GALILIEN MOONS ( PART - 2 )

 EUROPA :

              Europa is named for a woman who, in Greek mythology, was abducted by the god Zeus – Jupiter in Roman mythology.

With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometers), Europa is about 90 percent the size of Earth’s Moon.

if we replaced our Moon with Europa, it would appear roughly the same size in the sky as our Moon does, but brighter – much, much brighter. Europa’s surface is made of water ice and so it reflects 5.5 times the sunlight than our Moon does.

EVIDENCE FOR THE PRESENCE OF WATER :

The evidence that there is some sort of water or slush beneath Europa’s surface is fairly strong, based on models of how a buried ocean would affect the ice above it. Measurements of the moon’s magnetic field also hinted that there is some sort of electrically conductive fluid — such as salty water —flowing under the surface. There are even images from the Hubble Space Telescope that appear to show huge plumes of water vapor erupting from Europa’s south pole, although they are not high-resolution enough to be definitive.

If the liquid ocean really is there, it could make Europa an especially promising place to look for life, because liquid water is crucial for life as we know it. But many mysteries remain about this huge moon, from the thickness of the ice shell to the details of what happens beneath it

Facts :

Average surface temperature → -160 degrees Celsius 

Distance from Sun → 5.2 astronomical unit

Diameter → 3100 km

Atmosphere → extremely tenuous, mostly oxygen