The entire moon of Enceladus is just over 300 miles across. And yet the plume Webb observed spanned more than 6,000 miles.
One of the prime places that scientists are interested in looking for life in our solar system is Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The moon has an ocean of liquid water beneath a thick, icy crust that could potentially support life. Interest in this subsurface ocean was heightened when the Cassini mission was studying Enceladus in the 2000s and flew through plumes of water spraying from the surface,
“When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong. It was just so shocking to detect a water plume more than 20 times the size of the moon,” said lead author of the research, Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. “The water plume extends far beyond its release region at the southern pole.”
This amount of water is affecting the environment around Saturn, as the moon is leaving a trail of water as it orbits. “The orbit of Enceladus around Saturn is relatively quick, just 33 hours. As it whips around Saturn, the moon and its jets are basically spitting off water, leaving a halo, almost like a donut, in its wake,” said Villanueva. “In the Webb observations, not only was the plume huge, but there was just water absolutely everywhere.
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