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.
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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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
10-05-2014
The view from Greece: Meteor? Flare? UFO?
The view from Greece: Meteor? Flare? UFO?
Orange images in the sky over Lake Ontario, photographed from Braddock Bay in Greece.(Photo11: Jim Montanus/Montanus Photography)
Jim Montanus stood on a dock at Braddock Bay Marina Wednesday night making long-exposure photographs of a clear dark-blue sky set with twinkling stars being overrun from the west by a dense mass of clouds.
“It was a very dramatic situation with that front coming in. I was all excited about the photo,” said Montanus, an experienced photographer now trying to make a living with his cameras.
When he checked the preview window on his digital SLR to see how the images looked, he was stunned to see something that hadn’t been visible to the naked eye: Two orange objects, shaped like an inverted cone or, if you prefer, a disk with a conical.
“I was looking at these shapes on the back of my cameras and saying what IS it? I don’t believe in UFOs, but, you know, it’s just one of those things. It was just cool.”
Montanus, who lives in Greece, was standing on a dock that juts out into the bay toward the northwest, and the objects were in that direction. The frames in which they appear were recorded at 9:34 pm, he said.
He was shooting 15-second exposures, so his camera recorded images that weren’t easily seen unaided and Montanus thus wasn’t able to detect whether the objects were moving. But at least one of them showed up in different places in several different frames, suggesting movement.
He pulled magnified images from two different frames and superimposed them on one of the shots, and posted the image Thursday morning on Facebook and Twitter, where they are drawing drawing considerable attention.
Most people who have posted their thoughts about the images think they depict meteors. Montanus, though, isn’t convinced. “It didn’t look like a meteor to me. How a meteor would show up on the camera would be like a stream of light. These were weird, bizarre shapes. I said ‘Look at it, it’s got a parachute or something on it.’ If anything looked like a UFO, it would be that.”
Montanus does not think the objects were an artifact created by his camera or lengthy exposure, though he still researching that possibility.
The Democrat and Chronicle has done some fact-checking as well, with no explanation found yet.
The Monroe County 911 emergency communication center said it had no calls about lights in the sky Wednesday night. The National Weather Service in Buffalo also said it had no record of calls about the aerial phenomenon.
It is true there has been plenty of meteor activity lately, including one that was seen Sunday by people in the Toronto area. A known shower, the Eta Aquarid, was taking place Wednesday, but in the pre-dawn hours, not just after sunset. And as of 11:30 am Thursday, the American Meteor Society website has no reports of sighting in this part of the country.
As Montanus noted, both the U.S. and Canadian military engage in training in restricted airspace over Lake Ontario. At times they drop flares, which lakeshore residents sometimes spot from afar. But officials at the Federal Aviation Administration Cleveland air traffic control center who are notified when the U.S. military is planning to use the restricted airspace over Lake Ontario said their log showed no activity Wednesday night.
The U.S. Coast Guard in Buffalo said that agency was neither training not engaged in any activity Wednesday night that could account for the images Montanus recorded.
Officials with the Canadian air traffic control agency did not respond to a question as to whether the military there might have been responsible for the lights. But as the day wore on Thursday, various other parties came forward with more possible explanations. Lens glare related to the lights on the dock where Montanus stood or some other source, several people said. Chinese lanterns, those paper globes light by candles that rise and float through the air. Light reflecting off a passing airplane or satellite. Light from the surface refracting through the atmosphere.
With his father, Neil, who was a renowned photographer for Eastman Kodak Co., Jim Montanus has set up Montanus Photography, filled with high-quality images, and as he told the Democrat and Chronicle for a story published last month, he is thinking about opening a studio to display his work.
But he never expected to add a photograph of strange lights in the sky to his portfolio. “I was really freaking out when I took it,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
NASA telescopes coordinate best-ever flare observations
NASA telescopes coordinate best-ever flare observations
This combined image shows the March 29, 2014, X-class flare as seen through the eyes of different observatories. SDO is on the bottom/left, which helps show the position of the flare on the sun. The darker orange square is IRIS data. The red rectangular inset is from Sacramento Peak. The violet spots show the flare's footpoints from RHESSI. Credit: Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
On March 29, 2014, an X-class flare erupted from the right side of the sun… and vaulted into history as the best-observed flare of all time. The flare was witnessed by four different NASA spacecraft and one ground-based observatory — three of which had been fortuitously focused in on the correct spot as programmed into their viewing schedule a full day in advance.
