Mickey on Mercury? That's goofy!

We've had the Face on Mars, the Smiley Face on Mars, even the Elephant Face on Mars — and now we've got the Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury, courtesy of NASA's Messenger probe.
The mousy shape comes from three overlapping craters in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of a larger crater known as Magritte. The biggest crater in this scene, which serves as Mickey's head, measures about 65 miles (105 kilometers) across.

This picture was taken during Messenger's extended mission, with the aim of collecting imagery when the sun is near the horizon. Such conditions produce long shadows that highlight small-scale surface features. The result is that the Mercury mission's mapmakers get a better sense of the lay of the land.

Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury back in March 2011, and the end of its one-year primary mapping mission marked the beginning of a one-year extension. Which means we may be hearing more about Mickey, Magritte and their Mercurial friends for months or years to come.

The Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury was today's featured image for our "Where in the Cosmos" Facebook contest. It took just a couple of minutes for Leslie Kebschull and Brad Perdew to come up with the locale for the cartoonish craters. Their entries came in just three seconds apart. To reward their quick minds and fingers, I'm sending them a pair of 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

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In tree rings, Japanese scientists find 8th-century mystery

In the late eighth century, Earth was hit by a mystery blast of cosmic rays, according to a Japanese study that found a relic of the powerful event in cedar trees.

Analysis of two ancient trees found a surge in carbon-14 -- a carbon isotope that derives from cosmic radiation -- which occurred just in AD 774 and AD 775, the team report in the journal Nature on Sunday.

Earth is battered by protons and other sub-atomic particles which are blasted across space by high-energy sources.

The particles collide with the stratosphere and react with nitrogen to create carbon-14, which is then absorbed into the biosphere.

A team led by Fusa Miyake of Nagoya University found that levels of carbon-14 in the two cedars were about 1.2 percent higher in 774 and 775 compared to other years.

This may not sound much, but in relation to background concentrations of carbon-14, the difference is huge.

One source of cosmic rays is the Sun, whose activity varies in phases called Schwabe cycles. Our star also throws the occasional tantrum, spouting bursts of energy called solar flares.

But Miyake's team say that the cosmic whack of 774-775 cannot be attributed to the Schwabe cycle of the time -- and it is far bigger than any known flare from the Sun.

The other possibility is a supernova, or a star that explodes at the end of its life in a welter of gamma radiation.

It burns brightly for a few years before cooling into a remnant that can glow sullenly for centuries.

But there is no documented record in the northern hemisphere of a supernova at around 775.

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New Planet Found in Our Solar System?

by Richard A. Lovett

An as yet undiscovered planet might be orbiting at the dark fringes of the solar system, according to new research.

Too far out to be easily spotted by telescopes, the potential unseen planet appears to be making its presence felt by disturbing the orbits of so-called Kuiper belt objects, said Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Kuiper belt objects are small icy bodies—including some dwarf planets—that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Once considered the ninth planet in our system, the dwarf planet Pluto, for example, is one of the largest Kuiper belt objects, at about 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) wide. Dozens of the other objects are hundreds of miles across, and more are being discovered every year.

(See "Three New 'Plutos'? Possible Dwarf Planets Found.")

What's intriguing, Gomes said, is that, according to his new calculations, about a half dozen Kuiper belt objects—including the remote body known as Sedna—are in strange orbits compared to where they should be, based on existing solar system models. (Related: "Pluto Neighbor Gets Downsized.")

The objects' unexpected orbits have a few possible explanations, said Gomes, who presented his findings Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Oregon.

"But I think the easiest one is a planetary-mass solar companion"—a planet that orbits very far out from the sun but that's massive enough to be having gravitational effects on Kuiper belt objects.

Mystery Planet a Captured Rogue?

For the new work, Gomes analyzed the orbits of 92 Kuiper belt objects, then compared his results to computer models of how the bodies should be distributed, with and without an additional planet.

If there's no distant world, Gomes concludes, the models don't produce the highly elongated orbits we see for six of the objects.

How big exactly the planetary body might be isn't clear, but there are a lot of possibilities, Gomes added.

Based on his calculations, Gomes thinks a Neptune-size world, about four times bigger than Earth, orbiting 140 billion miles (225 billion kilometers) away from the sun—about 1,500 times farther than Earth—would do the trick.

But so would a Mars-size object—roughly half Earth's size—in a highly elongated orbit that would occasionally bring the body sweeping to within 5 billion miles (8 billion kilometers) of the sun.

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The Universe's Most Troubling Paradoxes

The universe seems like a chaotic place. Rules seem to guide a flow of random chances with even known universal laws occasionally overruling and rejecting one another. And on top of all of that the human race has put before itself the task of understanding everything. But somewhere along its journey it's come up with some extremely chilling theories about life the universe and everything.

Of course one of the first problems that arises when examining the universe is the Fermi Paradox. Contrary to the label often placed on the Paradox, there are no final conclusions to be drawn from it - only more questions. It was originally a response to the "silentium universi" or silence of the universe.

