there are spiders on Mars! European Space Agency's spacecrafts snap...

Although not actual spiders, 'araneiforms' are dark cracks in the Martian soil. READ MORE: Mars has David Bowie famously christened his backing band 'The Spiders from Mars ' in the early 1970s.

New images from two European Space Agency probes – the Mars Express and the Trace Gas Orbiter – show the curious formations in incredible detail. They have been proposed to form in spring, when sunlight passes through and heats a seasonal layer of CO2 ice. This creates characteristic 'spider-shaped' dark spots of between 150 feet and 3,000 feet across that can be seen in space probe images.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, with a 'near-dead' dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. This image of the planet was acquired using the Visual Monitoring Camera on ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, November 10, 2023 Experiments showed that the spider patterns are carved by the direct conversion of dry ice from solid to gas, known as 'sublimation'.

More formally known as Angustus Labyrinthus, Inca City was discovered in 1972 by NASA's Mariner 9 probe – the same year Bowie and the Spiders from Mars released their landmark album. As araneiforms were not known about 50 years ago, Bowie actually took inspiration from another source – a UFO sighting in October 1954.

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