Alien hunters uncover major clue on one of Saturn’s icy moons ‘essential’ to supporting life

 

NASA scientists have uncovered the building blocks for alien life on one of Saturn’s icy moons.

Thanks to data from the US space agency’s Cassini probe and a team of international researchers, high concentrations of phosphorus – an essential element for all biological processes on Earth – has been discovered.

An artist’s impression of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, July-December 2004 DeAgostini/ Getty Images

Saturn’s moon EnceladusGetty Images

The element was detected in ice crystals on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, beneath the ocean surface.

Phosphorous had long been a missing piece for the potential for alien life on the moon.

Researchers had already found six chemical elements considered necessary to all living things – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur.

Phosphorus was the only one absent, until now.

The Cassini spacecraft was the first to orbit Saturn, and made several passes of the gaseous planet between the years 2004 and 2017.

Data from the mission, which spanned more than a decade, was analysed by a German-led international team of scientists and published in the journal Nature.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed and built the Cassini probe, also made an announcement about the findings.

Frank Postberg, professor of planetary science at the Free University of Berlin, and leader of the international team analysing data from Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) explained that the discovery was a long time coming.

“It has been on the Nasa servers for everyone to look at for 15 years,” Postberg told The Register.

“This instrument delivered such a large amount of data that we were not able to analyse it all as the mission was active.”

After publishing a limited analysis of the data in 2017, the team received funding from the European Research Council to dig deeper into a much larger dataset.

“We didn’t look specifically for phosphates. We just thought, let’s look at a much larger dataset and much larger compositions of individualised grains,” he said.

“After more than three years, I found these nine ice grains which have this highly significant signature of phosphates.”

Contributor and professor of planetary geochemistry at Arizona State University, Mikhail Zolotov, said it paints an exciting picture for what other ice-covered planets could be hosting.

“The presence of phosphorus compounds in water is crucial for biological productivity on Earth, and is, therefore, a key factor when assessing whether distant worlds have the potential to support life,” he said in the report published in Nature.

“The new results also imply that aqueous phosphates could be abundant on other ice-covered bodies in the outer Solar System thought to have subsurface oceans, increasing the prospects of their habitability.”

But getting evidence from similar moons with oceans will take almost a decade.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also known as JUICE, is a European Space Agency mission to explore Jupiter and three of its icy moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede.

The space probe began its eight-year mission to Jupiter in April.

Nasa is also set to launch the Europa Clipper to the same planet system in October next year and expects it to arrive sometime in 2030.

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