Enceladus, the sixth largest of Saturn’s 146 moons, has a liquid ocean with a rocky bed beneath its bright, white, icy surface. Enceladus’ glaciers throw frozen grains of material io space, creating one of the couless rings that orbit Saturn.
Now, a team of researchers has discovered that these ice grains coain phosphate. They found the combination using data from Cassini, the joi NASA-Europa orbiter that has been studying Saturn, its rings and moons uil 2017. This is the first time that phosphate has been found in an ocean beyond Earth. The new discovery, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, raises the possibility that Enceladus could be the home of extraterrestrial life.
Frank Postberg“We didn’t look for (phosphate) and we didn’t expect it,” said the study’s lead author, a planetary scieist at the Free University of Berlin and lead author of the study. He describes the discovery of phosphates (chemicals coaining the eleme phosphorus) as an exciting mome.
With the discovery of phosphorus in the ocean world around Saturn, scieists say they have now found all the elemes we know are esseial for life. Phosphorus is a key eleme in human bones and teeth, and according to scieists, it is the rarest esseial biological eleme in the universe. Planetary researchers previously discovered five other key elemes on Enceladus: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, the last of which has been teatively ideified.
Previous research has shown that phosphorus must be scarce in extraterrestrial oceanic worlds, and this scarcity has probably preveed the formation of life in other parts of the solar system or galaxy. But Dr. Postberg says that in the case of Enceladus, researchers found exactly the opposite of this issue; That is, the ice sea of this moon, instead of lacking phosphate, is enriched with this compound almost a thousand times or more compared to the oceans of the earth.
Dr. Postberg and his colleagues conducted an in-depth study of 345 ice grains that Cassini studied while passing through Saturn’s E ring, and concluded that phosphates are prese. This ring is formed by the material emitted from Enceladus. They measured the composition of dust masses arising from the collisions of these grains with the metal plate of one of the instrumes installed on the spacecraft called “Cosmic Dust Analyzer” and found that the molecular mass of 9 ice particles indicates the presence of phosphate.
