A recent study of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, has detected several organic compounds that had never been recorded there before. The findings, published this month in Nature Astronomy, provide new clues about the interior chemical composition of this icy world, as well as new hope that it could harbor life.

The researchers analyzed data from the Cassini probe, which launched in 1997 and studied Saturn and its moons for years until its destruction in 2017. For Enceladus, Cassini gathered data from ice fragments forcefully ejected from the moon’s subsurface ocean up into space.

Enceladus is one of 274 bodies so far discovered in Saturn’s gravitational pull. It measures about 500 kilometers in diameter, making it the planet’s sixth-largest satellite. While this moon does not stand out for its size, it is notable for its cryovolcanoes—geysers at Enceladus’s south pole that spew out water vapor and ice fragments. Plumes of ejected material can extend to nearly 10,000 kilometers in length, which is more than the distance from Mexico to Patagonia, and some of this material rises into space. The outermost of Saturn’s main rings—its E ring—is primarily made up of ice ejected into space by Enceladus.

This material is believed to come from a saline water chamber beneath the moon’s icy crust that is connected to its rocky core. It’s possible that chemical reactions are taking place down there, under high pressure and heat.

Until now, most chemical analyses of ice from Enceladus were of particles deposited in Saturn’s E ring. But during a high-speed flyby of the moon in 2008, Cassini was fortunate enough to directly sample freshly ejected fragments from a cryovolcano. The new research paper reanalyzed this data, confirming the presence of previously detected organic molecules, as well as revealing compounds that had previously been undetected.

“Such compounds are believed to be intermediates in the synthesis of more complex molecules, which could be potentially biologically relevant. It is important to note, however, that these molecules can be formed abiotically as well,” Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin and lead author of the study, told Reuters. The discovery significantly expands the range of confirmed organic molecules on Enceladus.

The key is that the compounds appeared in freshly ejected particles, suggesting that they were formed within the moon’s hidden ocean or in contact with its internal interfaces, not during their journey through the E ring or via exposure to the conditions of space. This reinforces the hypothesis that hydrothermal processes beneath Enceladus’s surface could be generating rich organic chemistry. Combining this new research with previous studies, scientists have now found five of the six elements essential for life—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—in the satellite’s ejected material.

This itself is not a discovery of life, nor of biosignatures—the signs of life. However, the research confirms that Enceladus has the three basic conditions for life to form: liquid water, an energy source, and essential elements and organics. “Enceladus is, and should be ranked, as the prime target to explore habitability and search whether there is life or not,” Khawaja said.

This year is a boom time for comets. Not only did we have the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS gracing our skies (and Mars’) earlier this year, but now we have another brand new comet to look out for.

Expected to be at its brightest on October 21, this month you might have the chance to spot the comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) blazing across the night sky—no telescope or binoculars required.

the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that instead of being destroyed, it was transformed, incorporating the mass of that foreign body to become the planet we know. Recent research adds another layer of relevance to that hypothesized cosmic event: Scientists believe that without that other body, the basic conditions for life to emerge on Earth might never have appeared.

A team from the University of Bern in Switzerland argues that, due to its proximity to the sun, the proto-Earth that existed before this potential collision lost the volatile elements essential to form complex molecules. Any hydrogen, carbon, or sulfur, their analysis suggests, evaporated in just the first 3 million years after proto-Earth’s formation. And so if Earth had evolved without external inputs, they say, it would probably be a drier world, more hostile to the development of complex life.

On the other hand, if a body formed in the outskirts of the solar system—a region that produces rocks with abundant water and other volatile elements—and this then hit a rocky planet like proto-Earth, then this could have provided the strange chemical richness that characterizes our planet today, even after Earth’s initial aggressive evaporation process. This hypothesis coincides with other proposals that point to an extraterrestrial origin of water, according to which icy meteorites bombarded the primitive Earth and deposited their molecules.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers precisely measured the radioactive decay of two isotopes, manganese-53 to chromium-53, in both terrestrial samples and meteorite fragments found on Earth. Since these space rocks formed at the same time as the sun and the solar system’s planets, analyzing traces of them and their composition is equivalent to opening a time capsule from the past. By calculating the radioactive decay of manganese-53, the researchers revealed the point in time when the planets stopped exchanging material with their environment and fixed the chemical elements they would keep forever.

Their results show that proto-Earth sealed its elements just 3 million years after the birth of the solar system. Moreover, they found that the early planet’s ratio of manganese to chromium was very low, suggesting that proto-Earth was an extremely hot world, capable of expelling manganese. Since this element is less volatile than other more important elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, or sulfur, these too must have escaped.

“Thanks to our results, we know that the proto-Earth was initially a dry rocky planet. It can therefore be assumed that it was only the collision with Theia that brought volatile elements to Earth and ultimately made life possible there,” Pascal Kruttasch, first author of the report, said in a University of Bern press release.

Theia is the name of the hypothetical body thought to have hit proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The researchers believe the impact would have occurred between 30 and 100 million years after the beginning of the solar system—that is, several tens of millions of years after the ancestor of our planet was known to be a very dry world.

However, the arrival of water and other volatile elements does not equate to the immediate emergence of life. Water alone does not produce life, but it does create a much more favorable chemical and physical environment for other molecules to appear and, with them, the biological processes that underlie cells. In this sense, Theia set the stage but did not ignite the spark.

Your favorite exosolar system and mine -- TRAPPIST-1 -- has long been known to have a few plants in its Goldilocks zone where water can exist in liquid form. New analysis of data from the JWST's scan of planet TRAPPIST-1e now shows that in addition to surface water (in the form of liquid water or ice), it also has some form of atmosphere, increasing the chances that it could possibly harbor life.