Sinister Security

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Underground Labrynth in Hawara Reveals Keys to Ancient Egypt Secrets

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There is very indisputable confirmation of an immense underground megalithic structure beneath the necropolis of Hawara in Egypt. These endorsements depend on information gave by a few radar clears in the zone did by the Mataha Expedition, in a joint effort with the University of Ghent, Belgium, and other authority associations.

The purported Labyrinth of Egypt has been referred to by numerous authors and writers of days of yore and is accepted to be a landmark of monster measurements and presumably the key that would demonstrate the presence of human progress that went before other old societies of which there are remnants in the region.

Of the considerable number of creators who said this maze, it is important Herodoto, who guaranteed to have witnesses for himself this underground structure and whose depiction is essentially stunning. Here we abandon you with this fascinating passage separated from Fragments of Histories, book II, of Herodoto:

I have seen a huge work. If somebody set up together the developments of the Greeks and demonstrate all their cooperate, it would appear to be less in exertion and cost contrasted with this maze. Indeed, even the pyramids are enormously outperformed by this incredible work.

And in spite of the fact that I talk about the lower chambers due to what I have gotten notification from others, I have seen the prevalent ones, and they all outperform the human undertaking.

The Mysterious Underground Labyrinth of Hawara

Herodotus was alluding to a two-story maze. One that has high tops of stone and another underground. There have even been endeavors to speak to the labyrinth as it existed in the season of Herodotus. Among them are the outlines of the Italian paleontologist Canina and a visual remaking made by Athanasius Kircher, an Egyptologist, and German researcher, creator of intriguing works. These portrayals underscore the two levels of the maze:

maze

Be that as it may, coming back to the present, the endeavor Mahata has demonstrated the consequences of the radar that bring up the underground nearness of a few holes as a lattice under the sands of the Necropolis of Hawara. Here we demonstrate to you concentrate on one of the endeavors comes from reports:

Under the surface of the artificial stone shows up, in spite of the impact to some degree mutilated by the nearness of groundwater, at a profundity of in the vicinity of 8 and 12 meters, a large lattice formed a structure made of a high-quality material as it could be granitic stone.

We talk about the nearness of a monster archeological structure under the region of Petrie, which must be considered as the top of the as yet existing maze.

In any case, why isn't it burrowed? The reality six years have gone since this disclosure. It is mind-boggling to state it however it is exceptionally inquisitive that Dr. Zahi Hawass prohibited individuals from the Mataha campaign from distributing any data about this finding until the point when more data was accessible. In any case, since it never went promote in the examination, the campaign has chosen to distribute these exciting information on its site.

Shockingly, access to the Hawara pyramid is presently overflowed with groundwater and mud, which makes it likely that the maze is too. Also, a diver has been worked in the zone such that the place has been partitioned into two areas.

Today we keep on asking ourselves if this finding is the official verification of a lost human advancement or is another necropolis like Zoser's, albeit more significant. Whatever it will be, it ought to have been explored.

Soon after the disclosure, the Egyptian government through the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities stifled the find and made any specify of it a National Security issue. What conceivable support could there be to conceal this site from the general population unless its discharge so would draw into question acknowledged perspectives of history?

Fate of Secret Satellite a Mystery

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This Is The Biggest Unsolved Paradox Of Mars

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“It’s a paradox, an unresolved paradox of Mars,” says Kevin Zahnle, a NASA scientist. “On the one hand, some people say that it looked warmish and wettish, at least occasionally. On another hand, nobody can figure out how it could have been warmish and wettish.”

Since its epic touch down in 2012, NASA's rover Curiosity has discovered that Mars' 96-mile-wide Gale Crater harbored a series of lakes around 3.5 billion years ago, revealing environments that would have been potentially habitable for Earth-like life.

Because of its history, 96-mile wide Gale Crater crater with its strangely sculpted Mount Sharp --three times higher than the Grand Canyon is deep--was the ideal place for Curiosity to conduct its mission of exploration into the Red Planet's past. NASAS researchers used Curiosity to study layers in the mountain that hold evidence about wet environments of early Mars.

