NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected homemade carbon dioxide on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa; This raises the possibility that the cold-water world could harbor life.

Slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, Europa is covered by a shell of water ice surrounding a salty ocean. The presence of liquid water makes Europa an intriguing object of study for scientists interested in extraterrestrial life. But until now, no one has shown that the ocean contains the right molecules, especially carbon, the basic building block of life on Earth.

The new JWST finding is intriguing because the carbon dioxide does not appear to be carried by a meteorite or asteroid and appears to be in a geologically young region of the moon called Tara Regio, suggesting the gas may have formed inside the moon. .

“Preliminary Hubble Space Telescope observations indicate the presence of ocean salt in the Tara region,” said planetary scientist Samantha Trumbo of Cornell University. “We now see that carbon dioxide is also quite concentrated here. We think this means the carbon is probably coming from the inland ocean.”

Trumbo is the lead author of one of two papers on new observations of Europa published in the journal Science. Thanks to the power of JWST, researchers needed only a few minutes from the observatory to discern new details about Europa. Source