I would imagine that most people missed this news story today with all the political news out there. Scientists have discovered complex, heavy organic compounds from Enceladus. For those that do not know, Enceladus is one of the moons of Saturn (there are 61 other moons). It is pretty small (like 310 miles across) and covered in ice. There is liquid water below the surface though and it will sometimes shoot into space due to geysers. The Cassini spacecraft was able to collect a bunch of data on those fountains and they can study the composition.
One of the things they discovered was that there were heavy compounds, which were arranged in complex structures. Before anyone gets too excited, there could be natural processes that form these, so it does not necessarily mean life. However, this puts Enceladus up there as probably the number one candidate for microbial life in our solar system (I think this puts it ahead of Europa or Titan).
Hopefully we can get a mission together in the very near future. I believe NASA has a few proposed ideas and there is a Russian billionaire who wants to send something there immediately. It would be nice if we could get some collaboration (NASA, ESA, etc + private sources–Elon Musk, Russian guy, whoever else).
This is an exciting time. I feel like within my lifetime there will be the discovery of life outside of Earth.
