Enceladus is regarded as nothing more than a ball of ice clinging close to Saturn's rings, but the international Cassini mission caught it doing something spectacular in December 2005: from cracks in the ice in its south pole, it spewed a watery geyser some 270 miles into space, reports USA Today.
The water shot out so far it actually hit the orbiting Cassini spacecraft. And this has astronomers fascinated. After all, water is the essential ingredient for life. So does life exist here? The official answer isn't "no." It's: Who knows?
Astronomers and astrobiologists are unable to explain how such a small body that is only 318 miles wide at its equator could pump out so much water. "Nobody has figured it out," Andrew Dombard of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., told USA Today reporter Dan Vergano. "Enceladus has jumped to the top of astrobiologists' list for a mission."
Ever since the Voyager missions flew past Enceladus in the early 1980s, astronomers have known it's the brightest object in the solar system, thanks to its coating of fresh ice. But the most confusing part is that the geyser originates from the south pole instead of the equator, which has the strongest gravitational pull from Saturn.
And it's not just water spewing out of that geyser. It's also a mixture of life's building blocks, including organic compounds such as methane, propane, acetylene, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, according to a spectrometer carried aboard Cassini that performed a chemical analysis of the liquid.
So what does it all mean? Acetylene and propane indicate a very hot environment exists under all that ice with temperatures ranging from 440 degrees to 980 degrees. "I think we will someday find liquid water under the surface of Enceladus," Cassini scientist Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona in Tucson told USA Today. "It's very exciting and raises a lot of questions."
Although astronomers have several theories, they really don't know how such a tiny moon can generate the heat needed to fire up the intense eruptions from the geyser.
"Of the classic three ingredients for life, Enceladus has liquid water (at least in our model), it has organic molecules (they're shooting out of the geysers!), but does it have an energy source?" planetary scientist Geoffrey Collins of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., told USA Today. If the liquid water on the moon is in contact with warm rock below, then Collins and others think microbes could pull out energy from chemical reactions there, similar to some types of deep-sea bugs on Earth.
So is there life? There could be!
--From the Editors at Netscape
