One of the most surprising and intriguing finds during the decade-long Cassini mission has been the discovery of geysers on the Moon Enceladus. Originally spotted in 2005, scientists have spent the last decade trying to understand how they work. And now they finally have a working model. How does an eruption on a frigid Moon last so long? Eruptions on Earth are not long-lived, and if they are, they are very spread out. For Enceladus to have a ton of localized geysers in the South polar region, you need some pretty specific scenarios. Aside from the fact that a constant stream of material could clog...
The most violent single event in the universe is the death of a massive star, a supernova. We have seen several different types, though the common element is a massive explosion, taking a star hiding amongst the background into an eruption that outshines it’s entire host galaxy. We have seen the brightness grow and fade over the duration of a supernova event, but we have never seen one just as it’s starting. Until now. Would you ever have thought that the Kepler space telescope, a planet hunter that continuously observes stars, could see supernovae? The key is in the words ‘continuously observed.’ By keeping...
Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
