Will Mars and the moon will appear the same size on August 27, 2014?
Answer is certainly NO.
An email must be circulating – somewhere, social media must be buzzing – with the suggestion that – on August 27, 2014 – Mars will appear as large as a full moon in Earth’s sky.
The email and photo are perpetuating a hoax that rears its crazy head every summer. The hoax has circulated every summer since 2003. Eleven years running! That’s a long time for a hoax to run, in our world of information.
Answer is certainly NO.
An email must be circulating – somewhere, social media must be buzzing – with the suggestion that – on August 27, 2014 – Mars will appear as large as a full moon in Earth’s sky.
The email and photo are perpetuating a hoax that rears its crazy head every summer. The hoax has circulated every summer since 2003. Eleven years running! That’s a long time for a hoax to run, in our world of information.
As seen from Earth, in months when Mars does appear side by side with a full moon (and, again, that’s not happening in August of 2014), Mars’ diameter is about 1/140th the diameter of the full moon.You would have had to line up 140 planet Mars – side by side – to equal the moon’s diameter.Mars is also much much farther away than Earth’s moon.
So how did this rumor of Mars-as-big-and-bright-as-the-moon get started? It started with an actual (though much more subtle) event in 2003. On August 27 of that year, Earth and Mars came very slightly closer than they’d been in nearly 60,000 years. Our two worlds, center-to-center, were less than 35 million miles apart – just over three light-minutes apart. The last people to come so close to Mars were Neanderthals. Astronomy writers like me had a field day that year, talking about Mars at its closest. Was it a spectacular sight? Yes! It looked like a dot of flame in the night sky.
Source: earthsky
No comments:
Post a Comment