Astronomers Discover New Earth-Size World Where 1 Year = 10 days!

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered a close new world about the size of Earth, where a year lasts just under 10 days.

At a distance of 11 light-years, Ross 128 b is the second-closest planet to be detected yet outside our solar system with surface temperatures potentially similar to ours.

Ross 128 b is very near its star, thus the short orbit. But it doesn't get broiled because the red dwarf star is cool. The star is also quiet, meaning no radiation flare-ups. That's encouraging news for seekers of extraterrestrial life. The planet is believed to border the so-called habitable zone.

A team led by the University of Grenoble Alps' Xavier Bonfils made the discovery using La Silla Observatory in Chile. The findings were reported Wednesday.

NASA's exoplanet count stands at 3,550.
 

Earth's ozone hole shrivels to smallest since 1988

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ozone hole over Antarctica shrank to its smallest peak since 1988, NASA said Thursday.

The huge hole in Earth's protective ozone layer reached its maximum this year in September, and this year NASA said it was 7.6 million square miles wide (19.6 million square kilometers). The hole size shrinks after mid-September.

This year's maximum hole is more than twice as big as the United States, but it's 1.3 million square miles less than last year and 3.3 million square miles smaller than 2015.

Paul Newman, chief Earth scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said stormy conditions in the upper atmosphere warmed the air and kept chemicals chlorine and bromine from eating ozone. He said scientists haven't quite figured out why some years are stormier — and have smaller ozone holes — than others.

"It's really small this year. That's a good thing," Newman said.

Newman said this year's drop is mostly natural but is on top of a trend of smaller steady improvements likely from the banning of ozone-eating chemicals in a 1987 international treaty. The ozone hole hit its highest in 2000 at 11.5 million square miles (29.86 million square kilometers).

Ozone is a colorless combination of three oxygen atoms. High in the atmosphere, about 7 to 25 miles (11 to 40 kilometers) above the Earth, ozone shields Earth from ultraviolet rays that cause skin cancer, crop damage and other problems.

Scientists at the United Nation a few years ago determined that without the 1987 treaty by 2030 there would have been an extra 2 million skin cancer cases. They said overall the ozone layer is beginning to recover because of the phase-out of chemicals used in refrigerants and aerosol cans.

Did Humans Accidentally Create an Artificial Barrier Around Earth?

Last month, NASA’s Van Allen probes (which are designed to study electrons and ions in space) reported that there is actually an artificial barrier surrounding Earth created by none other than human beings.

How was this barrier made? This artificial barrier was the result of low frequency radio communications created by human activity. Very low frequency signals, or VLF, are often emitted by radio telescopes that have the task of contacting submarines in the ocean.  But while most of the signals are sent down into the deep, dark waters, some signals also float into the atmosphere, resulting in something called a VLF bubble that surrounds the earth. The VLF bubble extends all the way to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts, 3 belts that have energetic charged particles held by Earth’s magnetic field. The interaction between the VLF bubble and the radiation belts results in the artificial barrier that we’re talking about.

Two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy particles make up the Van Allen radiation belts. Credit: NASA

Phil Erickson, one of the scientists involved in the discovery, said: “A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth”.

In fact, if the VLF bubble didn’t exist, then we would be much closer to the radiation belt than we currently are. As shown in data from the 1960s, the Van Allen radiation belt was actually much closer to Earth back then than it is right now. This means that the barrier is actually protecting the earth from space radiation. Not only that, scientists also say that this barrier will be able to shield space from other dangers like coronal mass ejections, which are explosions that occur on the sun that may result in geomagnetic storms that can destroy communication satellites and power grids as well as affect the weather in space.

Scientists are now saying that the barrier could also potentially remove excess radiation around earth and are carrying out experiments as we speak. This newfound artificial barrier proves that we, as human beings, not only have a huge impact on the earth, but also in space as well.

