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Hidden lakes discovered on Jupiter's moon Europa

The large lakes that are under the ice sheet but above the ocean that is tens of kilometers deep on Europa's moon, may be the connecting factor between the surface and the ocean, and enable life there

Europa's "Great Lakes" as they might appear from analysis of data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft operating over the past decade
Europa's "Great Lakes" as they might appear from analysis of data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft operating over the past decade

Data from a NASA mission has provided scientists with evidence of what appears to be a body of liquid water, similar in volume to the Great Lakes of North America, beneath the ice sheet of the moon Europa, which orbits the planet Jupiter.

The data lead the scientists to hypothesize that there is an exchange of substances between Europa's ice shell and the ocean below it. This information may accelerate the argument that the existence of an underground ocean in Europa indicates the possibility of the existence of life elsewhere in the solar system. The findings were published in the journal Nature.

The data opens up spectacular possibilities, says Marie Whitek, director of the Astrobiology Program at NASA. "However, the scientists will want to take a closer look at the analysis and review of the data before we can fully assess the impact of these results."

NASA's Galileo spacecraft, launched from the space shuttle Atlantis in 1989 to Jupiter, made many discoveries and provided scientists with data for decades of research. Galileo studied Jupiter which is the most massive planet in the solar system and some of its moons.

A hidden lake on Europe. The scientists estimate that many like him are in the lower regions of the ice shell that surrounds the moon Europa. Illustration: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/Univ. of Texas at Austin. The Thera Macula region (in artificial colors.) is an apparently active region located above a large lake of water within the ice crust of Europa. The colors indicate topographical height compared to the ground in the background. Purple and red colors indicate a higher area. Photo: Paul Schenk/NASA.
A hidden lake on Europe. The scientists estimate that many like him are in the lower regions of the ice shell that surrounds the moon Europa. Illustration: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/Univ. of Texas at Austin. The Thera Macula region (in artificial colors.) is an apparently active region located above a large lake of water within the ice crust of Europa. The colors indicate topographical height compared to the ground in the background. Purple and red colors indicate a higher area. Photo: Paul Schenk/NASA.

One of the most important discoveries was the existence of an ocean composed of salty water under the surface of Europa. This ocean is deep enough to cover the entire surface of Europa and contain more liquid water than all the oceans on Earth combined. However, due to being far from the sun, the surface of the ocean is completely frozen. Most scientists believe that the thickness of the ice sheet reaches tens of kilometers.

"One of the opinions in the scientific community was that if the ice sheet is thick, it is bad for biology. This means that the material at the surface does not interact with the subsurface ocean," says Brittany Schmidt, the lead researcher on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin. "We have now found evidence that the thick ice sheet can be involved, and there is probably room for lakes at a small depth. This makes Europe and its ocean more welcoming to life."

Schmidt and her team focused on images taken by the Galileo spacecraft showing two roughly circular formations on the surface of Europa, in an area known as the Chaos Plain. Based on similar processes observed on Earth - in the ice shelf and under the glaciers that cover volcanoes - they developed a four-step model that explains how the formations formed. The model produced some conflicting results. Some of them concluded that the ice sheet was thick, while others thought it was thin.

This analysis showed that the formations on the surface of Europe in the Chaos region, may have been created by mechanisms involving significant exchanges between the little ice and the underground lakes. This allows nutrients and energy to be transferred from the surface to the long-discovered global ocean beneath the thick ice sheet. This increases the chance of life there.

Europe as seen from the Galileo spacecraft. The picture shows plains of light ice, cracks extending to the horizon and dark spots that apparently contain ice and dust. Photo: NASA
Europe as seen from the Galileo spacecraft. The picture shows plains of light ice, cracks extending to the horizon and dark spots that apparently contain ice and dust. Photo: NASA

The authors of the study have many reasons to believe that the model is correct, based on observations of Europa from Galileo and from Earth. Since the ocean is many kilometers deep, the only way to test its existence would be through a mission to probe Europa's ice sheet. Such a mission was ranked second in priority to the flagship mission in the National Research Council ranking and its feasibility began to be investigated by NASA.

"This new understanding of the processes on Europa would not have been possible without the basis of 20 years of observations of the glaciers and floating ice shelves on Earth" said Don Blankenship, who also co-wrote the article and is a senior researcher at the Institute of Geophysics, where he conducts aerial radar studies of the ice cover of the earth.

Galileo was the first spacecraft to measure Jupiter's atmosphere and make long-term observations of the Jupiter system. The spacecraft was also the first to fly by an asteroid and discover an asteroid's moon. NASA extended the mission three times to take advantage of Galileo's unique scientific capabilities, and finally it put it on a crash course on Jupiter to avoid the risk of hitting Europa.

