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 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.
06-06-2015
Crashing comets may explain mysterious lunar swirls
A closer look at the Reiner Gamma. Credit: Courtesy of NASA/Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Crashing comets may explain mysterious lunar swirls
Brown University researchers have produced new evidence that lunar swirls — wispy bright regions scattered on the Moon’s surface — were created by several comet collisions over the last 100 million years.
In a paper published in the journal Icarus, the researchers use state-of-the-art computer models to simulate the dynamics of comet impacts on the lunar soil. The simulations suggest that such impacts can account for many of the features in the mysterious swirls.
“We think this makes a pretty strong case that the swirls represent remnants of cometary collisions,” said Peter Schultz, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University. Schultz co-wrote the paper with his former graduate student, Megan Bruck Syal, who is now a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Lunar swirls have been the source of debate for years. The twisting, swirling streaks of bright soil stretch, in some cases, for thousands of miles across the lunar surface. Most are found on the unseen far side of the Moon, but one famous swirl called Reiner Gamma can be seen by telescope on the southwestern corner of the Moon’s near side. “It was my favorite object to look at when I was an amateur astronomer,” Schultz said.
At first glance, the swirls do not appear to be related to large impact craters or any other topography. “They simply look as if someone had finger-painted the surface,” Schultz said. “There has been an intense debate about what causes these features.”
In the 1970s, scientists discovered that many of the swirls were associated with anomalies of the Moon’s crustal magnetic field. That revelation led to one hypothesis for how the swirls may have formed. Rocks below the surface in those spots might contain remanent magnetism from early in the Moon’s history, when its magnetic field was much stronger than it is now. It had been proposed that those strong, locally trapped magnetic fields deflect the onslaught of the solar wind, which was thought to slowly darken the Moon’s surface. The swirls would remain brighter than the surrounding soil because of those magnetic shields.
But Schultz had a different idea for how the swirls may form — one that has its roots in watching the lunar modules land on the Moon during the Apollo program.
“You could see that the whole area around the lunar modules was smooth and bright because of the gas from the engines scoured the surface,” Schultz said. “That was part of what got me started thinking comet impacts could cause the swirls.”
Comets carry their own gaseous atmosphere called a coma. Schultz thought that when small comets slam into the Moon’s surface — as they occasionally do — the coma may scour away loose soil from the surface, not unlike the gas from the lunar modules. That scouring may produce the bright swirls.
Schultz first published a paper outlining the idea in the journal Nature in 1980. That paper focused on how the scouring of the delicate upper layer of lunar soils could produce brightness consistent with the swirls. The structure of the grains in the upper layer (termed the “fairy castle structure” because of the way grains stick together) scatters sun’s rays, causing a dimmer and darker appearance. When this structure is stripped away, the remaining smoothed surface would be brighter than unaffected areas, especially when the sun’s rays strike it at certain angles. For Reiner Gamma on the lunar nearside, those areas appear brightest during the crescent Moon just before sunrise.
As computer simulations of impact dynamics have gotten better, Schultz and Bruck-Syal decided it might be time to take a second look at whether comet impacts could produce that kind of scouring. Their new simulations showed that the impact of a comet coma plus its icy core would indeed have the effect of blowing away the smallest grains that sit atop the lunar soil. The simulations showed that the scoured area would stretch for perhaps thousands of kilometers from the impact point, consistent with the swirling streaks that extend across the Moon’s surface. Eddies and vortices created by the gaseous impact would explain the swirls’ twisty, sinuous appearance.
The comet impact hypothesis could also explain the presence of magnetic anomalies near the swirls. The simulations showed that a comet impact would melt some of the tiny particles near the surface. When small, iron-rich particles are melted and then cooled, they record the presence of any magnetic field that may be present at the time. “Comets carry with them a magnetic field created by streaming charged particles that interact with the solar wind,” Schultz said. “As the gas collides with the lunar surface, the cometary magnetic field becomes amplified and recorded in the small particles when they cool.”
Taken together, the results offer a more complete picture of how the swirls form, the researchers say.
“This is the first time anyone has looked at this using modern computational techniques,” Schultz said. “Everything we see in simulations of comet impacts is consistent with the swirls as we see them on the Moon. We think this process provides a consistent explanation, but may need new Moon missions to finally resolve the debate.”
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Brown University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Megan Bruck Syala, Peter H. Schultzb. Cometary impact effects at the Moon: Implications for lunar swirl formation. Icarus, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2015.05.005
Maybe dark matter is not made up of heavy particles after all
An image comparing the data showing the many galaxies and the X-ray emission from the hot gas (left) with the model of the hot gas (right). The "comet" shape of the X-ray data is well reproduced by the model. Credit: Image courtesy of University of the Basque Country
Maybe dark matter is not made up of heavy particles after all
Tom Broadhurst, the Ikerbasque researcher in the Department of Theoretical Physics of the UPV/EHU, together with Sandor Molnar of the National Taiwan University and visiting Ikerbasque researcher at the UPV/EHU in 2013, have conducted a simulation that explains the collision between two clusters of galaxies. Clusters of galaxies are the biggest objects that exist in the universe. They are collections of hundreds of thousands of galaxies pulled together by gravity.
In general, galaxy clusters grow in size by merging with each other to become increasingly larger. Gravitational forces cause them to slowly come together over time despite the expansion of the universe. The system known as “El Gordo,” the biggest known cluster of galaxies, is in turn the result of the collision between two large clusters. It was found that the collision process compresses the gas within each cluster to very high temperatures so that it is shining in the Xray region of the spectrum. In the Xray spectrum this gas cloud is comet shaped with two long tails stretching between the dense cores of the two clusters of galaxies. This distinctive configuration has allowed the researchers to establish the relative speed of the collision, which is extreme (~2200km/second), as it puts it at the limit of what is allowed by current theory for dark matter.
These rare, extreme examples of clusters caught in the act of colliding seem to be challenging the accepted view that dark matter is made up of heavy particles, since no such particles have actually been detected yet, despite the efforts being made to find them by means of the LHC (Large Hadron Particle Collider) accelerator in Geneva and the LUX (Large Underground Xenon Experiment), an underground dark matter detector in the United States. In Tom Broadhurst’s opinion, “it’s all the more important to find a new model that will enable the mysterious dark matter to be understood better.” Broadhurst is one of the authors of a wave-dark-matter model published in Nature Physics last year.
This new piece of research has entailed interpreting the gas observed and the dark matter of El Gordo “hydrodynamically” through the development of an in-house computational model that includes the dark matter, which comprises most of the mass, and which can be observed in the Xray region of the visible spectrum because of its extremely high temperature (100 million kelvin). Dr Broadhurst and Dr Molnar have managed to obtain a unique computational solution for this collision because of the comet-like shape of the hot gas, and the locations and the masses of the two dark matter cores that have passed through each other at an oblique angle at a relative speed of about 2200 km/s. This means that the total energy release is bigger than that of any other known phenomenon, with the exception of the Big Bang.
Sandor M. Molnar, Tom Broadhurst. A HYDRODYNAMICAL SOLUTION FOR THE “TWIN-TAILED” COLLIDING GALAXY CLUSTER “EL GORDO”. The Astrophysical Journal, 2015; 800 (1): 37 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/800/1/37
U.S. Senator Richard Russell Saw Disc-Shaped UFOs In Russia In 1955
U.S. Senator Richard Russell Saw Disc-Shaped UFOs In Russia In 1955
U.S. Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr. (D-Ga.) was travelling on a Soviet train in 1955 during a fact-finding mission in Russia when he spotted a disc-shaped, flying saucer UFO taking off near the tracks. He and his aides reported the sighting to U.S. security agencies after they left Russia, but the U.S. government kept the UFO sightings secret for about 30 years.
Senator Russell, then chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of the most influential senators until his death in 1971 after serving in Senate for 38 years, was travelling with two aides in the Transcaucasus region of Russia when, at about 7 p.m. on October 4, 1955, he looked out of the window and spotted two disc-shaped UFOs taking off from a spot near the tracks.
He called his military aide Lt. Col. Hathaway and interpreter Ruben Efron to the window urgently. Hathaway came to the window in time to see the first UFO, but Efron barely caught a glimpse of the first UFO as it disappeared. However, all three saw the second UFO as it took off.
They reported the sightings to the U.S. Air Force authorities immediately after they left Russia, agreeing that they saw a disc-shaped UFO.
The CIA, FBI, and Air Force documents, which give details of the sightings, were declassified in 1985 and obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) by the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) under its chairman Dr. Bruce Maccabee.
According to Maccabee, “These long secret documents are of major importance because they show for the first time that one of the most powerful U.S. Senators witnessed and reported a UFO.”