“This may be one of the thickest exposed sections of layered sedimentary rocks in the solar system,” said Joy Crisp, MSL Deputy Project Scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The rock record preserved in those layers holds stories that are billions of years old -- stories about whether, when, and for how long Mars might have been habitable.”

Today the Red Planet is a radiation-drenched, bitterly cold, bleak world. Enormous dust storms explode across the barren landscape and darken Martian skies for months at a time. Recent data suggests that Mars once hosted vast lakes and flowing rivers.

“Gale Crater and its mountain tell this intriguing story,” said Matthew Golombek, Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist from JPL. "The layers there chronicle Mars' environmental history.

The presence of water on ancient Mars is a paradox. There’s plenty of geographical evidence that rivers periodically flowed across the planet’s surface. Yet in the time period when these waters are supposed to have run — three to four billion years ago — Mars should have been too cold to support liquid water. So how did it stay so warm?

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) suggest that early Mars may have been warmed intermittently by a powerful greenhouse effect. In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers found that interactions between methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen in the early Martian atmosphere may have created warm periods when the planet could support liquid water on the surface.

“Early Mars is unique in the sense that it’s the one planetary environment, outside Earth, where we can say with confidence that there were at least episodic periods where life could have flourished,” said Robin Wordsworth, assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at SEAS, and first author of the paper. “If we understand how early Mars operated, it could tell us something about the potential for finding life on other planets outside the solar system.”

Four billion years ago, the Sun was about 30 percent fainter than today and significantly less solar radiation — a.k.a. heat — reached the Martian surface. The scant radiation that did reach the planet was trapped by the atmosphere, resulting in warm, wet periods. For decades, researchers have struggled to model exactly how the planet was insulated.

The obvious culprit is CO2. Carbon dioxide makes up 95 percent of today’s Martian atmosphere and is the most well-known and abundant greenhouse gas on Earth. But CO2 alone does not account for Mars’ early temperatures.

“You can do climate calculations where you add CO2 and build up to hundreds of times the present day atmospheric pressure on Mars and you still never get to temperatures that are even close to the melting point,” said Wordsworth.

There must have been something else in Mars’ atmosphere that contributed to a greenhouse effect. The atmospheres of rocky planets lose lighter gases, such as hydrogen, to space over time. (In fact, the oxidation that gives Mars its distinctive hue is a direct result of the loss of hydrogen). Wordsworth and his collaborators looked to these long-lost gases — known as reducing gases — to provide a possible explanation for Mars’ early climate. In particular, the team looked at methane, which today is not abundant in the Martian atmosphere.

Billions of years ago, however, geological processes could have been releasing significantly more methane into the atmosphere. This methane would have been slowly converted to hydrogen and other gases, in a process similar to that occurring today on Saturn's moon, Titan. To understand how this early Martian atmosphere may have behaved, the team needed to understand the fundamental properties of these molecules.

“When you’re looking at exotic atmospheres, you can’t compare them to Earth’s atmosphere,” said Wordsworth. “You have to start from first principles. So we looked at what happens when methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide collide and how they interact with photons. We found that this combination results in very strong absorption of radiation.”

Carl Sagan first speculated that hydrogen warming could have been important on early Mars back in 1977, but this is the first time scientists have been able to calculate its greenhouse effect accurately. It is also the first time that methane has been shown to be an effective greenhouse gas on early Mars.

“This research shows that the warming effects of both methane and hydrogen have been underestimated by a significant amount,” said Wordsworth. “We discovered that methane and hydrogen, and their interaction with carbon dioxide, were much better at warming early Mars than had previously been believed.”

The researchers hope that future missions to Mars will shed light on the geological processes that produced methane billions of years ago.

“One of the reasons early Mars is so fascinating is that life needs complex chemistry to emerge,” said Wordsworth. “These episodes of reducing gas emission followed by planetary oxidation could have created favorable conditions for life on Mars.”

