Chile

Strange waves rippled around the world, and nobody knows why

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Instruments picked up the seismic waves more than 10,000 miles away—but bizarrely, nobody felt them.

On the morning of November 11, just before 9:30 UT, a mysterious rumble rolled around the world.

The seismic waves began roughly 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte, a French island sandwiched between Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. The waves buzzed across Africa, ringing sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They traversed vast oceans, humming across Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away.

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These waves didn’t just zip by; they rang for more than 20 minutes. And yet, it seems, no human felt them.

Only one person noticed the odd signal on the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time seismogram displays. An earthquake enthusiast who uses the handle @matarikipax saw the curious zigzags and posted images of them to Twitter. That small action kicked off another ripple of sorts, as researchers around the world attempted to suss out the source of the waves. Was it a meteor strike? A submarine volcano eruption? An ancient sea monster rising from the deep?

“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” says Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University who specializes in unusual earthquakes.

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“It doesn’t mean that, in the end, the cause of them is that exotic,” he notes. Yet many features of the waves are remarkably weird—from their surprisingly monotone, low-frequency “ring” to their global spread. And researchers are still chasing down the geologic conundrum.

Why are the low-frequency waves so weird?

In a normal earthquake, the built-up tensions in Earth’s crust release with a jolt in mere seconds. This sends out a series of waves known as a “wave train” that radiates from the point of the rupture, explains Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the University of Southampton.

The fastest-traveling signals are Primary waves, or P-waves, which are compression waves that move in bunches, like what happens to an extended slinky that gets suddenly pushed at one end. Next come the secondary waves, or S-waves, which have more of a side-to-side motion. Both of these so-called body waves have relatively high frequencies, Hicks says, “a sort of ping rather than a rumbling.”

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Finally, chugging along at the end come slow, long-period surface waves, which are similar to the strange signals that rolled out from Mayotte. For intense earthquakes, these surface waves can zip around the planet multiple times, ringing Earth like a bell, Hicks says.

However, there was no big earthquake kicking off the recent slow waves. Adding to the weirdness, Mayotte’s mystery waves are what scientists call monochromatic. Most earthquakes send out waves with a slew of different frequencies, but Mayotte’s signal was a clean zigzag dominated by one type of wave that took a steady 17 seconds to repeat.

“It’s like you have colored glasses and [are] just seeing red or something,” says Anthony Lomax, an independent seismology consultant.

Mayotte’s volcanic roots

Based on the scientific sleuthing done so far, the tremors seem to be related to a seismic swarm that’s gripped Mayotte since last May. Hundreds of quakes have rattled the small nation during that time, most radiating from around 31 miles offshore, just east of the odd ringing. The majority were minor trembles, but the largest clocked in at magnitude 5.8 on May 15, the mightiest in the island’s recorded history. Yet the frequency of these shakes has declined in recent months—and no traditional quakes rumbled there when the mystery waves began on November 11.

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The French Geological Survey (BRGM) is closely monitoring the recent shaking, and it suggests that a new center of volcanic activity may be developing off the coast. Mayotte was formed from volcanism, but its geologic beasts haven’t erupted in over 4,000 years. Instead, BRGM’s analysis suggests that this new activity may point to magmatic movement offshore—miles from the coast under thousands of feet of water. Though this is good news for the island inhabitants, it’s irksome for geologists, since it’s an area that hasn’t been studied in detail.

“The location of the swarm is on the edge of the [geological] maps we have,” says Nicolas Taillefer, head of the seismic and volcanic risk unit at BRGM. “There are a lot things we don’t know.” And as for the November 11 mystery wave, he says, “it’s something quite new in the signals on our stations.”

Motion in the ocean

Since mid-July, GPS stations on the island have tracked it sliding more than 2.4 inches to the east and 1.2 inches to the south, according data from Institut National de L’information Géographique et Forestière. Using these measurements, Pierre Briole of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris estimated that a magma body that measures about a third of a cubic mile is squishing its way through the subsurface near Mayotte.

The early period of rumbling was also overprinted with what seemed to be the P- and S- waves of tiny tremors, explains Lomax, who spotted the faint pings by filtering out the low-frequency signals. Such pings are commonly associated with magma moving and fracturing rock as it squirts through the crust. But even those signals were a little strange, says Helen Robinson, a Ph.D. candidate in applied volcanology at the University of Glasgow.

“They’re too nice; they’re too perfect to be nature,” she jokes, although she quickly adds that an industrial source is impossible, since no wind farms or drilling are taking place in the deep waters off Mayotte’s shores.

Ekström thinks that the events on the morning of November 11 actually did begin with an earthquake of sorts equivalent to a magnitude 5 temblor. It passed by largely unnoticed, he suggests, because it was what’s known as a slow earthquake. These quakes are quieter than their speedy cousins since they come from a gradual release of stress that can stretch over minutes, hours, or even days.

“The same deformation happens, but it doesn’t happen as a jolt,” Ekström says.

These slow types of quakes are often associated with volcanic activity. At the Mount Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a similar slow earthquake and low-frequency waves were linked with a magma chamber collapsing. Slow quakes were also stunningly frequent during the most recent fiery run of Kilauea in Hawaii, which produced nearly 60 of these events between May and the end of July, sending seismic waves around the world.

