Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus

Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn’s Enceladus

Image Credit:
NASA,
ESA,
JPL,
SSI,
Cassini Imaging Team

Explanation:
Do underground oceans vent through canyons on Saturn’s moon Enceladus?

Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be
spewing ice from the moon’s icy interior into space,
creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon’s South Pole
and creating
Saturn‘s
mysterious E-ring.

Evidence for this has come from the
robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited
Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

Pictured here,
a high resolution image of
Enceladus
is shown from a close flyby.

The unusual surface features dubbed
tiger stripes are visible in false-color blue.

Why
Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon
Mimas, approximately the same size, appears
quite dead.

An analysis of
ejected ice grains
has yielded evidence that complex organic molecules exist inside Enceladus.

These large carbon-rich
molecules bolster — but do not prove — that oceans under Enceladus’ surface could contain life.