NASA teases bombshell discovery above 'Ocean Worlds' - Have they found life?

NASA plans big announcement for Thursday.

NASA will hold a special press conference Thursday to talk about the ocean worlds in our solar system. The study of these oceans is key to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. Several bodies in our solar system are believed to host oceans of various liquids.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- The Moons of Saturn hold secrets that we can only imagine so far. Chief among them are the moons Enceladus and Titan. Enceladus may have an ocean of liquid water under its surface of ice. This makes it the most promising candidate for Earth-like extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

Titan also has oceans, but of liquid methane. Could life flourish there too? It seems unlikely, but it is worth investigating.

Liquids are excellent mediums for mixing molecules that can potentially combine to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, liquid oceans are of great interests to astronomers. Liquids of any kind are of interest, such as water on Mars, but entire oceans are even more compelling targets for study.

According to some scientists, life on Earth arose in the ocean billions of years ago. Earth is considered an ocean world, and two-thirds of the planet's surface is covered by liquid water.

Mars and Venus likely also hosted oceans but lost them for various reasons. Venus was cursed with an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide which led to a runaway greenhouse effect, evaporating all of the planet's water and losing it to space.

Thursday's conference will not announce the discovery of ET, but we can expect to hear something that scientists will find exciting. Right now, scientists are working out how to study exoplanets for signs of life around nearby stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope, which will be many times more powerful than the Hubble, will be able to detect atmospheres around planets and determine what those atmospheres are made of. Certain gasses, such as oxygen in the atmosphere will alert us that either life exists on the planet or is very possible.

Using this method, we could answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe within the next decade or less.