Is there life on Saturn’s moon? Where there’s water, there’s a chance

At first glance, Saturn’s moon Enceladus seems rather unremarkable: it is much smaller than the Earth’s moon and is far away and completely covered in ice.

Yet beneath its frozen crust lies an ocean of liquid water, making it one of the most promising locations in the solar system in the search for extraterrestrial life.

“Where there is water, life is possible,” said astrobiologist Nozair Khawaja, who leads a research team at the Free University of Berlin. Experiments are set to begin soon to determine which substances could form under conditions similar to those on Enceladus.

Discovery of liquid water was a sensation

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun, following Mars and Jupiter. “Scientists used to believe that the region beyond Mars was hopeless for the search for life or conditions for life,” Khawaja explained. It was thought to be too cold and to receive too little sunlight.

The discovery of liquid water on Enceladus was therefore a minor sensation. The first indication of a subsurface ocean came in 2005, when several specialized instruments detected water jets and fountains at the moon’s south pole. Along large fissures, water vapor and ice particles are ejected hundreds of kilometers into space.

Life or chemical reactions?

Captured ice particles revealed small, simple, but also large and complex organic—carbon-based—molecules. “For the first time, we found very large organic molecules in an extraterrestrial ocean,” Khawaja explained. This could indicate biological activity on Enceladus.

Alternatively, the molecules could have been formed through hydrothermal reactions. In the laboratory, Khawaja and his team aim to simulate the conditions in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus and replicate what might be happening deep beneath the ice layer. What would it mean if life were actually found on Enceladus?

“The discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life would raise hopes that traces of life might also exist in other places in the universe, and that conditions could exist where human-like life is possible or could be established in the future,” Khawaja believes.

For science fiction fans, the scientist has disappointing news: the search is focused on simple life forms like bacteria. The idea of little green men inhabiting Enceladus is something people will have to let go of, Khawaja said.

“We are not looking for something that resembles us, with two eyes, a nose, and arms.”

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