Apparently, the oceans of Europa are fed with more than 100 times more oxygen than previous models suggested. According to National Geographic:

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"There's nothing saying there is life there now," said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. "But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it."

In fact, based on what we know about the Jovian moon, parts of Europa's seafloor should greatly resemble the environments around Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, said deep-sea molecular ecologist Timothy Shank.

"I'd be shocked if no life existed on Europa," said Shank, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

So how does the oxygen get into the water? It's created when charged particles from Jupiter's magnetic field hit the ice. Because the icy surface of the moon is constantly shifting and cracking due to tides created by both the Sun and Jupiter's gravitational fields, the oxygenated ice would crumble down into the oceans. Eventually, this would result in oxygen-rich waters like those in our own oceans. And these could possibly support Earth-ish life.

As of yet, no space probes from Earth have penetrated Europa's ice crust to examine the seas below, but NASA has proposed another mission to place a satellite in orbit around the moon. (No, they would not be crashing the satellite into the moon itself.)

via National Geographic

Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona will be presenting his findings on Europa today at American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. Europa's ability to support macrofauna — more complex organisms like animals — hinges on how much oxygen is contained in the suspected ocean beneath the moon's icy surface.

Greenberg believes that energetic particles from the sun are able to reach Europa's subterranean ocean despite that layer of ice. Because the surface of Europa is relatively impact-free, the ice is believed to be relatively new, about 50 million years. Based on this, Greenberg sets forth the idea that Europa is being constantly resurfaced, possibly with fresh materials, thanks to oxidizers at the planet's surface. He also estimates that, if there were, say, fish on Europa, and those fish used the same amount of oxygen as Earth fish, the moon's ocean has enough oxygen to support 6.6 billion pounds of such macrofauna.

Of course, just because Europa might be able to sustain life doesn't mean we'll find life there. But this does present the possibility that other bodies produce enough oxygen to support complex biological processes.

Europa, Jupiter's Moon, Could Support Complex Life [Discovery]

Anthony Wesley reports that he noticed the spot (seen at the top of the photo above) while observing Jupiter yesterday from his home observatory near Murrumbateman in New South Wales, Australia. Wesley, who had observed the planet two days earlier but had not seen the black spot, speculates that the spot might be an impact spot, possible the result of a comet or asteroid strike.

And, while Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy blogger and author of Death from the Skies!, initially cautioned excited armchair astronomers that the spot might be a mere weather event, he agrees that the emerging data seems to point to an actual impact.

Impact Mark on Jupiter

The scientists found the bacteria, named Herminiimonas glaciei, buried under nearly 2 miles worth of ice in Greenland. Scientists think that, since it's small even for bacteria, it survives on nutrients trapped in veins of ice and uses its flagella to move within veins to seek food.

It took the scientists almost a year to revive the bacteria and coax it to grow; once it did, it yielded small colonies of purple-brown bacteria. Although not as old as the 8 million year old bacteria resurrected from Antarctic ice in 2007, it does lead the Penn State scientists to believe that they might be able to find and re-grow bacteria from Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa:

All we can say is that because ice is the best medium to preserve nucleic acids, other organic compounds and cells, the potential for finding them in these environments is quite high because of the cold... It gives us hope that if something is there, we can locate it.

Because that turned out well for scientists in Species.

'Resurrection bug' revived after 120,000 years [New Scientist]
Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing [New Scientist]

Here's an old picture of Jupiter's famous red spot, taken by the Voyager spacecraft. According to scientists at U.C. Berkeley, the spot shrunk about one kilometer a day, between 1996 and 2006. We don't know exactly why it's shrinking - or why it changes colors - but it's a storm, and storms have a natural growth and disintegration rate, say scientists.

Meanwhile, it turns out the earliest photographed exoplanet was back in 1998 - a new technique stripped out starlight from a 1998 image to reveal a previously unknown planet orbiting the distant star HR8799. Here's a lovely artist's impression, with the actual image as an inset:

Finally, NASA is digitally restoring and cleaning up images from the lunar probes of 40 years ago, resulting in new images of the moon that include way more detail and depth:

Scientists Robin Canup and William Ward, from Boulder, CO's Southwest Research Institute, have uncovered the guilty secret of little ol' Jove: Namely, that the four moons that orbit it now had somewhere around five times more brothers and sisters that were lured to their deaths - and "eaten" - by the planet. Canup explains:

All the other moons - and there could have been 20 or more - were devoured by the planet in the early days of the solar system... There could have been five generations of moons. The current Galilean moons formed just as the inflow of material into the [debris] disc from the solar system choked off, so they escaped the fate of their unfortunate predecessors.