When Frank Drake of the University of California, Santa Cruz observed the potential for life existing elsewhere in the universe as very likely through a series of mathematical equations. The Fermi Paradox begged the question, "Why doesn't SETI observe more apparently artificial radio signals?" The conclusions are far from complete to say the least, but are nonetheless often erroneously used as evidence to suggest there is no life elsewhere in the universe.

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Mystery cloud spotted on Mars

Amateur astronomers are puzzling over a seemingly anomalous cloud that has shown up on images of Mars taken over the past few days. Is it really a cloud, or a trick of the eye? Does it really extend 150 miles up from the surface, as some of the observers suggest? And what churned up all that stuff, anyway? The amateurs and the pros will be trying to resolve those questions before the phenomenon fades away.

"It's not completely unexpected," Jonathon Hill, a member of the team at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, told me today. "But it's bigger than we would expect, and it's definitely something that our atmosphere guys want to take a look at."
Hill and his colleagues will be looking at the area where the cloud was spotted using the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, which is one of the instruments on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.

"In the command upload we're preparing to send today, we've included observations that will hopefully capture some of these recent clouds," Hill wrote in an email. "Our THEMIS camera on Mars Odyssey is capable of acquiring simultaneous visible and thermal infrared images, so our atmospheric researchers are pretty excited about the possibility of not only getting a good look at the cloud structures, but also their temperatures."

THEMIS will be checking out heightened cloud activity around Mars' shield volcanoes as well as around the southern site spotted by the amateurs. Pictures from a camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, called the Mars Color Imager, or MARCI, might provide further clues about the southern cloud feature. And amateur astronomers are sending out the alert for observers to keep a close watch on the Red Planet over the coming days.

There's been lots of buzz about the high-altitude cloud on Cloudy Nights and other online discussion forums for skywatchers. Sky & Telescope's Sean Walker says the puff of white was first noticed on March 20 by Wayne Jaeschke, an amateur astrophotographer from Pennsylvania. Since then, other observers have identified the feature in images going back as far as March 12.

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9 real-life planets so outrageous you'd swear they were sci-fi

Source: Blastr, The Syfy Online Network

Astronomers only started discovering planets outside our solar system two decades ago. Yet they're already finding planets freaky enough to house the lairs of supervillains. Here are nine planets so out this world, they make Tattooine feel as ordinary as Tunisia.

1. Diamond Planet

If we're all atoms underneath the fingernail of a giant, this planet is what that giant wears on her engagement ring. Putting literal meaning to "like a diamond in the sky," scientists in August discovered a distant planet that is a diamond. We don't mean "the surface is covered in diamonds," nearly the whole rock is one big sparkling gem. The planet is larger than Jupiter, which makes it slightly larger than our minds can comprehend.

The speculated formation of this body is quite epic. Once a massive star, layers were pulled away by a nearby pulsar. Finally, all that was left was the extremely dense inner core of a star. Which just goes to show if you polish anything long enough it always becomes a diamond.

2. Dark World

750 light-years away lies a planet that is darker than a piece of coal and less reflective than black acrylic paint. Planet TrES-2b is another of the many amazing finds made by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Although its shadowy nature is partially explained by light-absorbent chemicals and a lack of reflective clouds, scientists have no firm idea why it is so dark.

As if finding a planet that is so pitch-black it baffles the finest minds in science isn't creepy enough, the planet is also glowing. Like a charcoal briquette on a barbecue grill, planet TrES-2b is so hot that it constantly gives off a slight red aura. The nearby star that it orbits heats the planet's surface to almost 2,000 degress Fahrenheit. Scientists have not yet discovered whether nearby planets have a distinct char-grilled taste.

3. The Land of Two Suns

Imagine two giant, fire-bursting stars orbiting each other closely. Now imagine an alien planet doing a full orbit around these spinning stars. Now imagine the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd blasting throughout this galaxy, and you'll understand why Kepler-16b is such a mind-blowing planet. It is the only planet of the hundreds discovered that travels around two suns.

How did this one-of-a-kind orbit happen? Since all three bodies remain in the same plane, scientists believe they formed at about the same time from an interstellar disk of dust and gas. The temperature on the planet is well below mind-numbingly freezing, so don't get any hopes up of finding the savior of the galaxy here.


4. The Speeding Giant

"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm—something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't," stated Gáspár Bakos, discoverer of planet HAT-P-2b. The fact that these planets aren't given names like "Speederoo, the Wonder World" illustrates the enormous amount of restraint these astronomers have. Such is the case with HAT-P-2b, which is a massive planet 8 times the weight of Jupiter (but only slightly bigger).

What is this enormous bulk of a rock doing? Traveling blisteringly fast in a bizarre slingshot-style orbital. HAT-P-2b has an elliptical orbit that finds it anywhere between 3 million and 9 million miles from its sun. That's a distance discrepancy relative to the positions of Mercury and Mars. Traveling this orbit takes only 5.6 of our days, which gives a glimpse into the forces involved. Scientists speculate another planet might be near enough to affect HAT-P-2b's orbit. If so, that other planet must be scared, like a goldfish sharing a small aquarium with a whale.

