Jupiter’s moon Europa would have less oxygen than we thought

2024-03-07 23:56:00

This is one of the images captured by the Juno space probe of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Photo: NASA

The Juno space probe, which was launched in 2011 with the aim of studying Jupiter, had an important approach to one of its moons called Europa in 2022. These data were sent to Earth and have been studied by researchers from several universities in the United States, Germany and Switzerland.

Initially, thanks to observations made with telescopes specialized in the identification of condensed oxygen, it was believed that the surface of Europa generated more than 1,000 kilograms (kg) of oxygen per second.

That figure gave researchers reason to think that Europa, due to the large amount of water that has been identified under its crust, might host some form of life.

However, thanks to data collected by Juno, a study published last Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy considerably diminished hopes that this would be the case. “Europe’s atmospheric composition has never been directly sampled and model-derived oxygen production estimates ranged over several orders of magnitude,” the scientists said in their paper.

Direct samples obtained by the space probe gave much lower estimates of oxygen generation: regarding 12 kilograms per second. This is “less than previously thought, with a narrower range to support habitability in Europa’s ocean,” the researchers wrote.

Another finding from their analysis indicates that the oxygen generation process, which occurs in conjunction with hydrogen, occurs due to the radiation that Jupiter emits towards the ice layer that makes up the ocean of that moon. That would be the main form of erosion of the natural satellite.

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