and how can we use these as building blocks themselves? They’re much higher-level than chords — maybe they’re genre-related. We really don’t know. It would be really cool to do that analysis and see what happens by using just a subset of the language.
CJ: They’ve come up with a new music theory.
Well, it sounds like the three of us have a lot of the same questions about all this. Have you started tinkering with it to learn what’s going on?
CJ: We’ve just got the code running. The first example is this Sinatra thing. But as we use this more, the philosophical implications here are that as musicians, we know intuitively that music is very language-like. It’s not just waves and noise, which is what it looks like at a small scale, but when we’re playing we’re communicating with each other. The bass and the drummer are in step, strings and vocals can be doing call-and-response. And OpenAI was just like “Hey, what if we treated music like language?”
If the sort of alphabet this algorithm uses could be seen as a new music theory, do you think this will be a tool for you two going forward? Or is it more of an oddity to play around with?
CJ: Maybe I should correct myself. Instead of being a music theory, these models can train music theory.
Zack: The theory isn’t something that we can explain right now. We can’t say “This value means this.” It’s not quite as human interpretable, I guess.
CJ: the model just learns probabilistic patterns, and that’s what music theory is. It’s these notes tend to have these patterns and produce these feelings. And those were human-invented. What if we just have a machine try to discover that on its own, and then we ask it to make music? And if it’s good at it, probably it’s learned a good quote-unquote “music theory.”
Zack: An analogy we thought of: Back in the days of Bach, and these composers who were really interested in having counterpoint — many voices moving in their own direction — they had a set of rules for this. The first melodic line the composer builds off is called cantus firmus. There was an educational game new composers would play — if you could follow the notes that were presented in the cantus firmus and guess what harmonizing notes were next, you’d be correct based on the music of the day.
We’re thinking this is kind of the machine version of that, in some ways. Something that can be used to make new music in the style of music that has been heard before.
I know it’s early days and that this is speculative, but do you have any predictions for how people might use Jukebox? Will it be more of these mashups, or do you think people will develop original compositions?
CJ: On the one hand, you have the fear of push-button art. A lot of people think push-button art is very grotesque. But I think push-button art, when a culture can achieve this — it’s a transcendent moment for that culture. It means the communication of that culture has achieved its capacity. Think about meme generators — I can take a picture of Keanu Reeves, put in some inside joke and send it to my friends, and then they can understand and appreciate what I’m communicating. That’s powerful. So it is grotesque, but it’s effectual.
On the other side, you’ll have these virtuosos — these creators — who are gonna do overkill and try to create a medium of art that’s never existed before. What interests us are these 24/7 generators, where it can just keep generating forever.
Zack: I think it’s an interesting tool for artists who have worked on a body of albums. There are artists who don’t even know they can be generated on Jukebox. So, I think many of them would like to know what can be generated in their likeness. It can be a variation tool, it can recreate work for an artist through a perspective they haven’t even heard. It can bend their work through similar artists or even very distantly-stylized artists. It can be a great training tool for artists.
You said you’d heard from some artists who approached you to generate music already — is that something you can talk about?
CJ: When bands approach us, they’ve mostly been staying within the lane of “Hey, use just my training data and let’s see what comes out — I’m really interested.”
Fans though, on YouTube, are like “Here’s a list of my four favorite bands, please make me something out of it.”
So, let’s talk about the actual track you made for us. For this new song, Futurism suggested Britney Spears’ “Toxic” as sung by Frank Sinatra. Did the technical side of pulling that together differ from your usual work?
CJ: This is different. With SampleRNN, we’re retraining it from scratch on usually one artist or one album. And that’s really where it shines — it’s not able to do these fusions very well. What OpenAI was able to do — with a giant multimillion-dollar compute budget — they were able to train these giant neural nets. And they trained them on over 9,000 artists in over 300 genres. You need a mega team with a huge budget just to make this generalizable net.
Zack: There are two options. There’s lyrics and no lyrics. No lyrics is sort of like how SampleRNN has worked. With lyrics it tries to get them all in order, but sometimes it loops or repeats. But it tries to go beginning to end and keep the flow going. If you have too many lyrics, it doesn’t understand. It doesn’t understand that if you have a chorus repeating, the music should repeat as well. So we find that these shorter compositions work better for us.
But you had lyrics in past projects that used SampleRNN, like “Human Extinction Party.” How did that differ?
CJ: That was smoke and mirrors.
Zack: That was kind of an illusion. The album we trained it on had vocals, so some made it through to. We had a text generator that made up lyrics whenever it heard a sound.
In a lot of these Jukebox mashups, I’ve noticed that the voice sounds sort of strained. Is that just a matter of the AI-generated voice being forced to hit a certain note, or does it have something more to do with the limitations of the algorithm itself?
Zack: Your guess sounds similar to what I’d say. It was probably just really unlikely that those lyrics or the phonemes, the sounds themselves of the words, showed up in a similar way to how we were forcing it to generate those syllables. It probably heard a lot more music that isn’t Frank Sinatra, so it can imagine some things that Frank Sinatra didn’t do. But it just comes down to being somewhat different from any of the original Frank Sinatra texts.
When you were creating this rendition of Toxic, did you hit any snags along the way? Or was it just a matter of giving the algorithm enough time to do its work?
CJ: Part of it is we need a really expensive piece of hardware that we need to rent on Amazon Cloud at three dollars per hour. And it takes — how long did it take to generate, Zack?
Zack: The final one I had generated took about a day, but I had been doing it over and over again for a week. You have so little control that sometimes you just gotta go again. It would get a few phrases and then it would lose track of the lyrics. Sometimes you’d get two lines but not the whole chorus in a row. It came down to luck — waiting for the right one to come along.
It could loop a line, or sometimes it could go into seemingly different songs. It would completely lose track of where it was. There are some pretty wild things that can happen. One time I was generating Frank Sinatra, and it was clearly a chorus of men and women together. It wasn’t even the right voice. It can get pretty ghostly.
Do you know if there are any legal issues involved in this kind of music? The capability to generate new music in the style or voice of an artist seems like uncharted territory, but are there issues with the mashups that use existing lyrics? Or are those more acceptable under the guise of fair use, sort of like parody songs?
CJ: We’re not legal people, we haven’t studied copyright issues. The vibe is that there’s a strong case for fair use, but artists may not like people creating these deepfakes.
Zack: I think it comes down to intention, and whatever the law decides they’ll decide. But as people using this tool, artists, there’s definitely a code of ethics that people should probably respect. Don’t piss people off. We try our best to cite the people who worked on the tech, the people who it was trained on. It all just depends how you’re putting it out and how respectful you’re being of people’s work.
Before I let you go, what else are you two working on right now?
CJ: Our long-term research is trying to make these models faster and cheaper so bedroom producers and 12-year-olds can be making music no one’s ever thought of. Of course, right now it’s very expensive and it takes days. We’re in a privileged position of being able to do it with the rented hardware.
Specifically, what we’re doing right now — there’s the list of 9,000-plus bands that the model currently supports. But what’s interesting is the bands weren’t asked to be a part of this dataset. Some machine learning researchers on Twitter were debating the ethics of that. There are two sides of that, of course, but we really want to reach out to those bands. If anyone knows these bands, if you are these bands, we will generate music for you. We want to take this technology, which we think is capable of brand-new forms of creativity, and give it back to artists.
