Continue reading »]]> We were very much surprised, when we got our first result because it was positive. It was a very strong positive signal and it was a similar response to the one we did on earth with soils containing microorganisms. We had to wait 8 days until the experiment was completed before we could start the control experiment. Well, you can imagine the intensity, when we loaded the instrument with the control sample, heated it to 160 degree Celsius for 3 hours, then cooled and zapped it with the radioactive nutrient. Well, nothing happened, there was no response. Right there we could have gone home. This was the proof that everyone agreed to and that was needed to say that yes there are living microorganisms on Mars.

But not so fast, Nothing ever goes as planned and scientists are eternally skeptical as they should be and specially about such and important experiment which NASA has stated that its the most important experiment in the history of science that it detected living organisms on Mars. Doubts immediately began to rise and we had to cope with these. There was another experiment on Viking called the molecular analysis experiment which was designed to identify the organic compounds everyone knew must be on Mars. Just as on earth organic compounds were bombarded with planets both of them with comets, meteorites and so called interplanetary dust particles which contain organic matter. That’s how the earth got its organic matter, from bombardment from space. The same was undoubtedly true for its neighbor Mars.

So our interest was of identifying those compounds on Mars. But the instrument called the GCMS not only did not identify any organic compounds but it found none. Zero, it reported no organic matter. What a dilemma. NASA contemplated this as did other scientists, how can you have life if there is no organic matter? It was then decided that there must be no life on Mars. Its some weird chemical or physical effect that is mimicking life. No one doubted the results of GCMS, but they doubted the results of Label Release Experiment.

Well, the first theory offered to explain away biology was that the label release response came from soil that was activated by ultraviolet light, because the ultraviolet light on Mars is many times stronger as that hitting Earth because Mars has such a thin atmosphere. There theory was then that ultraviolet light would prevent any life from forming and therefore would destroy all organic matter, and that would explain the results of both instruments.

We were able, by some quick thinking to destroy that theory. What we did was one morning, on Mars we sent out an arms to the sampling rock which would have been sitting for hundreds of thousands or probably millions of years. It removed the rock and quickly took a sample of soil under it and put it under our label release experiment. And Lo and behold we got the same positive result as we got before on the surface of the planet in the broad daylight, and the control was also was nil. So we clearly showed that the effect could not be from ultraviolet light, but then other theories sprang up. In all, in a short time, some forty theories sprang forward to explain that our results were caused by chemicals or physical activation of some kind. We diligently spent 3 years trying to reproduce the results we got on Mars, trying to reproduce them without microorganisms in our laboratory, but with many different chemicals, those that were proposed. We were unsuccessful. We were able to show that none of the 40 proposals really pertain to our experiment.

None the less, despite publishing these results. The theories remained that A. There was no organic matter on Mars and B. There was a strong compound covering the surface of Mars that killed life and destroyed organic matter and C. There was no liquid water. Then there was another complaint that was lodged that in one of the experiments that we did on Mars that was not the part of the original program. Not required, but we had it on as a scientific curiosity was to see after the experiment had run and taken its course and the curve of evolving gas had flattened. If we injected a second dose of nutrient, what would happen. On earth you would get a second response as the organisms got new food and started digesting it, producing more gas. When we did this on Mars however, we saw that 25% of the gas that had already been produced disappeared. It had obviously been reabsorbed into the soil.

So the people who felt we could not have detected life said, that is not the way things are with biology therefore it must be a chemical. And the soil must be basic that when its wet it could reabsorb co2 that had been emitted. Well lets go down those objections. We already showed that ultraviolet light could not have produced the experiment. I guess then that it was the organic matter that remained the strongest objection. We showed in a number of studies that the GCMS was not nearly as sensitive as label release experiment. In fact, the experiment of the GCMS said that it took 3 million microorganisms in this test to render a positive organic matter. Remember, I previously told you that our experiment could detect 10 microorganisms. So we were a million times as sensitive as the organic analysis instrument and therefore it was quite possible that both instruments were right. We detected microorganisms, but they were in small numbers that could not be detected by organic analysis machine.

