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
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
10-11-2025
A 'nearly interstellar' object has just been discovered. Harvard astronomer clarifies possible link to comet 3I/ATLAS
A 'nearly interstellar' object has just been discovered. Harvard astronomer clarifies possible link to comet 3I/ATLAS
Story by Raj Naik
A 'nearly interstellar' object has just been discovered. Harvard astronomer clarifies possible link to comet 3I/ATLAS
Recently discovered celestial object C/2025 V1 (Borisov), initially labeled as "nearly interstellar" due to its orbital characteristics, is more likely a visitor from our solar system's own Oort Cloud, according to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb's Medium blog. The object, first identified by Gennady Borisov on November 2, 2025, sparked immediate attention because of its similarity to the enigmatic interstellar object 3I/ATLASdue to the absence of a clear cometary tail.
In dark evening skies over June Lake, northern hemisphere, planet Earth, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks stood just above the western horizon on March 30
(Representative Image Source: NASA APOD | Dan Bartlett)
However, in an analysis of the new object's trajectory, Professor Loeb concluded that C/2025 V1 is unlikely to be truly interstellar. According to the data shared by Solar System Dynamics, the comet's orbital eccentricity is 1.0095, a value extremely close to the threshold of 1.0 that defines an unbound object. However, Loeb's research suggests that when traced back beyond the influence of the planets, C/2025 V1’s eccentricity would likely drop below 1.0, indicating an origin in the far-flung Oort Cloud. Unmodeled outgassing could also push the eccentricity to below 1.0.
Loeb also addressed the fundamental question of whether C/2025 V1 could be linked to 3I/ATLAS, which some speculate could be a technological 'mothership' that released smaller probes. "C/2025 V1 is not related to 3I/ATLAS if it did not employ non-gravitational propulsion," Loeb Stated. The two objects' orbits are separated by a minimum of 75 million kilometers or 46.6 million miles (0.5 AU), and they never came closer than 225 million kilometers or 139.8 million miles (1.5 AU) without additional thrust. The measured non-gravitational acceleration of 3I/ATLAS is insufficient to bridge this distance.
Hubble captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21, 2025, when the comet was 277 million miles from Earth.
[Image Source: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)]
Loeb emphasized that the composition, outflow velocity, and mass flux of 3I/ATLAS's jets can be easily measured as the object nears Earth on December 19, 2025. This close approach offers a critical opportunity to spectroscopically determine whether the interstellar visitor is a natural
Comet C/2025 V1's closest approach to Earth
While the comet's scientific significance is high, its current brightness puts it far out of reach for casual observation, per Sky Live. C/2025 V1 (Borisov) is currently located in the constellation Virgo, about 103.3 million kilometers from Earth (64.2 million miles). Its closest approach to our planet is projected to occur on Tuesday, November 11, 2025, at a distance of about 103.11 million kilometers or 64 million miles (0.68 AU).
This chart is a 3D animated visualization of the orbit of comet C/2025 V1 (Borisov) relative to the other major objects in the Solar System
(Image Source: Sky Live)
Is it visible in the night sky?
The comet's current faintness means it is not visible to the unaided eye. Objects must be magnitude 6.5 or brighter to be potentially seen without optical aid under ideal, dark-sky conditions. A magnitude of 14.2 requires observers to use a telescope and a good, dark observing site to successfully track the object.
A woman sitting in the desert alone, watching the starry sky and the Milky Way in the background
(Representative Image Source: Getty | Oscar Gutierrez Zozulia)
Impact safety confirmed
The latest orbit calculation, based on 99 observations collected over seven days, gives high confidence in the comet's path, according to Solar System Dynamics. The comet's Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance (MOID) with Earth is calculated at 0.396 AU. This is a considerable distance; for comparison, Mars at its closest approach is about 0.5 AU from Earth, and indicates no immediate risk of an impact.
NASA and Lockheed Martin’s X-59 "quiet" supersonic plane flew for the first time in October. It’s a major step towards reintroducing commercial supersonic flight in the United States.
The X-59 jet at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in Palmdale on Jan. 12, 2024.
(Image credit: Lockheed Martin / Michael Jackson)
NASA and Lockheed Martin’s experimental X-59 aircraft has taken to the skiesfor the first time, making history as the first supersonic aircraft designed to make a soft "thump" instead of thunderous sonic booms.
The X-59’s flight is a major step towards commercial supersonic travel, which has been banned in the United States since 1973.
The test flight was planned to last about one hour, taking off from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, and landing at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California on Oct. 28. The plane reached a maximum speed of about 240 miles per hour (386 kilometers per hour) and flew at about 12,000 feet (3,658 meters) off the ground. It did not reach supersonic speeds for this test, which focused on checking critical systems.
The Science of Silencing Sonic Booms
US Testing its Newest $600 Million Silent Supersonic Jet Project
According to Lockheed Martin’s specifications, the X-59 has a top speed of Mach 1.4, or 925 mph (1,489 km/h), which is almost twice as fast as a Boeing 747. It’s designed to fly at an altitude of 55,000 feet (16,764 m). The aircraft has a wingspan of 30 feet (9.1 m), is 14 feet (4.3 m) high, and a whopping 100 feet (30.5 m) long, giving it a strong resemblance to a swordfish.
From the side, the airplane’s shockingly long nose appears to narrow to a point, but it’s actually shaped like a chisel. The nose’s shape is designed to change the shape of the shockwaves generated by supersonic flight, making the aircraft much quieter than the supersonic jets used today. These are banned from flying over populated areas in the United States because of their loud sonic booms.
Sonic booms are caused by shockwaves from rapidly compressed air, similar to thunder. As an aircraft flies, it pushes upon the air in front of it, creating pressure waves. When an aircraft goes supersonic, the pressure waves can’t move out of the way fast enough, so they combine into a single large shockwave, resulting in a sonic boom.
A controversial six-month test over Oklahoma City in 1964 showed that sonic booms from supersonic aircraft flying too close to the ground can break windows, cause minor damage to buildings, and startle people. At the end of the study, more than 1 in 4 people surveyed said that they could not learn to live with the sonic booms.
To lessen the impact of the booms, the X-59 design separates the usual shockwave into multiple smaller shockwaves, resulting in "thumps" that are about the same volume as a car door slamming.
The shockwaves that cause sonic booms can be seen with schlieren imaging, a type of specialized photography invented in 1864 by August Toepler, a German physicist. It relies on how changing air pressure warps light passing through it. Imaging the shockwaves helps us understand if the aircraft’s aerodynamics match what was modeled using computers and small model planes in wind tunnels.
The X-59 is planned to go supersonic in future test flights, and if all goes to plan, will be used to test public reaction to its supersonic "thumps” — paving the way for commercial supersonic flight to return to the US, albeit much quieter this time.
Streaks that form on the slopes of Mars, also known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), are a common feature on Mars. These dark, seasonal streaks are either the result of briny water patching thawing from seasonal ices or dry sand being displaced. While the exact cause remains unknown, new research continues to reveal clues about this picturesque phenomenon. Case in point, the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) recently captured images of streaks formed from a dust avalanche on the slopes of Apollinaris Mons the night before Christmas in 2023.
As indicated by author Valentin Tertius Bickel, a postdoctoral researcher from the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, recent geostatistical evidence has shown that RSL can be caused by "dry," non-seasonal factors. However, he argues, direct, quantitative measurements of the rate of dark streak formation and the frequency with which they occur due to specific factors are currently lacking. To this end, he considered the streak captured by the TGO, which scientists have determined was caused by meteorite impacts that happened between 2013 and 2017.
*Dark narrow streaks, called "recurring slope lineae," emanate from the walls of Garni Crater on Mars.
Credit: NASA*
Valentine relied on machine learning to analyze more than two million streaks captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) between 2006 and 2024, and which were likely associated with dry nonseasonal drivers, including meteoroid impacts, marsquakes, and winds. From this, he was able to develop a "streak census" that showed the majority of these features occurred in five distinct hotspots over the nineteen years in question. He further determined that about 0.1% of the annually formed population could be directly attributed to events such as meteoroid impacts and marsquakes.
"Dust, wind, and sand dynamics appear to be the main seasonal drivers of slope streak formation," Bickel said in an ESA press release. "Meteoroid impacts and quakes seem to be locally distinct, yet globally relatively insignificant drivers." These results provide vital evidence that could settle the debate on what causes dark streaks to form on Mars. They also offer insight into the kinds of dynamic forces that shape the Martian climate, both seasonally and non-seasonally.
"These observations could lead to a better understanding of what happens on Mars today," says Colin Wilson, ESA’s project scientist for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. "Obtaining long-term, continuous, and global-scale observations that reveal a dynamic Mars is a key objective of present and future orbiters."
In particular, understanding the dynamics of the planet's environment could answer the most fundamental questions scientists have about Mars. These include how and when its surface water disappeared, where it went, and whether or not life could have flourished there at one time. Addressing these questions is the primary objective of the nine missions operated by five space agencies that are currently exploring Mars. More robotic missions are planned, with crewed missions planned before mid-century.
Created using data from two extensive surveys, this spectacular radio image of the galactic plane of the Milky Way provides valuable insights into the birth and death of stars.
A radio view of the Milky Way shows both the carnage of dying stars (red) and the energy of newborn stars (blue).
(Image credit: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), S. Mantovanini/GLEAM-X team)
Quick facts
What it is:The Southern Hemisphere view of the Milky Way galaxy
Where it is: All around us
When it was shared: Oct. 29, 2025
We cannot see or image the entire Milky Way galaxy, because we are located inside it. From Earth, we can observe only a portion of the galaxy, and when we look up at the dark, clear night sky from a place free of light pollution, the Milky Way appears as a complex, busy band of stars and dust. This is our edge-on view of the dense galactic plane of our galaxy. And that's just the visible light view.
Imagine the sheer extravagance of this structure were it to be captured in radio colors, which can penetrate the thick clouds of dust and gas that block visible wavelengths. Fortunately, astronomers have now successfully captured a stunning view of the galactic plane as seen from the Southern Hemisphere using a wide range of radio wavelengths.
Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at Curtin University in Australia, took nearly 40,000 hours to compile the data from two surveys called the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM eXtended (GLEAM-X). The GLEAM and GLEAM-X surveys, conducted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, yielded abundant data over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014, and 113 nights from 2018 to 2020.
De mysterieuze hetze rond de komeet 31/Atlas: een wetenschappelijke analyse
De mysterieuze hetze rond de komeet 31/Atlas: een wetenschappelijke analyse
In de afgelopen maanden is er op sociale media en in sommige wetenschappelijke kringen een uitgebreide discussie ontstaan over de komeet 31/Atlas. Vooral de geruchten en speculaties dat deze object in de buurt van de aarde zou passen bij buitenaardse technologieën en dat het mogelijk een buitenaards ruimteschip zou kunnen zijn, maken veel ophef. Het is belangrijk om deze claims kritisch te onderzoeken, de onderliggende feiten te analyseren, en een wetenschappelijke blik te werpen op de situatie. In deze analyse zullen we de ontstane geruchten onder de loep nemen, bestaande kennis over komeet 31/Atlas bespreken, afwijkende patronen en mogelijke verklaringen verkennen, en tot een onderbouwde conclusie komen.
Op 1 juli 2025 ontdekten astronomen met de ATLAS-surveytelescoop in Rio Hurtado, Chili, een snel bewegend object dat officieel de naam 3I/ATLAS kreeg. NASA bevestigde woensdag dat het object een komeet is, en daarmee is het pas de derde interstellaire bezoeker ooit waargenomen na ʻOumuamua in 2017 en 2I/Borisov in 2019. Zijn snelheid en traject tonen aan dat het afkomstig is uit een ander sterrenstelsel, wat onderzoekers een zeldzame kans biedt om materiaal van buiten onze kosmische omgeving te bestuderen.
Inleiding
De komeet 31/Atlas, ontdekt in 2017 door de Pan-STARRS-telescoop, behoort tot de categorie van terugkerende kometen die vaak de kosmische omgeving van de aarde passeren. In 2024 kwam deze komeet opnieuw in de buurt van de aarde, wat aanleiding gaf tot allerlei geruchten op sociale media, waarin werd gesuggereerd dat deze mogelijk buitenaards van oorsprong zou kunnen zijn, of zelfs een ruimteschip. Het ontstaan van deze theorieën wordt gevoed door de onbegrijpelijkheid van sommige waarnemingen en de snelle verspreiding van informatie via online platforms. Om hier een wetenschappelijk verantwoorde analyse op los te laten, moeten we starten met een overzicht van de objectkenmerken, de historische context, en bestaande kennis over komeetgedrag.
Wat weten we over komeet 31/Atlas?
Kometen vormen een fascinerende categorie hemellichamen die uit de oudste en meest primitieve materialen van ons zonnestelsel bestaan. Ze worden vaak beschreven als ijsachtige rots- en stoflichamen, die ontstaan in de buitenste regionen van de Kuipergordel en Oortwolk. Wanneer ze de binnenste regionen van het zonnestelsel naderen, verdampen hun ijs en ontstaat er een kenmerkende coma en komeetstaart. De komeet 31/Atlas behoort tot deze groep en biedt ons inzicht in de oertijden van ons zonnestelsel.
Ontdekking en observaties:Komeet 31/Atlas werd voor het eerst ontdekt in 2017 door het Pan-STARRS-onderzoeksprogramma, dat wordt uitgevoerd vanuit Hawaï. Deze detectie volgde op een serie nauwkeurige fotografische waarnemingen van het hemellichaam, waaruit bleek dat het een terugkerende komeet is. De voorlopige ist orbitale metingen wijzen op een inclinatie van ongeveer 41 graden ten opzichte van de ecliptica, het vlak waarin de banen van de meeste planeten liggen. De perihelionafstand, oftewel de kortste afstand tot de zon tijdens haar baan, bedraagt circa 1,7 astronomische eenheden (AE). Dit betekent dat de komeet haar dichtste nadering tot de zon bereikt op ongeveer 1,7 keer de gemiddelde afstand van de aarde tot de zon.
Traject en snelheid:Tijdens haar passage dicht bij de aarde in 2024 bereikte komeet 31/Atlas snelheden die typisch zijn voor terugkerende kometen. Zo bewoog ze met een snelheid van ongeveer 45 kilometer per seconde. Deze snelheid is normaal voor een komeet die uit de buitenste regionen van het zonnestelsel komt en door de zwaartekracht van de planeten wordt beïnvloed. Als gevolg van haar onregelmatige baan vertoonde de komeet bij haar laatste passage typische kenmerken zoals het vormen van een coma en een mooie, heldere staart, afhankelijk van de hoeveelheid bevroren gassen en stof die werd vrijgegeven.
Samenstelling:Wetenschappelijke waarnemingen tonen aan dat de samenstelling van komeet 31/Atlas vergelijkbaar is met die van andere bekende kometen. Het bestaat uit een mengsel van stofdeeltjes en bevroren gassen, vooral water, kooldioxide en andere organische moleculen. Er is geen bewijs gevonden dat wijst op buitenaardse technologieën, vreemde materialen of een ongewone structuur. De fysische eigenschappen en chemische samenstelling vertonen overeenkomsten met typische kortperiodieke kometen.
Gedrag en uiterlijke kenmerken:Bij haar laatste passage vertoonde de komeet de verwachte kenmerken: een uitgebreide coma – een wazige wolk rond de kern – en een helder verlengde staart die ontstaat doordat het ijs en stof door de zonnestraling worden weggeblazen. Er waren geen opvallende onregelmatigheden of afwijkingen in haar gedrag, zoals plotselinge uitbarstingen of onverwachte veranderingen in de baan.
