So, around 30 minutes after I publish my unofficial guide to SL20B, an e-mail arrives announcing the SL20B Sweepstakes – something which I admit I’d missed when visiting the event’s Welcome Area.
Why is this newsworthy? Because the prizes – particularly for those in the United States – are pretty impressive, including as they do:
A physical world Chevrolet Bolt EV car (US residents only).
A physical world Asus high-end gaming laptop (US Residents only).
A Second Life Lifetime Premium membership.
A 1 Year Premium Plus membership.
DAILY 1 Year Premium membership.
No purchases are necessary to enter the sweepstakes, just a visit to the SL20B Welcome Area during the festivities, and click on one (or both, in the case of US residents) Sweepstakes kiosks.
The National (US residents only) and Global (US residents + rest of the world) Sweepstakes kiosks at the SL20B Welcome Area
There are also a couple of official web pages providing more information and rules, and which run a clock giving the time remaining to enter:
A screen cap of part of the official Global Sweepstakes website for SL20B
So why not give it a go – the Daily Premium prizes are worth a visit on their own, to say nothing of the rest. Just expect the Welcome Area to be busy!
Update: SL20B includes National and Global Sweepstakes with some impressive physical world and Second Life prizes – read more here!
Second Life marks its 20th anniversary in 2022 with 11 days of celebrations and exhibitions across multiple Birthday regions in Second Life. As with previous years, the event folds into in, live music, DJ sets, art, shopping (via the dedicated Shop and Hop event), exhibits by Linden Lab and – particularly exhibit by Second Life residents and communities.
The following is intended to provide a general overview of the celebrations and highlight some of the key aspects, although as there was (again) no preview opportunity (or even any announcement through the SLB Press Corps group, which makes me wonder what we’ve collectively done to be shunned by the Lab), this has in part been put together in a bit of a rush in order to still be relevant around the time of the opening ceremony.
SL20B: The Arboretum
Dates and Theme
This year the SLB festivities will open on Thursday, June 22nd, through until Sunday, July 2nd. Thing will launch on June 22nd with the start of the 3-day Music Fest, with the rest of the festivities and events running from June 25th.
We are pleased to announce our Birthday theme for this year: Our Fantastic Future. The cornerstone of this idea is what we would define as eco-futurism including sustainability, a focus on our environment, and the next generation of our world. Some might call this science fiction, but what is science fiction except a dream for a possible future? In Second Life we build worlds. Our worlds, our way. For SL20B, we invite you to show us your worlds of the future!
The best way the stay abreast of all that’s going on is via the official calendar of events, which I’ve embedded below.
Use the Week / Month options, top right to change the calendar view.
Click on any given line item on any given day of festivities to view more information, including teleport SLurls.
SL20B Guide Magazine
Published to coincide with the celebrations is the SL20B Official Guide Magazine. This not only provides a guide to all of the SL20B regions, it includes interviews with members of the Lab’s board and management team, it charts the history of Second Life, with input on the subject from both Lindens and a cross-section of residents (apparently including someone called “Pey”, for some reason who wibbles at some point within it).
The magazine is again a new venture for the Lab where SL Birthday events are concerned, and allows residents and also ISSSU users to find out more about the platform and its attractiveness, with articles tracking some of the popular activities within SL: fashion, content creation, and home décor. There is also a potted history of Second Life from 2003 through to 2023, which appears to be modelled on the (now) staple of SLB event: The Tapestry of Time exhibit, which appears within the SL20 Birthday regions.
For those interested in finding out what is where within the Exhibit regions, Pages 84 through 105 provide an alphabetical breakdown of the exhibitor regions and the exhibits to be found within them.
Key Events
Grand Opening
Patch Linden will be formally opening SL18B at 12:00 SLT at the Mandala Stage, which will also be streamed as a You Tube Lab Gab special, in which Strawberry Linden will afterwards host a tour of the SL19B regions.
Music Fest and Shop and Hop
As has become the tradition, the Birthday will kick-off with a 3-day Music Fest taking place at the Mandala Stage and featuring many of Second Life’s top vocalists and musicians. The full schedule (at the time of publication can be found in my SL20B: Music Fest, Lab Gab, Shop and Hop post, and in this official post post.
SL20B: The community Walkway Gallery with the Welcome Area beyond
Lab Gab Linden Talk Shows
As per usual, SL20B will feature a series of Talk shows featuring various members of the Lab’s Board, management team and advisors. These will be a mix of live and pre-recorded sessions, and whilst also already covered in the Music Fest, etc., blog post mentioned above, I’m including the schedule here for completeness, and further information can be found in this official blog post.
