There are six key elements for being alive. All of them exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus.
NASA's Cassini captured this mosaic of Enceladus in 2008, as the spacecraft sped away from Saturn’s moon.From space, Saturn’s moon Enceladus might not seem like a hospitable place for life. Its cold surface is caked thick with fresh ice, marked by craters and active cryovolcanoes that spew ice crystals. But scientists believe beneath that frozen exterior hides a salty liquid ocean.
, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin. “Life as we know it would simply not exist without phosphates. And we have no reason to assume that potential life at Enceladus—if it is there—should be fundamentally different from Earth’s.” The discovery does not provide any evidence for aliens on Enceladus. But the presence of phosphorus removes a major obstacle to any life that might evolve there. Previous studies had suggested Enceladus’s ocean might not contain any phosphorus, according to Postberg. This discovery changes how scientists must think about the moon’s potential habitability, and it may guide research on other icy moons with subsurface oceans, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Researchers had looked at data from the ice grains during the Cassini mission primarily to hunt for inorganic and organic compounds, according to Postberg. But in 2017, his research team received a grant from the European Research Council to examine a larger set of Enceladus ice grain data. After four years of work, they discovered phosphorus in salt form: phosphates.an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the study.
Phosphate is particularly important because it is the backbone of the DNA molecule. It’s also a crucial component of cell membranes and of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which provides the energy for cellular activity. “That’s the energy-carrying molecule for all known life, the energy currency,” Cable says, an arrangement likely to be used by any life that arises on Enceladus too, though perhaps in different combinations with the other elements.
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