Griffures de tigre fraiches sur Encelade
Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus?
Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be
spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space,
creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole
and creating
Saturn's
mysterious E-ring.
Evidence for this has come from the
robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited
Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
Pictured here,
a high resolution image of
Enceladus is shown from a close flyby.
The unusual surface features dubbed
tiger stripes are visible in false-color blue.
Why
Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon
Mimas,approximately the same size, appears
quite dead.
A recent analysis of
ejected ice grains
has yielded evidence that complex organic molecules exist inside Enceladus.
These large carbon-rich
molecules bolster -- but do not prove -- that oceans under Enceladus' surface could contain life.