Using data from NASA’s Cassini mission, planetary scientists have detected several compounds of strong importance to the habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, including hydrogen cyanide, acetylene, propylene and ethane. These compounds could potentially support living microbial communities or drive complex organic synthesis leading to the origin of life.
“Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions,” said Jonah Peter, a doctoral student at Harvard University.
“Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved.”
“The discovery of hydrogen cyanide was particularly exciting, because it’s the starting point for most theories on the origin of life.”
Life as we know it requires building blocks, such as amino acids, and hydrogen cyanide is one of the most important and versatile molecules needed to form amino acids.
Because its molecules can be stacked together in many different ways, Peter and his colleagues refer to hydrogen cyanide as the Swiss army knife of amino acid precursors.
“The more we tried to poke holes in our results by testing alternative models, the stronger the evidence became,” Peter said.
“Eventually, it became clear that there is no way to match the plume composition without including hydrogen cyanide.”
In 2017, planetary scientists found evidence at Enceladus of chemistry that could help sustain life, if present, in its ocean.
The combination of carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen in the plume was suggestive of methanogenesis, a metabolic process that produces methane.
This process is widespread on Earth, and may have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.
Peter and co-authors uncovered evidence…
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