YESTERDAY'S O'HARE PIC - NOT WHAT IT SEEMS

"UFOs" As Contemporary Art

Not *exactly* a hoax....but, our good friend "Mr. UFO" has informed us that the photo on yesterday's blog cane be seen in a totally different light (pun intended) if you look on the original page - http://www.ufoart.net/ - the artist has this to say: "

A NOTE FROM THE ARTIST "Whether you are a believer or a skeptic you must agree that UFOs have become a major part of our planets cultural vibration. These photo real works are a result of my dreams and hopes that friendly extraterrestrials will soon contact us and bless Earth with their advanced knowledge and peaceful social sensibilities. When these lucid artworks are framed and hung on your favorite wall or workspace you may feel the same positive resonance I felt when creating them." - Chuck Cirino

As our friend of many years and various investigations puts it, "Go to the site where it originates www.weirdamerica.com and you will see its an obvious fake -- its a ship from earth vs the flying saucers." mrufo@webtv.net "The Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" was a classic Ray Harryhausen 1950s sfx film - one of the best, but definitely fiction. "Mars Attacks" uses a great deal from this source in spoofing sci-fi genre films.

ALLEGED UFO FROM O'HARE AIRPORT

I have not yet evaluated this, but see Off On A Tangent for the story.

FIRST STARS

From NASA's images of the day, we thought you'd like to look back in time directly to nearly the time, 15 billion years ago, that the universe you are currently living in came into being. Courtesy of NASA and the Hubble Telescope direct from outer space, here are what was left of the earliest stars when their light began slowly moving towards the Hubble, to NASA, to Google, to me, to Blogger, to your screen.

White dwarf stars in the Milky Way Galaxy

Pushing the limits of its powerful vision, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovered the oldest burned-out stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. These extremely old, dim "clockwork stars" provide a completely independent reading on the age of the universe.

The ancient white dwarf stars, as seen by Hubble, are 12-13 billion years old. Because earlier Hubble observations show that the first stars formed less than 1 billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang, finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm's reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe.

Though previous Hubble research sets the age of the universe at 13-14 billion years based on the rate of expansion of space, the universe's birthday is such a fundamental and profound value that astronomers have long sought other age-dating techniques to cross-check their conclusions.

Globular clusters are the first pioneer settlers of the Milky Way. Many coalesced to build the hub of our galaxy and formed billions of years before the appearance of the Milky Way's magnificent pinwheel disk. Today 150 globular clusters survive in the galactic halo. The globular cluster M4 was selected because it is the nearest to Earth, so the intrinsically feeblest white dwarfs are still apparently bright enough to be picked out by Hubble.

Image credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)