With a bright and broken water ice shell, which cracks and crosses with many linear faults, Jupiter Europa's moon is an amazing world that is thought to contain a global ocean of liquid water beneath its strange surface of ice. Europa is the sixth largest moon in our Solar System, but despite its small size, this enchanting ice world has sung sirens to astronomers because where liquid water exists, life as we know it might also exist. Europa is believed to contain large amounts of liquid water beneath its surface shell, along with geological activity that allows the exchange of chemicals from the surface with an ocean of water flowing under its impenetrable ice crust. For this reason, Europa is considered the most promising world in our Solar System to look for signs of life today as we know it. In May 2016, astronomers announced that a new NASA study that modeled conditions in the hidden oceans of Europa showed that the balance needed from chemical energy for life was indeed there - even if the small world moon did not have volcanic hydrothermal activity.
The question of whether this Jupiter's ice moon, the largest planet of our Solar System, has the raw sulfur analyzer indonesia materials and chemical energy needed in the proportions needed to support living organisms, is currently a topic of intense scientific interest and debate. The answer to this tantalizing mystery may depend on whether Europa has an environment where chemicals are matched in the proportions needed to drive biological processes. Life on our own planet exploits a very valuable niche.
In the new study, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, compared Europa's potential for making hydrogen and oxygen with our Earth - through processes that do not directly involve volcanism. The balance between these two elements is an important indicator of the energy available for life to be exploited. The research found that the amount would be proportional in scale; in both worlds, oxygen production is about 10 times higher than hydrogen production.
The new study focuses on ways in which the rocky interior of Europa may be far more complicated, and potentially more Earth-like, than scientists have speculated in general, according to Dr. Steve Vance, a planetary scientist at JPL and lead author of the study.
"We are studying foreign oceans using methods developed to understand the movement of energy and nutrition in the Earth's own system. The rotation of oxygen and hydrogen in European oceans will be a major driver for the chemistry of the European oceans and whatever life there is, just as there is on Earth," Dr. Vance explained in the JPL Press Release 17 May 2016.
Finally, Dr. Vance and his team wanted to understand the cycles of other major elements of life that hover in distant oceans and hidden oceans: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
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