Jupiter's Ocean Moon Europa Probably Glows in the Dark
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Jupiter's ocean moon Europa probably glows in the dark:
The icy Jupiter moon Europa is an astrobiological beacon, quite literally glowing in the deep darkness far from the sun, a new study suggests.
Jupiter's intense radiation environment likely lights up Europa's icy shell, which overlies a huge, potentially habitable ocean of salty liquid water, researchers have found.
"If Europa weren't under this radiation, it would look the way our moon looks to us - dark on the shadowed side," study lead author Murthy Gudipati, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement. "But because it's bombarded by the radiation from Jupiter, it glows in the dark."
[...] "But we never imagined that we would see what we ended up seeing," study co-author Bryana Henderson, also of JPL, said in the same statement. "When we tried new ice compositions, the glow looked different. And we all just stared at it for a while and then said, 'This is new, right? This is definitely a different glow?' So we pointed a spectrometer at it, and each type of ice had a different spectrum."
This nightside glow - it won't be visible on Europa's sun-illuminated dayside - has more than just gee-whiz appeal. Its color and intensity could reveal key details about the composition of the moon's icy shell, study team members said.
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