Tag: unexplained phenomena

SOMETHING IS AFFECTING GRAVITY IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, AND ASTRONOMERS SAY IT COULD BE AN UNKNOWN PLANET

In the far reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, a mysterious and yet-unseen world may be lurking in the darkness. Dubbed “Planet 9,” this hypothetical celestial body has been the subject of intense scientific debate and speculation since its existence was first proposed in 2016.

Now, a new study published to the arXiv pre-print service by a team from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d’Azur, and Southwest Research Institute has provided compelling evidence supporting the presence of this enigmatic planet.

The origin of the Planet 9 hypothesis stems from the peculiar alignments in the orbits of several distant trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Astronomers over the years have debated that these orbital anomalies could be explained by the gravitational influence of an undiscovered planet, estimated to be about five to ten times the mass of Earth, orbiting the sun at a distance of hundreds of astronomical units. Simply put, something weird is going on around Neptune.

The astronomical community has been divided on the existence of Planet 9. Some scientists argue that the observed orbital alignments could be the result of observational biases or other factors, such as the self-gravity of a massive disk of planetesimals (which are bits of debris that form discs around planets).

However, the study’s authors, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown disagree. Back in 2015, the pair announced new research that provided evidence of a giant planet tracing an unusual, elongated orbit in the outer solar system. Ever since, they have worked hard to prove that their computer simulations are not only accurate, but reflective of what is happening at the far reaches of our solar system.

“The possibility of a new planet is certainly an exciting one for me as a planetary scientist and for all of us,” said the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, Jim Green, back in 2015. “This is not, however, the detection or discovery of a new planet. It’s too early to say with certainty there’s a so-called Planet X. What we’re seeing is an early prediction based on modeling from limited observations. It’s the start of a process that could lead to an exciting result.”

This new study provides a fresh perspective on the Planet 9 hypothesis by focusing on a previously overlooked population of TNOs: long-period, low-inclination, Neptune-crossing objects. Using comprehensive N-body simulations that account for the gravitational influence of all known giant planets, the Galactic tide (a series of forces exerted by objects in our galaxy outside our solar system), and passing stars, the researchers demonstrated that the presence of Planet 9 can naturally explain the observed distribution of these TNOs.

One of the key findings of the study is that Planet 9 can drive the orbits of distant TNOs with semi-major axes greater than 100 AU into Neptune-crossing trajectories, a feat that simulations without Planet 9 struggle to replicate. In short, something out there is causing these effects, and the study argues that the cause of these gravitational shifts is, most likely, a planet.

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Scientists still baffled from giant human skeletons up to 10 feet tall decades after initial discovery

A series of mysterious giant skeletons up to 10 feet tall reportedly discovered in and around Nevada caves last century — dubbed the “Giants of Lovelock” — are still baffling scientists decades later.

The claims about supersized humans who roamed the area around Lovelock, a remote town 90 miles northeast of Reno, thousands of years ago are rooted in Native America lore, which tells of fierce, redheaded, pale-skinned giants who arrived from Central America by boat and attacked local tribes.

After years of war, the foreign invaders were chased into a cave and slaughtered en masse, according to stories passed down by the indigenous Paiute people.

Experts believe the tale of the giant warriors’ violent extermination is likely a legend, but reports of discoveries made in the area of Lovelock decades ago have continued to raise many unanswered questions.

The first foray into the Lovelock cave was made in 1911, when a pair of miners searching for guano, or bat excrement used as fertilizer, allegedly unearthed 60 human skeletons, including some measuring between 7 and 8 feet tall.

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“Translated into over thirteen languages and now a major motion picture, John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecy is an unsettling true story of the paranormal that has long been regarded as a classic in the literature of the unexplained.

West Virginia, 1966. For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant is gripped by a real-life nightmare culminating in a tragedy that makes headlines around the world. Strange occurrences and sightings, including a bizarre winged apparition that becomes known as the Mothman, trouble this ordinary American community. Mysterious lights are seen moving across the sky. Domestic animals are found slaughtered and mutilated. And journalist John Keel, arriving to investigate the freakish events, soon finds himself an integral part of an eerie and unfathomable mystery.”

AFRICAN ‘FAIRY CIRCLES’ THAT ONCE BAFFLED SCIENTISTS POINT TO MYSTERIOUS ‘SWARM INTELLIGENCE’ IN PLANTS

For centuries, the grassy plains of the Namib Desert have been dotted with mysterious barren rings known as “fairy circles.” Local folklore warned that these strange patterns were the footprints of the gods, or a sign of a subterranean dragon poisoning the earth above.

However, modern science has a different explanation for these enigmatic bare patches; one that has sparked heated debate among researchers.

A new study published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics presents compelling evidence against the long-standing “termite hypothesis” that has dominated discussions around fairy circle origins. This hypothesis, championed by biologist Norbert Jürgens, proposed that the circles form when subterranean termites consume the roots of newly sprouted grasses, creating distinctive circular patches in the dry grasslands on the edge of the Namib Desert. 