5. Cork of the Universe

If you were to take a rocketship the speed of light for 453 years, you could arrive at a peculiar planet called HAT-P-1b. Unfortunately, the surface of the planet is so unstable you wouldn't be able to step out and take a pic, so this is generally viewed as a bad way to spend 900 years of your life. HAT-P-1b is one of the biggest planets discovered, with a radius 1.38 times that of Jupiter.



Despite its incredible size, HAT-P-1b could float on water. Its density is one quarter that of the wet stuff that covers the Earth. You may be wondering how astronomers can so certainly determine the density of a star that's trillions of miles away. The Astrophysical Journal has an in-depth article about the process. After reading the article, we now know that the way to determine the mass of a distant planet is to know a bunch of gobbledygook about astrophysics.

6. The Realm of Fire and Ice

One of the most confounding planets is upsilon Andromedae B. This star lies in the well-known Andromeda constellation (also known as "The Chained Maiden," because it was discovered back when constellations were allowed cool names). The planet itself always has the same side facing its sun. So one end of the world is blisteringly hot, while the dark side features clouds made of ice.

Estimates put the temperatures on the hot side at about 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, while the cold side checks in around negative 148. However, it's not the temperature extreme that has scientists baffled. For unknown reasons, the hottest part of the planet is not the part directly facing the sun, but rather a section off to the side. That's sort of the equivalent to sticking your hand in a fire and burning off your foot.

7. Lava Oceans

The most interesting feature of Gliese 876 d is hard to hide, since it glows bright red at night. During the day, it is predicted that this planet is bright yellow from the searing heat of a nearby sun. Large bodies of liquid lava would be separated by a burnt crusty surface.

This is one of the smallest planets ever discovered outside of our solar system. Keep in mind this is a relative term, as Gliese 876 b is the size of 7.5 Earths. In addition, it's also one of the closer planets to us: The Silver Surfer could leave Earth at light speed and be shredding wicked lava waves within 16 years.

8. Planet Quickyear

Thousands of light-years away lies a small planet, KOI-55 b that whips around its sun in under 6 hours. That's the shortest known orbital period of any planet discovered spinning around a star. Another nearby planet finishes its complete orbit in 9 hours. Scientists predict that our solar system might end up the same way, billions of years from now. Think of a solar system as a bowl of flushing toilet water, where the sun is the drain. The KOI system is at that point toward the very end when all that water is spiraling tightly towards the drain.

The discovery of this planet, only last December, proves the might of the Kepler space observatory. KOI-55b is smaller than the Earth, yet Kepler spotted it a third of a galaxy away. Since its launch in March 2009, Kepler's powerful space telescope has spotted more than 2,000 celestial objects, many of which are turning out to be planets.

9. Galactus' Punching Bag

In 2009, scientists discovered WASP-17b, a huge planet that might be almost twice as big as Jupiter. What interested astronomers most is that WASP-17b is the only planet ever discovered with what is known as a retrograde orbit. That means the planet is spinning in the opposite direction of its star. How did this happen? The leading theory is that some huge space object pulled the planet in the other direction.

Scientists might never get the chance to see if the planet's trick spin actually makes time flow backward. We're just going to assume the obvious: Time flows in reverse there, and anyone who goes to that planet travels backward in time. Unfortunately, you'd have to spend the first 1,000 years on the planet undoing the lengthy time it took to get there.

With the incredible advances of the past 20 years, new planets are being discovered at an amazing rate. Although the chance of discovering evolved life on another planet may still be a long way off, the unbelievably exotic planets being found nearly every month make us more than willing to wait.

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Awesome NASA Video Captures What Looks Like an Alien Spaceship

A camera on board NASA's STEREO A satellite seems to have captured video of an unknown thing that looks like an actual spaceship. The blip appeared when a Sun's coronal mass ejection (CME) reached planet Mercury. Watch the video and judge by yourself.

Update: whatever it is, it appears on the images taken by STEREO twin satellite too. Check out the new video, taken at the same time, taken from the opposite side of the action.

Make sure to run the video at full screen.



What is happening in the video?

The video shows a coronal mass ejection coming from the Sun and reaching the planet Mercury. Coronal mass ejections are massive explosions of solar wind, radiation and magnetic fields that go well beyond the solar corona, deep into space. They are so big that sometimes they reach Earth.

You can see the gigantic solar wave reaching Mercury but, just as it goes through, something else becomes visible: a very angular shape that seems to be formed by two separate objects joined together. It looks as if the CME wave reveals a volume on impact, interacting with it.

You know, like a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey being uncovered by the Sun's radioactive fury.

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Most liveable alien worlds ranked

Scientists have outlined which moons and planets are most likely to harbour extra-terrestrial life.

Among the most habitable alien worlds were Saturn's moon Titan and the exoplanet Gliese 581g - thought to reside some 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.



The international team devised two rating systems to assess the probability of hosting alien life.

They have published their results in the journal Astrobiology.

In their paper, the authors propose two different indices: an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) and a Planetary Habitability Index (PHI).

EARTH SIMILARITY INDEX

1) Earth - 1.00
2) Gliese 581g - 0.89
3) Gliese 581d - 0.74
4) Gliese 581c - 0.70
5) Mars - 0.70
6) Mercury - 0.60
7) HD 69830 d - 0.60
8) 55 Cnc c - 0.56
9) Moon - 0.56
10) Gliese 581e - 0.53

"The first question is whether Earth-like conditions can be found on other worlds, since we know empirically that those conditions could harbour life," said co-author Dr Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University, US.

