Monday, September 26, 2016

The moon Europa has an ocean on the inside and is the to flip it (slowly) to the Public – space.en



For the second time, there are indications that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, it spits out materials in the form of plumes that may be water vapor, announced the space agency of the north-american NASA in a press conference this Monday-Friday (from 19h Lisbon). The surface of this moon is formed by a layer of ice full of stretch marks. And everything indicates that, beneath this ice, there an ocean of liquid.

"If there are plumes, we investigate the ocean of Europa, without having to make perforations to the surface," he said at the press conference of William Sparks, the leader of the team that identified the feathers, and astronomer of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, in the United States.

Along with Encelado, one of the moons of Saturn, Europe presents itself as one of the locations of our solar system, which astronomers and astrobiologists at crave to explore. Any place where there is liquid water in space is a special, as the water, along with organic matter and the heat, is a fundamental ingredient for the existence of life as we know it.

The sunlight is not even required. On Earth there are life forms that do not depend on the sunlight, but the synthesis of the chemical elements, present in the hydrothermal vents deep-sea, fume of hot water coming from the interior of the Earth and that were discovered in the Pacific ocean for the first time in 70 years. And then in several oceans: offshore of the Azores met several since the 90′s.

In Encelado, Cassini, NASA, detected in 2005, plumes at the south pole of this moon with chunks of ice and water. Years later, confirmed the existence of an ocean full below the surface layer of ice. Both on this moon of Saturn as in Europe, it is thought that the energy required to produce liquid water is caused by the forces gravíticas between the moons and their planets. In Europe, one of the four galilean moons detected in the early SEVENTEENTH century by Galileo, it is estimated that the ocean interior, hidden by a layer of ice several tens of kilometers thick that covers the entire moon, has two times the water of Earth’s oceans. But, in the case of Europe, their feathers seem much more difficult to detect than those of Encelado.

In the new probe, the team of William Sparks used the spectrometer of the Hubble space telescope. This instrument can observe in the region of the ultraviolet radiation of the electromagnetic spectrum. When Jupiter is exactly behind of Europe, the radiation that the planet throws passes close to the surface of Europe, and reaches the lens of the Hubble. If there are molecules on the surface of Europa, which absorb that radiation, then the spectrometer will obtain the signature of the molecules in the ultraviolet region.

For 15 months, astronomers have observed ten times Europa in front of Jupiter. In three of these ten times found in the data of the spectrometer what may be plumes of material that rises up to 200 km in height and then falls on the surface of Europa. Most of the pens has been identified near the south pole of Europe, but one of them stood closer to the equator of the moon.

This is the second time that if they detect these eruptions. In 2012, a team led by Lorenz Roth, of the Research Institute of the Southwest in San Antonio, Texas, has detected plumes near the south pole of Europe. Published in 2014, the discovery was also made using the spectrometer of the Hubble, but with a different method.

"When we calculated, in a completely different way, the amount of material needed to create those signatures of absorption [obtained by the spectrometer], the results were quite similar to those of the team of Roth," he says now William Sparks, in a statement from NASA. "The estimates for the mass are similar, as well as the estimates for the altitude of the feathers. The latitude for two of the candidates for plumes corresponds to the results of that team."

At the conference, the researchers explained that this information obtained by the spectrometer of the Hubble was in the extreme of the capacity of that instrument. That is, it is not possible to already have a better definition than that obtained. On the other hand, despite the results being significant in the statistical level, yet there may be another explanation for the existence of that standard. That is why this discovery is not yet the final proof of the existence of the feathers.

Even the nature of the substance that will be excreted and absorb the radiation coming from Jupiter is an unknown. The information of the spectrometer does not say exactly which molecules absorbed radiation and the hypothesis to be water, water vapor or ice, it is because these materials are common in Europe.

To confirm that the feathers are indeed feathers, it will take more observations that are similar but with a completely different technique. While there are new instruments, such as the future space telescope James Webb (NASA), it is up to the scientists gizarem experiences unprecedented with the currently existing instruments. This discovery should now put teams of astronomers from all over the world to work for this purpose.

any way, to be true, these results show that those plumes are intermittent – the moon Europa is not constantly the launch material into space.

NASA is developing a mission to Europe for the next decade. With more information about the standard and the geography of these feathers, it will be possible to use this probe to analyze directly which frees up mysteriously from the interior of that moon. So try and answer one of the most important questions of humanity: is there life beyond Earth?

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