For information on the NASA website

36 תגובות

  1. I didn't understand the complaint, after all the article is from about a year ago, I don't delete articles, because the archive is the strongest part of the site.

  2. It seems to me that it is not only NASA that renews information from the past, but also on the "Hidan" website...

  3. Go detonate your planet
    A piece of cabbage head!

    Write here in the comments what your exact address is
    And we'll send you an asteroid by fast interstellar mail!

  4. N.C.:
    I guess you wanted an explanation and not moralizing and sending to unknown literature.
    Without going into all the possible details - I will point out to you one important mistake in the whole downsizing idea that you are adopting.
    The mass of a body (assuming a constant density) - increases as the third power of the radius.
    The surface area of ​​the body increases only as the square of the radius.
    The impact energy is proportional to the mass while its impact area is actually the surface area.
    Therefore - if we define the energy absorbed per unit area in your reduced model as 1, then in a model the size of the Earth - the energy per unit area will be 1200000000.
    The same relationship also exists between the amounts of ash that will fall on each point.

    Of course, the damage calculations are much more complicated than that.
    All in all, I wanted to give you an intuitive understanding of the error in your reasoning.

  5. N.C.
    Indeed, this is approximately the order of magnitude of the distances in the universe, a grain of dora (sun) every few tens of kilometers.
    Also, I understand your doubt about the asteroid impact. SA is a body that is one billionth the volume of the Earth

    But if you think of the harpoon as just a balloon filled with water now just prick it with a pin. Even then, will you be convinced that nothing will happen to the balloon?
    Think about it
    Good night N.C
    Sabdarmish Yehuda.

  6. To Yehuda, I want to clarify something. Many times, especially in astronomy and large numbers, the simple human mind cannot understand and imagine situations like the mentioned collision.

    I'll give you an example: I think 90% of the world's population, when you look at the sky and see the thousands of stars (that are visible)
    And few, who know about the hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy and the hundreds of billions of galaxies - all these do not know how much space the universe is actually...empty (if we ignore subatomic particles).

    But if you reduce everything by a trillion you will find out to them that actually the "density" of the stars in our galaxy is something like...a grain
    Dora (about 2 mm) every 42 km. Everyone will open their mouths in amazement and not believe it.

    Therefore, I believe that indeed an asteroid with a diameter of 10 km will cause everything you mentioned. But when you reduce everything, the common sense, it is clear to him that hitting a bullet with a diameter of 12.7 meters with a bullet with a diameter of XNUMX meters, even at a speed of thousands of kilometers per hour, will not cause any real damage. Hence my doubt.

  7. N.C.
    The conclusions from the "no experiment" are completely wrong and you should read material on the subject
    The impact of such an asteroid the size of Everest on Earth will create an earthquake of 10 on the Richter scale all over the world, and tsunami waves hundreds of meters high! In addition, hot rocks will be thrown on all parts of the Earth from Libya in a huge splash, the atmosphere will be covered in smoke and dust, the sun's radiation will not penetrate and it will rain scorching Great on the whole ball. Most of the vegetation will die and with it most of the animals and more
    So I suggest that you read material on the subject and draw conclusions.
    Besides, you can still conduct a nice experiment
    Shabbat Shalom N.C.
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  8. Thanks for the references.

    I am still of the opinion that even if the scaled-down model is hit by a bullet with a diameter of 1 cm at a speed of 100 km/h, still
    It seems to me that the damage will not be catastrophic.

    Since there has not been any impact of an asteroid on the Earth in modern times, (with the exception of the impact on Tunguska at the beginning of the last century, which no one saw at the time of its impact) I think that the calculations of the amount of damage caused by an asteroid with a diameter of 10 km or 1 km would be wrong.

    In my opinion, the impact that resulted in the elimination of the dinosaurs was from an asteroid with a diameter of more than 100 km - which is equivalent to the impact of a stone with a diameter of 10 cm in the scaled-down model, which is logically possible to understand that it will indeed cause great real damage.

  9. If we take only the raw data of the problem, and if we start from the assumption that what we are actually interested in is the ratio between the kinetic energy transferred by the asteroid to a unit of mass of the asteroid, it seems that in fact the masses of the asteroid and the asteroid according to the simulation data are small in the same proportion of 18^10.

    Therefore, since the kinetic energy is proportional to the mass, it seems that the speed of the reduced asteroid should remain the same as the original speed, namely: 100,000 km/h.

    I hope the answer is very helpful...