Scientists studying the ancient Martian Tissint meteorite say they’ve found new evidence that Mars was volcanically active a few hundred million years ago … and may still be today.
Orbital view from Mars Express of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano on Mars, stretching some 13.6 miles (22 km, 72,000 feet) above the red Martian plains. Olympus Mons is 2 1/2 times taller than Mount Everest!
Is Mars still volcanically active? At first glance, it wouldn’t seem to be, since no eruptions have ever been observed from any of the numerous volcanoes dotting its desert surface. Recent findings from NASA’s InSightlander have shown that there’s still at least some residual geologic activity underground, however, in the form of marsquakes. Now, a newly announced study of a Martian meteorite has provided the first evidence of what scientists call magma convection on Mars – a rising and falling of currents in molten material beneath Mars’ surface – that took place in the planet’s mantle a few hundred million years ago. Perhaps this slow roilingof magma beneath Mars’ crust still occurs today.
The new peer-reviewed findings were published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science on May 7, 2020.
The intriguing results – reported in ScienceAlert by Michelle Star on May 11, 2020 – come from a new study of the Tissint Martian meteorite. A Martian meteorite is a rock ejected from Mars, likely via an impact event, which traversed interplanetary space and ultimately landed on Earth. Found in Morocco on July 18, 2011, the Tissint meteorite originated from deep within Mars. Tissint has been the subject of much study already, but this time, the researchers found something surprising. The meteorite contained crystals of olivine, rock-forming minerals commonly found in Earth’s crust.
When those crystals were examined more closely, it was found that they could have only formed in changing temperatures within currents of magma convection.
Mars’ internal structure: core, mantle, crust and atmosphere.
Diagram of a possible magma chamber on ancient Mars. The Tissint meteorite may have originated from a place like this, beneath Mars’ surface.
Image via Mari et al./ Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2020/ ScienceAlert.
The crystals are an estimated 674 to 582 million years old, fairly young geologically speaking, so the implication is that Mars was still volcanically active at that time. Planetary geologist Nicola Mari of the University of Glasgow toldScienceAlert:
There was no previous evidence of convection on Mars, but the question ‘Is Mars a still volcanically active planet?’ was previously investigated using different methods. However, this is the first study that proves activity in the Mars interior from a purely chemical point of view, on real Martian samples.
The olivine crystals would have formed inside a magma chamber deep underground. Olivine is common in Earth’s mantle, and even in meteorites. But the researchers noticed something odd about the olivine crystals in Tissint. They had irregularly-spaced bands composed of phosphorus. It’s a known process on Earth, called solute trapping, where, during rapid solidification, solute (the substance dissolved in a solution) may be incorporated into the solid phase at a concentration significantly different from that predicted by equilibrium thermodynamics.
This occurs when the rate of crystal growth exceeds the rate at which phosphorus can diffuse through the melt, thus the phosphorus is obliged to enter the crystal structure instead of ‘swimming’ in the liquid magma. In the magma chamber that generated the lava that I studied, the convection was so vigorous that the olivines were moved from the bottom of the chamber (hotter) to the top (cooler) very rapidly, to be precise, this likely generated cooling rates of 15-30 degrees Celsius per hour [about 27-55 degrees Fahrenheit] for the olivines.
From the paper:
The Tissint martian meteorite is an unusual depleted olivine-phyric shergottite, reportedly sourced from a mantle-derived melt within a deep magma chamber. Here, we report major and trace element data for Tissint olivine and pyroxene, and use these data to provide new insights into the dynamics of the Tissint magma chamber. The presence of irregularly spaced oscillatory phosphorous (P)-rich bands in olivine, along with geochemical evidence indicative of a closed magmatic system, implies that the olivine grains were subject to solute trapping caused by vigorous crystal convection within the Tissint magma chamber.
Calculated equilibration temperatures for the earliest crystallizing (antecrystic) olivine cores suggest a Tissint magma source temperature of 1680 degrees Celsius [3056 degrees Fahrenheit], and a local martian mantle temperature of 1560 degrees Celsius [2840 degrees F] during the Late Amazonian, the latter being consistent with the ambient mantle temperature of Archean Earth.
How do the researchers know the meteorite came originally from deep under Mars’ crust? The larger olivine crystals contained traces of nickel and cobalt. This, along with previous evidence, shows that the meteorite must have once been part of rock 25 to 50 miles (40 to 80 kilometers) beneath the surface.
False color x-ray images of 2 thin sections of the Tissint meteorite. Embedded olivine crystals are marked OI.
Image via Mari et al./ Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2020/ Wiley Online Library.
With all of this data, the researchers could estimate the temperatures in the Martian mantle at the time when the crystals first formed. They came up with 1,560 degrees Celsius (2840 degrees F) during the Martian Late Amazonian period. That’s a lot hotter than had been previously thought, almost as hot as 1,650 degrees Celsius (3002 F) during the Archean Eon on Earth, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago. This is recent enough, geologically, to suggest that Mars may still have active magma convection even today. Mari said:
I really think that Mars could be a still volcanically active world today, and these new results point toward this. We may not see a volcanic eruption on Mars for the next 5 million years, but this doesn’t mean that the planet is inactive. It could just mean that the timing between eruptions between Mars and Earth is different, and instead of seeing one or more eruptions per day (as on Earth) we could see a Martian eruption every n-millions of years.
So Mars may still be volcanically active today – as in recent geological time – but eruptions are spaced far apart, by a few million years, according to the researchers. It would be amazing to see a volcanic eruption on Mars, since the planet’s largest volcanoes are much larger than ones on Earth. Olympus Mons, the biggest of them all, is taller than Mount Everest!
Nicola Mari of the University of Glasgow, lead author of the new study.
In 2014, it was reported that the Tissint meteorite might contain traces of ancient microbial activity. According to Philippe Gillet, director of École Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) Earth and Planetary Sciences Laboratory:
Insisting on certainty is unwise, particularly on such a sensitive topic. I’m completely open to the possibility that other studies might contradict our findings. However, our conclusions are such that they will rekindle the debate as to the possible existence of biological activity on Mars – at least in the past. So far, there is no other theory that we find more compelling.
While the jury is still out on the possible life traces, Tissint has shown, at the very least, that Mars was once much more active geologically than it is now.
Bottom line: A new study of an ancient Martian meteorite suggests that Mars was more volcanically active a few hundred million years ago than previously thought, and may even still be active today.
A team of researchers from the Higher School of Economics University and Open University in Moscow, Russia claim they have demonstrated that an artificial intelligence can make accurate personality judgments based on selfies alone — more accurately than some humans.
The researchers suggest the technology could be used to help match people up in online dating services or help companies sell products that are tailored to individual personalities.
That’s apropos, because two co-authors listed on a paper about the research published today in Scientific Reports — a journal run by Nature — are affiliated with a Russian AI psychological profiling company called BestFitMe, which helps companies hire the right employees.
As detailed in the paper, the team asked 12,000 volunteers to complete a questionnaire that they used to build a database of personality traits. To go along with that data, the volunteers also uploaded a total of 31,000 selfies.
