The footage caught a coronal mass ejection last week, where electronically charged material catapulted from the sun and hit Mercury. The solar flare that struck Mercury seemed to have hit another large object about the same size nearby, which was described as cylindrical on both sides with a shape in the center, resembling a spaceship.
YouTube user siniXster posted the footage on the Internet saying that the object in question was clearly a cloaked spaceship that may be indicative of alien life.
"What object cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?" said siniXster, who also mentioned that there could be no other explanation for the Mercury-sized object.
However, scientists at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) disagree. According to NRL's Russ Howard, head scientist, and Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer, the mystery UFO is actually Mercury itself. It is simply a ghost of where Mercury was positioned the previous day, and was visible due to the way raw HI-1 telescope data is processed.
Howard and Rich explained that NRL scientists typically remove background light when processing such data in order to make the glow of a coronal mass ejection apparent against the bright glare from space. They identify what light is background light by calculating the average amount of light that entered individual camera pixels the day of the event as well as the day before. Light found in the pixels on both days is background light, and is then eliminated from the footage while the rest of the light is enhanced. This process is relatively easy for bodies like stars, but for those that are closer and move, such as planets, the process is a bit more challenging.
"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, when then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," said Rich.
When this footage is reprocessed from a different day, the bright spot disappears due to different pixel values and removed light.
