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As the data being transmitted by the New Horizons space probe continues to flow back to Earth, scientists poring over the information continue to find new surprises, including possible evidence that Pluto has a subsurface ocean of liquid water. Scans of the western lobe of the dwarf planet’s "heart" show that, for some unknown reason, there is extra mass in the region. This came as a surprise to the researchers: the area, dubbed Sputnik Planum, is thought to have been formed by a meteor impact, meaning that it should have negative mass, as one would assume from an impact crater.
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NASA has announced that it has found evidence of water plumes erupting from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, hinting that the Jovian moon’s subsurface oceans — oceans that scientists consider to be a good candidate as a host for extraterrestrial life — may be more accessible than what was once thought.
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The more we study it, the universe continues to become curiouser and curiouser, and the last few weeks have been no exception: X marks the center of the galaxy; one of Saturn’s rings was broken; and NASA plans to destroy Juno space probe — to protect aliens?

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Toronto have verified the existence of an extremely large X-shaped arrangement of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a structure that was hinted at by previous observations of other galaxies and computer models. From Earth’s point of view, the galaxy’s central bulge of millions of stars looks like a peanut shape, with the X-structure being an integral part of this.
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Due to the limitations presented by our culture’s fledgling space travel technology, simply going to a planet orbiting another star isn’t a practical way of determining whether or not there’s any life there. Instead, researchers are using indirect methods of looking for extra-solar life, such as the conditions presented by the planet’s host star in relation to it’s orbit, the presence of an atmosphere, temperature, and so on. Now, a research team has devised a list of signature gases that astronomers can look for, that might be produced when a potential extraterrestrial organism metabolizes.
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