1/20/2024 0 Comments Life as we know it vodlocker![]() ![]() However, the new study "overturns the findings from my past model," Manasvi Lingam, who led the 2018 research but was not part of the new study, told. A 2018 study that modeled phosphorus concentrations on the moon concluded that the crucial element would be depleted in the moon's oceans and thus unavailable for potential life. Scientists have been split on the presence of phosphorus in Enceladus. ![]() "I admit phosphate is probably the best thing we could have found, but we never looked for it specifically." "It was a tantalizing moment when I first realized that these spectra very likely show phosphates," Postberg said, adding that his team was agnostic while analyzing the data. While browsing through measurements of over 300 ice grains sampled by the Cassini spacecraft and the data reproduced in the lab for validation purposes, the team behind the new study spotted nine grains that had a clear fingerprint of orthophosphate, which is the only form of phosphorus that living organisms can absorb and is used by them for growth. "But, we know that Enceladus's plume feeds the E ring. "The only thing that isn't so direct is that phosphate salts were found in Saturn's E ring, not in the plume itself," Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist and geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas who is one of the authors of the new study, told. While previous research based on computer models concluded there might be phosphorus on Enceladus, this is the first time that the crucial ingredient has been spotted directly in material from Enceladus' geysers. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) It was these particles that hit Cassini's instruments during its flybys.Ī sequence of images of Saturn's moon Enceladus taken by the Cassini mission. ![]() While most of the plume material falls back as snow on the moon's surface, some of it also feeds Saturn's E ring, a tenuous halo of tiny ice particles. Pressurized water then squirts through cracks in the ice crust, blasting into space at speeds of 79 gallons (360 liters) per second, which is fast enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just a couple hours. These powerful water jets are likely triggered as the gravity of the gas giant Saturn's squeezes the moon, heating up its rocky interior. It is just a habitability indicator, and a very good and important one," he added.įor the past five years, Postberg and his colleagues have been studying data collected by Cassini back in 2008, when the spacecraft flew through and "tasted" the water geysers that Enceladus spews into space. "We have just found signs of something that indicates that life could form there pretty good. "We didn't find life or even something that was created by life," Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany who led the research, told. ![]()
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