Scientists Take Baby Steps Toward Extraterrestrial Babies | WIRED
In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive . The plane's rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, González felt what it was like to be an astronaut. Then he pulled on the yoke to bring the plane out of its dive and did it all over again.
This sort of parabolic flight isn't remarkable for an experienced aerobatic pilot like González. But the cargo on his flight was a little unusual: In the passenger seat of the plane sat a small box, loaded with tubes of frozen human sperm .
This was the third and final flight of a yearlong study undertaken by a group of Spanish researchers to understand the effects of microgravity on human reproduction . This seminal study, which is currently under peer review, marks the first experimental results published on the effects of a zero-gravity environment on frozen sperm. The study was limited—the sperm was in microgravity for less than 9 seconds, for example—but it suggested that reduced gravity has negligible effects on the health of frozen sperm.
Did an extraterrestrial impact trigger the extinction of ice-age animals?
A controversial theory that suggests an extraterrestrial body crashing to Earth almost 13,000 years ago caused the extinction of many large animals and a probable population decline in early humans is gaining traction from research sites around the world.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, controversial from the time it was presented in 2007, proposes that an asteroid or comet hit the Earth about 12,800 years ago causing a period of extreme cooling that contributed to extinctions of more than 35 species of megafauna including giant sloths, sabre-tooth cats, mastodons and mammoths. It also coincides with a serious decline in early human populations such as the Clovis culture and is believed to have caused massive wildfires that could have blocked sunlight, causing an "impact winter" near the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.
In a new study published this week in Scientific Reports , a publication of Nature, UofSC archaeologist Christopher Moore and 16 colleagues present further evidence of a cosmic impact based on research done at White Pond near Elgin, South Carolina. The study builds on similar findings of platinum spikes -- an element associated with cosmic objects like asteroids or comets -- in North America, Europe, western Asia and recently in Chile and South Africa.
Nasa to look for alien tech made by advanced extraterrestrial civilisations | Metro News
It has joined up with the Breakthrough Listen initiative to launch a search for 'technosignatures' – the traces of technology which indicate the existence of 'advanced extraterrestrial civilisations'.
These could include massive structures like Dyson Spheres, which are hypothetical 'megastructures' built around stars to harvest their power.
But technosignatures could be signals which seem to be produced by artificial transmitters or perhaps even the engines of alien spaceships.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) drive will utilise the power of the TESS satellite, which is currently searching for planets.
It detects the presence of alien worlds orbiting distant suns by watching a telltale dip in the star's light, indicating a planet's 'transit' in front of it.
Asteroid wiped out giant sloths, woolly mammoths 12,800 years ago
A shocking new study claims the “smoking gun” behind the extinction of a number of animals and plants has been found: a massive asteroid that hit the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago.
The research, published in Scientific Reports , suggests that a brief ice age period occurred roughly 12,800 years ago and was caused by an asteroid impact, after looking at high levels of iridium and platinum in White Pond near Elgin, SC.
"We continue to find evidence and expand geographically,” University of South Carolina archaeologist Christopher Moore said in a statement. “There have been numerous papers that have come out in the past couple of years with similar data from other sites that almost universally support the notion that there was an extraterrestrial impact or comet airburst that caused the Younger Dryas climate event."
If, as English rock band UFO has intimated, its current 50th anniversary tour will be its last, then it went out in an otherworldly way Friday with its show at Penn's Peak near Jim Thorpe.
It gave a concert that not only displayed how strongly it has influenced heavy metal and other rock forms, but showed how aging rockers can continue to rock with strength and dignity.
When the band announced its current run of shows in February, it said that vocalist Phil Mogg, 71, who helped form the band in London in 1969 and has been its only constant member, will retire after the tour. "Consequently, it seems almost certain that at that point they will cease to exist," the band said.
And from the start of its 11-song, 70-minute show, it seemed UFO was doing its best to make every moment of the show count.
Army partners with former Blink-182 founder's UFO research company to study alien technology
Much like the universe, the military's affiliation with alien-related subject matter appears to be ever-expanding.
In 2017, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of a program that existed from 2007 to 2012, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, that was dedicated solely to investigating reports of UFO sightings.