The questionnaire was based around the “Big Five” personality traits, five core traits that psychological researchers often use to describe subjects’ personalities, including openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
After training a neural network on the dataset, the researchers found that it could accurately predict personality traits based on “real-life photographs taken in uncontrolled conditions,” as they write in their paper.
While accurate, the precision of their AI leaves something to be desired. They found that their AI “can can make a correct guess about the relative standing of two randomly chosen individuals on a personality dimension in 58% of cases.”
That result isn’t exactly groundbreaking — but it’s a little better than just guessing, which is vaguely impressive.
Strikingly, the researchers claim their AI is better at predicting the traits than humans. While rating personality traits by human “close relatives or colleagues” was far more accurate than when rated by strangers, they found that the AI “outperforms an average human rater who meets the target in person without any prior acquaintance,” according to the paper.
Considering the woeful accuracy, and the fact that some of the authors listed on the study are working on commercializing similar tech, these results should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.
Neural networks have generated some impressive results, but any research that draws self-serving conclusions — especially when they require some statistical gymnastics — should be treated with scrutiny.
Mammatus clouds may seem ominous. But they have a magnificent beauty of their own.
View larger at EarthSky Community Photos. | Adelina Bathorja in Tirane, Albania, captured these clouds on May 14, 2020. Adelina wrote: “For the first time ever I see mammatus clouds. Just, wow! It was a spectacular view of cellular and jellyfish patterns.”
Mammatus clouds are pouch-like protrusions hanging from the undersides of clouds, usually thunderstorm anvil clouds but other types of clouds as well. Composed primarily of ice, these cloud pouches can extend hundreds of miles in any direction, remaining visible in your sky for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
People associate them with severe weather, and it’s true they can appear around, before or after a storm. Contrary to myth, they don’t continue extending downward to form tornados, but they are interesting in part because they’re formed by sinking air. Most clouds are formed by rising air. Mammatus clouds can appear ominous. But, in a way that’s so common in nature, their dangerous aspect goes hand in hand with a magnificent beauty.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Marlane Burns captured this image on May 15, 2020, near Robert Lee, Texas. She said: “Mammatus clouds preceding a northern thunderstorm that came out of nowhere! The wind blew the flies away and the rain settled the dust!”
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Peter Lowenstein captured these spectacular mammatus clouds in Mutare, Zimbabwe, on March 23, 2020. He wrote: “I took an early morning walk up to the Murambi High Level Water Tanks in the hope of catching a glimpse of the very thin old moon rising. Instead there was a surprise appearance of mammatus clouds on the underside of a sunrise-illuminated band of altostratus cloud above.”
Stephanie Tilden Dorr in Wichita, Kansas, caught these clouds in June 2018. She wrote: “Mammatus clouds appearing exactly one hour after a hailstorm passed over. Twenty-five years in Kansas and I’ve only seen mammatus clouds this vivid one other time, years ago. So exciting!”
Mammatus clouds over New Jersey, via Phil Chillemi.
Mammatus clouds via Andrew Hill in Gloucestershire, U.K.
Crystal Kolb caught these mammatus clouds from Essex, Maryland – near Baltimore – after a bad storm.
Mammatus clouds at sunset from Andrew Ashton in Nampa, Idaho.
Josh Blash caught these mammatus clouds illuminated by lightning over Rye, New Hampshire.
From Lorrie Wy, who wrote in May 2014, “Bubbly clouds over central Alberta, approximately 9:20 p.m. Temp approximately plus 12. Winds cold and light from northwest. These clouds just rolled right over.”
Berit Roaldseth in Trondheim, Norway, saw these mammatus clouds after an April rain shower.
Mammatus clouds over Fayetteville, Arkansas, just before sunset.
Image via Mike Price.
Mammatus clouds over Fort Worth, Texas, in May 2013 – the day a tornado struck near Oklahoma City.
Pam Rice Phillips caught the same mammatus clouds as in the image above, on May 20, 2013, the day a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma. She was in Granbury, Texas, which is southwest of Fort Worth.
Mammatus clouds over Tynemouth, England, via Colin Cooper.
Mammatus clouds over Salt Lake City, Utah, from Shanna Dennis.
I'm a South London-based technology journalist, consultant and author
Patent showing laser decoy system
US NAVY PATENT
The U.S. Navy has patented technology to create mid-air images to fool infrared and other sensors. This builds on many years of laser-plasma research and offers a game-changing method of protecting aircraft from heat-seeking missiles. It may also provide a clue about the source of some recent UFO sightings by military aircraft.
The U.S. developed the first Sidewinder heat-seeking missile back in the 1950’s, and the latest AIM-9X version is still in frontline service around the world. This type of sensor works so well because hot jet engines exhausts shine out like beacons in the infrared, making them easy targets. Pilots under attack can eject decoy flares to lure a missile away from the launch aircraft, but these only provide a few seconds protection. More recently laser infrared countermeasures have been fielded which dazzle the infrared seeker.
A sufficiently intense laser pulse can ionize producing a burst of glowing plasma. The Laser Induced Plasma Effects program uses single plasma bursts as flash-bang stun grenades; a rapid series of such pluses can even be modulated to transmit a spoken message (video here). In 2011 Japanese company Burton Inc demonstrated a rudimentary system that created moving 3D images in mid-air with a series of rapidly-generated plasma dots (video here).
1:34 minutes video ‘Talking lasers and endless flashbangs: Pentagon develops plasma tech’ (‘Military Times’ YouTube)
1:53 minute video ‘True 3D Display in the Mid-Air Using Laser Plasma Technology’ (‘Deepak Gupta’ YouTube)
A more sophisticated approach uses an intense, ultra-short, self-focusing laser pulse to create a glowing filament or channel of plasma, an effect discovered in the 1990s. Known as laser-induced plasma filaments (LIPF) these can be created at some distance from the laser for tens or hundreds of meters. Because LIPFs conduct electricity, they have been investigated as a means of triggering lightning or creating a lightning gun
US Army 'lighting gun' experiment with laser-generated plasma channel
US ARMY
One of the interesting things about LIPFs is that with suitable tuning they can emit light of any wavelength: visible, infrared, ultraviolet or even terahertz waves. This technology underlies the Navy project, which uses LIPFs to create phantom images with infrared emissions to fool heat-seeking missiles.
The Navy declined to discuss the project, but the work is described in a 2018 patent: “wherein a laser source is mounted on the back of the air vehicle, and wherein the laser source is configured to create a laser-induced plasma, and wherein the laser-induced plasma acts as a decoy for an incoming threat to the air vehicle.”
The patent goes on to explain that the laser creates a series of mid-air plasma columns, which form a 2D or 3D image by a process of raster scanning, similar to the way old-style cathode ray TVs sets display a picture.
A single decoy halves the chances of an incoming missile picking the right target, but there is no reason to stop at one : “There can be multiple laser systems mounted on the back of the air vehicle with each laser system generating a ‘ghost image’ such that there would appear to be multiple air vehicles present.”
Unlike flares, the LIPF decoy can be created instantly at any desired distance from the aircraft, and can be moved around at will. Equally importantly, moves with the aircraft, rather than dropping away rapidly like a flare, providing protection for as long as needed.
