Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus has fresh ice in unexpected place

[Admin]

Saturn's geyser-spewing moon Enceladus may be even more active than scientists had thought.

Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus has fresh ice in unexpected place : Read more

 

[rod]

FYI, here is a bit from another report on this topic. "New composite images made from NASA's Cassini spacecraft are the most detailed global infrared views ever produced of Saturn's moon Enceladus. And data used to build those images provides strong evidence that the northern hemisphere of the moon has been resurfaced with ice from its interior..."The infrared shows us that the surface of the south pole is young, which is not a surprise because we knew about the jets that blast icy material there," said Gabriel Tobie, VIMS scientist with the University of Nantes in France and co-author of the new research published in Icarus. "Now, thanks to these infrared eyes, you can go back in time and say that one large region in the northern hemisphere appears also young and was probably active not that long ago, in geologic timelines.", ref - https://phys.org/news/2020-09-infrared-eyes-enceladus-hints-fresh.html

A young surface age is encountered, not expected. Concerning the south pole surface age, there is "A further issue with these hypotheses is that the `tiger stripes' may be short-lived. We show here that impact resurfacing can seal off plumes and mass loss can lead to their compression and closure over ∼1Myr . Since plumes are observed at present, a mechanism by which new plumes can be generated every ∼1Myr and by which such plumes are most likely to form at the south pole is needed.", ref - Repeated Impact-Driven Plume Formation On Enceladus Over Myr Timescales, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200307866S/abstract

My observation. Like apparent young age for Saturn's rings, young surface ages are difficult to reconcile with the conventional long age for the solar system, i.e. some 4.5 billion years.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

This is highly interesting since it promotes Enceladus as a globally active ocean world!

It, and now Venus, place it on the list of a handful worlds where we can expect life has evolved (seeing how fast it started here and how diverse it has been ever since). [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6152910/pdf/emss-78644.pdf ]

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Since plumes are observed at present, a mechanism by which new plumes can be generated every ∼1Myr and by which such plumes are most likely to form at the south pole is needed.", ref - Repeated Impact-Driven Plume Formation On Enceladus Over Myr Timescales, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200307866S/abstract

... Like apparent young age for Saturn's rings, young surface ages are difficult to reconcile with the conventional long age for the solar system, i.e. some 4.5 billion years.

? All these ages are separate phenomena: age of the solar system, ages of young debris disks and other young satellites, ages of oceans on water worlds.

The age of the solar system is known to better precision than the age of the local universe, itself a wonder of precision dating 3 times as old, thanks to meteorites. "The oldest inclusions found in meteorites, thought to trace the first solid material to form in the presolar nebula, are 4568.2 million years old, which is one definition of the age of the Solar System." [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System#Presolar_nebula ]

The age of Enceladus may be no more than 100 Myrs [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#Date_of_formation ]. The suggested formation process is from older moons after an orbital resonance with the Sun [ https://astronomy.com/news/2016/03/moons-of-saturn-may-be-younger-than-the-dinosaurs ] - but I'm sure there was alternate hypotheses after the orbital models uncovered the age problem.

The age of Enceladus ocean is an open question as well [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#Possible_heat_sources ].

 

[rod]

The assumption in post #4 uses meteorites as a fixed age reference, now dating back to 1956 Clair Patterson studies. This methodology presented keeps the fixed age reference from scientific falsification What is presented is circular reasoning in an effort to avoid showing the 1956 age is wrong