There are few places in our planetary group where scientists believe life could be found, and one of those places is the moon Europa, which is part of the system of natural satellites of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.
Europa is very far from the Sun: more than five times the distance between Earth and the star around which we rotate.
This moon is a fascinating world. It is a cosmic body a little smaller in size than the Earth’s Moon, but it is nevertheless believed that it could accommodate more water than our planet, Earth, according to Western space agencies: the European ESA and NASA. US.
Water is a key ingredient for life. In Europe it is frozen on its surface, forming a layer as hard as rock, and is found in a liquid state below that frozen crust.
The surface of Europa appears to be scratched and marked with reddish-brown “scars,” which rake the crust in a criss-cross pattern and are etched into a layer of water ice, which is thought to be kilometers thick and cover a vast underground ocean, potentially habitable by creatures adapted to that extreme environment.
The reddish “scars” on this bluish-white moon are apparently a series of long cracks in its icy surface, believed to arise when the gravitational force of giant Jupiter “pulls” on Europa, fracturing the ice, according to the THAT.
Scientists from Western space agencies are eager to explore beneath the thick ice cover of Europa, a moon for which images and scientific data captured by NASA’s Galilee probe in the 1990s are available.
A FROZEN OCEAN WORLD.
In fact, these space organizations plan to launch two probes in the current decade that will approach Europa and allow them to investigate different aspects of the icy moon using their sensors and scientific instruments.
These are the Juice mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), which will investigate Jupiter and its lunar system, and the Europa Clipper mission, of the American NASA, which will focus exclusively on studying the Jovian satellite (Jupiter is named after the god of Roman mythology, also called ‘Jove’).
As the time for those direct explorations approaches, scientists are investigating Europa indirectly, searching for and analyzing evidence of activity emanating from beneath the icy crust.
In this way they hope to reveal the characteristics of this partially frozen ocean world, and find out if its liquid part could harbor conditions compatible with life.
In 2020, a study, led by ESA researcher Hans Huybrighs and based on studies of the magnetic fields of the space region where Europa is located carried out by the Galileo probe, revealed that a disturbance detected in Europa’s thin and tenuous atmosphere was due possibly a column or plume of water vapor that shot into space.
If the existence of these plumes of vapor is confirmed, crossing the icy layer of the Jovian moon, they would offer a possible way to access and characterize the contents of Europa’s vast, and for now inaccessible and mysterious underground ocean, to reveal some of its secrets. , according to the ESA.
More recently in 2022, a team of researchers from Stanford University (www.stanford.edu) in the US has proposed an explanation for the formation of some of Europa’s features, which bode well for the search for life. alien in that distant and cold world.
A MOON WHERE THERE COULD BE LIFE.
Europa is a leading candidate for finding life in our solar system, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades, according to Stanford.
But it is enclosed by an icy layer that could be kilometers or tens of kilometers thick, which makes it very difficult to explore that ocean environment and take samples, they point out. Now, the evidence analyzed by scientists from this prestigious university reveals that the ice sheet could be a dynamic system, instead of just a barrier, and that potentially habitable environments for some form of life could exist on the outside of the Jovian moon. life.
Stanford research has found in the ice of the moon Europa some characteristics analogous to those of the ice of Greenland, a huge Danish island located between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans and which has most of its surface frozen.
From the data captured in the Greenland ice by a system called “penetrating radar” it is clear that the frozen layer that covers Europe could have formations similar to those on the Danish island: “double ridges”, below which There are shallow pockets of water.
The known characteristics of the Jovian moon, and the alleged existence of “double ridge” formations on its surface, lead us to think that in its ice sheet there could also be a large number of water pockets similar to those of Greenland, which are a environment potentially suitable for life.
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