Fresh “complex organic molecules” have been spotted coming out of a nearby moon that scientists believe could be home to alien life.
On Earth, the same molecules are part of the chemical reactions that lead to life. The new findings are yet more evidence that the moon – Enceladus, an icy world around Saturn – could be habitable, the researchers behind them say.
Scientists have long been excited about the possibility that Enceladus could be habitable, thanks in large part to its active underground ocean. In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft flew by and found evidence of that hidden ocean, and researchers have been looking to better understand it ever since.
Much of that has been done by looking at the powerful jets that spew out of cracks in the icy surface. Samples from those jets have already shown evidence of organic molecules, some of which are particularly exciting to researchers looking for life.
But some of those grains may be hundreds of years old, and therefore have been changed by the radiation they have been subjected to in space. Now, researchers have found evidence that fresh grains also include interesting chemicals.
They include many of the same molecules that had already been found in other grains, which confirms they are being made within Enceladus’s ocean. “These molecules we found in the freshly ejected material prove that the complex organic molecules Cassini detected in Saturn’s E ring are not just a product of long exposure to space, but are readily available in Enceladus’s ocean,” said study co-author Frank Postberg.
But they also found entirely new molecules – ones that, on Earth, are central to life.
“There are many possible pathways from the organic molecules we found in the Cassini data to potentially biologically relevant compounds, which enhances the likelihood that the moon is habitable,” said lead author Nozair Khawaja.
“There is much more in the data that we are currently exploring, so we are looking forward to finding out more in the near future.”
The work is described in a new paper, “Detection of Organic Compounds in Freshly Ejected Ice Grains from Enceladus’s Ocean”, published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
