The Cassini spacecraft detected phosphorus—a building block of life—in the subsurface oceans of the icy moon Enceladus.
“It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth,” said Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin and the study’s lead author, in the same release.
The concentrations of phosphorus were estimated to be 100 times that of Earth’s oceans; furthermore, the team speculated that phosphates may persist in other ocean worlds in our solar system., no trips are currently planned for Enceladus’ cool embrace. That may change soon, though., which would seek to determine if life exists on the moon, and if not, whether the conditions to sustain it do.
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