A moon around Saturn could be even more hospitable to alien life than we thought, scientists have said.
Heat is coming out of the top of the icy world, researchers have found in a major new study. That suggests that Enceladus has the long-term stability that would be needed for it to support life.
Researchers have long suggested that Enceladus may be the most likely place to find alien life within our own solar system. Underneath its icy crust is believed to be a vast, salty ocean – and the fact it has liquid water as well as heat and the right chemicals have long excited scientists.
But researchers have worried that the ocean might not be able to support life if the environment around it is not stable enough. If its energy losses and gains are not kept in a stable balance, its surface activity could stop entirely – and if it is not losing enough, the ocean activity could become too much.
Researchers previously thought that only the south pole of Enceladus was engaged in that activity, emitting heat in dramatic plumes of water ice and vapour. The north pole was thought to be inactive.
New research using data from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft, however, shows that energy appears to be leaking out from the ocean at the north pole, too.
What’s more, when scientists estimated the heat loss through that process and added it to that from the south pole, they found that it was roughly matched with our predictions of how much heat is being input into the system. Enceladus heats up as it is stretched and squeezed by its orbit – but that seems to be balanced by heat loss.
That suggests that the world could be stable enough to support life, according to the researchers behind it.
Scientists now hope to explore Enceladus further and understand how long its ocean has existed – and whether that is long enough to allow life to develop.
The work is reported in a new paper, ‘Endogenic heat at Enceladus’ north pole’, published in the journal Science Advances.
