Space organization finds that hydrogen erupts out of underground ocean on Enceladus, meaning it has the water, chemistry and energy sources life requires

A tiny moon of Saturn has most of the conditions necessary for life, Nasa announced on Thursday, unveiling a discovery from an underground ocean that makes the world a leading candidate for organisms as humans know them.

Scientists stressed that the discovery on a moon named Enceladus is not evidence that life has in fact developed on another world, but they have managed to establish the existence of the water, chemistry and energy sources that are necessary for it.

“We now know that Enceladus has almost all of the ingredients that you need to support life as we know it on Earth,” said Linda Spilker, a project scientist who said the finding essentially confirmed vents on the moon’s seafloor.

Chris Glein, another scientist involved in the project, said the discovery showed that the moon’s ocean contained a potential chemical feast for microbes. “We have made the first calorie count on an alien ocean,” he said.

Beneath its frozen surface, Enceladus has a saltwater ocean, and the hydrogen – produced in a reaction between heated water and rocks – indicates that the moon has active energy sources, possibly akin to the undersea vents that teem with life on planet Earth.

“We don’t know whether there’s life out there yet but right now we’re making a lot of progress,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa’s associate administrator.

The spacecraft Cassini detected the hydrogen in the fall of 2015, when it flew through a plume of vapor that had been spewed out through cracks in the moon’s icy surface. The flyby discovered water, ice, traces of methane, salts and other carbon compounds, the researchers said.

Their findings were revealed at a Nasa briefing on Thursday and in a paper published in the journal Science.

Cassini also found silicates and hydrogen, meaning there are energy sources beneath the moon’s surface, and the chemicals microbes are known to consume on Earth.

“This finding does not mean that life exists there, but it makes life more plausible and potentially quite abundant if a fraction of the hydrogen is used to drive biology,” said Jeffrey Kargel, a professor at the University of Arizona.

Andrew Coates, a professor of physics at University College London, added: “This distant moon now joins Mars and Europa as the best potential locations for life beyond Earth in our solar system.”

Nasa has found liquid water on Mars, but solar winds have for eons stripped away its atmosphere and the planet has dried out into its current irradiated state. Like Enceladus, Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has an icy crust and an underground ocean. Nasa hopes to send a probe to the moon in the 2020s, complete with instruments to detect heat and penetrate ice in search of undersea vents. On Thursday the researchers also announced new evidence of plumes around Europa, and of one hot spot in particular on the moon.

Forming shapes like chimneys and geysers, Earth’s hydrothermal vents gush clouds of heated chemicals in the places that magma and seawater collide in great depths. The formations host whole ecosystems on the ocean floor, and microbes thrive there, using the energy created by these chemical reactions to power their own metabolisms.

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft to end 20-year mission by crashing into Saturn Read more

Biologists have for decades studied the vents to learn about how life began on Earth about 4bn years ago – and how it might begin on an alien world where extreme temperatures and radiation do not stop evolution cold.

“If we knew that life had started independently in two places in our solar system, then we could be pretty confident that life also got started on some of the tens of billions of planets and moons around other stars in our galaxy,” said David Rothery, a professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University.

Cassini, which is running out of fuel, will end its 20-year mission to Saturn and its moons later this year, with a final journey between Saturn’s rings and then a fiery disintegration into the planet’s storms. The scientists plan to destroy Cassini on Saturn in part to prevent the spacecraft from crashing on Enceladus, where it could contaminate life there – if, that is, it exists.</s>A moon orbiting Saturn could harbour favourable conditions to support life, according to new information released by NASA.

On Thursday, NASA announced Saturn’s moon Enceladus was found to have giant plumes containing hydrogen molecules that could be a potential source for microbial life.

The new findings from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2002, indicate that ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and organics were also found coming from the plumes, almost all the ingredients needed to support life on earth.

According to Chris Glein, a Cassini spacecraft team associate, NASA believes the hydrothermal fluids are circulating below the ocean floor and possibly creating a chemical reaction between the water and rocky core of the moon, inducing hydrogen.

According to Mary Voytek, director of the Space Administration Astrobiology Program, the next steps would be to see if Enceladus has had enough time to evolve life in the oceans as the Cassini spacecraft was only able to look for habitability but not detect life.

