Tag: astrophysics

Why Are Scientists Suddenly So Concerned About An Asteroid Hitting Earth?

Authorities assure us that we are perfectly safe and that no giant space rocks are heading our way. If that is true, why is a scenario that has been developed for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference “based around a hypothetical impact threat” from a very large asteroid? And why are scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory studying how to destroy a giant asteroid that is heading toward Earth using nuclear weapons? If there is no threat anywhere on the horizon, wouldn’t you think that those scientists would have something better to do with their time? On top of everything else, NASA recently concluded a secretive operation known as “OSIRIS-REx” in which a spacecraft visited an asteroid, plucked a piece off of it, and returned it to Earth. While the general public is being told that we are safe for decades to come, a tremendous amount of time, money and energy is being poured into preparing for a potential asteroid threat.

Do they know something that the rest of us do not?

I am convinced that there is far more going on behind the scenes than we are being told.

They never say anything that will alarm the general public, but at the same time they are pumping vast resources into “sophisticated planetary defense efforts” that are intended to protect our planet “from potentially hazardous asteroids”…

Would we be prepared if a potentially life-threatening object from space were on a collision course with Earth? And how much damage could an incoming asteroid actually cause?

Such questions remain at the forefront of increasingly sophisticated planetary defense efforts aimed at protecting our planet from potentially hazardous asteroids. Yet even if astronomers are able to identify a space object that might pose a threat, a significant number of uncertainties remain: the object’s size, composition, structure, and potential impact locations all must be considered, as these factors can dramatically influence what happens once an asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere.

If there are no near-Earth objects that are a threat, why spend so much money on this?

We certainly have a lot of other very pressing matters that do require funding right now.

NASA is either wasting our money, or something else is going on.

Interestingly, NASA is a participant in the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference. An exercise is underway that simulates how authorities would respond to a “Tunguska-sized object” that is headed toward Earth…

Additionally, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) regularly participates in planetary defense exercises designed to test these assessment methods, with current scenarios under development for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference that take a cue from one of history’s most concerning airburst events.

“The current exercise that is underway for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference is based around a hypothetical impact threat from a roughly Tunguska-sized object,” Wheeler told The Debrief.

For those of you that are not familiar, in 1908 the Tunguska event flattened approximately 2,000 square kilometers in Siberia…

Tunguska event, enormous explosion that is estimated to have occurred at 7:14 AM plus or minus one minute on June 30, 1908, at an altitude of 5-10 km (15,000-30,000 feet), flattening some 2,000 square km (500,000 acres) and charring more than 100 square km of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia (60°55′ N 101°57′ E), Russia. The energy of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to the explosive force of as much as 15 megatons of TNT – a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

Why hold an exercise of this nature if there is absolutely no threat of this sort of event occurring for decades to come?

And why did NASA just send a small spacecraft to grab a piece of an asteroid known as Bennu and bring it back to Earth?…

On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.

The van-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft – whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer – visited and sampled Bennu, an ancient space rock holding pristine remnants from the dawn of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Among those cosmic relics are raw organic building blocks, the kind that may have seeded life on Earth.

“I have known this day was coming for a long time, but it is still difficult to see it arrive,” OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, who’s based at the University of Arizona, said in a post on LinkedIn. “I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end.”

That was certainly an impressive scientific achievement.

But it also cost a lot of money to do that.

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Scientist Suggests DARK MATTER Could Be BLACK HOLES From A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE

While the scientific establishment has spent decades chasing invisible particles that never quite show up, a leading cosmologist has dropped a theory that turns everything on its head: dark matter isn’t some exotic new particle. It could be ancient black holes that survived from an entirely different universe.

This idea, laid out by Professor Enrique Gaztanaga of the University of Portsmouth, doesn’t just tackle one cosmic puzzle. It offers a clean fix for the Big Bang’s thorniest problems and lines up with fresh observations that have astronomers scrambling.

Gaztanaga argues the elusive substance that makes up roughly 27 per cent of the universe’s mass may actually be “relic” black holes formed in a previous collapsing phase of the cosmos.

“The idea is that dark matter may not be a new particle, but instead a population of black holes formed in a previous collapsing phase and bounce of the Universe,” Professor Gaztanaga says.

He rejects the standard singularity model where everything explodes from an infinitely dense point that breaks physics. Instead, he proposes a “bouncing” universe.

“The Big Bang corresponds to a bounce from a previous collapsing phase, rather than the absolute beginning of everything,” the Professor Gaztanaga further noted, adding “So it is the start of the expansion we observe, but not necessarily the beginning of time itself.”

In this picture, black holes from the collapsing galaxies of that earlier universe survived the bounce and now drift through our cosmos, exerting gravity without emitting light.

