Life on Saturn’s moon has a ring to it

Theory says cells that need no light, air may survive it

With its subsurface ocean and geysers spewing water and complex organic molecules, scientists say Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the most promising places to look for extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

But what would life on Enceladus look like and how would it function? After all, the theoretical organisms growing and multiplying deep below the ice moon’s surface would have no access to the sunlight that fuels most life forms on Earth.

There is no available oxygen to work with, and a tremendous amount of pressure to contend with if an organism hopes to derive energy from the chemical reaction between Enceladus’ subsurface ocean and its rocky core.

Despite these hurdles, researchers found there is at least one life form on Earth that likely would do fine living under the presumed conditions on Enceladus. It’s a single-celled organism known as

that lives in hydrothermal vents more than 3,000 feet below sea level off Japan.

In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communication, researchers show

could thrive in what scientists believe to be the conditions on Enceladus by turning molecular hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane.

No spacecraft has penetrated Enceladus’ frozen crust, but NASA’s Cassini spacecraft did fly through plumes of material that were spewing from the moon’s south pole.

To see if any life forms on Earth could survive on Enceladus, the authors turned to three types of methanogenic archaea — singlecelled organisms that grow in the absence of sunlight and oxygen, and produce methane as a metabolic product.

After attempting to grow the archaea in a variety of different conditions, the authors decided to work exclusively with

because it grew predictably in several scenarios.