Finding life on Saturn’s moon Titan may be more difficult than previously thought | 24CA News

“Are we alone?” It’s the age-old query about life within the universe, one which astrobiologists and astronomers world wide are attempting to reply.

While Earth is the one planet in our photo voltaic system that has an abundance of life, astronomers and house companies are trying in our personal yard for indicators that we’re not alone. And many imagine that the perfect locations to go looking are the icy moons round two of the most important planets, Jupiter and Saturn.

Currently, there are seven our bodies within the outer photo voltaic system which are believed to have oceans beneath their crust: two of Saturn’s moons, Titan and Enceladus; three of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; one in every of Neptune’s moons, Triton; and eventually, Pluto.

They could have water, however have they got the chemical substances to create — and maintain —  life?

WATCH | Ocean worlds: The seek for life 

Recently, a research revealed within the journal Astrobiology, centered on the potential of life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. 

The research aimed to reply the query: If one thing slammed into Titan, creating an affect crater soften, may organics on the floor make it all the way down to the ocean the place they may help life?

The reply, sadly, was no.

“We found that even in the most optimistic scenario we could think of the amount of organics that makes it down there is quite small,” stated Catherine Neish, lead creator of the research and an Earth sciences professor at Western University.

“So small that either life would be very difficult to be sustained over time, or in a slightly more optimistic scenario, maybe it’s there, but it’s so minimal that we need better instruments in order to detect such a very low level of activity.

“So it’s not the thriving biosphere that I feel we had hoped for.”

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the search for life on other icy moons — or even Titan — is dead in the water.

Shannon MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said she believes that it was a very good study. However, she notes that there’s a lot about Titan we just don’t know.

“It’s actually arduous to to conduct research like this, as a result of we do not, to start with, know what’s on the floor of Titan,” she said. “So you must make an assumption about what sort of organics are mixing in that affect soften. The laboratory–based mostly or analogues that we’ve studied effectively right here on Earth, are simply that — they’re analogues. They’re our greatest guess of what sitting on the floor.”

Another issue for astrobiologists is that they don’t know how long Titan has had its thick atmosphere that transports organics down to the surface.

Other moons, other chances at finding life

While Neish is skeptical about subsurface life existing on icy moons, she’s not ruling it out entirely on Titan.

“On Earth, we do not see life simply unfold evenly out all through the ocean: it is in these like, micro–habitats that perhaps cluster close to the ocean flooring…. It’s not simply evenly distributed. And so I’m hopeful that perhaps on Titan, perhaps the organics do not get evenly distributed all through all the ocean, perhaps they keep trapped close to the ice–ocean interface.”

There is also the possibility that something is occurring beneath the surface, hundreds of kilometres below the ice that could sustain it. She said there is an upcoming paper that will discuss that prospect.

And, of course, there are other places in the solar system that are good candidates, including two of the most talked about: Enceladus and Europa.

Missions to moons

In 2005, the European Space Agency’s Huygens spacecraft (part of the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission) gave us the first glimpse of what lay beneath the thick, orange-yellow atmosphere of Titan — and it was a surprise. As it descended, it captured large bodies of lakes — later confirmed to be made of hydrocarbons — and, once on the ground, smooth pebbles. 

That has been the only mission to the surface of another moon. And while the data collected was invaluable, it was limited.

But that’s about to change.

NASA plans to send a rotorcraft mission — called Dragonfly — that will fly around Titan gathering critical information that will help astronomers and astrobiologists further study the moon and its composition (Neish is the astrobiology lead for Dragonfly, and MacKenzie is also part of the team).

Both scientists are anxiously awaiting the launch, set for some time in 2028.

“We’re going with Dragonfly to actually perceive how natural chemistry can evolve in these different environments within the photo voltaic system to get a greater understanding of what occurred on our personal planet earlier than life took over and rewrote the chemistry, the chemical historical past,” MacKenzie said.

And in October, the Europa Clipper will launch to its namesake moon that orbits Jupiter. Along with Saturn’s moon Enceladus, it is considered a promising place to look for life: It spews particles into space from fissures in its surface ice.

MacKenzie said she’s excited about the upcoming mission and that, with so many unique moons in our solar system, there are plenty of places to search for life.

“We have these totally different flavours of ocean worlds at our disposal, which I feel is why we want a complete fleet of missions to go discover all of them as a result of they’re totally different,” she stated.