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.
03-09-2025
Strange blobs found inside Mars could be remnants of something ancient, astronomers say
Strange blobs found inside Mars could be remnants of something ancient, astronomers say
Findings also have implications for our understanding of Earth’s history
Strange blobs found insideMars by Nasa’s InSight lander may be remnants of the ancient “embryo” that eventually developed into theplanetwe see today, according to a new study.
The findings, published in the journal Science, may change what we know about the formation of rocky planets like Mars, Venus and the Earth.
The first four planets from the Sun are often depicted in textbooks as having smooth, layered interiors, with crust, mantle and core stacked like a millionaire’s shortbread.
However, seismic anomalies detected on Mars by the InSight mission reveal that the mantle is far from smooth and contains rough lumps of ancient fragments up to 4km wide, preserving the planet’s violent early history like geological fossils.
The solar system’s rocky planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago when dust and rock orbiting the young Sun clumped together under gravity.
As Mars took shape, it was struck by giant objects the size of entire planets in cataclysmic collisions similar to the kind thought to have formed our Moon.
“These colossal impacts unleashed enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet into vast magma oceans,” Constantinos Charalambous, an author of the study from Imperial College London, said. “As those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material, and we believe it’s these we’re now detecting deep inside Mars.”
Cutaway view of Mars in artist’s concept shows debris from ancient impacts scattered through planet’s mantle
(Nasa)
These cataclysmic collisions mixed fragments of the planet's crust and mantle from its “embryo” with debris from the impacting objects.
Then, as Mars cooled, these diverse chunks were trapped in a sluggishly churning mantle, “like ingredients folded into a Rocky Road brownie mix”, the study said. However, the mixing of these “ingredients” was too weak to fully smooth things out.
Unlike the Earth, where plate tectonics constantly recycle the crust and mantle, the interior of Mars is sealed up beneath a stagnant outer crust, preserving a geological time capsule.
“The fact that we can still detect its traces after four and a half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars’s interior has been churning ever since,” Dr Charalambous said.
Astronomers uncovered these lumps by analysing data from eight marsquakes detected by the InSight lander, including two triggered by recent meteorite impacts that left almost 150m-wide craters on the planet.
The lander is equipped with instruments to detect seismic waves on Mars travelling through the mantle.
The researchers found that seismic waves of higher frequencies took longer to reach the lander sensors from the impact site. This revealed that the interior was chunky rather than smooth.
“These signals showed clear signs of interference as they travelled through Mars’s deep interior,” Dr Charalambous said.
“That’s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins – leftovers from Mars's early days.”
The latest findings, the study notes, have implications for our understanding of the histories of other rocky planets as well.
Artist's conception of WASP-121b, a planet with a metal-rich atmosphere. Credit - NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI)
Life is complicated, and not just in a philosophical sense. But one simple thing we know about life is that it requires energy, and to get that energy it needs certain fundamental elements. A new paper in preprint on arXiv from Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli from the University of Naples discusses how we might use that constraint to narrow our search for stars and planets that could potentially harbor life. To put it simply, if it doesn’t have many of the constituent parts of the “building blocks” of life, then life probably doesn't exist there.
So how does one go from needing energy to needing elements? Life gets much of its energy from a physical phenomenon called a “thermodynamic disequilibria” - basically a fancy way of saying that a “system” in nature has some potential energy, whether that’s thermal, mechanical, chemical, or radiative. One of the most common ways for life to take advantage of a disequilibria is through a process called a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction.
Redox reactions are common in chemistry, and usually involve the transfer of an electron, which itself involves a release of energy. That energy is what life uses to power itself, and to facilitate these types of reactions, it uses proteins called oxidoreductases. Each of these proteins requires at least one metal as part of their chemical structure. To clarify, these are metals in the chemistry sense, not the astronomical one, which classifies any element higher on the periodic table than hydrogen as a “metal”. For example, nickel and iron are key components of proteins that take electrons from hydrogen, whereas copper is a key component of proteins that redox oxygen.
Fraser discusses the importance of another element for life, though it's not a metal - phosphorous.
Archaeologists have noticed that the availability of these metals has affected the course of life on Earth. Their availability changes based on events like plate tectonics, volcanism like the Deccan Traps, or the “Great Oxidation Event” of 2.3 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria released so much oxygen into Earth's atmosphere that it dramatically changed the planet’s biosphere. That change included a massive extinction event, but also gave life the ability to develop aerobic respiration, eventually paving the way for the development of animals.
Given the known impact of the availability of these elements on the evolution of life, Drs Covone and Giovannelli put forward a reasonable argument - if they are so important, why don’t we check stars and planets to see if they have these elements in abundance as a way of pre-screening them for astrobiological investigation. There are thousands of exoplanets that could make interesting targets for those investigations, and likely millions more that we’ll uncover as we continue our survey of the galaxy. Sorting and prioritizing them becomes increasingly important as humanity is limited in the number of observatories that are capable of checking for concrete biosignatures.
Typically that screening process is done by looking at the availability of three things: free energy, liquid water, and CHNOPS (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous, and Sulfur) elements. However, the authors argue that those are all relatively abundant in the galaxy, and the constraints on higher atomic number metals, like those found in the proteins used for redox reactions, are actually much more of a constraint than the three typical search parameters. By further constraining their search to stars and planets that have an abundance of these critical materials, they could save scarce observational resources for targets that have a higher likelihood of actually harboring life.
Fraser talks about a realistic search for extraterrestrial life, and how we might find it.
Luckily, missions like ESA’s upcoming PLATO observatory will already be checking the spectroscopies of exoplanets for CHNOPS, and doing so for the biometals discussed in the paper would be collected in the same dataset. All the scientists would have to do is add a further screening category to any systems marked for a follow up. However, that is getting into a complex realm, as we have reported on other papers that show a higher “metallicity” star tends to have less UV radiation, causing less development of critical ozone layers. There are many complex factors that go into the search for life, and continually looking for them is the best way to keep refining them. This paper adds one more, particularly unique, consideration to the mix.
Planetoïden die bijna onze planeet raakten Asteroïden zijn rotsachtige objecten die rond de zon draaien, en meteoren zijn stukken van asteroïden (of kometen) die de atmosfeer van de aarde binnendringen. Ze variëren sterk in grootte en bedreiging voor ons hier op aarde. Terwijl kleine meteoren elke dag voorkomen, zijn grote meteoren of asteroïden veel zeldzamer. Volgens NASA komt een asteroïde zo groot als een auto meestal één keer per jaar de atmosfeer van de aarde binnen. Deze grootte verbrandt voordat hij de grond raakt, wat een indrukwekkende vuurbal oplevert. Ruwweg elke 2000 jaar raakt een object ter grootte van een voetbalveld de aarde en richt aanzienlijke schade aan.
Geïntrigeerd? Lees dan verder om een aantal van de close calls van de afgelopen 20 jaar te ontdekken.
Wat zijn meteoren? Volgens NASA komt zo'n incident voor wanneer een meteoroïde de atmosfeer van onze planeet binnendringt en verdampt. Dit noemt men ook wel een vallende ster.
Hoe vaak dringen meteoroïden de atmosfeer binnen? Dagelijks komen er meer dan 100.000 stofdeeltjes ten grootte van een zandkorrel op onze planeet terecht.
Wat is een meteoriet? Een meteoriet is in wezen een meteoroïde die erin slaagt de atmosfeer binnen te dringen en het oppervlak van de planeet te raken.
Hoe zit het met kometen? Kometen zijn relatief kleine objecten die bestaan uit ijs dat in zonlicht kan verdampen. Wat bijzonder aan ze is, is dat ze een laag van stof en gas vormen die soms lijkt op een staart.
Hoe groot kunnen kometen worden? Asteroïden zijn tamelijk kleine, inactieve, stukken rots die in een baan om de zon draaien. Vele hiervan komen gevaarlijk dicht in de buurt van de aarde. De bewegingen van asteroïden worden voortdurend in de gaten gehouden. Ongeveer één keer per jaar dringt een asteroïde ter grootte van een auto de atmosfeer binnen, maar deze gaat in vlammen op voordat hij het oppervlak van de planeet bereikt.
