JWST/Hubble Make Unusual Findings On Enceladus and Saturn's Rings

how wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing some of the new discoveries coming from our neighbor Saturn and to be more specific the rings of Saturn but also one of its most famous moons the Moon that you see right here that I usually call Enceladus but some people seem to pronounce it very differently especially when they're hungry and they want some

enchiladas like I would actually like some right now anyway moving on so this moon is very famous for one simple reason the discovery from the casino Pro approximately a decade ago which can be easily seen in this image right here and this was a really big Discovery because once again it suggested that there is some kind of a liquid water present inside this object very likely

a large subsurface ocean that once in a while seems to escape through various Stripes visible on the surface of this beautiful moon and these unusual tiger stripes have only recently been potentially explained these angular cracks especially the ones that seem to be Parable with a relatively equal distance between them seem to be the result of the moon's eccentric ormit which creates a very specific thermal stress

fracturing the eye shell forming these unique patterns this was discussed in one of the videos you can find in the description in a little bit more detail and so because in certain regions around the surface the ice is much thinner mostly because of this cracked ice resulting from tidal interactions in certain regions the pressure from the ocean below creates enough stress to suddenly erupt from within

and so as this pressure builds up it eventually creates various Pathways for liquid water to reach the surface that can actually be as far as 20 to 30 kilometers away from the ocean itself in essence creating very unique three-dimensional cracks going all the way down to the ocean itself but it's really what happens afterwards and how these emissions are created that sort of is surprising as

a matter of fact the recent observations from the jeans well created quite a lot of Buzz because of these eruptions the image was only taken a few days ago but in essence it shows us a plume that's approximately 10 thousand kilometers in length and this is the largest boom that we've ever seen coming from this moon with the actual physical observations suggest that it's mostly made

out of water actually seems to be just water there doesn't seem to be any carbon dioxide carbon monoxide methane or any carbon molecules which the scientists expected to see but I guess more intriguingly it's really the size of this particular emission that seems to be surprising it's at least 40 times bigger than the moon itself this moon is only 500 kilometers across with the overall emission

rate being approximately 300 liters per second and though this is surprising and definitely not something we've seen before there have been discoveries of previous massive eruptions that just did not make sense otherwise the scientists previously discovered these unusual pit chains that are actually visible in other locations in the solar system that seem to indicate these massive eruptions that happen sometimes in the past and were definitely

larger than average eruptions we've seen from this object so just you know sometimes these eruptions are really huge but the question is what exactly is causing them so unlike for example a typical volcano or similar volcanoes on objects like IO the moon of Jupiter things seem to work a little bit differently here it's actually not really correct to call these volcanoes at all for example here

on iO the outgassing that's mostly sulfur dioxide creates a lot of flow on a surface on the other hand we have what's known as a cry volcano such as the ones on Titan the biggest of Saturn's moons where all sorts of Isis including water essentially act in a very similar way to a typical volcano erupting and creating a flow on the surface but this doesn't seem

to happen around Enceladus especially because we don't really observe any flow at all so in essence these are closer to geysers or even just a unique object altogether and that's what some of the recent studies that you can find in the description kind of propose they basically explain this as not really an eruption as much as just evaporation to be more exact it's decompression boiling which

results from liquid water suddenly reaching vacuum and basically extremely cold conditions and violently evaporating all at once in the process also creating huge amounts of pressure but fundamentally also different from cry volcanoes on objects like for example Europa the moon of Jupiter here the scientists believe that these are actual volcanoes with pressurized liquid escaping and depositing on the surface but the mechanism around in solidus seems

to be fundamentally different so first of all it all starts with these cracks and specifically in the location where the cracks form a kind of a perfect pathway for the water from within to escape and especially this location right here that seems to have these unusual cracks 35 kilometers apart 130 kilometers long that Creed is sort of a mesh responsible for most of these eruptions on

