Science Frontiers
The Unusual & Unexplained

Strange Science * Bizarre Biophysics * Anomalous astronomy
From the pages of the World's Scientific Journals

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About Science Frontiers

Science Frontiers is the bimonthly newsletter providing digests of reports that describe scientific anomalies; that is, those observations and facts that challenge prevailing scientific paradigms. Over 2000 Science Frontiers digests have been published since 1976.

These 2,000+ digests represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The Sourcebook Project, which publishes Science Frontiers, also publishes the Catalog of Anomalies, which delves far more deeply into anomalistics and now extends to sixteen volumes, and covers dozens of disciplines.

Over 14,000 volumes of science journals, including all issues of Nature and Science have been examined for reports on anomalies. In this context, the newsletter Science Frontiers is the appetizer and the Catalog of Anomalies is the main course.


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Compilations of back issues can be found in Science Frontiers: The Book, and original and more detailed reports in the The Sourcebook Project series of books.


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... Dark Days, Ice falls, Firestorms and Related Weather Anomalies (Geophysics) 2006: Archeological Anomalies: Graphic Artifacts I 2003: Archeological Anomalies: Small Artifacts 2003: Scientific Anomalies and other Provocative Phenomena 2001: Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature 2001: Ancient Structures (Archeology) 1999: Ancient Infrastructure (Archeology) 1998: Biological Anomalies: Birds 1996: Biological Anomalies: Mammals II: 1995: Biological Anomalies: Mammals I 1994: Science Frontiers, The Book 1994: Biological Anomalies: Humans III 1993: Biological Anomalies: Humans II 1992: Biological Anomalies: Humans I 1991: Inner Earth: A Search for Anomalies (Geological) 1990: Neglected Geological Anomalies 1989: Anomalies in Geology: Physical, Chemical, Biological 1988: Carolina Bays, Mima Mounds, Submarine Canyons (Geological) 1987: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos 1986: The Sun and Solar System Debris 1985: The Moon and the Planets 1984: Rare Halos, Mirages, Anomalous Rainbows (Geophysics) 1983: Earthquakes, Tides, Unidentified Sounds (Geophysics) 1983: Tornados, Dark days, Anomalous Precipitation (Geophysics) 1982: Lightning, Auroras, Nocturnal Lights (Geophysics) 1982: Unfathomed Mind 1981: Incredible life (Biology) 1980: Unknown Earth (Geological) 1979: Mysterious Universe (Astronomy) 1978: Ancient Man (Archeology) 1977: Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenonema Sourcebook Series 1978: Strange Planet E2 1977: Strange Universe A1 1976: Strange Artifact M2 1976: Strange Minds P1 1976: Strange Life B1 1975: Strange Planet E1 1975: Strange Universe A1 1974: Strange Artifact M1 1974: Strange ...
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... Science Frontiers The Book Strange reports * Bizarre biology * Anomalous archaeology From New Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, etc Archaeology Astronomy Biology Geology Geophysics Mathematics Psychology Physics Science Frontiers The Book Contents Science Frontiers is an indexed compilation of the first 86 issues of our Science Frontiers newsletter . Chapter 1. Archeology: Ancient Engineering Works * Small Artifacts * Epigraphy and Art * Bones and Footprints * Diffusion and Culture. Chapter 2. Astronomy: Planets and Moons * Solar System Debris * Stars * Galaxies and Quasars * Cosmology. Chapter 3. Biology: Humans .* Other Mammals * Birds * Reptiles and Amphibians * Fish * Arthropods * Invertebrates * Plants and Fungi * Microorganisms * Genetics * Origin of Life * Evolution. Chapter 4. Geology: Topography * Geological Anomalies * Stratigraphy * Inner Earth. Chapter 5. Geophysics: Luminous Phenomena* Weather Phenomena * Hydrological Phenomena * Earthquakes * Anomalous Sounds * Atmospheric Optics. Chapter 6. Psychology: Dissociation Phenomena * Hallucinations * Mind - Body Phenomena * Hidden Knowledge * Reincarnation * Information Processing * Psychokinesis. Chapter 7. Chemistry, Physics, Math, Esoterica: Chemistry * Physics * Mathematics. Comments from reviews: "This fun-to-read book may lead some to new scientific solutions through questioning the phenomena presented", Science Books and Films Publishing details: 356 pages, paperback, $18.95, 417 illus., subject index, 1994. 1500+ references, LC 93-92800 ISBN 0-915554-28-3 , 8.5 x 11. Order From:The Sourcebook Project P.O . Box ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 134: MAR-APR 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Missing Planets In Globular Clusters If you lived on a planet circling a star in a globular cluster, you would see a night sky ablaze with thousands of stars all brighter than the brightest in the earth's sky. This is because globular clusters contain tens of thousands of stars all compressed into 5-25 parsecs -- they are much more tightly packed than those in the Milky Way in general. In fact, though, you would have to observe this blazing sky from a spaceship, because diligent searches have not detected any planets in any of the many globular clusters. In 1999, a team of 24 astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planets in the cluster named 47 Tucanae. Their method was to look for dark planets crossing the bright disks of the cluster's stars. After patiently watching 34,000 stars, they came up empty-handed. For some unknown reason, planets never formed around the stars in 47 Tucanae -- or in any other globular clusters checked so far. Are globular clusters in general different from the rest of the Milky Way? Possibly, see below. (Anonymous; "No Globular Planets?" Astronomy, 28:34, October 2000. Anonymous; "Planets Come Up Missing in a Globular Cluster," Sky & Telescope, 104:23, October 2000.) Answer. Globular clusters are peculiar in several additional ways. For example, the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 128: MAR-APR 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Archeometeorology (Top) Even with hazy viewing, the six brightest Pleiads are usually visible. (Bottom) With good seeing more of the stars come into view. Ancient farmers the world over counted off the seasons and fixed planting times by watching the stars and the sun. But the stars can also help forecast the weather, even though they have no influence over it. We'll call this unique sort of archeoastronomy: "archeometeorology." Farmer-astronomers in the drought-prone regions of the Andes learned how, after what must have been centuries of sky-watching, to wring rainfall predictions from observations of the Pleiades. This information allowed them to better time the planting of potatoes -- their most important crop. The astronomical phenomenon they employed is far from obvious. The Pleiades are a cluster of bright stars in the constellation Taurus. The visibility of these stars varies slightly depending upon the amount of subvisual cirrus. If the Pleiades were dull in the month of June, the Andean farmers knew from experience that an El Nino was on the way. This betokened reduced rainfall and told them to postpone the planting of their potatoes by 4-6 weeks for best yields. The critical observations were made between June 13 and 24, when the Pleiades shine brightly just before dawn over the northeastern horizon. At this low angle, the presence of the subvisual cirrus has an obvious effect on the brightness of the stars ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 133: JAN-FEB 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Invisible Suns And Maybe See-through Planets, Too Astronomers have been baffled lately by the discovery of planets wandering aimlessly through outer space apparently without the guidance of a central sun. (Ref. 1) Planets, you see, are supposed to have been formed in the discs of dense dust orbiting newly created stars. They have no business wandering through the void unattended. No problem, says R. Frost of the University of Melbourne, "They could be in orbit around Invisible Stars! (Ref. 2) If we can have Missing Matter, we suppose that Invisible Stars are not as ridiculous as they sound. It is postulated that Invisible Stars are composed of Mirror Matter, a new construct of astronomers who are desperately trying to explain their burgeoning files of celestial anomalies. Mirror Matter is strange "stuff." It interacts with Ordinary Matter only through gravity, it doesn't emit light. It is palpable but invisible. (This sounds weird, but no weirder than quantum mechanics!) Foot also pointed out that stars composed of Ordinary Matter may be orbited by Mirror-Matter planets. Expanding along these lines, whole star systems could be 100% Mirror Matter, and we'd never see them at all. How about Mirror-Matter asteroids and meteors zipping around our solar system -- invisible but palpable