• Europa, Jupiter's moon, may glow

    From RS Wood@21:1/5 to All on Tue Nov 17 11:48:22 2020
    From the «easier to read at night» department:
    Title: Jupiter's Ocean Moon Europa Probably Glows in the Dark
    Author: Fnord666
    Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 13:38:00 -0500
    Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/11/16/1331227&from=rss

    upstart[1] writes in with an IRC submission:

    Jupiter's ocean moon Europa probably glows in the dark[2]:

    The icy Jupiter moon Europa[3] is an astrobiological beacon, quite literally glowing in the deep darkness far from the sun, a new study suggests.

    Jupiter's intense radiation environment likely lights up Europa's icy shell, which overlies a huge, potentially habitable ocean[4] of salty liquid water, researchers have found.

    "If Europa weren't under this radiation, it would look the way our moon looks to us — dark on the shadowed side," study lead author Murthy Gudipati, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement[5]. "But because it's bombarded by the radiation from Jupiter, it glows in the dark."

    [...] "But we never imagined that we would see what we ended up seeing,"
    study co-author Bryana Henderson, also of JPL, said in the same statement. "When we tried new ice compositions, the glow looked different. And we all
    just stared at it for a while and then said, 'This is new, right? This is definitely a different glow?' So we pointed a spectrometer at it, and each
    type of ice had a different spectrum."

    This nightside glow — it won't be visible on Europa's sun-illuminated dayside — has more than just gee-whiz appeal. Its color and intensity could reveal key details about the composition of the moon's icy shell, study team members said.

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    Original Submission[6]

    Read more of this story[7] at SoylentNews.

    Links:
    [1]: http://soylentnews.org/~upstart/ (link)
    [2]: https://www.space.com/jupiter-moon-europa-glows-in-the-dark (link)
    [3]: https://www.space.com/15498-europa-sdcmp.html (link)
    [4]: https://www.space.com/alien-life-ocean-moons-europa-enceladus.html (link) [5]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7779 (link)
    [6]: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=45374 (link)
    [7]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/11/16/1331227&from=rss (link)


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