The possibility of life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be dead.
Europa — which scientists have long thought of as one of the most habitable worlds in the Solar System — contains less oxygen than previously thought, Knewz.com has learned.
The results were found via the Juno mission’s sampling of Europa’s atmosphere, according to Study Finds.
Scientists were intrigued by the possibility of life on Europa because they discovered that has an ocean below its icy surface that contains approximately twice the amount of water in the Earth’s oceans.
Other information gathered during the Galileo mission showed that Europa’s ocean floor is in contact with rock, allowing chemical water-rock interactions that produce energy, which means it would be a strong candidate for supporting life.
Also, when scientists looked through high-powered telescopes, they found that Europa appears to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere. They also found that the plumes of water frequently burst from the ocean.
Europa also is believed to have basic chemical elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur, which are all used by life on Earth.
Europa also has a source of heat that comes from Jupiter’s tidal forces.
With water, the right chemical elements and a source of heat combined, it is believed that conditions to support life are available.
However, it’s unclear if there’s been enough time for life to develop there.
Scientists also believe Mars is a prime candidate for life. However, it’s also possible that life once was present on the planet before climate change doomed the population.
As Knewz.com reported on March 7, ancient Mars was a watery land boasting flowing rivers and oceans, but new research has found that hardly any rainfall seeped into the surface — a striking difference between the Red Planet and Earth.
The scientists behind this discovery say it could help identify the conditions needed to produce rain on early Mars and inform future explorations of the plane.
Using various modeling techniques, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin found that just a minuscule amount of groundwater — averaging 0.03 millimeters — recharged the underground system, or aquifer, in Mars’ southern highlands each year.
This rate is 80 to 1,600 times lower than it is on Earth, where the Trinity and Edwards-Trinity Plateau aquifers in San Antonio, for example, receive 2.5 to 50 millimeters of recharge annually.
The low groundwater flow rates on Mars could either be due to rain washing across the Martian surface as runoff, or a lack of rainfall altogether, according to the researchers.
“The fact that the groundwater isn’t as big of a process could mean that other things are,” Eric Hiatt, a graduate student who led the new study, said in a university statement published on Wednesday, February 21. “It might magnify the importance of runoff, or it could mean that it just didn’t rain as much on Mars. But it’s just fundamentally different from how we think about [water] on Earth.”
The post Life on Jupiter Moon Is Less Likely Than Previously Thought Despite Having Right Elements, NASA Mission Finds appeared first on Knewz.
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Author: David Wetzel
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