Wat is een planetoïde? Een planetoïde is een klein rotsachtig object, die kleiner zijn dan een planeet maar groter dan meteoroïde. Ze bevinden zich in een baan om de zon, meestal tussen Mars en Jupiter. Ze variëren van 1 tot 1000 km in afmeting.
Data en afmetingen In het volgende deel van de galerij volgen een van de belangrijkste aardscheerders (zoals meteorieten, asteroïden, etc.) die vlakbij onze planeet zijn waargenomen, gerangschikt op de datum waarop ze zich het dichtst bij de aarde bevonden en hun grootte.
18 december, 2018 Op 18 december 2018 ontplofte een grote meteoor, die tien keer krachtiger was dan de atoombom van Hiroshima, in de atmosfeer. Het is echter nog niet zo lang geleden dat deze ontdekking werd gedaan. De explosie werd door een Amerikaanse militaire satelliet waargenomen en vervolgens kenbaar gemaakt aan NASA.
The province of Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia has attracted the attention of the global astronomical community. A photograph of the night sky above this region was selected by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as its “Astronomy Picture of the Day.” All because the astrophotographer managed to capture a brightgreen meteoragainst the backdrop of the Pleiades star cluster. The photograph, taken with a one-hour exposure, is not only visually stunning, but also confirms Al-Ula’s status as one of the most attractive places on the planet for stargazing.
“Meteor and Star Cluster.” Authors: Yousif Alqasimi & Essa Al Jasmi / NASA
Perfect sky for astronomy
Why Al-Ula? The answer lies in the region’s crystal clear, dark skies. Thanks to the almost complete absence of light pollution, it is rated among the top 5% of places in the world for astronomical observations. This unique status was officially confirmed by DarkSky International, which awarded the prestigious Dark Sky certificate to two sites in the province: the ancient archaeological complex of Hegra, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Gharameel Nature Reserve. This makes Makkah Region the destination for astrophotographers and stargazers from around the world.
The Pleiades in a Hubble Space Telescope image
The author named the photograph “The Meteor and the Star Cluster.” For the first time in history, NASA has highlighted the work carried out in Al-Ula. This achievement was made possible thanks to the efforts of Manarat AlUla, an organization that is working hard to ensure a night sky free of light pollution and to develop the region as a global center for space research and astro-tourism. NASA’s choice highlights not only the incredible beauty of this corner of Saudi Arabia for those who seek to glimpse the deepest secrets of the universe.
Astronomers have been given the rare opportunity to study an extrasolar object after the recent discovery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Experts tell Live Science how they are planning to observe the cosmic visitor.
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will blaze through our solar system for the rest of the year before zooming away forever.
(Image credit: ESA/Las Cumbres Observatory)
The astronomical community is abuzz over a newly discovered "interstellar object," only the third of its kind ever seen, which is currently shooting toward us on a one-way trip through thesolar system.
The race is now on to study the alien interloper, named 3I/ATLAS, before it leaves forever.
"We only have one shot at this object and then it's gone forever," Darryl Seligman, an astronomer at Michigan State University and the lead author of a new paper about the object, told Live Science. "So we want as much information from all of our observatories as we can possibly get."
Experts say studying 3I/ATLAS could potentially tell us about alien star systems and how exoplanets form — and we may even be able to trace it back to its origins.
Initial discovery
3I/ATLAS (previously dubbed A11pl3Z) has a high speed and extremely flat trajectory, which is it what first hinted it was interstellar object. (Image credit: David Rankin/Catalina Sky Survey)
3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1 from data collected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) and immediately piqued researchers' interests due to its trajectory and extreme speed, which exceeds 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Within 24 hours of its discovery, NASA had confirmed that it was an interstellar object.
A day later (July 3), a group of more than 40 astronomers, led by Seligman, had uploaded the first paper describing the extrasolar entity to the preprint database arXiv. All data so far indicates that 3I/ATLAS is a large comet surrounded by a cloud of ice, dust and gas up to 15 miles (24 kilometers) across.
Prior to this discovery, only two other interstellar objects (ISOs) had been spotted: 1I/'Oumuamua, a space rock that was discovered in 2017; and 2I/Borisov, a comet spotted in 2019. This makes the newly discovered comet particularly appealing to astronomers.
However, there is a limited window to study 3I/ATLAS. The comet, which is currently around 4.5 times farther from the sun than Earth, will reach its closest point to the sun, or perihelion, on Oct. 30, before beginning its journey out of the solar system, when it will get much harder to spot. It will also be out of view between late September and early December, when it is positioned on the opposite side of the sun to Earth.
Observing an interstellar visitor
Astronomers discovered the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on July 1. This was one of the first photos of the object. (Image credit: ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA)
Over the next few weeks and months, researchers will attempt to use "any and all telescopes" they can to make observations of 3I/ATLAS, Sean Raymond, a planetary scientist at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Live Science in an email.
This will be especially true for observatories in the Southern Hemisphere, which will have a better view of the increasingly bright comet, Aster Taylor, a graduate student at the University of Michigan and co-author of the arXiv study, told Live Science in an email.
Experts are particularly excited about the possibility of imaging 3I/ATLAS with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — the world's most powerful optical telescope, which recently released its first images. The observatory, located in Chile, has already proved to be adept at imaging never-before-seen asteroids and will undoubtedly target the interstellar comet when it comes fully online in a few months time.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Hubble Space Telescope, meanwhile, could help reveal the interloper's chemical composition because of their ability to study the object in multiple wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum Pedro Bernardinelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Live Science in an email.
Some researchers have also proposed using NASA's Mars rovers to snap pictures of the comet as it makes a close pass by the Red Planet a few weeks before it reaches perihelion. The robots have previously been used to spy on dangerous sunspots lurking on the sun's far side from Earth.
3I/ATLAS is currently racing towards the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). (Image credit: Olivier Hainaut et al./European Southern Observatory)
Studying 3I/ATLAS provides a rare opportunity for us to glean insights into alien star systems and potential exoplanets.
"Interstellar objects are probably the leftovers of the formation of exoplanets," Raymond said. "Studying them can open a window into understanding other planetary systems' formation and evolution."
In this way, ISOs like 3I/ATLAS also "connects the solar system with its galactic environment," Amir Siraj, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University who has previously studied ISOs, told Live Science.
While it is still unclear where 3I/ATLAS came from, it's possible we can pinpoint its origins, especially if researchers can work out how old it is, Wes Fraser, an astronomer with National Research Council Canada, told Live Science in an email. And as the comet reaches perihelion, the amount of ice and other "volatile" substances that get burned off the interloper will help us narrow this down, Fraser added.
However, even then "we probably won't ever be able to pin it down to a single star system," Taylor argued.
The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302 and known as the Butterfly Nebula (Credit : NASA/ESA)
The Butterfly Nebula, officially known as NGC 6302, earned its name from its distinctive wing like lobes that spread in opposite directions from a central dusty band. This striking shape isn't just beautiful, it’s a natural laboratory where scientists can study the very processes that create the raw materials for rocky planets like Earth.
At the centre of this beautiful object lies one of the hottest known stellar cores in our Galaxy, blazing at 220,000 Kelvin. This ancient remnant of a Sun like star is surrounded by a doughnut shaped ring of dusty gas called a torus, which acts like a forge where planetary building blocks are born.
Test unit of the sunshield stacked and expanded at the Northrop Grumman facility in California, 2014
(Credit : Chris Gunn)
A recent study has revealed a wide variety of dust particles within this stellar graveyard. Most cosmic dust has a random, soot-like structure, but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed both crystalline dust grains that sparkle like tiny gemstones and irregular particles forming in more turbulent regions.
"We were able to see both cool gemstones formed in calm, long-lasting zones and fiery grime created in violent, fast-moving parts of space, all within a single object.”