"The second question is whether conditions exist on exoplanets that suggest the possibility of other forms of life, whether known to us or not."

As the name suggests, the ESI rates planets and moons on how Earth-like they are, taking into account such factors as size, density and distance from the parent star.

The PHI looks at a different set of factors, such as whether the world has a rocky or frozen surface, whether it has an atmosphere or a magnetic field.

It also considers the energy available to any organisms, either through light from a parent star or via a process called tidal flexing, in which gravitational interactions with another object can heat a planet or moon internally.

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Dark Twin of Earth in Sky and Planet X Near Sun

Submitted by Gordon J. Gianninoto on Tue, 09/20/2011 - 11:47

Hi,

These are recent photos taken in the sky of the what the Hopi call the Blue Katchina, which is the Dark Twin of Earth. It is the same size of Earth, in the same orbit of Earth, and usually on the opposite side of the Sun, unseen. But, as Planet X, aka Nibiru, aka The Winged Globe, came into our solar system going clockwise as seen from above, it stopped Venus in its orbit, stopped the Earth, and then the Dark Twin caught up to Earth and then stopped.

The Dark Twin has no water, no atmosphere, no oceans, no life, but it is loaded with gold and the inhabitants of Planet X, the Annunaki, also known as the 'gods' of the Old Testament of the Bible, have been mining gold there since the last pole shift in 1650 BC. Everytime they came back to Earth, wouldn't you know it, something went wrong until they finally gave up. They are also mining gold on one of the moons of Mars, Phobos.

As you can see, one of the NASA SOHO satellites photographed it when it was near the sun. It does not reflect much light, but as it looms larger it will be more visible. It has been photographed from the U.S. before, but now it is looming larger and easier to spot. You have to photograph the sky just after sunset. Right now the Dark Twin is visible only in the night skies.



DARK TWIN OF EARTH TEXAS SEPT 7TH 2011 1101 PM

PLANET X MOON SWIRL CAPTURED AUGUST 2ND 2011 OVER ARMENIA

Planet X came at us in 1983 from the direction of Taurus, which is Orion. It entered the solar system in 1999 and came from the left behind the Sun around to come out on the right in 2003. Since 2003, NASA's SOHO satellite has photographed it many times, both the Stereo Ahead, and the Stereo Behind satellites have gotten images of it which you must be quick to download as NASA will not discuss the subject. It is laying on its side with its north pole facing the ecliptic and Earth like a flashlight. As it approached, it caused the Sun to erupt and now that it has passed the Sun and is only 30 million miles from the Earth, it is quieting the Sun in its supposed peak eruption period.

As gravity pushes, not pulls, Planet X is not going to hit the Dark Twin, Earth, or Venus. But it has pushed Venus further from the Sun, and amateur astronomers are noting how the disk is larger. Before pole shift, the cloudy planet, Venus will have a ring going almost around it that will look amazingly like the horns of a bull: the horns of Taurus the bull. Again this appearance is noted in prophecies around the world as the horns of Horus. Here we have new photos showing Venus larger than ever, but not as large as it will soon be. The horns have not become evident yet as the Sun illuminates this cloudy planet.

The Dark Twin, Earth and Venus are all trying to evade Planet X, but they are held in a cup of particle flows. When Planet X is first visible to all the world standing alone near the Sun, mark your calendars and it is 7.3 weeks until pole shift: 50 days, during which time as it appears as large as the full moon, or almost so, it will cause the crust of the Earth to separate from the core for one hour and then reattach. Planet X streams a five million mile long tail behind it of twin strands of moons, largest near Planet X, which make it appear, from the front to have wings. As it passes it will be seen from the side as a massive blood red, atmospheric, oceanic, inhabited planet with a serpentine tail rippling behind it. After Planet X passes, it will whip the Earth with the part of the tail that is loaded with trillions of rocks, lots of gravel, lots of iron ore dust, and lots of oily hydrocarbons; all of which will rain down on earth in various but not all spots. Then the oceans will sweep toward the new equator and wipe out all coastlines with a 600 foot tidal surge. That will drain, and then all the ice in the world will be in new locations, as over the next two years the oceans will come up 700 feet.

In the time leading up to pole shift, the earth will moan and shriek, and sing and hum, and huge thunderclaps will be heard in the skies and quakes of force 8 to 10 will sweep the entire globe as lands open up sinkholes, release methane gases, trigger all volcanoes to erupt, and give us very strange weather best characterized by a complete mixing of the seasons.

No one, not one, except the Hopi and Zetatalk, have ever mentioned the Dark Twin, yet here is photographic proof it is real, it is here, and poleshift is about to happen. Time is short. Are you where you want to be? Are you with whom you wish to be? Are you doing what you should be doing?

