Europa, one of Jupiter’s 79 moons, is one of the hottest objects in our solar system.
the Moon has all the prerequisites that it can support life, which also has made it a højprioritets-object to examine for NASA.
Now Europe has become even more interesting, writes NASA in a press release, according to the Science.dk. You can see a video of the discovery of the article.
A NASA-led research team has thus – for the first time – found a direct and measurable evidence for the existence of water vapor on Jupiter-the moon.
Lucas Paganini, planetforsker at NASA, who led the vandjagten in Europe, are satisfied:
– The essential chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur) and the different energy sources, which represent two out of the three prerequisites for life, are found everywhere in the solar system, says Lucas Paganini in a press release, according to Science.dk.
– But the third – liquid water is hard to find anywhere other than on Earth. Although researchers have not yet observed liquid water directly (at the European, ed.), so have we found the next best thing in the form of water vapor, he adds.
Scientists have long had good indications that there is liquid water, which from time to time be shot out into space from the great geysers of Europe’s isklædte surface.
It’s just never been directly observed, which the team now has made by watching Europe very closely, through one of the world’s largest telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
At the observatory, used the researchers a spektrogram, which can provide insight into the particles and molecules chemistry by means of infrared light.
the water molecules and emits a specific frequency of infrared light, when hit by the Sun’s rays, and the researchers used this property to determine that there really was talking about water vapor.
the Research team observed as many water molecules on the way out of the ice-cap, that they would be able to fill a whole olympic swimming pool of 2.5 million gallons within a few minutes.
the Observation put two lines under that there is water vapor on Europa, and it comes without a doubt to help scientists understand the moon.
The hills, for example, a prevailing theory that goes that during Europe’s ice surface is a sea of liquid water, which is twice as large as the Earth’s seas.
Lucas Paganini and his research team have published their observations in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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