* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Europa

Blobrana · L

What may be lurking under Europa's ice?

Jupiter's moon Europa is covered with ice.
It's kind of unsettling to think about it out there, circling silently around the giant planet in the middle of magnetic- and gravity-ridden space. It's white and almost as smooth as a cue ball. The ridges, pits, cracks and grooves in its ice rise and descend no more than a few hundred yards, which is about the terrain you'd find if you expanded the cue ball to just less than the size of our own moon.
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Blobrana · L

Hunting for Fossils on Europa

If extraterrestrial life exists on Jupiter's moon Europa, instead of deploying probes to drill past its ice shell to look for aliens in the ocean below, one might just go fossil-hunting on the icy surface.
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Blobrana · L

Europa's Race Track: Agenor Linea

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Blobrana · L

Jupiter's moon Europa has plenty of oxygen to support life
A new research has suggested that there may be plenty of oxygen available in the global ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa to support life, in fact, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.
The global ocean on Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth's oceans combined.

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Blobrana · L

Physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson says we should search for extraterrestrial life where it is easiest to find, even if the conditions there are not ideal for life as we know it. Specifically, he says spacecraft should look for flowers - similar to those found in Earth's Arctic regions - on icy moons and comets in the outer solar system.

"I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe to look for what's detectable, not what's probable" - Freeman Dyson.

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-- Edited by Blobrana on Tuesday 5th of May 2009 06:16:56 PM

Blobrana · L

One of the moons in our solar system that scientists think has the potential to harbour life may have a far more dynamic ocean than previously thought.
If the moon Europa is tilted on its axis even slightly as it orbits the giant planet Jupiter, then Jupiter's gravitational pull could be creating powerful waves in Europa's ocean, according to Robert Tyler, an oceanographer with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory and author of a letter in the Dec. 11 Nature. As those waves dissipate, they would give off significant heat energy.
Depending on the amount of tilt, the heat generated by the ocean flow could be 100 to thousands of times greater than the heat generated by the flexing of Europa's rocky core in response to gravitational pull from Jupiter and the other moons circling that planet.
That's the current assumption -- that oceans on moons are heated mainly by this flexing of their cores. In the case of Europa, it also has been thought that the thick ice covering its ocean probably generates some heat as two sides of cracked ice rub together in response to gravitational pull.

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Blobrana · L

With average temperatures of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, an almost nonexistent atmosphere and a complex web of cracks in a layer of ice encompassing the entire surface, the environment on Jupiters moon Europa is about as alien as they come. So are the enormous forces behind the surface display, namely an ocean beneath the ice nine times deeper than Earths deepest ocean trench and gravitational affects from a planet 318 times the mass of Earth.
For nearly a decade, it has been Simon Kattenhorns passion to understand the amazing surface features on Europa and how they are formed. And supported by new grants from NASA, his research may provide clues to one of mankinds biggest questions is there life outside of Earth?

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Blobrana · L

Curved features on Jupiters moon Europa may indicate that its poles have wandered by almost 90°, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution, Lunar and Planetary Institute, and University of California, Santa Cruz in the 15 May issue of Nature. Such an extreme shift suggests the existence of an internal liquid ocean beneath the icy crust, which could help build the case for Europa as possible habitat for extraterrestrial life.

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Blobrana · L

The icy outer shell of Jupiter's moon Europa may have slipped about 80° within the last 60 million years, carrying the moon's polar regions towards its equator, a new study reports. The research bolsters the idea that a global ocean which just might harbour life lies hidden beneath the moon's icy surface.

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