Free Republic

MOSCOW: Several objects resembling living beings were detected on photographs taken by a Russian landing probe in 1982 during a Venus mission, says an article published in the Solar System Research magazine. Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences published a research that analysed the photographs from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982. The photographs feature several objects, which Ksanfomaliti said, resembled a "disk", a "black flap" and a "scorpion".

...the planet's surface... a smoldering 470° Celsius... shows signs of recent geological activity, with hot spots resembling those beneath Hawaii... appears to be insulated by one large, solid lid... Some regions in the southern hemisphere... are emitting more heat than others... appear to be younger... with basaltic lava flows... at least nine volcanic hot spots, or mantle plumes.. between 250,000 and 2.5 million years old... Though alternative explanations for the Venusian veneer point toward cataclysmic processes, Svedhem says the data support gradual resurfacing... a thin layer of ozone on Venus' nightside... only one-thousandth the amount on Earth... the presence of...

Boulder, Colo. — Nov. 10, 2011 — Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to an article recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We have all sorts of clues about the early evolution of the solar system," says author Dr. David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute. "They come from the analysis of the trans-Neptunian population of small bodies known as the Kuiper Belt, and from the lunar cratering record." These clues suggest that the orbits of giant...

Scientists have discovered that Venus has an ozone layer. The thin layer, which is hundred of times less dense than the Earth's, was discovered by the European Space Agency's Venus Express craft, researchers report in the journal Icarus. Until now, ozone layers have only been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. The find could help astronomers refine their hunt for life on other planets. The European spacecraft spied the ozone layer when focusing on stars through Venus' atmosphere. The distant stars appeared fainter than expected, because the ozone layer absorbed some of their ultraviolet light.

Comet Hartley 2 contains water more like that found on Earth than prior comets seem to have, researchers say. A study using the Herschel space telescope aimed to measure the quantity of deuterium, a rare type of hydrogen, present in the comet's water. The comet had just half the amount of deuterium seen in comets. The result, published in Nature, hints at the idea that much of the Earth's water could have initially came from cometary impacts. Just a few million years after its formation, the early Earth was rocky and dry; something must have brought the water that covers...

...at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth's... However, higher up, the weather gets more interesting, according to a new study of old data by NASA and international scientists. The team detected strange things going on in data from telescopic observations of Venus in infrared light at about 68 miles (110 kilometers) above the planet's surface, in cold, clear air above the acid clouds, in two layers called the mesosphere and the thermosphere. ...said Dr. Theodor...

Tuesday November 13 08:37 AM EST Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer, SPACE.com "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to ...

PASADENA , Calif. - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.

Olympia, the Sanctuary of Zeus and venue of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, was probably destroyed by tsunamis that reached far inland, and not as previously believed, by earthquakes and river flooding... Paläotsunamis that have taken place over the last 11,000 years along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. The Olympic-tsunami hypothesis has been put forward due to sediments found in the vicinity of Olympia, which were buried under an 8 metres thick layer of sand and other debris, and only rediscovered around 250 years ago. "The composition and thickness of the sediments we have found, do not fit...

New images of the planet Uranus reveal more diversity in cloud features than ever seen before. The new images, from the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, provide insight into some of the most enigmatic weather in the solar system, researchers said today at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. "The cloud features range from small to large, from dim and diffuse to sharp and bright, from rapidly evolving systems to stable features that last for years," said Lawrence Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center. A large storm in the...

Venus Express set for liftoff Venus Express, the European Space Agency's first mission to explore Earth's closest neighbour, will be launched next Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The ESA gave the prospective launch time as 0443 GMT. The 1.27-tonne unmanned spacecraft, which will be taken aloft by a Russian-made Soyuz-Fregat rocket, is expected to arrive at Venus on April 6. Venus Express, equipped with seven instruments, is intended to map the Venusian surface and weather system, looking at temperature variation, cloud formations, wind speeds and gas composition. Its main goal is to help understand why Venus fell prey...

