Enceladus’s unusual features could help scientists search for evidence of life outside Earth.
Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth largest moon, is awash with liquid water beneath its icy shell. At the moon’s south pole, the subsurface ocean erupts from one hundred geysers located along four parallel fractures known as ‘tiger stripes.’ The towering jets of ice particles form a plume that snows back down to the surface. Some of the ice even escapes the moon’s gravity and forms Saturn’s E-ring.
To understand exactly how the tiger stripes formed, researchers model ice shell fractures based on various thicknesses.
Like hydrothermal vents on Earth, those on Enceladus sit on the seafloor. There, heat from the moon’s rocky interior may erupt hot mineral-rich water in chimney-like ocean currents — and organisms could take advantage of the different concentrations of dissolved minerals in these streams. “We are conservative in our estimate of life due to the limited energy budget, but you could certainly have multicellular organisms such as crabs,” Cable says.
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