This April, the Navy confirmed it was drafting a fleet-wide message to establish guidelines for pilots and other military personnel to report UFO sightings, the culmination of a surge in what the Navy called a series of intrusions by advanced aircraft on Navy carrier strike groups.
Mysterious case of the vanishing UFOs | Comment | The Times
Port Talbot is inundated with UFOs. The Welsh steel town is a magnet for alien spacecraft. The place is positively awash with flying saucers. This is according to the actor Michael Sheen, who claims to have had a close encounter with a formation of alien lights on his way home from school in the 1970s. The lady next door apparently spotted a flying saucer hovering over the garden. Sheen's dad also saw a UFO, on New Year's Eve, sober.
"I think Port Talbot is some kind of hub," Sheen said last week. "It's like some sort of stop-off . . . the Little Chef of the Galaxy."
Cluster of lights of Outer Banks, North Carolina sets off UFO debate | Charlotte Observer
A man visiting the Outer Banks, North Carolina recorded a cluster of lights in September 2019 that many people claim are UFOs. Others believe they are military flares.
If the space industry these days really is an opportunity on par with the dawn of the internet, Nicolas Gaume is a businessman built to take advantage.
Gaume believes in the future. He founded his first technology company, which made video games, as a 19-year old in 1990. "I've built nine different companies in very different areas," he told Quartz last year. "I was a millionaire, I was a billionaire, I was bankrupt, I was a millionaire again."
Now, the French entrepreneur and his co-founder Emmanuel Etcheparre have a new company, Space Cargo Unlimited , which aims to perform biological research in the microgravity of Earth's orbit. Begun in 2014, it plans to fly experiments on rockets made by Blue Origin and SpaceX as soon as next year. But, first, on Nov. 2, they will launch a dozen bottles of the finest wine to the International Space Station on a rocket built by Northrop Grumman . They are believed to be the first glass bottles flown to the orbiting laboratory.
Researchers using telescopes around the world confirmed and characterized an exoplanet orbiting a nearby star through a rare phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet has a mass similar to Neptune, but it orbits a star lighter (cooler) than the Sun at an orbital radius similar to Earth's orbital radius. Around cool stars, this orbital region is thought to be the birth place of gas-giant planets. The results of this research suggest that Neptune-sized planets could be common around this orbital region. Because the exoplanet discovered this time is closer than other exoplanets discovered by the same method, it is a good target for follow-up observations by world-class telescopes like the Subaru Telescope.
On November 1, 2017 amateur astronomer Tadashi Kojima in Gunma Prefecture, Japan reported an enigmatic new object in the constellation Taurus. Astronomers around the world began follow-up observations and determined that this was an example of a rare event known as gravitational microlensing. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity tells us that gravity warps space. If a foreground object with strong gravity passes directly in front of a background object in outer space this warped space can act as a lens and focus the light from the background object, making it appear to brighten temporarily. In the case of the object spotted by Kojima, a star 1600 light-years away passed in front of a star 2600 light-years away. Furthermore, by studying the change in the lensed brightness, astronomers determined that the foreground star has a planet orbiting it.
Air Force spaceplane lands after two years orbiting Earth | KIRO-TV
We look forward to seeing you on [website] frequently. Visit us and sign in to update your profile, receive the latest news and keep up to date with mobile alerts.
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Officials said the Air Force's X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle Mission 5 successfully landed early Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center .
The spaceplane was used to improve technology that allows scientists and engineers to recover experiments tested in a long-duration space environment.
Officials said the mission launched Sept. 7, 2017, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on board a Space X Falcon 9 booster. The U.S. Air Force is preparing to launch the sixth X-37B mission in 2020.
Publisher: KIRO
Date: 2019-10-28T12:48:54+00:00
Author: Jared Leone Cox Media Group National Content Desk
Virgin Orbit plans to launch first commercial small satellites to Mars – TechCrunch
The consortium is working to follow in the footsteps of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s MarCO mission from 2018, which saw two smaller satellites successfully launched to Mars. The group’s early studies have suggested that even satellites as small as 50 kg (around 110 lbs), or potentially even smaller, can provide meaningful and useful research, including imagery collection, from both Mars and its orbiting body, Phobos. These satellites could provide key info about the atmospheric composition of Mars, or even scouting for underground water, Virgin Orbit says.
