Researchers model 1,000-mile Mars cloud, pointing to exotic atmospheric physics
Researchers modeled a 1,000-mile Mars cloud, suggesting a physical process never directly observed in any atmosphere.
During Martian spring and summer, the thin cloud emerges every morning, gradually elongating until it stretches more than 1,000 miles—roughly the straight-line distance from New York to Kansas City—before dissipating. The cycle repeats for several months, Ars Technica reported.
Scientists had been unable to explain the cloud’s repeated appearance until the new modeling work. Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and the study’s lead author, said in a press release: “We found that we needed to include some exotic physics… physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before.” He added: “Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.”
The results suggest that the AMEC’s formation depends on physics that textbooks treat as theoretical and that has not been seen operating in nature, according to the researchers. The modeling effort is the first to reproduce the cloud’s formation, Ars Technica reported.