[IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have been informed that the ring depicted in this image is the G ring, and not the E ring. It was misidentified in the original CICLOPS press release, and an update has been issued. Unfortunately, not being a Saturn expert, I wasn't able to tell them apart, and they are both diffuse rings - though the E ring is far more spread out than G. I'll leave the post below as it was published, but bear in mind the one paragraph describing the ring is incorrect.]
There are times I wish I had more than 610 pixels of width to this blog, because then I could display this eerie and wonderful picture in its full glory:
[Click to embiggen]
The full size image isn’t much bigger, but gives you a better idea of the loneliness and blackness of space. Taken by Cassini, it shows the ice moon Enceladus. You can just see the geysers at the moon’s south pole spewing out plumes of frozen water hundreds of kilometers high.
The diffuse swath of light in the background is Saturn’s faint E ring, which is composed of the very ice particles Enceladus has launched into space. The ice is moving rapidly enough to leave the feeble gravity of the moon, but not the far stronger gravity of the solar system’s second largest planet. It settles into orbit, creating the ethereal annulus.
A note: look at how the moon is lit. On the far left is the thin bright crescent of the part of Enceladus lit directly by the billion-kilometer-distant Sun. There is a twilight region as you move right, and then ever-brightening landscape as your eyes track even more to the right. That part of Enceladus is being lit by Saturnlight, the glow from the planet 240,000 km (150,000 miles) away. That light is doubly-reflected; once from Saturn to the moon, then from the moon to Cassini’s waiting cameras. Then, of course, it’s translated into radio waves and sent back home, to an Earth a long, long way off, where we can oooh and aaahhhh over the beauty of astronomy and worlds so distant and cold.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Related posts:
- Enceladus is erupting!
- A marvelous night for a (Saturn) moon dance
- Seasons E rings!
- What if Earth really did have rings?
August 9th, 2010 at 7:18 am
Sorry to be nitpicking, but this “Saturnlight” is presumably sunlight reflected by Saturn, which would make one more step in the reflection chain you mention above, i.e. Sun-Saturn, Saturn-moon, moon-Cassini.
Or does Saturn actually emit light? I am “only” a physicist, not an astronomer, so please correct me if I am wrong but unlike stars planets don’t have a power source to actively emit light, or am I missing something here?
UPDATE – Google gave me this answer:
“While it’s true that none of the planets shine in visible light, all of the four gas giants in our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) actually give off more radiation than they get from the Sun. The extra energy, in the form of heat, comes from gravity compressing the planet’s gases more and more over time. You could say that these planets really haven’t finished forming yet. Gravity is still crushing together the gases that form these planets, and they will someday be denser and cooler. If you had eyes sensitive to infrared radiation, these planets would actually “shine” on their own.”
(quoted from Yahoo!Answers)
What says the astronomer – is this true?
August 9th, 2010 at 7:22 am
An existentialist’s sad, stark beauty – staring into the faceless void. I love it!
August 9th, 2010 at 7:25 am
That is hauntingly beautiful.
What would be cool is we could line up the probe, moon, and earth into one shot. Another rendition of Pale Blue Dot as it were, but this with a water based theme?
August 9th, 2010 at 7:30 am
The photographer certainly has a good eye for composition. Amazing little robot.
August 9th, 2010 at 7:35 am
Not so cold, given the fact that Cassini found a source of high temperature under a layer of ice on Enceladus.
August 9th, 2010 at 7:35 am
Now scientists left to determine because of what actually heats up the inside Enceladus, because its diameter is insufficient to tectonic activity. While the prevailing view that the heating associated with a highly eccentric orbit of Enceladus and caused by tidal forces.
But in reality the orbital eccentricity of Enceladus is very small and amounts to 0.00452 – http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sat_Enceladus&Display=Facts, that is, a moon of Saturn is nearly circular orbit (not elliptical).
Span “Cassini” 12 March 2008 confirmed that the energy source on Enceladus is a point and it is precisely at the South Pole. Northern Hemisphere was almost not affected by tectonic changes. Therefore, reasoning that the “pole of Enceladus heated more than the Equator” refer to only one of them – the South.
The main question – what is still prevented a complete freeze satellite? It seems that the existence of a stable thermal anomalies in the 5.8 gigawatts due to the presence of an ancient ocean and the continuous flow of energy from the compact generator.
August 9th, 2010 at 7:42 am
Is that a Tauntaun on the upper right?
August 9th, 2010 at 8:03 am
Aleksey, by ‘point’ you mean a small area of heat, right? Only, I’ve watched way too much Star Trek, and ‘point-source energy emissions’ sounds way too much like an operation reactor to my fevered imagination.
Of course, that WOULD be pretty cool.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Marc– The light has been reflected twice. Once from Saturn, and once from Enceladus. The Sun emits light, it doesn’t reflect it.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:24 am
Jigsaw Man – «Cassini» found a hot spot, the origin of which scientists can not explain.
More details are available here:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08385
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09761
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09037
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10361
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10355
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07794
Of course, she is hot by ttemperature in the area the satellite is 85 Kelvin (-188 degrees Celsius)
The puzzle is that this hot spot – the south pole of the planet, which is heated more than the equator, which contradicts all traditional notions. Because the sun can not be so warm this region – is to assume an internal heat source.
None of the existing theories unable to explain the mechanism of energy on Enceladus, which is at least three times higher than for any part of the surface of the Earth the same area.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:41 am
Anyone notice the illusion that the moon image seems to creep slowly to the left when you stare past the lower right corner of the image? Anyone? It happens to me with both the enlittled blog image and the embiggened click-through size.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:41 am
Anyone notice the illusion that the moon seems to creep slowly to the left when you stare past the lower right corner of the entire image? Anyone? It happens to me with both the enlittled blog image and the embiggened click-through size.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:52 am
Cool.
August 9th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Nice image.
Saturn-light is certainly brighter than Earthlight for this stunning ