sputnik--2019-12-30--Strange Halo of Earth’s Nearby Pulsar Could Hold Key to Puzzling Mystery, Astronomers Claim

Astronomers may have finally found the answer to a question that has long puzzled them, according to a new study, the results of which were published in Physical Review D on 17 December 2019.  The research, titled "Detection of a gamma-ray halo around Geminga with the Fermi-LAT data and implications for the positron flux", sheds light on the reason for the presence of an abundance of anti-matter near Earth - something that has been a mystery for about a decade.  A team of astronomers had been watching a nearby pulsar, named Geminga, with a strange halo around it.  It’s one of the nearest pulsars to Earth, about 800 light years away in the constellation Gemini, and is also very bright in gamma rays.  Di Mauro who led a small team of scientists studying a decade’s worth of Geminga data, says: “These are positrons, the antimatter version of electrons, coming from somewhere beyond the solar system".  Discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, pulsar Geminga’s halo is invisible to our eyes, since it’s in the gamma wavelength. It’s impressively large, covering the equivalent of 40 full Moons.  It was this halo that might be responsible for the abundance of anti-matter near Earth, suspected astronomers.  Geminga is the result of a supernova explosion about 300,000 years ago in the constellation Gemini, and is a rotating neutron star oriented towards Earth. Its energy is directed toward our planet.  The pulsar is surrounded by a cloud of both electrons and positrons, since a neutron star has an intense electromagnetic field. This strong field pulls the particles from the pulsar's surface, and accelerates them.  These particles, including electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons, are cosmic rays that are subject to the effects of magnetic fields. By the time cosmic rays reach Earth, astronomers cannot determine their source.  Throughout the past decade, a number of observatories, such as NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, and various experiments have detected more high energy positrons in Earth’s vicinity than expected.  Scientists suspected nearby pulsars like Geminga might be the source, but couldn't prove this.  The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-ray Observatory (HAWC) confirmed what some earlier data had suggested: a small but intense gamma-ray halo around Geminga.  Initially, scientists thought that the high energy halo was caused by accelerated electrons and positrons colliding with starlight.  But the team of astronomers used the HAWC to observe Geminga and its halo and reached the conclusion that the high-energy positrons would only rarely reach Earth, based on the size of the halo and sought another explanation for the abundance of positrons near Earth.  As the current team of scientists narrowed down their interest to the close and bright pulsar, they studied data on Geminga from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT.), which observes lower energy light than HAWC does.  One of the study's co-authors, Silvia Manconi, a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, said in a press release:  Once they had subtracted all the other sources of gamma rays in the sky, the data revealed the vast oblong-shaped halo around Geminga.  The high energy structure covered 20 degrees in the sky at 20 billion electron volts, and an even larger area at lower energies.  Study co-author Fiorenza Donato, from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the University of Turin, added:  The team compared the LAT data with the HAWC data and concluded that the data-sets matched.  They also found that bright, nearby Geminga could be responsible for as much as 20 percent of the high-energy positrons that the AMS-02 experiment observed.  The team claims pulsars remain the best explanation for the original mystery: the source of all those positrons near Earth.


thedcclothesline--2019-01-14--Shock Claim Chairman Of Harvard Astronomy Says Oumuamua Object Is Reconnaissance Spaceship Deli

Shock Claim: Chairman Of Harvard Astronomy Says “Oumuamua” Object Is “Reconnaissance Spaceship… Deliberately Sent To The Inner Solar System”

For thousands of years human civilization has documented objects in the sky. With the advent of instant video sharing, we’ve seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases of unidentified flying objects. Scientists and governments have discounted the vast majority of these instances as meteors, asteroids, man-made rocket tests or weather balloons.  But on October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer saw an anomaly floating through our solar system that can’t be so easily dismissed.  The object, dubbed “Oumuamua,” is the first ever object detected by humans that originated outside of our own solar system. Moreover, what makes Oumuamua even more intriguing is that as it rounded the sun it accelerated in such a way that our known laws of physics simply can’t explain it.  That is, unless the object has its own propulsion system, which would in turn suggest that it is not naturally occurring, but rather, deliberately built by an advanced civilization.  The claim sounds like an Ancient Aliens conspiracy theory, until you realize that the scientists behind the theory is none other than Avi Loeb, Chairman of Harvard University’s Astronomy department and founding director of The Black Hole Initiative. And while most scientists would never risk their careers over wild and outlandish claims, Loeb says he has enough tenure to not be concerned about it. That and he believes his analysis is accurate.  According to Loeb, the acceleration data sourced from the Hubble Space telescope is indicative of an object that has been, “deliberately sent to the inner solar system,” and he believes it could be a reconnaissance spaceship.  What does it feel like to sit next to colleagues in a university lunchroom a day after publishing an article arguing that Oumuamua may actually be a reconnaissance spaceship? Loeb: “The article I published was written, in part, on the basis of conversations I had with colleagues whom I respect scientifically. Scientists of senior status said themselves that this object was peculiar but were apprehensive about making their thoughts public. I don’t understand that. After all, academic tenure is intended to give scientists the freedom to take risks without having to worry about their jobs. Unfortunately, most scientists achieve tenure – and go on tending to their image.” “It was only under consecutive observation for six days, from October 25 to 31 – namely, a week after its discovery. At first they said, Okay, it’s a comet – but no comet tail was visible. Comets are made of ice, which evaporates as the comet approaches the sun. But we didn’t see a trail of gas or dust in Oumuamua. So the thinking was that it must be an asteroid – simply a chunk of stone. But the object rotated on its axis for eight hours, and during that time its brightness changed by a factor of 10, whereas the brightness of all the asteroids that we’re familiar with changes, at most, by a factor of three. If we assume that the light reflection is constant, that means its length is at least 10 times greater than its thickness.” The biggest surprise came last June, when new data from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the mysterious object had accelerated during its visit to the inner solar system in 2017 – an acceleration that is not explained by the sun’s force of gravity. We have no way of knowing whether it’s active technology, or a spaceship that is no longer operative and is continuing to float in space. But if Oumuamua was created together with a whole population of similar objects that were launched randomly, the fact that we discovered it means that its creators launched a quadrillion probes like it to every star in the Milky Way. Of course, the randomness is significantly reduced if we assume that Oumuamua was a reconnaissance mission that was deliberately sent to the inner solar system – namely, to the habitable region where life would be feasible. But we need to remember that humanity didn’t broadcast anything tens of thousands of years ago, when the object was still in interstellar space. They didn’t know there was intelligent life here. Which is why I think it’s just a fishing expedition.” Full Interview Via Haaertz: If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History  The object Oumuamua is long gone and we may never know what it really was.  What we do know is that we’ve seen similar cigar-shaped objects appear in the skies over Earth throughout history.  On April 14, 1561 the town of Nuremberg, Germany was abuzz with contemporary news reports highlighting a celestial phenomenon directly overhead. According to witnesses, there was some sort of aerial battle involving various types of alien aircraft.  The event was documented in local newspapers:  Here is a brief description of the events of the day translated from the news report above:  These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.  While hard to believe, consider the shape of the object identified in October of 2017 and compare it to the images above.  If nothing else, it’s curiously coincidental.  Another example of a cigar-shaped or rod-type object was observed as recently as 2010, when it shut down a Chinese airport. The incident was actually reported on by ABC News:  The origins of these objects may never be known, but more evidence of the existence of an advanced alien species begins to emerge. Some have even suggested that governments around the world may be actively working with them and utilizing advanced technologies.  For now, it’s all very hush-hush. but perhaps one day the people of the world will witness direct contact with an alien species not of this planet.


theguardianuk--2019-01-12--Colliding galaxies and Goldilocks planets the revolution in astronomy