PARIS, 28 June 2006 - The European Space Agency’s new mission to Venus has discovered that the planet has a bizarre double vortex which whirls in the atmosphere above its south pole, ESA said on Tuesday. The “double eye”, formed by winds of super-hurricane force, was spotted by the unmanned Venus Express spacecraft in its very first swing around Venus, it said. Previous missions to Venus have spotted a similar structure over its north pole and glimpsed at stormy atmospheric behaviour at the south pole. The winds on Venus spin westwards at hundreds of kilometres per hour, taking only four...

A strange spot emerged on Venus last week, and astronomers are not sure what caused it. They hope future observations will reveal whether volcanic activity, turbulence in the planet's atmosphere, or charged particles from the sun are to blame. Amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, New York, first spotted the new feature, which is brighter than its surroundings at ultraviolet wavelengths, on the planet's southern hemisphere on 19 July. That same day, an amateur observer in Australia found a dark spot on Jupiter that had been caused by a meteoroid impact.

A sudden bright spot that appeared in the clouds of Venus just days after a comet left a bruise on Jupiter has scientists stumped as to its cause. Venus' bright spot, first noticed by amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, NY on July 19, is not the first such brightening noticed on our cloudy neighbor, said planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We have seen such events before," he told SPACE.com. This time is a little different though because the brightening is confined to a smaller region, Limaye said. It also came in the wake of Jupiter's...

A collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus possible in distant future.

PHOTO: AP A FORCE known as orbital chaos may cause our Solar System to go haywire, leading to possible collision between Earth and Venus or Mars, according to a study released on Wednesday. The good news is that the likelihood of such a smash-up is small, around one-in-2500. And even if the planets did careen into one another, it would not happen before another 3.5 billion years.

Bright hazes that mysteriously appear and then disappear on Venus in a matter of days have revealed a new dynamic feature of the planet's cloudy atmosphere that is unlike anything on Earth... Over a period of days, the high-altitude veil continually brightened and dimmed, moving towards equatorial latitudes and then back towards the south pole... Exactly what causes the sulfur dioxide and water vapor to well up is not known, but Titov says it is likely some internal process of Venus' atmosphere. The transient dark markings on the VMC images are even more of a mystery. They are caused by...

Samples of icy spray shooting from Saturn's moon Enceladus collected during Cassini spacecraft flybys show the strongest evidence yet for the existence of a large-scale, subterranean saltwater ocean, says a new international study led by the University of Heidelberg and involving the University of Colorado Boulder. The new discovery was made during the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a collaboration of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Launched in 1997, the mission spacecraft arrived at the Saturn system in 2004 and has been touring the giant ringed planet and its vast moon system ever since. The plumes...

Astronomers have found a nascent star 750 light years from earth that shoots colossal jets of water -- a cosmic fire hose -- out its poles in bullet-like pulses. In a process that almost defies adjectives and analogies, each jet of water is the equivalent of a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second and the speed of the jet is the equivalent of 80 times the muzzle velocity of an AK-47 assault rifle. The blast creates huge shockwaves around the star and the process may be responsible for sprinkling the universe with water. And...

Modern methods are slowly helping us build a history of the Heroic Age. The exploits of the Sea Peoples are perhaps not as distinctly preserved in the Greek tradition as those of the Achaeans who sacked Troy, probably sometime during the 1180s BC, with the nostos of Odysseus recently dated to 1,178BC. The lack of distinct information may be, in part, due to the fact that the Sea Peoples were active mostly away from the Aegean, and in lands where Greek colonization did not occur centuries later, and hence were cut off from the Aegean world. The memory of the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A pair of NASA probes wandering in deep space discovered that the outer edge of the solar system contains curious magnetic bubbles and is not smooth as previously thought, astronomers said Thursday. The NASA Voyager twin spacecraft, which launched in 1977, are currently exploring the furthest outlays of the heliosphere, where solar wind is slowed and warped by pressure from other forces in the galaxy, the US space agency said. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt," said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "Far, far away...