Patch Linden, Vice President of Product Operations (Live)
Tuesday 27th June, 13:30
Grumpity Linden, Vice President of Second Life Product and Mojo Linden, Vice President of Engineering (Pre-recorded)
Wednesday 28th, June, 13:30
Linden Lab Executive Chair Brad Oberwager and Founder Philip Rosedale (Live)
Thursday 29th June, 13:30
Chief Marketing Officer StyFy Linden and VP of Marketing Brett Linden (Pre-recorded)
Friday 30th June, 13:30
Meet the Moles. The Moles are builders, scripters, and content creators employed by Linden Lab to work in the Linden Department of Public Works (Live)
The Welcome Area
Never been to an SLB event before – try starting at the Welcome Area where you’ll find lost of help, things like the SL20B Hunt HUD, and more!
The Tapestry of Time and Gift Area.
First presented in 2018, the region-wide Tapestry of Time presents visitor with a walk-through of Second Life’s history from 2003 through to the present day using images, text and videos. True, not everything has been recorded, but there’s enough within the region to be of interest to the historically minded.
within the Tapestry of Time can be found the SL20B Gift Area, offering gifts from the Birthday exhibitors and from merchants participating in the Shop & Hop event.
The Community Gallery Walkway
For 20 years, Second Life has offered us a virtual space to create, define and explore, bringing people from around the world together to create, share, discover new interests and make new friends, participate in games and adventures, to learn and discuss, and simply have fun.
For SL20B, the Community Gallery walkway, extending to / from the Welcome Area, has been created to offer a place where visitors can share their memories of their times and adventures, memories that turned a virtual world into a community of Residents.
SL20B The Tapestry of Time and Gift Area
Exhibitor Regions
As is common for SLB events, the mix of content is varied, and the representation of interests broad. Role-play groups, arts, communities, are represented across the nine regions open to exhibitors; some are static, others are interactive in nature.
Direct links to the exhibitor regions can be found in the SLurls lists at the end of this piece.
Note that teleport boards are available at the centre of all Exhibitor regions for easy of moving between them.
Adult Exhibitor Regions
for the first time at SLB, Adult content and groups are permitted to exhibit at the event, with four dedicated regions – separate to the main exhibitor regions – open to visit. These have a dedicated Teleport Hub sitting kitty-corner admits the four regions, and I’ve also included individual region SLurls at the end of this article.
Advice on a Better Experience
The SL19B regions – celebratory and Shop & Hop can get exceptionally busy. To help ease the pain for you:
If you have a high draw distance, reduce it to as low as is comfortable for your enjoyment.
Turn off shadows in your viewer if you usually have them enabled.
Go to Preferences → Graphics and reduce the slider Max # Non-Imposter Avatars to a minimum and dial-down your Complexity slider.
Remove texture-heavy HUDs to free-up more texture memory.
To assist the simulator, remove unnecessary scripted attachments.
Dress lightly, avoid accessories of high complexity.
SLurls and Destination Guide Links
Core Event Region SLurls
The Welcome Area – teleports to the stages, Tapestry of Time, Pod Tours, Gift Area, Community Gallery and Shop and Hop, etc.
The Arboretum – home to the Opening Ceremony, Lab Gab specials and more (rated General):
The Second Life 20th Birthday celebrations are almost upon us, with the regions opening on Thursday, June 22nd, and will remain open through until until Sunday, July 2nd.
The following is a summary of the Music Fest and the Lab Gab sessions with will take place throughout the event. Please note that where SLurls are given, they will not be available for public use prior to the event opening.
Music Fest
As with more recent(ish!) years, festivities will kick-off immediately following the opening on Thursday, June 22nd with the Music Fest, a 3-day celebration of live music in Second Life, and on Monday, June 19th, Linden Lab published the line-up for the event. This year, the festival will be taking place at a dedicated 4-region venue (which presumably will be used for other entertainment as well), comprising the four SLB regions of Amaze, Astound (primary landing point), Astonish (alternate landing point) and Imagination (alternate landing point).
