NASA Brings Scientists & Theologians Together To Prepare World For Extraterrestrial Contact

by Arjun Walia

A couple of months ago top U.S. astronomers gathered in front of congress to let them know that extraterrestrial life exists without question. Their main argument was the size of the universe, emphasizing that there are trillions of stars out there, with one in every five most likely harboring an Earth-like planet. It’s also important to keep in mind that planets do not have to be “Earth-like” in order to harbor life. You can read more about that story here.

“The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven’t even talked about the moons. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion.” – Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at California’s SETI Institute (source)

This time, NASA and the Library of Congress have teamed up bringing together scientists, theologians, philosophers and historians from around the globe for a two day symposium in order to discuss how to prepare the world for extraterrestrial contact, whether it be microbial organisms or intelligent beings.

“We’re looking at all scenarios about finding life. If you find microbes, that’s one thing. If you find intelligence, it’s another. And if they communicate, it’s something else, and depending on what they say, it’s something else! The idea is not to wait until we make a discovery, but to try and prepare the public for what the implications might be when such a discovery is made. I think the reason that NASA is backing this is because of all the recent activity in the discovery of exoplanets and the advances in astrobiology in general. People just consider it much more likely now that we’re going to find something — probably microbes first and maybe intelligence later. The driving force behind this is from a scientific point of view that it seems much more likely now that we are going to find life at some point in the future.” – Astronomer, symposium organizer and former chief NASA historian, Steven J. Dick. (source)

One of the theologians present was Brother Guy Consolmagno, who is the new president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. This is what he had to say:

“I Believe [alien life exists], but I have no evidence. I would be really excited and it would make my understanding of my religion deeper and richer in ways that I can’t even predict yet, which is why it would be so exciting.” (source)

He is urging the public not to be so surprised when extraterrestrial life is discovered, because it will be discovered. He even said that he would be happy to baptize them, if it’s intelligent extraterrestrial life that’s discovered. The Vatican has been very open to the idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and they’ve expressed these views for a very long time.

Earth is not the center of the universe, it’s not flat, and it’s looking very likely that the next major paradigm shifting revelation will be the fact that we are not alone in the universe.

It’s great to see the mainstream world gather, discuss and prepare for this possibility and ultimate reality, and it’s a great seg-way to create more awareness about the world of secrecy, the worlds within our world that deal with projects the human race knows nothing about.

The Other Probability – Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life Is Already Here

All of the information I’ve provided below is probably old information for CE fans that regularly visit our site. This information is from a previous article I wrote earlier in the year, I thought it would be fitting to cut and paste it here for our new readers. You can find more CE articles on the UFO/Extraterrestrial topic by visiting our exopolitics section HERE.

In the United States alone, at least half of all Americans say that we’re not alone in the universe. Fifty percent of Americans already believe that there is some form of life on other planets, while only seventeen percent think that there isn’t. A quarter of Americans believe that intelligent extraterrestrial visitors have already come to Earth and have been doing so for a long time. (source)

Here’s one of them:

“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time.” (source) (source) – Apollo 14 Astronaut, Air Force Captain and Founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dr. Edgar Mitchell

There are multiple reasons why the extraterrestrial question continues to gain popularity. People are starting to ask questions about the world around them, utilizing critical thinking and investigation. After thoroughly investigating this topic your conclusions will be similar to the conclusions of the majority, we are not alone, and we are being visited.

1. The Size of the Universe

How often do you look up into the night sky and wonder just how many stars, planets, galaxies and more are out there? Space has been a high area of interest that has always fascinated scientists, philosophers, musicians and pretty much just about everyone. What is it about deep space that grabs our attention so much? To think about just how big the universe is can really put things into perspective.

Counting the stars in the universe  is like trying to count the number of sand grains on a beach , not possible. Although estimates vary among different experts, the general consensus is that there are at least between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in our universe. Think about that for a moment, and now throw in billions of stars in each galaxy! (source) This number could very easily be in the trillions for all we know.

Take the Milky Way Galaxy for example, which measures to about 120,000 light years across (it would take light that many years to travel across the galaxy), and contains up to 400 billion stars. Again, that’s billions of galaxies that contain billions of stars. (source)

Scientists estimate that at least 10 billion habitable Earth-sized planets exist in the milky way alone ( one galaxy out of billions), but it’s important to keep an open mind as to what type of conditions and environments some unknown extraterrestrial like forms could thrive in. They all don’t necessarily have to be Earth-like.

Given our estimation of the size of the universe, or multiverse (whatever you want to call it), odds are we are not alone.

2. Whistle Blowers

The past few years have seen a surge of whistle-blowers that’ve come out and said some remarkable things. Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have received the most attention, but the reality is that there are hundreds of whistle blowers who have come forward with verified credentials and backgrounds. Mass survelience and the security state is not the only thing shocking people around the world, it’s the fact that many of these whistle blowers claim that we are not alone in the universe. It wouldn’t be so hard to ignore if it wasn’t for the backgrounds these people have in their respected fields.

The first one that comes to mind is Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defence Minister, the man responsible for unifying the Canadian Air Force, Army and the Navy into one united force now known as the Canadian Forces. For someone with such a background to come out and make these extraordinary claims definitely grabbed the attention of many people.

“Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after. Trillions of dollars have been spent on black projects which both congress and the commander in chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.” (source)

Read more about “black projects” HERE.

”In one of the cases during the cold war, 1961, there were about 50 UFOs in formation flying South from Russia across Europe. The supreme allied commander was very concerned and was about ready to press the panic button when they turned around and went back over the North Pole. They decided to do an investigation and they investigated for three years and they decided that with absolute certainty that four different species, at least, have been visiting this planet for thousands of years. There’s been a lot more activity in the past two decades, especially since we invented the atomic bomb.” (source)

Paul Hellyer isn’t the only one making extraordinary statements, at least a dozen NASA astronauts have done the same. Just like Dr. Edgar Mitchell’s quote, other astronauts have said some remarkable things. Let’s take a look at a few (out of many) examples.

“There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been monitoring us for a very long time. That their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic western point of view. That these visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO phenomenon” (source) – Dr. Brian O’leary, Former NASA Astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor

“In my opinion I think they were worried that it would panic the public so they started telling lies about it. And then I think they had to tell another lie to cover their first lie, now they don’t know how to get out of it. Now it’s going to be so embarrassing to admit that all these administrations have told so many untruths, it would be embarrassing getting out of it. There are a number of extraterrestrial vehicles out there cruising around.” (source) – Gordon Cooper, Former NASA Astronaut, Aeronautical Engineer and test pilot. One of the seven original Astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space program of the United States

The list goes on and on, the latest in NASA Astronaut statements about UFOs came from the 2005 International Space Station (ISS) Commander, Leroy Chiao. You can read more about that HERE.

Here is a video of John Podesta who was recently appointed as councillor to Barack Obama supporting UFO disclosure.

Some of the most extraordinary statements about UFOs and extraterrestrials come from persons who have held some of the highest positions known. Those who would be in a position to ‘know’ about possible extraterrestrial encounters.

“Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source)

“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” (source) – Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee

” Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2″, Written by Richard Dolan

The list of military whistle blowers is huge, there are hundreds of them and hundreds of quotes to choose from. To view military whistleblowers (with verified backgrounds) give a press conference at The National Press Club about UFOs deactivating nuclear weapons, click HERE. You can also look up Dr. Steven Greer and the disclosure project.

The list of quotes from all fields, from many people is outstanding. I could literally fill pages upon pages so I’ll stop here, I think you get the picture. These quotes by whistleblowers and people with prestigious backgrounds leads perfectly into the next point as to why almost everybody knows that we are not alone in the universe.

“There is another way whether it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that they’re here shows us that they found a way.” (source) - Jack Kasher, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Nebraska.

In this clip, it seems he (Dr. Jack Kasher)  is referring to FREE ENERGY. 

“This thing has gotten so highly-classified…it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified” – Senator Barry Goldwater , Chairman of the Senate intelligence committee (source)

3. The Evidence of UFOs

Within the past few years, dozens of governments admitted to allocating resources and having programs to study the UFO phenomenon. For instance, in Canada the RCMP, Transport Canada, and the Department of National Defence recently admitted to tracking UFOs and investigating them. (source) They’ve been doing it for years, accumulating thousands upon thousands of UFO related documents. Many of these documents have since been officially released.

HERE is the latest batch of UFO files released from the United Kingdom.

Documents released by the National Security Agency (NSA) reveal what is recorded when a UFO is being tracked on radar. HERE is one example. HERE is a four page U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and NSA report describing a particular encounter in great detail.

“As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4. ”

You can read more about the radar tracking of UFOs HERE. 

HERE is a Wikileak cable that describes how some politicians already know we are not alone in the universe. You can read more about that HERE.

Again the list goes on and on and thousands upon thousands of UFO related documents are now available in the public domain. For a summary of more documents that have been declassified and made available, a video done by UFO Richard Dolan does a great one in 10 minutes. To watch it click HERE.  and see what type of information is out there.

4. Mass Mainstream Media Attention

Media outlets of all kind are covering the topic, almost every movie that comes out these days has something to do with space or some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence. We’ve been bombarded with the topic for a while now so it’s not hard to see how it’s on the minds of many.

The most recent case of mainstream extraterrestrial ‘noise’ was made when scientists recently spoke to the house Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Dan Werthimer of the SETI Research Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, recently called for more funding to be allocated to the search for extraterrestrial life since he is “close to 100 percent” certain that we are not alone. (source)

In mid 2013, the same committee held a hearing about exoplanet discoveries, but perhaps one of the largest UFO/extraterrestrial hearings came at the National Press Club, which also took place in Mid-2013.  At this event, hundreds of researchers, activists and military/agency/political witnesses representing ten countries gave UFO/extraterrestrial testimony to six former members of the United States Congress about events and evidence indicating an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.

Former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), and 2008 presidential candidate said that there is “an extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet. Something is monitoring the planet and they are monitoring it very cautiously.” You can learn more about the citizens hearing here.

Apart from these events, UFOs are constantly a topic of interest in today’s mainstream news. Unfortunately, most mainstream media outlets that cover the topic seek out to ridicule it rather than investigating it properly.

To view military whistleblowers (with verified backgrounds) give a press conference at The National Press Club about UFOs deactivating nuclear weapons, click HERE.

HERE is a clip on the same topic on CBC news.

5. Personal Experience & Video Footage

There are millions of people out there claiming to have contact with extraterrestrial beings. This has played a large role in spreading the influence of extraterrestrial interest across the world. All of us seem to be naturally fascinated with the unknown, especially when it comes to space. It seems  like human nature.

Neuroscience can now explain what happens to our body when we meditate, but it’s something we all knew to be beneficial before the science. Is extraterrestrial life similar? Is it something we all feel deep down inside, something we don’t need proof for? (Even though the proof is there).

Besides the thousands of videos available on YouTube, there is some very fascinating officially documented UFO footage available for us to see. Click HERE to see raw footage of a UFO showing up in Norway for scientists at their observatory.

Click HERE to see film from the 1991 NASA STS-48 Discovery Space Shuttle mission. It’s some of the best, officially documented UFO footage that’s out there today.

HERE  is a video that made headlines once released. It came from straight front the Mexican Air Force. Do a quick UFO search on youtube and you’ll see many fakes, but many real videos of unknown aerial objects.

Final Thoughts

A few years ago the question was “Do UFOs exist?” Today that question has been answered, and the presence of UFOs performing maneuvers that defy our laws of physics has been well documented. The question has more so shifted to, “Is that an extraterrestrial space craft?”

It’s nothing to fear, in my opinion they’ve been around forever. They have been aware of us long before we have been aware of them. As speculated with our ancient civilizations in Earth’s brief past, perhaps they will one day interact with humanity again. I guess we will see.

Perhaps some groups are concerned about our planet, and come here further pushing the idea that we need to start changing the way we are doing things here. Perhaps one day soon we will find out.

I definitely believe that a good chunk of these UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin. I also believe that many of these crafts are “ours.”

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/nasa-astrobiology-alien-search_n_5860714.html

{ http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

01-01-2015 om 22:12 geschreven door peter  

Martian Rock: Clues to Planet’s Habitability

The surface of Mars was once wet, but no water flows there now. UC San Diego chemists and others took a close look at meteorite that may have been blasted from this huge rift across the planet’s surface. The image is a composite of hundreds of photos taken by NASA’s Viking missions in the 1970s.

Tales from a Martian rock: New chemical analysis of ancient Martian meteorite provides clues to planet’s history of habitability

A new analysis of a Martian rock that meteorite hunters plucked from an Antarctic ice field 30 years ago this month reveals a record of the planet’s climate billions of years ago, back when water likely washed across its surface and any life that ever formed there might have emerged.

01-01-2015 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

07-12-2014 om 18:32 geschreven door peter  

07-12-2014 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

Did a UFO land in Iceland?

07-12-2014 om 18:17 geschreven door peter  

29-11-2014 om 11:35 geschreven door peter  

The French Government Has An Official Agency Of UFO Hunters

Image: GEIPAN.

Inside the French Space Centre headquarters, a small team consisting of four staffers and a dozen volunteers is tasked with analyzing reports of unidentified flying objects — and sometimes, the agency dispatches trained investigators to visit the locations of the strange sightings. They are the Agents of G.E.I.P.A.N.

Okay, in truth, their acronym is not the least bit cool. It stands for Group d’Etudes et d’Informations Sur Les Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non Identifies (Study Group and Information on Non-Identified Aerospace Phenomenon). And, as the agency explains on its website, it is not a research organization “dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life or the existence of very advanced extraterrestrial technologies.”

But, GEIPAN does take its actual mission very seriously — playing “a vital role to make the information it collects available to the scientific community and, of course, the general public.”

As the BBC reports:

The team receives, on average, two UFO sightings a day. The department insists an 11-page form is filled out for each one. The idea is to provide details including photographs where possible but also weed out jokers and time-wasters.

If someone claims to have seen strange lights in the skies, the UFO team might go online to see whether the observation took place on a flight path— it can trace commercial air traffic going back more than a week.

The team also has access to military flight paths and is in touch with the air force and air traffic controllers.

