On Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, powerful eruptions may spew into space, raising questions among hopeful astrobiologists on Earth: What would blast out from miles-high plumes? Could they contain signs of extraterrestrial life? And where in Europa would they originate? A new explanation now points to a source closer to the frozen surface than might be expected.
Rather than originating from deep within Europa’s oceans, some eruptions may originate from water pockets embedded in the icy shell itself, according to new evidence from researchers at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Using images collected by the NASA spacecraft Galileo, the researchers developed a model to explain how a combination of freezing and pressurization could lead to a cryovolcanic eruption, or a burst of water. The results, published Nov. 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, have implications for the habitability of Europa’s underlying ocean—and may explain eruptions on other icy bodies in the solar system.
There are around 300 million planets that exist outside our Solar System but within the Milky Way which could potentially harbour life. According to research from NASA, four of them are within just 30 light-years from Earth, with the closest just 20 light-years away, NASA claims.
They went in search of the Holy grail of astronomical research, scouring for the ‘Goldilock’s Zone’ where life may thrive.
But there’s some bad news: Proxima Centauri tends to bombard any planets in its vicinity with a ferocious amount of X rays — Proxima b receives about 400 times the amount as Earth receives from its Sun.
That leads to the question: “Is there an atmosphere that protects the planet from these deadly rays?” asked co-author Christophe Lovis, a researcher who worked on ESPRESSO, in the statement. Lovis hopes that the next generation of spectrographs — ESPRESSO’s successor, “RISTRETTO,” is already in the works — could help us find the answer.
For us to get a closer look at Proxima b however, Proxima Centauri is “only” 4.2 light-years from the Sun — meaning it would still take several thousand years to get there using today’s propulsion technology.
“On Mars, it would occupy one of the maze of lava tubes which run beneath the Martian surface,” the architects explained.
Hugh Broughton Architects and Pearce+ are creating Martian House, an inflatable building in Bristol, England, that will explore what an extraterrestrial house for life on Mars could look like.
The house, a collaboration with local artists as part of the ongoing art project Building a Martian House, is set over two levels, with the lower level designed to be built below the ground of the red planet.
There are many options for living on Mars. 3D-printed ice habitats around the poles, building underground, etc. The technology is finally here.
This is part of the reason why the surface is so cold, ranging from −143 in the polar regions during winter and 35 °C (−226 to 95 °F) near the equator during midday in the summer. But because the air is so thin, a person standing on Mars (in the summer and at noon) would experience extreme cold anywhere above their ankles.
There are nearly one million catalogued asteroids, but we don’t know much about many of them. Now Unistellar and its scientific partner, the SETI Institute, can count on a network of nearly 3,000 amateurs capable of observing thousands of asteroids and providing an estimate of their size and shape. With mobile stations located in Asia, North America and Europe, the Unistellar network, the largest network of citizen astronomers, participates in cutting-edge research and has delivered its first scientific results including the 3D shape model of an asteroid and the size of another one.
“The Unistellar eVscope is more than a telescope. It’s also a tool to access a network made of citizen astronomers throughout the world who can observe together and participate in scientific campaigns,” said Franck Marchis, senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer at Unistellar. “Today more than 150 people have already contributed to our campaigns and collected valuable scientific data from their backyard.”
In addition to the SETI Institute, Marchis’ group collaborated with Josef Hanuš and Josef Ďurech of the Institute of Astronomy at Charles University to identify potential targets of interest in the asteroid population. “After having designed and validated our data analysis pipeline in 2020, we can now routinely propose campaigns to our citizen astronomers,” said Marchis.
Astronomer Eamonn Kerins with the University of Manchester has developed an approach to looking for intelligent extraterrestrial beings on other planets that involves using game theory. He has written a paper describing his ideas and has uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.
The current approach to looking for intelligent life on other planets is basically two-pronged. One approach involves scanning the skies looking for signals from space that could be created by intelligent beings. The other involves scanning the sky for evidence of exoplanets that appear to be habitable. Kerins suggests that a way to meld the two approaches into a logical systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to use some of the logic inherent in game theory.
