The Last Vital Ingredient for Life Has Been Discovered on Enceladus

upstart writes:

Phosphorus, though rare on Earth's surface, may be abundant on other worlds:

The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.

Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to construct DNA and RNA. Now, an analysis of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveals that Enceladus' underground ocean contains the crucial nutrient. Not only that, its concentrations there may be thousands of times greater than in Earth's ocean, planetary scientist Yasuhito Sekine reported December 14 at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting.

The essential element may abound on many other icy worlds too, holding promise for the search for alien life, said Sekine, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

"We knew that Enceladus had most of the elements that are essential for life as we know it - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur," says Morgan Cable, an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved in the research. "Now that [phosphorus] has been confirmed ... Enceladus now appears to meet all of the criteria for a habitable ocean."

Many researchers consider Enceladus to be among the most likely places to house extraterrestrial life. It's a world encased in ice, with an ocean of salty water hidden beneath (SN: 11/6/17). What's more, in 2005 the Cassini spacecraft observed geysers blasting vapor and ice grains out of Enceladus' icy shell (SN: 8/23/05). And in that space-faring spray, scientists have detected organic molecules.

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