Sometimes if its staff is really intrigued by photos they have seen or if there have been several witnesses to the same sighting, they will call the local police to ask whether they can be considered credible.

The department can explain away nearly all these phenomena and, believe it or not, the most common culprits are Chinese lanterns sent up at night during parties. The investigators often telephone the local town hall to ask if, perhaps, there had been a wedding going on at the time.

But there are around 400 UFO sightings going back to the 1970s that the French team cannot explain. One, an alleged flying saucer landing near Aix-en-Provence in 1981, they take very seriously— there were landing marks and multiple witnesses.

One point that the BBC report overlooks is that GEIPAN doesn’t like the term UFO, preferring instead the acronym PAN. As their website explains:

The acronym UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) is the translation of the English term UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). The review of the evidence and the results of investigations show that this term is often misused: in most cases, observations describe a phenomenon known or unknown, generally light but no evidence of the presence of a material object with characteristics comparable to those of flight of an aircraft. The use of the general term PAN (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) is more appropriate.

Whether you call them UFOs or PANs, GEIPAN’s website offers an extensive library of the software tools they use in their analyses. The only software not publicly available is an in-house tool developed for tracking satellites. It’s called — wait for it — “Scully.”

{http://nationalufocenter.com/}

15-11-2014 om 23:02 geschreven door peter  

Earth’s magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime

The 'north pole' -- that is, the direction of magnetic north -- was reversed a million years ago. This map shows how, starting about 789,000 years ago, the north pole wandered around Antarctica for several thousand years before flipping 786,000 years ago to the orientation we know today, with the pole somewhere in the Arctic. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Berkeley

Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north.

It’s not as bizarre as it sounds. Earth’s magnetic field has flipped — though not overnight — many times throughout the planet’s history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction.

Now, a new study by a team of scientists from Italy, France, Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates that the last magnetic reversal 786,000 years ago actually happened very quickly, in less than 100 years — roughly a human lifetime.

“It’s amazing how rapidly we see that reversal,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Courtney Sprain. “The paleomagnetic data are very well done. This is one of the best records we have so far of what happens during a reversal and how quickly these reversals can happen.”

Sprain and Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in- residence of earth and planetary science, are coauthors of the study, which will be published in the November issue of Geophysical Journal International and is now available online.

Flip could affect electrical grid, cancer rates

The discovery comes as new evidence indicates that the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal, leading some geophysicists to predict a reversal within a few thousand years.

Though a magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by convection in Earth’s iron core, there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals, despite much searching in the geologic and biologic record. Today, however, such a reversal could potentially wreak havoc with our electrical grid, generating currents that might take it down.

And since Earth’s magnetic field protects life from energetic particles from the sun and cosmic rays, both of which can cause genetic mutations, a weakening or temporary loss of the field before a permanent reversal could increase cancer rates. The danger to life would be even greater if flips were preceded by long periods of unstable magnetic behavior.

“We should be thinking more about what the biologic effects would be,” Renne said.

Dating ash deposits from windward volcanoes

The new finding is based on measurements of the magnetic field alignment in layers of ancient lake sediments now exposed in the Sulmona basin of the Apennine Mountains east of Rome, Italy. The lake sediments are interbedded with ash layers erupted from the Roman volcanic province, a large area of volcanoes upwind of the former lake that includes periodically erupting volcanoes near Sabatini, Vesuvius and the Alban Hills.

Italian researchers led by Leonardo Sagnotti of Rome’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology measured the magnetic field directions frozen into the sediments as they accumulated at the bottom of the ancient lake.

Sprain and Renne used argon-argon dating, a method widely used to determine the ages of rocks, whether they’re thousands or billions of years old, to determine the age of ash layers above and below the sediment layer recording the last reversal. These dates were confirmed by their colleague and former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Sebastien Nomade of the Laboratory of Environmental and Climate Sciences in Gif-Sur-Yvette, France.

Because the lake sediments were deposited at a high and steady rate over a 10,000-year period, the team was able to interpolate the date of the layer showing the magnetic reversal, called the Matuyama-Brunhes transition, at approximately 786,000 years ago. This date is far more precise than that from previous studies, which placed the reversal between 770,000 and 795,000 years ago.

“What’s incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years,” said Renne. “We don’t know whether the next reversal will occur as suddenly as this one did, but we also don’t know that it won’t.”

Unstable magnetic field preceded 180-degree flip

Whether or not the new finding spells trouble for modern civilization, it likely will help researchers understand how and why Earth’s magnetic field episodically reverses polarity, Renne said.

The magnetic record the Italian-led team obtained shows that the sudden 180-degree flip of the field was preceded by a period of instability that spanned more than 6,000 years. The instability included two intervals of low magnetic field strength that lasted about 2,000 years each. Rapid changes in field orientations may have occurred within the first interval of low strength. The full magnetic polarity reversal — that is, the final and very rapid flip to what the field is today — happened toward the end of the most recent interval of low field strength.

Renne is continuing his collaboration with the Italian-French team to correlate the lake record with past climate change.

Renne and Sprain’s work at the Berkeley Geochronology Center was supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

26-10-2014 om 00:42 geschreven door peter  

Milky Way may bear 100 million life-giving planets

A new computation method to examine planets orbiting other stars suggests the Milky Way galaxy may house 100 million other places that could support complex life. Credit: Courtesy of Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

There are some 100 million other places in the Milky Way galaxy that could support complex life, report a group of university astronomers in the journal Challenges. They have developed a new computation method to examine data from planets orbiting other stars in the universe.

Their study provides the first quantitative estimate of the number of worlds in our galaxy that could harbor life above the microbial level.

“This study does not indicate that complex life exists on that many planets. We’re saying that there are planetary conditions that could support it. Origin of life questions are not addressed — only the conditions to support life,” according to the paper’s authors Alberto Fairén, Cornell research associate; Louis Irwin, University of Texas at El Paso (lead author); Abel Méndez, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo; and Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Washington State University.

“Complex life doesn’t mean intelligent life — though it doesn’t rule it out or even animal life — but simply that organisms larger and more complex than microbes could exist in a number of different forms. For example, organisms that form stable food webs like those found in ecosystems on Earth,” the researchers explain in an auxiliary statement.

The scientists surveyed more than 1,000 planets and used a formula that considers planet density, temperature, substrate (liquid, solid or gas), chemistry, distance from its central star and age. From this information, they developed and computed the Biological Complexity Index (BCI).

The BCI calculation revealed that 1 to 2 percent of the planets showed a BCI rating higher than Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to have a subsurface global ocean that may harbor forms of life. With about 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, the BCI yields 100 million plausible planets.

Despite the large number of planets that could harbor complex life, the Milky Way is so vast that planets with high BCI values are very far apart, according to the scientists. One of the closest and most promising extrasolar systems, called Gliese 581, has two planets with the apparent, possible capacity to host complex biospheres. The distance from Earth to Gliese 581 is about 20 light years.

“It seems highly unlikely that we are alone,” say the researchers. “We are likely so far away from life at our level of complexity that a meeting with such alien forms might be improbable for the foreseeable future.”

The research, “Assessing the Possibility of Biological Complexity on Other Worlds, With an Estimate of the Occurrence of Complex Life in the Milky Way Galaxy,” in Challenges, received no external funding.

