Thursday 14 September 2017
Thursday 7 September 2017
Bannon on Catholic Church’s DACA support: ‘They need illegal aliens to fill the churches’
Washington (CNN)Former White House chief strategist Steven Bannon said the Catholic Church’s support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, is economically driven and owes to the church’s struggle to fill pews.
Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/
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‘UFO’ spotted over California’s San Gabriel Valley?
A YouTube video on the mysterious object has gone viral, but there may be a terrestrial explanation for the ‘UFO’.
The video, posted by Julian Lopez, appears to show a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter circling around an unidentified flying object, which some observers say may be an advertisement for marijuana products.
Fox 11 reports that the object was seen floating over the San Gabriel Valley on the morning of Aug. 28.
On the video, Lopez can be heard saying: “A helicopter is circling it. It looks like a big eyeball.”
MINING COMPLEX ON THE MOON? UFO HUNTER CLAIMS STRUCTURES VISIBLE ON LUNAR SURFACE
Other witnesses (as reported by the Pasadena Star News) reported seeing a large, white advertising ballon for a company known as “Brass Knuckles.” Brass Knuckles is described as “the industry leader in Super Premium CO2 extracted cannabis oil products,” according to a medical marijuana website.
Lopez’ video has attracted significant interest on social media, gathering nearly 300,000 views.
One commenter wrote: “[A]t that altitude a balloon would be long gone – this is a powered craft it is the only way it could hold a stationary position.”
Another commenter, user name al gonzalez, wrote: “This is great capture.”
REPORTS CLAIM UFO WHIZZES PAST INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
SecureTeam10, a YouTube channel known for its conspiracy theory videos, has mentioned the unidentified object in one of its recent videos.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Wednesday 6 September 2017
Saturday 2 September 2017
Alien search detects radio signals from dwarf galaxy 3bn light years from Earth
Stephen Hawkings Breakthrough Listen project picks up radio pulses that could be from black holes, neutron stars or, some speculate UFO beacons
Astronomers searching for signals from alien civilisations have detected 15 powerful, repeated radio pulses coming from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away from Earth.
The source of the mysterious signals, known as fast radio bursts, is unknown. Some have proposed they could be emanating from black holes or rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields. A more speculative possibility is that they are beacons from extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The signals were picked up by the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100m (77m) initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe set up by Professor Stephen Hawking and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner.
About two dozen fast radio bursts have been detected previously. Because they last only a few milliseconds and radio telescopes can only monitor a small area of the sky at any given time, only one of these sources has been observed to repeat.
The source, known as FRB 121102, was discovered in 2012 and resides in a dwarf galaxy about 3bn light years from Earth.
Now 15 more signals have been observed from the same source and at a higher frequency than the previous signals although what this signifies about the source of these mysterious events is not yet clear.
As well as confirming that the source is in a newly active state, the high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before, said Breakthrough Listen postdoctoral researcher Vishal Gajjar, who discovered the increased activity.
Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and of the Breakthrough Listen programme, said: Whether or not fast radio bursts turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the universe around us.
The findings were reported on the Astronomers Telegram website.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Monday 21 August 2017
Sunday 20 August 2017
Churchill essay on the possibility of alien life discovered in US college
Winston Churchills essay Are We Alone in the Universe? was penned the year before he became prime minister, and reveals his keen interest in science
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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New contender in hunt for alien life discovered by astronomers
Exoplanet LHS 1140b is believed to be about 40% larger than Earth and lies 39 light years away in the constellation of Cetus, orbiting a red dwarf star
A rocky planet that orbits a red dwarf star has been revealed as the latest contender for the best place to hunt for life beyond the solar system.
The newfound world was spotted as it crossed the face of its parent star and cast an almost imperceptible shadow that was detected by the MEarth-South observatory in the Chilean desert.
The planet lies 39 light years away and is believed to lurk in the habitable zone where liquid water could support life as we know it around a star named LHS 1140 in the constellation of Cetus, the sea monster.
Jason Dittmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the new exoplanet, known as LHS 1140b, was the most exciting he had seen in 10 years. We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science: searching for evidence of life beyond Earth, he said.
Astronomers now discover new planets with such frequency that what is considered to be the most promising home for extraterrestrials changes from month to month. In February, scientists spotted seven planets around another star at a similar distance to LHS 1140, a discovery that meant the search for life elsewhere could begin sooner than many thought. Last year, astronomers raised the prospect of life on Proxima b, a planet circling our nearest star a mere four light years away.
What makes LHS 1140b notable is that it is not bombarded with as much high-energy radiation that batters other planets around similar stars. Intense blasts of radiation can strip away tenuous atmospheres and harm any life beneath. In the more hospitable environment on LHS 1140b, a vast magma ocean could have fed steam into the atmosphere, replenishing the planet with water, the scientists said.
Further measurements of the planet by the European Southern Observatory in Chile found the planet to be about 40% larger than Earth, but with seven times the mass, which astronomers believe could be explained by it being rocky with a dense, iron core. Details of the discovery are reported in the journal Nature.
- This article was amended on 20 April 2017 to correct lead author Jason Dittmanns name.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Thursday 17 August 2017
Alien contact could be 1,500 years away, say Cornell astronomers | Fox News
File photo – The prototype of the Allen Telescope Array, which aims to aims to seek out signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. (Reuters)
If you are hoping to meet an alien then you may be in for a very long wait, according to astronomers at Cornell University.
The experts say that it could be 1,500 years before alien contact with Earth and will present their research at the American Astronomical Societys meeting in San Diego Thursday.
We havent heard from aliens yet, as space is a big place but that doesnt mean no one is out there, said Cornell student Evan Solomonides, who will present the research paper, in a statement.
Related: Real-life ‘X-Files’? CIA posts trove of UFO documents
The astronomers research is based partly on deconstructing the Fermi Paradox described by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, when he noted that aliens have had plenty of time to make contact with Earth. The Cornell experts paired this analysis with the Mediocrity Principle devised by 16th-century mathematician Copernicus, which says that Earths physical attributes are not unique and that natural processes are likely common throughout the cosmos, so it could take a while for aliens to discover us. The resulting equation gives a 1,500-year estimate for contact.
Its possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now, said Solomonides. Until then, it is possible that we appear to be alone even if we are not. But if we stop listening or looking, we may miss the signals. So we should keep looking.
The research paper A Probabilistic Analysis of the Fermi Paradox is co-authored by Yervant Terzian, Cornells Tisch Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy.
Related: ‘Laser cloak’ could hide Earth from evil aliens
The Cornell researchers explain that extraterrestrials could receive radio and TV signals from Earth, which have been travelling from our planet for the last 80 years. Aliens, however, would likely find these transmissions indecipherable, according to Solomonides, who says they would need to decode the light waves into sounds, then parse 3,000 human languages to interpret the message.
Despite these challenges, the scientists say that Earths broadcast signals have reached every star within about 80 light years from the Sun about 8,531 stars and 3,555 earthlike planets. Our Milky Way galaxy alone contains 200 billion stars, they note.
The astronomers suggest that Earth might encounter an alien civilization when around half of the Milky Way has been signaled in 1,500 years.
Related: 2015 was a big year for Canadian UFO sightings, report says
This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone, said Solomonides. We simply claim that it is somewhat unlikely that we will not hear anything before that time.
David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the research, told FoxNews.com that the search for alien life is much broader than radio and TV signals, encompassing, for example, the search for artifacts within and beyond our solar system.
The professor used the example of KIC 8462852, a distant dimming star in the constellation Cygnus, which sparked debate about a possible ‘alien megastructure.’
Related: Alien megastructure? Dimming star may have less exotic explanation
Kipping describes himself as “agnostic” with regard to the possibility of alien life. “We don’t have any evidence right now for extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy,” he said.
Nonetheless, the search for alien life continues to fascinate. In April, for example, celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking joined forces with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and investor Yuri Milner in an ambitious plan for seeking life in outer space.
The $100 million project is aimed at establishing the feasibility of sending a swarm of tiny spacecraft, each weighing far less than an ounce, to the Alpha Centauri star system.
