The top candidate for life beyond Earth just got even better

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By Science Advisor. 

Excerpt: If the space community had to place bets on the most promising candidate for life in the solar system, Enceladus would probably win...a salty liquid ocean, as well as compounds like phosphorus and complex hydrocarbons, all necessary for life as we know it on Earth. But the world had been missing one crucial factor: stability. Since life takes a long time to evolve, a good candidate world should remain stable over many millions or billions of years. Stability is often determined through a world’s heat balance, where the amount of energy it receives from its star equals the amount of energy it radiates outward. Though scientists knew that Enceladus’s southern pole leaked out heat from the forces of Saturn’s gravity stretching and squashing the world, its heat balance was still off. But when researchers used data from NASA’s Cassini mission to study Enceladus’s north pole, they found that the surface was around 7ºC warmer than the models predicted. That missing value puts the world in radiative balance and indicates a stable liquid ocean.... 

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