Off Topic Dark Matter and other Astronomy information.

Didn't watch but the Apollo trajectory avoided the main part of the inner belt and minimised the exposure in the outer belt, so if it's about going through both belts then yes it hasn't been done and testing it unmanned first would be a reasonable check, especially in today's risk-averse society

 

it was actually bait for Donga I should have known better

 

Did you like the new pics of Jupiter from the Hubble?

 

The spot is shrinking #climatechange

 

Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way
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The Independent
Lee Williams5 hrs ago
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Odom took 'every drug imaginable'

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The most beautiful holiday spot in every European country

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© Reuters Milky Way seen from Lady Elliot Island, AustraliaA large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mess of matter in tight formation.

This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.

Boyajian, who oversees the “Planet Hunters” project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.

That’s when Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) got involved. Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.

The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilizations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.

“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”

 

Astronomers have for the first time detected ethanol and the simple sugar glycolaldehyde in a comet (Sci. Adv. 2015, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500863).

The observations add to the rapidly growing roster of complex organics found in comets and bolster the theory that such molecules somehow formed on icy dust grains during early solar system formation.

The report comes on the heels of the recent discovery of four other molecules never before seen in comets: methyl isocyanate, acetone, propanal, and acetamide. The Philae lander, dispatched to the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency’s Rosettaspacecraft, spotted those species earlier this year (C&EN, Aug. 3, page 7).

In the new experiments, Nicolas Biver, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, in France, and colleagues obtained rotational spectra from a comet called Lovejoy using the 30-meter telescope at IRAM, in Spain’s Sierra Nevada.

Lovejoy is a particularly active comet, spewing great quantities of dust and gas into space and providing Biver’s team with a rich source of material to study. The group found signatures for 21 different molecules, including species that have already been identified in comets, such as ethylene glycol and formamide.

But although ethanol and glycolaldehyde have been observed—along with many other complex organics—in star-forming regions of space, they had never before been observed in comets.

Given that these two molecules are in the same family of compounds, such as methanol and formaldehyde that have been found in comets, the discovery is not surprising, says Jason P. Dworkin, an astronomer at the National Aeronautics & Space

Ale in space

 

You've had Shermans, you've had the French....

Coming soon to a pub in Latchford....

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"The observations add to the rapidly growing roster of complex organics found in comets and bolster the theory that such molecules somehow formed on icy dust grains during early solar system formation."

Except that there are many substances on comets that could not possibly have formed in the depths of space. Strange that they ignore all of that

 

EXCLUSIVE: 'I stopped Large Hadron Collider destroying human race', claims ex-politican

 

Simon Parkes, who until April was a Labour town councillor for Whitby in North Yorkshire, claimed "psychopathic" members of a group of world leaders, known as the Illuminati by conspiracy theorists, were hellbent on using the huge atom colliding machine to open a vortex that would allow them complete control over all of us.

The LHC, run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Geneva on the French-Swiss border, is the world’s largest and most powerful machine and used to collide particles at close to the speed of light in a bid to discover more about physics and the possibility of parallel universes.

 

The curious machine developed across a 16-mile ring of superconducting magnets has had critics before amid claims it could inadvertently create a black hole that may swallow up the world, but Mr Parkes' story is one of the strangest to date.

Mr Parkes, who has previously been a borough councillor in London and lectured at the Natural History Museum, made the extraordinary claims before hundreds of people during a paranoia-inducing speech at a UFO convention in a country manor house.

Conspiracy theorists claim the Illuminati is a worldwide secret organisation which really runs the world above the global leaders we see in office.

He claimed to have foiled a sinister plot by the "elite group" just weeks ago in August to use the LHC to open an evil portal that would allow them to become more powerful.

Mr Parkes, who has earlier made national headlines after saying his mother was alien, and he lost his virginity to one, was the key speaker of the event organised by the UFO Academy at High Elms Manor in Watford, Hertfordshire.

 

So many people turned out to see him there were people seated in a corridor outside the main hall and others watching it on a live stream in another room.

He even said the LHC was developed using alien technology from another planet by evil Illuminate scientists to "interfere with time, open portals to other dimensions and severe the link between good humans and the spiritual plane and divine consciousness."

He claimed an attempt was made to severe "the link" on August 15.

He said: "It became very obvious the LHC was going to be used for a pivotal roll on August 15 this year."

This was a month after the announcement that the LHC had discovered a new particle known as a pentaquark.

Mr Parkes said: "I have not said the LHC can break the divine link between all good humans on this plane and divine consciousness, but that was their plan."

But Mr Parkes claimed to have sources who made him aware of what was about to unfold, so he set about arranging a global "mind warp" to defeat the plan.

He said: "We couldn't just do nothing. There is much you could do without sticking your head above the parapet.

 

"I created a global meditation group connecting consciousness and most countries now have two or three people.

"Places like the US and UK have got hundreds.

"We really can affect matters with our mind."

He said he planned to get everyone to take part in a "combined meditation" at lunch time on August 15, but said the Illuminati became aware of this and decided to switch the LHC on at 3am to out fox him.

He said: "A number of people who associate with me made me aware that someone had activated it in the early hours and placed Satanic black magicians, who were remotely viewing the installation on the inside."

Mr Parkes claimed his group sent a telepathic wave of "positive energy" which stopped the portal from completely opening and damaged the LHC.

He said: "it is not illegal to psychically damage government equipment because the law courts do not believe it is possible."

 

The LHC came back on, but they thwarted it again, he claimed.

He said: "All over the globe good people started to meditate for five to six minutes, after the meditation it failed again, but we did take some damage. One person lost hearing in an ear for three weeks and others had ringing in ears because there was an attack by those psychically protecting it."

He claims the mass meditation caused a thunderstorm over Switzerland, meaning the LHC was forced onto a back-up power system which only gave a thirds of its full capacity.

He said: "Gaia came to our rescue and a thunderstorm took out the power."

According to New Age philosophies Gaia is an all powerful force govering the universe.

He said: "With just a third of the power it created a 0.8mm hole between the third and fourth frequency, but that was not enough to bring anything through."

There is, of course, no evidence that the LCH was used in any such attempt or that Mr Parkes and his group stopped it in its tracks.

However, his conspiracist claims did disturb some audience members.

 

One woman, aged in her 50s, who would not be named, told Express.co.uk: "I was expecting to come and learn about UFO sightings, but all the speakers were pretty out there even by UFO standards. I found Simon's talk quite disturbing and it makes you wonder where on Earth this is all coming from?"

But a man, in his 20s, said he trusted the advice.

He said: "Simon is spot on with all this. If he says it happened, it happened."

Express.co.uk has contacted CERN, which runs the LCH, to see if it wishes to respond to the extraordinary allegations, and awaits a response.

Mr Parkes also said the failure of the LCH plan meant the cruel Illuminati leaders needed a new plot as there were just 200 of them left on Earth, after some of them had fled the planet.

He said: "For 25 years it has been known the psychopaths want to kill half to a third of the population.

"But now they may not need to kill so many because of what they are planning next."

You couldn't make this **** up, but someone did

 

****ing hell, someone call the white coats for crying out loud!

 

Good stuff.................'he set about arranging a global 'mind warp' to defeat the plan' ....................sounds cool

 

Good job he's not evil, he could rule the world

 

.....and if it hadn't been for you meddling kids, I would of got away with it

 

Do you think this global mind warp could help us beat chelsea and score more than one goal.

Either way its no more nonsensical than some of the stuff that gets posted on here.