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 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
01-11-2020
Pluto's mountains have SNOW: Stunning new image reveals how icy methane covers the dwarf planet's peaks
Pluto's mountains have SNOW: Stunning new image reveals how icy methane covers the dwarf planet's peaks
Nasa's New Horizons team has discovered a chain of exotic methane snowcapped mountains in Cthulhu
This is an area that stretches halfway around Pluto's equator, starting from icy plains of Sputnik Planum
Follows news last month that Pluto may be covered in a lot more water ice than astronomers first thought
Much like Earth, Pluto's huge mountains may have vast expanses of snow covering their peaks.
This is according to Nasa's New Horizons team who has discovered a chain of exotic snowcapped mountains stretching across the dark expanse on Pluto informally named Cthulhu region.
The area stretches nearly halfway around Pluto's equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum.
Scroll down for video
The reddish enhanced color image shown as the left inset reveals a mountain range located in southeast Cthulhu that’s 260 miles (420km) long. The upper slopes of the highest peaks are coated with a bright material that contrasts sharply with the dark red color of the surrounding plains. The right inset also shows how the bright ice on the mountains matches up with the distribution of methane (purple)
Measuring around 1,850 miles (3,000km) long and 450 miles (750km) wide, Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THU-lu) is a bit larger than the state of Alaska.
Cthulhu's appearance is characterised by a dark surface, which scientists think is due to being covered by a layer of dark tholins.
Tholins are complex molecules that form when methane is exposed to sunlight.
Cthulhu's geology exhibits a wide variety of landscapes - from mountainous to smooth, and to heavily cratered and fractured.
The reddish enhanced colour image reveals a mountain range located in southeast Cthulhu that's 260 miles (420km) long.
The range is situated among craters, with narrow valleys separating its peaks.
The upper slopes of the highest peaks are coated with a bright material that contrasts sharply with the dark red colour of the surrounding plains.
Hills of water ice on Pluto 'float' in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth's Arctic Ocean. This shows the inset in context next to a larger view. The resolution is about 1050ft (320 meters) per pixel and 300 miles (almost 500km) long and 210 miles (340km) wide. It was taken 9,950 miles (16,000km) from Pluto, 12 minutes before New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto on July 14
Scientists think this bright material could be predominantly methane that has condensed as ice onto the peaks from Pluto's atmosphere.
'That this material coats only the upper slopes of the peaks suggests methane ice may act like water in Earth's atmosphere, condensing as frost at high altitude,' said John Stansberry, a New Horizons science team member from Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland.
Compositional data from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft, indicates that the location of the bright ice on the mountain peaks matches up almost exactly with the distribution of methane ice, shown in false colour as purple.
The resolution of the enhanced colour image is about 2,230 feet (680 meters) per pixel.
The image measures approximately 280 miles (450km) long by 140 miles (225km) wide.
It was obtained by New Horizons at a range of approximately 21,100 miles (33,900km) from Pluto, about 45 minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.
Last month, hills of water ice were found to be 'floating' in a sea of frozen nitrogen on Pluto, moving over time like icebergs in Earth's Arctic Ocean
These hills, which can be seen in the recent images studied by the New Horizons team, are believed to measure one to several miles across.
They are found in the vast ice plain informally named Sputnik Planum within Pluto's 'heart' and are likely miniature versions of the larger, jumbled mountains on the region's western border.
The two scans were taken 15 minutes apart on July 14, 2015 from 67,000 miles away, showing the hemisphere visible to New Horizons as it flew by. According to Nasa, water ice is the crustal bedrock of Pluto, over the course of the changing seasons, it is covered by more volatile ices
Their discovery follows news last month that Pluto may be covered in a lot more water ice than astronomers previously thought, which could boost the chances for finding a liquid sea and alien life.
Nasa describes the feature as 'yet another example of Pluto's fascinating and abundant geological activity.'
Because water ice is less dense than nitrogen-dominated ice, scientists believe these water ice hills are floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs on Earth.
The hills may be fragments of the rugged uplands that have broken away and are being carried by the nitrogen glaciers into Sputnik Planum.
'Chains' of the drifting hills are formed along the flow paths of the glaciers.
When the hills enter the cellular terrain of central Sputnik Planum, they become subject to the motions of the nitrogen ice, and are pushed to the edges of the cells, where the hills cluster in groups reaching up to 12 miles (20km) across.
At the northern end of the image, the feature informally named Challenger Colles – honouring the crew of the lost space shuttle Challenger – appears to be an especially large accumulation of these hills, measuring 37 by 22 miles (60 by 35km).
This feature is located near the boundary with the uplands, away from the cellular terrain, and may represent a location where hills have been 'beached' due to the nitrogen ice being especially shallow.
Nasa experts believe the object may be a 'dirty block of water ice' which is floating in denser solid nitrogen. Also visible are thousands of pits in the surface, which scientists believe may form by sublimation
Last week, Nasa said that Pluto may be covered in a lot more water ice than astronomers previously thought.
The space agency has now stitched together images from the observations to create a three-dimensional 'data cube' to map the findings.
Using observations taken in infrared light by the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument, astronomers have created false-colour maps to plot the concentration of Pluto's water ice.
The two scans were taken 15 minutes apart on July 14, 2015 from 67,000 miles away, showing the hemisphere visible to New Horizons as it flew by.
According to Nasa, water ice is the crustal bedrock of Pluto, and over the course of the changing seasons, it is covered by more volatile ices.
One of these other ices is methane, which can block the 'spectral signature' of water ice.
In the first map, shown on the left, the researchers compared LEISA spectra with a pure ice template spectrum to work around this.
But, the map only shows areas that were either very rich in water, or very low in methane.
For the second map, the team used more sensitive techniques, including the various kinds of ice found on the surface, in addition to water ice.
The more detailed map reveals the spread of water ice across much of Pluto, much more than previously known.
NEW HORIZONS' NEW MISSION
The spacecraft that gave us the first close-up views of Pluto now has a much smaller object in its sights.
New Horizons is now track to fly past a recently discovered, less than 30-mile-wide object out on the solar system frontier.
The close encounter with what's known as 2014 MU69 would occur in 2019. It orbits nearly 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto.
Nasa and the New Horizons team chose 2014 MU69 in August as New Horizons' next potential target, thus the nickname PT-1. Like Pluto, MU69 orbits the sun in the frozen, twilight zone known as the Kuiper Belt.
MU69 is thought to be 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than average comets, including the one being orbited right now by Europe's Rosetta spacecraft.
On the other end, MU69 is barely 1 percent the size of Pluto and perhaps one-ten-thousandth the mass of the dwarf planet. So the new target is a good middle ground, according to scientists.
The team plans to formally ask Nasa next year to fund the mission extension for studying MU69.
Scientists promise a better name before showtime on January 1, 2019.
Some regions on the map, including Sputnik Planum, the western region of Pluto's 'heart,' and Lowell Regio in the north, were observed to exhibit little evidence of water, if any at all.
This suggests that the bedrock in these areas is buried beneath an accumulation of other ices, such as methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide.
Earlier this month, New Horizons sent back one of its most intriguing images of the surface of Pluto. It shows a mysterious object appearing to 'slide' through the surface.
Nasa experts believe the object may be a 'dirty block of water ice'.
They say it is 'floating' in denser solid nitrogen, and which has been dragged to the edge of a convection cell.
Also visible are thousands of pits in the surface, which scientists believe may form by sublimation.
This image depicts an entire day on the dwarf planet. The space agency released a series of 10 close-ups of the frosty, faraway world today, representing one Pluto day, which is equivalent to 6.4 Earth days. The New Horizons spacecraft took the pictures as it zoomed past Pluto in an unprecedented flyby in July. Pluto was between 400,000 and 5 million miles from the camera for these photos
THERE COULD BE ALIENS BENEATH PLUTO'S CRUST, SAYS BRIAN COX
Alien life may be lurking beneath Pluto's crust, according to physicist Brian Cox.
His comments come after the historic flyby of the dwarf planet by New Horizons, which uncovered huge glaciers and mountains made of water ice.
These features hint at the possibility of subterranean seas on the dwarf planet warm enough for organic chemistry to thrive, said Cox.
The probe 'showed you that there may well be a subsurface ocean on Pluto,' Cox told The Times. '[This] means - if our understanding of life on Earth is even slightly correct - that you could have living things there.'
Transmitted to Earth on Dec. 24, another image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) extends New Horizons' highest-resolution views of Pluto to the very center of Sputnik Planum,.
Sputnik Planum is at a lower elevation than most of the surrounding area by a couple of miles, but is not completely flat.
Its surface is separated into cells or polygons 10 to 25 miles (16 to 40 kilometers) wide, and when viewed at low sun angles (with visible shadows), the cells are seen to have slightly raised centers and ridged margins, with about 100 yards (100 meters) of overall height variation.
Mission scientists believe the pattern of the cells stems from the slow thermal convection of the nitrogen-dominated ices that fill Sputnik Planum.
A reservoir that's likely several miles or kilometers deep in some places, the solid nitrogen is warmed at depth by Pluto's modest internal heat, becomes buoyant and rises up in great blobs, and then cools off and sinks again to renew the cycle.
'This part of Pluto is acting like a lava lamp,' said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team, from Washington University in St. Louis, 'if you can imagine a lava lamp as wide as, and even deeper than, the Hudson Bay.'
Computer models by the New Horizons team show that these blobs of overturning solid nitrogen can slowly evolve and merge over millions of years. The ridged margins, which mark where cooled nitrogen ice sinks back down, can be pinched off and abandoned.
The 'X' feature is likely one of these—a former quadruple junction where four convection cells meet. Numerous, active triple junctions can be seen elsewhere in the LORRI mosaic.
How similar are Pluto and Charon to the Earth and the Moon?
Flowing ice and a extended haze are among the discoveries from Nasa's New Horizons mission, which reveal distant Pluto to be an icy world of wonders. This panorama was captured by the New Horizons spacecraft from 18,000 kilometers (11,00 miles) away, just 15 minutes after the probe's closest approach
THE BIGGEST ICE VOLCANO IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM: IMAGES REVEAL 90 MILE-WIDE CRYOVOLCANO ON PLUTO
The most detailed image yet of a giant mountain on Pluto, which is suspected to be an ice volcano, was released by Nasa last month.
It is one of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015.
At about 90 miles (150km) across and 2.5 miles (4km) high, this feature is enormous.
The feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers.
If it is in fact a volcano, as suspected, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.
'These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing — a volcano,' said Oliver White, a New Horizons researcher.
