Researcher aids in identifying evidence of habitability in ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus
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The search for extraterrestrial life has just become more interesting as a group of scientists, including Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Christopher Glein, has discovered new evidence for a key building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. New modeling indicates that Enceladus' ocean should be moderately wealthy in dissolved phosphorus, an essential ingredient forever.
"Enceladus is one of the ideal objectives in mankind's search for life in our solar system," said Glein, a leading master in extraterrestrial oceanography. He is a co-creator of a paper in the Proceedings of the Public Foundation of Sciences describing this research. "In the years since NASA's Cassini spacecraft visited the Saturn system, we have been more than once amazed by the discoveries made possible by the gathered information."
The Cassini spacecraft discovered Enceladus' subsurface fluid water and examined samples as plumes of ice grains and water fume emitted into space from cracks in the moon's cold surface.
"What we have discovered is that the crest contains almost every one of the basic requirements of life as we probably are aware it," Glein said. "While the bioessential component phosphorus has yet to be distinguished straightforwardly, our group discovered evidence for its accessibility in the ocean underneath the moon's frigid crust."
Quite possibly of the most profound discovery in planetary science throughout recent years is that worlds with oceans underneath a surface layer of ice are normal in our solar system. Such worlds include the cold satellites of the goliath planets, such as Europa, Titan and Enceladus, as well as additional distant bodies like Pluto. Worlds like Earth with surface oceans must reside within a restricted scope of distances from their host stars to maintain the temperatures that support surface fluid water. Interior water ocean worlds, in any case, can happen over a lot more extensive scope of distances, extraordinarily expanding the quantity of tenable worlds prone to exist across the cosmic system.
"The quest for extraterrestrial habitability in the solar system has shifted focus, as we currently search for the building blocks forever, including natural molecules, smelling salts, sulfur-bearing compounds as well as the substance energy expected to support life," Glein said. "Phosphorus presents an interesting case because previous work suggested that it very well may be scarce in the ocean of Enceladus, which would diminish the prospects forever."
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Phosphorus in the type of phosphates is imperative for all life on The planet. It is essential for the production of DNA and RNA, energy-carrying molecules, cell membranes, bones and teeth in individuals and animals, and, surprisingly, the sea's microbiome of microscopic fish.
Colleagues performed thermodynamic and kinetic modeling that simulates the geochemistry of phosphorus based on insights from Cassini about the ocean-seafloor system on Enceladus. In the course of their research, they fostered the most nitty gritty geochemical model to date of how seafloor minerals dissolve into Enceladus' ocean and anticipated that phosphate minerals would be unusually soluble there.
"The underlying geochemistry has an exquisite simplicity that makes the presence of dissolved phosphorus inevitable, reaching levels close to or considerably higher than those in current Earth seawater," Glein said. "How this affects astrobiology is that we can be more sure than before that the ocean of Enceladus is livable."
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