Plumes of ice particles, water vapour and organic molecules spray from Enceladus’s south polar region. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltec
Joel Kontinen
Evolutionists think that there might be some kind of life on Enceladus.
The
liquid water ocean hidden underneath the icy crust of Enceladus has long made
this moon of Saturn one of the best prospects in the hunt for
extraterrestrial life – and it just got even more promising. The
discovery of heat emanating from the frozen moon’s north pole hints the ocean
is stable over geological timescales, giving life time to develop there.
“For the first time we can say with certainty that Enceladus
is in a stable state, and that has big implications for habitability,”
says Carly Howett at
the University of Oxford. “We knew that it had liquid water, all sorts of
organic molecules, heat, but the stability was really the final piece of the
puzzle.”
Howett and
her colleagues used data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited
Saturn from 2004 to 2017, to hunt for heat seeping out of Enceladus. Its
interior is heated by tidal forces as it is stretched and crunched by Saturn’s
gravity, but so far this heat has only been caught leaking out of the south
polar regions.
For life to
have developed in Enceladus’s ocean, it would require balance: the ocean
should be putting out as much heat as is being put in. Measurements of
the heat coming out of the south pole don’t account for all of the heat input,
but Howett and her team found the north pole is about 7°C warmer than we
previously thought. Combined with the heat radiating from the south pole, that
matches the total almost exactly – the ice shell is thicker around the equator,
so heat only escapes in significant amounts at the poles.
This means the ocean should be stable over long periods of
time. “It’s really hard to put a number on it, but we don’t think it’s going
to freeze out anytime soon, or that it’s been frozen out anytime
recently,” says Howett. “We know life needs time to evolve, and now we can say
that it does have that stability.” Actually finding that life, if it is there, is another story
entirely. But both NASA and ESA have missions in the works o look for it
over the coming decades.
But life needs
a Creator. Life cannot just spring from
nothing.
Source:
Leah
Crane 2025