  10. N.C.
    If you read my previous comment carefully, you will see that in the end I did get over the mistake.
    But why do the calculations the way you do? You can do them differently.
    The kinetic energy of such an asteroid is as strong as millions of Hiroshima atomic bombs, and then please decide for yourself what damage a million such bombs, or however many, do to our little earth.
    And by the way homework:- check how many atomic bombs this asteroid is worth. I will be happy to hear.
    Good Day
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  11. Another error correction: 100000 km/h divided by a million means a speed of 100 meters per hour, sorry for the mistake. (Interesting that no one noticed this).

    Well, without going into all kinds of complicated calculations, simple logic says that when a ball with a diameter of 1 cm hits
    With a ball with a diameter of 12.7 meters, even at a speed of 1000 km/h (and not 100 meters per hour) it will not cause catastrophic damage. While all scientists agree that an asteroid impact with a diameter of 10 km at a speed of 100
    A thousand km/h on Earth means a real catastrophe.

    And so there is probably something more missing in the simulation I brought. Is it possible to also divide by a million the strength of the materials from which the earth and the asteroid are made?

  12. Yuval and N.C.
    It's not that simple because the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed. And besides, I don't understand why you put the whole earth in 12.7 meters, it's not enough to put the Black Sea in, for example, a tub of water
    N.C. We are small for these calculations but I tell you to do it according to what I explained to you in my previous response.
    A jubilee asteroid moving at a speed of 100 km per hour crosses an atmosphere of 100 km in a thousand hours, which is about 3.6 seconds, which means that you too will have to move and pass a meter of atmosphere in a few seconds, which are more than a kilometer per hour, not a centimeter per hour. But again, additional factors come into play whose calculation is difficult
    That's why I finished and turned to NASA
    Good night
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  13. Addendum to the above: It should be read: .....”that hits a ball whose diameter is 12.7 meters at a speed of 10 cm per hour”…..

  14. Since speed is measured in terms of distance divided by time, and since you did not change the time but only the distance, you will have to change the speed to the same extent as you changed the distance.
    A simulation of an asteroid moving at a speed of 10 cm per hour along a few millimeters will last a short time, just as it will happen with a real asteroid that will move at a speed of 100,000 km through a few kilometers of atmosphere.
    On the other hand, if for the sake of study and impression you need to dwell on certain processes or skip them, you are allowed to play with the speed however you like - as long as you inform the viewers that it is a disproportionate speed.

  15. Judah and others,

    Thanks for your response .

    But exactly the main point of interest in this experiment was ignored.
    Referring to the data I mentioned (all of which are accurate) - if I want the theoretical-experiment- to be successful, I need to know at what speed the asteroid, reduced as mentioned above, must hit the reduced Earth. Does the speed also need to be reduced by a million times? Or the impact speed should remain a speed of 100 thousand km/h.

    If the speed also needs to be reduced a million times, then this means a speed of 10 cm
    B. S. E.

    If so, at least according to this experiment, the impact of a marble with a diameter of cm that hits a ball with a diameter of 12.7 meters
    (with the parameters mentioned above) should not cause real damage (that's what my logic says) to the earth.

    Therefore, the figure of the impact speed in the above model is a very, very, very important element. Right ?

    Therefore, I ask the scientists on the site to try and answer me about it.

  16. Excuse me, Mr. N.C. And Mr. "Shame on you"
    The problem you gave is a problem that needs to deal with a lot of data and it is a problem of supercomputers and it also depends on what you are supposed to ask for
    But if it's for the sake of demonstration, take a tub of water, fill it with sand and water (continents and oceans) when the depth is a few cm, as well as the height of the mountains, and drop a glass or metal marble into it from a height of one meter. You will be able to see interesting things such as waves and the washing of the continents in a tsunami, you will also be able to see the increase of the tsunami in the bays, you will be able to see the depth of the craters falling at different speeds and also the height of the waves relative to the depth of the oceans and more. I'm sure you can come up with more ideas.
    Don't forget to take pictures and keep a record of the experiment. I think this is a very instructive thing and if you organize the experiment in an interesting way, I promise you that I will even consider publishing the experiment in the "Astronomy" booklet of the Israeli Astronomical Society, of which I am the editor.
    And maybe also Avi Blizovsky, from the website here, will agree to publish something here on the website, but it depends on him and the quality of the experiment.
    The main thing is not to get upset
    Good Day
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  17. Why did no one answer N.C.'s question? It intrigues me too.

    You don't know or you're just stupid.

  18. jubilee
    I have a feeling you switched to a Turkish computer
    With them, everything goes the other way around.

    Good day to all the merry ones
    (:))
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  19. jubilee
    There will be no war, check it!
    They will just think that some small meteorite or asteroid hit the upper layers.
    But maybe they will decide to attack, in a preemptive war, the Earth, which has come to test their world with explosives.
    Hoping for peace in the universe
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  20. sparrow!
    The method you proposed is probably not acceptable to NASA scientists. What will we say if it turns out that there is a supreme life there and the exploded probe sparks a war of moons and worlds?

