The discovery of water clouds inside Jupiter’s Great Red Spot means that scientists ‘can’t rule out’ the existence of alien life on the gas giant.
Observations made by ground-based satellites have detected chemical signatures of water deep beneath the swirling surface.
The Great Red Spot is a gigantic storm, twice the size of Earth, that has been raging for hundreds of years. Humans only started observing it in 1830.
‘Jupiter is a gas giant that contains more than twice the mass of all of our other planets combined,’ explained Máté Ádámkovics, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson University in South Carolina, USA.
‘And though 99 percent of Jupiter’s atmosphere is composed of hydrogen and helium, even solar fractions of water on a planet this massive would add up to a lot of water – many times more water than we have here on Earth,’ he said.
Because of the presence of water in the atmosphere, it’s impossible to rule out that some form of life, however microscopic, might have evolved to live there.
‘Where there’s the potential for liquid water, the possibility of life cannot be completely ruled out, Ádámkovics said.
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