X-ray binaries are stellar systems composed by a compact object (which may be a neutron star or a black hole) and a 'normal' star. The compact object sucks matter out of the star and adds it slowly to its own mass, through a spiral disc formed around it. This process of absorption is known as acretion. Only 20 binary systems, out of an estimated population of around 5,000 within our Galaxy, are known to contain a black hole.
XTE J1859+226 is, in particular, a transient X-ray binary located in the Vulpecula constellation. It was discovered by satellite RXTE during an eruption registered in 1999.
"Transient X-ray binaries are characterised for spending most of their life in a state of calmness, but occasionally entering eruption stages, during which the rhythm of acretion of matter toward the black hole is triggered," Jesús Corral Santana explains, an astrophysicist from the IAC, who led the work published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
Neutron stars as well as black holes are the remains left by a massive star after its death. Most of the known neutron stars have a mass around 1.4 times that of the Sun, though in some cases, values up to over twice the mass of the Sun have been measured. Astronomers believe that when greater than tree times the solar mass, neutron stars are not stable, and end up collapsing and forming a black hole.
For Corral-Santana, "measuring the mass of compact objects is essential to determine what kind of object it may be. If it's greater than three times the solar mass, it can only be a black hole. We found that XTE J1859+226 has a black hole more than 5.4 times greater than the mass of the Sun. It's the definitive confirmation of the existence of a black hole in this object."
"With this result we add a new piece to the study of the mass distribution of black holes. The shape of this distribution has very important implications for our knowledge about the death of massive stars, the formation of black holes, and the evolution of X-ray binary systems," the IAC astrophysicist adds.
Twelve years of observation: measuring the visible and the invisible
The astrophysicists' team at IAC hadn't lost track of the stellar object since it entered an eruption stage in 1999, when they started to set up observation campaigns to follow its evolution. The researchers have combined the photometric measures from the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in year 2000, and those from the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) in 2008, with the spectroscopy carried out with the GTC in 2010, the first one ever published about this particular object.
"Due to the low brilliance of the system under observation, we needed 10 meter telescopes in able to obtain spectra. In this sense, having been able to make our observations from the GTC has been determinant," Corral-Santana emphasises.
The measurements at the GTC were carried out with the OSIRIS instrument, which may be used as a camera or as a spectrograph in the visible range. The spectrograph decomposes the light emitted by a star into its different frequencies and allows detecting lines corresponding to the different chemical elements present in its atmosphere. These lines adduce information about the physical properties of the star and its movement.
The photometric measures allowed determining the orbital period of the binary (6.6 hours), while the spectroscopy data also provided information about the speed of the star's orbital movement around the black hole. The combination of both of these parameters proved to be vital to calculate the mass of the back hole.
The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (in La Palma, Canary Islands), is the biggest optical-infrared telescope of the World, with a 10.4 metre diameter mirror.
Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals.
These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added.
These new calculations are based in data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those worlds. [The Strangest Alien Planets]
After the researchers analyzed the four months of data in this initial batch of readings from Kepler, they determined that 1.4 to 2.7 percent of all sunlike stars are expected to have Earthlike planets — ones that are between 0.8 and two times Earth's diameter and within the habitable zones of their stars.
"This means there are a lot of Earth analogs out there — two billion in the Milky Way galaxy," researcher Joseph Catanzarite, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com. "With that large a number, there's a good chance life and maybe even intelligent life might exist on some of those planets. And that's just our galaxy alone — there are 50 billion other galaxies."
After three to four years of Kepler data are investigated, the scientists predict a total of 12 Earthlike worlds will be found. Four of these have already been seen in the four months of data released so far, they added. Kepler mission scientists have estimated that, altogether, there could be 50 billion planets in the Milky Way, though not all would be Earth-size worlds within the habitable zone of their local stars.
BEIJING -- An earthquake toppled houses and damaged a hotel and supermarket in China's extreme southwest near the border with Myanmar on Thursday, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than 200, officials and state media said.
Photos from the scene showed buildings that buckled, crushing their lower floors. Police, firefighters and soldiers rushed to the area to pull out people trapped in the rubble, including a man and girl stuck in the stairwell of a four-story building, according to state broadcaster China Central Television.
One sidewalk was lined with injured people, lying on blankets and being shielded from the sun by large vendor umbrellas.
The quake hit while many people, including students, were home for a customary midday rest, the broadcaster said. In addition to the 22 killed, 201 people have been injured, it said. The report said at least two students were among those killed but didn't give details.
The website of the Chinese government earthquake monitoring station said the magnitude-5.8 quake was centered on Yunnan province's Yingjiang county and struck just before 1 p.m. at a depth of six miles. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a magnitude of 5.4 and at a deeper 21 miles.
