Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Might Be Suitable For Alien Life
Can Enceladus, Saturn’s moon, be home to alien life? Even though it is not significant in size, its icy surface hides a global water ocean and, according to scientists, that might mean that this space body could be habitable. Who knows what lives deep in that dark abyss of Enceladus’ oceans? The water of Enceladus is salty like the ones in our planet’s seas, as the Cassini spacecraft has discovered. In addition to that, the space probe found hydrothermal activity on the bottom of the ocean and the possibility of the existence of organic molecules.
The ocean on Enceladus can optimally support life as it age offers all its conditions for the Saturn’s moon to be habitable. A research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has announced the study on 24th of June 2019 during this year’s Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon2019). The results have been previously published in the journal Nature Astronomy on 1st of April 2019 after the team reviewed them.
Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Might Be Suitable For Alien Life
The age of the Enceladus ocean has been estimated to be 1 billion. In terms of life starting and evolving, this is the best age because the different elements would not have had enough time to mix if it were too young. On the contrary, if it were too old, the chemical processes would have no longer taken place. The equilibrium of the Saturn’s moon Enceladus would have been reached, in that case, and no form of life could have appeared there.
The team led by Neveu came to this conclusion by analyzing all the data Cassini gathered during its mission until late 2017. Using that, they created 50 different simulations of how life could evolve thanks to the Enceladus ocean. Everything was taken into account including the radioactivity of the rocks on Enceladus and Saturn’s moons’ orbits. All indicate that Enceladus might host alien life
Tiesha loves to share her passion for everything that’s beautiful in this world. Apart from writing on her beauty blog and running her own beauty channel on Youtube, she also enjoys traveling and photography. Tiesha covers various stories on the website.
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