Scientists have found phosphorus, the rarest of the six elements on which life as we know it depends, on Enceladus.a minor moon of Saturn and one of the most likely places in the solar system where life could exist.

For the finding, the experts reviewed data sent home by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft nearly 15 years ago. They said they found plenty of phosphorus in the water geysers that routinely explode into space from that moon, which is covered in ice and harbors a vast ocean of liquid water beneath an icy crust.

Scientists have previously found other important components of life in the moon’s ocean, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. Phosphorus, which binds to sugars to form a backbone for DNA molecules and also helps repair and maintain cell membranes, has so far escaped detection.

The intriguing new findings, published in Naturethey estimate that Phosphorus concentrations on Enceladus are at least 500 times higher than the highest known concentrations in Earth’s oceans.

The discovery, announced in a paper published Wednesday (June 14), shows that the icy moon, already one of the hottest candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life, now meets “the most stringent requirement for habitability.”

“We do not find life or even anything created by life‘ he said to the portal room Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary sciences at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, who led the research. “We just found signs of something that could very well form life there. It’s just one indicator of habitability, and a very good and important one.”

While previous computer-based research has concluded that there may be phosphorus on Enceladus, this is the first time that the crucial ingredient it is directly detected in the material of that moon’s geysers.

“The only thing that isn’t so direct is that phosphate salts were found in Saturn’s E ring, not in the plume itself.Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist and geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, who is one of the authors of the new study. “But we know that the Enceladus plume feeds the E ring. There’s no mystery there,” he added.