Ancient Egyptian Blue Pigment Revolutionizes Biomedicine
A German research team has produced new nanosheets for near infrared imaging from ancient ‘Egyptian blue pigment’.
In October 2018, I wrote an Ancient Origins article about Egyptian blue, a brilliant blue color first created in ancient Egypt over 4000 years ago and used to adorn the crown of the world famous bust of Nefertiti. A team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has now found the ancient color holds unique qualities that can not only reduce building energy consumption and boost solar energy output, but it also “increases the output of certain types of solar cells, through strong infra-red emissions.”
The international research team was led by Dr Sebastian Kruss from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Göttingen , and in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications detailing their production of a new “nanomaterial” based on the Egyptian blue pigment. The researchers say Egyptian blue is ideally suited for applications in imaging using “near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and microscopy,” which according to Zeiss is based on the absorption of electromagnetic (EM) radiation when light interacts with a sample and a detector measures its transmittance and absorbance.
Egyptian blue, or properly, “calcium copper silicate,” is one of the earliest artificial pigments created by humans and the oldest known sample is from about 5000 years old, discovered in a tomb painting dated to the reign of Ka-Sen, the last pharaoh of the First Dynasty.
By the time of the New Kingdom, Egyptian blue pigment was an extremely popular and painted onto statues, tomb paintings and sarcophagi. It was also used to produce a ceramic glaze known as ‘Egyptian faience’. And the manufacture of Egyptian blue spread beyond Egypt’s borders across Greece and Rome, leaving its trace on statues from the Parthenon in Athens, and according to an article in Art in Society , 19th century archaeologists discovered Egyptian blue pigment on wall paintings during excavations at Pompeii.
Egyptian blue pigment shabti figures on display in the Egyptian exhibit at the Louvre in France in 2006.
(sataikasia / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 )
Dr. Kruss said microscopy and optical imaging are important tools in basic research and biomedicine, when light relating substances are excited and release “fluorophores” and these substances stain tiny structures in samples, enabling clear resolution using modern microscopes.
Most fluorophores shine in the range of light in the near infrared spectrum with a wavelength starting at “800 nanometers,” penetrating deep into tissue, therefore, fewer distortions are found in images. And so far, according to the new paper, there are only a few known fluorophores that work in the near infrared spectrum.
The research team’s big achievement was in exfoliating extremely thin layers from grains of calcium copper silicate, Egyptian blue pigment, and these particular nanosheets are “100,000 times thinner than a human hair” and in the near infrared range, which according to Dr Sebastian Kruss, makes them “ideal for optical imaging.”
Near-infrared image of nanosheets taken from a plant.
Egyptian blue emits infrared light when red light is shone onto it, and while it’s an extraordinarily powerful and long-lived light, it cannot be seen by the naked eye, being too deep in the infrared range of the light spectrum.
The scientists followed the movement of individual nanosheets in order to visualize mechanical processes in the structure of animal and plant tissues, for example, in the cell nuclei of the fruit fly. Furthermore, the researchers integrated the nanosheets into plants and identified them without a microscope, which the paper says promises future applications in the agricultural industry. And Dr Kruss said the potential for state-of-the-art microscopy from this material means that new findings in biomedical research can be expected in the future.
Egyptian blue has a new role in advanced biomedical imaging with its near-infrared radiation being able to penetrate through tissue more effectively than other wavelengths, and for this same reason, because Egyptian blue splits into ‘nanosheets’ – a thousand times thinner than a human hair – if stirred in warm ater for several days, it might serve as a future communication system as its emissions are similar to those used in remote controls and telecommunication devices.
By Ashley Cowie
A large asteroid ignored social distancing norms over the weekend
An asteroid as wide as a football field passed through the neighborhood.
Public health officials advise keeping 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from others during the coronavirus pandemic to avoid potential risks. Astronomers also have a standard distance at which an asteroid is considered "potentially hazardous," and on Sunday a space rock as wide as a football field whipped by us 50 times closer than that threshold.
We obviously have enough to worry about right now, so you can breathe easier knowing that despite coming very close by space standards, there was never any threat the asteroid known simply as 2020 FL2 was going to hit Earth. It passed by Sunday at a distance of 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers).
Northolt Branch Obs@NBObservatoriesApollo-type asteroid 2020 FL2. Diamter 15-34m. First observed at Purple Mountain Observatory. Close approach, yesterday, 145,000km. 2020 FL2 was moving at a rapid 1,800 arc-minutes per hour. #SpotTheAsteroid@AsteroidDay @NEOShieldTeam @QHYCCD @RoyalAstroSoc
For a little context, NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is located about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, the moon is 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away and many large satellites orbit at an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers). The threshold at which a large asteroid comes close enough to earn the label "potentially hazardous" and warrant monitoring by astronomers is about 4.5 million miles (7.2 million kilometers).
So 2020 FL2's close flyby is kind of like the solar system equivalent of tying a bunch of boats together for a spring break party during a time when everyone with a brain is calling for social distancing to stop the spread of a pandemic. The difference, I suppose, is that the huge asteroid flying above us at 45,000 mph (72,420 km/h) doesn't actually pose a threat to anyone.
John Huddy@JohnHuddyTVMiami party boat and yacht charters still operating. Plenty of jam packed yachts on Biscayne Bay yesterday. Social distancing be damned indeed.
Social distancing be damned: Miami sandbar jampacked despite coronavirus ordershttps://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241404096.html …
Social distancing be damned: Miami sandbar jampacked despite coronavirus orders
UPDATE: After this story published Saturday night, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced the closure of all marinas and boat ramps countywide. He added that the Miami-Dade Police Departm...
miamiherald.com
2020 FL2 was significantly bigger than most asteroids that pass within the moon's orbit, measuring at between 49 and 112 feet (15-34 meters) across. Normally the space rocks that come close are more like the size of a house appliance or a small vehicle and would likely burn up in our atmosphere if they did impact Earth.
This asteroid, however, is more on par with the asteroid that wasn't detected until it was exploding in the sky over Russia in 2013, blowing out thousands of windows in the process.
But again, asteroid 2020 FL2 has already passed by us safely. So please go back to whatever you were doing, as long as you don't do it within 6 feet of me or anyone I know.
It's Not an Alien, Says NASA for Millionth Time
So what's the strange smudge on this camera image?
For the millionth time, NASA has issued a statement assuring UFO buffs that what they've seen in an image is not, in fact, an alien.
This time, it was a tiny, pinwheel-shaped smudge in an image snapped by the agency's STEREO camera that captured the interest of extraterrestrial enthusiasts.
NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Mission is comprised of twin spacecraft that launched in 2006 to study the sun and its weather. Only one of the mission's spacecraft is still operating today.
"The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image," the STEREO team wrote in the statement. "At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-A field-of-view from the left. Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector."
The object, the note continues, is actually a reflection of the planet within the telescope's optics and is a common occurrence. You can actually see the same shape crop up on otherreadings here and here.
|
| Internal reflections of the planet Earth, as seen in the HI2-B telescope on May 5, 2007. Also visible are the Moon, and the planet Mars. Click on the image to see the full-sized version. |
The group also released a graphic explaining what exactly you're seeing in the image.
Maybe you'll have better luck next time, Agent Mulder.
Quasar tsunamis rip across galaxies
Astronomers using the Hubble Telescope found that the region around a quasar’s black hole pushes out material at a few percent the speed of light. These quasar tsunamis wreak havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Artist’s concept of a distant quasar. They’re thought to have supermassive black holes at their cores; they generate energy via infalling matter. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that radiation pressure from a supermassive black hole pushes material away from its galaxy’s center at a fraction of the speed of light. The quasar winds are propelling hundreds of times our sun’s mass outward every year, affecting the whole galaxy as the material snowplows into surrounding gas and dust.
Image via NASA/ ESA/ J. Olmsted/ HubbleSite.
A series of six papers published in March 2020 in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Supplements outlines this new research. Ann Jenkins and Ray Villard, both of HubbleSite, explain.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. They emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space like tsunamis, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Quasars are extremely remote celestial objects, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy. Quasars contain supermassive black holes fueled by infalling matter that can shine 1,000 times brighter than their host galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars.
As the black hole devours matter, hot gas encircles it and emits intense radiation, creating the quasar. Winds, driven by blistering radiation pressure from the vicinity of the black hole, push material away from the galaxy’s center. These outflows accelerate to breathtaking velocities that are a few percent of the speed of light. Principal investigator Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, said:
No other phenomenon carries more mechanical energy. Over the lifetime of 10 million years, these outflows produce a million times more energy than a gamma-ray burst. The winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year. The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
The quasar winds snowplow across the galaxy’s disk. Material that otherwise would have formed new stars is violently swept from the galaxy, causing star birth to cease. Radiation pushes the gas and dust to far greater distances than scientists previously thought, creating a galaxy-wide event.
As this cosmic tsunami slams into interstellar material, the temperature at the shock front spikes to billions of degrees, where material glows largely in X-rays, but also widely across the light spectrum. Anyone witnessing this event would see a brilliant celestial display. Arav said:
You’ll get lots of radiation first in X-rays and gamma rays, and afterwards it will percolate to visible and infrared light. You’d get a huge light show – like Christmas trees all over the galaxy.
Numerical simulations of galaxy evolution suggest that such outflows can explain some important cosmological puzzles, such as why astronomers observe so few large galaxies in the universe, and why there is a relationship between the mass of the galaxy and the mass of its central black hole. This study shows that such powerful quasar outflows should be prevalent in the early universe. Cosmologist Jeremiah P. Ostriker, of Columbia University in New York and Princeton University in New Jersey, commented:
Both theoreticians and observers have known for decades that there is some physical process that shuts off star formation in massive galaxies, but the nature of that process has been a mystery. Putting the observed outflows into our simulations solves these outstanding problems in galactic evolution.
Astronomers studied 13 quasar outflows, and they were able to clock the breakneck speed of gas being accelerated by the quasar wind by looking at spectral “fingerprints” of light from the glowing gas. The Hubble ultraviolet data show that these light absorption features created from material along the path of the light were shifted in the spectrum because of the fast motion of the gas across space. This is due to the Doppler effect, where the motion of an object compresses or stretches wavelengths of light depending on whether it is approaching or receding from us.
Aside from measuring the most energetic quasars ever observed, the team also discovered another outflow accelerating faster than any other. It increased from nearly 43 million miles per hour (70 million kilometers per hour) to roughly 46 million mph (74 million kph) in a three-year period. The scientists believe its acceleration will continue to increase over time. Team member Gerard Kriss of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said:
Hubble’s ultraviolet observations allow us to follow the whole range of energy output from quasars, from cooler gas to the extremely hot, highly ionized gas in the more massive winds. These were previously only visible with much more difficult X-ray observations. Such powerful outflows may yield new insights into the link between the growth of a central supermassive black hole and the development of its entire host galaxy.
'Einstein's Biggest Blunder' May Have Finally Been Fixed
The cosmological constant has plagued physicists for more than a century.
There is a fundamental problem in physics.
A single number, called the cosmological constant, bridges the microscopic world of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world of Einstein's theory of general relativity. But neither theory can agree on its value.
In fact, there's such a huge discrepancy between the observed value of this constant and what theory predicts that it is widely considered the worst prediction in the history of physics. Resolving the discrepancy may be the most important goal of theoretical physics this century.
Lucas Lombriser, an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has introduced a new way of evaluating Albert Einstein's equations of gravity to find a value for the cosmological constant that closely matches its observed value. He published his method online in the Oct. 10 issue of the journal Physics Letters B.
The story of the cosmological constant began more than a century ago when Einstein presented a set of equations, now known as the Einstein field equations, that became the framework of his theory of general relativity. The equations explain how matter and energy warp the fabric of space and time to create the force of gravity. At the time, both Einstein and astronomers agreed that the universe was fixed in size and that the overall space between galaxies did not change. However, when Einstein applied general relativity to the universe as a whole, his theory predicted an unstable universe that would either expand or contract. To force the universe to be static, Einstein tacked on the cosmological constant.
Nearly a decade later, another physicist, Edwin Hubble, discovered that our universe is not static, but expanding. The light from distant galaxies showed they were all moving away from each other. This revelation persuaded Einstein to abandon the cosmological constant from his field equations as it was no longer necessary to explain an expanding universe. Physics lore has it that Einstein later confessed that his introduction of the cosmological constant was perhaps his greatest blunder.
In 1998, observations of distant supernovas showed the universe wasn't just expanding, but the expansion was speeding up. Galaxies were accelerating away from each other as if some unknown force was overcoming gravity and shoving those galaxies apart. Physicists have named this enigmatic phenomenon dark energy, as its true nature remains a mystery.
In a twist of irony, physicists once again reintroduced the cosmological constant into Einstein's field equations to account for dark energy. In the current standard model of cosmology, known as ΛCDM (Lambda CDM), the cosmological constant is interchangeable with dark energy. Astronomers have even estimated its value based on observations of distant supernovas and fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Although the value is absurdly small (on the order of 10^-52 per square meter), over the scale of the universe, it is significant enough to explain the accelerated expansion of space.
"The cosmological constant [or dark energy] currently constitutes about 70% of the energy content in our universe, which is what we can infer from the observed accelerated expansion that our universe is presently undergoing. Yet this constant is not understood," Lombriser said. "Attempts to explain it have failed, and there seems to be something fundamental that we are missing in how we understand the cosmos. Unraveling this puzzle is one of the major research areas in modern physics. It is generally anticipated that resolving the issue may lead us to a more fundamental understanding of physics."
The cosmological constant is thought to represent what physicists call "vacuum energy." Quantum-field theory states that even in a completely empty vacuum of space, virtual particles pop in and out of existence and create energy — a seemingly absurd idea, but one that has been observed experimentally. The problem arises when physicists attempt to calculate its contribution to the cosmological constant. Their result differs from observations by a mind-boggling factor of 10^121 (that's 10 followed by 120 zeroes), the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of physics.
Such a disparity has caused some physicists to doubt Einstein's original equations of gravity; some have even suggested alternative models of gravity. However, further evidence of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have only strengthened general relativity and dismissed many of these alternative theories. Which is why instead of rethinking gravity, Lombriser took a different approach to solve this cosmic puzzle.
"The mechanism I propose does not modify Einstein's field equations," Lombriser said. Instead, "it adds an additional equation on top of Einstein's field equations."
The gravitational constant, which was first used in Isaac Newton's laws of gravity and now an essential part of Einstein's field equations, describes the magnitude of the gravitational force between objects. It is considered one of the fundamental constants of physics, eternally unchanged since the beginning of the universe. Lombriser has made the dramatic assumption that this constant can change.
In Lombriser's modification of general relativity, the gravitational constant remains the same within our observable universe but may vary beyond it. He suggests a multiverse scenario where there may be patches of the universe invisible to us that have different values for the fundamental constants.
This variation of gravity gave Lombriser an additional equation that relates the cosmological constant to the average sum of matter across space-time. After he accounted for the estimated mass of all the galaxies, stars and dark matter of the universe, he could solve that new equation to obtain a new value for the cosmological constant — one that closely agrees with observations.
Using a new parameter, ΩΛ (omega lambda), that expresses the fraction of the universe made of dark matter, he found the universe is made up of about 74% dark energy. This number closely matches the value of 68.5% estimated from observations — a tremendous improvement over the huge disparity found by quantum field theory.
Although Lombriser's framework might solve the cosmological constant problem, there’s currently no way to test it. But in the future, if experiments from other theories validate his equations, it could mean a major leap in our understanding of dark energy and provide a tool to solve other cosmic mysteries.
Originally published on Live Science.
The Atmosphere of Uranus Is Literally Leaking Gas Into Space
Poor old Uranus just can't seem to catch a break. Something already tipped the planet on its side, so its orbit is perpendicular to those of the other Solar System planets. It probably smells terrible. And now scientists have discovered that the atmosphere of Uranus is leaking out into space.
Hidden in the data from Voyager 2's historic 1986 encounter with the icy planet, and undiscovered until now, was the presence of a plasmoid - a pocket of atmospheric material being funnelled away from Uranus by the planet's magnetic field.
It's the first time a plasmoid has been spotted in connection with an ice giant, and it doesn't just show us that Uranus' atmosphere is leaking. It's also revealing some of the dynamics of this planet's peculiar, twisted magnetic field.
Actually, leaky atmospheres aren't that uncommon. It's called atmospheric escape, and it's how Mars, for example, turned from what we think was quite a damp planet into a dusty barren wasteland. Venus is leaking hydrogen. Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Titan are leaking. Even Earth is losing about 90 tonnes of atmospheric material a day (don't worry, we have around 5,140 trillion tonnes, it will take a long time to completely disappear).
(David Stern, Reviews of Geophysics, 1996)
There are several mechanisms whereby this can occur, and one of those is through plasmoids. These are large, cylindrical bubbles of plasma - ionised gas - bound by magnetic field lines streaming away from the Sun, the region known as the magnetotail. The image above shows what that looks like for Earth.
Ions from the atmosphere are channelled along the magnetic field into this region. When the solar wind causes the magnetic field to break at the side facing the Sun - the bow shock - they whip around and reconnect in the tail, pinching off spinning plasmoids. Some of the ions bounce back towards the planet (producing, on Earth, auroras), and the plasmoid hurtles off in the opposite direction, taking the atmospheric ions with it.
For Earth, that's pretty straightforward and well understood. And there's evidence solar wind tears plasmoids off Mars on a daily basis in a slightly different fashion, since Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field.
But Uranus is a tricky beast of a planet, and let's be honest, its magnetic field is a straight-up mess.
Where Earth's magnetic field is more or less consistent with the planet's orientation, Uranus' is all twisted sideways, with the magnetic poles angled 59 degrees away from the geographic poles. And it's not even centred. If you were to draw a line between those two poles, it would miss the centre of Uranus by quite a large distance.
There's even evidence to suggest that the magnetic field opens at night and closes during the day. Seriously, look at this. Who came up with this.
(Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
It was this mess of a magnetic field that drew the attention of astronomers Gina DiBraccio and Dan Gershman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who were planning potential planetary missions and thought this particular oddity would be a good starting point.
They were studying the data collected by Voyager 2's magnetometer in January 1986 in higher resolution than any previous research when they noticed a wiggle in the data, a blip in the magnetic field.
They processed the data and came to the conclusion that, yep. Even though Uranus has a weirdly skewed, wobbly magnetic field, that blip did indeed represent a plasmoid, roughly 204,000 kilometres in length and 400,000 kilometres across (127,000 by 250,000 miles), likely full of ionised hydrogen, moving away from the planet.
And this reveals some new information about that magnetic field. According to the researchers' analysis, it shows that Uranus' magnetic field reconnects at the tail, like Earth's. It also suggests that internal forces play a role in the planet's magnetic dynamics.
And, of course, it reveals a mechanism whereby Uranus could be losing a substantial amount of mass, transported away by plasmoids.
The Voyager data used for this analysis is over two decades old, so the researchers suggest the best way to find out more is to send another probe to check it all out.
"The nature of magnetospheric circulation and mass-loss processes remain outstanding and essential topics at both Uranus and Neptune," they wrote in their paper.
