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

[ilan]

New fly-over video of dwarf planet Ceres

http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2016/01/30/ceres-dwarf-planet-jnd-orig-pkg.nasa

[Kimbo]

I would let Agent Mulder and Agent Scully take a look at this documents!!

[ilan]

It would make a show or two for sure...

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Chinese photos show moon's surface in vivid detail

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/01/asia/china-moon-photos-jade-rabbit/index.html?sr=twCNN020116china-moon-photos-jade-rabbit0842AMStoryGalLink&linkId=20839601

Beijing (CNN)China has released hundreds of high-resolution photos taken by its Chang'e-3 lunar lander and rover, showing the moon's surface in vivid detail.


The China National Space Administration made the images, video clips and scientific data available on its website in a rare show of openness for the country's usually secretive space program.


China sent its first unmanned lunar probe, the Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit," to the moon in 2013 as part of its Chang'e-3 mission, becoming only the third nation after the United States and Russia to land on the moon's surface.


Despite a shaky start to its mission, the Jade Rabbit is still working and sending images and data back to earth.


The images show the moon's crust in true color and spectacular detail. The tracks of the Jade Rabbit rover are clearly visible in some pictures. The full data sets are available for the public to download on the website.


China has ambitious plans to explore the moon, with two robotic missions planned for the next two years.


In 2017, China will launch the Chang'e-5 spacecraft, which plans to land on the moon and return with soil samples.


While in 2018, China plans to land on the far side of the moon with the Chang'e-4 spacecraft, a mission, which, if successful, would make it the first country to do so.


China hasn't committed to it, but many analysts think the country ultimately wants to put a man on the moon.

Cnn.com

[ilan]

Some interesting UFO news. Consult the site for video footage.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/641166/UFO-footage-which-sent-alien-hunters-into-frenzy-confirmed-as-GENUINE-by-expert

UFO footage which sent alien hunters into frenzy 'confirmed' as GENUINE by expert

FOOTAGE of a 'UFO' hovering over Moscow that sent alien hunters into a frenzy has been 'confirmed' as being authentic.

Last month, footage emerged of four lights hovering over the Russian capital which sent UFO fanatics into a frenzy.

The uploader of the video, known as Timur, said to local media in Russia: “There were four balls of light. A red one to the left, two white ones in the middle and a less bright one to the right.

“Sometimes the one on the right would disappear and come back. All together, they made the geometric shape of a rhombus.
“I’ve been living in the district for two years, and have never seen anything like that before.”

After debate about whether the footage of genuine arose, a UFO expert in Russia, Vadim Chernobrov, has chipped in to give his opinion, and said that the footage is indeed real, he believes.

Mr Chernobrov said: “The lights cannot be explained as either an atmospheric or a cosmic image.

The chance of it being some sort of mirage is also impossible due to the precise geometric form the objects have formed.

“Some have said they could look like Chinese lanterns but I would dismiss this possibility because of the movements and speed of the objects.”

This year has kicked off positively for UFO hunters, even in the UK.

Last month, Wiltshire resident Ian Jones was out walking his dog when he noticed a strange light hovering in the night sky.

He shot a video of it which shows a light with an orange ambience flashing brighter in certain sections, sitting almost perfectly overhead.

Mr Jones watched the light for about five minutes in the hope that something would occur that would explain the phenomenon, but noticed no change.

Speaking to Express.co.uk, he said: “At first I thought it was a Chinese lantern but it wasn’t moving. It could have also been an Apache, but there was no noise. “I went back the next day in the day time to see if it was a crane or something, but there was nothing there.”

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Good stuff. Thanks ilan...

[ilan]

Welcome, Cap.. UFO sightings are always fun...

[ilan]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/from-exile-to-eminence-how-the-alien-hunters-conquered-astronomy/

From exile to eminence: How the alien hunters conquered astronomy
Jill Tarter tells Ars how technology and discovery have primed the search for life.

by Eric Berger - Feb 5, 2016 9:34am CST

Tarter speaks after a screening of Contact, in 2014, at the Qualcomm Institute.

When Jill Tarter first began to look for aliens, she drew looks askance from her friends and colleagues. The perception was “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a subject like this?” she recalled in an interview with Ars. Tarter, now 72, would go on to rise above that perception, becoming a leading figure at the SETI Institute. And the astronomer played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, which was largely based on Tarter, would further bolster her reputation.

