A 1,000-mile cloud on Mars may reveal physics never seen in nature
摘要
火星春夏季每天清晨，阿尔西亚山附近会出现一条细长云带，逐渐延伸至超过1000英里后消散，如此循环数月。自2018年被探测器记录以来，科学界一直缺乏合理解释。近期研究人员首次成功模拟该云的形成，结果表明其可能由一种从未在任何行星大气中直接观测到的物理过程驱动。研究负责人称，需引入通常被视为理论性、被认为不会在自然界发生的物理机制，模拟后云带如预期出现。
Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months.
Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled the cloud’s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet's atmosphere.
"We found that we needed to include some exotic physics… physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before," Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.”
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