and threatening? As a matter of fact, it has been speculated that the still- ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 134: MAR-APR 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Incroyable?" Incredible?" Yes, if what paleoastronoer C. Jegues-Wolkiewiez claims is borne out by further study. The venue here is the Lascaux Cave in France where, some 17,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon artists drew incredibly expressive portraits of animals in the glare of torches. Its is in this cave's dark recesses that Jegues-Wolkiewiez sees two phenomena that could overturn our view of the Cro-Magnon culture. First, he claims that some of the animal paintings are really based upon star configurations. In effect, humans 17,000 years ago were constructing a zodiac of sorts. This was about 10,000 years be-for the ancient Babylonians laid out their first zodiacs. For example, Jegues-Wolkiewiez asserts that the painting of a bull in Lascaux is drawn and positioned such that it mirrors a group of stars in the constellation Scorpio. He identifies several other like "congruences." Cro-Magnons, it seems, were astute observers of the heavens and attempted to make some sense out of the star configurations they saw. Cro-Magnon artist painting a zodiac figure on cave ceiling. His assistant holds a star map to guide him. The second claim of Jegues-Wolkiewiez notes that on the summer solstice the last rays of the setting sun penetrate the cave and illuminate a bison painted in red. He believes this is no accident, and that, 17, ...
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... ONLINE No. 130: JUL-AUG 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Drifters Sure, there may now be or once have been primitive life forms on Mars, but there does seem to be a serious shortage of carbon-based life forms elsewhere in the universe. In fact, there seems to be a great dearth of small, cool, solid, water-and-carbon-rich planets circling beneficent suns. Can it be that we are looking for extraterrestrial life in the wrong places? Life may have originated and prospered on the multitude of sun-less aggregations of matter drifting through the void, some doubtless quite close to us. Myriad nomadic planets may be roaming our Galaxy free from the clutches of parent stars. Two teams of astronomers think they have detected 25 of these free-floating planets, and say there could be hundreds of millions of them wandering the Milky Way. These free-floaters or "drifters" were created when small clouds of gas and dust coalesced under gravity's urging. If such collapsing clouds were less than 80 times Jupiter's mass, they would not be able to sustain nuclear reactions and become long-lived stars. Many would be-come "brown dwarfs." Still smaller aggregations -- less than 14 Jupiters -- would never shine at all. These would remain warm for a while as they dissipated the gravitational energy that created them. Such small objects would be temporarily detectable by infrared telescopes. Hundreds of such infrared "point sources" ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 135: MAY-JUN 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sourceless Magnetic Fields?Our pocket compasses attest to the reality of the earth's magnetic field, and astronomers can also measure the magnetic fields of the sun and some other stars. Plasmas streaming along the Milky Way's spiral arms also create galactic magnetic fields. But nowhere in the immense distances between the galaxies do astronomers see anything that might generate even a few lines of magnetic force. Nevertheless, intergalactic magnetic fields do exist. Furthermore, they are just as strong as the magnetic fields measured in the ponderously swirling, star-rich galaxies. Given the great volume of intergalactic space, we cannot ignore these apparently sourceless magnetic fields. Because, as astrophysicist S.A . Colgate observes: These magnetic fields are the dominant free energy of the universe. If so much energy pervades intergalactic space, it is there that we may find of the source of those perplexing high-energy cosmic rays mentioned in the preceding item. (Musser, George; "Magnetic Anomalies," Scientific American, 283 :22 , August 2000.) Comment. Imagine that! Cosmic rays of incomprehensible energy emanating from a region where resides the dominant free energy of the universe. And yet, we see nothing there in our telescopes. Future science is going to be littered with the fragments of smashed paradigms. From Science Frontiers #135, MAY-JUN 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, ...
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... No. 131: SEP-OCT 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Planetary Conjunctions that Changed the World On May 17, 2000, five solar-system planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) plus the moon slowly wheeled into a tight 19 arc. It was a notable heavenly conjunction. All manner of natural catastrophes were predicted but failed to materialize. It has been this way down recorded history. Universal deluges were anticipated during similar conjunctions on September 14, 1186, and February 19, 1524, but the weather refused to cooperate with the planets. Humanity survived nicely. This does not mean that historical upheavals are never correlated with planetary conjunctions. If a society believes strongly enough in the power of the stars and planets to shape human destiny, events may be correlated with the heavens. Such was the case in ancient China. In China, the "Mandate of Heaven" concept has been used since ancient times as both a framework for history and a guide to future actions. The basic idea is that Heaven awards ruling power to a sage-king because of his virtue. His descendants remain as Earthly deputies until they become corrupted, whereupon outraged Heaven gives signs in the sky that the Mandate has passed on to a different sage-king to continue the cycle. Three transfers of the Heavenly Man-date marked the beginnings of the Hsu, Shang, and Chou Dynasties. In fact, the tightest grouping of the five visible planets in the period from 3,000 B.C ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 130: JUL-AUG 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Midi-Chlorians are with Us!Whoops! We meant to write "mitochondria" in that title. In the movie Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn explains the origin of the supernatural powers possessed by Jedi knights. It arises, he says, from microscopic lifeforms called chlorians" that dwell within all living cells and reveal the will of the Force. Mitochondria are popularly seen as mere powerhouses within cells, with little influence on the organisms they inhabit. They are, it is believed, just the distant progeny of bacteria that invaded complex cells hundreds of millions of years ago. With only 37 genes in their arsenal, human mitochondria would not seem to pose any threat to humanity. After all, we have about 100,000 genes per cell. Of course, mitochondria do evolve separately from us, and this is a bit disconcerting. Could they be more than mere symbionts? The midi-chlorians of the Jedi knights were "good guys", but our mitochondria sometimes seem to be working for an insidious alien Force. There is good evidence that they: Selected which of your mother's germ cells matured to produce you; Have decided your odds of living to be 100; and May influence your being afflicted with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's , as well as rarer disorders. The first item (or "force") is the most ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 106: Jul-Aug 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A SAGA OF SOOT: PART I The tale began on March 27, when Comet Hyakutake passed within 15 million kilometers of earth. At this point in its trajectory, it came into the field of view of the X-ray astronomy satellite ROSAT. ROSAT was designed to look at stars whose extremely high temperatures can generate X-rays. It seemed ridiculous to point ROSAT's instruments at a comet composed mainly of ice and dust. How could a comet emit X-rays? When a German-American team of scientists proposed taking a peek at Hyakutake with ROSAT, scientific eyebrowns were raised. What a waste of observing time! At the most, the team thought they might pick up a smudge of weak X-rays where dust grains flying off Hyakutake collided with dust grains normally present in interplanetary space. The team did get ROSAT to take a look, and what the satellite saw ignited a controversy. Some 50,000 kilometers in front of the comet was a bright crescent of X-rays, 100 times brighter than the brightest "smudge" the team of scientists had hoped for. This was completely unexpected. All astronomers could do was come up with three rather unconvincing theories: (1 ) Solar X-rays were absorbed and reemited by the comet (Xray fluorescence); (2 ) Cometary material emitted X-rays when bathed in the solar wind; and (3 ) Charged particles were ...
