Transient Lunar Phenomena
WHAT ARE TRANSIENT LUNAR PHENOMENA?
For centuries, people have reported seeing flashing lights on the moon. They come in different colors, all emanating from a specific area of the moon. The activity is intermittent. An amber colored light may suddenly appear and then disappear just seconds later.
Once telescopes were invented in 1608, astronomers became even more fascinated with the intermittent flashing lights.
The majority of this activity is around Aristarchus, a crater almost the size of the Grand Canyon.
What is this translunar phenomenon, more commonly known as transient lunar phenomenon? Could extraterrestrial life have anything to do with it?
In 1966, a transient lunar phenomena report was compiled for NASA by four of the top scientists and astronomers of the time. Barbara Middlehurst, a well-known astronomer, worked with her team member, Patrick Craig, and others. They prepared a detailed chronology of lunar events that occurred from June 1950 to October 1967. The report was published in 1968, prior to the first moon landing.
Middlehurst provided detailed documentation on sightings of moving objects, flashing lights and many other odd events on the lunar surface. About 60 percent of the activity was around Aristarchus or based on activity coming from the crater itself. Some examples of her entries include the following:
- October 25, 1966: “Large bright area obscuring half of crater wall. It was not present on Oct. 24″
- April 22, 1967: “Aristarchus so bright that it could be seen by the naked eye”
- August 13, 1967: “Glow in interior in crater”
Naturally, the crater was an area of interest once manned missions to the moon began. Many audio tapes and photos of the moon missions, particularly the most important ones from Apollo 11, are mysteriously missing.
One copy of a debriefing log taken after the astronauts had returned from their first landing on the moon reveals a conversation with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Michael Collins and an unknown speaker. They discussed that one request had been for them to look at the crater Aristarchus to see if they “could see any glow or evidence of observations that had been made by people on the ground.”
Aldrin concluded that the lights around and emanating from Aristarchus were brighter “than anything else we could see in either direction.” They also mentioned that the photos taken during the trip could shed light on what they had seen. But, the photos are either missing or of such poor quality it is difficult to use them in a meaningful way.
In 1994, a joint task force between NASA and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization sent a probe to the moon as part of their Clementine Project. The probe had several tasks, one of which was to fly over the Aristarchus Crater and take photos. Astronomers who viewed the photos reported seeing a clearly visible blue dome-shaped structure when the Aristarchus “lights are on.”
Even though the photos are in low resolution and highly pixelated, astronomers believe there is a dome structure in the Aristarchus Crater. One photo, dated September 7, 2007, shows an “electric blue” color emanating from the crater with “dome like structures” in the crater itself.
There is a strong indication that the dome-shaped structure is a fusion reactor. A former NASA manager of the photo department claims that the government has evidence of ancient alien cities on the moon. These were discovered mostly during the Apollo program. If there is evidence of ancient cities, could the activity around the Aristarchus Crater indicate current extraterrestrial life?
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Nemesis Star Theory; Does the Sun Have an Evil Twin?
Many people remain anxious about the threat posed from a hidden nemesis planet, known as Nibiru, that has been prophesied to collide with Earth. Though many of the proposed dates for this collision have come and gone, there is another celestial body that may be more likely to lead to an apocalyptic event: The Nemesis Star.
The Nemesis Star Theory
Binary star systems occur frequently and are actually more common than single stars. At least that’s what we thought, until a recent hypothesis proposed the possibility that every star starts out as a binary pair or multi-pair system. While the theory hasn’t been confirmed, there is significant evidence that our Sun likely has a twin, an evil twin.
The majority of stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, which are a fifth of the size of the sun and up to 50 times fainter. These types of stars are pretty commonly paired with another star in a binary system, leading astronomers to believe that Nemesis would be the Sun’s red dwarf star companion. But due to the small size and faintness of these stars, they can be hard to find, making Nemesis all the more elusive.
binary stars courtesy wired.com
This star is thought to be responsible for 12 cyclical extinction events on Earth, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. The Nemesis Star Theory’s roots can be traced to two paleontologists, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, who noticed that there was a periodicity to major die-outs throughout Earth’s history, occurring in 26 million year intervals. This led to a number of astrophysicists and astronomers, postulating their own Nemesis Star hypotheses.
So how would the sun’s twin be responsible for mass extinctions? The Nemesis Star Theory proposed the idea that the Earth’s binary twin must be in a large 1.5 light-year orbit, retaining just enough gravitational pull between it and the Sun so as not to drift off. But the issue with the orbit of Nemesis is the possibility that it occasionally passes through a cloud of icy debris on the fringe of our solar system, known as the Oort Cloud.
Don’t Perturb the Oort
The Oort Cloud is a theoretical sphere that is believed to orbit our solar system, consisting of planetesimals, the small icy building blocks of planets, comets, and asteroids. These planetesimals are sticky and collide with each other until they become large enough to have a significant gravitational pull, eventually becoming as large as a moon or a planet. They also create asteroids and comets which can be knocked out of orbit and sent hurtling toward the center of the solar system, crashing into planets.
There is a binary star system that once passed close enough to nearly perturb the Oort, and it was likely visible from Earth. Scholz’s Star made a flyby some 70,000 years ago, at a distance of 50,000 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance from Earth to the Sun. The Oort is thought to extend from anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000 AUs and is believed to contain up to two trillion celestial objects. Astronomers are 95% certain that Shulz’s star passed within half of a light-year of us, possibly perturbing the Oort, though apparently not enough to cause a mass extinction event.
Comets are believed to exist within the Oort and are the product of a thief model, a give-and-take of celestial bodies between stars when they’re formed. In this process, comets get pulled back and forth between the gravitational field of stars. It was for this reason that the Oort was theorized, due to the number of comets coming from it, there had to have been a sibling star that pulled them out to the Oort.
The Oort courtesy of space-facts.com
Astronomers also found a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a region just before the Oort that also contains icy, celestial bodies. This planet, named Sedna, orbits the Sun in a long, drawn-out elliptical path and is one of potentially hundreds. Sedna may help to explain the Nemesis star theory, in that its far-flung orbit was likely caused by our Sun’s twin, pulling it out as it drifted off into the depths of space. Imagine if instead of 9 planets in our solar system, there were a few hundred?
So where is this Nemesis star? Several years ago, the E.U. launched the wonderfully named, Gaia satellite, to map out the stars in the Milky Way and look specifically at stars that have had a close encounter with our solar system or that might come close in the future. But whether or not Nemesis will be found is unknown; it’s possible that it could make a return for the next mass extinction, or it is possible that it drifted off, perturbing the Oort of another star.