  21. my father
    This reaction apparently belongs to the Sarn experiment
    And in addition
    700 billion km is absolutely not the end of the universe and is less than a tenth of a light year away!!!
    A light year is a little less than ten thousand billion km.
    Good night, father
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  22. A question for the experts and scientists of the site on a matter that does not relate to the above item. I'm asking here because I can't find anywhere else to ask.

    I want to build an imaginary simulation of an asteroid hitting the Earth. The scale will be one in a million:

    A. The diameter of the earth will be 12.7 meters.
    B. The average depth of the oceans - which in reality is about 5 km - will be 5 mm.
    C. The height of Mount Everest will be about 9 mm above sea level.
    d. The size of the offending asteroid (so I decided...) which in reality will be 10 km - will be 1 cm on the above scale.

    The figure I am missing in this simulation is: if in reality the impact speed of the asteroid on the earth will be 100 thousand km per hour - what impact speed should it have based on the above scale and the above data in order for the simulation experiment to be correct and accurate?
    I will be grateful if I receive the above figure, after receiving it I will have a very "interrogative" question...

  23. The difference is sixty nanoseconds or sixty billionths of a second over 700 kilometers or sixty seconds (minutes) over 700 billion kilometers, which means that even to the end of the universe it is a matter of a few seconds at most

  24. You don't need to drill... UART can send 2 probes that will land on the surface and check the layers below using seismic waves, meaning one will detonate a serious explosive charge on one side of Europe and the other will land on the other side and measure the speed at which the waves reach it. (And I have a feeling that even better methods already exist and I just don't remember them right now..)

  25. Yehuda:
    I am happy for you that you are able to read in my words what is not in them.
    I didn't write that this was sensational news and even the article didn't claim that.

  26. Judah is right! Already a few years ago he showed models of a probe that is supposed to go down and with the help of a thermonuclear drill will melt the way down and there release a submarine with a relay back to the probe that will transmit images and information from the sensors back out... there is nothing new under Tzedek
    But I would be very happy to see this mission come out.
    What's down there is fascinating.

  27. Happy for NASA that Michael thinks this is sensational news/hypothesis
    In this I will give you another sensational news that O, TOO, TOO, is about to come out of the seminary house of Nasa:
    "The aforementioned noisy lakes are connected by underground rivers between them and the ocean below them!"
    I have some more alleged sensational news but we'll save that for another time
    Have a good week Michael
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  28. It is quite surprising that people fail to read in the article what he himself says that he is repeating, and even when it is explained to them - they try to defend the wrong claim that they made in advance.
    The ocean under the ice sheet is also mentioned in the article as old knowledge.
    The lakes are a new discovery.
    What is not clear here?
    And this is a hypothesis?
    After all, all we have ever had are hypotheses.

  29. PS: In my opinion, space sciences will only be promoted in an era in which a way is found to create a profitable industry from the utilization of sources located in near space.
    I think the Chinese will be the first to use space for their industry, in their first step it will drag the other powers into a space race once again.

  30. Also in my opinion, NASA "restores" archaic messages and information about everything related to space.
    In the past, she presented plans and theories regarding deep drilling on top of "Europe".

    It seems to me that all these news are like death palpitations and nothing else.

  31. To my father
    It is written in the article:
    "The data lead the scientists to hypothesize that there is an exchange of substances between Europa's ice shell and the ocean below it. End quote.
    And the emphasis is on the word "hypothesis". Nothing is certain.
    The dark streaks on the surface of the moon Europa have always been explained by material that erupted from the moon's subglacial ocean.
    And for the formation of life forms this inner material of the moon is sufficient,
    Everyone knows that a space vehicle must be sent to dig and reach, (or not reach), the water ocean in Europe. There are no shortcuts.
    All the rest are just speculations whose achievement is maximum for journalistic reasons.
    That's my opinion, and I apologize to NASA if I'm wrong.
    Good Day
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

  32. The innovation is that between the surface and the ocean there are smaller lakes, and it is possible that thanks to them there is a connection of energy and nutrients between the surface and the ocean buried under kilometers of ice and about which it was known a long time ago.

  33. I want to understand what is happening today at NASA?
    Am I the only one who thinks that NASA is upgrading information that was already known a long time ago? After all, we always knew that "apparently" there is a lake of water under the ice of Europa, and what is the "shocking" news? Yes, there is "apparently" a lake of water under the ice of Europa!
    Budget-cut NASA is trying to show it's still on the map.
    inconclusive!
    Good Day
    Sabdarmish Yehuda

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