Enceladus contains a full ocean, says NASA – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
                         

Enceladus, with 500 kilometers in diameter, is the sixth largest moon of Saturn. In recent years, he got to know their water jets at the South Pole and its inland sea, under the icing, in the same country. These discoveries were made thanks to Cassini, a NASA spacecraft that arrived at the Saturn system in 2004. Now, scientists have made new calculations with the probe data and conclude that, after all, the ocean that had identified exists not only at the Pole south, but extends to the entire moon beneath the ice sheet.

                     

                          The study was published in the journal Icarus , and was released on Tuesday by NASA.

“This was a difficult problem which required years observations, calculations and involved a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident that ultimately decided the issue, “said Peter Thomas of Cornell University, New York, United States, quoted a statement from NASA. The researcher belongs to the team Cassini and is an author of the article.

For this, the scientists observed the movements of the moon from Enceladus images taken for more than seven years. Mapping the geography of the star in several photographs, the team found that the moon fluctuates slightly as it rotates around Saturn. According to NASA, as the moon is not perfectly spherical and runs through space at different speeds depending on the region you are in, the giant planet turns out to force Enceladus to swing.

“If the surface [ cold] and the core were rigidly connected, the core would do so much dead weight that oscillation would be much smaller than the one we observed, “said Matthew Tiscareno in turn, co-author of the article, the SETI Institute in California. “This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid water between the surface and the core,” he says, quoted in the same statement.

There is still no explanation for the origin of this water in the state net – Saturn’s surface reaches a maximum temperature of 180 degrees below zero. One theory to explain the phenomenon is that Saturn’s gravity generates much more energy inside Enceladus than previously thought. But the existence of water associated with hydrothermal activity, moon makes this one of the most inviting places to look for life in our solar system.