The US has been sending mixed signals over UFOs for 75 years

A legacy of hype, hysteria and fraud is undermining legitimate inquiry into strange objects often reported in the skies

By Stephen Mihm / Bloomberg Opinion

The spectacle of the US military shooting down three unidentified objects in the space of a week has opened the door to baseless speculations and conspiracy theories, thanks in part to the government’s contradictory messaging, which has toggled between genuine alarm and casual dismissal.

Sadly, this looks a lot like what happened 75 years ago, when sightings of what became known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, led to a media circus that undermined legitimate inquiry into what are now known simply as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.

This legacy of hype and fraud is with us today. That is unfortunate, given that more recent sightings — many recorded by decorated combat pilots — prompted the US Congress to pass legislation that seeks to get to the bottom of the mystery. Doing so must avoid the rank silliness and deliberate obfuscation that defined our first major engagement with the issue.

Although sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena date back centuries, our collective obsession with flying saucers, aliens, “little green men” and other now-familiar tropes arguably began on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and pilot, spotted nine objects flying at unfathomable speeds near Mount Rainier in Washington state.

Arnold dutifully reported these to aviation officials. When pressed to describe the movement of the curious craft, he likened it to “a saucer skipping across the water.” This initial report went out across the news wires. Bored reporters eager to make something of the story ran with it, inventing details along the way.

In a few days, journalists had turned Arnold’s movement metaphor into something more material — a “flying saucer.” Arnold complained to veteran journalist Edward Murrow that newspapers had “misunderstood and misquoted me,” but to no avail. The idea of a flying saucer immediately captured the nation’s imagination, sparking a flood of alleged sightings.

Popular culture was not far behind. One month later, country singers Chester and Lester Buchanan issued the first song celebrating the phenomenon: (When You See) Those Flying Saucers. Others followed. In Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer, Ella Fitzgerald crooned about aliens with “little green antennas” who find Earth decidedly wanting and conclude: “It’s too peculiar here.”

Hollywood did its part, too, with several films about alien visitors, most of which featured flying saucers. Sometimes their occupants came in peace (Klaatu, the noble protagonist of The Day the Earth Stood Still), but for the most part, alien visitors had a bone to pick with humans — for example, The Thing From Another World and the classic Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.

US government info on “everything” to do with UFO sightings, held by the CIA, was released and published online on January 14, 2021 .                     

Source: IgorZh / Adobe Stock

Retailers sold flying saucer wind-up toys, flying saucer kids’ pajamas and other artifacts testifying to our collective obsession with aliens. All of this went hand-in-hand with thousands of alleged sightings of flying saucers, or what the US Air Force increasingly referred to as UFOs.

Government representatives found the collective obsession with UFOs deeply frustrating. In public, they dismissed the reports, arguing that ordinary citizens, their imaginations inflamed, had mistaken weather balloons, jet planes and meteorites for extraterrestrial craft.

Yet in private, high-ranking officials acknowledged that some sightings, particularly those reported by military pilots and radar, could not be so easily dismissed. In the fall of 1947, General Nathan Twining, then head of the US Air Force Materiel Command, authored a memo on the subject. Reviewing classified data, he concluded that “the phenomena is something real and not visionary or fictitious.”

By “phenomena,” Twining was referring to craft that moved at extraordinary speeds and displayed “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and motion.”

These aerial vehicles, he reported, generally left no trail and rarely made any noise. They behaved in ways that defied conventional explanations.

PUBLIC MESSAGING

Twining, who would go on to become chief of staff for the US Air Force and eventually chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was extremely circumspect in his assessment. Notably, he did not speculate about extraterrestrials and instead worried that a foreign nation could be responsible.

The air force’s “Project Sign,” begun that same year, studied the phenomena more closely. An initial memorandum — known as the “Estimate of the Situation” — seriously entertained the possibility that at least some of the sightings might be interstellar craft, although leaders of the air force did not take kindly to this unsettling conclusion. They remanded the memo and ultimately shut down Project Sign, replacing it with Project Grudge.

The new initiative was not a dispassionate inquiry, but a deliberate attempt to quell public anxiety. One scholarly account has described it as a “a public relations campaign designed to persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary.”

While it is easy to interpret these initiatives as government cover-ups, the reality is far more complicated and interesting. Their implementation reflected a genuine concern that the task of investigating the torrent of sightings would divert precious time and money from countering the more immediate threat posed by the Soviet Union.

Some strategists even feared that the Soviets might be sowing hysteria about UFOs in order to overload the nation’s air defenses. One CIA analyst said in 1952 that the spate of official and unofficial sightings had overwhelmed the military’s ability to recognize Soviet bombers.

“As tension mounts,” the analyst wrote, “we will run the increasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of falsely identifying the real as phantom.”

Still, not everyone got the memo. In 1952, after ground observers and radar picked up fast-moving mysterious objects over the nation’s capital, then-US Air Force intelligence director John Samford held a news conference. He bluntly spoke of “credible observers” reporting “relatively incredible things.”

That same year, a scientific adviser within the CIA warned that “something was going on that must have immediate attention.” He concluded that “sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”

SUPERPOWER SUSPICIONS

However, such incidents, impossible to explain and posing no obvious threat to the US and its allies, increasingly took a back seat to dealing with the Soviet Union. Through the later 1950s and 1960s, Project Blue Book, the successor to Project Grudge, successfully quelled the nation’s obsession with flying saucers. Increasingly, UFOs became a risible punchline, akin to Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

Fast forward to the 21st century. In recent years, a growing number of aircraft sightings defying the laws of physics has belatedly prompted a federal effort to collect and analyze data. Meanwhile, the damage done by Grudge and Bluebook — what the US director of national intelligence recently described as “sociocultural stigmas” — has made that task difficult.

So does the fact that our newfound interest in the subject is taking place against the backdrop of a growing conflict with another rival superpower: China. The risk that Chinese espionage could become entangled with the UAP question is high.

Witness, for example, the confused and contradictory messaging around the three objects shot down last week in the wake of the downing of a Chinese spy balloon. A day after the US Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said he was not ruling out extraterrestrial origins for the UAPs, a White House spokesperson said: “There is no, again, no indication of aliens or extra terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”

If we are to avoid a repeat of the mistakes of an earlier era, we must avoid both the popular hysteria and hostile indifference that defined our first engagement with the issue. That means the government and the media must adopt a far more nuanced, transparent approach.

One step in that direction is to acknowledge that there might be things out there that cannot yet be explained, but should be studied with an open mind. If we can pursue that inquiry without succumbing to either skepticism or credulousness, we might finally get to the bottom of the mystery.

• Stephen Mihm is a professor of history at the University of Georgia

{ https://www.taipeitimes.com/ }

3-Million-Year-Old Oldowan Tools and Cut-Marked Bones Unearthed in Kenya

by Enrico de Lazaro

Oldowan tools, consisting of stones with one to a few flakes removed, are the oldest widespread and temporally persistent hominin tools. The oldest of these were previously known from around 2.6 million years ago in Ethiopia, and by 2 million years ago, they were found to be quite widespread. Now, paleoanthropologists have discovered a new, older fossil site from around 3 to 2.6 million years ago in Kenya, where Oldowan tools were not only present, but were also being used to process a variety of foods, including hippopotamus and bovids. Thus, it appears that these tools were widespread much earlier than previous estimates and were widely used for food processing. Which hominins were using these tools remains uncertain, but Paranthropus fossils occur at the site.

Oldowan tools from the site of Nyayanga in Kenya: a dorsal flake, a ventral flake, and a core.

Image credit: Plummer et al., doi: 10.1126/science.abo7452.

The appearance of Oldowan tools around 2.6 million years ago was a technological breakthrough that used systematically produced, sharp-edged flakes for cutting and cobbles or cores for percussion.

Although the Oldowan is often attributed to the genus Homo, multiple hominin species overlapped with these early tools, and it is possible that other genera, such as Paranthropus, made and/or used them.

Some scientists have linked emergent Oldowan technology to the first access to or more efficient processing of nutrient-rich animal carcasses.

Scientists have unearthed more than 300 stone tools at the Nyayanga site in southwestern Kenya (pictured in 2014, prior to excavation).

PHOTOGRAPH BY T.W. PLUMMER, HOMA PENINSULA PALEOANTHROPOLOGY PROJECT

Others have argued that plant food processing was the primary goal of early Oldowan stone tool usage, with increased carnivory — and butchery with stone tools) being added to the behavioral repertoire after 2 million years ago.

The evolutionary benefits connected with the emergence of Oldowan technology are unclear because of the paucity of Late Pliocene Oldowan sites, previously known only from the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia.

The new finds from the 3.03- to 2.6-million-year-old site at Nyayanga, Kenya, expand the geographic range of the earliest Oldowan tools by more than 1,300 km and the range of Paranthropus by approximately 230 km to southwestern Kenya.

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” said Queens College researcher Thomas Plummer, lead author of the study.

“This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized.”

Paranthropus boisei.

Image credit: © Roman Yevseyev.

Not only were Oldowan tools present, but fossilized bones with associated stone-tool damage demonstrate the tools were used to butcher large animals: hippopotamids and bovids.

Furthermore, use-wear patterns on the tools themselves suggest the processing of plant materials.

“The site featured at least three individual hippos,” Dr. Plummer and colleagues said.

“Two of these incomplete skeletons included bones that showed signs of butchery.”

“We found a deep cut mark on one hippo’s rib fragment and a series of four short, parallel cuts on the shin bone of another.”

“We also found antelope bones that showed evidence of hominins slicing away flesh with stone flakes or of having been crushed by hammerstones to extract marrow.”

“The analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they had been used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants”

“Because fire would not be harnessed by hominins for another 2 million years or so, these stone toolmakers would have eaten everything raw, perhaps pounding the meat into something like a hippo tartare to make it easier to chew.”

The discovery of teeth from the muscular-jawed Paranthropus alongside these stone tools begs the question of whether it might have been that lineage rather than the Homo genus that was the architect of the earliest Oldowan stone tools, or perhaps even that multiple lineages were making these tools at roughly the same time.

“The behaviors preserved at Nyayanga are at least 600,000 years older than prior evidence of megafaunal carcass and plant processing and substantially predate the increase in absolute brain size documented in the genus Homo after 2 million years ago,” the authors concluded.

“The Late Pliocene expanded geography of the earliest Oldowan, and new evidence of its use in diverse tasks amplifies our understanding of the adaptive advantage of early stone technology in hominin diet and foraging ecology.”

• A paper on the findings was published February 9, 2023 in the journal Science.
• Thomas W. Plummer et al. 2023. Expanded geographic distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus. Science 379 (6632): 561-566; doi: 10.1126/science.abo7452

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Astronomers Observe Elongated Object near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

An elongated dust and gas feature named X7 has a mass of about 50 Earth masses and is on an orbital path around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, that would take 170 years to complete.

“No other object in this region has shown such an extreme evolution,” said Dr. Anna Ciurlo, an astronomer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“It started off comet-shaped and people thought maybe it got that shape from stellar winds or jets of particles from the black hole.”

“But as we followed it for 20 years we saw it becoming more elongated. Something must have put this cloud on its particular path with its particular orientation.”

X7 has a mass of about 50 Earths and is on an orbital path around Sagittarius A* that would take 170 years to complete.

But that might never happen. Based on its trajectory, Dr. Ciurlo and colleagues estimates that the object will make its closest approach to the supermassive black hole around the year 2036, and then likely spiral toward it and disappear.

“We anticipate the strong tidal forces exerted by the Galactic black hole will ultimately tear X7 apart before it completes even one orbit,” said University of California, Los Angeles Professor Mark Morris.

“Tidal forces are the gravitational pull that cause an object approaching a black hole to stretch; the side of the object closest to the black hole is pulled much more strongly than the opposite end.”

X7 shows some of the same properties as the other strange dusty objects orbiting Sagittarius A*.

Those so-called G-objects look like gas but behave like stars.

But X7’s shape and velocity have changed more dramatically than G-objects have.

As it accelerates toward the black hole, X7 is moving rapidly, clocking in at speeds of up to around 1,130 km per second (700 miles per second).

“It’s exciting to see significant changes of X7’s shape and dynamics in such great detail over a relatively short time scale as the gravitational forces of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way influences this object,” said Dr. Randy Campbell, an astronomer at the W.M. Keck Observatory.

Although X7’s origin is still the subject of debate, the finding suggests that it arose after two stars collided.

“One possibility is that X7’s gas and dust were ejected at the moment when two stars merged,” Dr. Ciurlo said.

“In this process, the merged star is hidden inside a shell of dust and gas, which might fit the description of the G-objects. And the ejected gas perhaps produced X7-like objects.”

“The merger of two stars is very common, especially when they are near black holes.”

“This is a very messy process: the stars circle each other, get closer, merge, and the new star is hidden within a cloud of dust and gas. X7 could be the dust and gas ejected from a merged star that’s still out there somewhere.”

• A paper on the findings was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
• Anna Ciurlo et al. 2023. The Swansong of the Galactic Center Source X7: An Extreme Example of Tidal Evolution near the Supermassive Black Hole. ApJ 944, 136; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/acb344

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{ https://www.sci.news/ }

Webb Discovers Impossibly Massive Galaxies in Early Universe

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have observed six candidate galaxies with stellar masses as high as 10¹¹ solar masses about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.

Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way, but is 30 times more compact.

Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / I. Labbe, Swinburne University of Technology / G. Brammer, Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center, University of Copenhagen.

Webb is equipped with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies.

Essentially, the telescope allows astronomers to see back in time roughly 13.5 billion years, near the beginning of the Universe as we know it.

“We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the Universe,” said Dr. Joel Leja, an astronomer at the Pennsylvania State University.

“These objects are way more massive than anyone expected.”

“This is our first glimpse back this far, so it’s important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing.”

“While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes.”

“Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our Universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.”

The six massive galaxies were identified in the first observations of the JWST Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) program.

This program obtained multi-band images with Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) in a ‘blank’ field, chosen to overlap with existing Hubble imaging.

“We’ve never observed galaxies of this colossal size, this early on after the Big Bang,” said Dr. Ivo Labbé, an astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology.

“The six galaxies we found are more than 12 billion years old, only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, reaching sizes up to 100 billion times the mass of our Sun. This is too big to even exist within current models.”

“This discovery could transform our understanding of how the earliest galaxies in our Universe formed.”

Follow up measurements are being carried out to confirm the galaxies and rule out alternative explanations.

“One alternative, equally fascinating, is that some of the objects belong to a new class of emerging supermassive black holes, never seen before,” Dr. Labbé said.

One way to confirm the team’s finding and alleviate any remaining concerns would be to take a spectrum image of the massive galaxies.

That would provide the authors data on the true distances, and also the gasses and other elements that made up the galaxies.

They could then use the data to model a clearer of picture of what the galaxies looked like, and how massive they truly were.

“A spectrum will immediately tell us whether or not these things are real,” Dr. Leja said.

“It will show us how big they are, how far away they are. What’s funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list.”

“We’ve found something we never thought to ask the Universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are.”

• A paper describing the findings was published in the journal Nature.
•  Labbé et al. A population of red candidate massive galaxies ~600 Myr after the Big Bang. Nature, published online February 22, 2023; doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05786-2

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Strange DNA found in the desert offers lessons in the hunt for Mars life

Story by Joel Achenbach 

The Atacama Desert in Chile is just about the driest place on Earth. In spots, it looks a lot like Mars. But it’s not lifeless, even in the hyper-arid regions. Using state-of-the-art equipment to probe the desert rocks, researchers found bits of DNA from an intriguing mix of microbes.