Mars' wettest period was likely the first billion years of its 4.6 billion-year life, the Noachian period, when it had a thicker atmosphere that would have been better able to keep liquid water stable on the planet's surface.

“Although the climate was relatively cold compared to Earth, there is evidence that liquid water flowed in streams and rivers, formed alluvial fans and deltas, and ponded in big lakes and possibly seas,” Alberto Fairen of the Centro de Astrobiologia in Spain and Cornell University.

The Noachian Epoch was followed by the 600 million-year Hesperian period, when Mars morphed from a cold, wet world to a cold, icy one, as the protective atmosphere thinned and the planet's interior cooled. The next 3 billion years until now are known as the Amazonian period, during which Mars became the harsh, cold, dry planet we see today.

“Previous hypotheses have struggled to explain lake-forming climates that are both rare and long-lasting,” Fairen wrote. "For example, volcanism and impacts can produce episodes of climate warming, but not of sufficiently long duration."

This evidence of liquid water suggests that Mars might have experienced periodic warm spells during an otherwise icy period — but so far, no one has been able to figure out exactly how. Now, Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist the University of Chicago, and his colleagues say that after running climate models they've come up with an explanation for the intermitent wet epochs of the Red Planet --"global warming produced by massive quantities of methane in the atmosphere."

Earlier in 2017, research led by Robin Wordsworth at Harvard University revealed that methane — when mixed with carbon dioxide — could have been a much stronger greenhouse gas on Mars than previously thought, strengthening the theory Kite and planetary scientist Peter Gao were building for methane’s role in warming up the Red Planet.

For this methane to be released into the atmosphere, the ice had to thaw. That could have happened when Mars wobbled on its axis, according to Kite’s models — tilting so that the Sun hit more of the planet’s surface. triggering enough warming to thaw some of the ice beneath the surface, releasing the methane trapped inside — kicking off a bout of global warming that could last hundreds of thousands of years, ending when the Sun’s light disintegrated the methane molecules.

Shag Harbour UFO Incident – 50 Years On

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Mystery of a Star That Vanished After 14 Days

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Mysterious Cloud Engulfs East Sussex, Sends Scores To The Hospital

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Has The Baffling Mystery Of The ALIEN MEGASTRUCTURE Star Finally Been Solved?

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The “alien megastructure” star that has been puzzling us for the past few years might have a more ordinary explanation: an orbiting Saturn-like planet, complete with wobbling rings. In 2015, a group led by Tabetha Boyajian, then of Yale University, found that a star called KIC 8462852 had dimmed several times over a few years in a way they couldn’t explain.

The star had been observed by the Kepler space telescope between 2009 and 2013 as it hunted for exoplanets by staring at a patch of sky. When a planet passes in front of a star, an event called a transit, the light intensity dips slightly and then returns to normal.

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But KIC 8462852, since dubbed Tabby’s star, didn’t behave that way, with the amount of dimming varying wildly. Speculation abounded, with explanations ranging from exoplanetary comets to a vast orbiting “megastructure” built by an advanced alien civilisation.

Now Mario Sucerquia and his colleagues at the University of Antioquia in Colombia have proposed another possibility: a ringed planet, similar to Saturn, orbiting close to the star. Such a planet would dim the star’s light in an irregular way during a transit. First, the rings would block some of the star’s light, followed by the planet, which would dim it further. Then, after the planet passes, the rings would block some light again.

New angle

But because the rings would be at a different angle each time, the small dips at the beginning and end of the transits would be larger or smaller. Without seeing many transits, there would be no obvious pattern to this.

To test this idea and measure the irregularity, Sucerquia and his colleagues simulated a light curve from a ringed planet about one-tenth the Earth-sun distance from its star. They found another effect: the star would tug on the rings, making them wobble. This would make the silhouette of the rings as seen by an earthbound observer even more irregular from transit to transit.

