Saturn's Moons Harboring Water?

eldavojohn writes "New bizarre images of Saturn's moons are exciting scientists as there may be some indication of water, possibly at very low depths in the frigid environment they possess. From the article, 'Titan's north pole is currently gripped by winter. And quite a winter it is, with temperatures dropping to -180C and a rain of methane and ethane drizzling down, filling the moon's lakes and seas. These liquids also carve meandering rivers and channels on the moon's surface. Finally, last week NASA and Esa revealed images from Cassini which confirmed that jets of fine, icy particles are spraying from Saturn's moon Enceladus and originate from a hot 'tiger stripe' fracture that straddles the moon's south polar region. The discovery raises the prospect of liquid water existing on Enceladus, and possibly life.' You can find the images here."

Comments

Re:Saturnians

[Red Flayer]

I for one welcome our new Saturnian overlords.

Now that's just sad.

If they were Jovian overlords, then we could celebrate.

Enceladus, Tiger Stripes, and Jets

[CheshireCatCO]

You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.

Re:It makes sense

[MBGMorden]

That explanation is, somewhat lacking. It explains very well why Jupiter is not a brown dwarf. "Failed star" isn't quite so specific.

Basically, Jupiter is one extremely massive body. It's far more massive (more than twice as much) than all the other planets (even all the other gas giants, including similarly sized Saturn) combined. It's also made of MOSTLY hydrogen (prime element fueling a star), and interestingly enough, the center of mass between the Sun and Jupiter is actually OUTSIDE of the surface of the Sun. Not much outside of it admittedly, but no other planet in our system comes anywhere near it, and it's much like the Pluto/Charon system though not as exaggerated; the objects to some degree orbit each other rather than just one orbiting the other.

So, we really need a good understanding on how binary star systems form. If they both coalesce from the same cloud, then Jupiter can indeed be seen as an "almost" star that had all the right components, and could have formed in a way similar to a binary system, but it simply didn't pickup enough mass during formation.