The most detailed image yet of a giant mountain on Pluto, which is suspected to be an ice volcano, has been released by Nasa (left). It is one of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. At about 90 miles (150km) across and 2.5 miles (4km) high, this feature is enormous
Mission scientists are baffled by the sparse distribution of red material in the image and wonder why it is not more widespread.
Also perplexing is that there is only one identified impact crater on Wright Mons itself, telling scientists that the surface - as well as some of the crust underneath - was created relatively recently.
This is turn may indicate that Wright Mons was volcanically active late in Pluto's history.
The other potential ice volcano on Pluto has been named Piccard Mons, is up to 3.5 miles (6 km) high. Both ice volcanoes are located near Pluto's South Pole.
'We're not yet ready to announce we have found volcanic constructs at Pluto, but these sure look suspicious and we're looking at them very closely,' said Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at Nasa said in an earlier release.
Nasa says that if Pluto does have cryovolcanoes, it may be an indication that there is volatile ice that coats its surface.
A new study shows how methane snow accumulates on Pluto’s mountain peaks. These snowcaps – first seen by New Horizons in 2015 – look a lot like ones on Earth, but form in a very alien environment.
Comparison of snowcapped mountains in Cthulhu Macula on Pluto (left) with the Alps on Earth (right).
Image via NASA/ Johns Hopkins APL/ SWRI/ Thomas Pesquet/ ESA/ EurekAlert!.
With their tall peaks reaching into the sky and and their snow glistening in the sun, snowcapped mountains on Earth are beautiful. Other planets, like Mars and Venus and even some moons, also have mountains, but they lack the scenic snow cover of earthly mountains. One notable exception, though, was discovered in 2015 by the New Horizons spacecraft, when it made its sweep through the outer reaches of our solar system. I’m talking about the snowcapped mountains of Pluto!
Not only does Pluto have mountains, which was a bit surprising given its small size, but Pluto’s mountains also have snow on their peaks. There is one significant difference, though, between the mountains of Earth and Pluto. The “snow” or frost on Pluto consists of frozen methane (CH4) instead of water ice crystals.
Meanwhile, Pluto’s mountains themselves are composed of rock-hard water ice.
The new research, by an international team of scientists led by researchers from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, was announced on October 13, 2020.
The associated peer-reviewed paper was published in Nature Communications on the same day.
Snowcapped mountains on Earth. Sudip Aich captured this image of the Himalayas at sunrise, at Sandakphu, the highest point of the Darjeeling district on the West Bengal-Nepal border. The peak on which he was standing is 11,900 feet (3,627 meters) high. From this spot, you can see 4 of the 5 highest peaks in the world, Everest, Kangchenjunga, Lhotse and Makalu.
View larger. | Enhanced color view of the methane snowcapped Pigafetta Montes mountain range in Cthulhu Macula on Pluto, as seen by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. The new study helps explain how snow comes to be on Pluto’s mountains, in a process that is opposite to the way in which snow comes to be on mountain peaks on Earth. The resolution of this image is about 2,230 feet (680 meters) per pixel. The image measures approximately 280 miles (450 km) long by 140 miles (225 km) wide.
Image via NASA/ Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/ Southwest Research Institute/ Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The snow on Pluto’s mountains – particularly in Cthulhu Macula (formerly called Cthulhu Regio) – is part of a cycle, reminiscent of Earth’s water cycle, but integrating traces of methane in Pluto’s thin atmosphere instead of water vapor. The researchers used a climate model to find out just how the methane snow could be produced in Pluto’s un-Earthlike conditions. They found that Pluto’s mountain peaks are the only places high enough in altitude on the little world so that methane could condense out from the atmosphere. From the paper:
Here we demonstrate that the bright frosts observed in Cthulhu are mostly made of CH4-rich ice. We then use a numerical climate model of Pluto to investigate the origin of their formation. Our simulations reproduce the accumulation of high-altitude CH4 ice where the frostcapped mountains are observed, in particular on the ridges and crests of thePigafetta and Elcano Montesin eastern Cthulhu. They show that CH4 condensation is favored by sublimation-induced circulation cells that seasonally enrich the atmosphere with gaseous methane at those higher altitudes.
Overall, the formation of CH4 frost on top of Pluto’s mountains appears to be driven by a process completely different from the one forming snowcapped mountains on the Earth, according to our model. It is remarkable that two phenomena and two materials that are so dissimilar could produce the same landscape, when seen at similar resolution.
Comparison of snow-capped mountains on Pluto and Earth.
The findings also help solve another mystery as to why glaciers on Pluto, also composed of methane, have craggy ridges on them, while Earth’s glaciers, composed of water ice, tend to have smoother surfaces. As described in the paper:
Pluto is covered by numerous deposits of methane, either diluted in nitrogen or as methane-rich ice. Within the dark equatorial region of Cthulhu, bright frost containing methane is observed coating crater rims and walls as well as mountain tops, providing spectacular resemblance to terrestrial snowcapped mountain chains. However, the origin of these deposits remained enigmatic. Here we report that they are composed of methane-rich ice. We use high-resolution numerical simulations of Pluto’s climate to show that the processes forming them are likely to be completely different to those forming high-altitude snowpack on Earth. The methane deposits may not result from adiabatic cooling in upwardly moving air like on our planet, but from a circulation-induced enrichment of gaseous methane a few kilometers above Pluto’s plains that favors methane condensation at mountain summits. This process could have shaped other methane reservoirs on Pluto and help explain the appearance of the bladed terrain of Tartarus Dorsa.
Pluto is covered by exotic-composition ices and its landscape strongly resembles the polar caps on Earth (Greenland and Antarctica). New Horizons even discovered spectacular mountains on Pluto covered by bright deposits, strikingly resembling snowcapped mountain chains seen on Earth. Such a landscape had never been observed elsewhere in the solar system. Could Pluto’s atmosphere behave like Earth’s? We discovered that a new and unique (in the solar system) atmospheric process forms these snowy mountains on Pluto.
New Horizons’ view of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto, a vast, smooth field of nitrogen ice glaciers which makes up half of Pluto’s “heart” feature. Pluto also has possible cryovolcanoes (ice volcanoes) and a subsurface ocean of water, making it a surprisingly geologically active world.
On Earth, temperatures in the atmosphere decrease with altitude. The opposite occurs on Pluto, however. Its thin atmosphere is warmed by the sun, and temperatures increase the higher up you go, which allows the methane to condense onto the mountain peaks. As Bertrand explained:
At its contact the air is cooled and flows downslope. Pluto’s atmosphere has more gaseous methane at its warmer, higher altitudes, allowing for that gas to saturate and freeze directly on the mountain peaks tall enough to reach the enriched zone. At lower altitudes, the concentration of gaseous methane is lower, and it cannot condense.
This discovery teaches us that there are still plenty of physical and dynamical processes out there in space that we do not know about, and that climates can be very different than that of Earth (despite forming a similar landscape). It is important to study Pluto and other planetary bodies because they are natural laboratories to explore and investigate the diversity of possible climates (and geology, and other planetary sciences) which gives us more perspective on our own climate.
Tanguy Bertrand at NASA’s Ames Research Center, lead author of the new study.
The discovery of a snowcap cycle on Pluto is a fascinating example of how active this cold, distant dwarf planet actually is. Pluto also has vast, smooth glaciers of nitrogen ice such as in Sputnik Planum, dunes of methane ice and odd “bladed terrain” with blades of ice as tall as skyscrapers. There may also be cryovolcanoes – ice volcanoes – and a subsurface ocean of water. This little world is surprisingly geologically active despite being so small and so far from the sun. It even has five moons!
Even though its visit to Pluto was just a brief flyby, New Horizons has already transformed our knowledge about this little world, and its findings will keep scientists busy for decades to come.
Bottom line: Pluto has snow on its mountain peaks just like Earth does, but these snowcaps are made of frozen methane, not water ice. A new study shows how they form in such an un-earthlike environment.
“The Search for Techno-Artifacts” –Did an Earlier Civilization Exist in the Solar System?
“The Search for Techno-Artifacts” –Did an Earlier Civilization Exist in the Solar System?
One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Astrophysicists Avi Loeb at Harvard and Penn State’s Jason Wright have both explored the question, with Loeb suggesting that ancient technological artifacts from beyond the Solar System may exist on Earth’s Moon amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, “We exist.”
Wright, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, has considered the possibility that a technological species could have existed in the Solar System prior to humanity’s rise on Earth in his study, Prior Indigenous Technological Species.
In 2016, Wright authored a paper that discussed possible origins and locations for “technosignatures” of such a civilization while other astronomers have suggested looking for lights on Kuiper Belt Objects that “may serve as a lamppost which signals the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and thus civilizations.”
The origins and possible locations for technosignatures of such a priorindigenoustechnologicalspecies might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars. In the case of Venus, the arrival of its global greenhouse and potential resurfacing might have erased all evidence of its existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and, ultimately, plate tectonics may have erased most such evidence if the species lived a billion years ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures, observes Wright, might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.
“The most obvious answer is a cataclysm, whether a natural event, such as an extinction-level asteroid impact, or self-inflicted, such as a global climate catastrophe,” Wright asserts. “In the case of a prior space-faring species that had settled the Solar System, such an event would only permanently extinguish the species if there were many cataclysms across the Solar System closely spaced in time (a swarm of comets, or interplanetary warfare perhaps), or if the settlements were not completely self-sufficient. Alternatively, an unexpected nearby gamma ray burst or supernova might produce a Solar-System-wide cataclysm.”
From a purely scientific standpoint, observes Wright, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether life may have existed elsewhere in the Solar System, or does today.
Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, suggests Wright, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.
In a later, 2019 study, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, suggested that Earth’s Moon might yield traces of technological equipment that crashed on the lunar surface a billion years ago, amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, “We exist.”
A 2019 paper Loeb wrote with Manasvi Lingam answers this question with a resounding “yes”, suggesting to consider the moon’s surface for interstellar objects collected over time and potentially deliver building blocks of life from the habitable environments around other stars.
“The absence of a lunar atmosphere,” writes Loeb in “The Moon as a Fishing Net for Extraterrestrial Life”, “guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up. In addition, the geological inactivity of the moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected all impacting objects during the past few billions of years. Most of this “mail” comes from within the solar system.”
The Astronaut of Casar Is An Unsolved Mystery, But Can We Explain It?
The Astronaut of Casar Is An Unsolved Mystery, But Can We Explain It?
Some artifacts seem to be easy to misunderstand or are not well understood at all and this leads to wild theories. One of the biggest curiosities on display at the Caceres Museum in Caceres, Spain is a steleor upright stone slab that originally stood at the southern end of the cemetery in the nearby village of Casar. The carving on the stele appears to be a human figure with a misshapen head and bulbous shoulders. It has been dubbed by some “the astronaut of Casar”, but why?
