For decades, Jupiter’s moon Europa has tantalized astrobiologists: Its streaked, icy crust encapsulates a giant saltwater ocean—a perfect potential home for life. But recent headlines have dampened that enthusiasm. Its icy crust has turned out to be a shocking 35 kilometers thick—four Mount Everests—which implies in part that not much heat is coming out of Europa’s rocky interior. A moon with a weak pulse is less likely to host percolating hydrothermal vents, one potential home for life at the bottom of the ocean. Moreover, despite a claimed detection in 2013, nobody has confirmed the moon has geyserlike plumes of water spewing into space, which, if present, would support the idea of a geologically active world.
“Is Europa truly dead?” asks Ngoc Tuan Truong, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Or should we broaden our perspective on other mechanisms that can sustain life?”
Research Truong presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union is putting a little pep back into Europa scientists’ step. He proposes that rocks leaching radioactive elements into the ocean could generate plenty of energy to support primordial life. What’s more, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which launched last year, might be able to detect the breakdown of some of these elements when it arrives at the moon next decade for a series of ice-skimming flybys.
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