This bizarre footage comes from the SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft. A craft launched in 1995 whose mission was to study the deep core of the sun and solar emissions. It was a join project between the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA.
We are not as convinced as this YouTuber that the bizarre footage is a solid object. But the images are curious and worthy of further study.
Excellent adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven” from the series “X Minus One”. It originally aired May 8, 1955.
On October 7th a YouTuber named DominatorPS3 posted a video in which he showed an odd anomaly in a NASA photo taken from the Cassini Orbiter. When the brightness was boosted on the photo evidence of manipulation seems to be visible. One can see what appear like digital “brush strokes” in the shadow area behind the moon. And rainbow halo behind it.
DominatorPS3 believes this was done to hide a large object.
Unfortunately, DominatorPS3 has deleted his original video. He explains why here:
More on this controversy after the jump …
Only moments ago, the Soyuz rocket (TMA-01M) blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome for a rendezvous with the Internation Space Station. This flight is coming only days after the 53rd anniversary of Sputnik. This is part of larger mission to revitalize the ISS.
Some interesting links after the jump …
Yup, it’s true. And the New Scientist puts it this way:
Future space probes that operate in cooperative swarms must commit hara-kiri if they begin to fail and risk damaging their comrades, says a recent patent application by NASA.
The agency foresees a day when space missions are undertaken not by one large spacecraft but by swarming formations of much smaller, cheaper ones. Such craft could collectively provide a “floating optics” system for a space telescope comprising separate craft flying in formation, for instance.
Hmm … is it just us, or doesn’t it seem like it would be smarter to create craft who could just avoid crashing into each other? No, that would be crazy.
And, come to think of it, what’s up with swarming space craft? Is that even a good idea? Especially if they’re in such risk of crashing into each other. We think the people at NASA have watched the opening of Revenge of the Sith one too many times.
Space has a smell. Well, at least that’s what some recent shuttle astronauts say.
In an article from Discovery On, astronaut Gregory Charmitoff says:
I haven’t had a chance to do a spacewalk yet, but when the other guys did and they came back in, there’s this really, really strong metallic smell.
While astronaut Kevin Ford adds:
It’s like something I haven’t ever smelled before, but I’ll never forget it … You know how those things stick with you.
The astronauts have taken to calling it “the smell of space.”
Yup, like Starbucks coffee, scientists have now discovered that black holes come in three sizes: Small (about the size of a typical star), supermassive (about a billion times as massive as our sun), and now medium … about 500 times the size of sun.
Or in Starbucks sizing parlance this would be the Grande of black holes.
Here’s more on this new discovery from Science Daily:
A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers.
The finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth is reported today in the journal Nature.
Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).
The new discovery is the first solid evidence of a new class of medium-sized black holes. The team, led by astrophysicists at the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France, detected the new black hole with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.
“While it is widely accepted that stellar mass black holes are created during the death throes of massive stars, it is still unknown how super-massive black holes are formed,” says the lead author of the paper, Dr Sean Farrell, now based at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester.
He added: “One theory is that super-massive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate mass black holes. To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes.
“This is the best detection to date of such long sought after intermediate mass black holes. Such a detection is essential. While it is already known that stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still unknown.”
“The identification of HLX-1 is therefore an important step towards a better understanding of the formation of the super-massive black holes that exist at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies.”
A black hole is a remnant of a collapsed star with such a powerful gravitational field that it absorbs all the light that passes near it and reflects nothing.
It had been long believed by astrophysicists that there might be a third, intermediate class of black holes, with masses between a hundred and several hundred thousand times that of the Sun. However, such black holes had not been reliably detected until now.
This new source, dubbed HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49. It is ultra-luminous in X-rays, with a maximum X-ray brightness of approximately 260 million times that of the Sun.
The X-ray signature of HLX-1 and the lack of a counterpart in optical images confirm that it is neither a foreground star nor a background galaxy, and its position indicates that it is not the central engine of the host galaxy.
Using XMM-Newton observations carried out on the 23rd November 2004 and the 28th November 2008, the team showed that HLX-1 displayed a variation in its X-ray signature. This indicated that it must be a single object and not a group of many fainter sources. The huge radiance observed can only be explained if HLX-1 contains a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. No other physical explanation can account for the data.
S.A.F acknowledges funding from the CNES. S.A.F. and O.G. acknowledge STFC funding. This work made use of the 2XMM Serendipitous Source Catalogue constructed by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre on behalf of ESA. We thank the Swift team for performing a TOO observation which provided justification for an additional observation with XMM-Newton. This work was based on observations obtained with XMM-Newton, an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and NASA.
From Yahoo News:
PARIS (AFP) – European astronomers said on Wednesday that an anomalous energy signal detected by an orbiting satellite could be a telltale of the enigmatic substance known as dark matter.
The researchers, in a study appearing in the British journal Nature, say the hunch is that they picked up a signature of this strange phenomenon, but more work is needed.
Some years ago, astrophysicists calculating the amount of matter in the Universe arrived at the startling discovery that ordinary material — atoms — comprises perhaps as little as five percent of the stuff in the cosmos.
The rest, they believe, comes from the “dark” sector: matter and energy that appear to be pervasive but whose nature remains a puzzle.
Dark matter, which believes to account for 23 percent of the Universe, has been detected only indirectly, through the gravitational pull it exerts on visible matter.
What it is has ignited huge debate, including the hypothesis that dark matter is a new dimension of the Universe.
Another theory is that dark matter must be a new particle, or particles, that interact so weakly with ordinary matter that it does not produce light-emitting reactions. WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are among the candidates for this.
Another idea is that dark matter is linked to “supersymmetric” particles, or partners to known sub-atomic particles.
A team led by Piergiorgio Picozza of the University of Rome Tor Vergata looked over data sent back by a European satellite called PAMELA between July 2006 and February 2008 and found a unusual abundance of positrons, the counterpart to the electron, in cosmic rays at a high part of the energy spectrum.
“Some scientists [in the team] think this is dark matter, while others think we have to study contributions” from other positron sources, Picozza told AFP.
These include positrons that are produced by pulsars, or magnetised neutron stars that emitted regular pulses of radiation, he said.
“We need much more verification, which can come from other observations,” he said.
Around 72 percent of cosmic matter is dark energy, which could be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
