Saturn's moon Enceladus’ Sea Floor has Hydrothermal Vents, Similar to Those on Earth
Where there’s heat and water on Earth, there’s life.
In 1977, a group of marine researchers discovered something they’d only before theorized: cracks in the ocean floor releasing heat, warming up (and often boiling) the ocean around it. They also found mollusks in them, and subsequent vents have yielded heat resistant microbes, giant tube worms, and more fantastic creatures living in what are essentially small, underwater volcanoes.
Now, NASA has announced that they have indirect evidence for hydrothermal vents beyond Earth. In its encounters with Saturn’s moon Enceladus, the Cassini craft found chemicals associated with these events. The results were published today in Science. It adds to the body of evidence that Enceladus could be ripe for life.
"Enceladus is too small to have retained the hydrogen from when it formed, so the hydrogen we see today is coming from inside Enceladus," Linda Spilker, project scientist on the Cassini mission, said in a press conference.
Enceladus, which is a tiny moon, took Cassini researchers by surprise when they discovered what seemed to be geysers of water emitting from the south pole in 2005. Subsequent investigations built a picture of the origin: liquid water under the surface of Enceladus, which led to the idea of an entire ocean under the surface. The heating mechanism, to date, has not been discovered.