Catching UP On Space Events

Remember all the fuss that was made over the lights that were seen in the sky over Norway? The lights scared a lot of people who believed that they were seeing a extraterrestrial vehicle. There seemed to be no explanation in nature for what was going on. A week or two later, the Russians revealed that they had tested a missile that was launched from a submarine and it went out of control and spiraled back to earth creating a pinwheel light effect in the sky. Well it looks like this mystery is solved.

YouTube Video

Scientists have been wondering why Saturn's moon Iapetus seems to appear and disappear. It has been called the yin-yang look. The problem has been solved. The Cassini probe has shown that migrating ice makes one half of the moon very reflective. The other side of the moon is covered with dark dust. The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 and has spent all the years since 2004 orbiting Saturn.

Hexagon Cloud Over Saturn
Photo Source: NASA

Saturn's hexagon cloud is in the news again. Scientists are examining the cloud even more closely. The Cassini spacecraft has been focusing on the cloud lately. Most scientists think that this cloud was formed by the path of a jet stream traveling around the planet's pole. The cloud was discovered by the Voyager spacecraft a little more than 25 years ago and is still going strong. The cloud is so large that it has an estimated diameter larger than twice that of earth. It has been estimated that the jet stream would have to be traveling about 220 miles per hour. The longevity of the cloud has been compared to the storm on Jupiter, known as the cause for the Great Red Spot on that planet.

Artist Conception Of A Newly Discovered Planet
Graphic Source: NASA

Up to now we have been discovering hundreds of new planets, but that is about to change. Soon they will be discovering thousands of them, thanks to new equipment. The most advanced probes that can be used for planet hunting are the COROT from the European Space Agency and the Kepler from NASA. These probes are capable of discovering planets much smaller than Mercury and also planets that are much closer to their star, or sun. One article stated that there could be planets so close to their suns that they sizzle as they orbit. One scientist connected with Kepler stated that some of the findings are so unusual that he isn't ready to go public with them. I can't help but wonder what he has found?

A film is on YouTube that purports to show many anomalies that NASA has caught on film. Here is the link to it:

Video YouTube

I have to say this, because it has become obvious to me over the years. We have been conducting secret activities in space. I think that there is no doubt that a military program exists and there are ships out there that belong to us that are far more advanced than anything that is currently being shown at NASA, or in the civilian sector. Combine this with the new stealth technology that can hide things from view and from radar and they are easily hidden from even the shuttle crews. There could be anything out there, even ships that have perfected the ability to bend space itself. There are so many military secrets that there is just no way of knowing how far we have advanced, but I remember one of the engineers at a large aerospace firm stating that people would be shocked if they knew how far ahead we really were in technology and that we could reach the stars if we wanted to.

Black holes are one thing, but a Quark star or a Strange star, which are theoretical now, may turn out to be more plentiful than black holes and be just a few times heavier than our sun. They would be stellar black holes and physicists are studying this phenomena worldwide and trying to decide if these things exist. It is thought that a massive star collapsing can create a black hole, but what about stars that are not quite massive enough for that? It is believed that these become Neutron stars. If a strange star was formed, that would mean that the gravity was so strong that it squeezed out the quarks from the sub atomic particles, which are protons and neutrons. What would be left would be stuff science knows as strange matter. That is why the stars are called strange stars. Unlike a black hole, a strange star, or quark star, would give off a dim light known as a bremsstrahlung emission. An astrophysicist stated, "If we just found one object that was made of strange matter and was stable, that would be an amazing result,"

NASA scientists just can't figure out what the data means that is coming in from some probes. If it is correct, they figure that the laws of physics have to be wrong. What are they finding? It is a strange force that is picked up when probes go through the gravitational field of planets and it doesn't seem to have a source. This strange force was first noticed in 1990, when the NASA probe Galileo went through the gravitational field of our own earth. They noticed this force because the probe was going faster when it swung past the earth than was calculated. The effect does not create a lot of force, but enough to be easily measured. In the case of the Galileo, the probe was traveling about 0.01 more kilometers per hour, than predicted. Since then this has been noticed several times with other probes. Here is the really strange thing, not all probes are affected by this force. Why it effects some and not others makes the mystery even more mysterious.

Good news for everyone out there, NASA scientists say that the world won't end in 2012! They went on to say that nothing bad will happen to us that year. That is quite a prediction for an agency that wasn't even able to predict two close encounters between the earth an asteroids in 2009.

Let me end this article with a couple of strange facts. If we are talking about the quantum world, then events in the future can effect the past. An experiment was carried out in 2007 by researchers that proved this. Now I am the first to admit that I do not understand this, but here it is. If you wait for light to pass through one of two slits and then observe which way it came through, it will retroactively force it to have passed through one or the other. Causality is then working backwards, the present is affecting the past. No questions please. Another strange thing is that scientists can only account for about 2% of the mass of the universe, that is why they are always talking about dark matter and dark force as the way to make up the difference. If black holes do not have a source of mass to acquire they will eventually evaporate since they lose their mass through Hawking radiation.