Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus has everything needed for alien life to exist, scientists have reported, saying that all the six key elements have been found.
Researchers at the Free University of Berlin found phosphorus – the rarest of the six. It is the first time it has been seen beyond Earth. The findings may now lead scientists to study Jupiter’s fourth moon, Europa, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which are also icy.
Phosphorus was discovered from studying data from the Cassini–Huygens space probe, which studied Saturn from 2004 to 2017. The project was a coordinated effort by NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency.
The other required elements are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur.
Frank Postberg of the Free University of Berlin said: “We didn’t find life or even something that was created by life. We have just found signs of something that indicates that life could form there pretty good. It is just a habitability indicator, and a very good and important one.”
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco of the Cassini-Huygens project added: “[It is] the most promising place, the lowest-hanging fruit, in our solar system to search for extraterrestrial life.”
Mr Postberg and his team have been studying data that was gathered in 2008 for the past five years.
Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth largest moon and only around 314 miles wide and could fit within the United Kingdom. It was originally thought to be a frozen ice ball until further probing showed it contained water vapour and icy particles.
The Cassini–Huygens studied 345 ice grains from Saturn’s E-Ring over five years and five of those were found to have phosphates.
Mr Postberg added: “The most surprising thing was how clear and unmistakable the phosphate signatures are in the data. It took years analysing a lot of data, but from my perspective, this is really a bulletproof detection.”
