Carbon dioxide detected on Jupiter’s moon Europa comes from a vast ocean beneath its icy crust, research using data from the James Webb Space Telescope showed Thursday, potentially raising hopes that 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 it has been difficult to determine whether this hidden ocean contains the chemical elements necessary to support life.

Carbon dioxide, one of the basic building blocks of life, has been detected on Europa’s surface, but whether it rises from the ocean below remains an open question. In an effort to find an answer, two US-led teams of researchers mapped Europa’s surface CO2 using data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrometer and published their findings in separate studies in the journal Science.

The most CO2 was observed in the 1,800-kilometer (1,120-mile) wide Tara Reggio region, which has many “chaos areas” with jagged ridges and cracks.

It’s unclear exactly what caused the damage to the land, but one theory is that warm water from the ocean melts the surface ice, which then refreezes to form new, jagged rocks. The first study used data from James Webb to see if the CO2 was coming from somewhere other than the ocean below (such as a meteor strike).

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.”

But researchers cannot rule out that carbon comes out of the bowels of the planet in the form of rock-like carbonate minerals, which can then decompose into CO2 under the influence of radiation. Table salt has also been found in the Tara region, making it significantly more yellow than the rest of Europe’s stark 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 bit more about what the 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 detect clouds of water or volatile gases emerging from the lunar surface but were unable to detect any.

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 two other Jupiter 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 to support life; 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