Jupiter Great Red Spot has deep roots

A moon in our own solar system might support life according to scientists. Europa which orbits around Jupiter looks cold and desolate. But strange activity appears to be happening under its surface which could indicate that it would be hospitable to aliens according to scientists who study it. Researchers say they have found evidence that there are sliding tectonic plates underneath the moon s ice shell. The presence of such activity could have important implications for the possibility of life in the sea that scientists think is hiding underneath the crust that covers it. Nasa s most stunning pictures of space 30 show all Nasa s most stunning pictures of space 1/30 Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa 2/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa s HiRISE camera which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa 3/30 Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later having proved that it can be used one day to carry humans to Mars Nasa 4/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday Nov. 24 2014 carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar ready for the satellite s inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa 5/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa 6/30 Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead sharing pictures of black holes Nasa 7/30 NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array or NuSTAR overlaid on a picture taken by NASA s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa 8/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection or sunglint off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn s moon Titan Nasa 9/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora shown here both orbit Saturn they are very different moons. Pandora small by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across) a medium-sized moon formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa 10/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September captured by NASA s Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa 11/30 Solar Flare An image from Nasa s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200 000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun s corona in September 2013 Nasa 12/30 Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa 13/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa 14/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa s Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa 15/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station 16/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts 17/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all they are huge conglomerations of galaxies hot gas and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity 18/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa s Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8 000 years ago 19/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63 seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower 20/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 more commonly known as WR 124 and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it 21/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto 22/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a fresh (on a geological scale though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta 23/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments including photography of Earth s weather and terrain for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White s historic spacewalk on June 3 24/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years NASA has been suiting up for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first field tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) 25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way 26/30 An Astronaut s View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind or aeolian bedforms: ripples transverse aeolian ridges dunes and what are called draa 28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan Kazakhstan 29/30 Jupiter s Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet s atmosphere 30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region That crust appears to contain within it oxidants and other chemical food that can support life. If the tectonic plates are moving then they could cause a process called subduction where those materials would be spread into the sea beneath and provide the material for whatever alien life lurks beneath. If indeed there s life in that ocean subduction offers a way to supply the nutrients it would need said Brandon Johnson an assistant professor in Brown s Department of Earth Environmental and Planetary Sciences and a lead author of the study. Read more What is Enceladus and why might it have alien life? On Earth that process of subduction happens when slabs are pushed into the hot mantle since the cooler material from the crust is more dense it sinks down deep into the mantle and causes movement within the planet. But it wasn t clear how that would work on an icy planet without such differences in temperature. But the new research found the same thing might happen with the amount of salt rather than heat. That would change the density of the slabs and move them around. Adding salt to an ice slab would be like adding little weights to it because salt is denser than ice said Professor Johnson. So rather than temperature we show that differences in the salt content of the ice could enable subduction to happen on Europa. The movements have important implications for life on Europa. But they re also incredibly important in themselves they would be the first time that we ve somewhere else that has such movements like us and so give us the opportunity to compare them as never before. It s fascinating to think that we might have plate tectonics somewhere other than Earth said Professor Johnson. Thinking from the standpoint of comparative planetology if we can now study plate tectonics in this very different place it might be able to help us understand how plate tectonics got started on the Earth. It s somewhere between unlikely and basically impossible that there s live on any of the large planets in our solar system. Mars is the most likely home for aliens and it s almost certain that if anything did once live there it s not dead. But other smaller worlds like icy Europa and Saturn s similar moon Enceladus seem more promising. They appear to have plenty of water and other important materials and scientists have even detected processes on them that would suggest they could actually support some forms of alien life. More about: Europa Jupiter Aliens Reuse content