To have a record of such an intense flare from so many observatories is unprecedented. Such research can help scientists better understand what catalyst sets off these large explosions on the sun. Perhaps we may even some day be able to predict their onset and forewarn of the radio blackouts solar flares can cause near Earth — blackouts that can interfere with airplane, ship and military communications.
“This is the most comprehensive data set ever collected by NASA’s Heliophysics Systems Observatory,” said Jonathan Cirtain, project scientist for Hinode at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “Some of the spacecraft observe the whole sun all the time, but three of the observatories had coordinated in advance to focus on a specific active region of the sun. We need at least a day to program in observation time and the target — so it was extremely fortunate that we caught this X-class flare.”
The telescopes involved were: NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS; NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO; NASA’s Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI; the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hinode; and the National Solar Observatory’s Dunn Solar Telescope located at Sacramento Peak in New Mexico. Numerous other spacecraft provided additional data about what was happening on the sun during the event and what the effects were at Earth. NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and the joint European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory both watched the great cloud of solar material that erupted off the sun with the flare, an event called a coronal mass ejection. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations GOES satellite tracked X-rays from the flare, and other spacecraft measured the effects of the flare as it came toward Earth.
This event was particularly exciting for the IRIS team, as this was the first X-class flare ever observed by IRIS. IRIS launched in June 2013 to zoom in on layers of the sun, called the chromosphere and transition region, through which all the energy and heat of a flare must travel as it forms. This region, overall is called the interface region, has typically been very hard to untangle — but on March 29, IRIS provided scientists with the first detailed view of what happens in this region during a flare.
Coordinated observations are crucial to understanding such eruptions on the sun and their effects on space weather near Earth. Where terrestrial weather watching involves thousands of sensors and innumerable thermometers, solar observations still rely on a mere handful of telescopes. The instruments on the observatories are planned so that each shows a different aspect of the flare at a different heights off the sun’s surface and at different temperatures. Together the observatories can paint a three-dimensional picture of what happens during any given event on the sun.
In this case, the Dunn Solar Telescope helped coordinate the space-based observatories. Lucia Kleint is the principal investigator of a NASA-funded grant at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute grant to coordinate ground-based and space-based flare observations. While she and her team were hunting for flares during ten observing days scheduled at Sacramento Peak, they worked with the Hinode and IRIS teams a day in advance to coordinate viewing of the same active region at the same time. Active regions are often the source of solar eruptions, and this one was showing intense magnetic fields that moved in opposite directions in close proximity — a possible harbinger of a flare. However, researchers do not yet know exactly what conditions will lead to a flare so this was a best guess, not a guarantee.
But the guess paid off. In the space of just a few minutes, the most comprehensive flare data set of all time had been collected. Now scientists are hard at work teasing out a more detailed picture of how a flare starts and peaks — an effort that will help unravel the origins of these little-understood explosions on the sun.
Astronomers create first realistic virtual universe
Astronomers create first realistic virtual universe
This still frame from the Illustris simulation is centered on the most massive galaxy cluster existing today. The blue-purple filaments show the location of dark matter, which attracts normal matter gravitationally and helps galaxies and clusters to clump together. Bubbles of red, orange and white show where gas is being blasted outward by supernovae or jets from supermassive black holes. Credit: Illustris Collaboration
Move over, Matrix — astronomers have done you one better. They have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called “Illustris.” Illustris can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution.
“Until now, no single simulation was able to reproduce the universe on both large and small scales simultaneously,” says lead author Mark Vogelsberger (MIT/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who conducted the work in collaboration with researchers at several institutions, including the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany.
These results are being reported in the May 8th issue of the journal Nature.
Previous attempts to simulate the universe were hampered by lack of computing power and the complexities of the underlying physics. As a result those programs either were limited in resolution, or forced to focus on a small portion of the universe. Earlier simulations also had trouble modeling complex feedback from star formation, supernova explosions, and supermassive black holes.
Illustris employs a sophisticated computer program to recreate the evolution of the universe in high fidelity. It includes both normal matter and dark matter using 12 billion 3-D “pixels,” or resolution elements.
The team dedicated five years to developing the Illustris program. The actual calculations took 3 months of “run time,” using a total of 8,000 CPUs running in parallel. If they had used an average desktop computer, the calculations would have taken more than 2,000 years to complete.
