Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Scarey Days For Creationists As More Signs of Life on Other Bodies Are Found

An artist's depiction of water erupting from the "tiger stripe" fractures in the surface of Enceladus's south pole

ESA - Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean

In a soccer manager’s jargon, this is squeaky bum time for creationists who cling to the notion that science will never demonstrate that abiogenesis is even possible, let alone explain how it happened.

Squeaky bum time for a football manager is when the team’s league position — and with it qualification for European tournaments, and often the manager’s job — hangs on a single unpredictable result.

So it is with creationism. One single piece of definitive evidence that life has arisen independently on another world in the Solar System, or on an exoplanet orbiting a distant sun, would comprehensively consign creationism to the dustbin of history where it has been struggling to avoid ending up since 1859. Such a discovery would refute the claim that ‘life from non-life’ is impossible. Instead, it would show that under the right conditions, life is simply a natural product of chemistry and physics.

And the signs are as dire for creationism as for the embattled football team that finds itself 2–0 down in stoppage time. Scientists at the European Space Agency have just announced the detection of possible signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, as revealed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This follows close on the heels of strong evidence that life once existed on Mars.

The tentative evidence from Enceladus points to processes in its subsurface ocean producing organic precursors to amino acids — the basic building blocks of proteins and a fundamental requirement for prebiotic chemistry that could eventually lead to organised cells. Researchers also report the detection of previously unknown molecules, including aliphatic and (hetero)cyclic compounds, esters, alkenes, ethers, and tentatively nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

These organics were detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) in ice crystals ejected in plumes through cracks in Enceladus’ ice covering. These plumes are thought to form when water seeps into the moon’s rocky core, is heated, and then forced back up to the ocean floor as hydrothermal vents — much like those found in Earth’s oceans. The hot water increases the pressure in the subsurface ocean until the ice cracks and jets of vapour and ice crystals erupt. Most fall back to the surface, but some escape Enceladus’ weak gravity and contribute to one of Saturn’s rings, within which the moon orbits.

Enceladus^ Saturn’s Shining Moon.

Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 146 known moons, is tiny — just 504 kilometres across, barely a seventh the size of Earth’s Moon. Discovered in 1789 by the astronomer William Herschel, it has long intrigued scientists for one remarkable feature: it shines like a cosmic beacon. Its surface is coated in clean, fresh ice that reflects nearly all the sunlight that strikes it, making it one of the brightest objects in the Solar System.

Despite surface temperatures of around –200 °C, Enceladus is anything but dead. Its icy crust is scarred with fractures, especially around the south pole, where great “tiger stripe” fissures vent plumes of water vapour and ice crystals into space. These eruptions are so powerful they replenish Saturn’s faint E ring, which the moon orbits within.

What lies beneath is even more exciting. Cassini data point to a global salty ocean hidden under the ice, kept liquid by the moon’s internal heat and in direct contact with its rocky core. Signs of hydrothermal activity — hot water reacting with rock — mirror the environments that host rich ecosystems around Earth’s deep-sea vents.

Add to this the detection of organic molecules, and Enceladus suddenly becomes one of the most promising places in the Solar System to search for alien life. With liquid water, chemistry, and energy all in one place, it ticks the essential boxes for habitability.

The detection of these organic molecules is reported, open access, in Nature Astronomy and summarised in an ESA article published yesterday (1 October 2025).

Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean
Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains that lead to even more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules.

Published today in Nature Astronomy, this discovery further strengthens the case for a dedicated European Space Agency (ESA) mission to orbit and land on Enceladus.
In 2005, Cassini found the first evidence that Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. Jets of water burst from cracks close to the moon’s south pole, shooting ice grains into space. Smaller than grains of sand, some of the tiny pieces of ice fall back onto the moon’s surface, whilst others escape and form a ring around Saturn that traces Enceladus’s orbit.

Lead author Nozair Khawaja explains what we already knew:
Cassini was detecting samples from Enceladus all the time as it flew through Saturn’s E ring. We had already found many organic molecules in these ice grains, including precursors for amino acids.

Nozair Khawaja, corresponding author
Freie Universität Berlin
Institute of Geological Sciences
Berlin, Germany.

Saturn’s E ring is created by icy grains spewed from Enceladus, visible in the centre of this image.

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The ice grains in the ring can be hundreds of years old. As they have aged, they may have been ‘weathered’ and therefore altered by intense space radiation. Scientists wanted to investigate fresh grains ejected much more recently to get a better idea of what exactly is going on in Enceladus’s ocean.

