Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life.
It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s moons taken during the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys in 1979. Even in those first low-resolution snapshots, Europa was intriguing.
“It looked like a cracked egg,” she says.
Those cracks — in a snow-covered, icy shell — were probably filled with material that had welled up from below, Buratti and colleagues had shown. That meant there had to be something underneath the ice.
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