She and her fellow searchers haven’t found E.T. yet, but they have become respected members of the scientific community. These days, when NASA plots future explorations of Mars or ice-covered moons in the outer solar system, they’re driven by the search for microbial life. And with the discovery of billions of planets in the Milky Way, no one snickers any more at the idea of sniffing atmospheres around other worlds for biosignatures.

The search for aliens has become respectable because it no longer is a philosophical or religious matter to ask if we are alone. During Tarter’s lifetime, scientists and engineers have developed the tools and technology to finally probe this question in a meaningful way.

“When I first started in this field, we were coming off the bad science done by Percival Lowell and Martian canals,” Tarter said. “It made the field odoriferous.”

Lowell, an American businessman and astronomer, popularized the idea that the long, somewhat linear features seen on Mars were canals. This influence pervaded the public mind through the middle of the 20th century and featured in science fiction works by both Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. But then NASA probes to Mars, beginning in 1964 with Mariner 4, found a cold, barren, and likely dead world. Many scientists began to dismiss the notion of aliens.

Tarter became intrigued with the search for alien signals from other worlds in the 1970s, while earning a PhD in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She was working on brown dwarfs, objects too large to be planets but too small to be stars. But the work felt remote to her. “I was always wondering why is the taxpayer paying my salary? Once I started working on SETI I no longer had that feeling," she said. "The person on the street I’d talk to understood it. It wasn’t like trying to explain the Large Hadron Collider. It was a topic people have been interested in forever.”

Over time, the alien hunters slowly garnered respect, but during the 1980s and 1990s, SETI remained on the fringes of mainstream science. For example, on Columbus Day in 1992, NASA formally launched a $100 million radio astronomy program called SETI. Yet Congress canceled funding a year later, with some members criticizing the plan as a “search for little green men.” Things began to change soon after that however, aided by two key discoveries which had implications both for life inside the solar system and beyond.

By the 1990s, scientists were finding organisms that survived at very high and very low pressures and temperatures, and sometimes in environments with no oxygen at all. Scientists learned that microbes were a lot more adaptable than previously thought, and they began to consider all of the places in the solar system where life might exist today, such as on ice-covered ocean worlds in the outer solar system like Europa and Enceladus.

Gradually NASA’s plans to explore Mars and these worlds have made finding evidence of present or past life as a key goal. The agency's chief scientist, Ellen Stofan, said in 2015 that NASA is close to achieving that goal. "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade,” she said during a panel discussion last year.

The second key discovery has come far outside solar system. Scientists first began finding exoplanets about 20 years ago, but these were giant, Jupiter-like worlds close to their stars. The launch of the Kepler spacecraft in 2009 changed everything. It has found more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets, with thousands of more candidate worlds. Moreover, many of the planets it has found are close in size to Earth. Based upon calculations by astronomers working with Kepler’s data, there may be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zones of solar systems in the Milky Way Galaxy.

“Kepler has been a game changer,” Tarter said. “When I first started this work, we didn’t know if there were any planets beyond our solar system. The fact that many of them are Earth-sized and close to Earth mass is also a hopeful outcome because we don’t know what’s required for life.”

THE SETI INSTITUTE LOOKED AT ODDLY DIMMING “E.T.” STAR, FOUND NOTHING
The initial survey is not conclusive, but hopes for a Dyson sphere also dimming. For a long time, the SETI Institute’s work was largely an ad hoc affair. But with the Allen Telescope Array and better computation, its ability to search for alien signals has gotten much better. Think of it like this, Tarter says, comparing the area and dimensions of space and time that must be searched to the vastness of Earth’s oceans. During the last 50, years SETI astronomers have looked at about one glass of that water. With new tools, she said, they will perhaps look at an amount the size of Lake Michigan during the next two decades.

And NASA is getting into the game, too. It is contemplating projects such as a giant starshade, which would block the light from distant stars and allow astronomers to image rocky, Earth-like worlds directly. It is proposing projects to study the atmospheres of those worlds as well.

It is perhaps a measure of the SETI Institute’s success that when the Kepler spacecraft found a world with rapidly dimming light, the explanation of an alien megastructure as the cause wasn’t dismissed out of hand. Instead, astronomers have considered aliens as one possible cause of the unique light curve from KIC 8462852.

For Tarter, hunting for aliens has paid dividends. After the movie Contact, she was named one Time’s 100 most influential people in the world and recently became a member of the Creative Class. Respect is nice, she says, but what Tarter is really after is answers. “I think this is our century,” she said. “I would like to be able to stay around long enough to see this play out.”

[ilan]

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor.

