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Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources
There is an increasing interest in the icy moons of the Solar System due to their potential habitability and as targets for future exploratory missions, which include astrobiological goals. Several studies have reported new results describing the details of these moons’ geological settings; however,...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5762670/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29321597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18470-z |
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author | Altair, Thiago de Avellar, Marcio G. B. Rodrigues, Fabio Galante, Douglas |
author_facet | Altair, Thiago de Avellar, Marcio G. B. Rodrigues, Fabio Galante, Douglas |
author_sort | Altair, Thiago |
collection | PubMed |
description | There is an increasing interest in the icy moons of the Solar System due to their potential habitability and as targets for future exploratory missions, which include astrobiological goals. Several studies have reported new results describing the details of these moons’ geological settings; however, there is still a lack of information regarding the deep subsurface environment of the moons. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the microbial habitability of Europa constrained by terrestrial analogue environments and sustained by radioactive energy provided by natural unstable isotopes. The geological scenarios are based on known deep environments on Earth, and the bacterial ecosystem is based on a sulfate-reducing bacterial ecosystem found 2.8 km below the surface in a basin in South Africa. The results show the possibility of maintaining the modeled ecosystem based on the proposed scenarios and provides directions for future models and exploration missions for a more complete evaluation of the habitability of Europa and of icy moons in general. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5762670 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57626702018-01-17 Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources Altair, Thiago de Avellar, Marcio G. B. Rodrigues, Fabio Galante, Douglas Sci Rep Article There is an increasing interest in the icy moons of the Solar System due to their potential habitability and as targets for future exploratory missions, which include astrobiological goals. Several studies have reported new results describing the details of these moons’ geological settings; however, there is still a lack of information regarding the deep subsurface environment of the moons. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the microbial habitability of Europa constrained by terrestrial analogue environments and sustained by radioactive energy provided by natural unstable isotopes. The geological scenarios are based on known deep environments on Earth, and the bacterial ecosystem is based on a sulfate-reducing bacterial ecosystem found 2.8 km below the surface in a basin in South Africa. The results show the possibility of maintaining the modeled ecosystem based on the proposed scenarios and provides directions for future models and exploration missions for a more complete evaluation of the habitability of Europa and of icy moons in general. Nature Publishing Group UK 2018-01-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5762670/ /pubmed/29321597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18470-z Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Altair, Thiago de Avellar, Marcio G. B. Rodrigues, Fabio Galante, Douglas Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title | Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title_full | Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title_fullStr | Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title_full_unstemmed | Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title_short | Microbial habitability of Europa sustained by radioactive sources |
title_sort | microbial habitability of europa sustained by radioactive sources |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5762670/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29321597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18470-z |
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