In wetenschappelijke termen vertoont komeet 31/Atlas geen afwijkingen die wijzen op buitenaardse intelligentie, ongewone samenstelling of geavanceerde technologie. Haar beweging, uiterlijk en fysische eigenschappen vallen binnen de parameters die bekend zijn voor een typische terugkerende komeet. Verder onderzoek kan meer inzicht bieden in haar precieze samenstelling en evolutie, maar tot nu toe is deze komeet een mooi voorbeeld van de primitieve resten uit het geboorteuur van ons zonnestelsel.
De basis van de geruchten en speculaties
Hoe ontstaan de geruchten dat 31/Atlas een buitenaards ruimteschip zou zijn? Deze theorieën ontstaan vaak uit een combinatie van verschillende factoren die samen de basis vormen voor de vermeende buitenaardse status van het object. Hieronder volgt een gedetailleerde analyse van de belangrijkste oorzaken.
Onvolledige gegevens en interpretatie: Een van de belangrijkste redenen is dat waarnemingen van ongewone patronen op beelden of video’s vaak verkeerd geïnterpreteerd kunnen worden. Reflecterende oppervlakken, lichtflitsen of schijnbare bewegingen kunnen lijken op kunstmatige objecten, terwijl ze in werkelijkheid natuurlijke of technische fenomenen zijn. Een klein detail kan al leiden tot de conclusie dat er sprake is van een buitenaards schip.
Visuele illusies en waarnemingsfouten:Bij het bekijken van beelden onder slechte omstandigheden, zoals lage lichtomstandigheden of door technische beperkingen van telescopen, kunnen verschijnselen worden waargenomen die niet fysiek bestaan. Bijvoorbeeld, sensorartefacten, chromatische aberraties, of statische ruis zorgen voor visuele illusies die voor het ongetrainde oog lijken op een object in de ruimte, wat de vermeende aanwezigheid van een ruimteschip versterkt.
Misbruik van sociale media: In het tijdperk van digitale communicatie worden beelden en informatie snel gedeeld. Bewuste verspreiding van disinformatie, sensationele rapportages en het gebruik van clickbait dragen bij aan het ontstaan en versterking van complottheorieën. Mysterieuze of onduidelijke objecten worden vaak doelbewust als buitenaards afgeschilderd om aandacht te trekken en publieksthema’s te creëren.
De menselijke drang tot mysterie:Mensen hebben van oudsher een natuurlijke neiging om onopgeloste raadsels te verklaren door het toeschrijven van buitenaardse intelligentie of technologie. Vooral wanneer een object opvallend ‘buitengewoon’ lijkt, zoals een vreemd gevormde komeet of een atypisch bewegend object, ontstaan snel interpretaties in de richting van buitenaardse beschavingen. Deze drang wordt versterkt door storytelling en de fantasie om het onbekende te begrijpen.
Het is essentieel om te benadrukken dat er momenteel geen wetenschappelijke bewijzen bestaan die het bestaan van een buitenaards ruimteschip zoals 31/Atlas ondersteunen. Wetenschappelijke analyses blijven kritisch en gebaseerd op data, en het is belangrijk om dergelijke geruchten met een gezonde dosis scepsis te benaderen.
Waarden en patronen in de waarnemingen
Binnen de uitgebreide geschiedenis van astronomische waarnemingen bestaan er diverse patroonanalyses die helpen om onderscheid te maken tussen natuurlijke verschijnselen en de mogelijkheid van buitenaardse objecten. Door nauwkeurig te observeren en te kijken naar specifieke kenmerken, patronen en gedragingen, kunnen astronomen een beter begrip krijgen van wat er zich in de ruimte afspeelt. Deze methoden vormen de basis voor het evalueren van waarnemingen en bieden inzicht in de aard van de objecten die men observeert.
Patroon 1: Lichtpatronen en snel veranderende helderheid
Eén van de meest opvallende aspecten bij het volgen van hemellichamen is de variatie in lichtintensiteit. Zo vertoonde komeet 31/Atlas bepaalde lichtpatronen die echter geen uitzonderingen vormen binnen het bekende komeetgedrag. De schommelingen in helderheid konden volledig verklaard worden door de afstand van de komeet tot de zon en de wijze waarop stof en ijs op het oppervlak van de komeet de lichtreflectie beïnvloeden. De variaties pasten binnen het patroon dat men verwacht bij gewone kometen, zonder onregelmatigheden die wijzen op onbekende of buitenaardse oorzaken. Deze observaties bevestigen dat de veranderingen in helderheid niet direct wijzen op nieuwe of vreemde fenomenen, maar eerder gerelateerd zijn aan de natuurlijke fysica van kometen en de interactie met zonlicht.
Patroon 2: Traject en lichtfases
Een belangrijk aspect van astronomische waarnemingen is de nauwkeurigheid waarmee de banen van hemellichamen kunnen worden berekend. In het geval van 31/Atlas werd de baan duidelijk en nauwkeurig vastgesteld. Geen afwijkingen werden vastgesteld die niet verklaard konden worden door bestaande kosmische modellen en fysische wetten. De baangegevens kregen bevestiging via multiple observaties met verschillende telescopen die over de hele wereld opereren. Bovendien werden deze observaties ondersteund door complexe berekeningen en simulaties die overeenstemmen met de fysieke wetten van beweging en zwaartekracht. Dit versterkt het vertrouwen op de natuurlijke, bekende oorsprong van de koers en beweging van deze komeet.
Patroon 3: Ongewone voorvallen
Ongewone voorvallen Soms worden er waarnemingen gedaan die buiten de standaardpatronen vallen, zoals een lichtflits die wordt gedeeld op sociale media en door sommigen wordt geïnterpreteerd als een buitenaards ruimteschip. Bij nadere analyse blijkt echter dat zulke waarnemingen vaak kunnen worden verklaard door optische artefacten, reflecties van licht op ruimtepuin of andere technische afwijkingen. Reflecties van zonlicht op fragmenten, ruimteschroot of glas en plastic voorwerpen in de atmosfeer kunnen zeer sterk lijken op vreemde objecten, maar worden uiteindelijk weerlegt door fysische kennis en verdere gecontroleerde observaties. Deze voorbeelden onderstrepen dat vaak schijnbare anomalieën kunnen ontstaan door menselijke en technische factoren, en niet door buitenaardse technologie.
Algemene conclusie:Al deze patronen en waarnemingen leiden tot een consistente conclusie: er zijn geen aanwijzingen voor patronen van anomalieën die niet kunnen worden verklaard door bekende natuurkundige principes en technologische limieten. De waargenomen verschijnselen passen binnen de grenzen van de huidige wetenschap en technologie, zonder dat er bewijs is voor buitenaardse objecten. Het is daarom van essentieel belang om waarnemingen kritisch te blijven bekijken, met oog voor de details en met voortdurende evaluaties op basis van actuele wetenschappelijke kennis.
De identificatie door NASA van 3I/ATLAS als een komeet kwam na gedetailleerde telescoopwaarnemingen die duidelijke tekenen van activiteit onthulden. Wetenschappers observeerden een ijzige kern omgeven door een coma, de lichtgevende halo van gas en stof die zich rond kometen vormt. Dit uitgassen en het vrijkomen van stof geeft aan dat het object voornamelijk uit bevroren verbindingen bestaat, wat overeenkomt met het gedrag van een komeet en niet met de kenmerken van een asteroïde. De naam is afgeleid van de aanduiding als het derde interstellaire object dat werd ontdekt, waarbij ATLAS verwijst naar het telescopenetwerk dat het waarnam.
Mogelijke verklaringen en hypothesen
Gegeven dat de meeste waarnemingen vrijwel allemaal binnen de natuurlijke parameters blijven, kunnen we verschillende hypotheses formuleren om de waargenomen verschijnselen te verklaren en te begrijpen wat er waarschijnlijk aan de basis ligt van de waarnemingen. Het is belangrijk om elke hypothese kritisch te bekijken en rekening te houden met de context waarin de observaties plaatsvinden, evenals de betrouwbaarheid van de gebruikte instrumenten en interpretaties. Hieronder worden de meest gangbare en plausibele hypothesen nader toegelicht.
Hypothese 1: Het object is een natuurlijke komeet met standaard gedrag
De meest waarschijnlijke en gangbare verklaring is dat het object in kwestie een natuurlijke komeet betreft die zich volgens de bekende fysische en astronomische wetten gedraagt. Kometen vertonen doorgaans bepaalde standaardkenmerken, zoals een opvallende compositie van ijs en stof, een actief coma rondom de kern en een opvallende staart die onder invloed van de zonnewind wordt gevormd. Het lijkt erop dat 31/Atlas, een bekende komeet, zich overeenkomstig deze gedragsvoorschriften gedraagt. De waargenomen afwijkingen en onvolkomenheden die soms worden gerapporteerd, kunnen meestal worden verklaard door de beperkingen van de instrumenten die de waarnemingen verrichten, zoals oude telescopen, verouderde camera’s of onjuiste kalibraties. Daarnaast kunnen interpretaties van de gegevens door waarnemers variëren, afhankelijk van hun ervaring en kennisniveau. Dergelijke afwijkingen vallen vaak binnen de natuurlijke variaties en meetfouten en betekenen niet noodzakelijk dat het object niet natuurlijk is.
Hypothese 2: 'Verkeerde interpretatie van visuele waarnemingen'
Veel waarnemingen die worden gerapporteerd als mogelijke buitenaardse verschijnselen of vreemde objecten, kunnen vaak worden toegeschreven aan optische artefacten, reflecties of verkeerde interpretaties van het waargenomen beeld. Bijvoorbeeld kunnen reflecties in de atmosfeer, spiegelingen op de lens of parasitaire lichtinvallen leiden tot uitingeffecten die lijken op onbekende of buitenaardse verschijnselen. Daarnaast kunnen asymmetrische vormen of knipperende lichtpatronen van de komeet zelf de illusie creëren dat het object niet natuurlijk is. Soms worden bijzonder gevormde objecten in de lucht verkeerd geïnterpreteerd vanwege de beperkte zichtbaarheid of omdat waarnemers niet over voldoende ervaring beschikken om de natuurlijke verschijnselen juist te identificeren. Dergelijke interpretatiefouten dragen bij aan het ontstaan van buitenaardse theorieën, terwijl de werkelijkheid veel eenvoudiger en natuurlijker is.
Hypothese 3: Gekozen voor sensatie of disinformatie
In sommige gevallen spelen menselijke factoren en de wens naar aandacht of geld een grote rol bij het verspreiden van verhalen over buitenaardse objecten. Geruchten, gerapporteerde waarnemingen en beeldmateriaal kunnen opzettelijk worden versterkt of overdreven door mensen met een bepaald belang, zoals media, complottheoretici of groepen die commerciële winst willen maken. Sociale media en internetplatforms zorgen ervoor dat sensationele verhalen razendsnel kunnen worden gedeeld en verspreid, vaak zonder dat deze onderbouwd zijn door wetenschappelijk onderzoek of objectieve waarnemingen. Hierdoor ontstaan mythen en achterhaalde theorieën die vooral inspelen op menselijke nieuwsgierigheid en angst voor het onbekende, terwijl de realiteit veel eenvoudiger en natuurlijker is.
Hypothese 4: Onjuiste interpretatie van gegevens of incomplete waarnemingen
Een andere mogelijke verklaring is dat sommige waarnemers niet beschikken over voldoende expertise of toegang tot volledige gegevens om de waarnemingen correct te interpretëren. Veel waarnemingen worden gedaan met beperkte apparatuur of onder omstandigheden die de resultaten kunnen beïnvloeden, zoals slecht zicht, atmosferische storingen of onjuiste communicatie. Hierdoor kunnen foutieve conclusies ontstaan, zoals het denken dat er buitenaardse technologieën of vreemde objecten betrokken zijn bij de waarneming. Bovendien kan een gebrek aan aanvullende gegevens en secundaire observaties leiden tot misinterpretaties die niet op de werkelijkheid zijn gebaseerd. Het is daarom cruciaal dat waarnemingen geverifieerd worden door meerdere, gekwalificeerde onderzoekers en dat alle beschikbare gegevens zorgvuldig worden beoordeeld voordat conclusies worden getrokken over de aard en oorsprong van het waargenomen verschijnsel.
Kortom, het beoordelen van dergelijke waarnemingen vereist een kritische blik, duidelijke criteria en een brede kennis van natuurlijke fenomenen. De meest plausibele verklaringen blijven in de lijn van bekende en natuurlijke parameters, waarbij de rol van menselijke interpretatie en media-incidenten niet over het hoofd mag worden gezien. Door systematisch en objectief te werk te gaan, kunnen we een beter begrip krijgen van deze verschijnselen en de factoren die eraan ten grondslag liggen.
NASA meldt dat 3I/ATLAS zijn dichtste nadering tot de aarde zal maken op een afstand van ongeveer 270 miljoen kilometer, zonder dat dit een bedreiging voor onze planeet vormt. De baan van de komeet voert hem door het binnenste zonnestelsel, waardoor astronomen waardevolle observatiemogelijkheden krijgen terwijl hij zich tussen de banen van de planeten beweegt. Deze veilige afstand stelt wetenschappers in staat de interstellaire bezoeker te bestuderen met grond- en ruimtetelescopen zonder zich zorgen te hoeven maken over de veiligheid van de aarde.
Kansen en mogelijkheden tot verdere studie
Ondanks dat er geen bewijs is voor buitenaardse oorsprong, biedt het onderzoek naar kometen als 31/Atlas belangrijke mogelijkheden:
Verbetering van waarnemingsinstrumenten:Door geavanceerde telescopen en schepen kunnen we de fysische eigenschappen van komeetmaterialen nauwkeuriger bestuderen.
Analyse van stof en ijs samenstelling: Dit kan helpen bij het begrijpen van de oerstaat van het zonnestelsel en de condities tijdens de vorming ervan.
Monitoring van baanbewegingen: Hierdoor kunnen we nauwkeurig voorspellen wanneer kometen het dichtst bij de aarde komen, en eventuele risico’s inschatten.
Anomalieën onder de radar houden: Door systematische en wetenschappelijke monitoring kunnen we afwijkingen snel identificeren en beoordelen.
Tom Statler, NASA's hoofdwetenschapper voor kleine lichamen in het zonnestelsel, verwierp Loebs perspectief en stelde dat 3I/ATLAS eruitziet als een komeet, zich gedraagt als een komeet en in vrijwel elk opzicht sterk lijkt op bekende kometen. NASA's standpunt is gebaseerd op concrete observatiegegevens, waaronder de coma van de komeet, uitstootpatronen en samenstelling. Loeb heeft daarna in een blogpost erkend dat de eenvoudigste hypothese is dat 3I/ATLAS een komeet is, en verduidelijkte dat zijn doel was om aannames uit te dagen in plaats van harde beweringen te doen.
Verklaringen en aanpak van geruchten
De verspreiding van ongefundeerde theorieën over de komeet 31/Atlas lijkt te worden aangejaagd door:
Gebrek aan kennis:Mensen die niet vertrouwd zijn met astronomische principes, kunnen de waargenomen verschijnselen verkeerd interpreteren.
Media en internet:Sensationalistische berichtgeving en virale video’s versnellen de verspreiding van onjuiste informatie.
Onwetendheid over natuurkundige principes: Bijvoorbeeld dat lichtreflecties of lensflare in camera’s bevestigd kunnen worden op natuurlijke fenomenen.
