Enigmatic traces of water in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter came from a comet that crashed into the giant planet in 1994, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.
Astronomers have been debating the water for 15 years after telltale molecules were spotted by an infrared telescope.
Some argued the water brewed up from lower levels of the gassy planet, but others said it could not have crossed a cold barrier separating the stratosphere from the cloud level below.
ESA’s deep-space Her-schel telescope has now found that most of the water is concentrated in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere.
The collisions left dark scars in Jupiter’s roiling atmosphere that persisted for weeks.
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3,000-YEAR-OLD SKELETONS FOUND IN INDONESIA
Melbourne: Archaeologists have discovered remains of 66 humans dating back to 3,000 years in a cave in Sumatra island of Indonesia.
The team which excavated the Harimau or Tiger Cave also found the first example of rock art in Sumatra besides the discovery of 66 human burials.
“Sixty-six is very strange,” said Truman Simanjuntak from Jakarta-based National Research and Development Center for Archaeology, adding that he and his colleagues have never found such a big quantity of burials.
“It means that this cave was occupied intensely by humans and they continued to occupy it for a very, very long time,” he said.
The findings shed new light on the complex cultural behaviours of Indonesia’s first farming communities, who lived in the limestone caves of Harimau and used them as a burial place. — PTI