In the not too distant future, many hope that we will have established a human colony on Mars.

Why Mars? Because it’s the only other planet (and maybe Venus) that arguably sit inside the Goldilocks Zone of our solar system.

While there are better candidates for planets to live on outside of our solar system, the convenient location of Mars makes it a prime candidate – despite the fact that its freezing temperatures, thin atmosphere and lack of surface water make it a challenge to say the least.

More than that though, there is still so much we don’t know about Mars – and a recent paper published in the journal Science proves how much we still have left to learn.

Just like our own, each planet has its own weather and climate, dictated by many factors including atmospheric composition, distance from the sun, and geological activity.

We know Mars is cold, sure, with temperatures varying between 70 degrees and -225 degrees Fahrenheit – but as for the rest of the Red Planet’s weather?

Well, we only know what we’ve discovered so far – and recently, thanks to NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter, it seems likely that we’ve for the first time detected lightning strikes on Mars.

And it’s all due to something known as a ‘whistler wave.’

This very low frequency electromagnetic wave is only known to be associated with lightning – so imaging the surprise of the researchers when they detected such a wave on the Red Planet.

Over the course of more than 108,000 observations, the team were only able to find one whistler wave, which tells us a lot about Mars’s atmosphere and weather, as the team explain in the paper:

“It occurred on the nightside, in a region with a nearly vertical magnetic field, which is a necessary condition for the successful wave propagation to higher ionospheric altitudes. We note that while nightside ionospheric conditions were present in about one-third of the analyzed wave snapshots, these high magnetic field inclinations are extremely rare. This suggests that although lightning-like electric discharge processes can occur on Mars, the ionospheric properties often preclude the formation of a detectable whistler. In addition, the discharges themselves may be infrequent or weak, possibly due to additional processes hindering breakdown electric field generation.”

Whether lightning is rare on Mars, or whether other factors make whistler waves difficult to detect, scientists aren’t yet sure – but the takeaway from this?

Just like Earth, Mars is home to some gnarly weather.

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