Saturn’s moon has all the right stuff for life

WE may not have found a colony of little green men just yet – but we could be a step closer.

Scientists have discovered that one of Saturn’s moons carries all the ingredients needed for life to evolve.

Complex carbon-based molecules have been detected erupting from the crust of Enceladus. The discovery, by Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft, means the moon has all the building blocks for simple lifeforms – potentially similar to microbes living in extreme conditions on Earth.

“This moon is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for life as we know it,” Dr Christopher Glein from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas said.

Enceladus – Saturn’s sixth largest moon – is around 1000 million kilometres from Earth. The carbon discovery was made as Cassini sampled a plume of material emerging from beneath its surface.

Previous discoveries have found hydrogen molecules, which could be used as a food source, as they are on Earth.

Dr Hunter Waite, coauthor of the paper published in the journal Nature, said: “Hydrogen provides a source of chemical energy supporting microbes that live in the Earth’s oceans.”