Warsaw-based SatRevolution has experience in the commercial space industry, and in April this year sent Poland’s first commercial nano satellite into orbit. The universities involved, which include the AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology and many others, all have experience in space industry research, as well. The plan is to launch the spacecraft developed by the universities and SatRevolution aboard Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket, which takes off from a converted 747-400 Virgin has retrofitted for the process.
Simulations explain giant exoplanets with eccentric, close-in orbits
"A giant planet is not as easily scattered into an eccentric orbit as a smaller planet, but if there are multiple giant planets close to the host star, their gravitational interactions are more likely scatter them into eccentric orbits," explained first author Renata Frelikh, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Frelikh performed hundreds of simulations of planetary systems, starting each one with 10 planets in circular orbits and varying the initial total mass of the system and the masses of individual planets. As the systems evolved for 20 million simulated years, dynamical instabilities led to collisions and mergers to form larger planets as well as gravitational interactions that ejected some planets and scattered others into eccentric orbits.
Analyzing the results of these simulations collectively, the researchers found that the planetary systems with the most initial total mass produced the biggest planets and the planets with the highest eccentricities.
'Improbable Planet' Somehow Survives Being Swallowed by Red Giant Star | Space
Scientists have discovered a "survivalist" planet that shouldn't exist orbiting a pulsating star.
Using astroseismology data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite , or TESS, a team of researchers studying the red giant stars HD 212771 and HD 203949 detected oscillations, which are "gentle pulsations at the surfaces of stars," lead author Tiago Campante of the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) and Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, told Space.com. This is actually the first time that oscillations have been found by TESS in stars that host exoplanets.
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" TESS observations are precise enough to allow measuring the gentle pulsations at the surfaces of stars. These two fairly evolved stars also host planets, providing the ideal testbed for studies of the evolution of planetary systems," Campante said in a statement .
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 30 October 2019 - Crop Harvest - SpaceRef
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir cuts Mizuna mustard green leaves grown aboard the International Space Station for the VEG-04B space agriculture study. The botany research is helping scientists to learn how to provide fresh food to space crews on long-duration missions. The Expedition 61 crewmembers also tasted the leaves for edibility and stowed the leftovers in a science freezer for scientific analysis. Credit: NASA.
The Expedition 61 crew harvested a space-grown crop today aboard the International Space Station. The orbital lab residents also tested robotics systems before exploring blood pressure and time perception in microgravity.
Space agriculture aboard the orbiting laboratory has been ongoing for several years to learn how to provide fresh food to space crews. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan continued that research by cutting Mizuna leaves today for a taste test and stowing the leftovers in a science freezer for scientific analysis.
S. M. Lawler, A. C. Boley, M. Connors, W. Fraser, B. Gladman, C. L. Johnson, J.J. Kavelaars, G. Osinski, L. Philpott, J. Rowe, P. Wiegert, R. Winslow
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There is a vibrant and effective planetary science community in Canada. We do research in the areas of meteoritics, asteroid and trans-Neptunian object orbits and compositions, and space weather, and are involved in space probe missions to study planetary surfaces and interiors. For Canadian planetary scientists to deliver the highest scientific impact possible, we have several recommendations. Our top recommendation is to join LSST and gain access to the full data releases by hosting a data centre, which could be done by adding to the CADC, which is already highly involved in hosting planetary data and supporting computational modelling for orbital studies. We also support MSE, which can provide spectroscopy and thus compositional information for thousands of small bodies. We support a Canadian-led microsatellite, POEP, which will provide small body sizes by measuring occultations.
Second interstellar visitor may be carrying water from beyond our solar system, shocking study
A shocking new study suggests that the second interstellar object ever discovered, Comet 2I/Borisov, could be carrying water on it from beyond the Solar System.
The study suggests that 2I/Borisov, discovered on Aug. 30 by astronomer Gennady Borisov, is releasing water vapor on its journey.
