Saturn’s Moon Enceladus is Spewing Water Vapor #SpaceSaturday
We all remember the planets, often, because of their most memorable features. Mercury is the one closest to the sun, Venus is the one that has the highest temperatures, Earth is where we live, Mars is red, Jupiter has that big red spot, and Saturn has those rings. One of Saturn’s rings now has a headline-grabbing feature: it’s spewing a plume of water vapor. Here’s more from Astronomy Now:
Water vapour from a presumed sub-surface ocean below the icy crust of Enceladus has been seen before in striking images collected by the Cassini Saturn orbiter, but never at the scale revealed by Webb. The observations indicate the water vapour is spewing out at 300 litres (79 gallons) per second.
“When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong,” said Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author of a paper accepted by Nature Astronomy. “It was just so shocking to detect a water plume more than 20 times the size of the moon. The water plume extends far beyond its release region at the southern pole.”
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