Om dit te voorkomen moeten wetenschappers, mediaprofessionals en amateur-astronomen gezamenlijk werken aan het verspreiden van correcte informatie, en open communiceren over wat wel en niet bekend is.
Professor Avi Loeb, een theoretisch astrofysicus aan de Harvard University, heeft gepleit voor een nader onderzoek van 3I/ATLAS via het Galileo-project, dat mogelijk bewijs van buitenaardse technologie onderzoekt. In wetenschappelijke essays gepubliceerd op Medium betwijfelde Loeb of de helderheid van het object afkomstig kon zijn van zelfluminescentie in plaats van gereflecteerd zonlicht, een eigenschap die anders is dan bij bekende kometen. Hij stelde voor dat wetenschappers zouden moeten overwegen of 3I/ATLAS een kunstmatig sondage of artefact van een andere beschaving zou kunnen zijn.
Oplossingen en aanbevelingen
Om de kloof tussen wetenschap en publieke perceptie te overbruggen, kunnen de volgende strategieën effectief zijn:
Educatieve campagnes: Uitleggen hoe komeetwaarnemingen technisch en fysisch verklaard kunnen worden.
Betrouwbare communicatiekanalen: Wetenschappelijke instituten en ruimtevaartorganisaties moeten altijd transparant en toegankelijk communiceren over nieuwe waarnemingen.
Publicatie van data: Verzamelde gegevens moeten zoveel mogelijk gedeeld worden met de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap en publiek.
Wetenschappelijke toezicht op sociale media: Het opzetten van betrouwbare bronnen die snel kunnen ingrijpen en misvattingen corrigeren.
Inzet van amateur-astronomen:Samenwerking tussen professionele en amateur-astronomen kan helpen om waarnemingen te valideren.
Door dergelijke maatregelen kunnen we de verspreiding van fictie beperken, en het publieke vertrouwen in de wetenschap vergroten.
In een artikel getiteld "Is het interstellaire object 3I/ATLAS buitenaardse technologie?" schreef Loeb dat als het object een technologische artefact met actieve intelligentie is, twee mogelijkheden volgen: de bedoelingen ervan kunnen volledig goedhartig of kwaadwillig zijn, of ergens daartussenin. Hij waarschuwde dat de gevolgen, mocht de hypothese correct blijken, mogelijk rampzalig zouden kunnen zijn voor de mensheid en mogelijk verdedigingsmaatregelen vereisen. De provocerende uitspraken zorgden voor aanzienlijke discussie binnen de astronomische gemeenschap.
Conclusie
Na een uitgebreide wetenschappelijke analyse van de komeet 31/Atlas en de geruchten die hierover circuleren, kunnen we concluderen dat:
Er geen bewijzen zijn voor buitenaardse technologie of ruimteschepen in de verschijning van deze komeet.
De waarnemingen en gedragingen van 31/Atlas volledig binnen de natuurlijke parameters van bekende kometen vallen.
De claims over buitenaardse oorsprong voortkomen uit een combinatie van interpretatiefouten, optische artefacten, en de influencer van sociale media en sensatiezucht.
Het is van belang dat wij blijven vertrouwen op wetenschappelijk onderzoek, en sceptisch blijven ten opzichte van ongefundeerde geruchten.
3I/ATLAS zal rond 30 oktober 2025 zijn dichtstbijzijnde nadering van de zon maken en komt daarbij binnen 1,4 astronomische eenheden, ongeveer 130 miljoen mijl, iets binnen de baan van Mars. Dit periheliumpassage vertegenwoordigt het punt waarop de komeet de maximale zonneverwarming ervaart, wat mogelijk zijn activiteit en helderheid vergroot. De nauwe nadering van de zon zal waarschijnlijk de uitgas- en stofproductie van de komeet versterken voordat hij zijn reis terug het zonnestelsel uit begint.
In plaats van in te gaan op sensationele verhalen, verdienen objectieve, data-gedreven analyse en communicatie onze aandacht. Alleen zo kunnen we misverstanden over astronomische objecten zoals komeet 31/Atlas voorkomen, en het publiek meenemen in de wonderen en mysteries van ons universum, met een waarneming gebaseerd op feiten en wetenschap.
De komeet raast door de ruimte met ongeveer 61 kilometer per seconde, waarbij de snelheid toeneemt naarmate hij de zon nadert. Volgens Con Stoitsis, komeet- en meteorendirecteur bij de Astronomical Society of Victoria, volgt 3I/ATLAS een hyperbolische baan, wat betekent dat hij te snel beweegt om door de zwaartekracht van de zon te worden gevangen. De komeet zal door het binnenste zonnestelsel tussen de banen van Mars en de aarde trekken voordat hij langs de zon vliegt en ons zonnestelsel voorgoed verlaat.
Einde van de analyse
Tot slot wil ik benadrukken dat het streven naar kennis en waarheid altijd de hoogste prioriteit moet krijgen. Het universum is complex en fascinerend, en onze zoektocht om het te begrijpen, vereist dat we openstaan voor nieuwe inzichten, maar altijd kritisch blijven op de bronnen en interpretaties. Mogelijk kunnen toekomstige technologieën en onderzoek ons verder brengen in het vertrouwen dat de vreemde verschijnselen die we observeren, altijd te verklaren zijn binnen de natuurlijke gang van de wetenschap.
NASA meldt dat 3I/ATLAS weer zichtbaar zou moeten worden via telescopen vanaf de aarde begin december 2025, zodra het weer tevoorschijn komt van achter de zon. De omvang en fysieke eigenschappen worden nog bestudeerd terwijl astronomen doorgaan met observaties tijdens de doorgang door ons zonnestelsel. Het kijkvenster in december zal wetenschappers extra mogelijkheden bieden om gegevens te verzamelen over deze zeldzame interstellaire bezoeker, voordat het ons zonnestelsel voorgoed verlaat en materiaal van een ander sterrenstelsel terug de diepe ruimte in meeneemt.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has published an intriguing image taken by the Trace Gas Orbiter. It shows distinctive black “scratches” on the Martian surface. These were formed by a meteorite impact.
Dark streaks on Mars caused by a meteorite impact. Source: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS
According to scientists, these stripes were formed when a meteorite struck the edge of Mount Apollo, an ancient volcano located in the southern Hemisphere of Mars. The image shows a faint cluster of impact craters in a discolored area at the base. The impact caused more than a hundred dust avalanches to descend the mountain slope.
Similar dark streaks can be found in many regions of Mars. Scientists believe they are formed when layers of fine dust suddenly slide down steep slopes. Having found no traces of water, they concluded that these formations were mainly the result of dry processes caused by wind and dust.
The results of a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications suggest that most of them are not related to meteorites: less than one in a thousand streaks were formed by rocks falling on Mars. In most cases, seasonal changes and wind causing dust to rise are to blame.
“The dynamics of dust, wind, and sand appear to be the main seasonal factors influencing the formation of stripes on slopes. Meteorite impacts and earthquakes are locally significant but relatively insignificant factors on a global scale,” explains lead author Valentin Bickel from the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Valentin used deep learning algorithms to analyze more than two million streaks on slopes in images taken by the MRO spacecraft. As a result, the census of streaks made it possible to determine their location in five separate “hot spots” on Mars between 2006 and 2024.
“These observations can help us better understand what is happening on Mars today. Obtaining long-term, continuous, and global observations that reveal the dynamics of Mars is a key task for current and future orbiters,” says Colin Wilson, ESA scientist for the Trace Gas Orbiter project.
Trace Gas Orbiter continues to photograph Mars from orbit in order to understand its ancient past and potential suitability for life. The spacecraft regularly takes images of the surface, and its data has made it possible to identify areas of the Red Planet that are rich in water ice.
Last month, mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS came within just 18 million miles of Mars during its unusual trajectory through our solar system.
During its approach, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to take high-resolution images of the rare visitor, which is widely suspected among experts to be a comet. But thanks to a bureaucratic nightmare triggered by the ongoing federal government shutdown, which kicked off just days after the images were taken, scientists have yet to see them over a month later.
Last week, representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) sent a letter to interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, urging the space agency to release the images, which offer roughly three times the resolution of the object compared to July images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
“This information is of great importance to advancing our understanding of interstellar visitors and their interaction with our solar system,” she wrote. “The brightest pixel in these images will provide our most precise constraint on the object’s size to date.”
Duffy appears to have acknowledged her request — but the outcome isn’t going to make astronomers happy.
“Just had a good conversation with NASA regarding 3I/ATLAS,” she tweeted on Wednesday. “As soon as the government reopens, they’ll be releasing images/data.”
“Unfortunately, due to bureaucratic reasons, they cannot until then,” Luna wrote.
Fortunately, while we await the release of the images, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has been assisting Luna in her request, pointed out in a blog post today that MRO wasn’t the only spacecraft snapping pictures of the intriguing object. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released images of the rock taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars Orbiter’s High-Resolution Imaging Camera (HiRIC), which also came within just 18,000 miles of 3I/ATLAS.
“The released HiRIC images show the nucleus and a surrounding coma with a diameter of several thousand kilometers,” Loeb noted, referring to the fuzzy, glowing atmosphere of gas and dust that surrounds a comet’s solid core.
Getting a more accurate, higher-resolution image of 3I/ATLAS could allow us to better estimate the actual size of its nucleus. Per Loeb’s previous calculations, the object could be “anomalously massive,” with a “solid-density nucleus” that “must be larger than [3.1] miles,” and an estimated mass of more than “33 billion tons.”
Apart from being only the third confirmed interstellar object passing through the solar system, 3I/ATLAS has also exhibited some surprising behavior, as Loeb has been painstakingly documenting.
For instance, November 5 images taken by the R. Naves Observatory in Spain show that 3I/ATLAS has no tail, which is highly unusual for a comet that only recently passed its closest point to the Sun, or perihelion.
“Based on momentum conservation, I derived here that the mass fraction lost during the perihelion passage of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 13 percent,” Loeb wrote in a separate blog post. “For a typical comet, this should have resulted in a massive coma with dust and gas that would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind to the shape of a typical cometary tail pointing away from the Sun.”
“No such tail is visible in the new images from November 5, 2025,” he added.
Shocking new images of the interstellar visitor have revealed that it has mysteriously shrunk in size weeks ahead of its closest approach to Earth.
NASA recently calculated the change, noting it shed 13 percent of its material after 3I/ATLAS soaring past the sun last month.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb, who has been analyzing the object since the summer, noted that this sudden shrinkage was directly tied to the noticeable change in the interstellar object's course as it moved closer to the sun.
'For a typical comet, this should have resulted in a massive coma with dust and gas that would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind to the shape of a typical cometary tail pointing away from the sun,' he said in a blog post.
'No such tail is visible in the new images from November 5, 2025.'
3I/ATLAS will make its closest approach to our planet on December 19, just six weeks from now.
Loeb has previously warned that contact with 3I/ATLAS has the makings of a 'black swan event,' meaning this massive space object could be an alien mothership trying to disguise itself as a space rock for an unknown purpose.
However, NASA and hundreds of researchers are sure 3I/ATLAS is nothing more than a comet from outside of our Solar System.
An image of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS taken on November 5 revealed no obvious cometary tail, which should have formed after passing the sun
Clues have continued to pile up that suggest this object from outside the solar system is not a natural phenomenon. This includes displaying a strange 'anti-tail' which pointed towards the sun as it made its closest approach to the star last month
With no such tail forming around 3I/ATLAS, Loeb maintains that the odds of this strange visitor being an artificial craft of extraterrestrial origin are growing every single day.
The shedding of material happened when a ground-based telescope in Chile identified a mysterious increase in speed.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) said the mysterious shift by 3I/ATLAS could not be explained by the sun's extreme gravity pulling on the alleged comet.
Instead, 3I/ATLAS clearly pulled away from the sun and also turned to its side, which Loeb suggested was a sign of a rocket engine adjusting the craft's course.
For a normal comet to complete this shocking maneuver naturally, 3I/ATLAS would have had to lose more than 13 percent of its mass, creating giant jets of gas pouring out of the space rock.
These jets of gas would have had the same effect as a rocket engine, pushing the comet away from the sun despite the massive star's gravitational pull on everything in the solar system.
However, this kind of outpouring of gas leaves a trail of evidence, clear signs that the comet melted and released roughly five billion tons of gas and dust into space.
NASA's latest images, released on November 5, show absolutely no signs that 3I/ATLAS has done any of this, despite shrinking by about 13 percent and pulling away from the sun.
NASA telescopes photographed 3I/ATLAS as it moved out of its blind spot behind the sun in early November
Moreover, Loeb revealed that the unidentified object hasn't changed much at all compared to a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in July.
The physicist and head of the Galileo Project, a scientific research group looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, has argued that 3I/ATLAS has shown at least 10 signs it's an artificially constructed vessel that's now heading toward Earth.
However, clues have continued to pile up that suggest this object from outside the solar system is not a natural phenomenon.
This includes displaying a strange 'anti-tail' which pointed towards the sun as it made its closest approach to the star last month.
A normal comet's tail points away from the sun as ice and rock break away and trail behind the comet as it moves through space.
3I/ATLAS has also repeatedly changed color during its journey through the solar system, including turning blue as it reached the sun, something a typical comet never does.
Normal comets turn red as their cold surfaces absorb blue light and bounce back mostly red light, just like a cold piece of metal glows red when you start heating it.
While one strange oddity being seen in a comet could be explained by science, Loeb noted that the odds of 3I/ATLAS displaying 10 strange anomalies at the same time are astronomical and point to the object being created by a distant intelligence.
Co-author Dr Carly Howett, of the University of Oxford, told Daily Mail: 'We think life likes stability to survive - so showing Enceladus’ energy is stable means its sub-surface environment probably is too.'
Saturn's Moon Enceladus (artist's impression) might be home to alien life, according to a new study, as researchers find heat escaping from the moon's North Pole
Although Enceladus looks barren on the surface, beneath the ice, there is a vast liquid water ocean which has all the ingredients for life. Pictured: Enceladus as seen by the Cassini spacecraft
With a diameter of 310 miles (500 km) – about as wide as Arizona – Enceladus is Saturn's sixth–largest moon.
On the surface, conditions are exceptionally cold with temperatures as low as –201°C (–330°F).
But beneath the surface, there is enough heat energy to maintain a large, liquid ocean of water.
The moon gets heat from a process called tidal heating, where it is squeezed and stretched by Saturn's gravity.
This energy prevents the moon from freezing completely, but the underground oceans would only be able to support life if the energy coming in matches the energy flowing out.
Dr Howett says: 'If Enceladus is losing more energy than gaining, then eventually the whole moon will cool and Enceladus’ ocean is going to freeze – which is obviously bad for life!
'If it's gaining more energy than losing, then the ocean will heat and melt the ice shell from the bottom – which will change both the ocean’s temperature and chemistry.'
Previous studies have estimated how much energy Enceladus loses through its active South Pole, where jets of water are constantly erupting through tectonic fissures known as 'tiger stripes'.
Scientists have calculated how much heat is escaping through the North Pole from the warm ocean below. This reveals that the planet is losing as much energy as it gets from the gravitational pull of Saturn
Since Enceladus' energy is balanced, scientists say that its oceans are likely to be stable and long-lived. This increases the chances that the planet might have developed life
What is Enceladus?
Enceladus is Saturn's sixth–largest moon, at 313 miles wide (504 kilometres).