The aircraft carrying the laser projector could also project decoys to cover other targets: “The potential applications of this LIP flare/decoy can be expanded, such as using a helicopter deploying flares to protect a battleship, or using this method to cover and protect a whole battle-group of ships, a military base or an entire city.”
The lead researcher in the patent is Alexandru Hening. A 2017 piece in the Navy’s own IT magazine says that Dr. Hening has been working on laser-induced plasma at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific since 2012.
“If you have a very short pulse you can generate a filament, and in the air that can propagate for hundreds of meters, and maybe with the next generation of lasers you could produce a filament of even a mile,” Dr. Henning told the magazine, indicating that it should be possible to create phantoms at considerable distances.
Phantom aircraft that can move around at high speed and appear on thermal imagers may ring some bells. After months of debate, in April the Navy officially released infra-red videos of UFOs encountered by their pilots, although the Pentagon prefers to call them “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The objects in the videos appear to make sudden movements impossible for physical aircraft, rotate mid-air and zip along at phenomenal speed: all maneuvers which would be easy to reproduce with a phantom projected image.
It is unlikely the Pentagon would release videos of their own secret weapon in a bizarre double bluff. But other nations may have their own version. In the early 1990s the Russians claimed that they could produce glowing ‘plasmoids’ at high altitude using high-power microwave or laser beams; these were intended to disrupt the flight of ballistic missiles, an answer to the planned American ‘Star Wars’. Nothing came of the project, but the technology may have been refined for other applications in the subsequent decades.
Heat-seeking missiles will no doubt evolve ways to distinguish the plasma ghosts from real jets, leading to further refinement of the decoy technology, and so on. Whether humans also get smart enough to recognize such fakes remains to be seen.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
28-05-2020
Mysterious “Black Goo” Of Egyptian Burials Demystified
Mysterious “Black Goo” Of Egyptian Burials Demystified
Dr Kate Fulcher is a Research Assistant in the British Museum's Department of Scientific Research, and she led the new research project searching for answers as to what this “black goo” used in Egyptian burialsis, and what it might reveal about ancient Egyptian funerary practicesand rituals.
An article on the British Museum’s website opens by describing the burial of Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh, an ancient Egyptian high priest who served as the “Opener of the Doors of Heaven” at the Temple of Amun at Karnak almost 3,000 years ago. This title means he was the gatekeeper of the temple sanctuary shrine in which the cult image of the god resided and according to Dodson and Hilton’s 2004 book The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh was wrapped in linen cloths, mummified and buried in Deir el-Bahari , a complex of mortuary temples and tombs located on the west bank of the Egyptian Nile, opposite the city of Luxor.
Technicolor Black
The high priest’s face was covered in gold leaf and his mummy case was painted in bright colors before it was placed into its coffin, then carried to the tomb. British Museum scientists describe “several liters of warm black goo” being poured all over the mummy case, cementing it into the coffin before the lid was placed, allowing the priest to journey into the underworld in a ‘hermetically-sealed' container (see what I did there?).
Mummy of Djedkhonsiufankh. The mummy, when acquired, was in a gilded cartonnage mummy-case and wooden coffin with a gilded face and inlaid glass
The mysterious ‘black goo’ has been found in a number of ancient Egyptian burials but now over 100 samples from twelve coffins and mummy cases, dating to the 22nd Dynasty (c. 900–750 BC), have been chemically analyzed in the British Museum science labs located beneath the museum in London. The method of analysis in this instance was Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry in which vaporized goo samples were forced into a mass spectrometer which separates them according to their mass to charge ratio, revealing the types and amount of molecules present in the samples.
Testing determined the goo was a composition of “plant oils, animal fats, tree resins, beeswax and bitumen (crude oil)” and the museum scientists think other materials may have been present in the goo but that they have vanished over the last 3,000 years.
The researchers said that some of these ingredients “only naturally occur outside of Egypt,” indicating they had been imported and they said the two tree resins were from conifer trees and pistacia, the later of which grows around the Mediterranean, from Greece to Western Asia.
Examining the bitumen biomarkers in the goo samples revealed it had been imported from the Dead Sea , which the researchers says makes sense because ancient Greek texts refer to “solid blocks of bitumen floating to the surface of the Dead Sea” and they record sailors rowing out to collect it for selling in Egypt.
Spiritual Goo For The Elites That Could Afford it
What then was this mysterious black goo’s practical purpose, or spiritual meaning? The museum scientists are currently unclear about this but they say previous analyses of mummification balms shows it was made of the same ingredients as the black goo. This means it was applied at different points in the burial process, from the ritual preparation of the dead body to when it was poured onto the mummy cases and coffins. And the researchers suggest the color of the goo, black, represented the dead taking on a form of Osiris, the god death and rebirth known as “the black one.” What’s more, according to the museum scientists black is also the color associated with the alluvial silt deposited on the banks of the River Nile after the annual flood receded which was believed to be “inherently magical and regenerative.”
The scientists’ study also demonstrated that black goo was reserved for the burial of social elites which is apparent in that most of the earliest goo samples were found in royal burials, for example, Tutankhamun’s innermost gold coffin was cemented into the middle coffin with “bucketfulls of black goo”. Examples of the use of black goo are more common in the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1069 BC–c. 664 BC), which the researchers think either relates to changes in funerary practices, or perhaps because more recovered coffins from this time are in good states of preservation.
In the search for the hypothetical 9th planet in our solar system, these scientists may have uncovered another explanation for the patterns in the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects.
An artist’s concept of a hypothetical planet with a distant sun.
The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.
But does Planet Nine actually exist?
Discoveries at the edge of our solar system
The Kuiper Belt is a collection of small, icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, at distances larger than 30 AU (one astronomical unit or AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun). These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) range in size from large boulders to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) across. KBOs are leftover small bits of planetary material that were never incorporated into planets, similar to the asteroid belt.
After Pluto, the second Kuiper Belt Object – 1992 QB1 – was discovered in 1992 by American astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu using the 2.2-m telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The discoveries from the most successful Kuiper Belt survey to date, the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), suggest a sneakier explanation for the orbits we see. Many of these KBOs have been discovered to have very elliptical and tilted orbits, like Pluto.
Mathematical calculations and detailed computer simulations have shown that the orbits we see in the Kuiper Belt can only have been created if Neptune originally formed a few AU closer to the sun, and migrated outward to its present orbit. Neptune’s migration explains the pervasiveness of highly elliptical orbits in the Kuiper Belt, and can explain all the KBO orbits we’ve observed, except for a handful of KBOs on extreme orbits that always stay at least 10 AU beyond Neptune.
Proof of Planet Nine?
These extreme orbits have provided the strongest evidence for Planet Nine. The first few that were discovered were all confined to one quadrant of the solar system. Astronomers expect to observe orbits at all different orientations, unless there is an outside force confining them. Finding several extreme KBOs on orbits pointed in the same direction was a hint that something was going on. Two separategroups of researchers calculated that only a large, very distant planet could keep all the orbits confined to part of the solar system, and the theory of Planet Nine was born.
