tidal effects tagged posts

Image showing the thickness of Enceladus’s ice shell, which reaches 35 kilometers in the cratered equatorial regions (shown in yellow) and less than 5 kilometers in the active south polar region (shown in blue). Credit: © LPG-CNRS-U. Nantes/U. Charles, Prague

With eruptions of ice and water vapor, and an ocean covered by an ice shell, Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the most fascinating in the Solar System, especially as interpretations of data provided by the Cassini spacecraft have been contradictory until now. An international team recently proposed a new model that reconciles different data sets and shows that the ice shell at Enceladus’s south pole may be only a few kilometers thick...

The new paper finds that Saturn’s moon Rhea and all other moons and rings closer to Saturn may be only 100 million years old. Outer satellites (not pictured here), including Saturn’s largest moon Titan, are probably as old as the planet itself. Credit: NASA/JPL

New research suggests that some of Saturn’s icy moons, as well as its famous rings, might be modern adornments. Their dramatic birth may have taken place a mere hundred million years ago, more recent than the reign of many dinosaurs. “Moons are always changing their orbits. That’s inevitable,” says Matija Cuk, principal investigator at the SETI Institute. “But that fact allows us to use computer simulations to tease out the history of Saturn’s inner moons...