KILLER alien jellyfish may be lurking in the water — near Jupiter.
Experts say conditions are perfect for the fearsome floating stingers, which may be weirder and deadlier than our ones.
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Scientists studying newly formed “gashes” on icy Greenland found them eerily similar to terrain on Jupiter’s moon Europa, a world which has long interested alien hunters like Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear.
Dramatic “double ridges” around 1,000ft high and half a mile apart were first photographed across icy oceans in Europa by the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s.
It had been a mystery how they were formed, until scientists saw it happen in north-west Greenland, when ice fractured around a pocket of pressurised water.
As well as freaky jellyfish, Greenland is a fertile breeding land home to slugs, shrimps and snails.
And researchers say Europa — with its deep salty ocean under the ice and surrounded by chemical activity from its outer space neighbours — may be just as bountiful.
Professor Dustin Schroeder, of California’s University of Stanford, said: “Because it is closer to the surface — where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io — there is a possibility life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell.”
He added: “If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there is water everywhere.”
The breakthrough came by accident — with researchers studying climate change.
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Riley Culberg, a PhD student at Stanford, said it “opens up all these new possibilities for a very exciting discovery”.