Planet Nine is theorized to be five to 10 times as massive as Earth, with an orbit ranging between 300-700 AU. There have been several published predictions for its location in the solar system, but none of the search teams have yet discovered it. After more than four years of searching, there is still only indirect evidence in favor of Planet Nine.
The search for KBOs
Searching for KBOs requires careful planning, precise calculations and meticulous followup. I am part of the OSSOS, a collaboration of 40 astronomers from eight countries. We used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope over five years to discover and track more than 800 new KBOs, nearly doubling the number of known KBOs with well-measured orbits. The KBOs discovered by OSSOS range in size from a few kilometers to over 100 km (60 miles), and range in discovery distance from a few AU to over 100 AU, with the majority at 40-42 AU in the main Kuiper Belt.
KBOs do not emit their own light: these small, icy bodies only reflect light from the sun. Thus, the biases against detection at larger distances are extreme: if you move a KBO 10 times farther away, it will become 10,000 times fainter. And because of the laws of physics, KBOs on elliptical orbits will spend most of their time at the most distant parts of their orbits. So, while it is easy to find KBOs on elliptical orbits when they are close to the sun and bright, these KBOs spend most time being much fainter and harder to detect.
This means that the KBOs on elliptical orbits are particularly hard to discover, especially the extreme ones that always stay relatively far from the sun. Only a few of these have been found to date and, with current telescopes, we can only discover them when they are near pericenter – the closest point to the sun in their orbit.
This leads to another observation bias that has historically been ignored by many KBO surveys: KBOs in each part of the solar system can only be discovered at certain times of year. Ground-based telescopes are additionally limited by seasonal weather, with discoveries less likely to happen during when cloudy, rainy or windy conditions are more frequent. Discoveries of KBOs are also much less likely near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars make it difficult to find the faint, icy wanderers in telescopic images.
What makes OSSOS unique is that we are very public about these biases in discoveries. And because we understand our biases so well, we can use computer simulations to reconstruct the true shape of the Kuiper Belt after removing these biases.
Adjusting for biases
OSSOS discovered a handful of new extreme KBOs, half of which are outside the confined region, and are statistically consistent with a uniform distribution. A new study (currently in review) corroborates the non-clustered discoveries of OSSOS. A team of astronomers using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) found over 300 new KBOs with no clustering of orbits. So now two independent surveys – both of which carefully tracked and reported their observational biases in discovering independent sets of extreme KBOs – have found no evidence for clustered orbits.
All known KBOs with orbits larger than 250 AU. The orbits of KBOs discovered by OSSOS and DES are in many directions; previous surveys with unknown biases discovered them in the same direction. This image was produced using public data from the Minor Planet Center Database.
All of the extreme KBOs that had been discovered prior to OSSOS and DES were from surveys that did not fully report their directional biases. So we do not know if all these KBOs were discovered in the same quadrant of the solar system because they are actually confined, or because no surveys searched deep enough in the other quadrants. We performed additional simulations that showed that if observations are made only in one season from one telescope, extreme KBOs will naturally only be discovered in one quadrant of the solar system.
Further testing the Planet Nine theory, we looked in detail at the orbits of all known “extreme” KBOs and found that all but the two highest pericenter KBOs can be explained by known physical effects. These two KBOs are outliers, but our previous detailed computer simulations of the Kuiper Belt, which included gravitational effects from Planet Nine, produced a set of “extreme” KBOs with pericenters smoothly ranging from 40 to over 100 AU.
These simulations predict that there should be many KBOs with pericenters as large as the two outliers, but also many KBOs with smaller pericenters, which should be much easier to detect. Why don’t the orbit discoveries match the predictions? The answer may be that the Planet Nine theory does not hold up to detailed observations.
Many beautiful and surprising objects remain to be discovered in the mysterious outer solar system, but I don’t believe that Planet Nine is one of them.
Cults have always hovered out on the fringes of religion. There are always those for which established doctrines don’t answer all of the questions for us, or solve the many mysteries of the universe that taunt us. Sometimes these cults take a sharp right turn into bizarreness, embracing beliefs that many might find questionable at best, and it all gets quite a bit darker when there are deaths involved. Here we will take a look at a rather infamous UFO cult, which took things to the extreme to leave many dead and many unanswered questions behind.
The whole morass of weirdness all began with a rather unsual chance meeting. In 1972, a man by the name of Marshall Applewhite had found himself unemployed from his job as a teacher at the University of Thomas, in Houston, Texas, due to a dalliance with a male student, and was a little down on his luck, confused and aimless. One day he went to meet a sick friend at a hospital, where he met a nurse by the name of Bonnie Nettles, and whether this was a pick-up line or not, he told Nettles that he was convinced they had met in a past life. Far from put off by this, Nettles would take it even further into the weird when she said she had been told by extraterrestrials that they would meet, and that they had a divine mission together. It was basically love at first sight.
In the coming days, Applewhite would claim to have vivid dreams and visions, and Nettles took this as a sign of the prophecy that had been foretold to her by the aliens. The fact that Nettles was married at the time does not seem to have deterred her at all when she then embarked on a 6-month-long retreat with Applewhite, during which time they read extensively on theology, philosophy, and extraterrestrials, as well as praying and engaging in long bouts of intense meditation. Through their studies they became convinced that they were a higher level of humanity than others, and that they were actually the two witnesses spoken of in the Book of Revelation, who were described as prophets who died, were resurrected, and were taken up into heaven upon a cloud. Nettles and Applewhite had their own unique spin on all of this, in that they believed that the cloud spoken of in the Bible was actually an alien spaceship, and that they were destined to also die and be brought aboard to be whisked away by their extraterrestrial saviors in an event they called “The Demonstration.” In addition to this, they believed that God was in fact an advanced, super-evolved alien, that life had been seeded on Earth by these very same aliens, and that we were basically an extraterrestrial garden that would be harvested when the time was right.
Marshall Applewhite
Despite the raised eyebrows this all brought them from pretty much everyone, they were undeterred, and went about making plans to actually carry out their plan and try to contact these higher aliens. Their first step was to gather a group of followers, and they really went full stop with their bizarre claims to those who came to see them. Applewhite and Nettles told potential members that they were the spokespeople for aliens, who could take them away to a place far away in the cosmos basically associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. According to them, the Earth was set to be harvested and then basically reset, and that the only way to avoid being wiped out was to join the extraterrestrials aboard their ship and effectively be taken to “Heaven,” which they called “The Next Level,” where they would become perfected entities. Followers were told that if they embraced the group’s teachings, they would become eligible for this transport off Earth, to essentially become immortal. It seems to have been a good pitch, because they began to attract a decent following of believers, steadily accruing members, attracting a broad spectrum of ages and from different religious backgrounds and walks of life, including people in high positions such the Republican politician John Craig, who joined in 1975 as he was running for the Colorado House of Representatives.