"In order to definitively determine the relative contributions of planetary rotation and solar wind forcing in driving global plasma dynamics, new in situ measurements will be necessary. Until then, the enigmatic ice giant magnetospheres await further exploration."
Navy Seal Whistleblower! Inside Intel - New Project Camelot Interview!(1).jpg)
Robert has a fascinating life story that brought him face to face with the Committee of 300, the ET Controllers and more. He was a Navy Seal who ended up working for Bush Sr. and John McCain and has traveled in some very dark circles.
ROBERT WIEGAND – NAVY SEAL – INSIDE INTEL
Other videos, selected by peter2011
Ancient Acoustic Levitation is Evident in Egyptian, Mayan, Incan and Indian Cultures
COAST TO COAST AM –
Douglas Stearns argued that the ancients had access to advanced sound technology, which is expressed in the similar architecture and building techniques seen in Egyptian, Mayan, Incan, Indian, and other cultures separated by time and distance.
The ancients were masters of resonance and vibration, changing sound frequencies to alter the atomic forms of matter, he hypothesized, and this was how they created levitation or antigravity technology such as when the Egyptians moved giant and numerous blocks of stone to build the pyramids.
Old gas blob from Uranus found in vintage Voyager 2 data
Buried inside data that NASA's iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet's gassy atmosphere.
That's according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the spacecraft's 45-hour journey past Uranus.
The tiny wobble in the Voyager 2 data represents something much larger since the spacecraft was flying so fast. Specifically, the scientists behind the new research believe the zigzag marks a plasmoid, a type of structure that wasn't understood particularly well at the time of the flyby in January 1986.
But by now, plasmoids have earned scientists' respect. A plasmoid is a massive bubble of plasma, which is a soup of charged particles. Plasmoids can break off from the tip of the sleeve of magnetism surrounding a planet like a teardrop.
Scientists have studied these structures at Earth and nearby planets, but never at Uranus or its neighbor Neptune, since Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to date ever to visit those planets.
Scientists want to know about plasmoids because these structures can pull charged particles out of a planet's atmosphere and fling them into space. And if you change a planet's atmosphere, you change the planet itself. And Uranus' situation is particularly complicated because the planet rotates on its side and its magnetic field is skewed from both that axis and the plane all the planets lie in.
Because Voyager 2 flew straight through this plasmoid, scientists could use the archived data to measure the structure, which they believe was about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) across and could have stretched 127,000 miles (204,000 km) long, according to a NASA statement.
Ideally, scientists would piece together more observations of Uranus' magnetic field, enough to better understand how this phenomenon has shaped the planet over time. But that will require another spacecraft visit the strange sideways world.
The research is described in a paper published in August in the journal Geophysical Review Letters. NASA announced the finding on Wednesday (March 25).
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Welcome to the future: 11 ideas that went from science fiction to reality
These modern-day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time.
Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like "Back to the Future" and "Total Recall," are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality.
From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"
It's something that almost everyone has in their pockets. Mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of remarkable features. The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, the Motorola DynaTAC. It was a bulky thing that weighed 2.4 lbs. (1.1 kilograms) and had a talk time of about 35 minutes. It also cost thousands of dollars.
The Motorola DynaTAC was invented by Martin Cooper, who led a team that created the phone in just 90 days. A long-standing rumor was that Cooper got his inspiration from an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk used his hand-held communications device. However, Cooper stated in a 2015 interview that the original inspiration was from a comic strip called Dick Tracy, in which the character used a "wrist two-way radio."
From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"
While exploring space, characters such as Captain Kirk and Spock would come across alien life who spoke a different language. To understand the galactic foreigners, the Star Trek characters used a device that immediately translated the alien's unusual language. Star Trek's universal communicator was first seen on screen as Spock tampered with it in order to communicate with a non-biological entity (Series 2 Episode 9, Metamorphosis).
Although the idea in Star Trek was to communicate with intelligent alien life, a device capable of breaking down language barriers would revolutionize real-time communication. Now, products such as Sourcenext's Pocketalk and Skype's new voice translation service are capable of providing instantaneous translation between languages. Flawless real-time communication is far off, but the technological advancements over the last decade mean this feat is within reach.
From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"
The idea behind "beaming" someone up was that a person could be broken down into an energy form (dematerialization) and then converted back into matter at their destination (rematerialization). Transporting people this way on Star Trek's USS Enterprise had been around since the very beginning of the series, debuting in the pilot episode.
Scientists haven't figured out how to teleport humans yet, but they can teleport balls of energy known as photons. In this case, teleportation is based on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. This refers to a condition in quantum mechanics where two entangled particles may be very far from one another, yet remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, regardless of distance. The information exchange between the two photons occurs at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light.
From: "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope"
Not long into the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi receives a holographic message. By definition, a hologram is a 3D image created from the interference of light beams from a laser onto a 2D surface, and can only be seen in one angle.
In 2018, researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, created a real hologram. Their technique, called volumetric display, works like an Etch-A-Sketch toy, but uses particles at high speeds. With lasers, researchers can trap particles and move them into a designated shape while another set of lasers emit red, green and blue light onto the particle and create an image. But so far, this can only happen on extremely small scales.
From: "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back"
Imagine getting your hand chopped off by your own father and falling to the bottom of a floating building to then have your long-lost sister come and pick you up. It's unlikely in reality, but not in the Star Wars movies. After losing his hand, Luke Skywalker receives a bionic version that has all the functions of a normal hand. This scenario is now more feasible than the previous one.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, have been developing a way for amputees to control each of their prosthetic fingers using an ultrasonic sensor. In the movie, Skywalker's prosthesis uses electromyogram sensors attached to his muscles. The sensors can be switched into different modes and are controlled by the flexing or contracting of his muscles. The prosthesis created by the Georgia Tech researchers, however, uses machine learning and ultrasound signals to detect fine finger-by-finger movement.
Director Ridley Scott presents a landscape shot of futuristic Los Angeles in the movie "Blade Runner." While scanning the skyscrapers, a huge, digital, almost-cinematic billboard appears on one of the buildings. This pre-internet concept sparked the imagination of Andrew Phipps Newman, the CEO of DOOH.com. DOOH — which stands for Digital Out Of Home — is a company dedicated to providing live, dynamic advertisements through the use of digital billboards. The company is now at the forefront of advertising as it offers a more enticing form; one that will make people stop and stare.
Digital billboards have come a long way since DOOH was founded in 2013. They have taken advantage of crowded cities, such as London and New York, to utilize this unique advertising tactic. Perhaps the more recent "Blade Runner 2049" will bring us even more new technologies.
From: "Blade Runner"
The "Blade Runner" story heavily revolves around the idea of synthetic humans, which require artificial intelligence (AI). Some people might be worried about the potential fallout of giving computers intelligence, which has had disastrous consequences in many science-fiction works. But AI has some very useful applications in reality. For instance, astronomers have trained machines to find exoplanets using computer-based learning techniques. While sifting through copious amounts of data collected by missions such as NASA's Kepler and TESS missions, AI can identify the telltale signs of an exoplanet lurking in the data.
From: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Orbiting Earth in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is Space Station V, a large establishment located in low-Earth orbit where astronauts can bounce around in microgravity. Does this sound familiar?
The Space Station V provided inspiration for the International Space Station (ISS), which has been orbiting the Earth since 1998 and currently accommodates up to six astronauts at a time. Although Space Station V appears much more luxurious, the ISS has accomplished much more science. The ISS has been fundamental to microgravity research since the start of its construction in 1998.
The Space Station V wasn't just an out-of-this-world holiday experience, it was also employed as a pit-stop before traveling to the Moon and other long-duration space destinations. The proposed Deep Space Gateway would be a station orbiting the moon that would serve a similar purpose.
From: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Tablets are wonderful handheld computers that can be controlled at the press of a finger. These handy devices are used by people across the globe, and even further upwards on the ISS. Apple claims to have invented the tablet with the release of its iPad. However, Samsung made an extremely interesting case in court that Apple was wrong: Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur C. Clarke did, by including the device in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.
In the film, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole watch news updates from their flat-screen computers, which they called "newspads." Samsung claimed that these "newspads" were the original tablet, featured in a film over 40 years before the first iPad arrived in 2010. This argument was not successful though, as the judge ruled that Samsung could not utilize this particular piece of evidence.
From: "Back to the Future Part II"
The Back to the Future trilogy is a highly enjoyable trio of time-traveling adventures, but it is Part II that presents the creators' vision of 2015. The film predicted a far more outlandish 2015 than what actually happened just five years ago, but it got one thing correct: hoverboards, just like the one Marty McFly "borrows" to make a quick escape.
Although they aren't as widespread as the film perceives, hoverboards now exist. The first real one was created in 2015 by Arx Pax, a company based in California. The company invented the Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA™) used to provide the levitation of a hoverboard. The board generates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an eddy current, which then creates another opposing magnetic field. These magnetic fields repel each other against a copper "hoverpark" that provides lift.
From: "Total Recall"
In the 1990 film, set in 2084, Total Recall's main protagonist Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) finds himself in the middle of a sci-fi showdown on Mars. In one scene Quaid is on the run from the bad guys and jumps into a driverless car. In the front is "Johnny Cab," which is the car's on-board computer system. All Johnny needs is an address to take the car to its intended destination.
Although the driverless car wasn't seen in action before the protagonist yells profanities and takes over the driving, the idea of having a car that takes you to your destination using its onboard satellite navigation has become increasingly popular. The company at the forefront of driverless cars is Waymo, as they want to eradicate the human error and inattention that results in dangerous and fatal accidents.
In 2017, NASA stated its intentions to help in the production of driverless cars, as they would improve the technologies of robotic vehicles on extraterrestrial surfaces such as the Moon or Mars.
Additional resources:
This article was adapted from a previous version published in All About Space magazine, a Future Ltd. publication.
Email Lee Cavendish at lee.cavendish@futurenet.com.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Oldest Ancestor of All Living Creatures Discovered in Australia
You may want to plan to get a second Mother’s Day and Father’s Day card this year – scientists have discovered the single living creature that all living creatures on Earth descended from. And, in case you’re just filling out your U.S. census form, your original nationality is Australian, mate!
“This organism is consistent with predictions based on modern animal phylogenetics that the last ancestor of all bilaterians was simple and small and represents a rare link between the Ediacaran and the subsequent record of animal life.”
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Scott Evans, a recent doctoral graduate from University of California, Riverside, and Professor Mary Droser, a professor of geology at the school, describe leading a team of researchers to Nilpena, South Australia, where fossilized burrows found in 555 million-year-old Ediacaran Period deposits were believed to have been made by bilaterians – animals whose bodies have a bilateral symmetry — a left and a right side that are mirror images of each other – as well as a front, a back, a head and a gut. If this looks familiar, you’re probably looking in a mirror. Scientists believe bilaterians are the ancestors of all living creatures and this Ediacara Biota– the oldest known complex animal community — should contain the oldest evidence of them. The problem is, no one has found bilaterian fossils there.
Until Evans and Droser found Ikaria wariootia.
With funding from NASA, the team studied the burrows with a 3-D laser scanner and saw tiny grooves that would match a tiny (2-7 mm (.08-.27 in) long, 1-2.5 mm (.04-.1 in) wide – about the size of a grain of rice) cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail. The burrows showed that the creatures moved by contracting muscles like a worm (peristaltic locomotion) and contained evidence that they fed on buried organic matter with a mouth, digested it with a gut and excreted it out an anus. (TMI?) All of that adds up to this:
“Together, these suggest that Ikaria represents one of the oldest total group bilaterians identified from South Australia, with little deviation from the characters predicted for their last common ancestor.”
They named the creature Ikaria wariootia – Ikara means “meeting place” in the Adnyamathanha language, and warioota comes from the nearby Warioota Creek – to signify they are the original custodians of this land. More significantly, since this is the oldest known burrow of bilaterians, they are the “last common ancestor” of every symmetrical creature – basically all animals except sponges, jellyfish, anemones and some tiny multicell organisms. That includes the group at the other end of the bilaterians – humans … or at least those who believe in evolution.
There is significance to this discovery besides the obvious “last common ancestor” … which is why NASA was involved.
“We can also see that Ikaria specifically sought out oxygen rich environments and avoided oxygen poor ones. These indicate that having an appreciable amount of oxygen was really important for the evolution and success of these types of organisms and that we should be looking for exoplanets with similar, well-oxygenated conditions.”
NASA’s exobiology program gave Evans and his team a grant, and the investment paid off. The search for signs of oxygen on exoplanets should lead to signs of life resembling Ikaria wariootia – and its descendants.
If you can’t find an appropriate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day card for Ikaria wariootia, just draw a picture (here’s a photo) and sign your name. it’s the thought that counts.
Artist’s rendering of Ikaria wariootia.
Credit: Sohail Wasif/UCR
These are Ikaria wariootia impressions in stone.
Credit: Droser Lab/UCR
A 3D laser scan that showing the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature.
Credit: Droser Lab/UCR
UFOs, Ghosts, and a Mt. Everest Explorer
The whole odd tale revolves around the English mountaineer author, photographer and botanist, Francis Sydney Smythe, better known as Frank Smythe (1900-1949). He was an incredibly prolific and well respected mountaineer and adventurer of his era, traveling to exotic lands and climbing some of the highest peaks in some of the most inhospitable places around the world, including the Alps, Rocky Mountains, and the Himalayas, and he also wrote vast amounts of work on his adventures. In the 1930s his target was the then very enigmatic, mysterious Mt. Everest, which for many was so remote it might as well have been the face of the moon, and it was as he sought to conquer this treacherous beast of a mountain that he would allegedly have some very bizarre encounters.
Mt. Everest
1933 saw Smythe’s first attempt to climb Everest, and in June of that year he had managed to approach the summit, on the top of the world and at the time higher than anyone had ever climbed before. It was at this time when he was almost within reach of his goal, which beckoned to him yet remained unreachable, as it would for the next two decades, an inscrutable, evasive goal that would pull many to their deaths trying to achieve it. Looking upon that elusive summit Sythe would say:
It was only 1,000 feet above me, but an aeon of weariness separated me from it. Bastion on bastion and slab on slab, the rocks were piled in tremendous confusion, their light-yellow edges ghostlike against the deep-blue sky. From the crest, a white plume of mist flowed silently away. Those who have failed on Everest are unanimous in one thing: the relief of not having to go on. The last 1,000 feet of Everest are not for mere flesh and blood.
It was on this excursion that he would have his brushes with what could be called the paranormal. As he made his way alone up the frigid, wind scorched mountainside he would claim that he had felt as if someone were following him, watching him. This presence haunted him for quite sometime before he was able to make out against that vast sea of white the form of a person out there with him on that slope, standing amongst the snow and rock. This mysterious figure would approach to walk there alongside him, and Smythe would later explain that he seemed t be very real indeed. He was so real, in fact, that the mountaineer felt obligated to break off a piece of Kendal mint cake he kept in his pocket to offer to his unexpected companion. The figure then disappeared into thin air to leave the bewildered Smythe alone once again, and he would say “so near and so strong did this presence seem, that it was almost a shock to find no one to whom to give it.” The mountaineer would later write of this experience in his book Camp Six, and he never would be able to explain what he had experienced.
Frank Smythe
The strangeness would only continue on that same expedition. Defeated in his goal of mounting the actual summit, Smythe was on his way back down the harrowing terrain on his way too camp when he allegedly witnessed something very peculiar in the sky above. There moving about in the clear blue expanse were two odd objects that seemed at first almost like kites, but which pulsated and moving in odd ways. He at first tried to ignore them as he got his bearings straight and clear his head, but when he looked back to that spot the things were still there. As he looked on wondering what to make of it all, a mist apparently congealed out of nowhere to envelope them, and when it cleared they were gone. He would write of this strange sighting:
I was still some 200 feet above C6 and a considerable distance horizontally from it when, chancing to glance in the direction of the north ridge, I saw two curious looking objects floating in the sky. They strongly resembled kite balloons in shape, but one possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other a protuberance suggestive of a beak. They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate, a pulsation much slower than my own heart-beats, which is of interest supposing that it was an optical illusion. The two objects were very dark in colour and were silhouetted sharply against the sky, or possibly a background of cloud.
So interested was I that I stopped to observe them. My brain appeared to be working normally and I deliberately put myself through a series of tests. First of all I glanced away. The objects did not follow my vision but they were still there when I looked back again. Then I looked away again and this time identified by name a number of peaks, valleys and glaciers by way of a mental test. But when I looked back again, the objects confronted me. At this I gave them up as a bad job, but just as I was starting to move again a mist suddenly drifted across. Gradually they disappeared behind it; and when a minute or two later it had drifted clear, exposing the whole of the north ridge once more, they had vanished as mysteriously as they came.
What were these surreal objects? Were they UFOs, mysterious creatures, pure hallucination, something else? Did they have anything to do with that phantom figure he had encountered earlier? Who knows? Smythe would launch two other expeditions to Mt. Everest in the 1930s, but he never did get higher than he did on that first, and he never had any experiences quite as inexplicable either, nor would he never again until his death in 1949. Yet these accounts sit there amongst his journals and writings, evading any easy answers.
There has been a it of speculation as to what he might have encountered out there. Perhaps the most popular theory is that he was experiencing what is sometimes called “The Third Man,” which is a sort of ghostly presence that has been reported by many other explorers, usually in times of crisis. There have been other Everest explorers who have encountered something very similar, such as mountaineer Nick Estcourt, who in 1975 was climbing in approximately the same area where Smythe had had his own experience. Estcourt would explain:
I set off on my own at about 3.30 in the morning (from Camp IV) pulling up the fixed ropes leading up to Camp 5. It was a moonlit night and the shapes of the rocks were etched clearly against the brightness of the snow. I was about two hundred feet above the camp when I turned around. I can’t remember why but perhaps I had a feeling that someone was following me. Anyway I turned around and saw this figure behind me. He looked like an ordinary climber, far enough behind, so that I could not feel him moving up the fixed rope, but not all that far below. I could see his arms and legs and assumed that it was someone trying to catch me up. I stopped and waited for him.
He then seemed to stop or to be moving very, very slowly, he made no effort to signal or wave – I shouted down, but got no reply and so in the end I thought, ‘Sod it, I might as well press on!’ I carried on and turned round three or four times ___ and this figure was still behind me. It was definitely a human figure with arms and legs and at one stage I can remember seeing him behind a slight undulation in the slope, from the waist upwards as you would expect with the lower part of his body hidden in the slight dip. I turned again as I reached the old site of Camp 4 (six hundred above Camp IV in the current expedition) and there was no one there at all. It seemed very eerie. I wasn’t sure if anyone had fallen off or what. He couldn’t possibly have had time to have turned back and drop down the ropes out of sight, since I could see almost all the way back to Camp 4. The whole thing seemed very peculiar.
This seems very similar to what Smythe encountered, and is a good example of this particular phenomenon. Many other explorers have experienced the same thing, and it has been proposed that it could be anything from ghosts, to guardian angels, to the simple effect of stress, physical duress, and oxygen deprivation leading to hallucinations. The same could be said of the strange objects in the sky that Smythe claimed to have witnessed. How can we explain what this seasoned explorer saw? Was this all illusion and hallucination, or something more? It only adds to the vast number of accounts of people venturing to the ends of the earth and coming back with mysteries, ones which perhaps may be best left to the remote wildernesses from which they sprang.