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... Light In The Night Sky A. Kosa-Kiss, a Romanian scientist, has submitted the following observation to the Journal of Meteorology. At dawn on 1 September 1986, I was preparing to terminate my astronomical observations when suddenly at 0200 UT in the north-north-east a small [luminous 1 'bubble' -- convex side upward appeared in the sky as viewed between two nearby buildings and the farther trees. The bubble ascended slowly, higher and higher, and developed into a huge semicircular cupola or dome before halting for a few minutes. Its homogeneous, uniform structure was striking as it shone with a strong, silvery-bluish light in the absolutely black sky. By then, the cupola almost completely covered the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) whose five or six brighter stars clearly sent their rays through the phenomenon. The cupola had sharply-cut edges all round it, until later when a thin arm-like feature separated from its right topside and bent in the direction of the cupola, while remaining slightly apart from it. The semicircle (cupola) of light soon began to shrink and fade. By 02.23 UT it had disappeared. Rosa-Kiss suggested that the phenomenon may have been a precursor earthquake light associated with the Vrancea earthquake of August 31. 1986. that occurred in the Carpathians. (Rosa-Kiss, Attila; "Earthquake Lights, or Celestial Medusa," Journal of Meteorology, U.K ., 26:132, 2001.) References. Earthquake lights (GLD8) and expanding balls of light on the ...
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... at the ready -- because a well-observed flare had occurred at this location in 1954, and calculations showed that conditions would be just right for the sun to be again reflected by clouds at this spot on June 7, 2001. It was a prediction that came true. Sunlight reflected from Martian clouds cannot be the total answer, though. An area called Tithonius Lacus, for example, is the source of many flares, but it is too cold in this part of Mars for clouds of water-ice crystals to exist. No closed book here! (Dobbins, Thomas, and Sheehan, William; "The Martian-Flares Mystery," Sky & Telescope, 101:115, May 2001. Anonymous; "Source of Flashes of Light Found," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 24, 2001. Cr. D. Phelps.) Comment. The Martian-flare phenomenon is reminiscent of the "Perseus-flasher" discussions in 1987. (SF#53) The frequently observed flashes of light seen in the constellation Perseus turned out to be sun glinting off an artificial satellite. From Science Frontiers #137, SEP-OCT 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... , geoglyphs, and spoked ray-centers. They all overlap. It's all a gigantic Rorschach test; and different observers see different things! A Nazca biomorph (monkey with spiral tail) overlain by an abstract, unexplained geoglyph. See Book Supplement for still another Nazca figure. Of course, there are doodles on this 400-square-mile canvas that don't fit on any of the three pages. We'll have to ignore them for now. The archeoastronomers first tried to read something meaningful into the Nazca lines, but they were disappointed. Computer analyses revealed no significant connections with the rising and settings of heavenly bodies. Next, some tried to relate the biomorphs to the celestial sphere. Did a terrestrial bird figure point toward a bird-like grouping of stars? A few earth-sky bird connections are interesting in this regard, but generally the idea that the Nazca lines are a terrestrial zodiac has not panned out well. The geo-speculators have had more success. There are many "water" connections. The geoglyphs were drawn at the time of a great drought. The geoglyphs are often colocated with groups of subterranean aqueducts called "puquios," which were constructed during the drought. The "ray centers" are usually located near water sources. The trapezoids are generally oriented parallel to the flow of surface water. Seashells and ceremonial drinking vessels have been excavated near the trapezoids, suggesting water-connected rituals. Fossil footpaths follow many of the Nazca lines. Accumulating evidence has led many archeologists and anthropologists to conclude that some of the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 132: NOV-DEC 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Theories that are Hard to Believe Explain Things We Cannot See That "something" we cannot see is that astronomical fudge factor called "dark matter". Astronomers are sure it exists because its presence, though unseen, explains two anomalies: The high circular velocity of the stars and gas in the outer reaches of galaxies. Circular velocities should decrease with distance from the galactic center, just as planet velocities do in the solar system. They don't , so some gravitational force from some unseen mass must counterbalancing centrifugal force (mark that this is presumptious! The "force" need not be gravity.) Observations suggesting that galaxies formed when the universe was less than a billion years old. The gravitational pull of the visible mass is inadequate to cause this clumping so quickly in the history of the universe. Many candidates have been proposed to play the dark-matter role. One of the more popular possibilities is that vast sea of neutrinos pervading the cosmos -- if they really do display just a hint of mass. Two other candidates now on the table are so bizarre that we marvel at the ingenuity of the theorists. One involves exceedingly large particles, the other unbelievably tiny clumps of particles. At the "giant" end of the size spectrum are galaxy-size particles weighing only 10-24 as much as an electron, which is itself by no means large. It would be hard to experimentally distinguish such ...