"Using a simple sublimation model we estimate an H2O active area of 1.7 km2 [0.65 miles squared], which for current estimates for the size of Borisov suggests active fractions between 1-150 [percent], consistent with values measured in Solar System comets," the study's abstract states. It is common for asteroids in the Solar System to carry water.
The study was submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be read on the arXiv repository ,
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"The discovery of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov provides an opportunity to sample the volatile composition of a comet that is unambiguously from outside our own Solar System, providing constraints on the physics and chemistry of other protostellar discs," the researchers wrote in the paper.
Best pictures of the solar system from the decade you were born - Business Insider
For decades, scientists have pointed Earthly lenses toward the sky to capture images of the cosmos. Even the earliest rockets that launched off the planet brought cameras into space.
At first, our photos of the solar system came back grainy, unclear, and colorless. The very first image taken in space, for example, came from a 33mm motion-picture camera that American scientists strapped to a captured German rocket and launched off Earth at the end of World War II. The camera fell back to Earth and shattered, but the film survived.
Other early solar-system images came as NASA and the Soviet Union explored the moon for the first time — people born in the 1950s and 60s grew up with the iconic photos of the first astronauts walking on the moon.
Since then, increasingly sophisticated missions have ventured farther into space with better and better cameras. Kids in the '80s got the first up-close images of Saturn and Neptune, while children today are accustomed to high-quality colorful shots of the deserts of Mars and swirling clouds of Jupiter.
Asteroid Hygiea is Round Enough That it Could Qualify as a Dwarf Planet, the Smallest in the
Within the Main Asteroid Belt , there are a number of larger bodies that have defied traditional classification. The largest among them is Ceres, which is followed by Vesta, Pallas, and Hygeia. Until recently, Ceres was thought to be the only object in the Main Belt large enough to undergo hydrostatic equilibrium – where an object is sufficiently massive that its gravity causes it to collapse into a roughly spherical shape.
However, it now seems that there is another body in the Main Belt that has earned the designation of "dwarf planet". Using data from the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers found compelling evidence that Hygeia is actually round , making it the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.
Even before this came to light, Hygeia satisfied most of the qualifications for being designated as a dwarf planet – which were adopted by the IAU General Assembly in 2006. In accordance with these qualifications and definitions, a "dwarf planet" is:
Publisher: Universe Today
Date: 2019-11-01T22:07:59-04:00
Author: https www facebook com Storiesbywilliams 205745679447998 ref hl
Campus solar system model draws intrigue from commuters and classrooms
A to-scale, 1-mile-long model of the solar system lines the West Woodruff Avenue sidewalk. Credit: Jackie Appel | For The Lantern
While most Ohio State students won't have the chance to travel through space, a new collaboration with artists and scientists brought small-scale space exploration to campus.
A to-scale, 1-mile-long model of the solar system that is 4.5 billion times smaller than the actual system lines the West Woodruff Avenue sidewalk. Ohio State collaborated with scientists, artists, fabricators and accessibility advocates to complete the project that has even become part of some lesson plans, Wayne Schlingman, planetarium director and main coordinator of the project, said.
The permanent model consists of a 1-foot-diameter sun followed by the eight planets at their appropriate distances and sizes, including Pluto. On West campus, Pluto marks the outer edge of the model that begins outside the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry Building.
NASA's Voyager Missions Were Amazing. Now Scientists Want a True Interstellar Probe | Space
WASHINGTON — Humanity should consider building an interstellar probe to see our neighborhood from an outside point of view, argued several scientists at a recent conference.
NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are the only machines that people have sent beyond our solar system. These 42-year-old spacecraft are still functioning well enough to send us information from interstellar space, and many of their insights have been surprising, according to Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis, the principal investigator of the low-energy charged particle experiment that is still working on both spacecraft.
"The models have been wrong," Krimigis told delegates on Oct. 25 at the International Astronautical Congress held here. One prominent example was the shape of the heliosphere, or the region of space in which the stream of charged particles emanates from our sun and wraps around the solar system. Until the 2010s, scientists thought it had a fan shape; the Voyagers, upon crossing the heliosphere in 2012 and 2018, revealed it is more like a bubble.
