Map of Europa's surface

This graphic shows a map of Europa’s surface with NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) in the first panel and compositional maps derived from NIRSpec/IFU (Near Infrared Spectrograph’s Integral Field Unit) data in the following three panels. In the compositional maps, the white pixels correspond to carbon dioxide in the large-scale region of disrupted chaos terrain known as Tara Regio (centre and right), with additional concentrations within portions of the chaos region Powys Regio (left). The second and third panels show evidence of crystalline carbon dioxide, while the fourth panel indicates a complexed and amorphous form of carbon dioxide.

Astronomers using Webb have found carbon on the chaos terrain of Tara Regio and Powys Regio. Surface ices in these regions have been disrupted, and there has likely been a relatively recent exchange of material between the subsurface ocean and the icy surface. Carbon, a universal building block for life as we know it, likely originated in Europa’s ocean. The discovery suggests a potentially habitable environment in the salty subsurface ocean of Europa.

The NIRSpec/IFU images appear pixelated because Europa is 10 x 10 pixels across in the detector’s field of view.

[Image description: Four square panels appear in a horizontal strip. The first features a blue-and-white sphere against a black background. With fuzzy edges, this sphere has darker blue patches in the northern hemisphere and two large white patches in the southern hemisphere.Each of the second, third, and fourth panels has a pixelated, roughly circular image of small, white, blue, or orange squares. In each of these panels, there are slight variations in the arrangement of the coloured squares.]

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