Assembling the geologic puzzle

So what is actually causing the super-slow vibrations at Mayotte? A submarine eruption could produce these low rumblings, but evidence for such an event has yet to materialize.

Most current guesses revolve around resonance in a magma chamber, triggered by some type of subsurface shift or chamber collapse. The resonance itself can be any type of rhythmic motion, like sloshing of the molten rock, or a pressure wave ricocheting through the magma body, Ekström explains. Studying the intricate features of the seismic waves could yield clues to the size and shape of the molten material lurking below.

It is very difficult, really, to say what the cause is and whether anyone’s theories are correct.

Helen Robinson, University of Glasgow

“It’s like a music instrument,” says Jean-Paul Ampuero, a seismologist at the Université Côte d’Azur in France. “The notes of a music instrument—whether it’s grave or very pitchy—depends on the size of the instrument.”

The signal’s odd uniformity could be due, in part, to the surrounding rocks and sediments, Lomax adds. Perhaps the local geology is filtering the sounds and only letting this single 17-second wave period escape.

Robinson agrees with this idea, noting that the geology here is extremely complex. Mayotte sits in a region crisscrossed by ancient faults—including fracture zones from the final breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana. What’s more, the underlying crust is somewhat transitional, shifting between the thick continental crusts and the thinner oceanic crusts. Perhaps this complexity drives the simplicity of the escaping waves, Robinson says.

Secrets of the sea

For now, though, the lack of data makes it tough to say more about the wiggly forms. Hicks’ preliminary models hinted that the waves emanated from subsurface inflation, rather than a magma chamber draining or collapsing. But with a little additional data, the model flipped and pointed to chamber deflation instead.

It also could be a bit of both, notes Robinson: “Some collapse mechanisms, you can get inflation and deflation occurring at the same time,” she says. Or sometimes they can alternate, pumping up and down like Earth’s fiery lungs.

“It is very difficult, really, to say what the cause is and whether anyone’s theories are correct—whether even what I’m saying has any relevance to the outcome of what’s going on,” Robinson says.

BRGM plans to do ocean bottom surveys to get more detailed information about the region and investigate the possibility of a submarine eruption. In the meantime, the seismic sleuthing continues with the data that’s available. Whether the cause is ordinary or extraordinary remains to be seen, Lomax says, but the science—and the fun—is in the chase.

“Depending on what field and what time in history, 99.9 percent of the time, it’s ordinary, or noise, or a mistake, and 0.1 percent, it’s something” he says. “But that’s just the way it goes. That’s the way it should go. That’s scientific advance.”

 

Earth Changes Accelerate As 12 Major Earthquakes Hit Chile Within The Last 24 Hours

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Earth Globe Water Fire - Public DomainSomething strange is happening to our planet.  Over the past 30 days, there seems to have been much more “shaking” than normal, and this is particularly true along the Ring of Fire.  This afternoon I visited the official website of the U.S. Geological Survey, and I discovered that Chile had been hit with 12 major earthquakes within the last 24 hours alone.  The smallest was of magnitude 4.4, and the two largest both measured magnitude 6.9.  We have also seen dozens of volcanoes erupt recently, including the incredibly dangerous Mt. Popocatepetl in Mexico.  Fortunately we have not seen a major disaster that kills thousands of people yet, but many believe that all of this shaking is leading up to one.  In addition, the weather all over the world continues to get freakier and freakier.  Just today, Yemen was hit by a second major tropical cyclone in less than a week.  Any one of these strange disasters in isolation may not seem like that big of a deal, but when you start putting all of the pieces together it starts to become clear that something really significant is taking place.

So why are all of these things happening?  Well, some experts point to the sun.  In recent years there has been a tremendous amount of hype about “global warming”, but the truth is that evidence is starting to emerge that indicates that our sun might be heading into a period of “hibernation”…

The sun will go into “hibernation” mode around 2030, and it has already started to get sleepy. At the Royal Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in July, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK confirmed it – the sun will begin its Maunder Minimum (Grand Solar Minimum) in 15 years. Other scientists had suggested years ago that this change was imminent, but Zharkova’s model is said to have near-perfect accuracy.

And what did we see last winter?  It was a very cold, bitter winter that set new all-time records all over the planet.  Here is more from that same article…

Solar cycle 24 – two cycles prior the cycle that’s expected to bottom out into a Maunder Minimum – was weak. In 2013-14 it reached its maximum far below average. Meanwhile extreme cold-weather anomalies have occurred around the world. Last year “polar vortices” slammed into the central US and Siberia as a third hovered over the Atlantic. All 50 US states, including Hawaii, had temperatures below freezing for the first time in recorded history. Snowfall records were broken in cities in the US, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. Southern American states and central Mexico, where snow is rare, got heavy snow, as did the Middle East.

This past summer the cold didn’t let up, with more temperature records across the US and rare summer snows seen in Canada, the US and China. Birds have migrated early in the last two years. Antarctic sea ice set a new record in 2013 and it was broken again in 2014.

Will this upcoming winter be similar?

Should we be anticipating a lot of cold and a lot of snow?

