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The hunt for habitable (and already inhabited) worlds has largely focused on a "Goldilocks zone" around a star, where it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. But astrobiologists have begun to broaden their search – thanks to discoveries by NASA's Cassini orbiter.
Saturn sits too far from the sun for its rays to melt ice, and yet Cassini discovered that one of the planet's moons, Enceladus, has a vast ocean sloshing beneath its icy crust. Instead of sunlight, tidal forces keep Enceladus's ocean warm. The gravity of Saturn pulls at Enceladus's core, driving thermal processes that create a new Goldilocks zone inside the moon itself.
"It's definitely been a paradigm shift in where you might find life," says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.
Still, it takes a lot more than water to make a place habitable. But here, too, Enceladus delivers. Icy geysers fueled by Enceladus's ocean shoot out from cracks in the moon's surface, allowing the Cassini spacecraft to sample them directly during flybys. What it found is that Enceladus has almost everything required for life as we know it: a source of energy, a source of carbon, and salts and minerals.
Thank goodness for Cassini, after that whole thing about being banned from Europa.
(Score: 4, Funny) by donkeyhotay on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:16PM (5 children)
I think the sentence, "contains the ingredients for life as we know it" is practically meaningless.
My kitchen, with its pantry and refrigerator contain all the ingredients for a cake. Yet every night when I return home, I find that no cake has appeared. :-)
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)
You're just too neat and organized.
It you stored your food in a giant heated mixer instead of on shelves and in drawers, you might occasionally find that some of the resulting mess is in fact pretty good.
The metaphor is greatly helped by the quasi-certainty that Enceladus is not blessed, yet, with the presence of an Ikea.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:10PM (1 child)
Are you saying that the presence of an orbiting teapot (relatively) nearby is some kind of disincentive for Ikea?
Some people!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:38PM
Ikea will not come to the Saturn area, out of respect for the untouchable flat-pack superiority of those rings.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:57PM (1 child)
Going for a cake right out the gate is a bit aggressive. Perhaps a tortilla first which can evolve into a pastry is more probable.
Also, your lifespan is horribly short. The probability of this tortilla occurring is very low, but over 5 million years you might get something.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Osamabobama on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:32PM
Over the course of 5 million years, you might just learn to like whatever you do get.
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