Jupiter+or+What?

I was on my AOL and I was looking through the news section to find out something about one of Jupiter's Moons. I thought it was really cool so thats why I am putting this up on th Wiki.

New research that suggests Jupiter's moon Europa has a body of water the size of the Great Lakes just two miles below its icy surface has brought scientists one step closer to determining whether or not the freezing satellite is suitable for the development of extraterrestrial life. According to NASA, scientists have long thought that a huge ocean -- more voluminous than all of earth's oceans combined -- existed below Europa's surface. But since the moon is so far from the sun, the surface ice is thought to be tens of miles thick. Now, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft have found ice blocks on Europa's surface that suggest an interaction between the moon's icy shell and a lake-like body of water under the surface, Discovery reports. According to Britney Schmidt, the lead author of the study that appears in the journal Nature, this could mean nutrients and energy are moving between the ocean and icy shell. "One opinion in the scientific community has been if the ice shell is thick, that's bad for biology. That might mean the surface isn't communicating with the underlying ocean," Schmidt said in a statement. "Now, we see evidence that it's a thick ice shell that can mix vigorously and new evidence for giant shallow lakes. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable." To come to this conclusion, Schmidt and her team analyzed "chaos terrains," areas of dark, bumpy, irregular features on the surface of Europa. According to TIME and the paper's abstract, the team created models based on the formation of similar terrain on Earth -- subglacial volcanos and ice shelves -- to determine how the chaos terrain on Europa could have formed.

Here is a video about this:

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Sources:

[|http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/17/europa-water-jupiter-moon-photo-video_n_1099463.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl3%7Csec1_lnk2%7C113705#s480278&title=Europa]

-Nicholai Nosworthy

Cool Video on the Galilean moons- [] -Colin



- Abigail Biddle