Upon entering the group, followers were required to take on an extremely ascetic lifestyle. They gave up all earthly possessions and connections, including their money, jobs, and families, as well as eschewing their more human tendencies, such as sexuality and their very individuality. Many males, including Applewhite himself, intentionally had themselves castrated in order to escape the binds of sexuality. They believed that this was the only way to condition themselves for the arduous journey they would eventually make, and it was seen as essentially helping them to “graduate” to ever more perfected levels, with the final stage being to leave Earth entirely. Through all of this they believed that there were sinister entities on Earth that sought to deceive and mislead humans through the use of lies and advanced technology such as holograms, and that all other religions had fallen victim to these devious creatures. Over time, the group’s belief’s evolved and were refined to include several New Age concepts, such as the idea that aliens could inhabit human bodies similar to a spiritual “walk-in,” basically a type of possession, as well as astral travel and others. Applewhite and Nettles, who called each other aliases such as “Bo and Peep” and “Do and Ti,” also tweaked their own stories, later claiming that they were not merely the earthly representatives of the aliens, but actually harbored the souls of the extraterrestrials themselves, much in the same way they believed had happened to Jesus Christ. Indeed, Applewhite would begin to proclaim himself as an actual successor to Jesus.
In 1975, the group suddenly sort of vanished off the public radar, going underground, moving covertly across the country camping out and evading the media so effectively that it had seemed as if they had just vanished off the face of the earth. It was all part of their plan to reach a higher level of existence, and to more fully metamorphose into superior beings. Nettles would die in 1985, which spurred a few more changes in the doctrine they had been preaching. Up until that point they had believed that they would physically be brought up into space aboard a UFO, but when Nettles died of cancer and that obviously didn’t happen, it was changed to the idea that only the soul or consciousness was beamed aboard, leaving the empty vessel of the physical body behind. This worked well with the idea of spiritual walk-ins, and so the cult trudged on, later funding the operation partly through a website called “Higher Source,” and indeed the group was heavily involved in using computers and the Internet to spread their ideology and pull in money, leading to their reputation as a sort of “cybercult.”
In September of 1996, the group, which now called itself “Heaven’s Gate,” made its headquarters in a sprawling, 9,200 square feet (850 m2) mansion in the upscale area of Rancho Santa Fe, just outside of San Diego, California. They also began buying up “alien abduction insurance,” which not only surprisingly is a thing, but also cost them ludicrous amounts of money. It was at this time that the approaching Comet Hale–Bopp started to be seen as having some sort of deep significance for them, and was seen as a sign. They became increasingly convinced that in the trail of the comet was a spaceship that was coming to finally pick them up, and that this was the moment they had been dreaming of for over two decades. Applewhite convinced his followers that this was so, that they were being presented a chance to join the Next Level, but how were they to go ride aboard it? In Applewhite’s view it was simple, they just had to leave their corporeal forms behind and be beamed aboard as the comet passed.
Now suicide had long been against the cult’s beliefs, but Applewhite found a way to twist this around. In his mind, since their human bodies were only vessels for their alien souls, then by choosing not to join their brethren aboard the UFO was the real “suicide,” as it would be denying their best chance to evolve to the next stage. This rationale seems to have been perfectly logical and reasonable to his followers, because they then started making arrangements to go about carrying out a series of ritual suicides that would allow them to leave their physical vessels to join the comet’s spacecraft. The website would give the chilling last message:
Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate … Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion—’graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.
The members then videotaped farewells to the friends and family they had long ago abandoned in their twisted faith, and in March of 1997 began their final journey. A total of 39 members of the group dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, with armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” and then took a concoction of an epilepsy medication called phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding, which they then washed down with vodka. They then wrapped plastic bags around their heads for good measure, and as each one died their body was placed in a bed. The entire ritual was carried out over three days, between approximately March 22 and March 26, with three different groups, with some staying behind to tend to the bodies and send out videotaped farewells. Applewhite was among the last to die, and in the end, only a handful of the members remained to tell the tale.
On March 26, 1997, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department would find the bodies and it immediately hit the media to shock the entire nation. It was one of the worst mass suicides in history, made all the more chilling by the cheerful, hopeful demeanors of the final taped farewells, which showed that they really believed what they were preaching. Bizarrely, there would follow more suicides, including three of the cult’s remaining members and a copy cat suicide carried out by a 58-year-old man with no known connection to the cult, who left behind a note reading, “I’m going on the spaceship with Hale–Bopp to be with those who have gone before me.” The news was all so shocking and tragic, that even the co-discoverer of the comet, Alan Hale, spoke out to admonish what had happened and the belief systems and cultish techniques of isolation and indoctrination that had led to it. Despite the shockwaves of horror and revulsion the mass suicide caused, unbelievably the Heaven’s Gate website remained operational, run by two of the group’s surviving members.
The tale of the Heaven’s Gate cult is a bizarre, terrifying, and yet at times fascinating look into the belief system that cults can use to enslave the minds of their followers. That such a large group of perfectly sane individuals can be so absorbed into an aberrant belief system and truly embrace it to the point that they happily give their own lives is chilling at best. In the end 39 people are dead by their own choosing, looking to join the aliens they so desperately took as being real, and whether they really did find their ultimate goal or not, they leave a legacy of an ominous UFO cult, strangeness, and a dark peek into the human mind that will probably never be fully understood for most of us.
Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.
If something is referred to as an anomaly, you already expect it to be strange and mysterious. If it’s called an anomaly by respected scientists, that complicates things … and makes it scarier. If those same scientists say this anomaly is breaking apart and forming more anomalies, that starts trending towards terrifying … and confusing. Is an anomaly an anomaly to another anomaly? That would be a predicament, which should be the subject of a different study.
“Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa – indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.”
The South Atlantic Anomaly
The scientists in this case are from the European Space Agency and the anomaly is the South Atlantic Anomaly. We’re all interested in the health of Earth’s magnetic field because it protects us from solar wind and cosmic rays. The ESA and NASA are concerned about it because it protects astronauts and, more importantly, their moneymakers … satellites. The South Atlantic Anomaly was discovered in 1958 and, once its danger was determined, has forced satellites, spacecraft and observatories to be shielded in order to pass through safely. That hasn’t always worked – the South Atlantic Anomaly was blamed for the sudden destruction of Japan’s Hitomi space observatory in 2016. And now, the anomaly itself is breaking apart. What could possibly be worse?
“It has been speculated whether the current weakening of the field is a sign that Earth is heading for an eminent pole reversal – in which the north and south magnetic poles switch places.”
There goes your GPS … and that of planes, ships and everything else depending on the poles being in the their proper north and south locations. The North Pole has already been drifting into Siberia and scientists still aren’t sure why, so studying if the South Atlantic Anomaly is a possible influence can’t hurt. In fact, the anomaly itself has been drifting westward at a rate of 20 km (12 miles) per year as well as growing in size … and that’s the real problem here. The South Atlantic Anomaly is growing like an amoeba about to spit, with a second nucleus forming on the African side – the side which may have caused the anomaly in the first place. That’s the location of the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, a so-called “slab graveyard” of ancient slabs or plates sliding under each other to form a gigantic solid formation.
What does something under the ocean have to do with the magnetic field?
Good question. The magnetic field is continually created and refreshed by the constant churning of the Earth’s molten iron core. The “slab graveyard” anomalies (there’s also one in the Pacific) may be blocking the force creating the field. The Atlantic anomaly causes more problems, which is why the mysterious breakup is cause for alarm. Will it form two equally powerful anomalies?
