JWST discovers water vapor plume erupting from Enceladus
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and G. Villanueva (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI).
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted a gigantic jet of water ejecting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. We knew that Enceladus had a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust that leaked out from time to time, but this jet is much larger than anything seen so far.
Enceladus is only about 500 kilometers in diameter, and plumes of water vapor previously found there erupted from hundreds of kilometers above the surface. This new plume is over 9,600 kilometers long, longer than the length of Africa and almost three times the diameter of Earth’s moon.
“When I was looking at the data, at first I thought I must be wrong. Detecting a plume of water more than 20 times the size of the Moon was really shocking,” says Maryland. said Jeronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in a statement.
Villanueva and colleagues found water cascading out of Enceladus at an insane rate of about 300 liters per second. As the icy moon orbits Saturn, the researchers found that about 30 percent of the leaked water ends up in a ring-shaped structure called the torus that shares its orbit with Saturn’s outermost rings. The remaining water vapor drifts away and sinks elsewhere in the Saturn system.
“…
Enceladus’ orbit around Saturn is relatively fast, just 33 hours. As it orbits Saturn, the moon and its jets basically spit out water, leaving an almost donut-like halo in its wake,” Villanueva said. “From Webb’s observations, not only was the plume large, but there was water everywhere.”
Enceladus’ liquid water ocean is one of the most promising places in our solar system to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Studying plumes like this could help researchers understand the composition and dynamics of its oceans, and JWST will continue to observe this amazing little moon for years to come.
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