Journal Reference:

1. Louis Irwin, Abel Méndez, Alberto Fairén, Dirk Schulze-Makuch. Assessing the Possibility of Biological Complexity on Other Worlds, with an Estimate of the Occurrence of Complex Life in the Milky Way Galaxy. Challenges, 2014; 5 (1): 159 DOI: 10.3390/challe5010159

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14-06-2014 om 19:02 geschreven door peter  

55-year old dark side of the moon mystery solved

Far side of the moon: this is a composite image of the lunar farside taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in June 2009, note the absence of dark areas. Credit: NASA

The Man in the Moon appeared when meteoroids struck Earth-facing side of the moon creating large flat seas of basalt that we see as dark areas called maria. But no “face” exists on farside of the moon and now, Penn State astrophysicists think they know why.

“I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks,” said Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics. “It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it’s been a mystery since the fifties.”

This mystery is called the Lunar Farside Highlands Problem and dates back to 1959, when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 transmitted the first images of the “dark” side of the moon back to Earth. It was called the dark side because it was unknown, not because sunlight does not reach it. Researchers immediately noticed that fewer “seas” or maria existed on this portion of the moon that always faces away from Earth.

Wright, Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astrophysics and Arpita Roy, graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics, and lead author of the study, realized that the absence of maria, which is due to a difference in crustal thickness between the side of the moon we see and the hidden side, is a consequence of how the moon originally formed. The researchers report their results in today’s (June 9) Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The general consensus on the moon’s origin is that it probably formed shortly after Earth and was the result of a Mars-sized object hitting Earth with a glancing, but devastating impact. This Giant Impact Hypothesis suggests that the outer layers of Earth and the object were flung into space and eventually formed the moon.

“Shortly after the giant impact, Earth and the moon were very hot,” said Sigurdsson.

Earth and the impact object did not just melt; parts of them vaporized, creating a disk of rock, magma and vapor around Earth.

“The moon and Earth loomed large in each others skies when they formed, ” said Roy.

The geometry was similar to the rocky exoplanets recently discovered very close to their stars, said Wright. The moon was 10 to 20 times closer to Earth than it is now, and the researchers found that it quickly assumed a tidally locked position with the rotation time of the moon equal to the orbital period of the moon around Earth. The same real estate on the moon has probably always faced Earth ever since. Tidal locking is a product of the gravity of both objects.

The moon, being much smaller than Earth cooled more quickly. Because Earth and the moon were tidally locked from the beginning, the still hot Earth — more than 2500 degrees Celsius — radiated towards the near side of the moon. The far side, away from the boiling Earth, slowly cooled, while Earth-facing side was kept molten creating a temperature gradient between the two halves.

This gradient was important for crustal formation on the moon. The moon’s crust has high concentrations of aluminum and calcium, elements that are very hard to vaporize.

“When rock vapor starts to cool, the very first elements that snow out are aluminum and calcium,” said Sigurdsson.

Aluminum and calcium would have preferentially condensed in the atmosphere of the cold side of the moon because the nearside was still too hot. Thousands to millions of years later, these elements combined with silicates in the moon’s mantle to form plagioclase feldspars, which eventually moved to the surface and formed the moon’s crust, said Roy. The farside crust had more of these minerals and is thicker.

The moon has now completely cooled and is not molten below the surface. Earlier in its history, large meteoroids struck the nearside of the moon and punched through the crust, releasing the vast lakes of basaltic lava that formed the nearside maria that make up the man in the moon. When meteoroids struck the farside of the moon, in most cases the crust was too thick and no magmatic basalt welled up, creating the dark side of the moon with valleys, craters and highlands, but almost no maria.

Journal Reference:

1. Arpita Roy et al. Earthshine on a Young Moon: Explaining the Lunar Farside Highlands. Astrophysical Journal Letters., June 2014 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/788/2/L42

14-06-2014 om 18:56 geschreven door peter  

UFO spotted from AIRCRAFT flying over London

The YouTube clip shows a dark-coloured disc with lights on either side flying above the cloudline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c12uok9c6cY

This extraordinary video shows a UFO in the skies above London – as seen from the window of an aircraft.

The two-minute five second clip, uploaded to YouTube, shows a dark-coloured disc with lights on either side.

The craft appears to be flying above the cloudline.

According to the video, the incredible scenes played out above the capital on the morning of May 25.

It has been viewed more than 92,000 times since it was first uploaded.

YouTube user Wayne McCabe was impressed with the footage, remarking:
“Cool intro and good video.”

However, Jessica Souzer was less impressed.

She wrote: “Looks like a boat in an ocean photoshopped into the sky.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Dockter suggested: “Military drone of some sort.”

Original Article
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/video-ufo-spotted-aircraft-flying-3634860#ixzz33TsfMdqx

{http://nationalufocenter.com/}

07-06-2014 om 17:35 geschreven door peter  

Spectacular UFO Footage From NASA STS-48 Discovery Space Shuttle Released [Video]

When it comes to some of the most unexplained footage of unidentified flying objects, there has been spectacular UFO film footage released from the NASA STS 48 Discovery Space Shuttle Flight. They filmed this original UFO footage between September 12 and 18, 1991. The top secret NASA film shows a UFO following after the space shuttle while it was in orbit during one of its mission.

NASA continues to refuse comment on the video even though it has come straight from one of the Discovery missions and it is most definitely at the top of the unexplained list. This footage has not been photoshopped, altered in any way, is very well documented, and has been the subject of an ongoing arduous scientific examination by multiple astronomers, scientists and space institutions all over the world.

The footage is available on YouTube and it is also below for anyone who wants to view it. The video appears to show at least a dozen objects moving around in an unusual manner. Along with that, what seems to be the most amazing part is when one entity is near the horizon and some sort of flashing occurs. It is then followed by yet another object that travels extremely fast across the field of view. After this, the first body takes off into space.

07-06-2014 om 17:27 geschreven door peter  

Football field sized UFO stops Alabama I-20 traffic

The witness was near this location traveling eastbound along Alabama’s I-20 nearing the 205 exit when she first saw the triangle-shaped object hovering at the tree top level on January 20, 2014. (Credit: Google Maps)

An Alabama witness eastbound along I-20 nearing the 205 exit reported stopping her vehicle to watch a silent, triangle-shaped UFO “as large as a football field” moving slowly at the tree top level that terrified her and appeared to cause missing time, according to May 29, 2014, testimony in Case 56669 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The incident began sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. on January 20, 2014, as the witness was on I-20 heading toward Georgia with an 18-wheeler about a mile or two behind her.

Alabama countryside near Ranburne. (Credit: Tim McWhorter)

“About a mile to a mile and-a-half before I reached the 205 exit between Heflin and Ranburne, Alabama, I topped the hill and far in the distance on my right side I saw the most extreme, bright, white lights lighting up the entire side of the road and pasture,” the witness stated. “I was very confused as to what I was looking at.”

The witness first thought she was looking at a police search team possibly responding to a traffic accident.

“But then I realized that I didn’t see any emergency police or fire department colored lights and it was extremely quiet. I began to slow my speed as I approached closer and then I noticed the lights that were shinning straight through the tree line onto the interstate had not only risen to above the tree line, but had also turned from pointing toward the road to pointing toward the ground.”