It is an icy satellite with hydrothermal activity – a rare combination – with vents spewing water vapour and ice particles out from a global ocean buried beneath the moon's frozen crust.
According to NASA observations, the plume includes organic compounds, volatile gases, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica.
Microbes on our planet either produce these compounds or use them for growth, leading some to speculate that tiny organisms live in Enceladus' hidden ocean.
However, figuring out how much energy the entire planet loses from its ocean is extremely difficult because it heats the entire ice sheet at once.
This means there is only a tiny difference from the normal day-night temperature cycle at any given time.
'These subtle temperature increases are easiest spotted against a cold surface, and probably where the ice shell is thinnest,' says Dr Howett.
'Enceladus’ north polar region met these requirements.'
Using measurements from the Cassini spacecraft, the researchers compared the surface temperature of the North Pole in deep winter and in summer.
This revealed that the surface around the pole was around 7°C (7 Kelvin) warmer than expected.
From this data, Dr Howett and her co-authors were able to calculate that the moon is losing 46 milliwatts of energy per square metre, or 35 gigawatts of energy across the entire planet.
Combined with the known energy loss from the active South Pole, Enceladus' total energy loss rises to 54 gigawatts.
In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft discovered striking tectonic faults at the south pole known as 'tiger stripes' (bottom right), which allow water from the inner ocean to escape. Analysis found that this water contained complex molecules associated with the origins of life
Scientists don't know yet whether the planet hosts life, but any life that does exist might look similar to that found around hydrothermal vents in Earth's deep oceans
This figure is almost exactly the same as the estimated total energy input from tidal warming, proving that it is balanced.
Dr Howett says this 'supports Enceladus having an ocean that is long-lived and stable, in which life stands a better chance of evolving.'
Scientists aren't sure what that life might look like, since we have only ever seen how life evolved on one planet, but it could share some similarities with life on Earth.
'It’s possible life on Enceladus looks a little like that around the deep hydrothermal vents of the Earth, says Dr Howett.
'There we see things that look like shrimp, crabs and lobsters. So perhaps like that – but maybe not like that at all!'
The next steps will be to work out whether the oceans on Enceladus have existed long enough for life to have formed.
If the oceans are old enough, it might justify sending another probe to look for chemical signs of life in the South Pole's icy plumes or even to burrow through the ice into the ocean itself.
Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1997, then spent seven years in transit followed by 13 years orbiting Saturn.
An artist's impression of the Cassini spacecraft studying Saturn
In 2000 it spent six months studying Jupiter before reaching Saturn in 2004.
In that time, it discovered six more moons around Saturn, three-dimensional structures towering above Saturn's rings, and a giant storm that raged across the planet for nearly a year.
On 13 December 2004 it made its first flyby of Saturn's moons Titan and Dione.
On 24 December it released the European Space Agency-built Huygens probe on Saturn's moon Titan to study its atmosphere and surface composition.
There it discovered eerie hydrocarbon lakes made from ethane and methane.
In 2008, Cassini completed its primary mission to explore the Saturn system and began its mission extension (the Cassini Equinox Mission).
In 2010 it began its second mission (Cassini Solstice Mission) which lasted until it exploded in Saturn's atmosphere.
In December 2011, Cassini obtained the highest resolution images of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
In December of the following year it tracked the transit of Venus to test the feasibility of observing planets outside our solar system.
In March 2013 Cassini made the last flyby of Saturn's moon Rhea and measured its internal structure and gravitational pull.
Cassini didn't just study Saturn - it also captured incredible views of its many moons. In the image above, Saturn's moon Enceladus can be seen drifting before the rings and the tiny moon Pandora. It was captured on Nov. 1, 2009, with the entire scene is backlit by the Sun
In July of that year Cassini captured a black-lit Saturn to examine the rings in fine detail and also captured an image of Earth.
In April of this year it completed its closest flyby of Titan and started its Grande Finale orbit which finished on September 15.
'The mission has changed the way we think of where life may have developed beyond our Earth,' said Andrew Coates, head of the Planetary Science Group at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London.
'As well as Mars, outer planet moons like Enceladus, Europa and even Titan are now top contenders for life elsewhere,' he added. 'We've completely rewritten the textbooks about Saturn.'
Relics of the impactor identified in the Chang'e-6 lunar regolith. Credit: Prof. Xu,Y., et al. (2025)
Meteorites are both the messengers and time capsules of the Solar System. As pieces of larger asteroids that broke apart, or debris thrown up by impacts on other bodies, these "space rocks" retain the composition of where they originated from. As a result, scientists can study other planets, moons, and objects by examining the abundance of chemical elements in meteorites. Unfortunately, such studies are limited when it comes to meteorites retrieved on Earth, due to erosion, atmospheric filtration, and geological processes (like volcanism and mantle convection).
However, meteor impacts are well-preserved in the lunar environment, as it has virtually no atmosphere, experiences no wind or water erosion, and is (for the most part) geologically inactive. Recently, a research team with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) examined samples returned by the Chang'e-6 mission from the far side of the Moon. They identified seven olivine-bearing minerals from the lunar regolith they examined, which they determined to have been deposited by Carbonaceous Ivuna-type (CI) chondrites, a type of fragile meteorite that rarely survives impact with Earth.
CAS Professors Xu Yigang and Lin Mang led the research team. It consisted of researchers from the CAS's Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (GIG), the College of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the CAS University, the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, the Research Organization of Science and Technology of Ritsumeikan University, and the Department of Archaeology, Environmental Changes and Geo-Chemistry at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The paper describing their findings was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Oct. 20th.
*Meteorites bombard a molten landscape in this illustration of the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Credit: NASA GSFC Conceptual Image Lab*
CI chondrites are a rare type of carbonaceous meteorite, which are defined by their relative abundance of carbon (up to 3%) in the form of graphite, carbonates, and organic compounds (including amino acids). The parent bodies originally formed in the outer Solar System, and many migrated into the inner Solar System when the planets were still forming. Due to their fragile nature, these meteorites account for less than 1% of meteorite samples examined by scientists. But on the Moon, chondrites are largely preserved, and their chemical makeup speaks volumes about the environment in which they formed.
"Systematic identification and classification of meteorites on the airless Moon thus provide additional critical constraints for reconstructing the primordial accretion history and impactor population of the inner Solar System," they state in their paper. However, this remains challenging since meteors will vaporize upon colliding at high velocities with the lunar surface. Upon examining the samples, the team confirmed that they were formed from molten droplets resulting from impact, which then underwent rapid cooling and crystallization due to exposure to the extreme cold and vacuum of space.
However, using textural characterization and an analysis of in-situ triple oxygen isotopes, the team confirmed that the samples are relics of CI-like chondrites that struck the Moon before the Nectarian Period (approximately 3.92 billion years ago). This coincides with the Late Heavy Bombardment, which took place 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. This period was characterized by a disproportionately high number of asteroids and comets striking the Earth-Moon system and other bodies in the inner Solar System.
These impacts are believed to have been the means through which water and organic molecules were introduced to the inner Solar System. Since CI chondrites are known to be rich in water and organic materials, as demonstrated by the samples returned from asteroid Bennu that showed traces of amino acids, these findings support the hypothesis that asteroids played a key role in delivering water and other volatiles to the inner Solar System. Additionally, the team suggests that previously-detected deposits of water ice on the Moon, which showed indications of certain positive oxygen isotopes, were likely delivered by CI chondrites in the past.
Based on these findings, the team conducted a preliminary statistical analysis of meteoritic materials, indicating that CI chondrites likely played a significantly greater role in shaping the Earth-Moon system than previously thought. Their study offers new insight into the evolution of our Solar System and the events that helped give rise to life. Furthermore, the integrated methodology they devised could be a valuable tool for assessing other returned samples of extraterrestrial materials, pointing the way towards future research opportunities.
Mysterious 3I/ATLAS object leads NASA and Harvard to take unprecedented action in space
Mysterious 3I/ATLAS object leads NASA and Harvard to take unprecedented action in space
Hubble captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21, 2025, when the comet was 277 million miles from Earth. Hubble shows that the comet has a teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust coming off its solid, icy nucleus.
Hubble captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21, 2025, when the comet was 277 million miles from Earth. Hubble shows that the comet has a teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust coming off its solid, icy nucleus.
A mysterious interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS has prompted NASA and Harvard University to initiate one of the most extraordinary cooperative monitoring operations in modern space history, as reported by El Adelantado. The joint effort, which involves agencies across the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), was discreetly activated after the comet began exhibiting behavior scientists described as “inexplicable.”
Discovered in July 2025 by the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Chile, 3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar object ever identified passing through our solar system. It appears to have come from a completely different star system, traveling at speeds exceeding 209,000 km/h on a hyperbolic trajectory that will eventually send it back into deep space.
NASA and Harvard’s unprecedented response to 3I/ATLAS
The quiet but sweeping international alert surrounding 3I/ATLAS began on October 21, 2025, when Harvard’s Minor Planet Center issued bulletin MPEC 2025-U142. The notice marked the activation of a global space safety protocol under the IAWN, directing international observatories to focus on the comet until January 27, 2026. Although NASA confirmed that Earth is not in danger, the object’s unpredictable motion and unique physical features have raised scientific—and political—interest.
“The object is most likely a natural comet, but its anomalies imply that we must consider a technological origin because of the large implications to humanity in that case,” explained Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb (as per NY Post).
Loeb, who first suggested that the interstellar traveler ʻOumuamua might have been artificial, described 3I/ATLAS as potentially a “black swan event”—a rare, unpredictable phenomenon with civilization-altering potential.
“We must remain open-minded. It’s at least a thousand times more massive than the previous interstellar objects we’ve seen,” he said.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble, and several other observatories—including TESS, Swift, Lucy, and Parker Solar Probe—have been tasked with monitoring the object. Even amid a U.S. government shutdown, NASA confirmed that “essential personnel” continue tracking 3I/ATLAS due to its significance. Congress has also taken notice. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) recently called on NASA to release unreleased imagery and data about the object, writing that “this information is of great importance to advancing our understanding of interstellar visitors.” Sources within NASA and the Pentagon confirmed plans to brief lawmakers about the ongoing investigation, despite normal operations being paused.
To the untrained eye, 3I/ATLAS might appear to be just another comet, but astronomers quickly realized it was anything but ordinary. Its hyperbolic orbit confirms that it originated beyond our solar system, and its Manhattan-sized nucleus—approximately 5 kilometers in diameter—places it among the largest interstellar objects ever observed. The comet’s most striking feature is its “anti-tail”—a bizarre plume of dust and particles that points toward the Sun instead of away from it. This reversal defies normal cometary behavior, which typically results from solar radiation pushing material outward. Compounding the mystery is the comet’s non-gravitational acceleration, believed to be caused by uneven jets of gas and dust that act like thrusters, sending it veering slightly off expected paths.
NASA’s Webb Telescope also detected nickel emissions without any iron, a composition never seen in natural comets. Loeb noted that this particular form of nickel—nickel tetracarbonyl—has only ever been observed in human manufacturing processes, further deepening the enigma. Despite the growing intrigue, NASA maintains that 3I/ATLAS poses no threat to Earth. It will pass no closer than 270 million kilometers from our planet—roughly 1.8 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Still, the object’s unusual characteristics have prompted agencies to use it as a “natural laboratory” to test methods for tracking and analyzing future interstellar visitors.
“The more we learn about 3I/ATLAS, the better we’ll understand how interstellar material moves through our solar system—and how to respond to it safely,” said a NASA spokesperson.
For now, Earth remains safe—but the lessons gleaned from 3I/ATLAS will likely shape our planetary defense and interstellar research strategies for decades to come.
Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie have been on the Tiangong station since April, completing science experiments, carrying out space walks, and living in zero gravity, as part of China's Shenzhou 20 mission.
At some point before the trio officially handed over the station to the next crew, the collision occurred.
It left a noticeable mark on the space vehicle's hull, leading the team to fear their craft may have also sustained internal damage that could endanger their flight home.
Their replacements had already arrived at the space lab after taking off in their own rocket on October 31.
The two crews will now have to comb through the spacecraft to check for any critical problems before attempting to use the vessel again. The next return data has not yet been released.
It's the second time this year that astronauts has been stranded in space due to a problem with their space capsule, taking place just seven months after NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were rescued from the International Space Station (ISS).
Astronauts Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie (Pictured) have been stranded on the Chinese space station Tiangong until their return vehicle can be repaired
Shenzhou 20, seen launching in April, was scheduled to go back down to Earth on Wednesday, but it's believed that space junk damaged the return craft
Chinese officials are unsure what struck the spacecraft, but the damage is believed to have been caused by space debris, which is basically junk floating around the Earth from older space missions and rocket launches.
This could include anything from bits from broken satellites and dropped tools from spacewalks to giant pieces of discarded rocket parts.
This floating garbage is moving around the planet at incredible speeds of up to 17,000mph, the average velocity for objects in low Earth orbit.
This can be a real hazard for manned spacecraft, similar to driving through a hailstorm of bullets.
However, experts at NASA think there could be over half a million smaller pieces too small to track easily.
'The impact analysis and risk assessment are underway,' officials at CMSA said, according to CNN.
However, the agency did not provide any details on how long it might take the crews of Shenzhou 20 and 21 to check the ship and repair whatever damage was done.
China's Tiangong space station (Pictured) was launched in 2021 and orbits about 250 miles above Earth
The interstellar object racing through our solar system has been caught unexpectedly picking up speed as it moves away from the sun and closer toward Earth.
NASA has confirmed a small extra 'kick' moving the mysterious visitor dubbed 3I/ATLAS off its predicted path, which can't be explained by the sun's gravity.
The sun contains almost all of the solar system’s mass, meaning its weight pulls all the planets together in a predictable motion scientists can measure, but these new movements by 3I/ATLAS appear to defy our laws of gravity.
The object, which many scientists claim is a comet, set a record as the fastest space rock entering the solar system ever detected by humans at more than 130,000mph.
After reaching its closest point to the sun on October 29, known as perihelion, its speed has now soared to approximately 152,000mph.
While NASA believes the sun's gravity is mainly responsible for the speed boost, scientists are having a harder time figuring out what has caused 3I/ATLAS to noticeably shift away from our home star.
If it were an ordinary comet, the heat of the sun would be causing the icy cold space rock to melt and shoot out jets of gas trapped inside, potentially pushing the comet in a different direction.
However, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb has revealed that astronomers are still awaiting evidence that 3I/ATLAS has released anywhere close to enough gas to prove the object is really a comet.
3I/ATLAS (pictured) has exhibited unique features, including an anti-tail, extreme color changes, and an extremely unusual course through our solar system
The interstellar visitor has unexpectedly changed course as it picked up speed during its perihelion with the sun in late October
3I/ATLAS is now just six weeks from reaching its closest point to Earth, and Loeb added that not detecting a cloud of gas coming from the object would be a clear sign that this latest speed boost was powered by an extraterrestrial rocket engine.
NASA's latest readings found the mystery push got significantly weaker in the days after 3I/ATLAS reached its perihelion with the sun, but it was still noticeable and unrelated to the star's gravitational pull.
For a natural space rock to pull off this strange maneuver, scientists examining the NASA data have estimated that 3I/ATLAS would have had to suddenly lose at least 13 percent of its total mass as it approached the sun.
That's the only way enough of the comet would have been transformed into a gas that blasted the object away like a thruster on a spacecraft.
If this happened while 3I/ATLAS was hiding in the sun's blind spot from our viewpoint on Earth, a huge cloud of dust and gas from that event would have formed around the rock.