Strange DNA found in the desert offers lessons in the hunt for Mars life

© Armando Azua-Bustos/Armando Azua-Bustos

Strikingly, 9 percent of the genetic fragments belong to organisms unknown to science, making them part of the “dark microbiome,” according to a report published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

These organisms are bacteria that are “so strange and different,” as the report puts it, that researchers could not identify any known relatives.

“In almost half of the cases, the databases could not clearly say what we had in our hands,” lead researcher Armando Azua-Bustos, a microbiologist at the Center of Astrobiology in Madrid, told The Washington Post.

And that brings him back to the Mars analogy: The Atacama, he and his scientific colleagues believe, is a brilliant test bed for the search for Martian life. But the same search conducted with versions of the instruments on today’s Mars rovers could barely detect the microbial signatures. That means finding conclusive evidence of present or past life in Martian soils is going to be difficult without bringing samples back to Earth, Azua-Bustos and his colleagues concluded.

The research seems to bolster the long-term Mars exploration strategy of NASA and its partner, the European Space Agency. They are in the midst of a multistage mission called Mars Sample Return. If all goes as planned, samples of Martian soil obtained by NASA’s Perseverance rover — which just celebrated its second anniversary on Mars — will be hauled back to Earth sometime early in the next decade for scrutiny in high-containment laboratories.

But this new research also highlights the challenges facing scientists who want to know the (conjectured) biological history of Mars. Microbial life, especially if extinct and long fossilized, may exist at or beyond the farthest limit of what can be detected with the kind of instruments small enough to be blasted into space and landed on another planet.

Scientists have never found an example of life beyond Earth, but a general assumption is that “habitable” worlds will become inhabited — that life emerges, somehow, under the right conditions. The Red Planet has long tantalized astrobiologists. It was more Earthlike about 3 billion years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface. Conceivably, there is still cryptic life on Mars, although astrobiologists would be thrilled to find even a microfossil of something that lived billions of years ago.

NASA’s Viking mission of 1976 carried experiments designed to detect life, and one offered an initially promising signal, but most scientists concluded that they’d landed on sterile soil.

Since the Viking mission, NASA has followed a more incremental strategy focused on finding and exploring sites that show evidence of being potentially habitable billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and wetter. Perseverance and its still active predecessor, the Curiosity rover, have found traces of organic molecules — the kind of molecules that are the basis of life as we know it — on the surface, though this is not by itself proof of a biological origin.

“The question remains whether they are meteoritic, geologic, or biologic,” said Amy Williams, a planetary scientist at the University of Florida and a member of the Curiosity and Perseverance scientific teams.

Williams said the new report from Azua-Bustos and his collaborators is important because it shows that the preservation of organic matter is limited in Mars-like environments and will be difficult to detect even with state-of-the-art laboratory instruments.

“This means that organics detection with spaceflight instruments, like on current and future Mars rovers, may be an even larger challenge, as organic matter is readily broken down in the radiation-bathed Martian surface environment,” Williams said in an email.

Still, the Atacama research shows that even a very arid environment will have layers of sedimentary rock with significant amounts of biological remnants, said Chris House, a Pennsylvania State University geologist and astrobiologist. “It is not really a surprise, but the results might have just shown uniform bleakness,” he said. That’s good news for scientists hoping dry Mars rocks might yield traces of alien biology.

Azua-Bustos is a native of the Atacama who spent years as a winemaker before becoming a scientist. He recalls growing up in a Chilean town where rain would fall only about once a year, always a highlight. There are places, he said, where residents have never seen rain going back multiple generations.

He said he would regularly pass through a region of the desert, called Red Stone, en route to a research site, and one day he decided it would be worth a closer look. The rocks were rust-red because of the presence of a mineral, hematite, that also accounts for the red color of Mars, he said.

More than 100 million years ago, in the age of dinosaurs, the Red Stone site was a river delta, much like the plateau on Mars within Jezero Crater that Perseverance is exploring.

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this portrait of 10 recently collected rock samples on Jan. 31.

Azua-Bustos was surprised by the genetic material of an unfamiliar nature seen in the Atacama research. All life on Earth comes from a common ancestor — so far as we know. There has been speculation, notably from scientist and author Paul Davies, that life could have originated on Earth more than once and to this day there could be a “shadow” biosphere that is simply too weird to fit into our definition of Earth life.

Azua-Bustos, however, defaults to the less spectacular interpretation of the unclassified organisms: This is relic genetic material from life forms long extinct and not previously documented.

The Perseverance rover continues to explore Jezero Crater, digging up and storing samples of Martian soil. The plan is to put another spacecraft on the surface, which would double as a launchpad. Perseverance would then deliver the samples to the lander, which would hurtle the material into orbit. There it would rendezvous with yet another vehicle, a European-built orbiter, that could transport the precious cargo back to Earth for analysis with the best possible lab instruments.

The new research suggests this may be the most effective — and possibly the only conclusive — way to find out if anything was ever alive on Mars.

“We know there are things to detect,” Azua-Bustos said. “But if your instrument is not designed to be able to detect those things, then we have a problem.”

{ https://www.msn.com/ }

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Mudlarker Finds Bronze Age Shoe on a UK Riverbank Dated 2,800 Years Old!

A man exploring along a riverbank in northern Kent recently discovered the oldest shoe ever found on United Kingdom soil. Carbon dating tests proved the decayed but still recognizable leather artifact was nearly 3,000 years old, having been manufactured sometime between the years 888 and 781 BC. This incredible age highlights what an absolute miracle this discovery was, as the ancient shoe, which likely belonged to a toddler, was lying out in the open fully visible to anyone who might walk by.

One of the Best Mudlarking Adventures Ever

The small, flattened shoe was spotted by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, a resident of Ramsgate, Kent who works with the Canterbury Archaeological Trust.

On September 17, 2022, Tomlinson and a colleague, archaeologist Emily Brown, were out walking along rivers in Kent, searching for valuable artifacts that might have washed up along the edges. This activity is known as mudlarking, and archaeologists who do it often find intriguing objects that may be anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries old. The best sites for mudlarking are rivers that feed into the ocean (like the River Thames , for example) and are affected by the rising and sinking of the tides. Mudlarkers will arrive during times of low tide, searching along shores that are normally covered by water.

• Mudlarking the Thames: How a Riverbed Became the World’s Biggest Archaeological Site
• The Havering Hoard: Baffling Bronze Age Artifacts Found in London

The unassuming ‘thing’ on the river beach didn’t slip past finder Steve’s trained eye

( Steve Tomlinson )

Someone with an untrained eye might have passed by the shoe without noticing it, or even caring if they did notice. But Tomlinson was actively searching for anomalous objects, and the aged shoe caught his attention immediately.

“The day started well, and between us we had a good selection of finds including plenty of pottery sherds from the Roman period, and various small objects like a small piece of Roman tesserae,” Tomlinson recalled in an article in the Isle of Thanet News :

“We had been out for 3 hours scouring the shoreline, and the tide was turning when we hit the last leg of our day. As we made our way along the foreshore … I came across what looked like a very old shoe-like piece of leather washed up on the mud. It was around 15 centimeters [6 inches] in length.”

Tomlinson and Brown examined the weathered leather of the flattened shoe carefully, trying to estimate its age. The archaeologists concluded that it was most likely an early medieval artifact, meaning it might have been dropped or washed into the river as long as 1,000 years ago.

It might seem unusual that someone finding a shoe next to a river would conclude the object was centuries old. But this wasn’t Tomlinson first time. While mudlarking in 2018, he discovered an Anglo-Saxon shoe sticking out of the mud that was ultimately dated to the 10th century AD.

Expecting a similar result this time, Tomlinson sent his interesting discovery on to the SUERC carbon dating facility in East Kilbride, Scotland. But when the lab revealed the results five weeks later, Tomlinson received one of the great shocks of his life, as he learned he’d underestimated the age of the little old shoe by nearly 2,000 years.

"The date they had given me was just astonishing," Tomlinson said. “This could be not only the oldest shoe found in Kent, but in the British Isles itself, and a very high possibility that this is also the smallest Bronze Age shoe ever discovered in the world.”

It has now been confirmed that this is the most ancient shoe ever recovered in the United Kingdom. This distinction previously belonged to a 2,000-year-old shoe found in 2005 in a quarry in Somerset.

By modern standards the shoe would be listed as a child size 7, and would be appropriate for a toddler aged around 2-3 years old, explained Mr Tomlinson. The child presumably had lost the shoe while playing in or around the riverbank all those years ago, and it had been lying on the bottom of the riverbank waiting to be found ever since.

• What Does This 5,500-Year-old Shoe Found in a Cave Tell Us About Ancient Armenians?
• Ironclad Hoof: Unique Roman Horse Shoes Found on Hadrian’s Wall

The shoe has been conserved by Dana Goodburn Brown, an accredited Archaeological Conservator at DGB Conservation . 

(Steve Tomlinson )

Walking Back in Time in a Bronze Age Toddler’s Shoe

Archaeologists are always surprised and delighted when they find ancient items of clothing that are in good enough shape to be studied.

“Prehistoric textiles like this rarely survive and the only chance is by finding them in anaerobic conditions such as bogs and mud (away from the air),” Tomlinson explained. 

But even when an organic artifact is preserved for hundreds or thousands of years, it still takes a lot of luck to actually locate it. And Steve Tomlinson was blessed with an inordinate amount of good fortune, as he fully appreciates.

"Finding something like that is quite extraordinary,” Tomlinson confirmed in an interview with Kent Online . "It opens up history too; we just know nothing about these kinds of things."

The ancient toddler’s shoe will be transferred to the British Museum for more analysis. Now that the shoe has been successfully dated to the Late Bronze Age , it will be tested further to see if scientists can learn what animal it came from. Attempts will be made to extract traces of human DNA from the artifact as well, and if this is successful it could reveal the true age, gender and ethnic identity of the child who wore the leather shoe in the first millennium BC.

• Top image: The Bronze Age shoe, in situ where it was found on the river edge in Kent, England.   
• Source: Steve Tomlinson

By Nathan Falde

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Discovery of Bronze Age child's shoe suggests perennial problem of toddlers dropping their things stretches back 3,000 years

• A 3,000-year-old leather shoe belonging to a toddler was found in north Kent 
• The 15cm shoe was found by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, in a riverbed 

By CHRIS MATTHEWS FOR MAILONLINE 

Most parents will know the feelin

g of getting home, opening the door and realising your child has somehow lost a shoe.

Scientists now think it could be a feeling that tens of billions of parents have felt for millennia.

A 3,000-year-old toddler's shoe from the Bronze Age, dating from between 888 and 781BC, has been discovered in a north Kent riverbed.

A comforting fact is since then at least 62 billion people have come and gone on Earth and many have likely also faced the same shoe problem that parents today often scratch their heads about.

The rare Bronze Age 15cm leather shoe is thought to be the oldest found in the UK and was found by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, as he was mudlarking in September.

A Bronze Age leather shoe (pictured) thought to be the oldest in the UK was unearthed in north Kent riverbed

Archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, (pictured) discovered the 3,000-year-old shoe that belonged to a toddler

A micro-CAT scan (pictured) of the shoe discovered that the sole was made from several layers

Mr Tomlinson, from Ramsgate, Kent, didn't think much of the find at first but sent it for carbon-dating at a unit in East Kilbride, Scotland.

Five weeks later he received the 'shocking' result that dated the show from the late Bronze Age.

Mr Tomlinson said: 'I thought it was something good but I still thought it was medieval. 

'I sent it off for carbon-dating and five weeks later I got a call from a gentleman at the lab who said to me, "I think you better sit down for this".

'I'd had a good day's mudlarking that day - I'd found quite a few Roman pottery shards - but I was not expecting that. 

'I could've quite easily missed it but I had an inkling it was something special.

'It's absolutely fascinating.'

The unassuming ‘thing’ on the river beach didn’t slip past finder Steve’s trained eye

( Steve Tomlinson )

The shoe is 15cm long, meaning in today's terms the child would have been a size seven

The child is thought to have been around two or three years old and scientists will do DNA tests to try to determine whether the show's owner was a boy or a girl

An X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern

In today's sizes the shoe would be a size seven and archaeologists think its owner was around two or three years old.

Mr Tomlinson said he is 'confident' it is the oldest of its kind in the UK and possibly the smallest in the world.

He said: 'It's a tiny little thing really.'

READ MORE: 

• Ancient treasures emerge from sinking reservoir in heatwave: Rocks that were intentionally marked by prehistoric Britons up to 6,000 years ago are found as water level drops 

'We hope professionals might be able to reconstruct it eventually and that it might go into the British Museum down the line.

'It's of incredible national interest.'

The shoe is now in the care of heritage scientist and archaeological conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown, 63, who specialises in micro-excavation.

Ms Goodburn-Brown said: 'Organic materials like leather, textiles or wood will not survive unless they're somewhere very arid or in mud without oxygen.

'This shoe has been in a silt environment with sediment, without oxygen. 

'It's what we call anaerobic conditions .

'It gets to this equilibrium state where it doesn't biodegrade. That's why it's so rare.

'It's amazing that it survived so long. 

'The fact that it dislodged from elsewhere and Steve came across it before it started to degrade is incredible.

'We don't know where it originated but it's most likely it was either washed out with cliff erosion, which happens quite regularly in Kent, or emerged during dredging.

Dana, from Sittingbourne, Kent, took the shoe to experts at the University of Kent who examined it under a micro-CT scanner, where they discovered the sole was made up of several layers.

More significantly, an X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern, suggesting it had either been wrapped in or pressed against a piece of material for some time.

The next step is to send the leather for DNA testing to see what they can learn about the shoe's original owner. 

Scientists might even be able to tell whether the toddler was a boy or a girl and what animal the leather came from.

The shoe has been conserved by Dana Goodburn Brown, an accredited Archaeological Conservator at DGB Conservation . 

(Steve Tomlinson )

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

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Three UFO Reports, Mexico To Florida! Feb 27, 2023, UFO Sighting News. 100% Raw Footage!

Date of sighting: Feb 27, 2023

Location of 1st sighting: River Maya, Mexico

Location of 2nd sighting: Miami, Florida, USA

Location of 3rd sighting: Sarasota Florida, USA

 

Hey everyone, check this out. Three different eyewitness videos just came in today and they are all of the same UFO, but in different locations and this baby is big! I as a UFO researcher for the last 20 years have never seen anything like this. It's really strange, very odd, looks like a cloud, but its not, its a solid craft, actually two solid craft one following the other. Absolutely mind-blowing raw footage! This is 100% proof that aliens are putting in the effort to make themselves known to the public. The real question is...how is the US government going to try to cover this one up? 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

{https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

“What’s Up With UAPs?” Exploring the Government’s Interest in UFOs with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly referred to as UFOs, have captured the imagination of people around the world for decades. These sightings of strange objects in the sky have prompted many to speculate about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, sparking widespread interest and fascination. However, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains in a recent Youtube video, the government’s interest in investigating these phenomena is not based solely on their potential connection to alien life.

According to Tyson, the government’s interest in investigating UFOs is largely motivated by concerns over safety and security. If there is something flying in the sky that cannot be identified, it is important to determine whether it poses a threat to individuals, the economy, or national security. As such, it is reasonable to allocate resources towards identifying and investigating these phenomena.

Despite the common association between UFOs and aliens, Tyson cautions against jumping to conclusions about the nature of these phenomena. As a scientist, Tyson encourages a skeptical, evidence-based approach to studying and investigating the unknown. While it may be tempting to attribute unexplained sightings to alien life, it is important to maintain a rational perspective and consider alternative explanations.

Furthermore, Tyson notes that the prevalence of technology such as smartphones means that any potential alien invasion would likely be reported and documented quickly. With millions of people around the world carrying smartphones capable of recording and sharing videos, it is unlikely that any significant event would go unnoticed or unreported.

