March 7, 2015 ⋆ Dimensional Bliss

Date: March 7, 2015

History of Cannabis and the Truth Behind Its Prohibition

March 7, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Documentary Film - This film about cannabis, True History of Marijuana, discusses the incredible number of uses for this amazing plant.Please like and share through your social networks if you believe that it is time to stop thecriminalization of cannabis. Be part of the movement to end marijuana prohibition! [...]

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Is This a Baby Picture of a Giant Planet?

March 7, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Hubble optical image (left) and VLT infrared image (right) of the circumstellar disk surrounding HD 100546. (ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.)

Excerpt from news.discovery.com

Mommy, where do baby planets come from? There’s no storks, birds, bees, or romantic dinners for two involved in the answer to that question — regardless of size, planets are all formed in pretty much the same way: through the aggregation of material within the disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star. While how long it actually takes and just what sort of planets are most likely to form where are still topics of discussion among astronomers, the birth process of a planet is fairly well understood.

And this may be the very first image of it actually happening.

Acquired by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the infrared image above (right) shows a portion of the disk of gas and dust around the star HD100546, located 335 light-years away in the constellation Musca. By physically blocking out the light from the star itself by means of an opaque screen — seen along the left side of the image — the light from the protoplanetary disk around HD 100546 can be seen, revealing a large bright clump that’s thought to be a planet in the process of formation.

If it is indeed a baby planet, it’s a big one — as large as, or perhaps even larger than, Jupiter.

A candidate protoplanet found in a disc of gas and dust around young star HD100546 (ESO)

This does raise an interesting question for astronomers because if it is a Jupiter-sized planet, it’s awfully far from its star… at least according to many current models of planetary formation. About 68 times as far from HD100546 as we are from the sun, if this planet were in our solar system it’d be located deep in the Kuiper Belt, twice as far as Pluto. That’s not where one would typically expect to find gas giants, so it’s been hypothesized that this protoplanet might have migrated outwards after initially forming closer to the star… perhaps “kicked out” by gravitational interaction with an even more massive planet.

Alternatively, it may not be a planet at all — the bright blob in the VLT image might be coming from a much more distant source. While extremely unlikely, further research will be needed to rule that possibility out.

If it’s found to be a planet, HD100546 “b” would offer scientists an unprecedented opportunity to observe a planetary formation process in action — and from a relatively close proximity as well.

According to the team’s paper, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, ”What makes HD100546 particularly interesting is that 1. it would be the first imaged protoplanet that is still embedded in the gas and dust disk of its host star; and 2. it would show that planet formation does occur at large orbital separations.”

(Now all we have to do is wait a couple billion years and then show these pictures to HD100546b’s girlfriend. How embarrassing!)

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Exoplanet Imager Begins Hunt for Alien Worlds

March 7, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

This infrared image shows the dust ring around the nearby star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus.

Excerpt from news.discovery.com

By Ian O'Neill

A new instrument attached to one of the most powerful telescopes in the world has been switched on and acquired its ‘first light’ images of alien star systems and Saturn’s moon Titan.
The Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (or SPHIRES) instrument has been recently installed at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s already impressive suite of sophisticated instrumentation. The VLT is located in the ultra-dry high-altitude climes of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

In the observation above, an ‘Eye of Sauron‘-like dust ring surrounding the star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus, a testament to the sheer power of the multiple technique SPHIRES will use to acquire precision views of directly-imaged exoplanets.

The biggest problem with trying to directly image a world orbiting close to its parent star is that of glare; stars are many magnitudes brighter that the reflected light from its orbiting exoplanet, so how the heck are you supposed to gain enough contrast between the bright star and exoplanet to resolve the two? The SPHIRES instrument is using a combination of three sophisticated techniques to remove a star’s glare and zero-in on its exoplanetary targets.

This infrared image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was one of the first produced by the SPHERE instrument soon after it was installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in May 2014.

ESO

The first technique, known as adaptive optics, is employed by the VLT itself. By firing a laser into the Earth’s atmosphere during the observation, a gauge on the turbulence in the upper atmospheric gases can be measured and the effects of which can be removed from the imagery. Any blurriness caused by our thick atmosphere can be adjusted for.

Next up is a precision coronograph inside the instrument that blocks the light from the target star. By doing this, any glare can be removed and any exoplanet in orbit may be bright enough to spot.

But the third technique, which really teases out any exoplanet signal, is the detection of different polarizations of light from the star system. The polarization of infrared light being generated by the star and the infrared glow from the exoplanet are very subtle. SPHIRES can differentiate between the two, thereby further boosting the observation’s contrast.

“SPHERE is a very complex instrument. Thanks to the hard work of the many people who were involved in its design, construction and installation it has already exceeded our expectations. Wonderful!” said Jean-Luc Beuzit, of the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, France and Principal Investigator of SPHERE, in an ESO press release.

The speed and sheer power of SPHIRES will be an obvious boon to astronomers zooming in on distant exoplanets, aiding our understanding of these strange new worlds.

