One of the Solar System's best places for life to thrive is the moon Enceladus. It harbors a salty ocean that is theoretically warm enough to support an alien marine ecology.
It's difficult to detect that life. At its deepest point, the ocean is 10 kilometers deep, and the moon is covered in a thick shell of ice. This would pose a huge challenge here on Earth.
We may not need to drill through Enceladus's shell in order to get to it. Even if there isn't a lot of life on the moon, we should be able to detect it in the salty water that erupts from its surface.
It would be difficult to send a robot crawling through ice cracks and deep-diving into the ocean.
Our team has shown that this approach would be enough to determine whether or not there is life in the ocean without having to look at the depths of the moon. This is a great view.
It isn't likely to be crawling with cows and butterflies. There was a different kind of ecology under the ocean far from the life-giving light of the Sun. Life is reliant on chemical reactions to harness the energy of the ocean floor vents.
According to what we know of Enceladus, there may be similar environments on its seafloor. The moon's interior is flexed by an elliptical path that creates enough heat to keep the water close to the core liquid.
The high concentrations of methane and lesser amounts of dihydrogen and carbon dioxide were detected by the probe. These can be linked to methane producing archaea.
In spite of darkness and insane pressure, the life on our planet is big and small. Even in the absence of sunlight, the simplest living creatures there are methanogens.
Methane is released as a by-product from the metabolism of dihydrogen and carbon dioxide. The methanogen could be found on Enceladus if it existed in the same way that it does on Earth.
They modeled how much of the material we would find would be ejected through the vents.
Antonin Affholder is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and was at Paris Sciences et Lettres University in France.
It may be very sparse. Our models show that it would be productive to feed the plumes with just enough organic molecule or cell to be picked up by instruments on a future spaceship.
If it were possible to make multiple flythroughs to collect enough material, it would be possible to detect them.
The chance that a cell will survive the trip through the ice and be sent out into space is slim, even if there is enough biological material.
If abundances exceed a certain threshold, the team suggests that the use of glycine would be an indirect signature.
According to the calculations, any life present on Enceladus would be extremely sparse, so there's a good chance that we won't find enough organic molecule to conclude that it is there.
We wanted to know what the maximum amount of organic material that could be present in the absence of life was.
The figures could be used to design future missions. We'll just be here on Earth, wondering what an environment under the ocean on a moon would be like.
The research was published in a journal.
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