The computer simulation began a mere 12 million years after the Big Bang. When it reached the present day, astronomers counted more than 41,000 galaxies in the cube of simulated space. Importantly, Illustris yielded a realistic mix of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and football-shaped elliptical galaxies. It also recreated large-scale structures like galaxy clusters and the bubbles and voids of the cosmic web. On the small scale, it accurately recreated the chemistries of individual galaxies.
Since light travels at a fixed speed, the farther away astronomers look, the farther back in time they can see. A galaxy one billion light-years away is seen as it was a billion years ago. Telescopes like Hubble can give us views of the early universe by looking to greater distances. However, astronomers can’t use Hubble to follow the evolution of a single galaxy over time.
“Illustris is like a time machine. We can go forward and backward in time. We can pause the simulation and zoom into a single galaxy or galaxy cluster to see what’s really going on,” says co-author Shy Genel of the CfA.
M. Vogelsberger, S. Genel, V. Springel, P. Torrey, D. Sijacki, D. Xu, G. Snyder, S. Bird, D. Nelson, L. Hernquist. Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation. Nature, 2014; 509 (7499): 177 DOI: 10.1038/nature13316
This is a map showing the structure and contour of the Bow City crater. Color variation shows meters above sea level. Image courtesy Alberta Geographic Survey/University of Alberta.
From SpaceDaily by Staff Writers Edmonton, Canada (SPX) May 09, 2014
The discovery of an ancient ring-like structure in southern Alberta suggests the area was struck by a meteorite large enough to leave an eight-kilometre-wide crater, producing an explosion strong enough to destroy present-day Calgary, say researchers from the Alberta Geological Survey and University of Alberta.
The first hints about the impact site near the southern Alberta hamlet of Bow City were discovered by a geologist with the Alberta Geological Survey and studied by a U of A team led by Doug Schmitt, Canada Research Chair in Rock Physics.
Time and glaciers have buried and eroded much of the evidence, making it impossible at this point to say with full certainty the ring-like structure was caused by a meteorite impact, but that’s what seismic and geological evidence strongly suggests, said Schmitt, a professor in the Faculty of Science and co-author of a new paper about the discovery.
“We know that the impact occurred within the last 70 million years, and in that time about 1.5 km of sediment has been eroded. That makes it really hard to pin down and actually date the impact.”
Erosion has worn away all but the “roots” of the crater, leaving a semicircular depression eight kilometres across with a central peak. Schmitt says that when it formed, the crater likely reached a depth of 1.6 to 2.4 km-the kind of impact his graduate student Wei Xie calculated would have had devastating consequences for life in the area.
“An impact of this magnitude would kill everything for quite a distance,” he said. “If it happened today, Calgary (200 km to the northwest) would be completely fried and in Edmonton (500 km northwest), every window would have been blown out. Something of that size, throwing that much debris in the air, potentially would have global consequences; there could have been ramifications for decades.”
The impact site was first discovered in 2009 by geologist Paul Glombick, who at the time was working on a geological map of the area for the Alberta Geological Survey. Glombick relied on existing geophysical log data from the oil and gas industry when he discovered a bowl-shaped structure.
The Alberta Geological Survey contacted the U of A and Schmitt to explore further, peeking into the earth by analyzing seismic data donated by industry. Schmitt’s student, Todd Brown, later confirmed a crater-like structure.
The research team’s paper about the discovery was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science in an early online release.
Nearest bright hypervelocity star found: Speeding at 1 million mph, it probes black hole and dark matter
Nearest bright ‘hypervelocity star’ found: Speeding at 1 million mph, it probes black hole and dark matter
An astrophysicist-artist's conception of a hypervelocity star speeding away from the visible part of a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way and into the invisible halo of mysterious "dark matter" that surrounds the galaxy's visible portions. University of Utah researcher Zheng Zheng and colleagues in the U.S. and China discovered the closest bright hypervelocity star yet found. Credit: Ben Bromley, University of Utah
A University of Utah-led team discovered a “hypervelocity star” that is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest of 20 found so far. Speeding at more than 1 million mph, the star may provide clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the halo of mysterious “dark matter” surrounding the galaxy, astronomers say.
“The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy — especially its center and the dark matter halo,” says Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study published recently in Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team of U.S. and Chinese astronomers.
“We can’t see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star,” Zheng says. “We gain insight from the star’s trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy.”