The witness then completely stopped her vehicle along the interstate, but checked out the roadway for her safety.

“I looked in the rear-view mirror to see where the 18-wheeler truck was in relationship to my car because I wanted to make sure that I was wasn’t going to get hit and also I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the only person who was seeing this. The 18-wheeler had also come to a stop about one mile behind me and had his cab door open and he also had not pulled off the interstate.”

The witness then turned her attention back to the lights and noticed that they were at the tree top level and the lights were pointing toward the ground.

“The next thing I knew it was completely dark. I then was very confused and began looking about the sky for anything that could have done this.”

The witness then realized that the lights were attached to a very large, triangle-shaped object.

“Still very confused and extremely scarred, I noticed a huge, huge, triangular-shaped object that had rounded edges where the point of a triangle would be. There was no sound at all and no lights on this object were seen now. This object remained about tree top tall as it passed over my car heading northwest.”

The silent object was very large.

“This object was as large as a football field if not larger. And was about 50 to 60 feet thick. I could clearly see the pattern on the bottom and the sides of this object.”

The witness was near this location traveling eastbound along Alabama’s I-20 nearing the 205 exit when she first saw the triangle-shaped object hovering at the tree top level on January 20, 2014. (Credit: Google Maps)

The witness became terrified of her position at this point and looked again for the 18-wheeler.

“I sat at a full stop in the middle of the interstate feeling completely terrified and violated and again looked behind me to check and see if there was any other traffic that the was going to hit me. The truck was nowhere to be seen and he was only about one mile behind me and was stopped with his door open only moments before. He couldn’t have made an exit off the interstate because the 205 exit in front of me was the only exit off the interstate for a few miles. This left me dazed and confused.”

The witness then realized she had experienced missing time.

“I realized that I had time missing from when I saw the object in the field about tree top tall with its lights on and when it was coming over my car without any lights on. When I finally pulled myself back together and began to drive slowly home I realized that the time was now 4:12 a.m.”

The witness described herself as a professional with no problems that would account for the incident.

“I am 47 years old and I am an RN with almost 30 years experience working as a nurse in the ER, ICU, and Dialysis.”

Alabama MUFON is investigating. Alabama has a current UFO Alert Rating of 5 with a low number of recent reports nationally. Alabama had 10 UFO reports in April 2014 – the 20th highest reporting state – while California had 80 reports – the highest reporting state in the nation. The above quotes were edited for clarity.

by: Roger Marsh

{http://nationalufocenter.com/}

07-06-2014 om 17:21 geschreven door peter  

NASA missions let scientists see moon’s dancing tide from orbit

Illustration of Earth as seen from the moon. The gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and the moon raises a small bulge on the moon. The position of this bulge shifts slightly over time. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientists combined observations from two NASA missions to check out the moon’s lopsided shape and how it changes under Earth’s sway — a response not seen from orbit before.

The team drew on studies by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been investigating the moon since 2009, and by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, mission. Because orbiting spacecraft gathered the data, the scientists were able to take the entire moon into account, not just the side that can be observed from Earth.

“The deformation of the moon due to Earth’s pull is very challenging to measure, but learning more about it gives us clues about the interior of the moon,” said Erwan Mazarico, a scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The lopsided shape of the moon is one result of its gravitational tug-of-war with Earth. The mutual pulling of the two bodies is powerful enough to stretch them both, so they wind up shaped a little like two eggs with their ends pointing toward one another. On Earth, the tension has an especially strong effect on the oceans, because water moves so freely, and is the driving force behind tides.

Earth’s distorting effect on the moon, called the lunar body tide, is more difficult to detect, because the moon is solid except for its small core. Even so, there is enough force to raise a bulge about 20 inches (51 centimeters) high on the near side of the moon and similar one on the far side.

The position of the bulge actually shifts a few inches over time. Although the same side of the moon constantly faces Earth, because of the tilt and shape of the moon’s orbit, the side facing Earth appears to wobble. From the moon’s viewpoint, Earth doesn’t sit motionless but moves around within a small patch of sky. The bulge responds to Earth’s movements like a dance partner, following wherever the lead goes.

“If nothing changed on the moon — if there were no lunar body tide or if its tide were completely static — then every time scientists measured the surface height at a particular location, they would get the same value,” said Mike Barker, a Sigma Space Corporation scientist based at Goddard and co-author of the new study, which is available online in Geophysical Research Letters.

A few studies of these subtle changes were conducted previously from Earth. But not until LRO and GRAIL did satellites provide enough resolution to see the lunar tide from orbit.

To search for the tide’s signature, the scientists turned to data taken by LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or LOLA, which is mapping the height of features on the moon’s surface. The team chose spots that the spacecraft has passed over more than once, each time approaching along a different flight path. More than 350,000 locations were selected, covering areas on the near and far sides of the moon.

The researchers precisely matched measurements taken at the same spot and calculated whether the height had risen or fallen from one satellite pass to the next; a change indicated a shift in the location of the bulge.

A crucial step in the process was to pinpoint exactly how far above the surface LRO was located for each measurement. To reconstruct the spacecraft’s orbit with sufficient accuracy, the researchers needed the detailed map of the moon’s gravity field provided by the GRAIL mission.

“This study provides a more direct measurement of the lunar body tide and much more comprehensive coverage than has been achieved before,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at Goddard.

The good news for lunar scientists is that the new results are consistent with earlier findings. The estimated size of the tide confirmed the previous measurement of the bulge. The other value of great interest to researchers is the overall stiffness of the moon, known as the Love number h₂, and this was also similar to prior results.

Having confirmation of the previous values — with significantly smaller errors than before — will make the lunar body tide a more useful piece of information for scientists.

“This research shows the power of bringing together the capabilities of two missions. The extraction of the tide from the LOLA data would have been impossible without the gravity model of the moon provided by the GRAIL mission,” said David Smith, the principal investigator for LRO’s LOLA instrument and the deputy principal investigator for the GRAIL mission. Smith is affiliated with Goddard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

07-06-2014 om 17:13 geschreven door peter  

Violent stellar explosion: Stellar behemoth self-destructs in a Type IIb supernova

A star in a distant galaxy explodes as a supernova: while observing a galaxy known as UGC 9379 (left; image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; SDSS) located about 360 million light years away from Earth, the team discovered a new source of bright blue light (right, marked with an arrow; image from the 60-inch robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory). This very hot, young supernova marked the explosive death of a massive star in that distant galaxy. A detailed study of the spectrum (the distribution of colors composing the light from the supernova) using a technique called "flash spectroscopy" revealed the signature of a wind blown by the aging star just prior to its terminal explosion, and allowed scientists to determine what elements were abundant on the surface of the dying star as it was about to explode as a supernova, providing important information about how massive stars evolve just prior to their death, and the origin of crucial elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Credit: Avishay Gal-Yam, Weizmann Institute of Science

Our Sun may seem pretty impressive: 330,000 times as massive as Earth, it accounts for 99.86 percent of the Solar System’s total mass; it generates about 400 trillion trillion watts of power per second; and it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Yet for a star, it’s a lightweight.

