[X] My Assistant

[Palomar]

Tiny Enceladus May Hold Ingredients of Life Yep, Titan's having to share the spotlight.

*A friend wrote the following to me privately yesterday, regarding Enceladus:

In the absence of a better idea from any quarter, I wondered about a large rocky meteor perhaps having impacted Enceladus at that anomalously warm point some time ago, burying itself in the moon's icy crust. The radioactive elements in the meteor, decaying over geological time periods like a lesser version of the ones powering volcanism in Earth's interior today, might be producing just enough heat to melt a deep portion of the crust, causing the outgassing, and elevating the surface temperature by the observed 20 deg.K.  That same relative warmth, softening the frozen crust, might quickly have erased the crater which resulted from the collision and removed the tell-tale evidence of the meteor's existence.
         
Being a comparatively rare event, an impact like this would explain why Enceladus alone has a hotspot while other icy moons of a similar size are uniformly cold and geologically dead, as we would expect.

It's an understatement to say that's an extremely interesting speculation.

-Cindy

[mike]

It would have to be a rare sort of meteor to contain that much radioactive material, and thus far Enceladus' hot spot is the only one we have found so far, making it rare..

Alternatively a warm object made by sentient beings crashed into Enceladus and sunk into the crust sometime thereafter, though I suppose that is rarer still.

It's an intriguing spot..