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NEWSCIENCENEWSCIENCEN high-powered gamma rays coming from outside Earth’s Milky Way galaxy, said James Gaidos, a professor of physics at Purdue University and a member of the Whipple Observatory Gamma Ray Collaboration team that made the discovery reported in the journal Nature. Although each individual gamma ray carries a great deal of energy, the ener- gy is absorbed before reaching ground level, posing no danger to plant or ani- mal life on Earth. Located in the middle of a galaxy 400 million light years away, the source is about the size of our solar sys- tem, the researchers said, but it pro- duces as much energy in these trillion- electron-volt gamma rays as Earth’s galaxy emits in all kinds of energy, Gaidos said. the Whipple Observatory, the group made their observations of Markarian 421 between March 24 and May 8. In addition to Gaidos and Lamb, other principal investigators affiliated with the Whipple Gamma Ray Collaboration include: Trevor | Weekes, Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics; Carl W. Akerlof, University of Michigan; Michael Cawley and David Fegan, National University of Ireland; and Michael Hillas, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. (Source: MUFONET-BBS GROUP - MUFONET-BBS NETWORK (1:123/265) roiled, giving off strange odours, due possibly to underground gasses released due to considerable below sur- face electro/mechanical activity. When the concentration of charges from underground strata reach a critical state the discharge of hard electrons produces an explosion, the resultant waves of energy causing the earth to shake. The same action takes place in storm clouds, causing a lightning explosion. It could be argued that Rotorua has a higher degree of seismic activity than the Whakatane area. This is ue, but the activity in Rotorua is of a vast dif- ference to the seismic activity taking place in the Whakatane area. Rotorua might be termed a safety valve vent for local and adjacent activity. All volcanoes in the Rotorua region are at present inactive and have been for a considerable time, and egarth- quakes in the area are rare in compari- son to the Whakatane area at the time of writing. However, in the case of the Whakatane area, we have the close proximity of an active volcano in White Island which as been recently showing signs of increased activity, with resul- tant seismic disturbances in the area, ie earthquakes. SCIENTISTS THEORISE THAT MAN MAY HAVE BEEN IN THE AMERICAS 300,000 YEARS AGO This makes the distant gamma ray source, an active galactic nucleus called Markarian 421, the source of the high- est energy gamma rays discovered to date outside our own galaxy, he said. ’’The presumption is that the energy engine powering Markarian 421 is a super-massive black hole, probably more than a million times the mass of our sun,”’ Gaidos said. ”’There is no other known mecha- nism, or even speculative mech- anism, that could SS. produce these EMA kinds of ener- gies.” A black hole is a hypothetical for- mation in space with such strong gravitational pull that nothing can escape it. High energy TIME Mi gamma rays can ———— be generated on Earth only rarely by collisions of = particles produced = in the most pow- | erful _ particle \s accelerator labo- ao ratories, he said. Using a finely OMATH| tuned detector at |__AROMATH CARACAS, VENEZUELA (AUG. 4) IPS - Man may have lived in the Americas as early as 300,000 years ago, and not 40,000 years ago as offi- cial history texts say. Venezuelan anthropologists Mikos Szabadics and German Jimenez base their theory on evidence, gathered from all over Venezuela, pointing to human life in the Americas during the lower Semanrics Zz FLOAT TANK AROMATHERAPY SOLAR POWERED CLOTHES DRYER Sm POWERFUL GAMMA RAYS DETECTED HITTING EARTH’S UPPER ATMOSPHERE WASHINGTON (AUG. 5) UPI Scientists have detected the most pow- erful source of high-energy gamma rays ever detected outside Earth’s galaxy, an international team reported Wednesday. Researchers from six institutions detected the ultra-high-energy gamma rays striking the Earth’s upper atmos- phere with energies of 1 willion elec- tron volts - 1 trillion times the amount of energy contained in a comparable amount of visible light coming from a desk lamp. With energy typically billions of times greater than visible light, gamma Trays are a type of radiation generated by the most violent physical processes. This is the first observation of such NEXUS¢51 OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1992