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... Astronomical Manuscript," Sky Telescope, 100:40, November 2000. Ber man, A.S .; "Try Your Hand at Cracking the Uncrackable," USA Today, August 3, 2000. Cr. V. White via L. Farish.) Comment. We have passed lightly over a big subject. For more, visit: www.vonich.nu Or read: Brumbaugh, Robert S.; The Most Mysterious Manuscript, Carbondale, 1978. As for Roger Bacon, it has been claimed that he wrote some of Shakespeare's plays and, further, that these acknowledged works of genius even include an embedded cipher, which, like the Voynich Manuscript, has never been decoded. One of the astronomical diagrams in the Voynich Manuscript. The meaning of the star symbols in the eight (not the Zodiacal twelve!) sectors is obscure. The language used in the accompanying text is likewise mysterious. From Science Frontiers #135, MAY-JUN 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... 's UFO As long-time readers of Science Frontiers are aware, UFOs get little space here. Every once in a while, though, we see something UFOish worth passing along. The one below is from 1957, and the observer was a famous astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. Tombaugh was an avid skywatcher as well as an acute telescopic observer. He was very familiar with atmospheric phenomena. His experience belies the common assertion of UFO skeptics that "professional astronomers never see UFOs." An Unusual Aerial Phenomenon by Clyde W. Tombaugh I saw the object about eleven o'clock one night in August, 1949, from the backyard of my home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I happened to be looking at zenith, admiring the beautiful transparent sky of stars, when I suddenly spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light similar to the "Lubbock lights". My wife and her mother were sitting in the yard with me and they saw them also. The group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space of formation smaller, (at first about one degree across) and their intensity duller, fading from view at about 35 degrees above the horizon. Total time of visibility was about three seconds. I was too flabbergasted to count the number of rectangles of light, or to note some other features I wondered about later. There was no sound. I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight as strange as this. The rectangles of light were ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The star of the star-nosed mole (Left) Tenticle-like rays surrounding one nostril of the star-like mole. (Right) The number of rays around the other nostril give the density of sensory receptors. The star-nosed mole is one of North America's more bizarre mammals. Its nostrils are surrounded by mobile, Medusa-like appendages that are richly suppled with nerves and blood vessels. These tentacle-like structures form the "star," which has long been considered a tactile organ used for feeling for prey. However, behavioral experiments by E. Gould et al indicate that the star may be more than a tactile organ. It seems to sport electrical sensors that detect the minute electrical fields surrounding worms, leeches, insect larvae, and other favorite mole tidbits. This conclusion derives from experiments in which starnosed moles preferentially attacked the parts of worms that are most strongly electrical. Actually, scientists have been puzzled as to how this mole found its prey, for this mammal is semiaquatic and somehow locates its dinner in muddy water even though it has poor eyesight. Although some fish possess electrical sensors, they are uncommon in mammals. Half way around the planet, another strange creature, also classified with the mammals, frequents muddy waters looking for the same sort of prey favored by the star-nosed mole. The Australian platypus also has weak vision and employs search techniques similar to those of ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 105: May-Jun 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Wrong-way stars in spiral galaxies Spiral galaxies are believed to form when gigantic clouds of gas collapse under the pull of gravity to create spinning discs. Further condensations give rise to the billions of stars that make up these immense rotating stellar wheels. Intuitively, one would expect all of the stars in a given galaxy to rotate around the hub in the same direction, like all of the water molecules in a whirlpool. But galaxy NGC4138, 50-million light years away, defies this common-sense expectation. M. Haynes and colleagues at Cornell have discovered that fully one-fifth of this galaxy's stars are rotating in a direction opposite from the rest. Otherwise, NGC4138 is a well-behaved spiral galaxy, almost a boring one, exhibiting no signs of internal turmoil or past collisions with another galaxy. However, all of the wrong-way stars appear to be youngish. This little clue may lead to some sort of explanation. (Muir, Hazel; "Counter-Revolutionaries Lurk in Spiral Galaxies," New Scientist, p. 18, March 16, 1996.) Comment. If all of NGC4138's counterrotating stars did condense from the original spinning gas disc, their large wrong-sign angular momentum would have had to be compensated for by a speed up of all the "right-way" stars. From Science Frontiers #105, MAY-JUN 1996 . 1996-2000 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 89: Sep-Oct 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects An Age Paradox "Cosmologists say the universe may be 8 to 15 billion years old. Stellar astronomers disagree. They say the oldest stars are much older, perhaps 16 to 19 billion years old. Because the oldest stars can't be older than the universe in which they lie, this age paradox presents a thorny problem for astronomers." At least two solutions to the paradox are possible: (1 ) The cosmological distance scale used to determine the age of the universe is incorrect; and/or (2 ) Our theories about how stars work and evolve are in error. Something has to give. (Jayawardhana, Ray; "The Age Paradox," Astronomy, 21:39, June 1993.) Comment. Also pertinent here are H. Arp's collection of red-shift anomalies, which also call into question the cosmological distance scale; and those missing solar neutrinos, which cast doubt on our ideas about how stars work. H. Arp's redshift anomalies are cataloged in AQB and AWB in our catalog: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos. To order, see: here . From Science Frontiers #89, SEP-OCT 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The milky sea a.k .a . "white water"June 1854. South of Java. Aboard the American clipper Shooting Star . Captain Kingman reporting: "The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky...appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world." We selected this account of the milky sea phenomenon because of its vivid verbiage -- something absent from the modern reports: "August 13, 1986. Northwest Indian Ocean. The entire sea surface took on an intense white glow which was not unlike viewing the negative of a photograph." The milky sea is a rather common phenomenon. In fact, the British Meteorological Office has established a Bioluminescence Database, which presently contains 235 reports of milky seas seen since 1915. P.J . Herring and M. Watson have employed this Database in a review paper on these impressive displays. Geographical plotting of the reports shows a strong concentration in the northwest Indian Ocean (see figure). Seasonally, there is a strong peaking in August and a secondary blip in ...
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... Take a look at the distribution of 153 gamma-ray bursts registered by the Gamma-Ray Observatory (a satellite). There is no pattern, gamma-ray bursters seem to be evenly distributed in all directions. This is not what the astronomers expected, and the implications of this isotropy are staggering. Gamma-ray bursts emanate from highly localized unseen sources. They may last for a few milliseconds or stretch out for several minutes. The energy in the bursts ranges over 26 orders of magnitude. The rise-times of the bursts are so short that the sources can only be a few hundred kilometers across. Before the accompanying map appeared, most scientists thought that the bursters were nearby, probably in the disk of the galaxy, and were due to asteroids being digested by neutron stars or possibly neutron-star quakes. If such were so, the bursters would be concentrated in the plane of the galaxy (the Milky Way), which clearly they are not. Another theory places the bursters in a distant spherical halo about our galaxy. But, in this case, the bursters would have to be much more energetic than astronomers care to contemplate. In fact, if they exist in a galactic halo, we should also be able to detect the bursters in our neighboring galaxies -- but we do not! A more exciting suggestion is that gamma-ray bursters are really very close! This would be consistent with the failure to find cosmological redshifts in the burster spectra. Could they be really close, just a few hundred light away? Perhaps arranged in a ...
