Thursday 25th of April 2024
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... we watched too many alien movies... and made too many sequels of star wars...

 

scramble

This week, scientists are preparing to study a mysterious cigar-shaped object, the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system.

Scientists will listen to the object for radio transmissions for the first time using the Green Bank telescope, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, in West Virginia on December 13.

​Radio Sputnik discussed the first stage of observation of this bizarre interstellar body with Avi Loeb, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and an adviser to the Breakthrough Listen project, the largest scientific research program searching for life beyond Earth. Breakthrough Listen was founded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

"It was the first object discovered from interstellar space. It looks like its brightness changes by a factor of 10 as it rotates and reflects sunlight, and that implies that it is wide, and so it is a very elongated object that we have never seen before in the solar system. This very first object coming from interstellar space appears to have formed under very unusual circumstances," Loeb explained.

The object — named Oumuamua, after the Hawaiian word for "messenger" — was first noticed in October by Robert Weryk, who was using the Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii.

"What we would like to find out is whether [Oumuamua] was artificially made by some alien civilization. It is not that we believe that is likely to be the case. It is probably a rock coming to us from a very distant system. However, we should still check," Loeb explained.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201712131059949602-mysterious-interstell...

 

big xmas present to fight the alien invasion...

 

US President Donald Trump has signed into law $700 billion in funding to the Pentagon, which includes a pay raise for troops and funding for a number of pet projects. It also breaks the ceiling set by the 2011 law on budget caps.

Congress sent the final version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to Trump at the end of November, and he ceremonially signed the bill Tuesday. The White House noted that the bill envisioned the largest pay raise for US military personnel in eight years and the biggest military expansion since the 1980s.

The final markup allocates $634 billion to Pentagon operations and almost $66 billion for the overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund, intended for bankrolling wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. That’s about $32 billion more than what Trump initially requested.

Shiny toys

“Brand new beautiful equipment is on its way, the best you’ve ever had by far,” Trump said on Tuesday. The bill authorizes the purchase of many weapons systems. In particular, the Congressional version authorizes the expenditure of $10.6 billion for 94 Joint Strike Fighter planes, which is $3.1 billion and 24 planes more than the White House asked for.

This translates into 60 F-35A models for the US Air Force, 24 F-35B models for the Marines, and 10 F-35C models for the US Navy. Another 24 F/A-18 Super Hornets – 10 more than the administration requested – have also been approved, to make up the shortfall of Navy planes.

The bill also approves $103 million more than the government requested to restart the production of A-10 ground attack aircraft, a 1970s workhorse which the F-35 was supposed to replace.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/412918-trump-ndaa-troops-projects/

 

Idiots...

 

a rock in disguise...

The first scans for alien technology aboard a mysterious object that is barreling through the solar system have found no evidence it is the work of an intelligent civilisation.

The cigar-shaped object was spotted hurtling through the solar system in October and while astronomers suspected it was an interstellar asteroid, its curious shape led them to propose sweeping it for radio signals in case it happened to be an alien craft.

While the long, slender object may have been well suited to flying through clouds of interstellar gas at breakneck speed, as some researchers noted, the observation that the body was tumbling through space suggests any aerodynamic advantage was at best minimal.

Scientists on the Breakthrough Listen project, funded by the internet billionaire Yuri Milner, used the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia to eavesdrop on the 400m-long body named ‘Oumuamua, from the Hawaiian word for “messenger” or “scout”. The body is twice as far from Earth as the sun, but the telescope is so sensitive it could detect transmissions as weak as those produced by a mobile phone.

But on Thursday, the astronomers declared that the first observations across four bands of the radio spectrum had found no evidence that ‘Oumuamua is anything other than a long lump of space rock. Scientists on the project have released the data from the observations so anyone can study the information.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/14/is-oumuamua-an-alien-spa...