In January the CIA offered a peek into its X-files, shining a spotlight on a series of once-classified UFO documents. The UFO documents, which date primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, are among hundreds that the CIA declassified in 1978.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Aliens could conquer Earth by following ‘dangerous’ maps NASA ‘foolishly’ sent into space
Back in the optimistic early days of space exploration, everyone thought it was a great idea to offer aliens a chart telling them how to find Planet Earth.
But now the man who sent four maps into deep space fears this decision could prove to be disastrous.
Frank Drake, an American astronomer and famed alien hunter, worked with Nasa to design maps which were placed inside Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes.
All four of these spaceships have now left the solar system and are speeding through deep space.
The plaque placed aboard the Pioneer craft shows a man and a woman alongside a basic map which plots the position of Earth compared to a distant pulsar stars, which are bright and long-lasting so could still direct aliens our way if they are found millions of years from now.
Voyager was fitted with “golden records”, which can be played to reveal natural sounds and even images from Earth.
A similar pulsar map is engraved on the front of the records.
Frank Drake now fears it may have been a bad idea to send the maps into space.
Responding to a request for comment by Fox News, a NASA spokesperson said: “[T]he so-called Golden Records are unlikely to be found anytime soon, as space is largely empty and the Voyagers will not be encountering any other planets or stars in our lifetimes.”
“In those days, all the people I dealt with were optimists, and they thought the ETs would be friendly,” Drake told National Geographic.
“Nobody thought, even for a few seconds, about whether this might be a dangerous thing to do.”
The article about Drake was actually written by his daughter Nadia, who asked whether it may one day be seen as “foolish and dangerous” to have broadcasted details of our whereabouts to aggressive aliens.
Many scientists now believe contacting extraterrestrials is a spectacularly bad idea.
Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned that “meeting an advanced civilisation could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus“.
“That didnt turn out so well,” he said. He claimed alien life could be “rapacious marauders roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder, and planets to conquer and colonize.
This story has been updated with NASA’s comment.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Mining complex on the moon? UFO hunter claims structures visible on lunar surface
A UFO hunter claims to have spotted a mining complex on the surface of the Moon.
Streetcap 1, which posts extraterrestrial-related and other paranormal videos on its YouTube page, purports a series of objects in a video could be a mining complex on the lunar surface.
In the video, Streetcap 1 says: “Can you see those buildings? They are in Tycho Crater on the moon. That’s quite amazing isn’t it?”
GIANT HOLE ON MARS COULD BE WORK OF ALIENS, RESEARCHERS SAY
Below is the video in its entirety:
Commenters on the video, which has over 5,000 views, seemed to agree with the findings. “Nice find mate,” Thomas Mundt wrote.
Another commenter, Kristin Bacon, wrote: “[T]his is a great pic. definitely something going on. no one can say that dosnt look like a mining complex of some sort. i would love to go to the moon and look around lol”
A third commenter, going by the name of Clint Steel, wrote: “I do believe there are structures on the moon but what i think is happening here is pixelization of some kind with any white patches on the surface. The pixelization is even subtly there on the darker areas. Can you show us a white patch that doesnt pixelize like this?”
This latest video, which was published on July 29, is the latest in a series of videos from Streetcap 1 about unexplained anomalies on the Moon.
ALIEN SHIPS NEAR SATURN? EX-NASA SCIENTIST CLAIMS OF THEIR EXISTENCE
Others have also purportedly found inanimate objects on the lunar surface, though none have ever been proven.
In May, UFO researcher SecureTeam 10 claimed to have spotted an “alien tank” on the surface of the Moon.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Spacecraft discovers possibility of alien life, then runs out of fuel
Scientists say discovery of ingredients for life on Saturns moon Enceladus is bittersweet as spacecraft prepares to end 20-year mission
Could there be life in our own solar system?
This is the question posed by the discovery of hydrogen gas erupting in plumes from Saturns moon Enceladus, indicating the likely existence of an energy supply for microbial life.
