Beneath the icy layer cloaking Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, scientists believe a vast ocean and a geologically active seafloor could potentially hold habitats for life.
And now a new study has shown that the chemical balance of those oceans would be very similar to the ones here on Earth, suggesting there'd be enough hydrogen and oxygen there for life to form - even without volcanic activity.
"We're studying an alien ocean using methods developed to understand the movement of energy and nutrients in Earth's own systems," said lead researcher Steve Vance, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "The cycling of oxygen and hydrogen in Europa's ocean will be a major driver for Europa's ocean chemistry and any life there, just as it is on Earth."
To understand how that might work, the team compared Europa's potential for producing hydrogen and oxygen to that of Earth.
For the purposes of this study, they only looked at processes that didn't involve volcanism - volcanic activity is thought of as a kickstart for the formation of life, but the team wanted to see if passive processes on the moon could do the same thing.
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