NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed homemade carbon dioxide on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, raising the possibility that the frigid waterworld could host life.
The new detection by JWST is intriguing because the carbon dioxide does not seem to have been carried by a meteorite or asteroid, and it appears in a geologically young region of the moon called Tara Regio, suggesting the gas may have formed within the moon itself.
It’s certainly exciting, but worth keeping in mind that there are indeed many other processes that can generate CO2 without living beings.
Yeah, I was real excited until seeing the “sign of life”. It’s just like all of the articles saying “Evidence found for the formation of life on Mars!” And then you read it, and they just found signs of water, which is neat, but not that level of headline neat.
There’s a whole geological carbon cycle that occurs without the presence of life, so all this really does is provide a place for further investigation with the upcoming Europa space missions.
Stupid clickbait headline.
They found the necessary elements for life, they didn’t find signatures of anything more significant than that.
Big Barotrauma vibes here
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Oh boy hope they have some gas there 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
In all honesty, I wonder if it’s just primitive bacteria or not primitive I suppose.
Do you have any idea just how absolutely groundbreaking primitive bacteria on other celestial bodies would be?
Even more groundbreaking if their cell structure and genetic material structure is similar to the bacteria on Earth.
Or even if it is comletely different. A second sample of how life can look like would be groundbreaking.
You right. I was more thinking a seeding hypothesis (life on other planets coming from a single source)
I enjoy how the search for life in the universe is like, in the whole visible universe, there’s not that many planets that could host life, but have we checked our neighboring planets?
in the whole visible universe, there’s not that many planets that could host life
Surely depends on what you regard as “not that many”. I’d say their number is huge. It keeps increasing with better detection technology.
There are a lot of people trying to look at a lot of objects with only one capable toy.
