The European Space Agency has captured mysterious arachnid forms on the Red Planet

David Bowie named his famous backing band “The Spiders from Mars” in the early 1970s.

But the rock legend certainly had no idea that this was describing an actual phenomenon on the red planet.

Although not true spiders, “arachniformes” are dark cracks in the Martian soil, completely unlike anything else on Earth.

Clustered around the south pole of the planet Mars, they are known as “Mars spiders” because they have a distinctive arachnid-like shape.

New images obtained by two European Space Agency probes – Mars Express and the Trace Gas Orbiter – show these curious formations in incredible detail.

The scientific name for these features – “araneiform” – literally means “spider-shaped” in Latin.

How “Arachnids” Form

They form when the spring sun falls on layers of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) on the planet’s surface.

Sunlight causes the CO2 ice at the base of the solid layer to turn into gas, which then builds up and erupts upward through the overlying ice sheets.

The resulting jets of gas, laden with dark dust, break through layers of ice up to a meter thick before falling back and settling on the surface.

This creates characteristic dark, “spider” shaped spots between 150 and 3,000 meters in diameter that can be seen in images obtained by the spacecraft.

“The carbon dioxide jet process that forms the ‘spiders’ is a completely unearthly phenomenon,” said Dr Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.

“The process is linked to the Martian seasons and reintroduces carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. By studying these ‘spiders’ and jets we are learning more about how Mars differs from Earth,” added Meg Schwamb.

According to Dr. Schwamb, the only other body suspected of having these jets is Triton, Neptune’s moon, which is known to be geologically active.

Arachnids were first observed more than 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2021 that astronomers demonstrated how they form.

Reconstructing the Martian process in the laboratory

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have recreated the Martian process in the laboratory by dropping and lifting blocks of frozen CO2 onto stretches of gravel.

Experiments have shown that the spider patterns are sculpted by the direct transformation of dry ice from solid to gas.

Such a process occurs on Mars because the planet has an atmosphere composed mostly of CO2 – about 95%.

On Earth, by contrast, only about 0.04% of the atmosphere consists of CO2. Most of it is made up of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (20%).

According to the ESA, arachnids are particularly clustered on the outskirts of a part of Mars called Inca City.

More formally known as Angustus Labyrinthus, Inca City was discovered in 1972 by NASA’s Mariner 9 probe – the same year David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars released their landmark album.

“Life on Mars” (Life on Mars) from 1971

As arachnids were unknown 50 years ago, David Bowie drew inspiration from another source – a UFO sighting in October 1954.

A crowd of spectators in an Italian stadium thought they had witnessed a Martian ship allegedly dropping a thin filament material – believed to be spider webs.

Meanwhile, the title of one of David Bowie’s best-known hits – “Life on Mars” from 1971 – is said to have been inspired by the intense media coverage of the race between the US and the Soviet Union to reach the planet.

As for life on Mars, scientists generally think the answer is no, largely because of the lack of atmosphere and cold temperatures.

The possibility that life once existed on Mars is more promising because the planet is believed to have once been covered by an ocean, according to the Daily Mail.

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