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... Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The pit-zodiacs Schagen-Muggenburg lies 50 kilometers north of Amsterdam. The Muggenburg part of the town name is only a few years old. Before it was built, archeologists were allowed to explore the meadows making up the construction site. L. Therkorn, an archeologist from the University of Amsterdam, led the exploration team. The digs yielded artifacts going as far back as 300 AD, when this region was sparsely populated by farmers. However, if Therkorn et al had dug up only these old bones and pottery shards, we would not be writing this for SF! For anomalists, it was the pits -- old pits that had been filled in and that seemed to be arranged in an intricate pattern that mirrored the star constellations making up the classical Greek zodiac. But this revelation didn't come until later. After all, pits are common in archeology. Often they contain just rubbish, sometimes human remains. "But the pits at Muggenburg are different. There are 57 of them, each about a meter wide and deep, extending over about half a hectare [about 1 acres] They were certainly not used for storage because the level of the groundwater is too high. Nor were they used as dumps; archaeological evidence shows that they were filled in shortly after they were dug, and some have very little in them." It was only when Therkorn mapped the pits did she see that they were not distributed at random. Connecting them as children do with dot-puzzles, she quickly ...
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... be careening about in a dense cloud of unseen, unknown masses. These might be dark, Jupiter-sized objects, black holes, and/or some exotic forms of matter. We must choose between the reality of dark matter or admit that something is awry with our laws of gravitation and motion when they are applied on a cosmological scale Now, let us examine those four darkmatter items from the recent literature: D. Lin, a University of California astronomer, has shown that the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits around our own galaxy (the Milky Way) is being torn apart (" cannibalized") by the powerful gravitational pull of a dense cloud of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way. This dismemberment of the Large Magellanic Cloud cannot be explained by the gravitational forces exerted by the stars in our galaxy that we can see. Lin calculates that our halo of dark matter is equivalent to 600-800 billion solar masses, compared to the only 100 billion solar masses of visible matter. (Flam, Faye; "Spinning in the Dark," Science, 260:1593, 1993. Also: Anonymous; "' Dark Matter' Is Observed 'Cannibalizing' a Galaxy," Baltimore Sun, p. 8A, June 8, 1993.) The dark matter surrounding a galaxy will, according to the Theory of Relativity, act as a gravitational lens that will deflect light rays passing near it. This dark matter, acting like a telescope, should increase the number of quasars counted in the sky near galactic clusters. Such larger quasar counts are indeed observed, ...
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... and Napier corrected each redshift to account for the Earth's motion around the center of the Milky Way -- a different correction for each location in the sky -- out popped a periodicity of 37 km/sec, close to one of Tifft's values. It was so strong that the chance of it being a statistical fluke was less than 1 in 3,000." Tifft's work therefore seems to have been verified again. But Tifft is now waxing even more iconoclastic, claiming that galactic redshifts have actually changed slightly in just a few years! (Anonymous; "Quantized Redshifts: What's Going on Here?" Sky and Telescope , 84:128, 1992.) Comment. A strange geometrical concordance exists between quantized redshifts and the shells of stars surrounding some elliptical galaxies. See AWO5 in our catalog: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos . This volume also contains much more on quantized redshifts in AWF8. Ordering information here . From Science Frontiers #84, NOV-DEC 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... they radiate microwaves instead of visible light. Natural masers have been found in the atmospheres of both earth and Mars as well as in interstellar space. They form in space when electromagnetic radiation falls upon dense molecular clouds, which then reradiate the energy at frequencies characteristic of the molecules, Armed with radio telescopes, astronomers can "see" masers as bright spots (" maser spots") in the radio sky. R. Norris and J. Whiteoak et al, at the Australia Telescope National Facility, while surveying just 16 regions of the Milky Way between 5,000 and 30,000 light years, detected a dozen intense methanol masers (6 .7 -12.2 gigahertz) arranged in lines. Early thinking is that these maser spots decorate the discs of gas clouds surrounding nascent stars. In other words, maser spots could be protoplanets. Given the small area of the sky sampled by Norris and Whiteoak, maser spots may be very common. (Dayton, Leigh; "Microwaves May Mark Position of Protoplanets," New Scientist, p. 16, July 10, 1993.) Questions. Whence all this interstellar methanol? And where does it all go when the protoplanets coalesce into planets? Could these molecular clouds also contain those other organic compounds necessary for the creation and development of life? If so, we can speculate that life may originate often and repeatedly as stars and planets are born. From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 80: Mar-Apr 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Unidentified Light Strange optical phenomenon seen off the coast of Trinidad in 1991. January 13, 1991. Caribbean Sea. Aboard the m.v . Trinidad and Tobago . "At 0210 UTC whilst the ship was proceeding eastwards along the north coast of Trinidad, a relatively bright patch was noticed in the almost cloudless sky and was thought to be a cluster of stars. Its bearing was approximately 300 at an elevation of about 50 , and closer inspection through binoculars revealed a rather strange phenomenon, as shown in the sketch. "The bright patch was a perfect circle of a bright, light-blue colour and was transparent as stars could be seen through it. There was also a trail from the circle which looked like the track a disc would describe if it moved through an arc. This trail was also of light-blue colouration but was not nearly so bright as the circle. The entire phenomenon dissipated after about five minutes." (Knight, M.; "Unidentified Light," Marine Observer, 62:22, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #80, MAR-APR 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Does nature compute?Back in the 1960s, kids used to watch the TV series Lost in Space . Starring on this show was a robot which, when asked a stupid or answerless question replied, "It does not compute!" More seriously, we now ask, "Does Nature compute?" Science believes very deeply that mathematics reflects the real world, that we live in an ordered universe where everything can be reduced to mathematical expressions. The progress of science, particularly physics, seems to bear out this symbiotic relationship between mathematics and the physical world. However, P. Davies points out that that there are uncomputable numbers and operations. In fact, there are infinitudes of them. All the world's computers could chug away forever and not come up with answers in these cases. So far , Nature has been kind, or we have been lucky, because we have been able to nicely mirror Nature with "doable" math. Davies wonders if it has been entirely a matter of luck: "Einstein said that God is subtle but not malicious, and we must hope that the laws of physics will turn out to be computable after all. If so, that fact alone would provoke all sorts of interesting scientific and philosophical questions. Just why is the world structured in such