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NASA Teleconference About Europa
NASA will host a teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 26, to present new findings from images captured by the agency's Hubble Space Telescope of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.
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.
NASA currently plans to perform additional flybys of Europa and put a lander on the surface as part of the Europa Clipper mission. The ESA's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer will also fly by Europa twice, but focus on Ganymede.
Nasa to Reveal 'Surprising' Activity On Jupiter's Moon Europa
There's something going on beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa. But what?
NASA teased a "surprising" announcement for Monday, based on Hubble Space Telescope images of the celestial body, which many experts believe could contain a subsurface ocean, even possibly some form of life.
The US space agency has already proclaimed that Europa has "strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its crust and which could host conditions favorable for life."
At Monday's announcement, "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," it said in a statement.
The announcement will be made at a news conference at 2 pm (1800 GMT) Monday featuring Paul Hertz, NASA's director of astrophysics, and William Sparks, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:54AM
To a certain extent what you say is true, but unless the laws of physics and chemistry are somehow radically different in other parts of the universe (and we're pretty damned sure they aren't), then actually we can make quite a few good assumptions that put boundaries on the likely places to find life:
1 - Life is basically an exercise in chemistry [1] which means that you need a stable-ish environment where chemistry can occur. That means the surface of stars, the hearts of black holes and the depths of gas giants are out of the question. They are too hot, too intense for atoms to bond together and then unbond later in useful and interesting ways.[2] Similarly ridiculously cold places are unlikely to harbour life, since chemistry can't happen without energy.[3]
2 - More specifically, life is about chemistry which enables the capture, storage and release of energy in a controlled and repeatable way. That is a requirement for growing, feeding, reproducing etc. You can't call something "alive" if it doesn't do anything more interesting than sit still and slowly decay / erode / rust / maybe grow some pretty crystals. Things that behave that way are called "rocks" and if they are alive then PETA are going to get even weirder. Anyway, some elements are better for working with energy than others. Carbon is more useful than silicon, for instance. Silicon is more useful than, say, iron. That's one of the reasons SETIists are always banging on about water and oxygen and carbon - they're very well suited to the kind of dynamic chemistry that enables energy management.
3 - Furthermore chemistry needs chemicals (obviously) and evolution can only work with what's available. It's all very well hypothesising an alien that eats plutonium and craps out skittles but that life form isn't ever going to evolve because there just aren't significant naturally occurring deposits of plutonium anywhere in the universe. Water, on the other hand, is abundant, probably one of the most common things in the universe (after nothingness, helium and loose hydrogen.) Carbon too is pretty commonplace compared to most other elements.
4 - Which leads us to the point of the post; gravity wells. For chemistry to occur you need all these things (useful elements, stable-ish environment) all together in one place. That doesn't happen out in deep space. Even what we think of as "clouds" in space, the colourful[4] star nurseries and spectacular nebulae you see in hubble photos are still incredibly sparse, desolate volumes of slightly-less-close-to-vacuum-than-usual bugger all.[5] The only thing capable of bringing elements together is... gravity. I guess you could argue that life might arise on some negligible-gravity asteroid or comet or something but then we are back to (1) the stable-ish environment. Planetary atmospheres (and oceans) are great for smoothing out the extremes of hot and cold found in space, and also for stirring and mixing all those chemicals together to enable the chemistry to happen.
[1] Unless you want to go completely Star Trek and start talking about "energy-based life forms" and such which, well, you might as well be talking about the FSM.
[2] I think some people (science fiction authors, at least) have suggested that there may be some kind of "chemistry" going on in the most super-intense hot environments, where atoms break down and you just have a soup of subatomic particles whose interactions in those conditions we don't yet fully understand. That would fall under "...laws of chemistry work differently in other parts of the universe" as stated in the first paragraph.
[3] Technically what we are looking for is an energy gradient - IE a place where there are patches of higher energy and patches of lower energy and some way of exploiting the difference. This might be possible on extremely cold worlds, but at best you could expect any life to be ridiculously slow-moving: As in, "a seed takes a hundred thousands years to grow a leaf" kind of slow.
[4] False colour, remember. In "true colour" those images would be just white specks on a black background, same as any other patch of sky.
[5] I guess it might also be worth considering the proto-stellar disc just before a star ignites. Thick(ish) soupy mixture of elements, parts of it would be of a sensible (and maybe stable?) temperature... who knows? Of course star ignition would be an extinction event.
Disclaimer: IANAPhysicist, Chemist or Xenowhateverist. Corrections from more educated people are more than welcome.
TL;DR: We look for life on goldilocks planets because Science.