The Strange Case of the Las Vegas UFO Crash
There are perhaps more UFO crash reports than some people might realize. Far from being merely the realm of the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash there have been a plethora of such incidents reported throughout history, and these are not always recorded out in the middle of nowhere, either. One rather obscure supposed UFO crash, considering its location, is the time one apparently exploded and crashed right on the fringes of the neon studded gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas.
The whole odd affair actually began all the way across the country over in Oneida, New York, where on April 18, 1962 military radar stations began picking up an anomalous object that seemed to be moving west rapidly. As it did so, there began a series of reports marking its progress, as panicked witnesses from across the country saw what looked like a glowing red ball or “flaming sword” that was at times bright enough to make night seem like day. These reports came on from several states along its trajectory, including Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, and most remarkably of all in Eureka, Utah, where there would be a report that it had actually landed and caused massive electrical disruptions before taking to the sky again. Throughout all of this the object was reportedly as largely completely silent, and there was such a deluge of calls to authorities that fighter jets were even scrambled and put on alert at Luke Air Force Base, in Arizona. The object headed towards Nevada, where it continued to be seen by hundreds of people as it approached Reno, then was witnessed to make a turn to head in the direction of Las Vegas, and this is where things would get even stranger. There was reportedly heard an enormous rumbling and then a thunderous boom and blinding flash of light, after which the object vanished both visually and off of radar somewhere over Nellis Air Force Base, right out in the badlands just past the lights of Las Vegas.
Las Vegas
The sheriff’s office for Clark County, Nevada, was apparently so flooded by calls from terrified residents who had heard the boom that it was thought that there had been an explosion and that perhaps an aircraft had gone down. A sheriff’s search party was sent out to the area that the object was last seen, yet there could be found no sign of a downed aircraft and there were furthermore no reports of a missing aircraft from any airports in the region. Considering this, it was assumed that what had been seen was a meteor that had exploded in midair, and the military was quick to use this explanation as well. There was only a single newspaper article related to the odd incident at the time, which appeared the next day in The Las Vegas Sun with the headline “Brilliant Red Explosion Flares In Las Vegas Sky,” and for the most part everyone just sort of forgot about it. Despite the fact that thousands of people across the country had seen the mysterious object and several hundreds had heard the massive explosion, it seemed the meteor explanation was good enough. Case closed. Or so it seemed.
It would not be until decades later that anyone would blow the dust off the case, when UFO researcher Kevin Randle began snooping around for more information in military reports and declassified reports from the Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, and he also went about interviewing numerous witnesses to the events in order to shed more light on what happened on that evening, which would all be covered in his book A History of UFO Crashes. What Randle would manage to uncover would begin to paint a picture of something perhaps quite a bit stranger than a meteor, and which the military quite possibly knows more about than it is letting on.
Even a casual look into the old reports began pointing out oddities. One declassified military report that was completely free to read by anyone who cared came from a Captain Herman Gordon Shields, who on the evening of the incident had been flying a C-119 aircraft near La Van, Utah. He would report that both he and his co-pilot had witnessed a very bright light, that continued to get brighter even as they maneuvered their plane to get away from it. Whatever it was, it was apparently “as bright as daylight,” completely illuminating the landscape, and as they tried to further evade and avoid what they felt might be an incoming collision they were able to get a clear look at the source of the light. According to pilot Shields, it was a long, cigar shaped object with a yellow top surface and the bottom of which was an extremely bright light. Shields would say in his report of the object:
And this object which I saw was illuminated. It had a long slender appearance comparable to a cigarette in size, that is, the diameter with respect to the length of the object. The fore part, or the lower part of the object was very bright, intense white such as a magnesium fire. The second half, the aft section, was a clearly distinguishable yellowish color. I would say the object was just about divided in half, the fore part being intensely white, the aft section having a more yellow color to it. There was no exhaust, no trail following after it. It was clearly defined. I saw it for a period of maybe one to two seconds.
Both the pilot and co-pilot were certain that this was no meteor. Another very curious report uncovered by Randle was that of witnesses Bob Robinson and Floyd Evans, who saw it fly low as they were driving along a highway near Eureka, Utah. The witnesses said it was clearly some sort of flaming cylinder with a “series of windows” along its side, and that its approach caused their vehicle to stall. They also claimed that it slowed to a stop to hover momentarily over them before continuing on its way, after which their engine promptly started up again. Other witness reports seemed to point towards something under intelligent control as well, including reports of the object making turns, speeding up or slowing down, reversing its course, and even landing, all things that you might realize meteors do not do. Another interesting eyewitness report uncovered by Randle comes from the declassified Blue Book files from a witness whose name had been redacted, and which reads:
As the object passed over Robinson [Utah), it slowed down in [the] air, and after, [a] gasping sound was heard, the object spurted ahead again. After this procedure was repeated three or four times, the object arched over and began descending to earth after which the object turned bluish color and then burned out or went dark. After the object began to slow down it began to wobble or “flshtail” in its path.
Military reports also showed some other intriguing details surrounding the case. It would turn out that not only had there been significant military activity in the area of Nellis Air Force Base after the explosion, including the scrambling of jets, but an investigator Douglas Crouch, from Hill Air Force base, would interview many witnesses and officially state that he did not believe the object seen to be a meteor. Crouch would also confirm that there had been no military tests in the area at the time, nor any unusual atmospheric phenomena on the night in question, and additionally no aircraft in the area that could have caused the disturbances. Far from the official government stance that this was a meteor, Crouch would clearly state that “no explanation has been developed for the brilliant illumination of the area, the object itself, or the explosion.”
Another detail that seems to not fully line up is that Air Force investigation reports state that an orange, glowing object in Eureka, Utah, was so low and bright that it actually knocked out photoelectric cells in the area. There was plenty of other evidence offered up by Randle that did not fit into the meteor theory either, such as that the directions of the various reports across states often described it going in a different direction, the speed was too slow to be that of a meteor, and on many occasions it was far too low to be a meteor, often wildly changing altitude in mid-course. Also, the official reports show that fighter jets had indeed been scrambled in response to the event, so would they do that for a simple meteor? Regardless, a follow-up investigation made by a J. Allen Hynek and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Friend would come to the conclusion that the object had been a rare type of bright meteor called a “bolide,” and Friend would say of this:
This investigation was completed in one full day and it was concluded that the object was a bolide. An attempt was made to locate the object but this effort failed due to the general nature of the data. Further study of this sighting indicates that the meteor probably struck in the area of the Wasatch National Forest; however, the Air Force has made no further at tempts to recover it.
One day to come up with that, and that seemed to be the end of it as far as the Air Force was concerned, but there were also some ominous hints of a cover-up found speckled throughout these files that did not add up. Randle noticed that Nellis air Force Base first labeled the object as “Unidentified,” but it was later changed to “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis” without further explanation. Perhaps even weirder is the assertion in the report that “no visual” was made of the object captured on radar, despite the fact that there were literally thousands of reports made to police of people seeing this thing. It was also found that the Air Force reports were intentionally and deceptively dated to make it seem as if the Utah accounts and Nevada accounts had happened on different days, possibly to make them seem like two separate events and throw off anyone snooping around. Randle says of this:
The reports, as filed in Project Blue Book, were deceptively dated. The Utah case had the time logged in “Zulu,” or Greenwich Mean Time, which means it was advanced at that time of the year by six hours. Add six hours to the 8:15 time, and you advance it to early morning the next day. A quick glance at the file shows the Utah case dated April 19, and the Las Vegas case logged in local time as April 18. On paper it looks as if they take place on separate days when, in reality, they happened within minutes of each other on the same day.
There were also inconsistencies throughout, such as the files at differing points claiming that the object was a weather balloon or a U-2 spy plane, before coming back to meteors again, almost as if they couldn’t decide which explanation to go with. It must also be remembered that at the time U-2s and balloons were tracked very carefully and there were none scheduled to be in the area at the time of the events. Much of this suggested to Randle that the military was being misleading at best, and downright lying at worst in an effort to muddy the waters and promote a mundane, palatable explanation. Randle believes that this was no meteor or balloon or conventional aircraft, and that somewhere out there in the desert outside of Las Vegas an alien craft of some sort crashed and is being covered up. He says of this in his book:
It is a case that demonstrates the air force’s policy of explaining UFO sightings, even if they have to change dates to make the explanations work. It shows that the air force would lie to the public about the UFO situation. And it shows that air force investigators, when handed a solution, wouldn’t ask the basic questions. They accepted the solution quickly. This also reveals that the air force was not interested in investigation or solving riddles. They were interested in clearing cases, slapping a label on them and letting it go at that. They ignored the information that didn’t fit with the bolide theory. Something extremely extraordinary happened on the night of April 18, 1962. The air force offered a series of explanations ignoring the facts. But the witnesses who were there know the truth. They saw something from outer space, and it was not a meteor. It was a craft from another world.
We are ultimately left to wonder just what happened out there on that night back in 1962. Was this just a meteor or was something more mysterious going on? If so what could it have been? Did a UFO actually crash right outside of Las Vegas, perhaps, as some conspiracies say, because it was actually engaged and shot down by the fighter jets that had been scrambled? Did the government willingly cover it all up? In the end there is no evidence at all to fall back on either way, and that time a UFO supposedly exploded out into the Las Vegas desert will likely remain for some time to come.
Silver UFO Shoots Past SpaceX Rocket On Live Broadcast, Video, March 18, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Silver UFO Shoots Past SpaceX Rocket On Live Broadcast, Video, March 18, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Daytime UFO & military helicopters over Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea – Marc 2020
This really interesting daytime footage was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It was recently recorded in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. It show some strange UFO craft that is escorted by military helicopters and planes.
What’s your opinion about this sighting? Please leave your comments below!
Abandoned ancient machinery on Mars proves that the planet was once inhabited
Abandoned ancient machinery on Mars proves that the planet was once inhabited
NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars just climbed its steepest slope yet (and snapped a selfie)The car-size rover tilted 31 degrees to crest a hill earlier this month.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just climbed its steepest Red Planet slope to date, after snapping a nice selfie that gives us a better appreciation of the achievement.
Curiosity crested a promontory called the Greenheugh Pediment on March 6, showing considerable perseverance in the process. (Perseverance, by the way, is the name of NASA's next Mars rover, a life-hunting robot that's scheduled to launch this July.)
"It took three drives to scale the hill, the second of which tilted the rover 31 degrees — the most the rover has ever tilted on Mars and just shy of the now-inactive Opportunity rover's 32-degree tilt record, set in 2016," NASA officials said in a statement Friday (March 20).
Opportunity holds several other records as well, including the greatest distance traveled on the surface of a world beyond Earth (28.06 miles, or 45.16 kilometers) and the longest-lived Mars rover. ("Oppy" landed a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, in January 2004 and was declared dead in February 2019, though it last communicated with Earth in June 2018, just before a huge dust storm engulfed the rover.)
Curiosity stopped to take some pictures on Feb. 26, shortly before concluding the historic climb. Mission team members stitched together 86 of these photos to make a mosaic selfie, which gives the lay of the Martian land and also shows a drill hole Curiosity made to sample and study some rock.
The Greenheugh Pediment is on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) mountain that Curiosity has been climbing since September 2014. The rover's handlers carefully plan out each drive to ensure that Curiosity stays safe.
Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a $2.5 billion mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life. The car-size robot quickly determined that Gale supported a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past and that this environment persisted for long stretches — perhaps millions of years at a time.
Curiosity is still going strong, reading Mount Sharp's rock layers for clues about how, why and when Mars transitioned from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry planet it is today.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.
Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
NASA asteroid probe will dodge building-size boulders to snatch sample of Bennu
Beware of giant space rocks.
Snatching a piece of asteroid Bennu was supposed to be — well, not easy, but certainly manageable: scope out the space rock, find some flat spots, swoop down at one, come back home.
But when NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu in December 2018, the scientists and engineers on the mission realized that the asteroid was much, much rockier than they had expected. Like, boulders everywhere. Boulders as big as buildings. Boulders you do not want your fancy spacecraft to bang into.
OSIRIS-REx, which launched in 2016, has a lidar navigation system that would have allowed the spacecraft to recognize obstacles based on the echoes of a light beam the probe produced. But once the mission revealed Bennu's surface in all its rocky glory, scientists and engineers decided it was time to come up with something new.
"Boulders as big as buildings. Boulders you do not want your fancy spacecraft to bang into."
The result is a process the team is calling Natural Feature Tracking, which relies on the massive image database that OSIRIS-REx has built up in the months since it arrived at Bennu and began taking images of the space rock from every angle possible.
As the probe embarks on a sampling attempt, it will begin taking still more such photos, which its computer system will automatically compare to the archived images showing the path it should be following. If those views don't line up, the spacecraft will automatically retreat for another attempt, rather than risk damage on the perilous surface.
If the system works as planned, it should boost OSIRIS-REx's accuracy: Whereas its lidar system was only designed for accuracy within a site 164 feet (50 meters) across, Natural Feature Tracking will be accurate enough to tackle a target area just 10% that size, NASA officials said in a statement.
Scientists on the OSIRIS-REx mission have selected two target sampling sites on Bennu, dubbed Nightingale and Osprey. The mission's window for sampling opens in late August in order to ensure that the spacecraft can leave Bennu next year. If all goes well, scientists should have their space rock on Earth in 2023.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
See Curiosity’s epic new selfie from Mars
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has taken a beautiful new selfie.
The amazing new selfie from the Curiosity rover on Mars, taken on February 26, 2020. View larger sizes.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS.
While we’re practicing social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, EarthSky’s been posting your #SocialDistanceSelfies from places across Earth. But here’s one from quite a bit farther …
It’s the newest selfie from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, and it’s stunning.
NASA’s Curiosity rover recently joined in the activity, sending back a beautiful photo of itself at the base of a steep hill, just before it started climbing. NASA posted the selfie on its website on March 20, 2020.
Curiosity snapped the selfie on February 26, 2020, just before the rover crested the “Greenheugh Pediment,” a broad sheet of crumbling bedrock that sits on top of the hill. The image is a stunning 360 degree view of the landscape around the rover, with Curiosity itself the focus of attention. The entire panorama is composed of 86 individual images. At the time the selfie was taken, Curiosity was about 11 feet (3.4 meters) below the spot where it later climbed onto the pediment.
Also visible in the image is the latest drill hole made by the rover, in the bedrock target called “Hutton.”
A Navcam view of Greenheugh Pediment (left side of image), after Curiosity made it to the top of the steep hill.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.
Not only is the selfie itself impressive, but Curiosity also set a new record for the steepest terrain it has ever climbed so far in its mission, a challenging 31 degrees. This is only one degree of tilt less than that climbed by the Opportunity rover, which set the all-time record of any rover so far on Mars in 2016. That sounds like a potentially dangerous incline, and it could be, but Curiosity is designed to be able to tilt up to 45 degrees safely, thanks to its advanced rocker-bogie wheel system.
It took Curiosity three drives to make it to the crest of the hill, which it reached on March 6, 2020, also known as sol 2,696 of the mission. A sol is one Martian day, which is about one Earth day plus 37 minutes.
People often ask how the rover(s) can take selfies, especially when you don’t see the robotic arm holding the camera in the photos. The arm acts as the “selfie stick” for the rover. Curiosity uses its Mars Hand Lens Camera (MAHLI), which is in the turret at the end of the arm. Since each image only shows a small area, many images are taken and then later stitched together to create the panorama. During this process, the arm itself is removed from the images. MAHLI is primarily used to take close-up images of sand and rocks. As Doug Ellison, a Curiosity camera operator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), explained:
We get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie. We thought the best way to explain it would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how it’s done.
See the videos below showing how this and other selfies are made:
Last Thanksgiving, Curiosity also took its highest-resolution panorama to date, containing over 1,000 images with 1.8 billion pixels. The view is breathtaking, to say the least. The images were taken between November 24 and December 1, 2019, and then assembled together.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, and since 2014 has been slowly moving up the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, the large mountain in the middle of Gale Crater. The rover has found evidence that a large lake used to fill the crater a few billion years ago, and that conditions at the time were suitable for microscopic life to have existed there. It has also found ancient organic material in rocks and confirmed the existence of the still-unexplained methane in the Martian atmosphere.
VREEMDE PATRONEN IN DE LUCHT WORDEN OOK IN HET DONKER GEVLOGEN ( VIDEO )
VREEMDE PATRONEN IN DE LUCHT WORDEN OOK IN HET DONKER GEVLOGEN ( VIDEO )
Wij leven in vreemde tijden en wanneer dan bepaalde gebeurtenissen plaatsvinden, is het zaak om goed alert te blijven.
Na een oproep aan onze lezers kwamen er veel reacties op een aantal onverklaarbare zaken, dank allemaal.
Bij de informatie die wij ontvingen zat ook een link naar de Stentor die een artikel heeft gewijd aan dit vreemde verschijnsel en zij concluderen dat dit alles te maken heeft met het in kaart brengen van de bepaalde (natuurgebieden).
Maar ook zij weten niet precies wat de reden hiervoor zou moeten zijn:
Waar de opnames exact voor worden gebruikt is niet bekend. Het vliegtuigje boven de Veluwe is van het Belgische bedrijf Eurosense, dat gespecialiseerd is in ‘geo informatie’. Zij staan 365 dagen per jaar paraat om de lucht in te gaan, maar het heldere weer van vandaag maakt dat de omstandigheden ideaal zijn voor luchtopnames. In België nemen ze echter niet de telefoon op om uitleg te verschaffen.
En dan gaan ze verder met te zeggen dat de omgeving van Zwolle ook recentelijk door Google opnieuw in kaart is gebracht.
Het zou inderdaad kunnen dat men gebruikt maakt van het heldere weer en het rustige luchtruim om nu overal luchtopnames te maken, maar of deze uitleg de werkelijke reden is weten we uiteraard niet zeker.
Ook in andere landen worden dit soort toestellen nu waargenomen:
Ik heb een reactie op artikel over die vliegtuigen over Nederland Mijn zus heeft een artikel gelezen dat in Tsjechië ook vliegtuigen waren gespot met rare vliegbewegingen en ze denken dat coronavirus zo wordt verspreid.
Ook ontvingen wij veel radarbeelden waaruit blijkt dat hetzelfde gebeurt boven Duitsland en zelfs boven de Waddeneilanden.
Een andere lezer schrijft:
Ik heb even gezocht naar een vliegtuig PH-KIO dat boven mijn woonplaats rondjes vloog en te zien op jullie site.
Onderstaand het resultaat.
Wij voeren LiDAR metingen uit vanuit ons eigen bemande vliegtuig. LiDAR is momenteel een van de meest nauwkeurige landmeettechnieken waarmee het mogelijk is om met enkele centimeter nauwkeurigheid metingen uit te voeren. Metingen met ons vliegtuig kunnen wij aanvullen met LiDAR-metingen vanaf onze auto en met een landmeting uitgevoerd met gps, tachymeter of 360-graden camera.