PLANET X NASA SOHO CAPTURE JULY 22ND 2010

This is a natural event and NOTHING will change it coming. This is the Tribulation of the last book of the Bible. This is your chance to see if people or possessions are more important to you. In the aftertime, unselfish human ETs will help unselfish survivors, and in about 100 years the earth will move to a higher frequency. Few who are alive now will live to see that. Out of every 10 people, 9 will perish. There is no amount of paying for a course on how to be 'ascended' that will change that. Praying, humming, meditating, will not change what is to happen, which occurs every 3657 years causing minor to major pole shift. This time will be the worst. If you only live 5 more minutes, make sure you were thinking of others before yourself.

Before the pole shift happens, and we are now in 7/10 where poleshift is 10/10, the economies of the world will fail and bartering will be the ONLY method of survival. In the poleshift, all governments, religions and banking systems will fail. They will never be replaced. Military bases will try to hang on for up to 10 years but the troops will leave, more interested in their own welfare than servicing the elite. The chaos will begin when Planet X becomes visible in the sky standing alone. People will not show up for work. Nuclear plants, water and sewage systems, will fail, as will transportation and manufacturing. In the quakes leading up to pole shift, all roads will become unusable as all bridges, pipelines and communications will come down with the grid. Modern communications will never be restored as the rain of rocks takes out all space satellites.

Be prepared to form survival communities and roll up your sleeves to work with your hands as your technology in your area will resemble anything from the year 1000 to the year 1800. Perhaps you should have been paying more attention to the Shakers and the Amish, who will hardly notice any difference or change!

If you don't know what to think of this, email it to a friend and ask them. You have my permission to post this as well.

Want to know more? Join http://poleshift.ning.com for free; read http://www.zetatalk.com, download the free program Equake 3D, and sign up for the free RSOE newsletter by sending an email to alertnet@rsoe.hu

Gordon

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NASA Whistleblower: Alien Moon Cities Exist

Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration Data and Photo Control Department manager, Ken Johnston, who worked for the space agency's Lunar Receiving Laboratory during the Apollo missions has been fired for telling the truth.

Johnston asserts NASA knows astronauts discovered ancient alien cities and the remains of amazingly advanced machinery on the Moon. Some of the technology can manipulate gravity.

He says the agency ordered a cover-up and forced him to participate in it.

Over the past 40 years other scientists, engineers and technicians have accused NASA of cover-ups and obscuring data.

The growing number of accusers' allegations range from hiding information about anomalous space objects and lying about the discovery of artifacts on the surface of the Moon and Mars, to denying the evidence of life reported back by the Viking lander during the mid-1970s.

According to Johnston, Apollo astronauts brought back photographic evidence of the artifacts they found during their lunar extravehicular activities (EVAs). Johnston claims NASA ordered him to destroy the EVA images while he was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but he refused.

When he went public, the space agency terminated him.

In a news release, Kay Ferrari, the JPL Director of the SSA Program, explained why she asked Johnston to resign: he had publicly criticized his employer.

When Johnston refused to tender his resignation, he was summarily dismissed without cause.

After his abrupt departure, he indicated he'd had enough and was tired that the U.S. government had been sitting on the proof for more than four decades that ancient alien cities are the Moon.

“I have nothing to lose," he said. "I quarreled with NASA and I got fired."

Evidence has emerged of large structures, perhaps even a base on the far side if the Moon, that seems to support Johnston's allegations. See Before It's News article "Claim: Secret American Base Discovered on Moon."

Space scientist livid over NASA cover-up

Ken Johnston isn't the only one to have a bone to pick with NASA.

The scientist who oversaw the important life-detection experiment aboard the 1976 Viking space probe mission on Mars continues to blast the U.S. space agency.

Gilbert Levin insists his biology experiment proved life is in the Martian soil.

"We obtained positive data corresponding with all the pre-mission criteria, which proved the existence of microbial life in the soil of Mars," Levin told National Geographic. ["I Found Life on Mars in 1976, Scientist Says"]

The prominent scientist is so angry at NASA he's even created his own website designed to shout to the world that life really is on the Red Planet.

The color of deception

Many space scientists have challenged NASA about yet another fraud the agency allegedly perpetrated for decades: the color of the Martian sky.

For years the space agency released photos of Mars with a reddish tinged sky and rusty red landscape. They got away with it too until independent researchers and Mars missions undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that the Martian sky actually looked very similar to Earth's sky--and the Martian landscape pretty much resembled the pale salmon-colored terrain of the American Southwest.

Holger Isenberg has written about it on the German site "The Color of Mars." Here's a translated link with the photographic evidence.

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Weird exoplanet discovered orbiting two stars

By Irene Klotz

If you could stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, you'd have two shadows. At sunset, you would see an orange star about the size of the sun and next to it a much fainter red star. As the stars slipped toward the horizon, they would change places in the sky, like partners in a square dance.

You would not need to be Luke Skywalker visiting his home planet of Tatooine in the movie "Star Wars" to watch the twin sunset. The only science fiction in this story is how to make the 200 light-year journey to Kepler-16, a binary star system jointly sharing the Saturn-sized planet, Kepler-16b.

The finding, reported by scientists on NASA's Kepler planet-hunting space telescope team, adds a new page into Mother Nature's recipe book for extrasolar planets.