Colliding galaxies and 'Goldilocks' planets: the revolution in astronomy

Astronomy is in the middle of a data revolution, a time of enormous discovery. Humans have been looking up at the stars for thousands of years, but modern telescopes and computers are rapidly accelerating our understanding. We know far more than we did even 20 years ago, and we are now much closer to answering questions about whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, how our planet came to be here, our cosmic origins and eventual fate.  On a clear night the stars twinkle in the sky, and often we can see the bright planets of our own solar system in orbit, like us, around our sun. Until the early 1990s, we had no idea whether there were any other planets around the stars in the sky. Astronomers suspected so, but had no way to prove it. We have in the past decade found thousands in orbit around foreign stars, and have a better idea of how common they are. A sizable fraction of stars probably have their own planets, their own worlds carried around them in the most fantastically diverse solar systems.  Look up at the stars, though, and you can’t see any of their planets. They are tiny and don’t make much light of their own. Even with powerful telescopes it is hard to see a planet directly, as the light from its parent star is blindingly bright in comparison. Instead, astronomers have devised ingenious methods to find them. One is the “wobbling” effect: a planet makes its parent star wobble just a little as it orbits around it, the star feeling a subtle pull of gravity from the smaller planet. In 1995 the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz used the Haute-Provence Observatory telescope in France to pinpoint a star, 51 Pegasi b, that was wobbling just as expected. It revealed a planet, similar in size to Jupiter but so close to its star that it takes only four days to orbit around it, far quicker of course than Earth or any of the planets in our solar system.  Astronomers have since found a huge haul of planets using Nasa’s Kepler satellite, which launched in 2009 and ended its spectacularly successful mission late in 2018. Kepler was designed to spot planets crossing in front of their parent stars, looking for the slight dimming effect of the planet blocking some of the starlight. Kepler has found thousands of planets this way, including many whose complete orbit around their star takes just hours or days. Some are so close to their star that their surface must be entirely molten lava. It has shown us solar systems with multiple planets, and some planets that orbit around two stars – “Tatooine” planets, named after Luke Skywalker’s fictional home. Some planets are larger than Jupiter, some are as small as our moon. Most were found by professional astronomers, but amateurs have found them too, using pattern recognition to mine online data from the Kepler mission and catch planets that automated searches had missed. We now think there are more planets than stars in the sky.  We want to find out how likely it is that a habitable planet like Earth exists and, even better, to find one. In the elusive “Goldilocks” zone, the conditions must be just right: not too hot and not too cold. Astronomers have already found a few dozen planets like this, of which at least three are in the Trappist I solar system, found in 2015 around one of our nearest stars. Trappist I has seven planets, all similar in size to Earth, and at least one has a liquid water ocean. Studying these planets, and some of the hundreds of millions of potentially habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy is the goal of ambitious new projects. Nasa’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess), launched in 2018, is expected to find more than 20,000 new planets. The most interesting will be examined in greater detail by the James Webb Space telescope, the Hubble space telescope’s successor, due to fly in the 2020s.  The stars in the sky are hosts to this wealth of solar systems, but they also have a vital role to play as nature’s great factories. Consider gold: where did it come from? Astronomers have long wondered how gold came to be part of Earth’s ingredients. We know that it is stars themselves that manufacture what our own bodies are made of, including mostly carbon and oxygen. The British-American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin first worked out in the 1920s that stars are themselves mostly just hydrogen and helium gas. The intense heat at the heart of stars can fuse together these tiny atoms into slightly larger ones, which are then ejected into space when the stars explode at the end of their lives. Those recycled remnants will later be present at the birth of new stars like our sun, and will end up making new planets like our own. But the alchemy of making gold has long been a mystery. Gold has much larger atoms than carbon and oxygen, and can’t be made in the core of a star. The explosions of individual stars could create some of it, but not enough.  In 2017 astronomers concluded that another way gold is generated is during intense collisions of pairs of neutron stars. Neutron stars are nature’s weirdest. They are incredibly dense, the result of squashing a star larger than our sun into a space just a few miles across, after it has run out of the fuel that kept it burning bright. A spoonful of neutron star weighs as much as a mountain. We can’t see them with regular telescopes, but they send out radio waves. The stars spin around and, if oriented right, their beam of radio waves sweeps past Earth regularly, like a lighthouse beacon. The astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell first discovered one of these stars in November 1967 using a radio telescope she built (with Anthony Hewish) as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. The pulses of radio waves she saw from the star were so regular, arriving every second, that they initially named it LGM-1 for “Little Green Men”, half-jokingly considering that it might be a signal from aliens.  When a pair of these neutron stars orbit around each other, their pull of gravity is so strong that they actually deform the fabric of space-time itself. A gravitational wave ripples outwards, subtly shrinking and then expanding space and everything in it, over and over, as it passes on by. On 17 August 2017 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave observatory in the US (Ligo), and the Virgo detector in Italy felt a burst of these waves passing through Earth. Using lasers to measure the precise length of two 4km-long tubes positioned at right angles, they directly measured the tiny squeezing and stretching of the tubes. They were sensing two neutron stars for the first time, catching the last two minutes of their life as they spun thousands of times around each other before colliding.  The Ligo and Virgo teams immediately alerted astronomers around the world, so that they could search for the aftermath. It was still daytime in Hawaii and Chile, home to many of the largest telescopes, so they had to wait until nightfall. Astronomer Ryan Foley and his team from the University of California in Santa Cruz were the first to locate a burst of intense light coming from the collision, using the Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. They in turn alerted the community so that other telescopes could swing to take a closer look. In the end it was seen by 70 observatories on all seven continents and from space. What they had found was a kilonova and by studying the explosion, astronomers could tell that it had produced huge amounts of gold and platinum, much more than the entire weight of Earth. That particular collision happened too far away to have produced the gold on your finger, but here at last was decisive proof that closer to home collisions like this could have created Earth’s gold.  The stars, source of heat and light and of our very bodies, give an impression of permanence. There they are, night after night. We do, though, already know that they will change. Their positions in the sky will gradually shift, as our own solar system moves around the Milky Way galaxy, our larger home to billions of stars. And they will eventually stop burning bright, and new ones will be born. Within astronomy, my particular expertise is cosmology, in which I ask questions about the life story of the whole of the universe. As a professor at Princeton University I also teach undergraduate students, and I train junior scientists to ask, and answer, their own questions about the cosmos.  By the late 20th century astronomers had begun to consider a big change on the horizon. If we look beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, we find a sea of galaxies, each a collection of billions of stars, strewn throughout space. A century ago, the astronomers Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître showed that the galaxies are, on average, all moving apart from each other. Space itself is growing. But the pull of gravity of all the galaxies towards each other should tend to slow down the growth of space, just as a ball thrown in the air comes to a halt and then falls back down again. So astronomers turned to wondering whether space would one day stop growing altogether, and then start to shrink. Billions of years in the future, might all the galaxies come crashing back towards each other, invading our local cocoon of stars and marking the end of the universe as we know it?  The key to answering this lay in measuring how fast space is growing and comparing it to its growth in the past. You can of course see into the past by looking far out into space, at places from which light set off a long time ago. Using a set of telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and the Canary Islands, rival teams of astronomers made new measurements of distant galaxies, using extremely bright exploding stars as cosmic markers. The teams, led by Brian Schmidt at Mount Stromlo observatory in Australia, and Saul Perlmutter at the University of California in Berkeley, measured galaxies whose light set off as long as 7bn years ago. In 1998 both announced the same surprising discovery, which was that space was not slowing down at all. Instead, galaxies appeared to be moving apart from each other faster and faster. This was as peculiar as if you threw a ball in the air, and it sped up and away from your hand into the sky. By the early 2000s other measurements of the universe were telling the same story, and over the past decade the evidence has become incontrovertible. We still don’t yet know why this is happening. Astronomers refer to whatever is causing this as “dark energy”, a form of energy we have not yet identified. It could be the energy of empty space itself, or something entirely new. It is a mystery waiting to be solved.  This new finding means that we no longer expect all the galaxies in space to come crashing back towards us. We are probably safe from that fate. But our own Milky Way is still on a collision course with at least one other galaxy. We are flying towards Andromeda, the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way, at a speed of more than 50 miles per second, and there is no turning back. A few billion years from now we will unavoidably collide and mix our stars together. Any living beings in our solar system by then will see a spectacular change in the night sky when it happens, but the gaps between stars is so large that it is unlikely any will physically collide. Our sun will simply find itself part of a larger home.  This future view of our cosmos, our revolutionary discoveries of new worlds around stars, and our understanding of how the inner workings of stars make the fabric of our lives, are just some of this century’s exciting discoveries. A common thread is that major advances in astronomy take teams of scientists working together, using telescopes around the world and in space, coupled with powerful computers. The questions we are asking cannot, for the most part, be solved by people working alone. As a result, the community is international. Meet an astronomer anywhere in the world, and most likely they are asking the same questions about the existence of life elsewhere, our place in space and the cosmic story of how we came to be here. And with many magnificent new telescopes being readied for the coming decade, we can expect together to take further great strides in our understanding of the night skies, and the wider universe, in the coming 20 years. We know, based on past experience, that the most exciting discoveries will probably be the ones we have been least expecting.  • Jo Dunkley’s Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide is published by Pelican on 31 January.


