The discovery of seemingly home-grown carbon dioxide suggests Europa’s ice-covered ocean could be habitable.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed homemade carbon dioxide on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, raising the possibility that the frigid waterworld could host life.
Europa, which is a little bit smaller than Earth’s moon, is covered with a crust of water ice enveloping a saltwater ocean. The presence of liquid water makes Europa an intriguing object of exploration for scientists interested in extraterrestrial life. But until now, no one had shown that the ocean contained the proper molecules, particularly carbon, which is a fundamental building block of life on Earth.
The new detection by JWST is intriguing because the carbon dioxide does not seem to have been carried by a meteorite or asteroid, and it appears in a geologically young region of the moon called Tara Regio, suggesting the gas may have formed within the moon itself.