A ringed planet has been floated to explain Tabby’s star before, but that would have required a world many times the mass of Jupiter, enough to make it a small star. This new-found wobble means the planet could be the mass of Neptune.

Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is not convinced the explanation works, as even wobbly rings would create a regular dimming pattern in the star’s light.

“To my knowledge, there has not yet been a claim of quasiperiodic or periodic dimming in Tabby’s star, as one would expect with something linked to material orbiting that star,” he says.

Sucerquia says there are other explanations for the weird light curve as well – it might even be a moon breaking up. To further solidify his findings, he is comparing new simulations with the data from Tabby’s star and others.

“The point of this work is to show the community that there are mechanisms that can alter the light curves,” Sucerquia says. “These changes can be generated by the dynamics of the moons or the rings, and the changes in these systems can occur in such short scales as to be detected in just a few years.”

Journal reference: arXiv, 1708.04600

The 7 Biggest Unanswered Questions in Physics

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If Isaac Newton suddenly popped out of a time machine, he’d be delighted to see how far physics had come. Things that were deeply mysterious a few centuries ago are now taught in freshman physics classes (the composition of stars is one good example).

Newton would be stunned to see enormous experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — and possibly perturbed to learn that his theory of gravity had been superseded by one dreamed up by some fellow named Einstein. Quantum mechanics would probably strike him as bizarre, though today’s scientists feel the same way.

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But once he was up to speed, Newton would no doubt applaud what modern physics has achieved — from the discovery of the nature of light in the 19th Century to determining the structure of the atom in the 20th Century to last year’s discovery of gravitational waves. And yet physicists today are the first to admit they don’t have all the answers. “There are basic facts about the universe that we’re ignorant of,” says Dr. Daniel Whiteson, a University of California physicist and the co-author of the new book "We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe."

What follows is a brief tour through seven of the biggest unsolved problems in physics. (If you’re wondering why head-scratchers like dark matter and dark energy aren’t on the list, it’s because they were in our earlier story on the Five Biggest Questions about the Universe.)

1. What Is Matter Made Of?

We know matter is made up atoms, and atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And we know that protons and neutrons are made up of smaller particles known as quarks. Would probing deeper uncover particles even more fundamental? We don't know for sure.

We do have something called the Standard Model of particle physics, which is very good at explaining the interactions between subatomic particles. The Standard Model has also been used to predict the existence of previously unknown particles. The last particle to be found this way was the Higgs boson, which LHC researchers discovered in 2012.

But there’s a hitch.

“The Standard Model doesn’t explain everything,” says Dr. Don Lincoln, a particle physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. “It doesn’t explain why the Higgs boson exists. It doesn’t explain in detail why the Higgs boson has the mass that it does.” In fact, the Higgs turned out to be a heck of a lot less massive than predicted — theory had held that it would be about “a quadrillion times heavier than it is,” says Lincoln.

The mysteries don’t end there. Atoms are known to be electrically neutral — the positive charge of the protons is cancelled out by the negative charge of the electrons — but as to why this is so, Lincoln says, “Nobody knows.”

2. Why Is Gravity So Weird?

No force is more familiar than gravity — it’s what keeps our feet on the ground, after all. And Einstein’s theory of general relativity gives a mathematical formulation for gravity, describing it as a “warping” of space. But gravity is a trillion trillion trillion times weaker than the other three known forces (electromagnetism and the two kinds of nuclear forces that operate over tiny distances).

One possibility — speculative at this point — is that in addition to the three dimensions of space that we notice every day, there are hidden extra dimensions, perhaps “curled up” in a way that makes them impossible to detect. If these extra dimensions exist — and if gravity is able to “leak” into them — it could explain why gravity seems so weak to us.

“It could be that gravity is as strong as these other forces but that it gets rapidly diluted by spilling out into these other invisible dimensions,” says Whiteson. Some physicists hoped that experiments at the LHC would give a hint of these extra dimensions — but so far, no luck.

