By Xinhua
Beijing : Scientists found warmth, water and organic chemicals on Saturn’s small moon Enceladus which are the basic ingredients for life, media reported Thursday.
Scientists did not say they had detected any actual evidence of life on this moon where geysers at its south pole continuously shoot watery plumes some nearly thousand km off its icy surface into space.
But they said the building blocks for life are there, and described the plumes as a surprising organic brew sort of like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas.
“Water vapor was the major constituent. There was methane present. There was carbon dioxide. There was carbon monoxide. There were simple organics and there were more complex organics,” said Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Organic molecules contain carbon-hydrogen bonds and can be found in living things.
Waite said the material bursting out of the geysers was very much like a comet’s chemistry. Comets are celestial bodies orbiting the sun made of rock, dust and ice with characteristic tails of gas and dust streams.
“The question that one would ask is: where did the organics come from?” Waite said.
“Of course, natural gas comes from decaying biological matter on Earth. But this is not the conclusion we reached for Enceladus. Another possibility is the geochemistry going on in the interior can also produce organics,” Waite added.