This is the moment two suns appeared in the clouds alongside each other.
Bizarre Explanation For Double Exposure Of Celestial Body In Sky pic.twitter.com/atuRA4hE3u
— NewsX (@newsx_media) July 11, 2023
The video was shot by an eyewitness in Yibin which is a prefecture-level city in the southeastern part of China‘s Sichuan province.
Despite speculation that it was a sign of the end of the world or a parallel universe, a more logical explanation was the one often used when more than one sun appears in the sky.
The presence of ice crystals in the atmosphere cause the image to appear to split because of the diffraction of light, which can make it appear that there are two or more suns.
However, in this particular case, Zhou Enping, associate professor of the Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ruled this out.
He said the suggestion that it was ice crystals was not correct because if it was ice crystals the second image would effectively be a virtual image of the first one.
He added that the angle between the two virtual images is generally 22 degrees and that the angle between these two suns was obviously not 22 degrees.
He concluded that with refraction, there was always a virtual sun and a real sun, but they do not block each other, and therefore another explanation was needed.
He said that the fact that the cloud was partially obscuring the sun meant that it was not a complete circle, and then when the mobile phone user had zoomed in, the algorithm and the mobile phone recognised that a sunset was being filmed, and set to work in order to correct the shape.
But the algorithm clearly did not realise that the sky cannot have two suns, and therefore mistakenly turned the two halves into two complete suns when the zoom function was used.
He said the proof was in the image, saying: “The cloud is blocking the sun on the left, but the round surface of the sun on the right is complete, which implies that the right side son is closer to us than the cloud, and the sun on the left side is on the other side of the cloud, but that can’t make sense because the sun is outside the atmosphere”.
He said this proved that it was the phone’s algorithm that had created the two sun images from the two halves.
The images were shot as the country experiences extremely high temperatures, with the Chinese Central Meteorological Observatory issuing an orange warning for high temperatures the light to reach up to 40 degrees Celsius.
