Sunday, September 27, 2020

Enceladus and its Fresh Ice

Saturn’s moon Enceladus appears to have a fresh ice and geysers.

via SyFy

The maps shown here use different colors to represent different parts of the infrared spectrum. Due to the differences between fresh and old ice, fresh ice appears red in the images. The south pole is obvious: The geysers erupt from a series of deep cracks in the surface called sulci (Latin for “furrows” or “grooves”; the singular is sulcus). There are a series of them, long parallel grooves nicknamed “tiger stripes,” though to me it looks more like deep gashes left by a tiger’s claws.

The geysers there deposit fresh ice, so that entire area appears red in the images. But there’s a large region centered at 30° north and 90° west that also sports relatively fresh ice. This was hinted at in earlier work, but shows up clearly here.

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