Saturn Moon Pops Its Cork

The James Webb Telescope witnesses Enceladus
erupting a phenomenal geyser plume of record size

 

 

Detecting active geysers on Saturn’s little Arizona-size moon Enceladus was one of the greatest discoveries and biggest surprises of the Cassini mission in 2005. Some 100 plumes have been observed, shooting out icy particles at supersonic speeds. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) witnessed an eruption that dwarfs the previous observations: a plume 20 times the diameter of the moon itself.

Webb Telescope finds towering plume of water escaping from Saturn moon (Southwest Research Institute, 30 May 2023). “Two Southwest Research Institute scientists were part of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team that observed a towering plume of water vapor more than 6,000 miles long — roughly the distance from the U.S. to Japan — spewing from the surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.” The diameter of Enceladus is only about 300 miles, roughly the width of Arizona or Iowa.

Read some of the superlatives about this geyser plume by amazed scientists, like Christopher Glein at SwRI:

“In the years since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft first looked at Enceladus, we never cease to be amazed by what we find is happening on this extraordinary moon.”

Once again, the latest observations made with Webb’s Near InfraRed Spectrograph have yielded remarkable results.

“When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong, it was just so shocking to map a plume more than 20 times the diameter of the moon,” said Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the recent paper. “The plume extends far beyond what we could have imagined.”

The problem of how long this level of activity could persist is ignored by the scientists. As usual, they sidestep to speculate whether the presence of water ice indicates there could be life on the moon. (See hydrobioscopy in the Darwin Dictionary.)

“Enceladus is one of the most dynamic objects in the solar system and is a prime target in humanity’s search for life beyond Earth,” said Glein, a leading expert in extraterrestrial oceanography….

Dr. Silvia Protopapa, an expert in the compositional analysis of icy bodies in the solar system who was also on the Cycle 1 team.  “This serves as a stunning testament to Webb’s extraordinary abilities. I’m thrilled to be part of the Cycle 2 team as we initiate our search for new indications of habitability and plume activity on Enceladus.” …

“We will search for specific indicators of habitability, such as organic signatures and hydrogen peroxide,” Glein said….

The new observations will provide the best remote opportunity to search for habitability indicators on the surface….

And yet it is unthinkable that eruptive activity this vigorous could continue for billions of years. Enceladus spews out so much water and ice, it creates a huge ring around Saturn’s main rings, called the E-ring. The torus-shaped ring even affects Saturn’s powerful magnetic field.

Webb’s sensitivity reveals a new story about Enceladus and how it feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings. As Enceladus whips around the gas giant in just 33 hours, the moon spews water, leaving a halo, almost like a donut, in its wake. The plume is not only huge, but the water spreads across Saturn’s dense E-ring. JWST data indicate that roughly 30 percent of the water stays in the moon’s wake, while the other 70 percent escapes to supply the rest of the Saturnian system.

James Webb telescope discovers gargantuan geyser on Saturn’s moon, blasting water hundreds of miles into space (Space.com, 30 May 2023). Does reporter Isobel Whitcomb discuss the dating problem with Enceladus?

This isn’t the first time scientists have seen Enceladus spout water, but the new telescope’s wider perspective and higher sensitivity showed that the jets of vapor shoot much farther into space than previously realized — many times deeper, in fact, than the width of Enceladus itself.

Then comes the hydrobioscopy in a big philosophical burp:

Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.

Water is another piece of evidence in the case for possible life on Enceladus. Enceladus is totally encrusted in a thick layer of water ice, but measurements of the moon’s rotation suggest that a vast ocean is hidden beneath that frozen crust. Scientists think the spurts of water sensed by JWST and Cassini come from hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor — a hypothesis supported by the presence of silica, a common ingredient in planetary crusts, in the vapor plumes.

Neither press release even talks about whether this activity could last for thousands of years, let alone millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or 4.5 billion (see timeline in article about Saturn’s rings from 12 May 2023). The JWST data exacerbates the problem. Why do the scientists ignore the implications? Enceladus must be young. When, and why, did it start spewing out water recently, if Saturn is old?

 

Enceladus Is Not Alone

NASA’s Juno Mission Getting Closer to Jupiter’s Moon Io (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 15 May 2023). The most active body in the whole solar system—more active than Earth, though much smaller—is Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. The lavas in these vents are hotter than anything the Earth is erupting in its volcanoes.

The Juno spacecraft was due to fly by Io on May 16. We’re waiting for news and photos of the flyby. We already know from Voyager data and photos in the 1970s, with more spectacular data and images from the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, that this little moon has hundreds of volcanic vents, many of them active. See the infrared images in this press release, showing the whole surface, from equator to poles, peppered with hot spots. Plumes hundreds of miles long have been imaged towering above the moon like fountains.