Alien Megastructure Star On the Move Again

KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star

Moving away from man-made barriers and onto the topic of aliens. Yes, it just gets weirder and weirder.

A report today has announced that one of the strangest stars in the universe, the KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star, has started behaving very strangely again.This star, nicknamed the ‘alien megastructure star’, was originally discovered in 2009 and is located 1,500 light years away from earth between the Cygnus and Lyre constellations of our Milky Way galaxy. The reason why this star is called the ‘alien megastructure star’ is because in late 2015, astronomers led by Tabetha Boyajian (AKA Tabby, the woman the KIC 8462852 is named after) of Yale University discovered that the star was emitting light in very strange patterns.

To give a little background info: stars usually emit light in very slight dips of less than 1 percent every few weeks, days, or months. But to the astronomers’ surprise,  KIC 8462852 was emitting light dips of up to 22 percent! And the strange thing was that the light dips didn’t follow a particular pattern either, which left astronomers and scientists completely baffled. No one had a clue what was going on, and could think of no explanations as to why the star was behaving the way it was. As a result, one scientist offered the possibility that an 'alien megastructure' was messing with the star, which is how it got it’s nickname ‘alien megastructure star’.

According to Jason Wright, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, the star started dimming again last Friday, and has already dimmed by 3 percent in the matter of a few days. He immediately tweeted about the phenomenon on Twitter, which caused everyone in the astronomical community to freak out and run for their telescopes.  "As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now," says astronomer Matt Muterspaugh from Tennessee State University.

The reason why this second dimming of the KIC  8462852 is so important is because it allows scientists to gather more data about its bizarre dip patterns. During the last dipping in 2015, astronomers were not able to collect enough data to provide reasonable explanations about the strange star’s light patterns. "We were kind of stuck in a spot where we couldn't do anything," Tabetha Boyajian said: "We had all the data we could, and to learn anything more, we needed to catch it in action again."

Some explanations surrounding the star’s bizarreness include comet swarms, the remnants of a devoured planet, or that the star is actually distorted in a way that gives it a bigger radius at the equator than at the poles. Of course, people are even considering the possibility of alien intervention. In fact, this star is one of the few phenomena where no one has even discounted the aliens yet….That’s how weird it is.

Jason Wright even said that: "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build." in fact, Wright believes that the star’s irregular light emission is caused by something like the Dyson sphere we see in sci-fi movies, a huge sphere created around a star that surrounds it and absorbs all of the energy output of the star so that lifeforms can live on the star’s surface.

Even someone like Wright, a professional astronomer with a solid background who considers aliens as the LAST possible explanation, believes that alien intervention is a very likely explanation for the star’s weird behavior. Regarding Wright’s theory about the Dyson sphere, Matt Muterspaugh says: "That theory is still a valid one...we would really hate to go to that, because that's a pretty major thing. It'd be awesome of course, but as scientists, we're hoping there's a natural explanation."

So what do you guys think? Do you think aliens actually built a huge Dyson sphere around the KIC  8462852 so that more aliens can live on the star’s surface?

Hell Found At the Bottom of Deepest Hole on Earth

With the amount of explorations humankind has undergone to find out what is going on outside our planet, it's interesting to note that we know even less of what is below our feet. That’s pretty much saying “we know nothing about our Earth”. If we haven’t even discovered enough of our own planet yet, why are we trying to fly out and invade others? On the brighter side of things, one discovery HAS given us a glimpse of what lies beneath our crusty earth. In Russia, on the Kola Peninsula, there is a 7.5 miles deep hole that’s deeper than the deepest point in the ocean, which, to put into perspective, is 6.8 miles deep. This hole is called the Kola Borehole and is, if you can believe it, a man-made hole.