There's Something Strange Going On Inside Neptune | Space
The storm was something of a surprise. In the southern hemisphere there was a swirling, counter-clockwise wind of up to 1,500 mph (2,414 km/h) — the strongest ever recorded. Astronomers called it the Great Dark Spot, and while it had gone by the time the Hubble Space Telescope looked at the planet five years later, they were keen to learn why the winds were so extreme.
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They were also perplexed by another issue: Voyager 2 revealed that Neptune is warmer than Uranus , despite being further from the sun. As physicist Brian Cox discussed in his BBC documentary, The Planets : "The source of this extra heat remains a mystery." But does that mean we have a double-puzzle on our hands, and can one mystery help to explain the other in some way?
Before we begin to address the two issues at hand, we must first look at what is actually meant by "warmer". Since Neptune is a gas giant , we cannot test the globally average temperature at ground level in the way that we could on Earth's solid surface. Instead, with Neptune's core likely to be small, temperature measurements must be taken at an altitude. Trouble is, which one?
NASA Needs to Update Its Rules to Keep Our Solar System Clean
NASA published a response to the Planetary Protection Recommendations, and aims to rethink its approach to ensure cleaner and safer missions.
NASA has been following the same guidelines to prevent contamination spreading from space onto our planet for the past 50 years.
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Planetary protection is meant to prevent or minimize biological contamination in our solar system. The aim is to limit the number of microbes we send into space and to other planets, so as to ensure we're able to study these areas in their natural habitats.
It's not all about protecting other planets and studies in space, though. Planetary protection is also meant to protect our Earth from outside contaminants.
Tune into the Planetary Protection Independent Review Board teleconference as they discuss findings and recommendations to protect the solar system from contamination as the face of #space exploration changes - TODAY at 3:30pm EDT https://t.co/tFtuz6OTqI via @NASA pic.twitter.com/cjxOOCgWhW
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This is the closest solar system to Earth containing multiple planets - CNN
(CNN) Just 11 light years from earth is the GJ 15 A star system with two planets orbiting a red-dwarf star. This makes it the closest solar system to Earth that contains multiple planets.
Illustration of a hot Jupiter planet in the Messier 67 star cluster. Hot Jupiters are so named because of their close proximity — usually just a few million miles — to their star, which drives up temperatures and can puff out the planets.
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Hot Jupiters were the first kind of exoplanet found. A quarter-century later, they still perplex and captivate — and their origins hold lessons about planet formation in general.
In 1995, after years of effort, astronomers made an announcement: They'd found the first planet circling a sun-like star outside our solar system. But that planet, 51 Pegasi b, was in a quite unexpected place — it appeared to be just around 4.8 million miles away from its home star and able to dash around the star in just over four Earth-days. Our innermost planet, Mercury, by comparison, is 28.6 million miles away from the sun at its closest approach and orbits it every 88 days.
A NASA report finds planetary contamination rules may be too strict | Science News
Some policies for protecting the moon, Mars and other places in the solar system from contamination by visiting missions may be too strict.
At least one astrobiologist cautioned, however, against relaxing current guidelines too much. Spacecraft landing in areas deemed sterile could still contaminate areas that are potentially interesting for astrobiology, says John Rummel of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. If a lunar probe crashes on the moon's surface, "you end up with material that's taken into the lunar atmosphere and deposited in the cold traps at the south and north anyway," he says. "You don't even have to land at the south pole to affect [it]."
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Astrobiologist Alberto Fairén of Cornell University welcomes the possibility of adding nuance to the "extremely restrictive" protection guidelines for Mars. He and colleagues recommended a few high-priority astrobiology zones in Advances in Space Research in March, including lakes of liquid water possibly hidden under ice sheets ( SN: 12/17/18 ).
Another Pluto? What the discovery of a new dwarf planet means to astronomy | Salon.com
Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and Pluto are expected to have a new friend, Hygiea, inducted into our solar system’s dwarf planet club. Hygiea was long believed to be a large asteroid in the asteroid belt, but has met all the requirements needed to become a dwarf planet thanks to new observations made by Chile’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The findings and new images that suggest Hygiea is actually a dwarf planet were published in Nature Astronomy by astronomer Pierre Vernazza of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France and his team of researchers.