At the time of writing, the scheduled line-up comprised:
Time (SLT)
June 22nd
June 23rd
June 24th
10:00
Gates Open
—
AnLaik
11:00
—
—
Fly Kugin
Noon
Opening Ceremony¹
Made in SL: the Movie¹
Mimi Carpenter
13:00
SEMINA
Tia Rungray
TEMPIO Breil
14:00
Marqs DeSade
DorianKash
Tally Mercury
15:00
Justin Elias Anatra
Randy De Lucia
Jordan Lively
16:00
Holly Giles
Joaquin Gustav
Slade S. Simunyé
17:00
Ruvi Gatchie
ryeshure
spiritLed
18;00
Frogg Marlowe & Jaycatt Nico (Effinjay)
Oblee
Cosmic Cat
19:00
Grace Loudon
FrankLee
Ras Solaris | Waverino
20:00
Angelikus Deo
Maximillion Kleene
Gabriel da Silva
21:00
—
John Rocky
—
At the time of writing, the Second Life Birthday calendar gave the SLurls for the Opening Ceremony and the film festival as those of the Music Fest. However, it appears that:
According to the official Talk Show blog post, the Opening Ceremony will in fact take place at the Mandala Stage (no SLurl available at the time of writing).
SL20B will feature a series of Linden Specials, featuring a mix of pre-recorded and live interviews with members of the the Lab’s board and management team. These can be attended in-world and will also be streamed via the Second Life You Tube channel. For those wishing to view the events in-world, the SLurl are as follows:
Patch Linden, Vice President of Product Operations (Live)
Tuesday 27th June, 13:30
Grumpity Linden, Vice President of Second Life Product and Mojo Linden, Vice President of Engineering (Pre-recorded)
Wednesday 28th, June, 13:30
Linden Lab Executive Chair Brad Oberwager and Founder Philip Rosedale (Live)
Thursday 29th June, 13:30
Chief Marketing Officer StyFy Linden and VP of Marketing Brett Linden (Pre-recorded)
Friday 30th June, 13:30
Meet the Moles. The Moles are builders, scripters, and content creators employed by Linden Lab to work in the Linden Department of Public Works (Live)
Shop and Hop
Coinciding with the Birthday celebrations is another Shop and Hop event, this one on a vast scale: 20 regions and 480 merchants! Find out more via the SL20B Shop and Hop Destination Guide category, or check out the list of participating merchants (with SLurls).
Second Life Birthday Calendar
The provides a full breakdown of events -note again that all times are SLT. Click here to open it in a separate browser tab.
Destination Guide links
Note: some of these may not be available until Thursday, June 22nd:
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 20th Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.
Meeting Overview
The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.
Server Deployments
There was no deployment on the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, June 20th. However, the simhosts were restarted.
On Wednesday, June 21st, the RC release deployed to the BlueSteel channel will be deployed to the rest of the RC simhosts. This release includes:
The “bot detection” update (i.e. AGENT_AUTOMATED constant for llGetAgentInfo() – so only detects if that flag is set, not if an agent is a bot or not.
The second part of the LSD rezzing fix + lLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound, among other things.
Viewer Updates
No changes to the crop of official viewers for the start of the week, leaving the available list as:
Release viewer: Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.12.579987, dated May 11, promoted May 16.
Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.13.580419, June 7.
glTF / PBR Materials viewer, version 7.0.0.580330, May 25.
Project viewers:
Emoji project viewer, version 6.6.13.580279, May 30.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
In Brief
This was a solstice party week, so not a lot of technical discussion.
Depending on who was speaking, vehicle-based region crossings either appear to have improved for some reason, or at exactly the same.
There is a bug with the automated Map refresh / clearing which can result in regions removed from the grid being removed from the Map. Anyone noticing this is asked to raised a support ticket requesting the Map be updated.
The Lab is playing with an experimental capability for adding labelling to the Map – some of this was shown by Alexa Linden some time ago, but the experiments at the Lab are continuing, although it is not clear if any of this work will result in anything user-facing, as currently the overlay is effectively a replacement for the actual Map tile, hence why the examples below are on “empty” parts of the the Map.
The latest in LL’s experiments with Map overlays
llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound are awaiting documentation, but are now integrated into the next maintenance simulator.
A semi-entertaining discussion on Babylon 5 and Star Trek – who would’ve said Rider Linden is a B5 fan?! All I’ll say is not Zathras – because no-one ever listens to Zathras. Zathras, however, probably did say so. Even if only to Zathras.‡.
† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
‡ No, I’m not going to explain that further. Watch Babylon 5 and find out. You won’t regret it 🙂 .
