# Mars Astronomers - Is this crazy or what?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 19, 2007, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442 "2007-07-19T20:51:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2007, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442/21 "2007-07-20T15:30:01Z")

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[QUOTE=Valteron]  
Is this message bullshit?  
[/QUOTE]

Yup:  
[The surface of Mars is now obscured by a globe-engulfing veil of dust](http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070720_mars_global_storm.html)

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**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2007, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442/22 "2007-07-20T15:30:19Z")

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[QUOTE=Sunspace]  
A full mars and a full moon at the same time? Do you realise how rare that is? 🙂  
[/QUOTE]

Nothing like as rare as a crescent moon and a crescent Mars!

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**Author:** ![control-z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2007, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442/23 "2007-07-20T15:36:52Z")

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[QUOTE=Merijeek]  
Is that when the [atmosphere is torn from the Earth, evil aliens, mutants run rampant, and I FINALLY GET MY SUNSWORD?](http://www.thundarr.com/)

[/QUOTE]

Are you kidding, I had a Sunsword when I was 10. Ok it was a stick that I picked up out of the woods after Thundarr went off, but it still whacked stuff real good.

Wow, that site even has Thundarr fanfic. Ok.

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mars-astronomers-is-this-crazy-or-what/412442/24 "2007-07-20T17:33:42Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> Wait till our galaxy collides with Andromeda . . . but not anytime soon.

This one bugs me, too. Not as much as the Mars one, since there’s a strong germ of truth to it, but then again, it also gets spread by folks who would never fall for the Mars one. The Andromeda galaxy (or M31 for short, but not just “Andromeda”) is, in fact, currently getting closer to our own Milky Way: This much is indisputable from the Doppler shift. But there’s no real way to measure the transverse motion. So it could be heading straight for us, but it’s much more likely that it’ll veer past us. If I’m standing on the sidewalk and see a car on the street getting closer to me, that does not necessarily mean that it’s going to hit me. In fact, it’s actually almost impossible that M31 will collide with us, since the orbital period of the two galaxies about each other is shorter than the age of either, so if they were on a collision course, they would already have collided several times over their history, and we don’t see any evidence that that’s happened.

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