A top secret Air Force intelligence report on the sightings, dated October 14, 1955, was written by Lieut. Col. Thomas Ryan, air attaché at the U.S. embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, who met the senator and his aides after they left Russia. Ryan wrote that the report was based on “an eyewitness account of the ascent and flight of an unconventional craft by three highly reliable United States observers.”
Col. Hathaway reportedly told Ryan, “I doubt if you are going to believe this, but we all saw it. Senator Russell was the first to see this flying disc we’ve been told for years that there isn’t such a thing, but all of us saw it.”
“One disc ascended almost vertically, at a relatively slow speed, with its outer surface revolving slowly to the right, to an altitude of about 6000 feet, where its speed then increased sharply as it headed north. The second flying disc was seen performing the same actions about one minute later. The take-off area was about 1-2 miles south of the rail line.”
The CIA also interviewed the three eyewitnesses. Ruben told the CIA that visibility was excellent during the sightings and that the UFOs gave an impression of “gliding” as “no noise was heard and no exhaust was heard, and no exhaust glow or trail was seen by me.”
The CIA also reportedly interviewed a fourth unidentified person who said that one of the UFOs had a “slight dome on top” and also a “white light on top.”
The eyewitnesses described the disc as having a pinkish-white glow. It rose “vertically with the glow moving slowly around the perimeter in a clockwise direction, giving the appearance of a pinwheel.”
According to Dr. Maccabee of the Fund for UFO Research, Senator Russell and his companions never spoke about the sightings in public “because they were no doubt advised not to talk.”
But rumors about the sightings soon began spreading, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner approached the senator for details.
The Senator’s response, dated 17 January, 1956, to a request from the Los Angeles Examiner’s Tom Towers for information about the sightings read, “I have discussed this matter with the affected agencies of the government, and they are of the opinion that it is not wise to publicize this matter at this time. I regret very much that I am unable to be of assistance to you.”
The report was finally declassified in 1985.
Maccabee concluded that “these documents provide startling new evidence that UFOs exist.”
Not all galaxies are neatly shaped, as this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6240 clearly demonstrates. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)
Hubble revisits tangled NGC 6240
Not all galaxies are neatly shaped, as this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6240 clearly demonstrates. Hubble previously released an image of this galaxy back in 2008, but the knotted region, shown here in a pinky-red hue at the center of the galaxies, was only revealed in these new observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.
NGC 6240 lies 400 million light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Holder). This galaxy has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails. This mess of gas, dust and stars bears more than a passing resemblance to a butterfly and a lobster.
This bizarrely-shaped galaxy did not begin its life looking like this; its distorted appearance is a result of a galactic merger that occurred when two galaxies drifted too close to one another. This merger sparked bursts of new star formation and triggered many hot young stars to explode as supernovae. A new supernova, not visible in this image was discovered in this galaxy in 2013, named SN 2013dc.
At the center of NGC 6240 an even more interesting phenomenon is taking place. When the two galaxies came together, their central black holes did so, too. There are two supermassive black holes within this jumble, spiraling closer and closer to one another. They are currently only some 3,000 light-years apart, incredibly close given that the galaxy itself spans 300,000 light-years. This proximity secures their fate as they are now too close to escape each other and will soon form a single immense black hole.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by NASA. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
ROSWELL: Man behind UFO crash proof mixed up in string of alien hoaxes
One of the most expensive monkey corpses in the world
ROSWELL: Man behind UFO crash proof mixed up in string of alien hoaxes
The point of this article is “the everlasting search for proof”, that so many people smear with loads of (censured) false evidence. UFO’s are a money industry, you might as well realize it. You might as well understand that the bigger part of all proof of extra terrestrial life is hoax.
This makes any investigation very hard to pursue. On one hand the truth may be hindered by the government, on the other hand the truth are constantly hindered by those who has kept such an open mind their brain fell out all over us, just as we were about to find something real.
Honestly, no proof is better than the faked ones that are believed necessary to keep the interest burning.
In my earlier article I clearly described that Roswell, was not the first alleged landing point for UFO’s but, Europe and Germany. This was years before Roswell. The Roswell incident are only a copy of what the whole world already was searching for.
Sometimes, I just feel “now how did you reach this conclusion, really?”. Always start by reading facts, no country is an isolated island (this is kind of funny because we’re all looking for extra terrestrial life, but wont look at our neighbors).
Scam artists as in UFO hoax dealers, should be stripped from all public reliability and excluded from any group that conduct investigations or serious research. I don’t think I am tough, I think this is the only way to give the subject of UFO back its credibility.
The article below is written for Express and tell the background story to my new subject (proposing real evidence). It is utterly important for me to find the truth, not only forwarding A “truth” heard from somewhere else but, being the one who found the source. I think, this is the only truth anyone should want.
***THE man behind the release of the so-called ‘smoking gun’ new Roswell photographs that supposedly proved an alien crash-landed a UFO near the New Mexico town in 1947 has previously been linked to a series of extra terrestrial hoaxes.
THE man behind the release of the so-called ‘smoking gun’ new Roswell photographs has previously been linked to a series of alien hoaxes.JamieMaussan, claimed to have proof of the notorious alleged UFO crash, once paid £15,000 for a skinned monkey believing it was an alien corpse.He also supported one of the most astonishing alien hoaxes ever attempted.Mr Maussan sold tickets to see the first release of copies of slides purporting to show the Roswell alien corpse at the ‘Be Witness to the Change in History’ event in New Mexico, America.
The photos promised to be historic and irrefutable proof of the legendary UFO crash near the New Mexico town of Roswell in 1947.
But the long-awaited disclosure has been widely panned by sceptics and even UFO hunters as a damp squib, with many suggesting the picture shows a mummified human child in a museum exhibit case.
The Roswell myth is that the US military found an alien corpse in a crashed space craft on a remote ranch but kept it hidden from the public ever since.
It has long been regarded as the world’s biggest alien mystery, since it first emerged.
YouTube•ADAMDEW
The newly released picture of an alien that some suggest is a baby mummy
I never did it for money, I knew I was going to lose cash even before starting the organisation of the event, but I didn’t care. The forensics experts explained in full why this is an alien.
Mexican UFO expert Jamie Maussan
Pictures which surfaced 20 years ago, alleging to show atop secret alien autopsy were later proved to be fake.MrMaussan, who runs his own alien investigation TV channel tercermilenio.tv, is described as Mexico’stopufologist, but has promoted a number of well-documented alien hoaxes.Staggering hoaxes MrMaussan has been involved with include the ‘Metapec creature’, a smallalienesque corpse which was later exposed as an amazing hoax using a skinned small monkey to create the weird-looking beast.In around 2007 a story surfaced that the small alien-like creature had been caught in a rat trap on a remote Mexico ranch.
Mr Maussan reportedly bought it for around £15,000 and spent years trying to prove it was of alien origin.
But in 2010 taxidermist Urso Ruíz confessed to skinning a squirrel monkey and leaving it on the ranch.
He later passed a lie detector test and scientific investigations backed him up.
Mr Maussan insists he was not in on the hoax at any stage, and was more likely a victim of it.
His involvement in the release of the ‘Roswell slides’ has cast even more doubt on legitimacy of the much-hyped event, that will have received hundreds of thousands of pounds in ticket and pay-for-view sales, according to UFO online forums.
Mr Maussan has been an ardent supporter of Dr Jonathan Reed, who still maintains the truth one of the most far-fetched alien discovery hoaxes on record.
JAIMEMAUSSAN•YouTube
The Metapect Creature which was later proved to be a skinned monkey
YouTube
Maussan with the Metapec Creature while trying to prove its alien origins
Mr Reed claimed to have stumbled across an alien and its UFO while walking his dog in October 1996 in the Cascade Mountains.But the ET allegedly vaporisedhisfour legged friend, so he killed the other worldly visitor, took the corpse home and filmed it.The story continued with allegations of Mr Reed having to go underground to avoid ‘Men in Black’ agents who killed a friend, and that the alien came back to life.The alien in his video, pictures and book were later exposed as a rubber dummy.
However, Mr Maussan is documented devoting a large amount of time to getting the ‘truth’ out about Mr Reed’s account.
More recently, Mr Maussan investigated and pushed the credibility of a picture which emerged of a man being watched by little green men, which was also later exposed as a digitally manipulated hoax.
The website www.ufowatchdog.com, which says it exposes alien and UFO hoaxers, includes a section devoted to Mr Massan.
It says of him: “Promoter and supporter of various UFO hoaxes.
“Constantly claims to have scientific proof, but never seems able to produce it when asked.
“Claimed to have radar tapes confirming UFOs in Mexico airspace. Was reportedly asked for the tapes – the tapes never came to fruition.”
It lists a number of other hoaxes he supported.
It has been reported that up to 6,000 people attended the ‘Be Witness to the Change in History’ event on Tuesday.
Premium ticket prices vary from as much as £1,000, according to website Ticket Master, but according to people who attended and commented on Facebook most were between £20 and £60.