Of course, such partnership between the Lab and external entities are not new; nor, it is not unfair to say, have they perhaps been the most successful of ventures, as might be said to be the case with Film Threat and Zenescope Entertainment Inc (see: The Zenescope Metaverse in Second Life), and it is more than likely that this announcement will cause some rolling of eyes / raising of eyebrows in an “oh no, not again” style of reaction. However, this time, it is actually different, for a reason I’d like to focus on here and which I’ll get to in a moment.
At first glance, the Motown Experience might appear to be along the same lines of the likes of Zenescope – it is offered as a themed region, in this case intended to evoke Detroit and the home of Motown music, and is designed with music events in mind, hosted by a pair of venues, one indoor and the other out on the streets. Within this setting and through the involvement of STYNGR, Second Life residents and visitors to the platform can explore Motown’s rich music and roster of alumni, the music being provided through STYNGER’s unique expertise in licensing and right management and their ability to generate and provide curated playlists of music for stream into platforms and games.
STYNGR is the gaming arm of the recorded music industry, collaborating across all major labels and publishers to give you access to music and artists. With the largest catalogue of music in the gaming ecosystem, STYNGR partners with you to increase engagement, LTV, and visibility for your platform.
– from the STYNGR website
The Motown Experience HUD includes (l) small and hard-to-read instructions on enabling media for both the official viewer and firestorm; (c) the current track on the current playlist; (r) a list of available tracks, accesses by a small button sitting alongside the play/pause and skip buttons at the bottom of the HUD. Speaking personally, I found the HUD slow to respond (before the region even got busy), with the buttons frequently require 2-3 clicks
This is done via a dedicated Motown Records radio station, curated by Motown and STYNGR, and which can be accessed through an auto-attaching HUD (above), which provides access to the various streams the station provides (at the time of my visit, 5 were on offer, per the above images). These tracks can be accessed via a dialogue box triggered by clicking on a HUD button, with buttons also being provided to start / stop / skip tracks during media playback. In addition, visitors can obtain “Styngs”, which might be described as a “digital badge” that can be attached to an avatar and plays snippets of their favourite Motown songs, and the region will be host to various events and activities.
All of which, admittedly, sounds like standard “partnership” fare; so what’s so special here? The clue is in taking a look at the map and / or camming around when in the region.
The Motown Experience sits within a nine-region estate built out as a comprehensive Welcome Hub that will in the new future be opened as a Community Gateway to receive incoming new users signing-up to Second Life. As such, it is designed to address what many people have felt has been missing from SL: a fairly engaging environment where incoming users can not only learn about the platform, the viewer and find out how to do the basics – they can actually get involved in activities and (allowing for the popularity of the Motown Experience as a music venue) actually get to meet other users and have some pleasant fun with them.
The Second Life Welcome Centre sitting adjacent to the Motown Experience
The heart of this hub – which is staffed by people signing-up to the recently announced new Second Life Mentors programme – is the Welcome Centre, where incoming new users will arrive, once the gateway aspect of the Hub is officially opened. This follows lines similar to the Welcome Island I first looked at in 2021 (see: Poking at the new Welcome Islands) and more recently, the BelliHub (see: A look at the new Belli Rub – I mean BelliHub – in Second Life), albeit with its own unique look and feel, which might be defined as semi-sci-fi. Here, as well as as taking lessons either directly or through Second Life Academy videos (isn’t that Second Life University elsewhere?), it s possible to try a game of bumper boats, or try taking to the air in little “robot-driven” flying cars.
Bridges from the Welcome Centre connect variously with the Motown Experience, a sandbox region (allowing visitors to discover the magic of prim-rezzing and banging them together), a sampling of Linden Homes (with open rezzers so the different styles of the available themes can be seen) a shopping district presenting something of a cross-section of content for sale from various creators (no idea how they were selected), and three games areas.
The Welcome Hub includes a Linden Homes region where many of the Linden Home themes currently available can be viewed, with the rezzers open to allowing visitors view the styles of home within a theme
The first of these is innocent enough, presenting an opportunity for people to dip a toe into combat-style gaming via a game of laser tag. This can be reached on foot directly from the Motown Experience region, or via the Shopping region. The remaining two games settings take the form of a Skill Gaming region tucked into one corner of the hub, and a copy of the (still) controversial Lab-developed “social casino” (which I still have yet to actually blog about, as my original piece lapsed into the realm of “meh-dom”). The latter met with (not entirely unjustified) negativity in the forums when the first one opened, and I admit I still cannot get my head around why it ever came to be seen as a good idea.
