Two studies published in Science Advances on September 25 have made Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus an even stronger target in the search for alien life. The papers approach the question from two directions: whether life could survive there, and whether we could detect it.

A laboratory team led by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München grew the Earth microbe Methanothermococcus okinawensis in water mimicking Enceladus’s hidden ocean. The conditions were harsh — extreme alkalinity and very little carbon dioxide — yet the methane-producing microbe kept growing and adapted its metabolism, widening the moon’s possible ‘habitability window’.

In the second study, a team led by Frank Postberg of Freie Universität Berlin combined nearly 1,000 Cassini ice-grain measurements with freezing experiments. They found that ocean spray rising through the moon’s fractured ice shell may sort and concentrate ocean material before erupting into space as plumes.

Neither study claims life exists on Enceladus. But together they suggest a plausible metabolism could endure there — and that future missions analysing individual ice grains would have a good chance of spotting its chemical traces.