NASA discovers water 'spewing' on Jupiter moon Europa

originally posted by: arcnaver
I'm pretty sure they've known about this fountain for a few years. Pretty cool either way. If it is indeed water, that's pretty interesting, but whats more interesting right now is why the water is spewing up in the first place.

Hubble detected water vapor high above the surface of Europa in 2012-2013, but they didn't know what was the source of that water vapor above the surface. They thought it might be deposited there by plumes or geysers emanating from the sub-surface ocean (partly because similar effects had been observed on Saturn's Moon Enceladus), but they had no confirmation.

Using the hypothesis that the water vapor may have come from plumes emanating from the sub-surface, they began to specifically search for these plumes, and that search resulted in this new (2016) confirmation of the existence of these plumes.

a reply to: Denoli

What I do think about is ,could it be possible that live living underneath those icecaps near the geysers not accidently get trapped in the streams and thrown on the ice?

If so they could land a robotic device near those geysers to find any signs of life and take samples . It's much easier then to penetrate that thick ice crust .

I see that it's being discussed already, maybe entering through these geysers also could be option .
Like salmon does with upstream rivers only now you go down into europas ocean.

I say make a robot and test it on our geysers here on earth..