San Fransisco (Reuters) : Scientist looking for possible alien life are focusing on Jupiter’s moon Europa, where huge cracks in the surface indicate that a massive liquid ocean may be sloshing under an icy crust.
“I don’t know if there are organisms (on Europa), but it’s a great environment to live in”, Richard Greenberg of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona-Tucson said on Thursday.
Scientist have posited the possibility of life on Europa before. But Greenberg told reporters at a meeting of the American Geophysical union here on Thursday that new evidence from the moon, including photographs returned only last week from the Galileo spacecraft, show a “clement and comfortable” world where micro-organisms may well have taken hold.
“it really is an environment very conductive to life”, he said’
Key to the envolving theory of possible life on Europa is the notion that the moon is not only covered by ocean, but that is also experiences tides which—-interacting with the icy surface crust—-could generate friction and heat enough to sustain life.
Scientist are fairly certain that Europa, which is about the size of our moo, has a 100 mile (160 km) thick layer of water which, at least on the surface where temperatures hover around minus 170 degrees Celcius (minus 274 F), is ice.
But if liquid exist beneath the surface than Jupiter, which is 300 times a massive as the earth, would exert an anormous tidal pull.
Greenberg said that this theory was gaining sterngth as new photographs show Europa to be covered by a network of misterious surface cracks, known as “cycloids”, which may have been caused by tidal forces in the partially frozen ocean.
Stressed by the ebb and flow of the tides, cracks open and close, pushing water and partially-frozen slush to the surface, that scientist believe.
“As aresult of tides, liquid water regularly bathed crystal cracks and surfaces with heat and whatever nutrients are included in the oceanic chemistry, creating a variety of potentialy habitablecrystal environments”, Greenberg said in his report.
“Moreover, these various processes in the crust make life possible in the ocean as well, because if the ocean were not regularly exposed to oxidants in the surface, oceanic life would suffocate”, he added.
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