“The mystery of the origin of the South Atlantic Anomaly has yet to be solved. However, one thing is certain: magnetic field observations from Swarm are providing exciting new insights into the scarcely understood processes of Earth’s interior.”
The European Space Agency has no idea what’s going to happen, so it took the opportunity to end its press release with a plug for its Swarm constellation — three satellites in two different polar orbits at different altitudes studying Earth’s magnetic field. While they’ve made a number of discoveries, including the weakening of the field over the anomaly, they don’t have the answer … yet. All it takes is time.
Do we have enough left? That’s a quandary from an anomaly.
One of the most profound questions we face is that of if we are alone in the universe. In 1950, influential and notable physicist Enrico Fermi was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and suggested almost half jokingly that if there were space-faring civilizations were out there in the cosmos we should have probably heard from them by now. He famously asked “Where is everybody?” and we still don’t really have an answer to that. Fermi was puzzled by the fact that, if such civilizations existed, they hadn’t visited or found us yet. In his opinion, if they were out there, they would have exponentially broken their barriers and moved out into the galaxy, colonizing new worlds, and we would have surely known about them by now, and it is a good question. Where are they? There are a lot of proposed reasons for why we haven’t found anyone, which I have covered before, but recently there has been talk of yet another reason. Perhaps the answer to the question of where all of the aliens are is that they are all buried under miles of ice, far from our prying eyes and efforts to find them.
Perhaps one of the problems with finding life in the universe besides our own is that we are simply not looking in the right places. There has been much effort directed by scientists at looking for “Earth-like planets,” that is, planets that are much like our own and which we deem to be the most habitable and welcoming to us. These are the planets that sit just the right distance from their star, called the “Goldilocks Zone,” to have a habitable temperature, an atmosphere conducive to life, with plentiful oxygen and organic molecules, and most important of all liquid water. These are the basic ingredients we have proclaimed to be crucial for life as we know it, and it makes sense that we should deem planets similar to our own to be the best candidates for life and try to find them. After all, the only life we truly know of in the universe, that of our own world, developed in these conditions. But what if alien life is somewhere else, not on the surface, but beneath it?
While all of this effort is being made to find second Earths, and several have been indeed located, a far more common type of planet is thought to be frozen worlds and moons encased in rock and ice, but harboring vast liquid oceans below. In fact, it is widely believed that such watery worlds are perhaps 1,000 times more common than rocky, earth-type planets. To give an idea of just how common this type of world is, we need only look to our own solar system, which holds many examples. For instance, Jupiter’s moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa are all thought to have liquid oceans buried by miles of ice and rock, as are Saturn’s moons Titan, Dione, and Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, all with these oceans kept in their liquid state through geothermal activity and the affects of tides and gravitational forces. Not only do such worlds have liquid water in plentiful supply, but through geothermal activity they hold the chance of having habitable conditions and the necessary nutrients and ingredients for life even outside of the magic Goldilocks Zone. Indeed, even planets within our own star’s Goldilocks Zone aren’t really habitable, such as Mars and Venus, so maybe this is a key, and looking at these subsurface oceans potentially opens up the doors to further planets we can search for life on.
In addition, these types of habitats hold other advantages as well, because since they are located so far under, hazardous surface conditions wouldn’t necessarily affect them. One NASA physicist Alan Stern has said of this, “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter.” Another group of scientists who think so are Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, who have written a whole study on this called Subsurface Exolife. Lingham has said of the benefits of a subsurface existence in these alien oceans:
The conventional notion of planetary habitability is the habitable zone (HZ), namely the concept that the “planet” must be situated at the right distance from the star such that it may be capable of having liquid water on its surface. However, this definition assumes that life is: (a) surface-based, (b) on a planet orbiting a star, and (c) based on liquid water (as the solvent) and carbon compounds. In contrast, our work relaxes assumptions (a) and (b), although we still retain (c). One major advantage that icy worlds have is that the subsurface oceans are mostly sealed off from the surface. Hence, UV radiation and cosmic rays (energetic particles), which are typically detrimental to surface-based life in high doses, are unlikely to affect putative life in these subsurface oceans.
We have seen whole sophisticated ecosystems around hydrothermal vents on Earth in areas previously thought to be hostile for life, so it is a promising idea. Yet, there are still some drawbacks to the notion, as Lingham has said:
On the negative side, the absence of sunlight as a plentiful energy source could lead to a biosphere that has far less organisms (per unit volume) than Earth. In addition, most organisms in these biospheres are likely to be microbial, and the probability of complex life evolving may be low compared to Earth. Another issue is the potential availability of nutrients (e.g. phosphorus) necessary for life; we suggest that these nutrients might be available only in lower concentrations than Earth on these worlds.
Nevertheless, such icy worlds are coming to be seen as more and more promising as a potential candidate for alien life, and such biospheres are even thought to very plausibly be able to spawn highly intelligent life. Yet, if these vast oceans did produce intelligent life comparable to or beyond human intelligence, the main problem would be even knowing they are there at all. Some of these worlds have miles and miles of rock or ice between the surface and the water, meaning that communication with radio signals might not be an option. Stern has explained, “If they have technology, and let’s say they’re broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can’t see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency.” There would also be a lack of biosignatures on the surface to give a clue as to any life that might lie below, as the surface could be completely forbidding and barren. It seems that really the only way to know if they exist is if they contacted us or if we physically went and drilled down to them. Professor Loeb has said of these challenges:
It is very difficult to detect sub-surface life remotely (from a large distance) using telescopes. One could search for excess heat but that can result from natural sources, such as volcanos. The most reliable way to find sub-surface life is to land on such a planet or moon and drill through the surface ice sheet. This is the approach contemplated for a future NASA mission to Europa in the solar system.
Adding to this is that even if there are highly intelligent civilizations under the ice, living in such an environment would not be conducive to space travel, as they would have to bore through all of that surface, and water would be a very heavy and difficult medium to transport into orbit and over very long distances. It has even been suggested by scientists like Stern that they might not even be aware that there is space out there over their heads at all, with the universe perhaps all effectively ending for them with the impenetrable wall above them. There has also been speculation that intelligent life would need a mastery of fire to really develop machines and technology, which would be impossible in their watery realm. For instance, dolphins and octopuses have in recent years been speculated as being possibly of human-level intelligence, but their biome makes development of any sophisticated technology a challenge. Could that be happening here? There is no way to know.
What we do know is that these icy planets and moons do exist, along with ample water and quite probably the elements necessary for life. We also know that they are likely far more common than rocky, earth-like worlds. Is it at least possible that if there has evolved intelligent life outside of our own it had done so in one of these environments? If so, what does that mean for our efforts to search out and contact such life? Due to their extreme circumstances is it likely we will ever detect them or meet them? Whatever the case may be, it poses an interesting possibility for the Fermi Paradox, and at the very least truly expands the locales we should be looking at for life in the universe besides our own.
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V-shaped craft over Toronto, Canada 26-May-2020
V-shaped craft over Toronto, Canada 26-May-2020
This triangular-shaped craft was recorded in the daytime sky above Toronto in Canada. This happened on 26th May 2020.