"It's the first one that circles two stars, so it's a fundamentally different kind of planet," lead researcher Laurance Doyle, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

From a distance about as far as Venus orbits the sun, Kepler-16b circles both its parent stars in 221 days. The stars, which on average have about 21 million miles between them, fly around each other about every 41 days.

The telescope points at a fixed position in space, looking for changes in light streaming from about 155,000 target stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Because the Kepler-16 system is so perfectly aligned, scientists believe the planet formed alongside its parent stars from a common disk of gas and dust. The plane in which the two stars orbit is aligned within one-third of a degree of the orbit of the planet.

"It shows the gears of celestial mechanics turning and interlocking so vividly, you almost want to reach out and touch it," exoplanet scientist Marc Kuchner, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"Kepler himself would have been dizzy with excitement," he added, referring to the telescope's namesake, Johannes Kepler, the 16th century scientist who deduced the laws of planetary motion.

Both the Kepler-16 stars are smaller than the sun, so their planet lives largely outside the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on its surface. Water is believed to be an essential ingredient for life as we know it.

The planet is estimated to experience temperatures that plummet from -100 to -150 degrees Fahrenheit (-70 to -100 degrees Celsius).

Timing also played a role in the discovery, notes Doyle. Computer models show that in early 2018, the planetary transits across the larger star will disappear from Kepler' view until around 2042. The passages across the smaller star's face, already slipping from view, will vanish in May 2014, and won't be back for 35 years.

"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said John Knoll a visual effects supervisor with Lucasfilm, developer of the "Star Wars" movies. "More often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we imagine."

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Comet Elenin heads towards Earth

The ancient Mayan calendar predicts that we will be coming to an end of a cycle in the year 2012. The winter solstice is believed to be the date that the world will end. Lately there has been a lot of buzz about the comet Elenin. The comet is set to come close to earth on October 16th of this year and many believe this will have atrocious affects on the planet. Brooks Agnew, author and host of X-squared radio, tells us why we should care.

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Giant Black Cubes near the Sun

It seems that recently a new fashion has developed with the SOHO images.

More and more black cubes are seen on the pictures of the sun. We think the picture clearly shows cutting of pixels within certain areas.

Why would NASA cut these pixels out of the pictures? Why do they make it seems so obvivious?

What is there to hide?

The next picture is a very remarkable one from January 2010 and might show something they want to hide!

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7 Things That Create Great Space Hoaxes

By Bjorn Carey and Remy Melina, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writers

It doesn't take much to convince people that they've seen an experimental missile or a UFO. A funny-looking cloud or an exceptionally bright planet will usually do the trick. Here, our top 7 things that drive space-related hoaxes.

1. Lightning

Mysterious UFO sightings may go hand-in-hand with a natural weather phenomenon known as sprites — flashes high in the atmosphere triggered by thunderstorms. Sprites suddenly appear when lightning from thunderstorms excites the electric field above the storm, producing dancing flashes of bright light.

Sprites can take the form of fast-paced balls of electricity, although they can also form streaks or tendrils. "Winter sprites" are common in the northern hemisphere during winter months.


The appearance of a "sprite" (about 30 miles high by 30 miles wide), flashing above a distant thunderstorm. The "sprite" is about 175-250 miles away from the camera.

2. Missile Tests

In December 2009, a spectacular spiral light show appeared in the sky above northern Norway: A giant spiral, with a green-blue beam of light shooting from its center, lit up the sky in a raindrop-ripple effect pattern.

It looked like a wormhole to another dimension, but it turned out that the lights were caused by a Russian missile that failed just after launch, according to Russia's defense ministry. The botched Bulava ballistic test missile spun out of control, thus creating the mysterious rotating spiral effect.


Norway residents got front-row seats to a bizarre light show: a giant spiral with a green-blue beam of light shooting from its center and lighting up the sky.

3. Weird Cloud Formations

Last October, footage of a giant halo in an overcast sky over Moscow surfaced on YouTube. The video had everything needed to ignite UFO rumors. It's grainy. At one point, a dark pointy object appears to bolt out of the ring. There's even a panicked-sounding Russian radio broadcast in the background.



Cool-headed meteorologists were quick to put the story to bed: It was just an optical illusion, the cause of sunlight hitting a cloud disturbed by wind or plane traffic in just the right way. Most likely it was what is known as a hole-punch cloud. These occur in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, which are often composed of ice crystals and super-cooled water droplets – water that is below freezing temperature, but still in liquid form. The physical properties that hold these clouds together are delicate, and when disturbed – by a jet plane, wind or even cloud seeding efforts – the droplets can freeze instantly or evaporate, the latter of which will form the hole.

4. Balloons

Unlike Balloon Boy, not all balloon-driven hoaxes are intentional. In the afternoon of Oct. 13, hundreds of people in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood saw a cluster of silvery, shiny lights glittering from above. Naturally, initial descriptions of the supposed UFO varied wildly: Some folks reported seeing one large, slow-moving object full of lights, while others say they saw nearly a half-dozen entities.

