SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: November 2002
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& science news > space & science news: November 2002
UK government lifts lid on UFO files
(Nov. 29, 2002)
This site maintains a skeptical but open-minded stance on the issue
of unidentified flying objects.
Whatever one's views, it can only be in the best scientific interests
that the UK government has agreed on Thursday (Nov. 28) to place in
the public domain previously classified information on the 1980 Rendlesham
incident (Britain's answer to Roswell!) in which US Air Force personnel
based at nearby RAF Bentwaters reported seeing a mysterious illuminated
aerial object. For more details on this incident and the opening of
the "Rendlesham file", go here
(BBC). This site has received many apparently sincere and, in some
cases, well-documented descriptions of anomalous aerial phenomena
(perhaps a better term than "UFO", which presupposes an object in
flight), and is of the opinion that these may indicate, at the very
least, poorly understood natural phenomena, such as earthquake
lights or ball lightning. In a small minority of cases, it is
feasible that advanced prototype military aircraft are involved. The
possibility that a residuum of cases may due to intelligent extraterrestrial
activity is very remote but can't be dismissed out of hand. It is
unfortunate that most professional scientists are discouraged from
investigating such anomalous phenomena because of a fear of being
associated with popular and hysterical claims and a general reluctance
of science to try to fit transient and unpredictable events into established
paradigms. |
Quark stars and quark meteorites?
(Nov. 21, 2002)
Quarks make up most of the matter around us, including all the protons
and neutrons in the atoms of your body. But they stopped existing
in a free form shortly after the Big Bang. Or did they? According
to two recent pieces of research, free quarks may still be around
in the universe today. Back in April, observations from the Chandra
X-ray Observatory hinted at the possibility that the collapsed star
known as RX J1856.5-3754, shown in the photo, might be a quark
star – something more squashed than a neutron star but not
as cokllapsed as a black hole. For more on this, go here
(BBC). Now, a group of researchers has suggested that a couple of
seismic events recorded in 1993 were caused by quark matter striking
the Earth.
For more on this, go here.
Weird forms of matter – and their possible interaction with
our planet – have certainly been in the news recently. See the
story on mirror matter below. |
Matter through the looking-glass
(Nov. 12, 2002)
Robert Foot (University of Melbourne) has been reflecting on the possibilities
of mirror matter
– a weird kind of opposite-to-ordinary-matter stuff that isn't
antimatter. Mirror
matter, so its proponents argue, is what is needed to balance the
fact that normal matter has a left-handed (sinistral) bias. For more
about this, go here
(Space Daily). Foot has written a book about the subject called "Shadowlands,"
which was published last year. Some readers, and Foot himself, make
some interesting comments at the Amazon webpage here.
Of course, one always has to be cautious about the comments of scientists
who have popular-level books on the market (mentioning no names, Foot
and Darling!). But the suggestion by a professional researcher that
mirror matter may play a key role in the cosmos, be affecting the
motion of our deep space probes (including Pioneer 10 and 11), have
been responsible for the 1908 Tunguska
event in Siberia, and may exist inside some craters on the asteroid
Eros, as reported here
(BBC) and shown in the photo above, certainly deserves some serious
attention. |
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