- Dr. Mikako Matsuura from Cardiff University.
These dust particles are enormous by cosmic standards, about a millionth of a meter across which indicates they've been growing for extended periods. The torus contains crystalline silicates like quartz alongside more irregularly shaped grains, creating a diverse mixture of materials that could eventually become incorporated into forming planets.
The research also revealed fascinating chemical geography within the nebula. Different elements arrange themselves in layers based on how much energy they need to form ions. Iron and nickel trace distinctive jets blasting outward from the central star, while other elements settle at various distances depending on their energy requirements.
Perhaps most intriguingly though, the team discovered polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, complex carbon based molecules that form flat, ring like structures similar to honeycomb patterns. On Earth, we commonly find PAHs in campfire smoke, car exhaust, or burnt toast, but finding them in this oxygen rich environment was unexpected.
Meteorites like ALH840001 from Mars have revealed polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(Credit : NASA)
The researchers suspect these PAHs form when stellar winds create "bubbles" that burst into surrounding gas. This may be the first ever evidence of PAHs forming in an oxygen rich planetary nebula, providing crucial insights into how these potential building blocks for life can form in space.
For years, scientists have debated how cosmic dust like this forms and grows in the harsh environment of space. The Butterfly Nebula offers a unique window into these processes because it contains both calm regions where crystalline dust can slowly form and violent areas where particles are rapidly created and destroyed. Understanding these processes helps scientists trace the journey from stellar death to planetary birth. These tiny particles eventually clump together through gravitational attraction, forming the asteroids, comets, and rocky planets that populate solar systems.
New models suggest that Ceres, the asteroid belt's largest object, once had a radioactive core that could have sustained life in the dwarf planet's hidden subsurface ocean billions of years ago.
New research suggests that the dwarf planet Ceres may have once had a radioactive core, capable of providing the energy needed to kickstart life on the wee world.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
New NASA research hints that Ceres — the closest dwarf planet to Earth — may have once had an ancient "power source" that could have sparked the evolution of extraterrestrial life-forms in the tiny world's hidden ocean.
Ceres is the largest object within the solar system's main asteroid belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The wee world is around 600 miles (950 kilometers) wide, roughly one-quarter the moon's diameter, meaning it is not large enough to be considered a planet. But it is large enough to be considered a "dwarf planet" like Pluto, which lost its full planetary status in 2006.
There are five official dwarf planets in our cosmic neighborhood, with others waiting to be properly recognized by the International Astronomical Union, and many more discoveries expected in the coming decades. However, Ceres is the only one located within the inner solar system. The rest of the dwarf planets, which include Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The Sun's Fiery Crown: Unveiling the Enigmatic Chromosphere
In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about Ceres thanks to NASA's Dawn probe, which visited the object between 2014 and 2018. One of the most intriguing discoveries from the Dawn mission is that the giant space rock is likely a water world: Traces of water and salty minerals on the dwarf planet's icy surface suggest a large reservoir of brine is trapped miles below. Other studies have hinted that this underground ocean could also contain organic carbon, which is a key component of all life on Earth.
However, until now, scientists thought that life was unlikely to have emerged on Ceres because the dwarf planet has no energy source capable of kick-starting life.
But in a new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Science Advances, researchers revealed this was not always the case.
Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Image credit: NASA)
The study team created computer models based on data collected by the Dawn mission to simulate how the rocky body's core changed over time. This revealed that the dwarf planet's innards probably used to emit large amounts of energy in the form of heat — raising hopes that tiny alien microbes could have emerged within Ceres' hidden ocean.
This could also have "big implications" for the potential of finding life in other parts of the solar system, study lead author Samuel Courville, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and a former intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA statement.
The researchers believe that Ceres' core once emitted significant amounts of heat from the gradual decay of radioactive isotopes. The team believes that this heating lasted between 0.5 and 2 billion years after the giant rock was created, which was likely shortly after the rest of the solar system, around 4.6 billion years ago. At its hottest, the core likely reached around 530 degrees Fahrenheit (280 degrees Celsius), the researchers wrote.
This is not the first time that scientists have proposed that Ceres had a radioactive core. However, this is the best evidence yet that it generated enough heat to potentially support life.
Researchers believe that the heat given off by Ceres past radioactive core could have created hydrothermal vent systems capable of kickstarting life in the dwarf planet's hidden ocean. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In addition to heating the dwarf planet's subsurface ocean to a habitable temperature, the radiation could also have caused jets of hot, mineral-rich water to shoot up through the ocean's floor, similar to the hydrothermal vent systems on Earth that support diverse microbial communities in the crushing dark depths of our oceans.
"On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy," Courville said.
Astrobiologists have proposed that similar systems may support extraterrestrial life on other water worlds in the solar system, including Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan, as well as Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.
However, since Ceres' radioactive core went dead around 2.5 billion years ago, any alien microbes would likely have died out from the cold, meaning there is practically zero chance that the dwarf planet supports life today, the researchers said.
All (or at least most) astronomical eyes are on 3I/ATLAS, our most recent interstellar visitor that was discovered in early July. Given its relatively short observational window in our solar system, and especially its impending perihelion in October, a lot of observational power has been directed towards it. That includes the most powerful space telescope of them all - and a recent paper pre-printed on arXiv describes what the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered in the comet’s coma. It wasn’t like any other it had seen before.
3I/ATLAS’s coma, which is the material surrounding its nucleus, is primarily made up of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to the paper first authored by Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America. It also contains water, carbon monoxide and carbonyl sulfide, all of which are expected to be in a comet’s coma. But the ratio of carbon dioxide to water is 8 to 1, the highest ever seen in a comet, and six standard deviations above the typical value. Strangely, the carbon monoxide (CO) ratio with water is more in line with previous observations, at 1.4.
To detect these chemicals, JWST used its NIRSpec infrared camera to observe 3I/ATLAS on August 6th, when it was 3.32 AU from the Sun. Other indications, which weren’t quite as surprising, include that the coma does have a bunch of water and dust scattered around it, as well as a higher dust concentration facing the Sun, which is typically for higher outgassing on the side the Sun heats.
NASA Explains what we know about 3I/ATLAS so far.
Another finding was that the ratio of two types of carbon isotopes, Carbon-12 and Carbon-13, was broadly similar to that found on Earth, suggesting the material was created in an environment with similar carbon species. However, there are a couple of features of 3I/ATLAS’s creation that could have caused the lopsided CO2/H2O ratio.
One is extremely high levels of ultraviolet radiation in the host star system the object was created it. Another could be that is was created beyond the CO2 “ice line”, where carbon dioxide ice is relatively abundant compared to water. Other explanations have to do with how heat from the Sun is able to affect the nucleus - if it is harder to heat up, then CO2, which has a lower melting point than water, would be sublimated first, accounting for the lopsided ratio despite having plenty of water stored in the nucleus waiting to be released as it gets closer to the Sun.
Either way, more observations are needed. This is only the third interstellar visitor we have confirmed, and the first (‘Oumuamua) wasn’t bright enough to capture its coma’s spectra, though even if it was it didn’t appear to have a coma anyway. That leaves the second interstellar visitor 2I/Borisov, as our only other point of comparison for the coma spectra of an interstellar comet. It actually had a higher carbon monoxide to water ratio, even as compared to 3I/ATLAS’s, so it seems of the two we have collected so far, each interstellar visitor’s coma hide new insights.
Fraser discusses how 3I/ATLAS is actively releasing water.
This undoubtedly won’t be the last paper examining 3I/ATLAS’s coma - it probably won’t even be the last one from JWST. We still have a few weeks of observational time before it passes too close to the Sun to be detectable, and then reaches its perihelion in early October, which it is still obscured from our view, though there is a chance some probes at Mars might be able to catch a glimpse of it during that time. When it finally becomes visible again in December, it will already be on its way out of our solar system, and likely would have shed most of the material it was going to. Sometimes astronomical events are fleetings, and astronomers have to try to capture them as they’re happening. At least with this one they’ll have a little bit of warning - we’ll see what they find as they continue to observe our newest interstellar visitor.
