James Webb Space Telescope Discovery

Webb Finds Carbon Source on Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa (NIRCam Image)

Webb’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) captured this picture of the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Webb identified carbon dioxide on the icy surface of Europa that likely originated in the moon’s subsurface ocean. This discovery has important implications for the potential habitability of Europa’s ocean. The moon appears mostly blue because it is brighter at shorter infrared wavelengths. The white features correspond with the chaos terrain Powys Regio (left) and Tara Regio (centre and right), which show enhanced carbon dioxide ice on the surface. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, G. Villanueva (NASA/GSFC), S. Trumbo (Cornell Univ.), A. Pagan (STScI) Europa (NIRCam image)
Europa (NIRCam image, cropped)
This graphic shows a map of Europa’s surface with NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) in the first panel and compositional maps derived from NIRSpec/IFU (Near Infrared Spectrograph’s Integral Field Unit) data in the following three panels. In the compositional maps, the white pixels correspond to carbon dioxide in the large-scale region of disrupted chaos terrain known as Tara Regio (centre and right), with additional concentrations within portions of the chaos region Powys Regio (left). The second and third panels show evidence of crystalline carbon dioxide, while the fourth panel indicates a complexed and amorphous form of carbon dioxide. Astronomers using Webb have found carbon on the chaos terrain of Tara Regio and Powys Regio. Surface ices in these regions have been disrupted, and there has likely been a relatively recent exchange of material between the subsurface ocean and the icy surface. Carbon, a universal building block for life as we know it, likely originated in Europa’s ocean. The discovery suggests a potentially habitable environment in the salty subsurface ocean of Europa. The NIRSpec/IFU images appear pixelated because Europa is 10 x 10 pixels across in the detector’s field of view. Map of Europa's surface
Raw images