Space News/UFO's Etc...(Discussion/Pics/Vids)

[ilan]

The incredible mystery of the ‘alien spacecraft’ that lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea
April 26, 201610:10am | new.com.au

Baltic Sea Anomaly” ... artist Tod Twentytod’s graphic depiction of the object. Picture:sonofmabarker/YouTubeSource:Supplied

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When the mystery object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea was first spotted in 2011, it baffled experts and excited alien hunters. They still don’t know what it is.

Dubbed the “Baltic Sea Anomaly”, the structure looks like the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars.

It was discovered five years ago by Swedish treasure hunters, Ocean X team, led by Peter Lindberg, its captain, and his co-researcher Dennis Asberg, The Sun reports.

They used a side-scan sonar and found something strange 91 metres below the surface of the water.
Mystery object found in Baltic Sea

It was reported that the divers exploring the anomaly said their equipment stopped working as they approached it.

“Anything electric out there, and the satellite phone as well, stopped working when we were above the object,” professional diver Stefan Hogerborn, part of the Ocean X team, said.

“And then when we got away about 200 metres, it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work.”

The 61-metre-wide and eight-metre-tall circular object hit the headlines, with many speculating the anomaly could be a giant mushroom, a sunken Russian ship or an alien spaceship.

A sample recovered by divers was given to geologist Steve Weiner who ruled out the possibility of it being a natural geological formation.

After examining fragments, he claimed that the materials were “metals which nature could not reproduce itself”.

Some experts think it’s a Nazi anti-submarine device or a battleship gun turret.

Other observers believe it is a UFO called the “Roswell of the Ocean”, but there is still no evidence to suggest that the UFO-like object is an alien ship.

Location ... the “Baltic Sea Anomaly” was found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Picture: GooglemapsSource:Supplied
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Volker Bruchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, told Life’s Little Mysteries.com: “My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.”

But Lindberg and Asberg claim the samples they gave for analysis weren’t from the object itself, but from the “vicinity” of the object”, according to Open Minds.tv.

It seems that nobody wants to fund research into the Baltic Sea discovery. The question remains: what really lies beneath?

 

[anon2599]

The incredible mystery of the ‘alien spacecraft’ that lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea
The Sun reports.​

Was getting quite interesting ........until I read what daily rag produced this information.

The Sun ...is the Biggest worthless heap of trash here in the UK daily s.
Produces and reports nothing but pure garbage.

It may well be true ....but probably not or extremely over exaggerated considering its this daily rag that has reported it.​

 

[ilan]

http://www.snopes.com/photos/supernatural/balticufo.asp

 

[anon2599]

http://www.snopes.com/photos/supernatural/balticufo.asp

Thank you Sir. It is a fascinating read indeed and I actually do have a open mind.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Thanks ilan. I really appreciate your contribution to these Space threads...

 

[ilan]

Welcome, Cap...

 

[ilan]

Bayesian Analysis Rains On Exoplanet Life Parade
26 Apr, 2016 by Evan Gough | universetoday.com

An exoplanet seen from its moon (artist's impression). Via the IAU.

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Is there life on other planets, somewhere in this enormous Universe? That’s probably the most compelling question we can ask. A lot of space science and space missions are pointed directly at that question.

The Kepler mission is designed to find exoplanets, which are planets orbiting other stars. More specifically, its aim is to find planets situated in the habitable zone around their star. And it’s done so. The Kepler mission has found 297 confirmed and candidate planets that are likely in the habitable zone of their star, and it’s only looked at a tiny patch of the sky.

But we don’t know if any of them harbour life, or if Mars ever did, or if anywhere ever did. We just don’t know. But since the question of life elsewhere in the Universe is so compelling, it’s driven people with intellectual curiosity to try and compute the likelihood of life on other planets.

One of the main ways people have tried to understand if life is prevalent in the Universe is through the Drake Equation, named after Dr. Frank Drake. He tried to come up with a way to compute the probability of the existence of other civilizations. The Drake Equation is a mainstay of the conversation around the existence of life in the Universe.

The Drake Equation is a way to calculate the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way that were technologically advanced to communicate. When it was created in 1961, Drake himself explained that it was really just a way of starting a conversation about extraterrestrial civilizations, rather than a definitive calculation. Still, the equation is the starting point for a lot of conversations.

