Jupiter’s icy moon Europe Scientists say they experienced enough heat to produce a layered inland and underground ocean. The finding could help researchers learn about the potential for life on other worlds.
Mohit Melwani Daswani, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, led a team that analyzed the data collected by the Galileo mission. Starting in the mid-1990s, Galileo studied Jupiter and its moons for about eight years and discovered that a global ocean of liquid water is likely to exist below Europe’s icy surface.
Daswani’s team discovered that a layering phenomenon called differentiation may be the reason why Europe has its ocean. Daswani announced her findings on Wednesday (June 24) during a virtual presentation Goldschmidt Conference, an annual conference on geochemistry and related fields. The work has not yet been peer reviewed.
Europe has some key characteristics suspected of being necessary for a livable world, Daswani told Space.com in an interview. Daswani’s findings could have implications for the study of habitability on other worlds, even those beyond the realm of our sun. The team hopes that upcoming missions like NASA’s Europa ClipperDue to the launch later this decade, it will help determine if the icy moon is habitable.
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Daswani’s team found evidence for a promising signal: Europe’s ocean could have originated from the decomposition of water-containing minerals in the interior of Europe. That process may have occurred during differentiation, during which Europe was “separated into distinct layers, something like an onion, “he said.
“The interior of Europe is much denser than the outer layers,” said Daswani. “That already tells us a really important property of the history and geology of Europe: it must have experienced great heat for that process of differentiation to occur.” That high heat from the past also increases the odds that Europe is currently hot enough to hide a liquid ocean.
The source of that heat could be radioactive decay inside the moon, or a phenomenon called tidal dissipation caused by interactions with Jupiter and big moons nearby, or one of the two, said Daswani. With liquid oceans, Europe has an important characteristic for maintaining life.
This process of differentiation occurred in the key habitable world, Earth, as well as on Mars. “Europe was big enough to experience that too,” said Daswani.
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There is no direct connection between differentiation and habitability, but Daswani said this process of decomposing minerals through heat to produce oceans may not be unique to Europe. “Large ocean worlds that experience this heat inland may have a mechanism for building oceans,” said Daswani. By looking at the processes that led minerals to release water in Europe, scientists could discover whether an exoplanet could harbor a liquid ocean, because this may be a common form of ocean formation on the worlds of our solar system and beyond.
There is a world in the solar system with an ocean that does not seem so promising for life, Daswani said. “The exception to this would be [Saturn’s moon] Enceladus … [it] it is a much smaller body than Europe and could not have experienced such high heat, and we know this because the density of Enceladus is much lower than the density of Europe. The ocean must have been created by a different process. “
But the neighbor of Europe Ganymede it could also have a different interior and it could be similar to Europe in that sense.
Of course, life needs more than just water to exist. “Life is chemical. Life is powered by chemistry, which is about the flow of electrons,” Steve Mojzsis, a geologist at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the new research, told Space.com in an interview. Electron exchange produces energy, and it is this type of energy that is used for metabolism.
In the future, Daswani wants to investigate whether or not there is enough energy for life to exist in the ocean of Europe.
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