However, an international team led by researchers Stephan Getzin and Hezi Yizhaq offers a systematic rebuttal, drawing from extensive fieldwork and analysis across multiple regions of the Namib Desert over several years, which led to intriguing findings.

Jürgens and his team had previously cited various studies as proof that termites of the species Psammotermes allocerus were the culprits behind fairy circle formation. But Getzin’s team wasn’t convinced by the evidence.

“Our review shows that there is no single study to date that has demonstrated with systematic field evidence that the green germinating grasses within the fairy circles would be killed by root herbivory of sand termites,” states the new paper.

Getzin and Yizhaq excavated and measured around 500 grass individuals across southern, central and northern Namib sites from 2020-2022. Crucially, the roots of dead grasses inside fairy circles were undamaged and often longer than those of living grasses outside the circles.

“If termite herbivory were the cause, the roots of the dying grasses should be shorter… and show signs of biomass consumption,” the authors write in the paper. Oddly, the roots were as long, and some significantly longer, which tells the researchers that something else killed those plants, not termites.

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Pentagon’s flawed UFO report demands congressional action

On March 8, the Department of Defense published the most significant report on UFOs in at least two generations — a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP.

Unfortunately, the report from the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contains an array of striking omissions and one particularly egregious misrepresentation. The result is a misleading report which, like so much government UFO-related propaganda over seven decades, tells the reader just to move on, nothing to see here.

To start, it makes no mention of how the U.S. government’s official investigation of UFOs began. In a landmark 1947 memo, Lt. Gen. (and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Nathan Twining stated that UFOs are “real and not visionary or fictitious.” He also described their flight characteristics as including “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability…and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”

Nor does AARO’s report mention the earliest surviving intelligence assessment of UFOs — a late 1948 analysis that found many UFO reports came from observers “who, because of their technical background and experience, do not appear to be influenced by unfounded sensationalism nor inclined to report explainable phenomena as new types of aerial devices.”

Citing reports from “trained and experienced U.S. Weather Bureau personnel” from early 1947, the omitted document noted multiple observations of “strange metallic disks” with “a flat bottom and a round top.” (Note that these incidents predated by several months the widely-publicized June 1947 incident that catalyzed the “flying saucer” era.)

Other incidents involved “silver disks or balls” and “balls of fire” that stalked World War II aircrews over the European and Pacific theaters. The Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, Newsweek, Stars and Stripes and the now-defunct International News Service referred contemporaneously to mysterious “silver colored spheres” and “silver balls which float in the air.”

Although omitted by AARO, all of this historical background remains significant because, to this day, images and videos continue to emerge of objects fitting similar descriptions. In fact, AARO’s ex-director openly stated as much during a May 2023 NASA presentation on UAP, that U.S. military personnel are observing “metallic orbs” “all over the world…making very interesting apparent maneuvers.”

Moreover, AARO has not provided a plausible explanation for naval aviators’ more recent encounters — including one harrowing near-collision — with spherical objects exhibiting extraordinary flight characteristics.

Worst of all, AARO’s review misrepresents the most exhaustive, comprehensive historical analysis of UFO incidents, conducted on behalf of the Air Force by the Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1950s. According to AARO, the resulting report found that “all cases that had enough data were resolved and explainable.”

But this is not what Battelle’s analysis found at all, and AARO’s misrepresentation of its conclusions speaks volumes.

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U.S. NAVAL RESEARCH LAB INVESTIGATING UNEXPLAINED ARCTIC PHENOMENA THAT EVADES CONVENTIONAL THEORIES

The U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) is assisting an investigation into unexplained arctic phenomena associated with the sudden formation of intense “polar lows” that are known to lead to hazardous conditions at sea.

Since late February, a field campaign, the Cold-Air outbreak Experiment in the Sub-Arctic Region, or CAESAR, has been collecting data on the phenomenon underlying these potentially dangerous arctic events by observing cloud formations and other Arctic meteorological conditions.

“These subjectively beautiful clouds serve as a natural lab to study cloud dynamics at a wide range of scales,” said Bart Geerts, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming and a CAESAR principal investigator, last month.

Based in Kiruna, Sweden, CAESAR is comprised of an international team of scientists and is attempting to determine the meteorological processes underlying Arctic cold-air outbreaks (CAOs), events that pose a threat to sailing vessels and can potentially cause disruptions to Arctic weather systems.

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NASA captures ‘eerie’ holes in clouds over Florida that have been linked to UFO reports and can be seen from SPACE

A chain of bizarre clouds just northwest of the Florida Keys looks like a giant floating jellyfish, or maybe the UFO from the sci-fi horror film ‘Nope.’

One fishing influencer posted a video of the clouds from below on TikTok, set to the theme music from Netflix‘s horror hit ‘Stranger Things.’ But, in reality, a well-known flying object was the cause: airplanes.

