There’s something innately enchanting about the Enceladan Ocean—if only because of its lyrical name. But don’t expect to go sunning yourself on its banks anytime soon. It’s located 888 million miles (1.4 billion km) from Earth on Saturn’s bitterly cold moon Enceladus. Oh, and the ocean is buried beneath a thick rind of surface ice too. But the discovery of the body of otherworldly water—made by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004—was nonetheless big news. Enceladus is intermittently squeezed and stretched by the gravitational pull of its sister moons Dione and Tethys as they pass. This leads to ice volcanoes and constant resurfacing of the moon’ frozen crust. Cassini images of that crust revealed cracks known as tiger stripes that come from the constant flexing. All of this suggests a world that’s so elastic that the conclusion that the moon is home to a massive water ocean—perhaps a globe-girdling one—became inescapable. Such a warm (at least above freezing) body of water could well be an incubator for life, provided you’ve got enough time. And the 4.5 billion years Saturn and its moons have been around ought to be more than sufficient.
Science & Space
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5. Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
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