In the past decade, astronomers have found about 20 of these odd stars. Hypervelocity stars appear to be remaining pairs of binary stars that once orbited each other and got too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. Intense gravity from the black hole — which has the mass of 4 million stars like our sun — captures one star so it orbits the hole closely, and slingshots the other on a trajectory headed beyond the galaxy.
Zheng and his colleagues discovered the new hypervelocity star while conducting other research into stars with the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, or LAMOST, located at the Xinglong Observing Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, about 110 miles northeast of Beijing.
LAMOST boasts a 13.1-foot-wide aperture and houses 4,000 optical fibers, which capture “spectra” or light-wavelength readings from as many as 4,000 stars at once. A star’s spectrum reveals information about its velocity, temperature, luminosity and size.
LAMOST’s main purpose is to study the distribution of stars in the Milky Way, and thus the galaxy’s structure. The new hypervelocity star — named LAMOST-HVS1 — stood out because its speed is almost three times the usual star’s 500,000-mph pace through space: 1.4 million mph relative to our solar system. Its speed is about 1.1 million mph relative to the speed of the center of the Milky Way.
Despite being the closest hypervelocity star, it nonetheless is 249 quadrillion miles from Earth. (In U.S. usage, a quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000 miles or 10 to the 15th power, or 1 million billion).
“If you’re looking at a herd of cows, and one starts going 60 mph, that’s telling you something important,” says Ben Bromley, a University of Utah physics and astronomy professor who was not involved with Zheng’s study. “You may not know at first what that is. But for hypervelocity stars, one of their mysteries is where they come from — and the massive black hole in our galaxy is implicated.”
The Down-Low on a Fast and Loose Star
A cluster of known hypervelocity stars, including the new one, is located above the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, and their distribution in the sky suggests they originated near the galaxy’s center, Zheng says.
The diameter of the visible part of our spiral-shaped galaxy is at least 100,000 light years, or 588 quadrillion miles. Zheng says that when the halo of dark matter is added, the estimated diameter is roughly 1 million light years, or 5,880 quadrillion miles.
Scientists know dark matter halos surround galaxies because the way their gravity affects the motion of a galaxy’s visible stars and gas clouds. Researchers say only about 5 percent of the universe is made of visible matter, 27 percent is invisible and yet-unidentified dark matter and 68 percent is even more mysterious dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe. By traveling through the dark matter halo, the new hypervelocity star’s speed and trajectory can reveal something about the mysterious halo.
Our solar system is roughly 26,000 light years or 153 quadrillion miles from the center of the galaxy — more than halfway out from the center of the visible disk.
By comparison, the new hypervelocity star is about 62,000 light years or 364 quadrillion miles from the galactic center, beyond as well as above the galaxy’s visible disk. It is about 42,400 light years from Earth, or about 249 quadrillion miles away.
As far as that is — the star has a magnitude of about 13, or 630 times fainter than stars that barely can be seen with the naked eye — it nevertheless “is the nearest, second-brightest, and one of the three most massive hypervelocity stars discovered so far,” Zheng says.
It is nine times more massive than our sun, which makes it very similar to another hypervelocity star known as HE 0437-5439, discovered in 2005, and both are smaller than HD 271791, which was discovered in 2008 and is 11 times more massive than the sun. As seen from Earth, only HD 271791 is brighter than LAMOST-HVS1, Zheng says.
The newly discovered hypervelocity star also outshines our own sun: It is four times hotter and about 3,400 times brighter (if viewed from the same distance). But compared with our 4.6-billion-year-old sun, the newly discovered LAMOST-HVS1 is a youngster born only 32 million years ago, based on its speed and position, Zheng says.
Is there any chance that the supermassive black hole might hurl a hypervelocity star in Earth’s direction one day? Not really, Zheng says. First, astrophysicists estimate only one hypervelocity star is launched every 100,000 years. Second, possible trajectories of stars near the supermassive black hole don’t forebode any danger, should any of them become a hypervelocity star in the future.
Collaborating Institutions and Funding
Zheng conducted the study with researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz.; National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing and Nanjing; Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif.; University of California Observatories-Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz; Georgia State University, Atlanta; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.; and University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.