The presence of hydrogen, detected by the Cassini spacecraft and announced by Nasa on Thursday, is seen as tantalising evidence that in the ocean beneath the moons icy surface chemical reactions are taking place that are strikingly similar to those that occur at hydrothermal vents on the Earths ocean floors.
In the fissures of the Earths oceans, a process called serpentinisation produces hydrogen when salty water reacts with hot rocks. This is what allows microbes, which use hydrogen as a source of chemical energy, to thrive in the ocean depths, raising the question of whether equivalent biology might have emerged on Enceladus.
Although we cant detect life, weve found that theres a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes, said Hunter Waite, programme director for the space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and lead author of the Cassini study.
Based on the observed concentration of the hydrogen in the plumes, scientists calculate that the hydrothermal activity on Enceladus produces more than enough energy to sustain a hypothetical colony of alien microbes.
Enceladus is a mysterious enigmatic object that now shows it has all of the ingredients for life, which is why scientists are so jazzed about the discovery, said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT. Hydrogen gas sets up a way for life to extract energy from chemistry a main way microbes exploit energy to live here on Earth.
However, the discovery of an available food source poses a new puzzle: why, if something is alive on Enceladus, is it not consuming all the available fuel? The surplus of hydrogen could be an indication of the absence of life, or of a very inactive microbe lurking in the oceans depths.
Until 11 years ago, Saturns tiny moon, with a diameter about the length of England, was regarded as an unremarkable object. But then Cassini discovered plumes coming from its south pole, indicating the presence of liquid water, often the first item on the checklist when seeking out the places in the universe that might host life.
Since then, scientists have ticked off some of the other chemical elements thought to be required carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and now hydrogen (the other two, phosphorus and sulphur, have yet to be detected but are almost certainly present).
Prof Andrew Coates, a Cassini scientist based at University College Londons Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: There are four things you need for life: liquid water, the right chemistry, a source of energy, and enough time for life to develop. This gives that chemical imbalance, that gives you a source of energy.
As Saturn moves in its orbit, the plumes have been observed to vary in intensity and it is not known whether conditions would have been stable enough for a chain of reactions leading to the emergence of life to occur uninterrupted. On Earth, it took millions of years after favourable conditions appeared for life to spark into existence. We dont know if there has been enough time or not on Enceladus, said Coates.
With the first three of the four prerequisites ticked off, Coates now considers Enceladus, along with Jupiters moon Europa, to be the most likely place in the solar system to discover microbial life today.
Coates describes this as a bittersweet realisation. The results, frustratingly, come just as Cassini is running out of fuel after 20 years in space. In September, Cassini will pass through the inner edge of the ring system and plunge into Saturns atmosphere where the probe will be vaporised in what Nasa describes as the missions grand finale. With no Saturn missions scheduled, it will be at least a decade before another Enceladus flyby, let alone a landing.
The great mystery of whether humans are alone in the universe and what other lifeforms might look like from basic microbes to advanced civilisations remains out of reach for now. But Cassinis findings add to scientists growing confidence that there are places beyond Earth where life might find a viable home and that some of them are probably within reach of a spacecraft.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Wednesday 16 August 2017
Alien megastructure? Dimming star may have less exotic explanation | Fox News
Cascading comets around a distant star. (NASA/JPL/CaltechNASA/JPL/Caltech)
A mysterious darkening star might not be home to an alien megastructure after all. Instead, the dimming that apparently occurred over the course of a century may actually have resulted from how telescopes and cameras have changed over time, researchers said.
Last fall, a star named KIC 8462852 made news when scientists found unusual fluctuations in the object’s light. The star is an otherwise-ordinary F-type star, slightly larger and hotter than Earth’s sun; it sits about 1,480 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
But astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian of Yale University in Connecticut and her colleagues, along with citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program, found something odd. They discovered dozens of strange instances of the star darkening over a 100-day period when they analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
The dimming events blocked up to 22 percent of the light from KIC 8462852, now nicknamed “Tabby’s Star,” making these events far too substantial to be caused by planets crossing (or “transiting”) the star’s face. Scientists also ruled out several other possible explanations, such as an enormous dust cloud.
