On Earth, those chemical reactions allow microbes to flourish in hot cracks in the planet's ocean floors - depths sunlight cannot reach - meaning the moon could also nourish life.
"[The] fact that that we can measure such high concentrations of hydrogen and carbon dioxide mean that there might not be life there at all, and if there is life, it's not very active".
The Cassini probe - a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's ASI space agency - will now undergo a course correction to enable it to study Saturn's rings before being plunged into the gas giant's atmosphere in September, ending its 13-year mission to explore the distant planet and its 62 known moons.
"We have not found evidence of the presence of microbial life in the ocean of Enceladus, but the discovery of hydrogen gas and the evidence for ongoing hydrothermal activity offer a tantalizing suggestion that habitable conditions could exist beneath the moon's icy crust". The findings were presented in papers published by researchers with NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and work on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Cassini's findings reveal that the ice-covered Enceladus has pretty much all the elements required to support life forms.
If or since hydrogen was found in the oceans of the moon, in the oceans, then this could be a potential source of chemical energy for life that might be found there - if any exists there.
Cassini has no instruments that can detect life, so it will be up to future robotic visitors to seek out possible life on Enceladus, the scientists said.
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"Although we can't detect life, we've found that there's a food source there for it".
"This is the closest we've come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment", shared Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington. "And part of that could be that we think Enceladus might be fairly young". And there's "no reason" why the same process wouldn't be happening on the moon orbiting Jupiter, Voytek says. "My money for the moment is still on Europa", she says.
Scientists said the moon appeared to have ample energy supplies to support life - roughly the equivalent of 300 pizzas per hour, according to Christopher Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.
The Europa Clipper will periodically fly past Jupiter's Europa moon to collect data and study the subsurface ocean.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft is to thank for the revelation.
The decision to end the mission was made in 2010, in order to avoid damaging moons like Enceladus, which could be explored for signs of life in the future. But NASA's New Frontiers program is holding a competition for its next mission, and Enceladus is a potential target.
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