Washington. The long-running search for extraterrestrial life just got a big boost with a new scientific study published in the journal Nature.
A group of scientists discovered that phosphorus, a key component for life, exists in the ocean below the icy surface of Enceladus, one of the moons of the planet Saturn.
The finding was based on a review of data collected by the probe Cassini of NASA with which the report published in Nature.
Cassini It began exploring Saturn and its rings and moons in 2004, before burning up in the gaseous layer of the atmosphere when its mission ended in 2017.
“This is an amazing discovery for astrobiology,” said Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the paper’s co-authors. And he added: “We have found abundant phosphorus in ice samples that bubble up from the subterranean ocean.”
unprecedented discovery
Geysers at Enceladus’ south pole shoot icy particles into space through cracks in the surface, feeding Saturn’s E ring, the faint ring outside the brighter main ones.
Scientists had already found other minerals and organic compounds in the ejected ice grains, but not phosphorus, an essential component for DNA and RNA, and also found in the bones and teeth of people, animals, and even in ocean plankton.
Simply put, life as we know it would not be possible without phosphorus.
While geochemical modeling had previously revealed that phosphorus was likely also present, and this prediction was published in a paper, it’s one thing to predict something and another to confirm it, Glein noted.
“This is the first time that this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth,” added lead author Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Germany’s Freie Universitat Berlin, in a statement from the US agency NASA.
investigations to come
The authors studied data collected by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer from Cassini and they confirmed the findings by performing laboratory experiments to show that Enceladus’ ocean has incorporated phosphorus in different water-soluble forms.
Over the past 25 years, planetary scientists have discovered that worlds with oceans under a surface layer of ice are common in our solar system.
Among them are Europa –one of Jupiter’s moons–, Titan –Saturn’s largest satellite–, and even the most distant planet in the solar system, Pluto.
While Earth-like planets—which have oceans on their surfaces—need to exist within a narrow range of their reference star to maintain temperatures suitable for life, the discovery of worlds with subsurface oceans expands the amount of habitable places that could exist in the universe.
“With this finding, it is now known that Enceladus’ ocean meets what is generally considered the most stringent requirement for life,” Glein said.
“The next step is clear: we have to go back to Enceladus to see if the habitable ocean is actually inhabited,” he stressed.
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