Image credit:  World's Deepest Hole Barely Scratches the Surface. - Rosie Research

So why did people suddenly think that digging a super deep hole towards the center of the earth was going to be a good idea? Well, to put it into one word: competition. We all know that the US and USSR have been trying to compete with each other for ages, especially during the space race in which both nations tried to outdo one another in terms of space exploration supremacy. But little do people know that the space race wasn’t the only thing the US and USSR were rivals over.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, while competing who could explore outer space the quickest, Americans and Soviets were also competing for who could explore WITHIN the earth the quickest. As a result, both nations planned separate efforts to drill into the Earth’s crust, each with the goal of drilling the deepest hole in the world.

The American drilling project was called “Project Mohole” and was executed in the spring of 1961. The goal of the project was the drill into the Mohorovicic discontinuity, better known as the Moho, which is the boundary between the Earth’s crust and the mantle. The project wasn’t so successful though, because just five years later it was cut short due to lack of funding. After that, they kind of just gave up and let the Soviets win the drill-race. The Soviets started their digging process in 1970, and with the help of the Interderpartmental Scientific Council for the Study of the Earth’s Interior and Superdeep Drilling, they were able to be much more successful and drill the deepest hole in the world, the Kola Superdeep Borehole. By digging more than 7.5 miles downwards, they were able to make some breaking discoveries

Project Mohole

One of the benefits of digging so deep into the earth was that the Soviets were able to put geological theories to the tests. One discovery made was that there ISN’T actually a transition from granite to basalt between 3 and 6 kilometers beneath the surface as many scientists had originally thought. The basalt actually extended beyond the 12 kilometer point, which made scientists rethink their original theories about seismic-reflection results. In other words, the Kola borehole led to the discovery that an entire layer of the Earth’s crust doesn’t actually exist.

What’s more, at around 4.3 miles down the hole, cracks in rocks were found to contain water. This was an amazing discovery because no one expected water to exist at such great depths. It made researchers realize that the water inside the rock cracks were probably caused by

Hydrogen and oxygen atoms squeezed out and then retained below the surface because of the impermeable rock above.

Finally, one of the most amazing discoveries made through the project was the detection of life in the form of microscopic fossils found in rocks that were more than two billion years old. From the fossils, researchers were able to find the remains of 25 different species of plankton.  The discovery was very surprising because the fossils were surround by organic compounds that were tough against the pressure and temperature of the surroundings.

Sadly, the Kola Superdeep Borehole project was halted in 1994 because of a variety of reasons. One reason was because it was just getting way too hot down there. The temperature at the bottom of the hole was a scorching 356 degrees F, which is the temperature where food (or people) get cooked. This was such a huge difference from the expected 212 F that it was almost unbearable for people to continue further. Not only that rock density increased the deeper the hole was dug, resulting in greater porosity and permeability. In other words, it was like drilling through plastic rather than solid which made it very a difficult operation.

Kola Borehole Location

There are other hypotheses that are a bit more far fetched though. After the discovery of water within the hole, people started to believe that the hole was associated with the tale of Noah’s flood. According to text, it was believed that after the massive flood, all the water drained into subterranean sinkholes. Scientists previously questioned how the flood could have possibly existed if rocks weren’t porous and that they didn’t know where the water went, but this could be the answer. Now many believe that this additional proof that Noah’s flood story was not merely a tall tale.

Not only were people associating the hole with Noah’s flood, there were even persistent rumors of scientists getting scared that they would ‘drill through hell’ and that they ‘heard screaming from tortured souls’ The idea that the hole could be a passageway to satan’s lair could be another reason as to why the hole is now closed down and no longer in labor.

The hole is now bolted shut

Yes, you won’t be able to access the 7.5 mile deep hole anymore because it is now bolted shut and completely inaccessible. In fact, the whole area surrounding the whole is completely out of use. But you know what is really crazy? Although the hole seems to be extremely deep, if you look at it from another perspective, the hole’s entire depth is only deep enough to cover around .002% of the distance to the center of earth. So that means there could be a whole different world right under our feet. And even if we COULD tread to the center of the earth, do we really want to? Who knows what we’ll find there: alien-warded facilities, five-headed monsters, and maybe even hell itself?