The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted Saturn’s moon, the Enceladusspewing a huge plume of water vapor, much larger than it had previously detected.

This massive cloud may contain the chemical components of life, escaping from beneath the moon’s icy surface.

In 2005, a spacecraft of hers NASA called Cassini discovered icy particles ejected from Enceladus’ subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon’s surface.

But JWST shows that the cloud’s contents are ejected much farther than previously thought—many times deeper into space than the size of Enceladus itself.

“It’s huge,” Sara Faggi, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said May 17 at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

He declined to elaborate, citing a scientific paper to be published soon.

Enceladus excites astrobiologists because it is one of the few “ocean worlds” in the Solar System, making it one of the best places to look for extraterrestrial life.

The salty ocean beneath Enceladus’ outer ice sheet is a potential refuge for life, which could be sustained by chemical energy in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

The liquid ejected from Enceladus, mainly through large drops known as “tiger stripes” around the Moon’s south pole, is a direct link to this possible alien ecosystem.

The plumes seen by Cassini contained silica particles that were likely transported from the sea floor by fluid agitation.

Cassini flew several times through the hills of Enceladus, measuring ice grains and chemicals such as methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia, substances that would not make life impossible.

However, it took JWST, a telescope located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, to discover something that Cassini could not by flying by the ring.

Although Cassini could detect ice grains that do not reach far from the surface, JWST has a wider perspective and more specialized instruments that can pick up faint signals of gas around Enceladus.

On November 9, 2022, JWST briefly inspected Enceladus.

Just 4.5 minutes of data revealed the massive, very cold cloud of water vapor.

Analytical data reports will quantify exactly how much water is ejected and also its temperature.

In any case, it is likely that these ridges are of low density, more like a diffuse, cold cloud.

This in any case poses difficulties in obtaining samples that could certify the existence of life, as these may be too sparse to be detected.

The ice grains seen by Cassini much closer to Enceladus are more likely to have high concentrations of organic particles, says Shannon MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.