For the first time in history, scientists have discovered phosphate in an ocean outside the Earth, on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Phosphate, the most basic building block of life, consisting of 1 phosphorus and 4 oxygen atoms, has been discovered for the first time in an ocean outside the Earth. The ocean where phosphate is found is located on Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest ice-covered moon.
The achievement by scientists from the Universities of Washington and Berlin was made possible by data obtained from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Moreover, the amount of phosphate on the moon is at least 100 times higher than the amount on Earth.

Fabian Klenner, one of the names leading the research, stated that they saw an uninterpretable sign in the data collected by the Cassian spacecraft. In order to make sense of this chemical sign, he and his team created different chemical compositions in the laboratory environment.
One of the compositions was phosphate. When the measurements made with the composition in the laboratory environment and the data from the spacecraft were compared, all measurements matched each other. Therefore, it was confirmed that the substance found on the satellite was phosphate.

Phosphate is one of the basic building blocks of DNA in all life forms on Earth. It is also found in bones and cell membranes.
For this reason, phosphate is actually one of the main evaluation factors in the search for all planets that are thought to be habitable or inhabitable in space.

 

Source: https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/06/14/phosphate-a-key-building-block-of-life-found-on-saturns-moon-enceladus/