In summary, while UFOs and their potential connection to alien life continue to capture the public’s imagination, the government’s interest in investigating these phenomena is primarily motivated by concerns over safety and security. Rather than making extraordinary claims without evidence, it is important to approach these sightings with a scientific mindset, embracing the unknown and seeking to understand the phenomena through rational investigation.

RELATED VIDEOS

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

BY ANTON POZDNYAKOV

Universe-Breaking Galaxies, Source of Dark Energy, Mars Anniversary

“The Universe Breakers”: Six Galaxies That are Too Big, Too Early

New images from JWST show six galaxies at a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age, 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. They should be baby galaxies, but they contain 100 times more stellar mass than astronomers were expecting to see soon after the beginning of the Universe. If true, this calls the current thinking of galaxy formation into question or challenges most models of cosmology.

• More about the “impossible” galaxies.

A 500-Meter-Long Asteroid Flew Past Earth and Astronomers Were Watching

An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building flew past Earth on Feb. 3rd, coming within 1.8 million km of our planet. For context, that’s about five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Astronomers turned the Goldstone Solar System Radar dish on the space rock, mapping its surface. The asteroid, called 2011 AG5, is one of the most elongated objects ever seen, with a length-to-width ratio of 10:3. It’ll have another close flyby in 2040 when it comes within three times the Earth-Moon distance.

Source of Dark Energy

A new paper was released suggesting that there might be a link between dark energy and the growth of supermassive black holes. Researchers speculate that, in fact, black holes can be the source of dark energy. If true (which we yet need to prove) this can be ground-breaking.

To shed more light on the research here’s an in-depth interview with Dr Chris Pearson from STFC RAL Space, who is a co-author of the paper.

• More about black holes and dark energy.

New Spacecraft Can See Into the Permanently Shadowed Craters on the Moon

The permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole are exciting because they contain vast reserves of water ice that future human explorers could use. But studying these craters is difficult because they’re in shadow and have no direct illumination falling inside them. NASA’s new ShadowCam instrument is at the Moon, flying with Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter. ShadowCam can see in such low light that it can reveal incredible details in these shadowed craters as if they were lit in sunlight.

• More about ShadowCam.-

ESA’s Early Warning System for Asteroids

ESA is considering their own mission to search for potentially dangerous asteroids. The spacecraft will be called NEOMIR and it will go to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point. This way it will be able to see incoming space rocks that will otherwise be missed because of the Sun blinding the telescopes. NEOMIR will also operate in the infrared, which will make its task even easier.

• More about NEOMIR.

Don’t Miss Out On Space News

If you want to get a curated selection of the most important space and astronomy news every week, subscribe to our Weekly Email Newsletter and get magazine-size ad-free news directly from Fraser Cain.

If you prefer the news to be videoed at you, check out our Space Bites playlist on our YouTube channel

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Lights Over Luke AFB Near Glendale, Arizona Feb 1, 2023, UFO Sighting News. Warning The Military That Aliens Are Still #1 Most Powerful On Earth.

Date of sighting: Feb 1, 2023

Location of sighting: Glendale, Arizona, USA

 

They eyewitness was really on top of it when he caught a fleet of glowing spheres over Luke AFB a few days ago. The UFOs glowed powerfully and each was almost the same size as the one next to it. UFOs are often seen investigating the USAF military bases, even known at to shut down nuclear missiles in silos, forcing the military to remove them entirely since they could never repair them (Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota). Ellsworth was my personal base I worked at in the USAF (Scott Waring) and its also where I had a sighting of a fleet of over 25 spheres the size of 747s back in 1990 abouts, when I worked on B1 Lancer Bombers. There is another aliens interaction with guards at Ellsworth, but this is about Luke AFB, so for a later time. Aliens have a high interest in US military, to both predict, control and warn the Governments of the world of their own alien power being still #1 on Earth.

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

Started off with 3 Lights then I initially saw them they slowly faded in then 5 other lights fade into sight then faded out the same way they appeared.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Mexican president photographed a Maya elf in a tree, releasing it on Twitter, UFO Sighting News.

The president of Mexico has posted a photo on Twitter of a strange tree climbing, hiding creature that resembles a human with a hoodie. The photo resembles some ancient mayan gods carved in stone, but he said it reusables a woodland elf. Maybe, maybe not, but its odd, and he  himself recored this strange alien creature. Yes I said alien. I believe it to be an alien species watching the president, recording him, because he will do something very important, very soon. Similar sightings occurred to US president Ronald Reagan, who saw twice a UFO while flying his private plane as Governor of California. Also US president Jimmy Carter said he came out of the building and saw from a distance a glowing light in the sky, watching him. It was such a profound experience that President Carter went home and wrote it all down in a diary. So yeah, presidents are on the top of the list for aliens to observer, record, and even visit. In 1957 US president Eisenhower met with an alien from Venus Captain Val Valient Thor, so says the US delegated priest in charge of meeting all foreign VIPs at the US presidents side. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Negative focused view above. 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

The remote village of Hessdalen, Norway may well be the scene of the longest continuously recorded UFO activity in the world. For more than forty years, people have observed -- and scientists have recorded -- highly unusual and so far inexplicable phenomena there. 

Especially high activity of Hessdalen lights took place from December 1981 until the summer of 1984 when lights were observed 15–20 times per week. Since then, the activity has decreased and now the lights are observed some 10–20 times per year. 

Some researchers believe that that bubbles of ionized gas are created when sulphurous fumes from the River Hesja react with the humid air of the valley. The geology also forms electromagnetic field lines in the valley, which could explain why for example orbs of light move around, but that has not been proven and it doesn't explain all the other unknown objects appearing over Hessdalen from which some of these objects appear to have involved craft under intelligent control, others have not. 

Now, Dr. Erling Strand has studied the Hessdalen mystery since the beginning and speaks with Richard Dolan about what he knows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmdBWCB1n8s

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

Unexplained UFO Sighting in Glendale, Arizona – Witness Reports Mysterious Appearance and Disappearance of Lights on February 1, 2023

On February 1, 2023, a mysterious sighting of unidentified flying objects occurred in Glendale, Arizona. According to a witness report, the sighting started with three lights that slowly faded into view. Then, five additional lights appeared and also slowly faded out of sight, leaving observers puzzled and intrigued.

The witness report describes the UFO sighting as a slow and deliberate appearance and disappearance of the lights. This raises questions about what type of technology was used to create such an effect. Were the lights under the control of a human operator, or was this something beyond our current understanding of technology?

Glendale, Arizona is not a stranger to UFO sightings, as there have been numerous reports of similar events in the past. In fact, Arizona is considered to be one of the top places in the United States for UFO sightings, with some of the most famous sightings taking place in Phoenix in 1997.

• Two round bright UFO that didn’t move - San Diego, CA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWD_4T8C42Q

{https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

The Planet That Shouldn’t Exist

“The host star, TOI-5205, is just about four times the size of Jupiter, yet it has somehow managed to form a Jupiter-sized planet, which is quite surprising!” exclaimed Dr. Shubham Kanodia, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Carnegie Earth & Planets Lab and an expert in red dwarf stars, and lead author of the study. Dr. Shubham recently discussed the discovery in an in-depth blog post, as well. Using food as an analogy, Jupiter orbiting our Sun is equivalent to a pea orbiting a grapefruit, whereas TOI-5205b orbiting its parent star would be equivalent to a pea orbiting a lemon.

The general theory of planetary formation begins with a massive, rotating disk of gas and dust encircling young stars, with gas planets initially being formed from rocky material comprising approximately 10 Earth masses. Over time, this material forms the core of the giant planet which then accumulates large amounts of gas from the disk to produce the massive gas giants we observe today. As it turns out, the confirmation of TOI-5205b could throw this theory into disarray.

“TOI-5205b’s existence stretches what we know about the disks in which these planets are born,” explained Dr. Kanodia. “In the beginning, if there isn’t enough rocky material in the disk to form the initial core, then one cannot form a gas giant planet.  And at the end, if the disk evaporates away before the massive core is formed, then one cannot form a gas giant planet.  And yet TOI-5205b formed despite these guardrails. Based on our nominal current understanding of planet formation, TOI-5205b should not exist; it is a ‘forbidden’ planet.”

The discovery was initially made using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which uses the transit detection method for locating exoplanets, and the data indicated that TOI-5205b blocks approximately 7% of its parent star’s light, making TOI-5205b one of the largest transits ever recorded for a confirmed exoplanet in orbit around a main-sequence star.

To confirm the TESS data, follow-up observations were made from an international collaboration of instruments and observatories. These include the Habitable-zone Planet Finder, the ARCTIC camera on the 3.5-m Apache Point Observatory, the NN-Explore Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager, the 0.6-m Red Buttes Observatory, and the Three-hundred MilliMeter Telescope.

Given the very large transit that TOI-5205b produced, the researchers demonstrated that this could make this exoplanet an ideal candidate for future atmospheric observations using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which could help scientists better understand the secrets behind its formation and evolution, as well. This is because JWST has already been successful in observing exoplanet atmospheres in incredible detail, as it recently demonstrated with exoplanet, WASP-39b.

What fascinating new discoveries will scientists make about exoplanets in the coming years and decades, and how much will these discoveries continue to push our knowledge of planetary formation and evolution? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

UFO Caught On NASA Sun Image Recored Turning, 100% Intelligently Controlled UFO Sighting News.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Pulsating Orb Over El Paso, Texas Feb 25, 2023, UFO Sighting News. Video.

Date of sighting: Feb 25, 2023

Location of sighting: El Paso, Texas, USA

 

Wow, this one was recorded over Texas a few days ago. The eyewitness saw it coming from over the mountains and then all about for 15+ minutes. From the colors, I would say this one has a real friendly and happy glow about it. The orb knew it was being watched and didn't want to cause any fear. Oh, and yes, orbs can change colors, saw a softball size UFO up close 2 meters from me here in Taiwan and it was like cloudy liquid silver, colors moving slowly within it, but 50 meters away it was white as a star. Orbs change colors at will, they can also read your mind, your thoughts and if you call them to you with a kind and open heart, I promise, you will see one. But they are sneaky, the one I saw so close, it came behind my camera. As I said, it could read my thoughts and knew where to come safely. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 26-02-2023

Ancient Aliens: Great Flood DESTROYS Lost Iraqi Civilization (Season 19)

Did civilization exist 12,000 years ago? See more in this scene from Season 19, Episode 3, "Mystery of the Lost Civilization."

RELATED VIDEOS

A 10 Million Year Old Find Rewrite Human History!

I often talk about the fact that archeological finds can rewrite our history, and this time the find was not long in coming. In Germany, archaeologists discovered a unique object that was checked in a variety of ways in order to 100% clarify its age. And they were amazed that it was about 10 million years old! It has the power to completely rewrite our history! I will talk about this find and others in this video.

00:00 ► Intro

00:23 ► Silver Scrolls of Ketef Hinnom

00:59 ► Acambaro figurines

01:41 ► The oldest buildings in the UAE found

03:28 ► Mangazeya

04:34 ► Madaba map

05:27 ► An unusual dinosaurs feature

06:53 ► 10 million year old tooth

07:25 ► One of the oldest Buddhist temples in the world

09:02 ► Peruvian "sea monster"

10:45 ► Humanity nearly died out 70,000 years ago

12:36 ► The oldest family tree in the world7

14:24 ► Ancient tombs and sarcophagus found under Notre Dame

A unique find of archaeologists that amazed the whole world. It has the power to rewrite the history of mankind. To learn more about it and see the most ancient buildings of the United Arab Emirates, the oldest Buddhist temple, the Peruvian "sea monster" and the world's oldest family tree, then you should watch this video to the end! Hi Friend. You are on the KirTop channel.

The UnXplained: "Unearthly Image" Hidden in Utah Desert (Season 4)

Over 200 monoliths have mysteriously appeared around the world. See more in this scene from Season 4, Episode 22, "Mysterious Monoliths."

Have Aliens Found Us? More Oumuamua Like Technology Interstellar Spacecrafts Now in Our Solar System

Have Aliens Found Us? More Oumuamua Like Technology Interstellar Spacecrafts Now in Our Solar System. A strange Cosmic object was flying past our planet and no one had the slightest clue 5 days later the interstellar object was on its way out of the solar system when Robert Warwick an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa spotted it. It was from the moment of its discovery a weird object, weird orbit, weird speed, and weird properties, the strange object was called Oumuamua, the first known Interstellar object to visit the solar system but here is the thing astronomers had only 11 days to observe the odd visitor.

China’s New H-20 Stealth Bomber is Worse Than You Think

This new aircraft could change the balance of power in the world. Currently the United States is the only nation to operate a strategic stealth bomber fleet like the B-2. This new Chinese stealth bomber is the type of aircraft that is sent to destroy an entire enemy airfield or soften up defenses for an invasion. The H-20 would have major ramifications for a possible invasion of Taiwan if it is able to evade their air defense systems.

19 Events That Will Happen Before 2050 Compilation

19) Colonization of Mars No, we’re not talking about an upcoming sci-fi blockbuster – the colonization of Mars is a real possibility in the foreseeable future.

18) Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will trigger rampant technological growth, resulting in unimaginable changes to human civilization.

17) Nuclear fusion In nuclear physics, nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles - neutrons or protons. Fusion was accomplished in 1951 with the Greenhouse Item nuclear test, while nuclear fusion on a large scale in an explosion was first carried out on November 1, 1952, in the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test.

16) Interstellar exploration Until recently, interstellar travel was nothing more than a theoretical possibility. However, the exploration of other star systems may become reality sooner than you think

15) Ice-free Arctic The loss of Arctic sea ice is one of the clearest signs of human-caused climate change and so far the Arctic Ocean has melted to its lowest extent ever recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979

14) 99942 Apophis asteroid threat Before global warming brings humanity on the verge of extinction, a giant rock from outer space might wipe us all out

13) Chocolate extinction Bad news for all of you chocolate lovers out there: your favorite food may actually become extinct in a few decades

12) Antibiotics stop working According to a major 2016 UK study, urgent action is needed to control the use of antibiotics before they stop working and leave a number of major conditions untreatable

11) Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will trigger rampant technological growth, resulting in unimaginable changes to human civilization

10) New countries Situations and circumstances keep changing, but conflicts rarely end. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is war that ultimately leads to the division of borders and fights for independence have been ongoing for a long time in many parts of the world. Countries and Land Masses At first, this one may sound a bit...abstract. After all, don't we already have a LOT of countries on this Earth of ours?

9) A New Pandemic? We're sure that this one terrifies you to a certain level, but if 2020 proved anything to us, it's that you don't know what to expect until it happens

8) Brand New Medicines If you were to look at medicine as it was in the 1920s and see where they are in the year 2020, you'll see such a rapid scale improvement it would see ludicrous that people survived during the times without this medicine.

7) Sci-Fi Tech Don't go overboard on this one, we're not saying that hovercars and jetpacks are going to be commonplace in our world in the year 2050, however, certain pieces of sci-fi tech are likely to come around by 2050.

6) Green Planet? This one is honestly a bit more wishful thinking than anything else but it could happen should the right forces come into play.

5) Y2K Part 2? If you recall the year 1999, you might remember a gigantic fear that was going on called the Y2K Bug.

4) True Virtual Reality Heading back to sci-fi tech, let's single out another desired object that might just happen by 2050: true virtual reality.

3) A.I. Everywhere Judgment Day is inevitable, and yes, we're quoting Terminator.

2) Super-Automation Here's a darker element of growing technology that we're already facing right now. The more that technology grows, the more that humans can be replaced by automated machines.

1) The Unthinkable When it comes to predicting the future...there's always a risk. Because in truth, you have NO idea what's going to happen in the next however many days or months or years or decades

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

On January 24, 2023 what seems to be a metallic UFO has been spotted while hovering above the Arizona desert. the UFO is accompanied by another object visible in the distance. 