Stealing Israeli History By Ari Bussel What is the best way to fight Israel? Open its history books and duplicate its struggle for rebirth. As Israelis distance themselves from their history, and many simply do not know it, its enemies immerse themselves in the wealth of information, in the miracle of rebirth, and try to duplicate it to serve their own agenda. The results are nothing less than astonishing. Everything seems to be working perfectly. New miracles are suddenly created from nothing. Until several decades ago there were no “Palestinians” and no “Palestine.” There was a Palestine, not a country...

...What were we to think? Here were half a dozen diverse objects found lying on an unbroken brick pavement of the sixth century BC, yet the newest of them was seven hundred years older than the pavement and the earliest perhaps sixteen hundred. In this single room, Woolley had discovered at least 1,500 years of history all jumbled together, a bit like if you randomly found a Roman statue and a piece of medieval masonry while cleaning out your closet. Left to their own devices, these objects would never be found together like this. Somebody had messed around with these...

Italians find ancient Ur tabletsWritings could lead to buried library (ANSA) - Rome, March 28 - Italian archeologists working in Iraq have found a trove of ancient stone tablets from the fabled civilisation of Ur . The tablets bear around 500 engravings of a literary and historical nature, according to team leader Silvia Chiodi . "This is an an exceptional find," she said, noting that the area in question had previously only yielded prehistoric artefacts . She said the tablets, made of clay and bitumen, were discovered by chance at an archaeological site not far from the location of the...

BOSTON—The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate. In 1993, French mathematicians Jacques Laskar and Philippe Robutel showed that Earth’s large moon has a stabilizing effect on our planet’s climate. Without the moon, gravitational perturbations from other planets, notably nearby Venus and massive Jupiter, would greatly disturb Earth’s axial tilt, with vast consequences for the...

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth. The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material. The new finding is published in the journal Nature. In our early Solar System, well before planets had formed, a frisbee-shaped cloud of gas and dust encircled the Sun. Scientists believe that the planets grew from material pulled together by electrostatic charges - the...

Astronomers have discovered a whole new class of alien planet: a vast population of Jupiter-mass worlds that float through space without any discernible host star, a new study finds. While some of these exoplanets could potentially be orbiting a star from very far away, the majority of them most likely have no parent star at all, scientists say. And these strange worlds aren't mere statistical anomalies. They likely outnumber "normal" alien planets with obvious parent stars by at least 50 percent, and they're nearly twice as common in our galaxy as main-sequence stars, according to the new study. Astronomers have...

An international team of astronomers claim to have found free-floating "planets" which do not seem to orbit a star.Writing in Nature, they say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way. The objects revealed themselves by bending the light of more distant stars, an effect called "gravitational microlensing".Objects of large enough mass can bend light, as Albert Einstein predicted. If a large object passes in front of a more distant background star, it may act as a...

Scattered about the Milky Way are floating, Jupiter-mass objects, which are likely to be planets wandering around the Galaxy's core instead of orbiting host stars. But these planets aren't rare occurrences in the interstellar sea: the drifters might be nearly twice as numerous as the most common stars. "This is an amazing result, and if it's right, the implications for planet formation are profound," says astronomer Debra Fischer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. To find the wanderers, scientists turned their telescopes towards the Galactic Bulge surrounding the centre of the Milky Way. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing,...

This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of over-exposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than its actual size. The tail-like structure extending anti-sunward from the planet is visible over several days and spans an angular size exceeding that of a full Moon in the night sky.

First, the bad news: the inner solar system is unstable. Given enough time, Jupiter's gravity could yank Mercury out of its present orbit. Two new computer simulations of long-term planetary motion — one by Jacques Laskar (Paris Observatory), the other by Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz) — have both reached the same disturbing conclusion. Says Laughlin, "The solar system isn't as stable as we'd thought." Both teams have found that Jupiter's gravity can increase Mercury's orbital eccentricity over time. Mercury's path around the Sun is already nearly as elliptical as Pluto's. But Jupiter can make...