theguardianuk--2019-05-03--Black hole may have swallowed neutron star say astronomers

Black hole may have swallowed neutron star, say astronomers

Astronomers may have spotted a neutron star being swallowed by a black hole for the first time, marked by a belch of gravitational waves rippling across the cosmos.  If confirmed, the detection by the twin Ligo detectors in the US and the Virgo detector in Italy would be the first evidence that black holes and neutron stars can pair up in binary systems. The observations could also reveal new details about the nature of such dramatic mergers, including whether the neutron star was ripped apart before crossing the black hole’s threshold or whether it slid seamlessly into oblivion.  Patrick Brady, spokesman for the Ligo collaboration and professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said the signal from the possible collision, which took place on 26 April, needed further analysis before the team could be confident it was a real event rather than a random blip in the background noise. “It’s like listening to somebody whisper a word in a busy cafe, it can be difficult to make out the word or even to be sure that the person whispered at all,” he said. “It will take some time to reach a conclusion about this candidate.”  He put the chances of the observations being a glitch in the data at 14%.  Ligo and Virgo pick up the tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time that are sent out across the cosmos when two massive objects collide.  The possible detection came just a day after the Ligo and Virgo detectors identified a cataclysmic merger of two neutron stars for only the second time. Since the beginning of their third observational campaign on 1 April, the detectors have also spotted three black hole mergers.  Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars known to exist. They are about 12 miles wide, and a teaspoon of neutron star material has a mass of about a billion tonnes. They have a smooth crust of pure neutrons, 10bn times stronger than steel. They are the collapsed remnants of giant stars, after a supernova explosion – even more massive stars go on to form black holes.  When two neutron stars collide, they not only send out gravitational waves but also light, meaning that if astronomers are able to swivel their optical telescopes to the right bit of sky in time they can also pick up the explosive aftermath in light waves.  The location of the possible neutron star and black hole merger, which is estimated to have taken place 1.2bn light years away, has been narrowed down to about 3% of the total sky – but that is still a vast region.  “All the astronomers are now chasing an unfortunately enormous patch of the sky to see whether there’s some light that has switched on at that time,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, director of the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, University of Birmingham.  Detecting a flash of radiation could reveal crucial details about the size of the objects and the nature of the merger. Counterintuitively, the biggest black holes are the least dense and the gravitational pull at the edge of these objects is least fierce, so a neutron star colliding with a very large black hole might simply vanish from view. “The neutron star would just dive in and nothing happens, that’s it,” said Vecchio.  By contrast, for a smaller black hole, the gravity close to the event horizon would be so fierce that it could shred the neutron star, gobbling it up in several chunks. “Then you’d have this extremely dense material travelling at a fraction of the speed of light,” said Vecchio, which he said could release spectacular blasts of radiation that could be spotted by telescopes on Earth.    Since Ligo began observing in 2015, its sensitivity has been increased significantly meaning it is now making several detections a month. This increases the chances of it spotting previously unseen exotic objects which have been theoretically predicted, such as boson stars or mini black holes.  “We’re opening a new window on the universe and this will hopefully bring us a whole new perspective on what’s out there,” said Brady.


theguardianuk--2019-10-14--Interstellar comet just like ones from our solar system – astronomers

The first interstellar comet to be tracked by astronomers as it hurtles through the solar system is unremarkable in every way apart from where it comes from, researchers have said.  Scientists reached the conclusion after observing 2I/Borisov with two of the most powerful telescopes on Earth. They decided that it looked like any other comet except that it came from beyond the solar system and would soon leave for good.  The unusual body was spotted in August by a Crimean amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisov. It was swiftly identified as an outcast from another star system and may have been wandering the Milky Way for millions if not billions of years.  “This is the first comet known to science that arrived from outside the solar system, and it is completely similar to those we see inside the solar system,” said Michal Drahus, an astronomer at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.  The team, led by Piotr Guzik, gathered images of the comet after receiving an alert from a computer system that detects cosmic interlopers. Unlike comets and asteroids that formed in the solar system, the arrivals are on trajectories that do not swing around the sun.  Pictures from the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Spain, and the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, revealed that 2I/Borisov has a coma – a billowing cloud of dust and gas that surrounds a comet’s nucleus – and a short, fat tail. Both are created when ices on the comet’s surface sublimate into gas and blast dust and vapour into space. Details are published in Nature Astronomy.  The observations confirmed that the reddish body is a comet with a nucleus about 2km wide. It is only the second interstellar body to be spotted in the solar system, after the apparently more rocky and cigar-shaped Oumuamua, which was tracked in 2017 as it barrelled out of the solar system at 196,000mph.  Comets are what is left over when a planetary system forms, and the similarity of 2I/Borisov to solar system comets suggests our own planetary system is not unusual in the Milky Way. “The first thing it tells us is that at least some other planetary systems around other stars are similar to ours,” said Guzik.  Scientists are unsure where 2I/Borisov comes from, but another Polish research team has tentatively traced its trajectory back to a star system with twin red dwarves called Kruger 60, 13 light years from Earth.  The new comet tore into the solar system several years ago from an angle of about 45 degrees north. In October 2015 it was as far away as Neptune, the outermost planet, and now it is between Mars and Jupiter. On 27 October it will cross the plane of Earth’s orbit.  The early detection means astronomers will be able to observe the 71,500mph comet as it makes its closest approach to the sun on 8 December, when the extra heat will make the comet more active and its tail longer.  Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at Edinburgh University and a member of a team that has separate observations of 2I/Borisov coming out in Astrophysical Journal Letters, said: “This appears to be a completely unremarkable comet on a very remarkable orbit.”  “It’s very interesting that this interstellar comet looks like our own ones,” he added. “It implies that some of the formation processes we are trying to figure out with detailed observation of comets and asteroids, or space missions like Rosetta, are common between stars.”  A new mission being developed for the European Space Agency will send a robotic probe into space to intercept and study a passing comet. Geraint Jones, the head of planetary science at UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory and the lead proposer of the Comet Interceptor mission, said the primary target would be a pristine, unaltered comet arriving fresh from the Oort cloud, a distant region of the solar system where comets reside.  “But we on the proposing team made it clear that if an interstellar object could be reached instead, it would clearly make an extremely compelling target,” he said. Launch is scheduled for 2028.


theindependent--2019-01-30--Astronomers spot mysterious long apostrash bagapos object floating above Earth

Astronomers spot mysterious long 'trash bag' object floating above Earth

A mysterious "empty trash bag" object has been spotted floating above Earth.  The satellite is thought to be several metres across but is extremely lightweight, the astronomers who spotted it say.  The object is probably a piece of light material, such as metallic foil, that has been left over from a rocket launch. But it is not clear what rocket launch the object known as A10bMLz could have been launched from.  At the moment, the object is on a strange, highly elliptical orbit. Sometimes it comes as close as 600 kilometres from the Earth – but it swings around to be 1.4 times as far out as the Moon.  Because of its small mass, A10bMLz is very susceptible to radiation pressure from the Sun. That means its orbit changes "chaotically" on a scale of days to weeks, according to the London-based Northolt Branch Observatories (NBO) that analysed it.  It means that it is impossible to fully predict where it might be flying. It is being buffeted around in space like a plastic bag might be in the wind.  The object could re-enter Earth's atmosphere within a few motnhs, for instance, or might continue to fly around the Earth.  Such "empty trash bag" objects have been spotted before. But this is the first one that has ever been seen drifting at such a distant orbit.  The object was first seen by Hawaii's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope. Further analysis by the NBO confirmed that the object was very light but relatively wide, as well as its strange orbit.


theindependent--2019-02-01--Astronomers accidentally find a tiny galaxy that is nearly as old as the universe itself