Isn't it strange that these kinds of unknown objects can fly through US airspace at low altitudes seemingly undisturbed and are not intercepted and brought down like the Chinese hot air balloon and the other three unknown objects? 

Wouldn't it make sense that these types of objects would also be intercepted and shot down by the US Airforce as happened with the Chinese balloon and the other three unknown objects? 

Since the many UFOs and UAPs are left alone, not only does it say a lot about the knowledge the Pentagon and the US government have about these UFOs and UAPs to make the decision not to shoot down these objects, but it also says a lot about the shooting down of the other objects, likely indicating that these actions were carried out as part of a secret agenda behind the scenes, that may not be known to the US government, to archive a particular target in the near future.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

Where Are The Aliens? The Search For Extraterrestrial Life

For more than four decades, scientists have been on a mission to find techno-signatures – signals coming from distant alien civilizations. Despite the search, no convincing evidence has been found for biology beyond Earth. But, considering the vastness of the universe, it is estimated that our galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains about 400 billion stars, is likely to have life beyond our planet.

The Fermi paradox remains unresolved, which states that if intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, then why haven’t we seen any evidence of it? Some scientists have attempted to estimate the number of technologically advanced species in the universe through the Drake Equation, which has seven terms that need to be answered to get an estimate. While this equation has been useful, a slightly different approach has been suggested by Adam Frank from the University of Rochester. Rather than estimating how many civilizations are out there to communicate with today, they estimate how many civilizations have been out there since the beginning of the universe.

The first term of the Drake Equation is the rate of star formation, which we now know is about one star forming per year. The next two terms we’ve recently nailed down are the fraction of stars that have planets and the number of habitable zone planets – planets in the right place for life to form. For every five stars, one of them has a planet in the right place for life to form.

• Bodies Of Alien Creatures Were Found In The Basement Of Old House

While we have made a lot of progress in the last 20 years, the question remains, where are the aliens? The answer to this question could lie in the search for technological signatures of other civilizations. Several international scientific projects are devoted to searching for evidence of life beyond Earth, from biomolecular detection to exoplanet atmospheres and biomarker detection.

In 2017, an object hurtled through the solar system. Although most astronomers believe it was a natural phenomenon, some believe it was the result of advanced technology developed by an alien civilization. NASA has funded a mission concept known as the Extrasolar object Interceptor.

The search for alien life has progressed a long way. According to a study published in the planetary science journal Planetary Science Journal earlier this month, NASA’s James Webb telescope can detect consistent passive technosigns. One of the most common characteristics of industry on Earth is atmospheric pollution. If this type of pollution is found in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, it could provide evidence of alien technology.

Watch 

• Where Are The Aliens? The Search For Extraterrestrial Life from Science Time

Civilizations need only be older than ours to have technology that we are incapable of understanding. If we were to meet life from a planet that had no contact with Earth, it would likely be shocking to us. Other planets have different histories of cooking their soup of chemicals and making life out of it. Most stars are different than the sun, which may explain why interstellar tourist agencies never advertise Earth as a desired tourist destination, as all we can offer them is green grass vacation sites illuminated by visible light.

In conclusion, the search for aliens has been ongoing for several decades, and we have made significant progress in our understanding of the universe. The quest to find intelligent extraterrestrial life may still be ongoing, but we continue to make discoveries that bring us closer to the answer.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

Ancient Aliens: Origins of Humanity

Over the past couple of years, the number of reports of extraterrestrial beings being spotted in different parts of the world has increased. These sightings put a question mark over the possibility of alien life. While some believe that the notion of alien life is just science fiction, other believers think that there’s more to it.

One of the most interesting aspects about the UFO phenomenon is the idea that extraterrestrial beings may have been visiting Earth for thousands of years. In ancient cultures, there have been numerous stories about encounters with beings in the sky. These stories provide a glimpse into the beliefs of our ancestors.

In ancient Egyptian literature, the gods were referred to as individuals who came from the sky and taught people how to build structures such as pyramids. In the Bible, there are also references to extraterrestrial beings and chariots of fire. The Mahabharata, which is a part of the Hindu epicurean literature, talks about the gods’ use of flying machines known as “Vimas,” which were capable of moving across different dimensions.

• Pictures Mainstream Archaeology Does Not Want You To See

The increasing number of reports about extraterrestrial beings has raised various questions about the nature of our existence. Some believe that these beings could have helped us develop our ancestors by providing us with the necessary tools and knowledge to build advanced civilizations. Others think that they might have left us with advanced technology that governments around the world have been keeping secret.

Although the idea of ancient aliens has been around for a long time, the mainstream scientific community has started to take it seriously in the last couple of years. In 2017, the U.S. Defense Department released footage of an alleged alien encounter, which caught the public’s attention.

Despite the lack of evidence supporting the existence of alien life, the discovery of new planets outside our solar system has raised the possibility that other civilizations could also exist. Some believe that the conditions in the universe are so similar that intelligent life could easily evolve.

Despite the various cover-ups and mysterious nature of alien life, the evidence supporting the notion of alien existence continues to grow. As we continue to search for new planets outside of Earth, it’s possible that we will find more proof of alien life. However, it’s not yet clear if we will ever encounter these beings.

Although it may seem extraterrestrial life is already a distant idea for some people, the evidence suggests there could be more to it than we currently know. We must not lose sight of the fact that these beings have been a part of our culture and history. As the universe continues to expand, we can only look for answers to the many alien-related questions.

Watch FULL documentary movie about Origins of Humanity

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

'Mars' interior is not behaving,' active mantle plume reveals

Op een koude februaridag in 2021 lichtte een ruimtesteen de nachtelijke hemel op in Alberta, Canada. De vuurbal liet de wetenschap schudden op zijn grondvesten.

De ruimtesteen kwam namelijk vanuit de Oortwolk aansuizen en was opgebouwd uit rotsachtig materiaal. Tot op heden werd verondersteld dat objecten uit deze immense wolk aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel alleen uit verschillende soorten ijs, zoals waterijs, methaan, ethaan, koolstofmonoxide of waterstofcyanide konden bestaan.

On Feb. 22, YouTuber Mieszko Paradis caught a glimpse of a meteor as it flew through the sky over Edmonton.

(Video credit: Mieszko Paradis/YouTube)

De Oortwolk bestaat uit vele miljarden komeetachtige objecten rondom ons zonnestelsel. De Nederlandse astronoom Jan Hendrik Oort bedacht deze hypothese in 1950. Volgens Oort is er een stabiele wolk waar zo nu en dan een komeet vandaan komt die richting de aarde gaat, met een omlooptijd van duizenden jaren, zoals de bekende komeet Hale-Bopp. Dichterbij de aarde zijn er de Kuipergordel en de scattered disk, twee schijven vol puin buiten de baan van Neptunus. Hier komen periodieke kometen met een omlooptijd van minder dan tweehonderd jaar vandaan, zoals de komeet Halley. Materiaal uit deze meer dichtbijgelegen verzameling ruimtepuin bestaat vaker uit gesteente.

Mysterieuze Oortwolk
Passerende sterren, die mogelijk ook een eigen Oortwolk in hun buitenste schil hebben, duwen de ijzige reizigers uit ‘onze’ Oortwolk soms richting de zon, is de veronderstelling. We kunnen deze kometen dan waarnemen als lange lichtgevende slierten, omdat het ijzige materiaal verdampt en kleur afgeeft. Wetenschappers hebben nog geen objecten in de Oortwolk direct waargenomen, maar alles wat tot nu toe onze kant op is geslingerd, leek gemaakt van ijs. Tot de ontdekking van vorig jaar dus. En dat zet ons begrip van het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel op z’n kop. Er zouden alleen ijzige objecten moeten bestaan in deze buitenste regionen, in de theorieën is geen plaats voor rotsachtig materiaal.

De astronomie kan echter niet om de rotsachtige meteoroïde heen, die als een oogverblindende vuurbal door de lucht boven centraal Alberta vloog. Vele professionele en amateurastronomen legden de immense vuurbal vast op de gevoelige plaat en analyseerden de data en het beeldmateriaal. Een team van de University of Western Ontario concludeerde dat alle tekenen erop wijzen dat de oorsprong van de ruimtesteen recht in het midden van de Oortwolk ligt.

Bom onder ontstaanstheorieën
“Deze ontdekking dwingt ons na te denken over een geheel ander model van de vorming van het zonnestelsel, een model dat het idee ondersteunt dat aanzienlijke hoeveelheden rotsachtig materiaal samen met ijzige objecten rondvliegen in de Oortwolk”, zegt expert in de meteoorfysica Denis Vida. “De conclusies uit ons onderzoek stroken niet met de meest gangbare modellen waarin de vorming van het zonnestelsel wordt beschreven. Dit is een complete gamechanger.”

De superscherpe Global Fireball Observatory (GFO)-camera’s van de University of Alberta kregen de rotsachtige meteoroïde van ongeveer 2 kilo, ter grootte van een grapefruit, in het vizier en hebben het laatste stukje van zijn reis door het zonnestelsel en door de aardse dampkring vastgelegd. Het team kon zo berekenen dat de ruimterots zich in een baan bewoog die normaal gesproken alleen wordt afgelegd door ijsklompen uit de Oortwolk.

“In zeventig jaar van regelmatige vuurbalwaarnemingen is dit een van de meest bijzondere ooit geregistreerd. Het is geweldig hoe de GFO, die vijf jaar geleden is opgestart en zo het bereik enorm vergrootte, het voor elkaar heeft gekregen om wetenschappelijke experts van over de hele wereld bij elkaar te brengen”, zegt hoofdonderzoeker van de GFO Hadrien Devillepoix. “We kunnen hierdoor meer kostbare meteorieten vinden en bestuderen, maar misschien nog wel belangrijker: het lukt ons nu om deze zeldzame gebeurtenissen rechtstreeks te volgen en de gegevens op te slaan die zo essentieel zijn voor het begrijpen van ons zonnestelsel.”

Rotsvast bewijs
Waarom denkt men nu dat de vuurbal van Alberta van steen was gemaakt en niet van ijs? De ruimteklomp drong veel dieper de atmosfeer binnen dan ijzige objecten die in het verleden in vergelijkbare banen richting het aardoppervlak vlogen. Hij brak op exact dezelfde manier in stukken als een vuurbal, die in rotsachtige delen uit elkaar valt. Dit bewijst dat dit stuk ruimtepuin van steen is gemaakt en niet van ijs.

“We willen erachter komen hoe deze rotsachtige meteoroïde daar aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel is terechtgekomen, omdat we onze eigen oorsprong willen begrijpen. Hoe beter we de omstandigheden begrijpen waarin het zonnestelsel werd gevormd, hoe beter we snappen wat nodig was voor het ontstaan van leven op aarde”, legt Vida uit. “We willen een zo nauwkeurig mogelijk beeld schetsen van deze vroege momenten van het zonnestelsel, die zo cruciaal waren voor alles wat er daarna gebeurde.”

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

Where could aliens exist in our solar system? Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's satellites Enceladus and Titan are among the worlds most likely to host extraterrestrial life, experts say - PART I

• MailOnline looks at the worlds in our solar system most likely to harbour alien life
• They include Jupiter's moons, a dwarf planet, Mars, Venus and Saturn's satellites 

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea we may not be alone in our solar system.

Speculation that aliens might exist dates back to philosophers in ancient Greece, but it was the middle of the 20th century when people's imaginations really began to run riot — suddenly 'little green men' were everywhere in popular culture.

Although the use of the phrase is believed to have originated in 1908, it was between the 1920s and 50s that green Martian characters were plastered all over the covers of science fiction

The reality is that if extraterrestrial life does exist in our solar system it will be of a more simpler variety, perhaps hidden in Venus' clouds, beneath Mars' surface or in the vast underground oceans of one of Saturn's icy moons. 

But where else is the best bet of finding it? MailOnline speaks to a number of experts to find out.

Are we alone? For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea that aliens might exist in our solar system. But despite mid-20th century's excitement about 'little green men', if there is extraterrestrial life it will be of a more simpler variety, perhaps hidden in Venus' clouds, beneath Mars' surface or in the vast underground oceans of one of Saturn's icy moons

Mars

The most obvious candidate for extra-terrestrial life either past or present.

Scientists know the Red Planet was once habitable because billions of years ago it had lakes and rivers of liquid water on its surface, as well as a much thicker atmosphere than the thin one it has now.

But although the conditions were right for life to emerge, is that actually what happened?

Scientists have been trying to find out since the 19th century, although the answer has so far eluded them. Telescopes and probes have offered clues, while NASA has also deployed rovers to hunt for evidence over the past two decades.

Near neighbour: Mars is the most obvious candidate for another world in our solar system to harbour alien life either past or present. NASA's Perseverance rover is currently collecting samples in its search for evidence of ancient life, which will be analysed on Earth in the 2030s

Opportunity and Curiosity began the work, but today that baton has very much been handed over to Perseverance and its accompanying Ingenuity helicopter, which touched down on the Red Planet in February 2021.

Car-size robot Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, has so far collected 18 samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) from the Jezero Crater where a river flowed billions of years ago.

Busy: Car-size robot Perseverance (pictured) has so far collected 18 samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) from the Jezero Crater where a river flowed billions of years ago

When these sample tubes are eventually collected and returned to Earth by a European spacecraft some time in the 2030s, it could help scientists determine whether microbial left ever existed in the region.

If there are signs of ancient life, it is also possible that there are still alien microbes on Mars today, although these would more likely be underground rather than on the surface.

Several studies have previously used radar observations to show that reservoirs of liquid water probably exist just over a mile below the surface, but it would take future exploration – and likely a tricky mission – to try and establish once and for all if life exists there.  

Professor Andrew Coates, from the Department of Space & Climate Physics at University College, said the UK-built Rosalind Franklin rover could help with this.

'We're searching for evidence of biomarkers with the Rosalind Franklin rover (launch 2028), which will drill 2m under the surface, below where UV and oxidants are, and below where energetic solar and galactic radiation can penetrate,' he told MailOnline.

Professor Coates said Mars would be in his top three most likely worlds to host life in our solar system.

'Mars had the right conditions 3.8 to 4 billion years ago – with evidence for water on the surface, CHNOPS [the six elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur make up 98 per cent of living matter on Earth] and energy – at about the same time life was starting on Earth,' he added.

'It is the nearest possibility for life beyond Earth. Even the cold night side on the Mars surface (about 150K) is warmer than the surfaces on Europa (140K), Enceladus (70K) and Titan (90K).

Professor Michael Garrett, of the University of Manchester, said: 'There is probably no life above ground (Mars' atmosphere is thin to absorb sterilizing UV radiation from the sun) but underground looks a better bet.

'There is likely to be significant quantities of water underground and the temperature is also higher, so it's possible some sort of basic life might be hiding there, like microbial life.'

How are we going to confirm either way?

In all likelihood, Perseverance. There are high hopes for the Mars rover, but it won't be for another decade until we potentially get an answer. 

Venus

Earth's closest neighbour and the second planet from the sun, Venus is a hellish world where surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead and its atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide.

But despite such inhospitable conditions, there has been a lot of excitement recently that it might in fact host a type of life in an unusual place.

Just over a year ago, a new study suggested that alien lifeforms 'unlike anything we've ever seen' may be living in the clouds of Earth's 'evil twin'.

Scientists claimed that the planet could be becoming 'more habitable' after identifying a chemical pathway by which life could neutralise Venus' acidic environment, creating a self-sustaining, habitable pocket in the clouds.

For nearly 50 years experts have been baffled by the presence of ammonia, a colourless gas made of nitrogen and hydrogen, which was tentatively detected in Venus' atmosphere in the 1970s. 

