Pluto may contain a subsurface ocean warm enough to
host life, according to English physicist Brian Cox (who also said that
humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy). Cox believes the tell-tale ooze of glaciers on Pluto’s surface hints at
the possibility of a subterranean sea warm enough to host organic
chemistry. “New Horizons probe showed that there may
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 three 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. It is unlikely that New Horizons would be able to tell for certain whether warm water exists in the dwarf planet. Cox said that the most immediate prospect for finding evidence of life was on the moons of other planets closer to home. “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. Cox also said it was plausible that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy. The biological “bottlenecks” on the way to multi-cellular 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. Cox added that science is telling us now that “complex life is probably rare.”
Source:The Hindu
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