Mysterious Unexplained Short Signals From Outside Our Galaxy Baffle Astronomers

MessageToEagle.com - These signals are very short and originate from outside of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
They are baffling astronomers and the nature of the objects remains unexplained.
Are the signals natural or artificial in origin? Is it possible an extraterrestrial civilization is sending them or are we witnessing an unknown astronomical phenomenon?
We have previously discussed the possibility raised by astrophysicists that some extraterrestrial civilizations could send us signals by manipulating starlight. This means that there could alien messages concealed in the stars.
Several years ago, we picked up a mysterious signal from outer space that has never been explained. The signal was heard on three different occasions and originated in a region of space between the constellations Pisces and Aries.

Determing whether a signal is of natural or artificila origin is very diffifult.
We can assume that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations can appreciate the benefits of transmitting into space, as a good means of establishing communication with other intelligent alien life-form.
Humans are eager to learn about other alien civilizations and one way to contact other alien cultures is through interstellar signals. However, we should ask ourselves if transmitting radio messages into space pose a risk to human civilization?
Space is filled with sound that we cannot easily identify. It is a very complex task to determine what is of natural or artificial origin.
In July, 2012, an international team using the CSIRO Parkes 64metre radio telescope in Australia detectedmysterious bursts of radio waves coming from billions of light years away.

The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars or black holes."A single burst of radio emission of unknown origin was detected outside our Galaxy about six years ago but no one was certain what it was or even if it was real, so we have spent the last four years searching for more of these explosive, short-duration radio bursts," said Dan Thornton at the University of Manchester.This brings us to the astronomical phenomena known as "fast radio transients", which are objects and events that emit radio waves on ultra-short timescales.

These objects could include flares coming from stars, collisions between black holes, lightning on other planets, and RRATs - Rotating RAdio Transients, pulsars that only fire up when they feel like it. More speculatively, some scientists believe extraterrestrial civilizations could be flashing fast radio beacons into space.
While searching for pulsars back in 2007, astronomer Duncan Lorimer accidently came across something unexpected and unexplainable - a burst of radio waves appearing to come from outside our galaxy, lasting just 5 milliseconds but possessing as much energy as the sun releases in 30 days.

Alien messages can be hidden in the stars. The star cluster NGC 3603 lights up a nebula 20,000 light-years from Earth, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA / ESA / U.Va. / NIA / USRA / NASA Ames
A pulsar is a rotating neutron star. Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of massive stars which have mass greater than 4 to 8 times that of our Sun. After these stars have finished burning their nuclear fuel, they undergo a supernova explosion.
Neutron stars are on average only about 30km in diameter, but they have hugely powerful surface magnetic fields, billions of times that of our Sun. Sometimes it can be very difficult to decide whether astronomers detected unusual pulsar or alien signals.
The so-called Lorimer bursts are very strange. The very short signals come from an unknown region of space. Scientists are convinced the signals are coming from well beyond the Milky Way.
"The awareness of these short signals has long existed," said Andrew Siemion, who searches the time domain for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence at SETI. "But it's only the past decade or so that we've had the computational capacity to look for them."
Scientists are speculating what these burst may be. Some think it is new kind of source. Other theorists suggest that it was a primordial black hole evaporating or a 'spark' from a superconducting cosmic string.
Could they be signals sent from an extraterrestrials civilization that is searching the galaxy for other intelligent species? Duncan Lorimer, professor of physics at West Virginia University is doubtful the bursts are artificial.

What is the cause of these short signals coming from deep space?
"I think that becomes unlikely now that there's more than one of them. With one source, you could always think about it as some sort of single civilization. But now, you're seeing them, essentially, at different parts of the sky. It's very unlikely that different civilizations would be sending things in exactly the same way.
So I think it's something natural in origin, and that - it's really the time scale is the biggest clue to the size of the object, because it's only a few milliseconds in size. The emitting region can only be a few light-milliseconds across. And so that points to some sort of compact, star like a black hole or a neutron star where, potentially, there's large amounts of energy can be released," Lorimer said.
The Lorimer bursts are difficult to study. "The radio telescopes that found them have very small fields of view, and the bursts themselves don't last very long. And it's becoming clear from these recent results that the bursts could be going off in - over the entire sky about once every 10 seconds," Lorimer said.
Astronomers have yet another mystery to add to their list of fascinating phenomena. The mysterious radio bursts from deep space remain unexplained for the time being. "It's quite a puzzle as to what's producing these events so often, " Lorimer said

MessageToEagle.com

See also:
Search For Extraterrestrial Life Continues - UK Astronomers Will Jointly Look For Alien Signals

Mysterious Signal Originating From Jupiter Discovered - Changes In Its Intensity Observed

Source: http://www.messagetoeagle.com/weirdsignalsoutgalaxy.php

ISON Still Alive And Well, Heading On Its Way Away From The Sun, UFO Sighting News.

