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Post by gus on Dec 20, 2019 22:17:10 GMT
We know this stuff on this forum the question on my mind is how long has the US been working with ETs?
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Post by gus on Dec 26, 2019 23:59:24 GMT
wow another one.
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Post by gus on Dec 29, 2019 4:28:40 GMT
I’ve been chewing again on the UFOs being seen more or recorded more. What we really need is these fleets of UFOs to fly closer to the ground buzzing cities and towns all over the world.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 3, 2020 18:24:18 GMT
And yet, we are now filling the sky with tiny satellites.....This is the damage a tiny speck of space debris can do at 15,000mph Space is not the place to put waste, as it turns pretty much anything into a high-velocity projectile capable of causing incredible damage. Ned Dymoke
11 February, 2018
Space isn't as spacious as it should be; it's full of space debris, small amounts of scrap, trash, and machinery that humans have abandoned to Earth's orbit. The ISS has cataloged about 500,000 of these small pieces and they hurtle around our planet at about 15,000mph. Or 14.17 g-force. Or 24,140kph.
An anonymous user on Reddit, who claims to work in the aerospace field, posted an image of what a 1/2 oz of space debris can do to a block of solid aluminum. This test was done by a light-gas gun in close quarters and shows how much damage even a tiny amount of space debris can do:
Pretty scary, huh? It should be noted that although this looks enormous, the crater is about 5 inches deep. Having said that, it's caused by something about the size and weight of an eraser on the end of a pencil.
The ISS (International Space Station) is about the size of a football field, and thus an easy target for space debris. To solve this, it has to move their orbit to make sure they don't get hit. Every once in a while, they get hit by pieces the size of a paint chip and need to repair the ship for weeks.
What's that? Do you want another interesting space debris fact? Well, during the height of the Cold War in 1965-1967, the U.S. fired hundreds of thousands of tiny needles into space to try for what could best be described as high-powered radio signals. This, however, didn't work nearly as well as planned and the needles just clumped together into groups — turning these needles into high-velocity projectiles. 50 years later, there are about 38 of these clumps still in orbit, although sometimes they enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up.
bigthink.com/news/heres-the-damage-a-tiny-speck-of-space-debris-can-do-at-15000mph?utm_medium=Social&facebook=1&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1XH2o2vAnnHZVi3dlaIlyZ_m_xVNQk8ANTfSQhj9tPKZkTtwVnWeTrf24#Echobox=1577935106
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Post by gus on Jan 5, 2020 2:42:42 GMT
Wow that looks amazing swamp.
How about a nuclear bomb on the moon.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 7, 2020 2:44:16 GMT
Astronomers develop new way of finding extraterrestrial life on alien exoplanets Jasper Hamill | Monday 6 Jan 2020
Scientists have developed a new technique of finding distant planets capable of nurturing alien life. The method involves looking for oxygen in the atmosphere of exoplanets – worlds outside our solar system that orbit other stars. On Earth, this gas is generated when organisms such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into chemical energy.
The new technique will see researchers use Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect a strong signal that oxygen molecules produce when they collide. This signal could help scientists distinguish between living and nonliving planets. Thomas Fauchez, of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, and lead author of the study, said: ‘Before our work, oxygen at similar levels as on Earth was thought to be undetectable with Webb. ‘This oxygen signal is known since the early 1980s from Earth’s atmospheric studies but has never been studied for exoplanet research.’
University of California Riverside astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman originally proposed a similar way of detecting high concentrations of oxygen from nonliving processes and was a member of the team that developed this technique. The work has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Dr Schwieterman said: ‘Oxygen is one of the most exciting molecules to detect because of its link with life, but we don’t know if life is the only cause of oxygen in an atmosphere. ‘This technique will allow us to find oxygen in planets both living and dead.’
