NASA had announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had captured ‘surprising evidence of activity’ on Europa – which made many think that aliens might have been found.
The agency has looked to calm speculation on social media and elsewhere that a press conference on Monday will put a light on the discovery of life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
Experts have suggested that Europa could be the best place in the solar system to find life – and so speculation immediately jumped to the fact that the activity was aliens. That excitement flew around social media and eventually made it into the papers, some of which questioned whether Nasa was about to announce that it had found life on the moon.
Finally the space agency posted a tweet of its own that will come as a disappointment for anyone hoping to meet Europa’s aliens. It read: “Monday, we’ll announce new findings from Jupiter’s moon Europa. Spoiler alert: NOT aliens.”
The 1,900-mile-wide moon is thought to hold two to three times as much water as all the Earth’s oceans. Europa’s ocean is believed to be salty, and warmed by powerful tidal forces generated by Jupiter’s gravity so that it remains unfrozen.