The strange, shimmering lights turned out to be caused by 12 helium balloons that escaped from an engagement party held for a teacher at the Milestone School in Mount Vernon, Westchester County, about 15 miles away. The balloons were inadvertently released at 1 p.m., and the first of the "UFO" sightings occurred around 1:30 p.m.



5. Venus

The planet Venus often gets mistaken for a UFO. To viewers on Earth, the second planet from the sun appears as a bright light that hangs in the sunset sky, seeming to slowly hover in the twilight as it outshines every star except for the sun. Because Venus orbits the sun inside our own orbit, from our perspective it constantly darts out on the either side of the sun, which people often mistake for a moving UFO.



6. Airplanes

Here's proof that anything funny-looking in the sky can cause an uproar. This past Monday, most of the U.S. woke up to reports that a mystery missile had launched off the coast of California. The sightings were spurred by video of a condensation trail, or contrail, streaking through clouds lit up by the rising sun. No one could conclusively say what it was at the time—officials at the Department of Defense reported no scheduled missile launches, NORAD and USNORTHCOM detected no foreign activity and the FAA hadn't cleared any commercial space launches in the area. After a thorough investigation, many experts now believe that the streak was a – wait for it – a run-of-the-mill jet aircraft contrail that happened to hang around longer than usual. Contrails appear most vivid around sunrise or sunset, and it's not uncommon that one showing up in an unexpected location will generate whispers of a UFO or experimental military aircraft.

Lights in the sky, especially when viewed by pilots, can also cause a stir, but are almost always revealed to be running lights of other aircraft, or flares dropped by weather research craft.



7. Military Experiments

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a great time for spotting UFOs and aliens in New Mexico, primarily because that's where the Air Force was conducting some of its top-secret research. One such program was known as Project Mogul and involved floating microphone-carrying balloons to high altitudes in an attempt to pick up the sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. The Air Force has since confirmed that a 1947 crash of one of those balloons created the debris that birthed the Roswell UFO Incident.

Another military experiment provided the bodies for that UFO. In the 1950s, Air Force scientists dropped several dozen anthropomorphic dummies from planes to test new high-altitude parachutes and determine whether the bodies would enter a dangerous spin as they fell. Results from these studies contributed to designs for the parachutes and pressurized suits that fighter jet pilots and early astronauts would wear. The Air Force was more than happy to allow Russian spies to think New Mexicans were a little kooky than to reveal the true military origin of the sightings.

Some pictures and text in this article are granted permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; and as such are reproduced in this article.


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Mysterious Structure Discovered on Mars

According to this video, David Martines was looking around Google Mars when he happened to find a large building-like structure in the northern hemisphere of the planet. He calls it "Bio-Station Alpha," which of course is not its real name, but he assumes someone or something is living in it. Martines estimates that the white structure is over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide. It can be found at the following coordinates on Google Mars: 71 49'19.73"N 29 33'06.53"W

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Seeing Things On Mars: A History of Martian Illusions

by Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer

Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there's Martian life.

The most recent example was this week's supposed revelation that a secret Mars base, inhabited either by humans or Martians, can be seen in a photo of the Red Planet's surface taken by an orbiting spacecraft.

But scientific rigor has always stepped in to prove that these objects are not really there. In this vast and lonely universe, are Earthlings just desperate for next-door neighbors to play with? Looking back over the long history of Martian illusions (and human delusions), it certainly seems so.

1. Land and sea

In 1784, Sir William Herschel, a famous British astronomer, wrote that dark areas on Mars were oceans and lighter areas were land. He speculated that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings who "probably enjoy a situation similar to our own." Herschel's theory prevailed for a century, with other astronomers claiming that vegetation could even be observed in the lighter-colored regions taken to be land. Fortunately for Herschel, his other contributions to astronomy — which earned him the honor of being the namesake of two powerful observatories — were great enough to keep his theories on Martians near the bottom of his biography.

2. Canali vs. canals

During Mars' close approach to Earth in 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope and observed grooves or channels on the Red Planet's surface. The Italian word he used for them, "canali," was translated to "canals" in English, leading many in the English-speaking world to conclude that Mars had intelligent life that had built a system of waterways.

That misconception was popularized by an astronomer named Percival Lowell, who in 1895 presented drawings of the canals in a book, titled "Mars," and argued his full theory in a second book, "Mars as the Abode of Life," in 1908. The inaccuracy was further fueled, historians say, by excitement over the construction of the Suez Canal, an engineering marvel of the era completed in 1869.

The theory was debunked in the early twentieth century, when it was demonstrated that the "canals" were merely optical illusions: when viewed through poor-quality telescopes, pointlike features, such as Mars' mountains and craters, appear to be joined together by straight lines. Later, spectroscopic analysis of the light coming from Mars showed that there was no water on its surface.



3. ET radio

In 1921, Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the first radio telegraph system, claimed to hear signals that he thought might be Martian. The next year and again in 1924, at times when Mars swung relatively close to Earth, the U.S. government asked all radio stations to go silent so that they could listen out for any Martian transmissions coming our way.

But ET radio was silent.

4. The face

It all started back in 1976, when NASA released an image of an interesting mountain on Mars, taken by the Viking 1 spacecraft, complete with a caption that described the formation as appearing to have eyes and nostrils. More than thirty years later, the "Face on Mars" still inspires myths and conspiracy theories, with many people believing it to be an artificial structure built by an ancient Martian civilization.