When oxygen molecules collide, they block parts of the infrared light spectrum from being seen by a telescope. The scientists say that by examining patterns in that light, they can determine the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. However, they state that an abundance of oxygen on an exoplanet may not necessarily mean abundant life. It may instead indicate a history of water loss caused by the planet being too close to its star, leading to the evaporation of oceans. Dr Schwieterman cautions that astronomers are not yet sure how widespread this process may be on exoplanets. ‘It is important to know whether and how much dead planets generate atmospheric oxygen so that we can better recognise when a planet is alive or not,’ he said.
metro.co.uk/2020/01/06/astronomers-develop-new-way-finding-extraterrestrial-life-alien-exoplanets-12011586/
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Post by swamprat on Jan 7, 2020 18:13:30 GMT
NASA's TESS Planet Hunter Finds Its 1st Earth-Size World in 'Habitable Zone' By Mike Wall | January 6, 2020
TOI 700 d is a landmark discovery for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
NASA's newest planet hunter just bagged some big game.
For the first time, the agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a roughly Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its host star, the zone of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world's surface, researchers announced today (Jan. 6).
The newfound exoplanet, known as TOI 700 d, lies just 101.5 light-years from Earth, making it a good candidate for follow-up observations by other instruments, scientists added.
"TESS was designed and launched specifically to find Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars," Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Planets around nearby stars are easiest to follow up with larger telescopes in space and on Earth. Discovering TOI 700 d is a key science finding for TESS."
TESS, which launched in April 2018, hunts for planets using the "transit method," looking for telltale dips in stellar brightness caused by orbiting worlds crossing stars' faces from the satellite's perspective. This same strategy was used to great effect by NASA's Kepler space telescope, which discovered about 70% of the roughly 4,000 known exoplanets.
Artist's illustration of TOI 700 d, the first Earth-size, haitable-zone planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
TESS found three different planets circling the star TOI 700 (TOI is short for "Tess Object of Interest"). One of the other planets is a red dwarf about 40% as massive, 40% as wide and 50% as hot as Earth's sun. The innermost world, TOI 700 b, is roughly Earth-sized and completes one orbit every 10 Earth days. The center planet, TOI 700 c, is 2.6 times bigger than our planet, meaning it's likely a gassy "mini-Neptune," and zips around TOI 700 every 16 days.
TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system, is the really intriguing one. It's just 20% larger than Earth and completes one orbit every 37 days. The alien world receives 86% of the stellar energy that Earth gets from the sun, putting TOI 700 d in the habitable zone (at least as it's traditionally defined), discovery team members said.
All three planets may be tidally locked to TOI 700, always showing it the same face just as Earth's moon only ever shows us its near side. But tidal locking doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of life on an alien world, astronomers say. And there's more good news along these lines regarding TOI 700.
"In 11 months of data, we saw no flares from the star, which improves the chances TOI 700 d is habitable and makes it easier to model its atmospheric and surface conditions," discovery team leader Emily Gilbert, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, said in the same statement.
(Red dwarfs are generally much more active than the sun, and there's considerable debate about how habitable their planets may be as a result. Frequent and powerful flaring, for example, can strip away a planet's atmosphere.)
TESS isn't the only spacecraft that has spotted evidence of TOI 700 d. A different team of researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to confirm the existence of the alien planet.
"Given the impact of this discovery — that it is TESS’s first habitable-zone Earth-size planet — we really wanted our understanding of this system to be as concrete as possible," team leader Joseph Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in the same statement.
"Spitzer saw TOI 700 d transit exactly when we expected it to," Rodriguez added. "It's a great addition to the legacy of a mission that helped confirm two of the TRAPPIST-1 planets and identify five more."
TRAPPIST-1 is a dwarf star that lies just 40 light-years away from us and hosts seven Earth-size planets, three of which appear to be in the habitable zone. The system is a prime candidate for observation by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021. James Webb should be able to probe the TRAPPIST-1 worlds' atmospheres for potential biosignature gases, such as methane and oxygen, scientists have said.
TOI 700 is a bit farther away, but it's still close enough to be scrutinized in more detail in the future. And scientists do hope to learn more about it via observations by other instruments. For example, they want to pin down TOI 700 d's mass by measuring how much its gravity tugs the host star this way and that. Without knowing the mass, it's unclear how dense TOI 700 d is — and thus if it's a rocky world like Earth.
And in-depth observations of light that has streamed through TOI 700 d's atmosphere on its way to Earth could tell us a great deal about conditions on the alien world's surface, which remain a total mystery at the moment.
