The findings, noted Porco, point to the possibility of "an environment where life itself might be stirring. Should we ever discover that a second genesis had occurred in our solar system, independently outside the Earth," she added, "then I think at that point the spell is broken. The existence theorem has been proven, and we could safely infer from it that life was not a bug but a feature of the universe in which we live, that it's commonplace and has occurred a staggering number of times."
On the surface, Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is one of the oddest places in our solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. Located in the frigid outer solar system, it should have frozen solid billions of years ago.
Unlike Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa, which give hints that they might harbor liquid water beneath their surfaces. With a diameter only slightly more than 500 miles, Enceladus just doesn't have the mass needed for its interior to stay warm enough to maintain liquid water underground.
Although its surface temperatures hover around 324 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, in 2005 NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered a giant plume of water shooting up from cracks in the surface over the moon's south pole, indicating that there was a perhaps a global ocean of water beneath the ice.
Analysis of the plume by Cassini revealed that the water is salty, scientists estimate from the Cassini data that the south polar heating is equivalent to a continuous release of about 13 billion watts of energy generated by radiation coupled with tidal heating. During the formation of the solar system, if Enceladus was able to gather greater amounts of rock, which contained radioactive elements, enough heat could have been temporarily generated by the decay of the radioactive elements in its interior to melt the body.
But to keep Enceladus warm enough for liquid water to remain under its surface it's theorized that Enceladus' slightly oval-shaped orbit generates heat from friction deep within Enceladus, called gravitational tidal forcing.
The gravitational tides also produce stress that cracks open the surface ice at the south pole, opening and closing the cracks by shearing them back and forth generating friction, which releases heat.
To test the tidal heating theory, scientists with the Cassini team overlaid a map of the gravitational tidal stress on the moon's icy crust to a map of the warm zones created using Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer instrument (CIRS).
"However, they don't exactly match," says Dr. Terry Hurford of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "For example, in the fissure called the Damascus Sulcus, the area experiencing the greatest amount of shearing is about 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) from the zone of greatest heat."
Hurford and his team believe that this discrepancy is caused by Enceladus' rotation rate, which wobbles slightly as it rotates. "Cassini observations have ruled out a wobble greater than about 2 degrees with respect to Enceladus' uniform rotation rate," says Hurford.
The team created a computer simulation that made maps of the surface stress on Enceladus for various wobbles, and found a range where the areas of greatest stress line up better with the observed warmest zones.
"Depending on whether the wobble moves with or against the movement of Saturn in Enceladus' sky, a wobble ranging from 2 degrees down to 0.75 degrees produces the best fit to the observed warmest zones," said Hurford.
The wobble also generates about five times more heat in Enceladus' interior than tidal stress alone, and the extra heat makes it likely that Enceladus' ocean could be long-lived, according to Hurford. This is significant in the search for life, because life requires a stable environment to develop.
"Enceladus is not completely spherical, so as it moves in its orbit, the pull of Saturn's gravity generates a net torque that forces the moon to wobble," said Hurford. Also, Enceladus' orbit is kept oval-shaped, maintaining the tidal stress, because of the gravitational tug from a neighboring larger moon Dione. Dione is farther away from Saturn than Enceladus, so it takes longer to complete its orbit. For every orbit Dione completes, Enceladus finishes two orbits, producing a regular alignment that pulls Enceladus' orbit into an oval shape.
The team includes researchers from NASA Goddard, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo., and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif. The research was funded by the Cassini Data Analysis Program, which includes contributions from NASA and ESA.
Casey Kazan via NASA/JPL/Cassini and spacedaily.com
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus in this dramatically illuminated image.
0 comments:
Post a Comment