Tremors continued to be felt in the area throughout the afternoon and evening, according to CCTV reporter Shu Qian, who was at the disaster scene in Yingjiang County.
The quake's epicenter was in Shiming Village, just over a mile from the county seat, but triggered a power outage across Yingjiang, which has a population of about 300,000 people, Xinhua said.
By evening, the power supply was still cut off, though water and communications didn't appear to be damaged, Shu said.
An official on duty at the quake monitoring center, Gao Shaotang, said many houses had been destroyed. Xinhua said the army was sending 400 soldiers to the site for rescue efforts.
A government team that includes the Civil Affairs Ministry has also been dispatched to the quake-stricken area, CCTV said. About 5,000 tents, 10,000 quilts and 10,000 coats are also being sent from the central government.
The mountainous area lies 1,500 miles southwest of Beijing, close to the border with Myanmar, and is home to many ethnic groups on both sides of the border, which sees heavy traffic in people and goods.
Xinhua said the quake-prone region has been hit by more than 1,000 minor tremors over the past two months.
The Myanmar Meteorological Department released a statement saying a quake had hit some 230 miles northeast of Mandalay, the country's second-largest city.
The statement did not mention injuries, damage or the specific area of Myanmar most affected by the quake. Authorities in the tightly ruled country tend not to immediately discuss the effects of natural disasters.
Much of the area on the Myanmar side been under the control of various armed ethnic groups, who have battled the Myanmar military to remain free from central government control.
Weeks after a story shot across the Web claiming that the imminent explosion of a nearby star would result in the appearance of a second sun in the sky – a story that was later debunked – two suns were caught on camera yesterday in China. The suns – one fuzzy and orange, the other a crisp yellow orb – appeared side-by-side, one slightly higher than the other.
What's going on? Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to Space.com, asked Jim Kaler, the University of Illinois astronomer who squelched the excitement over the aforementioned exploding Betelgeuse and who has written books on the day and night sky. The double sun image is an effect of optical refraction, Kaler said, but it's a "pretty darn rare" one, and one not fully explained by science.
"I doubt it's been computer modeled," he said. "There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage." [Amazing Sun Photos From Space]
Mirages appear when particles in the atmosphere refract, or bend, light. This typically happens near the horizon, where air is thicker, though, and mirages are usually aligned vertically above or below the original source of the light – not beside it, like in the video. It's possible, Kaler said, that an unusually thick patch of atmosphere wandered in front of the sun to create the unusual effect.
Previous sightings of horizontally-aligned double images of the sun and moon are recorded in a book called "Light and Color in the Outdoors" (English edition: Springer 1993) by the famous Flemish astronomer Marcel Minnaert, which remains the most complete reference on double suns. "So many other instances have been reported that there is no longer any doubt about … observations of sun and mock sun(s) being at exactly the same altitude," Minnaert wrote.
"The case of a mock sun 3 degrees and 25 arc-seconds to the left of the nearly set sun sounds incredible but has been recorded photographically." Indeed, Minnaert's description sounds nearly identical to the scene in question.
He goes on to state that the double or multiple image phenomena are produced by abnormal refraction, but that "it remains extraordinary that the images of the sun and moon were sharp and of the same size as the real sun and moon."
To check whether more has been learned about the double sun effect since the time of Minnaert's writing,Life's Little Mysteries consulted several atmospheric optics experts. None of them had ever seen anything quite like the effect shown in the video.
"This is not a common optical phenomenon that we're seeing here," said Grant Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Satellite and Meteorological Studies. "I'm asking myself if this is an artifact of the lens, but if that were the case – if it's reflections of the lens elements – then the images would move in relation to each other as the camera moves," Perry said. "But that doesn't happen."
In terms of an optical explanation, he said, "You would have to assume it is particles of ice or something in the atmosphere aligned in such a way that they would refract the sunlight at that very small angle, but only in one direction. It would require some fairly peculiar characteristics."
Several related atmospheric optical effects are fully explained by science. Sun dogs, sunset mirages, sun pillars and sun halos are all relatively common and well understood. But not this effect.
We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.
That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.
Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.
Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.
In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.
He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot -- here on earth, that is.
“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
Other scientists tell FoxNews.com the implications of this research are shocking, describing the findings variously as profound, very important and extraordinary. But Dr. David Marais, an astrobiologist with NASA’s AMES Research Center, says he’s very cautious about jumping onto the bandwagon.
These kinds of claims have been made before, he noted -- and found to be false.
“It’s an extraordinary claim, and thus I’ll need extraordinary evidence,” Marais said.
