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 published March 19 in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists successfully recreated a shrunken-down version of the spiders in their lab, using a slab of carbon dioxide ice (also called dry ice) and a machine that simulates the Martian atmosphere. When the cold ice made contact with a much-warmer bed of Mars-like sediment, part of the ice instantly transformed from a solid to a gas (a process called sublimation), forming spidery cracks where the escaping gas pushed through the ice.