The #BroomstickChallenge, which emerged on social media Monday, is based on faulty science, according to NASA.
The challenge originated from a viral tweet, which claimed that NASA said Monday was the only day a broomstick could stand on its own because of the earth's gravitational pull. The tweet was accompanied by a video of a woman propping a broom up. As the woman watches the broom stand up on its own, she yells, "No strings, nothing."
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Though there was no evidence that NASA ever suggested that gravitational forces would be different on Monday, the tweet, which received more than 260,000 likes and was shared more than 60,000 times, garnered hundreds of responses from people who wanted to participate in the "novelty" of watching a broom stand up by itself.
Yet NASA astronaut Alvin Drew and scientist Sarah Noble, who responded to the #BroomstickChallenge on Twitter, say that the challenge can actually be conducted on any given day. The pair posted their own video of them standing up a broom Tuesday, to show that even though the window for the challenge had passed, it was still actionable.
"Did you do the Broomstick Challenge yesterday?" Noble asks in the video. "Well, turns out you can do it again today."
"It's just physics," Drew added.
The NASA Earth twitter account also weighed in saying "There's no special gravity that only affects brooms, but the Moon's gravity creates tides on Earth."
The myth, which is partly based on an old wives' tale that claims that every year on the vernal and autumnal equinox, eggs are able to balance on their ends, appears to have surfaced annually since at least 2012.
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