Scientists have accidentally found a tiny, ancient "living fossil" galaxy – and it was hiding surprisingly close to us.  The compact collection of stars is almost as old as the universe itself, according to the astronomers who found it. And it could offer an opportunity to look back into the beginning of the cosmos.  The tiny galaxy is only 30 million light-years away but is so dark and distant that it was only found while astronomers were looking for something else entirely.  Scientists made the discovery while they were using the Hubble Space Telescope to look at the white dwarf stars in a globular cluster known as NGC 672. They had hoped to use those stars to measure the age of the cluster.  But as they did so they spotted the small set of stars on the edge of the area they were observing. After analysis, they found the stars did not belong to the cluster they were looking at – a part of the Milky Way – but were in fact millions of light-years away from it.  The new discovery has been nicknamed Bedin 1 and is a small but long galaxy. It measures only 3000 light-years across even at its longest point, making it just a fraction of the size of our own Milky Way.  It is dark as it is feint. Together, those porperties led astronomers to classify it as what is called a dwarf spheroidal galaxy.  Such galaxies are defined by their small size and dim light, as well as their lack of dust and old stellar populations. Reserchers have found 36 galaxies of this kind in our nearby area, 22 of which are satellite galaxies around our own Milky Way.  Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are not uncommon, but the newly discovered one is strange in a number of ways. It is extremely isolated, about 30 million light-years from the Milky Way and two million light-years from its nearest possible host – making it the most isolated of any small dwarf galaxy ever found.  From studying its stars, scientists found that the galaxy is around 13 billion years old, making it nearly as old as the entire universe. Because it is so distant from any other galaxies – and so has been left largely undisturbed – as well as its old age, the astronomers refer to Bedin 1 as a fossil from the beginning of th ecosmos.


theindependent--2019-02-21--Huge neutron star sent blasts of gravitational waves and radiation towards Earth astronomers say

Huge neutron star sent blasts of gravitational waves and radiation towards Earth, astronomers say

Scientists have detected a blast of material sent 130 million light years through the universe, flung towards Earth by the merging of neutron stars.  Using an international network of radio telescopes around the world, astronomers detected a jet of material that travelled through the universe at nearly the speed of light.  As it hit the Earth, it was picked up by telescopes and shook gravitational wave detectors in August 2017. That allowed scientists to pick up an explosion that happened in a galaxy 130 million light years away.  When the jet was detected in 2017, the first few days of emissions suggested it had been produced by a kilonova. They are powered by radioactive decay, and originate from the mateiral that was flung out during and after the merger of the stars.  But in the weeks that followed, X-ray and radio emissions were still being detected, and carried on for several months. Those were thought to be the "afterglow" of the merger, suggesting that the material was interacting with the interstellar gas that surrounded the explosion, as it expanded through the universe.  But the process that created that afterglow has not been understood, because previous data did not have enough detail to allow scientists to find out where exactly it had come from.  Using the vast network of 32 radio telescopes that were spread over five continents, astronomers looked at the radio glow long after the merger. They combined that data to work out wha tthe source might have looked like.  The data showed that it could not have been in line with previous models of a "choked-jet" or a "cocoon".  Instead, it suggests that the emissions were flung towards Earth by a structured jet that was expanding at nearly the speed of light. That allowed it to break through the surrounding material and into interstellar space – allowing it to blast through the universe and reach Earth.


theindependent--2019-05-04--Black hole may have swallowed neutron star astronomers believe

Black hole may have swallowed neutron star, astronomers believe

A black hole may have been detected swallowing a neutron star for the first time ever, astronomers have said.  Vast gravitational waves – which scientists think could have been caused by such a merger – have been seen ripping across space.  Astronomers working on the twin Ligo and Virgo observatories, based in the US and Italy respectively, spotted them.  If proven, it could improve understanding of what exactly happens when black holes eat stars, and if the star itself passes through into oblivion intact or is ripped apart during the encounter.  Astronomers across the world are now focusing their observations on the patch of space – some 1.3 billion light years away – where it is roughly believed the clash happened in a bid to gather more evidence.  “The universe is keeping us on our toes,” Patrick Brady, a spokesperson for Ligo and professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the signal is rather weak. It’s like listening to somebody whisper a word in a busy cafe; it can be difficult to make out the word or even to be sure that the person whispered at all. It will take some time to reach a conclusion about this candidate.”  Ligo and Virgo were switched on again on 1 April after a period of upgrades.  They work by picking up tiny ripples in the fabric of space that are fired out across the universe when two massive objects collide.  The new detection, on 26 April, came just a day after the system had identified a cataclysmic merger of two neutron stars about 500 million light years from earth.  Giovanni Prodi, data analysis coordinator with Virgo and a professor at the University of Trento, described the two incidents as making the period an “incomparable scientific month”.


theindependent--2019-09-16--Astronomers discover most massive neutron star ever recorded

The most massive neutron star ever recorded has been discovered by astronomers 4,600 light years from Earth.  The star is more than twice the mass of the sun but just 15 miles in diameter, making it the most dense object in the universe except for black holes. It is so dense a single sugar-cube worth of neutron-star material would weigh the same as the entire human population of Earth (100 million tons).  Neutron stars are objects formed from the collapsed cores of large stars following a supernova explosion. They are also known as pulsars due to the pulses of radiation they emit as they rotate at high speeds.  Named J0740+6620, the star is 2.17 times the mass of the sun and 333,000 times the mass of the Earth, according to the paper published in Nature Astronomy. Scientists say this star is approaching the limits of how compact a single object can become without crushing in on itself.  “Neutron stars are as mysterious as they are fascinating,” sad lead researcher Thankful Cromartie, a pre-doctoral fellow at Virginia University.  “These city-sized objects are essentially ginormous atomic nuclei. They are so massive that their interiors take on weird properties. Finding the maximum mass that physics and nature will allow can teach us a great deal about this otherwise inaccessible realm in astrophysics.”  The neutron star was identified by the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia which is so sensitive it can pick up radio waves emitted milliseconds after the birth of the universe.  “These stars are very exotic. We don’t know what they’re made of and one really important question is, ‘How massive can you make one of these stars?’ It has implications for very exotic material that we simply can’t create in a laboratory on Earth,” said Maura McLaughlin, astrophysics professor at West Virginia University.  The neutron star is a pulsar that emits beams of radio waves like a lighthouse as it spins. Pulsars get their name because of twin beams of radio waves they emit from their magnetic poles as they rotate hundreds of times each second.  Astronomers measure these radio waves to work out the mass of stellar objects. They can do this thanks to its orbiting companion star.  As the white dwarf passes in front of the pulsar star there is a subtle delay in the arrival time of the radio waves. This phenomenon – known as “Shapiro Delay” – is because the gravity from the white dwarf star slightly warps the space surrounding it.  This warping means the pulses from the rotating neutron star have to travel a little bit further. Astronomers measure that delay to calculate the mass of the white dwarf, which in turn provides a measurement of the neutron star.  Once the mass of one of the co-orbiting bodies is known they can accurately determine the mass of the other.  “The orientation of this binary star system created a fantastic cosmic laboratory,” said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and co-author on the paper.  “Neutron stars have this tipping point where their interior densities get so extreme that the force of gravity overwhelms even the ability of neutrons to resist further collapse.  “Each ‘most massive’ neutron star we find brings us closer to identifying that tipping point and helping us to understand the physics of matter at these mind boggling densities.”  Pulsars spin with such speed and regularity that astronomers can use them to study the nature of space-time, the mass of stellar objects and our understanding of general relativity.


theindependent--2019-11-20--Astronomers spot highest-energy blast from most powerful cosmic explosion in the universe

