Are aliens on our sun? (gallery)

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• Too bad for these dumb intelligent aliens

  Aliens smart enough to build planet size spaceship capable of galactic travels. Then commit suicide going above a star?

  

  RelaxWalk

  17 March, 2012 11:35

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  • Smart enough to play with Sun

    If they're smart enough for galactic travel, then they could be a level 1 civilization. Which means, they're collecting/changing something from our sun.

    

    Madushan Siriwardena

    17 March, 2012 15:50

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    • Simple physical laws

      By Level1, I suppose you referred to the Kardashev scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
      If so, these hypothetical aliens are probably of "Type 3" because they know how to exploit the energy of a star which is outside of their solar system.
      
      Regardless of how smart they are, there are physical limits. No material could resist that close to a sun. Especially if a solar flare happens, that space ship would be fried in no time. And what they are capturing here? I hope they are not trying to siphon the Hydrogen from the sun atmosphere? There is much easy and less risky way. The main energy of a sun is radiative. They'd rather use a big surface structure to capture that energy. Going that close, they would finish being swallowed by the sun and finishes as a negligible solar burp.

      

      RelaxWalk

      18 March, 2012 15:38

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• No UFO...but a solar tornado is still dang cool

  Your first couple pictures note an object that was identified as a solar "prominence" (giant plasma filament). To my eyes, it looks like a poor picture of a solar tornado. Just like whirlwinds that form in our atmosphere, the solar corona can form them. The difference is in the astronomical size difference, in that the Earth could easily be swallowed in the maw of one of these. The energy involved in swirling that much super-heated plasma is also nearly inconceivable.
  
  The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) caught a beautiful movie of one of these in action:
  
  http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=132883751

  

  JJMach

  21 March, 2012 11:23

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• What about Saturn's creepy polar hexagon?

  Odd camera angles (Face on Mars) and imaging artifacts aside, I was creeped out by the hexagonal cloud formation around the north pole of Saturn, recorded over the past few years by the Cassini probe and first spotted by the Voyager missions, so it is at least 30-some years old.
  
  Some scientists have recently recreated the phenomenon in a lab environment, and it appears that the formation is quite stable and relatively easy to create:
  
  http://planetary.org/blog/article/00002471/
  
  I suppose I should be less surprised, given the common appearance of hexagons in nature (it's the roundest polygon that can tile with itself), but still, to see a polygon--many times the size of our planet--makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if there are greater powers wanting to mess with our heads, or at least toss down a "Kilroy was here" marker.

  

  JJMach

  21 March, 2012 11:36

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