Such analyses raised the possibility that astronomers had detected signs of alien life specifically, a Dyson sphere, a megastructure built around a star to capture as much of the sun’s energy as possible to power an advanced civilization. (In science fiction, Dyson spheres which are named after mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson are often depicted as solid shells around stars, but they could also be spherical swarms of giant solar panels.)
So far, astronomers at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institutein California analyzing Tabby’s Starwith the Allen Telescope Array have not detected any radio signals that would indicate the presence of an alien civilization. Scientists at SETI International in San Francisco and their colleagues have also failed to detect any laser signals from Tabby’s Star.
Still, in January, astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University reviewed archived photographic plates of the sky taken from 1890 to 1989 and found signs that Tabby’s Star had dimmed by about 20 percent over the past century. He noted that this finding was difficult to explain by natural means. For instance, Schaefer calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each about 125 miles wide, passing by the star in the past century to cause such dimming.
Now, however, researchers suggest this seemingly century-long dimming trend might not be real. Instead, the apparent darkening may just be due to how astronomical instruments have changed over time.
In the new study, scientists pored over DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) data. This is a collection of more than 500,000 photographic glass plates taken by astronomers at Harvard in Massachusetts between 1885 and 1993 that the university is digitizing.
“It is exciting that we have these century-old data, which are incredibly valuable for checks like this,” study lead author Michael Hippke, an amateur astronomer from the German town of Neukirchen-Vluyn, told Space.com.
The researchers looked not only at Tabby’s Star, but also at a number of comparable stars in the DASCH database. Results showed that many of these other stars experienced a drop in brightness similar to that of Tabby’s Star in the 1960s.
“That indicates the drops were caused by changes in the instrumentation, not by changes in the stars’ brightness,” study co-author Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said in a statement.
“Now, what does that mean for the mystery? Are there no aliens after all? Probably not,” Hippke said in an email. “Still, the daylong dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star, and we still have no idea what it is.”
The best explanation so far for this dimming may be that a giant comet fragmented into thousands of smaller comets that are now crossing in front of Tabby’s Star, some scientists say. To help solve this celestial mystery, amateur astronomers around the world are working with the American Association of Variable Star Observers to find new dips in the star’s brightness, Hippke noted. Other groups, such as the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, have also joined the effort, he said.
“Observing further dips in different colors can reveal information about the chemistry of the transiting object, which might confirm or reject a cometary origin,” Hippke said.
The scientists will detail their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Student petition at Dartmouth sparks Library of Congress to drop term ‘illegal alien’
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Venus-Like Planet Sheds New Light On Alien Atmospheres
A Venus-like alien world may hold clues to how rocky planets with atmospheres like our own have evolved in the universe. Named GJ 1132b, it is only 39 light-years away — close enough for astronomers to easily conduct further observations.
In May, the MEarth-South telescope array at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile discovered the exoplanet — a planet that orbits a star other than the sun. Now, scientists have determined that the alien world is likely to have an atmosphere, said Dr. David Charbonneau, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who co-wrote a paper describing the planet.
“This is the first terrestrial exoplanet — meaning a rocky, Earth-sized planet, such as Venus, Mars, Earth — that is very close and orbits a small star and hence allows us to study its atmosphere,” Charbonneau told The Huffington Post.
The researchers used an apparatus called a spectrograph to measure how much the planet and the star that it orbits, a red dwarf, pull on each other through gravity. This allowed the scientists to determine the mass of GJ 1132b, which is about 60 percent greater than Earth’s.
They found that the planet is about 16 percent larger than Earth, with a diameter of about 9,200 miles, and that it has an Earth-like gravity.So a person standing on the surface of GJ 1132b would weigh only 20 percent more than they do on our own planet.
GJ 1132b orbits its star at a distance of 1.4 million miles, which is pretty close. In our own solar system, Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, orbits at a distance of 36 million miles.
Because it’s so close to its star, GJ 1132b has an estimated surface temperature of around 450 degrees Fahrenheit. That may seem warm, but it’s not so hot that the atmosphere would evaporate or escape into space, Charbonneau said.
