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Washington, November 15 (IANS): According to new research, plumes of water vapor that could be vented into space by Jupiter’s moon Europa could come from within the same ice crust.
A model using images collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft outlines a process for brine, or salt-enriched water, which moves inside the moon’s shell and ultimately forms pockets of water, even more concentrated with salt. that could erupt.
“Understanding where these water plumes come from is very important to know if future explorers of Europa could have the ability to actually detect life from space without probing the ocean of Europa,” said lead author Gregor Steinbrugge. postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences.
Scientists have seen the possible plumes on Europa as a promising way to investigate the habitability of Jupiter’s icy moon, especially since they offer the opportunity to be sampled directly from spacecraft passing through them.
Information on the activity and composition of the ice shell covering Europa’s global inland ocean can help determine whether the ocean contains the ingredients needed to sustain life.
The source of the plumes is important: water from the ice crust is considered less hospitable to life than the global internal ocean because it likely lacks the energy that is a necessary ingredient for life.
In the ocean of Europe, that energy could come from hydrothermal vents on the sea floor.
The findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, could shed light on eruptions on other icy bodies in the solar system.
The researchers focused their analyzes on Manannan, a 29 km wide crater on Europa, the result of an impact with another celestial object tens of millions of years ago.
“The comet or asteroid that hit the ice shell was basically a big experiment that we’re using to build hypotheses to test,” said co-author Don Blankenship, senior research fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. (UTIG).
“Our model makes specific predictions that we can test using radar data and other instruments on the Europa Clipper,” said Blankenship, also principal investigator of the radar instrument that will fly aboard NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper spacecraft.
The model indicates that because Europa’s water partially froze following the impact, there may have been pockets of water remaining on the moon’s surface.
These pockets of salt water can move laterally through Europa’s ice shell melting adjacent regions of ice and consequently become even saltier in the process.
Missions such as Europa Clipper help contribute to the field of astrobiology, interdisciplinary research into the variables and conditions of distant worlds that could host life as we know it.
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