A conservative average price of £40 a ticket, Mr Maussan and co-organisers could have taken in at least £240,000.
Those not able to attend could pay between £10 and £15 to watch it online.
It is not known how many did, but the live stream crashed on the day, so the takings could be considerably higher.
DRJONATHANREED
The alien Dr Jonathan Reed insists he killed then photographed which has been branded a rubber dummy
YouTube
Dr Jonathan Reed
DRJONATHANREED
The UFO of the alien Reed claims to have killed
British UFO investigator Nigel Watson from Plymouth, said: “The whole event wasacynicalmoney making circus ring masteredbyJamieMaussan, who has a track recordforpromotingan whole string of UFO reports and images that have been revealed to be hoaxes. Not only does the alien look like a mummy itisobviouslyin some type of exhibition case.”This must be considered the lowest point UFO research has ever descended to.”But Maussan has been reported as saying after the conference when asked if it was a profit making venture, that he lost money pouting it on.
He said: “I lost about $100 thousand in the event, even though we had six thousand people in the auditorium and a few thousand watching on the Internet.
“I never did it for money, I knew I was going to lose cash even before starting the organisation of the event, but I didn’t care.”
He also maintained he had proved the slide showed an alien, adding: “The forensics experts explained in full why this is an alien.
Today he insisted on Twitter it was not a money-making event and said it was not clear if the organisers would ever recoup their investment in the event.“We also presented the analysis from photography experts stating that the picture is real and from the late 1940s.”
He also took a swipe at critics.
Translated from his native Spanish, he posted: “The difficulty is that you present the evidence and research and the critics, as they have nothing and are just looking to offend without a single argument.”
And he blasted at one disbeliever: “Your comparison is absurd. The size of the head, the shorter arms, lack of mammary glands , you have elbows or knees.”
We didn’t really know about aluminum before the 1800’s, still this substance seem to have been used all over the world for thousands of years. Feldspar is known as a volcanic rock and can be found together with quarts in basalt stones. Which in this case are found around the sea of Galilee.
Sometime during 70-132, Christian Era in the City of Petra
“Sometime during biblical time Benjamin born in Canaan, son of Rachel has been given the City Rekem ”
-If Petra is in fact Rekem, then nothing I have written is true.
In 1952 a archeologist found the mysterious Copper scrolls in a cave in Qumran near the City of Petra, the Sea of Galilee and the ancient city of Acco.
What differs the scroll between others are that they are made from copper and not papyrus, they are made to last and they are partly written in a different language. Further more they contain singular letters. And so does the caves.
This might naturally not mean anything but, the treasure map on the copper scrolls does, leading to the city of Tel Akko or Acre. But why would it say (originally) Acor?
From Wikipedia:
“The text is an inventory of 64 locations. 63 of which are treasures of gold and silver, that have been estimated in the tons. Tithing vessels are also listed among the entries, along with other vessels, and three locations featured scrolls. One entry apparently mentions priestly vestments. The final listing points to a duplicate document with additional details. That other document has not been found.
The following English translation of the opening lines of the first column of the Copper Scroll shows the basic structure of each of the entries in the scroll. The structure is first the general location, second the specific location, often with distance to dig, and third what to find.
In the ruin that is in the valley of Acor (Tel Akko or Acre), under 1:2 the steps, with the entrance at the East, 1:3 a distance of forty cubits a strongbox of silver and its vessels 1:4 with a weight of seventeen talents. KεN (The three letters at the end are Greek.)There is a minority view that the Cave of Letters might have contained one of the listed treasures, and, if so, artifacts from this location may have been recovered. Although the scroll was made of alloyed copper in order to last, the locations are written as if the reader would have an intimate knowledge of obscure references. For example, consider column two, verses 1–3, “In the salt pit that is under the steps: forty-one talents of silver. In the cave of the old washer’s chamber, on the third terrace: sixty-five ingots of gold.”As noted above, the listed treasure has been estimated in the tons. “”
This becomes a little bit confusing, what is my point?
My point is, nothing adds up historically or biblical correct. It seem like they mislead us on purpose. Why?
Now I am sure that a lot of you reflect on that I write Acor, Acre and Tel Akko as we have been taught without any proof that Acor and Tel Akko are different places. Looking in to when this could have happened, there can only be one old city left in ruins. “Acor” as historians claim, simply don’t exist.
Tel Akko and Petra was once rich with water, one we can imagine since resting nearby the Sea while the other one is stonecarvings in a massive mountain. And how on earth, did they get pouring lake water running freely across the Stone City? and even today, we can find a well there with freshwater sipping out from the hard rock.
Lets go back in time…
Not only was the Nabateans (who lived in Petra) skillful stone shaper’s but they had to be excellent water “shapers” too, mastering water. They built water conduits, ponds and reservoirs. But the Romans came (also skillful water shapers) they started to look for “pots” of gold instead. And on the entrance to the Kings Treasure they thought they saw a pot of gold on the top. So did the Bedouins and tried to “shoot” the pot.
So what made the Romans and the Bedouins think this? Maybe the copper scrolls left in cave 3.
As I did, they must have understood the map would lead them to Petra, Tel Akko or Acre.
Acre ( Acco) is a city in the Western Galilee region of northern Israel at the northern extremity of Haifa Bay. Acre is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the country.Historically, it was a strategic coastal link to the Levant. Acre is the holiest city of the Bahá’í Faith. The picture shows an aerial view of the Old City, its harbour, the ancient walls and the Al-Jazzir Mosque. Photo by Itamar Grinberg.
But if they already knew, then who left a (never seen before) map in the cave, to be found in 1952? Was it a well planned scheme? The treasures was “hidden” in so many places it would have taken years to locate. And with all clear instructions but confusing meaning, they would probably not find anything anyway.
The truth about who lived in Petra
How could the people work with water like this. Petra was inhabited with the Nabateans and the Romans and who knows what people but, was it really the Nabateans that built the city in the first place?
People have tried to solve this riddle for ages. How did they build it? We all know the story about how Moses split the Red Sea and made water flow freely from a rock, this near 1200 BCE.
I think that we must remember when talking about Petra, Acre and the Red Sea that the there are no red line between any historical document at all and that the landscape was totally different. The levels of water wasn’t near as low as what the levels are today.
The Jordan River pushed the water pressure from the upper top just before the Hula Valley with all together a 100 kilometers steep drop. And people at this time prefered to live on hills.
Blocking the water on the top would lower the levels, blocking the water down by The Sea of Galilee, you could dry out chosen parts of the land. Looking closer on The Stone City of Petra, we clearly understand that this wasn’t a excavation site with rough tools as Caterpillars and shovels.
When building Petra, they must have used their skills with chemistry in water, in more ways than making underwater balloons to lift rocks with, building dams or underwater resorvoirs.
They simply must have used the water levels? King Aretas 168 BC was the first Nabatean associated with Petra and in 2 Maccabees. Still not one single clue to how they did it.
So maybe, the City never was called Petra but Benjamins Rekem. And maybe there are more that is hidden than we’re smart enough to see. As the greek letters in the copper scrolls say, KεN (knowledge).
Looking into the caves of Qumran, the pictures on the walls more or less look like carvings on any stone age cave wall found in the world and the rest of the Qumran findings were the ingredients to “the goat bladder balloon” or modern “lifting bag”.
Thank you for reading and before you leave me for today, with even more questions. Reflect on what the buildings of the City of Petra actually show.
"My name is ChristineCleopatra and I am a new investigating journalist here on NUFOC.
I think it is fun and a tremendous opportunity for me to be a part of the great Filer Files and this enormous network.
I was born and raised in Sweden where I also live. A 1970's gal who have been studying different subjects through a diversity of schools for the past 20 years. My quest for the “true” truth (as if a 100 % could ever become 110%), has always driven me.
So beside writing, fighting for the truth and equal rights, I took my investigating skills and started to write a Science fiction series about The Anunnakis. -As if they would have been a part of our ancestors tree.
Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water
Mars distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes -- between the blue lines, in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as the surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that there are glaciers composed of frozen water underneath the dust. Credit: Mars Digital Image Model, NASA/Nanna Karlsson
Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water
Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice. The results are published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water (H2O) or of carbon dioxide (CO2) or whether it was mud.
Using radar measurements from the NASA satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have been able to determine that is water ice. But how thick was the ice and do they resemble glaciers on Earth?
A group of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have now calculated this using radar observations combined with ice flow modelling.
Data combined with modelling
“We have looked at radar measurements spanning ten years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is after all a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the ice flow,” explains Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson, a postdoc at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson explains that earlier studies have identified thousands of glacier-like formations on the planet. The glaciers are located in belts around Mars between the latitudes 300-500 — equivalent to just south of Denmark’s location on Earth. The glaiciers are found on both the northern and southern hemispheres.
