We just got closer to finding intelligent life – not light years away, but in our own Solar System. The revelation comes after Jupiter’s moon Europa was seen by the Hubble Space Telescope to be spurting water vapors as high as 200km into the air.

The dominant theory is currently that this is caused by water
eruptions on the surface of the icy moon. But the find is more
exciting yet, as it takes us one step closer to observing the
possibilities for life there. Because in combination with another
study, which found important minerals on the surface, scientists
can begin to examine the interaction of minerals above and below
the moon’s surface.

In short, all the building blocks for life are there, we just
need to get close enough to understand their interaction.

The chemical vapors in the atmosphere, identified by Hubble’s
sensitive filters, point to two huge plumes of water occasionally
erupting on the South Pole. These eruptions are thought to eject
the vapors, which reach such dazzling heights that they are seen
from the moon’s orbit. This is a result of being driven by
immense tidal forces, which heat up and put pressure on the
moon’s vast subsurface oceans. The analysis was published
December 12 in the journal Science and on the NASA website,
following a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San
Francisco.

Now, the lead author of the research, Lorenz Roth of Southwest
Research Institute in San Antonio, believes “If those plumes
are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident
exists under Europa's crust, then this means that future
investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of
Europa's potentially habitable environment without drilling
through layers of ice. And that is tremendously exciting."

Because the layer of ice could be tens of kilometers thick, this
is a huge breakthrough.

Scientists see the process of chemical interaction on Europa in
the following way: the vast subsurface oceans are naturally in
contact with the rock below, while the ice that covers them is
seen to harbor salts, producing reactions that generate heat –
and this is where Jupiter comes in. Its massive gravity pull
squeezes and stretches Europa so that its skin cracks and
ripples, producing the water vapors and mixing up surface and
sub-surface elements.

Other, parallel, findings were also revealed by NASA on Thursday
and are being presented on Friday at the aforementioned meeting
in San Francisco by Jim Shirley of the agency’s Jet Propulsion
Lab. They reveal that new analysis from the Galileo probe (which
has been exploring Jupiter and its moons since 1989) points to a
ring of clay-like minerals.

These are thought to originate from Europa’s past collisions with
various space rocks and give further credence to the theory that
organic life-forms are indeed very likely on the moon, though no
direct evidence has been found yet.

“Organic materials, which are important building blocks for
life, are often found in comets and primitive asteroids,”
said Jim Shirley of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California. “Finding the rocky residues of this comet crash
on Europa’s surface may open up a new chapter in the story of the
search for life on Europa.”

The clay-type materials seen by Shirley and team on the surface
are called phyllosilicates, and were taken by Galileo back in
1998. They can be seen on a ring that is 40km wide and 120km away
from the center of a crater 30km in diameter.

The theory describing collision with space rocks is explained by
materials ejected from Europa at the time of impact, JPL
scientists explain. The collisions probably took place at
45-degree angles, just askew enough for some of the asteroid’s
minerals to stay on the surface, instead of being driven
underwater.

It is still not known how the phyllosilicates from the moon’s
interior could also end up on the surface – since Europa’s icy
crust is about 100km thick in certain areas; however that is all
the more reason to study those hard-to-reach areas and the
complex chemical processes going on inside them.

At this point, scientists are still analyzing whether the massive
water vapors are a direct result of the water plumes erupting on
the surface, but that is so far the dominant hypothesis.