In December, the James Webb Space Telescope will look for this giant cloud around 3I/ATLAS.
However, Loeb has noted that 3I/ATLAS showed little evidence of shedding enough of its mass as it got closer to the sun last month.
'If 3I/ATLAS is not enshrouded in a much more massive gas cloud after perihelion than it had in the months preceding perihelion, then its recent non-gravitational acceleration must have resulted from a different cause than cometary evaporation,' Loeb said on Wednesday.
The supposed comet, 3I/ATLAS, mysteriously turned blue as it approached the sun on October 29, unlike normal comets which turn red
Loeb added that there are now 10 strange anomalies that science can't completely explain when it comes to the interstellar visitor's trip through the solar system.
The latest oddities that point to the object possibly being an extraterrestrial craft of some kind took place as 3I/ATLAS neared our sun.
Unlike a typical comet, which would have changed color to red, 3I/ATLAS quickly began to shine brighter than normal space rocks and also turned blue.
That's when its course suddenly shifted beyond gravity's control, which NASA has just confirmed for the first time on Tuesday.
It's also incredibly massive, weighing approximately 33billion tons, which Loeb said doesn't make sense because there isn't enough rocky material in interstellar space to have created such a structure naturally.
While fellow scientists have concluded that the massive object formed in a distant solar system on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, its strange chemical makeup is still raising serious questions about its origins.
Unlike comets that formed in our solar system, which are mainly composed of ice and water, scans have shown that 3I/ATLAS is an odd mixture of nickel and carbon dioxide.
Loeb has theorized that 3I/ATLAS could be a nuclear-powered 'mothership,' which would explain how it could get unusually bright if it were generating its own light.
Also, its nickel shell, which originally turned the object green, could be a sign of an alien intelligence using the valuable metal as a protective coating against the extreme heat of approaching our sun, just like humans do with manmade space probes.
In Part 1 of this 2 part exclusive interview, former NASA engineer and Warp Drive pioneer Harold G. “Sonny” White talked about his education, his time at NASA, and how he finally left the agency to work at the Limitless Space Institute (LSI).
Now, in Part 2, Dr. White talks about his goals of interstellar travel and how the grants awarded by LSI in 2020 are helping scientists and engineers from around the globe research things like Pulsed Fusion Drives, Solar Sails, Directed Energy Propulsion, and even Traversable Wormholes.
The Debrief: One of the main programs at Limitless Space is your ‘I-squared grants,’ which provide money for mainstream scientists and engineers interested in advanced power propulsion to pursue their research. Was LSI already working on the grants when you joined, or did you bring that concept with you?
Sonny White: That was something I immediately championed as soon as I came in the door. LSI’s mission is to inspire and educate the next generation to travel beyond our solar system and support the research and development of enabling technologies. We wanted to be a “doing” organization, and as we were talking about earlier in the discussion, it really comes down to power propulsion.
I felt we needed a focused grant initiative, where we can put out a solicitation for the community to write some proposals and where they can be as bold as they want to be. I think it feeds the community in a way that allows them to get attention at their own universities and maybe improve the chances that they’ll get resources from other entities.
TD: Is that already happening?
SW: It is. One of our grant winners, a Professor University of Pomona picked up a grant. He also just sent me a note the other day that his graduate student just got approved by the University for three years. It’s cool to see how that gets connected back to this.
TD: How many applicants were there for these first grants, and how did LSI choose the nine winners?
SW: There were a lot. And the thing that was amazing to me is that there were a lot of very good proposals. They did a good job of making it hard for us to pick. And if we had more resources, there were more we would have liked to have funded.
TD: In the 1990s, NASA had the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, which in many ways seems like a predecessor to this effort. Was that project an influence?
SW: I think they did some great work. They tried to champion stuff that is in the same categories that we try and champion.
TD: Is there a technological advantage to this program taking place almost 30 years later?
SW:There is. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, the stuff we can do that we couldn’t do five years ago because of technological capability!’ For example, we do work internally where we’re working with the DARPA science office. We do an enormous amount of simulation work with our models, and we have to have 1000 CPUs to make the run; otherwise, it would take forever. Even five years ago, we couldn’t have done that. We’re also seeing work in nanofabrication that wasn’t available even ten years ago.
TD: You mentioned that you’re doing some in-house stuff at Eagleworks that isn’t part of the grants. Would you be willing to give me a little more detail on that, or is it top secret?
SW: Certainly nothing’s classified, but we tend to be very cautious about how much we say. We’re currently funded by DARPA, through the science office, so this is meant to be categorized as basic research/applied research.
We’re doing some work exploring something we call our dynamic vacuum model. And there are some potential implications of this dynamic vacuum model when you apply it to the idea of a Casimir effect. There’s potential for some power implications, some propulsion implications, and maybe some communication sensor implications for fabricating some customized Casimir cavities using our dynamic vacuum model to predict the quantum vacuum that responds to this customized topology and structure that we build in these nanoscale customized Casimir cavities.
So, that’s the work that we’re doing currently, internally with DARPA. We’re working with things like the Casimir Force, trying to measure very, very small fields in these cavities. There’s a paper coming out on that soon.
TD: Will you share that research with us?
SW: At the time, yes.
TD: Did the money for the nine grants awarded last year come from DARPA as well?
SW: The I-squared grants are philanthropic money. They don’t come from DARPA. That’s all philanthropic dollars, primarily from our benefactor, Kam Ghaffarian. Our DARPA grant is to support our internal work.
TD: Is there anything from your original Warp Drive work among those things that you’re actually working on? Or did it kind of hit a wall with theory in 2011, and that’s kind of just been where it’s been since then?
SW: (Long pause) We’re always thinking about some potential steps we can take to get from where we are today to something far in the future. But often, with stuff like this, because it is, at best, basic science, in some cases, you’re trying to figure out the science…there’s just a lot of detailed work. And it takes a long time. So certainly, that’s something we’re always thinking about and have an interest in, and as I said, at some point in the future, there may be some papers in the literature that we can make you aware of.
TD: Was there a timeline on these original grants, meaning is there a period of time you’re expecting to see results or something published from your nine grant winners?
SW: The I-squared grants program was always implemented as being a biennial program, meaning it’s a two-year cycle with a 12 month period of performance. That means we will put out a solicitation for the next round of proposals in the summer of next year. That timeline gives us a chance to do the solicitation, do the proposal review, make the awards and then follow these grant performers as they go through their process. Then we kind of digest and learn what they figure out before starting the process again.
TD: So you will evaluate these first programs later this year, and the public will get the results sometime next year when the new solicitations go out?
SW: That’s correct.
TD: Are you already receiving applications for the next round?
SW: No, we have not put out the next solicitation. The first solicitation was the early summer of last year, so we’ll put out the next solicitation early summer of 2022. I think we put out the first solicitation in the early part of May, and I think we made the announcements in September. So it was an aggressive grant review process.
TD: That’s a pretty fast turnaround.
SW: I know. We worked hard. We worked really hard.
TD: Because Limitless Space is a nonprofit, and because you have a financial benefactor, is there any long-term goal to try and capitalize on some of the work that’s being done? Or is it really a pure science venture?
Warp Fields 101
SW: Let me restate the mission of LSI and then give you the pinnacle objective. Our mission is to inspire and educate the next generation to travel beyond our solar system and support the research and development of enabling technologies. And our pinnacle objective, our “North Star,” is to enable Interstellar flight. Everything we do traces to that critical path.
TD: You have previously mentioned the Perimeter Institute as an influence for your approach at LSI. Could you explain that?
SW: The Perimeter Institute is a nonprofit, and they are solely focused on theoretical physics. There are no commercial products, and it’s just trying to push the boundaries of knowledge. It was set up in a very beautiful facility in Canada, a 120,000 square foot facility on a lake, and they have professors who come and visit and have lectures.
At LSI, our focus is advancing power propulsion as it applies to this goal of interstellar travel. Their focus is just trying to push the boundaries of theoretical physics, just to help humanity develop a deeper understanding of nature at its core. And so, in some ways, they were a good analog for us to kind of look at, as we were trying to figure out how do we set up the gears in this system, how do we want to do things, and what do we want to be as we continue to move forward?
TD: Where do you see the Limitless Space Institute in 10 years?
SW: Hopefully, we’ll be doing some of the things that we’re already doing and we’ll just be doing them a little bit more. Ideally, we’d love to have a facility, whether it’s located on a university campus somewhere or some other location, have a facility with laboratories, classrooms, and is partnered with universities all over the planet, even more so than what we are now. We have about 17 formal partnerships already.
TD: What is the single most important thing about your work at LSI that you want to make sure gets across to The Debrief’s readers?
SW: It comes down to this. This is all about capability, and our objective is to enable human exploration to the outer reaches of the solar system and the stars.
As a capability, chemical propulsion enables us to do all kinds of things. We can send stuff to the surface of Mars, we can send stuff to the surface of the moon, and we can send people to the surface of the moon. We might be able to send people to the surface of Mars. But we can’t even send robotic probes all over the solar system. We cannot send humans to Saturn in 200 days with chemical propulsion. But as a capability, if you just think about known engineering, known physics, nuclear-electric propulsion as a capability enables us to send humans to every destination in the solar system.
And the beauty is, if you build that capability, you won’t have to convince anyone to do that; they’re just going to do it. There’s always this perennial debate about ‘humans or robots.’ Well, to me, that’s a beautiful philosophical discussion, but I prefer to think about the practical side. As a capability, advanced power propulsion is going to enable us to do all kinds of stuff. We’ll send humans, and we’ll send robots. Because as a capability, we can do that. So we will!
A special thanks to Dr. White for giving The Debrief this exclusive interview. In the coming weeks, look for exclusive interviews with a number of the I-squared grant winners, including projects on Pulsed Fusion Propulsion, Directed Energy Propulsion, and Traversable Wormholes. Plus, keep following The Debrief to learn more about Dr. White’s recent Warp Drive breakthrough.
Follow and connect with author Christopher Plain on Twitter:@plain_fiction
Scientists have revealed a grim prospect for humanity's future, as they warn Earth will eventually be consumed by the sun.
In roughly five billion years, our star will burn the last of its hydrogen fuel and begin expanding into a monstrous red giant.
When this happens, astronomers from the University College London and the University of Warwick predict that Earth will be swallowed by the sun or torn to pieces.
Lead author, Dr Edward Bryant says: 'Just like the Moon pulls on Earth's oceans to create tides, the planet pulls on the star.
'As the star evolves and expands, this interaction becomes stronger.
'These interactions slow the planet down and cause its orbit to shrink, making it spiral inwards until it either breaks apart or falls into the star.'
Scientists have given a terrifying glimpse into the future as they warn that Earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun (artist's impression)
This terrifying discovery, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was made by looking at nearly half a million stars that had just entered this 'post–main sequence' stage of their lives.
Main–sequence stars, like our sun, are stable because the inward force of gravity is balanced by the outward push from nuclear fusion reactions in their core.
But when stars run out of hydrogen to burn, this balance is disturbed, and the star begins to collapse in on itself.
This collapse makes the core hot enough to fuse helium atoms into carbon, releasing a surge of energy that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the outer layers, which then expand and cool.
During this process, a red giant can become anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times larger.
Using a computer programme, the researchers searched for the tiny dips in brightness caused by an orbiting planet passing in front of post–main sequence
Out of 15,000 possible signals, Dr Bryant and his co–author were able to identify 130 giant planets orbiting close to their stars, 33 of which were previously undiscovered.
They found that stars that had already expanded and cooled into red giants were much less likely to host large, close–orbiting planets.
In about five billion years, scientists say that the sun will burn the last of its hydrogen fuel. When this happens, it will expand to about 200 times its current size to become a red giant and destroy Earth (artist's impression)
A star's life cycle
Around 90 per cent of stars in the sun are what scientists call 'main sequence' stars.
These are stars that fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores, and range from about a tenth of the mass of the sun to about 200 times as massive.
Main sequence stars start as clouds of gas and dust, which collapse under gravity into 'protostars'.
When a protostar is dense enough, the pressure and heat start nuclear fusion and a star is born.
Stars keep burning helium until it runs out in around 10 to 20 billion years.
At this point, stars will enter the post–main sequence phase and become red dwarfs, white dwarfs, red giants, or even explode into neutron stars, depending on their size.
Overall, 0.28 per cent of stars surveyed were home to a giant planet, with the youngest stars in the sequence having planets more frequently.
However, for planets that had already grown enough to be classed as red giants, just 0.11 per cent were home to planets.
'This is strong evidence that as stars evolve off their main sequence they can quickly cause planets to spiral into them and be destroyed,' says Dr Bryant.
'We expected to see this effect, but we were still surprised by just how efficient these stars seem to be at engulfing their close planets.'
Worryingly, the researchers believe that the same thing will eventually happen to Earth.
Co–author Dr Vincent Van Eylen, of University College London, says: 'When this happens, will the solar system planets survive? We are finding that in some cases planets do not.'
Earth is likely to be safer than the giant planets in the study, which orbit very close to their stars.
The researchers studied thousands of stars that had transitioned into red giants and found that these were less likely to host large planets, suggesting that the stars had destroyed them already (artist's impression)
However, the researchers only looked at the first one to two million years of the 'post–main sequence' phase.
That means these stars have a long way still to evolve and could be even more destructive in the years to come.
Research suggests that the sun will grow so much that it swallows the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, but might not reach the Earth.
In either case, scientists predict that humanity is not likely to survive the sun's evolution.
Dr Bryant told Daily Mail: 'Life on the surface would not survive.
'The expansion of the Sun would drastically increase the level of radiation received at the surface of the Earth, dramatically increase the surface temperature and render the planet uninhabitable.'
Five billion years from now, it's said the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size.
Eventually, it will eject gas and dust to create an 'envelope' accounting for as much as half its mass.
The core will become a tiny white dwarf star. This will shine for thousands of years, illuminating the envelope to create a ring-shaped planetary nebula.
Five billion years from now, it's said the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size
While this metamorphosis will change the solar system, scientists are unsure what will happen to the third rock from the Sun.
We already know that our Sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet.
But whether the Earth's rocky core will survive is uncertain.
Space exploration has always been constrained by one fundamental issue: the need for fuel. Traditional rockets require vast amounts of propellant, which limits their range and the scope of their missions. But now, scientists are exploring the idea of propellantless travel, which could completely change the way we think about reaching distant planets and even other star systems. A new review posted to the arXiv preprint server sheds light on various propulsion concepts that harness natural forces, offering a glimpse into a future where fuel may no longer be necessary for deep space missions.
Unlocking the Potential of Propellantless Travel
The idea of propellantless space travel has been around for decades, but only in recent years has it gained serious attention. A new study available on ArXiv delves deeply into this concept, offering a comprehensive review of several propulsion methods that could revolutionize space exploration. These techniques rely on external energy sources like solar radiation, planetary gravity, and even the solar wind, opening doors to missions that would be impossible with traditional rocket technology. According to the study, these methods could dramatically change our approach to long-duration space travel.
One of the key methods discussed in the study is the use of solar sails. Solar sails harness the pressure exerted by sunlight to push spacecraft through space. These sails, made of ultra-light reflective material, capture the momentum of photons from the Sun. The advantage? They require no fuel, making them a viable option for missions that extend beyond the capabilities of current propulsion systems. Solar sails could theoretically carry spacecraft to distant parts of the solar system, and even to other stars, with continuous, low-thrust acceleration. As highlighted byUniverse Today, this approach could pave the way for exploring distant planets and even interstellar travel, without the need for propellant.