But the problem with the Drake equation, and with all of our attempts to understand the likelihood of life starting on other planets, is that we only have the Earth to go by. It seems like life on Earth started pretty early, and has been around for a long time. With that in mind, people have looked out into the Universe, estimated the number of planets in habitable zones, and concluded that life must be present, and even plentiful, in the Universe.

But we really only know two things: First, life on Earth began a few hundred million years after the planet was formed, when it was sufficiently cool and when there was liquid water. The second thing that we know is that a few billions of years after life started, creatures appeared which were sufficiently intelligent enough to wonder about life.

In 2012, two scientists published a paper which reminded us of this fact. David Spiegel, from Princeton University, and Edwin Turner, from the University of Tokyo, conducted what’s called a Bayesian analysis on how our understanding of the early emergence of life on Earth affects our understanding of the existence of life elsewhere.

IlAN: I took the liberty of adding my good friend Klatu/Klaatu to the article
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A Bayesian analysis is a complicated matter for non-specialists, but in this paper it’s used to separate out the influence of data, and the influence of our prior beliefs, when estimating the probability of life on other worlds. What the two researchers concluded is that our prior beliefs about the existence of life elsewhere have a large effect on any probabilistic conclusions we make about life elsewhere. As the authors say in the paper, “Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young-Earth-like conditions.”

A key part of all this is that life may have had a head start on Earth. Since then, it’s taken about 3.5 billion years for creatures to evolve to the point where they can think about such things. So this is where we find ourselves; looking out into the Universe and searching and wondering. But it’s possible that life may take a lot longer to get going on other worlds. We just don’t know, but many of the guesses have assumed that abiogenesis on Earth is standard for other planets.

What it all boils down to, is that we only have one data point, which is life on Earth. And from that point, we have extrapolated outward, concluding hopefully that life is plentiful, and we will eventually find it. We’re certainly getting better at finding locations that should be suitable for life to arise.

What’s maddening about it all is that we just don’t know. We keep looking and searching, and developing technology to find habitable planets and identify bio-markers for life, but until we actually find life elsewhere, we still only have one data point: Earth. But Earth might be exceptional.

As Spiegel and Turner say in the conclusion of their paper, ” In short, if we should find evidence of life that arose wholly idependently of us – either via astronomical searches that reveal life on another planet or via geological and biological studies that find evidence of life on Earth with a different origin from us – we would have considerably stronger grounds to conclude that life is probably common in our galaxy.”

With our growing understanding of Mars, and with missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, we may one day soon have one more data point with which we can refine our probabilistic understanding of other life in the Universe.

Or, there could be a sadder outcome. Maybe life on Earth will perish before we ever find another living microbe on any other world.

 

[anon2599]

I really must compliment you Guys that provide us with these stunning images and information.

Really compelling stuff ,That you guys post.........So thank you all who contribute to this Excellent! thread.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

I really must compliment you Guys that provide us with these stunning images and information.

Really compelling stuff ,That you guys post.........So thank you all who contribute to this Excellent! thread.

Thanks anon, we appreciate that...

 

[ilan]

Stephen Hawking explains how black holes could reveal their secret interiors
April 25th, 2016, by Greg White | space.news

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Astronomy abandons our preconceived notions of the universe, somewhere between the horizon of a black hole and its singularity. That is, at least, what the insights of famed physicist Stephen Hawking has achieved upon publishing a paper, which attempts to demonstrate that information locked inside a black hole is not forever shackled to the abyss.

The paper titled “Soft Hair on Black Holes” has since been published online. It attempts to resolve, what is known as, the information paradox. According to general relativity, information sucked inside a black hole is forever lost. According to quantum mechanics, however, information sucked inside a black hole is not completely lost but must be stored somewhere else. Hawking and his colleagues try to solve –or better yet, dissolve – this seeming paradox using “concrete tools."

Last year, Hawking hinted that black holes may not be the eternal prisons we vision them to be, but could, in fact, leak information. The 74-year-old physicist has since expounded upon this idea using zero-energy particles, known as soft hairs, which could teeter on the horizon of a black hole and leak information.

Black holes aren’t so black after all

“This has been an outstanding problem in theoretical physics for the last 40 years…no satisfactory resolution has been advanced,” Professor Hawking said. “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary – the event horizon,” he added.

In the 1970s, Hawking suggested black holes could radiate particles and that energy was lost in the process, inevitably causing the three-dimensional hole to shrink. Last year, Hawking modified the theory by stating black holes were actually grey.

