Hubble Finds More Evidence of Plumes on Europa

(Credit: NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab-Caltech / SETI Institute) Hubble hasn’t found aliens on Europa, but it may have found new evidence that plumes of salt water from the moon’s globe-spanning salty ocean can escape through cracks in its icy shell. Using its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument, Hubble captured far-ultraviolet images of what could be geysers of water from beneath the surface, erupting in Europa’s southern hemisphere. If the features in those images are really geysers, that could be very good news for future missions to Europa, providing an easier source of samples from Europa’s subsurface ocean and making it easier to search for signs of life beneath the ice. Space Science Telescope Institute astronomer William Sparks and his colleagues borrowed a method from exoplanet research and applied it to a potentially habitable world much closer to home (in relative space terms, anyway; Europa is about 390 million ...