Around this meter last twelvemonth , NASA ’s Hubble Space Telescope spottedevidence of water evaporation ventingoff the south polar neighborhood of Jupiter ’s moon Europa . Since previous work suggest that an ocean existed underneath its icy Earth’s crust , uranologist cogitate that water plumes were erupting off Europa ’s surface ( pictured above ) , reach ALT of up to 200 kilometre . Then in September of this year , astronomers announce thatthe gargantuan geysers have mysteriously vanished . Now , several teams searching for these plumes account that they ’ve come up empty too .
First , researchers who ’ve trained Hubble on Europa repeatedly over several calendar month this year have fail to confirm the plumes . " We have not yet find any signals of weewee vaporization in the raw images so far,“Southwest Research Institute ’s Lorenz Rothsaid at thefall meeting of the American Geophysical Union(AGU ) in San Francisco this month , according to Space.com .
Furthermore , research worker psychoanalyze data from Cassini ’s 2001 Jupiter flyby paper that they see no grounds of plume activity in the lean , hot gas around the lunar month . And if there is plume natural action , it ’s most likely intermittent .
As Cassini hotfoot through Jupiter ’s organisation on its elbow room to Saturn , the spacecraft ’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph ( UVIS ) showed that the hot , excited gas ( or blood plasma ) around Europa originates not from the moon itself but from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io . to boot , Europa contributes 40 times less oxygen to its surround surroundings than investigator previously thought , and its tenuous atmosphere – which is already trillion of time thinner than Earth ’s – is about 100 time less dense than older estimates . This novel downward revision in the amount of atomic number 8 Europa pump into the environment around Jupiter make it less potential that plumes of urine vapor are regularly being vented high into sphere . And plasma this raging further suggest that Europa is n’t outputting big amounts of gun , include weewee vapor .
Cassini has , however , detected on-going plume activity at Saturn ’s moon Enceladus starting in 2005 . " It is certainly still possible that feather activity occurs , but that it is infrequent or the plumes are little than we see at Enceladus,“Planetary Science Institute ’s Amanda Hendrixsays in aNASA release .
Another team reanalyzed range of a function gathered by NASA ’s Galileo probe – which studied the Jovian system up nigh from 1995 to 2003 – and also turned up no grounds for the plumes . " I find it intemperate to believe that if a plume that was standardized to the plume we see on Enceladus had been decease off on Europa during the Galileo era – I find it really unlikely that we would have missed it,“Cynthia Phillips of the SETIsaid at AGU , according to Space.com . " I think we would have see that affair . "
The hunt extend .