According to the grey hole theory, matter and energy are held for a period of time before they are released back into the universe. Hawking claims the idea of an event horizon – a boundary in space time, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer – is flawed. Instead, light rays trying to travel away from the black hole are held back, and can slowly shrink by releasing radiation.

This black hole pulls matter from blue star beside it. NASA/CXC/M.Weiss image added to article by ilan
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In collaboration with physicists Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, the researchers claim soft hairs could linger on the black hole’s horizon. According to the physicists, soft hair is like a record that captures and stores information taken from particles, as they fall into the black hole. In theory, the information lost in the black hole could be preserved in an alternative universe.

“The answer I propose is that the information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the in-going particles caused,” explained Hawking. “The information about in-going particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form…for all practical purposes the information is lost. The theoretical physicist likened the return of information to a burned encyclopedia, where information wouldn’t technically be lost, but would be incredibly hard to decipher.”

Solving the information paradox

The zero energy particles on the edge of the black hole capture and store information from the stripped particles. Even though the particle is lost, the information would create a hologram of the original particle. The radiation bleeding from the black hole would carry some information stored on the event horizon, thereby solving the information paradox.

Despite these new calculations, however, a complete understanding of how the holographic plate might work has yet to be fully developed.

“A complete description of the holographic plate and resolution of the information paradox remains an open challenge, which we have presented new and concrete tools to address,” the authors of the study concluded.

 

[ilan]

Astronomers Find a Moon Hiding Around Makemake in Hubble Data
Once a lonely ice block, now it seems the dwarf planet may have a close-in companion.
By John Wenz | Published: Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Dwarf planet Makemake and its newly discovered moon.
The newly discovered moon, MK 2, found in Hubble data orbiting Makemake.
NASA, ESA, A. Parker
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In 2005, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo discovered dwarf planet Makemake, currently believed to be the third largest object in the Kuiper Belt after Pluto and Eris. But at the time, astronomers believed it was alone out there on its long path around the Sun. But new data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a moon around the tiny world, and offer a little explanation as to where it was hiding.

“The satellite that we found was not that faint and not that close to Makemake,” says Alex Parker, principal investigator of the research and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “It popped right out of the data when we looked.”

It turns out it was always there. But the newly found object, provisionally called MK 2, orbits Makemake nearly edge-on from our point of view, meaning most of the time it’s obscured by the comparatively bright dwarf planet. Makemake is 886 miles (1,434 km) in diameter, while the new object appears to be only 100 miles (161 Km). Current scenarios also paint it as a dark companion compared to bright Makemake.

The dark surface of MK 2, which in one scenario may reflect as little as 4 percent of light, could explain why astronomers previously showed Makemake to have two highly contrasting albedos (reflectivities) that indicated different materials at work. Those dark spots didn’t seem to line up with the 7.7-hour day on Makemake, though.

“You would expect Makemake’s brightness would go up and down as it rotated, but it’s brightness hardly goes up or down,” Parker says.

There are two possibilities for why a bright dwarf planet has such a dark moon. In one scenario, it’s a captured Kuiper Belt Object that through various circumstances ended up in orbit around Makemake. In the other, a collision formed it, much like the one that formed Pluto’s moon system.

Kuiper Belt image added to artilce for clarity: ILAN
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In the latter scenario, Makemake may have a sort of seasonal atmosphere, and as the ices and other chemicals on its surface sublimate, it covers MK 2 in a hydrocarbon film known as tholin. This same process likely creates the red patches on Pluto’s moon Charon’s north pole.

“You might imagine you could paint this moon dark with a transitory Makemake-ian atmosphere,” Parker says.

Follow-up observations will help determine an orbit for MK 2, something that may be hard given its edge-on nature. This would give the researchers a chance to study the size of the moon and help determine a mass for Makemake, especially if they can predict the intervals at which it is visible. In the meantime, Makemake joins a short list of Kuiper Belt Objects known to have moons, including Pluto, Eris, Quaoar, and Haumea.

 

[ilan]

Planet Nine: A world that shouldn't exist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | May 3, 2016

An artist's conception of Planet Nine. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

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Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. Since then theorists have puzzled over how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit.

New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) examines a number of scenarios and finds that most of them have low probabilities. Therefore, the presence of Planet Nine remains a bit of a mystery.