“Thanks to the unique capability of the SPHERE instrument on the VLT , which is one of the most powerful imaging systems in the world, we could resolve Hygiea’s shape, which turns out to be nearly spherical,” Vernazza said in a media statement . “Thanks to these images, Hygiea may be reclassified as a dwarf planet, so far the smallest in the Solar System.”
NASA Just Picked New Planetary Missions to Study. Here Are The Most Exciting Ones
Look, Mars is great. It's full of great rocks , and those blue sunsets are just top-notch. But there's no denying it: Mars definitely gets way more attention than other planets. At time of writing, there are eight active probes on or orbiting Mars.
Other Solar System planets have their secrets too, and NASA has just funded a bunch of planetary mission concept studies to see what's feasible to explore in the near future.
These studies will be published in the 2023 Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a US National Research Council publication produced every 10 years or so, identifying key issues and outlining recommendations for the coming decade in planetary science.
Not all of the concept studies will be selected to be developed into full missions; and then, not all the selected missions will end up being fully developed. A Mars mission concept from the 2013 survey, for instance, was cancelled .
What Makes a Planet and How Many Are There in Our Solar System?
What makes a space object a planet? How many are there actually in our solar system? Let's find out.
How many planets are there in our solar system? 9? 8? 12? More? The answer might actually surprise you.
Here we explore the answer to this apparently simple question and take a quick tour of the main primary planets of our home solar system.
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What is a planet? An enormous chunk of stuff (rock or gas), roughly spheroidal in shape that orbits a star and may or may not have a moon, right?
While this is in part true, there are some issues with such a simple definition. What about asteroids? When does an object become large enough to be considered a planet?
Why are Venus and Mercury planets (according to current classifications) but not Pluto? As it turns out, the reasons are pretty straight forward.
'Galaxy of Horrors!' NASA Posters Highlight Spooky Alien Planets (Video) | Space
This Halloween season, NASA wants to open your eyes to the glorious spookiness all around us in the Milky Way galaxy.
The space agency has just released two new "Galaxy of Horrors" posters, which highlight a few of the most bizarre and inhospitable alien planets that scientists have discovered. And NASA created a fun 2-minute video, styled like a trailer for a 1950s horror movie, to promote the posters.
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One of the featured worlds is HD 189733 b , a blue planet where winds whip sharp silicate-shard rain through the air at up to 5,400 mph (6,700 km/h).
"If human or robotic explorers could travel 63 light-years from Earth to get there, they would never survive this planetary hellscape," NASA officials wrote in a statement about the exotic exoplanet.
The other poster focuses on Poltergeist, Draugr and Phobetor, three planets that orbit the pulsar PSR B1257+12, which lies about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Pulsars are fast-spinning stellar corpses that emit beams of radiation from their poles; these beams appear to pulse because of the rotation, which gives pulsars their name.
To Find Baby Planets, Researchers Chase Waterfalls of Gas | Smart News |
Since researchers discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s , astronomers have gotten pretty good at finding satellites orbiting distant suns, cataloguing 4,000 planets in more than 3,000 planetary systems since then. Now, researchers are interested in learning how these planets form, and a new technique may help them find hard-to-locate baby planets.
Young stars often have a disk of gas and dust swirling around them. Planets typically coalesce from this material, and eventually grow large enough to clear a path through these protoplanetary disks . But researchers aren’t certain that all of the gaps they’ve found actually come from young planets. That’s why a team recently looked at these disks in a new way, as they describe in a new study published in the journal Nature .
Astrophysicist Richard Teague, who conducted the study at the University of Michigan, and his team examined new high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile. In particular, they were able to observe the velocity of carbon monoxide gas moving within the protoplanetary disc around a young star called HD 163296. While hydrogen makes up the majority of the gas in the disk, carbon monoxide emits the brightest wavelengths, giving researchers the most detailed picture of how gas moves within the disk.
Scientists Take Baby Steps Toward Extraterrestrial Babies | WIRED
In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive . The plane's rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, González felt what it was like to be an astronaut. Then he pulled on the yoke to bring the plane out of its dive and did it all over again.