Further research showed that there were other problems with the organic analysis machine, and just recently as I would explain in a minute that the GCMS result is no threat to the result of label release experiment. Lets go to no liquid water on Mars. Actually Viking itself indicated liquid water on Mars, when during the rising day, the flip-pad temperature rose and got to the freezing point of 0 degree centigrade and stopped rising for a while. This indicative that ice is present. When the melting point of ice is released, the temperature does not keep rising because the energy of the increased temperature is used in melting the ice into water. This is a signature for liquid water that occurred. Even though, we published that it was not widely recognized. So my son, who was by this time a p.h.d physicist and I produced a paper that on the basis of thermodynamic theory, there must be liquid water in the soil of mars. Particularly and especially under the ice which was photographed by the viking II.

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Continue reading »]]> I worked for 10 years in this development. The first thing that I did was decide (since I don’t know what the space craft is going to be like and what kind of support I would have) I better develop a technology that is self supporting, that doesn’t need any help. And I did develop this little machine that I call Gulliver as shown below.

It is going to different places looking for tiny beings. So I thought this is a rather good name for it. The way it worked is first it borrowed a technique from whale industry from 1860 which was to shoot out a whale harpoon. I customized it to shoot out a string which I coated with silicon grooves to make it sticky and it popularly became known as the sticky string experiment. The way it worked is a little gun shot a string out and it went about 50 yards across the surface of the field then fell to the ground. Inside the instrument was the tiny electric motor powered by a battery. The motor then turned on and reel the string back in on a little spool.

When it was dragged across the surface of the ground, it picked up tiny grains of soil. That’s all I needed, because those grains maybe covered with micro-organisms. I needed only tiny few specs maybe as much as only 100 milligrams of soil. When the spool the round up, the radioactive nutrient was dumped on it and If anything was alive,then radioactive will come out of the spool evolved by the micro-organisms. They would rise to the top of the machine and there it would be detected by radiation detector.

So we monitored the evolution of gas as time went on, over several hours of the experiment. We tried this in a field near our laboratory and to our surprise, we got positive response immediately. But those of you who have even taken high school science know that the most important part in an experiment is the control. This is the part that proves if the experiment really did what you thought. And how could I know when I got a positive response that it came from micro-organisms and not some chemicals in the soil?

So the control that I made was the following.

If I got a positive response, I would run a duplicate experiment with a duplicate instrument, going out and bringing in a sticky string with some soil on it, just as in the first test. But now before I drop the radioactive material on it, I would drop a small germicides on it hopefully to kill any microorganisms that were present. Then I add radioactive nutrient. If I still got a string response as in the first test, this meant that it was not the microorganisms that were causing release of gas but some chemical. But on the other hand if the response was strongly diminished or eliminated. That confirms that fact that the first response came from the microorganisms. When I ran that in our first field test, indeed there was a dual response to control sample. We had detected microorganisms.

From thereon we went into a 10 year development program that not only develop four different versions of the instrument but more importantly selected the nutrients with which to test for microorganisms. How do you select nutrients to look for microorganisms that might be on another planet. What we did was assumed that Mars was made out of the same materials was earth, and its initial condition should be pretty much similar to that on earth. And it was from those ingredients and under those conditions that life might have evolved on mars as it is on earth. Therefore we went to use the most simplest organic materials thought to have developed on earth. These were identified by an experiment in the early 50s, and these experiments use the materials on earth in the atmosphere thought to have been present in the early atmosphere, i.e. carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, carbon monoxide and expose those to strokes of lightening. In the experiment the gas was in the large tube, the lightening was sparked with some electricity.

After a couple of days organic matter formed, dark material on the glass, these were analyzed and it was those organic compounds that were formed from which we selected materials to be used in our experiment. We selected 5 of them, tested them extensively to be sure that microorganisms responded to them. We never found any organisms not to respond to them, and therefore on the basis of theory that they should have been or might have been the first organic substance on Mars that might have been on earth. And that microorganisms responded to them, we thought that they were pretty good bets.

