Observing our planet with the help of satellites can help reveal unusual and amazing things.

Now, NASA has spotted a massive thermal anomaly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean causing a massive debate on social networks as people try to figure out what’s so hot in the water?

And while a number of YouTube conspiracy theorists wonder if we are looking at aliens… NASA has an answer. (Apparently)

As explained in an article published in Earth Observatory NASA, last year, on July of 2017, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite snapped a night image of the South Atlantic.

And while at first glance nothing may seem out of place, there’s a small red dot several hundred kilometers off the coast of Brazil.

That red dot signalizes a thermal anomaly, an area on the surface of the planet that’s unusually hot.

Now, of the thousands of images that the VIIRS detects each night, most of the red dot it shows are caused by fires.

However, we aren’t looking at a massive fire burning in the middle of the South Atlantic explains Patricia Oliva, a scientist at Universidad Mayor who helped develop a fire detection algorithm for VIIRS when she was at the University of Maryland.

But if VIIRS did not detect a fire, then what did it spot? Are Conspiracy theorists, right?

There are a couple of explanations for this odd image.

One such explanation is natural Gas flares, which are known for triggering thermal anomalies.

However, natural gas flares are found in shallow water near the coast, and this weird red dot is in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Volcanic activity could also explain the mysterious thermal anomaly, but no volcanoes exist anywhere near that location.

So, what is it?

According to Olivia that red dot isn’t actually there. What we are looking at is a SAMA- false flag– SAMA stands for South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly.

SAMA is an area where our planet’s Van Allen Radiation Belt comes really, really close to the surface dipping at an incredible altitude of just 200 kilometers.

Van Allen radiation belts are areas of energetic charged particles that are captured and contained by our planets magnetic field.

The South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly, which passes over the South Atlantic causes satellites passing above it to become exposed to powerful levels of radiations.

“Each night, the sensor was detecting several dozen thermal anomalies over the Atlantic Ocean in places that didn’t make sense,” said Wilfrid Schroeder, the principal investigator for the VIIRS active fire product, said in the statement.

And scientists built a series of filters into VIIRS’s algorithm to remove false signals in the region, but nevertheless one of them slipped through.

“We see probably one or two of these spurious fire detections a night, but remember that is in comparison to the thousands of real thermal anomalies [the] satellite detects each night,” Schroeder said. “False fires detections are quite rare.”