However, solar sails do come with challenges. The further a spacecraft gets from the Sun, the weaker the solar radiation becomes, diminishing the sail’s effectiveness. Moreover, the thin, fragile material used in solar sails needs to withstand harsh conditions in space, which poses significant engineering hurdles. Despite these challenges, the potential of solar sails as a propellantless propulsion system remains a promising avenue for the future of space exploration.
IKAROS, the Japanese satellite that demonstrated the solar sail (Credit : JAXA)
Gravity Assist: The Power of Planetary Motion
One of the oldest propellantless techniques, gravity assist, has been used successfully by missions like Voyager. By flying close to a planet and timing the approach carefully, spacecraft can gain speed by stealing a small amount of the planet’s orbital momentum. This method has been pivotal in exploring the outer solar system, as it allows spacecraft to change trajectory and gain velocity without burning fuel.
Gravity assists are highly effective, but they are dependent on planetary positions and careful mission planning. The limitation here is that the spacecraft must pass near specific planets, which makes missions highly dependent on the timing of planetary alignments. These kinds of opportunities are rare, and the trajectory of such missions can be inflexible. Despite these limitations, gravity assists have proven to be an invaluable tool for space exploration, allowing missions to traverse vast distances and visit multiple planets with minimal fuel consumption.
Magnetic and Electric Sails: Harnessing the Solar Wind
While solar sails offer steady thrust using sunlight, magnetic and electric sails take a different approach by utilizing the solar wind—charged particles constantly emitted by the Sun. Magnetic sails generate thrust by interacting with this stream of charged particles using large superconducting coils, while electric sails rely on long tethers charged with electricity to repel solar wind protons. Both methods offer several advantages, including the ability to accelerate spacecraft over long periods of time without the need for propellant.
However, these technologies are still in their infancy, with significant challenges to overcome. For instance, magnetic sails would require enormous superconducting loops, potentially up to 50 kilometers in radius, maintained at cryogenic temperatures. Such structures are far beyond our current engineering capabilities. Likewise, electric sails require large, thin wires that are both lightweight and strong, and they need significant electrical power to maintain the necessary charge.
Both magnetic and electric sails offer higher potential for acceleration compared to solar sails, and they don’t suffer from the same degradation over time. Yet, the required technologies are still in development, and creating and deploying such large structures in space presents a monumental challenge. Nonetheless, the study suggests that with continued research and innovation, these methods could one day provide a viable alternative to traditional rocket propulsion.
Source: X / @NASA (Unconfirmed image circulating online)
A photo claiming to be a NASA leak of the interstellar object 3I/Atlas has gone viral on social media. Around the same time, a beautiful sky photo from Japan also caught everyone’s attention. Both pictures have become popular online, sparking curiosity and conversation among space fans and regular viewers alike.
The alleged NASA leak
A photo purported to be of 3I/Atlas hit the internet early this week, with many users claiming it originated from NASA’s internal systems and showed a close-up of the mysterious space object in question.
3I/Atlas appears, in the picture, to be a glowing structure with a bluish-green light around it. Some online users described the shape of it as unusual and suggested it could be something artificial.
However, NASA has not confirmed that this image is real, and the agency has not made any official statement about any leak. Scientists have also warned people against believing unverified posts shared on the internet.
Experts say the image could have easily been a digitally edited photo or even real telescope data with added filters to make it look more dramatic.
What we know about 3I/Atlas
3I/Atlas is an interstellar object, which means it came from outside our solar system. It is the third known object of its kind after ‘Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019).
It is being watched closely by astronomers as this reaches our solar system. According to scientists, based on its movements, 3I/Atlas would pass by once and will not return.
There is no evidence that it is artificial or is connected with any extra-terrestrial life. The most common belief concerning the composition of comets among scientists is that they are composed of rock, ice, and dust.
Japan’s viral sky photo
While the NASA leak was trending, another photo went viral for a very different reason. A Japanese photographer captured a stunning view of the night sky.
The photo showed the Milky Way and what looked like faint Aurora lights glowing above a mountain. The image was taken on a clear night, and people online called it one of the most peaceful and beautiful space photos of the year.
Many users shared the picture, saying it reminded them of how amazing the sky can look without any filters or editing.
How social media responded
Both images — the NASA “leak” and the Japanese sky photo — quickly spread online. Hashtags like #3IAtlas, #NASAleak, and #JapanSkyPhoto started trending on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit.
Some people believed the NASA photo was real and hinted at secret discoveries. Others said it was probably fake but still interesting.
Scientists later explained that no official NASA data was leaked, and that many space images shared online are often altered or misunderstood.
What it shows about space curiosity
The two pictures have nothing to do with each other, but they both went viral on social media. They illustrate that space fascinates people to this day, and anything unusual catches the public's eye.
NASA hasn't given any new update about 3I/Atlas yet, but scientists are still studying it from different observatories in the world.
Images of vast ‘canals’ rippling across the red planet inspired fears of alien ‘engineers’ and changed science forever
The clearest ever picture of the planet Mars composed of over 100 Viking Orbiter mission photos from the 1970s missions.
Courtesy NASA
On 16 December 2017, TheNew York Times beganpublishing a series of investigative reports confirming what conspiracy theorists had long believed. There was a ‘secret programme’ hidden within the US Department of Defense that had investigated unidentified flying objects. From offices on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had uncovered remarkable evidence of what it called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including videos of craft resembling Tic Tac mints that moved with seemingly impossible speed and agility.
Military officers soon claimed that secret programmes like the AATIP had reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology and even recovered the bodies of aliens aboard downed spacecraft. By the early 2020s, hundreds of videos and images had come to light, some of which have still not been explained. Journalists learned that, at the very least, high-ranking military officers had been covertly discussing UFOs for decades – if only as a cover for secret weapons programmes.
An image from ‘Gimbal’, a video of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) taken by a pilot from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida on 21 January 2015.
It sounds like the plot of a science-fiction film. But it happened. And it’s still happening. In 2025, further video evidence was presented to Congress, showing another Tic Tac-shaped craft flying over the ocean near Yemen being targeted by a Hellfire missile fired from a drone. Incredibly, the missile appears to have bounced off the craft, which continued on its path, hurtling above the water.
But what’s odd about all this isn’t just the evidence. It’s our collective response. More than half of Americans, not to mention millions or even billions of people around the world, believe that UFOs probably confirm the existence of intelligent alien life. Yet, most of us probably don’t think much about secret Pentagon programmes or impossible craft. Isn’t that strange? At this point in a Hollywood movie, riots would be tearing through cities. Governments would be teetering on the brink of collapse. It’s why the Men in Black erase the memories of anyone who even glimpses an alien. Popular culture (and common sense) make it seem obvious that the apparent discovery of aliens, let alone a conspiracy to hide their existence, should lead to mass panic.
So, why the collective shrug? And what will happen if and when humanity really does, indisputably, encounter an extraterrestrial civilisation?
For answers, we can look to one of the strangest stories in the history of science: the 19th-century ‘discovery’ of canal-building aliens on Mars. This story isn’t widely known today and, when it is told at all, it’s usually framed as a curious delusion, shared by a small group of maverick astronomers – at least one of whom had an undiagnosed eye condition. But the event had an enormous impact on scientists and the public. It involved hundreds, perhaps thousands of astronomers, and captured the attention of millions of people.
The apparent discovery of aliens on Mars a century ago reveals that the consequences of an encounter with alien life may be less traumatic but also more far-reaching than science-fiction authors have imagined.
Indeed, in a sense, ‘aliens’ have already altered our world.
It was the summer of 1877, and Earth had an intimate date with Mars. Though these planets regularly pass each other, this time they were set to come closer than they had in decades.
Because Earth is nearer to the Sun than Mars is, it takes less time to complete a full orbit. That means that our world passes the red planet every two years – an event that humans have been witnessing for millennia. First, a dim red point of light gradually brightens until it outshines everything in the night sky, save the Moon. Then the point of light seems to move backwards as Earth wheels past, before fading again. During the peak of the event, the Sun, Earth and Mars form a straight line, with Earth in the middle and the red planet opposite us. That is why this moment is known as an ‘opposition’.
However, not all oppositions are equal. The one set to occur in 1877 would happen when Mars was alsoin the part of its elliptical orbit that brings it nearer to the Sun. Such ‘perihelic’ oppositions (from peri, meaning near, and helios, meaning Sun) happen just once every 15-17 years and bring Mars nearer to Earth. And in some of these oppositions, the tug of distant Jupiter’s gravity means that Mars is drawn even closer to our planet. That’s what happened in 1877, when Mars passed just 56 million kilometres from Earth (it’s more than 350 million kilometres away as I write this sentence). By the measure of cosmic distances, in 1877 the two planets were almost touching.
New telescope designs allowed observers to see genuine features on the Martian surface
Changes in astronomy and in the instruments used by astronomers ensured that this opposition would truly be like no other in history. The invention of the telescope in the early 17th century had already revealed that Mars was a world, not just a point of light. Indeed, in an age of colonial expansion, Mars seemed like a new world that could be explored and charted by Europeans, remotely of course, as though it were just another imperial frontier.
An 1867 map of Mars by the British author Richard Proctor, who gave the impression of an Earth-like world and named its most prominent features after British astronomers. From Other Worlds Than Ours (1870) by Richard Proctor.
By the end of the 18th century, new telescope designs allowed observers to see genuine features on the Martian surface. Astronomers had previously focused on making precise calculations of celestial movements, but now the environments of other worlds seemed worthy of serious study. What was on the surface of our neighbouring planet?
Observers soon determined that there were bright regions at the poles of Mars and dark patches at lower latitudes. What’s more, the shape and colour of these regions seemed to fluctuate dramatically over time.
Polar exploration on Earth suggested that the bright regions of Mars were ice caps undergoing seasonal melting and refreezing. The dark regions were more mysterious. These areas appeared to transform so much that early 19th-century scientists believed they had to be either cloud formations, oceans spilling their banks, or vegetation undergoing seasonal changes. Mars seemed to be a living world, much like our own.
Night after night, he huddled over his gleaming refractor, high up on a rooftop above Milan, sketching Mars
This widely held view made the opposition of 1877 a major event for scientists. Telescopes were now so powerful that it seemed like a second Earth could be unveiled for the first time during the passing of Mars.
Months before the opposition, as the red planet began to brighten in the night sky, the Italian astronomer and hydraulic engineer Giovanni Schiaparelli got to work. Night after night, he huddled over the eyepiece of his gleaming refractor, high up on a rooftop above Milan, sketching Mars. As the planet wheeled closer and closer, he recorded each new detail that shimmered into view. When the opposition passed, Schiaparelli gathered his sketches and drew a complete map of Mars in the Mercator projection – the same projection commonly used in maps of Earth’s continents.
An 1877 map of the channels, or canals, on Mars, by Giovanni Schiaparelli.
It was like no other depiction. Astronomers had previously glimpsed linear features on the planet, but Schiaparelli’s Mars was covered with them. They were, he wrote, canali that linked Martian oceans. Schiaparelli seems to have preferred that canali would be translated as ‘channels’. However, it was more often rendered as ‘canals’ when his observations were reported in English.
Some astronomers doubted that the channels, or canals, actually existed. But Schiaparelli was a leader in his field, with renowned eyesight, and it couldn’t be denied that his map of Mars was more detailed than any drawn before. Indeed, it included so many previously uncharted features that Schiaparelli introduced a new naming scheme, drawing from classical mythology, to make sense of them all. With a decidedly alien surface named after gods and goddesses, Mars became a more mysterious and intriguing world than anyone had imagined.
In a different time, Schiaparelli’s ‘canals’ might have been a short-lived curiosity. Instead, they became a popular sensation – thanks to the shifting nature of mass media, during an age of imperial expansion and technological disruption.
Around the time of the 1877 opposition, major newspapers, such as TheNew York Herald, were beginning to secure exclusive access to telegraph lines that permitted instantaneous communication between far-flung cities. These newspapers did not just reportwhat had happened along the exotic frontiers of the era’s empires. They also helped to create the news. In the process, they influenced how scientific discoveries reached ordinary people and shaped what counted as a ‘discovery’ among scientists.
These dynamics were primarily responsible for the ‘Mars Boom’ of 1892, during another perihelic opposition.
A key figure behind the boom was William Pickering, an ambitious young astronomer at Harvard College Observatory in Boston. Pickering accepted that Schiaparelli’s canals were real. He also believed that Mars was a world like Earth. The canals, he thought, were nothing more than strips of vegetation. But to know for certain, Pickering would need to take a closer look.
The canals seemed to copy themselves, or ‘germinate’, as Mars approached Earth
In 1891, he was sent to Peru by the observatory’s director (his brother, Edward) with orders to set up a modest mountaintop facility that would gather precise data about the colour and brightness of southern hemisphere stars.
Pickering did nothing of the sort.
It had been almost 15 years since the opposition of 1877, and Earth was once again bearing down on Mars. The tilt of Earth’s axis meant that when Mars reached opposition, it would be far easier to see in the southern hemisphere than in the north. With that in mind, Pickering spent lavishly to establish an observatory that would give him the best views of Mars that any astronomer had ever had. And he agreed to report what he saw to TheNew York Herald using a telegraph controlled by the newspaper. It was a chance for Pickering to make his name – and for the Herald to transform a planetary opposition into a sensational news event.
Schiaparelli continued mapping Mars. By 1891, the canals on his maps had taken on a more artificial appearance. From William Peck, A Popular Handbook and Atlas of Astronomy (1891).
In 1892, as Earth approached Mars, Pickering started to send curt descriptions of his observations to the Herald. The historian of science Joshua Nall showed in News from Mars (2019) that the newspaper reworded these descriptions into a vivid narrative that played on the expectations of readers in a colonial era. The Herald presented Pickering as an explorer who had journeyed to Earth’s ends in search of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover a new world.
Pickering’s reworded descriptions included dramatic accounts of environments on Mars that embarrassed more experienced astronomers who had downplayed the scientific value of the coming opposition. One of those experts was Edward Holden, the director of the greatest observatory in the northern hemisphere: the Lick Observatory in California. Holden’s views now seemed not only foolish, but an indictment of his observatory.
In the face of popular ridicule, Holden announced to the Associated Press that he had also put the opposition to good use. Peering through the Lick telescope, he had confirmed a remarkable property of the planet’s canals, earlier suggested by Schiaparelli: they seemed to copy themselves, or ‘germinate’, as Mars approached Earth.
Holden privately doubted that the canals were real. But in the process of defending his reputation, he had introduced millions of people to the idea that the canals existed – and that they behaved like nothing else in nature. An explosion of popular interest in the canals followed, reflected by a wave of newspaper reports in the United States and Europe.
The Lick Observatory, built between 1876 and 1887, was named after the land baron James Lick, one of California’s richest men. As he neared the end of his life, Lick considered how to preserve his legacy. He toyed with building a colossal pyramid, but ultimately decided to finance the construction of a telescope big enough to detect aliens on the Moon. That discovery, he thought, would let his name ring through the ages.
In the 1890s, history began to repeat itself. Another wealthy man – Percival Lowell, heir to a fortune gained in the textile trade – saw his chance to achieve immortality. Lowell seems to have decided that if Schiaparelli had been the Columbus of Mars, discovering a new world, then he would follow in the footsteps of the Conquistadors by realising that world’s true potential. He would discover what the canals really were.
