http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/bright-blips-mars-pictures-spark-buzz-among-ufo-fans-n74261
Bright Blips on Mars Pictures Spark a Buzz Among UFO Fans
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<address class="stack-byline">By Alan Boyle </address> Bright spots that look like a beacon flashing from a distant Martian hillside are attracting attention from the UFO crowd — but are they real or just photographic glitches?
The evidence so far favors a pixel dropout as the explanation, but the coincidence is curious enough to stir up chatter on websites such as
Disclose.tv and
UFO Sightings Daily. The webmaster for the latter site, Scott C. Waring, is having as much fun with this one as he had last year with the
Mars Rat and the
Martian Iguana.
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"This could indicate that there is intelligent life below the ground and uses light as we do," Waring wrote in a
posting about the pic on Sunday.
<figure class="ember-view image spanFull" id="ember960">
<small class="stack-credit-art-figcaption">
NASA / JPL-Caltech </small>
<figcaption class="stack-figcaption">The red circle highlights a bright speck in a picture sent back from the right-hand navigation camera on NASA's Mars Curiosity rover on April 3.</figcaption> </figure>The
picture that caught Waring's eye was taken on April 3 by the right-hand navigation camera on NASA's Mars Curiosity rover as it was
getting itself settled in a new study area known as the Kimberley. A bright speck that appears to flare upward can just be made out, right at the rim of a rise.
A picture taken by the right navcam on the day before shows a
similar bright speck, seen from a slightly different perspective. The only problem is that the navigation camera is a stereo system, and the left-hand navcam doesn't show the
bright spots on either day.
That suggests that the "light" might be a bit of lost data that left blank spots only on the right-hand navcam pictures. And it suggests that people are looking at the pictures from Curiosity very,
very closely. If there's a message from Mars flashing in any photos, you can bet somebody's going to see it.
We've asked NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to take a look at the pictures, and if we hear anything back, you'll find the update right here. Now, about that
deer-cam UFO...
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Update for 9 p.m. ET April 7: Doug Ellison, an imaging guru who happens to work at JPL, quickly told me in a Twitter update that the bright spot is due to a
"cosmic ray hit" affecting the rover. (Later: The Surrey Space Center's Chris Bridges
agrees.)
Update for 12:50 a.m. ET April 8: Here's a recap of the four pictures we're talking about:
<time title="2014-04-08 00:42:00 Z" class="stack-firstpub">First published April 7th 2014, 8:42 pm </time> <aside class="stack-talent">
</aside>
Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital. He joined MSNBC.com at its inception in July 1996,...
Expand Bio
Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital.
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- Bright Blips on Mars Pictures Spark a Buzz Among UFO Fans
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- Bright Blips on Mars Pictures Spark a Buzz Among UFO Fans
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Space
<time title="2014-04-08 02:04:30 Z" class="stack-time"> 5 hours </time> </article><article class="ember-view i1 expanded"><aside class="stack-sidebar">
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Astronomers have perhaps their best lead to date about the nature of dark matter, the strange and invisible stuff that dominates the material universe.
The center of our Milky Way galaxy generates more high-energy gamma rays than can be explained by conventional sources such as supernova remnants and fast-spinning, super-dense neutron stars known as pulsars, a new study suggests. The "excess" may be produced by the annihilation of colliding dark matter particles. This
NASA video explains the tantalizing dark matter find.
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"This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time," co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said in a statement. [
The Hunt for Dark Matter: Images and Photos]
</article> <figure class="ember-view image spanFull" id="ember1184">
<small class="stack-credit-art-figcaption">
T. Linden / Univ. of Chicago </small>
<figcaption class="stack-figcaption">At left is a map of gamma rays with energies between 1 and 3.16 GeV detected in the galactic center by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's Large Area Telescope. Red indicates the greatest number. Prominent pulsars are labeled. Removing all known gamma-ray sources (right) reveals the excess emission that may arise from dark matter annihilations.</figcaption> </figure>
Dark matter— which is thought to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe — is so named because it apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, making it impossible to observe directly with telescopes. But its gravity does affect the "normal" stuff we can see and touch, providing one way to hunt dark matter down.
Gamma rays — the most energetic light in the universe — also provide another potential detection method.
Many scientists think dark matter is primarily composed of
weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Theory suggests that some types of WIMPs annihilate when they collide with each other, while others generate a fast-decaying secondary particle when they interact. In either case, the idea goes, gamma rays are produced.
In the new study, researchers used data from NASA's
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to make maps of the Milky Way's center in gamma-ray light. The maps reveal an "excess" of gamma-ray emissions extending outward at least 5,000 light-years from the Milky Way's core, researchers said.
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They said the excess can be explained by annihilations of dark matter particles with a mass between 31 and 40 billion electron volts.
The new study has been submitted to the journal Physical Review D.
— Mike Wall, Space.com