We tested hundreds of different kinds of microorganisms, pure species, mixed species, soils, field tests we made on the top of a mountain above the timberline. Field tests we made on death valley, hot desert sands in the light of the day. And field tests on the very salty soil on the salty sea. In every case we quickly detected living microorganisms. The experiment was never fooled. When we took soil samples and heated them to the controlled temperatures that were specified by NASA. They wanted a different control than germicides. They specified 160 degrees Celsius for 3 hours treatment of the duplicate soil sample, then they cooled and tested. When we did that in all our field tests. We found a negative or no response, confirming that the positive test responses were from micro-organisms.

After the 10 years of that development program. After many hundreds of tests established that the experiment was very effective, and that the control always worked and that it would not be fooled by chemicals. We submitted a proposal to NASA when it announced openings for the Viking mission to Mars. In 1969, we learned that we had been selected as one of the life detection experiment to be developed for the actual mission. This was another 10 year effort.

I was very fortunate to induce Dr. Patricia to join my company to help the work on this development. She was able to take my ideas and to work with the engineering company TRW that was putting them into hardware and develop the instrument that eventually was flown to Mars. To do this she even had to live for a while out with TRW in California to work very closely with the hardware development.

It was remarkable successful, and we had a piece of that hardware in our laboratory back in Washington DC where we could test microorganisms and to be certain that we are getting the kind of instrument development that we needed. All went quite well, although it was quite stressful meeting the time demands of NASA, To get ready for this experiment. Finally the great day came and blastoff came in 1976 for the 10 month 445 million mile journey to Mars. Miraculously the 2 spacecrafts landed perfectly some 4,000 miles part as planned and all the experiments worked.

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Continue reading »]]> Although it is rarely mentioned in the numerous television science documentary programs dealing with Mars Exploration that the twin NASA Viking Landers found strong evidence for life on Mars in 1976, it seems the journalists and the editors putting these films together often overlook this evidence while erroneously implying that Viking found no evidence for life at all. This is completely untrue.

This evidence was found by the Viking Labeled Release experiment designed by Dr. Gilbert V. Levin. Although his scientific papers have been published in many peer reviewed scientific journals, it seems the directors and researchers of popular television science documentaries fail to do their homework and render only half the story.

The discovery of life on Mars would be one of the most profound events in history not to mention its implications for life in the Universe. In order to correct the misconceptions about Viking and its research for life, Dr. Gilbert V. explains his findings on Mars.

Many of you may never have heard about the Viking mission to Mars, especially people in the younger generation. But in 1976 NASA landed two of the most complex spacecrafts ever launched on the surface of Mars. I happened to have done experiment aboard one of those. The whole mission was dedicated to search for Life on Mars and my experiment was one of those that was a life detector. It was called the Labeled Release Experiment and I believe it did indeed life on Mars. However I am going to tell you the tale of how it was not widely accepted. The 34 year of fight I’ve had to have it accepted. Where the situation stands now ? and What I think we ought to do.

My trip along the yellow brick road that went 440 million miles to mars started on yellow sands on Santa Monica beach in California. There as a public health engineer for the state of California I was taking samples of seawater to have them analyzed for bacteria to see whether people could swim safely in the seawater. Much of the sewage from Los Angeles was being dumped at that time right into the Santa Monica Bay, right where people were swimming. What bothered me about this was after I took the samples. Took it back to the laboratory. It took 2-4 days for analysis and sometimes as long as a week for the reports to come back to me and telling me what the status of the water was. And on the basis of that I was to quarantine or not quarantine the stretches of the beach. Obviously anyone could see that the time when the results came back thousands of people had gone in the water and the results were for historic interests only. This thing frustrated me.

I went back to the district of Columbia changing my jobs where I work for DC department of public health and again I was responsible for microbiological quality of water. This time much serious than bating water, it was drinking water for entire municipality. Everyday I sent sanitarians out to sample taps from different parts of the city then bringing back to the lab for analysis, and then again it was up to a week before we got results and million or so people had consumed the water by then.

One day the thought occurred to me. That perhaps a simple modification in analyzing water for micro-organisms could speed the whole process up. The standard method consists of taking a sample suspected of containing micro-organisms and placing a part of it in to test tubes containing nutrient broths to grow the micro-organisms. If indeed they grew they would produce eventually bubbles which could be seen. This took 1-4 days before you could tell if there is something growing in the broth.