I have been watching stories like this for a couple of years.  Our sun has begun to behave very erratically, and yet very few people are paying attention.  But without the sun, life on earth would not be possible.  So the fact that the giant ball of fire that we revolve around is starting to act very strangely should be a huge news story.

And this is not something that scientists have just started noticing.  This has been going on for quite some time.  For example, the following is from a BBC article that was published last year…

“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.

“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.

This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.

Another thing that many scientists are watching closely is the possibility of a magnetic pole shift.  This has become such a concern that even scientists at NASA are talking about it.  A major news source in the UK recently published an article entitled “NASA: Earth’s magnetic poles are ‘switching’ with catastrophic consequences for humanity“, and the following was the most fascinating part of the story for me personally…

Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said when the switch does take place, the Earth’s magnetic field which prevents the Sun’s dangerous radiation getting through, would be neutralisedfor around 200 years.

He revealed the detail during an historic announcement about how Mars lost 99% of its atmosphere and its oceans that could have housed early life.

Mr Jakosky explained that Mars had been blasted by solar winds, which had stripped it of its atmosphere, for billions of years since the beginnings of our solar system.

He said: “When the polar shift happens the Earth will have no magnetic field for about 200 years.”

During that time the Sun’s solar blasts are expected to strip away at our atmosphere as they did on Mars billions of years ago.

That certainly doesn’t sound good.

How could humanity possibly survive if “the Earth will have no magnetic field” for 200 years?

Perhaps some would survive by living in underground facilities shielded from the sun.  But certainly most of humanity simply would not make it.

Meanwhile, as I have written about previously, scientists tell us that the entire universe is “slowly dying“.  Apparently the universe is only producing about half as much energy as it once did, and over time the level of energy being produced continues to fade.

Most of us just take for granted that our planet, our sun and our universe will remain stable and behave normally.

But what if we have entered a time when things start to change dramatically?

What if the years ahead are filled with earth changes of a magnitude that most of us cannot even possibly imagine?

What will that mean for our society and for the future of humanity?

Earth Changes Accelerate: 12 Major Earthquakes Hit Chile Within Last 24 Hours.

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Over the past 30 days, there seems to have been much more “shaking” than normal, and this is particularly true along the Ring of Fire
Earth Changes Accelerate: 12 Major Earthquakes Hit Chile Within Last 24 Hours
Something strange is happening to our planet.
Over the past 30 days, there seems to have been much more “shaking” than normal, and this is particularly true along the Ring of Fire. This afternoon I visited the official website of the U.S. Geological Survey, and I discovered that Chile had been hit with 12 major earthquakes within the last 24 hours alone. The smallest was of magnitude 4.4, and the two largest both measured magnitude 6.9. We have also seen dozens of volcanoes erupt recently, including the incredibly dangerous Mt. Popocatepetlin Mexico. Fortunately we have not seen a major disaster that kills thousands of people yet, but many believe that all of this shaking is leading up to one. In addition, the weather all over the world continues to get freakier and freakier. Just today, Yemen was hit by a second major tropical cyclone in less than a week. Any one of these strange disasters in isolation may not seem like that big of a deal, but when you start putting all of the pieces together it starts to become clear that something really significant is taking place.
So why are all of these things happening? Well, some experts point to the sun. In recent years there has been a tremendous amount of hype about “global warming”, but the truth is that evidence is starting to emerge that indicates that our sun might be heading into a period of “hibernation”…

The sun will go into “hibernation” mode around 2030, and it has already started to get sleepy. At the Royal Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in July, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK confirmed it – the sun will begin its Maunder Minimum (Grand Solar Minimum) in 15 years. Other scientists had suggested years ago that this change was imminent, but Zharkova’s model is said to have near-perfect accuracy.
And what did we see last winter? It was a very cold, bitter winter that set new all-time records all over the planet. Here is more from that same article…
Solar cycle 24 – two cycles prior the cycle that’s expected to bottom out into a Maunder Minimum – was weak. In 2013-14 it reached its maximum far below average. Meanwhile extreme cold-weather anomalies have occurred around the world. Last year “polar vortices” slammed into the central US and Siberia as a third hovered over the Atlantic. All 50 US states, including Hawaii, had temperatures below freezing for the first time in recorded history. Snowfall records were broken in cities in the US, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. Southern American states and central Mexico, where snow is rare, got heavy snow, as did the Middle East.
This past summer the cold didn’t let up, with more temperature records across the US and rare summer snows seen in Canada, the US and China. Birds have migrated early in the last two years. Antarctic sea ice set a new record in 2013 and it was broken again in 2014.
Will this upcoming winter be similar?
Should we be anticipating a lot of cold and a lot of snow?
I have been watching stories like this for a couple of years. Our sun has begun to behave very erratically, and yet very few people are paying attention. But without the sun, life on earth would not be possible. So the fact that the giant ball of fire that we revolve around is starting to act very strangely should be a huge news story.
And this is not something that scientists have just started noticing. This has been going on for quite some time. For example, the following is from a BBC article that was published last year…
“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.
“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.
This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.
Another thing that many scientists are watching closely is the possibility of a magnetic pole shift. This has become such a concern that even scientists at NASA are talking about it. A major news source in the UK recently published an article entitled “NASA: Earth’s magnetic poles are ‘switching’ with catastrophic consequences for humanity“, and the following was the most fascinating part of the story for me personally…
Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said when the switch does take place, the Earth’s magnetic field which prevents the Sun’s dangerous radiation getting through, would be neutralised for around 200 years.
He revealed the detail during an historic announcement about how Mars lost 99% of its atmosphere and its oceans that could have housed early life.
Mr Jakosky explained that Mars had been blasted by solar winds, which had stripped it of its atmosphere, for billions of years since the beginnings of our solar system.
He said: “When the polar shift happens the Earth will have no magnetic field for about 200 years.”
During that time the Sun’s solar blasts are expected to strip away at our atmosphere as they did on Mars billions of years ago.
That certainly doesn’t sound good.
How could humanity possibly survive if “the Earth will have no magnetic field” for 200 years?
Perhaps some would survive by living in underground facilities shielded from the sun. But certainly most of humanity simply would not make it.
Meanwhile, as I have written about previously, scientists tell us that the entire universe is “slowly dying“. Apparently the universe is only producing about half as much energy as it once did, and over time the level of energy being produced continues to fade.
Most of us just take for granted that our planet, our sun and our universe will remain stable and behave normally.
But what if we have entered a time when things start to change dramatically?
What if the years ahead are filled with earth changes of a magnitude that most of us cannot even possibly imagine?
What will that mean for our society and for the future of humanity?

