Saturn's Ocean Moon Enceladus: Large Water Vapor Plume Found | Webb Telescope

Saturn's Ocean Moon Enceladus: Large Water Vapor Plume Found | Webb Telescope

A water vapor plume jetting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

Saturn’s moon Enceladus feeds the water supply for the entire system of the ringed planet

Images from the NASA/European Space Agency/Canadian Space Agency James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) show a water vapor plume jetting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, extending out 40 times the size of the moon itself. The inset, an image from NASA's Cassini orbiter, emphasises how small Enceladus appears in the Webb image compared to the water plume. Enceladus, a prime candidate in the search for life elsewhere in our Solar System, is a small moon about four percent the size of Earth.

Image 1 Description: The two-part graphic shows a clearer image of a bright white circular moon at top left in a box. It is labelled Enceladus (Cassini). The majority of the graphic shows Webb’s image, which appears pixelated. At the bottom is the label, plume (Webb).

Webb is allowing researchers, for the first time, to see directly how this plume feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings. By analyzing the Webb data, astronomers have determined roughly 30 percent of the water stays within a torus, a fuzzy doughnut of water that is co-located with Saturn’s E-ring, and the other 70 percent escapes to supply the rest of the Saturnian system with water.

Enceladus, at just 505 kilometers across, is one of the most exciting scientific targets in our Solar System in the search for life beyond Earth. A global reservoir of salty water sits below the moon’s icy outer crust, and geyser-like volcanoes spew jets of ice particles, water vapor, and organic chemicals out of crevices in the moon’s surface informally called ‘tiger stripes’.

Webb’s NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, G. Villanueva (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), A. Pagan (STScI)

Release Date: May 30, 2023

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