MSNBC has picked up the story. MSNBC story

Added Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imaging team, "Suffice it to say the prospects of a sub-surface sea on Enceladus are excellent."

Cool! Any idea why NASA and ESA are not announcing this yet?

There was also this story last week on electrically charged plume grains; also based on data from the close flybys last year.

I thinks that jumping the gun.

I found the EGU Abstract:

Sodium Salts in Ice Grains from Enceladus' Plumes: Probes of a Subsurface Ocean

It may be "jumping the gun," but you have to admit that, IF it is confirmed, it would be pretty strong evidence. I am looking forward to hearing more opinion about this.

Does it need to be moved to a new topic?

Ron

Wouldn't Enceladus poles be more flattened if it's in core is surrounded by a "water ocean"

Why?

Phil

https://encfg.ciclops.org/files/Collins_Goo...s_submitted.pdf , Figure 4.

Interesting paper - it certainly explains why a south polar sea might produce the observed flattening at that specific location. But if the core were "surrounded by a 'water ocean' " as Decepticon asked, wouldn't it be flattened everywhere, i.e. spherical?

Phil

I suppose it would (well, not spherical but something like a more perfect triaxial ellipsoid), but all evidence points to that not being the case. Maybe I misunderstood what Decepticon was saying.

The use of the term "core" here is sort of...uh... disorienting. Wouldn't 'rocky substrate' be more accurate? "Core" seems to imply a homogeneous interior spheroid, and since Enceladus' vulcanism is hardly uniformly distributed, I wouldn't expect the rock/ice interface to be globally uniform either.

For, example, I wouldn't be surprised if some areas of the substrate are ice-permeated minerals gradually transitioning to dry rock with depth, while others are igneous material with a liquid water overlay.

Hopefully this doesn't sound like trivial nit-picking; just trying to provide a useful frame of reference for thinking about plausible subsurface models.

As I understand it, the an Earth-based observation that found no sodium in the plumes and E-ring has been the biggest fly-in-the-ointment regarding the idea that there was a large body of water beneath the crust, be it a localized "sea" or more global "ocean."

Sodium issue clouds Enceladus

Curiously, in that BBC article Torrence Johnson is quoted as saying, "If you took a salt-shaker and threw it into the air, the telescope wouldn't see any sodium, even though half the salt is sodium." That appears to be exactly what Postberg et al. found. (Well, not from a salt-shaker, I mean.)

From my limited knowledge, this discovery, if confirmed, is perhaps the strongest yet that there is a body of water in contact with rock below the south pole. Is this a smoking gun, or a less strong piece of evidence that fits in with the whole?