Today's Sydney Morning Herald has a story by Joel Achenbach that reports
on a discovery detailed in a paper led by Lorenz Roth at the Southwest Research
Institute, San Antonio, and published on Thursday online by the journal Science.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Joel Achenbach, Sydney Morning Herald
Since the late 1970s, when a NASA probe took the first close look at Europa, scientists have thought the moon could have an ocean beneath its cracked, icy crust. Late last year, the Hubble Space Telescope took a closer look. It didn't see the plumes but rather saw an occasional surplus of hydrogen and oxygen appearing in a spatially confined area over a period of roughly seven hours.
The implication is that tidal forces within the moon - created by Jupiter's immense gravity - cause Europa to contract and expand, a bit like a tennis ball being squeezed and released.
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Story here -
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci...#ixzz2nK0yUZFZ
Scientific American reports -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Alexandra Witze, Scientifc American
The work, reported today in Science, comes with plenty of caveats. Although previous theoretical work suggested that plumes could exist on Europa, earlier tantalizing hints of them have come to nothing. This time, Hubble spotted the potential plumes in just one observation. And if they do turn out to be real, the plumes might not even be connected to the moon's deep subsurface ocean.
“It’s a first-time discovery, and we need to go back and look some more,” says team member Joachim Saur, a planetary scientist at the University of Cologne in Germany.
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That article here -
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...spouting-water
In 2011, NASA reported on new evidence by the Galileo probe of what appeared to be a large body of water inside Europa's icy shell.
See
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news.../16nov_europa/
