Mars staggers, and scientists have questions – BGR

• Using data collected over 18 years of observations, scientists now say that the planet Mars is shaking.
• The winding of the planet causes the poles to move regularly.
• Earth also has a wobble, but Mars’ wobble is a bit more of a mystery than that of Earth, as Mars has no oceans.

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If you think about the planets in our solar system, you can probably imagine that it rotates just like a top. They rarely rotate exactly in line with their orbital plane – the earth rotates at an angle of about 24 degrees, for example – but most simple models of the solar system make planets appear to rotate perfectly. Well, some do not, and we just discovered that Mars is one of the planets.

In a new article published in Geophysical research letters, scientists reveal that Mars is a bit shaky about it. This means that the poles are not perfectly aligned all the time, but move on a timeline of about 207 days. This makes Mars the second planet with a known wrap (called a Chandler wobble). The first? Earth.

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The Earth’s Chandler wobble has been known for some time – it is named after Seth Carlo Chandler, the man who first noticed the wobble in 1891 – and there is still some mystery associated with it. how and why it falters as it does. Mars, on the other hand, is still mysterious, mainly because of all the things the Red Planet does not have that the earth has.

The origin of the earth’s slingshot is not fully understood, and theoretically it should have subsided over time. However, the fact that the earth has so much water and a thick atmosphere means that this imbalance can continue indefinitely. Mars, on the other hand, is very different.

A summary of the discovery by the authors:

For the first time for any solar system other than Earth, one component of the motion of Mars’ axis of rotation has been detected on the surface of Mars, called the Chandler wobble. The motion has a period of 206.9 ± 0.5 days, an amplitude of 10 cm on the surface and is seen in an almost circular anticlockwise direction, seen from the North Pole. The polar motion is determined by radio observations from Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor, in order of decreasing sensitivity. The detection of the Chandler pendulum improves our understanding of energy dissipation in the mantle for time intervals near the pendulum period.

The pendulum detected on Mars is more subtle than that of Earth, but Mars also has no moving surface water to maintain motion. However, Mars does have an atmosphere. It is much less robust than Earth’s, but atmospheric pressure can help keep the pendulum moving. It will probably eventually disappear completely, although it is difficult to say how long it will last.