Newly discovered planet may be first truly habitable exoplanet

A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.

To astronomers, a "potentially habitable" planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one that humans would consider a nice place to live. Habitability depends on many factors, but liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important.

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

The findings are based on 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "Advanced techniques combined with old-fashioned ground-based telescopes continue to lead the exoplanet revolution," said Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution. "Our ability to find potentially habitable worlds is now limited only by our telescope time."

Vogt and Butler lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. The team's new findings are reported in a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org. Coauthors include associate research scientist Eugenio Rivera of UC Santa Cruz; associate astronomer Nader Haghighipour of the University of Hawaii-Manoa; and research scientists Gregory Henry and Michael Williamson of Tennessee State University.

The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.

The most interesting of the two new planets is Gliese 581g, with a mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.

Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has a somewhat checkered history of habitable-planet claims. Two previously detected planets in the system lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.

"We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone--one too hot and one too cold--and now we have one in the middle that's just right," Vogt said.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the "terminator"), with surface temperatures decreasing toward the dark side and increasing toward the light side.

"Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt said.

The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the planet is between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius). Actual temperatures would range from blazing hot on the side facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side.

If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. The surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth's, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, Vogt said.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of Gliese 581 using the HIRES spectrometer (designed by Vogt) on the Keck I Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The spectrometer allows precise measurements of a star's radial velocity (its motion along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets induce complex wobbles in the star's motion, and astronomers use sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits and masses.

"It's really hard to detect a planet like this," Vogt said. "Every time we measure the radial velocity, that's an evening on the telescope, and it took more than 200 observations with a precision of about 1.6 meters per second to detect this planet."

To get that many radial velocity measurements (238 in total), Vogt's team combined their HIRES observations with published data from another group led by the Geneva Observatory (HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Search project).

In addition to the radial velocity observations, coauthors Henry and Williamson made precise night-to-night brightness measurements of the star with one of Tennessee State University's robotic telescopes. "Our brightness measurements verify that the radial velocity variations are caused by the new orbiting planet and not by any process within the star itself," Henry said.

The researchers also explored the implications of this discovery with respect to the number of stars that are likely to have at least one potentially habitable planet. Given the relatively small number of stars that have been carefully monitored by planet hunters, this discovery has come surprisingly soon.

"If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby," Vogt said. "The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy."

Source: http://news.ucsc.edu/2010/09/planet.html

UFOs and Nuclear Sites: National Press Club - September 27, 2010

Extraterrestrial UFO Are Real : Ben Rich Lockheed CEO Admitted In His Deathbed Confession

Extraterrestrial UFO Are Real : Ben Rich Lockheed Skunk Works CEO Admitted In His Deathbed Confession

Ben Rich Lockheed Skunk Works CEO had admitted in his Deathbed Confession that Extraterrestrial UFO visitors are real and the U.S. Military travel among stars.

According to article published in May 2010 issue of the Mufon UFO Journal [Link] - Ben Rich, the “Father of the Stealth Fighter-Bomber” and former head of Lockheed Skunk Works,had once let out information about Extraterrestrial UFO Visitors Are Real And U.S. Military Travel To Stars

What he said might be new to many people today, but he revealed the information before his death in January 1995. His statements helped to give credence to reports that the U.S. military has been flying vehicles that mimic alien craft.

The article was written by Tom Keller, an aerospace engineer who has worked as a computer systems analyst for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

1 : “Inside the Skunk Works (Lockheed’s secret research and development entity), we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. Our forte was building technologically advanced airplanes of small number and of high class for highly secret missions.”

2 : “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”

3 : “We now have the technology to take ET home. No, it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars. First, you have to understand that we will not get to the stars using chemical propulsion. Second, we have to devise a new propulsion technology. What we have to do is find out where Einstein went wrong.”

4 : When Rich was asked how UFO propulsion worked, he said, “Let me ask you. How does ESP work?” The questioner responded with, “All points in time and space are connected?” Rich then said, “That’s how it works!”

Ben Rich Lockheed Former CEO knew of extraterrestrial UFO visitors

Lockheed "Skunk Works" former CEO knew the Roswell extraterrestrial UFO influenced designs of Testor model kits for Roswell UFO models, and U.S. top secret aircraft. According to a CNI News report by Colorado resident Michael Lindemann, the design information was derived from forensic illustrations and numerous witness testimonies about the Roswell UFO, provided by William L. “Bill” McDonald.