Aurora around Jupiter's north pole captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (Credit : NASA)
Scientists from the University of Minnesota have discovered something extraordinary in Jupiter's polar regions that has never been seen before, a completely new type of plasma wave that creates aurora unlike anything we observe on Earth.
While Earth's northern and southern lights (also known as the aurora borealis and aurora australis) create familiar green and blue curtains dancing across our sky, Jupiter's aurora is an entirely different beast. In comparison, Jupiter is vastly more magnetic, due to its large size, fast rotation, and complex interactions with its moons, make it a natural laboratory for extreme physics.
The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shines above Bear Lake
(Credit : United States Air Force)
The discovery came from NASA's Juno spacecraft, which made history as the first probe to orbit Jovian poles. What the team found challenges everything we thought we knew about aurora, which have primarily been understood through Earth based observations.
The key to this breakthrough is the nature of plasma. Plasma is a state of gas where matter is so hot that atoms break apart into electrons and ions. This then flows like an invisible ocean around Jupiter. These particles are accelerated down toward the planet, where they ignite gases in the upper atmosphere, creating the aurora phenomenon.
An illustration shows NASA's Juno spacecraft near Io with its parent planet Jupiter in the background
(Credit : NASA)
Professor Robert Lysak, a world expert on plasma waves, worked with observational astronomers Ali Sulaiman and Sadie Elliott to decode what Juno was seeing. They discovered that Jupiter's unique conditions, an incredibly strong magnetic field combined with extremely low plasma density in its polar regions, created the never seen before phenomenon.
Alfvén waves, named after physicist Hannes Alfvén who first theorised in 1942 that plasma could behave like both a fluid and respond to magnetic fields are central to the phenomenon. The data showed that, due to the extremely low density of the plasma in Jupiter's polar region, the frequency of the plasma waves was very low especially compared to the frequency of similar waves on Earth.
The differences between Earth and Jupiter's auroral systems are striking. On Earth, the aurora forms a typical donut pattern of auroral activity around the polar cap, while the polar cap itself remains dark. Jupiter operates differently, thanks to its complex magnetic field system which allows charged particles to flood directly into the polar cap regions, creating aurora where Earth would have darkness.
Auroras shine bright blue over Jupiter
(Credit : NASA/ESA)
Unlike Earth's visible green and blue auroras created by oxygen and nitrogen, Jupiter's upper atmosphere is very different from Earth's and its aurora tends to be invisible to the naked eye and can only be observed with UV and Infrared instruments.
This discovery reveals an entirely new regime of plasma physics that couldn't be observed from Earth based studies alone. The research expands our understanding of how plasma behaves under extreme conditions, knowledge that could have applications in fusion energy research and space weather prediction.
While Juno continues to orbit Jupiter, the team hopes future missions like JUICE and Europa Clipper, arriving at Jupiter in the late 2020s, will provide additional opportunities to study this phenomenon. Each new observation helps scientists piece together the complex puzzle of planetary magnetospheres and their role in shaping the space environment around giant planets.
Alien Aurora: Lysak, Sulaiman and Elliott find new plasma regime in Jupiter’s aurora
Professor Robert Lysak, Assistant Professor Ali Sulaiman and Researcher Sadie Elliott, of the School of Physics and Astronomy recently published a paper in Physics Review Letters, “New Plasma Regime in Jupiter’s Auroral Zones,” on the first-ever detailed observation and analysis of a new type of plasma wave in Jupiter’s auroral zone. Their findings were featured in an article in the New Scientist magazine, under the headline “Astronomers found a completely new type of plasma wave near Jupiter.”
Sulaiman and Elliott brought their expertise in observation to data from NASA’s Juno probe, which made its historic low orbit flight over Jupiter’s north pole. “James Webb (Space telescope) has given us some infrared images of the aurora, but Juno is the first spacecraft in a polar orbit around Jupiter,” Sulaiman says. What the astronomers observed was an entirely new phenomenon in auroral physics which has mainly been based on examples tuned to the magnetic field of the Earth. Jupiter by comparison is vastly more magnetic, due to its large size, fast rotation, and complex interactions with its moons. The dynamo in the interior of Jupiter generates a field many times larger than that of Earth.
Fig 1.
The space around these magnetized planets is filled with superheated particles that form a plasma, a state of matter where extremes of temperature cause the atoms to break into electrons and ions. These particles are accelerated down toward the planet, where they ignite gases in the upper atmosphere (on Earth, Oxygen and Nitrogen) leading to their familiar blue and green colors. Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is very different from Earth's and its aurora tends to be invisible to the naked eye and can only be observed with UV and Infrared instruments.
The observational astronomers turned to Lysak, one of the world’s leading experts on these mechanics for help in describing the alien aurora. Plasma can exhibit the behavior of a fluid in that it travels in a wave. Unlike fluids, plasmas can have their own magnetic field and are influenced by external fields as well. Lysak studies Alfven Waves, a discipline named after Hannes Alfven who in 1942 first theorized that plasma could be understood by combining fluid mechanics with Electromagnetic field theory.
The data showed that due to the extremely low density of the plasma in Jupiter’s polar region, the frequency of the plasma waves was very low especially compared to the frequency of similar waves on Earth, combined with Jupiter’s supercharged magnetic field system, Juno showed a type of wave unlike anything ever observed before.
Figure 2
Lysak used what he called “basic plasma theory” to unpack the problem and to explain how combination of low plasma density and strong magnetic fields led to the new type of wave. At Earth, the aurora forms a typical donut pattern of auroral activity around the polar cap shown in figure 2b, while the polar cap itself is usually dark. The complex mechanics of the Jupiter’s magnetic field intermittently allow these particles to flood into the zone over the polar caps as shown in Figure 2a.
Elliott’s part of the project was to study how the field lines interact with upgoing electrons from the field lines which cause the plasma to diffuse out to 30 -50 times the radius of the gas giant. These electrons play a role in exciting the new plasma wave mode. The group hopes to be able to learn more about this phenomenon when Juno makes further passes around Jupiter. Unfortunately, the planned extended mission to Jupiter is doubtful given the uncertain state of funding of the American space program, but they have some hope that JUICE and Europa Clipper, due to arrive at Jupiter at the end of the decade, may be able to accommodate this research.
If you haven't had your dinner yet, look away now.
A mouth–watering new study has revealed exactly what the interior of Mars looks like – with scientists comparing the structure to a Rocky Road.
Until now, it has been widely assumed that the inside of Mars is smooth and uniform.
In fact, scientists have suggested the planet's crust, mantle, and core are stacked like the biscuit base, caramel, and chocolate of a neat slice of Millionaire's Shortbread.
However, data collected by NASA's InSight mission reveals that this isn't actually the case.
Instead, the Red Planet's mantle is rather messy, according to experts from Imperial College London.
Rock fragments measuring up to 2.5 miles (4km) wide are dotted throughout the interior – much like the marshmallows and biscuit pieces in a Rocky Road.
These ancient fragments are 'preserved like geological fossils from the planet's violent early history,' according to the team.
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A mouth–watering new study has revealed exactly what the interior of Mars looks like – with scientists comparing the structure to a Rocky Road
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Rock fragments measuring up to 2.5 miles (4km) wide are dotted throughout the interior – much like the marshmallows and biscuit pieces in a Rocky Road
We already know that Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago, as dust and rock orbiting the young Sun gradually clumped together.
Once Mars was almost fully formed, it was struck by a giant, planet–sized objects, in a series of 'near–cataclysmic collisions.'
'These colossal impacts unleashed enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet into vast magma oceans,' said lead researcher Dr Constantinos Charalambous.
'As those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material – and we believe it's these we're now detecting deep inside Mars.'
These impacts mixed fragments of Mars' early crust and mantle into the molten interior.
Then, as Mars cooled, these ancient chunks became trapped in the mantle – like the marshmallows and biscuit in a Rocky Road mix.
Finally, Mars sealed up its stagnant outer crust, leaving the ancient chunks trapped inside.