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160209132047.htm

Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth--very close in astronomical terms--the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space.

The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns.

Lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before.

"The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," he said.

Professor Staveley-Smith said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s.

"We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," he said.

"We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour."

The research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).

University of Cape Town astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg said astronomers have been trying to map the galaxy distribution hidden behind the Milky Way for decades.

"We've used a range of techniques but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars," she said.

"An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now."

Dr. Bärbel Koribalski from CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science said innovative technologies on the Parkes Radio telescope had made it possible to survey large areas of the sky very quickly.

"With the 21-cm multibeam receiver on Parkes we're able to map the sky 13 times faster than we could before and make new discoveries at a much greater rate," she said.

The study involved researchers from Australia, South Africa, the US and the Netherlands, and was published today in the Astronomical Journal.

[ilan]

The always amazing Einstein strikes again...

 http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/gravitational-waves-feat/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/gravitational-waves-feat/

(CNN) Einstein was right.

Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.

"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.

Reitze made the announcement Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington surrounded by other LIGO researchers and National Science Foundation head France Cordova.

The gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time -- were created by the merging of two black holes, Reitze said. One black hole had the mass of 29 suns; the other was the equivalent of 36 suns. Each was perhaps 50 kilometers (30 miles) in diameter.

More than a billion years ago -- LIGO estimates about 1.3 billion -- the two collided at half the speed of light. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so the result traveled through the universe for that time before reaching Earth.

The 'chirp' of black holes colliding
The gravitational waves stretched and compressed space around Earth "like Jell-O," said Reitze.

However, the waves are so small that it takes a detector like LIGO, capable of measuring distortions one-thousandth the size of a proton, to observe them. They were observed on September 14, 2015.

Scientists heard the sound of the black holes colliding as a "chirp" lasting one-fifth of a second. Though gravitational waves aren't sound waves, the increase in frequency the collision exhibited in its last milliseconds -- when the black holes were mere kilometers apart and growing closer -- is a frequency we can hear, said Deirdre Shoemaker, a Georgia Tech physicist who works on LIGO.

LIGO is described as "a system of two identical detectors" -- one located in Livingston, Louisiana, the other in Hanford, Washington -- "carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves." The project was created by scientists from Caltech and MIT and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Szabolcs Marka, a physicist at Columbia University who is leader of the LIGO member Columbia Experimental Gravity Group, said you could think of it as "a cosmic microphone."

Einstein's concepts
Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity in 1915, the theory that proposed space-time as a concept. The waves are a distortion of space-time.

However, in order for us to detect them, they needed to be created by a mammoth event -- for example, the collision of two black holes.

Black holes are a holy grail of the gravitational wave concept. To date, we'd been able only to see their aftereffects. Black holes themselves were a conjecture.

"There's been a lot of indirect evidence for their existence," says Shoemaker, an expert in black holes. "But this is the first time we actually detect two black holes merging and we know the only thing that predicts that (is) gravitational radiation, (which) comes from a binary black hole merging. There's no other way we could have seen that but gravitationally."

'Now we can listen to the universe'
But is LIGO correct? Have we really detected gravitational waves?

Scientists have what they call a "five-sigma" standard of proof, and LIGO's researchers say the gravitational wave discovery exceeds that.

"It took six months of convincing ourselves that it was correct," says Shoemaker. "It goes beyond that five-sigma to proving that nothing was happening with the equipment that couldn't be understood."

She's thrilled with the possibilities.

"Imagine having never been able to hear before and all you can do is see," she says. "Now we can listen to the universe where we were deaf before. It's a different spectrum (from the electromagnetic spectrum). It's unlike anything we've ever detected before."

"What's really exciting is what comes next," said Reitze at the announcement. "I think we're opening a window on the universe -- a window of gravitational wave astronomy."

Einstein would be surprised
Columbia University physicist Marka, who's been working on the project for more than a decade, said the discovery will open up new horizons, including direct tests of Einstein's general theory. Those could further support it -- or force physicists to come up with new ideas.

"A physicist is always looking for a flaw in a theory. And the only way to find a flaw is to test it," Marka told CNN. "Einstein's theory did not present any flaws to us yet, and that is really scary. Physicists are very (skeptical) of flawless theories because then we have nothing to do."

Ironically, Einstein didn't think gravitational waves would be discovered.

"He thought gravitational waves are a beautiful construct, but they are so small nobody would ever be able to actually measure it," said Marka.

CNN's Rachel Crane and Claudia Morales contributed to this story.