The Washington Post reports:

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has enticed scientists for years with its plumes fizzing their way up from an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice. Now there’s a new element to the story, literally: That cold, dark ocean appears to contain a form of phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life as we know it.

That means Enceladus has the only ocean beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed for life.

The claimed discovery of dissolved sodium phosphate, announced in a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, makes Enceladus all the more intriguing in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth.

The report is based on data from an instrument on board NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons for 13 years before engineers sent it plunging into the gas giant’s atmosphere in 2017.

“We now really have found that Enceladus’s subsurface ocean is the most habitable place in the solar system, at least as far as we know,” said lead author Frank Postberg, a professor at the Free University of Berlin.

“But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually hosting life, that it’s inhabited,” he added. [Continue reading…]