Ancient underwater cities being found that are 10,000 years old Lost city 'could rewrite history' By BBC News Online's Tom Housden The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history. Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 meters (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years. The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution. Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft. Lost civilization The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilization, which dates back around 4,000 years. Continued...
Lost World under the North Sea It also serves as a warning for the scale of impact that climate change can cause, Professor Gaffney says. Human communities would have lost their homelands as the rising water began to encroach upon the wide, low-lying plains. "At times this change would have been insidious and slow - but at times, it could have been terrifyingly fast. It would have been very traumatic for these people," he says. [Some of the advances by the sea would have been similar to the widespread flooding of the English East Coast in 1953. That happened overnight as a result of strong winds and a particularly high tide, but in the case of the North Sea plains the floodwaters would not have receded - at least not completely, and not permanently.] "It would be a mistake to think that these people were unsophisticated or without culture... they would have had names for the rivers and hills and spiritual associations - it would have been a catastrophic loss," says Professor Gaffney.
Ancient City Found in India, Irradiated from Atomic Blast Radiation still so intense, the area is highly dangerous. A heavy layer of radioactive ash in Rajasthan, India, covers a three-square mile area, ten miles west of Jodhpur. Scientists are investigating the site, where a housing development was being built. For some time it has been established that there is a very high rate of birth defects and cancer in the area under construction. The levels of radiation there have registered so high on investigators' gauges that the Indian government has now cordoned off the region. The Mahabharata clearly describes a catastrophic blast that rocked the continent. "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe…An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor…it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race." A Historian Comments Archeological Investigation provides information Interestingly, Manhattan Project chief scientist Dr J.
Mystery at Abydos - Hall of Gods In 1848, an archaeological expedition working in Egypt discovered strange hieroglyphs on a ceiling beam at an ancient temple in Abydos, several hundred miles south of Cairo. The hieroglyphs were carefully copied and brought back to Europe. The mysterious images gave rise to heated debate amongst Egyptologists. Eventually, however, they were dismissed as bizarre objects that nobody could adequately explain and were forgotten. In the mid 1990's photographs and videos, taken primarily by tourists who had visited Abydos, began to appear on the internet. They depicted the 'strange machine hieroglyphs' originally discovered in the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the ancient high-tech machinery glyphs have been dismissed out of hand by modern Egyptologists. Re-carving of inscriptions was a common phenomenon in ancient Egypt. Recently, the respected Arab newspaper 'Al-Sharq Al-Awsat' published several photographs taken at another Egyptian temple, the Amon Ra Temple in Karnak.
Bright galaxy sheds light on early Universe Astronomers said on Wednesday they had snared light from a bright, ancient galaxy with a super-massive black hole at its core, a finding that would help explain aspects of the young Universe. The phenomenon is called a quasar, which are very bright but very distant galaxies with a mighty black hole at their heart. Until now, the most distant quasar ever seen sent light 870 million years after the Big Bang, which is believed to have occurred nearly 13.7 billion years ago. This record has now been beaten by European astronomers, who after a five-year probe found a quasar whose light was emitted just 770 million years after the cosmic birth. ULAS J1120+0641 has a "redshift" -- a signature of red light that is a telltale of distance -- of 8.6, meaning that the light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. "This quasar is a vital probe of the early Universe," said team leader Stephen Warren of the astrophysics group at Imperial College London.
'Odd Couple' Binary Makes Dual Gamma-ray Flares In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light. The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense gamma-ray emission make this system irresistible to astrophysicists. "Even though we were waiting for this event, it still surprised us," said Aous Abdo, a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a leader of the research team. Few pairings in astronomy are as peculiar as high-mass binaries, where a hot blue-white star many times the sun's mass and temperature is joined by a compact companion no bigger than Earth - and likely much smaller.
Most Distant Quasar Found A team of European astronomers has used ESO's Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe. The results will appear in the 30 June 2011 issue of the journal Nature. "This quasar is a vital probe of the early Universe. Quasars are very bright, distant galaxies that are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes at their centres. The quasar that has just been found, named ULAS J1120+0641 [2], is seen as it was only 770 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 7.1, [3]). Although more distant objects have been confirmed (such as a gamma-ray burst at redshift 8.2, eso0917, and a galaxy at redshift 8.6, eso1041), the newly discovered quasar is hundreds of times brighter than these. [4] UKIRT is the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.
Galaxy Zoo: Hubble 'Zombie' stars key to measuring dark energy "Zombie" stars that explode like bombs as they die, only to revive by sucking matter out of other stars. According to an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, this isn't the plot for the latest 3D blockbuster movie. Instead, it's something that happens every day in the universe - something that can be used to measure dark energy. This special category of stars, known as Type Ia supernovae, help to probe the mystery of dark energy, which scientists believe is related to the expansion of the universe. Andy Howell, adjunct professor of physics at UCSB and staff scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT), wrote a review article about this topic, published recently in Nature Communications. LCOGT, a privately funded global network of telescopes, works closely with UCSB. Supernovae are stars that have been observed since 1054 A.D., when an exploding star formed the crab nebula, a supernova remnant. "That's what our sun will be at the end of its life," he said.
There's a Hole in the Sun! And it’s leaking plasma into space… This rather dramatic photograph of the sun was taken on Feb. 1 by the Japanese-led Hinode (pronounced hi-node-ay) solar mission currently orbiting the Earth. The 5-year old spacecraft can see the sun in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray wavelengths, so it is especially adept at seeing multi-million degree solar plasma. In this image, two large dark “coronal holes” can be seen. SLIDE SHOW: 5 Ways the Solar Wind Will Blow You Away As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the solar atmosphere — or “corona” — is hotter than the sun’s surface. In this image, the spacecraft has imaged the solar corona in X-ray wavelengths, so only the hottest coronal plasma can be seen. The solar surface is twisted with magnetic field lines and within those magnetic loops (known, unsurprisingly, as “coronal loops”) solar plasma is trapped, accelerated, heated and pulled back to the solar surface — producing a phenomenon called “coronal rain.” Image: The X-ray sun (JAXA)
NASA Finds Earth-Size Planet Candidates In Habitable Zone, Six Planet System RELEASE : 11-030 NASA Finds Earth-Size Planet Candidates In Habitable Zone, Six Planet System WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. "In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: - end -
Logarithmic Maps of the Universe This website contains figures from "Map of the Universe" e-print, by Gott, Juric et al. The paper has been published in the Astrophysical Journal (Gott et al., 2005, ApJ, 624, 463), and you can also find the manuscript here (note: Figure 8. of the manuscript has been published as an inset poster, and has to be downloaded separately (see below)). Note to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox users: your browser will automatically shrink the large maps once they're loaded. Click on the shrunk image to bring it back to its full size and be able to scroll it. To print the map, print out the individual sheets and tape them together to make a wall map.