Strange Skies
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Info

Astronomers discover several new trans-Neptunian objects beyond the orbit of Neptune

Sedna
© WikipediaArtist's conception of planet-like object Sedna.
Several new trans-Neptunian objects beyond the orbit of Neptune have reportedly been discovered by US astronomers.

American astronomers have managed to discover an array of new trans-Neptunian objects. The planetoids are located beyond the orbit of Neptune, media reports said.

A total of eight such objects were tracked, including 2014 FZ71, 2015 FJ345, 2004 XR190, 2013 FQ28, 2015 KH162, 2015 GP50, 2014 FC69 and 2012 FH84.

"We have been conducting a survey for distant solar system objects beyond the Kuiper Belt edge with new wide-field cameras on the Subaru 8 meter and CTIO 4 meter telescopes," scientists said.

The 2015 KH162 proved to be the largest object: it has a diameter of 800 kilometers and the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit is 61.9 astronomical units.

Question

Mysterious dark vortex appears over Neptune

Dark Spot on Neptune
© Hubblesite
New images obtained on May 16, 2016, by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm the presence of a dark vortex in the atmosphere of Neptune. Though similar features were seen during the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 and by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, this vortex is the first one observed on Neptune in the 21st century.

The discovery was announced on May 17, 2016, in a Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) electronic telegram by University of California at Berkeley research astronomer Mike Wong, who led the team that analyzed the Hubble data.

Neptune's dark vortices are high-pressure systems and are usually accompanied by bright "companion clouds," which are also now visible on the distant planet. The bright clouds form when the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the dark vortex, causing gases to likely freeze into methane ice crystals. "Dark vortices coast through the atmosphere like huge, lens-shaped gaseous mountains," Wong said. "And the companion clouds are similar to so-called orographic clouds that appear as pancake-shaped features lingering over mountains on Earth."

Beginning in July 2015, bright clouds were again seen on Neptune by several observers, from amateurs to astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Astronomers suspected that these clouds might be bright companion clouds following an unseen dark vortex. Neptune's dark vortices are typically only seen at blue wavelengths, and only Hubble has the high resolution required for seeing them on distant Neptune.

Flashlight

Mysterious lights reported in Manchester's night sky

Ashton Manchester lights
© Mitesh TaylorShop worker Mitesh Tailor also took pictures of the 'mysterious light' above Ashton.
Residents in parts of Greater Manchester say the truth is out there... after snapping what they say were 'mysterious lights' in the sky. People living in Tameside and in Gorton claim to have seen a strange phenomenon in the night sky.

Mitesh Tailor, 31, said he was amazed to spot 'glowing lights' above Ashton-under-Lyne's Hartshead Estate on Friday evening. HR officer Mitesh first spotted the lights from his bedroom window on Friday, which he says have resumed even more brightly on Saturday and Sunday nights. Intrigued by the phenomenon, Mitesh took photographs of what he saw shortly after midnight on Sunday.

He said: "At first I didn't think much of it, on Friday I thought it was just normal but last night it was a lot brighter. "It's not the moon, that is on the other side of my house. They weren't artificial lights either, the area is really dark."
Gorton Manchester lights
© Zac Weaver
And in a separate spotting, Gorton resident Zac Weaver also snapped images which show a strong milky light coming through the clouds. Zac explained: "The light abve Gorton is back and as you can see in three of the photos there's actually a little bright light above the tree that seems to move. "This can't be the stone roses events as that ended about an hour ago. And I know it wasn't because of the event becasue the light hasn't been there the past couple of days."

Rainbow

Circumhorizontal arc appears over Mount St. Helens in Washington

Rainbow cloud Mt. St. Helens
© Luke Hamill/The OregonianA circumhorizontal arc over Mount St. Helens on Sunday, June 19, 2016.
On Sunday, which happened to be the day of the Pride Parade in Portland, what seemed like a magical rainbow cloud appeared over Mount St. Helens.

According to the Andy Bryant, hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Portland, it was in fact science, not magic, that painted the sky rainbow colors yesterday.

Also, it wasn't a "rainbow cloud." Instead, it was something called a "circumhorizontal arc."

Circumhorizontal arcs are caused by a combination of crystals in clouds and the angle of the sun.

Bryant says circumhorizontal arcs are actually not that uncommon in the summer in Oregon. "Sometimes you can get multiple arcs in different positions in the sky," he says, "depending on how much of a cloud layer there is and on the type of ice crystals."

"It's kind of cool stuff," he adds.

Cloud Lightning

Electric universe: Lightning strength and frequency increasing

Greece lightning 2015
© YouTube/Adapt 2030 (screen capture)

Strange electrical phenomena across the globe over the last month can be attributed to decreased solar winds that are now allowing the magnetosphere to expand along with Earth's atmosphere. The wider gap is allowing more plasma arching and cosmic rays in, which also increases low cloud formation. A new feedback loop has begun.


Comment: For more on the rise in extreme weather phenomena, check out Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection.


Airplane

EgyptAir Flight MS804: Cockpit voice recorder found

cargo plane open rear
© EPAWreckage from EgyptAir flight MS804 has been found in the Mediterranean Sea alongside passengers’ belongings
Egyptian accident investigators have found one of the "black boxes" from flight MS804, the jet that crashed in the Mediterranean on 19 May with the loss of 66 lives.

The Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee announced that that the deep-ocean search vessel, RV John Lethbridge, had found the cockpit voice recorder. Even though it was damaged, the vessel equipment managed to pick up the memory unit. It has been taken to the city of Alexandria to be interrogated by the technical investigation committee.

The search team is working in one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean, at around 10,000 feet below sea level. They are believed to have already found wreckage of the fuselage, wings and tailplane in several locations.

Comment: See also: We also covered the subject of the disappearance of flight MS804 in our Behind the Headlines show: EgyptAir mystery, chaos in Syria, Saudi press blames U.S. for 9/11


Rainbow

'Rare' fire rainbow seen all across New Jersey

Fire rainbow
© NJ.com/UnaffiliatedVtrPeople all across New Jersey spotted a rare, colorful cloud formation known as a 'fire rainbow' on Tuesday, June 14. This was a view from Neptune City in Monmouth County.
If you happened to look up in the sky at the right time and in the right location Tuesday afternoon, you might have been lucky enough to see a rare, colorful cloud phenomenon known as a "fire rainbow."

Trisha Garlatti, of Edison, was one of those lucky ones. As she was driving through South River at about 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, she caught a glimpse of it and felt compelled to whip out her camera phone. "It was like a rainbow inside a cloud," she said.

NJ fire rainbow
© Toni HoffmanThe view from Spring Lake in Monmouth County.
Although it's commonly referred to as a fire rainbow, in the scientific world it's known as a circumhorizontal arc. And weather experts call it "cloud iridescence," said Sarah Johnson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service's regional office in Mount Holly.

Johnson said the conditions have to be right for this phenomenon to form, and on Tuesday those conditions were in play over parts of New Jersey: Thin clouds very high in the atmosphere, tiny ice crystals in the clouds, and sunlight hitting the ice crystals at a certain angle.

"It's basically the same principle behind what we normally see in rainbows," Johnson said. "But instead of dealing with rain droplets with regular rainbows, we're dealing with ice crystals, because these clouds are so high" and the temperatures are very cold up there.

If the clouds are shaped like an arc and the sunlight hits the ice crystals that are in those clouds, "they will refract the sunlight, creating the full spectrum of colored light instead of just white light," the meteorologist said.

Fire rainbows tend to form when thin, wispy cirrus clouds are high in the sky, as they were on Tuesday, about 15,000 feet above the ground, Johnson said. But they also could develop with even thinner clouds, such as cirrostratus clouds.

Fireball 4

Fiery meteor fireball blazed across SE Canada and NE United States

Montreal Fireball
© Neil Zeller PhotographyMeteors like this one, captured last year by photographer Neil Zeller, can be seen about every 15 minutes on any given night.
I was outside, enjoying a nice dinner and drink on a Montreal rooftop Tuesday evening when I saw it - a large fiery ball that blazed across the night sky. Then, as fast as it had appeared it was gone.

The entire incident, which occurred at around 9:30 p.m. ET, lasted all of five seconds, but the fear and paranoia set in for the rest of the night.

The end is near.

Social media

I took to the web to understand what had just happened. I was not prepared to rule out the possibility of alien invasion quite yet and neither were some in the Twitterverse.

Several people turned to Twitter to ask what the ball was.


Comment: The American Meteor Society (AMS) received over 150 reports (event 2083-2016) about a fireball seen over SE Canada and NE United States on Wednesday, June 15th 2016 around 01:29 UT.

meteor fireball AMS event 2083-2016
© American Meteor Society (screen capture)



Question

Christchurch man films mysterious flashing lights

Mysterious Flashing Lights
© Oisin Lavelle/Screen CaptureThe mystery object filmed above Christchurch.
"I thought, am I losing my mind?"

That was the reaction of Oisin Lavelle as he spent two hours watching a mysterious, brightly coloured sphere moving in the sky south-west of Christchurch on Monday night.

Lavelle took footage of the object before it moved away at high speed. On Tuesday night it reappeared and he drove nearer for a better look, and saw three such objects. He said he found the whole experience haunting and would like to know what he saw.

"I'm quite an open-minded person, but I'm not a UFO buff or a conspiracy theorist or anything.

"I couldn't come up with a logical explanation for it. My gut feeling is, this was not some sort of technology we have on earth," he said.

Lavelle, the managing director of a building firm, was letting out his dog Rollo when he first saw the bright lights in the night sky from the deck of his lower Cashmere home. It was just after 10.30pm on Monday.

"I grabbed my camera and tried to get the thing steady and in focus. I just didn't know what to think, it was just so peculiar," he said.

"I just kept watching and filming because I wanted to see what it would do".

Lavelle described the object as a brightly lit perfect sphere. The lights kept changing through a wide range of colours at first, but the colour spectrum narrowed.

Info

Evidence of giant plasma structures above Earth say astronomers

Plasma Structures
© Screen Capture YouTube
For the first time, astronomers have captured visual evidence of the existence of tubular plasma structures living in the inner layers of the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth.

"For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we've provided visual evidence that they are really there," explained Cleo Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

"The discovery of the structures is important because they cause unwanted signal distortions that could, as one example, affect our civilian and military satellite-based navigation systems. So we need to understand them," Loi, who is the lead author on this research, continued.

The plasma in the magnetosphere, which is the region of space around the Earth occupied by its magnetic field, is created by the atmosphere being ionised by sunlight. The ionosphere is the innermost layer of the magnetosphere, and higher up is the plasmasphere. These are implanted with many oddly shaped plasma structures, including the tubes.