Nasa finds plume of water coming from Jupiter's moon Europa, suggesting it could be the best place to find alien life

Huge plumes of water have been spurting out of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons – and it might be the best place in our solar system to find aliens.

The shock finding comes from a new look at old data, and has led scientists to confirm that the moon is a leading candidate in our search for alien life.

Europa has long been seen as a possible candidate to have extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. But getting to it seemed almost impossible: the planet is thought to be covered in a thick crust of ice that would stop us from reaching the ocean beneath.

The new discovery makes it much easier to actually find: the plume means that scientists can “taste” the water on the moon, helping them understand what might be found there.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

+ show all Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

1/30 Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa

2/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa

3/30 Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa

4/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa

5/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa

6/30 Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes Nasa

7/30 NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa

8/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa

9/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa

10/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa

11/30 Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa

12/30 Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa

13/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa

14/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa

15/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station

16/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts

17/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity

18/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago

19/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower

20/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it

21/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto

22/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta

23/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3

24/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)

25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way

26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014

27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa”

28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere

30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

The plume was discovered when scientists realised that a bend in Europa’s magnetic field observed by Nasa’s Galileo spacecraft during a 1997 flyby appeared to have been caused by a geyser gushing through its frozen crust from a subsurface ocean, researchers who re-examined the Galileo data reported on Monday.

Galileo was passing some 124 miles (200km) above Europa’s surface when it apparently flew through the plume.

“We know that Europa has a lot of the ingredients necessary for life, certainly for life as we know it. There’s water. There’s energy. There’s some amount of carbon material. But the habitability of Europa is one of the big questions that we want to understand,” said planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“And one of the really exciting things about detection of a plume is that that means there may be ways that the material from the ocean – which is likely the most habitable part of Europa because it’s warmer and it’s protected from the radiation environment by the ice shell – to come out above the ice shell. And that means we’d be able to sample it,” Ms Turtle told a Nasa briefing.

The research, headed by University of Michigan space physicist Xianzhe Jia, was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The findings support other evidence of plumes from Europa, whose ocean may contain twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans. Nasa’s Hubble space telescope in 2012 collected ultraviolet data suggestive of a plume.

Nasa will get a close up look from a new spacecraft during its Europa Clipper mission that could launch as soon as June 2022, providing a possible opportunity to sample plumes for signs of life, perhaps microbial, from its ocean.

Europa is considered among the prime candidates for life in our solar system, but is not the only one. For example, Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft sampled plumes from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus that contained hydrogen from hydrothermal vents, an environment that may have given rise to life on Earth.

A bit smaller than Earth’s moon, Europa’s ocean resides under an ice layer 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 km) thick, with an estimated depth of 40 to 100 miles (60 to 150 km).

The Independent's bitcoin group on Facebook is the best place to follow the latest discussions and developments in cryptocurrency. Join here for the latest on how people are making money – and how they're losing it.