What occurred to me was the use of radio-isotopic carbon instead of plain old nutrients. I had some radio-isotopic carbon nutrients made and I tested this in the standard method and I found that I could detect the micro-organisms in a very short period of time. Well, in order to do this however, I had first to make a proposal to the isotopic energy commission. When I got grant from them, then convince my boss, the head of the department of public health to take me to Georgetown University med school where Department of chemistry welcomed the opportunity to help me devote one day a week in laboratory to develop this method.

As I just indicated, the method developed very quickly and successfully, so that within a couple of months, it was obvious that a new method is available that could detect as low as 10 micro-organisms and could make the detection in record time from one hour to a couple of hours at the most. So there was a way that we could tell in real-time whether water was contaminated or not, be it bathing water, drinking water or swimming water.

As a result I wrote and published a couple of papers outlining this procedure hoping that public heath departments across the nation would adopt it. Alas! They did not. Why ? Because in those days radioisotope was a bad word. People were scared of anything that was radioactive. Even though by the U.S Atomic Energy Commission standards I could drink tap water with much of the radioisotopes in it as was required for the test. So it was really a very tiny amount. Unless, the word was enough to run people away.

So again I was quite frustrated that hardly just one or two states adopted the procedure. Well, one Christmas eve I found myself at a party where I was fortunate enough to bump into Dr. Keith Lanier, the first administrator of the newly formed National Aeronautics & Space Administration or NASA. During the course of the evening, I had a conversation with him and I asked him whether NASA ever intended to look for life on Mars. He said, “Oh! Yes we do, As a matter of fact I just hired a man in our biology department to do that”. I said, Oh isn’t that interesting that might work on Mars. He said if you do then why don’t you go down and speak to this man. Dr. Clark Rant. I said, I would love to do that and he gave me Dr. Rant’s number. I called him up the next work day and he invited me down. I described the method, he said that it sound great. We are just funding method to look for life on other planets. We have only one method so far funded so write a proposal.

I did write a proposal and then I realized something about the government. It takes time. After my proposal was submitted I waited for a year before I found out one day by a letter that it was accepted. So now I was funded in a little company that I had started to undertake research program to develop a technique for drinking water to one to look for life on Mars. It was very exciting.

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Continue reading »]]> The filmmakers behind “Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond,” who said that their film will reveal evidence of contact between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, have now released to TheWrap what they claim is photographic evidence of a pre-Mayan, alien civilization.

And they claim they’ve got Stephen Hawking on their side.

Producer Raul Julia-Levy supplied a photo (left), which he says was taken in southern Guatemala in the 1930s, showing a head carved in the jungle.

The monument, according to an accompanying letter by archaeologist Hector E. Mejia, dates back to between 3500 and 5000 B.C. and is evidence of a superior civilization unlike any known to have lived on Earth.

Mejia described the photograph as being “of a bust which a first glance can be seen to have an elongated cranium and fine characteristics which are not consistent with pre-Hispanic races of America.”

“I certify that this monument presents no characteristics of Maya, Nahuatl, Olmec or any other pre-Hispanic civilization,” he wrote. “It was created by an extraordinary and superior civilization with awesome knowledge of which there is no record of existence on this planet.”

The photo is one of several purported pieces of evidence that will be shown in Julia-Levy’s documentary, which he is making with the cooperation of the Mexican and Guatemalan governments keyed to 2012, the date the Mayan calendar ends.

“This explains who we are,” said Julia-Levy, the son of actor Raul Julia. “This explains why these big f—ing monuments are all around the world.”

And Julia-Levy then passed along a direct quote that, he claimed, came from no less than Stephen Hawking, who he said “is going to work with us” and will be included in his film:

“‘I warn humanity that aliens are out there. Just because the aliens were friends with the Mayans doesn’t mean they are our friends. Humans should avoid contact with aliens at all costs.’”

An email sent to a representative for Hawking asking about the authenticity of the quote was not answered.

