
First water plume seen firing from Jupiter moon Europa - Fletch137
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24743-first-water-plume-seen-firing-from-jupiter-moon-europa.html#.Uqnkrd-dmal
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GrantS
For those expecting to see an actual image, this is the closest thing to a
photo from NASA: [http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over-
europa/](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over-europa/)

They note: "Hubble didn't photograph plumes, but spectroscopically detected
auroral emissions from oxygen and hydrogen."

Full press release from NASA: [http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-
europa-water-vapo...](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-
vapor/)

For an amazing photo of Europa with Io's volcanic plumes in view, see this
older photo from 2007:
[http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg](http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg)

Full description here:
[http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103](http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103)

~~~
dmead
does this mean it's pure conjecture that it was a water plume? my idea of a
water plume would say that it's sub surface ocean water getting ejected out of
the surface. this evidence seems like it could have been water knocked up by a
meteor impact or some other mechanism to get the surface ice into orbit.

~~~
tokipin
it's my understanding that the gravitational "torsion" from Jupiter alone is
enough to do all sorts of things (like keep a planet thermally active)

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stephth
Please forgive my ignorance. What makes Europa more likely to contain life
than other moons thought to contain oceans like Callisto, Ganymede, Titan,
Enceladus ... ? [1]

[1]
[http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jp...](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jpg)
[2]

[2] [http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-
solar-s...](http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-solar-system)

~~~
maaku
Enormous oceans of liquid water, with internal tidal heat and protection from
harsh surface environment?

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ep103
And lets not forget the large black monolith.

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ChikkaChiChi
All joking aside, the guy who wrote those kind of knew what the hell he was
talking about.

~~~
ep103
Absolutely!

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jmpe
This is an awesome phenomenon. Yesterday we had a post re panspermia:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412)

Now think of an Europa with simple bacteria living in the water under the ice.
These events are like cosmic sporulation: long strings of frozen droplets that
could contain organisms, ejaculated into space like spores in the wind.

~~~
maaku
And promptly sterilized. Unfortunately most plausible life forms require
meters of soil/rock surrounding them to survive the harsh space environment
(probably more in the vicinity of Jupiter).

~~~
InclinedPlane
You obviously didn't read anything about the research. The analysis was
focused on the likelihood of large chunks of rock being ejected during an
impact, large enough to provide sufficient protection from the interplanetary
radiation environment for geologically significant periods of time.

~~~
maaku
While I am not a biologist myself, I did work 2 years at the NASA Astrobiology
Institute in a supporting role, where I learned all about the science
surrounding this stuff. I don't know any astrobiologist who seriously believes
that whatever microbes might exist in the comfort of Europa's inner ocean
might survive free-floating in the harsh Jupiter radiation belts, where it
takes hours or days (not millions of years) to sterilize all but the most
extreme life forms.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Which is why it's far from a sure thing, only a possibility. However, if an
object impacts Europa directly from a heliocentric orbit it won't spend much
time in Jupiter's radiation belts. With enough luck maybe it would hit just
the right patch of Europa to be captured in the ice and make its way down into
the ocean without much exposure to radiation. Certainly that's a very unlikely
event, as is simply getting a rock containing life from Earth to Europa in the
first place. However, the Solar System is very, very old and in such stretches
of time unlikely events can and do happen.

Ultimately the possibility cannot be conclusively ruled out, and given the
implications it's worth considering.

~~~
maaku
The GP was about life from the ocean surviving the geyser into space, as "long
string of frozen droplets that could contain organisms" in orbit around
Jupiter.

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eldude
Checkout the movie Europa Report to feed your SciFi fantasies.

~~~
sputknick
Second this. Excellent random movie selection on Netflix.

~~~
leephillips
Third it. The movie starts out looking like it's going to be pretty cheesy,
but stick with it. This is a unique film.

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swayvil
If I was an "ocean under an ice layer" based civilization this might be my
best way to get an object into orbit.

Was the plume aimed at anything in particular?

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
The fascinating aspect of your post is that scientifically we continue to
think of 'life' as 'life as we know it'

A civilization that evolves completely underwater (and in Europa's case
divided from one underwater oasis to the next) might be possible even if it
means the absence of fire.

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qhoc
If I take a wild guess (into the next 50 years), we probably will be able to
land on Europa. After collecting dirt and water, we found nothing. However,
scientists didn't give up on it and debate life could be existed in deep
ocean, which is way deeper than what we can go even on Earth. There you go: we
have to go far across space and end up swimming really deep. Too many
technological barriers. It'd be even more disappointing when we actually find
out living organisms, then they look so similar to what we already have on
Earth. Again, my "wild guess"

~~~
jmpe
Would be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses
resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A
record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity,
perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever
swam too close to one of these blowholes.

I can dream, can't I?

~~~
CanSpice
That's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that
new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any
sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times.

It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because
there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for
fossils to be formed.

~~~
jmpe
I imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why
islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same
thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is
fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot
opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a
chapter of the planet's history.

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deletes
As warm as the word vapor may sound it is actually really cold. Europa's
oceans, if they exist, are -50°C and lower.

~~~
mturmon
Hmm. I did not think that the temperature of Europa's oceans (below their
probable icy crust) has been well-constrained. To the extent that it has, I
think the subsurface temperature is expected to be much greater than -50C in
many places (the mechanism is tidal heating).

There is a general belief that Europa is likely to have significant liquid
water below its icy surface. The phase diagram for water (first image at
[http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html](http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html))
does not allow liquid water at -50C = 223K, no matter what the pressure.

Atmospheric pressure on Earth is about 0.1 MPa, and gravity on Europa is about
1/6 of Earth. The highest pressure in Earth's oceans is about 1000x
atmospheric pressure (100 MPa). Across this range (3 orders of magnitude), the
melting point of H2O is pretty constant, 0C or a little below (see the linked
phase diagram).

My conclusion: liquid water implies temperatures of at least 0C in the
relevant pressure range.

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deletes
Not really.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fot3m7kyLn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fot3m7kyLn4)

Also.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling)

~~~
yongjik
From your link: A liquid below its standard freezing point will crystallize
_in the presence of a seed crystal or nucleus_ around which a crystal
structure can form creating a solid.

Europa's ocean is surrounded by a vast sheet of actual ice. You can't keep
such an ocean at supercooled state.

