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Saturn's Moon Enceladus Has Global Subsurface Ocean
An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Cassini probe has made another fascinating discovery: Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has an underground ocean spanning its entire globe. Researchers were trying to explain why the moon wobbles as it orbits Saturn, and they eventually came to the conclusion that its outer shell must be completely detached from its core. "The mechanisms that might have prevented Enceladus' ocean from freezing remain a mystery. Thomas and his colleagues suggest a few ideas for future study that might help resolve the question, including the surprising possibility that tidal forces due to Saturn's gravity could be generating much more heat within Enceladus than previously thought."
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launch nukes at every planet, even those very far away. at every moon, every black hole. destory them all! all they are to us is eye candy anyway, fuck them.
someone will answer.
I'm sure I'm wrong considering the laws of thermodynamics and all, but if a moon is heated by gravitational shifting, does this go on for ever? I.e. is this a perpetuum mobile?
If it kept up long enough, Saturn would stop spinning.
Of course, Saturn's mass is considerably larger so it might take a trillion years.
Working on the assumption the moon itself is tidally locked, which did not bother to check but seems like safe assumption.
As a bowling ball with a liquid center.
and yet again a moon/planet is getting power by some unknown mechanism, Pluto was the other recent find. This is fascinating news! I wonder if it could be a combination of many, many small factors. Physicists (and I am studying it as an undergrad) are very prone to hacking off small factors when calculating things, thinking small factors don't contribute to the overall result, and most of the time they don't. But all the tiny factors like neutrino's, radioactive particles, other stars, gamma rays, etc etc, is there any way that the combined contribution could add up to the energy, or even a part of it, that we are failing to find? The rest of that unknown could be...I don't know, one of those energy's we are still trying to figure out, like Dark Energy or the new evidence for the Z', W' force...
I'm just throwing spit at a wall here cause it's fun. And fascinating.
No. Energy is being taken out every time. At some point it will become tidally locked, just like the Moon (of earth) and then the heating will stop.
Then all the fish freeze.
The geysers could spit them out and they would fall back to the surface. We need an orbiter to fly through those plumes and measure what is in them.
I know where the heat comes from: All those sharks with their frigging lasers heating up the sea water
Mmmmh, aren't _all_ oceans subsurface if you really consider it?
I've always liked enchaladas. So crispy on the outside and squishy in the middle.
Yeah, there's an ocean full of critters on Enceladus, and Europa, and Titan. And there was lots of life on Mars but it lost it's atmosphere so now there's not much of it left but there is some.
The universe is teeming with life. It's been known for years and you're all now slowly getting drip fed yesteryears news.
This ocean of molten iron exists just 1% of the planetary radius below the surface. Most people don't realize how close they are to this bizarre weird incredible iron ocean.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But can it be said that it's facing towards Saturn when it's wobbling around inside?
"Republican corporate welfare. Children are starving to death, but they instead want to funnel money by the truckload to corporations under the excuse of 'science'"
Meanwhile, the other guys defund science because of their hippie-chick fear of everything 'radioactive' or 'biological', or because the Hawaiian volcano god might be offended. Whatever your politics, if you want those children to be fed, you need to defend science.
All these worlds are yours, except Euro^H^H^Hnceladus.
Attempt no landings there.
I wonder what the chances are that, like Earth, it might have a core that's undergoing slow fission...
The speculation on Pluto's dynamic surface is that as it cycles closer and further from the sun, the substances on its surface change densities relative to each other, creating a kind of pumping action.
For example, at the furthest point from the sun, substance A may be denser than substance B. But it could reverse near the closest point to the sun if A expands more than B under the increased heat (at that temperature). Thus A is pushed beneath B for part of the orbit, and then B is pushed beneath A for the other part. This push/pull action against uneven terrain creates a natural pump which smushes stuff all around, giving the melted-plastic look we find at Pluto.
Table-ized A.I.
Conclusion with no evidence ... smooth
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