“It would be wonderful but we haven’t discovered organisms in the ocean on Enceladus,” said Voytek during the announcement.

NASA also announced that their Hubble Space Telescope had taken images of a possible plume coming from Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Europa is thought to have a global salty ocean underneath its thick crust of ice. Previous thermal images from the Galileo Europa Mission showed a hot spot that was originally identified as a thermal anomaly.

According to William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Hubble Space Telescope captured pictures of a plume emanating from the same hot spot both in 2014 and in 2016 that were almost identical in appearance.

“We looked 12 times and saw it twice,” Sparks said during the announcement. “The statistics tell us that they’re real.”

The next big mission for NASA is the Europa Clipper that will send a spacecraft to orbit Jupitar and make close flybys of Europa. The spacecraft will have ice penetrating radar and thermal imaging to detect what is going on beneath the surface.

NASA stresses the findings, that were announced in the journal Science, do not mean that there is life on either moon, but that there may be favourable conditions to harbour life.</s>A tiny, ice-encrusted ocean world orbiting Saturn is now a hotter-than-ever candidate for potential life.NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected hydrogen molecules in the geysers shooting off the moon Enceladus, possibly the result of deep-sea chemical reactions between water and rock that could spark microbial life, scientists announced Thursday.NASA and others are quick to point out this latest discovery does not mean there's life on Enceladus (ehn-SEHL'-uh-duhs), but that there may be conditions favorable for life.A liquid ocean exists beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, which is barely 300 miles (500 kilometers) across. Scientists have long known about the plumes of water vapor spewing from cracks at the moon's south pole, thanks to Cassini . The heavy presence of hydrogen suggests chemical reactions between the warm water and ocean-floor rock that could support life.Cassini uncovered the hydrogen during its final close flyby of Enceladus in 2015, when it dove deeper than ever through its plumes of vapor and particles. The researchers reported that the hydrogen, along with carbon dioxide that was also found, could mean that undersea microbes are producing methane as they do in the bowels of our own oceans and waterways."It really represents a capstone finding for the mission," said Cassini's project scientist, Linda Spilker, noting that the spacecraft has been circling Saturn for more than a decade."We now know that Enceladus has almost all of the ingredients that you would need to support life as we know it on Earth," she said at a NASA news conference.A press conference viewer, asking questions of the scientists via Twitter, asked if NASA was talking about bacteria or algae - or giant squids."Most of us would be excited with any life," said Mary Voytek, an astrobiology senior scientist for NASA. "We're going to start with bacteria and, if we get lucky, maybe there's something that's larger."The findings were reported Thursday in the journal Science by a team from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.Launched in 1997 and now finally running low on fuel, Cassini is drawing ever closer to its demise. The spacecraft will duck through the gap between Saturn and its rings 22 times before spiraling out of control and vaporizing in the sky above Saturn this September.Cassini has no instruments that can detect life, so it will be up to future robotic visitors to seek out possible life on Enceladus, the scientists said.Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter also believed to have a subsurface ocean, may have water vapor jets spewing into space as well, similar to Enceladus. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed what looks to be plumes emanating from Europa. A spacecraft under development called the Europa Clipper, to launch sometime in the 2020s, could shed more light on the matter.Voytek said her money is still on Europa for potential life, versus Enceladus, since Europa is much older and any potential life there has had more time to emerge.While questions remain, Thursday's news represents "an important advance in assessing the habitability of Enceladus," Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Jeffrey Seewald wrote in a companion article."We still have a long way to go in our understanding," said Seewald, who was not involved in the study. "Future missions to explore oceans beyond Earth will answer many of these questions."</s>New research from NASA indicates that Saturn’s moon Enceladus may support microbial life. Details of new findings about ocean worlds in our solar system, arising from discoveries by the agency’s Cassini spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope were announced live by the agency.

NASA scientists have detected hydrogen from hydrothermal vents in ice plumes from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus in conditions which they say could have led to the rise of life on Earth.

The discovery makes Enceladus the only place beyond Earth where scientists have found direct evidence of a possible energy source for life, according to the findings published in Science.

Chris Glein, Cassini INMS team associate at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), said during the news conference that they believe the hydrogen is produced by a chemical reaction between warm water and rocks.

