Meteorite impacts could have provided the spark to create the building blocks of life on Jupiter鈥檚 moon Europa, according to researchers in California.
The icy surface of Europa is crisscrossed with cracks created by these impacts. To get a similar effect, Jerome Borucki of NASA Ames and his team fired aluminium balls into blocks of ice. The impacts generated electricity as the fractures released stresses in the ice.
In a distant echo of Stanley Miller鈥檚 classic experiment synthesising organic molecules with the help of an electrical spark, the researchers suggest that pools of water beneath meteorite craters on Europa could be fed with electrical energy as the stress of impact spreads through the crust. 鈥淭his may persist for millions of years,鈥� says Borucki, who will report the work in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
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