The study was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Development and Reform Commission of China.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Utah. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Zheng Zheng, Jeffrey L. Carlin, Timothy C. Beers, Licai Deng, Carl J. Grillmair, Puragra Guhathakurta, Sébastien Lépine, Heidi Jo Newberg, Brian Yanny, Haotong Zhang, Chao Liu, Ge Jin, Yong Zhang. The First Hypervelocity Star from the LAMOST Survey. The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 785 (2): L23 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/785/2/L23
The intergalactic medium unveiled: Cosmic Web Imager directly observes dim matter
The intergalactic medium unveiled: Cosmic Web Imager directly observes ‘dim matter’
Comparison of Lyman alpha blob observed with Cosmic Web Imager and a simulation of the cosmic web based on theoretical predictions. Credit: Christopher Martin, Robert Hurt
Caltech astronomers have taken unprecedented images of the intergalactic medium (IGM) — the diffuse gas that connects galaxies throughout the universe — with the Cosmic Web Imager, an instrument designed and built at Caltech. Until now, the structure of the IGM has mostly been a matter for theoretical speculation. However, with observations from the Cosmic Web Imager, deployed on the Hale 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, astronomers are obtaining our first three-dimensional pictures of the IGM. The Cosmic Web Imager will make possible a new understanding of galactic and intergalactic dynamics, and it has already detected one possible spiral-galaxy-in-the-making that is three times the size of our Milky Way.
The Cosmic Web Imager was conceived and developed by Caltech professor of physics Christopher Martin. “I’ve been thinking about the intergalactic medium since I was a graduate student,” says Martin. “Not only does it comprise most of the normal matter in the universe, it is also the medium in which galaxies form and grow.”
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, theoreticians have predicted that primordial gas from the Big Bang is not spread uniformly throughout space, but is instead distributed in channels that span galaxies and flow between them. This “cosmic web” — the IGM — is a network of smaller and larger filaments crisscrossing one another across the vastness of space and back through time to an era when galaxies were first forming and stars were being produced at a rapid rate.
Martin describes the diffuse gas of the IGM as “dim matter,” to distinguish it from the bright matter of stars and galaxies, and the dark matter and energy that compose most of the universe. Though you might not think so on a bright sunny day or even a starlit night, fully 96 percent of the mass and energy in the universe is dark energy and dark matter (first inferred by Caltech’s Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s), whose existence we know of only due to its effects on the remaining 4 percent that we can see: normal matter. Of this 4 percent that is normal matter, only one-quarter is made up of stars and galaxies, the bright objects that light our night sky. The remainder, which amounts to only about 3 percent of everything in the universe, is the IGM.
As Martin’s name for the IGM suggests, “dim matter” is hard to see. Prior to the development of the Cosmic Web Imager, the IGM was observed primarily via foreground absorption of light — indicating the presence of matter — occurring between Earth and a distant object such as a quasar (the nucleus of a young galaxy).
“When you look at the gas between us and a quasar, you have only one line of sight,” explains Martin. “You know that there’s some gas farther away, there’s some gas closer in, and there’s some gas in the middle, but there’s no information about how that gas is distributed across three dimensions.”
Matt Matuszewski, a former graduate student at Caltech who helped to build the Cosmic Web Imager and is now an instrument scientist at Caltech, likens this line-of-sight view to observing a complex cityscape through a few narrow slits in a wall: “All you would know is that there is some concrete, windows, metal, pavement, maybe an occasional flash of color. Only by opening the slit can you see that there are buildings and skyscrapers and roads and bridges and cars and people walking the streets. Only by taking a picture can you understand how all these components fit together, and know that you are looking at a city.”
Martin and his team have now seen the first glimpse of the city of dim matter. It is not full of skyscrapers and bridges, but it is both visually and scientifically exciting.
The first cosmic filaments observed by the Cosmic Web Imager are in the vicinity of two very bright objects: a quasar labeled QSO 1549+19 and a so-called Lyman alpha blob in an emerging galaxy cluster known as SSA22. These objects were chosen by Martin for initial observations because they are bright, lighting up the surrounding IGM and boosting its detectable signal.
Observations show a narrow filament, one million light-years long, flowing into the quasar, perhaps fueling the growth of the galaxy that hosts the quasar. Meanwhile, there are three filaments surrounding the Lyman alpha blob, with a measured spin that shows that the gas from these filaments is flowing into the blob and affecting its dynamics.