Enceladus which though we cannot explain right now is very likely explainable through some kind of a very specific three-dimensional structure that all of this forms underneath the eyes and so violin sublimation or violin boiling is basically what's happening on the surface here and because these are also very unique formations not seen anywhere else in the solar system it makes this Moon particularly special and so these

recent discoveries from the James web and the previous discoveries of unusual features on the surface definitely suggest that once in a while eruptions can be very active and extremely explosive kind of like a very powerful blizzard that suddenly explodes from the surface and starts to throw off all of this really really fast moving ICE all at once what these ice particles moving really far away from

the Moon and eventually forming one of the Rings of Saturn specifically the Saturn's e-ring and the analysis from the jeans well determined that approximately 30 percent of water seems to be deposited inside the ring with the other 70 is skipping to the rest of the system which actually really interesting because it means that this particular ring of Saturn is created as a result of gradational forces

from Saturn squeezing in the moon so much that it starts to spew out all the water from within it quite an intriguing way to create a ring and speaking of rings we do have some discoveries in regards to these unusual formations here as well we actually talked about some discoveries in one of the previous videos you can find in the description including the discovery that the

Rings here seem to be relatively young but the reason this car is about the Rings go a little bit further and it's connected to this unusual observation from the Saturn's rings that was detected a few decades ago unusual dark patches or unusual spokes as they are also known that seem to be very seasonal and seem to appear and disappear whenever Saturn goes through its unusual phases

or its unusual seasons and that's because just like Earth Saturn's rotation is a little bit tilted so it also has four seasons but each season here lasts approximately 7 years and the Intriguing part here is of course not the seasons on Saturn but the seasons inside the Rings the I guess smoke Seasons as they're also known these unusual formations disappear when it's near summer or winter

solstice and then reappear again during fall or or during spring as a matter of fact it's going to have its full Equinox around May 6 of 2025 and that's when the scientists expect these particular spokes to be increasingly prominent and much easier visible than before the problem is that there's really no exact explanation for what causes these formations and for why they happen only sometimes but

not other times and so the current explanation seems to rely on the combination of sunlight and specifically charged particles from the Sun and the magnetic field and the reason the scientists believe its magnetic in nature and not really related to the planet or the Gravity from the moons is because their rotation rate doesn't match up with the rotation of the Rings as if something else was

controlling them and that something else is most likely the magnetic field and so here the scientists believe that once in a while certain icy particles can become charged as well and they actually become trapped and sometimes levited Right Above the Rest of icy particles inside the Rings and depending on your perspective sometimes they appear darker some sometimes they appear brighter and so these string spokes are

most likely the result of this very strange magnetic interaction between Saturn the sun and the icy particles inside the Rings although honestly it's still a bit of a mystery and still does not have a very good explanation here is the best Hubble observation we have so far showing how these cloaks change over time and so hopefully with the James Webb observations we might be able to

answer what's happening here for now it's still a bit of a mystery but what's not a mystery is how the Rings also seem to affect the atmosphere of Saturn turns out that the unusual observations of excess heat in the upper atmosphere seem to be the result of the interaction with the Rings the particles from the Rings as they fall into the atmosphere seem to turn certain

regions much harder and very likely through some kind of a chemical reaction we still don't really understand and so as the particles from the Rings slowly escape and become part of the Saturn's atmosphere they also seem to affect the chemical composition in the atmosphere and create heat in a process also changing the overall composition and that's independent of what's known as the ring rain we'll discussed

in the previous video where we know that Rings also create a kind of a rain on the surface so apart from the rain there also seems to be some kind of a chemical reaction that produces excess heat visible from far away and when it comes to the rain rain we know this is something that's also magnetic in nature and is basically the result of the solar

bombardment and the Magnetic lines from Saturn depositing the ring particles in a certain way when it comes to this observation these collisions and these reactions and the excess heat seems to be entirely chemical in nature and definitely not something the scientists expected to find up until relatively recently and so once again Saturn surprises us even more and presents even more evidence about how these Rings seem

to affect the planet in ways nobody expected but if you'd like to learn about previous discoveries or the other effects we'll discussed recently check out the video in the description anyway great observations from the jeans web and even mystery solved to some extent but I'm sure we'll be talking more about Saturn in the next few months as the scientists discover even more thank you for watching

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