NASA finds more evidence of Water Plumes on Europa
Elon Musk is taking our asses to Mars. Maybe. So like, can someone get on settling Europa? NASA has found further evidence of water plumes on the moon, furthering the idea that it has subsurface oceans. Fucking astounding.
NASA has discovered more evidence that water erupts from beneath the surface of Europa, one of the many moons of Jupiter. The new findings lend more legitimacy to observations from 2013, and further tease the possibility that Europa contains a subsurface ocean. A team from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) made the observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, and the agency announced the findings during a teleconference this afternoon. The full findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal on September 29th.
The STScI team watched Europa travel across the face of Jupiter on 10 different occasions over a period of 15 months, starting in December of 2013. During three of those transits, the team captured what appeared to be plumes of water vapor erupting from near the icy moon’s south pole. William Sparks, a STScI astronomer who led the research team, called the findings “statistically significant” — even if they aren’t proof. “We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes, but rather to have contributed evidence that such activity may be present,” Sparks said.
NASA has found evidence of water all overour Solar System, but the agency has only directly spotted geysers on one body — Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Scientists have long proposed that Europa is home to a subsurface ocean, but it took until 2012 to find evidence of water plumes erupting from that ocean. That year, a different NASA research team spotted aurorae in the southern region of Europa. Aurorae are caused by charged particles interacting with an atmosphere — we see them on Earth (you may know them as the Northern and Southern lights) thanks to the Sun’s solar wind. The light show on Europa has a different cause — hydrogen and oxygen, scientists argued. But the indirect connection wasn’t enough to confirm the existence of water plumes.