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Science's big discovery: a giant ocean could hide extraterrestrial life on Saturn's moon

2025-10-01 17:32:08Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Science's big discovery: a giant ocean could hide extraterrestrial life on
Illustrative photo

An ocean hidden beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus contains complex organic molecules, according to a study published on October 1, providing further evidence that this small world may have all the ingredients needed to support extraterrestrial life.

Only 500 kilometers wide and invisible to the naked eye, the moon Enceladus is one of hundreds of moons orbiting the sixth planet from the Sun.

For a long time, scientists believed that Enceladus was too far from the Sun – and therefore too cold – to be habitable.

The Cassini probe then flew by this moon several times during a journey to Saturn and its rings from 2004 to 2017, revealing evidence that a large saltwater ocean lies beneath a several-kilometer-thick glacial crust on the moon.

Since then, scientists have analyzed data collected by the Cassini probe, revealing that the ocean has many of the elements thought to be necessary to support life, including salt, methane, carbon dioxide and phosphorus.

When the probe passed over the moon's south pole, it detected water erupting through cracks in the surface.

This water ejected tiny ice particles – smaller than grains of sand – into space. While some of these ice particles fell back to the moon's surface, others accumulated around one of Saturn's many rings.

When Cassini flew through Saturn's outermost ring, called the "E" ring, it "detected samples from Enceladus all the time," said Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin and lead author of the new study, in a statement for the European Space Agency.

By analyzing these samples, scientists had previously identified a number of organic molecules - including precursors to amino acids, which are the main building blocks of life.

These ice particles may have undergone changes after being trapped in the ring for hundreds of years – or have been damaged by cosmic radiation bursts.

Therefore, scientists want to analyze some new ice particles, and fortunately they already have access to some of them.

When Cassini flew directly into the spray of water coming directly from the moon's surface in 2008, ice particles hit the probe's cosmic dust analyzer at about 18 kilometers per second.

But it took years to complete the detailed chemical analysis of these particles, which is the subject of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Co-author of the study, Frank Postberg, said the study proves that "the complex organic molecules that Cassini detected in Saturn's E ring are not just a product of long exposure to space, but are readily present in Enceladus' ocean."

French astrochemist Caroline Freissinet, who is not involved in the study, told AFP that there is "little doubt" that these molecules were in the moon's ocean.

But this confirmation offers "another piece in this mosaic," she added.

According to her, this proves that new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, enable scientists to perform new analyses on old data.

Freissinet said the best way to understand what's happening on Enceladus is for a mission to land near this area and take samples of the ice.

The European Space Agency has studied the possibility of a mission that would do just that.

Ultimately, "Enceladus meets all the conditions to be a habitable environment that would support life," the agency said in a statement.

Khawaja added that "even not finding life on Enceladus would be a major discovery, because it raises serious questions about why life is not present in such an environment when the right conditions exist."/REL


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