The carbon dioxide detected on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, comes from an ocean beneath its thick layer of ice, according to data from the James Webb telescope that reinforces hopes that this water can support life.
Scientists are convinced that a vast saltwater ocean lies dozens of kilometers beneath Europa’s icy surface, making this moon an ideal candidate to host extraterrestrial life in our solar system.
Despite data from the James Webb Space Telescope, it is difficult to determine whether this hidden ocean contains the chemical elements necessary for life to arise.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), which together with liquid water is one of the fundamental elements of this process, had already been detected on the surface of Europa, without its origin being determined.
For the discovery, two teams of North American researchers used data from the James Webb Space Telescope, collected through its infrared observation instrument.
Scientists have thus managed to map the surface of the moon Europa, according to two studies published this Thursday in the journal Science.
The largest amount of CO2 was found in an area 1,800 kilometers wide called Tara Regio.
The first study used data from the James Webb telescope to determine whether the CO2 could come from somewhere else, such as a meteorite.
The conclusion is that the carbon, “ultimately, comes from the interior, probably from the internal ocean of the Moon,” Samantha Trumbo, a planetary scientist at the American Cornell University and lead author of the study, explained to AFP.
In the Taga Regio area, scientists also detected the equivalent of table salt, making this area yellower than the rest of the white plains of Jupiter’s moon, and this element may also have arisen from the ocean .
“Now we have CO2, salt: we are beginning to know a little more about the internal chemistry” of Europe, the scientist highlighted.
Using the same data as James Webb, the second study also concludes that “carbon comes from within Europe.”
Europa, one of Jupiter’s three icy moons, is the target of two major space missions that must determine whether its mysterious ocean is conducive to the emergence of life.
The Juice probe of ESA, the European space agency, was launched last April and NASA’s Europa Clipper is expected to take off in October 2024.
It will take eight years to reach Jupiter, the giant of the solar system, and its large moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), discovered by Galileo in 1610.
Olivier Witasse, scientific director of ESA’s Juice project, considers the James Webb telescope analyzes to be “extremely interesting.”
“It allows us to learn more about this ocean, located deep under the ice and therefore quite inaccessible in the current state of space exploration,” he told AFP.
The Juice probe will also survey Ganymede, which also has a subglacial ocean and where carbon has been detected.
These two missions will not be able to directly find extraterrestrial life, but only identify the conditions conducive to its appearance, highlighted Olivier Witasse, recalling that, in such an extreme environment, they could only be primitive life forms, such as bacteria.
Source: TSF
