Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn, suddenly gets interesting. It may be spewing liquid water. And since the only life we know of needs liquid water--and since Enceladus may now be the second place we know of in the solar system with liquid water--I want to buy a ticket there. Details and pictures here.
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Neat.
One of the moons of Saturn, Enceladus, has cracks and eruptions that couldn't be explained by heat. (It is much too small to have volcanic actiivty.) They think that the cracks might be caused by tidal forces from Saturn's gravity:
In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft flew by Enceladus and saw…
"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." -Mark Twain
Back before the telescope was invented, Saturn was known as the Old Man of the Skies. The slowest-moving of the naked-eye planets, it's the only one that would reliably be in nearly the same location, year after…
"Aha! That satellite was scuttled on Enceladus, Saturn's main dump moon!" -Professor Farnsworth, Futurama
When you think about life beyond Earth, you likely think of it occurring on a somewhat Earth-like planet. A rocky world, with either a past or present liquid ocean atop the surface, seems ideal…
"Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Here on Earth, water can easily exist in all three…
This raises many questions about where the water came from, why is it not frozen, and what forces could build up pressure of that extent. Could this moon have a liquid water core?
~KC
Almost certainly the water is liquid due to tidal forces as Enceladus orbits Saturn in a 1:2 orbital resonance with Dione. Same goes for being under pressure. Interestingly, cryovulcanism is already known to exist on Neptune's moon Triton. And Cryovulcanism has long been suspected as the source of Enceladus' young and odd surface.
This recent news is more "filling in the blanks" than "out of the blue". Take a look at what was known about Enceladus previously and compare to the recent discoveries, for example. Nevertheless, it is a no less remarkable discovery.
Cryovulcanism is suspected on Titan as well.
Dear Carl Zimmer,
No, you really don't want to buy a ticket to there. See the most recent Scientific American! What you do want to do is encourage better NASA budgets for robotic exploration, to eventually include robotic searches for life.