Lowell ordered a gigantic telescope from Alvan Clark & Sons, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of fine optics. But that wasn’t enough – he also needed an ideal location to install the device. In Peru, Pickering had worked out a method for measuring the suitability of the atmosphere for astronomy. Under Lowell’s direction, Pickering’s former assistant, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, used the method to identify a perfect site to build an observatory for the new telescope: Flagstaff, Arizona, where thin, dry air would permit unrivalled observations of Mars.
What was this strange, fluctuating latticework that seemed to cover the planet?
As Earth approached Mars in 1894, Lowell, Douglass and other members of their team began to observe the canals. With painstaking diligence, they would eventually map more than 400, of which more than 50 canals seemed to show signs of ‘germination’, or doubling. What’s more, the team charted some 200 oases – circular features at the intersection of canals – including one that seemed to connect no fewer than 17 canals. Nor were these features stable. They were faint when Earth approached Mars, but darkened as Earth left Mars behind.
What was this strange, fluctuating latticework that seemed to cover the planet? To Lowell, the age of Mars provided the first clue. Most scientists believed that the planets had formed one after another, from rings of gas and dust released by the Sun. That meant that Mars was older than Earth.
Canals and oases rotate into view in sketches published by Lowell. From Percival Lowell, The Planet Mars (1894). Flagstaff: Lowell Observatory.
A second clue came from naturalists who had discovered fossilised sea creatures on dry land, far from the ocean. Earth, it seemed, was drying as it aged. When Douglass spotted a canal crisscrossing one of the dark regions of Mars, he believed he had uncovered proof that those regions weren’t oceans, as Schiaparelli and other astronomers had assumed. Because Mars was older than Earth, it was naturally drier.
A third clue came from the changes that swept across Mars. The canals seemed to darken, first around the pole and then towards the equator, as spring arrived in each Martian hemisphere. At the same time, what appeared to be an ‘ice cap’ in the northern hemisphere seemed to melt, creating a dark region around its perimeter.
A fourth clue consisted of environmental changes happening on Earth. Between 1877 and 1894 – from the time when Schiaparelli first mapped the canals to when Lowell arrived in Flagstaff – a series of extreme El Niño events brought catastrophic droughts and famine to much of the world. By then, irrigation systems and especially ship canals had emerged as quintessential infrastructure projects of an industrialising world. In the US alone, workers had built some 6,800 kilometres of navigable canals by 1860, a figure almost exactly equivalent to the diameter of Mars.
People believed they could actually see the canals using small telescopes
Lowell put the clues together. An alien civilisation, he speculated, had long ago emerged on Mars. When the planet dried out, that civilisation was imperilled. It responded by using its advanced technology to build a world-straddling network of canals. The canals funnelled water from its last reservoirs – the poles – to vast food-growing regions around the equator. When the ice caps melted in the spring, the water would flow south, and vegetation would sprout around the canals, appearing to darken them in a wave that swept from each pole to the equator. Around the north pole, a sea of meltwater formed first, creating the dark region that emerged every spring.
It was an elegant explanation, and it made Lowell an overnight celebrity. His books were bestsellers, his lectures sold out, and his ideas routinely made the front page of major newspapers. What’s more, people believed that they could actually see the canals using small telescopes, which had recently become a common possession for well-to-do families. Newspapers even printed instructions for canal-watching.
Not everyone believed Lowell’s explanation. Some astronomers always doubted that the canals were real – a view that gained credibility in the early 20th century, when powerful telescopes seemed to resolve apparently linear features on Mars into discontinuous spots and streaks. Then, in the 1960s, the robotic exploration of the planet finally proved beyond doubt that the canals were illusions, and that the environmental changes Lowell took for proof of flowing water had been caused by enormous dust storms that exposed or obscured dark rock and sand. In a sense, Mars is an even less Earth-like world than Lowell had imagined.
At the end of the 19th century, however, millions seem to have believed that a species much older and more advanced than humanity had found a way to survive on a dying planet that, every two years, passed precariously close to Earth.
In 1895, a front-page article in The Cook County Herald, an Illinois newspaper, announced that ‘very strange and mysterious things are going on on Mars.’ Douglass had just spotted what seemed like flashes along the Martian ‘terminator’, the dividing line between night and day on the planet. When he and other astronomers announced such sightings, their descriptions routinely made it into the newspapers – and prompted letters from anxious readers who believed that the Martians were messaging Earth.
Lowell uncharacteristically pointed out that the flashes were probably natural in origin, caused by sunlight glinting off ice, for example. Yet light seemed like a natural way to send a signal between worlds. Public figures of all stripes, from inventors to poets, now proposed ambitious schemes to message the Martians using light and colour.
The cover of the September 1919 edition of Popular Science magazine encouraged contact with Mars.
Courtesy Popular Science
Some called for the construction of enormous mirrors that could focus sunlight – or better yet, electric light – into beams bright enough for the Martians to see. Others suggested that immense geometric shapes could be carved into forests using fire, or that enormous strips of black fabric could be hooked to motors in the Saharan desert and rearranged to send a message. Everyone agreed that any message had to relay information universal to all intelligent life. If sent to clever Martian observers, flashes of light would communicate something about the structure of the solar system, or the basics of geometry. Once the Martians understood how humans used light flashes to communicate universal information, they would be able to respond in kind. Eventually, a shared, interplanetary language could be developed. This became the underlying principle that still informs how we think about communicating with aliens.
At the turn of the 20th century, breakthroughs in wireless communication, using radio waves, suggested light and colour weren’t the only ways to send and receive messages from Mars. Sitting in his laboratory in Colorado Springs one night in July 1899, the inventor Nikola Tesla suddenly heard a repeating radio signal that he believed might have come from another world. He was awestruck, thinking that he had witnessed ‘the revelation of a great truth’. For the rest of his life, he obsessed over how he could use his inventions to return the message. In all probability, he had actually heard a signal from Jupiter, caused by interactions between the planet’s magnetic field and the volcanoes of its moon, Io. Though the signal he received was not a real message from an alien transmitter, radio waves would become central to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the 20th century.
When another opposition with Mars was set to occur in 1924, most astronomers no longer accepted that idea of Martian canals. Still, many people continued to believe that the planet could harbour an alien civilisation. From 21-24 August, during the opposition, radio operators across Europe and the Americas observed a ‘National Radio Silence’ for five minutes at the top of every hour to listen for possible signals from Mars. At 7:12 am, operators at Point Grey Wireless Station in Vancouver even reported hearing a repeating pattern that briefly seemed like the message from Mars that everyone had been hoping for. The news made headlines, but the signal was soon traced to a terrestrial source.
Mars was silent. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the ‘Martians’ had communicated a grand truth. They had revealed, according to Lowell, that the ‘true history of man has consisted not in his squabbles with his kind’ but rather our species’ growing dominance over all other life. The canals suggested that the fate of all intelligent life was to remake its home world in order to delay extinction as the climate of that world dried out.
This was a forerunner to what we might now call the Anthropocene concept: the idea that humanity has remade Earth, and that this remaking is central to the history of our time. As Lowell put it, the discovery of megastructures on Mars helped to explain and justify why, even in the 19th century, ‘man has begun to leave his mark on this his globe in deforestation, in canalisation, in communication.’ Those Martian feats of planetary engineering hinted at humankind’s longer future: ‘[T]he time is coming when the earth will bear his imprint, and his alone. What he chooses, will survive; what he pleases, will lapse, and the landscape itself will become the carved object of his handiwork.’
An intelligent species did not need to go meekly into the night when facing a planetary threat
Yet the canals of Mars also hinted that the lifespan of intelligent species had a natural conclusion. Indeed, the apparent discovery of the Martians provided one of the first indications that humanity faced existential risks, meaning risks to its continued existence, and that these risks could come from changes to Earth’s climate. Mars was drying out, and the process would continue until the Martians could no longer siphon water from the poles. After that point, it seemed that every Martian would inevitably die.
Still, the beings on Mars had also shown that an intelligent species did not need to go meekly into the night when it faced a planetary threat. For some, that lesson sparked a very different kind of existential dread.
Martian fighting machines in the Thames Valley by Henrique Alvim Corrêa for the 1906 edition of The War of the Worlds (1898) by H G Wells.
The Martians had created ‘a shadow and a fear’, the president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada told an audience in 1897. It seemed logical, he said, that they would look enviously at the watery Earth. Indeed, if space travel was possible, then there was no reason for the Martians to accept their fate on a drying world. They might instead take over Earth – at humanity’s expense.
The English science-fiction author H G Wells played on these fears to reimagine the lights reported on Mars as flares created by the launch of projectiles headed for Earth, heralding the invasion of our planet by ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’. His novel TheWar of the Worlds (1898)popularised the alien-invasion genre in science fiction but it was, above all, a critique of British colonialism. The story resonated with particular force in the anxious years before the First World War. For more than two decades after it was published, newspapers speculated about a Martian invasion whenever the planet reached opposition. Radio broadcasts of TheWar of the Worlds would later spark widespread panic about the possibility of a real invasion – and concerns over the compatibility of mass media with democracy. To Wells and other authors, the Martian threat exposed the folly of imperial aggression.
The Martians also seemed to reveal which social structures allowed a civilisation to reach old age. For some scholars and writers, the canals vindicated social Darwinists who used the concept of natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify both colonialism and capitalism. Lowell believed that the stronger Martians had survived to reengineer their planet, while the weak had perished. Schiaparelli, by contrast, thought the canals were a triumph of collective socialism, a whole-of-society response to a planetary catastrophe.
In the decades after the great perihelic opposition of 1877 – through years marked by the emergence of the labour movement, the rise of communist insurgencies, the global spread of unregulated capitalism, and the eruption of imperial wars – the canal-builders on Mars seemed to have urgent lessons to impart. But what those lessons were, exactly, remained in the eye of the beholder. Some hoped that establishing contact with our Martian neighbours might change humankind. When that happened, ‘we may tell the Martians all about our great war,’ reflected an article in Popular Science in 1919; ‘perhaps we will learn from an older and wiser planet how we ought to run the Earth.’
Around the same time that alien engineers on Mars were being imagined, naturalists and explorers from imperial cities, like London or Paris, were enthralling their readers with tales of exotic lands and peoples on Earth. The Martians therefore also had a romantic, almost orientalist appeal. Novelists would later pioneer world-building science fiction by imagining adventures on a canal-covered planet with alien cultures and ecosystems.
The quest to map the canals of Mars directly expanded the frontiers of science
Few were more successful than Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Barsoomseries, beginning with A Princess of Mars (first serialised in 1912), inspired a generation of young readers. Some of those readers would play pivotal roles in the coming age of space travel. A map of the canal-covered Mars imagined by Burroughs, for example, adorned the office door of the planetary scientist Carl Sagan, a leading figure in the Viking missions that undertook the first tests for microbial life on Mars.
Indeed, the quest to map the canals of Mars directly expanded the frontiers of science. It helped establish the importance of a thin and steady atmosphere for astronomy, leading in a roundabout way to the construction of today’s mountaintop observatories. Douglass, who had compared the climate of different sites in Arizona for Lowell’s observatory, eventually decided to study the changing climate of Earth using the growth rings in trees. He would play a central role in the development of palaeoclimatology, the science of past climate change.
By revealing that climatic changes have undermined the foundations of historical societies, and by showing the deep connection between greenhouse gases and global temperature, palaeoclimatology has confirmed the essential truth of the canal theory: climate change can accompany the maturation of a technologically advanced civilisation, and can also threaten the destruction of that civilisation.
In short, the ‘discovery’ of the Martians had profound consequences – many of which continue to shape culture and science. After all, what are Star Wars’ Tatooine and Frank Herbert’s Duneif not variants of Lowell’s Mars?
The history of the canals on Mars upends two enduring assumptions. For decades, these assumptions have appeared in everything from classified government reports to Hollywood blockbusters.
The first assumption is related to how the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilisation would be made and shared. It’s easy to assume that such a discovery would happen when scientists find definitive proof, either by observing a distant planet or receiving a signal from such a planet. Major news outlets would then report the news. But science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and news is not a transparent reflection of reality. The Martian canal sensation – one of the first examples of scientists ‘discovering’ alien life beyond our planet – was a consequence of everything from environmental changes on Earth and Mars to the transformation of mass media in an age of global imperialism.
It’s no surprise that alien news today does not involve the careful evaluation of scientific evidence
The second assumption is that the discovery of an alien civilisation would destabilise society. The canal-builders of Mars did provoke widespread unease and even spasms of local panic, especially during radio broadcasts of TheWar of the Worlds. But, for the most part, public order received no serious challenge. The aliens on Mars were big news, but not as big as stories about political intrigue, economic trends or the descent to war – stories that had more tangible impacts on people’s lives.
So, maybe we shouldn’t be startled at our collective shrug when new reports of UAPs surface. Nor should it surprise us that alien news today does not involve the careful evaluation of scientific evidence. Instead, it is a reflection of cultural and technological changes, such as the spread of conspiracy theories on social media, for example, or the commercialisation of drones that resemble UAPs.
The Martian canals controversy has one more lesson to offer. When the canals were eventually exposed for the illusions that they were, the reputation of planetary astronomy briefly collapsed. Today, Lowell is often remembered as a misguided maverick, rather than a serious figure in the history of science. Yet few theories have stimulated as much thought, or been as enduring and productive for culture and science, as the canals of Mars.
Astrobiology, the science that explores how life begins, survives and evolves in the Universe, is today a burgeoning discipline. Two organisations – the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen – now lead unprecedented efforts to contact, or at least detect, an extraterrestrial civilisation. Even if their work uncovers nothing, the history of the canals on Mars reveals that there are few enterprises more worth pursuing.
Een wetenschappelijke analyse van UFO-activiteit nabij nucleaire sites en de implicaties voor ons begrip van onverklaarde fenomenen
Een wetenschappelijke analyse van UFO-activiteit nabij nucleaire sites en de implicaties voor ons begrip van onverklaarde fenomenen
Inleiding
De recente publicatie van een door pers beoordeelde studie die een statistisch verband aantoont tussen mysterieuze luchtverschijnselen en nucleaire testen uit de Koude Oorlog, markeert een belangrijke doorbraak in het onderzoek naar onverklaarde anomalieën (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP). Voorheen werden dergelijke waarnemingen vaak gereduceerd tot pseudowetenschap of onderbuikgevoelens, maar de huidige studie, uitgevoerd door Dr. Beatriz Villarroel en Dr. Stephen Bruehl, brengt een nieuw wetenschappelijk bewijsmateriaal naar voren dat de betrokkenheid van deze fenomenen bij nucleaire activiteiten suggereert.
Dit proefschrift beoogt de inhoud van de studie systematisch te analyseren, de methodologie en bevindingen te bespreken, en de bredere implicaties voor de wetenschap en de samenleving te verkennen. Daartoe wordt eerst de historische context geschetst, gevolgd door een gedetailleerde bespreking van de gebruikte onderzoeksopzet, resultaten, interpretaties en de beperkingen van de studie. Vervolgens worden de mogelijke verklaringen en de toekomstige gebieden van onderzoek verkend.
1. Historische context: UFO-waarnemingen en nucleaire sites
Gedurende de jaren 1940 en 1950 werden talloze rapporten gedaan van onverklaarde luchtverschijnselen, vooral rondom militaire en nucleaire gebieden. Militairen, wetenschappers en burgers rapporteerden vaak het zien van glanzende, metalige objecten die volgens getuigen intrigeerden door hun gedrag en uiterlijk. Voorbeelden zijn onder meer de incidenten bij Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967 en de uitgebreide waarnemingen tijdens de Koude Oorlog, waarin men vermoedde dat deze objecten mogelijk inlichtingen verzamelden of technologische observaties uitvoerden. Je kan deze vroegere waarnemingen het beste vergelijken met de actuele golf aan onbekende drones boven West-Europese militaite basissen, waaronder Kleine Brogel in België met Amerikaanse nuckeaire raketten..