Knowing that the study will be controversial, the journal invited members of the scientific community to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries ahead of time. Though none are online yet, those comments will be posted alongside the article, said Dr. Rudy Schild, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology.
"Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis," Schild wrote in an editor's note along with the article. "No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published, he wrote."
Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said there is a lot of hesitancy to believe such proclamations. If true, the implications would be far-reaching throughout the fields of science and astronomy, the suggestions and possibilities stunning.
“Maybe life was seeded on earth -- it developed on comets for example, and just landed here when these things were hitting the very early Earth,” Shostak speculated. “It would suggest, well, life didn’t really begin on the Earth, it began as the solar system was forming.”
Hesitancy to believe new claims is something common and necessary to the field of science, Hoover said.
“A lot of times it takes a long time before scientists start changing their mind as to what is valid and what is not. I’m sure there will be many many scientists that will be very skeptical and that’s OK.”
Until Hoover’s research can be independently verified, Marais said, the findings should be considered “a potential signature of life.” Scientists, he said, will now take the research to the next level of scrutiny, which includes an independent confirmation of the results by another lab, before the findings can be classified “a confirmed signature of life.”
Hoover says he isn’t worried about the process and is open to any other explanations.
“If someone can explain how it is possible to have a biological remain that has no nitrogen, or nitrogen below the detect ability limits that I have, in a time period as short as 150 years, then I would be very interested in hearing that."
"I’ve talked with many scientists about this and no one has been able to explain,” he said.
A chilling report prepared for President Medvedev by Minister Serdyukov of the Russian Defense Ministry on the building of an additional 5,000 underground ‘bomb’ shelters in Moscow warns that even though progress is being made, the appearance of the new Comet Elenin [photo top left] in our Solar System means“additional resources” will have to be added “immediately” as the 2012 timeline for completion “may not be soon enough”.
Sparking the fears of Minister Serdyukov, he says in this report, is that based upon the new orbit calculations for Comet Elenin, it appears in “all likelihood” that this celestial object is under some type of “intelligent control” and will approach our Earth “much closer” than originally thought this coming fall season.
Comet Elenin was discovered by Doctor-Scientist Leonid Elenin on 10 December 2010 from his research facility in Lyubertsy utilizing images acquired from the 18-inch (45-cm) telescope at the ISON-NM Observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico and confirmed by Doctor-Scientists Aleksei Sergeyev and Artem Novichenko from the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan.
Upon its discovery Comet Elenin was traveling very near the ecliptic plane at more than 4 Astronomical Units (375 million miles) from the Sun and headed inbound towards it. Its original perihelion [point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid or comet where it is nearest to the Sun] was calculated to occur well inside Earth’s orbit at about 0.45 Astronomical Units (42 million miles) from the Sun to occur on or about 5 September 2011 making it visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn skies in the Constellation of Leo.
Most ominous in Minister Serdyukov’s report is his assertion that Comet Elenin appears to be in “direct contact” with the mysterious Jupiter-sized planet discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto that is, also, headed inbound towards our Sun.
American scientists Daniel Whitmire and John Matese from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have named this mysterious planet Tyche, but as we had previously stated in our 18 February report, “Russian Leader Confirms To Pope New Planet Arrival In 2012”, the ancient peoples of our Earth new it by other names as well.
Interesting to note about Comet Elenin is that even though the American space agency NASA has said “Because of the possibility that the comet’s orbit slightly deviate from, there is no guarantee that Earth will be missed”, they have, also, in contradiction, stated that “…Comet Elenin will come nowhere near the Earth. At its closest (on 10 September 2011) it will be more than 25 million km from our planet.”
To the identity of those extraterrestrial forces controlling Comet Elenin our world had been forewarned about by the former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, who stated about them: “Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.”
As to those “visitors from other planets” referred to by Minister Hellyer we can further glean from the memo sent to President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) by his Army Chief of Staff George Marshall (1880-1959) [reprinted below in its entirety] about what is now referred to as “The Battle of Los Angeles” where American Forces fired upon a UFO fleet shortly after their countries entrance into World War II.
From the United States initial firing upon these UFO’s in “The Battle of Los Angeles” they continued to appear over both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operation during World War II and were dubbed as “Foo Fighters” by the US Army Air Forces 415th Night Fighter Squadron.
The most famous modern historical account of these UFO/Foo Fighters occurred in the summer of 1947 when at least one of them was shot down, or crashed near the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico which was home to the US Army Air Forces 509th Bomb Group that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and is known today as the “Roswell Incident”.
Though initially reported to the American public by their government that a “flying saucer” had, indeed, been captured, the US Military almost immediately contradicted themselves by denying what just 24-yours earlier they had admitted.