Hey guys, check out this gif of ISON heading to the sun. Astronomers around the world swore up and down that ISON was a comet and would either break up and explode before it got to the sun, or melt and disappear. Apparently the SOHO/NASA evidence points to the astronomers as all wrong! Remember NASA says ISON is half a mile wide...this baby is monster size and if its not a comet then holy c#@$! Thats one big ship. SCW

Source: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2013/11/ison-still-alive-and-well-heading-on.html

The overview effect. Seeing planet earth as a hole from space

NASA’s Spitzer Telescope Sees Super Earth

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a “super-Earth” planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.
“Spitzer has amazed us yet again,” said Bill Danchi, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.”

The planet, called 55 Cancri e, falls into a class of planets termed super Earths, which are more massive than our home world but lighter than giant planets like Neptune. Fifty-five Cancri e is about twice as big and eight times as massive as Earth. The planet orbits a bright star, called 55 Cancri, in a mere 18 hours.

Previously, Spitzer and other telescopes were able to study the planet by analyzing how the light from 55 Cancri changed as the planet passed in front of the star. In the new study, Spitzer measured how much infrared light comes from the planet itself. The results reveal the planet is likely dark and its sun-facing side is more than 2,000 Kelvin (3,140 degrees Fahrenheit), hot enough to melt metal.
The new information is consistent with a prior theory that 55 Cancri e is a water world: a rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a “supercritical” state where it is both liquid and gas, and topped by a blanket of steam.

“It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away,” said Michael Gillon of Universite de Liege in Belgium, principal investigator of the research, which appears in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The 55 Cancri system is relatively close to Earth at 41 light-years away. It has five planets, with 55 Cancri e being the closest to the star and tidally locked, so one side always faces the star. Spitzer discovered the sun-facing side is extremely hot, indicating the planet probably does not have a substantial atmosphere to carry the sun’s heat to the unlit side.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, likely will be able to learn even more about the planet’s composition. The telescope might be able to use a similar infrared method as Spitzer to search other potentially habitable planets for signs of molecules possibly related to life.
“When we conceived of Spitzer more than 40 years ago, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered,” said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Because Spitzer was built very well, it’s been able to adapt to this new field and make historic advances such as this.”

In 2005, Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light from a planet beyond our solar system. To the surprise of many, the observatory saw the infrared light of a “hot Jupiter,” a gaseous planet much larger than the solid 55 Cancri e. Since then, other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes, have performed similar feats with gas giants using the same method.

In this method, a telescope gazes at a star as a planet circles behind it. When the planet disappears from view, the light from the star system dips ever so slightly, but enough that astronomers can determine how much light came from the planet itself. This information reveals the temperature of a planet, and, in some cases, its atmospheric components. Most other current planet-hunting methods obtain indirect measurements of a planet by observing its effects on the star.

During Spitzer’s ongoing extended mission, steps were taken to enhance its unique ability to see exoplanets, including 55 Cancri e. Those steps, which included changing the cycling of a heater and using an instrument in a new way, led to improvements in how precisely the telescope points at targets.
JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about Spitzer, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Source: http://beforeitsnews.com/space/2013/07/nasas-spitzer-telescope-sees-super-earth-2462782.html
 

Also See:

Image Caption: This illustration shows HD 189733b, a huge gas giant that orbits very close to its host star HD 189733. The planet's atmosphere is scorching with a temperature of over 1000 degrees Celsius, and it rains glass, sideways, in howling 7000 kilometre-per-hour winds. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser

    

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Using imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have determined that a planet orbiting a star close to our solar system has a deep azure blue color when seen from space, much like Earth.
The international team that made the discovery noted similarities between these two planets likely end at their color, as the exoplanet HD 189733b is being described as a gas giant with thousand degree temperatures and violent winds in its atmosphere.