A third team of researchers, led by Gabrielle Engelmann-Suissa, a Universities Space Research Association visiting research assistant at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, did some modeling work to get at the various possibilities. And those possibilities are vast. For example, one of their simulations depicted TOI 700 d as an ocean-covered world with a carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere, whereas another one pictured the planet as a dry, cloudless world.
"Someday, when we have real spectra from TOI 700 d, we can backtrack, match them to the closest simulated spectrum and then match that to a model," Engelmann-Suissa said in the same statement. "It's exciting because no matter what we find out about the planet, it’s going to look completely different from what we have here on Earth."
Gilbert, Rodriguez and Engelmann-Suissa presented their results today in Honolulu at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Their papers have also been submitted to scientific journals.
Other exciting TESS news came out at AAS today as well. For example, mission team members also announced TESS' first circumbinary planet — a world with two suns in its sky — and revealed that the bright star Alpha Draconis and its dimmer companion mutually eclipse each other.
www.space.com/nasa-tess-first-earth-size-habitable-exoplanet-toi-700d.html
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Post by HAL on Jan 7, 2020 20:50:16 GMT
But it's 101.5 Light Years away. What use is it to us ?
HAL
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2020 21:24:23 GMT
Some day when we exceed warp drive we can get there even before our messages.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2020 22:18:49 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Jan 8, 2020 15:20:07 GMT
Origin of Deep-Space Radio Flash Discovered, and It's Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Ever Seen By Adam Mann | January 8, 2020
Things are only getting more confusing.
An animation shows the random appearance of fast radio bursts (FRBs) across the sky. (Image: © NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
HONOLULU — Mysterious ultra-fast pinpricks of radio energy keep lighting up the night sky and nobody knows why. A newly discovered example of this transient phenomenon has been traced to its place of origin — a nearby spiral galaxy — but it's only made things murkier for astronomers.
The problem concerns a class of blink-and-you'll-miss-them heavenly events known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). In a few thousandths of a second, these explosions produce as much energy as the sun does in nearly a century. Researchers have only known about FRBs since 2007, and they still don't have a compelling explanation regarding their sources.
"The big question is what can produce an FRB," Kenzie Nimmo, a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said during a news briefing on Monday (Jan. 6) here at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Scientists were given some help in 2016, when they discovered an FRB that repeated its quick-pulsing radio tune in random bursts. All previous examples had been one-off events.
The repeating FBR was eventually traced back to a dwarf galaxy with a high rate of star formation 3 billion light-years away, Nimmo said. The galaxy contains a persistent radio source, possibly a nebula, that could explain the FRB's origin, she added.
Astronomers have also managed to determine that three non-repeating FRBs came from distant massive galaxies with little star formation going on. This seemed to provide evidence that repeating and non-repeating FRBs arose from different types of environments, Nimmo said. But the new discovery challenges this simple story.
FRB 180916.J0158+65, as the object is known, is a repeating FRB discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) observatory, a radio telescope near Okanagan Falls in British Columbia that Nimmo called "the world's best FRB-finding machine."
Follow-up observations by a network of telescopes in Europe allowed the research team to produce a high-resolution image of the FRB's location. This location turned out to be a medium-sized spiral galaxy like our Milky Way that is surprisingly nearby, only 500 million light-years away, making it the closest-known FRB to date. The results were published (Jan. 6) in the journal Nature.
Despite precisely locating the FRB, the team was unable to detect any radio sources in the spiral galaxy that could explain the mysterious outbursts. Even worse, this new entity seems not to fit the patterns established by previous repeating and non-repeating FRBs.
"This is completely different than the host and local environments of other localized FRBs," Benito Marcote, a radio astronomer at the Joint Institute for VLBI European Research Infrastructure Consortium and lead author of the Nature paper, said during the news briefing.
The researchers hope that subsequent data might help them get a handle on what this FRB is telling them. But until then, they might have to continue scratching their heads over these puzzling phenomena.
www.space.com/fast-radio-bursts-traced-to-origin.html
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2020 16:34:40 GMT
Who said whatever you can imagine is overshadowed by reality, words to that effect?
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Post by HAL on Jan 8, 2020 19:16:31 GMT
Ground currents detected in Norway (or was it Sweden ?).
See Spaceweather for yesterday's report.