Astronomers have spotted the highest-energy radiation ever seen from the most powerful cosmic explosion in the universe.  The blast of radiation, known as gamma-rays, came in two bursts that hit Earth with more than 100 billion times the energy in visible light.  After decades of work, scientists have seen the most powerful ever blast from a gamma-ray burst, or GRB. Such blasts are the most intensely energetic phenomenon in the universe, suddenly appearing in the sky for only a brief period but releasing the same amount of energy in one second that the Sun will emit in its entire life.  GRBs are the most poweful explosions in the universe and are thought to come out of massive stars when they collapse at the end of their lives, or when binary star systems merge into much smaller objects. As they do, they throw out a flash of radiation that flies across the whole universe.  When observed, they begin with a bright flash that is then followed by an "afterglow". That afterglow throws out emissions across a range of different energies, including the very intense gigaelectronvolt gamma-rays – of which few have ever been seen.  Gamma-ray bursts were first spotted during the Cold War. During that period, the US and former Soviety Union had satellites in orbit in space, looking for gamma-rays being thrown out by the explosion of an atomic bomb.  Every so often, they would send an alert that they had spotted a huge increase in those gamma-rays. But there was no evidence of a nuclear explosion and the signals in fact appeared to be coming from space.  That is how gamma-ray bursts were first found. But they have stayed very mysterious in the years since, in part because the data was kept strictly classified and in part because they are so difficult to track down.  Now scientists hope to delve into that mystery after spotting the newly energetic blast, after trying for many years. Specialised telescopes were able to see the blast of photons, which reached about 100 billion times the level of visible light.  In an comment piece accompanying the release of three papers exploring the GRBs in the journal Nature, University of Nevada professor Bing Zhang said that the discovery was a "breakthrough" twice over. The results were both a "triumph" for the observatories that have been watching for such a result for more than a decade, he wrote, as well as a "triumph for GRB theories", which could now allow us to understand how such powerful explosions happen.  The breakthrough began when dedicated Nasa satellites spotted what appeared to be a gamma-ray burst, and sent a notification to other observatories that were looking for gamma-rays. That happened twice – in July 2018 and January 2019, allowing two teams of astronomers to see two GRB events from the ground for the first time.  "We were able to point to the region of origin so quickly that we could start observing only 57 seconds after the initial detection of the explosion," said Cosimo Nigro from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, a research group that helped find the burst. Within a few minutes, DESY had seen about a thousand photons from the blast, which is known as GRB 180720B.  What they went on to see was the most intense blast of light ever picked up from a GRB, itself the most intensely energetic phenomenon known to humanity. It faded within half an hour.  "High-energy GRBs with energies in the region of tera-electron-volts (trillions of electron volts) were theoretically predicted. Astronomers have searched for such powerful bursts for 15 years," said Masahiro Teshima from the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo.  "My international team and I are proud to announce the discovery of the first gamma-ray burst with observed energies up to 1 tera-electron-volt, by far the highest-energy photons ever detected from a GRB."  The GRB in question – known as 180720B – was very strong and lasted about 50 seconds. That is relatively long for such a burst, and suggests that it was thrown out by the death of a massive star, as its core collapses and forms a swirling black hole.  The burst is thought to be thrown out as the gas that srrounds the black hole forms into a disc around its edges, with gas jets that are ejected and create the flashes. They are created as particles are accelerated to speeds reaching the speed of light, creating gamma-rays as they interact wiht the matter and radiation that surround them.  The detection of the very-high-energy gamma radiation not only hows that there are extremely accelerated particles in GRBs, scientists say, but also is evidence that the particles still exist after the initial explosion. Before, scientists had presumed that the bursts could only be seen within the seconds and minutes following the explosion – but in the latest breakthrough, they were seen hours after the explosion.  David Berge, head of gamma-ray astronomy at DESY - a particle accelerator research centre in Germany, said: "For the first time, the two instruments have measured gamma radiation from gamma-ray bursts from the ground.  "These two groundbreaking observations have established gamma-ray bursts as sources for terrestrial gamma-ray telescopes.  "This has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of these violent phenomena."  Now astronomers hope to use the discovery to learn more about the context that give rise to such intense blasts. Astronomers hope that they will be able to spot as many as ten of the events per year when they switch on the Cherenkov Telescope Array, made up of over 100 individual telescopes that will look out for such gamma-rays – but that will not happen until 2023 at the earliest.  "Although long anticipated, the detection of TeV gamma rays from GRBs had been an extremely challenging endeavor. It was finally realized here with very high significance for the first time, after many years of technical improvements and dedicated efforts," said Professor Teshima.  "Continuing efforts with existing gamma-ray telescopes, as well as the new Cherenkov Telescope Array currently under construction, promise to bring forth new physical insight into the most luminous electromagnetic explosions in the universe."  Social media is an increasingly important battle ground in elections - and home to many questionable claims pumped out by all sides. If social media sites won't investigate the truth of divisive advertising, we will. Please send any political Facebook advertising you receive to digitaldemocracy@independent.co.uk, and we will catalogue and investigate it. Read more here.


theirishtimes--2019-08-19--Exhibition recognises Irish input in major astronomical discoveries

Ireland’s role in major astronomical discoveries of the past century is being recognised with a travelling exhibition that arrives in Dublin this week.  The centrepiece of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (Dias) exhibition is the Grubb coelostat that was designed in 1919 by Rathmines man Howard Grubb, and used in testing Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  Grubb was a respected telescope-maker and businessman, who employed 400 people in his optical works in Observatory Lane.  The coelostat, or solar telescope, played an essential role in proving Einstein’s theory of general relativity which was published in 1915.  Einstein predicted that starlight would be deflected during a solar eclipse, with the amount of deflection increasing from stars that came closer to the sun.  Grubb’s device reflected light from the sky onto a fixed telescope and the lens focused the light onto a photographic plate, enabling light deflection to be observed.  Ahead of an eclipse in May 1919, the Royal Irish Academy sponsored an expedition to Brazil, where several bright stars were due to appear close to the sun during the eclipse. The equipment was operated by another Irishman, Co Antrim’s Andrew Crommelin, whose results confirmed Einstein’s theory.  Grubb’s equipment is usually housed by the Dias Dunsink observatory in north Dublin, but has been on loan to a Brazilian museum. It is being displayed as part of a chronological tour of the most significant breakthroughs in astronomy and space exploration over the past century.  Prof Tom Wray, at the Dias School of Cosmic Physics, said “[Visitors] will see incredible progress over the 100 years and they’ll see Ireland’s involvement in it.”  Visitors will also learn about Larne scientist Jocelyn Bell who co-discovered the first radio pulsars – or collapsed stars – in 1967. She was overlooked for a Nobel Prize in favour of her supervisor, because she was a research student at the time.  Prof Wray hopes the exhibition will show that astronomy goes beyond stargazing, stating that advances in astronomy have informed progress in other areas, including mobile phone technology.  “Einstein’s theory is used in GPS systems; digital cameras were first developed by astronomers in the late 1970s; and WiFi was first developed in astronomical facilities in Australia, for radio telescopes that needed minimal interference.”  The Above and Beyond exhibition is open to the public at the Wood Quay Venue, Wood Quay, Dublin 2 from Tuesday, August 20th to Thursday, August 29th.  Commemorating the centenary of the International Astronomical Union, it has already been staged across selected venues in Europe and is midway through an Irish tour that takes in locations including Armagh, Birr, Cork and Galway.


thesun--2019-07-02--Mysterious distant alien star is flashing us with bizarre pattern and astronomers are stumped

Mysterious distant alien star is ‘flashing’ us with bizarre pattern – and astronomers are stumped

A STAR that's 350 light-years away from Earth is flashing at us and no one knows why.  It's called EPIC 249706694 and scientists have noticed it dip in brightness 28 times with the oddest part being that the time between these dips is completely random.  Scientists led by MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research have tested a variety of scenarios and have not found any to be plausible so far.  The star, which is actually a binary star that is made up of two stars revolving together, was studied by the Kepler planet-hunting telescope but didn't fit in with the patterns of other dimming stars.  Kepler collected 87 days worth of observations of the binary star, during which it recorded the 28 dips in brightness and all but two of these happened for the same amount of time.  The researchers said: "The unusual aspect of these dips ... is that they exhibit no periodicity, and their arrival times could just as well have been produced by a random number generator."  As far as current understandings of the universe go, the behaviour of EPIC 249706694 makes it completely unique.  If it is an object that is causing the binary star to dim then the researchers think that object would have to be twice as big as Earth for one of the binary stars and Jupiter-sized for the other.  Another possible explanation for the flashing is dust-emitting asteroids flying past but it would be a huge coincidence if all those asteroids were able to cause the same level of dimming each time.  The scientists did originally think that planets orbiting the binary star could have caused random dimming as they wouldn't have been able to cover the two stars at the same time but every model they attempted to make of this failed to create the correct number of flashes.  They said: "All transit scenarios that we have been able to conjure up appear to fail."  If there is something about the star itself that is causing it to flash then many more investigations will be needed to check this out.  The researchers concluded: "The purpose of this paper is largely to bring this enigmatic object to the attention of the larger astrophysics community in the hope that (i) some time on larger telescopes, or ones with high photometric precision, might be devoted to its study, and (ii) some new ideas might be generated to explain the mysterious dips in flux."  This study has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  In other space news, a rare solar eclipse will ‘plunge South America into darkness’.  Mysterious space object ‘Oumuamua’ that skimmed past Earth is not an alien probe, scientists claim.  And, SpaceX has lost control of 3 Starlink satellites weeks after launch.  What do you make of this flashing star? Let us know in the comments...  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.


thesun--2019-11-25--First merger of THREE black holes in a single galaxy caught on camera by astronomers