Hellish world: Venus has been in the news a lot recently amid excitement that the planet might host life. Just over a year ago, a new study suggested that alien lifeforms 'unlike anything we've ever seen' may be living in the clouds of Earth's 'evil twin' 

At the heart of the confusion is that it should not be produced through any chemical process known on the hellish planet.

In the study by Cardiff University, MIT and Cambridge University, researchers modelled a set of chemical processes to show that if ammonia is present, the gas would create a cascade of reactions that would neutralise surrounding droplets of sulphuric acid. 

If that were the case, this would then result in the acidity of the clouds dropping from -11 to zero, which although still very acidic on the pH scale, is a level that life could potentially survive at. 

As for the source of ammonia itself, the authors believe the most plausible explanation is of biological origin, rather lightning or volcanic eruptions.

This chemistry suggests that life could be making its own environment on Venus.

'No life that we know of could survive in the Venus droplets,' said study co-author Sara Seager, from MIT. 

'But the point is, maybe some life is there, and is modifying its environment so that it is liveable.'

If the researchers are correct, the lifeforms are likely to be microbes similar to bacteria found on Earth.

However, a separate study by Cambridge University scientists – published in the summer of last year – claimed to have found no evidence of life in the planet's clouds.

Any life form in sufficient abundance is expected to leave chemical fingerprints on a planet's atmosphere as it consumes food and expels waste. 

But the Cambridge experts found no sign of this in the atmospheric and biochemical models they used.

'We wanted life to be a potential explanation [for the strange behaviour going on in Venus' clouds], but when we ran the models, it isn't a viable solution,' said lead author Sean Jordan from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. 

The debate rages on and will likely not end until the various hypotheses can be tested with proposed Venus-bound missions set to launch later this decade.

The belief that life may exist in Venus's clouds has been disputed. Some studies say it could but others have ruled it out. Pictured is an artist's impression of what microbial life could look like

How are we going to confirm either way? 

Two new NASA probes, coming in at a total cost of $500million (£352m), are set to blast-off later this decade and head for Venus. They have cool acronyms – DAVINCI+ and VERITAS – but they won't actually be able to confirm the existence of life.

Despite this, scientists hope the information and findings they can gather will at least get us closer to answering that question more concretely. 

VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy), will orbit Venus and peer through its thick clouds to map the surface.

Its aim is to understand the planet's geological history and investigate why it developed so differently to Earth. The probe could also discover whether volcanoes and earthquakes are still happening on Venus.

WHAT ARE NASA'S TWO NEW MISSIONS TO VENUS?

In June NASA announced that it is sending two new missions to Venus to examine the planet's atmosphere and geological features. They will be the first US probes sent to explore the hellish world in 30 years. 

The missions, which have each been awarded $500million (£352m) in funding, are:

DAVINCI+

Pictured: The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging probe (DAVINCI+) that will carry out flybys of Venus and land on its surface

What does it stand for?

Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging

What will it do?

As it drops to the surface the high-tech probe will measure Venus' acrid atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved.

It will also aim to determine whether Venus — which is the hottest planet in the solar system with a surface temperature of 500C — ever had an ocean.

As it heads toward the surface, DAVINCI+ is expected to return the first high resolution images of the planet's 'tesserae' geological features in Alpha Regio.

Scientists believe these features could be comparable to continents on Earth and may possibly suggest that Venus has plate tectonics.

When will it launch?

2029

When will its scientific experiments begin?

The spacecraft will carry out two flybys of the planet in 2030 to study its atmosphere and the nightside surface. 

Seven months after the two flybys, the craft will make a one-hour descent through the clouds, beaming back data all the way down to its landing site Alpha Regio.

What could its big discovery be?

Whether Venus ever had an ocean.

VERITAS

Pictured: The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) probe that will orbit Venus and peer through its clouds to map the surface

What does it stand for?

Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy

What will it do?

VERITAS will orbit Venus and peer through its thick clouds to map the surface.

The aim is to understand the planet's geological history and investigate why it developed so much differently than Earth.

When will it launch?

2028

What could its big discovery be?

Whether volcanoes and earthquakes are still happening on Venus.

DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging), meanwhile, will go one step further by actually landing on the hothouse world.

As it drops to the surface the high-tech probe will measure the planet's acrid atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved.

It will also aim to determine whether Venus — which is the hottest planet in the solar system with a surface temperature of 900°F (500°C) — ever had an ocean.

US company Rocket Lab is also developing the first privately-funded science mission to Venus called Venus Life Finder (VLF).

It will see a probe inserted into the planet's hot, thick cloud layers to spend just five minutes searching for signs of habitable conditions. 

The plan is for VLF to be launched in May this year and arrive at Venus in October, but if it misses this target lift-off date it will have to wait until the next launch window in January 2025.

Enceladus

You wouldn't think that an object completely covered in ice would offer even the remotest chance of hosting life.

But although the surface of Enceladus is freezing cold, there is a lot of activity going on beneath it.

Scientists know this because Saturn's sixth largest moon ejects liquid water, ice and organic material from its core out into space.

The organic molecules have been identified as nitrogen and oxygen-bearing compounds, similar to those involved in chemical reactions on Earth that produce the amino acids that are the building blocks of life.  

Saturn's moon Enceladus is thought to have a vast salty, liquid water ocean hidden below its frozen crust, while NASA has also found evidence of hydrothermal activity deep underground. This, scientists believe, could provide the source of heat needed to give life a chance to thrive

The world is thought to have a vast salty, liquid water ocean hidden below its frozen crust, while NASA has also found evidence of hydrothermal activity deep underground.

This, scientists believe, could provide the source of heat needed to give life a chance to thrive.

'If the conditions are right, these molecules coming from the deep ocean of Enceladus could be on the same reaction pathway as we see here on Earth,' Nozair Khawaja, of the Free University of Berlin, has previously said.

He carried out research on data from NASA's Cassini mission, which discovered the organic compounds during a 13-year mission that ended in 2017.

'We don't yet know if amino acids are needed for life beyond Earth, but finding the molecules that form amino acids is an important piece of the puzzle,' Khawaja added.

Professor David Rothery, of the Open University, said he believed Enceladus was one of two worlds in our solar system most likely to harbour extraterrestrial lifeforms.

'The big unknown is how likely it is for life to get started, if conditions are suitable for life,' he told MailOnline.

'However, Enceladus and Europa both have internal (below an ice shell) oceans sitting on top of tidally-heated (so warm) rock. 

'Chemical reactions between water and hot rock probably result in "hydrothermal vents" (hot springs) on the ocean floor, where microbes can feed off the chemical energy. 

'It doesn't matter that sunlight can't penetrate to those depths — we have similar "chemosynthetic life" clustered around hydrothermal vents on Earth's sunless ocean floors too.

'If there are microbes, maybe some more complex forms of life have evolved that eat the microbes.'

Active: Saturn's sixth largest moon ejects liquid water, ice and organic material from its core out into space. It is thought to have a salty, liquid water ocean hidden below its frozen crust, while NASA has also found evidence of hydrothermal activity deep underground (pictured)

Professor Andrew Coates, of UCL, also said Enceladus was one of the leading contenders to host alien life.

'The plumes discovered by Cassini-Huygens come from a subsurface salty ocean under the ice, and the mission also discovered evidence for silicates in the plumes, which likely come from vents on the ocean floor, perhaps a bit like black smokers on Earth,' he told MailOnline.

'Also hydrogen was directly found, completing CHNOPS at Enceladus. [The six elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur make up 98 per cent of living matter on Earth.]'

How are we going to confirm either way?

Unfortunately there aren't currently any missions scheduled to study Enceladus. A number of proposals have been put forward, including several to NASA, but nothing has been picked to actually go to Saturn's moon.

This is a shame, given that many scientists believe Enceladus to be one of the most likely candidates to host extra-terrestrial life.

If and when we ever do go there, digging into the ocean would be the best way to see if any lifeforms exist on the moon, although it might also be possible to detect biosignatures in cryovolcanoes.

These are volcanos that erupt vaporised materials such as water or ammonia rather than molten rock.

Europa

Another popular candidate to host alien life — and this time there might soon be an answer from missions scheduled to fly to it.

Europa is the smallest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons but it is seen by most experts as the most likely to have the right ingredients for life.

Part of the reason is its massive subsurface, and potentially salty, ocean which is heated up by tidal forces.

This is believed to create an internal circulation system which keeps waters moving and replenishes the icy surface on a regular basis.

Such a theory is significant because it means scientists would not necessarily have to delve deep into the underground ocean to find evidence of life, as the fact that the ocean floor interacts with the surface means it could throw up clues there. 

A big contender: Europa is the smallest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons but it is seen by most experts as the most likely to have the right ingredients for life

'Of the Galilean satellites, Europa is the most likely [to have alien life] as the ocean is likely in contact with sand/rock according to models,' Professor Coates told MailOnline, 'whereas at Ganymede and Callisto the ocean floor would be ice due to lower temperature'.

He added that because Europa is bathed by Jupiter's energetic radiation belts this too could be useful for emerging life, as it could result in oxygen potentially finding its way into the subsurface oceans.

Professor Garrett, of the University of Manchester, added: 'The giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter tend to churn up the interiors of their icy moons, so there is a lot of mixing of water with carbon rich chemistry — but it would probably be microbial life, if there is any life at all.

'If we do find life in the solar system, I wouldn't be shocked if we discover it somewhere we think is least likely — new science is always full of surprises.'

How are we going to confirm either way?

NASA's Europa Clipper will provide the best chance of confirming the existence of extraterrestrial life on Europa.

The spacecraft is due to launch in 2024 and reach the Jovian moon in 2030, at which point it will carry out a series of low-altitude flights to study the surface.

Clipper will also investigate the subsurface environment where possible, in an attempt to find signs of alien activity.

More data will also be provided by the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft, which is due to launch in April.  

It will make two flybys of Europa during its time in the Jovian system and is set to explore three of Jupiter's moons during its mission.

The Europa Clipper (pictured) will provide the best opportunity of confirming the existence of extraterrestrial life on Jupiter's moon. It is due to launch in 2024 and reach Europa in 2030

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Where could aliens exist in our solar system? Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's satellites Enceladus and Titan are among the worlds most likely to host extraterrestrial life, experts say - PART II

• MailOnline looks at the worlds in our solar system most likely to harbour alien life
• They include Jupiter's moons, a dwarf planet, Mars, Venus and Saturn's satellites 

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea we may not be alone in our solar system.

Speculation that aliens might exist dates back to philosophers in ancient Greece, but it was the middle of the 20th century when people's imaginations really began to run riot — suddenly 'little green men' were everywhere in popular culture.

Triton

Now we're going a bit further afield.

Triton is Neptune's largest moon and one of just five natural satellites in our solar system confirmed to be geologically active.

Scientists know this because it has active geysers that spew out sublimated nitrogen gas. 

Much like Enceladus, it is a freezing cold world. But that's in part because it is so far from the sun, circling the most distant planet in our solar system.

Its surface is mostly frozen nitrogen, while it has water ice in its crust and an icy mantle.

Freezing: Triton is Neptune's largest moon and one of just five natural satellites in our solar system confirmed to be geologically active. However, despite there being a possibility of alien microbes, the fact that the moon is so cold makes it unlikely anything could stay unfrozen for long enough to exist

However, because of a gravitational phenomenon known as tidal heating, it is thought to receive some heat from Neptune that could help warm its waters and create conditions possible for life.

An example of how this works elsewhere in the solar system is the gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter's moons and the planet itself, causing the natural satellites to stretch and squish enough to warm them.

It that some of the icy moons contain interiors warm enough to host oceans of liquid water, and in the case of the rocky moon Io, tidal heating melts rock into magma.

However, despite there being a possibility of alien microbes on Triton, the fact that the moon is so cold makes it unlikely anything could stay unfrozen for long enough to exist.

Most scientists agree that the world is pretty low down on the list of potential sources of extraterrestrial life. 

How are we going to confirm either way?

Finding life on Triton seems highly unlikely, in part because the only mission to ever visit the world was Voyager 2 in 1989, and there is nothing else scheduled in the near future.

One of the main stumbling blocks for this is that the window for such a mission to Triton only opens every 13 years.

A concept to explore Triton, along with flybys of Jupiter and Neptune, was proposed to NASA in 2019.

However, the so-called Trident mission seems unlikely because it was beaten out by other concepts chosen by the US space agency, including the two probes to Venus.

Finding life on Triton seems like a very distant possibility, as the only mission to ever visit the world was Voyager 2 in 1989. The spacecraft (pictured) is now 12 billion miles and 18 hours' light distance from us

Ganymede

Not only is Ganymede Jupiter's largest moon, it is also the biggest natural satellite in our entire solar system.

Like some of the other moons mentioned, Ganymede has an icy shell with secrets hidden beneath its surface.

Once again, it has a saltwater ocean so vast that it is believed to contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined, a potential breeding ground for life.

The moon also has two more things going for it which would be beneficial for any extraterrestrial lifeforms.

The first is an extremely thin oxygen atmosphere and the second is a magnetic field, something that is vital in protecting worlds from the sun's radiation and an attribute that no other moon in the solar system has.

All very positive you may think.

The problem is that Ganymede is much colder than Earth, with daytime surface temperature ranging from 90 to 160 Kelvin (or -297 to -171 degrees Fahrenheit).

Not only that, but Jupiter and its moons receive less than 1/30th the amount of sunlight that the Earth does, and Ganymede has essentially no atmosphere to trap heat.

Biggest moon in the solar system: Ganymede has a saltwater ocean so vast that it is believed to contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined, a potential breeding ground for life

How are we going to confirm either way?

Sadly, there are no dedicated missions due to study Ganymede.

However, the JUICE mission mentioned above will take a close look at the moon when it enters its orbit in 2032. 

The European spacecraft may have an opportunity to peer down at the surface and study Ganymede's interior with radar, perhaps providing an insight into whether it is in any way habitable.

Titan

Saturn's largest moon Titan is so huge it is actually bigger than the planet Mercury.

Interesting though that may be, what really makes the world exciting is that it is extremely rich in organic materials and possesses the sort of simple chemistry that is believed to have been vital in the creation of life on Earth. 

Thanks to flybys from the Cassini spacecraft, experts have also found evidence of great lakes and signs of rain near the moon's north pole, while it has one of the thickest atmospheres for a rocky world outside of Earth and Venus.

The methane in this atmosphere is what makes Titan's chemistry possible, but where this gas comes from is a mystery. 

Like other moons mentioned above, Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean that is around 35 to 50 miles (55 to 80 kilometres) below its icy ground.

On the surface, the world is teeming with lakes, rivers, and seas, but rather than being made of water these are actually liquid methane and ethane, providing a potentially habitable environment for life.

The only problem, once again, is that Titan is very cold. It is nine times further from the sun than Earth, so only receives about 1 per cent the amount of solar warming.

Massive: What really makes Saturn's largest moon Titan so exciting is that it is extremely rich in organic materials and possesses the sort of simple chemistry that is believed to have been vital in the creation of life on Earth

It all adds up to the theory that if there is extraterrestrial life on this world it will be very alien indeed, and certainly different to us.

That's because anything on the surface would have to be ethane-based rather than water-based, and molecules such as DNA would not work. 

Nevertheless, Titan still sits at the number 4 spot on Professor Coates' list of worlds most likely to harbour extraterrestrial life, in part because of its thick atmosphere and prebiotic chemistry he told MailOnline.

Dr Joanna Barstow, of the Open University, also had Titan in her top three.

She told MailOnline: 'I would consider Titan to be a contender because it is the only other body in the solar system to have surface lakes [besides Earth].

'In the case of Titan, these are made of liquid hydrocarbons (methane and ethane) not water — but it isn't impossible that life elsewhere could have evolved to make use of these liquids instead. 

