THERE’S good and bad news for the prospects of finding alien life on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The raw materials for life do exist on the moon, which is thought to have a liquid ocean under its icy surface. But we may never get to look for any life there because the frozen crust is at least 19 kilometres thick.
Elements such as carbon are crucial to life on Earth. But nobody knew if Europa had large enough amounts of these elements to make life possible. To find out, Elisabetta Pierazzo of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Chris Chyba…