Een andere lezer schrijft dit
Normaal doe ik dit nooit , maar Ik wil toch graag reageren op het vreemde gedrag van de vliegtuigen.
Ik vroeg mijzelf 16 maart af waarvoor er zo laat nog continu propellorvliegtuigen in de lucht zijn ( ik woon in de aanvliegroute van Rotterdam airport en dit hoor ik haast nooit), dus dacht ik , laat ik even een keer op de flightradar app kijken. Dan vraag je je toch af, waarvoor vliegt een uit België afkomstig vliegtuig deze route / dit patroon ( zie bijgevoegde screenshots)?
Ik ben op het vliegtuig nummer gaan zoeken bij flightradar en zag op 12 maart het minder drukke patroon boven rotterdam terug ( laat in de avond) de dag erna een korte vlucht in Belgie. 16 maart het drukke patroon ( ook tot in de nacht).
Ik heb op de naam "eurosense" wat op het vliegtuig gezocht en kwam er achter dat dit bedrijf allerlei foto's maakt en geografisch onderzoek doet.
Toen zag ik het bericht op jullie site en zag dat het op meerdere plaatsen was. Dat vond ik nogal raar, vooral in deze tijd. Ik ben verder gaan zoeken op " vliegtuigen zigzaggen" en vond een origineel kranten artikel over dit onderwerp een paar dagen geleden
En dan deze reactie:
Net gesproken met een piloot.
Hij vertelde dat, omdat het luchtruim nu zo stil is, er allemaal vluchten met kleine vliegtuigjes worden uitgevoerd om voor Google maps nieuwe luchtfoto's te maken.
Die vliegtuigjes maken die malle lussen om zo alles goed in beeld te krijgen, Ze mogen nu op plekken komen, waar anders het vliegen verboden is.
Dan iets wat wel heel vreemd is als het (alleen) zou gaan om het maken van foto’s voor Google omdat het zulk prachtig helder weer is.
Dat zou nog te verkopen zijn, als er niet óók in het donker wordt gevlogen, hetgeen wel het geval is.
Wij ontvingen het volgende bericht:
Op 17 maart hoorde ik om 23:25 's avonds een laagvliegend vliegtuig overkomen. Ik woon redelijk dicht bij Rotterdam Airport, dus niet echt iets vreemds. Wat wel vreemd was, was het feit dat dit vliegtuig een paar keer over kwam vliegen om dit tijdstip, en dat vond ik wel vreemd. Dat gebeurt normaliter nooit.
Ik ben een fanatiek vliegtuigspotter tot op zekere hoogte: alles wat over vliegt of wat ik zie wil ik weten waar het vandaan komt, waar het heen gaat en wat voor type vliegtuig het is. Zelf ben ik ook fervent Flight Simulator enthousiast. Dus ik naar Flightradar24.com en ja hoor: ook ik heb een vreemde manoeuvre waargenomen.
Ik heb een foto gemaakt van mijn computerscherm en aan iemand gevraagd - die veel af weet van de luchtvaart - wat deze manoeuvre inhoudt. Deze persoon heeft een jaar in dit vakgebied intensief gewerkt en is veel meer bekend met bepaalde situaties. Mij is in eerste instantie verteld dat deze manoeuvre vaak inhoudt dat het vliegtuig niet mag landen, en dus in een soort "holding pattern" gaat. Echter, wat ik van mijn eigen kennis weet is dat een holding pattern via een FMC (Flight Management Computer) wordt geprogrammeerd of zelf wordt gevlogen, maar dat deze altijd in een ovaal figuur wordt gevlogen. Nooit in het patroon wat wij hier waarnemen.
Nu zat ik het artikel te lezen en heb ik weer even contact gezocht met die persoon. Nu is mij verteld dat het inderdaad wel een vreemde situatie is, want door het gehele land moet eigenlijk een soort landelijk verbod tot landen worden uitgeroepen, mochten zo veel vliegtuigen in een holding pattern op verschillende plekken vliegen. Wat ik wel zag is dat alle zware vliegtuigen (Boeing 737 - 747, Airbus A320 - A330 etc.) zowel vracht- als passagiersvluchten, gewoon normaal de vlucht vlogen zonder afwijkingen.
Wat mij verder opvalt is dat hetzelfde TYPE vliegtuig nabij Rotterdam eerder die dag (denk ik) heeft gevlogen zoals ik kon zien op Niburu:
Wat mij nog verder opvalt is de hoogte van het vliegtuig: deze vliegt ongeveer op 1.2 a 1.3 kilometer hoogte, wat in deze regio voor Rotterdam Airport wel eens wordt aangehouden als het wat minder goed weer is voor een landing. Maar dit vliegtuig vloog naar mijn idee constant op deze hoogte en heeft deze niet verlaten (is ook te zien aan de groene lijn op Flightradar24, en eventueel in de geschiedenis terug te vinden.
In mijn geval betreft het ook een ander vliegtuig (ander serienummer) maar wel hetzelfde type. Ik vind het ook heel vreemd dat op de foto's die jullie hebben gedeeld geen vluchtplan zichtbaar is (waar het vliegtuig is opgestegen en waar het van plan is te landen), want volgens mij is dit te allen tijde verplicht en zou ten minste de opstijg plaats bekend moeten zijn bij Flightradar.
Dus bij deze wil ik jullie een nieuwe foto inzenden, want in principe is dit een nieuwe vlucht die nog niet op de website staat.
Dus, waarom vliegen die vliegtuigen in het donker dat soort patronen als het om zoiets onschuldigszou gaan als het maken van foto’s bij helder weer?
En dan de hoogte kwestie. We kregen het volgende bericht waar onder andere de navolgende foto tussen zat waarop te zien is dat die vlucht op 16000 (krap 5km) plaatsvond met een vliegtuig dat een drukcabine heeft. Deze hoogte is niet geschikt voor het maken van fotos en heeft dus een ander doel:
Hoi,
Bedankt voor je reactie. Ik heb er vandaag nog een aantal gevonden. Die stuur ik hieronder weer mee (als het lukt). Ik zag dat het soms dezelfde (kleine) vliegtuigjes zijn, die vaak van dezelfde vliegvelden opstijgen en landen. Misschien lesvliegtuigjes?
Met vriendelijke groet,
Tot zover de info over de vreemde patronen die door veel kleine vliegtuigen in diverse landen tegelijkertijd wordt gevlogen.
Een lezer uit België stuurt het volgende:
Mijn naam is Steve en ik woon in Schilde (nabij Antwerpen) de laatste dagen zie ik tijdens de avond en nacht, zeker met dit heldere weer veel vliegtuigverkeer. Aangezien er bijna geen vliegtuigverkeer is door corona is dit wel raar.
Ook zag ik gisteren een soort lichtpunt in de lucht . Het bleef er toch een paar uur zonder bewegen. Ik schat enkele uren en dan was het weg.
Ik zei nog tegen mijn vriendin: is dat punt jou al eens opgevallen? Maar dan tegen 12u middernacht was het weg.Zondagavond heb ik exact hetzelfde gezien.
Van gisteren heb ik er een foto van genomen,het is niet zo goede kwaliteit sorry daarvoor.
Het feit dat je op de foto de sterren niet ziet en enkel dat punt terwijl ik zelf de sterren heel goed zag wilt zeggen dat dat lichtpunt sterk aanwezig was. Onze tuin is zuid west gericht.
Bovenstaande komt weer enigszins overeen met beelden die we ontvingen van iemand anders, helaas zonder dat we weten waar dit is.
Iemand anders schreef het volgende:
Vandaag om 22:00 hebben wij iets in de lucht zien hangen en ook heen en weer vliegen van links naar recht boven en beneden en vermoedelijk ook draaiend.. Het leek op een schijf met een cirkel eromheen die draaide en continue verschillende lichtflitsen afgaf, alle kleuren van de regenboog. Er is een melding wat precies in elke detail op die van ons leek . Hij vloog op t einde in een keer in een grote snelheid weg.
Dan over de troepenverplaatsingen:
Iemand schrijft:
Ik wou na aanleiding van het artikel over de grootte troepen verplaatsingen reageren.
Ik heb navraag gedaan binnen defensie dit als oud militair zelf. En had begrepen dat er een grootte oefening was onder leiding van de USA om te kijken of de intra het aan kon wanneer er grootte troepen verplaatsingen waren van west naar oost.
En oefeningen die al bezig waren los van deze van onze eigen defensie zijn ook allemaal terug getrokken naar Nederland vanwege het virus. Dat verklaart de verplaatsingen van onze eigen troepen.
En een ander dit:
Las net over de goederen trein met tanks erop..
Ik werk in Eindhoven in de buurt van het spoor.. en al zeker 3weken rijden er in de avond uren goederen treinen met tanks erop!! Wat me opvalt is dat het savonds gebeurt!!
Wat gaat er gebeuren?
Weer een andere lezer:
Vandaag op de A1 bij onze grensovergang Oldenzaal Duitsland colonnes vrachtwagens, allemaal blanco, geen enkele merk of naamaanduiding, compleet schoon (de meeste wit) zonder enig spoortje vuil. Ongeveer de helft van het vrachtverkeer bestond uit deze voertuigen, de meeste Splinternieuw ogend. Heel veel geparkeerd op stopplaats grensovergang. Bij nadere inspectie uitsluitend Poolse, Russische, Baltische, Oekraiënse kentekens. Verder geen idee, misschien wapentransporten? Kan geen andere verklaring bedenken.
En hier wederom een opname gemaakt op een station, in dit geval Den Haag.
Door het verzamelen van info krijgen wij in ieder geval een duidelijker beeld. Voor beide gebeurtenissen, de vreemde vliegroutes en de verplaatsing van militair personeel, lijken op het eerste gezicht redelijke verklaringen voorhanden te zijn. Als het inderdaad zaken betreft die verhuld worden dan is dat uiteraard voor de hand liggend dat gebruik wordt gemaakt van manieren waardoor wij mensen gemakkelijk genoegen nemen dit soort "redelijke verklaringen".
Het zou niet de eerste keer zijn dat een bevolking totaal wordt misleid. En vanwege de vreemde samenloop van omstandigheden, waarbij er én een virus opduikt én er vreemde vliegroutes worden gevlogen én er veel troepenverplaatsingen plaatsvinden, is het zaak om alert te blijven en uit te kijken naar eventuele andere aanwijzingen.
Eén van die vreemde aanwijzingen is dat ze de termijn voor het verbod op samenscholing van meer dan twee mensen vooruit hebben geschoven naar 1 juni. Dat lijkt een overdreven lange periode, waarbij ze klaarblijkelijk willen voorkomen dat mensen samen komen.
De volgende foto kregen wij via een lezer die deze had aangetroffen ergens op een website in India, uit naar zijn zeggen 2019. Het is een treinwagon, met daarop de naam van het virus Covid-19. Aangezien we geen verdere informatie hadden zijn we wat gaan zoeken en kwamen deze foto tegen in een aantal Italiaanse publicaties, waarvan de mainstream media zeggen dat het een nepfoto is die gemaakt is vorig jaar herfst ergens in Amerika en dat het hier een normale codering betreft voor treinwagons en dat dit dan toevallig covid-19 is.
Geloofwaardig verhaal of niet?
En tot slot nog een beetje vrolijke noot van kunstenaar Matt de kunstenaar, die waarschuwt voor corona virussen die je computer hacken.
Pole Shift: Ancient Megafloods & Mysteries & Science
COAST TO COAST AM 2020.
Geological explorer and renegade scholar, Randall Carlson has four decades of study, research, and exploration into the interface between ancient mysteries and modern science. In the first half, he discussed earth changes and catastrophic events, particularly “megafloods.
A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.
Other videos, peter2011
Absolute Proof Of Alien Life On Mars Found! Skull Near Rover, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Absolute Proof Of Alien Life On Mars Found! Skull Near Rover, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
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Giant Alien Spaceship Crossing The Sun (Live Footage)
UFO seen and filmed over Philippines 20-Mar-2020
This UFO video was just submitted to me through Latest UFO Sightings Facebook page. It was recorded on 20th March 2020 over Philippines.
Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last
In this image from the Fermi space telescope, the Milky Way's stellar disk, which runs horizontally along the middle, glows in gamma rays. A vast halo of dark matter engulfs the disk and emits no light at all, which makes measuring the galaxy’s total size a challenge.
FERMI LAT COLLABORATION/DOE/NASA
By
Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk. The number could lead to a better estimate of how massive the galaxy is and how many other galaxies orbit it.
Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across (SN: 8/1/19). Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them (SN: 10/25/16). But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure.
Now, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way’s edge. The precise diameter is 1.9 million light-years, give or take 0.4 million light-years, the team reports February 21 in a paper posted at arXiv.org.
To put that size into perspective, imagine a map in which the distance between the sun and the Earth is just one inch. If the Milky Way’s heart were at the center of the Earth, the galaxy’s edge would be four times farther away than the moon actually is.
o find the Milky Way’s edge, Deason’s team conducted computer simulations of how giant galaxies like the Milky Way form. In particular, the scientists sought cases where two giant galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest giant neighbor, because each galaxy’s gravity tugs on the other (SN: 5/12/15). The simulations showed that just beyond the edge of a giant galaxy’s dark halo, the velocities of small nearby galaxies drop sharply (SN: 3/11/15).
Using existing telescope observations, Deason and her colleagues found a similar plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center, marking the galaxy’s edge, the scientists say. The edge is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the sun is.
Although dark matter makes up most of the Milky Way’s mass, the simulations reveal that stars should also exist at these far-out distances. “Both have a well-defined edge,” Deason says. “The edge of the stars is very sharp, almost like the stars just stop at a particular radius.”
In the future, astronomers can refine the location of the Milky Way’s edge by discovering additional small galaxies nearby. Astronomers could also search for individual stars out at the boundary, says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved with the study. The farthest such stars will be very dim, but future observations should be able to find them.
The measurement should also help astronomers tease out other galactic properties. For instance, the larger the Milky Way, the more massive it is — and the more galaxies there should be revolving around it, says Rosemary Wyse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who was not part of the new work. So far, there are about 60 known Milky Way satellites, but astronomers suspect that many more await discovery.
Here Is What The Pentagon Is Not Answering About The Air Force And Recent UFO Encounters
One of the biggest questions regarding the U.S. Navy's recent disclosures regarding strange encounters with supposedly unidentified flying craft is why are we only hearing about this highly concerning phenomenon from just one service? A fact that isn't commonly understood is that it is not the Navy's job to maintain sovereignty over America's airspace, it is the U.S. Air Force's. If strange and unidentified craft are being detected or seen, the Air Force has the mission to respond and investigate, not the Navy, and it can do so at a moment's notice. So far, the Air Force has been totally mum on this issue, which is extremely bizarre considering the Navy's own messaging surrounding it.
With this in mind, last September, I reached out to the Air Force with a series of very pointed questions regarding what seems like a massive discrepancy in regards to the military branch's ability to execute its homeland air defense mission. What seemed like a good start to finding answers to these key questions quickly turned into something of a nightmare that has made me lose all confidence in the Defense Department's ability to address a subject, which they themselves have actively helped elevate within the public's consciousness, in any meaningful manner.
My initial inquiry to the Air Force resulted in a very positive experience. The folks at the Air Force headquarters' press desk were not phased at all by the topic and seemed eager to look into it on our behalf. After discussing the issue with them directly on the phone, the questions I sent them were specifically written to move the ball forward on this critical aspect of the issue and, in doing so, getting the Air Force on the record about the issue overall in some manner. Ideally, this would have included some background as to the nature of these events from the service's point of view, and especially in regards to its homeland air sovereignty mission, as well as information about whether its own aircrews were experiencing similar encounters.
Here are the questions I fielded to them on September 19th, 2019:
Here is what we are looking for on the ongoing UFO/UAP story with the Navy and the USAF's position and comment on the issue:
- Have Air Force pilots encountered any similar unexplained phenomenon on radar, electro-optically, or visually? If so, what is the general frequency and magnitude of these events?
- Navy Super Hornet pilots out of NAS Oceana had constant encounters with these objects in 2014-2015, especially on radar. It got so bad that by early 2015 Oceana filed NOTAMs warning aviators about the phenomenon in the warning areas off Virginia. We have talked to the crews directly about this and are in the process of obtaining those NOTAMs and the paper trail leading to their posting. Langley's F-22s, which have superior sensor capabilities in some respects to the Super Hornets, as well the base's T-38 aggressors, are based right next-door and use the exact same warning areas for training daily. Did Langley aircrews experience the same phenomenon? If so, to what extent? What about other USAF assets that use the same airspace for training?
- The Navy changed its reporting practices and procedures for encounters with unexplained flying objects significantly due to the massive increase in incidents in recent years. Has the Air Force done the same? If not, why? Does it even have set procedures for these events? If so, what are they?
- Has the USAF experienced the same massive increase in incursions of UAPs over its bases and installations that the USN has?
- Does the Air Force have similar electro-optical and infrared video of UAPs similar to what the Navy has, or other data for that matter?
- Does the Air Force see this phenomenon as a national security threat? What is it doing to mitigate or better understand it?
Thanks so much for your help on this. I think it's critical to clear these details up, especially now that the Navy has admitted that the videos depicting these unexplained craft are indeed real and show objects it cannot identify.
I quickly followed up with another question:
- The Navy is saying these things are constantly (as in many times a month or more) busting into controlled or even secured airspace. In 2015, they were out there for days off Virginia in the warning areas, even causing the base to post the NOTAMs due to near misses etc. The USAF is tasked with protecting this airspace. Has the USAF launched alerts and investigated these when the Navy (or maybe even the USAF) was calling them out? What was done in regards to homeland defense when these were in the warning areas so persistently? How did the USAF and its NORAD arm take this issue up during the 2014-2015 incidents and what does the Navy says has occurred constantly all over up through this very day?
Once again, I have to stress that the Air Force has the homeland air sovereignty mission. Fighter aircraft sit on alert across the United States ready to scramble within a matter of minutes to intercept and investigate any unknown craft flying in or near the nation's airspace. This includes what some may traditionally call UFOs. The War Zone has incredibly in-depth evidence of how such an action is taken with regards to the presence of transient unidentified flying objects, let alone ones that are persistently operating in restricted airspace, as was supposedly the case off the east coast of the United States in 2014 and 2015.
Air Force units that fulfill the homeland air defense mission are spread across the country, but those equipped with the highest level of fighter aircraft capability are scattered around the continental United States' maritime perimeter and are also based in Alaska and Hawaii. F-15C/Ds equipped with the most powerful fighter-optimized active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars in the world and carrying Sniper targeting pods for long-range visual target identification primarily fulfill the maritime border defense role in the lower 48 states, with F-22s in Hawaii and Alaska doing the same.
F-16C/Ds, which are also now equipped with AESA radars, based at Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington D.C., keep watch over the Capital Region. Other F-16s from a handful of Air Force units that patrol the central U.S. can also help augment the country's perimeter aerial security, but the alert mission is one that must be specifically trained for, with unique protocols and infrastructure requirements. It is resource-intensive and not cheap to execute, either. In other words, it is not something just any fighter squadron, especially a Navy one that has a very different mission focus, can just execute on the fly under normal circumstances.
