The discovery made using NASA's powerful space telescope brings scientists a step closer to determining if the salty water oceans of Europa could support life.
The James Webb Space Telescope has identified carbon dioxide originating from the salty liquid oceans of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
Scientists have been aware for some time that oceans of water lie beneath the icy shell of Europa but did not know if these oceans had the right chemistry to support life.
Thus, the discovery of carbon — a vital element in living things — from this subsurface ocean on one of Jupiter's moons has important implications for the potential habitability of this moon and is a testament to the groundbreaking science being made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
"On Earth, life likes chemical diversity — the more diversity, the better. We're carbon-based life. Understanding the chemistry of Europa's ocean will help us determine whether it's hostile to life as we know it or whether it might be a good place for life," research lead author and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Geronimo Villanueva said in a statement.
"This suggests that we may be able to learn some basic things about the ocean's composition even before we drill through the ice to get the full picture."
Even more exciting, the team was able to use observations made in infrared with the JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to determine that the carbon molecules were not delivered to Europa via meteorite impacts or other external sources.
"We now think that we have observational evidence that the carbon we see on Europa's surface came from the ocean. That's not a trivial thing. Carbon is a biologically essential element," lead author of a second paper detailing this discovery and Cornell University researcher Samantha Trumbo said.
The JWST observed that the carbon dioxide around Europa, the smallest of the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter, is most abundant in a geologically young region called Tara Regio.
Surface ice has been disrupted at this so-called "chaos terrain" area, indicating that material has been exchanged between Europa's icy surface and its subsurface ocean.
The detection of carbon dioxide on Europa will be slightly bittersweet for Villanueva and his team, who were also using the JWST to hunt for plumes of matter erupting from the surface of the Jovian moon, something the powerful space telescope failed to see.