Aurora From Space Station


There is a bizarre rocky landscape, well hidden from our prying eyes, in the secretive shadows under the oceans of our Earth. Here, in this strange and alien domain, it is always as dark as midnight. Thin, tall towers of craggy rock emit billows of black smoke from their peaks, while all around the towers stand a weird, wavy multitude of red-and-white, tube-like organisms--that have no eyes, no intestines, and no mouth. These 3-foot-long tubeworms derive their energy from Earth itself, and not from the light of our nearby Sun--a feat that most biologists did not believe possible until these wormish creatures were discovered back in 2001. The extremely hot, superheated black water, billowing out from the hydrothermal vents erupting on Earth's seafloor, provides high-energy chemicals that sustain the tubeworms, as well as other weird organisms that apparently thrive in this very improbable habitat. "From what we know about cloud formation on Titan, we can say that such methane clouds in this area and in this time of year are not physically possible. The convective methane clouds that can develop in this area and during this period of time would contain huge droplets and must be at a very high altitude--much higher than the 6 miles that modeling tells us the new features are located," Dr. Rodriguez explained in the September 24, 2018 JPL Press Release. On March 27, 2012, Cassini made its closest flyby yet over Enceladus's "tiger stripes". In a string of enticingly close passes over the dazzling moon, the spacecraft saw more hints that watery jets may be shooting out into Space from an immense subsurface sea. The jets, tearing through cracks in the moon's icy crust, could lead back to a zone harboring living tidbits.