A fresh look at old data is giving scientists a new reason to consider Europa,a moon orbiting the planet Jupiter,as a leading candidate in the search for life beyond Earth.The reason: evidence of water from the moon shooting into space.NASA, the American space agency, noted an unusual shape-- a bend -- in Europa's magnetic field in 1997.That was the year when NASA's Galileo spacecraft passed close to the moon.For a time, it was about 200 kilometers above the surface.Scientists reported earlier this month on their reexamination of the Galileo data.They now think this bend in the magnetic field could be explainedby an active geyser in an underground ocean.The scientists believe the spacecraft traveled through a plume of water.Elizabeth Turtle is a planetary scientistwith the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.She told reporters that Europa does have a lot of the qualitiesthat are necessary for life was we know it."There's water. There's energy.There's some amount of carbon material.But the habitability of Europa is one of the big questionsthat we want to understand," said Turtle."And one of the really exciting things about detection of a plumeis that that means there may be ways that the material from the ocean— which is likely the most habitable part of Europabecause it's warmer and it's protected ...to come out above the ice shell," she added.University of Michigan space physicist Xianzhe Jia led the latest study,which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.The findings support other evidence of plumes from Europa,whose ocean may contain two times as much water as all of Earth's oceans.In 2012, NASA's Hubble Space Telescopecollected evidence of ultraviolet radiation which suggests a plume.NASA will get a close-up look from a new spacecraftas part of the space agency's Europa Clipper mission.That spacecraft could be launched as soon as June 2022.The agency says this could provide a chance to examine plumesfor signs of life from Europa's ocean, some of which may be microscopic.Experts consider Europa to be among the top candidates for life in our solar system.But it is not the only one.For example, NASA's Cassini spacecraft examined plumes from Enceladus,a moon of the planet Saturn.The water from Enceladus's ocean contained hydrogen from hydrothermal vents,an environment that may have given rise to life on Earth.Europa is a little smaller than Earth's moon. Its ocean is buried under about 15 to 25 kilometers of ice.Experts believe the ocean itself to be anywhere from 60 to 150 kilometers deep.