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Life on Enceladus? It depends on its origin

Nature Astronomy volume 5, pages 740–741 (2021)Cite this article

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Cassini measurements suggest hydrothermal activity on Enceladus that could support methanogenesis. Bayesian analysis of models simulating an abiotic or biotic ocean indicates the latter is more probable so long as abiogenesis is sufficiently likely to occur.

The possibility of life elsewhere in our Solar System remains a driving question for planetary missions, although it is difficult to determine what the chances are of life arising elsewhere and what that life might look like. The Voyager missions forty years ago observed the first evidence that some icy moons of the outer planets might contain liquid water, and subsequent missions have studied these ‘ocean worlds’ further, particularly Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Writing in Nature Astronomy, Antonin Affholder and colleagues1 conducted modelling simulations to quantify the probability that observations of Enceladus could be indicative of an extant biosphere.

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Fig. 1: A schematic summarizing the biogeochemical processes modelled by Affholder et al. to simulate plume chemistry and compute the probability of life on Enceladus given Cassini data.

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Acknowledgements

This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). US government sponsorship acknowledged.

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  1. Planetary Sciences Section, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Laura M. Barge & Laura E. Rodriguez

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  1. Laura M. Barge
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  2. Laura E. Rodriguez
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Correspondence to Laura M. Barge.

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Barge, L.M., Rodriguez, L.E. Life on Enceladus? It depends on its origin. Nat Astron 5, 740–741 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01382-4

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