We may not be alone in the universe: Saturn’s moon may host life

NASA has hailed a “new frontier” after revealing some of the strongest evidence yet that alien life may exist.

The space agency said last night that practically all the elements needed for life had been discovered in the same place in our solar system – on one of Saturn’s icy moons.

A missing ingredient, hydrogen, has been found for the first time on Enceladus. The breakthrough discovery was made by unmanned Nasa spacecraft Cassini after 13 years spent exploring Saturn. During its deepest dive into high-powered jets of water from the moon’s surface, it found hydrogen.

The gas is the final piece of the puzzle following the discovery of water in an ocean under Enceladus’s surface.

It means Saturn’s sixth moon may have the same single-celled organisms with which life began on Earth, or more complex creatures still.

These organisms, still found on our planet within the darkest depths of our oceans, use hydrogen and carbon di- oxide as fuel.

Dr Mary Voytek, senior astrobiologist at Nasa, said: “This is a new frontier because this is the first time we have seen evidence of an alien food source in an ocean not on Earth. We knew we had two of the key ingredients for life and now we have the third. This is the most exciting discovery in my eight-year career at Nasa.”

The building blocks of life on Enceladus are water, without which no form of life on Earth can exist, an energy source and six elements – car- bon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur.

The last two of these, phosphorus and sulphur, have not yet been found in Enceladus’s ocean, but scientists suspect them to be there because the rocky core of the moon is believed to be chemically similar to meteorites containing them.

Professor David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University, said: “We only know of life beginning once in the universe, here on Earth, which leaves us alone in the dark. It could have simply been an incredible fluke.

“But if it has happened twice in this solar system, it opens up everything.

“There are tens of billions of worlds in our galaxy and there could be alien life on many of those too.”

Alien life was once thought possible only on planets far enough from our sun not to be a fireball, but not so far as to be freezing. Enceladus, a frozen moon around 1 288 million kilometres from Earth, was one of the least likely.

But in 2005 the Cassini spacecraft was orbiting Saturn when it picked up plumes of vapour coming from the deep fissures in the moon’s surface. This showed thatunderneath Enceladus’s freezing surface is a liquid ocean.

That ocean is warmed by rock at the core of the moon, tidally heated as Enceladus orbits Saturn. The gravity from the planet pulls the moon out of shape, creating friction that heats the rock to 90degC, enough to melt the ice. – Daily Mail