The Cosmic Web Imager is a spectrographic imager, taking pictures at many different wavelengths simultaneously. This is a powerful technique for investigating astronomical objects, as it makes it possible to not only see these objects but to learn about their composition, mass, and velocity. Under the conditions expected for cosmic web filaments, hydrogen is the dominant element and emits light at a specific ultraviolet wavelength called Lyman alpha. Earth’s atmosphere blocks light at ultraviolet wavelengths, so one needs to be outside Earth’s atmosphere, observing from a satellite or a high-altitude balloon, to observe the Lyman alpha signal.
However, if the Lyman alpha emission lies much further away from us — that is, it comes to us from an earlier time in the universe — then it arrives at a longer wavelength (a phenomenon known as redshifting). This brings the Lyman alpha signal into the visible spectrum such that it can pass through the atmosphere and be detected by ground-based telescopes like the Cosmic Web Imager.
The objects the Cosmic Web Imager has observed date to approximately 2 billion years after the Big Bang, a time of rapid star formation in galaxies. “In the case of the Lyman alpha blob,” says Martin, “I think we’re looking at a giant protogalactic disk. It’s almost 300,000 light-years in diameter, three times the size of the Milky Way.”
The Cosmic Web Imager was funded by grants from the NSF and Caltech. Having successfully deployed the instrument at the Palomar Observatory, Martin’s group is now developing a more sensitive and versatile version of the Cosmic Web Imager for use at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. “The gaseous filaments and structures we see around the quasar and the Lyman alpha blob are unusually bright. Our goal is to eventually be able to see the average intergalactic medium everywhere. It’s harder, but we’ll get there,” says Martin.
Plans are also under way for observations of the IGM from a telescope aboard a high-altitude balloon, FIREBALL (Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon); and from a satellite, ISTOS (Imaging Spectroscopic Telescope for Origins Surveys). By virtue of bypassing most, if not all, of our atmosphere, both instruments will enable observations of Lyman alpha emission — and therefore the IGM — that are closer to us; that is, that are from more recent epochs of the universe.
Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Cynthia Eller. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal References:
D. Christopher Martin, Daphne Chang, Matt Matuszewski, Patrick Morrissey, Shahin Rahman, Anna Moore, Charles C. Steidel. IGM Emission Observations with the Cosmic Web Imager: I. The Circum-QSO Medium of QSO 1549 19, and Evidence for a Filamentary Gas Inflow. The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 786 (2): 106 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/786/2/106
D. Christopher Martin, Daphne Chang, Matt Matuszewski, Patrick Morrissey, Shahin Rahman, Anna Moore, Charles C. Steidel, Yuichi Matsuda. Intergalactic Medium Emission Observations with the Cosmic Web Imager. II. Discovery of Extended, Kinematically Linked Emission around SSA22 Lyα Blob 2. The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 786 (2): 107 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/786/2/107
Are UFOs flying over London? Facebook user claims image of rotating object is UFO
Are UFOs flying over London? Facebook user claims image of ‘rotating’ object is UFO
Mysterious ... the bizarre object was spotted over London. Picture: Facebook/Mixtris UFO-images
Source: Facebook
IS IT a bird, a balloon, a drone, an helicopter or just another UFO sighting?
This weird object — described by the photographer as “rotating” — was reportedly spotted in the skies over Islington, north London.
The witness was so excited by the sighting, they took to Facebook, posting the images under the name Mixtris UFO-images, the Mirror reports.
In the text accompanying the images, the user wrote: “I captured this object a couple of streets away from where I live.
“The object appeared black in colour and was rotating as it moved along.
“I captured nearly 5 minutes of video before I lost sight of it floating in the direction of Highbury and Islington. I’m not sure what this object is. I thought it was a balloon, but there appears to be a light on it.”
It’s not the first time a UFO has been spotted in Islington, home to celebrities, bankers and media types.
One witness told the paper he saw “a round luminous object over the green. It was pretty big and flying quite low and slowly and went away into the clouds.”
Another witness noticed a strange object with bright lights, moving like “hovercraft suddenly changing direction very quickly”.
Those feeling in any way freaked out now have support on hand — a new helpline has been set up for people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
The Anomalous Mind Management, Abductee, Contactee Helpline, based in Sussex, is staging its inaugural conference to help those who believe they have had alien contact, the Mirror reports.
by Roger Mars UFO writer, author, playwright and independent filmmaker
Two Canadian witnesses traveling east along Highway 16 near Marlobo, Alberta, reported stopping and photographing an unknown object hovering above the tree tops about 400 feet away, according to April 29, 2014, testimony in Case 55866 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.
