Kepler Space Telescope

NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials

November 6, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “e156 NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials” on Spreaker.

Article by Sean Martin October 23, 2019 (express.co.uk)

• On October 23rd at the 70th annual International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, the SETI initiative known as ‘Breakthrough Listen’ announced that it is partnering with NASA to use its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search for exoplanets in the galaxy. Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives Dr Pete Worden said, “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.” “We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

• Using an array of wide-field cameras to survey 85 percent of the sky, the TESS space satellite identifies telltale brightness dips that indicate planets crossing in front of its star to allow it to study the mass, size, density and orbit of small planets, including rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars. Using this data, TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets that the Breakthrough Listen team should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Says TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager, “Out of all the exoplanet endeavours only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life.”

• The technique for finding exoplanets by identifying dips in luminosity of a star allowed the Kepler space telescope to discover Boyajian’s Star in 2015 by the online astronomers known as ‘Planet Hunters’. Astronomers speculated that this dip in luminosity might be due to an artificial ‘megastructure’ or ‘Dyson Sphere’ partially constructed around the star to harbor its energy. But Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, now says that “dust particles in orbit around the star are responsible for the dimming”.

• [Editor’s Note] The top tier leadership of both SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and NASA know that we have a secret space program that interacts with a variety of extraterrestrial beings and civilizations within our own solar system and throughout the galaxy. This ‘partnership’ between them is just a show to make people believe that astronomers and scientists are hard at work searching for alien civilizations on distant exoplanets, but despite their best efforts they have not found any. The reason is because both SETI and NASA exist to do the bidding of the uber-elite and their attack dog, the Deep State, who want to maintain its 70-year history of covering up the extraterrestrial presence and hiding the truth from the rest of the people on this planet.

Breakthrough Listen, an organisation which scans the stars in the hope of finding alien signals, has announced it will be

teaming up with NASA in the hunt for aliens. Making the announcement at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, Breakthrough Listen bosses said they will collaborate with scientists on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – which looks for planets outside the solar system. Together, the teams hope to answer the age-old question: Are we alone?

By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

The space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85 percent of the sky.

TESS is capable of studying the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.

The satellite works by searching for telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” — the passages of orbiting worlds across their parent stars’ faces.

Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.

“We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

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NASA’s Kepler Telescope Discovers a Colossal Artificial Structure Orbiting a Star in Our Vicinity

October 29, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E146 NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers a Colossal Artificial Structure Orbiting a Star in Our Vicinity” on Spreaker.

Article by Steve October 15, 2015 (ufoholic.com)

• A paper submitted by Tabitha Boyajian, an astronomer at Yale, to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (in 2015) described a particular star named KIC 8462852 orbiting only 1,500 light years from Earth. “… KIC 8462852 (aka “Tabby’s Star”), was observed by the Kepler Space Telescope (image above) to undergo irregularly shaped, aperatic dips in flux down to below the twenty percent level.” “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. (But the data) checked out.”

• The study mostly focused on two interesting anomalies of the star. The first event was recorded between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and showed a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent. The second event was recorded between days 1510 to 1570 and showed a burst of several transits with a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. The transiting objects have to be extremely big.

• Scientists are now trying to point a radio antenna at KIC 8462852 in order to pick up their television shows to solve the riddle. Meanwhile, a second paper is being drafted around the possibility of the light obstruction being caused a colossal artificial device engineered by advanced aliens.

• Considering that our galaxy has existed for more than 13 billion years, it’s not hard to imagine that an alien civilization may be out there, possessing technology that allows them to build megastructures around stars. Jason Wright, a fellow astronomer at Penn State said, “This looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” Researchers are hypothesizing the possibility of a mega-engineered project created by a Type 2 alien civilization on the Kardashev scale. With a vast shell or series of rings surrounding a star, a Dyson sphere-like structure could use all the available energy radiating from a star.

Besides Kepler’s ability of finding small, rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, it can also detect different space phenomenon like stellar flares, star spots and dusty planetary rings.

This time however, Kepler detected the signal of a supposed vast artificial structure orbiting a star only 1,500 light years away from Earth.

After finishing all plausible explanations, scientists now believe that this complex structure might be an artificial construction made by an advanced alien civilization way up on the Kardashev scale of comparison.

This megastructure works like a supersized solar array orbiting around its host star, stocking the energy and sending it back to the source. The size of the structure is so grand that it’s blocking a considerable fraction of starlight as it spins around its host.

Normally all the exoplanets discovered by Kepler have a typical planet-shape, meaning they are round. This time however, the telescope detected something that isn’t round and behaves unnatural.

A paper has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in which a particular star named KIC 8462852 is described.

OVER THE DURATION OF THE KEPLER MISSION, KIC 8462852 WAS OBSERVED TO UNDERGO IRREGULARY SHAPED, APERIODIC DIPS IN FLUX DOWN TO BELOW THE TWENTY PERCENT LEVEL.

WE’D NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS STAR, IT WAS REALLY WEIRD. WE THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE BAD DATA OR MOVEMENT ON THE SPACECRAFT, BUT EVERYTHING CHECKED OUT. – TABETHA BOYAJIAN, RESEARCHER AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Studies mostly focused on two interesting anomalies at KIC 8462852, one that was recorded between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and between days 1510 to 1570.

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Alien Megastructure Star: Dimming Of Tabby’s Star Sets New Record

April 14, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Allan Adamson March 27, 2018 (techtimes.com)

KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star, has dimmed again. Researchers say that it dipped in brightness more dramatically than ever.

