A 1,000-mile cloud on Mars may reveal physics never seen in nature
I keep coming back to the scale. A thousand miles is roughly a third of Mars's circumference. We're talking about a cloud that would wrap around the planet like a bandage, and we only just now have a model that says it should be there. That's the kind of detail that makes you wonder what else we've been glossing over in the datasets.
The physics is the real hook, though. Ice forming through a process nobody has caught happening in nature is the sort of thing that makes planetary scientists sharpen their pencils. If these conditions do exist on Mars, they'd almost certainly exist in the gas giants too, where the pressures and temperatures get truly alien. Mars just happens to be the laboratory we can actually reach.
I'd want to know how we verify this. The model makes predictions, presumably about temperatures or particle sizes, something a future orbiter could measure. Until then, it's beautiful math pointing at a ghost. But that's how the best discoveries tend to start.