This sort of parabolic flight isn't remarkable for an experienced aerobatic pilot like González. But the cargo on his flight was a little unusual: In the passenger seat of the plane sat a small box, loaded with tubes of frozen human sperm .
This was the third and final flight of a yearlong study undertaken by a group of Spanish researchers to understand the effects of microgravity on human reproduction . This seminal study, which is currently under peer review, marks the first experimental results published on the effects of a zero-gravity environment on frozen sperm. The study was limited—the sperm was in microgravity for less than 9 seconds, for example—but it suggested that reduced gravity has negligible effects on the health of frozen sperm.
NASA teams up with major alien hunting group as they up the search for extraterrestrials |
By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
The space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85 percent of the sky.
TESS is capable of studying the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.
The satellite works by searching for telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” — the passages of orbiting worlds across their parent stars’ faces.
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Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.
Did an extraterrestrial impact trigger the extinction of ice-age animals?
A controversial theory that suggests an extraterrestrial body crashing to Earth almost 13,000 years ago caused the extinction of many large animals and a probable population decline in early humans is gaining traction from research sites around the world.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, controversial from the time it was presented in 2007, proposes that an asteroid or comet hit the Earth about 12,800 years ago causing a period of extreme cooling that contributed to extinctions of more than 35 species of megafauna including giant sloths, sabre-tooth cats, mastodons and mammoths. It also coincides with a serious decline in early human populations such as the Clovis culture and is believed to have caused massive wildfires that could have blocked sunlight, causing an "impact winter" near the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.
In a new study published this week in Scientific Reports , a publication of Nature, UofSC archaeologist Christopher Moore and 16 colleagues present further evidence of a cosmic impact based on research done at White Pond near Elgin, South Carolina. The study builds on similar findings of platinum spikes -- an element associated with cosmic objects like asteroids or comets -- in North America, Europe, western Asia and recently in Chile and South Africa.
Asteroid wiped out giant sloths, woolly mammoths 12,800 years ago
A shocking new study claims the “smoking gun” behind the extinction of a number of animals and plants has been found: a massive asteroid that hit the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago.
The research, published in Scientific Reports , suggests that a brief ice age period occurred roughly 12,800 years ago and was caused by an asteroid impact, after looking at high levels of iridium and platinum in White Pond near Elgin, SC.
"We continue to find evidence and expand geographically,” University of South Carolina archaeologist Christopher Moore said in a statement. “There have been numerous papers that have come out in the past couple of years with similar data from other sites that almost universally support the notion that there was an extraterrestrial impact or comet airburst that caused the Younger Dryas climate event."
Study supports hypothesis extraterrestrial mass hit Earth 13,000 years ago, led to extinction of
Around 13,000 years ago, giant animals such as mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and ground sloths disappeared from the Earth. Scientists have found evidence in sediment cores to support a controversial theory that an asteroid or a comet slammed into Earth and helped lead to this extinction of ice age animals and cooling of the globe.
It’s called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and was first suggested in 2007. The hypothesis included the idea that an extraterrestrial body impacted Earth 12,800 years ago. This led to an extreme cooling of the environment, which in turn helped cause more than 35 species of large animals to go extinct.
At the same time, human populations declined. The impact also has been suggested as the cause of large, raging wildfires that created enough smoke to block the sun and created an “impact winter,” in which cold weather lasts longer than expected after Earth is impacted.
Publisher: CBS 4 - Indianapolis News, Weather, Traffic and Sports | WTTV
A private company that researches UFOs has a new contract with the U.S. government, for developing technologies that could enhance ground vehicles in the military.
Other divisions at TTSA focus on new technology. On Oct. 17, TTSA representatives announced that the group had entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, according to a statement .
The five-year contract outlines a research collaboration, and the U.S. Army will provide at least $750,000 in support and resources for developing and testing TTSA technologies, Motherboard reported on Oct. 21.
Those technologies could include "inertial mass reduction, mechanical/structural meta materials, electromagnetic meta material wave guides, quantum physics, quantum communications, and beamed energy propulsion," according to the contract.
UFOs are back in the news — and Minnesotans are seeing more of them - StarTribune.com
"My wife and I noticed what we thought was a star. It then started moving up and down, side to side and at 90 degree angles," reads a September report marked as coming from Hastings, Minn. "I have never seen anything like this before."
