Water plumes from Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus may show promising…
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What could Enceladus’ ocean be like?
Enceladus’ ocean seems to have hydrothermal vents similar to those found in the deepest, darkest parts of Earth’s oceans. Here, water seeps into Earth’s rocky crust and gets heated near magma, then erupts through hydrothermal vents on ocean floors, along with various chemicals. Not only do various microorganisms like methanogens thrive near such vents — scientists think this is how life on Earth could have started in the first place.
Methanogens on Earth don’t have access to direct sunlight; instead, they derive their energy by converting carbon in the ocean and molecular hydrogen released from hydrothermal vents into methane. While geological processes powering these vents also produce methane, methanogens release the majority of the gas. Could something similar be happening in Enceladus’ ocean?
Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the technology to send missions inside Enceladus’ ocean and hunt for life there. So instead, a new study published in Nature Astronomy modeled how likely it is for Earth’s methanogens to survive in Enceladus’ ocean and produce the plume gases observed by Cassini. And the results say it’s plausible!
What the new research says
The authors of the study made complex mathematical models based on known physics and chemistry to simulate possible environments on Enceladus’ ocean floor. Each simulation took one of the plausible composition and temperature values of both Enceladus’ ocean and fluids released from its hydrothermal vents and ran the mathematical model to see what kind of aquatic environment it forms. This gave them thousands of possible hydrothermal environments which would spew different concentrations of gases into Enceladus’ plumes depending on the intricately different physical and chemical processes at play.
High carbon dioxide levels measured by Cassini also indicated that Enceladus has an Earth-like ocean floor — in terms of temperatures, salinity, and acidity — so scientists were curious if Earth’s methanogens could survive there. They introduced several breeds of our methanogen populations into Enceladus’ simulated hydrothermal environments to see which and how many of the latter provide enough food for the microbes to grow. Out of 50,000 simulated environments, 32% were habitable and allowed the methanogens to thrive while the rest didn’t. This means there’s a chance Enceladus’ ocean is friendly to Earth’s methanogens.
The authors of the study then looked into how the methanogens could alter the habitable environments over time. This would, in theory, also impact the gas levels we can measure in Enceladus’ plumes. Simulations where methanogens could thrive consistently produced carbon dioxide and methane levels matching Cassini’s observations, and non-biological simulations didn’t. This was especially true for methane where even the best case scenarios for natural processes, like serpentinization, produced gas levels far from what Cassini observed. With Earthly microbes thrown into the mix, the methane levels fell right in the range of Cassini’s measurements.
Another interesting find was that the simulated microbes consumed only a small amount of hydrogen released from hydrothermal vents, meaning high levels of it in Enceladus’ plumes can’t be taken as signs of absence of life.
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