The Skill Gaming region – reached via either the Linden Homes region or the shopping region – I can understand; it may not everyone’s cup of tea (including me), but Skill Gaming is popular in Second Life. True, I’d rather see the space used as a broader show of what can take place in SL, but that’s a personal opinion. And that said, one thing that is showcased within the hub and via the cinema occupying its ninth region, is the potential for Second Life for producing quality machinima. For the opening, the cinema appears to be showing Waarheid, but I assume other films by residents will also be shown; although that said, I’d certainly not be averse to sitting down and watching “the truly fictious story of the battle of Dirty Hill” – We Were Moles!
The Welcome Hub cinema
Taken as a whole, this approach to providing a comprehensive hub environment with an active experience does represent a new take on a gateway experience for Second Life, and something that is going to be iterated upon and broadened through a rather of partnerships, as Brett Linden, the Lab’s VP of Marketing noted to me.
What you see now is our first test version [of] a new welcome hub we are testing. It hasn’t fully been turned on yet to newcomers (and [it] will be tested along with other community gateways), and but we expect to iterate and partner more with the community (and occasionally outside partners) for future iterations. We’ll be tracking things here closely and play-testing with newcomers to see what works and/or needs improvement for version 2.
Brett Linden, June 20th, in conversation
Given this launch, it is likely the new Hub and experience will be subject on comments and feedback during the upcoming SL20B Lab Gab sessions (of which more in an upcoming post), particularly given new user acquisition is a focus for the Marketing Team under Brett, and he and StyFy Linden from the team are featured in one of the upcoming shows sessions.
More broadly, this expanded tyle of Gateway / welcome facility for incoming new users does seek to address many of the critiques directed towards the on-boarding process: it is staffed by mentors who can provide a personal level of assistance; it covers the “first five (or fifteen) minutes” of in-world experience whilst offering a good opportunity to get to grips with the viewer and discover more about what Second Life is about; there is the opportunity to explore more broadly via the teleport portals (or should than be canons?!); there are local shopping and gaming opportunities; and – most importantly, and assuming the Motown Experience succeeds as a music venue / attraction for existing users as a well as new users – it presents the opportunity to meet people. In this, it might be suggested that how well it succeeds in helping incoming users to “stick”, once the gateway is open to incoming new users, is going to be down to how open, friendly and welcoming the established users visiting the Experience and its surrounding Hub are towards those newbies.
Certainly, I enjoyed my afternoon exploring the Hub regions – and my thanks, as ever, to Brett for his time in talking through aspects of the hub with me , and I will endeavour to keep tabs on what is happening with it over the next month or two; if not directly in relation to the Motown Experience, then certainly with the Welcome Hub as a whole.
Ice particles, with just a trace of phosphates, venting from near Enceladus’s south pole, as imaged by Cassini in 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Even as Europe’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is commencing its long trek to the Jovian system in order to study Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, more is being learned about Europa and its far more distant “cousin”, Enceladus, as the latter orbits Saturn.
In the case of Europa, the findings of a new study suggest that it may have formed somewhat differently than has long been thought, and that it may actually be less subject to deep heating and volcanism that has been thought – potentially decreasing the chances for it to harbour subsurface oceans and possible life.
As has been mentioned numerous times in this column, Europa is of fascination because it is covered in an icy shell which appears to cover a liquid water ocean, churning over a rocky mantle and kept liquid due to a combination of internal heat radiating out from the Moon’s molten core and the gravitational “push/pull” inflicted on it by both Jupiter and other three Galilean moons, which give rise to heating through subsea volcanism and hydrothermal vents (which might also pump the ocean full of biologically useful molecules).
However, Kevin Trinh, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University (ASU), and his follow researchers suggest that Europa may have formed a lot slower than previously assumed, and somewhat differently to how it is generally assumed planets and small moons form, and that even now, it may not have a fully-formed core – possibly a result of its distance from the Sun.
Internal evolution of Europa. Credit: Kevin Trinh/ASU
The accepted theory for the formation of solid planets and moons is that as they coalesced out of ice, dirty, rocks, etc., and were compressed under increasing gravity – assisted by the Sun’s heat – underwent melting, the heavier filling into the centre of the planet / moon to form the core, with the “middleweight” rocks forming a semi-liquid, hot mantle, and the outermost becoming the brittle crust.
But given its size and distance from the Sun, Europa may never have reached the stage of the heaviest elements separating out of its mantle to for the core – or that it is still going through the process, but at a much slower rate and assisted by the gravitational flexing imposed on it by the other large Jovian moons and Jupiter itself.