Hawking has in the past said that that alien life is likely to exist in the universe (“to my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly natural”), and has speculated about the dangers of contact.

“If aliens ever visit us,” Hawking has said, “I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

TheWrap has been unable to unearth any Instances of Hawking saying anything about the aliens ever contacting or being friends with the Mayans.

But Julia-Levy insisted that the words are Hawking’s. He also claimed government conspiracies surrounding the photo, and the head it depicts: After the photo was taken in the late 1930s, he said, it was only published once, in a magazine that was then immediately withdrawn from circulation by “the government of England.”

He also said the head depicted in the photo, 17 meters (51 feet) tall and six meters wide, is no longer in the Guatemalan jungle but has been moved to the United States and hidden.

“I was informed by officials in the government of Guatemala that the U.S. government brought it here,” he said.

According to Meija, “The creative style is not consistent with the civilizations that inhabited the southern coast of Guatemala prior to the arrival of the Spaniards … It is indisputably pre-Olmec and pre-Maya … [O]ne can assign an age between 3500 and 5000 BC.”

Mejia is a licensed archaeologist affiliated with the Atlas Arqueological de Guatemala and the Institute of Anthropology and History in Guatemala, and with the University of San Carlos. His statement was written in Spanish; TheWrap had it translated.

Mejia goes on to compare it to other monuments, including “the Moais of Easter Island,” “the Pascual Abaj monument … in Guatemala” and “the Great Sphinx in Egypt.” He said it was “created by an extraordinary and superior civilization” that “settled in the south of Guatemala and from there shone its light and knowledge on the hunter gatherers who were its first students and received its teachings.”

Julia-Levy (right) said that Mejia is part of an international team of archaeologists and other professionals assembled by the filmmakers because they are “willing to tell the world the truth” about the Mayan/alien connection.

“We have a gang of archaeologists and scholars and scientists that are going to come forward and show everything they have,” he said.

And, he swears, governments will do the same.

“I was told by the officials that the Mayans and the extra-terrestrials had a history of exchange,” he said. “This is official. This is as official as it can get.”

Added Julia-Levy, “The world hasn’t seen this. Nobody has seen this. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the world is ready fo the truth.

“This is going to create a worldwide impact in how people see things.”

His movie, by the way, has yet to begin shooting. Principal photography is scheduled to begin in Mexico and Guatemala in mid-November.

Continue reading »]]> Its looks like the experiment that rocked the physics was just a bad case of wiring. Last fall scientist at CERN announced that they had detected neutrinos that traveled faster than light which is against the established law of physics.

The earth shattering discover was actually a mistake according to the scientists sin Geneva. A faulty connection between the GPS receiver and a computer created the false reading. The original experiment fired the neutrinos from Switzerland to Italy and they found that neutrinos traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have. The scientists were doubtful from start and were somewhat sure that they had screwed up instead Einstein was wrong. When they first reported their surprising findings, the OPERA team was clear that there were actually not saying that neutrinos could travel faster than light but were simply revealing what they had observed.

Still the physics community had a fun few months picking a part of the data. They suggest that everything from relativity itself, throwing off the measurements to simple math errors but an inside source tells that it was because of a loose wire. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber. Researchers found that data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed.

Continue reading »]]> Congress is considering pulling the plug on James Webb space telescope. Its the successor of Hubble, and they say it can pear into the universe and maybe see moment when the universe was born. But it costs 6.8 Billion dollars which by the way costs the same amount to be in Afghanistan for one month.
1st of all lets clarify what the NASA budget is; You may already know about the $850 Billion bank bailout, if we had that sum of money we could build whooping 125 James Webb telescopes, That sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA.

So when someone says we don’t have money for this space program. I’m asking, no its not because you don’t have enough money. Its that the distribution of the money that you are spending is warped in some way, that you are removing the same thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow. Do you remember the 60s and 70s ? You didn’t have to go a week before there is an article in life magazine about The Home of Tomorrow or The City of Tomorrow or The Expectations of Tomorrow. After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming, so I am really worried about the decisions what congress makes. They doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow is gone. They are playing for the quarterly report. They are playing for the next election cycle, and that is destroying the actual future of this nation and maybe earth’s as well.

