SOHO square...no, not THAT Soho Square.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO for short was launched in 1996 and was planned to fulfil a two-year mission and 26 years later it’s still very much operational. It follows a halo orbit around L1 or Lagrange point 1 which is a point, a million miles away, between the Earth and the sun where the gravity of the two bodies reaches an equilibrium and cancel each other out and SOHO is orbiting this point between them. Its sensors are oriented towards the sun which it monitors using 12 different instruments to measure the intensity of the solar wind, take measurements of the temperature and activity of the solar corona, and variations in the sun’s magnetic field among other things, and it transmits this live data to Earth with whom it orbits the sun once every 12 months.

Now a million miles might seem like a long way away, but the sun itself is 93 million miles from Earth so the fact that the L1 is a million miles from Earth yet 92 million miles from the sun. might give an idea of the incredible gravitation power of the sun since, beyond L1, any object would be relentlessly pulled into the Sun’s gravitational well.

Incidentally there are 4 other Lagrange points, and they have the potential to be quite interesting and you should know about them for no other reason as there is something strangely comforting about them. They are popularly described as ‘parking spots’ in space, one of which L2, is just behind the moon, a million miles in the opposite direction to L1, and this is has been chosen as the ideal location for the James Webb Space Telescope since it’s close enough to transmit easily to the Earth while always being in contact with the sun for solar power while facing the deep-skies.

Compared to the Hubble telescope’s collecting mirror, Webb’s is 6 times bigger, which in broad terms makes it 100 times more powerful which means it can capture light 100 times fainter than that which could be captured by Hubble and hopefully, although ‘hope’ isn’t a very scientific term, I should say ‘theoretically’ it will be able to send back images of the very earliest stages of the creation of the universe, because of the unique fact that light takes a certain amount of time to reach us, this information about the creation of the universe and the big bang itself is still all flying around out there somewhere and it is thought that the James Webb Telescope will be able to capture light from as far away in time and space, as only 100 million years after the Big Bang, which in cosmological terms, is pretty early days if we consider that the universe is 13.6 billion years old.

Another Lagrange point known as L3, intrigues astronomers because it is directly opposite Earth’s orbit but permanently behind the sun and invisible to our technology, and were there to be any visiting alien spacecraft or anomalous object such as the mythical fodder of the internet Planet X, then L3 would be the perfect place for it to hide. I believe several works of science fiction have actually incorporated Lagrange point 3 into their mythos.

Occasionally SOHO makes the news but naturally only in the most sensational and generally highly specious manner and we will see an example of that here:

The sun here is blue, not because he’s having a bad day but because it is an image of the light from the sun in the ultraviolet spectrum. Now I want you to look at the top left of the image and there you will see something unusual. Does you know what it is?

Some might say it looks like a Borg Cube, if that’s the case we’d better prepare to be assimilated. Let’s hope it isn’t that. How about a black hole, or rather a 'black square'? It certainly looks resembles a black void of some kind but we’d be in pretty big trouble if we had a black hole next to the sun. The Borg invasion would definitely be a preferable option.

Before I tell you what it is, though you have probably already figured it out, I'd like to tell you about a very special group of people. There are people out there, God bless them, who spend their lives on the internet watching live images of the sun from the SOHO spacecraft, 24 hours a day seven days a week, and it’s just as well because scientists just don’t have that kind of time, but there are UFO searching people who think if they watch these live images long enough they will see something. In this instance they thought they had seen ‘something’.

Now I will tell you what it is. The black square is likely something less exciting and less potentially dangerous that the prelude to a full assimilation. The black square is really nothing more than missing data which SOHO failed to transmit.

There are other examples which often make the Daily Mail which for some reason seems particularly keen to run with these stories scavenged from the internet whether it be coronal loops mistaken for refuelling alien spacecraft or any one a dozen such anomalies, and I for one would like nothing more than alien spaceships whizzing about, but the problem is we just don’t have any hard evidence and that evidence which the UFO people offer, just doesn’t stand up to honest scrutiny and is usually if not always, something we know about which has been mistaken for something which it is not by someone who doesn’t know about it. Frankly I would welcome our alien overlords, they can’t make a worse job of running this planet than the oddballs we have presently got in charge.