For the other Astronuts out there

It was the Vogon Constructor Fleet...making a new highway...

 

Posted the original article rather than the DM one, since it seemed too much like an April Fool at first.
Still love to know what they mean by "187.5" though; what exactly?

"Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?

BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.

The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.

To calculate how far the bursts have come, astronomers use a concept called the dispersion measure. Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies – and the further the signal has travelled.

Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5 (see chart). This neat line-up, if taken at face value, would imply five sources for the bursts all at regularly spaced distances from Earth, billions of light-years away. A more likely explanation, Hippke and Lerned say, is that the FRBs all come from somewhere much closer to home, from a group of objects within the Milky Way that naturally emit shorter-frequency radio waves after higher-frequency ones, with a delay that is a multiple of 187.5 (arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245).

They claim there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line-up is coincidence. "If the pattern is real," says Learned, "it is very, very hard to explain."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630153.600-is-this-et-mystery-of-strange-radio-bursts-from-space.html?full=true#.VRtLlvnF9j8

 

1 in 2000 chance? WIth the amount of celestial bodies in our Milky Way...Thats a chance that WILL come up...Mini Pulsar?

 

#299
Vimana war
"India's Mars orbiter captured something strange"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana

 

And the mysterious radio signals are solved. Or at least some of them. Saw this one coming a mile off...
"For years, scientists have been trying to uncover the source of mysterious radio signals being picked up in Australia.
Theories have ranged from evaporating black holes to extraterrestrial communication and mergers of neutron stars.
Now researchers at the Parkes Observatory claim they have finally found the source of these 'alien' signals - in their kitchen microwave.
Scientists knew the strange signals, known as perytons, originated somewhere near to the planet, but they had no idea just how close.
In fact, the microwave was next door in the staff kitchen and visitors centre at the observatory."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3037684/Mystery-alien-signals-solved-Baffled-astronomers-trace-source-noise-observatory-s-kitchen-MICROWAVE.html#ixzz3XF4Is2Px

 

That's a first year student mistake...dubious...

 

Oh jeez, my head hurts...
"We are living in a giant hologram, and everything we see around us is merely a projection of a two-dimensional surface.
This is the bizarre theory put forward in 1997 by physicist Juan Maldacena, who was able to prove its existence in equations that only partially explain our universe.
Now researchers in Austria have, for the first time, been able to show how this strange holographic principle can also work in a more realistic model of our cosmos.
The holographic principle suggests that, like the security chip on your credit card, there is a two-dimensional surface that we can't see.
This surface contains all the information needed to describe a three-dimensional object - which in this case is our universe.
In essence, the principle claims that data containing a description of 3D object – such as the device you're reading this on - could be hidden in a region of this flattened, 'real' version of the universe.
Maldacena came to this conclusion when he discovered that mathematical descriptions of the universe actually require one fewer dimension than it seems.
But up until now, this principle has only been studied in something known as 'curved anti-de-sitter spaces' – or exotic spaces with negative curvature.
Scientists came up with these spaces as way to combine describing gravity in a three-dimensional setting while predicting quantum particles in two spatial dimensions.
Anti-de-sitter spaces are negatively curved, and any object thrown away on a straight line will eventually return.
The problem is they are very different from the spaces in our own universe.
Our universe is largely flat, and on astronomic distances, it has positive curvature.
The latest study by scientists at the Technology University of Vienna now suggests that the holographic principle holds in a flat space-time.
'Juan Maldacena proposed the idea that there is a correspondence between gravitational theories in curved anti-de-sitter spaces on the one hand and quantum field theories in spaces with one fewer dimension on the other', says Daniel Grumiller from the Technology University of Vienna.
To test the theory, scientists spent three years creating gravitational equations that do not require exotic spaces and, instead, live in a flat space."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3057957/Are-living-HOLOGRAM-time-scientists-prove-strange-theory-true-realistic-models-universe.html#ixzz3YYpZQS6X

 

"For years scientists have been left baffled as to why the sun’s outer atmosphere - its corona - is more than 200 times hotter than its surface.
But experts believe they have now found the answer after spotting millions of tiny explosions in the sun’s atmosphere.
Evidence has revealed that 'nanoflares' are heating the plasma in the corona, causing it to reach temperatures much higher than the surface.
The evidence was presented at the Triennial Earth-Sun Summit (Tess) in Indianapolis, Indiana today.
Four related science studies came together to reveal how the sun’s corona is heated to temperatures of more than a million degrees by explosions that are relatively small for the sun, but are large for Earth.

