Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
The Saturnian moon Enceladus
may be one of the most enigmatic bodies in the solar system.
For nearly a decade since the first close flyby of the Cassini space probe,
NASA scientists have faced a series of puzzles
that continue to challenge conventional theory.
The electrical nature of these puzzling phenomena has grown increasingly evident
leading to the 2012 NASA report,
Enceladus' plume is a new kind of plasma laboratory.
In part one of this two-part presentation we explore the question,
what makes Enceladus such a unique and fascinating case study in planetary science?
Enceladus is a moon of Saturn, orbits just outside the Rings.
It has one of the most perfect orbits of any moon in the solar system.
It's almost a perfect circle.
One of its faces always points towards Saturn as it moves around in its orbit.
It's almost perfectly aligned in the equatorial plane of Saturn.
And what all that means is that the gravity forces acting on it are almost zero.
It's almost as if it were sitting still.
Because all the variations caused by an eccentric orbit or an inclined orbit
or a rotation other than synchronous, have been zeroed out.
So Enceladus makes an almost perfect laboratory in space.
Saturn only receives 1% of the sunlight that the Earth gets.
Enceladus in turn, is the most reflective object in the solar system
so of that 1% of the light the Earth gets,
less than 1% of that even can heat that little moon.
So it isn't being heated by the Sun
so that can't be much of a factor for the things we see on this little moon.
Since 2005, NASA scientists have known
that Enceladus emits unexpected jets of icy material.
Adding further surprise, the jets were found near the South Pole,
which NASA scientists had expected to be the moon's coldest region
but which instead turned out to be its warmest.
"This is as astonishing as if we'd flown past Earth
and found that Antarctica was warmer than the Sahara..."
Adding further astonishment, in 2009 Cassini scientists discovered the presence
of electrically charged particles in the Enceladus' plumes.
"The spectrometer on Cassini,
the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) discovered a surprise:
the ice particles are electrically charged."
What can these jets tell us about the obvious electrical environment of Enceladus?
One of the features of Enceladus that is so intriguing,
are these jets we see coming off of it.
They were first discovered back in 2005,
when Cassini arrived at Saturn and began looking at the different moons.
They didn't announce it until November 2005,
because they weren't really sure what they were seeing.
But by now, it's become perfectly clear that jets of finely divided water particles
are coming off of this moon almost continuously
and the main area they come from is the southern region
where there are these four parallel bands called 'tiger stripes'
over a hundred kilometers long
and separated from each other by several tens of kilometers
and slightly discolored.
And they call them geysers or cryovolcanoes
because they cannot imagine any other mechanism that would produce such a feature.
But because Enceladus is so perfect in its orbit,
and there's no heat sources coming into it,
and there's not enough energy from cosmic rays to power it,
the only source of energy for these geysers, as they call them,
would have to come from within Enceladus itself.
But this little moon is only about 300 miles across.
It's a small little ball of ice, out in the middle of nowhere.
Its surface temperature is lower than the boiling point of nitrogen.
It's about 72 degrees above absolute zero.
And so the water ice that composes at least its outer layers,
would be as hard as steel and colder than anything we would care to touch.
So anything that would heat up inside of it,
the ice would want to conduct that heat away
before it could ever get more than a few degrees
above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.
So the heat conduction problem is one of many problems with the geyser theory.
But another problem is that, if it were
water being heated up and launched off of Enceladus,
that's actually a description of how a rocket engine works.
So if Enceladus has geysers, then Enceladus has its own onboard rocket engines.
And those rocket engines, no matter how tiny their thrust,
would be moving it in its orbit.
It would be distorting it in some fashion. Either in eccentricity,
which is nearly circular,
or in inclination, or in major axis,
either making it come closer to Saturn or move further away.
And we don't see any of that happening.
And if it were a heat source now, it would have been a bigger heat source
in the past. If it was radioactive or chemical.
And so these rocket engines would have been even more powerful.
And so the idea that Enceladus could end up in this perfectly circular orbit,
is statistically just about impossible.
These engines firing off more or less in random directions,
would be doing something to disturb that orbit.
So they're really at a loss to explain how an internal heat source
could be causing these jets to be escaping from Enceladus
and not disturbing its orbit.
It's a series of scientific problems.
A chain that's, with every link, is very, very speculative and weak.
And that's why we, in the Electric Universe, don't think these are geysers at all.
In 2011, NASA scientists found that the heat output
in Enceladus's south polar region,
is more than an order of magnitude higher than their models had predicted.
"The mechanism capable of producing the much higher observed internal power
remains a mystery and challenges the currently
proposed models of long-term heat production."
NASA scientists recently determined by calculation
that the power levels involved, are something like around 15 gigawatts.
That would be like about, oh, at least a dozen nuclear power plants
worth of power being generated in these jets coming off of Enceladus.
Well that's quite a bit of power for a moon that has no evident external heat source
and appears to be composed of ice at the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
So where could such power be coming from?
Well, if such power is coming from within
and if such power is generated radioactively,
which is what their main theory is,
that means that inside Enceladus are more than one dozen nuclear power plants
worth of radioactive decay.
We haven't even found such a thing on Earth.
So either the power of these jets is coming from within Enceladus
or it is being supplied from elsewhere.
This little moon is orbiting Saturn in its magnetic field
which is in turn being fed by power, either coming toward the Sun
or power coming, electric power coming from the Sun.
More likely, Saturn is acting as a cathode in the overall heliocentric circuit
that powers the Sun.
It seems to be intercepting part of that.
And in turn, Enceladus is intercepting some tiny, tiny fraction of that.
In fact, we have a number, 15 gigawatts. At least for the tiger-stripe area.
The power levels involved in the solar circuit
are far more than needed to explain the features on this little moon.
For continuous updates on Space News from the Electric Universe,
stay tuned to
Thunderbolts.info