The stele has an inscription, which is in Latin letters , but, so far, no one has managed to decipher the text. This has led to a great deal of speculation regarding the nature of this carving. Some fringe theorists have even gone as far as to suggest that it is an image of an of extra-terrestrial, hence the name “the astronaut of Casar.” But archaeological and linguistic analysis of the astronaut of Casar stele shows that the unusual features of the stele can all be explained with the knowledge that scholars have of the cultures and languages of ancient Iberia. Within this explanation, visitations from extra-terrestrials are not necessary. Nonetheless, the astronaut of Casar artifact does highlight ways that the science of archaeology may one day be able to contribute to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
The stele dubbed “astronaut of Casar” is exhibited in the Caceres Museum, Caceres, Spain.
The astronaut of Casar stele was originally located in the cemetery of Casar, a village outside of the city of Caceres, Spain. The image appears to have generated a lot of local suspicion and superstition. It is alleged that villagers would cross themselves as they walked by the stele and that children would throw rocks at it.
The figure in the stele does look strange. His head is misshapen and appears slightly too large. His shoulders also appear to bulge out. Although the carving is weathered, the figure looks like he is smiling. The image has been suggested to be that of a Celtiberian warrior made in the 2nd or 1st century BC. The inscription in Latin letters suggests that it was written during Roman times or just before the Roman occupation of Iberia.
Most mysterious of all is the inscription on the astronaut of Casar stele. Although the inscription is in the Latin script it appears to be written in an unknown language . The language is not completely mysterious, however, since it is likely an Indo-European language. Nonetheless, scholars have not been able to translate it and some say that it cannot be translated.
The Astronaut Of Casar Stele Inscription Origin Theories
At the beginning of the Roman period in Spain, several languages were spoken on the Iberian Peninsula including Celtiberian, Lusitanian, Tartessian, proto-Basque, Latin, and probably Greek and Punic. Of these languages, Celtiberian, Lusitanian, Tartessian, and proto-Basque were native to the Iberian Peninsula while the others were introduced by foreign cultures.
The equally mysterious Stela of Hernan Perez VI, like the astronaut of Casar stele, was also found in Caceres, Spain. It is carved in a single granite block and shows etched eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth.
Although the astronaut of Casar stele inscription seems mysterious it could have been written in one of the lesser-known native Iberian languages. The understanding of many of the Iberian languages is fragmentary and only a handful of inscriptions or documents have been found for some of these languages.
This makes it probable that the inscription uses words from Iberian languages that have not been found in other inscriptions. The fact that it appears to be an Indo-European language may also help to identify the language. One way to identify the language is to examine each of the Iberian languages and determine which one is most likely the dialect used in the inscription on the stele.
The Inscription Could Be In The Basque Language
The original, ancient Basque language was already being spoken in northern Spain in Roman times. The Basque language is unique among western European languages in that it is a non-Indo-European language. Ancient Basque is a language isolate, and its language family is unknown. This has led to speculation about the origins of the Basque people, including the idea that they descend from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers , although current evidence suggests that they are more closely related to early Neolithic farmers .
An ancient inscription written in proto-Basque.
(Nafarroako Gobernua - Gobierno de Navarra / CC BY-SA 4.0 )
The Basque language is agglutinative, meaning that phrases are constructed from root words using prefixes and suffixes. The Basque language also follows the SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, in contrast to languages, such as English, that have a SVO (subject-verb-object) word order. Other languages that are SOV, like Basque, include Japanese and Turkish.
The ancient Basque language influenced the development of Castilian Spanish. Certain features of the Spanish language, such as the lack of consonant clusters, are features that come from the Basque language. Furthermore, certain Spanish words, such as arroyo and izquierda, are Basque in origin.
Although the Basque language, or at least a proto-Basque language, existed during the time the astronaut of Casar stele was made, it was largely restricted to northern Spain. However, the stele was found in southwestern Spain near the modern Portugal border. Also, the inscription appears to be Indo-European, suggesting that the language was more likely a Celtic or Romance language, the two Indo-European language groups that were most prevalent in the Iberian Peninsula at the time. All these facts suggest Basque may not be the best way to figure out the inscription on the astronaut of Casar stele.
Celtiberian was spoken on the Iberian Peninsula until about the 1st century BC. Celtiberian is a Celtic language that is related to the Gaelic languages of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. This is interesting because the Irish Book of Invasions claims that the Irish descended from the Milesians who were supposed to have come from Iberia.
An example of the ancient Celtiberian writing script.
The Celtiberians are described by Roman writers as having been a mixture of Celtic and native Iberian stock. They may have been related to the Hallstatt culture, a Celtic culture known across Europe, which first entered the Iberian Peninsula around 600 BC.
About two hundred Celtiberian inscriptions have been found. Considering the possible origin of the Celtiberians as a mixed Celtic and Iberian population, the Celtiberian language may have loanwords from early non-Indo-European Iberian languages. The Celtiberians also used their own script, which was similar to other Iberian scripts.
It is possible that the inscription on the stele is in Celtiberian, but the Celtiberian language is relatively well known and would be more likely to be recognized. Also, the Celtiberians lived to the northeast of the region in which the stele was found. This makes it less likely that the inscription was in Celtiberian.
Would Lusitanian Be A Better Candidate?
Lusitanian was a language spoken in western Iberia. It is named for the realm of the Lusitania, where inscriptions in the Lusitanian language have been found. However, few inscriptions in the Lusitanian language have been uncovered possibly suggesting that the language was not typically used for official documents or written declarations. The Lusitanian language appears to have been mainly written in the Latin script even though native scripts are found in surrounding regions.
Lusitanian was spoken in the general vicinity of the region in which the stele was found. Also, the Lusitanian language was generally written in the Latin script used for the astronaut of Casar stele inscription. The timeframe of when the language was used, from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD, is also roughly consistent with the period during which scholars believe that the stele was made.
Nonetheless, Lusitanian is still a fairly well-known language so a Lusitanian inscription might be more likely to be recognized. For this reason, it is possible that the inscription is written in a yet rarer, or at least less well-known, Indo-European language.
Maybe The Tartessian Language Is The Key
The Tartessian language was spoken in southwestern Iberia in what is today southern Portugal and southwestern Spain. It is named for the city of Tartessus known for its great wealth. The region surrounding Tartessus was considered highly valuable by ancient civilizations such as the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and probably the Romans, because of its silver mines. The region of Tartessus was also distinctive in having retained a largely pre-Celtic, Iberian character, whereas the northern parts of Iberia were more influenced by Celtic culture or conquered by Celtic peoples who displaced or absorbed the native Iberian populations.
The Tartessian language used its own script which has not yet been deciphered. For this reason, the Tartessian language is shrouded in mystery. It is uncertain whether Tartessian was a Celtic language or more related to pre-Celtic Iberian languages. Some scholars believe that Tartessian was related to Lusitanian and some even call it southern Lusitanian.
It is not known if Latin letters were ever used to write Tartessian or if Tartessian continued to be spoken into Roman times. The latest inscriptions in the Tartessian script only date to the 5th century BC. Nonetheless, The Tartessian language was probably spoken in the vicinity of where the stele was found, and it is a language that is largely unknown and undeciphered. For this reason, it is possible that the language of the inscription could be Tartessian.
This is speculation, but it is possible that the stele could have been made by a community living in the vicinity of modern-day Caceres which lived in Roman times but still spoke Tartessian or Lusitanian as a mother tongue. They may have forgotten how to write the script of their mother tongue, so they wrote the inscription using Latin letters.
Was The Man of Casar An Ancient Astronaut?
There has been much speculation among fringe theorists that the man depicted on the Casar stele is not a human being. This is mainly due to the unusually shaped head and bulging shoulders of the figure that make it look like he is wearing a spacesuit. The oddly shaped head bears a passing resemblance to the big-headed aliens of popular science fiction and UFO lore.
Some think the odd shape is reminiscent of a space suit.
Although this is an interesting idea, all the evidence surrounding the stele can be explained by conventional means. The inscription is in an unknown language, but it is most-likely Indo-European. Also, the stele appears to be extremely weathered so the misshapen appearance of the head could be due to time and weathering. Moreover, it could be that he is wearing a helmet, or it could be his hairstyle. Also, besides the passing resemblance to modern depictions of extra-terrestrials or astronauts, there is nothing unusual or otherworldly about the man on the stele. It looks like it was carved out of stone by human tools and it fits into the archaeological and historical context of Celtiberian and Roman Spain. The only reason to believe that the figure is an extra-terrestrial is if there is a strong desire on the part of the observer for the figure to be an extra-terrestrial.
Another reason that it is unlikely that this is an extra-terrestrial is the low probability that an intelligent being from another planet would resemble a human being. The fact that it looks so human makes it likely that it is meant to depict something that is earthly in origin.
Implications For The Search For Extra-terrestrial Life
Most claims that particular archaeological discoveries reveal past visitations by life from another planet have eventually been disproven or at least found to be unconvincing. Nonetheless, this does not mean that there is no place for archaeology in the search for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence on planet earth.
The big question about extra-terrestrials is did they visit planet earth or didn’t they?
The vast majority of organisms that have evolved over the course of the earth’s history have gone extinct. It is likely that the same rule applies on other planets where life and civilization have evolved. For this reason, we will probably find an extinct extra-terrestrial civilization before we find a living one.
Therefore, it makes sense to use archaeological methods to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. One way to conduct exo-archaeology would be to look at nearby stars for signs of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres. This would use the tools of astrophysics and would not be significantly different from traditional SETI research approaches, which focus on extra-solar and extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Another approach that could be considered exo-archaeology would be to use the remote sensing tools of planetary science to survey planetary surfaces, such as the moon and Mars. It is unlikely that anything would be found from such a survey, but the discovery that another technological civilization existed in our solar system would be extraordinary. So, a low-cost search of high-resolution images from spacecraft that have visited the Moon and Mars would seem a good start.
Finding extra-terrestrial intelligence, however, requires critical thinking and careful analysis of the evidence. Claims such as the astronaut of Casar can be easily explained without any extra-terrestrials. A true archaeological discovery of intelligent life outside of Earth would be one which was unmistakably non-earthly in origin, such as the discovery of artificial structures made of materials that did not exist anywhere else on earth or in our solar system.
Conclusion? The Astronaut Of Casar Was Human Made!
The astronaut of Casar stele is mysterious but the inscription and the appearance of the figure can both be explained without involving any theories about extra-terrestrials. Nonetheless, the astronaut of Casar does reveal the increasing enthusiasm for archaeology as a big part of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Archaeology does have a role to play in this quest, but the so-called astronaut of Casar is really nothing more than an example of earthly archaeology being mistaken for something otherworldly.
