July 1, 2018
Every candle on your cake is a tiny imitation of the stars that made you possible.
Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn's Enceladus
Birthday · July 1, 2018
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APOD published July 1, 2018. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating 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 features dubbed tiger stripes are visible 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. News: Complex Organics Bubble up from Ocean-world Enceladus