Warm oceans under icy mountains likely to have life.
By Raif Karerat
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Pluto’s crust could have alien life living underneath it, according to English scientist Brian Cox.
The dwarf planet’s surface is made up of a crust, which includes huge icy mountains, that is very unlikely to have anything living on it. But underneath that could be warm oceans, which might be able to support life, the physicist said.
Cox believes the tell-tale ooze of glaciers on Pluto’s surface indicates the possibility of subterranean sea bodies of water warm enough to host organic chemistry.
“The New Horizons probe showed you that there may well be a subsurface ocean on Pluto, which means – if our understanding of life on Earth is even slightly correct – that you could have living things there,” Cox told The Times.
The New Horizons spacecraft completed a 3-billion-mile journey across the Solar System and performed a flyby of Pluto in July.
The spacecraft captured detailed images and other data of Pluto and also of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
Cox said that the most immediate prospect for finding evidence of life was on the moons of other planets closer to our own.
“It’s not as accessible, unfortunately, as Europa [a satellite of Jupiter] or some of Saturn’s moons. Titan looks as though it’s got a subsurface ocean now, and Enceladus throws liquid into space, so you can fly through that and see if it’s got organics in it,” he said.
However, Cox warned against getting too excited about finding other living things in our own galaxy.
“What science is telling us now is that complex life is probably rare,” he told The Times. “We’re physically insignificant and yet probably very valuable.”
Cox also said it was plausible that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy.
The biological “bottlenecks” on the way to multicellular organisms are so difficult to squeeze through that only a tiny fraction of the planets where life emerges will be home to anything more than the simplest biology, he said.