Pandoravirus: missing link discovered between viruses and cells

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Researchers at IGS, the genomic and structural information laboratory (CNRS/Aix-Marseille University), working in association with the large-scale biology laboratory (CEA/Inserm/Grenoble Alpes University) have just discovered two giant viruses which, in terms of number of genes, are comparable to certain eukaryotes, microorganisms with nucleated cells. The two viruses – called “Pandoravirus” to reflect their amphora shape and mysterious genetic content – are unlike any virus discovered before.

With the discovery of Mimivirus ten years ago and, more recently, Megavirus chilensis , researchers thought they had reached the farthest corners of the viral world in terms of size and genetic complexity. With a diameter in the region of a micrometer and a genome incorporating more than 1,100 genes, these giant viruses, which infect amoebas of the Acanthamoeba genus, had already largely encroached on areas previously thought to be the exclusive domain of bacteria.

For the sake of comparison, common viruses such as the influenza or AIDS viruses, only contain around ten genes each.In the article published in Science, the researchers announced they had discovered two new giant viruses: •Pandoravirus salinus, on the coast of Chile;•Pandoravirus dulcis, in a freshwater pond in Melbourne, Australia.Detailed analysis has shown that these first two Pandoraviruses have virtually nothing in common with previously characterized giant viruses. What’s more, only a very small percentage (6%) of proteins encoded by Pandoravirus salinus are similar to those already identified in other viruses or cellular organisms. With a genome of this size, Pandoravirus salinus has just demonstrated that viruses can be more complex than some eukaryotic cells . Another unusual feature of Pandoraviruses is that they have no gene allowing them to build a protein like the capsid protein, which is the basic building block of traditional viruses.Despite all these novel properties, Pandoraviruses display the essential characteristics of other viruses in that they contain no ribosome, produce no energy and do not divide.This groundbreaking research included an analysis of the Pandoravirus salinus proteome, which proved that the proteins making it up are consistent with those predicted by the virus’ genome sequence. Pandoraviruses thus use the universal genetic code shared by all living organisms on the planet.

This shows just how much more there is to learn regarding microscopic biodiversity as soon as new environments are considered. The simultaneous discovery of two specimens of this new virus family in sediments located 15,000 km apart indicates that Pandoraviruses, which were completely unknown until now, are very likely not rare. It definitively bridges the gap between viruses and cells – a gap that was proclaimed as dogma at the very outset of modern virology back in the 1950s. It also suggests that cell life could have emerged with a far greater variety of pre-cellular forms than those conventionally considered, as the new giant virus has almost no equivalent among the three recognized domains of cellular life, namely eukaryota (or eukaryotes), eubacteria, and archaea.

Source: http://www.cea.fr

Researchers find that bright nearby double star Fomalhaut is actually a triple.

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The nearby star system Fomalhaut – of special interest for its unusual exoplanet and dusty debris disk – has been discovered to be not just a double star, as astronomers had thought, but one of the widest triple stars known.

In a paper recently accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and posted today to the preprint server arXiv, researchers show that a previously known smaller star in its vicinity is also part of the Fomalhaut system.

Eric Mamajek, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and his collaborators found the triple nature of the star system through a bit of detective work. “I noticed this third star a couple of years ago when I was plotting the motions of  in the vicinity of Fomalhaut for another study. However I needed to collect more data and gather a team of co-authors with different observations to test whether the star’s properties are consistent with being a third member of the Fomalhaut system.”

