Bumping against fault lines in Enceladus’ frozen crust could be responsible for plumes of icy material emerging from the moon’s watery underside, according to a team of researchers who recently modeled the movement.
The team’s study focused on Enceladus’s “tiger stripes” – long fissures mostly located in the southern parts of the moon, which some thought were such caused by an ancient impact event. Other researchers concluded The irregular orbit of Enceladus was responsible for this; The moon moves far away from Saturn and back again, causing the planet’s gravitational pull to deform the moon through tidal forces and heat its interior. Now another team has characterized the movement of the Tiger Stripe faults in a computer model and found new details about how the moon’s jets form. Their findings were published this week in Nature Geoscience.
“We hypothesize that strike-slip motion can extend transtensional bends (e.g., pull-apart structures) along geometric irregularities across the tiger stripe, thereby modulating jet activity,” the researchers write in the study. In other words, the sideways movement of the Moon’s tiger stripes contributes to the Moon’s occasional swings.
Enceladus is an object of particular fascination for scientists because scientists believe that beneath the moon’s icy crust lies the salty waters of the ocean. Water is essential to life as we know it, and researchers can glimpse Enceladus’ ocean through the clouds of icy material that the moon spews through obvious cracks in its shell. Last year, astrobiological hopes for Enceladus were boosted by the Confirmation of phosphorus, a building block of life, in the feathers; Just a few months ago, data from the Cassini space probe confirmed this Evidence of hydrogen cyanide– another ingredient of life – being spat out by the moon.
Enceladus’ south pole cloud produces two peaks over the course of the Moon’s 33-hour orbit. One theory is that the Tiger Stripe faults open and close, allowing varying amounts of material to escape from the moon. But according to a Caltech publication, this mechanism uses more energy than scientists expect to be available from tidal power on Enceladus. The current team model offered a different theory: The cloud’s strength may vary in intensity due to a “strike-slip” motion, in which the faults shear past each other, creating gaps (or “pull aparts”) in the faults that allow jets to escape.
“We are now able to map fault displacements like earthquakes on Earth using radar measurements from orbiting satellites,” Alexander Berne, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of the study, said in an institute news release. “Applying these methods to Enceladus should allow us to better understand the transport of materials from the ocean to the surface, the thickness of the ice crust, and the long-term conditions that could enable the emergence and development of life on Enceladus.”
Enceladus is probably the one most promising candidate If we’re interested in a life-harboring body in our solar system – besides Earth, of course – with each study we get closer to understanding what that life might look like and how we can get a glimpse of it.
More: Experiment shows microbes could thrive on Saturn’s moon Enceladus