Top image: The stele dubbed by some as the “astronaut of Casar” is exhibited in the Caceres Museum, Caceres, Spain.
Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission say they have detected sprites or elves – electrical phenomena above thunderstorms on Earth – in the clouds of Jupiter for the first time. Unlike the red-colored earthly ones however, the Jovian ones are blue.
View larger. | Artist’s concept of a lightning sprite in Jupiter’s atmosphere, based on findings from the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter now. Scientists believe that, on Jupiter, sprites are likely blue in color.
Lightning sprites are fleeting but powerful electrical discharges high up in Earth’s atmosphere … above thunderstorms. They’re called transient luminous events or TLEs by scientists. They are eerily beautiful, and not easy to capture on film, and it wasn’t that long ago that scientists were debating their existence in Earth’s atmosphere. Now they’re a confirmed natural phenomenon on Earth – the subject of much study by meteorologists – and nature photographers sometimes capture them. And now NASA has found the first evidence of sprites and/or elves – rapidly expanding disk-shaped regions of luminosity, lasting less than a thousandth of a second – somewhere other than Earth. They’ve found them in the turbulent upper atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter.
The peer-reviewed findings were announced by scientists with the Juno mission at Jupiter and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets on October 27, 2020. The results were also presented in a press conference during the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS 2020).
Scientists had theorized that sprites or elves should be present in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but this is the first good evidence that they actually exist. How did they find them?
Along with taking images in regular light, Juno also views Jupiter with its ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS). In the summer of 2019, researchers were studying these images and discovered something interesting: a narrow, bright streak of ultraviolet light, which appeared to be what scientists had hoped to find, a sprite.
Bright flash near Jupiter’s south pole by Juno on April 10, 2020 (circled), thought to be either a sprite or elve.
Rohini Giles, a Juno scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and lead author of the new study, said in a statement:
UVS was designed to characterize Jupiter’s beautiful northern and southern lights. But we discovered UVS images that not only showed Jovian aurora, but also a bright flash of UV light over in the corner where it wasn’t supposed to be. The more our team looked into it, the more we realized Juno may have detected a TLE on Jupiter.
In the process of putting together those images, we noticed that very occasionally we saw these surprising, short-lived, bright flashes. We then went and searched through all of the data that we’ve taken over four years of the mission and we found a total of 11 flashes all with very similar properties.
Since this is still an initial detection, scientists don’t yet know how common sprites are on Jupiter. But finding the first one is an exciting discovery. Sprites had been predicted on Jupiter by several previous studies, but this is the first direct evidence of them.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Stephen Hummel, who works at McDonald Observatory in West Texas, captured this fleeting lightning sprite – aka a red sprite – on July 2, 2020. McDonald Observatory is spearheading a Dark Skies Initiative in its region. Stephen commented, “Dark skies help you see faint objects like sprites.” Thank you, Stephen!
Red sprites above a thunderstorm over the U.S., as seen by astronauts on the International Space Station in 2015.
The sprites detected by Juno were found in a region where lightning is also known to occur. The Juno scientists determined that these new flashes were not regular lightning because they were found 186 miles (300 km) above the altitude where the majority of Jupiter’s lightning occurs, above the water-cloud layer in the atmosphere. The flashes were also dominated by hydrogen emissions, unlike other lightning on the planet.
Sprites on Earth are rather bizarre-looking, sort of like a jellyfish with a central diffuse halo and long tentacles descending downward. They tend to occur up to 60 miles (97 km) above thunderstorms, and only last a few milliseconds, quicker than the blink of an eye, which explains why they had been rarely seen until pilots started reporting them. There weren’t even any good photographs of them until 1989, when experimental physicist John R. Winckler (1916-2001) captured one while testing a low-light television camera. Nowadays, you can find many photographs of them, such as on SpaceWeather.com.
Sprites on Earth are typically reddish, but may be different colors on Jupiter. Giles said:
On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere mostly consists of hydrogen, so they would likely appear either blue or pink.
These sprites happen when a lightning strike produces a high-altitude quasi-electrostatic field. In other cases, lightning strikes send electromagnetic pulses upward, producing glowing disks called elves.
Lightning has also been seen on Jupiter by Juno such as this flash (bright dot in lower right corner of inset) on May 24, 2018. The colorful oval is an aurora near the north pole.
From the ground, sprites may not look all that big, but they can be about 30 miles (50 km) across. Matthew Cappucci of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang said last year:
Imagine one electrical discharge spanning the distance from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.
Juno has also previously observed lightning on Jupiter. The discovery of both lightning and sprites highlights how Jupiter’s atmosphere is similar to Earth’s in some ways, at least visually. It is, however, much deeper and more turbulent, with long-lived storms that dwarf any ever seen on our planet, and is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.
Lightning strikes on Jupiter are also more powerful, although less frequent. Most are seen in the Jovian belts and near the westward jet streams. Some lightning flashes have also been seen at Jupiter’s poles, making it the only other planet besides Earth so far where polar lightning has been observed. As with thunderstorms on Earth, Jupiter’s lightning is closely associated with its massive storms.
Rohini Giles at SwRI, lead author of the new study.
Image via Rohini Giles.
These first detections of sprites or elves on Jupiter are exciting, and now scientists will continue to look for more of them, as Giles noted:
We’re continuing to look for more telltale signs of elves and sprites every time Juno does a science pass. Now that we know what we are looking for, it will be easier to find them at Jupiter and on other planets. And comparing sprites and elves from Jupiter with those here on Earth will help us better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres.
Veel mensen kijken momenteel op Netflix een documentaire over Saqqara, een necropolis in het oude Egypte waar onder andere de eerste gemummificeerde leeuw werd gevonden. We weten nog maar heel weinig over de oude Egyptenaren. Tegelijkertijd worden uit de verhalen heel veel fascinerende details weggelaten. Hoe zit dat?
Zo is het bijvoorbeeld vreemd dat er vele duizenden hiërogliefen zijn gevonden, maar dat ze geen enkele verwijzing naar piramides bevatten. Nog steeds kunnen we niet met 100 procent zekerheid zeggen hoe ze gebouwd zijn. We leerden op school dat piramides dienden als graftombe voor de farao’s, maar in de piramides op het Gizeh-plateau zijn nog geen mummies gevonden.
Spermacel
Jimmy van het YouTube-kanaal Bright Insight stuitte tijdens een zoektocht op internet op een aantal vreemde hiërogliefen die lijken te suggereren dat de oude Egyptenaren meer wisten dan we denken. Zo vond hij een afbeelding van Min, de god van de vruchtbaarheid, met daarbij iets wat sterk lijkt op een spermacel. Hoe konden de Egyptenaren dit weten? Officieel is sperma in 1677 voor het eerst waargenomen door de Nederlandse microbioloog Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, met behulp van een microscoop.
De afbeelding is op Twitter gezet door Anyextee, een onderzoeker die is opgeleid door de legendarische egyptoloog John Anthony West. Die won in 1993 een Emmy Award met zijn documentaire ‘The Mystery of the Sphinx’.
GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, geselecteerd en gepost door peter2011
Amazing Cloud Over Nevada May Contain An Alien Craft, Oct 28, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Amazing Cloud Over Nevada May Contain An Alien Craft, Oct 28, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Oct 28, 2020 Location of sighting: Nevada, USA
Wow, watch this raw footage taken by a woman going by the Youtube name Angel The Videos. She posted this video a few days ago and it contains a disk cloud. Its been long believed that some disk clouds contain UFOs. That UFOs can not only cloak to become invisible, but they can also create a cloud formation around them. This one has a line down the middle, probably caused from the cloud being pushed around there alien craft hidden within.
Hills of Yellow Gold Found On Mars Using Google Mars Map, Nov 1, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Hills of Yellow Gold Found On Mars Using Google Mars Map, Nov 1, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Nov 1, 2020 Location of discovery: Mars Google Mars Coordinates: 65°10'23.32"N 8°14'19.28"W
Today I was on Google Mars and found a crater called Lomonosov that was surrounded with hills of yellow gold. One of these hills measures 12km long and 3.5km wide. I'm wondering if a rare meteor that had a high concentration of yellow gold impacted and created this crater on Mars. Gold of course is not the most valuable minerals that would be needed on earth, but it is very noticeable from a long distance in large amounts. Some meteorites have contained various amounts of gold, but this is an massive amount if its is what it appears to be.
Strange lights Over New Taipei City, Taiwan Oct 30, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Strange lights Over New Taipei City, Taiwan Oct 30, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 30, 2020 Location of sighting: New Taipei City, Taiwan
Hey guys, I was closing my window for the night at work when I saw these strange lights in the sky. They are not spot lights. I walked over there after work and saw nothing in that area for three blocks. I have never seen these lights in this location before, so I began to record a short video of them. I was still at work and wanted to say goodbye to some kids in person so I ended the video after a minute and a half. Twenty minutes later after work the lights were gone, but I walked that way to go home and saw nothing in that location. I believe these to be some kind of energy ships with energy beings abroad. They don't have a pattern to their movements and are moving unpredictably. Aliens over my home, I'm not surprised.
UFO Landing Lights In Bethany, Oklahoma On Oct 28, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Landing Lights In Bethany, Oklahoma On Oct 28, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
In the below screenshot I enhanced it and found that there is a bright yellow triangle UFO there.
Date of sighting: Oct 28, 2020 Location of sighting: Bethany, Oklahoma, USA
While much of the world is on lockdown for protection at night...these strange lights were seen in the distance in Oklahoma. The lights are similar to what I expect some UFOs to appear like when landing. The eyewitness said he had no idea what this mysterious light was or what was causing it. But...when I enlarged a screenshot and added darkness to it, I found that there is a bright yellow triangle in the sky. A triangle UFO! This is 100% proof that aliens are visiting Oklahoma!
UFO Passes Over A Home In Irving, Texas. Oct 19, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Passes Over A Home In Irving, Texas. Oct 19, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 19, 2020 Location of sighting: Irving, Texas, USA
A door security cam alerted a person that it had recoded something that may be important. When they looked at the video, they saw a strange object passing over their home. The object is huge, 747 size, but its not a plane, because it has no wings, body, lights. Its not a cloud because its moving really fast. However it does look like a cloaked UFO. The security cam is using a special IR (infrared camera) to record at night. The human eye cannot see infrared light, but the cam can...and did. This one is flying really low...I would say 300 meters above the ground. I wonder if they were visiting the homes below to check Covid19 infected and recovered people for symptoms, effects of the virus before and after catching it, but most of all...checking for new mutations of the virus. Most mutations are less dangerous than the original, but I do believe this ship was trying to find such a mutation and stop it before it spreads.
