Overview
- Lauren E. Mc Keown and colleagues report in The Planetary Science Journal that Europa’s Manannán crater feature likely formed when subsurface brines erupted after an impact.
- Field observations of lake stars in Breckenridge, Colorado, together with cryogenic experiments using Europa ice simulants, produced similar asterisk-like patterns at roughly minus 100 degrees Celsius.
- Numerical modeling indicates a transient brine reservoir could have existed up to about 6 kilometers below the surface for as long as a few thousand years after the impact.
- The team informally named the feature Damhán Alla to differentiate it from Martian 'spiders,' which result from gas-driven processes under seasonal carbon-dioxide ice.
- Current views are limited to Galileo images from 1998, so higher-resolution data from NASA’s Europa Clipper, expected at Jupiter in April 2030, will be needed to test the hypothesis.