Let it snow

5 places in the Solar System where it snows

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

by JoAnna Wendel
Updated: 
Originally Published: 

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As winter approaches, visions of snowy hills, blanketed streets, and icy ponds may start creeping into your dreams.

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There’s nothing quite like that first snowy morning — when Earth feels quieter and more peaceful.

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But Earth isn’t the only place in the solar system with snow.

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sped by Pluto in 2015, it snapped vistas of snow-capped mountains.

NASA

Mars’s south pole is covered in water ice glaciers, but it snows carbon dioxide.

NASA

On Saturn’s moon Enceladus, plumes of water vapor spew into space at its south pole. Some of that vapor condenses and falls back to the surface as snow.

NASA

Incredibly, even the Solar System’s most volcanically active world, Jupiter’s moon Io, gets a snow day. It snows sulfur on Io, created as the gas is spewed into the atmosphere by volcanoes, cools, and then condenses.

NASA

On Saturn’s Moon Titan, huge clouds of methane condense in the atmosphere and fall to the ground as either rain or snow.

NASA

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