Scientists have caught Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus spewing a “huge plume” of water vapor far into space.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) discovery in November 2022 was detailed by scientists at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on May 17, 2023.
“It’s immense,” Sara Faggi, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said at the conference, according to Nature.com. According to Faggi, a full research paper on the massive plume is pending.
The enormous cloud of water vapor has astrobiologists very excited because the cloud might contain the chemical ingredients of life, escaping from beneath the moon’s icy surface.
Live Science points out that this isn’t the first time scientists have seen Enceladus spout water, but the new telescope’s wider perspective and higher sensitivity showed that the jets of vapor shoot much farther into space than previously realized and are many times deeper than the width of Enceladus itself. (Enceladus has a diameter of about 313 miles or 504 kilometers).
Enceladus is a real ocean world
We have to go back to 2005 and the NASA Cassini mission, when the spacecraft discovered icy particles squirting from Enceladus’s subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon’s surface.
To their amazement, scientists detected a huge cloud of water vapor and relatively warm fractures in the crust supplying the cloud of water vapor and ice particles that extend into space. They came to informally call the deep crevasses “tiger stripes.”
Cassini revealed the dramatic truth: Enceladus is an active moon that hides a global ocean of liquid salty water beneath its crust. What’s more, jets of icy particles from that ocean, laced with a brew of water and simple organic chemicals, gush out into space continuously from this fascinating ocean world.
The blasts are so powerful that their material forms one of Saturn’s rings, according to NASA. The faint E-ring is about 180,000 kilometers (118,000 miles) to 482,000 kilometers (300,000 miles).
Scientists believe the E-ring particles come from the plume of icy material that is shooting due south out of the moon’s pole.
Analysis of data from the Cassini mission revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia — all being organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life.
It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.
Enceladus is totally encrusted in a thick layer of water ice, but measurements of the moon’s rotation suggest that a vast ocean is hidden beneath that frozen crust, and the big question is does that water support life?
Last week, JWST organizers released a list of the observations to be taken in the telescope’s second round of operations — and it includes another project to study Enceladus.
The upcoming second study will last six times longer than the first one and will aim to find chemical compounds associated with habitability, such as organic compounds and hydrogen peroxide.
“The new observation will give us our best shot yet at searching for habitability indicators on the surface,” says project lead Christopher Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