“However, it is hotter than the Earth, so we think it would have lost its water to space,” he said. “This would leave behind an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide.”
So far, scientists have only studied exoplanet atmospheres that are mostly composed of hydrogen, similar to Jupiter and Saturn, Charbonneau said.
The researchers hope to conduct follow-up observations of GJ 1132b using the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes.
The nearby world may soon be frequently studied by scientists since it’s so close, noted Dr. Zachory Berta-Thompson, an observational astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the research.
“This planet is going to be a favorite target of astronomers for years to come,” he said in a statement.
The paper describing the planet appeared in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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Colorado House of Representatives passes bill dropping use of ‘illegal alien’
Tuesday 15 August 2017
The universe has probably hosted many alien civilizations: Study | Fox News
File photo – Reuters (ake/DIGITAL/Photo by J. UFO).
Many other planets throughout the universe probably hosted intelligent life long before Earth did, a new study suggests.
The probability of a civilization developing on a potentially habitable alien planet would have to be less than one in 10 billion trillion or one part in 10 to the 22nd power for humanity to be the first technologically advanced species the cosmos has ever known, according to the study.
“To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology-producing species very likely have evolved before us,” said lead author Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]
“Think of it this way: Before our result, youd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet was, say, one in a trillion,” Frank said in a statement. “But even that guess one chance in a trillion implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about 10 billion other times over cosmic history.”
In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake devised a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that may exist today in the Milky Way.
Adam Frank and co-author Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington were interested in the odds that intelligent aliens have ever existed anywhere in the universe. So they tweaked the famous Drake equation, coming up with an “archaeological version” that doesn’t take into account how long alien civilizations may last.
Frank and Sullivan also incorporated observations from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and other instruments, which suggest that about 20 percent of all stars host planets in the life-friendly, “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on a world’s surface.
The researchers then calculated the probability that Earth was the universe’s first-ever abode for intelligent life, after taking into account the number of stars in the observable universe (about 20 billion trillion, according to a recent estimate).
“From a fundamental perspective, the question is, ‘Has it ever happened anywhere before?'” Frank said. “Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical answer for that question, and it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advanced civilization has evolved.”
But this doesn’t mean that there are lots of intelligent aliens out there, just waiting to be contacted, the researchers stressed.
“The universe is more than 13 billion years old,” Sullivan said in the same statement. “That means that even if there have been 1,000 civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around roughly 10,000 years then all of them are likely already extinct. And others wont evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another ‘contemporary’ active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime.”
(The 10,000-year figure cited by Sullivan refers to humanity’s development of agriculture and other “rudimentary” technologies; mankind has been capable of sending radio waves and other electromagnetic signals out into the cosmos for just a century or so.)
The new study has been published in the journal Astrobiology; you can read it for free here.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Dems Try To Stop Republicans From Making Library of Congress Use Term ‘Illegal Alien’
Latino, Asian and black Democratic House members are fighting Republican efforts to force the Library of Congress to use the term “illegal alien,” a phrase many consider to be pejorative and that library leaders chose to stop using.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus signed onto a letter sent Monday by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) to the House appropriations committee.
It urged the committee to remove a provision requiring the Library of Congress to use the terms “aliens” and “illegal aliens” in its subject headings.
“Terms and how they are defined by society change with time. As meanings of words evolve with the times, so should our usage of those terms,” the letter reads.
The letter went on to say that “dated and dehumanizing terms such as ‘illegal alien’ and ‘alien’ have taken on a highly negative connotation and perpetuate the denigration of immigrant communities.”
This March, the Library of Congress made the decision to use the term “noncitizens” in place of “aliens” in subject headings and to replace “illegal alien” with “noncitizen” and “unauthorized immigration.” Some Republicans balked at that change.
House appropriations committee chairman Tom Graves (R-Ga.) argued that the subcommittee was not making a political statement surrounding the terminology, but rather attempting to ensure the language chosen by the Library of Congress matches that of the U.S. legal code.
