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."

ESA

[LuSiDe]

ESA is an initialism standing for European Space Agency [wikipedia.org]. If you write NASA with capital letters (in proper English one should do this) you should do the same with ESA.

Re:Kinda useless having it there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, there's no shortage of H2O on this planet.

It's a lot more cost effective, and a hell of a lot easier, to treat what's already here. Obtaining water in meaningful quantities from asteroids/comets is nearly as infeasible as obtaining it from Saturn.

If you want "low-hanging fruit", you might want to consider Earth first.

Re:Filling the lakes and seas?

[db32]

It is the same as how here on our much more boring earth, rain fills our lakes. If a pond or lake doesn't get any rain it will eventually evaporate away, it has to be refilled. I don't think it was meant in the sense of "its filling the lake with something other than what is already there" so much as "this is how these lakes were formed and are maintained".

I remember as a child reading about this stuff and being fascinated. It has been a long time, but the descriptions I read stuck with me. I can't say how accurate they are, but to think about the very large slow moving waves of non water moving on these moons is amazing. The gravity and so on makes the waves move so much differently than what a wave lookes like here in the ocean. Even if we can't ever set foot on some of those places, I really hope we start getting good clear color pictures of some of these places. These kinds of pictures would really spark new interest in our little corner of space. Most of what we have are just black and white stuff, and the color ones aren't the real colors, but spectrograph type things.

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.

Re:Saturnians

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, their air has no oxygen. In fact, bottle of oxygen would be there what bottle of propane is here. It could make a bang, but wouldn't blow everything. With proper nozzle on it, you can light a match and cook just fine. However... you can't put the fire out with a splash from a lake! Their "water" "aids" "oxidation" of "fuel" (oxygen), unlike ours. Whooh, after writing all that with all that quotation marks, finally I see how Earth-biased our chemistry is. If we were from some other surroundings, we would probably had made different grouping of chemical compounds. giving more attention to those which are ubiquitous over those which are "exotic", "rare" and "unlikely". We have so much oxygen on our planet, there are probably some aliens somewhere out there who think our planet is totally poisonous and corrosive hell, like if we were to learn about world mostly covered in hydrochloric acid, with atmosphere abundant in gaseous chlorine.

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 [ciclops.org].

Carolyn Porco gave a good TED Talk about this.

[EvilNight]

She discusses the Cassini mission in detail, including what we've learned about Titan and this strange behavior on Enceladus. It beats reading dead text.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178 [ted.com]

Enceladus naming of sulci

[mattr]

I was intrigued about why the names of those tiger stripe cracks are middle eastern cities. Googling I found this article [planetary.org] which notes that there is a convention of naming features on this moon after places in the Arabian Nights. The page is cool and tells you what a sulcus is. And there's is a link on that page to a giant 6mb map [arizona.edu] with names of features on it.

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.

Re:It makes sense

[Corporate Troll]

You find the following lacking?

So: Jupiter is *not* a BD; it formed like a planet, in the disk around the Sun. It also has about 1/1000 the mass of the Sun, or about 1/80 of the mass it needs to fuse hydrogen.

Plus the fact that Phil Plait is a real astronomer? I'd take his word over yours anyday...

Re:More Confirmation of Electric Universe Theory

[iamlucky13]

I didn't view the movie, but from the description provided by our resident EU theorist, it seems to be something easily explained by Cartesian geometry and oft-encountered in orbital mechanics.

As the radius of the plume increases, yet its speed remains the same, its angular velocity decreases, so it fall behinds objects below it moving the same speed along a concentric path. Thank goodness for this or we wouldn't have geosynchronous satellites as we know them and Copernicus might never have figured out heliocentrism. Also, I'm unsure how much of the movement is due to the rotation of Enceladeus and how much is due to the motion of Cassini, which would change the perspective of the plume. The EU proponents can easily determine that last part (something more interesting than Cassini moving relative to Enceladeus is happening) by getting the timestamps and orbital data from NASA and crunching some numbers, but that might be considered a testable prediction.

Additionally, the GP's argument is not any more supportive of the electric universe theory than it is of the Enceladians with Super Soakers Theory. He doesn't even give a useful theoretical description of why EU better explains the motion of the jets than conventional theories, much less refer to any work done to determine if it is likely or even possible. NASA has at least done calculations to determine what it would take to create the jets under their proposed mechanism.

...plasmas can be highly electrical.

Thank you professor obvious. Plasmas are by definition electrical. For the record, modelling plasmas electrically is only valid if they have a net charge relative to surrounding objects on large scales. There is no trivial mechanism for that to occur, and without it the net force is zero. In that regards it actually turns out to be convenient for the universe that gravity is only attractive.