Spectacular new evidence of 'alien life worlds'

A vibrant and warm "cradle of life", just like what has been happening on Earth, has been demonstrated on the deadly-looking alien world of Europa.

Europa is an 'ice giant' orbiting Jupiter, but NASA scientists have long believed that the icy crust is just a crust, with a life-bearing ocean underneath. Much research has been conducted from and in support of those missions, including one just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The work, conducted jointly by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Oxford (UK) and Hokkaido University (Japan), modeled existing data to explain how Europa's icy shell might be rotating.

Jupiter's "moon of life" Europa - (Photo: NASA).

"When scientists compare the images collected by the Europa Clipper spacecraft with those from Galileo and Voyager, they can check the position of the ice surfaces to see if they have changed," said Dr Hamish Hay from the University of Oxford.

Europa Clipper is a spacecraft specifically designed to explore Europa, scheduled to be launched by NASA in 2024, with the additional mission of hunting for evidence of alien life. Galileo is a spacecraft exploring Jupiter, while Voyager is tasked with studying the far reaches of the Solar System.

According to Sci-News, they concluded that this rotation is controlled by the dynamics of the subsurface ocean, which also becomes evidence that this underground ocean is very similar to Earth's ocean.

Previous studies have shown Europa's ocean is heated from below through tidal heating and radioactive decay of its rocky interior, while being cooled from the outside by its icy surface.

The new model shows this must result from convection , whereby heat is transported by warm and cold currents, going up and down.

These currents create alternating east-west ocean currents. At the ocean surface, the currents exert friction on the ice and cause the crust to rotate.

Conversely, the rotation of the ice crust also helps orient the water currents of the underground ocean, causing them to move in an East-West or West-East direction.

The discovery not only surprised scientists about how an underground ocean could impact the ice shells of moons and planets with similar patterns, but also helped them understand more about oceans under ice shells.

This will also help reveal more about Europa's geological history, guiding NASA and its partners on their quest to explore the world, which they hope will lead them to their first encounter with alien life. It will also be a great platform for studying other ocean worlds, including many similarly structured exoplanets that NASA has already found.