Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
Joel Kontinen
It is a hard for evolutionists, for “Jupiter’s moon
Europa may be less ripe for life than we thought. Although it has an ocean of
water beneath its icy shell, the frigid moon may be short of the oxygen
necessary to sustain life as we know it.”
They just taught
that Europa was ripe pr life. Now they are disappointed.
“Oxygen is
produced on Europa when radiation hits its surface and splits the
water ice there into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen. Models
of that process have suggested the rate of oxygen production could be anywhere
from 5 to over 1000 kilograms per second.
Jamey Szalay at
Princeton University and his colleagues used data from the Juno spacecraft,
which flew just 353 kilometres above Europa’s surface in 2022, to make a new
estimate. They found oxygen is only being produced at a rate of
about 12 kilograms per second on the surface – right at the low end of previous
estimates.
“In some sense, the shell is like a lung for Europa.
It’s continuously generating oxygen,” says Szalay. “That being said, we can’t
speak to what happens after the oxygen is produced on the surface – it’s still
a question how much of it could get into the ocean.”
Source:
Leah Crane 2024
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