Recent UFO sightings have been reported in Belgium, Poland, California: Fast moving ball of light, weird bird like a winged reptile, spinning Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon in a fixed position.
At first, I thought it was a kite, but after a short while, I realized it is something else, it looks like a large bird like a winged reptile named pterosaur.
It was one of those “big, if true” stories. In September, scientists reported that Venus’ atmosphere seems to be laced with phosphine, a possible sign of life.
Now there’s increasing emphasis on the “if.” As scientists take fresh looks at the data behind the Venus announcement, and add other datasets to the mix, the original claim of inexplicable amounts of phosphine is being called into doubt. And that’s a good thing, many scientists say.
“It’s exactly how science should work,” says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who studies Venus but was not involved in any of the phosphine papers. “It’s too early to say one way or the other what this detection means for Venus.”
Here’s a closer look at efforts to get from “if” to “true:”
The big claim
On September 14, astronomer Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales and colleagues reported that they had seen signs of phosphine in Venus’ clouds using two different telescopes (SN: 9/14/20). The phosphine seemed to be too abundant to exist without some kind of source replenishing it. That source could be strange microbes living in the clouds, or some weird unknown Venusian chemistry, the team said.
Greaves and colleagues first spotted phosphine with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and followed up with the powerful ALMA telescope array in Chile. But those ALMA data, and particularly the way they were handled, are now being called into question.
Reading the data: Real molecules or random wiggles?
The key Venus observations were spectra, or plots of the light coming from the planet in a range of wavelengths. Different molecules block or absorb light at specific wavelengths, so searching for dips in a spectrum can reveal the chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.
Phosphine showed up as a dip in Venus’ spectrum at about 1.12 millimeters, a wavelength of light that the molecule was thought to be absorbing. If Venus’ spectrum could be drawn as a straight line across all wavelengths of light, phosphine would make a deep valley at that wavelength.
But real data are never that easy to read. In real life, other sources — from Earth’s atmosphere to the inner workings of the telescope itself — introduce wiggles, or “noise,” into that nice straight line. The bigger the wiggles, the less scientists believe that the dips represent interesting molecules. Any particular dip might instead be just a random, extra-large wiggle.
That problem gets even worse when looking at a bright object such as Venus with a powerful telescope like ALMA, says Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Cordiner uses ALMA to observe other objects in the solar system, like Saturn’s moon Titan, but was not involved in the Venus work.
“The reason those bumps and wiggles are here at all is because of the intrinsic brightness of Venus, which makes it difficult to get a reliable measurement,” Cordiner says. “You could think of it as being dazzled by a bright light: If there’s a bright light in your vision, then your ability to pick out fainter details becomes diminished.”
So astronomers do a few different things to smooth out the data and let real signals shine through. One strategy is to write an equation that describes the wiggles caused by the noise. Scientists can then subtract that equation from the data to highlight the signal they’re interested in, like fuzzing out the background of a photo to let a portrait subject pop. That’s a standard practice, says Cordiner.
But it’s possible to write an equation that fits the noise too well. The simplest equation one could use is just a straight line, also known as a first-order polynomial, described by the equation y=mx+b. A second-order polynomial adds a term with x squared, third-order with x cubed, and so on.
Greaves and colleagues used a twelfth-order polynomial, or an equation with twelve terms (plus a constant, the +b in the equation), to describe the noise in their ALMA data.
“That was a red flag that this needed to be looked at in more detail, and that the results of that polynomial fitting could be untrustworthy,” says Cordiner. Going all the way out to the power of 12 could mean a researcher subtracts more noise than is truly random, allowing them to find things in the data that aren’t really there.
To see if the researchers were a little overzealous in their polynomial fitting, astrophysicist Ignas Snellen, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues reapplied the same noise reduction recipe to the ALMA data on Venus and found no statistically significant sign of phosphine, they report in a paper posted at arXiv.org on October 19.
Then the researchers tried the same noise filtering on other parts of Venus’ spectrum, where no interesting molecules should be found. They found five different signals of molecules that aren’t really there.
“Our analysis … shows that at least a handful of spurious features can be obtained with their method, and therefore [we] conclude that the presented analysis does not provide a solid basis to infer the presence of [phosphine] in the Venus atmosphere,” the team wrote.
Looking for other data — and getting no help yet
Meanwhile, scientists at ALMA discovered a separate, unspecified issue in the data that were used to detect the phosphine and took those data off the observatory’s public archive to scrutinize and reprocess, according to a statement from the European Southern Observatory, of which ALMA is a part.
“This does not happen very often,” says Martin Zwaan of the ESO ALMA Regional Center in Garching, Germany, but this isn’t a first. When issues are discovered, it is standard practice to reprocess the data. “In many cases, it does not affect the science outcome significantly,” Zwaan says. “In the case of the phosphine on Venus, this [outcome] has not been established yet.”
What can scientists do while they wait? One of the best ways to confirm the phosphine is to see an equivalent signal at a different wavelength in Venus’ spectrum. Unfortunately, the news isn’t great there either. In a paper to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomer Thérèse Encrenaz of the Paris Observatory and colleagues (including Greaves and some other authors of the original paper) looked at archived data from an infrared spectrograph called TEXES that operates in Hawaii. Those observations could have spotted phosphine in Venus’ cloud tops, a lower part of the sky than what ALMA could see.
Greaves and colleagues had approached Encrenaz to look for phosphine in infrared wavelengths before the original paper came out, but those observations were cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. So Encrenaz looked through data she had collected between 2012 and 2015 — and found nothing.
“At the level of the cloud tops, there is no [phosphine] at all,” Encrenaz says. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no phosphine higher up in the sky — there’s just no clear explanation for how it would get there. “The reasoning in the paper by Jane Greaves was that phosphine was coming from the clouds,” Encrenaz says. “So there is a big problem.”
‘This is just what science looks like.’
There are still ways for Venus’ phosphine to pull through. If it varies with time, for instance, it might be there some of the times that astronomers look and not at others. It’s too early to invoke that scenario, though, Cordiner says. “There’s no point of talking about the time variability of a signal if it isn’t there.”
But this is not a crisis, says Clara Sousa-Silva, an astrochemist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and a coauthor of the original paper. Other groups challenging the finding “is completely normal and what I expected (nay, hoped) would happen,” she wrote in an e-mail. “This is usually a phase of a project that I enjoy, and I am hoping people will realize this is just what science looks like.”
The silver lining in all of this is that it’s gotten people excited about Venus, says Byrne, who is a member of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group.
“These papers provide much value and a needed assessment of these extraordinary claims,” he says. “If nothing else, it has shone a light on just how little we understand about Venus. And the only way we get those answers is if we go to Venus.”
OP AARDE NEERGESTORTE METEORIET BLIJKT WONDERBAARLIJK VEEL ONGEREPTE BUITENAARDSE ORGANISCHE VERBINDINGEN TE BEVATTEN
OP AARDE NEERGESTORTE METEORIET BLIJKT WONDERBAARLIJK VEEL ONGEREPTE BUITENAARDSE ORGANISCHE VERBINDINGEN TE BEVATTEN
Vivian Lammerse
De steen werd zo’n 12 miljoen jaar geleden weggeworpen en blijkt te bestaan uit duizenden organische verbindingen.
Op 16 januari 2018 verscheen over het Midden-Westen van de Verenigde Staten een heldere vuurbol aan de nachtelijke hemel. De meteoor haastte zich door de lucht en landde vervolgens op een bevroren meer in de Amerikaanse staat Michigan. Wetenschappers en meteorietjagers wisten niet hoe snel ze zich naar de landingsplek moesten begeven om de brokstukken op te rapen, voordat de chemische samenstelling door blootstelling aan vloeibaar water zou worden aangetast. Ze kwamen op tijd. Want de neergestorte meteoriet geeft onderzoekers nu een ongekend inkijkje in een miljoenen jaren oude ruimterots.
Meteoroïde, meteoor of meteoriet? Meteorieten zijn simpel gezegd ruimterotsen die op aarde zijn gevallen. Wanneer rotsbrokken in de ruimte tegen elkaar botsen, kunnen er stukjes afbreken. Deze stukjes rots, meteoroïden genaamd, blijven door de ruimte zweven en komen soms op ramkoers te liggen met planeten of hun manen. Wanneer een meteoroïde door de atmosfeer van de aarde scheert en we hem vervolgens als een vuurbol of vallende ster waarnemen, wordt hij een meteoor genoemd. Alle stukjes van die meteoor die de reis door de atmosfeer overleven en op het aardoppervlak neerstorten, noemen we meteorieten.
Minder dan twee dagen na de landing vond meteorietjager Robert Ward het eerste stukje van de meteoriet op het bevroren oppervlak van Strawberry Lake, nabij de Amerikaanse plaats Hamburg. “Ik heb het hele weekend de meteoriet geanalyseerd, omdat ik zo benieuwd was wat voor soort meteoriet ik onder ogen had en waar hij precies uit bestond,” vertelt onderzoeker Jennika Greer. “Bij elke meteoriet die valt bestaat de kans dat het iets compleet nieuws en totaal onverwachts is.” De onderzoekers ontdekten dat de meteoriet een zogenoemde H4-chondriet is. En dat is zeldzaam. Slechts vier procent van alle meteorieten die op aarde inslaan, kunnen onder dit type geschaard worden.
Geluk De wetenschappers hadden geluk. Omdat de meteoriet neerkwam op een bevroren meer, behield hij zijn ongerepte aard. “Doordat het meer bevroren was is ie nooit in contact geweest met vloeibaar water,” vertelt onderzoeker Philipp Heck aan Scientias.nl. “Hierdoor is hij niet echt verontreinigd geraakt met terrestrische organische stoffen. Meteorieten lopen vaak scheurtjes op en eenmaal geland kan vloeibaar water gemakkelijk deze scheurtjes binnendringen. De Hamburg-meteoriet is echter één van de weinige meteorieten die dit lot heeft kunnen ontwijken. Dat is wat deze meteoriet zo opmerkelijk maakt.”
De betreffende meteoriet die in 2018 neerkwam op het Strawberry Lake in de Amerikaanse staat Michigan.
Afbeelding: Field Museum
De onderzoekers ontdekten dat de Hamburg-meteoriet een rijke voorraad buitenaardse organische verbindingen bevat. “Ik vond het verbazingwekkend hoeveel organische verbindingen er nog in deze meteoriet zaten, ondanks zijn thermische metamorfose,” zegt Heck. “Deze meteoriet bevat echt duizenden organische verbindingen. Dit soort organische verbindingen zijn waarschijnlijk door meteorieten aan de vroege aarde geleverd en hebben mogelijk bijgedragen aan de bouwstenen voor leven.”