A TRIO of monster black holes have been spotted crashing into each other.  The galactic fracas is taking place 300million light years from Earth and will lead to the birth of a single, mega black hole.  Scientists in Germany discovered the rare event within NGC 6240, a well-studied nearby galaxy.  The black holes are close to each other at the core of the system, and shed light on how massive galaxies are born.  "Up until now, such a concentration of three supermassive black holes had never been discovered in the universe," said Dr Peter Weilbacher, of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.  "The present case provides evidence of a simultaneous merging process of three galaxies along with their central black holes."  Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to make their discovery.  The NGC 6240 galaxy is relatively close to our own Milky Way in space terms, and has an odd shape.  Galaxies are often made up of hundreds of billions of stars locked in an orbital dance with a supermassive black hole at the core.  It had long been assumed NGC 6240 formed when two smaller galaxies collided, leaving it with a pair of black holes – hence the odd shape.  However, the new observations revealed the galaxy in fact had three black holes crammed into its violent core.  "Through our observations with extremely high spatial resolution we were able to show that NGC 6240 hosts not two but three supermassive black holes in its center," said Professor Wolfram Kollatschny, an astronomer at the University of Göttingen.  "Each of the three heavyweights has a mass of more than 90 million Suns.  "They are located in a region of space less than 3,000 light-years across, i.e. in less than one hundredth of the total size of the galaxy."  According to the team, the discovery opens new doors for our understanding of the universe.  Up until now, scientists had not been able to explain how the biggest galaxies in the universe evolved through the space processes we know and understand.  This puzzle could be solved if it's proved that three or more supermassive black holes can merge into a single entity.  "If simultaneous merging processes of several galaxies took place, then the largest galaxies with their central supermassive black holes were able to evolve much faster," Dr Weilbacher added.  "Our observations provide the first indication of this scenario."  The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.  In other news, scientists unveiled the first ever picture of a black hole in April.  There’s an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo – can you find it?  And, here's what happens if you fall head-first into a black hole.  What do you think of the new finding? Let us know in the comments!  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk


sottnet--2019-10-07--2,000 atoms exist in two places at once in unprecedented quantum experiment

But still, when the researchers switched the machine on, the detectors at the far end of the beam revealed an interference pattern. The molecules were occupying multiple points in space at once.  The new experiment demonstrated a bizarre quantum effect from the double-slit experiment at an unprecedented scale.Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics That's something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria , even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon "quantum superposition," and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles.To pull it off, the researchers built a complicated, modernized version of a series of famous old experiments that first demonstrated quantum superposition.Researchers had long known that light, fired through a sheet with two slits in it, would create an interference pattern, or a series of light and dark fringes, on the wall behind the sheet. But light was understood as a massless wave, not something made of particles, so this wasn't surprising. However, in a series of famous experiments in the 1920s, physicists showed that electrons fired through thin films or crystals would behave in a similar way, forming patterns like light does on the wall behind the diffracting material.If electrons were simply particles, and so could occupy only one point in space at a time, they would form two strips, roughly the shape of the slits, on the wall behind the film or crystal. But instead, the electrons hit that wall in complex patterns suggesting the electrons had interfered with themselves . That is a telltale sign of a wave; in some spots, the peaks of the waves coincide, creating brighter regions, while in other spots, the peaks coincide with troughs, so the two cancel each other out and create a dark region. Because physicists already knew that electrons had mass and were definitely particles, the experiment showed that matter acts both as individual particles and as waves.It's an exciting result, the researchers wrote, proving quantum interference at larger scales than had ever before been detected."The next generation of matter-wave experiments will push the mass by an order of magnitude," the authors wrote.So, even bigger demonstrations of quantum interference are coming, though it probably won't be possible to fire yourself through an interferometer anytime soon. (First of all, the vacuum in the machine would probably kill you.) Us giant beings are just going to have to sit in one place and watch the particles have all the fun.


sottnet--2019-11-18--New quantum experiment may prove that objective reality does not exist

Scientists in Edinburgh have been using quantum computers to measure the behaviour of photons while being observed in order to determine if reality changes its behaviour depending on if it is being observed or not.A new paper published in Science Advances in September claims that reality may in fact be subjective.According to the theory in the study, particles can simultaneously exist at several places or states, known as superposition. This is only the case, however, when they are not observed.Once a quantum system is observed, the specific location or state is established thus breaking the superposition.Časlav Brukner from the University of Vienna found a way of translating the "Wigner's friend" hypothesis into a real experiment to prove that reality may be subjective to individual observers.Brukner conducted the experiment using two "Wigners" and two "friends" in two separate boxes, where their states where measured both inside and outside each respective box.The experiment was conducted at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University on a small-scale quantum computer using three pairs of entangled photons.The first pair of photons and their polarization inside their boxes are measured. The pair outside the two boxes remain on either side and can also be measured.After many weeks, they succeeded in demonstrating that quantum mechanics may contradict the assumption of objective fact.Another issue is that isolate examples and experiments by themselves do not prove universal rules and may not apply on a larger-scale.


theindependent--2019-03-21--Two contradictory versions of reality can exist at the same time quantum experiment shows

Two contradictory versions of reality can exist at the same time, quantum experiment shows

Two versions of reality can exist at the same time, at least in the quantum world, according to a new study.  Scientists have conducted tests to demonstrate a theoretical physics question first posed as a mere thought experiment decades ago.  Within the concept, two imaginary scientists are both deemed to be correct, despite arriving at totally different conclusions.  Demonstrating this in practice therefore calls into dispute fundamental questions about physics and suggests there is no such thing as objective reality.  The results were published on arXiv, a site for research that has yet to undergo full peer review, by a British team based at Heriot-Watt University.  They set out to explore “Wigner’s friend”, named after Nobel prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner who came up with it 1961, which is based on the idea that a photon, or a particle of light, can exist in two possible states.  According to the laws of quantum mechanics, this “superposition” means the photon’s polarisation – or the axis upon which it spins – is both vertical and horizontal at the same time.  However, once one scientist in an isolated laboratory measures the photon, they find the photon’s polarisation is fixed at either vertical or horizontal.  At the same time, for someone who is outside the laboratory and is not aware of the result, the unmeasured photon is still in a state of superposition.  Despite these apparently conflicting realities, both are correct.  In their new study, the physicists were able to bring this experiment into reality, using real photons and measuring equipment that stood in for Wigner and his “friend”.  With their results, they were able to confirm the two realities described by Wigner held true.  “You can verify both of them,” study co-author Dr Martin Ringbauer told Live Science, explaining how this bewildering concept could make the leap from theory to reality.  “Theoretical advances were needed to formulate the problem in a way that is testable,” he said.  “Then, the experimental side needed developments on the control of quantum systems to implement something like that.”  While the experiment and its results may seem a world – or even a universe – away from everyday life, it raises profound and unsettling questions for physicists about the nature of reality.  “The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them,” the team wrote in their paper.  The role of quantum mechanics is to describe the world at such a small scale that the conventional rules of physics do not apply. If measurements from this field cannot be considered absolute, it could change how the discipline operates.  “It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement,” said Dr Ringbauer.  “The stories we tell about quantum mechanics have to adapt to that.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.


abcnews--2019-10-18--Real estate developer faces judgment in college bribery case

A California real estate developer is returning to court to face sentencing for his role in a college admissions bribery scheme.  Robert Flaxman is scheduled to appear in Boston's federal court Friday. The 63-year-old Los Angeles resident pleaded guilty in May to a single count of fraud and conspiracy.  Authorities say Flaxman paid $75,000 to have a test proctor feed his daughter answers on her ACT exam in 2016. They say she used the score to get into an undisclosed college that suspended her for a semester after the scheme was revealed.  Prosecutors are recommending eight months in prison and a $40,000 fine. His lawyers suggest supervised release and community service.  Flaxman's lawyers argue the scheme was not about "ego gratification," saying his daughter's school is "excellent" but not elite.


abcnews--2019-11-13--Ex-insurance exec faces judgment in college admissions scam

A former insurance executive is returning to court to be sentenced for paying $450,000 to get his son and daughter into the University of Southern California as fake athletes.  Toby MacFarlane is scheduled to be sentenced in Boston's federal court Wednesday. The 56-year-old Del Mar, California, resident pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud and conspiracy in June.  Authorities say MacFarlane paid the scheme's organizers $200,000 to get his daughter into USC as a fake soccer star in 2014, and then paid $250,000 to get his son admitted as a fake basketball recruit in 2017.  Prosecutors are recommending a year in prison. His lawyers say he deserves leniency.  MacFarlane has apologized and said he agreed to participate in the scheme at a time when his marriage was falling apart.


breitbart--2019-11-19--Undercover Journalist to Appeal Judgment in Planned Parenthood Fetal Tissue Trafficking Case

