Europa’s Plumes May Originate from Near-Surface Brine Reservoirs

Europa, the sixth of Jupiter’s moons and the fourth largest, has a subsurface ocean covered by an icy shell. Despite evidence for plumes on the icy moon, no surface features have been definitively identified as their source to date.

Furthermore, it remains unknown whether the activity originates from near-surface water reservoirs within Europa’s ice shell or if it is sourced from the underlying global ocean.

In a new study, a team of U.S. planetary researchers looked at an impact crater called Manannán and found that the fracture system located in its center is consistent with the formation of a near-surface brine reservoir; as the final water pocket at the crater’s center started to freeze, overpressurization resulted in a cryovolcanic eruption that emplaced brine onto the surface.

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Image credit: Justice Blaine Wainwright.

This artist’s conception of Europa shows a hypothesized cryovolcanic eruption, in which briny water from within the icy shell blasts into space.

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Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute

The surface of Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view; image scale is 1.6 km per pixel; north on Europa is at right.

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Hubble Directly Images Possible Plumes on Europa

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took direct ultraviolet images of the icy moon Europa transiting across the disk of Jupiter.

Out of ten observations, Hubble saw what may be water vapor plumes on three of the images.

This adds another piece of supporting evidence to the existence of water vapor plumes on Europa - Hubble also detected spectroscopic signatures of water vapor in 2012.

The existence of water vapor plumes could provide a future Europa flyby mission the opportunity to study the conditions and habitability of Europa's subsurface ocean.

Water Vapor Plumes on Europa