This doesn’t mean the moon doesn’t have an ocean – Trinh and his colleagues believe the evidence for the ocean is too great to deny –, but rather its formation was different to previously thought, and may have been the result of a metamorphic process, which continues to power it today. In short, the rocks of the mantle were naturally hydrated (that is, contain water and oxygen), as the interior heat increased, it caused the water and oxygen to be released, forming the ocean and its icy shell.
For most worlds in the solar system we tend to think of their internal structure as being set shortly after they finish forming. This work is very exciting because it reframes Europa as a world whose interior has been slowly evolving over its whole lifetime. This opens doors for future research to understand how these changes might be observed in the Europa we see today.
– Carver Bierson, ASU’s School Of Earth and Space Exploration.
Just how far along the formation of a core might be, assuming this ASU study is correct, is an unknown. The study suggests that the core started to form billions of years after Europa’s formation, and that full differentiation has yet to occur.
Credit: Arizona State University
If the theory is correct, it has some significant implications for Europa as a possible abode of life. As noted above, the traditional view is that the moon has had a hot, molten core which could, thanks to the gravitational flexing by Jupiter and the other large Jovian moons, power subsea volcanism and venting sufficient to create hotspots of life in the ocean depths. Without such a fully-formed core, however, it is unlikely that such is the case. But this does not mean that Europa is necessarily lifeless.
It could be that the heat within the rocky mantle – again driven by gravitational flexing – could lead to a more uniform heating of the sea floor, allowing for life to be more widespread around Europa and feeding on the minerals and chemicals released by the hydration process. However, the flipside to this is that such heating could equally leave much – if not all – of the ocean little more than an icy slush, either limiting any life to a very narrow band of heated water very close to the sea floor, or frozen out in the slush.
In the meantime, while Enceladus is even further from the Sun and a lot smaller than Europa – but the evidence for it having a subsurface ocean is more compelling. The southern polar area has long been subject to out gassing material into space – material which is known to be contributing to the growth of Saturn’s E-ring.
The out gassing was first imaged by NASA’s Voyager 2 vehicle in the 1980s and again by the joint European-NASA Cassini mission, which saw the Cassini spacecraft actually pass through some of the plume of material several times, confirming the presence of water vapour and other minerals, all of which are almost contributing to the tiny moon having a very tenuous atmosphere.
A sequence of images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus taken by the Cassini mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Data on the plumes gathered by Cassini have been the subject of extensive studies since they were gathered, revealing that do contain very simple organic molecules and even molecular hydrogen and silica. All of this indicates that chemical reactions between water and warm rock are occurring on the seafloor under Enceladus’ ocean, most likely around hydrothermal vents.
For the last 5 years, a team of scientists at Freie Universität Berlin, have been studying data from a number of sources – Cassini and Earth-based observations – relating to the materials found within Saturn’s E-ring, which, as noted, is at least in part made up of material ejected from Enceladus in an attempt to both better understand the composition of the ring and its relationship with material coming from the moon. What they’ve found has come as a surprise to many planetary scientists: phosphorus.
The importance here is that phosphorus is the rarest of six elements which life here on Earth utilises in various forms – such as combining it with sugars to form a skeleton to DNA molecules and also helps repair and maintain cell membranes. What’s more, the concentrations of the mineral within the plumes are about 500 times greater than the highest known concentrations in Earth’s oceans. While the phosphorus has been detected within Saturn’s E-ring rather than within the plumes rising from Enceladus, its discovery nevertheless is seen as offering “the strictest requirement of habitability” within the moon’s ocean, given that Enceladus is blasting material into the E-ring at the rate of 360 litres per second.
An image of Saturn’s moon Enceladus taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A 2018 study involving Enceladus’s ocean and the likely minerals in might contain had drawn the conclusion that any phosphorus concentrations on the moon would have been depleted in the moon’s oceans a long time ago, and thus unavailable for potential life. However, in reviewing the new findings, the team behind the 2018 study have stated their findings have now been overturned.
In particular, the Freie team also identified the presence of orthophosphate within the phosphates of the E-ring. This is the only form of phosphorus that living organisms can absorb and use as a source of growth. This suggests that not only are phosphates “readily available” in Enceladus’ oceans, it is in forms simple life can make use off to help in its development. Coupled with the fact that the oceans of Enceladus are likely warm and rich in a broad range of minerals and chemical elements, further raises the potential for the moon to harbour microbial life. This had already led to renewed calls for a dedicated mission to the little moon for a more direct investigation.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 