Today we talk about Jupiter’s moon, Europa, an icy world hiding what might be the best chance of finding extraterrestrial life in our own solar system.

On the surface, Europa looks like a cracked glass marble, crisscrossed with reddish-brown fractures and buffeted by intense radiation. But beneath its miles-thick shell of water ice lies a global, liquid water ocean containing up to twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined. In this episode, we explore how the gravitational pull of giant Jupiter flexes and kneads the moon’s core, generating the tidal heat needed to keep that subsurface ocean warm and liquid in the deep freeze of space.

We’re diving into the mystery of what lies at the bottom of that dark abyss. Could hydrothermal vents on Europa’s sea floor be pumping out the chemical ingredients for life? We’ll discuss the ...