'If there is anything there, we would expect it to be microorganisms.'

How are we going to confirm either way?

NASA's mission to Titan, known as Dragonfly, will fly more than 100 miles around the celestial satellite. It was originally set to launch in 2026, but the Covid pandemic pushed back the launch date to 2027. 

The mission will see the US space agency send a drone helicopter to explore Titan's atmosphere from 2034 in an attempt to shed further light on the moon's prebiotic chemistry.

The craft will explore diverse environments from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together for possibly tens of thousands of years.

It will also investigate the moon's atmospheric and surface properties and its subsurface ocean and liquid reservoirs, while trying to search for chemical evidence of past or current life.

NASA's Dragonfly mission will see the US space agency send a drone helicopter (depicted) to explore Titan's atmosphere

Callisto

The most fascinating fact about Jupiter's moon Callisto is that it has the oldest surface of any world in our solar system, at about 4 billion years old.

That doesn't have any real bearing on its potential for life, but it is another world thought to have a large ocean deep underground and an interesting atmosphere.

It is thin, but Callisto's atmosphere is more Earth-like than most other moons in the solar system as it contains oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

The drawback to there actually being life is again how cold the moon is. 

In the past, scientists always thought Callisto was a boring 'ugly duckling moon' and a 'hunk of rock and ice' because it was a crater-covered world which didn't seem to have much going on geologically.

The chance of it actually having life is less likely than some of the other planets and moons listed here, but it is certainly not seen as being as boring as it once was.

The most fascinating fact about Jupiter's moon Callisto (shown bottom) is that it has the oldest surface of any world in our solar system, at about 4 billion years old

How are we going to confirm either way?

Once again, JUICE will offer the most insight. The spacecraft will make several close flybys of Callisto during its mission to carry out detailed observations of Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons.

After a seven or eight-year cruise to Jupiter, utilising Earth and Venus gravity assists to get there, JUICE will go into orbit around the gas giant in 2031.

So we'll have to wait another decade before we have any more clues as to whether they could be life on Callisto or Jupiter's other moons. 

The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft will make several close flybys of Callisto during its mission to carry out detailed observations of Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons

Ceres

We've looked at the planets and moons that could host alien life in our solar system, but what if the most likely candidate is actually a dwarf planet?

It's an interesting thought, but seems unlikely.

Scientists think Ceres – which sits between Mars and Jupiter – could be home to liquid water deep underground, perhaps around 25 miles below the surface.

If this is the case, it would almost certainly be extremely salty and therefore would stop the water from freezing.

Not only that, but NASA's Dawn probe found evidence of organic compounds on Ceres while orbiting the world between 2015 and 2018.

As mentioned in relation to some of the other leading candidates for life above, this could provide the raw materials needed for life, but the world would need some heat source to actually create it.

Also working against Ceres is its size. The tiny dwarf planet is 13 times smaller than Earth, making it a complete mystery as to how the fraction of gravity on the world could affect any potential life.

Tiny dwarf planet: Scientists think Ceres (pictured) – which sits between Mars and Jupiter – could be home to liquid water deep underground, perhaps around 25 miles below the surface

How are we going to confirm either way?

As some of the interesting features about Ceres have only been discovered in the past decade, there is no mission currently scheduled to visit the dwarf planet.

So it will be a while before we get any concrete answers.

That being said, there has still been a series of proposals for how Ceres could be better studied by future missions.

KEY DISCOVERIES IN HUMANITY'S SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE

Discovery of pulsars

British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.

Since then other types of pulsars that emit X-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted.

Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could have come from aliens.

'Wow!' radio signal

In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data.

In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data

The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.

Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the 'Wow! signal', which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials.

Fossilised Martian microbes

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs.

The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. 

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike (pictured)

However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated. 

They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils. 

Behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005 

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astronomers since being discovered in 2015.

It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star.

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015 (artist's impression)

Recent studies have 'eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure', and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals.

Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2017 

In February 2017 astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away.

Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life.

Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them. 

Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said: 'This is just the beginning.' 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

What COULD aliens look like? Forget little green men - life on distant exoplanets may resemble HUMANS, experts say

• A number of experts and previous studies believe aliens would look a lot like us
• But others say they could be more 'jellyfish-like', or even akin to shrimp on Earth
• If extraterrestrial life exists on our solar system, these worlds are likely to host it 

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

They are often depicted as either little green men, bug-eyed creatures or terrifying monsters intent on wiping out all life on Earth.

But if aliens do exist, what might they actually look like? 

MailOnline asked a number of experts what they think — both for potential extraterrestrial life within our own solar system, as well as on distant exoplanets in faraway galaxies.

Among the wide-ranging answers were features such as big brains, enormous wings and gravity-induced spindly frames, while 'crab or squid-like beasties', jellyfish-esque creatures and aliens that look almost human-like are also a possibility.

The latter might seem surprising given how aliens are often portrayed in popular culture, but some experts think if another intelligent civilisation exists, life could have evolved in a similar way to us.

Mystery: If aliens do exist, what might they actually look like? MailOnline asked a number of experts and these were some of their answers

Mystery: They are often depicted as either little green men, bug-eyed creatures or terrifying monsters intent on wiping out all life on Earth (stock image), but this is unlikely to be the case

As one scientist put it, the reason is 'simple physics, plus competition for food and the need to escape predation will favour organisms with similar body plans to those that are successful on Earth'. 

Closer to home, if alien life does exist on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's satellites Enceladus or Titan, it is likely to be somewhat anti-climactic because it would probably just be 'scum-like' microbes.

Professor David Rothery, of the Open University, said it would probably be 'invisible to the unaided eye if you are trying to see an individual'.

He told MailOnline that it could well be 'like a scum or a stain on the rocks of an ocean floor or a discolouration in the surface ice if there is a colony'.

That may sound a little boring, but Professor Rothery does have hope that something slightly more interesting could exist in our solar system. 

'There may be larger organisms that have evolved to browse on the microbes,' he said, 'but crab-like, shrimp-like and squid-like beasties in Europa's ocean are probably too much to hope for.' 

NASA also believes that on Jupiter's icy moon, 'the best chance for life would be microbial'.

US space agency scientists have previously studied an 'extreme shrimp' ecosystem in the Caribbean to find clues about what life could be like on other planetary bodies such as Europa, which has a subsurface ocean and may have similar creatures.

Professor Andrew Coates, of University College London, thinks any life forms in our solar system would be 'simple, single cell'.

'But we won't know until we find it,' he added, 'and the hunt is on with missions like Rosalind Franklin [the UK-built Mars rover due to launch in 2028].' 

That's near Earth though. Surely there are more mind-bending and endless possibilities in distant galaxies?

Astronomer Michael Garrett, a professor at Manchester University, thinks 'we might be in for a shock'.

He told MailOnline: 'I think the way complex life might appear will depend a lot on the environment within which it evolves.

'For example, a more massive planet where the force of gravity is strong might favour life forms that are quite squat and muscular, while a less massive planet (where the force of gravity is weaker) might suit the evolution of complexities that are more delicate and potentially quite spindly and tall.'

Professor Garrett also said that if the world had a low density atmosphere, it may have 'life forms with wings of enormous scale'.

'Or if your star is a red giant, you might find life with eyes that are much more sensitive and larger than ours,' he added.

'Anyway, I'd be prepared for something very different that might be quite shocking at first but we'd hopefully soon get over that and begin to also see some similarities.'

NASA scientists have previously studied an 'extreme shrimp' ecosystem in the Caribbean (pictured) to find clues about what life could be like on other planetary bodies such as Europa, which has a subsurface ocean

Astronomer Michael Garrett, a professor at Manchester University, said the appearance of aliens would depend on their environment. For example, a less massive planet (where the force of gravity is weaker) might suit creatures 'quite spindly and tall', he added (stock image)

Professor Garrett is one of a number of scientists who think human-like aliens are also a possibility.

'Intelligent life like humans would presumably have relatively big brains, and have limbs and flexible digits that can record history and advances in knowledge that can then be passed on from one generation to the next, always building on what has gone before,' he said.  

Both Professor Rothery and Professor Simon Conway Morris, a palaeontologist at the University of Cambridge, agree that extraterrestrial life, if out there, would resemble the creatures we see around us on Earth, with limbs, heads, and bodies. 

'There is a school of thought that says that simple physics plus competition for food and the need to escape predation will favour organisms with similar body plans to those that are successful on Earth,' Professor Rothery told MailOnline.

'It is clearly effective to have your sense organs at the front (or top).'

He added: 'On other Earth-like planets some have surely developed complex life forms, but its anybody's guess what they look like.'

Professor Morris also said that any Earth-like exoplanet should evolve predators like sharks, pitcher plants, mangroves, and mushrooms, among many other things. 

Another previous study suggests that in reality, aliens could be more similar to us than some would think.  

The University of Oxford research indicates that life would potentially be shaped by the same processes that created humans, such as natural selection, and that these extraterrestrials may even 'look like us'.

Lead author Sam Levin said: 'We still can't say whether aliens will walk on two legs or have big green eyes.

'But we believe evolutionary theory offers a unique additional tool for trying to understand what aliens will be like, and we have shown some examples of the kinds of strong predictions we can make with it.

'By predicting that aliens have undergone major transitions — which is how complexity has arisen in species on Earth, we can say that there is a level of predictability to evolution that would cause them to look like us.'

He added: 'We can't say whether or not we're alone on Earth, but we have taken a small step forward in answering, if we're not alone, what our neighbours are like.'

Arik Kershenbaum, author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, also agrees that Darwinian natural selection would apply throughout the universe.

Welcoming our new jellyfish overlords: This is what evolution might have come up with on a world such as Saturn's moon Titan, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock believes

The University of Cambridge astrobiologist said this would result in alien creatures that have symmetrical bodies with wings, legs or fins. 

They would also be intelligent, have a developed language and possibly technology, he believes, and even added that humans might be able to 'have tea with an alien' if we came into contact with them.

Others don't think extraterrestrial life would look like us.

One leading space scientist previously claimed that aliens could look like giant jellyfish.

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a satellite expert and former government adviser, said extraterrestrial life was likely — but just more alien-like than some might imagine.

She believes Saturn's moon Titan could have aliens that look like football field-sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly or bottom.

Generated from silicon, rather than the carbon that is the basis of life as we know it, the creatures she envisions would be able to live off light absorbed through their 'skin' and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths.

KEY DISCOVERIES IN HUMANITY'S SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE

Discovery of pulsars

British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.

Since then other types of pulsars that emit X-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted.

Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could have come from aliens.

'Wow!' radio signal

In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data.

In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data

The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.

Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the 'Wow! signal', which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials.

Fossilised Martian microbes

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs.

The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. 

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike (pictured)

However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated. 

They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils. 

Behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005 

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astronomers since being discovered in 2015.

It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star.

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015 (artist's impression)

Recent studies have 'eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure', and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals.

Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2017 

In February 2017 astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away.

Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life.

Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them. 

Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said: 'This is just the beginning.' 

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{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

“It’s rare nowadays to have fundamental discoveries in science,” said Dr. Baptiste Journaux, who is an acting assistant professor in UW’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences, and lead author of the study. “Salt and water are very well known at Earth conditions. But beyond that, we’re totally in the dark. And now we have these planetary objects that probably have compounds that are very familiar to us, but at very exotic conditions. We have to redo all the fundamental mineralogical science that people did in the 1800s, but at high pressure and low temperature. It is an exciting time.”

For the study, the researchers investigated what is known as a hydrate, which is an icy lattice formed in cold water temperatures from the combination of salts and water. Until now, only one sodium chloride hydrate was known to exist, known as hydrohalite, which consists of one salt molecule for every two water molecules.

Using transparent diamonds and cold temperatures, the team compressed a miniscule amount of salty water near 25,000 times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, where they observed two new sodium chloride hydrate crystal structures. The first structure contains two sodium chloride molecules for every 17 water molecules, and the other contains one sodium chloride molecule for every 13 water molecules. It was also discovered that the structure containing 17 water molecules remained stable even near vacuum pressure, which is equivalent to the Moon’s surface, while the structure containing 13 water molecules only maintained its stability at high pressure. It is hypothesized that these unique crystal structures could help explain the “watery” signatures from Jupiter’s moons.

“We were trying to measure how adding salt would change the amount of ice we could get, since salt acts as an antifreeze,” said Dr. Journaux. “Surprisingly, when we put the pressure on, what we saw is that these crystals that we were not expecting started growing. It was a very serendipitous discovery.”

These same cold, high-pressure environments likely exist on Europa, as scientists postulate its interior ocean could be hundreds of kilometers deep underneath approximately 5 to 10 kilometers of ice, with denser ice structures possibly existing at the bottom of the ocean where the temperatures and pressures would be even colder and more extreme.

For next steps, the researchers wish to create or collect a bigger sample to conduct a more in-depth investigation regarding whether icy moons signatures such as the red streaks found on Europa complement the two recently discovered hydrates.

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) currently have a few planetary missions scheduled to visit Europa and Titan to explore their potential habitability. These include the ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also known as JUICE, which is slated to launch in April of this year and arrive at the Jupiter system in July 2031; NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is slated to launch in October 2024 and arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030; and NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, which is slated to launch in 2027 and arrive at Titan in 2034. All these missions will attempt to learn more about the chemical compositions of these mysterious and intriguing worlds, which will help scientists determine the best ways to search for life.

“These are the only planetary bodies, other than Earth, where liquid water is stable at geological timescales, which is crucial for the emergence and development of life,” said Dr. Journaux. “They are, in my opinion, the best place in our solar system to discover extraterrestrial life, so we need to study their exotic oceans and interiors to better understand how they formed, evolved and can retain liquid water in cold regions of the solar system, so far away from the sun.”

What new discoveries will scientists make about Europa, its chemical signatures, and potential for life in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

{https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Passenger on Allegiant Flight 1127 Captures Video of Pulsating UFO Lights – over West Virginia/Pennsylvania Border

On February 20, 2023, a peculiar incident occurred in the skies over the West Virginia/Pennsylvania border. A passenger aboard Allegiant Flight 1127, captured footage of a flashing unidentified flying objects while the plane was descending into Pittsburgh. The witness took a picture of the sunset and later noticed an unusual object in the frame. Curiosity led the individual to switch to video mode and capture footage of the lights emanating from the unidentified object.

The footage captured by the witness shows a small, circular object with a glowing aura, slowly moving across the sky. The lights emanating from the object are bright and pulsating, with different colors appearing at different times. The video lasts for approximately 2 minutes and provides a clear view of the object from different angles.

Upon closer inspection of the footage, it appears that the object is following the same flight path as the commercial airplane. The witness reported that the object was visible for a significant amount of time and that other passengers on the flight were also able to witness the strange phenomenon.

• You won’t believe what these Trowbridge (UK) residents caught on camera: A UFO

The witness has not provided any further information about the incident, and there has been no official statement from Allegiant Air or any relevant authorities. The incident has garnered attention from UFO enthusiasts and researchers, with many speculating about the nature of the object and its purpose.

The West Virginia/Pennsylvania region has been a hotspot for UFO sightings in the past, with numerous reports of strange objects and lights in the sky. While many sightings can be easily explained as natural phenomena or man-made objects, some incidents remain unexplained and shrouded in mystery.

The sighting on February 20, 2023, adds to the list of unexplained phenomena in the region, and the footage captured by the witness has sparked interest and curiosity among those interested in the UFO phenomenon. While the incident remains a mystery, it is a reminder that there is still much to be explored and discovered about the world around us.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

Pentagon Withholds Images of Unidentified Objects from Recent Shootdowns

The U.S. Department of Defense recently released a photograph taken by a pilot of a U-2 spy plane showing a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the continental U.S. While the image provided unprecedented details of the balloon, the release of the photo has left many wondering about the images showing the three unidentified objects shot down over Alaska, northern Canada, and Lake Huron over the weekend of February 10.