The undercover video journalist, David Daleiden, who exposed the alleged involvement of Planned Parenthood in the illegal sale of the body parts of aborted babies will appeal the judgment against him handed down by the jury in the federal case.  “This lawsuit is payback for David Daleiden exposing Planned Parenthood’s dirty business of buying and selling fetal parts and organs,” said lead Thomas More Society defense attorney Peter Breen in a press statement. “We intend to seek vindication for David on appeal. His investigation into criminal activity by America’s largest abortion provider utilized standard investigative journalism techniques, those applied regularly by news outlets across the country.”  On Friday, the jury in the case brought against Daleiden and his colleagues at Center for Medical Progress (CMP) sided with Planned Parenthood and awarded punitive damages to the abortion chain of over $2.2 million.  The jury found the undercover video journalists caused “substantial harm” to Planned Parenthood with its video series that exposed numerous officials of the organization and its partners in the biomedical procurement industry allegedly discussing the sale of fetal body parts and altering abortion procedures in order to ensure the harvesting of intact organs for sale.  “David’s findings revealed practices so abhorrent that the United States Congress issued criminal referrals for Planned Parenthood, and numerous states and elected officials have moved to strip it of funding,” Breen said. “Rather than face up to its heinous doings, Planned Parenthood chose to persecute the person who exposed it. I am fully confident that when this case has run its course, justice will prevail, and David will be vindicated.”  The jury verdict form states Daleiden and his colleagues were in violation of the Federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) or conspired to violate RICO.  The jury also said the undercover team breached Planned Parenthood’s national conference exhibitor and nondisclosure agreements and committed fraud or conspired “to commit fraud through intentional misrepresentation.”  Prior to the start of the trial, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III ruled the jury would not be allowed to consider any information Daleiden gleaned from the video recordings in determining its verdict.  Orrick was the subject of controversy as he presided over the case, during which he imposed a gag order on CMP regarding the online publication of the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and Planned Parenthood video footage. Daleiden and his attorneys claimed the order violated their First Amendment rights.  CMP had requested Orrick’s disqualification “on the grounds that there is evidence of bias in favor of the plaintiff and prejudice against the defendants.”  Evidence uncovered by Daleiden and his attorneys included that the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center — an entity that is in partnership with a Planned Parenthood affiliate, a member of the NAF — had named Orrick as an emeritus member of its board.  In addition, Orrick’s wife’s Facebook account indicates support for Planned Parenthood and criticism of Daleiden and CMP.  Planned Parenthood has yet to be prosecuted for any of the allegations of profiting from the sales of the body parts of babies aborted in its clinics.  In June, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and his predecessor Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), current chairman of the Committee on Finance, wrote to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray, seeking an update on the federal investigation that was supposedly launched in 2017 into the allegations raised, in part, through the video documentation by CMP.  The senators asked Barr and Wray to respond to their inquiry no later than July 2.  In August, Breitbart News reached out to the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) press team for an update on the Department of Justice/FBI response and was informed SJC was still awaiting a response.


cnsnews--2019-02-12--Bill Donohue Rush to Judgment on Fairfax Is Unjust

Bill Donohue: Rush to Judgment on Fairfax Is Unjust

In all likelihood, future generations will look back at this time in American history as one where fundamental due process rights for men accused of sexual crimes were jettisoned. From false accusations made against Catholic priests, to the wholly unfounded accusations made against Brett Kavanaugh, we have seen a mad rush to judgment, indicting the accused.  The latest to be subjected to this travesty of justice is Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. First a woman accuses him of sexually abusing her in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention. Then another woman emerges, claiming she was abused in 2000 when she and Fairfax were students at Duke University. This same woman now says she was raped by a Duke basketball player while in school.  Fairfax and the athlete, Corey Maggette, vehemently deny the charges.  Fairfax's first accuser, Vanessa Tyson, says she does not want to press charges, and the second one, Meredith Watson, came forward “out of a strong sense of civic duty.”  Neither woman has taken their accusations to the courts. Why not? Why are they content to try Fairfax in the court of public opinion? Is it because the current hostile environment for males accused of sexual crimes favors the accusers? College men can speak to this issue with authority.  There has been no evidence that Fairfax is guilty of sexual abuse. Yet presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris managed somehow to determine that the first accusation was “credible.” Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has no evidence either, but he is satisfied calling for Fairfax to resign. Ditto for Sen. Tim Kaine—he called on Fairfax to resign over “atrocious crimes,” even though the Lt. Gov. has not been convicted of anything.  BET co-founder Robert Johnson has put up $150,000 to hire a law firm, to be selected by all three parties to this dispute, to investigate this matter. Both accusers said no. What does that tell us?  Sexual abuse is a serious crime and those guilty of it should be treated harshly. But unsubstantiated accusations should never be treated as dispositive, and this is doubly true of those who refuse to access the courts to settle these matters.  Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of seven books and many articles.  In all likelihood, future generations will look back at this time in American history as one where fundamental due process rights for men accused of sexual crimes were jettisoned. From false accusations made against Catholic priests, to the wholly unfounded accusations made against Brett Kavanaugh, we have seen a mad rush to judgment, indicting the accused.  The latest to be subjected to this travesty of justice is Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. First a woman accuses him of sexually abusing her in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention. Then another woman emerges, claiming she was abused in 2000 when she and Fairfax were students at Duke University. This same woman now says she was raped by a Duke basketball player while in school.  Fairfax and the athlete, Corey Maggette, vehemently deny the charges.  Fairfax's first accuser, Vanessa Tyson, says she does not want to press charges, and the second one, Meredith Watson, came forward “out of a strong sense of civic duty.”  Neither woman has taken their accusations to the courts. Why not? Why are they content to try Fairfax in the court of public opinion? Is it because the current hostile environment for males accused of sexual crimes favors the accusers? College men can speak to this issue with authority.  There has been no evidence that Fairfax is guilty of sexual abuse. Yet presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris managed somehow to determine that the first accusation was “credible.” Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has no evidence either, but he is satisfied calling for Fairfax to resign. Ditto for Sen. Tim Kaine—he called on Fairfax to resign over “atrocious crimes,” even though the Lt. Gov. has not been convicted of anything.  BET co-founder Robert Johnson has put up $150,000 to hire a law firm, to be selected by all three parties to this dispute, to investigate this matter. Both accusers said no. What does that tell us?  Sexual abuse is a serious crime and those guilty of it should be treated harshly. But unsubstantiated accusations should never be treated as dispositive, and this is doubly true of those who refuse to access the courts to settle these matters.  Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of seven books and many articles.


activistpost--2019-03-25--8 Historic Cases That Show the FBI and CIA Were Out of Control Long Before Russiagate

Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.  These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US intelligence agencies.  Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.  These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.  It’s no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.  The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine “pretexts” the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign (“real or simulated”) and blaming it on Cuban refugees.  “We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” the Operation Mongoose document says.  Ultimately, the broader Mongoose effort failed to remove Castro from power or effectively establish an infiltration within Cuba, though the CIA did engage in several sabotage operations. Mongoose was suspended and ultimately discontinued amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In the summer of 2014, the CIA’s inspector general concluded that the CIA had “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency’s black history of torture. As the New York Times reported:  And that’s not the worst part. The Times goes on to note that CIA officers didn’t just read the emails of the Senate investigators. They also sent “a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.”  John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, insisted during Senate hearings these were “very limited inappropriate actions” and that “the actions of the CIA were reasonable.”  Brennan, who publicly lied about the episode, was not punished and even retained his security clearance until Aug. 15, 2018.  Before he had a day named in his honor and a monument on the National Mall, the government viewed Martin Luther King Jr. very much as a threat. In fact, his message of peace, love, equality, and civil disobedience had the FBI so scared that agents actually sent King and his wife a package containing a strange letter and tape recording. It contained details of the civil rights activist’s sexual indiscretions and encouraged him to kill himself.  In 1961, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, a known “Red,” had become a close advisor to King. The following year, Bobby Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, surveillance that would eventually expand. It turns out that J. Edgar Hoover stumbled on to MLK’s busy sex life while investigating King.  “Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge,” wrote Yale historian Beverly Gage in the New York Times in 2014, “but he did begin to learn about King’s extramarital sex life….”  The FBI apparently had no scruples about using the information to try to bring King down. James Comey, Gage writes, used to keep a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk “as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong.”  If you’ve never heard of Project MKUltra, you might find it hard to believe. Also known as “the CIA Mind Control Program,” the effort was launched by the agency in 1953. The program used drug experiments on humans, oftentimes on prisoners who were tested against their will or in exchange for early release. The experiments were undertaken so CIA agents could better understand how to extract information from enemies during interrogations. Here is a description from the History Channel:  MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences. Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”  How was any of this legal? Well, it wasn’t, which is why the CIA understood it had to be concealed from the American public at all costs.  “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote a CIA auditor. “The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.”  In the early 1990s, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, an attorney and chemist who worked at the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent, noticed troubling practices in the in the bureau’s Investigation Laboratory.  There were “alterations of reports, alterations of evidence, folks testifying outside their areas of expertise in courts of law,” said Whitehurst. “[Really] what was going on was human rights violations. We have a right to fair trials in this country… And that’s not what was going on at the FBI lab.”  In 1994, he blew the whistle on the “systemic forensic fraud” he witnessed. Nothing happened. So he took his case to the Department of Justice. The FBI didn’t like that. Whitehurst was eventually chased out of the Bureau, but not before winning a $1.16 million settlement.  Unfortunately, however, the wheels of justice turn slowly at the Bureau.  “It wasn’t until ten years later that Whitehurst was finally vindicated,” notes the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund note, “when a scathing 500+ page study of the lab by the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, concluded major reforms were required in the lab.”  But by then, an untold number of people had been convicted with the help of tainted evidence—evidence the DOJ knew was tainted.  At least 35 of these cases involved convicted criminals who received the death penalty, according to the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund.  In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA admitted to operating a “bawdy house” in a San Francisco apartment where “unsuspecting citizens were lured… for the CIA’s drug experiments,” according to a local news story report documented by the agency.  “Private citizens were taken to the bordello by $100 prostitutes and drugged without their knowledge, usually with LSD,” the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1977 after the CIA admitted to the operation. Agents sat behind a two-way mirror and filmed the interactions between the drugged men and prostitutes.  Then-CIA director Stansfield Turner suggested the operation was intended to understand how drugs could potentially be used against the American people, though he called the experiments “abhorrent” and acknowledged it was “inexplicable” that the CIA would do this without the subjects’ consent. He insisted the agency had ceased the experiments 12 years prior. In a 1977 Senate testimony, CIA agents said the purpose of the experiments was to “learn about thought control and sexual behavior,” the Examiner noted.  In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack.  In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized several examples of this deceitful tactic: [T]he FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro. From the agency’s earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the public. In his book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner documented how much influence the agency’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies: Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo. Weiner noted, “It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information.” During his time at the agency, Dulles “built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.” In 1977, Carl Bernstein further exposed the CIA’s efforts to influence news organization in an article for Rolling Stone in which he revealed that “more than 400 American journalists…in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” Amid the media and political establishment’s ongoing, frenzied coverage of Russiagate, Americans are eager to pin guilt on the president have shown a willingness to trust the CIA and FBI without question despite numerous past and present reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions. Considering the CIA’s long history of intervening in other countries’ elections and governments, it is particularly ironic that their claims of Russia’s meddling in the US’ democracy are taken at face value. Nor is the corruption and deceit limited to the FBI and CIA. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to lawmakers and the public in 2013 when he claimed NSA did not collect any type of data on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” He was caught red-handed months later when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s mass surveillance operations. The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power—and make no mistake, that includes President Trump. But in light of these federal agencies’ chronic tendency to engage in behavior wholly inconsistent with American values, the same distrust must be applied to the institutions that claim to shed light on abuses by unpopular leaders. Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times.  Carey Wedler is a video blogger and Senior Editor for Anti-Media. This article was sourced from FEE.org


activistpost--2019-05-07--Ugandan Regulators Order 13 Media Outlets to Suspend Staff Over Coverage of Opposition Figure

The Ugandan Communications Commission (UCC) has directed 13 media houses to suspend 39 employees including producers, heads of news and heads of programming.  The media outlets affected by the directive include six TV stations and seven radio stations.  This directive comes following the arrest of parliamentarian and pop music icon Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, on April 29. Public protests mounted after the MP was arrested as he made his way to a police station to record a statement about utterances he made during a press conference following a canceled concert by authorities.  Later that day, Wine was remanded to Luzira prison after appearing before a court. He was accused of “holding a public meeting” — a reference to the social media tax protests — without approval from the inspector general of police as per the Public Order Management Act (POMA). Wine has since been granted bail.  The court proceedings of April 29 were live streamed on a few television stations while breaking news segments about Wine and the protests around his arrest dominated other outlets.  The UCC says the reporting of these outlets was sensational and gave Wine, a persistent critic of the ruling government, undue prominence. The UCC directive reads:  This [directive to suspend staff] follows concerns over the nature of content aired on these broadcast stations particularly during live programmes, breaking news, and main news bulletins which do not comply with the Minimum broadcasting standards. The Commission observes that these programmes contain content that: Misrepresents information, views, facts and events in a manner likely to mislead or cause alarm to the public. Has extremist or anarchic messages, including incitement of violence for political and/or other purposes. Incites the public against other members of the public based on their political, religious, cultural and tribal affiliations which are likely to create public insecurity or violence. Further, the said programmes are presented in a manner that is unbalanced, sensational and often give undue prominence to specific individuals and/or groups of people, which is a breach of the Minimum broadcasting standards as enshrined in section 31, schedule 4 of the Uganda Communications Act, 2013.  The UCC further threatened to take action against the media houses that fail to comply with this directive, even vowing to cancel their license or temporarily switch their programmes off air.  The UCC and armed forces have on several occasions in the past raided and temporarily closed media outlets for reasons relating to a breach of minimum broadcasting standards. Many journalists, associations and organizations across the country came out to condemn the directive that was issued just a few days prior to World Press Freedom Day.  Journalists reporting from the Ugandan parliament under the umbrella Uganda Parliamentary Press Association issued a statement highlighting the role of the media in a society where the freedom to protest has been curtailed. Their chairperson further noted that live broadcasts and breaking news are a way to keep the public informed, not to incite violence or unlawful acts:  The president of the Uganda Journalists Association, Kazibwe Bashir, called for unity among journalists and other media practitioners, urging them to stand united and speak out about such injustices.  The African Center for Media Excellence purported that the UCC does not wish the media to report on the abuse of power by armed forces:  During a parliamentary sitting, several opposition MPs also asked parliament to intervene in the matter and block the directive while MPs from the ruling party told those affected to seek legal support from courts of law:  On Twitter, NTV Uganda journalist Sheila Nduhukire asked UCC Executive Director Godfrey Mutabazi whether it was actually the Commission’s role to direct media houses to suspend their employees for simply performing their roles:  Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam and wife to Ugandan opposition leader and four-time presidential candidate Kizza Besigye, opined that Uganda has reached a point where human rights are no longer respected:


eveningstandard--2019-01-16--Jamelia sparks aposageismapos row as she says old people should be BANNED from voting

Jamelia sparks 'ageism' row as she says old people should be BANNED from voting

Jamelia has sparked anger online after suggesting that people over the age of 75 shouldn’t be granted a vote.  Appearing on the Jeremy Vine show, the singer said that old people shouldn’t be allowed to take part in elections as they won’t live to see the consequences of their decision.  She shared her belief that the elderly should not have taken part in the EU referendum in 2016, and went on to suggest that they shouldn’t participate in a potential second Brexit vote either.  Speaking to a pensioner named Pat, the panellist laid out her argument.  After asking the caller not to “become offended by what’s being said,” she explained: “I think that you’re completely capable of being of sound mind [at the age of 75], I think that you are capable of making a vote.  “I just don’t think it’s fair that you have a vote when you’re not going to experience the consequences of that vote.  “And you’ve had 50 to 60 years of voting.”  The singer’s comments prompted intense debate online, with some commentators accusing her of "ageism," branding her views “unbelievable” and even “revolting.”  “Wow! How dare she!” one Twitter user wrote. “Who does she think she is! Maybe she should also say then that 18yr olds shouldn’t be allowed to vote as they have no life experience! She needs to keep her mouth shut if she hasn’t got anything sensible to say.”  “I think a 75 year old pensioner is more relevant than Jamelia nowadays,” one commentator weighed in.  Another described Jamelia’s views as “heartbreaking,” saying: “As a 60 year old woman, Jamelia’s views make my heart hurt. I’ve lived through the worst years of sexism especially in the workplace.”  “To now find myself in a world where my views are marginalised because of my age is heartbreaking.”  “What about respect for our elders and their hard-earned wisdom? Unbelievable,” another Twitter user added.  The Jeremy Vine Show airs on Channel 5 at 9.15am on weekdays