The real cosmic behemoths are Wolf-Rayet stars, which are more than 20 times as massive as the Sun and at least five times as hot. Because these stars are relatively rare and often obscured, scientists don’t know much about how they form, live and die. But this is changing, thanks to an innovative sky survey called the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which uses resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), both located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to expose fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae.

For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star — sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation — died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science led by Avishay Gal-Yam caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. They then triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event approximately 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed. These observations are providing valuable insights into the life and death of the progenitor Wolf-Rayet.

“Newly developed observational capabilities now enable us to study exploding stars in ways we could only dream of before. We are moving towards real-time studies of supernovae,” says Gal-Yam, an astrophysicist in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics. He is also the lead author of a recently published Nature paper on this finding.

“This is the smoking gun. For the first time, we can directly point to an observation and say that this type of Wolf-Rayet star leads to this kind of Type IIb supernova,” says Peter Nugent, who heads Berkeley Lab’s Computational Cosmology Center (C3) and leads the Berkeley contingent of the iPTF collaboration.

“When I identified the first example of a Type IIb supernova in 1987, I dreamed that someday we would have direct evidence of what kind of star exploded. It’s refreshing that we can now say that Wolf-Rayet stars are responsible, at least in some cases,” says Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. Both Filippenko and Nugent are also co-authors on the Nature paper.

Some supermassive stars become Wolf-Rayets in the final stages of their lives. Scientists find these stars interesting because they enrich galaxies with the heavy chemical elements that eventually become the building blocks for planets and life.

“We are gradually determining which kinds of stars explode, and why, and what kinds of elements they produce,” says Filippenko. “These elements are crucial to the existence of life. In a very real sense, we are figuring out our own stellar origins.”

All stars — no matter what size — spend their lives fusing hydrogen atoms to create helium. The more massive a star, the more gravity it wields, which accelerates fusion in the star’s core, generating energy to counteract gravitational collapse. When hydrogen is depleted, a supermassive star continues to fuse even heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium and so on, until its core turns to iron. At this point, atoms (even subatomic particles) are packed in so closely that fusion no longer releases energy into the star. It is now solely supported by electron degeneracy pressure — the quantum mechanical law that prohibits two electrons from occupying the same quantum state.

When the core is massive enough, even electron degeneracy won’t support the star and it collapses. Protons and electrons in the core merge, releasing a tremendous amount of energy and neutrinos. This, in turn, powers a shockwave that tears through the star ejecting its remains violently into space as it goes supernova.

The Wolf-Rayet phase occurs before the supernova. As nuclear fusion slows, the heavy elements forged in the star’s core rise to the surface setting off powerful winds. These winds shed a tremendous amount of material into space and obscure the star from prying telescopes on Earth.

“When a Wolf-Rayet star goes supernova, the explosion typically overtakes the stellar wind and all information about the progenitor star is gone,” says Nugent. “We got lucky with SN 2013cu — we caught the supernova before it overtook the wind. Shortly after the star exploded, it let out an ultraviolet flash from the shock wave that heated and lit up the wind. The conditions that we observed in this moment were very similar to what was there before the supernova. ”

Before the supernova debris overtook the wind, the iPTF team managed to capture its chemical light signatures (or spectra) with the ground-based Keck telescope in Hawaii and saw the telltale signs of a Wolf-Rayet star. When the iPTF team performed follow-up observations 15 hours later with NASA’s Swift satellite, the supernova was still quite hot and strongly emitting in the ultraviolet. In the following days, iPTF collaborators rallied telescopes around the globe to watch the supernova crash into material that had been previously ejected from the star. As the days went by, the researchers were able to classify SN 2013cu as a Type IIb supernova because of the weak hydrogen signatures and strong helium features in the spectra that appeared after the supernova cooled.

“With a series of observations, including data I took with the Keck-I telescope 6.5 days after the explosion, we could see that the supernova’s expanding debris quickly overtook the flash-ionized wind that had revealed the Wolf-Rayet features. So, catching the supernova sufficiently early is hard — you’ve got to be on the ball, as our team was,” says Filippenko.

“This discovery was totally shocking, it opens up a whole new research area for us,” says Nugent. “With our largest telescopes you might have a chance of getting a spectrum of a Wolf-Rayet star in the nearest galaxies to our Milky Way, perhaps 4 million light years away. SN 2013cu is 360 million light years away — further by almost factor of 100.”

And because the researchers caught the supernova early — when the ultraviolet flash lit up the progenitor’s stellar wind — they were able to take several spectra. “Ideally, we’d like to do this again and again and develop some interesting statistics, not just for supernovae with Wolf-Rayet progenitors but other types as well,” says Nugent.

Pipeline Upgrade Leads to Unexpected Discoveries

Since February 2014, the iPTF survey has been scanning the sky nightly with a robotic telescope mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California. As soon as observations are taken, the data travel more than 400 miles to NERSC in Oakland via the National Science Foundation’s High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network and the Department of Energy’s ESnet. At NERSC, the Real-Time Transient Detection Pipeline sifts through the data, identifies events to follow up on and sends an alert to iPTF scientists around the globe.

The survey was built on the legacy of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), designed in 2008 to systematically chart the transient sky by using the same camera at Palomar Observatory. Last year Nugent and colleagues at Caltech and UC Berkeley made significant modifications to the transient detection pipeline for the iPTF project. Working with NERSC staff, Nugent upgraded the pipeline’s computing and storage hardware. The iPTF team also made improvements to the machine learning algorithms at the heart of the detection pipeline and incorporated the Sloan Digital Star Survey III star and galaxy catalogs so the pipeline could immediately reject known variable stars.

They even added an asteroid rejection feature to the automated workflow, which calculates the orbit of every known asteroid at the beginning of the night, determines where the asteroids are in an individual image, and then rejects them.

“All of our modifications significantly sped up our real-time transient detection; we now send high quality supernova alerts to astronomers all around the globe in less than 40 minutes after taking an image at Palomar,” says Nugent. “In the case of SN 2013cu, that made all the difference.”

Journal Reference:

1. Avishay Gal-Yam, I. Arcavi, E. O. Ofek, S. Ben-Ami, S. B. Cenko, M. M. Kasliwal, Y. Cao, O. Yaron, D. Tal, J. M. Silverman, A. Horesh, A. De Cia, F. Taddia, J. Sollerman, D. Perley, P. M. Vreeswijk, S. R. Kulkarni, P. E. Nugent, A. V. Filippenko, J. C. Wheeler. A Wolf–Rayet-like progenitor of SN 2013cu from spectral observations of a stellar wind. Nature, 2014; 509 (7501): 471 DOI: 10.1038/nature13304

24-05-2014 om 23:39 geschreven door peter  

Analyzing sun-like stars that eat Earth-like planets

Some Sun-like stars are ‘Earth-eaters.’ During their development they ingest large amounts of the rocky material from which ‘terrestrial’ planets like Earth, Mars and Venus are made. Credit: Image courtesy of Vanderbilt University

Some Sun-like stars are ‘earth-eaters.’ During their development they ingest large amounts of the rocky material from which ‘terrestrial’ planets like Earth, Mars and Venus are made.

