Giant plume spotted erupting from moon of Saturn might contain ingredients for life

NASA’s JWST space telescope has observed a 10,000-kilometer-long plume of water vapor jetting into space from Saturn’s moon Enceladus—the largest spray ever detected from the icy world, which is just one-seventh the diameter of Earth’s Moon. Planetary scientists view Enceladus as a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life because beneath its icy crust the moon houses a salty ocean—a good medium for the ingredients of life to mix. Vented from fractures in the crust, the towering plume might saturate the Saturn system with some of the chemicals needed for life. Researchers describe the results today in a NASA press release and in a paper accepted at Nature Astronomy . “It’s staggering to have such a huge plume from such a small object,” says Christopher Parkinson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, who was not part of the JWST study. Parkinson was a research scientist on NASA’s Cassini mission, which in 2005 discovered the plumes on Enceladus. The space probe flew through them seven times during its 13-year mission, discovering organic molecules such as methane and formaldehyde, and hydrogen, a potential energy source for microbes. But models based on Cassini data indicated the plume extended several hundred kilometers into space, not several thousand, Parkinson notes. JWST’s observed the vast plume on 9 November 2022 using its high-resolution infrared s...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news