“Io is the most volcanic celestial body that we know of in our solar system,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “By observing it over time on multiple passes, we can watch how the volcanoes vary – how often they erupt, how bright and hot they are, whether they are linked to a group or solo, and if the shape of the lava flow changes.”

As with Enceladus, planetary scientists rarely acknowledge the time problem. Reporters typically attribute the heat to tidal pumping from Jupiter and nearby moons like Europa, but some estimates show it to be insufficient as an energy source. Even if it were, that’s not the whole problem. If Io had been erupting at this rate for 4.5 billion years, it would have erupted out all its mass multiple times over.

Volcanoes and Habitability

Some astrobiologists think that heat energy helps make a planet habitable. But look at the artist conception of an exoplanet observed by NASA’s TESS and Spitzer spacecraft:

NASA’s Spitzer, TESS Find Potentially Volcano-Covered Earth-Size World (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 17 May 2023). I doubt anyone would want to live on the volcano-covered  planet LP 791-18d.

Astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet, or world beyond our solar system, that may be carpeted with volcanoes. Called LP 791-18 d, the planet could undergo volcanic outbursts as often as Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in our solar system.

The planet lies in the inner edge of its star’s habitable zone, but it is tidally locked to the star. The same side faces the heat of the star all the time, while the back side lies in perpetual darkness and cold except for the volcanoes erupting. The faith of astrobiologists, however, remains unflappable by these facts.

“A big question in astrobiology, the field that broadly studies the origins of life on Earth and beyond, is if tectonic or volcanic activity is necessary for life,” said co-author Jessie Christiansen, a research scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “In addition to potentially providing an atmosphere, these processes could churn up materials that would otherwise sink down and get trapped in the crust, including those we think are important for life, like carbon.”

It’s doubtful that life could survive such a choking atmosphere with extreme temperatures everywhere. The fact that life can survive in extreme environments on Earth today does not mean that it originated in those environments.

Are Earth and Venus the only volcanic planets? Not anymore. (UC Riverside News, 17 May 2023). This is a press release from astrobiologist Stephen Kane’s home turf, UC Riverside. Any realism this time? A bit, but the same hydrobioscopy and raw faith in the power of evolution to create life in hell.

“The day side would probably be too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface. But the amount of volcanic activity we suspect occurs all over the planet could sustain an atmosphere, which may allow water to condense on the night side,” Benneke said.

Though the presence of so many constantly erupting volcanoes would likely make the planet uninhabitable, their presence offers new information about evolution.

Kane and another colleague, Jessie Christianson from Caltech, face a conundrum. They know that volcanoes on Earth can deliver nutrients and elements to the surface that life needs, but volcanoes can also destroy life, rendering a planet like Venus a hellish, sterile landscape. How did Earth achieve the finely-tuned balance of multiple factors that put it in the Goldilocks zone?

It was a privilege to be an eyewitness of the discoveries about Enceladus and the Saturn system at JPL  for 14 years, from 1996 to 2010. The day we saw the plumes on Enceladus was electrifying! I loved the job and considered many of the Cassini scientists to be friends. I knew almost all those in the photo by name, and they knew me. They are nice people and very smart. But growing through an educational system and professional milieu that has excluded intelligent design at the outset, they cannot or will not think outside the box. They will debate their colleagues on interpretations of details of their theories, but never question evolution and billions of years. Many express a knee-jerk reaction to any questions about Deep Time, like ‘that’s a question only a creationist would ask’ (sometimes with a sneer). And even if some could consider the problems with deep time honestly, they know that deviating from the evolutionary consensus with its requisite billions of years would be a career-ending move. The pressure for groupthink is strong, even among intelligent people.

How does one even begin to help such people begin to think outside the box? Gently and infrequently, I tried to share DVDs about intelligent design with some of them, like Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet (that one with JPL scientists filmed at JPL). Most were not offended at this; some took them and liked them; others had mild criticisms, and some were silent. But after sharing one too many with a non-scientific associate with whom I had worked cordially for over a decade, she used the H-word “harassment” to my boss, not because I offended her in any way, but because the DVD offended her. It set off a sequence of events that led to my demotion, warning, and firing for the crime of “pushing religion” on coworkers. I asked “Where is the religion in these videos?” to no avail. The scarlet letter H was on me and there was no recourse. I had offended Darwin. Evolutionists could push their materialistic worldview on the whole lab freely, but not a Darwin skeptic. In fact, I went to numerous lectures on the naturalistic origin of life during those years. They preached the Stuff Happens gospel with no restrictions on speculation. What they did to me shows the level of intolerance within academia toward any questioning of materialism in science.

So now, here at CEH, I am free to report the findings of planetary scientists openly and ask questions. I hope you are stimulated to think even if you don’t agree. Isn’t that the goal of science, open inquiry and investigation into the facts of nature? Does the idea that water means life make any sense? Do the observations of Enceladus and Io fit the deep time narrative? Should not science follow the evidence where it leads? Come now and let us reason together.