As such, my questions attempted to fill in a missing part of the Navy's recent UFO-related accounts. If these flying craft were indeed being detected, how is it possible that the Air Force didn't scramble to investigate them, and do so multiple times over the course of these events? If incursions over installations are ongoing, regardless of if they are drones or something far more fantastical, how isn't the Air Force directly involved with investigating and mitigating these potential threats inside the airspace they are responsible for defending?
This is not just a UFO issue, it comes down to America's ability, or willingness, to defend its airspace from non-traditional threats. The threat to the homeland posed by cruise missiles is already palpable, but we are now in an era where lower-end and swarming drone warfare is becoming one of the most preeminent security issues of our time. It's a threat that has recently manifested itself in spectacular ways that some of us have warned would occur for years. So, my questions are just as relevant to the core of our national security as they are to simply finding out new details about mysterious flying objects that seem to have risen to new heights in the public's consciousness in recent years.
After a promising start with the Air Force itself, I was told that the inquiries had been forwarded to the Office of the Secretary of Defense's (OSD) public affairs arm. One public affairs officer, Susan Gough, would be handling the request. At first, this sounded very promising. The inquiry had been elevated to someone in a position that might be able to really add some unique context to the issue.
Sadly, this ended up being anything but the case.
Simply put, my experience with Susan Gough has been the worst I have had with any of the Defense Department's public affairs personnel, ever. What has transpired, or more accurately what hasn't transpired, over the last six months leaves me with no confidence or trust in this official representing the DoD on the issue. This is not personal in any way. She may be a wonderful person, but her behavior has been a clear example of everything the Pentagon's media operations should not be and it certainly is not due to a lack of training or experience. Her resume is impressive and may even be concerning to some who are seeking some morsel of truth regarding this bizarre and historically tortured issue.
My experience is not unique in any way. Others who are working this story have had similar experiences almost to a laughable degree. The reason why so many journalists are interacting with her at all on this issue is that she now holds the entire media/public affairs portfolio on UFOs within the DoD. Sometime shortly before I submitted my questions, the decision was made to funnel every request regarding this issue to her and her alone. The services no longer had control of their own messaging on the matter. Why this decision was made has not been made clear.
I wrote and called Susan Gough for months after my initial inquiries were forwarded to her. No correspondence was answered and no comments were given—not a timeline for delivery or a simple "we cannot comment at this time" response to any of my inquiries.
Nothing.
In the meantime, prolific Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) filer and author John Greenwald over at the Blackvault.com had received a FOIA request that not only had my questions in it, but it also had the internal correspondence within the Air Force concerning answering at least a portion of my inquiries. John was nice enough to let me know he had received the documents and that he would work with me as to their release.
Once again, the whole idea was to get something, anything on record in regards to the Air Force, America's air sovereignty, and this issue. The last thing I wanted to do was publish a story about how the Defense Department won't even acknowledge these questions. I have had absolutely the best experiences with DoD public affairs over many years. We work with them daily in what we do. The vast majority of those interactions are hugely productive. In fact, I have never had a negative relationship with a U.S. military public affairs officer, even on topics that were far from positive for the Department of Defense. Overall, they do excellent work and understand our requests and process them with total professionalism in a timely manner. I cannot overstate how important their job is and how well they usually do it.
With this in mind, I dreaded having to take issue with the Department of Defense on their communications operations. But after nearly three months of getting no replies of any kind, I had to do something.
It wasn't until I sent a very frank letter on December 5th, 2019 that I received this answer from Ms. Gough. This was the first actual correspondence I had with her since my inquiry was made in September:
Hello Tyler,
My sincere apologies. It appears that your emails were being dumped into a junk/spam folder instead of my inbox, so I wasn’t seeing anything from you for a long time. Only just noticed because you are not the only one with a similar complaint. It was not intentional, I assure you, and I’m not quite sure how/why it happened; I get quite a few continuing queries about UAPs from multiple reporters, all with similar questions, so I know it’s not the subject.
I’m sorry, I don’t recall getting a voicemail from you, but I was out of the office for health reasons several times in the last several months, and may have missed it.
Anyway, I will look at your questions this morning, and will get back to you as soon as I can with answers.
Regards,
Sue
I replied very positively, I was so glad we had a breakthrough and I wouldn't have to write about how unresponsive the Department Of Defense's representative on this matter was. Even if they weren't willing to say much, we would actually have that on the record and I made Ms. Gough aware of the internal documents that had some answers to my questions that John Greenwald obtained. So, at least I could get some commentary on those, if nothing else. Above all else, a relationship could begin with the sole point of contact on this topic within the DoD. It's a long game. I was happy to finally be working with Ms. Gough so that future clarifications could be had.
I followed up quickly after her response asking if we could have this wrapped by the end of next week. Her reply stated as such:
"Yes, we should be able to. Thank you very, very much for your patience and understanding!"
Finally, I could slap a deadline on this and give John the heads up that there was progress.
The reality ended up being the complete opposite. Ms. Gough never got back to me. What followed over the next four weeks was me reaching out looking for an update and getting nothing back. This was different though as her original excuses were clearly false because she just went back to doing the same thing even after her apology and acknowledgment of a timeline.
By January 2nd, 2020, yet another month had gone by and it was clear that she had gone dark once again.
This was my email to her:
It's the New Year and still nothing. I haven't heard anything since we last touched base nearly a month ago when you said we could wrap it up the following week. Checked in multiple times. Nothing.
I am holding off another outlet on this with their FOIAs that include the DoD's correspondences with my name all over them, at this point, it is just embarrassing for me. I also find it odd that other outlets seem to have gotten responses and clarification follow-ups. In fact, some of them are people, not outlets.
I really want a good relationship here, as I have with every single one of my DoD PA contacts, rain or shine. I hate writing emails like this, but this is ridiculous and insulting. It has been what? FOUR months?
So what's the next step? Do I have to file a formal complaint over this? Something is really broken here, especially when you have your own aviators claiming that craft are violating our airspace regularly and I can't even get responses to specific questions, some of which were answered months ago in internal correspondences that the department released via FOIA long before I ever got them. In fact, I still don't have them.
Very disappointing and frankly, stunning.
Tyler Rogoway
No response.
On January 7th, I sent another note, stating that I have done everything I can, given her every opportunity to respond, and that months had rolled by since my initial request and it was now weeks past our deadline. Finally, I got another response:
Sorry Tyler, I’ve been out a lot, and just back today. Let me ping the people who owe me the info and see if they have it now.
Clearly, she had something to share, as I had the Air Force's internal emails in my hands for months via John Greenwald's FOIA request.
After that last glimmer of hope, the gaslighting operation was made clear. Once again, Susan Gough disappeared.
By this time I was so exhausted with the issue and a ton of other long-lead projects had come due, so I set it aside. Really, I didn't want to have to explain how terrible of an experience this was and how this DoD official evaded me for months. I thought, 'maybe if I just gave it a little more time she would pop up again.'
That never happened.
At the time of writing this, it has been six months since my original request. I can't thank John enough for being so patient with me on this story. He understood my important working relationship with the DoD and how I wanted to give Ms. Gough every possible opportunity for a professional and positive outcome.
I have no idea what the situation is behind the scenes with this topic at the DoD or what Gough's directives or issues are in regard to it. Yet the fact that after the Pentagon's own personnel have stated that constant intrusions into sensitive airspace have occurred by unidentified craft, they are not willing to even respond to questions about Air Force's role in those events, the service that is responsible for defending that airspace, is damning. The DoD seems to have helped seed interest in this issue, but is now unwilling to offer any explanations or clarifications regarding it. That seems very peculiar if not downright suspicious. For a topic that has been so abused over the decades, this really is an abhorrent stance for the DoD to take and it negates any trust it may have developed on the topic in recent years.
The most troubling part about this whole mess is that at least some of my inquiries actually got answers, ones the DoD shared with a FOIA requester, but not the actual reporter asking the questions. Once again, Gough had at least something to offer, but didn't convey it after months of prodding.
Greenwald's FOIAs show that the Air Force's public affairs officials actually did excellent work looking into at least some of my questions. They did not shy away from the topic and took it seriously, but with one unresponsive person having the authority to actually convey any of that information, it meant that in this case the results of their work were never released.
Here's what the Air Force found out in regards to Langely Air Force Base's F-22 and T-38 aircrews seeing similar objects in the restricted warning areas off the eastern seaboard. You can see the whole exchange below:
It would seem by these emails that the F-22 and T-38 pilots from Langley were not having the same encounters as the Hornet pilots from nearby NAS Oceana. If this is indeed the case, it really puts the Navy encounters in a different light and it does match anecdotally with what we have gleaned through our own background investigation. So, if the Air Force tactical jet pilots were oblivious to the craft flying off the east coast, why?
Certainly, technology isn't an issue. Like the Super Hornet, the F-22 is also equipped with an AESA radar and, in some ways, it has far more capable sensors than the Super Hornet and possesses significantly higher performance. The Navy pilots' UFO encounter stories have also matured a bit as time has gone by and explanations do exist that could explain their encounters off the East Coast that are far from out of this world, but this discrepancy really sets up a new set of circumstances that are even more puzzling than before.
In addition, another short email string appears to shows that the Air Force has not followed the Navy's move to change its policy surrounding how its personnel report encounters with unidentified aircraft and that the incidents that have occurred actually had to do with drones, not something more exotic.
You can check out these documents for yourself over at The Black Vault.
Once again, the disconnect between the Navy and the Air Force's stance on this issue is puzzlingly stark, which is highly intriguing.
We may take a deeper dive into some of these issues at another time, but for now, at least we have some record, albeit obtained indirectly, of the Air Force even looking into these recent encounters directly and even on a unit level. The question then becomes why weren't we informed about the inquiry's findings? Moreso, what about my other questions? Where did they end up? Could answers have been fielded to those questions, as well?
Sadly we just don't know. In fact, we don't even have a 'no comment at this time' regarding this issue from the Pentagon's spokesperson handling it. In the end, it is in the public's interest to know how the media is being treated by the Department Of Defense on this issue after they themselves helped perpetuate it.
Calling the situation disappointing and bizarre would be a huge understatement.
Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com
Dit wormachtige organisme is voorouder van zowat alle dieren, inclusief de mens - HLN.be
De stamboom van de mens en van de meeste dieren gaat helemaal terug tot een soort worm, zo blijkt uit het onderzoek van een wormachtig wezen van 555 miljoen jaar oud. Het is alleszins voorlopig het oudste voorbeeld van een fossiel van bilateria. Bilateria vormen een onderdeel van het onderrijk van de dieren waartoe bijna alle dieren behoren. Sponzen en neteldieren zijn de bekendste soorten die geen bilateria zijn.
Lees ook
Bilateria zijn dieren met een voor- en achterkant, twee symmetrische zijkanten en openingen aan beide uiteinden die verbonden zijn via een darmkanaal. Volgens de wetenschappers van de studie die in het vakblad PNAS verscheen, was de ontwikkeling van een bilaterale symmetrie een cruciale stap in de evolutie van het dierlijke leven. Organismen konden zich daardoor doelgericht bewegen. Het verschafte hen ook een gemeenschappelijke maar succesvolle manier om hun lichaam te organiseren. Van wormen tot insecten, van dinosaurussen tot mensen: enorm veel dieren kenmerken zich door eenzelfde basisplan voor bilaterale lichamen.
Het organisme Ikaria wariootia leefde 555 miljoen jaar geleden in het Ediacarium, het geologische tijdperk waarin leven meercellig en complexer werd. De ontdekking van het wormachtige organisme volgde op die van kleine holletjes die vijftien jaar geleden al aangetroffen werden in rotsen in Nilpena in Zuid-Australië. Wetenschappers vermoedden wel dat het sporen van bilateria waren, maar vonden in de oude afzettingen geen aanwezigheid van wezens.
Pas recent ontdekten onderzoekers Scott Evans en Mary Droser minuscule, ovale impressies bij sommige gaatjes. Dankzij driedimensionale laserscanning werd een regelmatige, consistente vorm van een cilindrisch lichaam met een duidelijke kop en staart en een lichtjes gegroefd spierstelsel blootgelegd.
Ikaria wariootia was tussen 2 en 7 mm lang en 1 tot 2,5 mm breed. De grootste ovaal paste perfect voor het aanmaken van de holletjes die al vroeger ontdekt waren.
Ikaria wariootia bracht waarschijnlijk zijn leven door met graven door lagen zand op de oceaanbodem, op zoek naar organisch materiaal waarmee het zich kon voeden.
video's , geselecteerd door peter2011
Lake Michigan UFO sightings still unsolved 25 years later
The eerie lights filled the sky along nearly 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, from Ludington south to the Indiana border.
On March 8, 1994, calls flooded 911 to report strange sightings in the night sky. The reports came in from all walks of life — from police and a meteorologist to residents of Michigan's many beach resorts. Hundreds of people witnessed what many insisted were UFOs — unidentified flying objects.
Cindy Pravda, 63, of Grand Haven remembers that night in vivid detail — four lights in the sky that looked like "full moons" over the line of trees behind her horse pasture.
"I got UFOs in the backyard," she told a friend on the phone.
Today, the mystery of one of the largest UFO sightings in Michigan history remains unsolved, but it continues to fascinate extraterrestrial researchers, psychologists and history buffs alike.
Pravda still believes the lights were UFOs.
Read more:
Think you've seen a UFO? Here's how to report it
"I watched them for half an hour. Where I'm facing them, the one on the far left moved off. It moved to the highway and then came back in the same position," Pravda told the Free Press on Thursday. "The one to the right was gone in blink of an eye and then, eventually, everything disappeared quickly."
She still lives in the same house and continues to talk about that night.
"I'm known as the UFO lady of Grand Haven," Pravda laugh.
Daryl and Holly Graves and their son, Joey, told reporters in 1994 they witnessed lights in the sky over Holland at about 9:30 p.m. on March 8.
"I saw six lights out the window above the barn across the street," Joey Graves told the Free Press in 1994. "I got up and went to the sofa and looked up at the sky. They were red and white and moving."
Others gave similar accounts, including Holland Police Officer Jeff Velthouse and a meteorologist from the National Weather Service Office in Muskegon County. What's more, the meteorologist recorded unknown echoes on his radar the same time Velthouse reported the lights.
"My guy looked at the radar and observed three echoes as the officer was describing the movement," Leo Grenier of the NWS office in Muskegon said in 1994. "The movement of the objects was rather erratic. The echoes were there about 15 minutes, drifting slowly south-southwest, kind of headed toward the Chicago side of the south end of Lake Michigan."
In 1995, The Free Press published the conversation between the National Weather Service and Velthouse.
"What do you think it is?" said the weather service radar operator.
Velthouse described witnesses seeing five to six objects, some cylindrical with blue, red, white and green lights.
The radar operator said, "There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren't planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I'm doing severe weather."
Hundreds of reports of suspected UFOs were called in not only to 911 dispatchers but also to the Mutual UFO Network's (MUFON) Michigan chapter.
MUFON, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in 1969, bills itself as the "world's oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization."
In 1994, the network received UFO reports from Ludington south to the Indiana state line, spokeswoman Virginia Tilly told the Free Press in 1994.
"We're getting 10 or 15 new sightings a day," Tilly said. "We have probably 20 people in various stages of investigating these reports."
The reported UFO sightings was the largest since March 1966, Bill Konkolesky, Michigan state director of MUFON, told the Free Press this week.
"It was one of the big ones in the state. We haven't seen a large UFO (reported sighting) wave since that time," Konkolesky said.
Konkolesky joined the network in 1993. He was not part of the investigation team but still has a copy of an article about the sightings with a picture of the Graves family on the front cover.
MUFON interviewed dozens of witnesses, Konkolesky said, many of whom remain in contact with the organization.
"There was a lot of enthusiasm into the UFO field (then) because of the amount of press coverage. It was outstanding," he said. "They were paying attention to the phenomenon."
Konkolesky said the flying objects reported in 1994 are characterized as "unexplained" and the sightings remain a mystery.
The idea of alien life isn't as farfetched as once thought, with a number of recent discoveries pointing raising the possibility.
In a series of reports from USA TODAY, researchers have studied whether life could exist on a recently discovered "Super Earth" about 30 trillion miles away.
Villanova University astrophysicists Edward Guinan and Scott Engle told USA TODAY that the planet, known as Barnard b, has a temperature of 274 degrees below zero, but "niches of life" may be possible under the ice.
Another group of researchers is studying whether a mysterious object entering the Earth's solar system from interstellar space at a high rate of speed actually is a probe intentionally sent here by an alien civilization. Scientists later decided that the weird object actually was a comet.
And another study reports that more “fast radio bursts" – bright, short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe — have been detected by astronomers. Some researchers have considered the idea that these bursts could be signals from intelligent aliens, according to Science News.
The UFO frenzy of 1994 was one in a string of unexplained phenomena in Michigan history.
In 2016, a mysterious phenomenon known as the Paulding Light was reported in the western Upper Peninsula.
Witnesses reported seeing a bright white light, glowing deep inside the woods, changing size and shape before fading into the darkness. Although many individuals believed the flickering lights was because of a car driving over a hill, others believed it to be something supernatural and too bright to be headlights.
That same year, a photo of a furry creature in the Upper Peninsula surfaced, sparking conversation about a possible Bigfoot. At that time, the Upper Peninsula Bigfoot/Sasquatch Research Organization also reported a sighting near the community of South Branch in Ogemaw County.
In December 2016, the organization led a search for the beast in the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.
Strange Ufo Encounter By Many Witnesses Over Lake Michigan
MARCH 8, 1994 ……SOUTH OF HOLLAND MICHIGAN
On the evening of March 8, 1994, residents of Southwest Michigan began seeing strange things in the skies over Lake Michigan to the south of Holland. Blue, white, red, and green lights, sometimes attached to cylindrical objects, and sometimes performing unusual maneuvers, were reported.
911 operators began receiving calls at around 9:30 p.m. about something that looked like “a string of Christmas lights way up in the sky.” It wasn’t just a few people reporting these things; it was counties all up and down Lake Michigan. Some sources said 300 witnesses, including several police officers, saw the lights.
There were so many reports that one of the Ottawa County 911 operators decided to call the National Weather Service radar operator at Muskegon. The conversations that 911 had with the NWS operator were taped and later made their way into the media. The radar operator’s voice could be heard describing abrupt movements of the object and multiple objects appearing on the radar screen.
He said that what he was seeing could not be precipitation, especially at that height. One object was tracked moving twenty miles in ten seconds.
Holland police officer Jeff Vellhouse spoke to the operator of the Muskegon radar that picked up the radar tracks: “He said he had three things on his radar, and they were in a triangular shape. He said they hovered over Holland and moved southwest. He said that one would move out of the triangular pattern, then move back in.”
The radar operator also reported: “There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren’t planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.”
