Enceladus's 101 Geysers Blast From Hidden Ocean 39
astroengine writes: New observations from NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft have revealed at least 101 individual geysers erupting from Enceladus' crust and, through careful analysis, planetary scientists have uncovered their origin. From the cracked ice in this region, fissures blast out water vapor mixed with organic compounds as huge geysers. Associated with these geysers are surface "hotspots" but until now there has been some ambiguity as to whether the hotspots are creating the geysers or whether the geysers are creating the hotspots. "Once we had these results in hand, we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the research papers. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots." And those roots point to a large subsurface source of liquid water — adding Enceladus as one of the few tantalizing destinations for future astrobiology missions.
Re:Astrobiology (Score:5, Insightful)
Alien bacteria would be an amazing reinforcement of cell theory. All life on earth is made of cells, but it's easy to dismiss that as saying that any other suddenly emergent kinds of life couldn't compete against the already evolving cells that happened to come first.
Finding truly alien bacteria would basically cement the idea that cells and life are synonymous.
What I'm trying to say, haphazardly, is that any kind of alien life would have tremendously informative side effects for biology in general.
Re:Astrobiology (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, it would reinforce the idea that life spread uniformly through our solar system from some shared visitor in a wonderful accident of cosmic cross-contamination.