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.