3. Why Does Time Seem To Flow Only In One Direction?

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Since Einstein, physicists have thought of space and time as forming a four-dimensional structure known as “spacetime.” But space differs from time in some very fundamental ways. In space, we’re free to move about as we wish. When it comes to time, we’re stuck. We grow older, not younger. And we remember the past, but not the future. Time, unlike space, seems to have a preferred direction — physicists call it the “arrow of time.”

Some physicists suspect that the second law of thermodynamics provides a clue. It states that the entropy of a physical system (roughly, the amount of disorder) rises over time, and physicists think this increase is what gives time its direction. (For example, a broken teacup has more entropy than an intact one — and, sure enough, smashed teacups always seem to arise after intact ones, not before.)

Entropy may be rising now because it was lower earlier, but why was it low to begin with? Was the entropy of the universe unusually low 14 billion years ago, when the Big Bang brought it into existence?

For some physicists, including Caltech’s Sean Carroll, that’s the missing piece of the puzzle. “If you can tell me why the early universe had a low entropy, then I can explain the rest of it,” he says. In Whiteson’s view, entropy isn't the whole story. “To me,” he says, “the deepest part of the question is, why is time so different from space?” (Recent computer simulations seem to show how the asymmetry of time might arise from the fundamental laws of physics, but the work is controversial, and the ultimate nature of time continues to stir passionate debate.)

4. Where Did All The Antimatter Go?

Antimatter may be more famous in fiction than in real life. On the original Star Trek, antimatter reacts with ordinary matter to power the warp drive that propels the U.S.S. Enterprise at faster-than-light velocities. While warp drive is pure fiction, antimatter is very real. We know that for each particle of ordinary matter, it's possible to have an identical particle with the opposite electrical charge. An antiproton is just like a proton, for example, but with a negative charge. The antiparticle corresponding to the negatively charged electron, meanwhile, is the positively charged positron.

Physicists have created antimatter in the laboratory. But when they do, they create an equal amount of matter. That suggests that the Big Bang must have created matter and antimatter in equal quantities. Yet almost everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of ordinary matter.

What’s going on? Why is there more matter than antimatter? Our best guess is that the Big Bang somehow produced a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. “What had to have happened early in the history of the universe — in the very moments after the Big Bang — is that for every 10 billion antimatter particles there were 10 billion and one matter particles,” says Lincoln. “And the matter and the antimatter annihilated the 10 billion, leaving the one. And that little ‘one’ is the mass that makes up us.”

But why the slight excess of matter over antimatter in the first place? “We really don’t understand that,” Lincoln says. “It’s bizarre.” Had the initial amounts of matter and antimatter been equal, they’d have annihilated each other completely in a burst of energy. In which case, says Lincoln, “we wouldn’t exist.”

Some answers may come when the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) starts collecting data in 2026. DUNE will analyze a beam of neutrinos — tiny, chargeless and nearly massless particles — fired from Fermilab to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, some 800 miles away. The beam will include neutrinos and antineutrinos, with the aim of seeing if they behave in the same manner — thus potentially providing a clue to nature’s matter-antimatter asymmetry.

5. What Happens In The Gray Zone Between Solid And Liquid?

Solids and liquids are well understood. But some materials act like both a liquid and a solid, making their behavior hard to predict. Sand is one example. A grain of sand is as solid as a rock, but a million grains can flow through a funnel almost like water. And highway traffic can behave in a similar way, flowing freely until it becomes blocked at some bottleneck.

So a better understanding of this “gray zone” might have important practical applications.

“People have been asking, under what conditions does the entire system jam up or clog?” says Dr. Kerstin Nordstrom, a physicist at Mount Holyoke College. “What are the crucial parameters to avoid clogging?” Weirdly, an obstruction in the flow of traffic can, under certain conditions, actually reduce traffic jams. “It’s very counterintuitive,” she says.

6. Can We Find A Unified Theory Of Physics?

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We now have two overarching theories to explain just about every physical phenomenon: Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity) and quantum mechanics. The former is good at explaining the motion of everything from golf balls to galaxies. Quantum mechanics is equally impressive in its own domain — the realm of atoms and subatomic particles.