Superpizza De gevonden verbindingen zijn waarschijnlijk zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar geleden in het moederlichaam gevormd, direct nadat deze het levenslicht zag. “Hij was op dat moment nog heet door aanwas en door het verval van radioactieve elementen die aanwezig waren in het vroege zonnestelsel,” legt Heck uit. Waarschijnlijk bevatte het moederlichaam miljoenen verbindingen die uiteindelijk, mede door temperatuurschommelingen, kelderden tot enkele duizenden. De onderzoekers gebruikten een breed scala aan analytische technieken en bestudeerden monsters uit verschillende delen van de meteoriet om een zo volledig mogelijk beeld van de ruimtebrok en de mineralen die hij bevat, te scheppen. “Je leert veel meer over een meteoriet als je verschillende stukjes ‘proeft’,” vertelt Greer. “Het is net een superpizza. Als je maar naar een klein stukje proeft, zou je kunnen denken dat de pizza alleen uit peperoni bestaat. Maar er kunnen ergens anders nog champignons en paprika’s te vinden zijn.”
Organische verbindingen De onderzoekers kwamen op die manier veel ongerepte, buitenaardse organische verbindingen op het spoor. “De organische verbindingen die we in de neergestorte meteoriet aantroffen, zijn in methanol oplosbare verbindingen,” gaat Heck verder. “De meest voorkomende zijn polaire koolwaterstoffen, gevolgd door zwavel- en stikstofhoudende verbindingen. We moeten echter nog veel werk verzetten om de verschillende verbindingen en processen die de organische stoffen hebben doorstaan, beter te begrijpen.”
Leven op aarde De meteoriet geeft ons een uniek inkijkje in de ongerepte organische verbindingen die ons meer zouden kunnen vertellen over de oorsprong van het leven. Veel wetenschappers denken namelijk dat meteorieten belangrijke mineralen naar de aarde gebracht kunnen hebben, waar uiteindelijk het leven zoals wij dat kennen uit voort is gekomen. “Ik denk dat het feit dat we alleen al in de Hamburg-meteoriet 2600 organische verbindingen hebben aangetroffen, aantoont dat veel meteorieten organische stoffen kunnen afleveren,” zegt Heck. “In onze studie troffen we een grote diversiteit aan organische stoffen aan. Er bestaan echter ook meteorieten, zoals de Murchison-meteoriet die 51 jaar geleden neerstortte, die veel minder heet zijn geweest en rijker zijn aan organische stoffen. Het zou goed kunnen dat zelfs ver voordat leven op aarde bestond, dergelijke meteorieten op aarde – en mogelijk ook op andere planeten – neerploften en bouwstenen voor leven afleverden.”
Meer over de Murchison-meteoriet De Murchison-meteorietis een grote meteoriet die in 1969 op de aarde neerplofte nabij Murchison in de staat Victoria in Australië. Het is een van de meest bestudeerde meteorieten vanwege zijn massa en omdat deze tot een groep meteorieten behoort die rijk is aan organische verbindingen. De Murchison-meteoriet – die ouder is dan de zon – blijkt namelijk organische moleculen, en dus bouwstenen van leven te bevatten. Hierdoor geeft de steen een goed beeld van hoe het zonnestelsel er in het begin uitzag.
Waar de Hamburg-meteoriet ooit het levenslicht zag? “We kwamen erachter dat de Hamburg-meteoriet ongeveer 12 miljoen jaar geleden uit zijn moederlichaam werd geworpen voordat hij in 2018 op het bevroren Strawberry Lake neerkletterde,” zegt Heck. “De meteoriet vond waarschijnlijk zijn oorsprong in de planetoïdengordel die zich ruwweg tussen de planeten Mars en Jupiter bevindt. We ontdekten dat de laatste belangrijke thermische gebeurtenis op het moederlichaam van de Hamburg-meteoriet ongeveer 3 miljard jaar geleden plaatsvond.”
Volgens de onderzoekers heeft de studie meerdere implicaties. “Het laat zien dat elke meteoriet die neerstort moet worden bestudeerd, want je weet maar nooit wat je gaat vinden,” zegt Heck. Bovendien hebben we nu een goed beeld van de zeldzame Hamburg-meteoriet, wat een belangrijk puzzelstukje toevoegt aan ons begrip over het zonnestelsel. “Het zal heel interessant zijn om deze in de toekomst te vergelijken met andere meteorieten die in vergelijkbaar detail zullen worden bestudeerd,” besluit Heck.
ALIENS KUNNEN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF HONDERDEN NABIJE PLANETEN SPOTTEN
ALIENS KUNNEN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF HONDERDEN NABIJE PLANETEN SPOTTEN
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Zouden ze – terwijl wij tot op heden vergeefs naar hen zoeken – al van ons bestaan weten?
Het is één van de vragen die zomaar in je op zou kunnen komen als je door dit nieuwe onderzoek bladert. In de studie wijzen wetenschappers 1004 nabije zonachtige sterren aan die mogelijk planeten bezitten die perfect zicht bieden op onze aarde. Eventuele aliens op deze planeten zouden niet alleen in staat moeten zijn om onze aarde te spotten, maar ook de signalen van leven in onze atmosfeer kunnen detecteren.
Het onderzoek “Wij stelden ons de vraag waar sterren gesitueerd moeten zijn, wil men vanuit de omgeving van deze sterren in staat zijn om de aarde voor de zon langs zien te bewegen,” legt onderzoeker Lisa Kaltenegger aan Scientias.nl uit. “We maakten daarbij gebruik van de sterrencatalogus van NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (kortweg TESS, red.).”
Op jacht naar exoplaneten TESS zoekt naar exoplaneten rond nabije sterren en maakt voor die zoektocht onder meer gebruik van data verzameld door de satelliet Gaia, die de afgelopen jaren de locatie en eigenschappen van talloze sterren nauwkeurig heeft vastgesteld. Door langdurig naar die sterren te turen, hoopt TESS er getuige van te zijn dat de helderheid van die sterren met enige regelmaat afneemt. Zo’n afname in helderheid kan vervolgens wijzen op de aanwezigheid van een planeet die – terwijl deze zijn baantjes rond de ster trekt – herhaaldelijk tussen de ster en TESS langs beweegt en daarbij een (klein) deel van het sterlicht tegenhoudt. Op deze manier zijn – voornamelijk door de gepensioneerde ruimtetelescoop Kepler – al heel wat exoplaneten ontdekt.
Op jacht naar de aarde En op vergelijkbare wijze zouden aliens dus ook onze aarde kunnen spotten. Voorwaarde is echter wel dat ze vanuit hun locatie in staat zijn om de aarde voor de zon langs te zien bewegen. Maar Kaltenegger en haar collega Joshua Pepper tonen nu met behulp van TESS’ sterrencatalogus aan dat er – alleen al in onze directe omgeving – meer dan 1000 sterren zijn die mogelijk planeten bezitten vanwaar een aardovergang zichtbaar zou moeten zijn. “Wij hebben ons gericht op de dichtstbijzijnde sterren die hooguit 326 lichtjaar van ons verwijderd zijn. Binnen die afstand hebben we 1004 van deze sterren gevonden. Sommige van deze sterren zijn slechts 28 lichtjaar van ons verwijderd, andere 326 lichtjaar. Dus licht heeft tussen de 28 en 326 jaar nodig om van die sterren naar ons of vanaf onze zon naar die sterren te reizen.”
Planeten Of er rond deze zonachtige sterren ook daadwerkelijk leefbare planeten te vinden zijn, is overigens nog onduidelijk. “Maar TESS zal deze sterren in 2021 gaan bestuderen en dan zullen we te weten komen of rond deze sterren planeten ter grootte van de aarde te vinden zijn en of ze ook echt aardachtig zijn.” Mochten dergelijke planeten bestaan en ook echt intelligent leven herbergen, dan zijn die intelligente aliens prima in staat om de aarde te spotten. “Ze kunnen er getuige van zijn hoe de aarde de zon één keer per jaar gedurende minstens 10 uur wat minder helder maakt,” aldus Kaltenegger.
Sporen van leven Slimme aliens zouden echter niet alleen in staat moeten zijn om de aarde te ontdekken. Vanaf hun planeten kunnen ze ook vaststellen dat er op die ‘Pale blue dot‘ waarschijnlijk leven is. “Zodra ze de aarde voor de zon langs zien bewegen, kunnen ze ook het zonlicht dat door de atmosfeer van de aarde sijpelt alvorens het hun telescopen – er even van uitgaande dat ze met telescopen naar ons kijken – bereikt, detecteren.” En uit het spectrum van dat licht kunnen ze afleiden waar die atmosfeer uit bestaat. En de samenstelling van de atmosfeer is grotendeels te herleiden naar het leven op aarde. Zo is het bijvoorbeeld aan organismen te danken dat de atmosfeer vandaag de dag (veel) zuurstof en methaan bevat. “Of ozon in combinatie met methaan,” stelt Kaltenegger.
Zoveel mogelijkheden Het idee dat er alleen al in onze nabijheid mogelijk heel veel planeten zijn vanwaar aliens ons kunnen spotten, is opwindend. “We weten dat grofweg elke vijfde ster een planeet herbergt die aardachtig kan zijn. Rekening houdend met die schatting zou je verwachten dat de 1004 sterren die we geïdentificeerd hebben, samen ongeveer 200 aardachtige planeten bezitten van waar we reeds gespot kunnen zijn. En dat is alleen nog maar in onze nabijheid – binnen 326 lichtjaar afstand. Ter vergelijking: onze Melkweg heeft een diameter van 100.000 lichtjaren.”
Contact Tegelijkertijd roept het echter ook een interessante vraag op. Want als er zoveel planeten zijn vanwaar aliens ons kunnen zien, waarom hebben ze dan nog geen contact gezocht? “Laten we die vraag eens omdraaien,” stelt Kaltenegger voor. “Waarom zouden wij andere beschavingen contacteren? En laten we daarbij even aannemen dat we uit heel veel beschavingen kunnen kiezen. Zou je dan gaan voor de beschavingen die geavanceerder zijn dan wij of de beschavingen die minder geavanceerd zijn? Als ik deze vraag tijdens mijn colleges stel, dan wil de meerderheid altijd een geavanceerdere beschaving contacteren.” Het lijkt niet ondenkbaar dat aliens er net zo over denken. En dan kun je je afvragen of wij – wanneer aliens voornemens zijn om contact te maken met een beschaving – wel hun eerste keus zijn. “Je kunt gemakkelijk beargumenteren dat wij nog niet zo’n geavanceerde beschaving zijn. We hebben weliswaar mensen naar de maan gestuurd, maar nog niet eens naar de dichtstbijzijnde planeet, laat staan naar de dichtstbijzijnde exoplaneet. Dus als wij zouden kunnen kiezen, zouden we een geavanceerdere beschaving contacteren. Waarom zouden we dan wel verwachten dat aliens – als ze bestaan – ons al gecontacteerd zouden hebben?”