From some locations on Mars they have good detailed high-resolution data, while they only have more sparse data from other areas. But by supplementing the sparse data with information about the flow and form of the glaciers from the very well studied areas, they have been able to calculate how thick and voluminous the ice is across the glacier belts.
Could cover the entire planet
“We have calculated that the ice in the glaciers is equivalent to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice — that much ice could cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters of ice. The ice at the mid-latitudes is therefore an important part of Mars’ water reservoir,” explains Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson.
That the ice has not evaporated out into space could actually mean that the thick layer of dust is protecting the ice. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low that water ice simply evaporates and becomes water vapour. But the glaciers are well protected under the thick layer of dust.
N. B. Karlsson, L. S. Schmidt, C. S. Hvidberg. Volume of Martian mid-latitude glaciers from radar observations and ice-flow modelling. Geophysical Research Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL063219
Cigar-Shaped UFO Hovers Near Mexico Volcano Captured By Live Cam
A UFO watcher shared images of what appeared as a cigar-shaped alien vehicle on the UFO Sightings Daily website. He claimed it was not the first time he spotted a UFO in the vicinity of the Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico. (Photo : Scott Waring)
Cigar-Shaped UFO Hovers Near Mexico Volcano Captured By Live Cam
A mysterious object seen hovering over the mouth of the Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico could yet again trigger another round of debate between believers and skeptics on the existence of intelligent alien life.
UFO watcher Scott Waring posted images of the unusual object he described as a cigar-shaped UFO on the website UFO Sightings Daily. He said that he found the anomaly in an archived live cam footage of the volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in Mexico.
Although the mysterious object was initially difficult to distinguish, the form became more apparent when the image was enlarged. It appeared as a black oblong-shaped object flying near the clouds. Waring likewise said that it was not the first time that a UFO was spotted in that particular area.
“I have been keeping an eye on this live cam for over five years now and I have reported over 50 UFOs over it since then,” Waring said in a post.
One of these supposed UFO sightings occurred in 2013 and was captured in a video that showed what seemed to be a UFO flying above Popocatepetl volcano. The footage, which depicted a spacecraft approaching the volcano, showed the mysterious vehicle slowing down and turning towards the crater of the mountain, where it descended. The footage was taken on May 30 at 8:30 p.m.
Mutual UFO Network chief photo and video analyst Marc D’Antonio said that this clip could be depicting a meteor that fell over the volcano. He also noted that the path of the object could also be illusory.
“In this case, the object is moving from right to left and appears to be descending, but it is exactly this behavior you see if an aircraft at altitude is heading away from you — this is the consequence of perspective and round Earth,” D’Antonio said.
In 2012, a similar video emerged showing another UFO shaped like a cigar exhibiting the same behavior.
UFO Sightings Daily is a hub for UFO enthusiasts. On Friday, Feb. 13, the website shared another UFO discovery in a video taken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) outside the International Space Station (ISS).
Space watchers claimed that the clip, which was posted by YouTube user Streetcap1 online on Thursday and has been dubbed the “Friday the 13th” sighting, could be depicting a UFO. The video has been viewed over 12,000 times since it was first uploaded.
This is an artist's impression of a quasar with a supermassive black hole in the distant universe. Credit: Zhaoyu Li/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Misti Mountain Observatory
Monster black hole discovered at cosmic dawn
Scientists have discovered the brightest quasar in the early universe, powered by the most massive black hole yet known at that time. The international team led by astronomers from Peking University in China and from the University of Arizona announce their findings in the scientific journal Nature on Feb. 26.
The discovery of this quasar, named SDSS J0100+2802, marks an important step in understanding how quasars, the most powerful objects in the universe, have evolved from the earliest epoch, only 900 million years after the Big Bang, which is thought to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. The quasar, with its central black hole mass of 12 billion solar masses and the luminosity of 420 trillion suns, is at a distance of 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.
The discovery of this ultraluminous quasar also presents a major puzzle to the theory of black hole growth at early universe, according to Xiaohui Fan, Regents’ Professor of Astronomy at the UA’s Steward Observatory, who co-authored the study.
“How can a quasar so luminous, and a black hole so massive, form so early in the history of the universe, at an era soon after the earliest stars and galaxies have just emerged?” Fan said. “And what is the relationship between this monster black hole and its surrounding environment, including its host galaxy?
“This ultraluminous quasar with its supermassive black hole provides a unique laboratory to the study of the mass assembly and galaxy formation around the most massive black holes in the early universe.”
The quasar dates from a time close to the end of an important cosmic event that astronomers referred to as the “epoch of reionization”: the cosmic dawn when light from the earliest generations of galaxies and quasars is thought to have ended the “cosmic dark ages” and transformed the universe into how we see it today.
Discovered in 1963, quasars are the most powerful objects beyond our Milky Way galaxy, beaming vast amounts of energy across space as the supermassive black hole in their center sucks in matter from its surroundings. Thanks to the new generation of digital sky surveys, astronomers have discovered more than 200,000 quasars, with ages ranging from 0.7 billion years after the Big Bang to today.
Shining with the equivalent of 420 trillion suns, the new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion years away). It harbors a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high redshift (very distant) quasars.
“By comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy has a black hole with a mass of only 4 million solar masses at its center; the black hole that powers this new quasar is 3,000 time heavier,” Fan said.
Feige Wang, a doctoral student from Peking University who is supervised jointly by Fan and Prof. Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, the study’s lead author, initially spotted this quasar for further study.
“This quasar was first discovered by our 2.4-meter Lijiang Telescope in Yunnan, China, making it the only quasar ever discovered by a 2-meter telescope at such distance, and we’re very proud of it,” Wang said. “The ultraluminous nature of this quasar will allow us to make unprecedented measurements of the temperature, ionization state and metal content of the intergalactic medium at the epoch of reionization.”
Following the initial discovery, two telescopes in southern Arizona did the heavy lifting in determining the distance and mass of the black hole: the 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, on Mount Graham and the 6.5-meter Multiple Mirror Telescope, or MMT, on Mount Hopkins. Additional observations with the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescope in Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, and the 8.2-meter Gemini North Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed the results.
“This quasar is very unique,” said Xue-Bing Wu, a professor of the Department of Astronomy, School of Physics at Peking University and the associate director of the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe.”
Wu leads a team that has developed a method to effectively select quasars in the distant universe based on optical and near-infrared photometric data, in particular using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, satellite.
“This is a great accomplishment for the LBT,” said Fan, who chairs the LBT Scientific Advisory Committee and also discovered the previous record holders for the most massive black hole in the early universe, about a fourth of the size of the newly discovered object. “The especially sensitive optical and infrared spectrographs of the LBT provided the early assessment of both the distance of the quasars and the mass of the black hole at the quasar’s center.”
For Christian Veillet, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, or LBTO, this discovery demonstrates both the power of international collaborations and the benefit of using a variety of facilities spread throughout the world.
“This result is particularly gratifying for LBTO, which is well on its way to full nighttime operations,” Veillet said. “While in this case the authors used two different instruments in series, one for visible light spectroscopy and one for near-infrared imaging, LBTO will soon offer a pair of instruments that can be used simultaneously, effectively doubling the number of observations possible in clear skies and ultimately creating even more exciting science.”
To further unveil the nature of this remarkable quasar, and to shed light on the physical processes that led to the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes, the research team will carry out further investigations on this quasar with more international telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Telescope.
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Arizona. The original article was written by Christian Veillet/LBTO and Daniel Stolte/University Relations – Communications. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Xue-Bing Wu, Feige Wang, Xiaohui Fan, Weimin Yi, Wenwen Zuo, Fuyan Bian, Linhua Jiang, Ian D. McGreer, Ran Wang, Jinyi Yang, Qian Yang, David Thompson, Yuri Beletsky. An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30. Nature, 2015; 518 (7540): 512 DOI: 10.1038/nature14241
Cold Spot suggests largest structure in Universe: A supervoid 1.3 billion light years across
A map of the cosmic microwave background made using the Planck satellite. The Cold Spot, the ellipse at the bottom right, area resides in the constellation Eridanus in the southern galactic hemisphere. The insets show the environment of this anomalous patch of the sky, as mapped by Szapudi's team using PS1 and WISE data and as observed in the cosmic microwave background temperature data. The angular diameter of the vast supervoid aligned with the Cold Spot, which exceeds 30 degrees, is marked by the white circles. Credit: Graphics by Gerg? Kránicz. Image credit: ESA Planck Collaboration
Cold Spot suggests largest structure in Universe: A supervoid 1.3 billion light years across.
In 2004, astronomers examining a map of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) discovered the Cold Spot, a larger-than-expected unusually cold area of the sky. The physics surrounding the Big Bang theory predicts warmer and cooler spots of various sizes in the infant universe, but a spot this large and this cold was unexpected.
