Scientists crack the code for Tiger Stripes on Saturn’s moon
Space is full of mysteries and there’s no bigger fun than solving them.
Enceladus has been an interesting topic for scientists since the time it was observed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The scientists observed stripes similar to on a tiger on the surface of this Saturn’s moon.
Now they may have solved this puzzle of tiger stripes on Enceladus.
With Cassini’s data, scientists detected an icy, subsurface ocean on the moon and strange, tiger stripe markings on the moon’s south pole that are unlike anything else in the solar system.
Icy material from Enceladus’ ocean spews into space through these stripes, or fissures, in the moon’s surface.
These stripes are parallel and evenly spaced, about 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart. What makes them especially interesting is that they are continually erupting with water ice.
The moon isn’t frozen solid, because the gravitational changes caused by its eccentric orbit around Saturn stretches it out slightly. This deformed shape causes the ice sheets at the poles to be thinner and more susceptible to splitting open.
The fissures that make up these tiger stripes could have formed on the moon’s north pole just as well as the south pole, but the south pole just cracked first.
Scientists also found the stripes are parallel because, after the first stripe (named for the city of Baghdad) split open, it stayed open. So ocean water spewed from it, which caused three other, parallel cracks to form as ice and snow built up along the edges of the first fissure as water jets froze and fell back down. This weight built up pressure and caused the new cracks.
Enceladus, one of Saturn’s smaller moons, reflects some 90% of the sunlight, making it more reflective than snow!