Dat er nu een kaartje is met daarop de sterren die mogelijk planeten bezitten vanwaar aliens ons kunnen spotten, is wel belangrijk, zo stelt Kaltenegger. “Als wij op zoek willen gaan naar intelligent leven in het universum dat ons zou kunnen vinden en misschien toch wel contact wil leggen, dan is er nu een sterrenkaartje waarop we kunnen zien waar we onze zoektocht het beste kunnen aanvangen. En wie weet, misschien wil niet iedereen enkel geavanceerdere beschavingen contacteren?” Ten slotte kan het ook geen kwaad om eens even op een andere manier naar het universum te kijken. “Als we ons – normaal gesproken aardcentrische – gezichtspunt veranderen, ontdekken we altijd iets interessants.”
An image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows molecular gas clouds around the region where the Milky Way's central, supermassive black hole is known to exist. That region, highlighted in red, looks dark and silent.
There's a beast hiding at the center of the Milky Way, and it's barely moving.
This supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (SgrA*), has a mass 4.15 million times that of our sun. It first revealed itself to scientists as a mysterious source of radio waves from the galaxy's center back in 1931; but it wasn't until 2002 that researchers confirmed the radio waves were coming from something massive and compact like a black hole —— a feat that earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. Just days before the team learned about their Nobel on Oct. 6, another group learned something new about the black hole: It's spinning more slowly than a supermassive black hole should, moving less than (possibly far less than) 10% of the speed of light.
Black holes, despite their awesome power, are extraordinarily simple objects. All the distinguishing features of the matter that forms and feeds them gets lost in their infinitesimal singularities. So every black hole in the galaxy can be described with just three numbers: mass, spin and charge.
Once researchers locate a black hole in space, measuring the mass is pretty straightforward —— just check how strongly its mass is tugging on nearby objects. To get the mass of SgrA*, scientists just observed its influence on the "S-stars," a collection of the Milky Way's innermost stars that get accelerated to incredible speeds as they whip around the black hole in tight orbits. And researchers assume that, like most large objects in space, black holes don't have strong electromagnetic charges.
(Planet Earth, for example, has some positively charged particles and some negatively charged particles, but they cancel each other out across the whole planet. The other planets and known stars work the same way. Researchers assume black holes are similarly neutral in charge.)
That leaves spin as the remaining measurable feature of SgrA*, and now researchers think they have evidence that the supermassive is an unusually slow spinner.
Spin matters for two main reasons.
First, as Live Science previously reported, a black hole's event horizon —— the shadowy region within which not even light can escape the monster's gravity —— grows as it gains more mass, reaching further and further from the singularity of the black hole. But as the black hole spins faster and faster, the event horizon shrinks. Very fast-spinning black holes should have smaller event horizons than slower-moving black holes of the same mass.
Second, spin is thought to play a role in the two white-hot jets of matter that sometimes launch into space at incredible speeds from a black hole's axis of rotation. Most Milky Way-sized galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center, and often these galaxies have enormous jets visible bursting from their cores.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured an enormous relativistic jet, in blue, emerging from the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. (The giant spiral galaxy itself appears as a bright point in the image, with the black hole too small to see.) The black hole's second jet extends in the other direction, and is hidden from view. (Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope/NASA)
But the Milky Way has no visible jets. That on its own implies that SgrA* probably isn't spinning very fast. Researchers think that a fast-spinning black hole stirs up the disk of accreting matter whirling just outside its event horizon, accelerating some of that matter to burst out as a jet. What scientists know about the quiet SgrA* already suggests it either has a small accretion disk, is barely spinning, or both.
In a new paper, a team of researchers attempted to measure SgrA*'s spin. Once again, they relied on the visible S-stars to learn what their big dark companion is doing.
Right now, the researchers found, the S-stars circle SgrA* on two orbital planes. If you were to draw their orbits around the black hole and view the system from the side, they'd form an X. SgrA* must be spinning at a rate less than 10% of the speed of light, they found, because any faster movement would have knocked the S-stars out of their X-shaped orbital planes by now.
That's because those orbits, the researchers wrote, are likely as old as the S-stars themselves. The stars still follow the orbits they were born with. If SgrA* were spinning very fast, that wouldn't be the case.
When heavy objects spin very fast in space, that spin influences anything in orbit around them. Over time, that massive object tugs on the orbits of those smaller objects, making them line up more and more with the rotating object's own direction of spin. The slower the spin is, the weaker the effect, and the longer it takes for those objects to line up in orbit around their hefty chief.
The stars are old enough that the spin should have noticeably tugged on them if it were very strong. With their orbits as pristine as the day they were born, the S-stars strongly suggest an upper speed limit for SgrA* at just one-tenth the speed of light. And it may be spinning much slower.
This result also would explain why SgrA* doesn't seem to have any visible jets, they wrote. A first close-up image of SgrA*'s shadow, expected to come in the near future from another research team, should help confirm this, they wrote.
Donald Trump has been dropping intriguing hints about his knowledge of UFOs lately - but will he use a big announcement to swing the election?Credit: Alamy Live News
Rising speculation about an imminent UFO disclosure isn’t being driven by internet gossip, but by hints dropped by President Trump himself.
Earlier this month on a Fox News show the president promised to take a "good, strong look" at UFOs, before launching into a statement about the formidable power of the US military, and weapons that he hoped would never have to be used.
Given the conspiracy theory that the Space Force was set up to counter an alien threat, the president’s bullish comments will only fuel the rumours about a real-life War of the Worlds.
The truth is out there
The president went further in an interview on his son’s TV show, Triggered.
When asked about Roswell – where UFO hunters believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947 – he cryptically responded: "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting", adding "I'll have to think about that one" when asked if he’d consider declassifying it.
Mannequin depicting an alien at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center New Mexico - arguably the most famous alleged UFO siting took place in the city in 1947Credit: Alamy
What makes these quotes even more extraordinary is the fact that less than three years ago the official position of the US government was that nobody was interested in UFOs and nobody was investigating.
UFO enthusiasts didn’t believe the denials and this time they were right. A series of bombshell revelations has exposed the shocking truth about America’s UFO secrets.
Warp drives and wormholes
It started in December 2017 with a New York Times exclusive, revealing the existence of a shadowy Pentagon project called AATIP – Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – set up years earlier by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
AATIP is still shrouded in mystery, but in a letter to Congress the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that this multi-million dollar programme had conducted research into the sort of theoretical physics that would be needed for interstellar travel, including anti-gravity, warp drives and wormholes.
The Department of Defense claimed that AATIP focused on "next-generation aerospace threats" and it’s true there’s huge concern about things like hypersonic missiles and drone swarms controlled by Artificial Intelligence.
An intercontinental ballistic missile launching in Russia - the US set up AATIP in response to new aerospace threatsCredit: AP:Associated Press
But one of the AATIP research papers related to the Drake equation – used by astronomers to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
The implication was clear: if AATIP was about advanced aerospace threats, it wasn’t threats from Russia or China, but from somewhere much further away...
Verified footage of UFOs
The next bombshell was the release of three videos showing US Navy jets chasing UFOs.
Several of the pilots have spoken on the record about these sightings and when quizzed about these mid-air encounters President Trump praised the pilots, saying: "Some of them really see things that are a little bit different than in the past, so we’re going to see, but we’ll watch it".
A still from a video of a US Navy pilot chasing an 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAP)Credit: AFP or licensors
In another interview he said: "That’s a hell of a video", adding: "I just wonder if it’s real."
It was real. On April 27 the Pentagon issued a press release confirming that all three films "were indeed Navy videos", adding that the phenomena observed remain "unidentified".
Aliens deactivating nukes
It turned out that there is – and has been for many years – an ongoing series of incursions into restricted military airspace, and over sensitive military installations.
It’s even claimed that UFOs have hovered over nuclear bases and deactivated the weapons, in what UFO hunters believe is a chilling warning to the human race.
American nuclear missiles have allegedly been deactivated by UFOs
In response to all this, the US Navy issued instructions to its pilots, telling them what to do if they encounter a UFO.
But they refuse to reveal what these instructions say – they’re classified.
Senior political figures have demanded action. Two powerful Senate bodies, the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee have taken a particular interest and classified briefings have taken place, though the senators involved have remained tight-lipped.
"I'm not going to get into any of the contents of the briefing. It was a classified briefing," was all Mark Warner – Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee – said, when quizzed by a reporter.
Senate Armed Services Committee member Jeanne Shaheen went a bit further when she admitted: "We have been briefed. It was a classified briefing so I'm not allowed to talk about it.
"But if you were to ask me personally do I believe there are UFOs, I think that there are events that have happened that have not been explained adequately".
UK kept in the dark
Whatever these senators were told about UFOs by the military intelligence briefers must have spooked them.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee published the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, a section had been inserted under the heading ‘Advanced Aerial Threats’, in which they demanded a report on the phenomenon from the Director of National Intelligence.
Navy pilots have encountered UAPs on more than one occasion Credit: US Department of Defense
In response to the committee’s demand that spy chiefs and the military get to the bottom of the UFO mystery, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist authorized the creation of a new group called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
Led by the Navy and with involvement from the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, no details of this shadowy unit will be made public, though a Pentagon press release dated August 14 offered some intriguing clues, when it stated: "The Department of Defense established the UAPTF to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.
What does the United States know about UFOs that the United Kingdom doesn’t know?
Nick Pope
"The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security".
People who’ve been following developments closely have noticed that the word ‘threat’ crops up repeatedly in official statements and documents about UFOs.
So what does the United States know about UFOs that the United Kingdom doesn’t know?
All this high-powered activity suggests the Americans are aware of some profound truth about UFOs.
Nick Pope investigated aliens for the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s
But it’s not being shared with allies. The so-called Special Relationship doesn’t seem to extend to UFOs, which is unfortunate if there is a threat.
Officially at least, the UK is no longer researching and investigating UFOs.
The Ministry of Defence project I ran in the Nineties was axed at the end of 2009, despite our having had some influence over US policy: it was our rebranding of ‘UFO’ to ‘UAP’ in the Nineties that finally got the subject taken more seriously, and a US press officer recently acknowledged that the term UAP "was borrowed from the United Kingdom".
But the UK desperately needs to get back in the game, reopen investigations, and exchange information with the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.