• In 2011, the Kepler Space Telescope observed a star that dimmed as much as 22 percent. The star is KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star named for Tabetha Boyajian, the Louisiana State University astrophysicist who discovered the star. Since then it has been observed to sporadically dim in brightness, then return to normal.

• On March 16, 2018, Boyajian and colleagues recorded the “…deepest dip we have observed since the Kepler Mission in 2013! WOW!!” By March 22nd, the star’s brightness increased rapidly and was nearly back to normal when it started to dim again on March 26th, even moreso than the previous week and setting a new record.

• A planet passing between a star and Earth will typically cause the dimming of the host star by 1 percent or less and at regular intervals. What makes the Tabby’s Star different from many others is that it dims at unpredictable intervals and at varying degrees.

• A popular theory of the cause of Tabby’s Star’s erratic dimming is the orbit of an alien megastructure around the star, such as an array of solar panels created by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization. Other theories involve the star devouring a nearby planet, or interference by a comet, or interstellar dust.

Louisiana State University astrophysicist Tabetha Boyajian, who discovered the star, and colleagues, revealed that the star has dimmed by at least 5 percent and possibly 10 percent.

The scientists said that Tabby’s star, also called “alien megastructure star” due to its bizarre behaviors suspected to be associated with an intelligent alien civilization, started to dim on March 16 and then returned to normal.

Boyajian and colleagues said that the dip in brightness was the largest observed dip in the star since 2013.

“On Friday (2018 March 16) we noted the last data taken were significantly down compared to normal,” the researchers wrote in their Tabby Star observation blog. “This is the deepest dip we have observed since the Kepler Mission in 2013! WOW!!”

By March 22, the star’s brightness increased rapidly and was nearly back to normal but it started to dim again on March 26.

“Today we have some very big news – data taken at TFN last night show the flux is down 5 percent,” Boyajian and colleagues reported on March 26. “Looks like we beat the record set just last week on the deepest dip observed since Kepler!”

In 2011, the Kepler Space Telescope observed that the star dimmed as much as 22 percent. Other dimming events also occurred throughout 2017.

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Galaxy is rich in small, Earth-like planets

July 25, 2010
Michael Salla

Video has recently emerged of a speech by Professor Dimitar Sasselov, Harvard astronomer and co-investigator of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, where he declared that the "Galaxy is rich in small, Earth-like planets." His speech was given at a Technology Entertainment and Design conference at Oxford University in mid-July where speakers are limited to 18 minutes on the latest scientific trends. The Kepler telescope uncovered evidence of up to 140 different planets similar in size to the Earth. Sasselov believes that the discovery amounts to a Copernican revolution where a clear affirmative answer is given to the question: “Are there other Earth like planets out there that can harbor life?” Significantly, Sasselov asserts that the evidence points to more earth-like planets in the galaxy than gas giants as previously thought. Estimates of earth-like planets in the galaxy could be quickly revised up to 100 million or more. Most importantly, he says that the data allows scientists to scan exoplanets for tell tale signs of life. Sasselov’s findings is good news for researchers in the fields of astrobiology and exopolitics since it encourages more scientific inquiry into the implications of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Sasselov’s speech was quickly featured in the international media with bold headlines such as Britain’s Daily Mail that “More than 100 'Earth-like' planets discovered in past few weeks." Not so fast according to Space.com.

What Dimitar presented was 'candidates,'" said David Koch, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "These have the apparent signature we are looking for, but then we must perform extensive follow-up observations to eliminate false positives, such as background eclipsing binaries. This requires substantial amounts of ground-based observing which is done primarily in the summer observing season."

Indeed, Sasselov confirmed that more work was to be done over the summer to confirm what the Kepler data was suggesting, and that more news was “to come later in the year!"

That did not however stop Sasselov commenting on the significance of what has been discovered so far. He said that smaller rocky Earth like planets were statistically more common than gas giants: "Even before we have confirmed the planets among these hundreds of candidates, we can see statistically that the smaller-sized planets will be more common than the large-sized (Jupiter- and Saturn-like ones) in the sample,"

Sasselov explained that the results so far of the Kepler mission heralded a Corpernican revolution. Just as Corpernicus revolutionized astronomy by publishing data that the solar system rotated around the sun, rather than the earth, so too the data from the Kepler mission would lead to another scientific revolution. Rather than planets like earth being unique or an uncommon occurrence in the galaxy, they in fact are plentiful. Sasselov declared in his speech that the “Galaxy is rich in small, Earth-like planets”

While more scientific investigation will occur in the months ahead to confirm the results of the Kepler mission so far, its implications are enormous. Astrobiologists will be able to conclude with great confidence that extraterrestrial life is certain to exist elsewhere in the galaxy. Importantly, for the field of exopolitics, intelligent extraterrestrial life will also be deemed certain to exist, and this has profound social and political implications for humanity. In April 2010, Prof Stephen Hawking claimed it was “perfectly rational” to discuss the motivations of advanced extraterrestrial life. The findings of the Kepler mission make inquiry into the possible motivations of intelligent extraterrestrial life not only “perfectly rational" but now a logical necessity. The Kepler space telescope results will not only bring about an astronomical revolution, but a revolution in social and political thought about technologically advanced intelligent life in the galaxy and its impact on humanity.

More:info at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296841/More-100-Earth-like-planets-just-past-weeks.html#ixzz0ufWGjQmd

Tag: Kepler Space Telescope

NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials

NASA’s Kepler Telescope Discovers a Colossal Artificial Structure Orbiting a Star in Our Vicinity

Alien Megastructure Star: Dimming Of Tabby’s Star Sets New Record

Galaxy is rich in small, Earth-like planets