Serendipity also played a part. A chance meeting in Chile between Mamajek and Todd Henry, from Georgia State University and director of the Research Consortium On Nearby Stars (RECONS) team, revealed a clue that helped solve the mystery: the distance to the star. Henry recalls sitting in the kitchen of a motel in La Serena, Chile, with Mamajek, discussing nearby stars. “Eric was playing detective on this third star and I just happened to be sitting there with an observing list that contained the unpublished parallax,” Henry said. Parallax is a type of measurement astronomers use to determine distances. “A student at the time, Jennifer Bartlett at the University of Virginia, was working with us on a sample of potentially nearby stars for her Ph.D. thesis, and LP876-10 was on it. Eric and I got to talking, and here we are with a cool discovery.”

By carefully analyzing astrometric (precise movements) and spectroscopic measurements (that allow the temperature and color to be determined), the researchers were able to measure the distance and speed of the third star. They concluded that the star, until recently known as LP 876-10, is part of the Fomalhaut system, making it Fomalhaut C.

“Fomalhaut C looks quite far apart from the big, bright star that is Fomalhaut A when you look up at the sky from Earth,” added Mamajek. There are roughly 5.5 degrees between the two stars, which is as if they were separated by roughly 11 full moons for an observer on Earth. Mamajek explained that they look this far apart, in part, because Fomalhaut is relatively close to Earth as stars go – approximately 25 light years. If these stars were far away from Earth, they would appear much closer together in the sky. That they appear so far apart could explain why the connection between LP 876-10 and Fomalhaut had been previously missed. Being able to obtain high quality astrometric and velocity data were the other keys.

The researchers also had to show that it would be feasible for these two stars to be bound, rather than moving independently. “Fomalhaut A is such a massive star, about twice the mass of our Sun, that it can exert sufficient gravitational pull to keep this tiny star bound to it – despite the star being 158,000 times farther away from Fomalhaut than the Earth is from the Sun,” Mamajek said.

Mamajek worked with a large team of collaborators to piece together the story of this interesting tiny star. “Henry and the RECONS team have been doing an exhaustive survey of the “Solar Neighborhood,” characterizing the stellar systems that are closest to our solar system and discovering new ,” said Mamajek. “His team had already gathered several years of observations on this particular star – using the SMARTS 0.9-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo in Chile.” The researchers also needed to know the radial velocity of the star, which Andreas Seifahrt from the University of Chicago measured, and which they pinpoint in the paper to be within about one kilometer per second of that of Fomalhaut A.

There are another 11 star systems closer to our Sun than Fomalhaut that consist of three or more stars, including the closest star system, Alpha Centauri. The new measurements in the paper also show that the Fomalhaut system is the most massive and widest among these nearby multiple systems.

Fomalhaut A is also the 18th  visible in our night sky and one of the few stars with both a directly imaged exoplanet and a dusty debris disk. The famous star has been featured in science fiction novels by writers Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Frank Herbert. Despite being a well-studied system, it was only recently confirmed that Fomalhaut was a binary star – two stars that orbit each other – although it had been first suggested in the 1890s.

One of Mamajek’s colleagues at Rochester, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alice C. Quillen, has worked for years to understand the way planets shape stellar dust disks like the one surrounding Fomalhaut. In 2006, she predicted the existence of a planet around Fomalhaut, as well as the shape of its orbit, by trying to understand why the debris ring was off-center and why it had a surprisingly sharp edge. The following year a new planet around Fomalhaut was imaged.

Many questions about Fomalhaut A’s exoplanet and debris disk still remain unanswered. For example, astronomers are puzzled by why the exoplanet known as Fomalhaut “b” is on such an eccentric orbit and why the debris disk does not appear to be centered on the star Fomalhaut A. It is possible that Fomalhaut’s wide companions B and C have gravitationally perturbed the Fomalhaut “b” exoplanet and debris belt orbiting Fomalhaut A, however the orbits of Fomalhaut’s companion stars are not well-constrained. The orbits of Fomalhaut B and C around Fomalhaut A are predicted to take millions of years, so pinning down their orbits will be a challenge for future astronomers.

While Fomalhaut C is a red  – the most common type of star in the universe – Fomalhaut B is an orange dwarf star about three-fourths the mass of our Sun. From the vantage point of a hypothetical planet orbiting Fomalhaut C, Fomalhaut A would appear to be a brilliant white star nine times brighter than Sirius (the brightest star in our ) appears from Earth, similar to the typical brightness of the planet Venus. Fomalhaut B would appear to be an otherwise unremarkable bright orangish star similar in brightness to Polaris. The age of the trio is about 440 million years – roughly a 10th of the age of our solar system.

Other collaborators who worked on this paper include Jennifer Bartlett, now at the U.S. Naval Observatory who published a preliminary distance to the star in her Ph.D. thesis, and Matt Kenworthy, from the Leiden Observatory, who measured the rotation period showing Fomalhaut C is a very fast rotator.

Source: http://phys.org



Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus neutralising serum antibodies in dromedary camels: a comparative serological study.

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Summary

Background

A new betacoronavirus—Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)—has been identified in patients with severe acute respiratory infection. Although related viruses infect bats, molecular clock analyses have been unable to identify direct ancestors of MERS-CoV. Anecdotal exposure histories suggest that patients had been in contact with dromedary camels or goats. We investigated possible animal reservoirs of MERS-CoV by assessing specific serum antibodies in livestock.