From a bird's-eye view, shadows on the mountain really do make it look like a face. From other angles, however — angles seen in photos taken by the Mars Express Orbiter, among other spacecraft — the mountain is clearly just that, and doesn't look much like a face at all.

"Pareidolia" is the scientific term for seeing faces (or other significant objects) where they aren't. Face pareidolia happens, scientists say, as a byproduct of our heightened sensitivity to the details of human faces. Takeo Watanabe of the Boston University Visual Sciences Laboratory put it this way: "We've over-learned human faces so we see them where they aren't."



5. Martian person

In a photo snapped by the Mars rover Spirit in 2007, there appears to be a human being wearing a robe and kneeling in prayer. It is, of course, a rock, and merely morphs into human form in our brains because of pareidolia, as explained above.



6. Bio Station Alpha

This week, yet another smidgen of evidence arose that, on first examination, seemed to support the notion that there's life on Mars. In a viral Youtube video, a self-described "armchair astronaut" claimed to have identified a human (or alien) base on Mars, which he dubbed Bio Station Alpha. He found a somewhat mysterious linear structure that appears to be on the Red Planet's surface as seen in Google Mars, a new map program created from compiled satellite images of the planet.

Astronomers immediately identified the structure — in actuality just a white, pixelated streak — as an artifact deposited by a cosmic ray in the image sensor of the camera that snapped the photo. "With space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it's very common to see these cosmic ray hits," said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona and the director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory.

Cosmic rays are energetic particles emitted by the sun. They deposit electric charge in camera pixels as they penetrate them, momentarily saturating them and creating a white streak in any photo snapped at the time.

When the raw image file was converted to a JPEG for use in Google Mars, McEwen said compression probably caused the cosmic ray artifact to become more rectangular and "Bio Station"-like. This was subsequently proven to be the case, when the original source photo that Google used was identified. It contained an obvious cosmic ray artifact, which, when processed, turned into the structure that the "armchair astronaut" mistook for a Mars base.



Some pictures and text in this article are granted permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; and as such are reproduced in this article.

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Two Huge Holes in the Sun Spotted

By IB Times Staff Reporter | February 13, 2011 5:23 AM EST

Japanese scientists have spotted two huge holes on the sun's magnetic field, and it has been observed that the holes look darker than other parts of the sun.

The holes, called coronal holes, are gateways for solar material and gas to spill out into space, according to space.com. The gaps in the sun's magnetic field make a hole through its atmosphere, letting gas out, NASA has said.

The new finding was made by Japan's Hinode sun-watching satellite which has been observing sun since 2006. "Japan's Hinode sun-watching satellite photographed the sun's two coronal holes on Feb. 1. In the image, one coronal hole appears near the top center of the sun while another one – a polar coronal hole – is visible near the bottom of the view", space.com said in an article.

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Possible New Planet Found in our Solar System Planet X? Nibiru

A new possible planet has been found right here in our own solar system. The possible planet Tyche (pronounced “tie-key”) is believed to be a gas giant located some 1.35 trillion miles from the Sun. If this planet is in fact a planet could it possibly be the infamous planet X otherwise known as Nibiru?

Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette study comet movements and were the first to find the planet by noticing the unusual patterns of comets in the area that seemed to be affected by a large mass swaying them in different directions. This really isn’t a brand new discovery as Matese and Whitmire have been trying to come up with the evidence of the possible Planet X since 1999 so after ten years of compiled evidence they think they may have enough to convince the rest of the scientific community.

NASA’s WISE (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) which scans the sky in infrared has been scanning the sky’s mapping out hundreds of millions of objects producing millions of images might soon be pointed in that direction to see if it can pick up the distant planet. If found it will make Tyche our 9th planet.

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The sun's journey through the year makes an infinity shape

Picture is (C) copyright to Tamas Ladanyi

Hungarian photographer Tamas Ladanyi photographed the sun's position at 9 AM GMT every ten days in 2010, and the result is this striking infinity symbol in the sky, known as an analemma.

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Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist

(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this was the beginning of everything, but lately a few scientists have been wondering if something could have come before that, setting up the initial conditions for the birth of our universe.

In the most recent study on pre-Big Bang science posted at arXiv.org, a team of researchers from the UK, Canada, and the US, Stephen M. Feeney, et al, have revealed that they have discovered four statistically unlikely circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers think that these marks could be “bruises” that our universe has incurred from being bumped four times by other universes. If they turn out to be correct, it would be the first evidence that universes other than ours do exist.

The idea that there are many other universes out there is not new, as scientists have previously suggested that we live in a “multiverse” consisting of an infinite number of universes. The multiverse concept stems from the idea of eternal inflation, in which the inflationary period that our universe went through right after the Big Bang was just one of many inflationary periods that different parts of space were and are still undergoing. When one part of space undergoes one of these dramatic growth spurts, it balloons into its own universe with its own physical properties. As its name suggests, eternal inflation occurs an infinite number of times, creating an infinite number of universes, resulting in the multiverse.

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