Now, a team of astronomers led by Dr István Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa may have found an explanation for the existence of the Cold Spot, which Szapudi says may be “the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity.” The researchers report their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
If the Cold Spot originated from the Big Bang itself, it could be a rare sign of exotic physics that the standard cosmology (basically, the Big Bang theory and related physics) does not explain. If, however, it is caused by a foreground structure between us and the CMB, it would be a sign that there is an extremely rare large-scale structure in the mass distribution of the universe.
Using data from Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, and NASA’s Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, Szapudi’s team discovered a large supervoid, a vast region 1.8 billion light-years across, in which the density of galaxies is much lower than usual in the known universe. This void was found by combining observations taken by PS1 at optical wavelengths with observations taken by WISE at infrared wavelengths to estimate the distance to and position of each galaxy in that part of the sky.
Earlier studies, also done in Hawaii, observed a much smaller area in the direction of the Cold Spot, but they could establish only that no very distant structure is in that part of the sky. Paradoxically, identifying nearby large structures is harder than finding distant ones, since we must map larger portions of the sky to see the closer structures. The large three-dimensional sky maps created from PS1 and WISE by Dr András Kovács (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) were thus essential for this study. The supervoid is only about 3 billion light-years away from us, a relatively short distance in the cosmic scheme of things.
Imagine there is a huge void with very little matter between you (the observer) and the CMB. Now think of the void as a hill. As the light enters the void, it must climb this hill. If the universe were not undergoing accelerating expansion, then the void would not evolve significantly, and light would descend the hill and regain the energy it lost as it exits the void. But with the accelerating expansion, the hill is measurably stretched as the light is traveling over it. By the time the light descends the hill, the hill has gotten flatter than when the light entered, so the light cannot pick up all the speed it lost upon entering the void. The light exits the void with less energy, and therefore at a longer wavelength, which corresponds to a colder temperature.
Getting through a supervoid takes hundreds of millions of years, even at the speed of light, so this measurable effect, known as the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect, might provide the first explanation of one of the most significant anomalies found to date in the CMB, first by a NASA satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and more recently, by Planck, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency.
While the existence of the supervoid and its expected effect on the CMB do not fully explain the Cold Spot, it is very unlikely that the supervoid and the Cold Spot at the same location are a coincidence. The team will continue its work using improved data from PS1, and from the Dark Energy Survey being conducted with a telescope in Chile to study the Cold Spot and supervoid, as well as another large void located near the constellation Draco.
István Szapudi, András Kovács, Benjamin R. Granett, Zsolt Frei, Joseph Silk, Will Burgett, Shaun Cole, Peter W. Draper, Daniel J. Farrow, Nicholas Kaiser, Eugene A. Magnier, Nigel Metcalfe, Jeffrey S. Morgan, Paul Price, John Tonry and Richard Wainscoat,. Detection of a supervoid aligned with the cold spot of the cosmic microwave background. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2015 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv488
Explosions of Jupiter’s aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction
Explosions of Jupiter’s aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction
In this artist's rendering, flows of electrically charged ions and electrons accelerate along Jupiter's magnetic field lines (fountain-like blue curves), triggering auroras (blue rings) at the planet's pole. Accelerated particles come from clouds of material (red) spewed from volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io (small orb to right). Recent observations of extreme ultraviolet emissions from Jupiter by satellite Hisaki (left foreground) and the Hubble Space Telescope (right) show episodes of sudden brightening of the planet's auroras. Interactions with the excited particles from Io likely also fuel these auroral explosions, new research shows, not interactions with particles from the Sun. Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
On Earth, bursts of particles spewed by the Sun spark shimmering auroras, like the Northern Lights, that briefly dance at our planet’s poles. But, on Jupiter, there’s an auroral glow all the time, and new observations show that this Jovian display sometimes flares up because of a process having nothing to do with the Sun.
Jupiter watchers have long known that the giant planet’s ever-present polar auroras — thousands of times brighter and many times bigger than Earth — are powered by both electrically charged particles from the Sun colliding with Jupiter’s magnetic field and a separate interaction between Jupiter and one of its many moons, called Io. But there are also auroral explosions on Jupiter, or periods of dazzling brightening, similar to auroral storms on Earth, that no one could definitively trace back to either of those known causes.
In the aurora-making interaction of Jupiter and Io, volcanoes on the small moon blast clouds of electrically charged atoms (ions) and electrons into a region surrounding Jupiter that’s permeated by the planet’s powerful magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth’s. Rotating along with its rapidly spinning planet, the magnetic field drags the material from Io around with it, causing strong electric fields at Jupiter’s poles. The acceleration of the ions and electrons produce intense auroras that shine in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum but most brightly in high-energy bands, like ultraviolet light and X-rays, that are invisible to unaided human eyes.
Now, new observations of the planet’s extreme ultraviolet emissions show that bright explosions of Jupiter’s aurora likely also get kicked off by the planet-moon interaction, not by solar activity. A new scientific paper about these observations by Tomoki Kimura of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan, and his colleagues, was published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Starting in January 2014, a telescope aboard the JAXA’s Hisaki satellite, which focused on Jupiter for two months, recorded intermittent brightening of the giant planet’s aurora. The telescope detected sudden flare-ups on days when the usual flow of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind, was relatively weak.
Additional space and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, also viewed Jupiter during these lulls in the solar wind. Both Hisaki and Hubble witnessed explosions of the planet’s aurora despite the solar wind’s calm, suggesting that it’s the Jupiter-Io interaction driving these explosions, not charged particles from the Sun, according to the new study. The new research does not address exactly what is happening in the Jovian magnetosphere to cause the temporary brightening of auroral explosions.
T. Kimura, S. V. Badman, C. Tao, K. Yoshioka, G. Murakami, A. Yamazaki, F. Tsuchiya, B. Bonfond, A. J. Steffl, A. Masters, S. Kasahara, H. Hasegawa, I. Yoshikawa, M. Fujimoto, J. T. Clarke. Transient internally-driven aurora at Jupiter discovered by Hisaki and the Hubble Space Telescope. Geophysical Research Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL063272
Nasa beefs up its team of ‘alien hunters’ – and says we may be on the verge of finding extraterrestrial life.
The Nexss team, includes those who study Earth as a life-bearing planet (lower right), those researching the diversity of solar system planets (left), and those on the new frontier, discovering worlds orbiting other stars in the galaxy (upper right)
Nasa beefs up its team of ‘alien hunters’ – and says we may be on the verge of finding extraterrestrial life.
Nasa claims we’ll find aliens in the next 10 to 20 years – and now the agency is revving up its efforts to track them down.
The group has put together a team of ‘extraterrestrial experts’ to see if any of the planets discovered outside our solar system are habitable.
And it says that the amateur astronomers could help with its ‘unprecedented’ search for ET by access research data online.
The initiative, dubbed Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (Nexss), will include scientists from 10 universities including Stanford, the University of California and Yale.
The study of exoplanets is a relatively new field with discovery of the first exoplanet around a star like our sun was made in 1995.
Since the launch of the Kepler space telescope six years ago, more than 1,000 exoplanets have been found, with thousands of additional candidates waiting to be confirmed.
Nasa has set up a website for the public called Planet Hunters which allows anyone to search the data gathered by Kepler, since launching six years ago.
Scientists are also developing new ways to confirm the habitability of these worlds and search for biosignatures, or signs of life.
By applying a ‘system science’ approach, the team hopes to understand on an alien planet’s biology interacts with the atmosphere, geology, oceans, and interior of a planet.
The announcement comes just weeks after Nasa’s top scientist predicted we could be on the verge of finding life on one of them.
During a talk in Washington last month, the space agency announced that humanity is likely to encounter extra-terrestrials within a decade.
THE NEXSS TEAM OF ‘ALIEN HUNTERS': WHAT WILL THEY DO?
Alien hunters from the University of Berkeley, California and Stanford are tasked with answering the question: ‘What are the properties of exoplanetary systems, as they relate to their formation, evolution, and potential to harbour life?’ They will combine astronomical observations of exoplanets and forming planetary systems with powerful computer simulations and cutting-edge microscopic studies of meteorites. The team from Arizona State University in Phoenix will take a similar approach. This research group will place planetary habitability in a chemical context, with the goal of producing a ‘periodic table of planets.’ Researchers from Hampton University, Virginia, will be exploring the sources and sinks for volatiles on habitable worlds. This research will help determine the past and present habitability of Mars and even Venus. The team centered at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies will investigate habitability on a more local scale. It will examine the habitability of solar system rocky planets through time. The team from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, will design new spectrometers – optical instruments that measure the spectrum of light – with the stability to reach Earth-detecting precision for nearby stars. A group led the University of Nebraska-Kearney will explore the existence and evolution of exospheres around exoplanets, the outer, ‘unbound’ portion of a planet’s atmosphere. From the University of California, Santa Cruz, a group will investigate how novel maths equations can be used to extract information from light that is emitted and reflected by planetary atmospheres.