Only 63 light years from Earth, HD 189733b is referred to as a “hot Jupiter,” a class of planets that resemble our solar system’s own gas giants but which orbit much closer to their sun than Saturn or Jupiter. It has been a recent planet of interest for Hubble and other telescopes.
“This planet has been studied well in the past, both by ourselves and other teams,” said Frederic Pont of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and a Hubble program leader. “But measuring its color is a real first – we can actually imagine what this planet would look like if we were able to look at it directly.”
According to the team’s report in Astrophysical Journal Letters, they were able to use the planet’s albedo, or light reflected off its surface, to determine its color. The planet’s reflected light was isolated from the light of its star using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to watch the entire system before, during and after the planet passed behind its star. When the planet passed behind the star, its reflected light was blocked from view, changing the dynamics of the entire system’s light being seen from Earth.

“We saw the brightness of the whole system drop in the blue part of the spectrum when the planet passed behind its star,” explained co-author Tom Evans of the University of Oxford. “From this, we can gather that the planet is blue, because the signal remained constant at the other colors we measured.”

According to the team, the planet’s color comes not from blue oceans, but rather from a muddled, chaotic atmosphere filled with silicate particles which disperse blue light. The Hubble observations allowed the scientists to confirm previous theories about the planet’s blue color.
The colors of gaseous planets like Jupiter and Venus are due to unknown atmospheric particles. Earth, on the other hand, appears blue because the oceans strongly absorb red and green light and reflect the bluish hue of our sky, the scientists said.

“It’s difficult to know exactly what causes the color of a planet’s atmosphere, even for planets in the Solar System,” Pont said. “But these new observations add another piece to the puzzle over the nature and atmosphere of HD 189733b. We are slowly painting a more complete picture of this exotic planet.”

First discovered in 2005, HD 189733b is one of a number of hot Jupiters known to exist throughout the Universe. The planet is relatively close to Earth and unlike anything else in our own Solar System, making it an attractive object of study for researchers.

 

Source: Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

 

True Blue Planet And Its Turbulent Alien World - 2,000 Degrees Fahrenheit And Wind Speed 4,500-mph

 

MessageToEagle.com - Astronomers making visible-light observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have deduced the actual color of a planet orbiting another star 63 light-years away.

The planet is HD 189733b, one of the closest exoplanets that can be seen crossing the face of its star.Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph measured changes in the color of light from the planet before, during and after a pass behind its star. There was a small drop in light and a slight change in the color of the light.

Click on image to enlargeExoplanet HD 189733b. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)


Click on image to enlargeThis artist's concept shows exoplanet HD 189733b orbiting its yellow-orange star, HD 189733. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope measured the actual visible-light color of the planet, which is deep blue. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
"We saw the light becoming less bright in the blue but not in the green or red. Light was missing in the blue but not in the red when it was hidden," said research team member Frederic Pont of the University of Exeter in South West England. "This means that the object that disappeared was blue."

Earlier observations have reported evidence for scattering of blue light on the planet. The latest Hubble observation confirms the evidence.
If seen directly, this planet would look like a deep blue dot, reminiscent of Earth's color as seen from space. That is where the comparison ends.On this turbulent alien world, the daytime temperature is nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and it possibly rains glass -- sideways -- in howling, 4,500-mph winds. The cobalt blue color comes not from the reflection of a tropical ocean as it does on Earth, but rather a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing high clouds laced with silicate particles.

Silicates condensing in the heat could form very small drops of glass that scatter blue light more than red light.
Hubble and other observatories have made intensive studies of HD 189733b and found its atmosphere to be changeable and exotic.HD 189733b is among a bizarre class of planets called hot Jupiters, which orbit precariously close to their parent stars. The observations yield new insights into the chemical composition and cloud structure of the entire class.

Click on image to enlargeThis plot compares the colors of planets in our solar system to exoplanet HD 189733b. The exoplanet's deep blue color is produced by silicate droplets, which scatter blue light in its atmosphere. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
Clouds often play key roles in planetary atmospheres. Detecting the presence and importance of clouds in hot Jupiters is crucial to astronomers' understanding of the physics and climatology of other planets.HD 189733b was discovered in 2005. It is only 2.9 million miles from its parent star, so close that it is gravitationally locked. One side always faces the star and the other side is always dark.In 2007, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope measured the infrared light, or heat, from the planet, leading to one of the first temperature maps for an exoplanet. The map shows day side and night side temperatures on HD 189733b differ by about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This should cause fierce winds to roar from the day side to the night side.