READ MORE: NASA's Cassini detects heat of ocean on Saturn moon (PHOTO)

The team says the moon has the sources needed for life, but what needs to be established is if it has enough time to evolve life.

”Although we can't detect life, we've found that there's a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes," said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.

Meanwhile, the Hubble telescope captured more evidence of water based plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. NASA said a similar plume candidate was captured at the same location in 2014 and 2016. The plumes also correspond with a relatively warm region on Europa's surface observed by the Galileo spacecraft.

William Sparks, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said the results are “intriguing as they found a repeating plume candidate at a position of a Thermal anomaly.”

Mary Voytek, senior astrobiology scientist at NASA Headquarters said there might not be life on either moon, adding, if there is life, it might not be very active. She said her money is on Europa, when asked by a reporter which moon was more likely to host life.

NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s will continue the search for life beyond Earth, and will study Enceladus with advanced equipment.

“These ocean worlds have just been discovered – we need to probe them because they are one of the best locations that may harbor life today,” the space agency said at the close of Thursday’s announcement.</s>An ice-encrusted moon orbiting Saturn appears to have the conditions necessary for life, NASA announced Thursday, unveiling new findings made by its unmanned Cassini spacecraft.

Cassini has detected hydrogen molecules in vapor plumes emanating from cracks in the surface of Enceladus, a small ocean moon coated in a thick layer of ice, the US space agency said.

The plumes have led scientists to infer that hydrothermal chemical reactions between the moon's rocky core and its ocean - located under the ice crust - are likely occurring on Enceladus.

On Earth, those chemical reactions allow microbes to flourish in hot cracks in the planet's ocean floors - depths sunlight cannot reach - meaning the moon could also nourish life.

"Now, Enceladus is high on the list in the solar system for showing habitable conditions," said Hunter Waite, one of the study's leading researchers.

The new research, published Thursday in the journal Science, "indicates there is chemical potential to support microbial systems," he said.

The hydrogen detection resulted from Cassini's October 2015 deep dive close to the surface of Enceladus.

Using a spectrometer, the spacecraft determined that the plumes are 98 percent water and one percent hydrogen, with traces of molecules including ammonia, carbon dioxide and methane.

Hydrogen had previously been "elusive," scientists said, but its detection shows the moon's life-supporting potential.

The hydrogen in the sub-surface ocean could combine with carbon dioxide molecules in a process known as "methanogenesis," which creates a byproduct of methane. If there are indeed microbes living in the moon's ocean, they could tap that energy source as sustenance.

Scientists said the moon appeared to have ample energy supplies to support life - roughly the equivalent of 300 pizzas per hour, according to Christopher Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.

"This is the first time we've been able to make a calorie count of an alien ocean," he said.

- 'Pushing the frontiers' -Though Cassini does not have instruments capable of actually finding signs of life, "we've found that there's a food source there for it," said Waite.

"It would be like a candy store for microbes."

Jeffrey Seewald of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution echoed those comments in a companion article to the study: "This observation has fundamental implications for the possibility of life on Enceladus."

"Chemical disequilibrium that is known to support microbial life in Earth's deep oceans is also available to support life in the Enceladus ocean."

In a separate study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope again found what is likely a plume emitting from Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons, which also has an icy crust atop an ocean.

After first spotting the apparent plume in 2014, scientists in 2016 saw it in the same spot, which appears to be a particularly warm region of Europa where fissures occur in the icy crust.

Both studies are laying the foundation for the Europa Clipper mission, which is slated to launch in the 2020s.

The Europa Clipper will periodically fly past Jupiter's Europa moon to collect data and study the subsurface ocean.

"If there are plumes on Europa, as we now strongly suspect, with the Europa Clipper we will be ready for them," said James Green, NASA's Planetary Science Division Director.

Cassini is slated to take a death plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in September, after it takes a final flyby of the giant moon Titan and a performs a series of 22 dives between the planet and its rings.

The decision to end the mission was made in 2010, in order to avoid damaging moons like Enceladus, which could be explored for signs of life in the future.

Researchers called its latest discovery a "capstone finding for the mission."

"We're pushing the frontiers. We're finding new environments," said Green.