Methods

We took sera from animals in the Middle East (Oman) and from elsewhere (Spain, Netherlands, Chile). Cattle (n=80), sheep (n=40), goats (n=40), dromedary camels (n=155), and various other camelid species (n=34) were tested for specific serum IgG by protein microarray using the receptor-binding S1 subunits of spike proteins of MERS-CoV, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and human coronavirus OC43. Results were confirmed by virus neutralisation tests for MERS-CoV and bovine coronavirus.

Findings

50 of 50 (100%) sera from Omani camels and 15 of 105 (14%) from Spanish camels had protein-specific antibodies against MERS-CoV spike. Sera from European sheep, goats, cattle, and other camelids had no such antibodies. MERS-CoV neutralising antibody titres varied between 1/320 and 1/2560 for the Omani camel sera and between 1/20 and 1/320 for the Spanish camel sera. There was no evidence for cross-neutralisation by bovine coronavirus antibodies.

Interpretation

MERS-CoV or a related virus has infected camel populations. Both titres and seroprevalences in sera from different locations in Oman suggest widespread infection.

Source: Lancet

 

 

NASA’S Hubble Uncovers Evidence of Farthest Planet Forming From Its Star .

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Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found compelling evidence of a planet forming 7.5 billion miles away from its star, a finding that may challenge current theories about planet formation.
Of the almost 900 planets outside our solar system that have been confirmed to date, this is the first to be found at such a great distance from its star. The suspected planet is orbiting the diminutive red dwarf TW Hydrae, a popular astronomy target located 176 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hydra the Sea Serpent.

Hubble’s keen vision detected a mysterious gap in a vast protoplanetary disk of gas and dust swirling around TW Hydrae. The gap is 1.9 billion miles wide and the disk is 41 billion miles wide. The gap’s presence likely was caused by a growing, unseen planet that is gravitationally sweeping up material and carving out a lane in the disk, like a snow plow.

The planet is estimated to be relatively small, at 6 to 28 times more massive than Earth. Its wide orbit means it is moving slowly around its host star. If the suspected planet were orbiting in our solar system, it would be roughly twice Pluto’s distance from the sun.

Planets are thought to form over tens of millions of years. The buildup is slow, but persistent as a budding planet picks up dust, rocks, and gas from the protoplanetary disk. A planet 7.5 billion miles from its star should take more than 200 times longer to form than Jupiter did at its distance from the sun because of its much slower orbital speed and the deficiency of material in the disk. Jupiter is 500 million miles from the sun and it formed in about 10 million years.

TW Hydrae is only 8 million years old, making it an unlikely star to host a planet, according to this theory. There has not been enough time for a planet to grow through the slow accumulation of smaller debris. Complicating the story further is that TW Hydrae is only 55 percent as massive as our sun.

“It’s so intriguing to see a system like this,” said John Debes of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. Debes leads a research team that identified the gap. “This is the lowest-mass star for which we’ve observed a gap so far out.”

An alternative planet-formation theory suggests that a piece of the disk becomes gravitationally unstable and collapses on itself. In this scenario, a planet could form more quickly, in just a few thousand years.

“If we can actually confirm that there’s a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties,” Debes said. “That might add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out.”

The TW Hydrae disk also lacks large dust grains in its outer regions. Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile show dust grains roughly the size of a grain of sand are not present beyond about 5.5 billion miles from the star, just short of the gap.

“Typically, you need pebbles before you can have a planet. So, if there is a planet and there is no dust larger than a grain of sand farther out, that would be a huge challenge to traditional planet formation models,” Debes said.

The team used Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) to observe the star in near-infrared light. The researchers then compared the NICMOS images with archival Hubble data and optical and spectroscopic observations from Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Debes said researchers see the gap at all wavelengths, which indicates it is a structural feature and not an illusion caused by the instruments or scattered light.

Source: NASA

‘Sirius’ Documentary Reveals DNA Test Results On Ata, The ‘6-Inch Alien’.

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r-ATAHUMANOID-large570The mummified remains of what looks like a 6-inch space alien has turned “Sirius” into the most eagerly awaited documentary among UFO enthusiasts.

The findings, however, might come as a disappointment.

In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn’t be medically classified.

In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human — closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,”said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University‘s School of Medicine in California.

“The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human,” Nolan, who performed the DNA tests, explains in the film.

“Sirius” focuses on the remains of the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, that was discovered in Chile‘s Atacama Desert 10 years ago and has, literally, gone through different hands and ownership since then.

The film also explores an ongoing grassroots movement to get the U.S. government to reveal what it reportedly knows about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the availability of advanced alternative energy technologies that could greatly benefit everyone on Earth.

The primary force behind “Sirius” is Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) andThe Disclosure Project.

One odd thing about the Ata controversy is how it came to the recent attention of the American public.

Early in the documentary, Greer refers to Ata as an extraterrestrial being, explaining how it was found in the Atacama Desert and “we don’t know how it came about.” That seems strange because HuffPost recently reported on the well known history of little Ata since its discovery 10 years ago and subsequent moving from hand to hand, ending up in Spain.