Fortunately, we already had the data. Back in 2008, Cassini flew straight through the icy spray. Pristine grains ejected only minutes before hit the spacecraft’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument at about 18 km/s. These were not only the freshest ice grains Cassini had ever detected, but also the fastest.

Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyser instrument.

ESA; dust grain inset: NASA/JPL; Saturn image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The speed mattered. Nozair explains why:

The ice grains contain not just frozen water, but also other molecules, including organics. At lower impact speeds, the ice shatters, and the signal from clusters of water molecules can hide the signal from certain organic molecules. But when the ice grains hit CDA fast, water molecules don’t cluster, and we have a chance to see these previously hidden signals.

Nozair Khawaja.

It took years to build up knowledge from previous flybys and then apply it to decipher this data. But now, Nozair’s team has revealed what kind of molecules were present inside the fresh ice grains.

They saw that certain organic molecules that had already been found distributed in the E ring were also present in the fresh ice grains. This confirms that they are created within Enceladus’s ocean.

They also found totally new molecules that had never been seen before in ice grains from Enceladus. For the chemists reading, the newly detected molecular fragments included aliphatic, (hetero)cyclic ester/alkenes, ethers/ethyl and, tentatively, nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

On Earth, these same molecules are involved in the chains of chemical reactions that ultimately lead to the more complex molecules that are essential for life.

Organic molecules in Enceladus ice grains.
NASA/JPL-Caltech.

There are many possible pathways from the organic molecules we found in the Cassini data to potentially biologically relevant compounds, which enhances the likelihood that the moon is habitable. There is much more in the data that we are currently exploring, so we are looking forward to finding out more in the near future.

Nozair Khawaja.

These molecules we found in the freshly ejected material prove that the complex organic molecules Cassini detected in Saturn’s E ring are not just a product of long exposure to space, but are readily available in Enceladus’s ocean.

Frank Postberg, co-author
Freie Universität Berlin
Institute of Geological Sciences
Berlin, Germany.

It’s fantastic to see new discoveries emerging from Cassini data almost two decades after it was collected. It really showcases the long-term impact of our space missions. I look forward to comparing data from Cassini with data from ESA’s other missions to visit the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

Nicolas Altobelli, (not an author of the paper)
ESA Cassini project scientist.

The inside of Enceladus.

Graphic composition: ESA; Surface: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Lunar and Planetary Institute
(CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Returning to Enceladus

Discoveries from Cassini are valuable for planning a future ESA mission dedicated to Enceladus. Studies for this ambitious mission have already begun. The plan is to fly through the jets and even land on the moon's south polar terrain to collect samples.

A team of scientists and engineers is already considering the selection of modern scientific instruments that the spacecraft would carry. This latest result made using CDA will help guide that decision.

Concept for ESA's next mission to orbit and land on Enceladus.

Work performed by ATG under contract to ESA
(CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Enceladus ticks all the boxes to be a habitable environment that could support life: the presence of liquid water, a source of energy, a specific set of chemical elements and complex organic molecules. A mission that takes measurements directly from the moon’s surface, seeking out signs of life, would offer Europe a front seat in Solar System science.

Even not finding life on Enceladus would be a huge discovery, because it raises serious questions about why life is not present in such an environment when the right conditions are there.

Nozair Khawaja.

Publication:
Khawaja, N., Postberg, F., O’Sullivan, T.R. et al.
Detection of organic compounds in freshly ejected ice grains from Enceladus’s ocean.
Nat Astron (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02655-y

Detection of organic compounds in freshly ejected ice grains from Enceladus’s ocean
Nozair Khawaja, Frank Postberg, Thomas R. O’Sullivan, Maryse Napoleoni, Sascha Kempf, Fabian Klenner, Yasuhito Sekine, Maxwell Craddock, Jon Hillier, Jonas Simolka, Lucía Hortal Sánchez & Ralf Srama

Abstract
Saturn’s moon Enceladus ejects a plume of ice grains and gases originating from a subsurface ocean via fractures near its south pole. The chemical characterization of organic material in such ice grains was previously conducted via the analysis of mass spectra obtained in Saturn’s E ring by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer at impact speeds below 12 km s^-1 Here we present a comprehensive chemical analysis of organic-bearing ice grains sampled directly from the plume during a Cassini fly-by of Enceladus (E5) at an encounter speed of nearly 18 km s^-1 We again detect aryl and oxygen moieties in these fresh ice grains, as previously identified in older E-ring grains. Furthermore, the unprecedented high encounter speed revealed previously unobserved molecular fragments in Cosmic Dust Analyzer spectra, allowing the identification of aliphatic, (hetero)cyclic ester/alkenes, ethers/ethyl and, tentatively, N- and O-bearing compounds. These freshly ejected species are derived from the Enceladus subsurface, hinting at a hydrothermal origin and involvement in geochemical pathways towards the synthesis and evolution of organics.

