Ocean Spray On Saturn Moon Contains Crucial Constituents For Life (theguardian.com)

Astronomers have found that blasts of ocean spray erupting from the Saturn moon of Enceladus contain complex organic molecules, "making it the only place beyond Earth known to harbor crucial constituents for life as we know it," reports The Guardian. From the report: Astronomers detected the compounds in plumes of water and ice that shoot from huge fractures in the south pole of Enceladus, a 300-mile-wide ice ball that orbits Saturn along with 52 other moons. Enceladus stands out among the planet's natural satellites because it hosts a global water ocean beneath its frozen crust. German and U.S. scientists found tell-tale signs of organic molecules far more complex than amino acids and 10 times heavier than methane in data gathered by Nasa's Cassini probe as it flew over the fractures on Enceladus. Known as "tiger stripes," the fissures reach several miles down into the ice and are largely filled with ocean water that percolates up from the ocean.

Writing in the journal Nature, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist who worked on the data at Heidelberg University, and his colleagues describe their analysis of fresh Cassini data that shows that most ice particles blasting out of Enceladus are almost pure water. But a small proportion, about 1%, are rich in organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and potentially nitrogen too. Some were made up of hundreds of atoms. "Our results mark the first ever detection of complex organics coming from an extraterrestrial water world," said Postberg.

Comments

some quotes

[mapkinase]

https://www.nature.com/article...

The data constrain the macromolecular structure of organics detected in the ice grains

This makes this sound almost like we can do a long distance crystallography on these.

Luckily in the article itself it explains that what they mean is the presence of peaks characteristic of aromatic rings and

hydroxyl (CH2OH+, CH3–CH-OH+), ethoxy or carbonyl functional groups or nitrogen-bearing ions (for example, CH2NH+2 and CH3–CH–NH+..... abundant cationic forms of a benzene ring, phenyl (C6H5+, 77 u) and benzenium (C6H7+, 79 u).