Quote:Plasma blobs hint at new form of life (NewScientist, 17 September 2003)

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate – fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Most biologists think living cells arose out of a complex and lengthy evolution of chemicals that took millions of years, beginning with simple molecules through amino acids, primitive proteins and finally forming an organised structure. But if Mircea Sanduloviciu and his colleagues at Cuza University in Romania are right, the theory may have to be completely revised. They say cell-like self-organisation can occur in a few microseconds.

Quote:Mystery plasma blobs lurk in deep space and no one knows why (NewScientist, 7 July 2015)

We’re homing in on the blobs from outer space.

In the past three decades astronomers have seen dips in the radio signals from quasars and pulsars, seemingly caused by a dark object passing by. These events don’t all look the same, so it isn’t clear if they share a cause. Sometimes different radio frequencies are delayed by different amounts, while other times the radio signal twinkles.

Now new observations are giving us a clearer picture. Bill Coles of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues used the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, which carefully measures pulsar signals in an attempt to detect gravitational waves. The team used it to look for radio waves held up by a passing blob.

Quote:The sun is vomiting globs of star stuff 500 times the size of our planet (April 11, 2019)

After 4 days and 93 million miles, this plasmatic ooze reaches the vicinity of Earth. Viall and her colleagues were recently able to observe what these things actually look like when they first leave the sun. Already 50 to 500 times the size of Earth and denser than solar wind, with twice the charged particles, they keep growing like something out of a cosmic monster movie as they travel through space. They can compress our magnetic field and interfere with communications signals as they creep by.

By studying data from solar probes Helios 1 and Helios 2, which were launched by NASA and the German Aerospace Center in the ‘70s and made their closest solar approach at 27 million miles, Viall and her colleagues were able to find data patterns that told them more about the blobs. A pattern that showed bursts of dense, superhot plasma with cooler stretches of time in between revealed that the sun ejects a blob around every 90 minutes.

Quote:U.S. Navy Laser Creates Plasma ‘UFOs’ (May 11, 2020)

The U.S. Navy has patented technology to create mid-air images to fool infrared and other sensors. This builds on many years of laser-plasma research and offers a game-changing method of protecting aircraft from heat-seeking missiles. It may also provide a clue about the source of some recent UFO sightings by military aircraft.
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The Navy declined to discuss the project, but the work is described in a 2018 patent: “wherein a laser source is mounted on the back of the air vehicle, and wherein the laser source is configured to create a laser-induced plasma, and wherein the laser-induced plasma acts as a decoy for an incoming threat to the air vehicle.”

Phantom aircraft that can move around at high speed and appear on thermal imagers may ring some bells. After months of debate, in April the Navy officially released infra-red videos of UFOs encountered by their pilots, although the Pentagon prefers to call them “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The objects in the videos appear to make sudden movements impossible for physical aircraft, rotate mid-air and zip along at phenomenal speed: all maneuvers which would be easy to reproduce with a phantom projected image.
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It is unlikely the Pentagon would release videos of their own secret weapon in a bizarre double bluff. But other nations may have their own version. In the early 1990s the Russians claimed that they could produce glowing ‘plasmoids’ at high altitude using high-power microwave or laser beams; these were intended to disrupt the flight of ballistic missiles, an answer to the planned American ‘Star Wars’. Nothing came of the project, but the technology may have been refined for other applications in the subsequent decades.

Quote:Scientists Discover Huge and Mysterious Jellyfish-Shaped Structure In Space (April 6, 2021)

The gigantic plasma structure, known as 'USS Jellyfish,' is more than one million light years across and poses a series of bizarre questions to astronomers.



The name “USS Jellyfish” may evoke visions of a Starfleet vessel designed to accommodate gelatinous marine aliens. But it is actually the name of a very real, newly discovered structure in outer space that is like nothing that has ever been observed before.

The enormous entity, which extends for more than one million light years, is made of aging plasma that has taken on the shape of a jellyfish, at least from our perspective on Earth. Located in Abell 2877, a cluster of galaxies some 340 million light years away, the USS Jellyfish is the first known example of a “polyphoenix,” a radio source of immense complexity and mystery, according to a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Quote:"99.9 percent of the Universe is made up of plasma," says Dr. Dennis Gallagher, a plasma physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Very little material in space is made of rock like the Earth."
Plasma, Plasma, Everywhere (Sept 1999)

Quote:Help Discover the Sounds of Space Played by NASA’s HARP

A new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP – or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas – has turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes. Early tests have already made surprising finds, and citizen scientists can join the journey of sonic space exploration to decipher the cosmic vibrations that help sing the song of the Sun and Earth.