Most important to note about the Roswell Incident, however, was that its investigation was headed by the first US Air Force Secretary, and close personal friend of then President Harry Truman (1884-1072),Stuart Symington (1901-1988) who reported his findings to the first US Defense Secretary James Forrestal (1892-1949).
Throughout 1948, and into 1949, Secretary’s Forrestal and Symington repeated clashed leading President Truman to replace Forrestal on 28 March 1949. Within two months (22 May 1949) Forrestal was reported dead by suicide after having jumped out the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital where he had been forcibly detained.
More interesting, however, is the report of the last meeting between Forrestal and Symington on the Roswell Incident, and as, in part, we can read:
“Forrestal accused Clark of having the FBI shadow him, which Clark denied, but which according to all of Forrestal’s biographers could well have been true. Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance.
What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. “There is something I would like to talk to you about,” Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that “shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses.” When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, “you are a loyal fellow,” for several hours.”
As we have attempted to detail in many recent reports, including “Greenland Sunrise Shocks World As Superstorms Pound Planet”, “Poisonous Space Clouds Slamming Into Earth Cause Mass Bird And Fish Deaths”, “New Superstorms Warned Have ‘Doomed’ World Food Production” and “Pole Shift Blamed For Russian Air Disaster, Closure Of US Airport”, the greatest fears Forrestal had after Symington’s final Roswell report was given to him are, indeed coming true in our times today.
Though the masses of the American people are still not being told the truth about the dire state of our world, the same cannot be said about their elite masters, who according to new evidence gathered by independent researchers are building for themselves vast underground bunkers to protect themselves when the times of trouble come.
One such company building these underground survival bunkers for the US elite is the American Reassurance Communities (ARC), and who describe their efforts as follows:
“Each ARC Bunker Complex consists of a 300,000 sq ft subterranean self-contained community survival shelter complex designed to accommodate 2500 people for up to 60 months in military grade bunkers complete with schools, medical/dental, greenhouses, theater, recreation, everything needed for a large group of people to live in a safe, comfortable environment and survive almost any disaster.
ARC Bunkers are manufactured to withstand a direct nuclear hit, EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attacks, biological attacks, hurricanes, tornados, volcanos, earthquakes, floods, solar flares, meteorites, and ground assaults.”
For anyone thinking they can order such protection for themselves (even allowing that they have the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost) an ARC spokesman said in a recently released conversation (listen to audio here) that it would take over a year for them to be able to build anything because of the tremendous backorders they are now filling due to what he says is because “everyone is freaked out about something”. And this is aside from the US government’s recent purchase of over $1 Billion in survival food to protect America’s leaders.
To what those in the knowing are so “freaked about” it is in our knowing too, but is, also, so complex and shrouded in shadows as to make it nearly indecipherable to all but the most informed, and which, most assuredly, the masses of people today aren’t even close to.
The complete story, and the knowledge you have a right to know, is only going to be gained by yourself as those who rule over you will tell you nothing, even to the point of disparaging those, like us, who believe not only in your right to know the truth, but how simple it can really be to protect yourself and your families from the many horrors yet to come.
This report, therefore, like all the others before it, is but another “puzzle piece” to be put into place so that when added to the many others to come will show you the shattering truth being kept from you.
The great German romantic writer Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) once said, “A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.” And these are, indeed, the times one has to choose which they are, we hope you are courageous, they will be the only ones to survive.
[Ed. Note: Western governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagrees with in believing that it is every human beings right to know the truth. Due to our missions conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ against us has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit and which is addressed in the report “Who Is Sorcha Faal?”.] Below it's a OFFICIAL NASA VIDEO, see it also at http://buzzroom.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/983/
At least 6,000 people have died since the start of the revolt against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime two weeks ago, a spokesman for the Libyan Human Rights League said Wednesday.
"Victims in the whole country were 6,000," Ali Zeidan told reporters in Paris, adding that this included 3,000 in the capital Tripoli, 2,000 in the rebel-held second city Benghazi and 1,000 in other cities.
"This is what people told us, but it can be more," he added.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court says he is opening a formal investigation into possible crimes against humanity in Libya.
The announcement is an unprecedentedly swift reaction to Gaddafi's violent crackdown on anti-government protests. Prosecutors often take months and sometimes years to decide whether to open an investigation into possible war crimes.
Wednesday's announcement said Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has decided to launch the investigation after a "preliminary examination of available information."
The United Nations Security Council on Saturday ordered the court to look into possible crimes in Libya. Moreno-Ocampo only began a preliminary probe Monday.
