Macromolecular organic compounds from the depths of Enceladus
Open accessAbstract
Saturn's moon Enceladus harbours a global water ocean 1 , which lies under an ice crust and above a rocky core 2 . Through warm cracks in the crust 3 a cryo-volcanic plume ejects ice grains and vapour into space 4-7 that contain materials originating from the ocean 8,9. Hydrothermal activity is suspected to occur deep inside the porous core 10-12, powered by tidal dissipation 13 . So far, only simple organic compounds with molecular masses mostly below 50 atomic mass units have been observed in plume material 6,14,15. Here we report observations of emitted ice grains containing concentrated and complex macromolecular organic material with molecular masses above 200 atomic mass units. The data constrain the macromolecular structure of organics detected in the ice grains and suggest the presence of a thin organic-rich film on top of the oceanic water table, where organic nucleation cores generated by the bursting of bubbles allow the probing of Enceladus' organic inventory in enhanced concentrations.
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Both complex, large insoluble organic material and low mass, reactive and soluble molecules have been found in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus.
“Both complex, large insoluble organic material and low mass, reactive and soluble molecules, have been found in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus [81,82].”
From The Future of Origin of Life Research: Bridging Decades-Old Divisions (2020) · cites this paper as [81]
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- Authors
- Postberg, F., Khawaja, N., Abel, B., Choblet, G., Glein, C. R., Gudipati, M. S., Henderson, B. L., Hsu, H.-W., Kempf, S., Klenner, F., Moragas-Klostermeyer, G., Magee, B., Nölle, L., Perry, M., Reviol, R., Schmidt, J., Srama, R., Stolz, F., Tobie, G., Trieloff, M., & Waite, J. H.
- Affiliations
- Heidelberg University (DE)
- Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (DE)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Southwest Research Institute (US)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory (US)
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- University of Oulu (FI)
- University of Stuttgart (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Postberg, Frank
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2018-06
- Volume
- 558
- Issue
- 7711
- Pages
- 564-568
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- PMC
- PMC6027964
- OpenAlex
- W2809669836
- Cited by
- 447
- References
- 80
- Citations by year
- 2026: 43 · 2025: 48 · 2024: 54 · 2023: 60 · 2022: 49 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 90 · 2019: 38 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 25.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-16-CE31-0023)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Astro and Planetary Science
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Planetary Science and Exploration
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
- Keywords
- Enceladus, subsurface ocean, cryovolcanic plumes, ice grains, complex organic molecules, hydrothermal activity, Saturn's moons, astrobiology
- MeSH terms
- Extraterrestrial Environment, Ice, Volatilization, Saturn, Exobiology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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