Saturn’s icy moon Rhea has an oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is very similar to Earth’s. Even better, the carbon dioxide suggests there’s life – and that possibly humans could breathe the air.
It seems oxygen is far more abundant than we ever suspected, particularly on moons that seem to be completely frozen solid. We recently found evidence of oxygen on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and now this finding on Europa. In fact, because the region of space surrounding Saturn’s rings has an oxygen atmosphere, it’s thought even more of the icy moons within the gas giant’s magnetosphere likely have little atmospheres of their own.
According to new data from the Cassini probe, the moon’s thin atmosphere is kept up by the constant chemical decomposition of ice water on the surface of Rhea. It’s likely that Saturn’s fierce magnetosphere is continually irradiating this ice water, which is what helps to maintain the atmosphere. Researchers suspect a lot of Rhea’s oxygen isn’t actually free right now, but is instead trapped inside Rhea’s frozen oceans.
While the presence oxygen is relatively easy to understand, the carbon dioxide is actually even more intriguing. The gas is likely created by reactions between organic molecules and oxidants down on the moon’s surface. That seems rather shockingly Earth-like, or at least like the Earth of a few billion years ago. This is just further proof that the building blocks and basic prerequisites of life exist all throughout the solar system, even if it was apparently only on Earth where conditions were good enough for it to actually lead very far.
“Two potential signatures of life on Saturn’s moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.
Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon’s surface.
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It is possible that the hydrogen is combining with carbon in molecules on Titan’s surface to make methane. But at the low temperatures prevalent on Titan, these reactions would normally occur too slowly to account for the disappearing hydrogen.
Similarly, non-biological chemical reactions could transform acetylene into benzene – a hydrocarbon that the VIMS instrument did observe on Titan’s surface. But in that case, too, a catalyst would be needed to boost reaction rates enough to account for the dearth of acetylene.
“Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed,” says Mark Allen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We have a lot of work to do to rule out possible non-biological explanations.“