In an e-mail, dated July 29, 1999, apparently addressed to Lindemann, McDonald referenced an excerpt of a discussion with Harold Puthoff, founder of the highly classified U.S. “remote viewing” program.

McDonald said: “Well Hal, you asked for it! Now that legendary Lockheed engineer and chief model kit designer for the Testor Corporation, John Andrews, is dead, I can announce that he personally confirmed the design connection between the Roswell Spacecraft and the Lockheed Martin Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs), spyplanes, Joint Strike Fighters, and Space Shuttles.

Andrews was a close personal friend of "Skunk Works" CEO Ben Rich -- the hand-picked successor of Skunk Works founder Kelly Johnson and the man famous for the F-117 Nighthawk "Stealth" fighter, its "half-pint" prototype the "HAVE BLUE", and the top-secret F-19 Stealth Interceptor. Before Rich died of cancer, Andrews took my questions to him.

Dr. Ben R. Rich former Lockheed Skunk Works CEO confirmed:

1. There are 2 types of UFOs -- the ones we build and ones 'they' build. We learned from both crash retrievals and actual "hand-me-downs." The Government knew and until 1969 took an active hand in the administration of that information. After a 1969 Nixon "purge", administration was handled by an international board of directors in the private sector…

2. Nearly all "biomorphic" aerospace designs were inspired by the Roswell spacecraft -- from Kelly's SR-71 Blackbird onward to today's drones, UCAVs, and aerospace craft…

3. It was Ben Rich's opinion that the public should not be told [about UFOs and extraterrestrials] . He believed they could not handle the truth -- ever. Only in the last months of his decline did he begin to feel that the "international corporate board of directors" dealing with the "Subject" could represent a bigger problem to citizens' personal freedoms under the United States Constitution than the presence of off-world visitors themselves.”

Lindemann added that “Bill McDonald received the above information from Andrews from 1994 until their last phone call near Christmas in 1998.” Lindemann also noted “It should also be known that Dr. Ben R. Rich attended a public aerospace designers and engineers conference in 1993 before his illness overwhelmed him in which he stated -- in the presence of MUFON Orange County Section Director Jan Harzan and many others that – ‘We’ (i.e., the U.S. aerospace community/military industrial complex) had in it's possession the technology to "take us to the stars".

See the complete letter in May, 2010 MUFON UFO Journal from John Andrews and the hand written reply from Dr. Ben Rich. Hear more revealing testimony from Disclosure Project whistleblowers. NASA can not deny secrets discovered by UK hacker Gary McKinnon and many astronauts if it expects full funding from the Obama White House administration.

Lockheed Skunkworks Engineer USAF, and CIA Contractor Admitted : UFO Are Real

Don Phillips, "These UFOs were huge and they would just come to a stop and do a 60 degree, 45 degree, 10 degree turn, and then immediately reverse this action". During the Apollo landing, Neil Armstrong says, "They're here.They are right over there and looking at the size of those ships., it is obvious they dont like us being here”. When I was working with the Skunkworks with Kelly Johnson, we signed an agreement with the government to keep very quiet about this.

Anti-gravitational research was going on. We know that there were some captured craft from 1947 in Roswell, they were real. And, yes, we really did get some technology from them. And, yes, we really did put it to work. We knew each other from what we call an unseen industry. We can term it black, deep black, or hidden.

The knowledge I have of these technologies came from the craft that were captured here. I didn`t see the craft, nor did I see the bodies, but I certainly know some of the people that did. There was no question that there were beings from outside the planet.

Are these ET people hostile? Well, if they were hostile, with their weaponry they could have destroyed us a long time ago .We got these things that are handhold scanners that scan the body and determine what the condition is. We can also treat from the same scanner.

I can tell you personally that we've been working on them. And we have ones that can diagnose and cure cancer. One of the purposes I had for founding my technology corporation in 1998 was to bring forth these technologies that can clean the air and can help get rid of the toxins, and help reduce the need for so much fossil fuel. Yes, it is time. I can tell you personally that it has already started. pp. 375 ,383.

Disclosure Military and Government

Source: http://www.ufo-blogger.com/2010/08/ufo-are-real-ben-rich-lockheed-skunk.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ufo_blogger+(UFO-Blogger+Uncover+The+UFO+Truth)