Space & Astronomy

Cassini detects hot springs on Enceladus

By T.K. Randall
March 12, 2015 ·  18 comments

Could extraterrestrial life have developed beneath the ice ? Image Credit: NASA/JPL Scientists long suspected that Enceladus, like Jupiter's moon Europa, could be home to an ocean of warm water beneath a thick icy shell and now thanks to new measurements by the orbiting Cassini spacecraft this has in fact turned out to be the case.

The findings suggest that Enceladus possesses a hot, porous core that heats up the deepest water in its subsurface ocean to 90 degrees Celsius, a temperature not dissimilar to that found around the hydrothermal vents in some of Earth's deepest oceans."A hydrothermal system like this could fulfill the basic criteria to have life: that is energy, nutrients and liquid water," said Hsiang-Wen Hsu from the University of Colorado.

"But we don't know if the water was warm enough for long enough. If the temperature wasn't stable, life may not have happened there."

Source: The Guardian | Comments (18)

Tags: Saturn, Enceladus