The two witnesses were returning home from work in Hinton and heading toward Edson when the incident occurred about 4 kilometers east of Marlobo about 1:45 a.m. on April 25, 2014.
“While driving I noticed on the north side of the highway green and red lights low within the tree line,” the reporting witness stated. “It was 1:45 a.m. and it was very dark. The trees are bare. No leaves as this is early spring here so I thought it was a low flying airplane as they carry the green and red lights. I thought I’d seen an airplane flying low on the horizon through the trees.”
But they approached closer to the object.
“As I was getting closer I noticed these lights were not moving and they appeared bigger. It was nothing of significance to us as we thought it was perhaps some sort of tower. Finally we passed the small grove of trees and were able to have the direct visual on these lights. We saw red, green, blue-purple light blinking, sort of pulsating around quite fast. There was also a light at the bottom like a dome light rotating a beam of white-yellow light illuminating the ground and trees.”
They parked their vehicle along the shoulder of the road to get a better look at the object.
“We got out of the truck to snap some photos with our cell phones. The truck was put on park, idling with radio playing – local Hinton music radio station. We were in front of that thing within 400 feet distance as it was just above the trees across the highway right in front of us. It was very dark and the lights it was projecting were very bright, sort of blinding us.”
The two tried to take photos.
“We tried to catch this object on the camera but you could not see it in the LCD display. I snapped two pictures without flash to see if I could capture something. As I was looking through the pictures my friend yelled that the object moved to the right abruptly.”
They tried to capture video too.
“I set up my cell phone on video record mode and recorded the event. I finally could see the object if I zoomed on it all the way – although this object was 300-400 feet in front of us, fairly large, maybe six cars wide, I could hardly see it on my cell phone cam. I recorded about a minute of video.”
The two began to become afraid of their encounter.
“We honestly got a bit freaked out, but I wanted to see it move, so we stayed a bit longer and I noticed that the object drifted slowly to the left.”
The witnesses began to wonder if the lights on the object were an attempt to communicate to them.
“I then thought that maybe that thing is projecting the lights – maybe I should use cell cam flash to signal a couple flashes as a form of communication. I got my phone again. I snapped once and nothing happened, but when I sent the next flash, that thing suddenly made a high pitch, two tones, sound lasting for maybe seven seconds. We got afraid a bit, so we jumped back in the truck and decided it was time to go.”
Back inside their vehicle, they realized the object was somehow interfering with their radio.
“What we noticed inside the cab was a static noise of the radio. Where we pulled over to investigate the object, we were listening to a Hinton music station. Now there was nothing but static noise. Upon that we realized we had just seen a UFO which interacted with the truck’s radio. We took off rather fast, leaving that thing behind.”
As they moved away from the scene, they were relieved that the object was not following them.
“It just sat there over the trees. We were quite disturbed. It was mine and my co-workers first time witnessing a UFO event, especially that close. We talked about that all the way to Edmonton.”
The two pulled over in Edmonton to review the images and video they had taken of the event. The witness included one video clip and four images with the MUFON report: Video, Image 1, Image 2, Image 3 and Image 4. Image 4 is a colorized sketch of the object.
“To our surprise we hardly had any photos on the phones. I shot four pictures in total and made about a minute long video. All I have on my phone is one picture and eight seconds of video. My friend shot over six photos. His phone did not record a single photo. This by far was the weirdest and most interesting experience I have ever had.”
Marlobo, Alberta is a hamlet in west-central Alberta, Canada within Yellowhead County, population 80. MUFON Canada is investigating.
Disc shaped UFO filmed passing near a plane over Belgium on 25th April 2014
Disc – shaped UFO filmed passing near a plane over Belgium on 25th April 2014
If this video is authentic, it is truly an amazing video. It was filmed by Eric Giavedoni and published on UFOvni2012′s YouTube channel. The video shows a disc shaped craft exit a cloud next to a large passenger jet and speed away at a very high rate of speed. The video was filmed with a 300mm lens pointing skyward over Belgium on April 25, 2014. You be the judge.
Jupiters moon Ganymede may harbor club sandwich of oceans and ice
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may harbor ‘club sandwich’ of oceans and ice
This artist's concept of Jupiter's moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, illustrates the "club sandwich" model of its interior oceans. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The largest moon in our solar system, a companion to Jupiter named Ganymede, might have ice and oceans stacked up in several layers like a club sandwich, according to new NASA-funded research that models the moon’s makeup.