Despite the Library of Congress’ decision to eliminate the language, the appropriators included a provision in the legislative branch funding proposal for the 2017 fiscal year that would force the Library of Congress to use the term.
“In the past, as society has come to understand the pain certain words can cause communities, we’ve done the right thing and eliminated those terms from our acceptable vocabulary,” Castro said in a press statement. “The Appropriations Committee should continue that progress now, not move our nation backwards and unnecessarily perpetuate a negative stigma.”
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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Alien Wow! signal could be explained after almost 40 years
A former analyst with the US Department of Defence is on the trail of an astronomical cold case an unexplained signal that some believe could have come from extraterrestrials
Way back in 1977 something amazing happened (apart from the release of Star Wars obviously). Astronomer Jerry Ehman was using the Ohio State Universitys Big Ear radio telescope to sweep the sky for possible signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. He found something.
While pointing towards a grouping of stars called Chi Sagittarii on 15 August, he received a powerful blast of radio waves that lasted for 72 seconds. He circled it on the readout and wrote: Wow!
Analysis of the signal showed that it displayed all the hallmarks of coming from interstellar space, and it became something of a cause clbre for those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The trouble is that despite numerous attempts, the signal has never been observed again and so remains unexplained. Until now perhaps, thanks to the work of Professor Antonio Paris of St Petersburg College, Florida.
Before he was an astrophysicist at the St Petersburg College, Paris was an analyst for the US Department of Defence. I have this investigative background, so I approached the Wow! signal as Im going back to the crime scene, he told me over Skype. Its a cold case, so I went to various [astronomical] databases to find culprits or suspects that were at this crime scene at the time.
He didnt find aliens but he did find two suspicious looking comets.
Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the Wow! signal was detected.
This could be significant because comets are surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas that are millions of kilometres in diameter. The Wow! signal itself was detected by Ehman at 1420MHz, which is a radio frequency that hydrogen naturally emits. He published his idea at the beginning of this year.
But before the case can be closed, Paris must test his hypothesis and for this he needs public support.
Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope they are all booked out.
So, he has launched a crowdfunding campaign on gofundme to raise the $13,000 he needs to buy a radio telescope to make the observation. Donations are rolling in and he is already most of the way to his target.
I would like to [be fully funded] in May, order the stuff so that I can have it by October, he says. This would give him time to construct the dish, test it and prepare for the January encounter.
Although some other astronomers have voiced scepticism at his hypothesis, Paris points out that even if he turns out to be wrong, its still good science because we are learning something about comets, and he and his colleagues have a new radio telescope that they can use for further research.
Also on the plus side; if it isnt comets, SETI scientists still have their best candidate for an extraterrestrial signal.
Stuart Clark is the author of The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus), and co-host of the podcast The Stuniverse (Bingo Productions). He is teaching the Guardian Masterclass Understand the Universe in an Evening on 23 May.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Alien hunters claim Venus has buildings | Fox News
Venus image from NASAs Magellan probe Venus Global GIS Mapping Application (usgs.gov)
Space might very well be considered the final frontier, but according to alien hunters, intelligent life on Venus includes cities for its inhabitants.
A 20-minute Spanish-language video posted to YouTube by mundodesconocido magnifies and examines images of the planet taken by NASAs Magellan probe.
The video applies 3D modeling to some of the images. In a post accompanying the video, mundodesconocido says the images reveal huge cities, artificial structures and all kinds of elements that seem to obey constructions appear intelligent effected [sic] by some kind of alien race that inhabited or colonized the second planet in our solar system.
Magellan launched on May 4, 1989 and began orbiting Venus on August 10, 1990. The spacecraft was sent to study the face of the planet and to model its interior.
Despite being referred to as the Earths twin and sister planet NASA describes Venus as an Earth-sized planet with no evidence of Earth-like plate tectonics. Magellan also revealed that at least 85 percent of Venus surface is covered with volcanoes. The planet has a surface temperature of 864 degrees.
NASA lost contact with Magellan on October 13, 1994.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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8 Signs Your Cat Is Definitely An Alien
If you have a “cat” at home, you may have at one time or another asked yourself whether he or she is really a cat. Sometimes your pet does cat-like things, including playing with yarn and being all cute with a whooshy tail, but other times kitty does things that seem more … extraterrestrial.