It was said that there was no NWS written or taped records of the radar contacts themselves, but Dave Reinhart of BIMUP (Bureau of Investigators of Mysteries & Unusual Phenomena) claimed to have received copies of the NWS radar operator’s report in late 1994. He also said that he had talked to an individual referred to as “Fred”, who worked at Area 51 and who had knowledge that what occurred on the night of March 8, 1994 was some sort of rendezvous of UFOs from the east, west, north, and south.
Scott Ruiter of Grand Haven saw the lights in Grand Haven Township at 10:30 p.m. March 7: “It looked like about five airplanes following each other fairly closely. One would blink, then the other, other and other, right to left,”
The National Weather Service later tried to downplay the radar trackings: “There is no relation between the UFOs and the radar tracks,” said Dean Gulezian, the weather service’s area manager for Michigan. Gulezian said that although the radar did show some echoes, one key thing is the eyewitnesses saw these things at tree-top level, while the radar echoes were from an altitude of 10,000 feet or higher.” (Note above where the first witnesses reported seeing something like a string of Christmas lights “way up in the sky”)
Randee Murphy and her husband, of Ada Township, observed a “huge” shape for about two minutes as it flew slowly about 100 feet over the woods outside their home. “It had four lights,” she said, and “made a soft, whirring noise. It sounded like a single jet engine.” The Michigan flap continued for several days, presumably ending on the 10th. The sightings were never adequately explained.
videos, peter2011
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Supermassive Black Holes Shortly after The Big Bang: How to Seed Them
According to classical theories, these space giants would not have had the time
They are billions of times larger than our Sun: how is it possible that, as recently observed, supermassive black holes were already present when the Universe, now 14 billion years old, was “just” 800 million years old? For astrophysicists, the formation of these cosmic monsters in such a short time is a real scientific headache, which raises important questions on the current knowledge of the development of these celestial bodies. According to classical theories, these space giants would not have had the time to develop in the young Universe. Yet, observations say they were already present. A new study by SISSA proposes a response to the fascinating question
A recent article published in The Astrophysical Journal, by the SISSA Ph.D. student Lumen Boco and his supervisor Andrea Lapi, offers a possible explanation to the thorny issue. Thanks to an original model theorized by the scientists from Trieste, the study proposes a very fast formation process in the initial phases of the development of the supermassive black holes, those up to now considered slower. Proving, mathematically, that their existence was possible in the young Universe, the results of the research reconcile the timing required for their growth with the limits imposed by the age of the Cosmos. The validity of the theory can be fully validated thanks to future gravitational wave detectors namely Einstein Telescope and LISA, but tested in several basic aspects also with the current Advanced LIGO/Virgo system.
The cosmic monster that grows at the centre of galaxies
The scientists started their study with a piece of well-known observational evidence: the growth of supermassive black holes occurs in the central regions of galaxies, progenitors of the current elliptical galaxies, which had a very high gas content and in which the stellar formation was extremely intense. “The biggest stars live a short time and very quickly evolve into stellar black holes, as large as several scores of solar masses; they are small, but many form in these galaxies”. The dense gas that surrounds them, explain Boco and Lapi, has a very powerful definitive effect of dynamic friction and causes them to migrate very quickly to the centre of the galaxy. The majority of the numerous black holes that reach the central regions merge, creating the supermassive black hole seed. Boco and Lapi continue: “According to classical theories, a supermassive black hole grows at the centre of a galaxy capturing the surrounding matter, principally gas, “growing it” on itself and finally devouring it at a rhythm which is proportional to its mass. For this reason, during the initial phases of its development, when the mass of the black hole is small, the growth is very slow. To the extent that, according to the calculations, to reach the mass observed, billions of times that of the Sun, a very long time would be required, even greater than the age of the young Universe”. Their study, however, showed that things could go much faster than that.
The crazy dash of black holes: what the scientists have discovered
“Our numerical calculations show that the process of dynamic migration and fusion of stellar black holes can make the supermassive black hole seed reach a mass of between 10,000 and 100,000 times that of the Sun in just 50-100 million years”. At this point, the researchers say, “the growth of the central black hole according to the aforementioned direct accretion of gas, envisaged by the standard theory, will become very fast, because the quantity of gas it will succeed in attracting and absorbing will become immense, and predominant on the process we propose. Nevertheless, precisely the fact of starting from such a big seed as envisaged by our mechanism speeds up the global growth of the supermassive black hole and allows its formation, also in the Young Universe. In short, in light of this theory, we can state that 800 million years after the Big Bang the supermassive black holes could already populate the Cosmos”.
“Looking” at the supermassive black hole seeds grow
The article, besides illustrating the model and demonstrating its efficacy, also proposes a method for testing it: “The fusion of numerous stellar black holes with the seed of the supermassive black hole at the centre will produce gravitational waves which we expect to see and study with current and future detectors”, explain the researchers. In particular, the gravitational waves emitted in the initial phases, when the central black hole seed is still small, will be identifiable by the current detectors like Advanced LIGO/Virgo and fully characterisable by the future Einstein Telescope. The subsequent development phases of the supermassive black hole could be investigated thanks to the future detector LISA, which will be launched in space around 2034. In this way, explain Boco and Lapi, “the process we propose can be validated in its different phases, in a complementary way, by future gravitational wave detectors.
“This research” concludes Andrea Lapi, coordinator of the Astrophysics and Cosmology group of SISSA, “shows how the students and researchers of our group are fully approaching the new frontier of gravitational waves and multi-messenger astronomy. In particular, our main goal will be to develop theoretical models, like that devised in this case, which serve to capitalise on the information originating from the experiments of current and future gravitational waves, thereby hopefully providing solutions for unresolved issues connected with astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics”.
Contacts and sources:
Ancient Face Found On Moon, Looks Viking, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Face Found On Moon, Looks Viking, UFO Sighting News.
NASA cuts live feed when colorful UFO appears
VIDEO: Triangle UFO over Burien, Washington 20-Mar-2020
In this video that was recorded over Burien, Washington on 20th March 2020 we can see these four orbs that appeared red to the naked eye performing maneuvers to first form the classic triangle formation only to break this formation to form a straight line before disappearing into the darkness of the night leaving just one orb visible. What is going on with the resurgence of these red orbs?
NASA explains why weird, wheel-like blip in space images is not a UFO
It might look like Deep Space Nine is visiting our solar system, but it has a scientific explanation.
This STEREO image from Feb. 29 shows the strange wheel-like shape that turned out to be a reflection.
NASA
UFO aficionados recently got excited about a strange shape that appeared in images captured by NASA's Stereo mission. Was it aliens? Nope. It was a reflection.
Stereo, short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, launched as twin space observatories in 2006 on a mission to study the sun and coronal mass ejections. One of the spacecraft is still in operation. Its HI2 telescope captured a nifty view that included Venus and Earth in late February. That's when the mysterious wheel-like shape appeared.
UFO debunker UFO of Interest tackled the visual phenomenon in early March, calling it out as a "recurring image artifact caused by internal reflections of a planet." NASA confirmed that diagnosis in a Friday update on the Stereo website.
ufoofinterest.org@ufoofinterestMany doubts about this video: a huge UFO spotted in our solar system by STEREO camera in the last ten days of February? Nope, that object is a recurring image artifact caused by internal reflections of a planet.
"The strange looking geometrical 'object' is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics," NASA said in the update.
This annotated image shows the Lagoon Nebula, Venus and Earth in the STEREO observatory's field of view. The reflected light artifact caused by Venus is circled.
NASA
This isn't the first (and won't be the last) time this sort of reflection has appeared in Stereo's field of view. An annotated look at Stereo data from March 12 shows the Lagoon Nebula, Venus, Earth and the light artifact, which looks like a steering wheel.
It's easy to see how a casual observer could get excited by this weird space blip. In time-lapse movies, the wheel looks like it's traveling through space. It also bears a slight resemblance to some circular sci-fi creations, like the Deep Space Nine space station from the Star Trek series of the same name.
For more fun with internal reflections, visit the Stereo image artifacts page, a delightful collection of images with strange-looking but completely explainable visual artifacts.
SpaceX Rocket Looks Like a UFO and Attracts One Too
What is it about SpaceX and UFOs? The gangs of tiny satellites it’s been launching are responsible for many UFO sightings recently. It’s nighttime launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Los Angeles have been blamed for other UFO sightings. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launchpad in 2016 with a mysterious UFO in the sky behind it, launching plenty of conspiracy theories. A UFO was spotted near a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule while it was attached to the International Space Station.
A SpaceX Falcon launching from Vandenberg AFB in 2017.
Need more? A recent UFO sighting over Phoenix had “Phoenix lights” hopefuls hoping, but it looks like it was another SpaceX launch. A few days earlier, the camera on another SpaceX launch picked up a UFO near the launch rocket as it descended for a landing. Should we be mad at Elon Musk … or jealous?
“We saw this really bright, bright light shining from an object moving away. It looked like a UFO to us.”
Well, if you haven’t seen a rocket launch on a hazy night, this one (see the photos here) probably struck you as a UFO too. AZ Central reports that Pam Sutton of Maricopa, Arizona, said she and her husband were driving around 7 p.m. and both saw the strange sky anomaly, as did everyone who pulled off the road with them, an editor for the Arizona Republic and former Arizona governor Jan Brewer. The Arizona Republic and local police received numerous calls, before SpaceX cleared things up with an email (wow … what a sense of urgency!) to Phoenix Fire Department’s Capt. Rob McDade.
“We were told it was indeed the SpaceX Rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base.”
SpaceX again … and yes, this one was also launching 10 mini-satellites. While the cases of mistaken identity don’t seem to be bothering SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk, could it be bothering actual UFO pilots?
Heads it’s SpaceX, tails it’s aliens.
“During the streamed launch of SpaceX Starlink 3/18/2020, during the decent of first stage rocket and seconds before the re-entry burn, an object is seen from under the rocket. The object is either stationary and the rocket is falling passed it or the object is traveling in a vertical direction (unknown if up or down).”
That description comes from “Latest UFO Sightings” which posted the video (see it here) and photos, as did a few other sites (here’s another one), not to mention SpaceX itself, which posted the entire launch (watch it here). They report that there’s not much else to report. Launch debris? Certainly a possibility, although one would think SpaceX takes extreme precautions to avoid creating debris that would linger so closely to the only reusable rockets as they land. A drone? Again, SpaceX is doing enough ‘dark’ missions for the military (although this wasn’t one) to make sure no one is trying to catch a glimpse of the launch or the secret cargo. Aliens? Have we exhausted the process-of-elimination yet?
Debris, drones and other natural reasons for this UFO should be alarming to SpaceX and Musk. However, no one seems to be alarmed. Is that a signal that it’s something else? In the meantime, maybe Ken Burns should devote his next documentary to showing all the things in the sky that are NOT alien spaceships. There’s a show that could stretch longer than “The Civil War”!
Diamonds Lead to Long Lost Chunk of an Ancient Arctic Continent
“Diamonds are forever” is a clever jewelry marketing slogan, a popular James Bond film and the thing that helped geologists find a long lost of an ancient arctic continent that once stretched from Scotland to Labrador, Canada. What’s the bigger deal – the chunk or the diamonds?
“For researchers, kimberlites are subterranean rockets that pick up passengers on their way to the surface.”
Wait a minute … you said this story was about rocks, not rockets and passengers from the center of the Earth!
“The passengers are solid chunks of wall rocks that carry a wealth of details on conditions far beneath the surface of our planet over time.”
Baffin Island
University of British Columbia geologist Maya Kopylova metaphorically describes how igneous rocks called kimberlites pick up diamonds and other ‘passengers’ as they are brought from deep underground to the surface by geological forces. Kopylova and colleagues were studying kimberlites from Baffin Island in Nunavut, specifically from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property (and yes, De Beers created the ‘Diamonds are forever’ slogan – see how all of this is connected?). While De Beers obviously wanted them looking for signs of diamonds, the team noticed that the mineral composition of these rocks showed that they belongs to the North Atlantic Craton – which sounds like a movie monster but is actually ancient form of continent. Some parts of this craton eventually became part of North America and Greenland, but others sank beneath the Earth’s crust, never to be seen again.
Never underestimate the lure of diamonds.
“Finding these ‘lost’ pieces is like finding a missing piece of a puzzle. The scientific puzzle of the ancient Earth can’t be complete without all of the pieces.”
In a press release by the University of British Columbia announcing the paper published in Journal of Petrology, lead author Kopylova describes why geologists are so excited about this find. Cratons are billion-year-old parts of the continental lithosphere – the combined ancient crust and upper mantle that eventually broke up to form today’s continents and tectonic plates. The North Atlantic Craton is one, as are the North China Craton, the Sarmatian Craton in Russia and Ukraine, the Amazonia Craton in South America, the Kaapvaal Craton in South Africa and the Gawler Craton in South Australia. Each has its own unique mineral structure which help identify them.
Also called Laurentia, the North Atlantic Craton has had its ups and downs over time, forming parts of early continents and supercontinents. Laurentia is named after the Laurentian Shield, a large area of exposed igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks that make its area an excellent place for mining minerals and diamonds. How important are these pieces of the Laurentia puzzle?
“With these samples we’re able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents based on deeper, mantle rocks. We can now understand and map not only the uppermost skinny layer of Earth that makes up one percent of the planet’s volume, but our knowledge is literally and symbolically deeper. We can put together 200-kilometre deep fragments and contrast them based on the details of the deep mineralogy.”
Believe it or not, while De Beers is obviously on Baffin Island for the diamonds, this is actually part of a graduate student project at the University of British Columbia to help train future geologists. UBC students get samples to study, De Beer gets maps to future diamond mines and Kopylova gets more data to add to the early history of Earth.
And those looking for movie monster ideas get a good one: The North Atlantic Craton Meets Godzilla at the North Pole!
The Mysterious Canary Islands Mass UFO Sighting
Located in the Atlantic Ocean in the region called Macaronesia and just about 62 miles from the northwestern coast of Africa off Morocco is a Spanish held archipelago called the Canary Islands. Known for its amazing beaches, pleasant climate, biodiversity, and numerous natural features it is a major tourist destination in the region, yet what many of those fun seekers may not know is that these scenic islands were once the location of one of the most bizarre mass UFO sightings in history, which would be seen by thousands of witnesses from all walks of life and remains an unsolved conundrum.
It began on June 22, 1976, when people living on the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera began calling in to report numerous strange lights performing odd maneuvers in the sky, amongst them one that seemed to be larger than the others, described as a giant, luminous sphere. Among these reports some were more spectacular than others, and one of the first reported incidents was made by the Navy escort ship, the Atrevida, which at the time was positioned off the coast of Fuerteventura Island. On this evening at approximately 9:27 PM the crew observed an extremely bright light moving in the general direction of the ship. It was first thought to be a normal aircraft, but this turned out to not be the case, as it began rotating, pulsating, and generating a blindingly bright halo of yellow and blue, as well as various flashing strobe effects.
The Canary Islands
(Credit: Oona Räisänen/Wikimedia Commons)
The Spanish navy vessel Atrevida.
(Credit: José Juan Medina Cobacho/Wikimedia Commons)
The captain explained that, minutes after this “halo” of light appeared, he observed the following:
[T]he light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.
The ship’s first officer echoed the captain’s statements. And the officers also confirmed that the ship’s surface radar detected nothing at the time of the sighting.
The depositions of the naval officers were considered to be some of the most-credible testimony regarding the UFO sighting. The deposition of a physician, however, was among the more strange accounts collected during the investigation. Dr. Francisco Padrón León was in a taxi on his way to see a patient in the town of Las Rosas on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. He explained that, when he had almost arrived at his destination, the taxi’s lights hit a luminous sphere hovering motionless just off the ground. He described that the sphere was electric blue in color and constructed of a “transparent and crystalline-like material.” He estimated that the UFO had a radius of approximately one hundred feet. Inside the sphere, Dr. Padrón saw a platform that looked like it was made of metal, and what appeared to be three control consoles. He also claimed to have seen two tall humanoid figures inside the sphere, whom he estimated were between eight and a half feet and ten feet tall. They wore brilliant red outfits and some type of head gear.
When the taxi arrived at the patient’s home, Dr. Padrón continued watching the sphere. He described it as follows:
I [then] observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.
The doctor raced into the patient’s house to inform the residents about the mysterious sphere. Everyone came outside to see the object that had ascended high in the sky. The UFO quickly accelerated, shooting away at an incredible speed. The doctor described that it “dissolved into a bluish spindle-shape with red underneath.” Similar to the description provided by the navy officers, Dr. Padrón said “a brilliant white halo was formed close to the object, which bit by bit was forming another very brilliant blue halo.”
The baffled crew watched this mysterious object for a full 40 minutes, and the official report from the ship would read in part:
The original light went out and a luminous beam from it began to rotate. It remained like this for approximately two minutes. Then an intense great halo of yellowish and bluish light developed, and remained in the same position for 40 minutes, even though the original phenomenon was no longer visible. Two minutes after the great halo, the light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.
At no point was the craft picked up on radar, and a check of air traffic in the area showed no military or civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the vicinity. This would start a whole series of reports from throughout the Canary Islands as whatever it was headed out on its inscrutable mission, and people seemed to be reporting two different types of phenomena, one being this large sphere and the other being smaller flitting orbs, and these were seen by hundreds of people across several islands. One of the most intriguing reports came from a doctor Francisco Padron Leon, who at the time was in a taxi on his way to a house call at the town of Las Rosas. However, things got very odd when both he and the driver noticed an illuminated globe up in front of them, just seeming to hover over the ground. According to Leon’s report, it measured an estimated 100 feet across, and was seemingly made up of a semi-clear material like crystal. More bizarre still was that as they drew closer they could see that the bottom of the sphere was ringed by some sort of metallic platform, upon which two immense humanoid beings around 10 feet in height were standing next to large consoles of some kind. These two creatures had oversized heads, wore some kind of helmets, and seemed to be operating a giant tube that belched forth a bluish smoke, and the doctor would say of these entities and what happened next:
At each side of the center there were two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m. [8.5 to 10 ft.] tall, but no taller than 3 m. [10 ft.], dressed entirely in red and facing each other in such a way that I always saw their profile. Then I observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.
This gigantic sphere would ascend and then purportedly shoot off at astounding speed along with its mysterious occupants. It would then be seen by several other witnesses directly after this, including the very patient that the doctor was on his way to see, all of who described the same translucent crystalline structure and giant beings on their catwalk. By the end of the evening there would apparently be thousands of reports from across the archipelago describing something bizarre going on in the sky, coming from a wide variety of professions and ages and making them one of the most mass witnessed UFO events ever, yet it was all mostly swept under the carpet by the Spanish Air Force.
