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Scientists have theorized about the origin of the water plumes that can erupt from Jupiter Europa’s moon. Recent research adds a potential new source to the mix.
According to new research, plumes of water vapor that could escape into space from Jupiter’s moon, Europe, could be coming from the icy crust itself. One model describes a process for brine, or salt-enriched water, moving through the shell of the moon and eventually forming pockets of water – even more concentrated in salt – that could burst.
Scientists from Europa considered the possible plumes over Europe as a promising way to study the habitability of Jupiter’s icy moon, especially since they offer the possibility of being directly sampled by spacecraft passing through them. . Information on the activity and composition of the ice shell covering Europe’s global interior ocean can help determine whether the ocean contains the ingredients necessary for life.
This new work which offers an additional scenario for some plumes proposes that they could come from pockets of water embedded in the icy shell rather than water forced up from the ocean below. The source of the plumes is important: the water from the frozen crust is considered less inviting to life than the global inland ocean because it likely lacks the energy that is a necessary ingredient for life. In the European Ocean, this energy could come from hydrothermal vents on the seabed.
“Understanding where these plumes of water come from is very important to whether future explorers of Europe might have a chance to actually detect life from space without probing the ocean of Europe,” said the lead author Gregor Steinbrügge, postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy. & Environmental sciences.
Using images collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, the researchers developed a model to propose how a combination of freezing and pressurization could lead to a cryovolcanic eruption or an explosion of freezing water. The findings, published Nov. 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, may shed light on eruptions on other frozen bodies in the solar system.
The researchers focused their analyzes on Manannán, an 18-mile-wide (29 kilometers wide) crater in Europe that resulted from an impact with another celestial object tens of millions of years ago. Believing that such a collision would have generated tremendous heat, they modeled how the melted ice and subsequent freezing of the pocket of water inside the icy shell could have pressurized it and caused the ice to erupt. water.
“The comet or asteroid hitting the ice shell was basically a great experiment that we use to build hypotheses to test,” said co-author Don Blankenship, senior researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of the Texas (UTIG) and Principal Investigator. the REASON radar instrument (Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface), which will fly aboard NASA’s future Europa Clipper spacecraft. “Our model makes specific predictions which we can test using data from radar and other instruments on Europa Clipper.”
The model indicates that, as the water in Europe partially froze to ice after impact, remaining water pockets may have been created on the moon’s surface. These pockets of salt water can move laterally through the European ice shell melting adjacent ice regions and therefore become even saltier in the process.
A salty driving force
The model proposes that when a pocket of migrating brine reached the center of the Manannán crater, it got stuck and began to freeze, generating pressure that eventually resulted in a plume, estimated to be over a mile high (1.6 km). The eruption of this plume left a distinctive mark: a spider-like feature on the surface of Europe that was observed by Galileo imagery and incorporated into the researchers’ model.
“Even though the plumes generated by the migration of brine pockets would not provide a direct glimpse of the European ocean, our results suggest that Europa’s ice shell itself is very dynamic,” said Joana Voigt , co-lead author, graduate research assistant at the University of Arizona. Tucson.
The relatively small size of the plume that would form at Manannán indicates that impact craters probably cannot explain the source of other larger plumes over Europe which have been assumed based on data from Galileo and the Hubble Space Telescope of NASA, the researchers said. But the process modeled for the Manannán eruption could occur on other frozen bodies – even without an impact event.
“The work is exciting because it supports the growing body of research showing that there could be multiple types of plumes over Europe,” said Robert Pappalardo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and project scientist from the Europa Clipper mission. “Understanding plumes and their possible sources contributes greatly to Europa Clipper’s goal of studying the habitability of Europa.”
Missions like Europa Clipper contribute to the field of astrobiology, interdisciplinary research into the variables and conditions of distant worlds that might harbor life as we know it. While Europa Clipper is not a life-detecting mission, she will perform a detailed reconnaissance of Europa and examine whether the frozen moon, with its underground ocean, has the capacity to support life. Understanding the habitability of Europa will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential to find life beyond our planet.
You can find more information about Europa and Europa Clipper here:
europa.nasa.gov
News Media Contact
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Danielle Torrent Tucker
Stanford University School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences
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