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Strange plasma-like UFO caught by Oklahoma City resident
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By USH
Some time ago, while visiting the Grand Canyon in Arizona, a photographer captured several short video clips of the landscape. In one of those clips, an unusual anomaly was discovered.
The original footage is only 1.9 seconds long, but within that moment, something remarkable was caught on camera. An unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) flashed across the frame, visible for less than a second, only noticeable when the video was paused and analyzed frame by frame.
The object was moving at an astonishing speed, covering an estimated two to three miles in under a second, far beyond the capabilities of any conventional aircraft, drone, or helicopter.
This isn’t the first time such anomalous flying objects have been observed. Their characteristics defy comparison with known aerial technology.
Some skeptics have proposed that the object might have been a rock thrown into the canyon from behind the camera. However, that explanation seems unlikely. Most people can only throw objects at speeds of 10 to 20 meters per second (approximately 22 to 45 mph). The velocity of this object far exceeded that range, and its near-invisibility in the unedited video suggests it was moving much faster.
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By NASA
Explore Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Webb’s First Images Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read Frigid Exoplanet in Strange Orbit Imaged by NASA’s Webb
This image of exoplanet 14 Herculis c was taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). A star symbol marks the location of the host star 14 Herculis, whose light has been blocked by a coronagraph on NIRCam (shown here as a dark circle outlined in white). Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), D. Bardalez Gagliuffi (Amherst College) A planetary system described as abnormal, chaotic, and strange by researchers has come into clearer view with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Using Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), researchers have successfully imaged one of two known planets surrounding the star 14 Herculis, located 60 light-years away from Earth in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The exoplanet, 14 Herculis c, is one of the coldest imaged to date. While there are nearly 6,000 exoplanets that have been discovered, only a small number of those have been directly imaged, most of those being very hot (think hundreds or even thousands of degrees Fahrenheit). The new data suggests 14 Herculis c, which weighs about 7 times the planet Jupiter, is as cool as 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 degrees Celsius).
Image: 14 Herculis c (NIRCam)
This image of exoplanet 14 Herculis c was taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). A star symbol marks the location of the host star 14 Herculis, whose light has been blocked by a coronagraph on NIRCam (shown here as a dark circle outlined in white). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), D. Bardalez Gagliuffi (Amherst College) The team’s results covering 14 Herculis c have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and were presented in a press conference Tuesday at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.
“The colder an exoplanet, the harder it is to image, so this is a totally new regime of study that Webb has unlocked with its extreme sensitivity in the infrared,” said William Balmer, co-first author of the new paper and graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. “We are now able to add to the catalog of not just hot, young exoplanets imaged, but older exoplanets that are far colder than we’ve directly seen before Webb.”
Webb’s image of 14 Herculis c also provides insights into a planetary system unlike most others studied in detail with Webb and other ground- and space-based `observatories. The central star, 14 Herculis, is almost Sun-like – it is similar in age and temperature to our own Sun, but a little less massive and cooler.
There are two planets in this system – 14 Herculis b is closer to the star, and covered by the coronagraphic mask in the Webb image. These planets don’t orbit each other on the same plane like our solar system. Instead, they cross each other like an ‘X’, with the star being at the center. That is, the orbital planes of the two planets are inclined relative to one another at an angle of about 40 degrees. The planets tug and pull at one another as they orbit the star.
This is the first time an image has ever been snapped of an exoplanet in such a mis-aligned system.
Scientists are working on several theories for just how the planets in this system got so “off track.” One of the leading concepts is that the planets scattered after a third planet was violently ejected from the system early in its formation.
“The early evolution of our own solar system was dominated by the movement and pull of our own gas giants,” added Balmer. “They threw around asteroids and rearranged other planets. Here, we are seeing the aftermath of a more violent planetary crime scene. It reminds us that something similar could have happened to our own solar system, and that the outcomes for small planets like Earth are often dictated by much larger forces.”
Understanding the Planet’s Characteristics With Webb
Webb’s new data is giving researchers further insights into not just the temperature of 14 Herculis c, but other details about the planet’s orbit and atmosphere.
Findings indicate the planet orbits around 1.4 billion miles from the host star in a highly elliptical, or football-shaped orbit, closer in than previous estimates. This is around 15 times farther from the Sun than Earth. On average, this would put 14 Herculis c between Saturn and Uranus in our solar system.
The planet’s brightness at 4.4 microns measured using Webb’s coronagraph, combined with the known mass of the planet and age of the system, hints at some complex atmospheric dynamics at play.
“If a planet of a certain mass formed 4 billion years ago, then cooled over time because it doesn’t have a source of energy keeping it warm, we can predict how hot it should be today,” said Daniella C. Bardalez Gagliuffi of Amherst College, co-first author on the paper with Balmer. “Added information, like the perceived brightness in direct imaging, would in theory support this estimate of the planet’s temperature.”
