News release

Blue clues

A moon so cold icewater is their magma.

From its distance from the Sun, it should be colder than that. Something is heating that moon if we're talking about liquid water.

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This image reminds me of a certain false-color image of Europa. Hmm... :-k

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Hmmm so much for
"titan is the only known moon that has an atmosphere"

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Triton is known to have an atmosphere, too. Titan is just the only one with a considerable atmosphere.

EDIT: Actually, I think some of Jupiter's moons have (tenuous) atmospheres, too. Earth's moon also has a (very tenuous) atmosphere. In fact, I suspect (this is speculation) that pretty much every solar system body big enough to be self-spherizing has some sort of atmosphere, however short-lived and tenuous it may be.

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The photographed the wrong bloody moon didn't they?

What is the current theory - does Enceladus have a rocky core or is it one giant snow cone?

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[quote="um3k"]Yeah, with the moon I believe it's "atmosphere" is a thin mix of non-persistent, noble gases. At least that's what I read ten years ago in some magazine, Glam maybe.

To layfolks, an atmosphere is something like well... ours. Thick, filled with fun gases and weather. A "thin" atmosphere would be something like on Mars. I don't even think "tenuous" atmospheres even rank as such to the general public. I'm sure the reporting about Enceladus' atmosphere is going to be wildly overhyped by the pseudo-scientists.

Well, every "self-spherizing" (did you make this word up?) body in the solar system has SOME whiff of gas around it -- from solar wind, if nothing else, -- but to qualify as "atmosphere" these gas molecules must at least hit each other more often than they hit the surface. Gas molecules on the Moon bounce around in parabolic trajectories almost never interacting with each other. I assume that's not the case with Enceladus.

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Triton's "tenuous atmosphere" causes wind shear. I'd say that "ranks as such" to the general public.

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Triton's got visible atmosphere! I don't think anybody's going to call its atmosphere "tenuous", certainly not me. Is someone else calling it that?

I think the moon atmosphere is just bits of the solar wind, held by its gravity.

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*chuckle* Dang, we can't even lock down a true definition of a planet, and here comes the debate over what consitutes an atmosphere. Great time to be alive, I tell ya.

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Wow! This i just going to show how little we really know about the solar system even with moons that had been studied before.

Is there any estimate about what the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Enceladus would be and how it would compare with other moons and planets?

No, they just say it's "significant" whatever that means. In any case, it is extremely thin. Probably something like the atmospheres of Galilean satellites, I guess.

Am I seeing things or that a really interesting feature?


It certainly looks like a hydrostatic pingo, or dare I say it, a cryovolcano.





Raw data :
Top Center
N00030072.jpg
N00030071.jpg
N00030070.jpg

Bottom center
N00030085.jpg
N00030086.jpg
N00030087.jpg

looks like a pimple

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According to http://volcanopele.blogspot.com/ , the upper limit on the density of Enceladus' atmosphere is 2-3 x 10^8 atom/cm^3 . I found another site that gave the density of Earth's atmosphere at 600 km as about 2 x 10^7 atoms and molecules/cm^3

jaeger -
Based on the two recent flybys the density of Enceladus has been revised upward to about 1.6 g/cm^3, so the proportion of rock to ice is higher . I remember from the Voyager encounters that it was thought to be around 1, but had heard more like 1.2-1.3 recently.