Publishing in Nature Astronomy in July, Roth and his team drew on new—and decades old—datasets collected from Hubble space telescope images and spectra.
The finding contributes to understanding the Jovian system and unravelling its history, from its origin to the possible emergence of habitable environments.
While Ganymede is believed to have water deep below its surface—possibly more than in all of the Earth’s oceans—the water vapor discovered on the surface is not a result of evaporation from the underground ocean. It is generated instead from a rock-hard layer of ice on the moon’s surface.
Source: “Water vapor revealed on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede”, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
