The first evidence of water vapor on Jupiter's moon was found

WASHINGTON: Astronomers have found the first evidence of water vapor on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. They found this evidence while studying an archival dataset sent by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

According to a study published in the Journal of Natural Astronomy, water vapor would have formed when ice from the lunar surface would have changed from solid to gaseous. Previous studies have found situational evidence on Ganymede. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system. It holds more water than all the oceans on Earth together, NASA said.

However the temperature there is such that the surface water has frozen to a dense form, the US Space Agency said. The Ganymede Sea is 160 km from its crust. Is below. Because of this, this sea water has not evaporated in the form of steam.

Astronomers have examined Hubble's observations over the past two decades to find evidence of water vapor on it. In 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph took the first ultraviolet (UV) images for Ganymede, showing colored ribbons of electrified gas called oral bands, along with evidence that Ganymede had a magnetic field.

The similarity of these UV observations was realized in the presence of molecular oxygen (O2). But some observations did not match the diffusion for a pure O2 atmosphere. It was at this time that scientists came to the conclusion that the reason for this discrepancy was the massive concentration of atomic oxygen (s).

A team led by Rolens Rath of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, measured the amount of atomic oxygen with Hubble.