Continue reading »]]> Star forming regions are some of the visually striking regions of the night sky. Within these regions perhaps the most spectacular stellar fireworks are the jets of matter that shoots out from newborn stars. Now scientists have used Hubble space telescope to watch these jets move, giving new insights of how stars form. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made detailed observations of the energetic jets that are ejected from young stars. Astronomer Patrick Hartigan and his team have been collecting high-resolution Hubble images of some of these jets for the past 14 years. The team have now combined their observations into movies that actually show how the jets evolve over time. Unlike most astronomical phenomena, which look completely static even over hundreds of years, these jets visibly change over human timescales.

Well my first reaction was ‘wow, this is really neat!’ And it was just really fun just to see all the dynamics of what’s going on. Because if you just see a single picture you can kinda make up all sorts of stories but all of a sudden when you see a movie stitched together it completely changes everything. You really see what’s happening. If you see just a single picture from Hubble you can interpret it in many different ways. But the fact that Hubble has been around for as long as it has means that by taking multiple images you can actually stitch them together and watch how the material moves. So that really gives you the only way to get true insight into the physics of the dynamics of what’s going on.

Some of the details in these jets had never been spotted before. For instance, the knots of gas brightening and dimming over time, and the collisions of fast and slow-moving material show that these jets are not ejected in a steady stream. Rather, they are launched sporadically in clumps. Astronomers think that the irregular structure of the jet is caused by material periodically falling onto the star.

We’re trying to study how stars form. And that’s a complex process because it has a lot of feedback in the sense that the stars affect the clouds, and the clouds form the stars. And just by looking at any particular one process, you don’t get the full picture. And so the idea is, what we want to try to do is see the main ways in which the stars can affect the surrounding molecular clouds. These jets are known to scientists as Herbig-Haro objects, in honour of George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, two astronomers who studied these outflows in the 1950s. However it is only now that their complex nature is coming to light. As well as detailed Hubble observations, members of the team have carried out lab experiments and computer simulations in scientific facilities around the world including New York’s Omega Laser Facility and the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment.

By combining observations, experiments and simulations, scientists can attack the problem how stellar jets behave from three different perspectives. The entire process is really very complex and it’s very important to understand, because that’s how our Sun formed and that’s how planetary systems form, and that’s basically how we got here.

Continue reading »]]> The closet spiral galaxy to us is known as the Andromeda galaxy, over two and a half million light years away and measuring 260,000 light-years across. Its is over twice the size of our galaxy and home to a trillion stars.

The Andromeda galaxy is very much like our own Milky Way, full of stars, nebulae and lots of dust and faintly glowing gas. This gas and dust hides much of our galaxy from us obscuring treasures we have only just begun to uncover. To see through this dust we must have eyes that is very different of human beings. To see these galactic wonders concealed behind interstellar dust storms, we must look in the infrared.

On August 25th 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer space telescope. Design to appear in the infrared ray of the spectrum, this instrument was designed to pierce the veil of dust and gas blocking visible light and looked deeper into galaxies where young stars are born. The infrared part of the spectrum is home to light we can’t see ourselves. This is the realm of heat. The radiation given off by the smouldering grains interstellar dust. The longer wavelengths of this light are not blocked by the gas and dust that are spread throughout all galaxies, it pass right through allowing instruments aboard Spitzer to literally see through of what would otherwise be an opaque curtain. Galaxies look much different it is viewed by the heat given off by interstellar gas and dust. Here is Andromeda Galaxy look like in infrared.

The embers of the dust and gases shine brightly yielding detail which otherwise would escape our notice. In the lower right portion of this image. A distinctive and curious ring is visible in one of the spiral arms. This never seen before hole believed to be the result of a massive and violent head on collision with the neighboring dwarf galaxy known as M32 (or Messier 32) more than 200 million years ago. Galactic collisions are impressive and violent events that sculpt galaxies into a variety of shapes, usually spirals. While the galaxies themselves do marge together, the stars in them are hardly affected. The stars within are so far apart that each galaxies passes right through the other with virtually no stars smashing into each other or being destroyed, only sprayed throughout space time by the gravitational influence of all the others.