Trey Mack, a graduate student in astronomy at Vanderbilt University, has developed a model that estimates the effect that such a diet has on a star’s chemical composition and has used it to analyze a pair of twin stars which both have their own planets. The results of the study were published online on May 7 in the Astrophysical Journal.

“Trey has shown that we can actually model the chemical signature of a star in detail, element by element, and determine how that signature is changed by the ingestion of Earth-like planets,” said Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy Keivan Stassun, who supervised the study. “After obtaining a high-resolution spectrum for a given star,

This ability will add substantially to astronomers’ understanding of the process of planet formation as well as assisting in the ongoing search for Earth-like exoplanets, according to the astronomers.

First, some background: Stars consist of more than 98 percent hydrogen and helium. All the other elements make up less than 2 percent of their mass. Astronomers have arbitrarily defined all the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals and have coined the term “metallicity” to refer to the ratio of the relative abundance of iron to hydrogen in a star’s chemical makeup.

Since the mid-1990′s, when astronomers developed the capability to detect extrasolar planets in large numbers, there have been several studies that attempt to link star metallicity with planet formation. In one such study, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued that stars with high metallicity are more likely to develop planetary systems than those with low metallicity. Another study concluded that hot Jupiter-sized planets are found predominantly circling stars with high metallicity while smaller planets are found circling stars with a wide range of metal content.

Building on the work of coauthor Simon Schuler of the University of Tampa, who expanded the examination of stars’ chemical composition beyond their iron content, Mack looked at the abundance of 15 specific elements relative to that of the Sun. He was particularly interested in elements like aluminum, silicon, calcium and iron that have melting points higher than 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius) because these are the refractory materials that serve as building blocks for Earth-like planets.

we can actually detect that signature in detail, element by element.”

Mack, Schuler and Stassun decided to apply this technique to the planet-hosting binary pair designated HD 20781 and HD 20782. Both stars should have condensed out of the same cloud of dust and gas and so both should have started with the same chemical compositions. This particular binary pair is the first one discovered where both stars have planets of their own.

Both of the stars in the binary pair are G-class dwarf stars similar to the Sun. One star is orbited closely by two Neptune-size planets. The other possesses a single Jupiter-size planet that follows a highly eccentric orbit. The difference in their planetary systems make the two stars ideal for studying the connection between exoplanets and the chemical composition of their stellar hosts.

When they analyzed the spectrum of the two stars the astronomers found that the relative abundance of the refractory elements was significantly higher than that of the Sun. They also found that the higher the melting temperature of a particular element, the higher was its abundance, a trend that serves as a compelling signature of the ingestion of Earth-like rocky material. They calculated that each of the twins would have had to consume an additional 10-20 Earth-masses of rocky material to produce the chemical signatures. Specifically, the star with the Jupiter-sized planet appears to have swallowed an extra ten Earth masses while the star with the two Neptune-sized planets scarfed down an additional 20.

The results support the proposition that a star’s chemical composition and the nature of its planetary system are linked.

“Imagine that the star originally formed rocky planets like Earth. Furthermore, imagine that it also formed gas giant planets like Jupiter,” said Mack. “The rocky planets form in the region close to the star where it is hot and the gas giants form in the outer part of the planetary system where it is cold. However, once the gas giants are fully formed, they begin to migrate inward and, as they do, their gravity begins to pull and tug on the inner rocky planets.

“With the right amount of pulling and tugging, a gas giant can easily force a rocky planet to plunge into the star. If enough rocky planets fall into the star, they will stamp it with a particular chemical signature that we can detect.”

Following this logic, it is unlikely that either of the binary twins possesses terrestrial planets. On one star, the two Neptune-sized planets are orbiting the star quite closely, at one-third the distance between Earth and the Sun. On the other star the trajectory of the Jupiter-sized planet grazes the star, taking it closer than orbit of Mercury at the point of closest approach. The astronomers speculate that the reason the star with the two Neptune-size planets ingested more terrestrial material than its twin was because the two planets were more efficient at pushing material into their star than the single Jupiter-sized planet was at pushing material into its star.

If the chemical signature of G-class stars that swallow rocky planets proves to be universal, “when we find stars with similar chemical signatures, we will be able to conclude that their planetary systems must be very different from our own and that they most likely lack inner rocky planets,” said Mack. “And when we find stars that lack these signatures, then they are good candidates for hosting planetary systems similar to our own.”

Added Stassun: “This work reveals that the question of whether and how stars form planets is actually the wrong thing to ask. The real question seems to be how many of the planets that a star makes avoid the fate of being eaten by their parent star?”

The research was supported by National Science Foundation grants AAG AST-1009810 and PAARE AST-0849736.

Video:

Journal Reference:

1. Claude E. Mack III, Simon C. Schuler, Keivan G. Stassun, John Norris. DETAILED ABUNDANCES OF PLANET-HOSTING WIDE BINARIES. I. DID PLANET FORMATION IMPRINT CHEMICAL SIGNATURES IN THE ATMOSPHERES OF HD 20782/81? The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 787 (2): 98 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/787/2/98

24-05-2014 om 23:37 geschreven door peter  

24-05-2014 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

That Viral Video Of A ‘UFO’ Attack In Afghanistan Is An Obvious Hoax

By Paul Szoldra

A YouTube video currently making the rounds across the internet showing a “UFO” destroying a Taliban camp is an obvious hoax.

While debunking videos isn’t exactly my forte, it’s worth it this time since The Daily Mail, The New York Daily News, International Business Times, and others have reported on the poorly-edited minute-and-a-half clip uploaded by “Section 51.”

Little green men may certainly exist, but it can’t be confirmed that they’ve fired on the Taliban. A quick perusal of the “Section 51″ channel — with dozens of videos of soldiers and Marines encountering supposed “UFO’s” uploaded — should convince most this is a hoax, but let’s look at the video:

That very fake-looking UFO hovering above the explosion said to be in “Afghanistan — March 2014″ is, well, obviously fake. This little computer-generated addition was thrown over a real video of a car bomb factory being blown to bits in Iraq that the Section 51 uploaders flipped.

“The authenticity of the video cannot be confirmed. The U.S. military has not announced any UFO sightings in Afghanistan,” wrote Joel Landau at the New York Daily News.Well, obviously.

18-05-2014 om 00:35 geschreven door peter  

Magnetar formation mystery solved? Supernova explosions and dizzying spins in a binary system

This artist's impression shows the magnetar in the very rich and young star cluster Westerlund 1. This remarkable cluster contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million suns. European astronomers have for the first time demonstrated that this magnetar -- an unusual type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field -- probably was formed as part of a binary star system. The discovery of the magnetar's former companion elsewhere in the cluster helps solve the mystery of how a star that started off so massive could become a magnetar, rather than collapse into a black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Magnetars are the bizarre super-dense remnants of supernova explosions. They are the strongest magnets known in the Universe — millions of times more powerful than the strongest magnets on Earth. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) now believe they’ve found the partner star of a magnetar for the first time. This discovery helps to explain how magnetars form — a conundrum dating back 35 years — and why this particular star didn’t collapse into a black hole as astronomers would expect.

