A new ocean has been discovered, that too on one of jupiter's moons, opening up the possibility of extraterrestrial life
LOOKING, at the images clicked
by spacecraft Galileo's
closest flyby of Europa on
February 20, 1997, scientists
say they are confident that
the Jovian moon has a thin
ice crust covering either
liquid water or slush. The
tantalising new images put
forward the possibility that
the slushy concoction of
chemicals in this region
could nurture life.
"How often is an ocean
discovered? The last one
was the Pacific by Balboa
and that was 500 years
ago," said Richard Terrile,
a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in
Pasadena, California.
A small pocket of water may have
been found on the moon. And Mars
once upon a time had rivers. But if most
of Europa's ice crust is melted, the
immense volume of water there could
be more than that in all the Earth's
oceans combined.
Scientists believe that such an ocean
is likely to contain a slushy cocktail of
chemicals and that there is a heat source
causing the icebergs and other disruptions on Europa's surface. The slushy
cocktail and a heat source are two key
elements that are essential for life to
exist. Europa has no atmosphere, so for
life to exist there it would have to be in
the sub-surface ocean.
Recent discoveries of microbial life deep within the
Earth's oceans and in other
unexpectedly extreme environments on our planet have
bolstered the theory that if
an ocean exists on icy
Europa, it would be one of
the two most promising
places in the solar system to
search for alien organisms - Mars being the other.
The issue of when the
water flowed and whether
it is frozen solid now is
much more controversial.
Planetary scientist Clark
Chapman of the Southwest
Research Institute, US, was
among those asserting that
Europa's surface is very young, about a few million
years or less, and constantly changing
today. But Michael Carr of the US
geological survey and his colleagues
argue that the surface is probably closer
to a billion years old.
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