Although the Pentagon has not officially confirmed the presence of images of the incidents, it is not planning on releasing them to the public. A spokesperson for the office of the secretary of defense stated that there are currently no other aerial images available.

The three objects shot down are suspected to have been benign amateur hobbyist or research balloons rather than state-sponsored espionage. However, the “unidentified” status of the objects has fueled public speculation that these could be something more than just wayward hobby balloons.

• UFO Hovering Above First Atomic Test Site Perplexes US Army

Social media users have speculated that the shoot downs were part of a cover-up operation to conceal the truth about the US’ involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. Others have claimed that the objects were alien spacecraft. The lack of debris recovery and images has also been interpreted as part of an attempt by the government to conceal its UFO activities.

It’s believed that the Pentagon obtained some of the captured images and video of the objects before they were shot down. However, it’s not clear if they were able to identify the objects using the jet’s targeting pods.

To investigate the object spotted near Alaska, a couple of F-35 aircraft were launched. These aircraft were equipped with the EOTS, which was designed to provide high-definition and electro-optical images. Unfortunately, the system was not able to capture images of the object. Two F-16C airplanes from Wisconsin’s 148th Fighter Wing were able to shoot down the object. They were equipped with the Sniper ATP, which is a sophisticated targeting pod.

According to the audio recordings of the cockpit conversations of the fighter planes, which were captured by amateur radio users, it’s almost certain that video of the object was taken during the shoot down. However, these descriptions do not provide enough evidence to identify the object.

An aura of mystery will remain over the incident until the Pentagon decides to release the captured images. Although the objects were likely benign, the lack of transparency by the Pentagon has led to various conspiracy theories and speculation.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

President Ronald Reagan Felt Burden Of Knowing Aliens Exist, Sept 1983 United Nations Speech, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of speeches: Sept 16, 1983

Location of speech: United Nations

Below is a video, of US President Reagan speaking at three different engagements, and in each...he tries to leak the truth...that aliens exist. He really tried hard to inform the public, even when he knew it was against national security to do so. 

On Sept 16, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan gave a memorable speech in front of the United Nations. In it, he subtly suggests that aliens exist and that all of humanity could be lost if they decide to attack. 

President Reagan states: 

Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. 

Of course President Reagan had inside information from the CIA and NASA and was told that aliens do exist. But he couldn't just come out and say so without breaking national security rules. So instead...he subtly hinted to the rest of the world leaders about what he had learned from the CIA and NASA. He also knows that a small percentage of the other presidents at the United Nations meeting also knew about the existence of aliens. He even hints at one other president...he talked to the General Secretary Gorbachov...who then later became Russian president. 

Now pondering about world peace is nice...but I feel that President Reagan felt a weight on his shoulders...a burden of carrying this knowledge of the existence of aliens. Remember its was the 1980s and back they the technology was very inferior to today tech marvels. It must have been very frightening for him to know that aliens existed, but to have so few people he could sit down and talk about this subject openly. 

Watch the video below and see. He is trying to tell the world the truth...that aliens exist.
Scott C. Waring 

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{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

The Soviet X-Files: Decoding the Enigma of the Petrozavodsk UFOs

If you are fascinated by the unknown and the unexplained, you might have heard of the UFO sightings over Petrozavodsk, a city in the northwestern part of the Soviet Union (now Russia), in the fall of 1977. The sightings involved multiple witnesses, including military personnel and civilians, who reported seeing strange, glowing, and sometimes pulsating objects in the sky. The objects appeared to move in a controlled manner, sometimes hovering or changing direction abruptly, and emitting bright beams of light. The sightings attracted the attention of both Soviet and international media, as well as ufologists and skeptics, who offered various explanations, ranging from natural phenomena to extraterrestrial visitations.

• Russian General Say's "We Been Summoning UFOs for Over 30 Years"

Official investigations

The Soviet Academy of Sciences launched several investigations into the UFO sightings over Petrozavodsk and other areas, involving scientists, engineers, and military experts. However, the official reports were inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. Some investigators suggested that the sightings might be related to natural phenomena, such as auroras, meteorites, or chemiluminescence, while others proposed that they might be linked to Soviet space missions, rocket tests, or ionospheric experiments. However, none of the hypotheses could fully explain the observed characteristics of the objects, such as their high altitude, speed, maneuverability, and radiation.

Conspiracy theories

Given the lack of consensus among experts and the secrecy of the Soviet regime, the UFO sightings over Petrozavodsk have spawned various conspiracy theories, ranging from the benign to the bizarre. Some theorists have claimed that the objects were extraterrestrial spacecraft, sent by aliens to study or communicate with humanity. Others have suggested that the objects were secret weapons or surveillance devices, developed by the Soviet military or intelligence agencies to spy on the West or intimidate their own citizens. Still, others have speculated that the objects were part of a wider cover-up or disinformation campaign, aimed at confusing or distracting the public from other sensitive issues, such as nuclear tests or political dissent.

• Soviet ancient aliens: The Petrozavodsk Phenomenon – FULL DOCUMENTARY

Conclusion

In conclusion, the UFO sightings over Petrozavodsk and other parts of the Soviet Union remain a mystery, shrouded in secrecy, controversy, and speculation. While some experts have offered natural or human-made explanations, the eyewitness testimonies and the official investigations suggest that the objects were highly unusual and unexplained by conventional means. Whether the sightings were a result of a technological breakthrough, a psychological projection, or an extraterrestrial visit remains a matter of debate and conjecture. The lack of reliable and verifiable data, coupled with the political and ideological context of the Soviet Union, makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction and truth from propaganda. Nevertheless, the UFO sightings over Petrozavodsk continue to fascinate and intrigue people around the world, serving as a reminder of the enduring mystery and wonder of the universe. Whether you are a believer, a skeptic, or something in between, the Petrozavodsk phenomenon invites us to keep an open mind and a curious spirit, and to explore the boundaries of our knowledge and imagination. Who knows what other mysteries and surprises await us in the vastness of the cosmos?

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS -

23-02-2023

The Most Intriguing Signals SETI Ever Detected - The Other Wow Signals

The most intriguing signals SETI ever detected - SHGb02+14a, BLC1 and fast radio bursts. Compare news coverage. Spot media bias. Avoid algorithms.

Try Ground News today and get 35% off your subscription by visiting https://ground.news/astrum

Big black holes in dwarf galaxies on course for smash-up

For the first time, NASA Chandra X-ray telescope has been used to discover a pair of black holes in dwarf galaxies that are on a collision course. The Chandra team explains.

Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart

China and Russia to build a Moon base, laughing at SpaceX&NASA...

It happened! China and Russia to build a Moon base (No SpaceX) ….

In the next decade, an International coalition plans to build a lunar research station to transform humanity's exploration and observation of the moon.
The planning phase is already underway, and it is going well. Construction is slated for 2026 through 2035, and crews could start operating from the base by 2036. The station will feature a lunar orbiter, a large, multi-level, habitat to enable surface-based activities, and play host to several lunar rovers.
If this sounds a lot like the NASA and SpaceX Lunar Gateway program, think again.
The station, called the International Lunar Research Station, is a rival to the U.S. space agency’s plans to put humans permanently on the surface of the Moon within a similar time frame. Instead, the ILRS is the brainchild of China and Russia — two of the U.S.’ greatest rivals on Earth.
" We're in a space race today just as we were in the 1960s. And the stakes are even higher."
Let’s dive into China's Secret Plans to Build A Moon Base and More in today’s episode of Alpha Tech!

On March 9, 2021, Zhang Kejian, the administrator of China National Space Administration (CNSA), and Rogozin, the General Manager of State Space Corporation “Roscosmos” (ROSCOSMOS), signed the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Russian Federation Regarding Cooperation for the Construction of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

Presently, China’s lunar presence includes the Chang’e 4 lander and the Yutu 2 rover, whose arrival in 2019 marked humanity’s first landings on the dark side of the moon. Both lunar crafts is performing scientific experiments, with Chang’e 4 conducting a lunar biosphere experiment to see how silkworms, potatoes, and Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant) seeds grow in lunar gravity, while the Yutu 2 rover is exploring the Von Kármán crater.

China and Russia to build a Moon base, laughing at SpaceX&NASA...

KSP 2: Interstellar, Multiplayer, Colonies and more! Interview with lead developers about the future

Just one more day until launch everyone! For today's KSP 2 video, I sit down with creative director Nate Simpson and senior designer Chris Adderley to ask some questions about what they're most excited about, what features they wish could be ready sooner, and Nate gives us lots of information about how colonies and multiplayer will work! Rest assured, the future is looking very exciting for Kerbal Space Program 2!

Is The Earth In The Wrong Place In The Galaxy?

By now we have no doubt. We are not at the center of the solar system, nor are we at the center of our galaxy... Much less are we at the center of the universe...
One step back at a time, we have finally realized that our planet is just one of many, among billions of billions of others.
Sure, a lucky planet, it seems... favored by exceptional cosmic coincidences...
But are we really sure? For example, are we really sure that the position where the Solar System was formed in the Milky Way is just the absolute best? Could we have found better? Could we have found worse?

Agreed, we are not in a "privileged" position in the universe. But perhaps the fact that we are not is in itself a special thing. Who knows?
But we are not here to philosophize... Our purpose is to try to understand whether Earth's position in the Milky Way may have positively or negatively affected its own development.
We all know that what we call the Milky Way is nothing more than the galaxy that houses our planetary system. In this case, it is a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years in diameter (just to understand what a boundless size we are talking about, one light-year is equivalent to about 63,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). Its basic structure consists of a stellar component compressed into a disk about 1,500 light-years thick--a disk filled with hundreds of billions of stars, dust, and gas, mostly arranged in irregular spiral arms. Globular clusters surround the disk in a spherical swarm concentrated toward the center of the disk

UFO Disguised As the Sun Spotted In The Sky

UFO Disguised As the Sun Spotted In The Sky. A small white light appears to launch from the top of Popocatépetl Volcano, also known as El Popo. Yes, it’s the volcano from the legend. It explodes into a giant ball and looks exactly like the sun but moving at a faster speed. And if you think that this is one of the instances that something strange has been seen over Mexico city, then let us show you what a second camera facing El Popo spotted on a different day.

Blue Origin Reveals MAJOR NEW Breakthrough On The Moon!

Blue Origin Reveals MAJOR NEW Breakthrough On The Moon!

Can a 3-D Printed Rocket Compete With SpaceX? | WSJ

Startup Relativity Space is developing the world's first 3-D printed rocket, which it says is cheaper and quicker to manufacture than conventional rockets. Ahead of the company’s first orbital launch attempt, WSJ visited its California facility to meet founder Tim Ellis.

0:00 Startup Relativity Space is creating new ways to manufacture rockets

0:51 Background on the global commercial space industry

2:47 How Relativity uses 3-D printers to produce rockets faster

3:30 Relativity’s 3-D printers use proprietary metal alloys

3:50 To refine its rocket designs, Relativity uses algorithms and machine learning

4:20 Following Terran-1, Terran-R is the second rocket from Relativity

6:30 Relativity is planning to be first for a commercial mission to Mars, before Space-X

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope spots six massive galaxies that are so old they shouldn't EXIST – in discovery that 'pushes the limits of our understanding of cosmology'

• NASA's new space telescope has found six massive galaxies in the early universe
• Discovery upends what experts previously thought about the origins of galaxies

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

NASA's new super space telescope was built to peer back to the dawn of time and give us clues about how the universe burst into existence.

In less than a year, James Webb has already dazzled us with incredible images — but now it is challenging our very understanding of the origins of galaxies.

That's because the $10 billion (£7.4 billion) observatory has just spotted six massive galaxies in the early universe that are so old they shouldn't actually exist.

'These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,' said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.

'We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.'

Ground-breaking: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has just spotted six massive galaxies in the early universe (pictured) that are so old they shouldn't actually exist. One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way

The researchers said their new discovery 'pushes the limits of our understanding of cosmology' and suggests that galaxies grew massive quicker than expected early in the history of the universe.

'We've been informally calling these objects "universe breakers" — and they have been living up to their name so far,' Leja said.

He added that the galaxies were so big they came into conflict with 99 per cent of the models for cosmology. 

To account for the high mass, it means these models would either have to be changed, or astronomers would have to alter their fundamental understanding of how galaxies formed in the early universe.

Namely, that they started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. 

Whichever way scientists go, Leja said it would require a fundamental rethink about how the universe came to be.

'The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,' said Leja. 

He said the international team of researchers had 'no idea what we were going to find' when they looked at Webb's first batch of data from the early universe.

'It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question,' Leja added.

The new findings show that the six galaxies were as mature as our Milky Way when the universe was just 3 per cent of its current age — about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.

Webb is capable of seeing as far back in time as 13.5 billion years – around two million years after the universe was formed – because it has infrared-sensing instruments that are able to detect light emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. 

Baffling: Researchers said their new discovery suggests that galaxies grew massive quicker than expected early in the history of the universe. These images are a composite of separate exposures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope using its NIRCam instrument

'This is our first glimpse back this far, so it's important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing,' Leja said. 

'While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. 

'Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. 

'Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.'

The research was carried out using the spectroscopic data and Webb's first full-colour images, which were released by NASA in July last year. 

'When we got the data, everyone just started diving in and these massive things popped out really fast,' Leja said. 

'We started doing the modelling and tried to figure out what they were, because they were so big and bright. 

Time machine: Webb (pictured in an artist's impression) is able to see as far back in time as 13.5 billion years – around two million years after the universe was formed – because it has infrared-sensing instruments that are capable of detecting light emitted by the most ancient stars

'My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives. But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying.'

Leja said the way for astronomers to confirm his team's findings would be to take a spectrum image of the massive galaxies. 

This, he added, would provide data on the true distances of the galaxies and also the gasses and other elements they are made of, which in turn would allow experts to create a clearer picture of how massive they truly were.

'A spectrum will immediately tell us whether or not these things are real,' Leja said. 

'It will show us how big they are, how far away they are. What's funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from James Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list. 

'We've found something we never thought to ask the universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are.'

The discovery has been published in the journal Nature.

The James Webb Telescope: NASA's $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a 'time machine' that could help unravel the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

The vast telescope, which has already cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is considered a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of roughly 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).

It is the world's biggest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of peering back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work in tandem for a while. 

The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude. 

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Dust Storms on Mars Generate Static Electricity. What Does This Do to Its Surface?

On Mars, chlorine is considered one of five ” mobile elements,” the others being hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and sulfur. Like Earth’s water cycle (or Titan’s methane cycle), this means that chlorine is transferred between the Martian surface and the atmosphere in different forms. It exists in gaseous form in the atmosphere, while chloride deposits are found across the surface. These deposits are similar to salt pans found across Earth, like the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the Etosha Pan in Namibia, and the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia (the largest in the world).

Similar to Earth, these chloride deposits are likely to be the dried remains of briny patches of water that existed on the surface. It is theorized that they formed from interactions between the surface and atmosphere during the Amazonian period. This geological era extends to this day and is thought to have begun with the end of the Hesperian period (ca. 3 billion years ago) when Mars was still transitioning from a warmer, wetter environment to what we see there today (extremely cold and desiccated).

Since there is no longer exchange between the surface and atmosphere, scientists have wondered how atmospheric chlorine and chloride deposits could be linked. In their new study, Wang (a faculty fellow with the MCSS) and her colleagues demonstrated that electrical discharges caused by dust storms are an efficient way for chlorine exchange between the surface and air. The possibility that dust storms might be a source of reactive chemistry on Mars was first proposed when the Viking 1 and 2 missions landed there in the 1970s.