According to researcher Dr Jim Klimchuk, from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, each one of these explosions has the ‘energy of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb,’ the largest ever detonated on Earth.
By comparison to other flares on the sun, they are relatively small, packing just a billionth the energy of a regular solar flare.
But with millions occurring every second they can ‘pack a real wallop and heat to high temperatures,’ said Dr Klimchuk.
This research provides the first evidence that such nanoflares exist."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3059091/Solar-corona-mystery-SOLVED-Millions-superhot-nanoflare-explosions-occur-sun-second.html#ixzz3YekzE1dR

 

Let's hope it wasn't someone's mobile...
"Mysterious 'infrasounds' have been captured from the edge of space for the first time in 50 years.
The sounds were recorded aboard a Nasa student balloon experiment using infrared microphones.
The recording features unexplained hisses and whistles heard 22 miles (36km) above the Earth's surface."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3067819/The-alien-sounds-captured-22-MILES-Earth-Nasa-recording-edge-space-unexplained-hisses-whistles.html#ixzz3ZDgQNlY6

 

What they forgot is that this measurement was done on the 24th of December.

The sounds were later found to be Santa Claus mushing his deer around the planet at high speed and altitude.

 

Well, well, well...
"The moon is engulfed in a permanent, lopsided ring of dust, Nasa has revealed.
Astronomers say the massive dust cloud increases in density when annual events like the Geminids meteor shower spew shooting stars.
It could even harm astronauts passing by on missions to Mars, they warn - and say it could also explain why Apollo astronauts reported seeing a strange glow around the moon.
Astronomers say the massive dust cloud increases in density when annual events like the Geminids meteor shower spew shooting stars.
The results from NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, mission are the first to show the moon is engulfed in a permanent, but lopsided, dust cloud.
'Knowledge about the dusty environments in space has practical applications,' said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi.
'Knowing where the dust is and where it is headed in the solar system could help mitigate hazards for future human exploration, including dust particles damaging spacecraft or harming astronauts.'
The cloud was discovered using data from a detector on board LADEE called the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) designed and built by CU-Boulder.
LDEX charted more than 140,000 impacts during the six-month long mission, which launched in September 2013 and orbited the moon for about six months.
NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, was responsible for spacecraft design, development, testing and mission operations, in addition to managing the overall mission."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3127093/The-moon-s-ring-dust-revealed-Nasa-uncovers-permanent-lopsided-cloud-caused-Apollo-astronauts-strange-glow.html#ixzz3dH7b1Xaq

 

Alien dune buggy races...der!

 

That time of year again already? Tempus Fugits etc...
"The island of Sardinia may be Plato’s island of Atlantis, an expert claims.
Writer and Atlantis expert Sergio Frau says the southern end of the Mediterranean isle resembles an underwater Pompeii, which may have been the inspiration for Plato’s fictional Island of Atlantis.
He and another expert believe a tidal wave that was caused by a comet washed the ancient civilisation away in the second millennium BC, taking the island back to a dark age.
Mr Frau, who is one of the founders of Italian newspaper La Repubblica, was joined by a dozen Italian scientists when visiting the island in June, La Monde via The Guardian reported.
He believes the island is Plato’s Atlas, or Atlantis, contradicting the long-held view that inspiration for the fictional island lies somewhere in the strait of Gibraltar.
The writer said that the southern tip of Sardinia resembles ‘a marine Pompeii submerged by mud’ where metal tools, ceramics, pots and oil lamps were found in the mid-20th Century, in a state suggesting people hastily abandoned the site.
He wanted to uncover why Sardinia was plunged into a ‘dark age’ in 1,175 BC.
Nuraghi, which are megalithic fortresses with a central tower dating from between the 16th and 12th century BC suggest the civilisation was quite advanced before disaster struck."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3200738/Was-Sardinia-home-Atlantis-Comet-triggered-enormous-tidal-wave-wiped-ancient-civilisation-experts-claim.html#ixzz3j5ASxlZr

 

Well, I nearly got the "Blood Moon" last night. In true Scottish fashion, the clouds magically appeared out of nowhere just as we reached totality, and all you could see was a faint reddish glow through them.
I really need to live somewhere like the Atacama desert...

 

Flowing water no less...nice way to rustle up some funding...makes a small outpost very possible given water is probably the hardest facet of such an endeavour...

 

Yes, interesting development!

 

Not to mention oxygen, which they could produce from water.