Jupiter’s moon Europa spews water vapor

The icy moon Europa squirts water like a squishy bath toy when it’s kneaded by Jupiter’s gravity — and the Hubble Space Telescope has caught it in the act.

The data captured by Hubble depict two huge geysers of water vapor spewing out of the moon, probably from cracks near its south pole. At 124 miles high, the geysers were tall enough to reach from Los Angeles to San Diego. The discovery, described Thursday in the journal Science, shows Europa is still geophysically active and could hold an environment friendly to life.

“It’s exciting,” said Lorenz Roth, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and one of the lead authors of the study, which was presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Europa isn’t the only squirty moon in our solar system: Saturn’s moon Enceladus has been caught spraying water from its south pole out of four parallel fractures, a formation that scientists have dubbed “tiger stripes.”

These pretty plumes are the result of tidal forces. Just as our moon’s gravity squeezes and stretches the Earth a bit, causing the oceans to rise and fall, Saturn’s massive gravitational pull squeezes and stretches Enceladus. That causes cracks on its icy surface to open and allows water to escape, feeding the planet’s diffuse E ring.

Scientists have long wondered whether Jupiter was doing something similar to Europa. After all, that moon’s surface is only about 65 million years old, making it less than 2 percent as old as the solar system.

Perhaps future studies can analyze the contents of Europa’s watery plumes and see if there are any signs of organic matter, Pappalardo said. A future spacecraft might even fly through a plume and take samples directly.