a way that we can describe its basic principles using 'do-able' mathematics? How was this mathematical ability evolved in ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects That's the way the universe bounces What follows is a chain of ideas (perhaps "speculations" is a better word) that was recently unleashed by L. Smolin in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (9 :173). At stake here is the very nature of Nature herself. We begin with the notion of anthropic cosmology, in which the physical constants of the universe are identified as having just the "right" values to allow the existence of stars, planets, carbon compounds, and the other ingredients of human life. (Just why this state of affairs prevails is a question rarely addressed!) Adherents of anthropic cosmology hold that our "human-friendly" universe is just one of many universes populating a larger metauniverse. These "other" universes are thought to have different values of the fundamental physical constants (viz., the mass of the proton) and, in consequence, wildly different forms of life. In nonhuman universes, there could even be entities for which our word "life" is inadequate. The second idea is that of an oscillating universe. In this concept, universes expand just so far and then collapse back into the "singularities" (i .e ., black holes) from which they arose. Then, Phoenix-like, they bounce back and reexpand into new universes -- ones with slightly different physical constants. These rebounding universes are in a sense ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Galaxy Spins Wrong Way We have all seen impressive photographs of spiral galaxies with their whirlpool patterns. One can easily imagine them spinning ponderously, with streams of stars spiraling out behind the rotating core. This picture is intuitively satisfying from a mechanical point of view. But: "A galaxy with a spiral arm going the wrong way has been found by astroomers in the U.S . Spiral arms usually trail behind as a galaxy turns, but in NGC 4622 an inner arm is wrapped round the galaxy in the direction it is rotating." (Mitton, Simon; "Puzzle of Galaxy That Points Two ways," New Scientist, p. 22, February 29, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Three Views Of Mortality The death of matter. Physicists have maintained for over a century that the Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees that our universe with run down one day and that life must cease. This cold reductionist view is seconded by recent evidence that protons, long con sidered immortal, may after all decay. The consequences of proton decay are even more dismal than the dire predictions of thermodynamics: "Perhaps the most disturbing piece of speculation to come out of theoretical physics recently is the prediction that the whole universe is in decay. Not only do living things die, species go extinct, and stars burn out, but the apparently immutable protons in the nucleus of every atom are slowly dissolving. Eventually -- in more than a quadrillion years -- nothing will be left of the universe but a dead mist of electrons, photons, and neutrinos." (Flam, Faye; "Could Protons Be Mortal after All?" Science, 257:1862, 1992.) The death of memory. With increasing entropy and decaying protons on their minds, it comes as no surprise that physicists likewise believe that when one dies, that's it . An afterlife is impossible. How do physicists conclude this? In a letter to the American Journal of Physics, J. Orear proffered an interesting sort of "proof": "One such proof: human memory is stored in the circuitry of the brain and after death ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Alien Meteors Meteors or shooting stars are usually considered to be small fragments that have been broken off the asteroids plying orbits between Mars and Jupiter. If this belief is correct, meteors darting into the earth's upper atmosphere would have speeds less than 260,000 kilometers per hour. Any objects with significantly higher velocities must come outside the solar system. It has, therefore, been unsettling to find that quite a few meteors hit our atmosphere at speeds much higher than 260,000 km/hr. Radar measurements of 160,000 meteors by A. Taylor and colleagues, at a New Zealand site, found that about 1% (1500 meteors) struck the atmosphere with velocities greater than 350,000 km/hr. These speedsters must come from beyond the solar system. The question arising is: Whence all this interstellar debris? One hint comes from the fact that the aliens appear to come from the direction in which the sun and its family of planets are traveling through interstellar space. Evidently, this interstellar medium is far from a vacuum; it is strewn with flotsam and jetsam -- but from what smashed planets, moons, and asteroids? (Samson, Alan; "Radar Traps Visitors from Outer Space," Dominion Sun Times (Wellington), April 25, 1993. (Cr. P. Hassall) From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. ...
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... is not a trivial observation, for it betrays a synthesizing, efflorescent cosmos rather than a universe slowly succumbing to the deepfreezing Second Law of Thermodynamics. Any of these soots and tars wafting down upon the surface of a suitable planet might initiate or accelerate life processes. Cosmic soot. A 70-year-old astronomical enigma is the origin of the DIBs (Diffuse Interstellar absorption Bands). These dark absorption bands in stellar spectra have never been correlated with known chemical compounds. Now, L. Allamandola and F. Salama (NASA-Ames) find that the DIBs may be due to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons! A more digestible descriptor would be "soot," like that found in automobile exhaust and on your barbecued steak. (Weiss, Peter; "Cosmic Soot Fills Space between the Stars," New Scientist, p. 15, March 13, 1993.) Organic asteroids. Some asteroids are abnormally red. Newly discovered asteroid 5145 Pholus is 3 times brighter at near-infrared wavelengths than it is in the visible portion of the spectrum. The best explanation so far for this redness is that 5145 Pholus is veneered with organic compounds called "tholins." Tholins are synthesized when methane and other simple chemicals are bathed in ultraviolet and particulate radiations. Tholins have even been dubbed the "first foods" of aspiring new life forms! (Anonymous; "An Organic Asteroid?" Sky and Telescope, 85:15, 1993.) From Science Frontiers #87, MAY-JUN 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 104: Mar-Apr 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Men Like Gods With the theft of the title from one of H.G . Wells' novels, we attend to an article that appeared in the London Times last summer. The article was based upon a paper written for the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society by Prof. E. Harrison. If, said Harrison, some properties of the universe had been just a tad different, our universe would be barren of stars, light, and of course life itself. He mentions such properties as the strength of gravity, the charge on the electron, and the speed of light. Why, he and many others have mused, are these critical properties so precisely adjusted so as to permit the existence of life -- and us? Harrison lists three answers: oThis is the way God wanted it to be. Further inquiry is unnecessary. oIf the universe were constructed any other way, we wouldn't be here to ask such silly, anthropomorphic questions! Some find this "anthropic principle" to be no answer at all. oOur universe was actually created and its properties fine-tuned by nonsupernatural entities of superior intelligence living in another universe. [These beings apparently get a kick out of manufacturing other universes, or perhaps it's a religious imperative for them!] Before you crumple up this issue of SF and hurl it at very high energy into a wastebasket, consider these two paragraphs from the ...