"The evidence points to Planet Nine existing, but we can't explain for certain how it was produced," says CfA astronomer Gongjie Li, lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Planet Nine circles our Sun at a distance of about 40 billion to 140 billion miles, or 400 - 1500 astronomical units. (An astronomical unit or A.U. is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun, or 93 million miles.) This places it far beyond all the other planets in our solar system. The question becomes: did it form there, or did it form elsewhere and land in its unusual orbit later?

Li and her co-author Fred Adams (University of Michigan) conducted millions of computer simulations in order to consider three possibilities. The first and most likely involves a passing star that tugs Planet Nine outward. Such an interaction would not only nudge the planet into a wider orbit but also make that orbit more elliptical. And since the Sun formed in a star cluster with several thousand neighbors, such stellar encounters were more common in the early history of our solar system.

However, an interloping star is more likely to pull Planet Nine away completely and eject it from the solar system. Li and Adams find only a 10 percent probability, at best, of Planet Nine landing in its current orbit. Moreover, the planet would have had to start at an improbably large distance to begin with.

CfA astronomer Scott Kenyon believes he may have the solution to that difficulty. In two papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, Kenyon and his co-author Benjamin Bromley (University of Utah) use computer simulations to construct plausible scenarios for the formation of Planet Nine in a wide orbit.

"The simplest solution is for the solar system to make an extra gas giant," says Kenyon.

They propose that Planet Nine formed much closer to the Sun and then interacted with the other gas giants, particularly Jupiter and Saturn. A series of gravitational kicks then could have boosted the planet into a larger and more elliptical orbit over time.

"Think of it like pushing a kid on a swing. If you give them a shove at the right time, over and over, they'll go higher and higher," explains Kenyon. "Then the challenge becomes not shoving the planet so much that you eject it from the solar system."

That could be avoided by interactions with the solar system's gaseous disk, he suggests.

Kenyon and Bromley also examine the possibility that Planet Nine actually formed at a great distance to begin with. They find that the right combination of initial disk mass and disk lifetime could potentially create Planet Nine in time for it to be nudged by Li's passing star.

"The nice thing about these scenarios is that they're observationally testable," Kenyon points out. "A scattered gas giant will look like a cold Neptune, while a planet that formed in place will resemble a giant Pluto with no gas."

Li's work also helps constrain the timing for Planet Nine's formation or migration. The Sun was born in a cluster where encounters with other stars were more frequent. Planet Nine's wide orbit would leave it vulnerable to ejection during such encounters. Therefore, Planet Nine is likely to be a latecomer that arrived in its current orbit after the Sun left its birth cluster.

Finally, Li and Adams looked at two wilder possibilities: that Planet Nine is an exoplanet that was captured from a passing star system, or a free-floating planet that was captured when it drifted close by our solar system. However, they conclude that the chances of either scenario are less than 2 percent.

 

[Marley]

yup thanks for info

 

[Kimbo]

Thank you Ilan!!

 

[anon2599]

Fascinating all this info concerning Planet X Nibiru .

Thanks for this Sir.................and lets hope we never see it close quarters .

 

[ilan]

Welcome... Never know, though, The Man from Planet X might just show up again. (Fun, sci-fi romp from '51. Spanish subtitles, but still worth a watch.)

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

Technically, though, Planet Nine and Planet X are different beasts.

 

[ilan]

NASA: Planet 9 is not the ‘mythical, non-existent’ Planet X / Nibiru

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The Many Lives of “Planet X”

An intriguing idea has long tugged at the collective imagination: what unknown planets might be hiding in the distant, dark reaches of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune?

The concept of an undiscovered “Planet X” has inspired science fiction stories, alien monster movies and Internet rumors of wandering planets that periodically wreak havoc when they pass near the Earth.

Astronomers have systematically searched for a Planet X for many decades. Their various hunts have often turned up nothing more than phantoms…with some major exceptions.

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Finding a New World

In the early 20th century, legendary astronomer Percival Lowell concluded that peculiarities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune resulted from an unseen planet. Lowell proposed that the gravity of this previously unknown “Planet X” pulled the gas giants slightly away from their expected orbital positions. He organized an intensive search with telescopes, but it came up empty.