Early PR for “Sirius” referred to the “paradigm shifting physical evidence of a medically and scientifically analyzed DNA sequenced humanoid creature of unknown classification.” This fueled rumors, speculation and more than likely, the hope many people had that, finally, a real alien creature had been discovered and proven to have non-human DNA.

But now that the film is available to everybody, and DNA analysis shows that Ata was human, was that early PR hype about the humanoid a bit premature?

“My interest, frankly, is to disprove that it’s anything unusual or anything paranormal,” Nolan said prior to beginning his DNA study of the small portions of Ata he was allowed to work with. “I would like to prove that this is human [and] just an interesting mutation. In every situation with scientists, your reputation’s at stake. I have every expectation that even doing this is going to lead to some ribbing from some of my colleagues.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

Two New Reports on the Chilean “UFO” Videos Produce Conflicting Results.

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Two new studies on the controversial video tapes from the El Bosque case in Chile have just been released. Richard Haines, chief scientist for the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) and Bruce Maccabee, retired Navy physicist, performed independent, meticulous analyses of the tapes.

For necessary background on this case, please see my previous articles: March 2012 with Ralph Blumenthal, and April 2012. I will not be repeating information here from these two posts but will assume everyone has read them.

Last June, I went to Santiago partly to seek further resolution on this case. General Ricardo Bermúdez, Director of the CEFAA, told me that the objects did not appear to be bugs, “but we can’t be 100 percent sure; it’s still under investigation.” During my second visit to the CEFAA office in September, the general informed me that the case is now being put to rest, but it remains unsolved.

Haines and Maccabee worked with the two best videos for their studies. I learned during my first meeting with CEFAA staff that due to circumstances beyond their control, the other five videos are no longer in the CEFAA’s possession. Therefore I was not able to view them nor can they be made available to others, as the CEFAA would have preferred. However, the two tapes which have been analyzed are by far the clearest tapes; the others were on cell phones and of poor quality.

It is both intriguing and puzzling that the two scientists disagreed about the most crucial question in this case: Did the same unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAP, appear on two separate cameras? If the exact same UAP was filmed by the two cameras 20 to 30 feet apart simultaneously, then we would know the object was large, distant and not a bug. Haines concluded that the two cameras captured the same UAP in one sequence, while Maccabee concluded they did not.

“This investigation was carried out with the hope that at least two videos would provide image data that would allow for a triangulation and subsequent calculation of distance and size,” Maccabee states in “Analysis of ‘UAP’ Images in two Videos Obtained During the El Bosque Air Show of November 5, 2010.” Triangulation requires that the same object be filmed at the same time by observers at separate locations; without this, the distance to the object cannot be estimated and therefore its actual size cannot be determined. “Unfortunately, the two most promising videos did not show the same object at the same time from two locations,” Maccabee concludes.

He analyzed only the UAP images that appeared during the Halcones fly by, the first planes to take off during the event at the Air Force base. These included footage of the approach of the Halcones, and their departure into the distance, which is where Haines discovered a “temporal coincidence” (the same UAP in two videos at the same time) and Maccabee determined that the images were different. “My analysis does not preclude the possibility that there might have been a temporal coincidence at some other time but I am unaware of such a coincidence,” he says.

Maccabee’s sometimes technical report includes section headings such as “Relative sizes and distances of the UFO if there were no motion blur,” “Apparent motion of the object,” and “Estimate of the distance traveled during the time between frames.” His analysis of frames from one section includes calculations of possible distance-size-speed relationships “ranging from insect size and speed to “saucer” size and (great) speed.”

He points out that some of the dark on the bottom of the two best images of the object may be due to the camera’s electronics reacting to the presence of a bright top portion. “Video cameras often create a dark ‘reaction’ to a very bright, small object in the field of view,” he explained in an email.

Maccabee concludes that the objects are not anomalies. “Without further information that would show the objects were distant and hence large, it must be considered most likely that the objects were small and nearby such as insects.” In a recent email he explained that “Since I could not accomplish a triangulation of any of the objects I analyzed, I have to accept the scientifically conservative conclusion that the objects I studied could have been small and nearby.”
Haines takes a different position, as shown in his 108 page report titled “The El Bosque Video Case: A Preliminary Study of Anomalous Objects in Active Airspace.” His analyses consisted of plotting the trajectories of as many different UAP as he could find as well as enlarging and enhancing the UAP images from selected frames. “That at least one of these UAP was not a flying insect near the cameras is supported by analysis of video images of the same UAP recorded by two separated cameras,” he writes.

And further, he explains that “the relatively short ‘flight’ durations, high angular velocities and high-speed changes in direction and small angular size of the UAP, recorded during seven of the ten airplane formation fly-overs, help explain why no one saw them at the time; these characteristics would appear to qualify these UAP as anomalous; they cannot be explained in prosaic terms.”

Haines states that “NARCAP’s interest in this case lay mainly in aviation safety” and it is for this reason that he conducted the study. He suggests that these UAP could have presented a risk to flight operations, but acknowledges that without knowing for sure whether they possessed finite mass it is not possible to say.

Many provocative questions are posed at the end of his paper: Why were there more UAP appearances associated with the fly-overs of certain types of airplanes than others? What are their energistic characteristics? What mechanism(s) guided their movements? What caused their changes in shape within very short periods of time?

