The interior ocean in Jupiter’s moon Europa may be able to sustain life, NASA scientists believe.
Their work is based on computer simulations of the reservoirs below the ice-shell surface of Europa, one of the largest moons in the Solar System.
Calculations by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California indicate this global ocean could have been formed by breakdown of minerals that contain water.
Their work, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was presented at the virtual 2020 Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.
The researchers developed their model using data from NASA’s Galileo mission and the Hubble Space Telescope, which was built by NASA and the European Space Agency.
In 2016, Hubble uncovered evidence of water vapour plumes erupting from the surface.
Findings suggest ocean worlds such as Europa can be formed by metamorphism, a change in the composition or structure of rocks by heat, pressure, or other natural phenomenon.
“We think Europa’s ocean may have been habitable early when it formed because our models show that the ocean’s composition may have been only mildly acidic, containing carbon dioxide and some sulfate salts,” said planetary scientist Mohit Melwani Daswani of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the study’s leader.
“A word of caution,” Melwani Daswani said. “If a place is habitable, it does not mean that it is actually inhabited, just that the conditions could allow for the survival of some extremely hardy forms of life that we know of on Earth.”