However, the chemical effects of dust activities were difficult to study since the ESA’s Schiaparelli lander (which would study the phenomenon) crashed on the surface in 2016. As a result, scientists have had to stick with climate modeling and experimental studies, including research that Wang and other planetary scientists have done in recent years. These have shown that when electrostatic discharges interact with chlorine salts in a carbon dioxide-rich environment (like the Martian atmosphere), chlorine gas is released, and perchlorates and carbonates can be generated.

However, this latest study was the first time planetary scientists attempted to quantify how much of these chemicals are produced during Martian dust storms. This was done through a series of experiments at Washington University’s Planetary Environment and Analysis Chamber (PEACh), where the team subjected various common chloride mineral salts to electrical discharges under Mars-like conditions. As Wang indicated in a Washington University (The Source) press release, the results confirmed their theory:

“Frictional electrification is a common process in our Solar System, with Martian dust activities known to be a powerful source of electrical charge buildup. The thin atmosphere on Mars makes it much easier for accumulated electrical fields to break down in the form of electrostatic discharge. In fact, it’s a hundred times easier on Mars than on Earth.

“The reaction rates are huge. Importantly, the released chlorine in a short-time mid-strength electrostatic discharge process is at a percent level. No other process that we know of can do this, especially with such quantitatively high yield of chlorine release.”

During a seven-hour simulated electrostatic discharge experiment, they found that at least 1 out of 100 chloride molecules decomposed and released a chlorine atom. In addition, the electrical discharge also accounted for the very high global concentrations of perchlorate and carbonate compounds in Martian topsoil – though the formation rates were slightly lower (sub-percent per-thousand levels). The experiment also showed that the observed concentration ranges could be accumulated within half of the Amazonian period.

Lastly, the high yields could account for the high atmospheric concentrations of hydrogen chloride observed during the 2018 and 2019 dust storms. Said Kevin Olsen, a research fellow at The Open University and a co-author of the new study:

“The high-releasing rate of chlorine from common chlorides revealed by this study indicates a promising pathway to convert surface chlorides to the gas phases that we now see in the atmosphere. These findings offer support that Martian dust activities can drive a global chlorine cycle. With the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, we see repeated seasonal activity that coincides with global and regional dust storms.”

Another interesting takeaway from this study was how the team theorized what electrostatic discharges might look like on Mars. According to Wang, the discharge would not look like a flash of lightning (as is the case on Earth). Instead, she said, it would be more akin to a glow due to Mars’ thin atmosphere. “It could be somewhat like the aurora in polar regions on Earth, where energetic electrons collide with dilute atmospheric species,” she said.

To date, no robotic missions on Mars, be they landers, rovers, or orbiters, have witnessed an electrical discharge during a dust storm. The glows would likely be obscured by the heavy dust concentrations and not be visible from orbit. Meanwhile, surface missions that rely on solar power are forced to suspend operations in heavy storms to preserve power (as was the case during the recent storm season for the Ingenuity helicopter). But perhaps the nuclear-powered Curiosity or Perseverance rover could get a candid shot of this phenomenon before their missions are complete.

Otherwise, we might have to wait on crewed missions to see one of these “aurora,” which could lead to a Mark Whatney-like situation!

Further Reading: 

• Washington University in St. Louis, Geophysical Research Letters

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{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Clouds of Carbon Dust Seen When the Universe was Less Than a Billion Years Old

The research team comprised astronomers and astrophysicists from multiple universities and institutes worldwide. This included the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, the Cavendish Laboratory, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre, the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), ASTRO 3D, and the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The paper that describes their findings recently appeared online and is being reviewed for publication.

The JADES program is an extragalactic survey and a collaborative effort between the JWST Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument teams. The purpose is to conduct deep parallel mid-infrared imaging and spectroscopy of roughly 100,000 galaxies in two extragalactic deep fields (GOODS-South (CDF-S) and GOODS-North (HDF)). These fields were previously imaged in the optical, infrared, and ultraviolet (UV) bands by the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS).

So far, the JADES survey has pushed the boundaries of astronomy by discovering and confirming galaxies that are about 13.4 billion light-years away – the most distant galaxies ever observed. By comparing these to the optical spectroscopy and morphology of galaxies 10 to 11.5 light-years distant, JADES will reveal more about the early phases of galaxy formation. Of particular concern is the role of cosmic dust – the stuff stars, planets, organic molecules, and all life are made of – and when certain grains formed.

The JWST is particularly well-suited to studying dust grains because of its advanced infrared imaging capabilities. As Dr. Joris Witstok, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology (University of Cambridge), told Universe Today via email:

“Dust grains catalyze the formation of molecules and the fragmentation of gas clouds, two mechanisms that are essential to star formation. Furthermore, while the dust mass of a galaxy is negligible compared to its stellar or gas mass, dust grains absorb a significant fraction of the optical and ultraviolet (UV) light and thermally re-emit the absorbed energy in the infrared (IR).”

An international team of astronomers has used data from the JWST to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date (ca. 13.4 billion years ago).

Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA

Based on the data obtained from these fields, the team observed direct evidence of carbonaceous grains that existed up to one billion years after the Big Bang (ca. over 13 billion years ago). This was evident from the broad UV absorption feature in the deep near-infrared spectra (2175 angstrom). This feature had previously been observed only in older galaxies at redshifts of z=< 3 (less than 11.476 billion years ago). These grains were previously believed to be produced by Red Giant stars over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Said Witstok:

“Most dust formation models typically rely on carbonaceous dust grains being formed in the stellar winds of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, while stars can only reach this evolutionary stage ~300 million years after they form. Therefore, it is surprising to see evidence for carbon dust in such early galaxies, the most distant of which is seen when the age of the Universe was only 800 million years: this implies its star formation started only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang (which, in cosmic timescales, is very early), or instead the carbonaceous dust grains can be formed through another faster mechanism.”

These results imply that a more rapid mechanism was responsible for forming carbonaceous dust grains in the early Universe. As Witstok explained, he and his colleagues suspect that supernovae seeded the early Universe with carbon as they blew off their outer layers. “This has important implications for galaxy evolution because the carbon from which the grains are made are also synthesized by these stars, meaning certain elements may spread through the galaxy more quickly than previously thought,” he said.

Further Reading: 

• arXiv

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

1KM Comet Or UFO Caught By Artemis 1 Cubsat! Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 20, 2023

Location of sighting: Is within the Taurus constellation 

 

This Comet ZTF (AKA) Comet C/2022 E3 doesn't seem to be a comet at all, but looks more like a huge sphere UFO. This was recorded by Japans Artemis cubesat Mission. But I feel that its caught a UFO disguised as a comet. Why? Because it has no long tail behind it, even though its at its closest position to Earth, and very close to our sun. Take a look and tell me your thoughts below. 

Thanks, Scott Waring.

RELATED VIDEOS

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

City In Moon Crater Recorded By Artemis 1 Mission Cubesat, Feb 20, 2023, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Feb 20, 2023, but taken in 2022

Location of discovery: Earths moon
Source: Twitter

 

Check out this latest tweet from the Artemis 1 moon mission when it was tweeted. A cubsat took an awesome photo of the moon and in it was more than they expected and more then they realized. I looked over the photo carefully enlarging it by 3X and found several amazing structures in a crater. The three structures all have signs of intelligent design. They are glowing, and yet they are on the bottom of the crater 2 miles deep or more. That means they have their own light source. They are making the light. The largest structure is a three armed structure and on each arm are about 6-8 round glowing spheres. This is 100% proof that aliens built structures on the moon and it comes from Artemis 1 mission cubsat!

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Antarctica’s Secret Alien Cover-Up

Antarctica is a land of mystery, a place where secrets are kept hidden beneath layers of ice and snow. It is a place where strange things happen, where rumors of alien activity have circulated for years. Could it be that Antarctica is home to an ancient extraterrestrial civilization that has been hidden from us all along?

According to ancient astronaut theorists, there is far more going on in Antarctica than we have been told. The sheer depth of the ice covering the landmass has made it impossible for us to see what lies beneath. But there are those who believe that something is happening on this mysterious continent, something that suggests the presence of an alien base.

In July 2018, Linda Moltenhow interviewed a whistleblower who claimed to have visited an ancient structure in Antarctica. The whistleblower, identified only as Spartan One, described the structure as an octagonal shape protruding from the ice. He claimed that the doors to the structure, which were between 18 and 30 feet thick, could be opened with just one finger, despite the outside temperature being 40 degrees below zero.

• Pictures Mainstream Archaeology Does Not Want You To See

Inside the structure, Spartan One reported that the temperature was an astonishing 68 to 72 degrees, and the walls were lined with hieroglyphics unlike anything he had ever seen before. He speculated that buried beneath the ice in Antarctica could be stone temple constructions and biological remains of beings that once lived there.

Could it be that Antarctica is home to an extraterrestrial civilization that has been hidden from us for thousands of years? If the rumors are true, it would be the greatest reveal in all of human history. It is no surprise that the government and military personnel have kept a tight lid on any information about the possible existence of an alien base in Antarctica.

The idea of ancient aliens and their possible influence on our history and technology has been a topic of debate for many years. The ancient astronaut theory suggests that extraterrestrial beings have visited our planet in the distant past and have had a profound impact on human civilization. Could it be that Antarctica is the key to unlocking this ancient mystery?

While there is no concrete evidence to support the idea of an alien base in Antarctica, the rumors and speculation continue to circulate. It is a place that holds our imagination and fuels our curiosity. The idea that something so incredible could be hidden beneath layers of ice and snow is enough to keep us all wondering what else lies hidden in the depths of this frozen continent.

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

Ancient grammatical puzzle that has baffled scientists for 2,500 years is SOLVED: Expert finally cracks the riddle by decoding a rule taught by 'the father of linguistics' Pāṇini

• Pāṇini was a scholar in India who lived between the 6th and 4th century BC
• Cambridge researcher has decoded a rule in Pāṇini's 'language machine'
• The language machine teaches the pronunciation of the Sanskrit language 
• It means Pāṇini’s grammar can be taught to computers for the first time

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

A grammatical puzzle that has defeated scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved.

Dr Rishi Rajpopat, an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge, has decoded a rule that devised by 'the father of linguistics' Pāṇini. 

The rule is a fundamental part of an ingenious grammatical system created by Pāṇini, called the 'language machine', intended to teach India's sacred Sanskrit language. 

Dr Rajpopat's efforts, detailed in his PhD thesis published today, now mean Pāṇini’s language machine can be taught to computers for the first time. 

Pāṇini's ingenious grammatical system - 4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500BC – is meant to work like a machine 

Who was Pāṇini?

Pāṇini was a philologist, grammarian and scholar in ancient India, who lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC. 

His 'language machine' is widely considered to be one of the great intellectual achievements in history.

It was detailed in his revered work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, thought to have been written around 500BC. 

'It's one document and all it's got is 4,000 very short rules,' Dr Rajpopat told MailOnline.

'Each rule is about three to four words on average. What these 4,000 rules do is they help us derive any word of Sanskrit. 

'These 4,000 rules essentially function together as a machine.' 

Dr Rajpopat refers to it as a conceptual machine rather than a physical machine. 

The purpose of the language machine is 'derivation' – the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it (e.g., 'hope' to 'hopeful' or 'combine' to 'combination'). 

To give an example in English, a user would take the base word 'define' and the affix 'ation' and give the resulting word to use – 'definition'.

The thing is, when combining a base word and an affix, there are sound differences that need to be accounted for, otherwise it would give a nonsensical word like 'define-ation' (pronounced def-ine-ey-shun).   

Dr Rishi Rajpopat (pictured) made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by 'the father of linguistics' Pāṇini

The 4,000 rules that make up Pāṇini's system effectively help users produce grammatically-correct forms of words. 

Each rule has a serial number, based on its order in the document – for example, 7.3.103.  

In case a user found that two of these rules were applicable – a situation known as 'rule conflict' – Pāṇini created one 'metarule' to help users decide which of the two rules should be applied. 

Dr Rajpopat names Pāṇini’s metarule '1.4.2 vipratiṣedhe paraṁ kāryam'. 

Until now, the meaning of this 'metarule' was widely misinterpreted for around 2,500 years, leading to grammatically incorrect results.

'Unfortunately the first scholar to comment on Pāṇini's grammar, Katyayana, misunderstood this metarule,' Dr Rajpopat said. 

'He was familiar with two possible interpretations of this rule and unfortunately he chose the wrong one.

'Thereafter, all the scholars to write about Pāṇini's grammar over the last 2,500 years essentially went ahead with that incorrect interpretation.' 

Pāṇini was a philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India, who lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC. Pāṇini is thought to have lived in a region in what is now north-west Pakistan and south-east Afghanistan

The traditional but incorrect interpretation of rule 1.4.2 is that when there is a conflict between two rules, the rule with a higher serial order should be chosen or 'wins' (for example, 7.3.103 rather than 7.1.9).

'Now that of course gives us all kind of grammatically incorrect forms if we are to go by that interpretation,' Dr Rajpopat said.

'I reinterpreted this rule as in the event of such interaction between two rules at the same step, the rule that is applicable to the right-hand part of the word wins. 

'That has helped us figure out the algorithm that runs this machine, so now when you follow the correct interpretation of this rule you automatically get the correct answer.'  

Unlike scholars before him, Dr Rajpopat correctly interpreted one of the 4,000-odd rules that make up the so-called 'language machine'. Pictured is his interpretation of the rule, which is referred to when there is 'rule conflict' 

For the last 2,500 years, scholars laboriously developed hundreds of other metarules to try and fix the system and make it work – even though the system wasn't broken. 

'They had to come up with all kinds of extra instructions to help the grammar achieve the grammatically correct form,' Dr Rajpopat told MailOnline. 

'Pāṇini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine unrivalled in human history. He didn’t expect us to add new ideas to his rules. 

'The more we fiddle with Pāṇini's grammar, the more it eludes us.'

Dr Rajpopat’s work means we have a 'very elegant, simple, teachable' algorithm that runs Pāṇini's grammar, which could potentially be taught to computers. 

Professor Vincenzo Vergiani, Dr Rajpopat’s supervisor at Cambridge, said: 'This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.' 

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Pāṇini's 'language machine: A revered system for using the ancient Sanskrit language

Pāṇini’s language machine is a reference document for how to use the Sanskrit, a classical Indian language, consisting of a checklist of about 4,000 rules.  

The system – 4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500BC – is meant to work like a machine. 

Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process.

Until now, however, there has been a big problem. Often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step leaving scholars to agonise over which one to choose.

Solving so-called 'rule conflicts', which affect millions of Sanskrit words including certain forms of ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’, requires an algorithm. 

Pāṇini taught a metarule ('1.4.2 vipratiṣedhe paraṁ kāryam’) to help us decide which rule should be applied in the event of 'rule conflict'. 

But for the last 2,500 years, scholars have misinterpreted this metarule meaning that they often ended up with a grammatically incorrect result.

In an attempt to fix this issue, many scholars laboriously developed hundreds of other metarules but Dr Rishi Rajpopat, an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge, found these are not just incapable of solving the problem at hand.

Dr Rajpopat found that Pāṇini’s 'language machine' is 'self-sufficient'. 

Rajpopat said: 'Pāṇini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine unrivalled in human history. 

'He didn’t expect us to add new ideas to his rules. The more we fiddle with Pāṇini's grammar, the more it eludes us.”

Traditionally, scholars have interpreted Pāṇini’s metarule as meaning: in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins - but Dr Rajpopat rejects this

Instead, he claims the rule has the following meaning: between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. 

Employing this interpretation, Rajpopat found Pāṇini’s language machine produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.

Source: University of Cambridge  

Read more:

• In Pāṇini We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Aṣṭādhyāy�

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