Witness report:
Dark color object of weird shape (could be bell), moving fast at heights generally planes travel. I saw a strange looking dark object moving fast at high altitude. I quickly went inside and grabbed my camera and shot this video at 100X zoom. I did not have the time to setup my camera on a tripod or something so was trying to move with it while focusing. It traveled from downtown Toronto (SW) and could see till it was visible in NW direction at 8:51 PM on 26th May 2020. I was out in my balcony looking at the sun set when I saw it. It took about 1-1.5 minutes to traverse the entire distance (city).
Astronomers have found two objects that, added to a strange object discovered in 2018, constitute a new class of cosmic explosions. The new type of explosion shares some characteristics with supernova explosions of massive stars and with the explosions that generate gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), but still has distinctive differences from each.
Artist’s conception illustrates the differences in phenomena resulting from an “ordinary” core-collapse supernova explosion, an explosion creating a gamma-ray burst, and one creating a Fast Blue Optical Transient. Details in text.
Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
The saga began in June of 2018 when astronomers saw a cosmic blast with surprising characteristics and behavior. The object, dubbed AT2018cow (“The Cow”), drew worldwide attention from scientists and was studied extensively. While it shared some characteristics with supernova explosions, it differed in important aspects, particularly its unusual initial brightness and how rapidly it brightened and faded in just a few days.
In the meantime, two additional blasts — one from 2016 and one from 2018 — also showed unusual characteristics and were being observed and analyzed. The two new explosions are called CSS161010 (short for CRTS CSS161010 J045834-081803), in a galaxy about 500 million light-years from Earth, and ZTF18abvkwla (“The Koala”), in a galaxy about 3.4 billion light-years distant. Both were discovered by automated sky surveys (Catalina Real-time Transient Survey, All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, and Zwicky Transient Facility) using visible-light telescopes to scan large areas of sky nightly.
Two teams of astronomers followed up those discoveries by observing the objects with the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). Both teams also used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the team studying CSS161010 used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Both objects gave the observers surprises.
Anna Ho, of Caltech, lead author of the study on ZTF18abvkwla, immediately noted that the object’s radio emission was as bright as that from a gamma-ray burst. “When I reduced the data, I thought I had made a mistake,” she said.
Deanne Coppejans, of Northwestern University, led the study on CSS161010, which found that the object had launched an “unexpected” amount of material into interstellar space at more than half the speed of light. Her Northwestern co-author Raffaella Margutti, said, “It took almost two years to figure out what we were looking at just because it was so unusual.”
In both cases, the follow-up observations indicated that the objects shared features in common with AT2018cow. The scientists concluded that these events, called Fast Blue Optical Transients (FBOTs), represent, along with AT2018cow, a type of stellar explosion significantly different from others. The scientists reported their findings in papers in the Astrophysical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Artist’s conception illustrates the phenomena that make up the new class of cosmic explosions called Fast Blue Optical Transients.
Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
FBOTs probably begin, the astronomers said, the same way as certain supernovae and gamma-ray bursts — when a star much more massive than the Sun explodes at the end of its “normal” atomic fusion-powered life. The differences show up in the aftermath of the initial explosion.
In the “ordinary” supernova of this type, called a core-collapse supernova, the explosion sends a spherical blast wave of material into interstellar space. If, in addition to this, a rotating disk of material briefly forms around the neutron star or black hole left after the explosion and propels narrow jets of material at nearly the speed of light outward in opposite directions, these jets can produce narrow beams of gamma rays, causing a gamma-ray burst.
The rotating disk, called an accretion disk, and the jets it produces, are called an “engine” by astronomers.
FBOTs, the astronomers concluded, also have such an engine. In their case, unlike in gamma-ray bursts, it is enshrouded by thick material. That material probably was shed by the star just before it exploded, and may have been pulled from it by a binary companion.
When the thick material near the star is struck by the blast wave, it causes the bright visible-light burst soon after the explosion that initially made these objects appear so unusual. That bright burst also is why astronomers call these blasts “fast blue optical transients.” This is one of the characteristics that distinguished them from ordinary supernovae.
As the blastwave from the explosion collides with the material around the star as it travels outwards, it produces radio emission. This very bright emission was the important clue that proved that the explosion was powered by an engine.
The shroud of dense material “means that the progenitor star is different from those leading to gamma-ray bursts,” Ho said. The astronomers said that in the Cow and in CSS161010, the dense material included hydrogen, something never seen in in gamma-ray bursts.
Using the W.M. Keck Observatory, the astronomers found that both CSS 161010 and ZTF18abvkwla, like the Cow, are in small, dwarf galaxies. Coppejans said that the dwarf galaxy properties “might allow some very rare evolutionary paths of stars” that lead to these distinctive explosions.
Although a common element of the FBOTs is that all three have a ‘central engine,’ the astronomers caution that the engine also could be the result of stars being shredded by black holes, though they consider supernova-type explosions to be the more likely candidate.
“Observations of more FBOTs and their environments will answer this question,” Margutti said.
To do that, the scientists say they will need to use telescopes covering a wide range of wavelengths, as they have done with the first three objects. “While FBOTs have proven rarer and harder to find than some of us were hoping, in the radio band they’re also much more luminous than we’d guessed, allowing us to provide quite comprehensive data even on events that are far away,” said Daniel Perley, of the Liverpool John Moores University.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The study of CSS161010 was partially supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation, NASA, and the National Science Foundation.
Contacts and sources:
Dave Finley National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Publications:
A Mildly Relativistic Outflow from the Energetic, Fast-rising Blue Optical Transient CSS161010 in a Dwarf Galaxy. D. L. Coppejans, R. Margutti, G. Terreran, A. J. Nayana, E. R. Coughlin, T. Laskar, K. D. Alexander, M. Bietenholz, D. Caprioli, P. Chandra, M. R. Drout, D. Frederiks, C. Frohmaier, K. H Hurley, C. S. Kochanek, M. MacLeod, A. Meisner, P. E. Nugent, A. Ridnaia, D. J. Sand, D. Svinkin, C. Ward, S. Yang, A. Baldeschi, I. V. Chilingarian, Y. Dong, C. Esquivia, W. Fong, C. Guidorzi, P. Lundqvist, D. Milisavljevic, K. Paterson, D. E. Reichart, B. Shappee, M. C. Stroh, S. Valenti, B. A. Zauderer, B. Zhang. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2020; 895 (1): L23 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab8cc7
The Koala: A Fast Blue Optical Transient with Luminous Radio Emission from a Starburst Dwarf Galaxy at z = 0.27. Anna Y. Q. Ho, Daniel A. Perley, S. R. Kulkarni, Dillon Z. J. Dong, Kishalay De, Poonam Chandra, Igor Andreoni, Eric C. Bellm, Kevin B. Burdge, Michael Coughlin, Richard Dekany, Michael Feeney, Dmitry D. Frederiks, Christoffer Fremling, V. Zach Golkhou, Matthew J. Graham, David Hale, George Helou, Assaf Horesh, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Russ R. Laher, Frank J. Masci, A. A. Miller, Michael Porter, Anna Ridnaia, Ben Rusholme, David L. Shupe, Maayane T. Soumagnac, Dmitry S. Svinkin. The Astrophysical Journal, 2020; 895 (1): 49 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab8bcf
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.