‘I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years,’ Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for Nasa, said.
‘We know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology.’
Jeffery Newmark, interim director of heliophysics at the agency, added: ‘It’s definitely not an if, it’s a when.’
‘We are not talking about little green men,’ Stofan said. ‘We are talking about little microbes.’
The announcement was prompted by the recent discovery of water by Nasa in surprising places.
Jim Green, director of planetary science at Nasa, noted that a recent study of the Martian atmosphere found 50 per cent of the planet’s northern hemisphere once had oceans a mile deep.
The same study found that water had been present on the red planet for up to 1.2 billion year.
‘We think that long period of time is necessary for life to get more complex,’ Stofan said.
Nasa associate administrator John Grunsfeld said he is excited about seeing what form life beyond Earth may take.
‘Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low,’ he said.
‘I think we’re one generation away in our solar system, whether it’s on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star.
At the same conference last year, Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden made a more conservative estimate.
He claimed that we will find life within the next 20 years – with a high chance it will be outside our solar system.
Nasa next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will search for signs of past life and bring samples for a possible return to Earth for analysis.
Nasa also hopes to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s, which Stofan says is crucial key to the search for Mars life.
‘I’m a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils,’ Stofan said. ‘Those are hard to find.
‘So I have a bias that it’s eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars — field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists — actually out there looking for that good evidence of life that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about.’
The space agency is also planning a mission to Europa, which may launch as early as 2022. It hopes to find out whether the icy moon is habitable.
Meanwhile, the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will launch in 2018 to scope out the atmospheres of nearby ‘super-Earth’ alien planets.
Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water
Mars distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes -- between the blue lines, in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as the surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that there are glaciers composed of frozen water underneath the dust. Credit: Mars Digital Image Model, NASA/Nanna Karlsson
Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water
Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice. The results are published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water (H2O) or of carbon dioxide (CO2) or whether it was mud.
Using radar measurements from the NASA satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have been able to determine that is water ice. But how thick was the ice and do they resemble glaciers on Earth?
A group of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have now calculated this using radar observations combined with ice flow modelling.
Data combined with modelling
“We have looked at radar measurements spanning ten years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is after all a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the ice flow,” explains Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson, a postdoc at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson explains that earlier studies have identified thousands of glacier-like formations on the planet. The glaciers are located in belts around Mars between the latitudes 300-500 — equivalent to just south of Denmark’s location on Earth. The glaiciers are found on both the northern and southern hemispheres.
From some locations on Mars they have good detailed high-resolution data, while they only have more sparse data from other areas. But by supplementing the sparse data with information about the flow and form of the glaciers from the very well studied areas, they have been able to calculate how thick and voluminous the ice is across the glacier belts.
Could cover the entire planet
“We have calculated that the ice in the glaciers is equivalent to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice — that much ice could cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters of ice. The ice at the mid-latitudes is therefore an important part of Mars’ water reservoir,” explains Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson.
That the ice has not evaporated out into space could actually mean that the thick layer of dust is protecting the ice. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low that water ice simply evaporates and becomes water vapour. But the glaciers are well protected under the thick layer of dust.
N. B. Karlsson, L. S. Schmidt, C. S. Hvidberg. Volume of Martian mid-latitude glaciers from radar observations and ice-flow modelling. Geophysical Research Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL063219
University of Copenhagen – Niels Bohr Institute. “Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 April 2015. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408102701.htm.
This artist's rendering shows the collision of two planetary bodies. A collision like this is believed to have formed the moon within the first 150 million years after our solar system formed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Violent formation of the moon: New view
Within the first 150 million years after our solar system formed, a giant body roughly the size of Mars struck and merged with Earth, blasting a huge cloud of rock and debris into space. This cloud would eventually coalesce and form the moon.
For almost 30 years, planetary scientists have been quite happy with this explanation–with one major exception. Although this scenario makes sense when you look at the size of the moon and the physics of its orbit around Earth, things start to break down a little when you compare their isotopic compositions–the geological equivalent of a DNA “fingerprint.” Specifically, Earth and the moon are too much alike.
The expectation has long been that the moon should carry the isotopic “fingerprint” of the foreign body, which scientists have named Theia. Because Theia came from elsewhere in the solar system, it probably had a much different isotopic fingerprint than early Earth.
Now, a team of scientists at the University of Maryland has generated a new isotopic fingerprint of the moon that could provide the missing piece of the puzzle. By zeroing in on an isotope of Tungsten present in both the moon and Earth, the UMD team is the first to reconcile the accepted model of the moon’s formation with the unexpectedly similar isotopic fingerprints of both bodies. The results suggest that the impact of Theia into early Earth was so violent, the resulting debris cloud mixed thoroughly before settling down and forming the moon. The findings appear in the April 8, 2015 advance online edition of the journal Nature.
“The problem is that Earth and the moon are very similar with respect to their isotopic fingerprints, suggesting that they are both ultimately formed from the same material that gathered early in the solar system’s history,” said Richard Walker, a professor of geology at UMD and co-author of the study. “This is surprising, because the Mars-sized body that created the moon is expected to have been very different. So the conundrum is that Earth and the moon shouldn’t be as similar as they are.”
Several different theories have emerged over the years to explain the similar fingerprints of Earth and the moon. Perhaps the impact created a huge cloud of debris that mixed thoroughly with the Earth and then later condensed to form the moon. Or Theia could have, coincidentally, been isotopically similar to young Earth. A third possibility is that the moon formed from Earthen materials, rather than from Theia, although this would have been a very unusual type of impact.
To tease out an explanation, Walker and his team looked to another well-documented phenomenon in the early history of the solar system. Evidence suggests that both Earth and the moon gathered additional material after the main impact, and that Earth collected more of this debris and dust. This new material contained a lot of Tungsten, but relatively little of this was of a lighter isotope known as Tungsten-182. Taking these two observations together, one would expect that Earth would have less Tungsten-182 than the moon.
Sure enough, when comparing rocks from the moon and Earth, Walker and his team found that the moon has a slightly higher proportion of Tungsten-182. The key, however, is how much.
“The small, but significant, difference in the Tungsten isotopic composition between Earth and the moon perfectly corresponds to the different amounts of material gathered by Earth and the moon post-impact,” Walker said. “This means that, right after the moon formed, it had exactly the same isotopic composition as Earth’s mantle.”
This finding supports the idea that the mass of material created by the impact, which later formed the moon, must have mixed together thoroughly before the moon coalesced and cooled. This would explain both the overall similarities in isotopic fingerprints and the slight differences in Tungsten-182.
It also largely rules out the idea that the Mars-sized body was of similar composition, or that the moon formed from material contained in the pre-impact Earth. In both cases, it would be highly unlikely to see such a perfect correlation between Tungsten-182 and the amounts of material gathered by the moon and Earth post-impact.
“This result brings us one step closer to understanding the close familial relationship between Earth and the moon,” Walker said. “We still need to work out the details, but it’s clear that our early solar system was a very violent place.”
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Maryland. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Mathieu Touboul, Igor S. Puchtel, Richard J. Walker. Tungsten isotopic evidence for disproportional late accretion to the Earth and Moon. Nature, 2015; DOI: 10.1038/nature14355
This is an artist's impression of a quasar with a supermassive black hole in the distant universe. Credit: Zhaoyu Li/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Misti Mountain Observatory
Scientists have discovered the brightest quasar in the early universe, powered by the most massive black hole yet known at that time. The international team led by astronomers from Peking University in China and from the University of Arizona announce their findings in the scientific journal Nature on Feb. 26.
The discovery of this quasar, named SDSS J0100+2802, marks an important step in understanding how quasars, the most powerful objects in the universe, have evolved from the earliest epoch, only 900 million years after the Big Bang, which is thought to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. The quasar, with its central black hole mass of 12 billion solar masses and the luminosity of 420 trillion suns, is at a distance of 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.
The discovery of this ultraluminous quasar also presents a major puzzle to the theory of black hole growth at early universe, according to Xiaohui Fan, Regents’ Professor of Astronomy at the UA’s Steward Observatory, who co-authored the study.
“How can a quasar so luminous, and a black hole so massive, form so early in the history of the universe, at an era soon after the earliest stars and galaxies have just emerged?” Fan said. “And what is the relationship between this monster black hole and its surrounding environment, including its host galaxy?
“This ultraluminous quasar with its supermassive black hole provides a unique laboratory to the study of the mass assembly and galaxy formation around the most massive black holes in the early universe.”
The quasar dates from a time close to the end of an important cosmic event that astronomers referred to as the “epoch of reionization”: the cosmic dawn when light from the earliest generations of galaxies and quasars is thought to have ended the “cosmic dark ages” and transformed the universe into how we see it today.