I formally call on the Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace, to take these actions, in consultation with his US opposite number Mark Esper.
Will Trump reveal the truth?
Back in the US, as the election approaches, interest in UFOs is reaching fever pitch.
And celebrities are getting in on the act too, with pop princess Miley Cyrus revealing she had her own UFO encounter in California, confessing to being "chased down" and then making "eye contact" with an alien being.
Miley Cyrus is one of many celebrities who claim to have seen aliens in the flesh
Hers is the latest in a long line of celebrity saucer sightings, dating back to John Lennon seeing a UFO in New York in 1974.
Robbie Williams – who I met at a UFO conference in 2008 – has gone skywatching at the infamous Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, where numerous UFO sightings and paranormal events have been reported.
Despite the intense speculation, I don’t know whether or not President Trump will make any announcement about UFOs in the run-up to the election, or in his second term, if he wins.
And if Trump loses, we have yet to learn what Joe Biden would do – though interestingly, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, so she may already have been briefed.
The bombshell UFO sightings that rocked the US
As speculation about imminent UFO revelations reaches fever pitch, a series of bombshell sightings has rocked the US.
In January 2015, US Navy fighter jets from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had a series of spectacular mid-air encounters with UFOs off the coast of Florida. As the F-18 Super Hornets chased the mystery objects, the elite military pilots captured the events on infrared cameras. On the soundtracks of two separate videos, the Top Guns can be heard whooping with excitement as they track the UFOs at incredible speed. The Pentagon confirmed these videos were real in April 2020 when they put them on a government website, along with another video taken in 2004 by a Navy pilot with the USS Nimitz task group, who chased a UFO described as being shaped like a Tic Tac. The two videos are named GOFAST and GIMBAL.
In February 2018, the Federal Aviation Administration released recordings of shocked commercial airline pilots describing how they encountered a UFO at 37,000 feet over the state of Arizona. The pilots described an incredibly bright light that wasn't an aircraft, and a subsequent investigation seemed to rule out military activity or weather balloons. Declassified UK Ministry of Defence UFO files contain several accounts of terrifying near-misses between airlines and UFOs, and the Civil Aviation Authority also has casefiles on such incidents.
In September 2020, cars were literally stopping on a New Jersey highway as astonished drivers honked their horns and got out of their cars, pointing and yelling in shock at the sight of a huge, saucer-shaped UFO. A video went viral on TikTok, but skeptics claimed that the mystery object was an airship, causing a furious row which is still raging. The video has since been posted multiple times on YouTube, with some of the clips having been viewed over a million times, showing the immense public interest in this subject.
In August 2014 in Houston, Texas, multiple photos and videos were taken showing a mystery object in the night sky. There were numerous independent witnesses and the pictures showed a disc-shaped craft with a ring of blue lights around the edge. The story even made the evening news as panicked locals heard the story and called in with details of their own sightings.
The island state of Hawaii has been the site of numerous UFO sightings over the years and some conspiracy theorists even think there's an alien base somewhere in the mountains. Ancient astronaut theorists believe that in the distant past, visiting extraterrestrials were worshipped as gods. In October 2016 a tourist was astounded when he captured a classic disc-shaped UFO hovering over the mountains at Waikane. The picture was passed to the Mutual UFO Network, a UFO-hunting organization that investigates thousands of sightings each year.
Aliens would certainly be the ultimate October Surprise, but whether or not we get official disclosure, government, military and intelligence community figures in the US have finally woken up to the fact that UFOs are a serious national security issue.
As for what happens next – watch this space.
Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he ran its UFO project.
The left image shows OSIRIS-REx’s collector head hovering over the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) after the probe’s robotic arm moved it into the proper position for capture. The right image shows the collector head secured onto the capture ring in the SRC. Both images were captured by OSIRIS-REx’s StowCam camera. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin)
NASA's pioneering OSIRIS-REx probe has bagged up its precious asteroid sample for return to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx has finished stowing the bits of the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu that it snagged last Tuesday (Oct. 20), successfully locking the material into the spacecraft's return capsule, mission team members announced Thursday (Oct. 29).
And the sample appears to be substantial — far heftier than the 2.1 ounces (60 grams) the mission had set as a target, team members said. Indeed, OSIRIS-REx collected so much material on Oct. 20 that its sampling head couldn't close properly; the head's sealing mylar flap was wedged open in places by protruding Bennu pebbles.
The OSIRIS-REx team noticed that issue last week when examining photos of the head and its collected sample; flakes of escaped asteroid material drifted through the frames. To minimize the amount lost, the team decided to expedite the precise and complex stowing procedure, which was supposed to happen next week.
So, over the course of 36 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday (Oct. 27 and Oct. 28), engineers directed OSIRIS-REx to deposit the sampling head, which sat at the end of the probe's robotic arm, into the return capsule; tug on the head to make sure it was secured properly; sever connections with the robotic arm; and lock up the return capsule via the locking of two latches.
This was all done while OSIRIS-REx was about 205 million miles (330 million kilometers) from Earth, meaning it took 18.5 minutes for each command to reach OSIRIS-REx, and another 18.5 minutes for each update from the probe to come back down to Earth.
"We wanted to only attempt stow one time, and we wanted to make sure we were successful," OSIRIS-REx mission operations manager Sandra Freund, of Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, said during a NASA news conference Thursday. "And we definitely were."
The change of plans required a last-minute reallocation of time on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), the system of radio telescopes that the agency uses to communicate with its far-flung probes. Because the stow operation was so important and so involved, OSIRIS-REx needed a large block of continuous DSN time, which other NASA missions sacrificed for the greater good.
It's unclear exactly how much asteroid material now sits in OSIRIS-REx's return capsule, which will come down to Earth in September 2023. The team canceled a planned post-sampling weighing procedure that would have involved spinning the probe, because this maneuver would have resulted in more sample loss. (Moving the arm — to photograph the sample and conduct the stow operation, for example — imparted grain-liberating acceleration, mission team members explained. So they wanted to minimize such motions.)
But there's definitely a lot of asteroid material on board, said mission principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.
The sampling operation on Oct. 20 went extremely well, Lauretta said, and the head penetrated deep into Bennu's surface — perhaps 19 inches (48 centimeters) or more. The team is confident that OSIRIS-REx pretty much filled its sampling head that day, meaning it likely backed away from Bennu with about 4.4 lbs. (2 kilograms) of collected material.
The losses over the ensuing days appear minimal by comparison — probably "tens of grams" in total, Lauretta said. And recent photos of the sampling head showed that it was still packed. Mission team members could only see 17% of the head's volume in those photos, but they estimate that about 14.1 ounces (400 g) of Bennu material is jammed into that space, Lauretta said.
If that estimate is accurate, and if the 17% slice is representative of the entire sampling head, then OSIRIS-REx may have held onto more than 4.4 lbs. (2 kg) of sample. Lauretta's overall prediction is more measured than that, but it's still decidedly bullish.
"I believe we still have hundreds of grams of material in the sample collector head — probably over a kilogram, easily," Lauretta said during today's news conference.
That would be great news. Such a large amount would allow lots of research groups to study the Bennu dirt and rock, and to perform a wide variety of experiments with the pristine cosmic sample. As an example, Lauretta pointed to organic chemistry — specifically, analyses involving sugars.
Sugars are "expected to be present in very low abundances [on asteroids like Bennu], requiring several grams of sample to extract them from," Lauretta said. "And we thought that would not be feasible with the 15-gram allocation but something that does open up with the larger mass available for analysis."
(The OSIRIS-REx science team gets to analyze up to 25% of the returned sample. If the total sample ended up being the targeted 60 grams, the team would get to study up to 15 grams of it.)
If all goes according to plan, such experiments will reveal a great deal about the solar system's early days and the role that asteroids like Bennu may have played in helping life get going on Earth, by delivering lots of water and carbon-containing organic chemicals. Shedding light on such big questions is the chief goal of the $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission, which launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in December 2018
The mission's next big steps involve gearing up for the return trip (though engineers are also trying to figure out if they can somehow get a rough mass estimate of the now-stowed sample). Orbital dynamics dictate that OSIRIS-REx must start heading for home between early March and May, and the current plan is to target the earliest part of that window, team members said today.
OSIRIS-REx is NASA's first asteroid-sampling mission, but it's not the first one in history. Japan's Hayabusa mission delivered small bits of the stony asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010, and that probe's successor, Hayabusa2, is scheduled to return a sample of the carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu this coming December.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.
Video of rocket body fragments captured over Haleakalā by an AMOS system camera.
Courtesy: AMOS Haleakalā
Thousands were mesmerized by a mysterious flurry of lights that appeared to float across Hawaiʻi’s evening sky on Saturday, October 24. Photos and videos of the string of lights flooded social media, leaving many to believe the sighting could be anything from a spaceship carrying extra terrestrials to a meteor shower.
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy Professor Richard Wainscoat believes onlookers witnessed the reentry of a spent rocket booster used to launch Venezualan satellite, Venesat-1, back in 2008. The used rocket has been circling Earth since the launch, slowly losing altitude due to friction with the tenuous atmosphere in low-Earth orbit. On Saturday, the booster made its final orbits.
Reentry captured by ATLAS, an asteroid impact early warning system on Haleakalā. (Photo credit: ATLAS/Larry Denneau)
Wainscoat works with the Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakalā, and said the reentry was predicted to occur over the Atlantic Ocean at 7:24 p.m. HST on October 24. He added that the object stayed in orbit a little longer than expected, and finally burned up in the atmosphere over Hawaiʻi, an occurrence that does not happen very often.
“Seeing a reentry is relatively rare for a specific location like Hawaiʻi, since we can only see the reentry if it occurs relatively close to us,” Wainscoat explained. Reentries are a common occurrence, with typically one to two per week taking place somewhere around the Earth. According to Wainscoat, although it’s possible for large solid pieces to survive reentry, most of the object will burn up, and any surviving debris will usually fall in the ocean or in uninhabited locations.
The reentry was also spotted by many of the sky-monitoring cameras at the Maunakea and Haleakalā observatories. The Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope cloud camera on Maunakea captured an image of the streaking debris, as did the all-sky monitor on the ATLAS telescope on Haleakalā. AMOS systems on Haleakalā and Maunakea captured the rocket re-entry, as well. The observations by AMOS are used for observations and analysis of meteors and fireballs to help astronomers understand the structure of the solar system.
Telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunakea also play a critical role in tracking potentially hazardous asteroids and assist with rapid follow-up observations to verify an asteroid’s orbit and if it poses any threat to Earth.
AMOS observatory on Haleakalā spotted disintegrating debris of the rocket booster
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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.
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