Saturn’s Icy Moon Enceladus Has All the Ingredients Needed to Make Life
Saturn’s moon Enceladus has long been one of the most compelling worlds in the solar system for scientists to study. Underneath its icy shell lies a salty liquid ocean that researchers think is a bonafide chemical lab that houses the ingredients needed for biological life to form and thrive.
Much of this, of course, has been wishful thinking. Sure, there have been detections of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur—five of the six essential ingredients needed for life. The presence of powerful plumes stretching hundreds of miles in altitude indicated that there was enough activity brewing under the surface that could churn those elements into something more complex.
However, we were still missing one very important component essential to life: phosphorus, which is often thought to be the rarest of the six.