'Most of this chaos likely unfolded in Mars's first 100 million years,' says Dr Charalambous.
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We already know that Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago, as dust and rock orbiting the young Sun gradually clumped together. Once Mars was almost fully formed, it was struck by a giant, planet–size objects, in a series of 'near–cataclysmic collisions'
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Scientists have previously suggested Mars' crust, mantle, and core are stacked like the biscuit base, caramel, and chocolate of a neat slice of Millionaire's Shortbread
How did Mars form?
We already know that Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago, as dust and rock orbiting the young Sun gradually clumped together.
Once Mars was almost fully formed, it was struck by a giant, planet–sized objects, in a series of 'near–cataclysmic collisions.'
These impacts mixed fragments of Mars' early crust and mantle into the molten interior.
Then, as Mars slowly cooled, these ancient chunks became trapped in the mantle – like the marshmallows and biscuit in a Rocky Road mix.
Finally, Mars sealed up its stagnant outer crust, leaving the ancient chunks trapped inside.
'The fact that we can still detect its traces after four and a half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars's interior has been churning ever since.'
In their new study, the team analysed seismic data collected by NASA's InSight lander.
As suspected, the data confirmed that the interior of Mars is chunky rather than smooth.
'What happened on Mars is that, after those early events, the surface solidified into a stagnant lid,' Dr Charalambous said.
'It sealed off the mantle beneath, locking in those ancient chaotic features — like a planetary time capsule.'
The ancient chunks detected inside Mars follow a 'striking' pattern, according to the experts.
A few large fragments, measuring roughly 2.5 miles (4km) wide, are surrounded by many smaller ones.
Professor Tom Pike, who worked with Dr Charalambous to unravel what caused these chunks, said: 'What we are seeing is a 'fractal' distribution, which happens when the energy from a cataclysmic collision overwhelms the strength of an object.
'You see the same effect when a glass falls onto a tiled floor as when a meteorite collides with a planet: it breaks into a few big shards and a large number of smaller pieces. It's remarkable that we can still detect this distribution today.'
The researchers hope the findings will help to unravel the mystery of not only how Mars formed, but also the other planets in our solar system.
'InSight's data continues to reshape how we think about the formation of rocky planets, and Mars in particular,' said Dr Mark Panning of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
'It's exciting to see scientists making new discoveries with the quakes we detected!'
Although scientists aren't sure that living creatures ever emerged, they are now certain that Ceres had the right conditions to help that life survive.
But the dwarf planet is still lacking anything for microbes to eat.
Now, using computer models to simulate Ceres' past, researchers have shown that this was not always the case.
Between 2.5 and four billion years ago, radioactively warmed water would have created a 'buffet for microbes' that could have supported simple forms of life.
Scientists say that the dwarf planet Ceres could have once had the conditions to support abundant microbial life
Today, Ceres, which sits between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is a barren frozen wasteland.
This liquid came from vast, underground reservoirs of brine, which are now around –63°C (–81°F) – far too cold to support any known forms of life.
However, between 500 million and two billion years after Ceres formed, the decay of radioactive minerals in the rocky interior would have produced a steady supply of hot water.
According to the researchers' simulations, water near the core would have reached temperatures exceeding 270°C (530°F).
That hot water would have surged up towards the surface, mixing with the cold water and injecting a stream of dissolved minerals and gases.
That might not sound anything like food as we would recognise it, but these sorts of hot water vents can actually be key to developing life.
Lead researcher Sam Courville, now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, says: 'On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy.
Although the dwarf planet, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter, is now a frozen wasteland, around 2.5 to four billion years ago, it may have been warm enough to support life
As radioactive materials decay, they heat water that pushes to the surface, carrying a stream of dissolved gases and minerals. Those chemicals then enter the cold reservoir of salty water and provide the fuel for life
'So it could have big implications if we could determine whether Ceres’ ocean had an influx of hydrothermal fluid in the past'
If life had emerged on Ceres, a type of microbe known as a chemotroph that gets its energy from chemical reactions could have survived on the supply of hot water.
Professor Helen Williams, an expert on planetary formation from the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Daily Mail: 'This research is really exciting because it shows that Ceres may once have had water at its surface.
'Water acts as a means of transporting and concentrating elements that are also essential to life.
'These elements are also concentrated in rocks, so water percolating through those rocks would transport and concentrate those elements near the planet’s surface, creating conditions extremely favourable for the development of life .'
Unfortunately, scientists say that our window for finding alien life on this distant dwarf planet has long since closed.
The radioactive materials that provided the heat decayed billions of years ago, removing the source of fuel.
Unlike some moons, such as Saturn's moon Enceladus or Jupiter's moon Europa, Ceres isn't heated by the intense gravitational push and pull of a nearby planet, so it is now too cold for life.
Scientists had previously found that Ceres contained liquid water and organic carbon–based molecules, which are both necessary ingredients for life. Now they also know that it once had a supply of food for life to feed on
However, today Ceres is once again frozen. As this diagram shows, the oceans have frozen as the radioactive minerals decayed, leaving only a thin layer of brine that is too cold to support life
However, the researchers say that this discovery opens the possibility of finding forms of life elsewhere.
Professor Williams says: 'These results certainly tell us that a wider class of planets could be habitable, although this depends on many other factors, such as the distance these planets are from the central star in their solar systems.'
Since Ceres was able to become habitable purely through its own inherent radioactivity, the same could be true of objects of a similar size.
In their study, published in Science Advances, Mr Courville and his co–authors write: 'Being in large numbers, these bodies might represent the most abundant type of habitable environment in the early solar system.'
That means there could be many more planets out there with the capacity to support life than researchers had previously thought.
In 1977, scientists discovered a mysterious signal beaming from space that was so powerful it prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write 'Wow!' on the telescope's readout.
Now, a team of experts has re-examined the signal's data with modern techniques and found that it could be even stranger than previously thought.
According to the new analysis, the Wow! signal was more than four times stronger than earlier estimates suggested.
The scientists were also able to definitively dismiss a number of natural or human explanations.
There were no known TV stations at that time which could have created the signal, nor were there any satellites passing overhead.
And although scientists believe that the Wow! signal is likely to have a natural cause, they say alien sources can't yet be ruled out.
Co–author Dr Hector Socas-Navarro, director of the European Solar Telescope Foundation, told Daily Mail: 'While aliens aren’t completely off the table, it seems that the signal may have originated by a natural astrophysical source. Our goal now is to find that source.'
For decades, scientists have struggled to find any natural process capable of producing the 72–second burst which prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write 'WOW!' on the telescope's readout
Using new data, the scientists also refined the area of the sky from which the signal emerged. This map shows the new refined regions (yellow) compared to the previous estimates (grey)
The Wow! signal was detected by astronomers at the Big Ear Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, back in 1977.
Scientists at the observatory were scanning the sky for radio waves as part of a hunt for extra-terrestrials when the telescope picked up an extraordinary signal.
The sudden burst of radio waves was not only exceptionally powerful, but it was also abnormally long-lasting – continuing for a full 72 seconds.
Additionally, scientists noted that the signal's frequency was in the so-called hydrogen line, which is a band of frequencies emitted by atomic hydrogen.
Since hydrogen is so abundant in the universe, some suggested that advanced civilisations might be using its frequency as a calling card for signalling to other intelligent species.
Strangely, the signal never repeated, and scientists haven't yet found another burst in the same frequency that is nearly as intense.
However, further study of the Wow! signal has been made difficult by the fact that all the data from the Big Ear Observatory is on paper printouts.
In this new paper, a team of researchers and volunteers painstakingly digitised over 75,000 pages of data from the observatory.
Researchers and volunteers analysed over 750,000 pages of data from the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Ohio, where the Wow! Signal was spotted
What are the theories to explain the signal?
There have been many theories over the years for what could have been the source of the short-lived, narrow-band radio signal that became known as the Wow! signal.
At the time, it was seen as having all the traits of having come from a distant planet, but the inability to pick it up again has frustrated astronomers.
