During an April 13 press conference, scientists from NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn announced that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn's Enceladus moon.
The data was collected by the Cassini spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004.
On Earth, those chemical reactions allow microbes to flourish in hot cracks in Earth s ocean floors - depths sunlight cannot reach - meaning the moon could also nourish life. As University of MI planetary scientist Sushil Atreya told Scientific American, water is necessary for life as-we-know-it for a number of important reasons: "Liquid water acts as a solvent, as a medium and as a catalyst for certain types of proteins, and those are three main things that allow life to flourish".
The research published Thursday in the journal Science was conducted by NASA, Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University.
"The search for life beyond Earth has enthralled humans for ages", Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cassini picked up hydrogen in a plume of gas and other material rising from the ocean that was observed on October 28, 2015.
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This established that, while Enceladus is freezing on its surface, underneath is a liquid ocean.
Analysis has shown the water plumes coming off the moon mainly consist of tiny particles of water ice, with traces of methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, salts, and simple organic molecules. So far, the Cassini mission has show almost all those ingredients except phosphorus and sulfur in the ocean world.
According to NASA, this chemical reaction is 'the root of the tree of life on Earth, ' and it may have served a vital role in the formation of life here.
In addition to the Enceladus discovery, researchers revealed that a "probable plume" was found erupting from Jupiter's moon Europa a year ago, lending credence to claims that such plumes exist on the moon.
The Cassini mission is scheduled to end in early September. "We're finding new environments", said NASA's Planetary Science Division director, James Green. "After over 10 years of the Cassini mission, this represents a capstone finding for the mission and means that Enceladus has nearly all of the ingredients you would need to support life here on Earth".
Scientists at the Goddard Space Center compared ultraviolet photos the Hubble space telescope took of Europa in 2014, when it first saw the gaseous spray emanating from the moon, and found it again in a 2016 picture. Europa is much older and any potential life there has had more time to emerge.
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