Potential energy source for life spotted on Saturn moon Enceladus

This enhanced-color image of Enceladus by NASA's Cassini spacecraft features the "tiger stripe" fractures, from which geysers blast water ice and other material from the Saturn moon's subsurface ocean out into space. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is looking more and more like a habitable world.

The same sorts of chemical reactions that sustain life near deep-sea hydrothermal vents here on Earth could potentially be occurring within Enceladus' subsurface ocean, a new study published today (April 13) in the journal Science suggests.

These reactions depend on the presence of molecular hydrogen (H2), which, the new study reports, is likely being produced continuously by reactions between hot water and rock deep down in Enceladus' sea.

"The abundance of H2, along with previously observed carbonate species, suggests a state of chemical disequilibria in the Enceladus ocean that represents a chemical energy source capable of supporting life," Jeffrey Seewald, of the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, wrote in an accompanying "Perspectives" piece in the same issue of Science. (Seewald was not involved in the new Enceladus study.)