Sci News
Jun 15, 2023 by News Staff
Enceladus, the sixth-biggest moon of Saturn, harbors a global water ocean.
This ocean lies under an ice crust and above a rocky core where tidal dissipation is suspected to drive hydrothermal activity.
There are several lines of evidence describing how volatile and dissolved materials from the rocky core are either emitted by the plume in the gas phase or incorporated into ice particles, respectively.
“We previously found that Enceladus’ ocean is rich in a variety of organic compounds,” said Dr. Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin.