Reanalysis shows that the Hubble Space Telescope’s detection of water vapor escaping from Jupiter’s moon Europa might have been a glitch. Jupiter's moon Europa, as imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute The putative vapor plumes detected escaping from Jupiter’s moon Europa might not be real. In 2013, Lorenz Roth (now at Royal Technical Institute, Sweden) and colleagues detected faint ultraviolet emissions from the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon Europa using the Hubble Space Telescope. The team interpreted the signal as a plume of water vapor escaping from the moon’s surface. The finding was widely accepted as evidence that liquid water was finding a way out of Europa’s subsurface ocean. (A geologically active surface and magnetic readings near the moon offer strong evidence of that ocean, separate from the plumes). At the time, the idea of Europa’s plumes seemed highly plausible.…