Europa is thought to have a hidden subsurface ocean of salty liquid water, which scientists believe may harbor the conditions suitable for life.
"I think these results are a step in the right direction," Samantha Trumbo, an author of one of the studies with the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told"They provide further evidence that material sourced from the ocean has made it to the surface, where we can study its composition and thereby gain insight on the chemistry of that internal ocean.
"We were really interested in answering this question by looking at the distribution of CO2 across the surface with the JWST data. We wanted to understand if the CO2—the only carbon-bearing species so far detected on Europa's surface—was related to the ocean composition," Trumbo said. "Europa's CO2 appears to lie preferentially within large-scale disrupted 'chaos' terrains on the surface, particularly the region known as Tara Regio, which we previously showed to also containusing data from the Hubble Space Telescope," Trumbo said."This really suggests to us that the CO2 is sourced from the interior.
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