LONDON: Enceladus may have a warm ocean beneath its icy surface, but it may also be shooting through that crust in big sheets, perhaps filled with sea monkeys.
We already know that Saturn’s moon Enceladus could be hiding some pretty interesting characteristics below its apparently dead, frozen exterior — namely a subsurface ocean that might be warm enough to support life. New findings reveal more details about the composition of that sea and that its waters are erupting into space in broad, “tiger stripe” sheets rather than narrow jets as it previously appeared.
Two separate teams published papers in academic journals this week about the water observed at Enceladus, both using data from the Cassini spacecraft that has been wandering around spying on Saturn and its moons for a few years now.
The researchers of the first paper, from the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (PDF here), used mass spectrometry data of ice grains and gases in one of the plumes shooting out of the satellite. Spectrometry is a fancy and fascinating way of looking at the elements of light the human eye can’t detect to determine the composition of a sample.
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