Sketch of the UFO occupants
The following year, in 1977, some of these reports were leaked to journalist J. J. Benitez by a Spanish Air Force General, and would subsequently find their way into his book UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government, but this was all still considered unverifiable and filled with spooky conspiracies. It would not be until 1994 that people would really take it seriously, when the Spanish Air Force declassified its files on the events and it was clear for all to see that something very odd had indeed been documented from that evening. The declassified report was very detailed, included over 100 pages of testimony, evaluations, drawings, a full chronology of the sightings, and it also took the step of separating witnesses by their perceived level of veracity and reliability, with the reports of the crew of the Atrevida and that of doctor Leon ranking at the top. It was also explained that an investigative adjunct had been launched by the Spanish Air Force, which had found that there had been no military or civilian aircraft at the time and they officially labelled it an “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report would conclude:
The fact that a very strange and peculiar aerial phenomena occurred on the night of 22 June is a true and proven fact, as incredible as its behavior and conditions may seem. We should have to think seriously of the necessity of considering the possibility of accepting the hypothesis that a craft of unknown origin, propelled by an equally unknown energy, is moving freely over the skies in the Canaries.
It is a startlingly clear and refreshingly frank piece of declassified information, with the rare stance of a government honestly throwing up their hands and admitting that they don’t know what they are dealing with. No Venus, ball lightning, Jupiter, or other attempts to wedge it all into the mundane, just the acknowledgment that something very weird was going on, indeed, and leaving the field open for speculation. What happened over these secluded islands back in 1976? What did they want and who or what were those enigmatic beings? The Canary Island UFO sightings remain important in that they were reported by so many witnesses, many of which were highly reliable, as well as the fact that occupants were observed and the government admitted they have no answer for it all. Although this case still remains rather obscure, it certainly seems to be worth another look.
Bizarre Cases of UFOs Dogfighting Other UFOs
In the annals of UFO sightings throughout history there have been many that stand out as truly incredible, even sometimes including purported military engagements between UFOs and human beings. This may seem pretty spectacular as it is, like something out of a science fiction movie, but what if we take it a step further? What happens when these enigmatic objects actually engage each other? While it seems to be a subject well off the beaten path, there are actually a few cases of UFO on UFO dogfights going way back.
The earliest case we will look at here, and probably the most flat out spectacular and bonkers, is an odd phenomenon that purportedly played out in the skies over Nuremberg, Germany, in 1561. On April 14th of that year, normal life ground to a halt as citizens looked upwards with a mixture of awe and fear as something very strange happened up there. There whizzing about in the heavens were reportedly hundreds of mysterious objects of all shapes and sizes, including spheres, cylinders, tubes, saucer-like objects, crosses, ovals, lunar crescents, a black spear, and myriad others, which seemed to be engaged in some sort of free-for-all aerial battle, scorching the sky with their hostilities, after which one of them was said to actually crash somewhere out in the wilderness. The objects moved erratically and with great speed, and an article that appeared in the local paper at the time, said of this bizarre scene:
At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.
These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.
The whole thing apparently lasted for a full hour, after which all of these various objects apparently flew off towards the sun. The article was accompanied by a woodblock print depicting the battle, which was also brought into modern discourse when it was published in Carl Jung’s 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and it has left people scratching their heads ever since. At the time of the article it was largely seen as some sort of celestial battle and a sign from God, but of course in that era flying spaceships would not have really been a thing since it was an age when we didn’t even understand the cosmos in the first place, let alone flying machines. It only makes sense they would try to explain it in a religious context, with something they could understand. In later centuries it has come to be seen as perhaps some sort of atmospheric phenomena such as a sundog, flying swarms of insects, clouds, birds, a sensationalized tall tale, or even an actual mass battle between UFOs. It is likely we will never know, considering how lost to time the report is, but it is definitely curious.
A very similar series of events allegedly occurred in April of 1665 in the skies over Barhöfft, which was then in Sweden, but is now in Germany. On this occasion there were supposedly seen several disc-shaped objects that were battling amongst themselves, after which they scattered and one remained hovering there, which apparently made all those who looked upon it sick. One Erasmus Francisci would write of this in a 1689 article entitled Der wunder-reiche Ueberzug unserer Nider-Welt/Oder Erd-umgebende, in which he says of the battle aftermath:
After a while out of the sky came a flat round form, like a plate, looking like the big hat of a man… Its color was that of the darkening moon, and it hovered right over the Church of St. Nicolai. There it remained stationary until the evening. The fishermen, worried to death, didn’t want to look further at the spectacle and buried their faces in their hands. On the following days, they fell sick with trembling all over and pain in head and limbs. Many scholarly people thought a lot about that.
As with the Nuremburg case, this has been speculated as being mirages, birds, or some other mundane phenomena, but the detail of the fishermen falling sick is intriguing, and makes one wonder if this could have been an effect of radiation sickness in an era when we didn’t even know what radiation was. What was going on here? There have been much more modern reports of this sort of battle between UFOs happening, such as one incident that reportedly happened in February of 1980 in Australia. On this day brothers Rob and Phil Tindale were at their home in the town of Aldgate when they spied what seemed to be a brightly lit yellow object “bobbing about” in the sky above. After several minutes another similar object then joined it, only this one was larger and emitted a red light towards the smaller object.
According to the brothers, the larger object would move up to the smaller one, stop, shoot its red light, back up and then repeat the process, which gave them the impression that it was an attack of some sort. The smaller object then took off and the two engaged in a breathtaking display of speed and aerial maneuverability, an obvious chase, before both of them sped off in opposite directions. One of the brothers would say, “Certainly there were two lights, one appeared to be chasing the other, they both dipped below the horizon. It was a very memorable thing.” Both of the brothers remain adamant that they actually witnessed two UFOs dogfighting each other, and there was even another witness, a local farmer named Daryl Browne, who reported seeing a “speedboat-shaped yellow thing” crash through some trees leaving a mess of broken branches behind. One wonders just what happened here.
Even more recently is an account covered on UFO Casebook and from Unsolved UFO Mysteries by William J. Birnes, and Harold Burt. Supposedly this report comes from the Russian UFO researcher Nikolay Subbotin, and took place in 1989 over Zaostrovka, Russia. Apparently, on September 16, 1989, several hundred witnesses observed a formation of six silvery saucer-shaped UFOs chase a larger, golden one, apparently attacking it in the process. During the confrontation, all of the craft exhibited acceleration and maneuverability far beyond anything known, and all were described as shooting strong beams of flickering intense light at each other. According to a report in the newspaper Semipalatinsk, the energy being thrown about by these UFOs was enough to cripple the power grid and send the whole town into darkness.
Making this report all the more sensational is that after some time of the silver saucers ganging up on seventh object, the golden one then seems to have succumbed to the many energy beam hits it was sustaining, losing altitude to go hurtling towards the ground off in the distance, purportedly coming down at a bog on a nearby military test range. As soon as this happened, the victorious silver objects then reportedly shot off into the distance, and although the first reaction of the witnesses was to see if the other had crashed, it was a military area off limits to civilians. According to Subbotin, the military wasted no time in moving in shortly after the crash, and cleared the area, during which time several personnel fell mysterious ill and the instruments of passing aircraft experienced interference. What happened to this alleged downed UFO, if it ever really existed at all? Why were those other UFOs attacking it? Who knows?
These are certainly some very surreal and off-kilter accounts, in that rather than human fighter jets engaging these unidentified flying objects they seem to have been engaging each other. It is all pretty wild to think about, these advanced craft testing their meddle with each other in battle, and if it is real one is left to wonder why they would do this. Are there differing factions of these beings that on occasion don’t see eye to eye? Are there enemies among the occupants of these craft, who for whatever reasons resort to battle? Or is it just that these are misidentified phenomena that give the illusion of such bizarre dogfights? Such cases surely are some pretty far-out stuff, and whether they are real or not they certainly stoke the fires of the imagination.
Mysterious Explosion On The Far Side Of The Sun Caused By Crashing UFO
UFO Shoots Past Hikers In Riverside, California, March 22, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Shoots Past Hikers In Riverside, California, March 22, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Miami UFO video: “Police cars created a distraction from what was happening in the sky above”
Strange UFO event happened in Miami, Florida on 16th March 2020.
Witness report:
Unidentified objects flying over the sky, military convoy like, white spherical drone and military planes. Flying sorcerer looking lights. I was outside on my balcony. 15 police cars created a distraction from what was happening in the sky above. This orb drone looking object was rotating, pulsating and emanating this green light while military completely silent vehicles were making their way south of Miami through an artificial passage made of clouds. After a while a sorcerer looking light came in the sky, just before the military convoy was passing by.
Other videos, by peter2011
Canadian Scientist’s Deep-Diamond Research Reveals Ancient Continent
Lucky Canadian scientists have discovered new evidence in diamonds of ancient continental formation and drift.
During the Archean Eon, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, the Earth's crust had cooled enough to allow the formation of continents and life began to emerge. The North Atlantic Craton (NAC) is an Archaean block of the Earth's crust that formed the nucleus of a continent which included the modern land masses of southern West Greenland, the Nain Province in Labrador, and the Lewisian complex in northwestern Scotland.
Now, a team of Canadian scientists have identified a remnant of this North Atlantic craton, and according to Science UBC , it was a “chance discovery” made while they were sifting through diamond exploration samples from Baffin Island , which “led to a major scientific payoff.”
According to University of British Columbia geologist, Maya Kopylova, the chance discovery, which is detailed in a new paper in the Journal of Petrology , was made through the analysis of what are known as “Kimberlite rocks.” Occurring deep within the Earth’s crust in vertical structures known as “kimberlite pipes,” they are the most important source of mined diamonds today. And according to Dr Michael Patterson, in his 2013 paper Kimberlite eruptions as triggers for early Cenozoic hyperthermals , kimberlites formed millions of years ago at depths of 150 to 400 kilometers and over time geological and chemical forces drove them to the surface of the Earth’s crust, “embedded with diamonds.”
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Kopylova, said kimberlites “pick up passengers” on their way to the surface in the form of solid chunks of “wall rocks” that carry data about historical geological occurrences deep within the bowels of the Earth. And by pairing up the stratifications of kimberlite rock samples, and “deeper, mantle rocks,” the scientists were able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents.
Diamond crystal in kimberlite matrix.
(public display, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA) Image: James St. John / CC BY 2.0 )
Deep core drill samples taken from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property, located in southern Baffin Island, were analyzed by Kopylova and colleagues and soon it became apparent that the wall rocks were “ very special,” as they shared a similar mineral signature with other portions of the North Atlantic craton. Kopylova wrote that it was “easy to tie the pieces together” because adjacent ancient cratons in Northern Canada, Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario and in Nunavu, “have completely different mineralogies.”
Cratons are referred to by scientists as “continental nuclei” that serve as anchors, about which other continental blocks gather. The North American plate still has some of these nuclei present at its center but the other continents have fragmented and re-arranged crating a long and tangled geological history of plate movements. Kopylova said:
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Kopylova, said kimberlites “pick up passengers” on their way to the surface in the form of solid chunks of “wall rocks” that carry data about historical geological occurrences deep within the bowels of the Earth. And by pairing up the stratifications of kimberlite rock samples, and “deeper, mantle rocks,” the scientists were able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents.
Diamond crystal in kimberlite matrix.
(public display, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA) Image: James St. John / CC BY 2.0 )
Deep core drill samples taken from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property, located in southern Baffin Island, were analyzed by Kopylova and colleagues and soon it became apparent that the wall rocks were “ very special,” as they shared a similar mineral signature with other portions of the North Atlantic craton. Kopylova wrote that it was “easy to tie the pieces together” because adjacent ancient cratons in Northern Canada, Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario and in Nunavu, “have completely different mineralogies.”
Cratons are referred to by scientists as “continental nuclei” that serve as anchors, about which other continental blocks gather. The North American plate still has some of these nuclei present at its center but the other continents have fragmented and re-arranged crating a long and tangled geological history of plate movements. Kopylova said:
“Finding these lost pieces is like finding a missing piece of a puzzle: a scientific puzzle of the ancient Earth can ’t be complete without all of the pieces.”
The North Atlantic craton fragmented about 150 million years ago and it stretches presently from northern Scotland, across southern Greenland and southwest into Labrador. But the newly identified rock sample covers the diamond bearing Chidliak kimberlite province in southern Baffin Island adding roughly “10 percent to the known expanse of the North Atlantic craton.” Previous attempts at continental reconstructions have been based on much shallower rock samples which had formed at depths of one to 10 kilometers but new technologies allowed this team of researchers to obtain mineralogy samples from “200-kilometers deep.”
The drill core samples taken from deep below the Chidliak Kimberlite Province in southern Baffin Island are described as exceptionally valuable, and very expensive to retrieve - much, much more than the average University Geology department budget would extend to. And it was for this reason the samples were initially provided by Peregrine Diamonds , who were acquired in 2018 by the international diamond exploration company and retailer De Beers .
Kopylova said their partner companies demonstrate “a lot of goodwill by providing research samples to UBC, which enables fundamental research and the training of many grad students.” Now, cynical readers will already be thinking to themselves that there is no way a commercial drilling company would “give away” such expensive drill core samples “in good will,” and they’d be right, for in return, UBC research provides the private drilling company with essential geological information about the deep diamondiferous mantle to support their successful, and highly profitable, diamond mining business.
By Ashley Cowie
What's that in the sky? It's a SpaceX rocket, but it sure doesn't look like itCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Planetary nebula? Supernova remnant? No, this incredible image is actually a photo of a rocket launch. The rocket's exhaust combined with atmospheric effects emulates an image of a deep-space object.
A photographer captured the shot during the launch of SpaceX's 20th cargo resupply mission on March 6 as the Falcon 9 blasted off toward the International Space Station. Before the first-stage booster touched down at the company's landing zone, a short distance away, it created quite the spectacle.
"It's always amazing to see this phenomenon happen in real time," Erik Kuna, a spaceflight photographer for Supercluster, told Space.com. "But there's nothing like seeing the images captured afterwards in your camera's viewfinder. I'm always amazed at the detail and clarity."
Standing in a grassy field at NASA's Kennedy Space Center that night, I, too, watched as the Falcon soared into the night sky. Appearing as a bright orange fireball, the rocket turned night into day, while the roar of the engines washed over me.
It was cold and windy at the press site, but it was also a clear night. This meant that you could see the rocket as it went through the various stages of flight: liftoff, main-engine cut-off (MECO), stage separation, second-stage ignition and a series of three landing burns.
As the rocket executed these steps, a glowing cloud appeared in the sky, resembling a planetary nebula. The cloud pulsed and rippled as the rocket's engines burned through their fuel. In the cloud, you could see two bright dots that separated as the rocket's two stages moved farther away from each other.
The phenomenon is featured in a short video that SpaceX posted to Twitter following the launch. The company explained that the effect is produced following stage separation, when the two stages are each doing their own thing: the second stage is firing up and propelling the payload into orbit while the first stage is firing its engines to head back to Earth.
The result? A trippy-looking rocket "nebula." But this isn't a phenomenon unique to the launch earlier this month. Erik Kuna, has been enthralled by the nebula since he first captured a nebula shot during the CRS-17 launch last year.
According to Kuna, most launches can cause stunning light shows, it's just not always as pronounced. "It happens every launch, just some are more prominent than others," he told Space.com. "The best are SpaceX launches where the booster returns to land, but any launch will have some level of the phenomenon."
For instance, during twilight launches just before sunrise or sunset, the sun can illuminate the rocket's plume and make it look like a giant jellyfish in the sky. These launches are often confused for UFOs because of the weird squiggly clouds produced. (Spoiler alert: It's definitely not aliens.)
ULA's Atlas V rocket, carrying the AEHF-5 military communications satellite, launched at dawn on Aug. 8, 2019. The rocket's exhaust is illuminated by the sun, producing a jellyfish-shaped plume.
(Image credit: ULA)
Nebula images require slightly different circumstances, however. First, you need a nighttime rocket launch and a booster landing, preferably touching down on land.
That's where the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy come into play. SpaceX designed its Falcon family of rockets to be reusable, so after liftoff, the rocket's first stage conducts an aerial somersault, reorienting itself midair to return to Earth. Then, it gently touches down, either on land or on the deck of a floating platform at sea.
Return to land landings are best for nebula shots because their flight trajectories make the interactions between the first and second stage separation and the boostback burn more visible against the dark sky. "This creates a magical symphony of light and gases that mix into a canvas of colors and shapes, producing one epic photo," Kuna told Space.com
"During previous night launches, I noticed that we would see this atmospheric glow almost like auroras around the rocket exhaust," he said. "The rockets were producing these fascinating patterns that looked a lot like deep-space images."
Kuna set out to capture the incredible phenomenon with photography, researching what kind of gear and settings he would need to use. Thanks to the ultrasensitive sensors in his camera and special light-gathering lenses, he was able to capture the stunning spectacle.
"The technique is kind of simple once you know your subject and understand what is happening," he said. For photographers who want to give it a try, he recommends a high ISO, a wide aperture and a slow shutter speed with a telephoto lens.
Kuna says there's a bit more to it than traditional launch shots, but that success really comes down to mastering basic concepts. Kuna was the first to capture the spectacle, but has seen a rise in the nebula's popularity ever since.
"I think it's been elusive for many because as photographers we are weary of things like noise [variations in brightness or color] or lack of sharpness in an image," he says.
"I had a picture (in my head) of what I thought a nebula looks like," Kuna said. "I started experimenting and finally captured it during that launch." He said his co-worker noticed the similarity to the cosmic cloud. "He leaned over my shoulder and said 'that looks like a freaking nebula,'" Kuna said. "I knew I got the shot." And the term "rocket nebula" was born.
So what do we see when looking at a rocket nebula photo? According to Kuna, in the CRS-17 photo, the first stage engine appears as a pinpoint of orange glow while the second-stage vacuum engine radiates out as a bluish purple web of light on the bottom.
"These two interact to form the image you see, both areas smashing into each other, wave after wave, creating a beautiful display in the dark sky," he said.
Each nighttime land landing, Kuna tries to photograph the nebula. So far, he's captured three: CRS-17, STP-2 (a Falcon Heavy mission) and now CRS-20. (The CRS-17 booster touched down at sea, not on land, but it was close enough to the launch site to produce the same effects.)
John Kraus, a local rocket photographer, had a different take on the CRS-20 nebula that was featured in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on March 12. In it, he focuses more on the boostback burn, the first of three burns that the rocket conducts in order to land itself.
In his image, we see the Falcon 9's first-stage boostback burn arc up toward the top of the frame as the second stage continues on its journey to low Earth orbit, its own fiery trail visible below the boostback burn. In the background are expanding exhaust plumes from the rocket's two stages.
John Kraus@johnkrausphotos
A closeup, long exposure look at Falcon 9’s boostback burn and second stage burn, and the resulting plume interaction between the two stages. Incredible.
This image is a hybrid between your typical "streak" photograph, a sort of time-lapse image, and a rocket nebula. Streak shots have historically been rocket photography gold if you frame your shot just right. That's because in one shot, a photographer can capture the entire launch, including the landing.
"I think [streaks] are an exciting way to sum up an entire launch — or in my case, a unique portion of it — in a single photograph," Kraus told Space.com.
Kraus and Kuna both say that planning a shot like this is very different from planning a streak.
"Nebulas and streaks are two different worlds," Kuna said. "One is about capturing a small amount of light through the biggest opening possible on your camera and focusing on a specific moment of the launch, while a streak aims to capture a large amount of light in a very small opening, usually through a wider lens during a long period of time to convey the rocket's motion."