Captured from above late this January, by NASA‘s Terra satellite, the ‘Cavum clouds’ are ‘so odd that people sometimes argue they are signatures of flying saucers,’ according to the US Space Agency, which released the overhead image this week.

The true source of Cavum clouds, sometimes called ‘hole-punch clouds‘ and ‘fallstreak holes,’ had eluded scientists for nearly 70 years, until meteorologists finally cracked the case in 2010.

The strange shapes, they found, are produced when aircraft fly through ‘altocumulus clouds’ — patchy banks of small clouds that form between 7,000 and 23,000 feet up.

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JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE HAS DISCOVERED AN ENORMOUS REMNANT OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE THAT ASTRONOMERS SAY SHOULDN’T EXIST

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has helped reveal an 11-billion-year-old discovery more massive than the Milky Way, which astronomers say should not exist.

The unprecedented discovery, which could upend our current understanding about the formation of galaxies, and also require scientists to rethink the mysterious nature of dark matter, involves an extremely old—and massive—galaxy that existed in the early universe which was home to an ancient population of stars.

What makes the discovery unique and perplexing to astronomers is that the stars observed in this primordial galaxy should not have been able to form according to current models, because there would not have been enough dark matter accumulated to enable their genesis.

The discovery is the latest in a series of findings by the James Webb Space Telescope since its launch that are challenging our existing theories about the universe, and broadening our understanding of cosmic phenomena.

According to Karl Glazebrook, a Distinguished Professor at Swinburne University of Technology and leader of an international team behind the discovery, the new findings were several years in the making and required separate observations from two of the world’s most massive telescopes to tease out enough data to determine its age through spectroscopic observations.

“We’ve been chasing this particular galaxy for seven years,” Glazebrook said in a statement, “and spent hours observing it with the two largest telescopes on earth to figure out how old it was.

However, according to Glazebrook the dormant galactic monster “was too red and too faint, and we couldn’t measure it.”

“In the end, we had to go off Earth and use the JWST to confirm its nature,” Glazebrook said.

Present models about galactic formation are in conflict, since ongoing observations that include discoveries that the James Webb Space Telescope have helped enable continue to challenge existing theoretical ideas. These include longstanding tenets of modern astrophysics like the prediction that massive galaxies were unlikely to be as prevalent in the early universe.

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Strange Reflective ‘Anomalies’ on the Moon Are a Mystery, Scientists Say

Moon dust has fascinated scientists ever since Neil Armstrong scooped up a vial of the stuff back in 1969. The jagged and statically charged lunar dust provides clues about the moon’s early formation, and tells us about our own geologic history and that of the inner solar system.

Now, planetary scientists have discovered strange “anomalies” in sun-reflecting particles covering meter-wide moon rocks. This research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, could help scientists understand more about the processes that formed and changed the moon’s crust and created unexplained magnetic anomalies. But, for now at least, the odd rocks and dust particles remain an unsolved mystery.

Researchers came across these extraterrestrial dust bunnies while trawling a catalog of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. They used artificial intelligence to go through the more than a million images and narrow rocks of interest down to around 130,000.

“We keep finding unknown objects in this way, such as the anomalous rocks that we are investigating in this new study,” said study co-author Valentin Bickel, from the University of Bern, in a press statement. 

They saw that some rocks around the Reiner K crater—a smaller impact crater near the larger Reiner crater on the western side of the moon—had noticeable dark patches on them. “Normally, lunar dust is very porous and reflects a lot of light back in the direction of illumination,” explained Marcel Hess, an image analyst from the Technische Universität Dortmund. “However, when the dust is compacted, the overall brightness usually increases. This is not the case with the observed dust-covered rocks.”

The team described the rocks’ strange light-reflecting properties using a technique called photometric analysis, which measures how light reflects off objects. 

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MARS ROVER SPOTS MYSTERIOUS POLYGONS HIDDEN BENEATH THE RED PLANET’S SURFACE

Researchers operating China’s Zhurong rover say they have spotted a series of mysterious polygons hidden beneath the planet’s surface, similar to polygons NASA spotted on the surface of Mars in 2012. The newly discovered features, however, were detected more than 35 kilometers beneath the planet’s surface.

While researchers believe that these polygon structures could have formed due to extreme environmental shifts in Mars’ ancient past, their exact nature and formation remain a mystery.

The discovery was initially made during the rover’s one-year mission, which lasted from May 2021 to May 2022, in the Utopia Planitia region. Described by researchers from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the largest impact crater in the entire solar system, the researchers behind this mysterious find say that Utopia Planitia “has both experienced and recorded variations of the Martian palaeoclimate.”

By using the rover’s ground penetrating radar, researchers scoured a 1.2-kilometer-wide area for various geological features. As a result, 16 mysterious polygons were spotted below a depth of 35 meters, meaning they were likely formed billions of years in the planet’s past.

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