Hundreds of 'black spiders’ pictured scattered across Mars in eerie satellite images
Are there really creepy crawlies on the surface of Mars?
If you were looking forward to space exploration as a way of ridding yourself of some of Earth's less delightful elements, you might want to think again.
Well, that is if you're not a fan of creepy crawlies - because new images have found signs of 'spiders' on the surface of Mars.
And they really do look like clusters of spiders in the images, taken by the CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System) instrument aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
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OK, OK, they're not actually real-life arachnids, like the ones you find under rocks at the park. Instead, they're just dubbed spiders by scientists because of how they look - but are actually small, dark features that 'form when spring sunshine falls on layers of carbon dioxide deposited over the dark winter months', the ESA says.
What happens is the sunlight causes the carbon dioxide ice to turn into gas, which builds up and explodes through the ice on top of it. When the weather warms up during the Martian spring, these gas bubbles burst free and bring with it a whole lot of dark materials from the depths it came from - exploding up through the cracks as tall fountains or geysers.
The gas - mixed with all this dark material - then fall back onto the surface, creating the dark spots we see in the image, with its unusual spider-shaped pattern.
And the 'spiders' aren't just caused by the gas explosions - some of them are under the surface of ice, threatening to break through at any moment.
A whole cluster of these 'spiders' were pictured nearby to a Martian area called Inca City - called that because its 'linear, almost geometric network of ridges' is 'reminiscent of Inca ruins', the ESA says. Inca City was discovered back in 1972, and is formally known as Angustus Labyrinthus.
According to the ESA, astronomers are still unsure how Inca City was actually formed. There are a couple of theories floating around - perhaps it was due to sand dunes that turned to stone over time, or it could be that magma or sand is bubbling through layers of rock. A third hypothesis is that these ridges are actually 'eskers', which tend to be deposited by glacial meltwater flowing through tunnels around glaciers.
It just goes to show that there's still so much we don't know about the vast expanse of the universe - and while things might look like something we're used to seeing here on Earth, the reality couldn't be more different.