When a massive star collapses under its own gravity during a supernova explosion it forms either a neutron star or black hole. Magnetars are an unusual and very exotic form of neutron star. Like all of these strange objects they are tiny and extraordinarily dense — a teaspoon of neutron star material would have a mass of about a billion tonnes — but they also have extremely powerful magnetic fields. Magnetar surfaces release vast quantities of gamma rays when they undergo a sudden adjustment known as a starquake as a result of the huge stresses in their crusts.

The Westerlund 1 star cluster [1], located 16,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar), hosts one of the two dozen magnetars known in the Milky Way. It is called CXOU J164710.2-455216 and it has greatly puzzled astronomers.

“In our earlier work we showed that the magnetar in the cluster Westerlund 1 must have been born in the explosive death of a star about 40 times as massive as the Sun. But this presents its own problem, since stars this massive are expected to collapse to form black holes after their deaths, not neutron stars. We did not understand how it could have become a magnetar,” says Simon Clark, lead author of the paper reporting these results.

Astronomers proposed a solution to this mystery. They suggested that the magnetar formed through the interactions of two very massive stars orbiting one another in a binary system so compact that it would fit within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. But, up to now, no companion star was detected at the location of the magnetar in Westerlund 1, so astronomers used the VLT to search for it in other parts of the cluster. They hunted for runaway stars — objects escaping the cluster at high velocities — that might have been kicked out of orbit by the supernova explosion that formed the magnetar. One star, known as Westerlund 1-5 [2], was found to be doing just that.

“Not only does this star have the high velocity expected if it is recoiling from a supernova explosion, but the combination of its low mass, high luminosity and carbon-rich composition appear impossible to replicate in a single star — a smoking gun that shows it must have originally formed with a binary companion,” adds Ben Ritchie (Open University), a co-author on the new paper.

This discovery allowed the astronomers to reconstruct the stellar life story that permitted the magnetar to form, in place of the expected black hole [3]. In the first stage of this process, the more massive star of the pair begins to run out of fuel, transferring its outer layers to its less massive companion — which is destined to become the magnetar — causing it to rotate more and more quickly. This rapid rotation appears to be the essential ingredient in the formation of the magnetar’s ultra-strong magnetic field.

In the second stage, as a result of this mass transfer, the companion itself becomes so massive that it in turn sheds a large amount of its recently gained mass. Much of this mass is lost but some is passed back to the original star that we still see shining today as Westerlund 1-5.

“It is this process of swapping material that has imparted the unique chemical signature to Westerlund 1-5 and allowed the mass of its companion to shrink to low enough levels that a magnetar was born instead of a black hole — a game of stellar pass-the-parcel with cosmic consequences!” concludes team member Francisco Najarro (Centro de Astrobiología, Spain).

It seems that being a component of a double star may therefore be an essential ingredient in the recipe for forming a magnetar. The rapid rotation created by mass transfer between the two stars appears necessary to generate the ultra-strong magnetic field and then a second mass transfer phase allows the magnetar-to-be to slim down sufficiently so that it does not collapse into a black hole at the moment of its death.

Notes:

[1] The open cluster Westerlund 1 was discovered in 1961 from Australia by Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund, who later moved from there to become ESO Director in Chile (1970-74). This cluster is behind a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust, which blocks most of its visible light. The dimming factor is more than 100,000, and this is why it has taken so long to uncover the true nature of this particular cluster.

Westerlund 1 is a unique natural laboratory for the study of extreme stellar physics, helping astronomers to find out how the most massive stars in the Milky Way live and die. From their observations, the astronomers conclude that this extreme cluster most probably contains no less than 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, and all of its stars are located within a region less than 6 light-years across. Westerlund 1 thus appears to be the most massive compact young cluster yet identified in the Milky Way galaxy.

All the stars so far analysed in Westerlund 1 have masses at least 30-40 times that of the Sun. Because such stars have a rather short life — astronomically speaking — Westerlund 1 must be very young. The astronomers determine an age somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million years. So, Westerlund 1 is clearly a newborn cluster in our galaxy.

[2] The full designation for this star is Cl* Westerlund 1 W 5.

[3] As stars age, their nuclear reactions change their chemical make-up — elements that fuel the reactions are depleted and the products ofthe reactions accumulate. This stellar chemical fingerprint is first rich in hydrogen and nitrogen but poor in carbon and it is only very late in the lives of stars that carbon increases, by which point hydrogen and nitrogen will be severely reduced — it is thought to be impossible for single stars to be simultaneously rich in hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, as Westerlund 1-5 is.

Journal Reference:

1. J. S. Clark et al. A VLT/FLAMES survey for massive binaries in Westerlund 1: IV.Wd1-5 binary product and a pre-supernova companion for the magnetar CXOU J1647-45. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2014 (in press)

18-05-2014 om 00:26 geschreven door peter  

UFO mania: Underground Aliens

In the American southwest we have evidence of what appears to be modern day descriptions of the Reptilian Alien Race. The majestic mesas and rugged mountains of the American southwest are home to many native peoples, including the Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, Hopi and Apache. These tribes have many different beliefs, but their creation myths all share something quite remarkable, all of them share the belief that  they came up from the ground.  The Apaches and pueblo Indians, the Zuni and the Hopi Indians have a legend that they emerged from some underground world into today’s world and some of the southwestern people went back underground for safety. The Hopi of Arizona say their ancestors escaped a deadly storm of falling stars with the help of the snake people, who took them to shelters deep in the earth. 

For decades, stories of encounters with UFOs and alien beings have been told among the people of new Mexico’s Jicarilla Apache reservation (near the town of Dulce, where there is an alleged Underground facility where aliens and humans work on several projects together),  nestled in the shadow of the over 9,000-foot-high Archuleta mesa, it is from this mesa and mountain that people claim they have seen UFO’s flying out of the mountain, and even today New Mexico is one of the places where the most UFO sightings occur, there is no doubt that there is something in this part of our planet that attracts these extraterrestrial visitors.

Hollow Earth 

In 1818, former U.S. army Captain John Cleves Symmes, Jr., announced that there were vast openings at each pole where we could enter inner earth. In 1864 Jules Verne released his second novel, a journey to the center of the earth and that captured the interest of people around the world, everyone wanted to know more about this and if it was actually real, could you literally access the center of the Earth.

The question here is why would anyone want to live underground? Why was this underground city built? The Cappadocia region– where Derinkuyu is located, was part of the Zoroastrian empire, which was Persian in nature. The Zoroastrian religion based on opposing forces of good and evil is widely believed to have influenced both Hinduism and Judeo-Christianity. Scholars say it was founded sometime before the sixth century b.C. and its chief God is the creator Ahura Mazda. In the second chapter of the Zoroastrian sacred text, the Vendidad, Ahura Mazda saves mankind from a worldwide environmental disaster, the great prophet Yima was instructed to build a kind of underground refuge similar to Derinkuyu by the sky God Ahura Mazda. 

According to the sacred texts, Yima built a multilevel underground city to protect a select group of people and animals from a global ice age. The Vendidad calls this “the evil winters.” The underground city at Derinkuyu has an  unusual security system: 1,000-pound doors on rollers that allow them to be moved by a single person, but only from one side. This was a very complex security measure and obviously the inhabitants of the underground city wanted to hide something from the outside.

Source: Ancient Post

12-05-2014 om 01:02 geschreven door peter