Another Interesting Leak: A Second NASA Scientist Tells Us That ‘Somebody Else’ Is On The Moon

We live in a strange world, and as Neil Armstrong once said, there are "great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers."

NASA Scientists & What They Say About The Moon

Multiple NASA personnel have made some pretty shocking claims about the Moon. George Leonard, a NASA scientist and photo analyst who obtained various official NASA photographs of the Moon, many of which he published in his book titled Somebody Else Is On The Moon, is just one of these personnel.

Although the photos are small in size and their resolution is not up to today’s standards, they show details of original prints which were huge. Leonard published the identifying code numbers of the photos in his works to back up their source...

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Astronomers have discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. The discovery suggests that liquid water could exist on the rocky world’s surface, possibly forming a global ocean.

The discovery, made with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, is the first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of such a planet. Because the planet, dubbed K2-18 b, is likely to have a temperature similar to Earth, the newly discovered water vapor makes it one of the most promising candidates for follow-up studies with next-generation space telescopes.

"This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has the correct temperature to support water, it has an atmosphere, and it has water in it, making this planet the best candidate for habitability that we know right now," lead author Angelos Tsiaras, an astronomer at University College London, said in a press conference.

K2-18 b is located 110 light-years away in the constellation Leo, and it orbits a small red dwarf star about one-third the mass of our Sun. Red dwarfs are notorious for being active stars that emit powerful flares, but this particular star appears to be surprisingly docile, according to the researchers.

This is good news for the water-bearing planet, whose 33-day orbit brings it roughly twice as close to its star as Mercury is to the Sun."Given that the star is much cooler than the Sun, in the end, the planet is receiving similar radiation to the Earth," said Tsiaras. "And based on calculations, the temperature of the planet is also similar to the temperature of the Earth."

Specifically, the paper suggests K2-18 b has a temperature between about –100 °F (–73 °C) and 116 °F (47 °C). For reference, temperatures on Earth can span from below –120 °F (–84 °C) in regions like Antarctica to above 120 °F (49 °C) in regions like Africa, Australia, and the Southwestern United States.

Although K2-18 b has some of the most Earth-like features ever observed in an exoplanet — water, habitable temperatures, and a rocky surface — the researchers emphasize that the world is still far from Earth-like. To begin with, K2-18 b is roughly twice the diameter of Earth, making it nearly eight times as massive. This puts K2-18 b near the upper limit of what we call a super-Earth, which typically refers to planets with masses ranging from one to ten Earth masses.

The density of K2-18 b, on the other hand, firmly establishes it as a rocky planet. K2-18 b has a composition most similar to Mars or the Moon, with a density roughly twice that of Neptune. Because the planet is thought to have a solid surface and an extended atmosphere with at least some water vapor, researchers believe K2-18 b could be a water world with a global ocean covering its entire surface.

However, they cannot say for sure.

The uncertainty comes in part from Hubble’s inability to probe the atmospheres of distant exoplanets in great detail. For example, using a sophisticated algorithm, the researchers were able to extract the undeniable signal of water vapor in K2-18 b’s atmosphere, but they couldn’t tell how much water vapor is really there. As a result, in their paper, they took a conservative approach and provided a broad-range estimate of water abundance — somewhere between 0.01 percent and 50 percent.

For the first time, astronomers have discovered evidence for a giant planet orbiting a tiny, dead white dwarf star. And, surprisingly, the Neptune-sized planet is more than four times the diameter of the Earth-sized star it orbits.

"This star has a planet that we can’t see directly," study author Boris Gänsicke from the University of Warwick said in a press release. "But because the star is so hot, it is evaporating the planet, and we detect the atmosphere it is losing." In fact, the searing star is sending a stream of vaporized material away from the planet at a rate of some 260 million tons per day.

The new discovery is the first proof that a massive planet can survive a star’s transition into a white dwarf. It implies that evaporating planets orbiting dead stars are fairly common in the universe. The discovery could also shed light on the fate of our solar system, as our Sun, like most stars, will eventually evolve into a white dwarf.

The white dwarf in question, dubbed WDJ0914+1914, is located in the constellation Cancer, about 1,500 light-years away. Although the white dwarf is no longer undergoing nuclear fusion like a normal star, its lingering heat means it’s still a blistering 49,500 degrees Fahrenheit . That’s some five times hotter than the Sun.

After sifting through about 7,000 white dwarfs identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, researchers discovered the smoldering stellar core. When the team looked at the unique spectra of WDJ0914+1914, they discovered hydrogen chemical fingerprints, which is somewhat unusual. But they also picked out signs of oxygen and sulfur — elements they had never seen in a white dwarf before.

"It was one of those chance discoveries," Gänsicke said in a European Southern Observatory (ESO) press release. "We knew that there had to be something exceptional going on in this system, and [we] speculated that it may be related to some type of planetary remnant."

So, in order to get a better understanding of what was going on in the strange system, the team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s X-shooter instrument to conduct follow-up observations. Based on a deeper investigation, the researchers discovered that the unusual elements they thought were embedded in the white dwarf were actually coming from a disk of gas churning around the dead star.

"At first, we thought that this was a binary star with an accretion disk formed from mass flowing between the two stars," said Gänsicke. "However, our observations show that it is a single white dwarf with a disk around it roughly 10 times the size of our Sun, made solely of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Such a system has never been seen before, and it was immediately clear to me that this was a unique star."

After realizing just how unusual the white dwarf really was, the team shifted their focus to figuring out what the heck could create such a system.

"It took a few weeks of very hard thinking to figure out that the only way to make such a disk is the evaporation of a giant planet," said Matthias Schreiber, an astronomer at the University of Valparaiso in Chile, who was vital to determining the past and future evolution of the bizarre system.

The disk’s composition matched what astronomers would expect if the guts of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune were vaporized into space, according to their analysis.

According to Schreiber’s calculations, the white dwarf’s extreme temperature means it’s bombarding the nearby giant planet with high-energy photons. The nearby giant planet is 0.07 astronomical unit (AU) from the star, where 1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance. This is causing the planet to lose mass at a rate of more than 3,000 tons per second.

But according to the paper, published Wednesday in Nature, "As the white dwarf continues to cool, the mass loss rate will gradually decrease, and become undetectable in [about 350 million years.] And by then, the paper adds, the giant planet only will have lost "an insignificant fraction of its total mass," or about 0.04 Neptune masses.

Because the giant planet is located so close to the white dwarf, the researchers say it should have been destroyed during the stars’ red giant phase. That is, unless it migrated inward after the star transitioned to a white dwarf.