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

Kinda useless having it there...

[Penguinisto]

Between the gravity well of each repsective Moon (and the big Saturnian one as well) and the hard radiation coming off of Saturn, you'll likely spend as much energy getting it out as it could provide.

Now if they could score a lot of water off of asteroids and other ultra-low-gravity objects, we'd be golden, esp. the theories floating about concerning "dead comets", which IIRC are almost all water ice.

That's where IMHO we need to be throwing exploration money; to get the low-hanging fruit first.

/P

liquid water

[wizardforce]

The fact that some of Satrun's moons have water is nothing new, Tethys for example has a density very near 1 g/cm^3 indicating that it is likely mostly made of water ice. The real interesting thing here is that tidal heating could create pools of warmed liquid water neneat the surface.

Pretty harsh

[east coast]

a rain of methane and ethane drizzling down, filling the moon's lakes and seas.

I'm guessing this is a non-smoking moon?

Off topic: Headline

[Billosaur]

Saturn's Moons Harboring Water?

CmdrTaco's pun routine is up and running this morning I see...

Re:hmm

[david.given]

How could life, as we know it, exist in an atmosphere dominated by methane?

It wouldn't, of course. But there could be life as we don't know it. There's nothing magic about oxygen: it's merely a good oxidiser and we have lots of it. In some exotic environments on Earth, there's life that doesn't respire oxygen; and how did you think it got there, in the first place? Photosynthesising plants made it all. What do you think they breathed?

Complex organic chemistry + lots of energy + a rich environment = ...well, we don't know, really. But it's bound to be interesting.

Re:Ewww...?

[Tim C]

Given that methane is odourless, no.

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.