posted on Nov, 6 2003 @ 08:10 AM
(deep breath)
Uhm... guys, remember back to your old Earth Science classes? Junior high school was a very long time ago for some of us, but you should remember
your basic planetary information.
Remember, Mars is a planet. Nobody moves it around. It is still MUCH closer to us than it's been in a long time, and it will still continue to be
unusually brighter than it's been in our lives as it moves away from us again. It'll still look very bright for the next year or so.
It didn't suddenly bounce near and then bounce back. It's a planet with an orbit that takes 2+ years to complete.
Gallileo was the first one to discover that the sun actually wasn't a perfect ball of flaming gas (remember this from history?) and that it had
sunspots on it. Before this, nobody had ever suspected that there were any irregularities in it.
While the sun IS having some unususal activity, we have not had the instruments to measure solar flares before (in fact, they were unknown before the
1950's or so.) So when we say this is the most unusual activity we've seen... it really means "we haven't seen this much since we started
observing with instruments, less than 50 years ago."
It does NOT mean "in the billions of years since the solar system was formed, this is the most active that the sun has ever been."