Hardly had the minimalist argument been developed than it was profoundly undermined by an archaeological discovery. In 1993 and 1994, several fragments of an Aramaic stela were found at the long-running excavation of Tel Dan led by Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. The historical references in the inscription and the paleography of the writing make it clear that it dates to the ninth century B.C.E. Moreover, the text specifically mentions a king of Israel and a king of the "House of David" (Hebrew, bytdwd ), that is, a king of the dynasty of David. This discovery led...

Human Remains in Ancient Jar a Mystery Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Jan. 23, 2007 — For over 100 years, four blue-glazed jars bearing the nametag of Rameses II (1302-1213 B.C.) were believed to contain the Egyptian pharaoh's bodily organs. But analysis of organic residues scraped from the jars has determined one actually contained an aromatic salve, while a second jar held the organs of an entirely different person who lived around 760 years later. Now the question is, who was this individual? "We do believe that the unknown person was of importance for at least two reasons," said Jacques Connan,...

It's an unlikely marriage between state-of-the-art and 40-year-old technology that has yielded extraordinary results. Signals from seismic sensors left on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts in 1971 have revealed that the Moon has a liquid core similar to Earth's. Scientists at Nasa applied contemporary seismological techniques to the data being emitted from sensors placed by their colleagues during the U.S. space program's heyday....

Astronomers have been busy trying to determine the spin period and composition of Venus' moon. On Dec. 8, 2010, results of the study were announced by JPL/Caltech scientists, led by Michael Hicks... It has the rather unfortunate name of 2002 VE68. That's because it was discovered on Nov. 11, 2002 by LONEOS, the Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Search. 2002 VE68 is an Earth orbit-crossing asteroid that has been designated a Potential Hazardous Asteroid by the Minor Planet Center... 2002 VE68 used to be a run of the mill, potential impact threat Near Earth Object (NEO). But approximately 7,000 years...

A mysterious high-altitude layer of sulphur dioxide discovered by ESA’s Venus Express has been explained. As well as telling us more about Venus, it could be a warning against injecting our atmosphere with sulphur droplets to mitigate climate change. Venus is blanketed in sulphuric acid clouds that block our view of the surface. The clouds form at altitudes of 50–70 km when sulphur dioxide from volcanoes combines with water vapour to make sulphuric acid droplets. Any remaining sulphur dioxide should be destroyed rapidly by the intense solar radiation above 70 km. So the detection of a sulphur dioxide layer at...

Astronomers have confirmed the first discovery of an alien planet in our Milky Way that came from another galaxy, they announced today (Nov. 18). The Jupiter-like planet orbits a star that was born in another galaxy and later captured by our own Milky Way sometime between 6 billion and 9 billion years ago, researchers said. A side effect of the galactic cannibalism brought a faraway planet within astronomers' reach for the first time ever. [Illustration of the extragalactic planet] "This is very exciting," said study co-author Rainer Klement of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. "We have no...

Saturn's biggest and never-been-seen before ring has been discovered.The 'super-sized' halo was found by Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope. To get a sense of its size it has a vertical height which is about 20 times the diameter of the planet, which is nine times the size of our planet. Furthermore, the entire volume of the ring could hold about one billion Earths. The bulk of the ring starts about 3.7million miles from Saturn itself and extends outward about another 7.4million miles.With it being so huge many will ask how come it was not seen before. This is because the ring...

Science Daily — Earth sits between two worlds that have been devastated by climate catastrophes. In the effort to combat global warming, our neighbours can provide valuable insights into the way climate catastrophes affect planets.From what scientists know now, it is possible that Venus and Mars started out a lot like Earth. At some point in time, each planet followed a path that changed its climate. The transition was from Earth-like to either a cloudy inferno (Venus) or a frigid desert (Mars). Data from Venus Express and Mars express is now helping scientists determine if, when and why each...