In de vroegere periode voerden de supermachten de eerste nucleaire tests uit, met meer dan 124 bovengrondse explosies wereldwijd tussen 1949 en 1957. Het is opvallend dat veel waarnemingen gelijktijdig gebeurden met het testen van nucleaire wapens, wat vragen oproept over een mogelijk verband tussen deze fenomenen en de menselijke atoomactiviteiten. Tot op heden blijven dergelijke verbindingen in grote lijnen anekdotisch en onderbelicht, ondanks bewijs uit getuigenissen en historische documenten.
2. De studie en haar methodologie
2.1 Toelichting op de data
De studie van Villarroel en Bruehl maakt gebruik van twee hoofdbronnen: (1) fotografische gegevens uit de Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) uit de jaren 1949-1957 en (2) de database UFOCAT, een gesystematiseerde verzameling van UAP-waarnemingen die deels gebaseerd is op Amerikaanse militaire en civiele rapportages.
In totaal werden meer dan 100.000 'transients' geanalyseerd — heldere, sterren- of puntvormige lichtverschijnselen die kortstondig op de foto's verschenen en snel weer verdwenen. Deze transients werden automatisch geïdentificeerd via algoritmes voor beeldherkenning, met een subset die handmatig werd geverifieerd om de betrouwbaarheid te vergroten.
De Palomar-observatorium in Californië, waar de luchtenonderzoekfoto's werden gemaakt tussen 1949 en 1957.
(Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)./CC BY-SA 4.0)
2.2 Analyse technieken
De onderzoekers gebruikten geavanceerde statistische analyses, zoals correlatiemodellen en temporele patroonherkenning, om het verband te onderzoeken tussen het voorkomen van transients en nucleaire testen. Vooral werd gekeken naar de periodes rondom de tests: de dag vóór, de dag van en de dag na de explosies. De statistische significantie werd beoordeeld met behulp van p-waarden, waarmee de kans werd bepaald dat deze verbanden bij toeval zouden voorkomen.
Daarnaast werd gekeken naar het aantal UAP-rapporten op de dagen met nucleaire testen, wat resulteerde in een analyse van de correlatie tussen getuigenissen en de waargenomen transients.
De VS experimenteerde met kernenergie sinds de eerste atoombomaanvallen van het beroemde Manhattanproject tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (afgebeeld)
3. Resultaten: statistische verbanden en observatiepatronen
3.1 Toename van transients rond nucleaire tests
De belangrijkste bevinding is dat op dagen dat nucleaire testen plaatsvonden, het aantal waargenomen transients met 8,5% toenam vergeleken met dagen zonder tests. Meer nog, het meest significante verband werd gevonden voor de dag na een test: op die dag werden 68% meer transients geregistreerd dan op andere dagen. Deze timing is cruciaal omdat het niet aansluit bij de verwachting dat eventuele effecten onmiddellijk ná de explosie optreden (zoals stof en rook), maar eerder met een vertraging.
3.2 De aard en kenmerken van de transients
De waargenomen verschijnselen vertoonden een opvallende consistentie: ze verschenen als discrete puntgerelateerde bronnen, vaak metallic glanzend, spiegelend en mogelijk roterend. Dit wijst op een mogelijk artificieel, technologische oorsprong, en het feit dat ze niet als bewegende stippen of strepen over de foto’s maakten, suggereert dat ze relatief stilhielden tijdens de opnames.
Foto's uit de jaren 1940 en 1950 onthulden duizenden heldere vlekken, transiënten genoemd, die verschenen in de baan om de aarde tijdens de vroege kernproeven van de wereld.
3.3 Correlatie met getuigenrapporten
Naast de directe astronomische data, werd een significante correlatie gevonden met getuigenrapportages van UAP’s. Voor elke extra UAP-rapportage op een dag steeg het aantal transients met 8,5%. gezamenlijke waarnemingen rondom nucleaire tests en getuigenlijke informatie versterken de hypothese dat deze fenomenen mogelijk een relatie hebben met menselijk uitgevoerde nucleaire activiteiten.
In een visuele demonstratie van surveillancebias worden punten volledig willekeurig geplaatst (witte stippen, boven). Punten worden het meest waarschijnlijk gedetecteerd (rode stippen, midden) als ze zich in de buurt van een gebied met verhoogde controle bevinden (geel). De gedetecteerde resultaten (rode stippen, onder) lijken geclusterd rond hotspots. Volgens een inlichtingenanalyse uit 2021 kan het onevenredig grote aantal UFO-meldingen rond militaire locaties te wijten zijn aan "verzamelingsbias als gevolg van gerichte aandacht".
4. Interpretatie van de bevindingen
4.1 Alternatieve verklaringen en afwegingen
Hoewel de statistische resultaten indrukwekkend zijn, moeten ze worden geëvalueerd binnen een breder wetenschappelijk kader. Mogelijke provocaties zijn onder meer:
Atmosferische artefacten: stofdeeltjes, vlammen of chemische dampen die reflecteren op de fotografische plates en mogelijk lijken op transients.
Contaminatie en defecten: fotografie-emulsie of defecten kunnen ten onrechte worden geïnterpreteerd als heldere puntverschijnselen.
Nucleairgerelateerde fysische fenomenen: ionisaties, elektromagnetische interferentie of radiatie die de film beïnvloeden.
De onderzoekers hebben systematisch deze opties uitgesloten door de aard van de waarnemingen en aanvullende analyses, onder meer door controle van mogelijke contaminaties en het gebruik van geautomatiseerde identificatiemethoden.
4.2 Implicaties voor de aard van de fenomenen
De consistentie en timing van de waarnemingen wijzen op een niet-natuurlijke oorsprong. Het verschijnen van metallic, spiegelende objecten in periode met nucleaire testen past bij het bestaan van artificiële technologieën, mogelijk van niet-menselijke herkomst, die mogelijk de aard van het bewijs op een fundamenteel niveau verandert.
De afwezigheid van dergelijke transients na 1956 suggereert dat het fenomeen zich wellicht aanpaste of reageerde op menselijke activiteiten, zoals het intensiveren of de overgang naar ondergrondse testen. Dit kan duiden op een bewuste observatie- of meetstrategie van een buitenmenselijke intelligente aanwezigheid.
Een nucleair gerichte oppervlakteschot wordt afgevuurd op het Eniwetok-atol in de Marshalleilanden in 1956.
(VS-regering/CC BY NC 2.0)
5. Wetenschappelijke en maatschappelijke betekenis
5.1 Doorbraak in het UAP-onderzoek
De publicatie in het prestigieuze tijdschrift Scientific Reports betekent dat de studie niet langer wordt afgedaan als pseudowetenschap. Een belangrijke waarde ligt in de methodische toetsing en openbare reproduciteit van de bevindingen, wat de weg wijst voor verdere wetenschappelijke exploratie.
5.2 Verstoringen, theoriën en scepticisme
Niettemin blijft er scepsis bestaan over de interpretatie van de data. Kritieken kunnen zich richten op:
Geautomatiseerde herkenning en fout-positieven.
Onvolledige of niet-representatieve gegevens (enkele observatietekens, single locatie).
Externe factoren die niet werden meegenomen, zoals weerpatronen of technische anomalieën in de fotografie.
5.3 Implicaties voor het begrip van buitenaardse activiteiten
De studie opent de deur naar nieuwe hypotheses over buitenaardse observatie en mogelijk technologische aanwezigheid in de buurt van nucleaire sites. Dit kan leiden tot nieuwe wetenschappelijke zoekrichtingen, waaronder:
Digitalisatie en analyse van historische atmosferische en astronomische archieven.
Multidisciplinair onderzoek naar technologische en fysische kenmerken van anomalieën.
Beleid en veiligheidsmaatregelen omtrent onverklaarde waarnemingen bij nucleaire faciliteiten.
Transienten werden waarschijnlijker waargenomen de dag nadat een nucleaire test was uitgevoerd, waardoor de mogelijkheid dat de plekken het gevolg van de explosie waren, werd uitgesloten.
6. Beperkingen en toekomstig onderzoek
Hoewel de studie significante doorbraken markeert, blijven er beperkingen:
De herkomst van de transients blijft onduidelijk, en bewijs voor bewust artificialiteit is inferentieel.
Data zijn historisch en beperkt tot Britse en Amerikaanse observatoria; observaties wereldwijd kunnen andere patronen onthullen.
Geautomatiseerde detectiemethoden, hoewel krachtig, kunnen nog steeds fouten bevatten; een combinatie van AI en menselijke beoordeling wordt aanbevolen.
Vooruitkijkend moet toekomstig onderzoek onder meer bestaan uit:
Analyses van digitale en nucleaire archieven van vergelijkbare fenomenen.
Opzetten van gerichte waarnemingsprogramma’s, inclusief moderne radarsystemen, telescopen en sensoren.
Interdisciplinaire samenwerking tussen fysici, astronomen, ufologen en veiligheidsinstanties.
7. Conclusie
De bevindingen van Villarroel en Bruehl vormen een fundamentele stap in het empirisch onderbouwen van de hypothese dat bepaalde mysterieuze luchtverschijnselen gerelateerd kunnen zijn aan nucleaire activiteiten uit de Koude Oorlog. De statistische correlaties en de karakteristieken van de waarnemingen wijst op de aanwezigheid van artificiële objecten die mogelijk in of nabij nucleaire sites opereren.
Hoewel verdere verantwoorde en gedetailleerde studies vereist blijven, opent deze doorbraak de weg naar een serieuzere wetenschappelijke benadering van het fenomeen. Het benadrukt tevens het belang van transparantie en samenwerking tussen verschillende disciplines en instellingen, om zo de diepe vragen over buitenaardse intelligentie, technologische observaties, en de veiligheid van nucleaire installaties wetenschappelijk te onderzoeken.
In samenvatting toont deze studie aan dat het onverklaarde niet langer louter een kwestie van folklore of pseudowetenschap is, maar dat het fenomeen mogelijk een integrale rol speelt in onze toekomstig mogelijk begrip van universele intelligente aanwezigheid en de risico’s voor onze beschaving.
Onderzoekers richtten zich op de kernproeven uitgevoerd door de VS, het VK en de Sovjet-Unie tijdens de vroege dagen van de Koude Oorlog (Stockfoto)
Bronnen
Villarroel, B., & Bruehl, S. (2023). "UFO activity near nuclear sites gains peer-reviewed validation." Scientific Reports.
UFOCAT Database, Center for UFO Studies.
Historische gegevens van de Palomar Sky Survey.
Documenten van de Amerikaanse en Britse nucleaire testen (1949-1957).
Getuigenissen en incidentrapporten uit de jaren 1950-1960.
Eindwoord
Het wetenschappelijk onderzoek zoals gepresenteerd in deze studie vormt de basis voor een nieuwe fase in het bestuderen van onbegrepen luchtverschijnselen. Door de combinatie van astronomisch bewijs, statistische analyse en getuigenverslagen, wordt de hypothese versterkt dat er bij onze nucleaire geschiedenis misschien meer betrokken is dan wij tot nu toe konden bevatten. De weg ligt open voor een diepere exploratie, die mogelijk het begrip van onze plek in het universum fundamenteel kan veranderen.
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been spotted for the first time since it disappeared behind the sun.
Using the Lowell Observatory's powerful Discovery Telescope, astronomer Dr Qicheng Zhang managed to snap the mysterious object as it sped back into Earth's line of sight.
The optical observations show that 3I/ATLAS is now even brighter than when it went in.
Scientists have been carefully watching 3I/ATLAS since it was first detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope on July 1.
In early October, the comet vanished from Earth's view as it approached its closest point to the sun, known as perihelion.
As it approached a distance of 130 million miles (210 million kilometres), the sun started to evaporate the outer layers of ice into a cloud of glowing gas.
According to Dr Zhang, the comet is now bright enough for even amateur telescopes to pick up.
'Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now rising early enough in morning twilight to be seen even with small telescopes under imperfect conditions,' he explained in his blog.
Scientists have spotted the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for the first time since it disappeared behind the sun in early October
3I/ATLAS is the third time that scientists have managed to detect an object travelling from another solar system. It is moving on an unusually flat and straight path at speeds over 130,000 miles per hour (210,000 km/h)
3I/ATLAS is travelling through our solar system on an unusually flat and straight path at speeds over 130,000 miles per hour (210,000 km/h).
Professor Mark Burchell, an astronomer from the University of Kent, told Daily Mail: 'A swing round the sun is perfectly normal behaviour for a comet.
'The term swing is a slight exaggeration; it is attracted by the sun's great mass, and its orbit gets deflected a bit, but it is not a tight sling shot effect, more a slow change of course.'
Dr Zhang found that the interstellar object underwent a rapid brightening ahead of reaching perihelion and also took on a distinctively blue hue.
Their study found that the comet was brightening at twice the normal rate, which suggests some big changes were taking place on the surface.
Dr Matthew Genge, an expert on comets and meteors from Imperial College London, told Daily Mail: 'Comets usually produce more gas as they approach the sun and become brighter. Their surface heats up, and more and more ice is turned to gas. It's like turning the kettle on.'
The fact that this comet turned blue also hints that gases, rather than just dust, are responsible for a large part of the brightening.
As it approached the sun, the heat caused outer layers of ice and dust to evaporate. This has produced the glowing cloud which surrounds 3I/ATLAS
As the comet moves away from the sun and into Earth's view, astronomers will be able to watch these ongoing transformations to learn more about our interstellar visitor.
Dr Genge says: 'As it moves away from the sun, its gas tail will point directly away from the Sun, ahead of the comet, since it is swept by the solar wind. In contrast, its tail of dust will trail behind the comet.'
By studying the gases it leaves behind, scientists hope to learn more about the solar system 3I/ATLAS came from and how it differs from comets from our own neighbourhood.
For instance, scientists have already found that the comet's surface has been transformed by billions of years of exposure to harsh gamma radiation while travelling through space.
This has given 3I/ATLAS a thick, irradiated crust that has been responsible for the unusual amounts of CO2 released by the comet.
Professor Marina Galand, a planetary scientist from Imperial College London, told Daily Mail: 'After perihelion, a deeper layer below the surface will have been revealed.
'It will be interesting to see how the composition of the gas changes as the comet gets further away from the Sun, compared with when it approached it.'
However, despite rampant speculation, one thing scientists are absolutely sure about is that 3I/ATLAS is definitely a comet.
As it leaves the sun, scientists will be able to study how the comet has changed over time. If it got hot enough, pristine layers of ice from another solar system might be revealed. This would offer valuable clues about how stars form
Dr Mark Norris, an astronomer at the University of Lancashire, told Daily Mail: 'In terms of why we think it is a comet, it is because it looks and acts exactly like a comet.
'It is just happening faster because this comet is moving so much faster than solar system comets, which remain gravitationally bound to the Sun.'
There are still a lot of questions to answer about this object, but that is mainly because it is only the third interstellar object humanity has ever discovered.
Dr Genge adds: 'Aliens would be literally barmy to hollow out a comet for a spacecraft.'
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 75 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.
![Hubble captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21, 2025, when the comet was 277 million miles from Earth. [Image Source: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)]](https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1PurOU.img?w=768&h=566&m=6)
