The Hunt for Mars' Mysterious Canals

The Hunt for Mars' Mysterious Canals:
Mars had a secret for decades, and its secret was...that it had no secret. But just because the secret didn't exist, didn't stop astronomers from searching for it. For decades an intense battle raged over whether or not Mars was home to an intricate series of canals spreading hundreds of miles across the planet's surface. What were the canali for? Why were they there? Well, no one really knew. Some speculated they were the foundation of a planetary wide agricultural system, transporting water from deep craters to urban areas and farmlands across the globe, built by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

But even without knowing what they were used for, many astronomers were sure it existed. The most notable among them was one Percival Lowell, a world renowned astronomer most known for his later discovery of pluto. In 1894, using state of the art telescopes, Lowell observed what he believed to be canals on the surface of the red planet. At first there were only a few, but as word got around and more and more astronomers cast their gaze upon the red planet, more and more canals started to appear. It seemed the entire planet was covered in them and each year the number of martian canals appeared to grow, almost as if the martian men were still building them.

But this craze wouldn't last, and soon it would be discovered that what many thoughts had been canals, were really an optical illusion created by the telescopes of the day. Although, more than a century later modern-day astronomers recorded observations of canals on the Martian surface, caused by summer water melting into streams. Now, more than a hundred years later, we're left questioning if the martian canali of the 19th century were really just an optical illusion after all.

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