NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a 100-kilometer-high plume near the equator of Jupiter’s moon Europa in February 2016. The announcement was made recently by the officials and researchers from the American space agency.
Incidentally, the plume was detected in the same location as an earlier smaller one, which the Hubble had seen back in March 2014. According to a report, the location of both plumes is right in the center of an unusually warm part of the surface on Europa. A fact identified it by the U.S. space agency’s Galileo Jupiter mission that took place in the late 1990s.
"This recent observation adds to the growing evidence that Europa's complex geology belies an active, maybe habitable, ocean and ice shell," said Hubble team member Britney Schmidt in a statement. "Understanding the plumbing of Europa through studies like this gives us a chance to better understand that picture." The research paper has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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