Saturn’s moon Titan may be more alive with possibilities than we thought. New NASA research suggests that in Titan’s freezing methane and ethane lakes, simple molecules could naturally arrange themselves into vesicles—tiny bubble-like structures that mimic the first steps toward life. These compartments, born from splashing droplets and complex chemistry in Titan’s atmosphere, could act like primitive cell walls.

NASA research has shown that cell-like compartments called vesicles could form naturally in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Titan is the only world apart from Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. However, Titan’s lakes and seas are not filled with water. Instead, they contain liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane.

What happens when you hurl molecules faster than sound through a vacuum chamber nearly as cold as space itself? At the University of Missouri, researchers are finding out—and discovering new ways to detect molecules under extreme conditions.

The discovery could one day help chemists unravel the mysteries of astrochemistry, offering new clues about what the universe is made of, how stars and planets form and even where life originated.

In a recent study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Mizzou faculty member Arthur Suits and doctoral student Yanan Liu fired a laser at methane gas molecules moving faster than the speed of sound in a vacuum chamber at roughly −430°F, close to the temperature in parts of outer space.

“This finding by Perseverance …is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars,” said acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy in a statement. “The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars.”

Perseverance did not discover fossilized microbes and it surely didn’t discover living ones. What it found was a rock streaked in a range of colors—red, green, purple, and blue—flecked with poppy-seed-like dots and decorated with what the Perseverance scientists compared to dull yellow leopard spots. That said a lot. As the rover’s instruments confirmed, the red is iron-rich mud, the purple is iron and phosphorous, the yellow and green are iron and sulfur. All of those elements serve as something of a chow line for hungry microbes.

The poppy seeds and leopard spots, meantime, resemble markings left behind by metabolizing microbes on Earth. When the rover trained its instruments on those features they detected two iron-rich minerals—vivianite and greigite. On Earth, vivianite is frequently found in peat bogs and around decaying organic matter—another item on the microbes’ menu. And both minerals can be produced by microbial life. Images of the rock with its distinctive features were beamed back to Earth by Perseverance, while X-ray and laser sensors analyzed the chemistry of the markings.

The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than one-10 thousandth of the age of Earth.

All of this suggests that life might be common on planets that support liquid water, but it might be uncommon to find life that studies the universe and seeks to travel through space. To find extraterrestrial life, it might be necessary for us to travel to it.

However, the vastness of space, coupled with the impossibility of traveling or communicating faster than the speed of light, places practical limits on how far we can roam.