Europa: Could Jupiter’s Moon be a Host to Alien Life?
In the dim suburbs of the solar system far beyond Mars' familiar ruddy orb and past the rocky pickets of the asteroid belt spins a fractured world suddenly caught in the cross-hairs of scientific scrutiny.
Here, 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) from Earth, lies Europa, one of four moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo.
If life exists on this distant moon, it does so where the Sun never shines. Europa is wrapped in a steel-hard crust of ice, above which wafts only a negligible atmosphere. If this moon were situated anywhere else in the solar system, it would be just another chunk of dead rock.
But fate declared that Europa should be a slave to Jupiter, one of that planet's entourage of some 16 satellites. Prodded into an elliptical orbit by its sister moons, Europa's innards are relentlessly stressed and stretched by Jupiter's powerful pull.
Every few days, the moon is cyclically kneaded like a ball of dough. This ceaseless gravitational tug-of-war inevitably heats Europa, perhaps enough to melt some of its thick, icy mantles into an ocean 100 miles (160 kilometers) deep. In these inky-dark seas, alien creatures might dart and dive, populating a vast watery expanse whose volume would exceed that of all the oceans on Earth.
0 Comments