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The hunt for habitable (and already inhabited) worlds has largely focused on a "Goldilocks zone" around a star, where it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. But astrobiologists have begun to broaden their search – thanks to discoveries by NASA's Cassini orbiter.
Saturn sits too far from the sun for its rays to melt ice, and yet Cassini discovered that one of the planet's moons, Enceladus, has a vast ocean sloshing beneath its icy crust. Instead of sunlight, tidal forces keep Enceladus's ocean warm. The gravity of Saturn pulls at Enceladus's core, driving thermal processes that create a new Goldilocks zone inside the moon itself.
"It's definitely been a paradigm shift in where you might find life," says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.
Still, it takes a lot more than water to make a place habitable. But here, too, Enceladus delivers. Icy geysers fueled by Enceladus's ocean shoot out from cracks in the moon's surface, allowing the Cassini spacecraft to sample them directly during flybys. What it found is that Enceladus has almost everything required for life as we know it: a source of energy, a source of carbon, and salts and minerals.
Thank goodness for Cassini, after that whole thing about being banned from Europa.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:22PM (3 children)
It would be interesting if we could imagine life forms that do not use photosynthesis as a source of energy, but rather use tidal gravitational forces to harvest energy. I wonder what such a life form would be like? Long? Would it be life?
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:58PM
We already know of earthly ecosystems that are completely isolated from the sun. They're pretty interesting, often harvesting energy from volcanic processes.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2, Informative) by fustakrakich on Friday September 15 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)
You don't have to imagine anything. We've already been there [oceana.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 15 2017, @04:11PM
Fair point - I was imagining directly harvesting via gravitational tidal forces; which would mean a completely different biology (not necessarily carbon-based, for example)