"We're looking in a way that we never thought possible before for environments in our solar system which may harbor life today."</s>Yesterday, NASA held a press conference today announcing that Enceladus may harbor life. That’s right; we may have alien life right here in our solar system.

Scientists have confirmed that there’s plenty of chemical energy within the moon’s underground lakes to support life. Molecular hydrogen, for example, is evidence of hydrothermal vents, and it, alongside water, and a smattering of other minerals and compounds are all necessary for life. What’s more, every time we’ve found this cocktail of chemicals here on earth, we’ve also found life. It’s likely that if Enceladus has life, we’ll find it near the ocean floor where thermal vents provide an excellent source of energy and nutrients for life. This discovery officially makes Enceladus the most likely candidate for life outside of Earth we’ve yet found.

The results were published today in the journal Science and expounded with a press conference at Washington’s James Webb Auditorium. To be clear — we haven’t found life yet, but we’re looking at a very similar set of materials to what we’d find on Earth’s own ocean floor. And while it might be dark and cold in the depths, it’s also home to vital ecosystems and thousands of species across the world.

Enceladus is, notably, not Earth and there will be some big challenges to any search for life. For one, the ocean is a staggering 37 miles deep — a long way to go for a remote-controlled submersible. Enceladus also has an elliptical orbit around Saturn, meaning tidal forces keep the core and the ocean above it uncharacteristically warm. Parts of the massive ocean may be close to water’s boiling point, and there’s no telling how that might affect potential organisms.

The announcement is also the culmination of more than a decade of study with the Casini probe as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2015, NASA used Casini to collect samples from massive plumes of water vapor erupting from the icy surface. Since then, the analysis suggests that there’s a litany of organic molecules as well as virtually all of the major ingredients for life.

We still can’t say for sure that life is on Enceladus, but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this is the closest humanity has yet come to finding life on another world. Molecular hydrogen, for example, is generally unstable and quickly binds to other chemicals. It’s also an important ingredient for life, and without a source to replenish it, the substance doesn’t stick around for long. Since Casini found loads of hydrogen, we know that something has to be making it. And that dramatically increases the chances that Enceladus has active hydrothermal vents, which could be feeding primitive microbes.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the discovery, but you can be sure that NASA, the European Space Agency, and others are probably eyeing Saturn’s medium-sized oceanic moon a bit more closely for future missions.</s>Could there be life under the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus?

NASA announced on Thursday that its Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn has gathered new evidence that there's a chemical reaction taking place under the moon's icy surface that could provide conditions for life. They described their findings in the journal Science.

"This is the closest we've come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.

However, the scientists think that because the moon is young, there may not have been time for life to emerge.

In 2015, researchers said that there was evidence of a warm ocean under the moon's surface, as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reported.

This posed an exciting prospect — researchers wondered whether that warm ocean might be interacting with rock to create a form of chemical energy that could be used by some forms of life.

If true, it would be analogous to ancient organisms on Earth fueled by the energy in deep-sea ocean vents.

On Thursday, NASA scientists said they have detected evidence that this kind of chemical reaction is likely occurring under the surface of Enceladus. By flying through a plume spraying out of its icy shell, Cassini was able to detect molecular hydrogen.

NASA said in a press release that the presence of hydrogen in the sub-surface ocean "means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in water." Called methanogenesis, it's a reaction that it says is "at the root of the tree of life on Earth."

As the lead author Hunter Waite put it, the reaction would basically provide a "candy store for microbes."

So what exactly could be lurking under the surface?

"Most of us would be excited with any life, and certainly when we're talking about the sources of energy, this is to feed the base of a food web. So we're going to start with bacteria and if we get lucky, maybe there's something that's larger," NASA astrobiology senior scientist Mary Voytek said at a news conference.

The hydrogen found "speaks to the habitability" of the moon, Voytek says. But paradoxically, the large amount detected could make finding life less likely. She explains:



"[The] fact that that we can measure such high concentrations of hydrogen and carbon dioxide mean that there might not be life there at all, and if there is life, it's not very active. ... We have this buildup of food that's not being used. And part of that could be that we think Enceladus might be fairly young."



The findings were announced along with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of another, much older moon — evidence of plumes spraying out of the surface of Jupiter's Europa.