While some have taken it to be a radio message broadcast by an alien beacon into space, others have looked for other astronomical sources.
Theories have included collisions between asteroids and stars, flares from stars, merging white dwarfs and colliding neutron stars.
Now, experts suggest that it could have been caused by energy from a neutron star triggering a cloud of atomic hydrogen gas to release a laser burst.
For the first time ever, this allowed for the computational analysis of data about the Wow! signal.
Dr Hector Socas-Navarro says: 'The paper basically rewrites the basic stats of the Wow! signal.'
In addition to showing that the signal had been stronger than previously thought, the researchers have been able to characterise the burst much more accurately.
They narrowed the part of the sky that the signal came from to two small regions, each of which produced a different component of the signal.
The researchers were also able to determine this location with two-thirds greater statistical certainty.
Additionally, this new data slightly revises the signal's frequency – putting it at 1420.726 MHz rather than 1420.4556 MHz.
That keeps the signal solidly within the hydrogen line, but that small change suggests that whatever produced the signal must have been spinning a lot faster than previously thought.
This means the source must be moving at about 46 miles per second (74 km/s), over double the previous estimate of 18 miles per second (30 km/s/).
The researchers say that the most likely cause of the Wow! signal is an intense beam of energy from a dying star hitting a cloud of cold hydrogen, causing it to produce a laser-like burst which hit Earth
'This means that when we look for candidates, the ones moving at that speed will stand out, like a very tall person in a large crowd, and it will be easier to identify the emitting source,' says Dr Socas-Navarro.
Importantly, this research also rules out some natural phenomena that had been suggested as possible explanations.
It had been proposed that a man-made signal could have bounced off the moon and been mistakenly picked up by the observatory.
However, this new analysis clearly shows that the moon would have been on the wrong side of the planet at this time, so nothing could have bounced off it.
Likewise, the sun was not active enough during the year 1977 to produce anything close to the Wow! signal's intensity.
That means the Wow! signal really must have come from somewhere outside our solar system.
However, there are still many questions remaining about the origins of this mysterious radio beam.
Lead author Professor Abel Mendez, of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told Daily Mail: 'We can’t rule out an extraterrestrial communication signal explanation for the Wow! Signal yet, but the evidence points to a natural origin.'
The dying star could have been a magnetar, which produce the most powerful magnetic fields in the Universe and are rare, explaining why the Wow! Signal has not been repeated
Previous research has spotted several signals which appeared to be extremely similar to the Wow! signal, albeit considerably fainter.
Four of those originated from the tiny red dwarf star, Teegarden's Star, which is just 12.5 light-years from Earth, and is surrounded by clouds of pure hydrogen.
Professor Méndez says: 'The most likely origin of the Wow! Signal is a maser flare or superradiance emission from a neutral hydrogen cloud.
'Small clouds emit consistent narrowband signals similar to the Wow! Signal but much weaker, so a cloud became temporarily much brighter due to any of these processes.'
The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200-400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life.
The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
He first posed the question back in 1950.
Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extra-terrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness.
Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.
This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s, which explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billion planets in our galaxy
If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.
Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars will ultimately lead to its destruction.
He said: 'One solution to the Fermi Paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself.
‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'
Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that intelligent alien species are out there, but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.
Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilisations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.
If two worlds are separated by several thousand light years, it's possible that one or both civilisations would become extinct before a dialogue can be established.
The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.
An interstellar object speeding through our Solar System has been spotted spewing a metal unlike anything seen in natural comets.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile detected an unusual nickel plume from the object, known as 3I/ATLAS. Unlike natural comets, which always emit nickel alongside iron, 3I/ATLAS shows the metallic element without any detectable iron.
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb highlighted the anomaly described in a new study, noting that this nickel signature is a hallmark of industrial production of nickel alloys.
'Is this anomaly another clue for a possible technological origin of 3I/ATLAS?' Loeb wrote in a blog post.
'The paper suggests that chemical formation occurs through the nickel carbonyl channel, an extremely rare process in comets, but a standard technique in industrial nickel refining,' he added.
The new study, published by astrophysicists in Chile on Wednesday, found that 3I/ATLAS is shedding nickel at roughly five grams per second and cyanide at 20 grams per second, with both rising sharply as the object moves closer to the sun.
They hypothesized that nickel might be released from dust through gentle processes, such as sunlight, causing it to evaporate or breaking down small nickel-containing compounds.
A new study has revealed that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is releasing nickel without iron, an anomaly that a Harvard physicist said could hint at industrial or technological processes
Traditional comets are typically water-rich and release gases such as water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as they approach the sun.
They also emit nickel and iron together, as both elements are produced in the same cosmic processes, like supernova explosions.
3I/ATLAS, however, deviates sharply from this pattern by releasing nickel without any detectable iron.
Additionally, both nickel and cyanide emissions rise steeply as it approaches the sun, unlike the more gradual outgassing seen in normal comets.
NASA also released new observations of 3I/ATLAS this week, taken by SPHEREx and the James Webb Space Telescope, showing that its gas plume is dominated by carbon dioxide and only five percent water.
'These results add to the chemical anomalies implied by the SPHEREx space observatory and Webb space telescope [are] very different from an expected water-rich comet,' Loeb shared in a blog post.
'The idea that the nucleus is much smaller than the 29-mile diameter inferred from the 1-micron data collected by SPHEREx requires a dense coma of dust to reflect nearly all the sunlight from 3I/ATLAS.
NASA's James Webb captured its first look at the interstellar object this month, showing it is not 12 miles in diameter as originally thought. It's closer to 1.7 miles long
'In that case, the dust would be pushed by solar radiation pressure to trail the nucleus, forming a prominent cometary tail.'
Loeb added that observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope failed to identify a cometary tail.
The object was first identified in July 2025 by the ATLAS telescope network, which searches for objects that might hit Earth.
Earlier images taken by the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile had unknowingly photographed the object, but no one realized it was there at the time.
Until now, 3I/ATLAS has been a total mystery, as early scans suggested the object was larger than anything that had ever passed through the solar system, and might even be generating its own light.
These characteristics have led Loeb to suggest other possibilities, such that 3I/ATLAS is an artificial craft developed by an extraterrestrial civilization.
The idea has been dismissed by many scientists, including Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, who said Loeb's theory is 'nonsense on stilts,' calling it 'an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.'
The interior of Mars is not smooth and uniform, as depicted in the familiar illustrations in textbooks. New research shows that it is more like an uneven cake than a glazed cookie, as it is usually depicted. The reason for this is traces of ancient collisions.
Collision between Mars and an asteroid. Source: phys.org
InSight mission data
We often imagine rocky planets such as Earth and Mars as having a smooth, layered internal composition — with a crust, mantle, and core stacked on top of each other like the biscuit base, caramel center, and chocolate coating of a Millionaire’s Shortbread cookie. But the reality for Mars is somewhat less neat.
Seismic vibrations detected by NASA’s InSight mission revealed minor anomalies, prompting scientists from Imperial College London and other institutions to uncover a more chaotic reality: Mars’ mantle contains ancient fragments up to 4 km wide, preserved since its formation, like geological fossils.
History of Giant Collisions
Mars and other rocky planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago when dust and rocks orbiting the young Sun gradually coalesced under the influence of gravity.
When Mars was almost fully formed, giant objects the size of planets fell onto it as a result of a series of near-catastrophic collisions — the kind that probably also formed Earth’s moon.
“These colossal impacts released enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet, turning them into huge magma oceans,” said lead researcher Dr. Constantinos Charalambous from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at Imperial College London. “When these magmatic oceans cooled and crystallized, they left behind pieces of material with an excellent composition — and we believe that this is what we are now discovering in the depths of Mars.”
These early impacts and their aftermath scattered and mixed fragments of the planet’s early crust and mantle — and possibly debris from fallen objects — into the molten inner core. As Mars slowly cooled, these chemically diverse chunks became stuck in the slowly stirring mantle, like ingredients added to a Rocky Road chocolate chip cookie mix, and the stirring was too weak to completely mix everything together.
