It was revealed that the carbon dioxide detected on Jupiter’s moon Europa comes from a vast ocean beneath its icy shell, and a study conducted on Thursday using data from the James Webb Space Telescope strengthened hopes that the hidden water could harbor life. Scientists believe that a vast saltwater ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy surface, making the Moon a prime candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

But determining whether this hidden ocean has the right chemical elements to support life has been difficult. Carbon dioxide, one of the basic building blocks of life, has been found on the surface of Europa, but whether it originated in the ocean remains an open question.

To find an answer, two US-led teams of researchers used data from the Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrometer to map CO. ₂ on the European surface, by publishing their results in separate studies in the journal Science. The highest CO2 emissions occurred in a 1,800-kilometer (1,120-mile) wide area called Tara Regio, which is full of “chaos” with jagged ridges and cracks.

It’s not fully understood what exactly ravaged the land, but one theory is that warm water from the ocean rose to melt the surface ice, which then refroze into new, jagged rocks.

The first study used Webb’s data to see if CO was possible. ₂ It does not come from the ocean but from somewhere, for example, during the journey of a meteorite.

Samantha Trumbo, a planetary scientist at Cornell University and lead author of the study, told AFP they concluded that the carbon “ultimately came from underground, probably from the interior of the ocean.” However, researchers cannot rule out that carbon originates from the planet’s interior in the form of stone-like carbonate minerals, which can then decompose into CO under the influence of radiation.₂.

Table salt has also been found in Tara Reggio, making the area much more yellow than the rest of Europe’s scarred white plains, and scientists believe it may have come from the ocean.

“Now we have salt, we have CO₂ : We’re starting to learn a little more about what internal chemistry might look like,” Trumbo said.

Looking at the same Webb data, a second study also found that “carbon comes from Europe.” NASA-led researchers also hoped to find clouds of water or volatile gases escaping from the lunar surface but were unable to detect them. Two major space missions plan to take a closer look at Europa and its mysterious ocean.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter moon probe Juice launched in April, and NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is scheduled for October 2024. Juice project scientist Olivier Vitasse welcomed the two new studies and said they were “very exciting”. Juice said that when it passes by Europe twice in 2032, it will collect “a lot of new information,” including the chemistry of the surface.

Juice will also explore Jupiter’s other two moons, Ganymede and Callisto, where carbon has been discovered.

Vitasse emphasized that the goal of the Juice mission is to find out whether these icy moons, like the Europa Clipper, have the right conditions for life to exist; They will not be able to confirm whether aliens exist.

Even if a future mission finds life, anything that can survive in such harsh conditions under more than 10 kilometers of ice is expected to be very small, such as primitive microbes. Source