Use the video from Cole And Marmalade above as a guide to determine whether you’ve got a cat for a pet or something else.
You can find more from these cute kitties on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Related on HuffPost:
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Three newly discovered Earth-sized planets may be prime spot to hunt alien life | Fox News
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Astronomers searching for life beyond our solar system may need to look no farther than a little, feeble nearby star.
A Belgian-led team reported Monday that it’s discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star less than 40 light-years away. It’s the first time planets have been found around this type of star and it opens up new, rich territory in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Because this star is so close and so faint, astronomers can study the atmospheres of these three temperate exoplanets and, eventually, hunt for signs of possible life. They’re already making atmospheric observations, in fact, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope will join in next week.
Altogether, it’s a “winning combination” for seeking chemical traces of life outside our solar system, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Julien de Wit, a co-author of the study, released by the journal Nature.
The star in question named Trappist-1 after the Belgian telescope in Chile that made the discovery is barely the size of Jupiter and located in the constellation Aquarius.
Other exoplanet searches have targeted bigger, brighter stars more like our sun, but the starlight in these cases can be so bright that it washes out the signatures of planets. By comparison, cool dwarf stars that emit infrared light, like Trappist-1, make it easier to spot potential worlds.
University of Liege astronomers in Belgium lead study authors Michael Gillon and Emmanuel Jehin built the Trappist telescope to observe 60 of the nearest ultra-cool dwarf stars. The risky effort paid off, de Wit noted in an email.
“Systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology,” Gillon said in a statement. “So if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, this is where we should start to look.”
The two inner exoplanets take between 1.5 and 2.4 days to orbit the Trappist-1 star. The precise orbit time of the third planet is not known, but it falls somewhere between 4.5 days and 73 days. That puts the planets 20 times to 100 times closer to their star than Earth is to our sun, Gillon noted. The setup is more similar in scale to Jupiter’s moons than to our solar system, he added.
Although the two innermost planets are very close to the star, it showers them with only a few times the amount of energy that Earth receives from our own sun. The third exoplanet farther out may receive significantly less of such radiation than Earth does.
The astronomers speculate the two inner exoplanets may have pockets where life may exist, while the third exoplanet actually might fall within the habitable zone real estate located at just the right distance from a star in order to harbor water and, possibly, life.
Spitzer and Hubble should answer whether the exoplanets have large and clear atmospheres, according to de Wit. They also might be able to detect water and methane, if molecules are present.
Future observatories, including NASA’s James Web Space Telescope set to launch in 2018, should unearth even more details.
Gillon and his colleagues identified the three exoplanets by observing regular dips in the infrared signals emanating from the Trappist-1 star, some 36 light-years away. A single light-year represents about 6 trillion miles.
The astronomers conducted the survey last year using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, or Trappist. It’s considered a prototype for a more expansive European project that will widen the search for potentially habitable worlds to 500 ultra-cool stars. This upcoming project is dubbed Speculoos short for Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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Sunday 13 August 2017
Saturday 12 August 2017
UFO hunters spot ‘weird orb’ while lost in hills near Boston
Three UFO hunters snapped a photo of a mysterious object while they were lost in the Blue Hills near Boston last week, according to reports.
Ramona DiFrancesco and her friends were lost for several hours Thursday night and had to be rescued by state police, WHDH-TV reported.
DiFrancesco, 18, of Plymouth, told the station she and her friends spotted UFOs they had never seen before Thursday night.
Well, we saw these two ships that had these like bright spotlights and then we saw this like weird orb that was like a spotlight, sort of, she told the station.
She showed a WHDH reporter a photo of the mysterious object she said had been taken with a Nikon camera.
They got lost on Buck Hill, The Boston Globe reported.
Our phones were dying, the paper quoted DiFrancesco as saying. We didnt have any flashlights. We were a little unprepared.”
A state police helicopter spotted them and officers led them down a trail on foot.
They were not hurt.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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