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

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

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]

[CENTER][B]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.

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

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

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

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.