HAL
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Post by swamprat on Jan 8, 2020 23:20:25 GMT
More on the FAST BURSTS:Astronomers race to study mysterious fast radio burst detected in a nearby galaxy The bizarre phenomenon of fast radio bursts could originate in supernovae, magnetars, or even alien civilizations
Nicole Karlis
January 7, 2020 11:47PM (UTC)
Just as astronomers thought they were making sense of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — the mysterious repeating signals originating deep in space — the universe threw us a curveball.
A new paper published in Nature this week traced one fast radio burst to its source galaxy, making it the fifth FRB to be traced back to its origins. But this time the source came as a surprise to astronomers, as it defied their theories about fast radio bursts.
For the unfamiliar, FRBs are, true to their name, short bursts of radio waves that are so powerful that scientists are able to detect them on Earth, despite their extragalactic origins. The specific astrophysical event that causes FRBs is still unknown, although all observed FRBs are from galaxies outside our own.
According to the latest study, the FRB in question — dubbed FRB 180916 — is a repeating signal coming from a spiral galaxy located 500 million light years from Earth. While 500 million light years might seem far away by Earth standards, it is the closest known source of of this strange phenomena.
"This object's location is radically different from that of not only the previously located repeating FRB, but also all previously studied FRBs," astronomer Kenzie Nimmo of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper said in a press statement. "This blurs the differences between repeating and non-repeating fast radio bursts. It may be that FRBs are produced in a large zoo of locations across the Universe and just require some specific conditions to be visible."
The close proximity of this FRB is perplexing to astronomers, because it suggests its environment is different than the other ones that have been identified.
“This is the closest FRB to Earth ever localised,” Benito Marcote, of the Joint Institute for VLBI European Research Infrastructure Consortium and a co-lead author of the paper, said. “Surprisingly, it was found in an environment radically different from that of the previous four localised FRBs — an environment that challenges our ideas of what the source of these bursts could be.”
Astronomers all over are intrigued by these findings. Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, told Salon via this paper implies that FRBs are a “mixed bag,” meaning “we could see fainter versions of distant FRBs near us and that these might be much more numerous.”
“The new FRB appears to reside in a different environment than the others and is obviously much less luminous,” Loeb said, adding that astronomers are away of systems that look like FRBs, but are in the Milky Way galaxy, called Rotating Radio Transients (RRATS). “One can imagine the new FRB as a bright version of newly-born RRATS.”
Loeb added via email: “Incidentally, RRATS were discovered in 2006 by Maura McLaughlin ([of] West Virginia University) who is married to Duncan Lorimer, who discovered in 2007 the first FRB, [the] so-called 'Lorimer burst.'”
The vast distance between Earth and the discovered FRBs makes them particularly difficult to probe with certainty. Astrophysicists have suggested they may emerge from supernovae, magnetars, or even one-way extraterrestrial communication, though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute dismisses that as unlikely.
“In my view, the nature of FRBs will be understood from either studying carefully the environment of a very nearby source (even closer than the new one) or by detecting counterparts to the radio pulses at other wavelength bands (optical, UV, X-ray or gamma-rays),” Loeb added.
As Salon reported in January 2019, to the imaginative mind, the mysterious and far-reaching nature of FRBs might resemble an intergalactic alien communication system. Researchers say that is a far-reaching assumption, though.
“It is unlikely that all FRBs are from alien civilizations due to the power requirements at cosmological distances, but possible,” Loeb told Salon in 2019. “We worked out the numbers in a paper with my postdoc, Manasvi Lingam, two years ago. One needs to use all the power intercepted by the Earth from the Sun. But a small fraction of nearby FRBs could be artificial radio beams sweeping across the sky. “
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), agreed.
"They aren’t coming from one galaxy, they are coming from all over... and when it comes from all over, history tells you it is nature, not aliens,” Shostak said. “It would be like everybody showing up for the PTA meeting in the same outfit.”
Nicole Karlis is a news writer at Salon. She covers health, science, tech and gender politics. Tweet her @nicolekarlis.
www.salon.com/2020/01/07/astronomers-rush-to-study-mysterious-fast-radio-burst-detected-in-a-nearby-galaxy/
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2020 14:20:35 GMT
Ground currents detected in Norway (or was it Sweden ?). See Spaceweather for yesterday's report. HAL As my generation would say in California back in the day, surfs up !
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