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Martian Polar “Spiders” Finally Explained

Martian Polar "Spiders - NASA

Ziggy played guitar, and scientists in the U.K. played with a big chunk of dry ice to try to figure out what’s behind the strange alien patterns known as the “spiders on Mars.” Those patterns, visible in satellite images of the Red Planet’s south pole, aren’t real spiders, of course; but the branching, black shapes carved into the Martian surface look creepy enough that researchers dubbed them “araneiforms” (meaning “spider-like”) after discovering the shapes more than two decades ago. Measuring up to 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) across, the gargantuan shapes don’t resemble anything on Earth. But in a new study … Read more

SPACE: The Gassy Highway That Connects Everything

nebula - pixabay

In the cold wilderness of space, galaxies huddle together around the campfires of stars and the assuring pull of supermassive black holes. Between these cozy clusters of galaxies, where empty space stretches on for millions of light-years all around, a faint highway of gas bridges the darkness. This gassy, intergalactic network is known in cosmological models as the cosmic web. Made of long filaments of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, the web is thought to contain most (more than 60%) of the gas in the universe and to directly feed all of the star-producing regions in space. At … Read more