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Aliens may have been trying to contact us for DECADES, scientists claim – as they warn we’ve been ‘looking for the wrong thing’

For decades, we’ve been looking to the skies for any sign of aliens – but it turns out we may have been missing attempts at contact.

A new study has cast doubt on our radio signal detection methods, arguing that ‘space weather’ could be distorting incoming transmissions.

Until now, most experiments have focused on identifying spikes in radio frequency – signals unlikely to be produced by any other natural processes in space.

But experts have highlighted an overlooked complication.

Even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow radio signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home star’s atmosphere.

This distortion, which happens near the point of origin, can ‘smear’ the signal’s frequency, meaning it can be missed by our detectors that are primed to search for more focused radio waves.

‘Searches are often optimized for extremely narrow signals,’ Dr Vishal Gajjar, astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper, said.

‘If a signal gets broadened by its own star’s environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it’s there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we’ve seen in technosignature searches.’

For their study, the team analysed radio transmissions from our own spacecraft in the solar system.

Using measurements from probes, they worked out how turbulent plasma released from stars – such as the Sun – affects radio signals.

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Accused Killer of Astrophysicist Arrested for Trespassing on Scientist’s Property With Loaded Rifle Two Months Before Killing — Newsom-Appointed Judge Dropped Charges

New details have emerged regarding the accused killer of Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmair.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, 67, was shot in his torso by a gunman who approached him on his porch on February 16.

Authorities have since arrested Freddy Snyder, 29, who has been charged with Grillmair’s murder and is being held on a $3 million bail.

New details obtained by the Los Angeles Times have revealed that Snyder was previously arrested two months earlier for trespassing on Grillmair’s property with a loaded, unregistered rifle.

Per The Los Angeles Times:

On Dec. 20, Lt. Michael Modica of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said, the scientist spotted someone possibly trespassing on his property and called law enforcement.

When deputies arrived and found Snyder in the area, Modica said, he was carrying a rifle and explained that he was on his way to the post office.

Grillmair’s home and the local post office are in opposite directions from Snyder’s home, property records show.

According to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, Snyder told deputies he was carrying the rifle just in case he ran into wild animals. But deputies noted that the rifle was loaded and not registered to Snyder, so they took him into custody.

In addition to one felony count of carrying a loaded firearm, the criminal complaint against Snyder charged him with trying to escape from the Palmdale station jail the day after he was arrested.

The New York Post further reported that Judge Osman Abbasi, appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom, dismissed Snyder’s felony gun charges.

Exclusive | Newsom-appointed judge gave suspect in Caltech genius’s slaying a slap on the wrist weeks before bloodbath https://t.co/WoJPp0m7ug pic.twitter.com/IJtk4VU0zR

— California Post (@californiapost) February 24, 2026

After dropping the felony gun charge, Judge Abbasi ordered Snyder to complete a gun safety course, and he was released from jail shortly thereafter.

Snyder was scheduled to appear in court again on February 5 regarding his case, but he did not show up for the hearing.

Despite not appearing, Snyder’s charges were dismissed under California Penal Code 1385, and just 11 days later, he allegedly murdered Grillmair.

Grillmair’s murder has rocked the astrophysicists’ community, considering he was a renowned researcher in the studies of Dark matter, Galactic structure, stellar populations, and exoplanets.

Grillmair was also notable in the community for finding water on a distant planet orbiting a star.

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The Oldest Known Eclipse Record is Shedding Light on Early Celestial Mysteries, Revealing the Location of a Misplaced Ancient Chinese City

Using ancient Chinese records, scientists have calculated Earth’s variable rotational speed back to 709 BCE, based on the earliest datable total solar eclipse.

The team’s work sought evidence to support the recently developed reconstruction of the solar cycle stretching back to the 8th century BCE. To do so, they analyzed descriptions of the solar corona produced in the ancient Chinese Lu Duchy’s capital, Qufu, which provided new information about the Earth’s rotational speed over time, as revealed in a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Eclipse Records of the Lu Duchy Court

Written in the Spring and Autumn Annals of the Lu Duchy court, it is reported that on July 17, 709 BCE, “the Sun was totally eclipsed.”

Ancient Chinese rulers filled their courts with ancient astronomers, tasked not with understanding the physical nature of the universe but with interpreting the signs and portents the night skies might hold. Notable astronomical events, such as auroras and eclipses, were believed to provide insight into whether cosmic forces approved of an emperor’s decision-making. The scrutiny placed on interpreting the meaning of these events led China to keep the ancient world’s best astronomical records.