Discovered in 1963, quasars are the most powerful objects beyond our Milky Way galaxy, beaming vast amounts of energy across space as the supermassive black hole in their center sucks in matter from its surroundings. Thanks to the new generation of digital sky surveys, astronomers have discovered more than 200,000 quasars, with ages ranging from 0.7 billion years after the Big Bang to today.
Shining with the equivalent of 420 trillion suns, the new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion years away). It harbors a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high redshift (very distant) quasars.
“By comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy has a black hole with a mass of only 4 million solar masses at its center; the black hole that powers this new quasar is 3,000 time heavier,” Fan said.
Feige Wang, a doctoral student from Peking University who is supervised jointly by Fan and Prof. Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, the study’s lead author, initially spotted this quasar for further study.
“This quasar was first discovered by our 2.4-meter Lijiang Telescope in Yunnan, China, making it the only quasar ever discovered by a 2-meter telescope at such distance, and we’re very proud of it,” Wang said. “The ultraluminous nature of this quasar will allow us to make unprecedented measurements of the temperature, ionization state and metal content of the intergalactic medium at the epoch of reionization.”
Following the initial discovery, two telescopes in southern Arizona did the heavy lifting in determining the distance and mass of the black hole: the 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, on Mount Graham and the 6.5-meter Multiple Mirror Telescope, or MMT, on Mount Hopkins. Additional observations with the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescope in Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, and the 8.2-meter Gemini North Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed the results.
“This quasar is very unique,” said Xue-Bing Wu, a professor of the Department of Astronomy, School of Physics at Peking University and the associate director of the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe.”
Wu leads a team that has developed a method to effectively select quasars in the distant universe based on optical and near-infrared photometric data, in particular using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, satellite.
“This is a great accomplishment for the LBT,” said Fan, who chairs the LBT Scientific Advisory Committee and also discovered the previous record holders for the most massive black hole in the early universe, about a fourth of the size of the newly discovered object. “The especially sensitive optical and infrared spectrographs of the LBT provided the early assessment of both the distance of the quasars and the mass of the black hole at the quasar’s center.”
For Christian Veillet, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, or LBTO, this discovery demonstrates both the power of international collaborations and the benefit of using a variety of facilities spread throughout the world.
“This result is particularly gratifying for LBTO, which is well on its way to full nighttime operations,” Veillet said. “While in this case the authors used two different instruments in series, one for visible light spectroscopy and one for near-infrared imaging, LBTO will soon offer a pair of instruments that can be used simultaneously, effectively doubling the number of observations possible in clear skies and ultimately creating even more exciting science.”
To further unveil the nature of this remarkable quasar, and to shed light on the physical processes that led to the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes, the research team will carry out further investigations on this quasar with more international telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Telescope.
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Arizona. The original article was written by Christian Veillet/LBTO and Daniel Stolte/University Relations – Communications. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Xue-Bing Wu, Feige Wang, Xiaohui Fan, Weimin Yi, Wenwen Zuo, Fuyan Bian, Linhua Jiang, Ian D. McGreer, Ran Wang, Jinyi Yang, Qian Yang, David Thompson, Yuri Beletsky. An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30. Nature, 2015; 518 (7540): 512 DOI: 10.1038/nature14241
Local UFO investigator: It’s ‘obvious we’re not alone’ (Michigan)
Local UFO investigator: It’s ‘obvious we’re not alone’ (Michigan)
By Diane Gale Andreassi, Michigan.com
Harry Wilnus sits near a wooden figure of an extraterrestrial wooden carving he displays in his Salem Township home. (Photo: Hal Gould | Staff Photographer)(Photo: Hal Gould Michigan.com)
Harry Willnus knows all too well that eyebrows will rise when he talks about unidentified flying objects, but that doesn’t stop the retired social studies teacher from continuing his 60-year quest to see the issue become accepted by the mainstream population.
“UFO sightings are reported every day around the world and in every country around the world,” said the Salem resident and former president of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the world’s largest investigative body looking into the UFO phenomena.
Willnus, like other UFO enthusiasts ask, “Are we alone in the universe?”
That question will be the focus of his appearance on the Science Channel’s show “Close Encounters.” Now in its second season, Willnus will appear on an upcoming episode scheduled to air at 10 p.m., March 10. Willnus will share his vast knowledge about the highly publicized March 1966 reported UFO sighting in Dexter,. He’ll be on the show again, at 10 p.m., March 31, talking about a reported sighting in Exeter, N. H.
In the March 20, 1966, Dexter case a group of people, including police officers, reported seeing an object turn from a blue green to a brilliant red to a yellow coloring. It rose 500 feet and returned to the ground, one man said.
Trying to investigate further, the officers said they went out to the far edge of the wooded area and also saw a brilliant light appear and then disappear. The officers said when they returned to their patrol vehicle, a group of people had gathered and reported seeing something similar. These witnesses said the object departed in a western direction at a high rate of speed.
Area reports
A UFO investigator, Willnus sat in the living room of his home and retold other stories of what he believes are extraterrestrial visits. Like a sighting by WJR reporter Marc Avery on Feb. 10, 1978. Avery was on his way to the airport on Interstate 275 when he and his wife saw two lights hovering over their car “for 30, 40, 50 seconds.” He called the radio station and spoke on air, describing the aircraft with Warren Pierce. Willnus has the report recorded on his smart phone.
The citing was never debunked, Willnus said. In fact, two men, who were walking in the Merriman Road and Michigan Avenue area later reported they saw a similar aircraft about five minutes before Avery’s report.
The U.S. Air Force investigated UFO sightings from 1947 to 1969, in Project Blue Book, which consisted of 12,618 accounts spanning nearly 130,000 pages, Willnus said. The project was discontinued, however, after a committee formed at the request of President Gerald Ford concluded UFOs weren’t a threat to national security.
Sightings on the rise
Sightings have doubled in the last couple of years, Willnus said.
“This major increase shows there’s something going on,” he said. “It’s driving the interest in the number one question: ‘Are we alone?’ Are there other intelligences out there?
“After studying UFOs, it becomes obvious we are not alone,” Willnus continued. “I base that on the fact that there are 200 sightings every day around the world. There’s pictures, photos and movies. It’s not a hoax when these crafts can disappear before our eyes. Or fly at over 1,000 miles an hour and make a right angle turn – or, stop on a dime.”
Willnus also refers to a case involving former Novi resident Nancy Tremaine, who had described being abducted by a UFO off Orchard Drive near Meadowbrook Road in the 1960s. Former Novi Police Chief Lee BeGole, who spoke to the Novi News last year at age 93, didn’t see the UFO, but he was on duty at the police station the night the incident occurred.
BeGole said an off duty officer told dispatch he saw a strange object overhead and police dispatch took multiple calls from people who said they also saw a strange object in the sky.
If you ask your 10 best friends if they ever had a UFO experience, Willnus said, 10 percent would say, “yes.”
“But, people get laughed at once they say that,” Willnus said. “And then they say, ‘I’m not going to share that again.'”
Not always out of this world
He does note, however, that 90 percent of reported UFOs can be explained by something other than an extraterrestrial visit. The “UFO” might actually be a blimp, a flock of birds flying at night or even the planet, Venus, because it’s the closest to Earth and moves quickly.
“The other 10 percent, we’re not sure what they are,” Willnus added. “I think a good many of those are that we are being visited by intelligent life off the planet Earth. Look at the evidence. The evidence is, overwhelmingly, there is a UFO phenomenon that we don’t understand at this time.
“I’m getting up there and I want this story to break before I pass,” he said. “Some people in the U.S. government are aware we are being visited. This is a cosmic Watergate where there is a cover-up keeping this from people. The best thing that could happen is if governments, including the United States, would come out and say, ‘The UFO phenomenon is real and don’t panic, because they don’t appear to be here to harm us.'”
Diane Gale Andreassi is a reporter for HometownLife.com. Contact her at dandreassi@hometownlife.com, 734-432-5974 or on Twitter: @HeraldReporter.
Explosions of Jupiter’s aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction
Explosions of Jupiter’s aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction
In this artist's rendering, flows of electrically charged ions and electrons accelerate along Jupiter's magnetic field lines (fountain-like blue curves), triggering auroras (blue rings) at the planet's pole. Accelerated particles come from clouds of material (red) spewed from volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io (small orb to right). Recent observations of extreme ultraviolet emissions from Jupiter by satellite Hisaki (left foreground) and the Hubble Space Telescope (right) show episodes of sudden brightening of the planet's auroras. Interactions with the excited particles from Io likely also fuel these auroral explosions, new research shows, not interactions with particles from the Sun. Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
On Earth, bursts of particles spewed by the Sun spark shimmering auroras, like the Northern Lights, that briefly dance at our planet’s poles. But, on Jupiter, there’s an auroral glow all the time, and new observations show that this Jovian display sometimes flares up because of a process having nothing to do with the Sun.