Kerins starts by noting that it seems possible that the reason scientists on Earth have not discovered signals from beings on other planets is because they are not sending any, fearing that doing so might draw the attention of unfriendly adversaries. He further suggests that if others are out there, they might be listening just as intently as we are. This leads to the SETI paradox, in which everyone is listening but no one is sending. And it also leads to the question of how such a paradox could be resolved. He notes that game theory suggests that both parties should agree that the party with more access to information should be the one that transmits first to the other.
This is the episode for anyone who has wondered about the fundamental structure of the universe and its extremely distant future — a time which is so distant that for all practical purposes, it’s almost synonymous with eternity. Black Holes, Fundamental Physics, and the meaning behind the cosmological catchphrase — Turtles All the Way Down. Please listen.
What happens when all the stars in our cosmos’ galaxies burn out; with little or no hydrogen gas left to fuel star formation; and everything pretty much turns to toast? It will presage an age of black holes where extremely low temperatures and fundamental particle decay will alleviate life as we know it. This universal endgame in an almost infinite far future may actually be a Dark Age where little or nothing can happen. And if it does, only on the longest timescales. Yale University astrophysicist Gregory Laughlin and I discuss these and other issues in this cosmological “turtles all the way down” episode of the podcast.
In a recent study of the upper atmosphere of Venus, finding the chemical fingerprint of phosphine has led to speculation that it may be tied to airborne life high in the clouds of our sister planet [1]. We harbour similar suspicion of microbial life on Mars [2], Saturn’s moon Enceledus [3], and Europa, the icy Galilean of the Jovian system [4]. The dwarf planet Ceres of the asteroid belt could be added to that list also, with recent evidence of oceanic water [5], while more exotic variations of life may exist on Titan, which is known to be teeming with organic materials [6]. Should we be more wary of our Solar System as an environment to explore, and the potential of pathogens we may encounter?
If one rewinds 500 years, to when exploration of new worlds involved sailing the oceans, the discovery of the Americas introduced viruses which decimated the native population at that time [7]. That in itself was far from a unique event in history, of course. There have been many occurrences throughout history where travel between distant lands has resulted in the introduction of devastating plagues to one population or the other — not least the Black Death, which arrived in Europe from commercial travel with Asia in the 1300s [8]. Meanwhile, 2020 has reminded us how a novel virus can prove virtually unstoppable from spreading worldwide in a matter of months and reaching pandemic level, once introduced to our now interconnected world [9].
Indeed when the first astronauts returned from the Moon in the 60s, they had to undergo weeks of quarantine as a precaution against introducing a lunar pathogen to Earth [10]. We now know the Moon to be a sterile world, but this should not give us a false sense of security when visiting and returning from other worlds, which are far more likely to harbour microbial life. It is quite plausible to consider that any microbes which have evolved to survive in the harsh environments on other worlds could multiply out of control if introduced to a more fertile environment on Earth. The likelihood of any such foreign microbes being capable of becoming infectious pathogens to our species is difficult to measure, but one could still cause problems regardless, by undermining Earth’s ecosystem in competing with native microbial life as a runaway invasive species.
Fortunately, due to the vast distances involved in inter-planetary travel, returning astronauts would likely show symptoms of infection from any dangerous pathogen long before reaching home, as such a journey would be expected to take many months, even with more advanced propulsion technology than we use in space travel today. That is not to say they could not inadvertently return with microbial life on board — or even on the exterior of craft: Earth’s tardigrades, for example, have proven quite durable in journeys into outer space [11].
Grady believes creatures could be living in glacial oceans underneath a hard shell of ice that’s up to 15 miles thick on Jupiter’s frigid moon.
Scientists have long suspected the existence of these deep subsurface oceans on Europa — and maybe even life. In fact, NASA announced in August that it’s completing the final designs for a Europa-bound spacecraft called Europa Clipper, which will look for signs of life.