"To think we would never see this sight if SpaceX didn't land its boosters; it's truly majestic and awe-inspiring," he said. "I can't wait for the Starship boostback!"
Whether you're trying a streak for the first time or a nebula or anything else, Kraus said to remember to try new things, you never know what you may capture.
Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
Top physicist claims USS Nimitz UFO 'time travelled' to reach 19,000mph
Dr Jack Sarfatti, a world-renowned expert in quantum physics, believes a metamaterial that not from our time allowed the speed of light to "slow down" on the infamous UFO
Simon Green - Video News Editor
A top physicist has claimed the Nimitz UFO was able to reach never-before-seen speeds thanks to a “metamaterial” that let it “time travel”.
The sighting of the “Tic Tac” craft off the coast of San Diego in 2004 has become one of the most famous UFO encounters of all time.
One of the most startling descriptions given by the fighter pilot witnesses was that it somehow dropped from 80,000ft to around 28,000ft in several seconds and 28,000ft to just above sea level in under a second.
Such a feat to reach sea level would mean the craft would have had to be travelling at 19,000mph – speeds unimaginable for Earthly craft.
But Dr Jack Sarfatti, a world-renowned expert in quantum physics and author of several books in the field, believes he knows what happened.
The USS Nimitz UFO has been officially classified as a UAP by the Navy
(Image: US Navy)
Speaking on The Hidden Truth Show with James Breslo, he suggested the craft used a type of meta-material that allowed the speed of light to “slow down”.
"See the problem is this, if you read any of the standard papers in the field, if they’re talking about warp drive, time travel and wormholes they say the problem is it ‘takes too much energy’ to achieve it," he explained on the YouTube podcast.
"The tic-tac does not need a lot of energy. They observed the tic-tac going from 80,000ft down to 50ft in less than two seconds and there’s no jet engines, no flares.
“It’s going at 1,000s of Gs, how’s it doing that? There is no way it can do that by conventional propulsion.”
Meta-material that the fuselage of the Nimitz UFO is built on helps explain this unimaginable speed.
"What happens is that if you pump electromagnetic energy into the material, it will have a certain resonance.
“In that resonance, the speed of light inside the material can go down to a very small number.”
This, according to Dr Sarfatti, will allow for the type of “warp drive” technology made famous in sci-fi blockbusters like Star Trek.
As the physicist notes, the meta-material industry is hugely lucrative and has already been used for sensors and lenses.
But, while many firms are using forms of the technology already, the one seen on the Nimitz UFO does not belong to the US Navy.
Instead, Dr Sarfatti suggests the craft actually came back from the future.
This, he claims, is made possible by using the Novikov loop. Dr Sarfatti explained to this site that: "A causal loop is a paradox of time travel that occurs when a future event is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event.
"Both events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined."
The metamaterial fuselage means the craft doesn't just move through space but "controls it", Dr Sarfatti added.
The low-energy “warp drive” seen in the Tic Tac allows it to “squeeze the space in front of it and stretch the space behind”.
The 80-year-old is so confident in his theory that he is hoping to present it to US President Donald Trump.
During the interview, he claimed “talks are ongoing” over a meeting.
How to see bright Comet ATLAS
Recently discovered comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) isn’t bright enough to see with the unaided eye … yet. But it’s getting brighter. Will it provide a good show or fizzle out? Click here to learn more.
A nice image of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) by Efrain Morales from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The marked object is a distant galaxy.
A recently discovered comet is getting the attention of astronomers and sky enthusiasts as it’s become brighter than expected in the last few days. Astronomers using the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) in Hawaii discovered Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on December 28, 2019. As of mid-late March, it shines at about the brightness of an 8th-magnitude star – not visible to the eye yet – but within reach of medium-sized telescopes in dark skies. The comet is currently crossing Mars’ orbit and is approaching the inner solar system. As it gets closer to us, it’ll get brighter still. You’ll find charts for observers at the bottom of this post.
Comet ATLAS should become bright enough to be easily visible in binoculars, and perhaps bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye from dark sky locations.
Just know that comets are notoriously erratic and inherently unpredictable! We will have to wait to see how Comet Atlas performs.
Astronomer Alessandro Marchini, director of the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Siena in Italy – whose death toll from COVID-19 ramped up dramatically yesterday – sent the video below last night. He wrote:
During this surreal period of the health emergency for the Covid-19, I’m trying to use our social channels to entertain people forced at home. This evening I observed the comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS during a Facebook Live streaming and here is a time-lapse I made with the images I acquired with our telescope. I hope all is fine with you.
Follow Osservatorio Astronomico Università di Siena on Facebook
Follow Osservatorio Astronomico Università di Siena on YouTube
Thank you, Alessandro, and please stay safe.
Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will come closest to Earth on May 23, 2020. Its perihelion or closest approach to the sun will occur on May 31, 2020.
If predictions are correct, Comet ATLAS might reach a visual magnitude of +5 around May 1, 2020. That is theoretically bright enough to be see with the eye, but the fuzziness of faint comets can make them harder to spot than comparably bright stars. When looking for fuzzy objects, it’s best to use averted vision: explanation here.
How bright will the comet get after that? Estimates of Comet ATLAS’s peak brightness range from magnitude +2 to -6 during perihelion or closest approach to the sun, but please know that many comets fizzle and never reach their expected brightnesses. We will have to wait and see.
Orbit of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)
Courtesy of NASA/JPL.
How close to our planet will the comet come? The celestial visitor will pass at a huge distance, at some 72,610,769 million miles away (116,855,706 km).
Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will pass very close the sun, and thus may disintegrate before becoming bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.
It will pass at some 23,517,819 miles (37,848,261 km) from the sun, which is closer to our star than Mercury’s elliptical orbit (about 36 million miles or 57.9 million km on average).
Calculations by NASA/JPL indicate Comet ATLAS takes some 6,025 years to complete an orbit around the sun. Observations show it has a similar orbit to the Great Comet of 1844, which suggest Comet Atlas may be a fragment of the same 1844 comet.
Will Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) provide a good show or just fizzle out? Let’s keep a close eye on it, just in case! Bookmark this article, as we’ll provide updates and new photos when we can …
Here are some charts for you.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) in late March 2020. This chart faces north-northeast from a temperate latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. The time is around 9 p.m. local daylight (8 p.m. if you’re not using daylight time) for all locations. In late March, the comet requires a small or medium-sized telescope, but it may be visible in binoculars very soon!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) during late March 2020. Facing north-northeast at around 9 p.m. local daylight time (8 p.m. if you’re not using daylight time) for all locations. In late March, the comet requires a small or medium-sized telescope, but it may be visible in binoculars very soon!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) during early April 2020. Facing north at around 9 p.m. local daylight time (around 8 p.m. if you’re not in daylight time).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on April 15, 2020, around 9 p.m. local daylight time (around 8 p.m. if you’re not in
daylight time). Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on April 30, 2020, around 9:30 p.m. local daylight time (around 8:30 p.m. if you’re not in daylight time).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
By May 15, 2020, Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will become increasingly closer to the Northwest horizon. By then it might be bright enough to be easily seen with small binoculars, or perhaps even with the unaided eye!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Mystery as cluster of red lights move 'in formation' over motorway in Texas
Conspiracy theorists have ruled out the lights being Chinese lanterns, given their positioning and that they're "not flickering"
Simon Green - Video News Editor
Bizarre footage showing several red UFOs hovering in the night sky in Texas has sparked a conspiracy frenzy.
The strange video, taken in the city of El Paso, shows eight bright lights slowly moving across the sky.
Four seemed clustered in a group with the bottom orb appearing to flash much like a plane. Ahead of them, a further four can be seen flying away in a line.
The video was taken by Mario Rios at around 7.15pm on March 17. After posting it to YouTube, the clip was picked up by popular conspiracy channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0.
“So in this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building,” the channel owner said.
“Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don’t seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path.
“If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together.
“It’s not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared.”
“These aren’t Chinese lanterns,” one wrote. “You’re going to see in the time to come what they really are.”
Another bizarre claimed to have seen the same lights in Brazil, adding: “There were more than 50 lights, which ran in the sky and disappeared into space.”
A third suggested: “Those lights are ours. It is said that 75% of those lights are our own. Reverse-engineered.”
But some were more practical, suggesting they were nothing more than drones.
It comes after a huge triangular UFO was caught on camera above Texas.
UFO or space force? Strange flying vessels spotted in Texas sparks row
It was around a couple of years back that Donald Trump, the United States president asked authorities to begin a space force to proclaim the dominance of the country in the skies and beyond. However, conspiracy theorists argue that the space force or a similar kind of sky army has been active for the past couple of decades, and they believe that sightings of a triangular aircraft, popularly known as TR-3B is concrete evidence of advanced space technology the country has attained.
Strange lights in Texas sparks debate
Recently, a YouTube channel named 'The Hidden Underbelly' has shared an eerie video that shows eight bright flying objects flying in formation in the skies of Texas. The strange video clip was captured by a man named Mario Rios, and it gained popularity after it was shared by the conspiracy theory YouTube channel.
After analyzing the video, the conspiracy theory channel revealed that these strange flying objects are not Chinese lanterns, as they don't seem flickering, and all these flying objects followed a path.
"In this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building. Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don't seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path. If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together. It's not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared," said the conspiracy theorist in the YouTube video.
What are those flying objects?
After watching the video, viewers also shared their opinions to explain this weird UFO sighting. Most of the viewers argued that these flying vessels are not Chinese lanterns, and it could be most probably alien space ships from deep space. Some other people claimed that these vessels could be secretive military vessels developed by the United States army.
"It is more terrifying to think we are alone in the Universe that to know there are at least others out there," commented J Kennedy, a YouTube user. "Those lights are ours. It is said, that seventy-five percent of those lights are our own. Reverse engineered," commented Twisted Existence, another YouTuber.
SCIENTISTS FIRED A COPPER CANNONBALL INTO AN ASTEROID — HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT “All this is super exciting.”
“All this is super exciting.”
What happens when you fire a cannonball at an asteroid?
Thanks to a wild new study published Thursday in the journal Science, we now know the answer.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft fired a copper cannonball into Ryugu, an 850 meter-wide near-Earth asteroid. The 2 kilogram "Small Carry-on Impactor," a bit larger than a tennis ball, hit the asteroid at approximately 7,200 kilometers/hour and blew out a 14.5 meter wide crater with a depth of .6 meters. After a year of analysis, scientists have reported their analysis of the plume created by the impact and properties of the crater. From Space.com:
The number and size of craters that pockmark asteroids such as Ryugu can help scientists estimate the age and properties of asteroid surfaces. These analyses are based on models of how such craters form, and data from artificial impacts like that on Ryugu can help test those models...
Features of the artificial crater and the plume suggested that the growth of a crater was limited mostly by the asteroid's gravity and not by the strength of the space rock's surface. This, in turn, suggested that Ryugu has a relatively weak surface, one only about as strong as loose sand, which is consistent with recent findings that Ryugu is made of porous, fragile material.
These new findings suggest that Ryugu's surface is about 8.9 million years old, while other models suggested that the asteroid's surface might be up to about 158 million years old. All in all, while Ryugu is made of materials up to 4.6 billion years old, the asteroid might have coalesced from the remains of other broken-apart asteroids only about 10 million years ago, Arakawa said.
Scientists used the Japanese-made spacecraft Hayabusa2 to fire a 2-kilogram copper cannonball at a speed of 2 kilometers-per-second into the asteroid Ryugu, a tiny, rocky body orbiting nearby, between Earth and Mars.
The cannonball, though tiny, managed to blast a 14-meter-wide, semicircular crater into the asteroid’s crisp surface. But aside from making an impact in the real sense, the shot transformed scientists' understanding of the asteroid's age, composition, and other properties.
The unprecedented results pave the way for researchers to better estimate these same details for the myriad other asteroids strewn across the universe.
“All this is super exciting,” Patrick Michel, director of research at the French Scientific Research National Center, tells Inverse.
“And in this crazy and dangerous world (...), it gives hope that we can fight big challenges! The SCI was an operation done on a tiny body, at several hundred million km from Earth. This is amazing and gives a lot of hope.”
The collision enabled scientists to capture images and samples from the asteroid that would be otherwise impossible.
“The surface of the asteroid is heated by the solar radiation and irradiated by the solar wind and the cosmic ray, so the outermost layer of the surface could be altered,” Masahiko Arakawa, professor of planetology at Kobe University, tells Inverse.
He explains that the organic materials and hydrated minerals on the surface of the asteroid can change dramatically over time.
“We wanted to have a fresh material without alteration, so we developed and operated a Small Carry-on Impactor, SCI, to form an artificial impact crater to expose the asteroid subsurface or interior,” Arakawa says.
The team then developed a microsatellite to observe the crater formation process and the continuous ejection of the subsurface material.
“Collisions play a fundamental role in the formation and history of our Solar System, starting with planet formation through collisional accretion,” Michel explains.
“So far, models developed to understand the collisional history of our Solar System rely on ad-hoc parameters to determine the outcome of each collision.”
This means researchers’ understanding of cosmic collisions are usually obtained from laboratory simulations, and not first-hand observations.
“Scaling the lab results to asteroid scales is not trivial,” Michel says.
“The SCI experiment is the first hyper-velocity impact experiment on such an asteroid, and it is a super complex operation, and yet achieved with high success.”
Firing the cannonball enabled researchers to directly observe the formation of a crater in microgravity for the first time, answering how much the microgravity affects crater formation.
The crater growth process appears to be controlled by the surface gravity, not by the surface material strength. In fact, the diameter of the new crater on Ryugu is about 7 TIMES LARGER than if it had formed on sand under the Earth’s gravity.
“We found that the crater’s formation and dimensions are such that the only way to explain them is that the process is controlled by the gravity of the asteroid, despite its extremely low value,” Michel says.
“This was totally unexpected, and I must say that I still have a hard time to interpret this.”
“How can such small gravity be the only contributor? And we see many boulders, which should have strength, so how is this possible? This is fascinating and opens a totally new window in our understanding of cratering physics in such different regimes than on Earth,” Michel says.
“IF WE WANT TO DEFLECT AN ASTEROID BY AN IMPACT, WE NEED A MUCH BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PROCESS.”
Aside from this finding, Arakawa and his colleague were also able to put a number on the asteroid's age — previously estimates had pegged it at between 9 million and 160 million years. Turns out Ryugu is on the younger side of the spectrum.
“Our results suggest that 9 million years is better for the surface age of Ryugu.”
Knowing what Ryugu's surface is made of and how impact craters form there is critical for defending our own planet from incoming collisions from the cosmos, Michel says.
One of the main strategies scientists propose for any near-Earth object that looks like it might actually hit us is to send a projectile to knock it off course.
“If we want to deflect an asteroid by an impact, we need a much better understanding of this process,” Michel says.
“So, even if the SCI was not meant to deflect Ryugu because the impact energy is too small, its results will definitely feed planetary defense studies.”
According to Michel, this experiment helps to pave the way for NASA's DART and Hera missions, which will perform the first asteroid-deflection test using a kinetic impactor.
But in these missions' cases, the asteroid target is very different from Ryugu, and probably much less porous, so the results won't apply entirely. However the new study does offer a guide for using this "wrecking ball" method of data collection to understand how asteroids form, their key features, and whether they might do damage to Earth.
Abstract:
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft investigated the small asteroid Ryugu, which has a rubble pile structure. We describe an impact experiment on Ryugu using Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI). The impact produced an artificial crater with a diameter >10 m, which has a semicircular shape, an elevated rim and a central pit. Images of the impact and resulting ejecta were recorded by the Deployable CAMera 3 (DCAM3) for >8 min, showing the growth of an ejecta curtain (the outer edge of the ejecta) and deposition of ejecta onto the surface. The ejecta curtain was asymmetric, heterogeneous, and never fully detached from the surface. The crater formed in the gravity-dominated regime i.e., crater growth was limited by gravity, not surface strength. We discuss implications for Ryugu’s surface age.
Is New UFO Footage Videos Enabling You To Discover Alien Craft?
The latest UFO footage on the web can offer you several excellent videos. It may be hard to believe, but it’s true. These strange alien craft videos can be found on the web in a number of ways, including your local television station. From there, it’s on to the internet and you get to watch them.
Now, if you’re a skeptic then perhaps you don’t want to try this new way of accessing footage. After all, you’re just going to have to live with your skepticism for now. However, there are more benefits to watching the UFO footage than just denying your doubts. You could actually be joining the club.
In fact, in this case, you might be the first person to see this strange video. Just imagine how excited your child would be if they found the video on YouTube. They’ll also get to see and understand why UFOs exist.
How would you feel if you could see that? If you haven’t seen one yet, then now is the time. You can find UFO footage online, and there are a number of sites that specialize in their documentary videos.
You can find more than just this site’s selection of UFO video on the web. There’s a variety of online sites that show a wide range of UFO footage. With these websites, you can view even the newest UFO footage on the web and see the latest ones.
Another major benefit is the very low cost. A great deal of money can be saved when you watch UFO footage online. Your savings will start out small, but over time you will save hundreds of dollars. When you’re just starting out in this hobby, you can use that savings to get the proper equipment to help you discover these ancient craft.
In addition, the economy is still recovering from a natural disaster’s effect on our economy. It’s a good time to save money on everyday items like gas and food. When you can watch UFO footage online, you won’t even think about spending a dime.
This, in addition to the financial benefits of looking for UFO videos online, is why it’s so important to have a membership to a credible site. You should pay only for videos that are worthy. Many of the UFO videos online have been verified, so you know they’re legitimate.
Source:
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
NASA’s automated asteroid tracking system has detected four near-Earth objects that are expected to approach the planet this weekend. According to the agency, the biggest asteroid in the group is about as big as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.
The first asteroid that will approach Earth this weekend has been identified by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) as 2020 FK. As indicated in CNEOS’ database, this asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 43 feet, which makes it the smallest in the group.
CNEOS noted that this asteroid is currently traveling across space at a speed of over 23,000 miles per hour.
Trailing behind 2020 FK is an asteroid known as 2020 FS. This space rock is currently flying towards Earth at a speed of about 9,600 miles per hour. CNEOS estimated that this asteroid measures around 56 feet wide.
Both 2020 FK and 2020 FS will visit Earth’s vicinity on Saturday. 2020 FK is expected to approach the planet on March 21 at 12:05 a.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00909 astronomical units or around 845,000 miles away.
2020 FS, on the other hand, will zip past the planet on March 21 at 11:29 a.m. EDT. During its approach, the asteroid will be about 0.02096 astronomical units from the Earth’s center, which is equivalent to around 1.9 million miles.
The second asteroid that will fly past Earth on Sunday is known as 2020 FF1. This space rock measures about 49 feet wide and is moving towards Earth at a velocity of almost 29,000 miles per hour.
2020 DP4 will fly past Earth on March 22 at 2:34 p.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00903 astronomical units or 840,000 miles away. As for 2020 FF1, this asteroid will approach from a much closer distance on March 22 at 6:09 p.m. EDT. According to CNEOS, this asteroid will zip past the planet from a distance of only 0.00477 astronomical units or 443,000 miles away.
Image: Artist illustration of an asteroid heading for the Earth Photo: Pixabay