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35. It
... and their paper was accepted. It seems. therefore, that a lot of galaxies, maybe all of them, are receding from our telescopes at velocities separated by 37.5 kilometers/second, rather than in a continuous range of velocities. Unless Napier and Guthrie and, of course, W.G . Tifft, the discoverer of IT, can be proven wrong, all of modern astronomy and cosmology will be in jeopardy: the expanding universe, the big bang, the presumed age of the universe, not to mention the endless assertions that these are all facts not theories! (Matthews, Robert; "Do Galaxies Fly through the Universe in Formation?" Science, 271:759, 1996.) Reference. The quantization of redshifts is cataloged in AWF8 in our catalog Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos. Ordering information here . The power spectrum of galaxy redshifts reveal a strong signal at 37.5 kilometers/second. From Science Frontiers #105, MAY-JUN 1996 . 1996-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... . The revised steady state model has jettisoned the idea of continuous creation in favor of many discrete "creation events," which will doubtless be called "little bangs." They also fill space with small metallic needles which absorb microwaves and reemit the uniform microwave background. The new theory needs more work, but Hoyle and his colleagues write in the June 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal: "This paper is not intended to give a finished view of cosmology. It is intended rather to open the door to a new view which at present is blocked by a fixation with big bang cosmology." (Crosswell, Ken; "Return of the Steady State Universe," New Scientist, p. 14, February 27, 1993.) Reference. A substantial portion of our catalog volume Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos is devoted to questioning the Big Bang. Details here . From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Scientific and Technical Terms ) An Abstract. Stellar aberration, discovered nearly three centuries ago by Bradley, was immediately recognized as a phenomenon owing to the velocity of the earth in its orbit around the sun. Einstein provided an explanation of aberration in his famous 1905 paper using his new relativity theory, and his explanation remains essentially without modification in many modern textbooks. Herein, we show that his explanation is very much in disagreement with measurement. (Hayden, Howard C.; paper to be published in Galilean Electrodynamics , vol. 4, no. 5, 1993.) A Comment. The essence of Prof. Hayden's main argument is that, if stellar aberration depended on the relative velocity between source and observer (as Einstein maintained), then each component of a spectroscopic binary star would have drastically different stellar aberration, contrary to observation. (Van Flandern, Tom; Meta Research Bulletin, 2:29, 1993.) From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Un Oggetto Misterioso April 22, 1966. Genova and Novi di Modena, Italy. We have just learned of this "mysterious object." Translation provided by P. Cortesi. "Near the star Alfa Hydrae (see illustration) appeared a perfect bright sphere, about 5 apparent diameter; it became largest in a few seconds, then it grew thinner and appeared like a line. In 45 minutes, its brilliance diminished progressively, and it disappeared at the western horizon. "From astronomical observations by some amateur astronomers were calculated the following data: The object's altitude was between 600 and 650 kilometers above the earth's surface; at its biggest dimension, the object was 95 kilometers wide; it was over the Mediterranean Sea, in a place between Algiers and the Balearic Islands. "No astronomer was able to explain the phenomenon, and the university astronomical review Coelum denominated it 'un oggetto misterioso' (a mysterious object)." (Anonymous; Coelum , 34:36, May-June 1966. Cr. P. Cortesi.) From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... be wrong that I propose to ignore them." (Anonymous; "Big Bang Brouhaha," Nature, 356:731, 1992.) Comment. It is ironical that before astronomers found large-scale inhomogeneities in the cosmos (galactic clusters and superclusters, the Great Wall, etc.), the Big Bangers claimed that the very smoothness of the microwave background proved the reality of the Big Bang. The Big Bang, it seems, is one of those "politically correct" paradigms, which one criticizes at his peril. (Beichman, Arnold; "The Big Bang Censorship," Insight , p. 22, April 13, 1992. Cr. B. Horstmann.) Reference. To read more about the trials of the Big Bang hypothesis, see our catalog: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos. To order, visit: here . From Science Frontiers #82, JUL-AUG 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... , crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids. P. Keher, a KTB scientist, was amazed at what the drill found: "When I started 25 years ago, the idea was that the deeper you go into the crust, the drier it gets." (Kerr, Richard A.; "Looking -- Deeply -- into the Earth's Crust in Europe," Science, 261:295, 1993.) Comment. Deep-living bacteria were not mentioned in the above article, but Soviet scientists claim to have pumped them up from 12 km down! Outer space may not be our final frontier despite the introductory blurb to Star Trek! From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... , as indicated in the figure. What deadly climatic changes must have wracked our sister planet! (Touma, Jihad, and Wisdom, Jack; "The Chaotic Obliquity of Mars," Science, 259: 1294, 1993. Also: Laskar, J., and Robutel, P.; "The Chaotic Obliquity of the Planets," Nature, 361:608, 1993.) Comment. The successful evolution of higher life on earth (a presumption!) therefore seems to have depended upon the gravitational shields of Jupiter and Saturn as well as the presence of our unusually large satellite. How likely is this combination of planets and satellites in the rest of the universe? Of course, life-as-we-know-it also requires just the right kind of central star and a planet with good air and water. Perhaps lifeas-we-do-not-know-it is more likely! From Science Frontiers #87, MAY-JUN 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 70: Jul-Aug 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Two Anomalous Types Of Stars Blue straggler stars. The stars comprising a star cluster are usually assigned the same age, since it is thought that they were all created at the same time that the cluster was formed. Lurking in many star clusters, however, are brighter, bluer nonconformists called "blue straggler stars." These stars seem to have about twice the mass of the "normal" cluster members, and they appear to be only about one-fifth as old as their compatriots. The motions of the blue stragglers are consistent with those of bona fide cluster members, implying that they are not interlopers or foreground objects. Several explanations have been suggested to explain the presence of blue stragglers. One thought is that they harbor asteroid-size black holes at their cores. So far, all of the profferred explanations have serious flaws. (Fogg, Martyn J.; "Blue Straggler Stars: A Cosmic Anomaly," The Explorer, 6:4 , Spring 1990.) Socket stars. "A picture book hardly seems a likely source of an astronomical discovery, especially in a world where mysteries of the universe usually tumble from sophisticated electronic instruments attached to huge telescopes. Nevertheless, while recently paging through Exploring the Southern Sky , by G. Madsen and R. West, Walter A. Feibelman (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) recognized something that had caught his attention decades before. High-resolution photographs of ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 66: Nov-Dec 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Globular Clusters Upset Theory Of Galaxy Formation A spherical cloud of globular clusters surrounds the Milky Way galaxy. Each cluster is itself a spherical groups of stars. Through the telescope, globular clusters are beautiful spherical aggregations of bright stars that seem to get ever denser toward the cluster's center. Globular clusters harbor many anomalies (AOB4 and AOB17 in Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos); here, we mention two involving spatial distribution and age. Many spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, spin ponderously in the center of a spherical cloud of scores, even hundreds, of globular clusters (see sketch). Not only do the globular clusters surrounding us display a different spatial distribution (spherical rather than flat-spiral), but their individual ages undercut galaxy theory. All of the Milky Way's globular clusters were supposed to have been formed when our galaxy was created. Yet, the ages of these clusters vary by as much as 5 billion years. (Dayton, Leigh; "Globular Clusters Upset Theory of Galaxy," New Scientist, p. 34, May 13, 1989.) Comment. We cannot resist mentioning still another cluster anomaly: The globular clusters do not participate in the galaxy's general rotation. Where did these oddballs come from? Reference. The catalog volume: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos, mentioned above, is described here . From Science Frontiers #66, NOV-DEC 1989 ...
