On Dec. 1, a camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft recorded a wave of electrically charged material shooting out from the sun and blasting Mercury. Footage of this "coronal mass ejection" (CME), as such events are called, has caught the attention of alien-hunters, who say it has unveiled a giant, "cloaked" spaceship parked near the solar system's innermost planet.
In the footage, one sees a huge spurt of plasma and other solar ejecta washing over Mercury; peculiarly, the material seems to flare up as it hits another nearby object, too. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has quickly spread across the Web.
The commentator says there's "absolutely no explanation" for the nearly Mercury-size mystery object other than that it's a spaceship. "What object in space cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?" siniXster asked.
The question was meant rhetorically, but nonetheless, the video is curious, so we've put it to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) — the group that analyzes data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1), the telescopic camera that shot the new footage.
As you might suspect, there is a non-UFO explanation of the apparent flare-up near Mercury. According to Russ Howard, head scientist of the NRL group, and Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer, it is simply an artifact left over from the way raw HI-1 telescope data gets processed. Rather than a UFO mothership parked near Mercury, the bright spot is "where the planet was on the previous day," Rich told Life's Little Mysteries. [A History of Recent UFO 'Sightings']
To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space — caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background — the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.
This works great for objects far off in the distance, such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But it gets a little trickier when trying to account for nearer objects, particularly moving ones, like planets.
"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich wrote in an email.
He noted that the bright spot disappears when the CME footage is reprocessed using pixel values from a different day — the day after the CME, for example — to remove background light, instead of pixel values from the previous day.
Those in favor of the bright spot being a cloaked UFO mothership rather than a data-processing artifact will surely point out that the spot in question is not round like the ghost of a planet, but rather sharp-edged like the Starship Enterprise.
CREDIT: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Nathan Rich
And they have a point: A high-resolution image of the spot shows that it is composed of two roughly parallel lines. "The pixels which form the two parallel lines are where the circle from the planet and the bleeding pixels (cross-like features) overlap as it progresses across the field," Rich wrote. In other words, because Mercury moves over the course of each day, and because saturated pixels bleed light into adjacent pixels, an averaged image of Mercury from the previous day looks like two streaks, rather than an orb.
This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
UPDATE FROM DR RAM
"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked."SiniXster commented further that there is "absolutely no explanation for the nearly Mercury-size mystery object other than that it's a spaceship. What object in space cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?" Experts have, however, said that the image next to Mercury is not an alien spaceship. According to Daily Mail, the image has been analyzed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory. Experts explain that the "alien ship" really is the "ghost" of the image of Mercury taken the previous day. According to the experts, to ensure that the CME being tracked stands out clearly visible, astronomers compare new images taken with previous ones and eliminate or subtract images that appear twice as "interfering background light." Far and stationary objects such as stars are easy to identify and eliminate, but moving objects such as near planets are difficult to identify for subtraction. Nathan Rich, an astronomer, explained to Space.com:
"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image."MSNBC also reports that Rich explained the image is simply an artifact left over from the way raw HI-1 telescope data gets processed. Rather than a UFO mothership parked near Mercury, the bright spot is "where the planet was on the previous day." Another astronomer Dr Heather Couper, confirmed Rich's statement to Daily Mail. Couper explained that the bright object is not a "cloaked alien ship." According to Couper, there is no way an alien spaceship the size of our moon could hide from us next to Mercury without astronomers having detected its presence:
"The scientists have not managed to subtract the image of Mercury. The technical guys are saying the problem is that when you try to subtract something that’s moving the pixels blend into each.It’s imaging processing that they haven’t got their heads around. No way could it be an alien spaceship the size of Mercury because Mercury is the size of our moon and we would know about it."But some UFO theorists, according to MSNBC, have faulted the expert explanations, saying that the image looks more like a cloaked UFO mothership because it is not round like the previous day's image of a planet should be. Rather, high-resolution image shows that it is composed of two lines running parallel. But Rich explains that, "the pixels which form the two parallel lines are where the circle from the planet and the bleeding pixels (cross-like features) overlap as it progresses across the field." MSNBC interprets Rich's technical explanation:
"In other words, because Mercury moves over the course of each day, and because saturated pixels bleed light into adjacent pixels, an averaged image of Mercury from the previous day looks like two streaks, rather than an orb."
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