Things That Make You Go "Hmm..."
Things That Make You Go "Hmm..."
Three bizarre stories from our solar system constitute a trend!
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World knows why you are reading these words. You are interested in world politics! You want someone who knows something to comment on real-world events! I could be that someone!
I certainly intend to be. There is a lot going on in the world right now, from the devastating earthquake in Turkey to the upcoming one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Twitter’s slow-motion implosion.
The hard-working staff here is monitoring all those developments. But… can we put these issues to one side for a second and ask what the heck is going on in our solar system?!
First, consider this story from the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang:
A small icy world far beyond Neptune possesses a ring like the ones around Saturn. Perplexingly, the ring is at a distance where simple gravitational calculations suggest there should be none.
“That’s very strange,” said Bruno Morgado, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Dr. Morgado is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday that describes the ring that encircles Quaoar, a planetary body about 700 miles in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance of about four billion miles.
Okay, full disclosure, I was not aware of the existence of Quaoar until I read that story. But exist is does, in the Kuiper belt — “a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto” — with a ring around it that defies the laws of physics.
That is, to use the scientist’s technical jargon, strange. But it’s also more than 3.9 billion miles away from Earth! Somewhat closer to home, things are… also strange.
According to the New York Post’s Brooke Kato:
Scientists were left baffled after material broke off of the sun’s surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its northern pole….
Unusual activity typically occurs at the sun’s 55-degree latitudes once every 11-year solar cycle, according to experts, but this incident is stumping researchers.
A prominence is a large, bright feature that extends outward from the sun’s surface. Other filament tear-aways have been observed in the past — not like this, though.
Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, the deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told Space.com that researchers aren’t sure what causes such a unique event.
“Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55-degree latitude and it starts to march up to the solar poles,” McIntosh said. “It’s very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move toward the pole one time and then disappear and then come back, magically, three or four years later in exactly the same region?”
Side note: if you ever want to amuse yourself/freak yourself out, Google “scientists baffled” and see what pops up.
Strange things might be afoot in the solar system, but at least here on terra firma things have not gone haywire, right? Right?!
Say, what’s this Nature story by Alexandra Witze saying?
Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so.
“We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University in Beijing who reported the findings today in Nature Geoscience….
“I keep thinking we’re on the verge of figuring this out,” says John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “But I’m not sure.”
Wait just a minute. As someone who has spent the past twenty years stumbling onto The Core on late-night TV and watching it for five minutes before moving on, I find research papers stating that the Earth’s “differential inner-core rotation has recently paused” to be somewhat disconcerting!
Reading the rest of Witze’s story, it seems that perhaps the film starring Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank was not completely accurate. So even if strange things are happening in the solar system, it is not at the disaster-film level of concern.
This is good, because after reading CNN’s story about the object shot down off the coast of Alaska, there’s a whole new weird thing to worry about:
US military pilots sent up to examine the object gave conflicting accounts of what they saw, which is part of the reason why the Pentagon has been cautious in describing what the object actually is, according to a source briefed on the intelligence….
F-35 fighter jets were sent up to investigate after the object was first detected on Thursday, according to a US official. [National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John] Kirby told reporters that the first fly-by of US fighter aircraft happened Thursday night, and the second happened Friday morning. Both brought back “limited” information about the object.
But the pilots later gave differing reports of what they observed, the source briefed on the intelligence said.
Some pilots said the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes, but not all pilots reported experiencing that.
Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet….
“We’re calling this an object because that’s the best description we have right now,” Kirby said. “We don’t know who owns it – whether it’s state-owned or corporate-owned or privately-owned, we just don’t know.”
When the best description the U.S. government can use for an unidentified aerial phenomenon is “object,” I sure hope that there will be some follow-up briefings.
I suppose it could be worse, it’s not like anyone described it as a “cylindrical object”— um… never mind.
The Ramans always do everything in threes.
It's a refreshing change from humanity-based news. And, possibly, reassuring to know we're not the only ones slowly (well, not so slowly) sliding towards systemic breakdown.