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The Fountains of Enceladus

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the photo-goodness dept.

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."

1 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Looks like another place to search for life.... by Luminary+Crush · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What was interesting to me was this diagram:

    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image -details.cfm?imageID=1681/

    In JPL's warm-spot modelling for Enceladus there is an undersurface ocean heated by one of the two now-familiar forces of tidal heating or radiological decay heating (though the former seems more likely).

    So the statement goes: "where there is liquid water, there could be life". Do we have another Europa on our hands here?