However, after Lowell’s death a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Tucson, AZ. He searched the sky near the predicted location of Lowell’s mystery planet, comparing telescopic photos of star fields to look for moving objects. In 1930, he discovered Pluto. Even though we now know that an incorrect estimate of Neptune’s mass, not Pluto, explains the orbital discrepancies, Lowell was right that other bodies lurked in the outer solar system.

But Wait … There are More — Many More

In 2005, a team led by astronomer Mike Brown discovered a previously unknown object at a vast distance-about three times as far away from the sun as Pluto. It was round like a planet, and even had its own moon. At first it was believed that this object, which was officially named Eris, was even larger than Pluto. What’s more, astronomers knew that many other similar objects could exist as well.

This set off a debate about just what a “planet” is, and ultimately led to the International Astronomical Union designating Pluto and Eris as “dwarf planets.” Outer solar system explorers, using a variety of instruments on the ground aboard Earth-orbiting spacecraft, have now found a host of similar tiny worlds. They carry the names of creator gods and other deities from many traditions, including Varuna, Quaoar, Makemake and Haumea. Some of these orbit in the region known as the Kuiper Belt, while others trace huge, tilted, elongated orbits that carry them even farther out.

A Planet of Possibilities

Mike Brown piqued the world’s interest again in January 2016 when he and his colleague at Caltech, Konstantin Batygin, announced they had evidence for another previously unknown planet. But this time, the proposed discovery is no dwarf. The potential object, which the researchers have nicknamed “Planet Nine,” could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the sun.

No one has actually seen this possible new planet. As with previous “Planets X,” the proposed evidence again revolves around the idea that although this new planet has not yet been seen, its gravitational effects have been. Mathematical modeling and computer simulations suggest that the orbits of many smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt region have been clustered together by “Planet Nine’s” gravity.

More Than Meets the Eye

One thing that recent exploration has made clear: the realm beyond Neptune is vast, complex and populated by a menagerie of varied objects. Thanks to the New Horizons mission, we have seen that at least one of them tells a much more involved story of planetary evolution than might have been expected. The simple solar system map that we saw in grade school-showing the neat, nearly circular orbits of Mercury through Neptune-is just the innermost core of what may be out there.

“Planet X” comes in many forms, and we’re only beginning the quest to understand the solar system it inhabits.

No, It’s Not Nibiru

There is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of “Nibiru,” the mysterious object from online conspiracy theories that supposedly swings near the Earth on occasion. The recently predicted “Planet 9” comes nowhere near Earth or even the inner solar system. According to the Caltech astronomers’ calculations, the planet would never approach closer than about 200 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

 

[anon2599]

Absolutely loving the information and post Sir.

 

[ilan]

Thanks... It is fun stuff!

 

[wickedjoker]

We haven't seen Mars like this in more than a decade.

The red planet will soon be closer to Earth that it has been in 11 years: On May 30, Mars will be about 46.8 million miles (75.3 million kilometers) from Earth. Yes, that's still a long way off, but sometimes Mars is 249 million miles (400 million kilometers) from Earth.

Skywatch: Your guide to space
What does this close approach mean for sky watchers? It means Mars will appear bigger and brighter from May 18 until June 3, according to NASA. But you don't have to wait. Mars already is putting on a spectacular show in the early morning sky. And you don't need a telescope or binoculars to see it. In fact, you'll probably be able to find it without a star chart or an astronomy app. In the United States, the best time to look for Mars during its close approach will be around midnight Eastern time, according to NASA. It will be the brightest "star" that you'll see in the southeastern sky and it will appear a bit reddish. 'Way Up There': Above the Earth and onward to Mars NASA's Mars mission: Spaceship under construction To find out when Mars is visible in your neighborhood, you can go to timeanddate.com/astronomy and pop in your location. It will give a list of times that the sun, moon and planets rise and set. Also, both CNN partners Astronomy and Sky & Telescope.com offer online tools to help you track what's going on in the night sky. After you have seen Mars shining bright in the morning sky, you may want to get an even better view. You can hook up with your local astronomy club to see Mars through a telescope. If you miss this year's close approach, Earth and Mars will be even closer on July, 31 2018. They'll come about 35.8 million miles from each other. Back in August 2003 they were closer still: The two planets were only 34,646,418 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from center to center. That was the nearest Earth and Mars have been in almost 60,000 years, according to NASA. Scientists calculate they won't get that close again until August 28, 2287.

Source -- CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/05/us/mars-close-approach-to-earth/index.html