Pushing along fault lines in Enceladus’ frozen crust may be responsible for plumes of icy material spewing from the moon’s watery belly. according to a team of researchers who recently modeled the movement.
This is what the Kings League looks like inside
The team’s study focused on Enceladus’s “tiger stripes”: long fissures located primarily in southern fringes of the moon that some thought were caused by an ancient impact event. Other researchers concluded that Enceladus’ irregular orbit was responsible; The moon arcs away from Saturn and vice versa, causing the planet’s gravitational pull to deform the moon with tidal stresses, heating its interior. Now, a different team has characterized the movement of the tiger ray faults in a computer model and found new details of how the Moon’s jets are produced. Their findings were published this week in Nature Geoscience.
“We hypothesize that glide motion may extend transtensional curvatures (e.g., separable structures) along geometric irregularities on tiger stripes and thus modulate jet activity,” the researchers wrote in the study. In other words, the lateral and gliding motion of the moon’s tiger stripes contribute to the moon’s occasional flares.
Enceladus is an object of particular intrigue to scientists because of the salty ocean water that scientists believe lies beneath the moon’s icy crust. Essential for life as we know it, and researchers can glimpse Enceladus’s ocean through the plumes of icy material ejected by the moon through obvious cracks in its shell. Last year, astrobiological hopes for Enceladus were boosted by the phosphorus confirmation, a building block of life in the columns; Just a few months ago, data from the Cassini spacecraft confirmed evidence of hydrogen cyanide—another ingredient of life: being belched by the moon.
Enceladus’ south polar plume produces two peaks along the course of the moon’s 33-hour orbit. One theory was that the tiger stripe fails to open and close, allowing different amounts of material to escape from the moon. But according to Caltech Launch, that mechanism requires more energy than scientists expect to be available due to the tidal pull on Enceladus. The team’s recent model offered a different theory: The strength of the plume may vary in intensity due to a “slip” motion, whereby faults cut into each other, creating gaps (or “breaks”) in the faults that They allow the escape of the jets.
“We now have the ability to image fault slips, such as earthquakes, on Earth using radar measurements from orbiting satellites,” Alexander Berne, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of the study, said in a statement from the institute. “Applying these methods to Enceladus should allow us to better understand the transport of material from the ocean to the surface, the thickness of the ice crust, and the long-term conditions that may allow life to form and evolve on Enceladus.”
Enceladus is probably the most promising candidate For a body that supports life in our solar system (besides Earth, of course), and study after study, we’re getting closer to understanding what that means. what life could be like and how we can glimpse it.
Further: Experiment shows microbes could thrive on Saturn’s moon Enceladus
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