The contradictory element of these two new studies, and the questions they raise about the nature of the UAP depicted in the videos, adds to the increasing complexity of this case. This material has proven itself worthy of scientific scrutiny, initially in Chile and now in the United States, and as been given a great deal of attention. And how encouraging it is to see high-ranking military officers, scientists and aeronautic specialists in Chile recognizing the existence of the “UFO phenomenon” and taking it seriously! I have observed this firsthand and talked to many of these officials in person.

It is in the well-established tradition of science that research results differ sometimes, and debate follows. The issues usually get ironed out over time – although with this case, that may not happen.

The controversy surrounding this case has centered around whether the object(s) could simply be bugs. It seems that if they are not some kind of anomaly, or “UFO,” they are likely bugs. There are not many other realistic alternatives.

Maccabee has deduced that these objects most likely are bugs. “Lacking conclusive proof that a flying insect could not make an image such as recorded on the video, one may conclude that the ‘anomalous phenomena’ images were, in fact, images of insects,” he writes. Others have put forward the same position on various internet blogs.

As I mentioned in my previous article, entomologists in the U.S. with knowledge of Chilean insects stated fairly uniformly that it is impossible to determine whether the objects were bugs; there was nothing in particular that would lead them to conclude that they were. Most thought it was unlikely. While in Chile, I talked to two independent scientists who believed the object(s) may be insects, but who also said we can’t know for sure. And of course, none of them were photo experts.

I was curious: If indeed this were a bug, which species would it most likely be? Perhaps by observing the candidate in flight, we could see if it resembled the objects in question, particularly the two still images that show a consistent shape in two different parts of one video. This would not be a “scientific” process…but it could be interesting.

The clearest images of our dome-shaped UAP in the El Bosque videos show no such wing sheathes. Would the sheathes show up in a video of this bug two feet from the camera moving at 12 mph? Perhaps the tiny wings would be moving too quickly to show up…but the sheathes do not move at all. Should they be visible?

Furthermore, if you look at the body of the ladybug in flight, it looks elliptical and rather soft, since it has no shell covering it. It doesn’t look much like the dome-shaped bug that we see sitting on a leaf or crawling.

I sent Elgueta the links to some videos of ladybugs in flight, and asked him to comment on the fact that the flying bug does not look like the domed “thing” in our video. First he reiterated that it is impossible to say if they are bugs or not. “We estimate that no experienced entomologist regardless of what country can give a definite answer about these images.”

Regarding specifically the videos of the flying ladybugs, he made the astute observation that these videos, “made with short focus in centimeters scale, cannot be compared with others made in a different scale. Perhaps, you can make new technical studies with videos that can be equivalent concerning speed, focus, lighting and distance.” Maybe this is the next step if anyone wants to continue this exploration.

Haines makes some interesting observations as to why he believes at least some of the El Bosque objects are not bugs, even beyond his conclusion that the same UAP appears on two cameras 20 to 30 feet apart. He includes an image of an actual insect, dark and blurred, taken from one of the El Bosque videos. I recall quite a few bugs on this footage near the camera that looked like blurred, black blobs.) “Virtually all of the UAP images reviewed in this report were in sharper focus than was this alleged insect suggesting that they were all at a distance greater than the hyperfocal distances of these cameras!” Haines writes.

On the question of whether all the UAP could have been insects, Haines states that “on balance, the answer is very likely no.” He offers a host of reasons why: “Because of the linearity of their flight, their high angular velocity, their occasional spontaneous and unexpected appearance within a video frame, their apparent trajectories relative to the different airplane formations, their almost consistent oval shape and nearly horizontal orientation, their lack of any color other than gray and white and perhaps most importantly, for one UAP at least found in Figures 8 and 11, its relatively large distance from the two cameras.”

“Nevertheless,” he concludes, “this hypothesis must be left unanswered at this time.”

And after all this, what is the final position of the CEFAA on this case? I received this official response to that question: “After hearing from the entomologists who have looked at the images, we at the CEFAA agree that these photos do not show anything which allows for the conclusion that they are bugs. But since we are unable to identify the objects in the videos, the case remains unsolved. We are posting on our web page diverse analysis and opinions on this case, to allow each interested person to draw his/her own conclusions.”

Along with the two new American reports, the CEFAA web page includes four Spanish studies which also provide conflicting results. Marcelo Moya, a Chilean photo analyst, affirms that “the object that caused a commotion because of its brightness would with a high probability correspond to the flight of an insect, the hypothesis being it is a fly or a botfly (the latter being a bigger size) that passed by the focus of the camera.”

However, Carlos González Sasso, a photo expert from the DGAC Air and Space Museum in Santiago, states that the image of the same object shows something metallic, “a defined geometry, not being an object of biological origin, with an inclination that suggests ascending forward movement, this being reinforced by a flash of clear light at the base.”

I commend the CEFAA for working so hard on this case with experts from many branches of the Chilean government, and for making whatever information they could available to these scientists. It’s not clear what these videos show. At this point, each of us can form our own opinions about something that science cannot determine, or we can simply accept that we will likely never know.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com