0
There has been a lot of publicity this year about the search for "potentially habitable planets" around other stars.
The public has been repeatedly reminded of the search for planets in a star's much coveted habitable zone where the "Goldilocks" temperature is "just right" for liquid water to exist.
The irony is, however, that the nearest form of extraterrestrial life in the solar system may only be 1 billion miles away, say astrobiologists.At that distance, the sun is a feeble 1/100th its brightness as seen from Earth, and therefore temperatures are a chilly -330 Fahrenheit (-200 degrees Celsius). Out here, the majority of solar system bodies froze rock solid billions of years ago.
But the unlikely oasis is Saturn's frost-covered moon Enceladus. This would be a place for life on the edge, so say scientists at a recent meeting of the Enceladus Focus Group at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Source