Jupiter watchers have long known that the giant planet’s ever-present polar auroras — thousands of times brighter and many times bigger than Earth — are powered by both electrically charged particles from the Sun colliding with Jupiter’s magnetic field and a separate interaction between Jupiter and one of its many moons, called Io. But there are also auroral explosions on Jupiter, or periods of dazzling brightening, similar to auroral storms on Earth, that no one could definitively trace back to either of those known causes.
In the aurora-making interaction of Jupiter and Io, volcanoes on the small moon blast clouds of electrically charged atoms (ions) and electrons into a region surrounding Jupiter that’s permeated by the planet’s powerful magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth’s. Rotating along with its rapidly spinning planet, the magnetic field drags the material from Io around with it, causing strong electric fields at Jupiter’s poles. The acceleration of the ions and electrons produce intense auroras that shine in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum but most brightly in high-energy bands, like ultraviolet light and X-rays, that are invisible to unaided human eyes.
Now, new observations of the planet’s extreme ultraviolet emissions show that bright explosions of Jupiter’s aurora likely also get kicked off by the planet-moon interaction, not by solar activity. A new scientific paper about these observations by Tomoki Kimura of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan, and his colleagues, was published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Starting in January 2014, a telescope aboard the JAXA’s Hisaki satellite, which focused on Jupiter for two months, recorded intermittent brightening of the giant planet’s aurora. The telescope detected sudden flare-ups on days when the usual flow of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind, was relatively weak.
Additional space and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, also viewed Jupiter during these lulls in the solar wind. Both Hisaki and Hubble witnessed explosions of the planet’s aurora despite the solar wind’s calm, suggesting that it’s the Jupiter-Io interaction driving these explosions, not charged particles from the Sun, according to the new study. The new research does not address exactly what is happening in the Jovian magnetosphere to cause the temporary brightening of auroral explosions.
T. Kimura, S. V. Badman, C. Tao, K. Yoshioka, G. Murakami, A. Yamazaki, F. Tsuchiya, B. Bonfond, A. J. Steffl, A. Masters, S. Kasahara, H. Hasegawa, I. Yoshikawa, M. Fujimoto, J. T. Clarke. Transient internally-driven aurora at Jupiter discovered by Hisaki and the Hubble Space Telescope. Geophysical Research Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL063272
Did Mars once have a nitrogen cycle? Scientists find fixed nitrogen in Martian sediments
Did Mars once have a nitrogen cycle? Scientists find fixed nitrogen in Martian sediments
The rover Curiosity on the surface of Mars collects data by means of the instrument SAM (Sample Analysis on Mars). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Javier Martín-Torres, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Luleå University of Technology, is one of several researchers who has found fixed forms of nitrogen in Mars. The research findings are now being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This discovery is a new step in assessing whether Mars is and/or was habitable, since nitrogen is a basic requirement for life as we know it,” says Javier Martín-Torres.
It’s the researchers in the Mars Science Laboratory Mission Science Team, in which Javier Martín-Torres is included, who have discovered the solid forms of nitrogen on Mars.
“The presence of nitrogen-bearing compounds in Martian soil means the existence of a source of biochemically accessible nitrogen, and suggest that it could be a nitrogen cycle sometime along the evolution of Mars as a planet,” he says.
Many findings behind the discovery
The detection has been verified through analyses of samples taken at three different points on Mars. Analyses are made by the instrument SAM (Sample Analysis on Mars) on board the unmanned rover Curiosity located on Mars. Two of the samples come from drilling at a place called Sheepbed mudstone and the third sample is generally believed to be representative of the global Martian dust.
“It has been established that the nitrates, which is a form of nitrogen, comes from fixation of atmospheric diatomic nitrogen in the atmosphere during meteorite impacts, which is consistent with the data that we obtained through the SAM analyses, so this may be the main source of fixed nitrogen on Mars,” says Javier Martín-Torres.
Martin-Torres is also co-author of the scientific manuscripts on the first detection of organics on Mars (published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets) and the first in-situ measurement of methane on the Red Planet, which in 2014 was published in the journal Science.
Jennifer C. Stern, Brad Sutter, Caroline Freissinet, Rafael Navarro-González, Christopher P. McKay, P. Douglas Archer, Arnaud Buch, Anna E. Brunner, Patrice Coll, Jennifer L. Eigenbrode, Alberto G. Fairen, Heather B. Franz, Daniel P. Glavin, Srishti Kashyap, Amy C. McAdam, Douglas W. Ming, Andrew Steele, Cyril Szopa, James J. Wray, F. Javier Martín-Torres, Maria-Paz Zorzano, Pamela G. Conrad, Paul R. Mahaffy. Evidence for indigenous nitrogen in sedimentary and aeolian deposits from theCuriosityrover investigations at Gale crater, Mars. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 201420932 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1420932112
1956 Maui UFO Sighting Report Included in Air Force Files
1956 Maui UFO Sighting Report Included in Air Force Files
By Wendy Osher
1956 Maui UFO Sighting Report
A 1956 UFO report from Maui is included in now unclassified documents that were compiled and investigated by the US Air Force.
According to the Air Intelligence Information Report, a 56-year-old retired Lahaina woman reported seeing an orange object with a “flame” and “muffled roar” during the night time hours on Jan. 20, 1956.
According to the report, the woman observed the object coming fast from the distance, then slowing and hovering, and finally fading into the distance into a valley on the Island of Molokaʻi, about 10 miles across the channel.
The report states that the woman observed the object at night for about 25 minutes while looking through a screen window.
Investigators noted that, the “color, size and flight path as described by (the) observer leaves little doubt that (the) object was actually an aircraft.”
The report further stated that, “diffusion and refraction of such lights passing through the dense atmosphere close to the Earth’s surface accounts for observer’s generous estimates of size and color.”
The Air Intelligence Information Report is part of the Project Blue Book from the National Archives Archival Research Catalog that is searchable online at the Fold3 website, which provides access to US military records, including the stories, photos, and personal documents of the men and women who served.
The Project Blue Book includes US Air Force investigations into unidentified flying object sightings reported between June 1947 and December 1969.
A total of 40 documents surface when the search word Hawaiʻi is entered, with reports filed in Hilo, Honolulu, Kauaʻi, Hickam Air Force Base, Waikīkī Beach, ʻEwa Beach, Pearl Harbor, Haleʻiwa, Barbers Point, and Kunia.
Peruvian UFO sighting supports extraterrestrial embassy campaign, Raelians say
Peruvian UFO sighting supports extraterrestrial embassy campaign, Raelians say
Peruvian UFOsightingsupports extraterrestrial embassy campaign, Raelians say
Right when Raelians were holding a press conference in Lima and describing their plan to build an embassy for extraterrestrials, a UFO was hovering nearby over Lima’s Miraflores neighborhood, according to a statement released today by the International Raelian Movement (IRM).
“News of this UFO, seen from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on February 10, spread throughout Peru,” said Raelian Guide David Uzal, who leads South America’s Raelian Movement. “It hovered over 2 hours, long enough for a TV crew from ‘Alto al Crimen’ to film it.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFQYUYOubqc).
The timing of the UFO’s appearance isn’t a coincidence, Uzal declared.
“It’s much more than an amazing UFO sighting,” agreed Raelian Guide Erich Rever of the Peruvian Raelian Movement. “This UFO appeared right when we held a press conference to present our embassy project plan, which we have submitted to the Peruvian government. Peru must be dear to our extraterrestrial creators, who lived here in ancient times and left many traces, so we’re asking the government for permission to build the embassy here. It’s a wonderful opportunity for Peruvians to understand their past and, more importantly, to consider receiving our creators, the Elohim, who were taken for gods by our ancestors and now ask to be welcomed back. We’re hoping the Peruvian government will receive their request loud and clear!”
UFOsightings have often occurred during Raelian activities.
“It’s common to see them over the Raelian village in Burkina Faso, West Africa,” Uzal said. “They were also seen over a Canadian compound when Rael was living there. Lately, many sightings have been made in China, where the Raelian community is developing quickly.”
But the Miraflores UFO appearance is special, he said.
“Raelians participating in our first South American Happiness Academy next week in Ricardo Palma hope the Peruvian government will approve our embassy plan, and they’re thrilled by this timely support from the Elohim,” he explained. “Raelians from many countries are here to participate in the Academy and support our embassy effort.”
The Raelian Movement will hold a press conference about the significance of the Milaflores UFO at 7:30 p.m. on Thurs., Feb.12, at the Hotel Boulevard, Avenida Jose Pardo 771, Lima. A publicconference will take place at the same location on Saturday, Feb. 14, at 10 a.m.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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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 74 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.
