Enceladus life

A giant planet around Alpha Centauri A was first glimpsed as a candidate by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2025. Later surveys confirm it, and find it has a large moon, Veil, with a thick ice shell over a tidally warmed ocean. Lantern Probe flybys imaged it in the 2150s, and surveys from Proxima, only 0.2 light-years away, have mapped its hidden ocean — but from outside, all anyone can see is ice, and life sealed under kilometres of it would leave no trace a telescope can read. Since life was found in Enceladus and Europa, the Settlement has banned penetrating any alien ocean until a probe can be certified sterile, and since the 2450s the Concord Accord's ban on disturbing alien biospheres has bound every bloc, so nobody has looked inside.

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