Klingons off Mercury? A False Alarm
Dec. 12, 2011
People seeking evidence of extraterrestrial life got a jolt in early December when images from space probes studying the sun appeared to show a mysterious object parked in the orbit of the planet Mercury. Rumors of aliens observing Earth from a “cloaked” spaceship went viral on the Internet. Like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, cloaking devices render objects invisible. One of most famous cloaking device in modern science fiction was that used by the Klingons in the Star Trek series to ambush the U.S.S. Enterprise and other ships of the United Federation of Planets.
The images were from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a pair of satellites designed to help scientists predict spectacular eruptions from the sun called coronal mass ejections (CME’s). The satellites follow Earth’s orbit around the sun, with one traveling 37 million miles (60 million kilometers) ahead of Earth and the other following 37 million miles behind. In the series of three-dimensional images, the probes showed a CME washing over Mercury. But the images also seemed to show another object nearby. The object was invisible, but as the CME passed over it, the dark shape of a cylinder was revealed. Were we no longer alone in the universe?
A drawing of one of the STEREO spacecrafts is superimposed on an actual image of a coronal mass ejection from May 20, 2011, taken by the probe. NASA
In the end, the scientists who process the STEREO data had a logical explanation. It seems that the computers that filter the blinding light of the sun from the STEREO images also mistakenly removed some of the CME itself. The black spot in the images was only the result of an overactive computer program. The finding allowed the United States government to maintain its position on the existence of life on other planets. In November 2011, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy had issued an official statement that the U.S. government had no knowledge that extraterrestrial life exists or that beings from other planets have made contact with humans.
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