Europa is potentially billions of years older than Enceladus, and life takes time to emerge. And there's "no reason" why the same process wouldn't be happening on the moon orbiting Jupiter, Voytek says.

That's why she thinks it's actually more likely that they'll find life on Europa than Enceladus. "My money for the moment is still on Europa," she says.

It's going to take years for scientists to definitively determine whether there is life on either moon. The Europa Clipper mission is set to launch to Europa in the 2020s.

Cassini will end its mission in September and as NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, it "doesn't have the instruments needed to look for life itself" on Enceladus.

After that ends, it's not clear when another spacecraft will head to Saturn's moon. But NASA's New Frontiers program is holding a competition for its next mission, and Enceladus is a potential target.</s>A natural-color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible, is seen in this NASA handout taken from the Cassini spacecraft July 19, 2013 and released November 12, 2013. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Handout via REUTERS

Ice plumes shooting into space from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus contain hydrogen from hydrothermal vents, an environment that some scientists believe led to the rise of life on Earth, research published on Thursday showed.

The discovery makes Enceladus the only place beyond Earth where scientists have found direct evidence of a possible energy source for life, according to the findings in the journal Science.

Similar conditions, in which hot rocks meet ocean water, may have been the cradle for the appearance of microbial life on Earth more than 4 billion years ago.

“If correct, this observation has fundamental implications for the possibility of life on Enceladus,” geochemist Jeffrey Seewald, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, wrote in a related commentary in Science.

The discovery was made using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which in September will end a 13-year mission exploring Saturn and its entourage of 62 known moons.

The detection of molecular hydrogen occurred in October 2015 during Cassini’s last pass through Enceladus’ plumes, when it skimmed 30 miles (49 km) above the moon’s southern pole taking samples.

In 2005, Cassini discovered Enceladus’s geysers, which shoot hundreds of miles into space. Some of the material falls back onto the surface as a fresh coat of ice, while much of the rest gathers into a halo of ice dust that feeds one of Saturn’s rings.

A decade later, scientists measuring the moon’s slightly wobbly orbit around Saturn determined it holds a vast ocean buried 19- to 25 miles (30- to 40 km) beneath its icy shell. The ocean is believed to be the geysers’ source.

Several moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn are known to contain underground oceans, but Enceladus is the only one where scientists have found proof of an energy source for life.

“We’re moving toward Enceladus’s ocean being habitable, but we’re not making any claims at this point about it being inhabited,” lead author Hunter Waite, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in an interview.

“The next time we go back … you’re going to take something that not only picks up on the habitability story, but it starts looking for evidence for life.”

Enceladus has a diameter of 310 miles (500 km) and is one of Saturn’s innermost moons. The heat needed to keep its ocean from freezing is thought to come from tidal forces exerted by Saturn and a neighboring larger moon, Dione.</s>Today, NASA will announce a new finding which the space agency says will ‘inform the broader search for life beyond Earth’.

A report from a former NASA employee suggests that the finding relates to hydrothermal vents in an icy ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

If true, it could be highly significant – as many scientists believe life on Earth began in similar warm vents on the ocean floor.

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Keith Cowing, who writes for Astrobiology, says, ‘The process is indicative of possible habitable zones within the ocean of Enceladus. Before we go any further, ‘habitable’ does not mean ‘inhabited’.’

The event will be held at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA’s headquarters in Washington at 2pm on Thursday 13th April.

‘These new discoveries will help inform future ocean world exploration – including NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s – and the broader search for life beyond Earth,’ NASA said.

Speakers include several members of the team from the Cassini orbiter, fuelling speculation that the announcement could be about Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.</s>A tiny, ice-encrusted ocean world orbiting Saturn is now a hotter-than-ever candidate for potential life.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected hydrogen molecules in the geysers shooting off the moon Enceladus, possibly the result of deep-sea chemical reactions between water and rock that could spark microbial life.

The findings were announced Thursday in the journal Science. NASA and others are quick to point out this latest discovery does not mean there's life on Enceladus, but that there may be conditions favorable for life.

A liquid ocean exists beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, which is barely 300 miles (500 kilometers) across. Plumes of water vapor spew from cracks at the moon's south pole.
NASA announces Saturn's moon Enceladus has the conditions in its global subsurface ocean to support life.