A later addendum to the record in the first century CE states that the eclipse “penetrated the center of the Sun, and it was completely yellow above and below.” However, there is no documented provenance to support the claim that this quote originated with a witness to the event.

“What makes this record special isn’t just its age, but also a later addendum in the ‘Hanshu’ (Book of Han) based on a quote written seven centuries after the eclipse,” explained lead author Hisashi Hayakawa, Assistant Professor from the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research and Institute for Advanced Research at Nagoya University. 

“It describes the eclipsed Sun as ‘completely yellow above and below.’ This addendum has been traditionally associated with a record of a solar corona,” Hayakawa continued. “If this is truly the case, it represents one of the earliest surviving written descriptions of the solar corona.”

Locating Qufu from an Eclipse

The work not only revealed information about the Earth and Sun, but also about the geography of ancient China. Where the Lu Court at Qufu was believed to reside at the time would not have had the view of the eclipse described in the annals. The implication, therefore, is that earlier historical research obviously must have had the city’s location wrong. 

Matching historical sources and modern archaeology to discern the actual location was a task unto itself. Eventually, the researchers pinpointed a new site some 8 kilometers from the previously purported location of Qufu. With his PhDs in both solar physics and Asian history, Hayakawa was uniquely suited to the task.

“This correction allowed us to measure the Earth’s rotation during the total eclipse accurately, calculate the orientation of the Sun’s rotation axis, and simulate the corona’s appearance,” Hayakawa said.

Our planet has not always rotated at the same speed. At the time of the observation, 2,700 years ago, due to a variety of factors, including the Moon’s pull on the tides, it rotated faster than it does today. By correlating the revised location of Qufu with the date, the researchers were able to accurately measure the Earth’s rotational speed between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE.

“This new dataset fixes coordinate errors in previous Earth rotation studies. Additionally, it improves the accuracy of dating and reconstructing historical astronomical events,” Mitsuru Sôma, coauthor from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said.

“This unique historical addendum for the possible solar coronal structure is critical for providing a spot reference on solar activity reconstructions from tree rings and ice cores, as well as providing independent validation of solar activity models,” explained Mathew Owens, coauthor and professor of Space Physics at the University of Reading.

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‘Alien ship’ releases ‘seven jets’ with ‘glowing halo’ as it nears sun

An alien expert claims that an interstellar object which is seemingly an “alien ship” with a “complex jet structure” and a “glowing halo” is passing by the sun.

The mysterious interstellar object, which has been dubbed 3I/ATLAS, was reportedly at 29 degrees separation from the Sun. Stacked images show a “large glowing halo extending out to half a million kilometres” with at least “7 distinct jets.” According to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, some of them are anti-tails in the sunward direction.

In an article published by Loeb, he wrote: “This morning, at 4.10 Universal Time (UT) on November 8, 2025, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS showed a complex jet structure. M. Jäger, G. Rhemann and E. Prosperi observed 3I/ATLAS at 29 degrees separation from the Sun in the sky.”

He added: “The stacked images, constituting 24 exposures in the green filter, each lasting 35 seconds , 2 exposures in a red filter and 2 exposures in a blue filter, show a large glowing halo extending out to half a million kilometers (5 arcminutes).

“The images show at least 7 distinct jets, some of which are anti-tails in the sunward direction.

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Did 3I/ATLAS Just Show Signs of Technology? Interstellar Object Displays ‘Non-Gravitational Motion’ as it Swings Past the Sun

A new report on the enigmatic interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has revealed deeper insights into the object’s behavior, which include signs of non-gravitational motion during its recent closest approach to the Sun.

Presently, most astronomers maintain that the space object, discovered in July 2025, is a natural comet, based on a growing body of data that confirms this interpretation. The object is the third known interstellar visitor that has entered our planetary neighborhood from another star system.

3I/ATLAS is also helping confirm data that suggests such objects probably make appearances far more frequently in our Solar System than previously known. With its glowing gassy envelope—what astronomers call a coma—and other key traits that have manifested as the object has moved closer to the Sun, little doubt has been left about the interstellar visitor’s identity as a natural object.

However, there are still some experts who interpret its recent activity as being noteworthy indicators—if additional related phenomena were to be confirmed in future observations—which some might expect to associate with objects of technological origin. So what does the latest data reveal, and why does it still have some astronomers divided over whether 3I/ATLAS might show signs associated with intelligent life?

What the New Report Reveals

A recent report by researcher Davide Farnoccia with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers some of the latest data on the gravitational characteristics displayed by 3I/ATLAS during its journey through our Solar System.

Farnoccia specializes in the study of small objects and their orbits, which includes “nongravitational perturbations” some space objects display, as well as whether some near-Earth objects (NEOs) may pose an impact hazard to Earth.

