'The next step is to figure out if indeed it is inhabited...'
of five of the six major building blocks of life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Phosphorous, however — the sixth element essential for all known life — was nowhere to be found., by an international team of researchers and published in the journalon Wednesday, phosphorous is located on the moon after all, found in the form of phosphate and buried deep in Encelades' salty subsurface oceans.
"Life as we know it doesn’t operate without it," Christopher Glein, a geochemist from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a study co-author, told theDetecting the phosphate was a fairly tall order, as Encelades' element-rich ocean is trapped beneath roughly 30-mile-deep sheets of frozen ice.notes, geysers at the Moon's South Pole are known to blast plumes containing icy material from that ocean into the Moon's surrounding orbit.
"This is the final [study] saying, 'Yes, Enceladus does have all of the ingredients that typical Earth life would need to live and that the ocean there is habitable for life as we know it," NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory chemist Morgan Cable, who was not involved in the new research, told the, adding that while the discovery doesn't necessarily mean that there's life currently on Enceladus, it means it could potentially host it.
"The next step is to figure out if indeed it is inhabited, and it is going to take a future mission to answer that question," Cable continued. "But this is exciting, because it makes Enceladus an even more compelling destination to go and do that kind of search."
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