NASA has announced a teleconference to be held on Monday afternoon next week, during which it will present new findings from images of Europa, one of the largest of Jupiter’s 67 known moons, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Astronomers will present results from a unique Europa observing campaign that resulted in surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a subsurface ocean on Europa,” the agency said.
The announcement prompted fevered speculation on social media: Europa is considered to be one of the best places to find alien life in the Solar System and astrobiologists have theorised that organisms could survive in its oceans.
However, NASA sought to quell some of the more outlandish expectations by stipulating that its new findings were most certainly “NOT aliens”.
Participants in the teleconference will include: Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division; William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; Britney Schmidt of the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Jennifer Wiseman, senior Hubble project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
In late 2013 the Hubble telescope observed water vapor erupting from Europa, in what was hailed as a ‘tremendously exciting’ discovery.
Lorenz Roth of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said at the time that if the plumes of vapour were connected to the ocean beneath the crust they could start searching for life nearer the surface.
“This means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa’s potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice,” he said.
“And that is tremendously exciting.”
Source: The Telegraph
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