The star HR 7581 (Iota Sgr) was observed in SPHERE survey mode (parallel observation in the near infrared with the dual imaging camera and the integral field spectrograph ). A very low mass star, more than 4000 times fainter that its parent star, was discovered orbiting Iota Sgr at a tiny separation of 0.24". This is a vital demonstration of the power of SPHERE to image faint objects very close to bright ones.

ESO

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Ancient ‘Blue’ Mars Lost an Entire Ocean to Space

March 7, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Artist impression of Mars ocean

Excerpt from news.discovery.com

Mars was once a small, wet and blue world, but over the past 4 billion years, Mars dried up and became the red dust bowl we know today.

But how much water did Mars possess? According to research published in the journal Science, the Martian northern hemisphere was likely covered in an ocean, covering a region of the approximate area as Earth’s Atlantic Ocean, plunging, in some places, to 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) deep.

“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper, in an ESO news release. “With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars.”

Over a 6-year period, Villanueva and his team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (in Chile) and instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii) to study the distribution of water molecules in the Martian atmosphere. By building a comprehensive map of water distribution and seasonal changes, they were able to arrive at this startling conclusion.

It is becoming clear that, over the aeons, Mars lost the majority of its atmosphere to space. That also goes for its water. Though large quantities of water were likely frozen below the surface as the atmosphere thinned and cooled, the water contained in an ocean of this size must have gone elsewhere — it must have also been lost to space.

This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago. The young planet Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 meters deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere.

The water in Earth’s oceans contains molecules of H2O, the familiar oxygen atom bound with 2 hydrogen atoms, and, in smaller quantities, the not-so-familiar HDO molecule. HDO is a type of water molecule that contains 1 hydrogen atom, 1 oxygen atom and 1 deuterium atom. The deuterium atom is an isotope of hydrogen; whereas hydrogen consists of 1 proton and an electron, deuterium consists of 1 proton, 1 neutron and 1 electron. Therefore, due to the extra neutron the deuterium contains, HDO molecules are slightly heavier than the regular H2O molecules.

Also known as “semi-heavy water,” HDO is less susceptible to being evaporated away and being lost to space, so logic dictates that if water is boiled (or sublimated) away on Mars, the H2O molecules will be preferentially lost to space whereas a higher proportion of HDO will be left behind.

By using powerful ground-based observatories, the researchers were able to determine the distribution of HDO molecules and the H2O molecules and compare their ratios to liquid water that is found in its natural state.

Of particular interest is Mars’ north and south poles where icecaps containing water and carbon dioxide ice persist to modern times. The water those icecaps contain is thought to document the evolution of water since the red planet’s wet Noachian period (approximately 3.7 billion years ago) to today. It turns out that the water measured in these polar regions is enriched with HDO by a factor of 7 when compared with water in Earth’s oceans. This, according to the study, indicates that Mars has lost a volume of water 6.5 times larger than the water currently contained within the modern-day icecaps.

Therefore, the volume of Mars’ early ocean must have been at least 20 million cubic kilometers, writes the news release.

Taking into account the Martian global terrain, most of the water would have been concentrated around the northern plains, a region dominated by low-lying land. An ancient ocean, with this estimate volume of water, would have covered 19 percent of the Martian globe, a significant area considering the Atlantic Ocean covers 17 percent of the Earth’s surface.

“With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than previously thought, suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer,” said Michael Mumma, also of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

This estimate is likely on the low-side as Mars is thought to contain significant quantities of water ice below its surface — a fact that surveys such as this can be useful for pinpointing exactly where the remaining water may be hiding.

Ulli Kaeufl, of the European Southern Observatory and co-author of the paper, added: “I am again overwhelmed by how much power there is in remote sensing on other planets using astronomical telescopes: we found an ancient ocean more than 100 million kilometers away!”
Source: ESO

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Ormus And Monoatomic Gold — The Manna Mystery

March 7, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

SOURCEThere are many mysterious and magical things that have been recorded in history. The Biblical manna, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Fountain of Youth, Orgone energy, prana, chi, the Holy Grail, the Great Pyramid and the Ark of the Covenant are a few of these things. It looks like these things and more might be related to a new class of materials that have been identified and described in the last few decades.In the late 1970s an Arizona farmer named David Hudson noticed some ver [...]

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What Do You Mean The 3rd Dimension Is Going Away?

March 7, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

by Jim SelfAs the Age of Aquarius approaches there is an increasing urgency to this message because we’re all, literally, running out of time to play in the third dimension.In simple terms, the habit of thinking and feeling and behaving that we know of as the third dimension is going away. Everyone is shifting into a fourth dimensional consciousness and experience, and then into a fifth dimensional consciousness and experience.However, most people on the planet are not prepared [...]

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Neuroscientist Describes Cases Of Out of Body Experiences

March 7, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Arjun Walia, Collective-EvolutionScientific knowledge is expanding every day at an exponential rate, and the implications of new developments, particularly those that challenge the current framework regarding the true nature of reality, are far-reaching indeed. One area that continues to become a focal point of study for many physicians and neuroscientists is the relationship between mind, brain, and consciousness.Is the brain a receiver of consciousness, or is consciousnes [...]

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