April 27, 2020
Your birthday marks the moment a small planet circling a modest star gained another witness to its wonders.
Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn's Enceladus
Birthday · April 27, 2020
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APOD published April 27, 2020. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
How will humanity first learn of extraterrestrial life? One possibility is to find it under the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. A reason to think that life may exist there are long features -- dubbed tiger stripes -- that are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space. These surface cracks create clouds of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and create Saturn's mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come from the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Pictured here, a high resolution image of Enceladus is shown from a close flyby. The unusual surface tiger stripes are shown in false-color blue. Why Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon Mimas, approximately the same size, appears quite dead. A recent analysis of ejected ice grains has yielded evidence that complex organic molecules exist inside Enceladus. These large carbon-rich molecules bolster -- but do not prove -- that oceans under Enceladus' surface could contain life. Another Solar System moon that might contain underground life is Europa. Experts Debate: How will humanity first discover ET life?