[HN Gopher] Mars Keeps Spinning Faster, and Scientists Don't Kno...
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Mars Keeps Spinning Faster, and Scientists Don't Know Why
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-08-08 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Sounds like they're dealing with Climate Change too.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > [Mars is] dealing with Climate Change too.
|
| Boo. A blatant fallacy of equivocation.
|
| For any readers confused by the jargon: Just because there's
| something somewhere involving "a climate" that is somehow
| "changing" does NOT mean it's really the same thing as what
| people are referring to when they say "Climate Change".
|
| I'm reacting strongly against this because it seems like more
| than just an innocent joke... I fear the tip of some climate-
| denial nonsense I've seen before, claims that the _sun_ is
| making _all_ the planets hotter, claims that are ridiculously
| false. [0]
|
| [0] https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-
| wa...
| hackernewds wrote:
| I like to explain it as "I like music. I like festivals. I do
| not like music festivals".
| [deleted]
| Terr_ wrote:
| Might also ask people if they like to eat Lady Fingers,
| Pork Butt, or Spotted Dick.
| svachalek wrote:
| It's hard to call this climate, even if you were to be
| generous. But as a matter of fact Earth's rotation is also
| changing: in our case it's decelerating, due to the moon's
| pull.
| jvalencia wrote:
| Would that equivocation not be a positive thing? When we said
| global warming, it caused huge political nightmares when
| things were cold. By saying we study climate change, we
| depoliticize it. We state these are the facts about climate
| change. Let's look at what's causing it, what we do about it,
| etc. If there is warming due to too much carbon in the
| atmosphere, perhaps we can try carbon capture.
|
| The moment you make it into a political club, you bring out
| the talking heads, you make the situation an opinion column
| instead of scientific --- then it's just opinions of people
| who couldn't understand the science arguing about it and
| grossly misrepresenting it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| (Note: I may have added to my post a bit before seeing your
| reply.)
|
| > Would that equivocation not be a positive thing? When we
| said global warming, it caused huge political nightmares
| when things were cold.
|
| I don't thinks so, since a similar kind of equivocation
| (and a strawman from it) was involved in creating those
| "political nightmares" in the first place:
|
| 1. Scientists pointed out that the globe, as an entire
| system, was warming. For short, "Global Warming."
|
| 2. Opposed politicians took "Global Warming" and twisted
| that into something like "every single point, globally, is
| warming simultaneously and strictly increasing." Then they
| "disproved" the strawman whenever anywhere had a colder
| winter night than the prior year.
| FredPret wrote:
| All the robots running around are churning it into a frenzy
| janalsncm wrote:
| Is it possible that Mars is shrinking? That would explain an
| increased rotation rate.
| vikingerik wrote:
| This happens with Earth. An earthquake can displace mass
| towards the center, such that the rotation rate increases
| measurably, on the order of a fraction of a microsecond per
| day. In fact some of this is why we haven't needed leap seconds
| recently.
| foota wrote:
| Could also be elongating (as opposed to shrinking in every
| dimension or losing mass)
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| The title of this post is related to the last sentence of the
| abstract, and least interesting part of the paper.
|
| Let's not sensationalize good research for the sake of trying to
| get upvotes. This isn't reddit.
| zakki wrote:
| Does it bury human dream to live on Mars?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Not any more than Earth's slightly-inconsistent spin rate rules
| out human life here.
| moomin wrote:
| I'd worry about the chlorine in the soil first.
| raymondh wrote:
| From the abstract, "We also find evidence of a slow acceleration
| in the Martian rotation rate, which could be the result of a
| long-term trend either in the internal dynamics of Mars or in its
| atmosphere and ice caps."
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Reminds me of this recent work suggesting at some point our solar
| system might just fall apart 'suddenly':
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-math-shows-when-solar-sys...
|
| Would be a wild ride!
| rcthompson wrote:
| It seems weird to me that so many of the "falling apart"
| simulations described in the intro involve planets crashing
| into each other. I would expect direct collisions to be an
| extremely rare "failure mode", even once the system
| destabilizes, especially for the much smaller inner planets.
| Much more common, I imagine, would be near misses that fling
| one or both planets into the sun, out of the system, out of the
| orbital plane, into extreme elliptical orbits, etc.
| moomin wrote:
| The thing is, there's a fair bit of evidence around the solar
| system that planet and moon smashing events have happened,
| more than once.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Maybe Mars is spinning at the same speed and time is slowing
| down.
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