Main
The Saturnian moon Enceladus emits a plume of water ice grains and volatiles through surface fractures at its south pole. The Cassini–Huygens space mission conducted compositional analysis, both in situ with its mass spectrometers—the Cosmic Dust Analyzer¹ (CDA) and the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer² (INMS)—and with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph³, which acquired compositional data from plume observations, indicating an oceanic origin of this material^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11}. A global, salty subsurface ocean percolates through Enceladus’s rocky core, where hydrothermal activity is thought to occur^{6,12,13,14,15,16}. The vented material from Enceladus contains a variety of organic and inorganic species originating from the subsurface ocean^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10,17,18}. The recent identification of phosphates9 in the plume means that five of the six bioessential CHNOPS elements have been detected in material from Enceladus.

Cassini’s CDA recorded hundreds of thousands of in situ time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectra of ice grains in the E ring. After ejection from Enceladus’s interior, about 10% of these grains¹⁹ settle across the E ring over days to decades at distances of about 2.5–20 R_S (Saturn radii R_s = 60,330 km)^20,21,22. Mass spectral analysis revealed three distinct compositional types of Enceladean ice grains in the E ring^6,8,10,23: type I, almost pure water ice; type II, organic enriched; and type III, salt rich. In type II E-ring ice grains, Khawaja et al.¹⁰ found volatile, low-mass (≤100 u; u = atomic mass unit), N- and O-bearing organic species as well as single-ringed aromatic compounds. In a particular type II subtype, Postberg et al.⁸ discovered complex macromolecular fragments of refractory insoluble organic compounds with masses exceeding 200 u, with multiple aryl moieties connected to chains of saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons, alongside N- and O-bearing groups.

While the majority of previous results were inferred from relatively old E-ring ice grains, fly-bys of Enceladus by Cassini provided a unique opportunity to sample freshly ejected grains. This offers compositional insights into ice grains immediately after ejection and ensures that the compounds detected arise from the Enceladean subsurface rather than space weathering in Saturn’s E ring²². The impact speed of ice grains significantly influences the spectral appearance of their mass spectra²⁴. While spectra of ice grains in Saturn’s E ring were mostly recorded between 4 and 12 km s^-1, Cassini’s E5 fly-by occurred at the highest speed (17.7 km s^-1) of all Enceladus fly-bys, offering new diagnostics for the analysis of previously unseen high-energy-induced fragmentation pathways. Simultaneously, INMS recorded measurements during the E5 fly-by, showing a similar correlation between fly-by speed and extent of fragmentation²⁵. The absence of water-cluster species—which are prevalent below 12 km s^-1 and can mask signals arising from organic species—at such high impact velocities is advantageous. Here we reanalyse the data from Cassini’s E5 fly-by to identify specific organic species within type II grains, from which Postberg et al.⁷ estimated relative proportions of ice grain types without detailed compositional analysis.

Khawaja, N., Postberg, F., O’Sullivan, T.R. et al.
Detection of organic compounds in freshly ejected ice grains from Enceladus’s ocean.
Nat Astron (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02655-y

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

For creationists, these discoveries are nothing short of disastrous. The argument that “life from non-life” is impossible has long been one of their last redoubts, clung to in the absence of evidence and against the tide of scientific progress. Yet what Cassini has revealed at Enceladus — alongside the mounting evidence from Mars — shows that the ingredients and conditions for life are not unique to Earth. Far from being impossibly rare, they may in fact be widespread.

If even one independent origin of life is confirmed beyond Earth, it will demonstrate that life is not some miraculous exception, but a natural outcome of chemistry and physics under the right circumstances. The theological scaffolding of creationism, already tottering since Darwin, would collapse under the weight of that reality.

For science, however, the stakes are exhilarating rather than existential. Enceladus has gone from an icy speck in Saturn’s shadow to a world of oceans, heat, and organic chemistry — a place where life *might* exist, or once have existed. Whether the answer proves to be yes or no, the search itself illuminates the universality of natural processes and strengthens our understanding of what it means to be alive in the cosmos.

In short, it is squeaky bum time indeed — but only for those who fear discovery. For the rest of us, the whistle has yet to blow, and the game has never been more exciting.

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