Posted on Friday, June 26 2009 @ 1:16 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Scientists discovered the watery plumes spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus are sprinkling the planet's rings with sodium salts. The finding adds more weight to the belief that there may be a liquid ocean underneath the moon's thick ice layer. More info
at National Geographic.
Many astronomers think the geysers created and continue to feed the so-called E ring, Saturn's outermost ring.
New data from Cassini offer evidence of sodium salts in the icy particles of the E ring, which suggests the salts came from Enceladus's plumes.
"It's really hard to explain [salt in the E ring], other than [the theory] that there is a saltwater reservoir feeding the plumes. That's by far the most plausible explanation," said study co-author Frank Postberg, of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.