Trouble is, the two theories describe our world in very different terms. In quantum mechanics, events unfold against a fixed backdrop of spacetime — while in general relativity, spacetime itself is flexible. What would a quantum theory of curved space-time look like? We don’t know, says Carroll. “We don’t even know what it is we’re trying to quantize.”

That hasn’t stopped people from trying. For decades now, string theory — which pictures matter as made up of tiny vibrating strings or loops of energy — has been touted as the best bet for producing a unified theory of physics. But some physicists prefer loop quantum gravity, in which space itself is imagined to be made of tiny loops.

Each approach has enjoyed some success — techniques developed by string theorists, in particular, are proving useful for tackling certain difficult physics problems. But neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity has been tested experimentally. For now, the long-sought “theory of everything” continues to elude us.

7. How Did Life Evolve From Nonliving Matter?

For its first half-billion years, Earth was lifeless. Then life took hold, and it has thrived ever since. But how did life arise? Before biological evolution began, scientists believe there was chemical evolution, with simple inorganic molecules reacting to form complex organic molecules, most likely in the oceans. But what kick-started this process in the first place?

MIT physicist Dr. Jeremy England recently put forward a theory that attempts to explain the origin of life in terms of fundamental principles of physics. In this view, life is the inevitable result of rising entropy. If the theory is correct, the arrival of life “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill,” England told Quanta magazine in 2014.

The idea is highly speculative. Recent computer simulations, however, may be lending support to it. The simulations show that ordinary chemical reactions (of the sort that would have been common on the newly formed Earth) can lead to the creation of highly structured compounds — seemingly a crucial stepping-stone on the path to living organisms.

What makes life so hard for physicists to study? Anything that’s alive is “far from equilibrium,” as a physicist would put it. In a system in equilibrium, one component is pretty much like every other, with no flow of energy in or out. (A rock would be an example; a box full of gas is another.) Life is just the opposite. A plant, for example, absorbs sunlight and uses its energy to make complex sugar molecules while radiating heat back into the environment.

Understanding these complex systems “is the great unsolved problem in physics,” says Stephen Morris, a University of Toronto physicist. “How do we deal with these far-from-equilibrium systems which self-organize into amazing, complex things — like life”

Finally! The "Mystery" Of The Bermuda Triangle Has Been Solved

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Let’s get this out of the way right at the start: The Bermuda Triangle is bullshit. Planes and boats do not go missing in the space between Puerto Rico, Florida and Bermuda any more than they do in any other part of the world – there’s no statistical significance to the region at all. Even though there are plenty of natural mechanisms which could sink boats over the oceans, almost none of them exist in the Triangle.

Despite that, the Triangle has made it into the news again. Although we were initially braced for another round of nonsense explanations behind the myth, fortunately, for the first time in ages, the reports are actually pointing out that the phenomenon simply doesn’t exist.

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During an on-air interview with news.com.au, one Karl Kruszelnicki – a well-known science communicator out of Australia – notes that the number of vessels and aircraft that disappear in the area “is the same as anywhere else in the world on a percentage basis.”

“It is close to the equator, near a wealthy part of the world, America, therefore you have a lot of traffic.”

According to Kruszelnicki, the myth behind the Bermuda Triangle began when several high-profile military convoys – and their subsequent rescue missions – went down in the region between the First and Second World Wars. In reality, terrible weather and less rigid boats and aircraft ensure plenty of disappearances.

Some of the pilots that went missing back in the day were also prone to making catastrophic mistakes, including frequently getting lost, drinking heavily before flying, and even leaving without the appropriate aviation equipment on board.

Bodies and wreckage were never found in most cases, but this isn’t surprising considering that it’s a massive body of water that’s incredibly deep. Even today, the wreckage of planes and boats are rarely located despite massive advances in reconnaissance and tracking technology.

