Did Comets Spark Alien Life in Europa's Oceans?

Discovery News

Did Comets Spark Alien Life in Europa's Oceans?

If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa's icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers.

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New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job -- penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses.

“It's one of the best candidates for an ecosystem,” said Rónadh Cox of Williams College, Mass., regarding Europa's ocean. “But how do you get biological precursers into the ocean?”

To find out if icy, chemical-rich comets could do it, she and her team modeled impacts by the full range of comets that have been influenced by Jupiter, and brought into relatively short orbits around the sun -- so-called Jupiter Family Comets. The team simulated the collisions of these known comets into a range of ice thicknesses. Their results were surprising and led to a new insights into the moon's actual ice crust thickness.

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