...died aged 69, was the author of 30 science-fiction novels and five collections of short stories and essays. His work was generally considered "hard" SF -- technologically possible and adhering mostly to scientific fact -- and his best work was an exhilarating mix of optimistic futurism and a central mystery to be solved by scientific investigation and action. ...In Voyage from Yesteryear (1982), a race which embraces individual and economic freedom proves more than a match for visiting Earthmen who wish to gain control. It won Hogan the first of two Prometheus awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. The second,...

Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system, might have gained its dominant position after swallowing up a smaller planet, scientists believe. Studies on Jupiter have revealed that the giant planet, which is more than 120 times bigger than the Earth, has an extremely small core that weighs just two to 10 Earth masses. Now scientists have claimed that Jupiter's core might have been vaporised in huge collision with a planet up to ten times the size of Earth, the New Scientist reported. Researchers led by by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China have modelled what might have...

Editorial Reviews Review Allen West, coauthor of The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes : “Graham Phillips argues persuasively that Earth encountered a massive comet 3,500 years ago around the time of the Exodus from Egypt. The object appeared twenty times larger than the full moon and was by far the largest comet sighting ever recorded by ancient historians. The worldwide consequences for mankind were devastating. Our own scientific research confirms that the author’s theory is completely credible.” Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, authors of The Templar Revelation and The Sion Revelation : “an extraordinary tour de force . . . ”...

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?The universal human myth may be the first example of disaster reporting. by Scott Carney11-15-2007 The Fenambosy chevrons at the tip of Madagascar. Image courtesy of Dallas Abbott The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a...

HD 209458b, shown in red in an artist's conception, is the first confirmed "cometary planet," experts say. Image courtesy G. Bacon, NASA/ESAAn alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail, astronomers announced Thursday. (Related: "Odd Star Sheds Comet-like Tail.") About 153 light-years from Earth, planet HD 209458b hugs its star so tightly that the planet's atmosphere is likely a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius) an a year passes in just 3.5 days—making Mercury's 88-day orbit seem downright leisurely.That tight orbit also means this gas giant—meaning...

The ion tail of Venus. Credit: Jeff Hecht, New Scientist Magazine May 31, 1997.   Feb 20, 2008Venus' Tail of the UnexpectedAncient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some...

A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed...

A bullet-shaped object can be seen rocketing out of the huge explosion from a dying star in a new image taken by a powerful X-ray space telescope. The new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows N49, the aftermath of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that neighbors our own Milky Way.

  Origins of Myth 05/18/08 When Saturn was King When Saturn ruled the skies alone (That golden age, to gold unknown,) This earthly globe to thee assign'd Receiv'd the gifts of all mankind.-- Johnathan Swift, A Panegyric on the Dean Of the five visible planets today, none is more enchanting than the ringed gas giant Saturn, now the object of intense investigation by NASA’s Cassini probe. Data returned by the earlier Voyager probes, and now by Cassini, have left NASA scientists in a state of awe, as one surprise after another has re-defined our picture of Saturn and its...

To solve the mystery of where Punt was, a team of scientists is turning to two mummified baboons in the British Museum... One was found at Thebes and the other in the Valley of the Kings. The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a 'signal' that can tell scientists where an animal is from... To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope...

If we identify the KV55 mummy as Smenkhare and assume that Akhenaten remains missing, we can add Akhenaten and Nefertiti into the family tree, while retaining KV55 (Smenkhare) as the father of Tutankhamun as shown by the Hawass team. It's tempting to consider that KV21B and the Younger Lady are also daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. While not essential for my revised theory, this would neatly fit historical facts. In considering whether the DNA data would fit the revised family tree, it seems appropriate to consider that KV21B and the Younger Lady may also have been daughters of Akhenaten and...