Nevertheless, this combination of missing crew and highly publicized disappearances ensured a legend was born. Despite the fact that it’s long been known that there’s nothing mystical or otherworldly about the Triangle, plenty of hypotheses have sprung up attempting to “explain” these vanishings – and they’ve ranged from the science-flavored to the totally outlandish.

Most recently, people have been suggesting that methane bubbles rising up from frozen caches beneath the sea have been swallowing up boats. Although this is somewhat scientifically plausible, there’s a problem with this: there are no methane reserves beneath the Triangle.

In summary, no reputable scientific organization considers the Bermuda Triangle to be a bona fide thing. So it’s rather nice that, for once, everyone else seems to think so too.

Strange Signals Coming From a Star, 11 Light Years Away

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There's a Massive, Glowing Blob in The Universe, And a Mystery Source Is Lighting It Up

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Astronomers have discovered a vast, glowing blob of gas in the distant Universe, and they can't figure out what's actually lighting it up. This glowing nebula is located at the centre of an enormous 'protocluster' of early galaxies some 10 billion light-years from Earth, and is the brightest cosmic object of its kind ever found. And yet, there's no obvious source of its power.

The object, called an 'enormous Lyman-alpha nebula' (ELAN), is not only the brightest object of its kind found in the Universe - it's also one of the biggest, rivalling even the 'Slug Nebula', which stretches 2 million light-years through intergalactic space.

"It's extremely bright, and it's probably larger than the Slug Nebula, but there's nothing else visible except the faint smudge of a galaxy. So it's a terrifically energetic phenomenon without an obvious power source." says one of team, J. Xavier Prochaska, from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Only a handful of ELANs have been discovered so far, and these accumulations of gas are thought to be part of a network of filaments that connect neighbouring galaxies to each other in the vast cosmic web of the Universe. While other ELANs appear to be powered by the intense radiation given off by quasars, star formation, or supernovae, no such events could be found near this latest example, dubbed the MAMMOTH-1 nebula.

What we do know is the light has the same wavelength that's absorbed and emitted by hydrogen atoms as they cool down - a discharge known as Lyman-alpha radiation - but it's not clear what's been heating them up. Scientists have suggested that supermassive black holesswallowing matter in galaxies within the central region of the blob could be responsible.

The MAMMOTH-1 nebula was found by a survey called Mapping the Most Massive Overdensities Through Hydrogen (MAMMOTH), which was also responsible for finding the Slug Nebula back in 2014. The protocluster it's found in is massive, hosting an unusually high concentration of galaxies in an area of about 50 million light-years across - all bound together by gravity. While the galaxies are now mature, our telescopes are only just seeing them as they would have looked a mere 3 billion years after the Big Bang - the peak of galaxy formation in our Universe.

Several hypotheses have been put forward for how the MAMMOTH-1 nebula at the heart of this great protocluster got so bright, but the most likely ones revolve around radiation or discharges coming from something called an active galactic nucleus (AGN).

AGNs are compact regions at the centre of galaxies that have a much higher than normal luminosity. The team explainsthat AGNs are powered by a supermassive black hole actively feeding on gas in the centre of a galaxy, and are known for being extremely bright sources of light. The intense radiation emitted by AGNs ionise the hydrogen gas in the space around it, and this could prompt the ELANs to emit super-bright Lyman-alpha radiation.

Quasars - the brightest objects in the Universe - are known for being the most luminous AGNs in visible light, except the MAMMOTH-1 nebula is not associated with a quasar, as far as the researchers can tell. But that doesn't mean there isn't one lurking in the background.

"It has all the hallmarks of an AGN, but we don't see anything in our optical images. I expect there's a quasar that is so obscured by dust that most of its light is hidden," Prochaska says.

The team has its work cut out for it in trying to spot a single quasar some 10 billion light-years from Earth, and until then, the brightest known ELAN will remain a cosmic mystery.

The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, and you can read it in full at the pre-print website, arXiv.org.

8 Science Mysteries Begging To Be Unraveled

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