from the ride-to-the-ridge-where-the-ice-commences dept.
Parallel ice ridges, a common feature on Jupiter's moon Europa, are found on Greenland's ice sheet
Parallel ice ridges in Greenland bear a striking resemblance to ridges on Jupiter's ice-encased moon Europa, suggesting the moon's icy shell could be riddled with pockets of water.
This similarity could greatly improve the odds of NASA's Europa Clipper mission detecting potentially habitable environments on the Jovian moon. The spacecraft's ice-penetrating radar instrument REASON (short for Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface) will be ideal for conducting such a search.
"If there are pockets of water under the ridges, we have the right instruments to see them," said Dustin Schroeder, a Stanford University associate professor and coauthor of a new study comparing Greenland's "double ridges" with those of Europa.
[...] "It's exciting, what it would mean if you have plenty of water within the ice shell," said coauthor Gregor Steinbrügge, a former Stanford researcher who is now a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.[...]
Potential life-sustaining nutrients on Europa's surface – perhaps deposited there by another Jupiter moon, volcanic Io – might find their way to the subsurface ocean, he said.
Journal Reference:
Culberg, R., Schroeder, D.M. & Steinbrügge, G. Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter's moon Europa. [open] Nat Commun 13, 2007 (2022).
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29458-3
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 04 2022, @04:33PM (1 child)
My understanding is that beyond the frost line hydrogen and helium swamps out solids carbon, silicon, etc. Is there any hope for significant amounts of rock out there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:20PM
Of course there is a lot of rock out there, it's just buried under miles of ice. ;) But seriously, any outer system body large enough to experience enough compression heating for differentiation should follow that pattern. I suppose a collision could vaporize enough surface material without shattering the core to leave a primarily rocky body. Some asteroids might have been thrown out that far by Jupiter during the Late Heavy Bombardment, but unless one got lucky and had it's orbit circularized by Neptune then they would have all been swept up long ago. Capture of an orphaned rocky body ejected from a different star system is also a possibility, but I expect a very rare one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @07:16PM
Is it a monolith?