Unlike Earth, where tectonic plates constantly reshape the crust and mantle, Mars closed early under a fixed outer crust, preserving its inner core as a geological time capsule.
Listening to Mars
The evidence comes from seismic data recorded by NASA’s InSight lander, specifically from eight particularly clear Martian quakes, including two caused by two recent meteorite impacts that left craters 150 meters wide on the surface of Mars.
InSight detects seismic waves passing through the mantle, and scientists were able to see that higher-frequency waves took longer to reach its sensors from the impact site. These signs of interference, they say, indicate that the interior of the planet is rough rather than smooth.
“These signals showed clear signs of interference as they traveled through Mars’s deep interior,” said Dr. Charalambous. “That’s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins—leftovers from Mars’s early days.”
Differences between the geological structure of Mars and Earth
By comparison, the Earth’s crust is constantly shifting slowly and recycling material from the surface into the mantle of our planet — on tectonic plates such as the Cascadia subduction zone, where part of the plates forming the bottom of the Pacific Ocean are subducting beneath the North American continental plate.
The debris found in the mantle of Mars has a striking shape: several large fragments — up to 4 km wide — are surrounded by many smaller ones. Scientists have discovered that the so-called “fractal distribution” of debris in the mantle of Mars occurs when the energy of a catastrophic collision exceeds the strength of the object. In this case, the object breaks into several large fragments and a large number of smaller pieces, as, for example, when a meteorite falls on a planet.
This discovery may be significant for our understanding of how other rocky planets, such as Venus and Mercury, have evolved over billions of years. This new discovery of Mars’ preserved interior composition provides a rare opportunity to glimpse what may lie beneath the surface of immobile worlds.
SpaceX has released high-resolution photos and videos taken in the Indian Ocean. They show the moment the Starship spacecraft splashed down.
Starship spacecraft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Source: SpaceX
Starship was launched on August 27 from Starbase in Texas. Unlike previous tests, which ended in accidents, this time the super-heavy rocket performed at its best. The Super Heavy booster successfully completed its mission, then separated from the spacecraft and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America. During the descent, SpaceX conducted a series of tests with it, including an experiment to shut down one of the engines and replace it with a backup.
As for Starship, it was launched into a suborbital trajectory. During the flight, the spacecraft deployed eight full-scale Starlink satellite simulators. Despite some “glitches,” such as collisions between models and the gateway during unloading, this stage was completed successfully.
The decisive test for Starship was its entry into the atmosphere. SpaceX specialists deliberately removed a number of heat shield tiles from the most vulnerable parts of the spacecraft to test what damage it would sustain and whether it would be able to survive landing. In addition, in the 47th minute of flight, a mysterious explosion occurred in the engine compartment, damaging the Starship.
Despite all these problems, Starship showed remarkable resilience and managed to splashdown at the designated point, where the SpaceX buoy was located. The images it took show that passing through the atmosphere caused a change in the color of the spacecraft’s heat shield, which appeared to have “rusted.”
Starship spacecraft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Source: SpaceX
The photographs also clearly show dark marks where Space engineers removed heat shield tiles and damage to the back skirt and flaps caused by the explosion. And what seems even more incredible is that, despite everything, the spacecraft was able to perform a rollover and landing maneuver that placed it approximately 3 meters from its target splashdown point.
The Universe is challenging us once again. Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, traveling through the galaxy, is currently passing through our Solar System and continues to surprise scientists. The new data only deepens the mystery of its origin, fueling scientific debate about whether we are dealing with a natural phenomenon or the creation of another civilization.
Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS through the “eyes” of Copilot artificial intelligence
Pure nickel in 3I/ATLAS
The latest research using the powerful Very Large Telescope has discovered another strange anomaly. In the gas trail surrounding 3I/ATLAS, scientists found pure nickel — without the usual iron impurities found in nature. This phenomenon is extremely unusual for comets, as these two elements are usually formed together during supernova explosions and travel through space together.
However, pure nickel is a familiar phenomenon in terrestrial metallurgy, where it is obtained through refining. Although there is a rare natural explanation involving nickel carbonyls, the artificial technological process seems much more plausible. This raises a key question: is this object a product of space manufacturing?
A chain of strange anomalies
The discovery of nickel is not the only thing that surprises scientists. Previously, the SPHEREx and Webb space observatories showed that the object’s gas trail consisted of 95% CO2 and only 5% water. For a normal comet, this is a paradoxical ratio.
Photograph of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS taken by the Hubble Telescope. Source: NASA/astrafoxen
Furthermore, Hubble’s observations did not reveal a classic comet tail that would extend under the pressure of sunlight. This means that either the core of the object is incredibly massive — a million times larger than the previous interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov. Or the surface of the interstellar traveler has unusual properties that prevent the formation of a tail. Its trajectory, perfectly aligned with the plane of the planets’ orbits, also raises suspicions that someone deliberately launched it into the inner part of our system.
Crucial observations of the future
October 3, 2025, will be a decisive moment: 3I/ATLAS will pass 29 million km from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This will enable us to obtain images with sufficient resolution to finally determine the size and shape of its nucleus with certainty, separating it from a possible dust coma.
Nobel Prize winner David Gross suggested going even further and pointing radio telescopes at the object. The goal is to try to record any technological radio signals that may be coming from it. After a century of our own radio transmissions into space, we may finally have an answer.
On the edge of fiction and science
Some eagerly await confirmation of the object’s artificial origin, seeing it as an opportunity for humanity to unite for a common cause. Others hope that it is just a strange but perfectly natural comet, and that its properties are simply characteristic of an object from another star system. However, everyone agrees: 3I/ATLAS is already forcing us to take a fresh look at space and our place in it.
The discovery of such an object, regardless of its nature, gives us a sense of cosmic humility. It reminds us that we may not be the only intelligent beings in the Universe, and that our technologies, including artificial intelligence, may be only the first steps on a long path of development.
Alien tech? 3I/ATLAS appears to have an electroplated shell
Alien tech? 3I/ATLAS appears to have an electroplated shell
On July 1, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station at Río Hurtado, Chile, detected something extraordinary: a fast-moving object flagged with the provisional designation A11pl3Z, later named 3I/ATLAS, also cataloged as C/2025 N1 (ATLAS).
At first glance, it was classified as a comet. But almost immediately, astronomers realized that this visitor was anything but ordinary.
3I/ATLAS imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec on 6 August 2025.
Why 3I/ATLAS is different.
Interstellar Origins Like ʻOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) and Borisov (2I/2019 Q4) before it, 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system. Its steep hyperbolic orbit—with an eccentricity greater than 1.02—proves it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun.
A Composition Unlike Any Comet Most comets are rich in water ice. Not 3I/ATLAS. Spectroscopic analysis from both the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed it is dominated by carbon dioxide with one of the highest CO₂-to-water ratios ever measured. This makes it chemically alien compared to the comets that formed in our own solar system.
A Tail That Breaks the Rules Comets typically sprout tails pointing away from the Sun, driven by sublimating ice. 3I/ATLAS, however, displays a dust plume angled toward the Sun—a tail in the “wrong” direction. This phenomenon has never been observed in a natural comet and suggests either unusual physics or engineered behavior.
Perfectly Aligned Trajectory Instead of cutting randomly across the solar system, 3I/ATLAS travels almost exactly along the ecliptic plane, the flat orbital path where Earth, Mars, and most of the planets reside. Statistically, the odds of a random interstellar object aligning this precisely are less than 0.005%.
Unexplained Acceleration Data from radar tracking and JWST confirm subtle but persistent non-gravitational acceleration. Normally, such changes are explained by outgassing jets. Yet Webb detects no coma, no jets, no thermal signature to explain the push. Instead, the acceleration resembles controlled propulsion, similar to how an ion engine expels dust or gas for thrust.
Forward-Facing Glow: Instead of a tail behind it, 3I/ATLAS shines with a glow ahead of its motion, almost as if it were illuminating its path.