Previously, the moon was thought to harbor a thick ocean sandwiched between just two layers of ice, one on top and one on bottom.
“Ganymede’s ocean might be organized like a Dagwood sandwich,” said Steve Vance of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explaining the moon’s resemblance to the “Blondie” cartoon character’s multi-tiered sandwiches. The study, led by Vance, provides new theoretical evidence for the team’s “club sandwich” model, first proposed last year. The research appears in the journal Planetary and Space Science.
The results support the idea that primitive life might have possibly arisen on the icy moon. Scientists say that places where water and rock interact are important for the development of life; for example, it’s possible life began on Earth in bubbling vents on our sea floor. Prior to the new study, Ganymede’s rocky sea bottom was thought to be coated with ice, not liquid — a problem for the emergence of life. The “club sandwich” findings suggest otherwise: the first layer on top of the rocky core might be salty water.
“This is good news for Ganymede,” said Vance. “Its ocean is huge, with enormous pressures, so it was thought that dense ice had to form at the bottom of the ocean. When we added salts to our models, we came up with liquids dense enough to sink to the sea floor.”
NASA scientists first suspected an ocean in Ganymede in the 1970s, based on models of the large moon, which is bigger than Mercury. In the 1990s, NASA’s Galileo mission flew by Ganymede, confirming the moon’s ocean, and showing it extends to depths of hundreds of miles. The spacecraft also found evidence for salty seas, likely containing the salt magnesium sulfate.
Previous models of Ganymede’s oceans assumed that salt didn’t change the properties of liquid very much with pressure. Vance and his team showed, through laboratory experiments, how much salt really increases the density of liquids under the extreme conditions inside Ganymede and similar moons. It may seem strange that salt can make the ocean denser, but you can see for yourself how this works by adding plain old table salt to a glass of water. Rather than increasing in volume, the liquid shrinks and becomes denser. This is because the salt ions attract water molecules.
The models get more complicated when the different forms of ice are taken into account. The ice that floats in your drinks is called “Ice I.” It’s the least dense form of ice and lighter than water. But at high pressures, like those in crushingly deep oceans like Ganymede’s, the ice crystal structures become more compact. “It’s like finding a better arrangement of shoes in your luggage — the ice molecules become packed together more tightly,” said Vance. The ice can become so dense that it is heavier than water and falls to the bottom of the sea. The densest and heaviest ice thought to persist in Ganymede is called “Ice VI.”
By modeling these processes using computers, the team came up with an ocean sandwiched between up to three ice layers, in addition to the rocky seafloor. The lightest ice is on top, and the saltiest liquid is heavy enough to sink to the bottom. What’s more, the results demonstrate a possible bizarre phenomenon that causes the oceans to “snow upwards.” As the oceans churn and cold plumes snake around, ice in the uppermost ocean layer, called “Ice III,” could form in the seawater. When ice forms, salts precipitate out. The heavier salts would thus fall downward, and the lighter ice, or “snow,” would float upward. This “snow” melts again before reaching the top of the ocean, possibly leaving slush in the middle of the moon sandwich.
“We don’t know how long the Dagwood-sandwich structure would exist,” said Christophe Sotin of JPL. “This structure represents a stable state, but various factors could mean the moon doesn’t reach this stable state.
Sotin and Vance are both members of the Icy Worlds team at JPL, part of the multi-institutional NASA Astrobiology Institute based at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The results can be applied to exoplanets too, planets that circle stars beyond our sun. Some super-Earths, rocky planets more massive than Earth, have been proposed as “water worlds” covered in oceans. Could they have life? Vance and his team think laboratory experiments and more detailed modeling of exotic oceans might help find answers.
Ganymede is one of five moons in our solar system thought to support vast oceans beneath icy crusts. The other moons are Jupiter’s Europa and Callisto and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus. The European Space Agency is developing a space mission, called JUpiter ICy moons Explorer or JUICE, to visit Europa, Callisto and Ganymede in the 2030s. NASA and JPL are contributing to three instruments on the mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2022 (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-069).
Other authors of the study are Mathieu Bouffard of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, and Mathieu Choukroun, also of JPL and the Icy World team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for NASA.
Steve Vance, Mathieu Bouffard, Mathieu Choukroun, Christophe Sotin. Ganymede׳s internal structure including thermodynamics of magnesium sulfate oceans in contact with ice. Planetary and Space Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1016/j.pss.2014.03.011
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