Icy Enceladuss tiger stripes are a window on its watery depths
24 April 2017
Astrophile is Joshua Sokol's monthly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse
By Joshua Sokol
Place yourself at the south pole of Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn. You are standing on a ridge overlooking a trench a few hundred kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide, parallel to three similar trenches – a linear pattern that planetary scientists call tiger stripes.
Below, the ice is cracked and jagged. Plumes of gas, ice and organic compounds hiss out of metre-wide crevasses, rising from an ocean of liquid water below all the way up into space.
Without all this, Enceladus wouldn’t grab so many headlines. It’s not much of a world, really. You could fit almost seven Enceladuses end to end along the equator of Earth’s moon. Its gravity is so weak that a bullet shot from a gun could easily escape into space. And it’s colder than a tank of liquid nitrogen, even during the summer.
Enceladus does have an attractive ocean of liquid water sealed beneath a coat of ice. But so does Jupiter’s much bigger moon Europa, and half a dozen other bodies in the solar system, probably.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128414-icy-enceladuss-tiger-stripes-are-a-window-on-its-watery-depths/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=ILC&utm_campaign=webpush&cmpid=ILC%257CNSNS%257C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-Enceladus