However, what researchers expect isn’t always reflected in the results. With 14 Herculis c, the brightness at this wavelength is fainter than expected for an object of this mass and age. The research team can explain this discrepancy, though. It’s called carbon disequilibrium chemistry, something often seen in brown dwarfs.
“This exoplanet is so cold, the best comparisons we have that are well-studied are the coldest brown dwarfs,” Bardalez Gagliuffi explained. “In those objects, like with 14 Herculis c, we see carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide existing at temperatures where we should see methane. This is explained by churning in the atmosphere. Molecules made at warmer temperatures in the lower atmosphere are brought to the cold, upper atmosphere very quickly.”
Researchers hope Webb’s image of 14 Herculis c is just the beginning of a new phase of investigation into this strange system.
While the small dot of light obtained by Webb contains a plethora of information, future spectroscopic studies of 14 Herculis could better constrain the atmospheric properties of this interesting planet and help researchers understand the dynamics and formation pathways of the system.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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By NASA
5 Min Read 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data
A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. Some of the gas came from a star that was pulled apart by the black hole, forming the long stream of hot gas on the right, feeding into the disk. Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat gas and dust, and appear to glow brightly over time as matter falls in. But other black holes secretly lie in wait for years until a star comes close enough to snack on.
Scientists have recently identified three supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, each of which suddenly brightened when it destroyed a star and then stayed bright for several months. A new study using space and ground-based data from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and other institutions presents these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called “extreme nuclear transients.”
Looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil some of the most massive supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet.
“These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,” said Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii and lead author of a new study in the journal Science Advances describing this phenomenon.
The black holes in question seem to have eaten stars three to 10 times heavier than our Sun. Feasting on the stars resulted in some of the most energetic transient events ever recorded.
This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole — close enough to be gravitationally disrupted — the stellar material gets stretched and compressed as it falls into the black hole. NASA/JPL-Caltech These events as unleash enormous amount of high-energy radiation on the central regions of their host galaxies. “That has implications for the environments in which these events are occurring,” Hinkle said. “If galaxies have these events, they’re important for the galaxies themselves.”
The stars’ destruction produces high-energy light that takes over 100 days to reach peak brightness, then more than 150 days to dim to half of its peak. The way the high-energy radiation affects the environment results in lower-energy emissions that telescopes can also detect.
One of these star-destroying events, nicknamed “Barbie” because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California, and documented in two 2023 studies. The other two black holes were detected by ESA’s Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018 and are studied in detail in the new paper.
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was critical in confirming that these events must have been related to black holes, not stellar explosions or other phenomena. The way that the X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical light brightened and dimmed over time was like a fingerprint matching that of a black hole ripping a star apart.
Scientists also used data from NASA’s WISE spacecraft, which was operated from 2009 to 2011 and then was reactivated as NEOWISE and retired in 2024. Under the WISE mission the spacecraft mapped the sky at infrared wavelengths, finding many new distant objects and cosmic phenomena. In the new study, the spacecraft’s data helped researchers characterize dust in the environments of each black hole. Numerous ground-based observatories additionally contributed to this discovery, including the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes through their NASA-funded archive and the NASA-supported Near-Earth Object surveys ATLAS, Pan-STARRS, and Catalina.
“What I think is so exciting about this work is that we’re pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,” said Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and study co-author, who helped look for the chemical fingerprints of these events with the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter Telescope.
A Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant from the agency helped enable Hinkle to search for these black hole events. “The FINESST grant gave Jason the freedom to track down and figure out what these events actually were,” said Ben Shappee, associate professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, a study coauthor and advisor to Hinkle.
Hinkle is set to follow up on these results as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. “One of the biggest questions in astronomy is how black holes grow throughout the universe,” Hinkle said.
The results complement recent observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing how supermassive black holes feed and grow in the early universe. But since only 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients — that is, catching a supermassive black hole in the act of eating a massive star — are a different way to find black holes in the early universe.
Events like these are so bright that they may be visible even in the distant, early universe. Swift showed that extreme nuclear transients emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. But as the universe expands, that light is stretched to longer wavelengths and shifts into the infrared — exactly the kind of light NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was designed to detect.
With its powerful infrared sensitivity and wide field of view, Roman will be able to spot these rare explosions from more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just a tenth of its current age. Scheduled to launch by 2027, and potentially as early as fall 2026, Roman could uncover many more of these dramatic events and offer a new way to explore how stars, galaxies, and black holes formed and evolved over time.
“We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,” Payne said.
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By European Space Agency
Thanks largely to Copernicus Sentinel-1, scientists have discovered that a glacier in Antarctica is rapidly siphoning ice from neighbouring flows – at a pace never before seen. Until now, researchers believed that this process of ‘ice piracy’ in Antarctica took hundreds or even thousands of years, but these latest findings clearly demonstrate that this isn’t always the case.
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