Enceladus Further Troubles Cosmic Evolution and Deep Time
There was a great deal of excitement about the James Webb Space Telescope, understandable when people saw some amazing images it produced. These were adjusted from the infrared. While it spends a great deal of time looking for extrasolar planets, JWST is also used for closer images.
We recently considered the young rings of Saturn and the surprisingly warm moons of Jupiter, and more recently, the JWST revealed something startling from Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It has been known that it shoots ice geysers (troubling old universe philosophies) — and now this.
Geyser Basin of Enceladus, NASA et al., colorized at Palette (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents by anyone) |
Detecting active geysers on Saturn’s little Arizona-size moon Enceladus was one of the greatest discoveries and biggest surprises of the Cassini mission in 2005. Some 100 plumes have been observed, shooting out icy particles at supersonic speeds. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) witnessed an eruption that dwarfs the previous observations: a plume 20 times the diameter of the moon itself.
The rest of the article is parked at "Saturn Moon Pops Its Cork."