Europa may have less oxygen to fuel life in its seas than we thought

Jupiter’s moon Europa may be less ripe for life than we thought. Although it has an ocean of water beneath its icy shell, the frigid moon may be wanting the oxygen mandatory to maintain life as we comprehend it.

Oxygen is produced on Europa when radiation hits its floor and splits the water ice there into its constituent components, hydrogen and oxygen. Models of that course of have steered the speed of oxygen manufacturing may very well be wherever from 5 to over 1000 kilograms per second.

Jamey Szalay at Princeton University and his colleagues used knowledge from the Juno spacecraft, which flew simply 353 kilometres above Europa’s floor in 2022, to make a brand new estimate. They discovered oxygen is barely being produced at a charge of about 12 kilograms per second on the floor – proper on the low finish of earlier estimates.

“In some sense, the shell is like a lung for Europa. It’s continuously generating oxygen,” says Szalay. “That being said, we can’t speak to what happens after the oxygen is produced on the surface – it’s still a question how much of it could get into the ocean.”

But if there’s less oxygen being produced in the primary place, less of it can make its method into Europa’s waters. That may lower the probability of researchers discovering organisms comparable to these dwelling on Earth there.

One of the following steps is to determine how a lot of that oxygen can seep by way of the alien moon’s icy shell. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, deliberate to launch in October, ought to assist us work that out. It will measure the thickness of the ice and hopefully make it potential to decide whether or not components and compounds helpful for life might cross by way of.