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First water plume seen firing from Jupiter moon Europa
- GrantS 13y agoFor those expecting to see an actual image, this is the closest thing to a photo from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over-europa/ http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over-europa/ They note: "Hubble didn't photograph plumes, but spectroscopically detected auroral emissions from oxygen and hydrogen." Full press release from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-vapor/ http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-vapo... For an amazing photo of Europa with Io's volcanic plumes in view, see this older photo from 2007: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg Full description here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103 http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103
- dmead 13y agodoes this mean it's pure conjecture that it was a water plume? my idea of a water plume would say that it's sub surface ocean water getting ejected out of the surface. this evidence seems like it could have been water knocked up by a meteor impact or some other mechanism to get the surface ice into orbit.
- tokipin 13y agoit's my understanding that the gravitational "torsion" from Jupiter alone is enough to do all sorts of things (like keep a planet thermally active)
- deletes 13y agoAs warm as the word vapor may sound it is actually really cold. Europa's oceans, if they exist, are -50°C and lower.
- trekky1700 13y agoDoesn't water freeze and become ice at 0°C?
- Fargren 13y agoOnly at one atmoshpere of pressure.
- trekky1700 13y agoThe difference is negligible: http://i.stack.imgur.com/n6LXj.gif http://i.stack.imgur.com/n6LXj.gif
- Fargren 13y agoAccording to this[1] the pressure on Europa is "one hundred billionth that of the Earth". Your graph uses a log scale, so maybe I'm measuring this wrong, but I'm pretty sure under so little pressure, water can be vapor at -50ºC. So the pressure is hardly negligible in this case. [1]http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1995/12/text/ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1995/12/te...
- deletes 13y agoYou can make supercooled water in your freezer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling
- ceejayoz 13y ago> The process of supercooling requires that water be pure and free of nucleation sites Good luck finding distilled water with no contact with rocks/ice on Europa...
- trekky1700 13y agoThat requires very difficult circumstances that almost certainly can't occur at the planetary scale.
- eldude 13y agoCheckout the movie Europa Report to feed your SciFi fantasies.
- sputknick 13y agoSecond this. Excellent random movie selection on Netflix.
- leephillips 13y agoThird it. The movie starts out looking like it's going to be pretty cheesy, but stick with it. This is a unique film.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoThe entire time I was watching it I felt like they were pissing on Arthur C. Clarke's grave.
- stephth 13y agoPlease forgive my ignorance. What makes Europa more likely to contain life than other moons thought to contain oceans like Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus ... ? [1] [1] http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jpg http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jp... [2] [2] http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-solar-system http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-solar-s...
- trekky1700 13y agoAnd this is why NASA's Planetary Sciences division should not suffer huge budget cuts.
- maaku 13y agoEnormous oceans of liquid water, with internal tidal heat and protection from harsh surface environment?
- ep103 13y agoAnd lets not forget the large black monolith.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoAll joking aside, the guy who wrote those kind of knew what the hell he was talking about.
- ep103 13y agoAbsolutely!
- dmead 13y agoread the 2010 novel by authur clarke. he goes into some detail about how it might work
- rsynnott 13y agoI believe there's more evidence for an ocean in Europa than the other Galilean moons, and the ice sheet on top is thought to be substantially thinner. As for the moons of Saturn, I suspect Enceladus gets less interest simply because it's far less accessible, and if Titan has life it won't be remotely like any sort of life we're used to, and may be quite difficult to detect.
- jmpe 13y agoThis is an awesome phenomenon. Yesterday we had a post re panspermia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412 Now think of an Europa with simple bacteria living in the water under the ice. These events are like cosmic sporulation: long strings of frozen droplets that could contain organisms, ejaculated into space like spores in the wind.
- xacaxulu 13y agoI'm (existentially/cosmically) aroused!!
- maaku 13y agoAnd promptly sterilized. Unfortunately most plausible life forms require meters of soil/rock surrounding them to survive the harsh space environment (probably more in the vicinity of Jupiter).
- ceejayoz 13y agoWe're finding extremophiles in all sorts of places we didn't expect. Radiation-resistant bacterial spores are hardly outside the realm of possibility - we've already found some.
- maaku 13y agoYes, but context. They're not likely to have evolved inside the relative oasis of Europa's oceans (or put differently, they're not likely to have retained any extremophile traits they might have once had).
- ceejayoz 13y agoSome water is clearly getting to the surface. If there's life, at least some of it is being exposed to decent levels of radiation.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
- qhoc 13y agoIf I take a wild guess (into the next 50 years), we probably will be able to land on Europa. After collecting dirt and water, we found nothing. However, scientists didn't give up on it and debate life could be existed in deep ocean, which is way deeper than what we can go even on Earth. There you go: we have to go far across space and end up swimming really deep. Too many technological barriers. It'd be even more disappointing when we actually find out living organisms, then they look so similar to what we already have on Earth. Again, my "wild guess"
- jmpe 13y agoWould be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity, perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever swam too close to one of these blowholes. I can dream, can't I?
- CanSpice 13y agoThat's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times. It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for fossils to be formed.
- jmpe 13y agoI imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a chapter of the planet's history.
- swayvil 13y agoIf I was an "ocean under an ice layer" based civilization this might be my best way to get an object into orbit. Was the plume aimed at anything in particular?
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoThe fascinating aspect of your post is that scientifically we continue to think of 'life' as 'life as we know it' A civilization that evolves completely underwater (and in Europa's case divided from one underwater oasis to the next) might be possible even if it means the absence of fire.