Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
jwst is also looking for the chemical
building blocks of life much closer to
home in our Cosmic backyard
the one big question I want this
telescope to answer is if there is life
in our own solar system if we found it
in our own solar system it would really
hit home that it's not so rare that life
can happen
there are three places in our solar
system beyond the Earth and Beyond Mars
which are good candidates to go look for
life and those are Europa around Jupiter
and the moons of Saturn Enceladus and
Titan
Titan is a really exciting Moon because
it has an atmosphere and rivers and
streams and lakes and oceans but instead
of being made of water like they are on
earth they're made of methane like
liquid methane so it has like a water
cycle like we have on Earth but it's a
methane cycle and that's really exciting
for scientists because if we find life
on Titan it's not going to be life like
it is on it it's gonna be totally
different life
so that's a really exciting thing to be
looking for but also how do you look for
life that you don't understand
um so it's also a massive challenge
so the question comes up can life evolve
from chemistry in a liquid medium that's
not water that doesn't have the polar
properties of water and the answer is we
don't know
researchers are also on the hunt for the
ingredients for Life as We Know It On
Enceladus a moon of Saturn and Europa a
moon of Jupiter those are what are
called ocean worlds which means that
they have liquid water in their
Interiors
[Music]
that there is a big body of water below
the surface protected from the
environment
where there could be the subsurface
ocean where there could be hydrothermal
vents just like the ones that we have on
Earth which have life like plants and
animals
full of Organics
maybe some energy internal energy heat
energy and you have the soup of life
we don't know what could be happening
there but it's definitely a place that
has all the right conditions for us to
explore
some biochemists have suggested that
it's in environments like this where
life might have got going billions of
years ago on the Earth
and that would be amazing to find even
if we just found bacteria that would be
amazing
back in 2015 the Cassini Mission studied
Saturn its rings and moons
but captured this image of plumes
bursting out of the ice at enceladus's
Southern pole we saw dozens of fine jets
shooting off the South Pole of encelors
when these pictures hit the web the web
exploded
and so we see within solidism there are
places where the ocean actually escapes
from the surface and it just flows out
of these cracks and bursts out in outer
space
so this is in effect our best
opportunity to
study an extraterrestrial habitable zone
saying may be true for Jupiter's moon
Europa covered with cracks and ridges
that could be caused by the heat of an
ocean beneath its icy surface
so we'll be looking for water signatures
so H2O the same water that we have on on
Earth and we'll also be looking for
things like methane which can be a
chemical Tracer that gives us an
inclination that there might be
something alive
bacteria on Earth produces methane we
probably won't directly image life
because you can't really image bacteria
from a telescope but you can
look at what the bacteria creates when
it comes to the search for the chemical
building blocks of life in our own solar
system
jwst's observations of Enceladus and
Europa are finally in I was wondering
about this by the way and researchers
have begun to analyze their data pixel
by pixel creating these chemical maps of
two mysterious worlds
when it comes to the plumes of Enceladus
they see something downright bizarre we
saw this huge plume which stands at 40
times the size of the Moon to put this
in perspective this red pixel is about
the size of Enceladus
the Moon is is within a pixel that
picture is actually bigger than the moon
the blue pixels around it water pouring
out of the plumes it's gonna be right
this is to be compared to the Moon
and this massive plume may be chock full
of Clues to the chemical building blocks
of life in its underground ocean we can
look for carbon dioxide carbon monoxide
for every single Pixel that we had we
actually had a full spectrum behind it
Europa also delivers a surprise
turns out that its surface is far more
complex than the team expected so this
is on the surface this is on the surface
we've seen all these surface composition
you know speaking to us I mean we have a
Spectra for every single of these pixels
so we can actually see what it's made of
so I think this data is going to be
super cool
we see things on the surface had never
seen before we can see the ice is
changing and new ices signatures that we
were not expecting you just have to go
and mine it and search for it if you
don't search for it you don't know so
our exploration has been just slowly
going molecule by molecule but there are
hundreds of other molecules or ices that
may be hidden below behind every pixel
Geronimo Villa Nueva and his team will
spend the next few months pouring over
those pixels
hunting for the chemical building blocks
of life on Europa and Enceladus