Scientists Find Phosphorus--a Key Element for Life--on a Saturn Moon

This is the last of six essential elements for life to be detected on Enceladus, giving the strongest indication yet that its ocean is habitable

Will Sullivan

June 16, 2023 5:44 p.m.



Enceladus spews material from its ocean into space, which spacecraft from Earth can study to learn more about what lies below. NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute


Scientists have detected the presence of the sixth and final essential ingredient of life in ice grains spewed into space from the ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Previous studies had spotted signs of the other five elements needed for life—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur—in material from Enceladus’s ocean, according to the Atlantic’s Marina Koren. Now, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers have added phosphorus to that list. The presence of this element is thought to be the “strictest requirement of habitability,” the authors write in the paper.

“This was basically the last piece that was needed to finally, now, deem Enceladus’s ocean to be habitable without any doubt,” Frank Postberg, a co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin, tells Vice’s Becky Ferreira.

The finding makes Enceladus “the most promising place, the lowest-hanging fruit, in our solar system to search for extraterrestrial life,” Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist who was not involved in the research, tells National Geographic’s Charles Q. Choi.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-find-phosphorus-a-key-element-for-life-on-a-saturn-moon-180982385/