"I was driving to work early in the morning and noticed double-layered lights surrounding a massive circular object in the sky around 494 and Minnetonka Blvd," reads another from Minnetonka in August.
"Just got home from buying a dirt bike for my kids and took it for a drive in the dark to the end of the driveway," described another from Mora in June, "I saw a fireball looking circle moving around slightly about a half mile away, about 60 ft up, it just suddenly disappeared."
Nearly a hundred times each year, Minnesotans file reports of suspected UFO encounters with a volunteer organization known as the National UFO Reporting Center, which makes them available to be searched online . Extraterrestrial encounters have been creeping back into the zeitgeist this year, with the U.S. Navy acknowledging the existence of mysterious flying objects in September! Videos for Rock Star ' s Company Seeks UFOs , Finds 2:51 Ailing Former H/Stars And Gor Mahia Coach Seeks Help YouTube!! Soon after, thousands of revelers descended on Area 51 as part of a viral stunt that began on Facebook.
'UFO clouds' create spectacle in skies over Tasmania - ABC News (Australian
It's not just the dancing lights of the Aurora Australis or the vibrant blue algae of bioluminescence that wow shutterbugs in Australia's southernmost state.
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Snaps of sphere-shaped clouds lit up social media this week, with users capturing a spectacular display of "alien space ships" spotted across Tasmania.
Lenticular clouds form when winds travel over mountain ranges and form waves and, when the wind cools, they appear to stand alone in the sky.
"If there is a slight difference in speed or humidity of the air it will cause differences in the clouds that form," he said.
"My kids always referred to them as alien space ship cloaking devices," Yvonne Kerklaan said, adding to the public opinion that the clouds resembled UFOs.
They are also common in other locations surrounded by mountain ranges, like the Andes in South America.
Publisher: ABC News
Date: 2019-11-01T07:52:12+1100
Author: https www abc net au news megan macdonald 10731526
UFO sightings: The top 5 states where the aliens are flying through
That's one way, anyway, to interpret the results from a new report on the states with the most unidentified flying object sightings per capita! Rock Star's Company Seeks UFOs, Finds Military Contract ...www. alien ...Rock Star's Company Seeks UFOs, Finds Military Contract Space.com October 30, 2019 A private company that researches UFOs has a new contract with the US government, for developing technologies that could enhance ground vehicles in the military.!! Washington state topped that list, followed in order by Montana, Vermont, Alaska and Maine.
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So much for Roswell, New Mexico, or the lonely Nevada desert. New Mexico came in 8th on the list; Nevada, 13th.
Meanwhile, the states with the fewest UFO sightings per capita — Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama -- are all down South.
The list was put together by the analysts and space nerds at internet provider SatelliteInternet.com , which culled data from the National UFO Reporting Center and the U.S. Census, to attract attention in time for World UFO Day on July 2. (Yep, there is such a day.)
Mysterious case of the vanishing UFOs | Comment | The Times
Port Talbot is inundated with UFOs. The Welsh steel town is a magnet for alien spacecraft. The place is positively awash with flying saucers! Rock Star's Company Seeks UFOs, Finds Military Contract ...weeklyreviewer.com/ ...contract A private company that researches UFOs has a new contract with the U.S. government, for developing technologies that could enhance Rock Star's Company Seeks UFOs, Finds Military Contract - WeeklyReviewer!! This is according to the actor Michael Sheen, who claims to have had a close encounter with a formation of alien lights on his way home from school in the 1970s. The lady next door apparently spotted a flying saucer hovering over the garden! Rock Star's Company Seeks UFOs, Finds Military Contract ...www.sciencetells. co .uk/ ...contract A private company that researches UFOs has a new contract with the U.S. government, for developing technologies that could enhance ground vehicles in the military. To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA) was launched in 2017 by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge; in December of that year, TTSA became the first company to […]!! Sheen's dad also saw a UFO, on New Year's Eve, sober.
"I think Port Talbot is some kind of hub," Sheen said last week. "It's like some sort of stop-off . . . the Little Chef of the Galaxy."
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