In the very distant future, roughly 3 billion years from now, the Andromeda Galaxy will ultimately collide with our milky way. Our stars will intertwine through gravity. Their final destination sculpting newer more massive galaxy. The black holes at their center possibly joining to form a stronger one. On earth some 3 billion years hence, our night sky will be filled with stars. None of them are not likely heading for us, but all of them guiding our ultimate destiny within a new milky way.

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This is how an asteroid look like through the most powerful telescope on earth. So how do we begin to study the object we can hardly see ? Well, one way is to study tiny fragments of asteroids fallen to earth then broken apart called meteoroids. It is the oldest thing you can hold in your hand, its really a piece of history back to the time even before the earth was formed and even way before we were ever formed. Almost everything we know what asteroids are made of comes from studying these kind of fragments. Each one has its own history of the solar system. They are like a puzzle that we are trying to understand.

Some asteroids are made of iron, they were so large that when they formed, they heated and melted. They could get all the iron to their core just like the earth has an iron core. When we take an iron meteor about the size of human hand and slice it open, then we can see the quality of the metal which is really quiet amazing. Its a very pure metal, in fact nickel iron is some of the most oldest metal in the solar system about 4.5 billion years old.

Out there in space there are gigantic boulders ranging in size from 900 kilometers to just a few meters and made of primordial metal and dust. But as more scientists examine the remains of asteroids, the stranger they get. Its probably a complete zoo, we find that meteoroids have huge variety of types and compositions and its telling us that the asteroids must have as wide variety as well.

There is one type in particular that has opened a door on the strange and unfamiliar world that asteroids inhabit out there in the coldness of space. We think that most asteroids are stony kind that we most find on earth, but they have a completely different chemistry than earth rocks. They are put together like little bits of rocks all reheated, remelted and glued together and it tells us that the asteroid belt is a place of an incredible impact history, asteroids colliding into each other, breaking apart, reforming and when we see meteoroids samples its telling us about that amazing collision history in the asteroid belt.

Continue reading »]]> E=mc2 is energy of the body E is proportional to its mass and it implies nothing travel faster than speed of light. We know that c says it would require infinite amount of energy to do so. The team at CERN have seen these subatomic particles called neutrinos breaking that rule traveling a tiny bit significant fraction faster than the speed of light. They have repeated the experiment, they weren’t sure, they checked it 15,000 times and brought the same result each and every time. If the results are found to be accurate, it will turn Physics on its head.

The question now is how the Einstein have been wrong all along. If this is true, its an earthquake, a revolution in Physics. This is one of the great changes in Physics. Einsteins theories are about a hundred years ago and the discovery of the quantum world. Einstein said in its special theory of relativity that nothing can travel faster than light. The only reason light travel at light speed is because it lacks what scientists call rest mass. Any physical object can’t get to the speed of light. Scientists at CERN have looked through every aspect of their experiment to see what could account for this and they could find nothing. They also put it on internet to other scientists and asked them to look, if they can find anything, but they can’t.

These strange particles called neutrinos which go through anything. They are ghostly particles which are difficult to make are created at the Large Hadron Collider. They are fired 720km through the earth’s crust to a detector that is underground to keep it quiet and still in Italy and it got there before they thought it would, before light would. It doesn’t matter how small it is or just over the speed of light, it changes out fundamental understanding of the universe. Time travel might also be possible now, because speed and time are all linked. If we can go faster than the speed of light it fundamentally changes our fundamental understanding. Time travel, faster than light travel, exploration of universe, Amazing world of strange new physics opens in front of us.

The lesson from science is that as soon as you think you have got it nailed down, as soon as you think that the earth is the center of the universe, that Einstein’s theories are correct, the quantum world, all these things. As soon as you are arrogant enough to understand the universe, the universe comes along and shows that you are not right and that there is a new level of understanding.

If this is true than this is one of the greatest revolution in Physics and our understanding of the universe.

UPDATE:  Faster Than Light Neutrino Result Caused by Loose Wire