According to Farnoccia’s report, 3I/ATLAS follows a hyperbolic orbit, displaying an eccentricity of e = 6.1373 (rounded). This figure is important, as it significantly exceeds the accepted value of 1 that astronomers recognize as being required to escape the Sun’s gravity. This means that the object’s trajectory confirms that 3I/ATLAS is not gravitationally bound to our Solar System, confirming astronomers’ suspicions that once it completes its recent planetary drive-by visit, the object will continue back into interstellar space.

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Manhattan-sized space object 3I/ATLAS has grown a tail — a possible sign of alien ‘maneuver’: Harvard scientist

New images reveal the Manhattan-sized interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has started to sport a tail, indicating that it could possibly be a “maneuvering” alien craft, one Harvard scientist suggested.

After exhibiting signs of an incredibly strange “anti-tail” since first cropping up in the solar system in July, 3I/ATLAS is now showing evidence of a true cometary tail, images taken by Spain’s Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Island in September revealed.

These new images shows materials being peeled off behind the 33-billion ton object as it travels toward the sun and is hit with up to 33 gigawatts of solar radiation, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb wrote in a recent paper.

However, the succession of an anti-tail and then the presence of a tail could be indicative of “controlled maneuvering” and a high-impact Black Swan event.

3I/ATLAS’s anti-tail was a plume composed of mostly carbon dioxide and water with trace amounts of cyanide and a never-seen-in-nature nickel alloy that has only been used in human manufacturing.

“[I]f the object is an alien spacecraft slowing down,” Loeb wrote, then the anti-tail would be evidence of a “braking thrust” maneuver which would naturally change to a tail as the slowing procedure completed.

The International Asteroid Warning Network added 3I/ATLAS to its list of targets earlier this week, and began monitoring the object for scientific purposes.

The group wrote on its website: “While it poses no threat, comet 3I/ATLAS present a great opportunity for the IAWN community to perform an observing exercise due to its prolonged observability from Earth and its high interest to the scientific community.”

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‘Massive’ comet hurtling toward us is larger than previously thought, could be alien tech, scientist says: ‘It could change everything for us’

Scientists have discovered that the 3I/ATLAS — a Manhattan-sized interstellar object that potentially has alien tech — is much larger than previously thought, according to a new report.

First discovered by NASA on July 1, the cosmic anomaly has been under watch by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team as it shoots across the solar system. The object, which is believed to be a comet, reportedly has interstellar origins, making it the third ever object from beyond the solar system ever detected after ‘Oumuamua, which was discovered in 2017, and 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Now the team has gleaned some “sizable” new intel on the interstellar visitor, namely that the “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons,” per a blog post by Loeb.

They arrived at this number by calculating the object’s trajectory to find that ATLAS’s “gravitational acceleration” is “smaller than 49 feet per day, squared,” Futurism reported.

This was then compared to how much mass it was shedding via gases and dust particles to determine the size.

Loeb and co. also found that the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than 3.1 miles — the upper limit of current projections that are based on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This makes it larger than “three to five orders of magnitude” more massive than its predecessors, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

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Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS updates: Will we intercept it?

Will we send a spacecraft to intercept 3I/ATLAS?

Scientists first spotted 3I/ATLAS, the 3rd interstellar visitor ever identified in our solar system, in early July 2025. And since then, one question has been asked countless times: will we send out a spacecraft to take a closer look? On August 21, EarthSky’s Will Triggs spoke to University of Edinburgh astronomer Colin Snodgrass to find out the answer. Plus, Colin talked about ESA’s Comet Interceptor, an upcoming spacecraft that will be primed to intercept future interstellar objects. Watch in the player above, or on YouTube.

3I/ATLAS shrinks again

On August 7, 2025, NASA shared a new image of 3I/ATLAS (above) – the world’s 3rd known interstellar object – as well as provided an updated estimate of the size of the object’s nucleus, or core. Shortly after the object was first identified on July 1, 2025, 3I/ATLAS was estimated to have a diameter of about 20 km (12 miles). Then in late July – using data from the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile – the size estimate dropped to 10 km (6 miles). The latest analysis uses data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It reduces the estimated diameter of 3I/ATLAS’s nucleus still further, to 5.6 km (3.5 miles).

And, the astronomers using Hubble data said, the object could be even smaller, as small as 320 meters (1,050 feet) across!

Plus, as you can see from the image, 3I/ ATLAS is looking more and more comet-like as it approaches our sun. It’s currently between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The two previous known interstellar objects are 1I/ ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. ‘Oumuamua’s size is thought to be about 200 meters across at its widest (you’ll recall it has an elongated shape). And Borisov is thought to be less than a kilometer across.

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