Stabilized Rotation: Unlike natural tumbling comets, it appears to maintain attitude control, consistent with artificial stabilization.
Speculations of nuclear propulsion: Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, already known for his bold ʻOumuamua interpretations, has highlighted its non-gravitational acceleration and trajectory. He even speculated that 3I/ATLAS might be nuclear-powered technology, perhaps venting dust as thrust.
3I/ATLAS will not simply zip past and leave. Its calculated path takes it past several key planets: Venus flyby – August 2025
Mars encounter – September 2025
Jupiter flyby – late 2026
Tilted view of 3I/ATLAS's trajectory through the Solar System, with orbits and positions of planets shown. Such a sequence of planetary passes looks less like coincidence and more like a deliberate survey trajectory.
Finally, on October 30, 2025, the object will reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. Crucially, at that moment it will be hidden directly behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective, a perfect opportunity for a stealth maneuver if it is indeed under intelligent control.
10. And the latest news on this object is that 3I/ATLAS shows signs of alien electroplating. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have detected something never before seen in a natural comet, a plume of pure nickel gas, laced with cyanide, but completely lacking iron.
This is not how comets behave. In every known case, nickel and iron are paired together in space rocks, asteroids, and cosmic debris. The absence of iron in 3I/ATLAS makes it impossible to explain through natural processes.
The nickel-cyanide combination looks eerily familiar to something we know from human technology: nickel-cyanide electroplating. This industrial process is used to coat and protect metals like iron, creating a corrosion-resistant shell. When heated, such a coating releases nickel vapor and cyanide gas, the exact chemical fingerprint astronomers now see venting from 3I/ATLAS.
Renowned astrophysicist Avi Loeb has already highlighted this bizarre discovery, stressing that the nickel-only signature matches industrial alloy production rather than anything we’d expect from natural comet chemistry.
Pure nickel without iron: impossible in natural comets.
Artificial signature: hallmark of industrial processes.
Putting it all together, so far:
It is an interstellar visitor on a hyperbolic escape path.
It has a carbon dioxide–dominated composition, nearly devoid of water.
It has a dust plume points toward the Sun, breaking cometary rules.
It has a trajectory which is perfectly aligned with the ecliptic plane.
It shows mysterious acceleration without visible outgassing.
It exhibits a forward glow, possible radio emissions, and signs of stabilization.
It will perform planetary flybys. It probably has nuclear propulsion.
It has an electroplated shell.
Mainstream astronomers remain cautious, still labeling 3I/ATLAS as a comet, but with mounting evidence, we may be staring at the first tangible proof of alien technology crossing our solar system, a probe from another civilization on a reconnaissance mission, silently mapping habitable worlds before making contact.
Record-breaking images from the world's largest solar telescope, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, reveal a solar flare in unprecedented detail.
The Inouye Solar Telescope captured this image of a solar flare on August 8, 2024. (Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA, CC-BY)
The world's largest solar telescope just captured the highest-resolution images of a solar flare to date — and they're spectacular.
Researchers trained the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the final stages of a powerful X-class solar flare on Aug. 8, 2024, capturing detailed images of chaotic loops of plasma at the sun's surface. The observations could help scientists understand the mechanics of solar flares and improve predictions of future flares.
"This is the first time the Inouye Solar Telescope has ever observed an X-class flare," study coauthorCole Tamburri, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. "These flares are among the most energetic events our star produces, and we were fortunate to catch this one under perfect observing conditions."
Solar flares are massive bursts of light emitted by the sun during solar storms. Twisting magnetic fields create large, bundled loops of plasma called arcades that extend into the corona — the hot, outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere. When the magnetic fields get so convoluted that they snap back into place (a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection), the sun blasts particles and energy in the form of solar flares into space. When aimed at Earth, energy from the flares can disrupt radio communications and spacecraft orbiting our planet.
But scientists don't know the size of the plasma loops that make up these arcades. Previous observations of the individual loops have been limited by the resolutions of older solar telescopes.
In a new study, published Aug. 25 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Tamburri and his colleagues collected high-resolution images of plasma loops in the last stages of a powerful solar flare using the Inouye's Visible Broadband Imager instrument. On average, the plasma loops spanned about 30 miles (48 kilometers) wide. But some were smaller, down to about 13 miles (21 km), which is about as small as the telescope can resolve.
"We're finally peering into the spatial scales we've been speculating about for years," Tamburri said in the statement. "This opens the door to studying not just their size, but their shapes, their evolution, and even the scales where magnetic reconnection — the engine behind flares — occurs."
According to the researchers, it's possible that the coronal loops observed here might be the building blocks of larger solar arcades. "If that's the case, we're not just resolving bundles of loops; we're resolving individual loops for the first time," Tamburri said in the statement. "It's like going from seeing a forest to suddenly seeing every single tree."
The new data on coronal loops could help scientists improve models of solar flares and better understand the magnetic field in the corona, the researchers wrote in the study.
"It's a landmark moment in solar science," Tamburri said. "We're finally seeing the sun at the scales it works on."
How exactly did the universe start and how did these processes determine its formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from Spain and Italy proposed a new model for the events that transpired immediately after the birth of the universe. This study has the potential to challenge longstanding theories regarding the exact processes that occurred at the beginning of the universe, along with how these processes have governed the formation and evolution of the universe.
For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate the beginning of the universe that challenge the longstanding theory that the universe began with a period of rapid expansion known as “inflation”, with scientists estimating this occurred within the first fraction of a second of the universe’s existence. However, this inflation theory postulates that several variables were all involved in making this theory possible.
In contrast, this new model suggests that a longstanding phenomenon of general relativity called gravitational waves are responsible for the universe and all its components, including galaxies, stars, planets, and life on Earth. The team proposes these gravitational waves are part of a longstanding mathematical model called De Sitter space, which is named after the Dutch mathematician Willem De Sitter, who worked with Albert Einstein regarding the universe’s structure throughout the 1920s.
“For decades, we have tried to understand the early moments of the Universe using models based on elements we have never observed”, said Dr. Raúl Jiménez, who studies experimental sciences & mathematics at ICREA in Spain and is a co-author on the study. “What makes this proposal exciting is its simplicity and verifiability. We are not adding speculative elements but rather demonstrating that gravity and quantum mechanics may be sufficient to explain how the structure of the cosmos came into being”.
First proposed in 1893 and 1905 by Oliver Heaviside and Henri Poincaré, respectively, gravitational waves received a huge boost in attention in 1916 when Albert Einstein proposed them to be ripples in the space-time continuum as part of his general theory or relativity. Despite myriads of sources, including supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars, gravitational waves are incredibly difficult to detect and require very sensitive instruments. This is potentially why gravitational waves were not detected until September 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observatory, which have locations in Washington and Louisiana.
The origin of the universe remains one of the biggest mysteries in science, as the Big Bang has long been theorized to have been the catalyst for the origin of the universe. Despite ongoing scientific breakthroughs and advancements, scientists remain puzzled regarding the origins of the universe, and especially what might have happened before the Big Bang.
Carl Sagan famously said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
We may never know exactly how the universe began and the processes responsible for you reading this article right now. But like the simplicity this study presents, perhaps this study is simply a way for us to know the universe itself a little bit better.
What new discoveries about the origins of the universe will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
You know, I find a lot of interesting things here and there when looking into NASA photos and here is a thought provoking anomaly that needs further investigation into. I found two massive planet size spheres within our sun. Let me explain, the sun has dark spots, areas that open up from deep within our sun and reveals the inner workings of the sun. This revealed not one but two mini planets hiding with the sun. Certainly there are many more. I would estimate that there are 10+ planets of massive sizes within it. So, not only a few planets but an entire solar system within our sun. It's so complex an issue, so massive of a discovery and change that stands opposite to everything we have been taught...and yet...it's real.
Hollow Sun Theory is a theory I made a decade ago, but still talk about it now and then, when the evidence presents itself.
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.