Canup also thinks that Jupiter may not be alone in its interest in eating moons:

We think something similar happened around Saturn, where the last generation contained one giant moon - Titan.

Amateur astronomers are now being urged to contact the authorities if they think any of our neighboring planets may be looking at us hungrily.

Cannibalistic Jupiter Ate Its Early Moons [New Scientist]

Although the images and movie - made from 540 stills taken over a two hour period - were only released just before Christmas, they were actually shot in April 2007. The reason for the delay in their release? We're saying that it's got something to do with the amount of time the NASA animators were distracted watching Wall-E.

Hubble Catches Jupiter's Largest Moon Going to the 'Dark Side' [HubbleSite]

The traditional theory has been that comets and other debris get caught in Jupiter’s gravity well and neutralized by the immense planet. But that theory has come under fire in the past year, and new simulations indicate that Jupiter’s gravitational field could be doing more harm than good:

Using a model of some 40,000 planetesimals, Kevin Grazier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues found that debris in the outer solar system initially had circular orbits and posed no threat to Earth or the other inner planets early in the history of the solar system. But the researchers showed that, through a series of close gravitational encounters with the outer planets, especially Jupiter, the objects assumed more elongated orbits and were handed down to the inner solar system.

In the simulation, Jupiter was responsible for most of the debris that entered in the inner solar system. And, dinosaur-killing comets aside, such debris may have had an impact on the development of our planet:

Not all of the bullets were destructive, Grazier emphasizes. Some of the material that had been delivered to Earth from the outer solar system contained water and other compounds that could have helped life to gain a foothold.

Sniping at Jupiter [via Science Not Fiction]

[Boston Globe via A Second Hand Conjecture]

According to Yahoo! News:

They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it's a brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA facilities. The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts. A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as little more than a sketch on a napkin that won't work.

A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.

It's depressing to think that NASA engineers are so frustrated by their current projects that they have to strike out on their own. But looked at another way, it's fantastic that they're giving NASA a run for its money. I want to see more amateur and private moon rocket projects creating a competitive market for space travel. Image by Phillip Metschan for Horizons.

NASA Engineers Work on Alternative Moon Rocket [Yahoo! News]

As you scan through the data (Hole G, section 8 is where the action is, really), you can almost imagine running your fingers along the fault. The images are side-by-side photos, taken from opposite sides of the drill cores. Admittedly, they're not as sexy as a lot of the eye candy we usually link to. But they're beautiful in the same way images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slamming into Jupiter in 1994 were beautiful. Looking at them, it's hard to ignore that little voice inside saying "wow, that could happen to us."

Source: Earthscope.org via Discovery News

According to Marcus, Jupiter's equatorial regions are getting warmer and the South Pole appears to be cooling. The difference in temperature between the two parts of the planet is causing increased cloud convection and turbulence — meaning more storms.

Red Spot III: Rise of the Clouds may be short-lived, though. Astronomers expect that it will meet up with the Great Red Spot by August, when it could be consumed by the much more massive, ancient raging storm.

Source: HubbleSite.org via Space Telescope Science Institute

I love this picture because I'm just finishing up John Varley's new novel Rolling Thunder (due out in March), which is partly set on Europa. The main character has a view of Jupiter from her window in the habitat where she lives on Europa. Image via NASA.

And finally, here's a nice image for getting some perspective on where the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are relative to the rest of the solar system. Image via NASA.

Top image via Calvin J. Hamilton.

"One of the interesting things we've discovered about this is that when you try to recreate this in the lab, it's highly, highly unstable," Marcus told Discovery News. "It just literally rips itself to shreds."

Yet the real Giant Red Spot is one of the most stable features visible on Jupiter. So what gives?

"It's telling us something about Jupiter," said Marcus. "There must be something special about Jupiter's atmosphere that makes it different."

Red Spot Offers Window Into Jupiter [Discovery News]

Space.com reports:

Io's volcanoes spew out sulfur dioxide, which is a gas that stinks of freshly lit matches and almost entirely makes up the moon's atmosphere. As Io rotates from daylight into darkness, chilling the yellowish rock down to -226 F (-143 C), the gas freezes into a solid, much like dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide gas). About 1 to 3 percent of Io's dayside atmosphere, it turns out, is created by the volcanoes. The rest is generated from frozen sulfur dioxide turning directly into gas which, over eons, has accumulated on Io's surface.

New Horizon also got a cool image of Io's "aurora," which is caused by all that volcanic gas getting hurled into the air. Looks awesome.