Amateur astronomers have spotted huge cloudlike plumes erupting from Mars \u2013 a phenomenon that scientists are at a loss to explain.<\/p>\n
The bright flares, which have now died away, towered higher than anything else observed in the Martian atmosphere. Their tops reached some 150 miles in altitude, more than twice as high as the highest Martian clouds, and they sprawled across 300 to 600 miles, researchers report in this week\u2019s Nature, a science journal.<\/p>\n
The researchers initially were skeptical, but \u201cwe came to the conclusion that what we were seeing is actually real,\u201d says study co-author Antonio Garc\u00eda Mu\u00f1oz, a planetary scientist at the European Space Agency. The plumes are \u201cexceptional. \u2026 It\u2019s difficult to come to terms with this.\u201d<\/p>\n
This scientific brainteaser first came to light in early 2012, when amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke was poring over footage of Mars he had captured at his private observatory. He came across a puzzling image showing the Red Planet with a blob billowing off the planet\u2019s rounded edge.<\/p>\n
In all his years of peering at Mars, \u201cI\u2019d never seen anything like that,\u201d says Jaeschke, a West Chester, Pa., resident who spends about 100 nights a year training his gear on the heavens. He quietly ran the image by a few friends, then circulated it among a larger group of both amateur and professional astronomers.<\/p>\n
The image confounded the pros, too. Martian clouds, which are typically made of ice crystals, tend to be wispy, like the thin cirrus clouds seen high in Earth\u2019s sky. But these were enormous wide plumes seen on 11 days in March 2012 and again in April 2012. Later, the scientists dug up 1997 images of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope that show a similar plume.<\/p>\n