Mars Keeps Spinning Faster, and Scientists Don't Know Why | Hacker News Reader

Mars Keeps Spinning Faster, and Scientists Don't Know Why

nature.com

26 pointsBrajeshwar22 comments

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.

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!

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.

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.

Is it possible that Mars is shrinking? That would explain an increased rotation rate.

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.

Could also be elongating (as opposed to shrinking in every dimension or losing mass)

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."

All the robots running around are churning it into a frenzy

That’s the only explanation. Someone should talk to the Mechanicum about it.

Maybe Mars is spinning at the same speed and time is slowing down.

Does it bury human dream to live on Mars?

Not any more than Earth's slightly-inconsistent spin rate rules out human life here.

I’d worry about the chlorine in the soil first.

Sounds like they're dealing with Climate Change too.

> [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...

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.

(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.

There’s literally nothing that won’t be politicized, as the last few years have amply demonstrated.

> 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]

You are reading far too much into something that was neither a joke nor a political statement. But it is awfully telling to see how dissenting narratives tend to get viciously derailed, early and often, without any constructive discussion about the actual premise.

I like to explain it as "I like music. I like festivals. I do not like music festivals".

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.

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