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The Fountains of Enceladus
EccentricAnomaly writes "Cassini has observed fountain-like plumes from the warm fractures near Enceladus' south pole. This confirms what had been suspected from an image taken last January. And seems to point to these cryo-volcanoes as being the primary source of Saturn's E-ring. There are also more images available from Cassini's raw images archive."
its not all that scary as long as your gravitiy well is shallow and your atmosphere is thin.
This has nothing really to do with the temperature per se, its more like a side effect.
Also, considering that the background of the universe is only 2.73k, 110k deserves the designation "warm".
I mean, its even warm enough to evaporate nitrogen...
(also, at 0K everything still has the zero point energy, i.e. the 0.5h_bar you can never shave off those pesky harmonic osszillators. Thats for example the reason why helium wont become solid even at 0k and zero pressure...)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Pardon me, but Cassin is NOT slow to release its results. Some of these images came down in the past two *days*. And I'd like to note that they got posted to the JPL website almost instantly. That's actually rather unfair to us, since there's usually a one *year* propriatary period where the data are the kept by the people who put the work into designing, building, and operating the instrument. Thanks to JPL, anybody off the street can get up at 3 AM to grab the images of the website before we've woken up that morning, let alone gotten our coffees in.
Of course, amateurs are not bound be either rules for peer-review to get published or by NASA's process for press-releases, so their results will often appear on the web sooner than the offical findings. But they should also be treated with a certain measure of skepticism. Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.
Oh sure, 'cause that's worked rather flawlessly in the past. Just ploppin them down.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Pure H2O is frozen rock solid at 110K. But H2O-NH3 ices are not. Try mixing 50% ammonia and 50% water together and putting them in the freezer. The mixture will not freeze but will just become more viscous. Low temperature mixtures of H2O, CO, CH4, or N2 have similarly weird properties. Check this out. The compositions of Saturn's icy moons have not been well established. But indirect evidence like eruptions on Enceladus, or cometary outbursts, suggest exotic icy chemistry.
an ill wind that blows no good