I still have a ton of research reading to catch up on from 2018. This weekend, I read a paper about Europa. I wasn’t sure at first why this was on my to-be-read list, but by the end I knew why this one had caught my attention.
Europa is one of the icy moons of Jupiter. It’s often listed as one of the most likely places in the Solar System where we might find alien life. That’s because there’s evidence of a vast ocean of liquid water sloshing around beneath Europa’s icy crust.
Maybe someday we’ll be able to drop a little robo-submarine into that ocean and see if anything’s swimming around down there. But in the meantime, we’re really only able to explore Europa’s surface. And as you can see in the highly technical diagram below, no matter where you go on Europa’s surface, it’s cold. But in one specific region, Europa gets really cold.
Or at least, that one region appears to be extra cold. This is a case where it’s important to understand how we get our data. We’re really measuring Europa’s thermal emissions, the amount of heat that gets radiated out into space. So that cold spot may represent one of two things:
- Either that region absorbs less sunlight than the rest of Europa, and so it never heats up in the first place…
- Or that region does a better job trapping the heat it absorbs from the sun, and so we detect less heat escaping back into space.
Either way, something weird is happening. Unfortunately, our previous missions to the Jupiter system did not provide us any useful photos of that one specific spot on Europa’s surface. Our current Juptier mission, Juno, is unable to approach Europa at all, so that’s no help.
So we can’t match this anomalous cold spot to a visible surface feature. However, the authors of the paper I read did suggest that this could be a sign of recent geological activity—the formation of chaos terrain, perhaps.
And if that’s true, we might (might!) find the waters of Europa’s subsurface ocean seeping up to the moon’s surface. Maybe there’s fresh organic material seeping up onto the surface too. Maybe.
Maybe.
Could be worth checking out, though. Don’t you think?
I’m going to very disappointed if there’s no merfolk on Europa.
What would we call life found on Europa? Europan? That could get confusing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
*gets awesome story idea
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yay!
LikeLike
Had to dig deep in my archive to find this. I knew I’d drawn a Europan mermaid at some point. https://planetpailly.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/alien-mermaid.jpg
LikeLiked by 1 person
that is AMAZING. Thank you for sharing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
So the anomoly may be extra cold or extra warm – relatively. Europa’s surface is interesting but it’s that ocean we want! I hypothesized a way to get a submarine probe into the ocean of a Jovian moon – Amalthea, just to be contrary, since Europa is so well known. I gave my probe a plutonium 238 butt and let it melt through the ice. But Pu-238 is hard to come by. What would a real probe use? Standard drilling doesn’t seem promising – so much equipment needed and the ice is so thick. Bombs (of any sort) might be fun…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Europa does get a lot of attention, so I like the idea of shifting the focus to some other moon. Drilling on Europa does not sound feasible, unless the ice turns out to be thinner in some regions than others. Maybe this “cold spot” is one of those thin ice regions?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder if you’d like to feature – or just mention – my funny song and cideo about my impoverished attempt to get into the space race. It’s called The Naked Spaceman and can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_OLpSR340A
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cool song! I will definitely keep it in mind. Could work well with an updated post on the skin-tight counter-pressure spacesuits NASA’s been working on.
LikeLiked by 1 person