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... fact"; no doubts permitted; here the Book of Science is closed! It was like a breath of fresh air to read this sentence in Sky and Telescope: "Scientists are still unable to confirm the existence of even a single black hole, despite a widespread belief that such things should, and indeed must, exist." This single sentence won't change anything, because everyone is comfortable with black holes. They are part of the (often false) reality that the media smothers us with. Actually, there are two places where black holes "might" dwell, based upon the anomalous behavior of matter around these regions: (1 ) at the centers of some galaxies, including our own Milky Way; and (2 ) as unseen components of some close double stars, where the mass of the unseen companion is too great for it to be an ordinary neutron star. W. Kundt and D. Fischer, at Bonn University, have recently concluded that the second possibility is better explained without resorting to black holes. For example, a neutron star with a massive accretion disk might suffice. As for black holes at the centers of galaxies, with masses of several million suns, gravitationally sucking in surrounding matter and careless spaceships - well, they are possible. Unfortunately, galac-tic centers are too far away and obscured by dust for us to be certain what lies at their cores. Black holes are really only surmise; although they make good copy! (Anonymous; "No Black Holes?" Sky and Telescope, 78:572, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 69: May-Jun 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Mystery Of The Missing Comets A key feature of our solar system is the Oort Cloud of comets that surrounds the sun and its family of planets. No one has yet seen the Oort Cloud directly, but the textbooks say that it must be there. In fact, all stars like our sun with planetary systems should have their own private Oort Clouds of comets - if the prevailing theory of planetary-system formation is correct. When we see a comet looping around the sun, it is because it has been jostled loose from the Oort Cloud by a passing star or molecular cloud. Further, some of these jostled comets should be kicked outwards and thus escape the solar system. Continuing with this reasoning, we on earth should sometimes see interstellar comets that have been shaken loose from other stellar systems. But we don't ! T.A . McGlynn and R.D . Chapman worry about this. "This lack of detections of extrasolar comets is becoming an embarrassment to the theories of solar system and comet formation." McGlynn and Chapman calculate that we should have seen six interstellar comets in the past 150 years, but the actual number is zero. Such interstellar comets would be easy to spot because they would be moving much faster than our own comets. Two possible explanations for the missing interstellar comets are: (1 ) The Oort Cloud theory is wrong; and (2 ) Solar systems like ours are rarer ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 27  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf069/sf069a02.htm
... have surfaced. First, B. Guthrie and W, Napier, at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory, have checked Tifft's "bunching" claim using accurately known red shifts of some nearby galaxies. They found a periodicity of 37.5 kilometers/second -- no matter in which direction the galaxies lay. (Gribbin, John; "' Bunched' Red Shifts Question Cosmology," New Scientist, p. 10, December 21/28, 1991.) The work of Guthrie and Napier is elaborated upon in the next item. Sec ond, B. Koo and R. Krone, at the University of Chicago, using optical red-shift measurements, discovered that, in one direction at least , "the clusters of galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, seemed to be concentrated in evenly spaced layers." (Browne, Malcolm W.; "In Chile, GalaxyWatching Robot Seeks Measure of Universe," New York Times, December 17, 1991. Cr. P. Gunkel.) Comment. Explanations for the unexpected bunching vary and are highly controversial: There are systematic defects in the radiotelescopes and/or the observational techniques. But, as just reported by Koo and Krone, the phenomenon is also seen with optical instruments. The red shifts are not entirely due to the Doppler Effect and the recessional velocities of galaxies. If this is so, the dimensions and age of the universe would have to be revised. The red-shift bunching occurs because some galaxies are arranged in shells surrounding the earth. To some, this ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 26  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf080/sf080a04.htm
... along a linear "borehole" through the universe 7 billion light years long centered on the earth. If the redshifts are assumed to be measures of distance (as mainstream thinking demands), one gets the clumping effect seen in the accompanying illustration. (Henbest, Nigel; "Galaxies Form 'Megawalls' across Space," New Scientist, p. 37, March 19, 1990.) Comment. Not mentioned in the above article are the papers by W.G . Tifft on quantized redshifts. (See SF#50, for example.) It will be interesting to learn if "boreholes" pointed in other directions will encounter the same megawalls. If they do, the earth will be enclosed by shells of galaxies, much as some elliptical galaxies are surrounded by shells of stars. Wouldn't it be hilarious if the earth were at the center of these concentric shells? Some measurements of the universe's rotation also seem to imply geocentrism! It is more likely, however, that redshifts are just poor cosmological yardsticks. See our Catalog volume Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos for more on these subjects. Ordering information here . From Science Frontiers #69, MAY-JUN 1990 . 1990-2000 William R. Corliss ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 26  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf069/sf069a03.htm
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 65: Sep-Oct 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sweeping Anomalies Under The Rug A series of articles in the science magazine Mercury so slavishly followed the scientific party line on the meaning of the redshift that G. Burbidge was prompted to pen a rejoinder. Burbidge reviewed the considerable observational evidence supporting a non-cosmological interpretation of some redshifts. (Such data has been included in past issues of Science Frontiers and in our Catalog Stars Galaxies, Cosmos.) A typical observation is the apparent physical connection (streams of connecting matter) between quasars and galaxies with radically different redshifts. Burbidge remarks: "Evidence of this kind exists. If it is accepted it means: That at least some quasars do lie at so-called cosmological distances. That at least some parts of the redshifts of quasars are due to some effect other than the expansion of the universe. That quasars are physically related to bright, comparatively nearby galaxies." Burbidge is not concerned by the fact that some astronomers find the data unconvincing, rather he objects to the so-obvious attempts to brush such anomalous data under the rug. His concluding remarks are pertinent to all of science: "I cannot end this part of the discussion without making two points which are rarely made, but which are important: Evidence of the kind just mentioned which is favorable to the cosmological interpretations of the redshifts does not negate the other evidence. It simply means that the world is a complicated place. Only in articles of this ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 24  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf065/sf065a03.htm
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 78: Nov-Dec 1991 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Lunar Rainbow And Unexplained White Arc April 12, 1990. North Atlantic. Aboard the m.v . Canterbury Star. From left to right: normal secondary lunar rainbow (white). Normal primary bow (colored), anomalous secondary bow (white). "At 0004 UTC a bright, white arc was seen on the starboard bow and was quickly identified as a lunar rainbow. The moon was one day after its full phase and was just rising; it had little colouration but was unusually bright. A faint, secondary bow became visible outside the main bow at 0010 while the latter, at the same time, began to show colouring; it was possible to see a bluish reddish-orrange colour on the outside, merging into yellow, then to a bluish colour on the inside edge. See sketch. Unfortunately, measurement of the width of these bands was not possible as they were not clear enough. During this time, the outer secondary bow together with a third, inner bow remained faint and were white in colour; the inner secondary bow being nearly too faint to see." Comments from an expert in meteorological optics remarked that the radii of the primary and outer secondary bows were less than the theoretical values. He dismissed the inner secondary bow as a misinterpretation, since "theory predicts no such inner secondary bow." (Jackson, C.; "Rainbow," Marine Observer, 61: ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 15  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf078/sf078g14.htm
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 77: Sep-Oct 1991 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Supernova Theory Exploded What happens when two white dwarf stars in close orbit finally fall into one another? Theory says you get a colossal explosion called a Type-I supernova. But this hypothesis is in trouble because a recent survey of white dwarfs revealed absolutely no double white dwarfs in a sampe of 25 from the Milky Way. Even if a few pairs are eventually found, they do not appear to be numerous enough to account for the rate at which supernovas are observed. (Crosswell, Ken; "Supernova Theory Exploded by Solitary White Dwarfs," New Scientist, p. 23, March 23, 1991.) From Science Frontiers #77, SEP-OCT 1991 . 1991-2000 William R. Corliss ...
Terms matched: 1  -  Score: 15  -  15 May 2017  -  URL: /sf077/sf077b05.htm
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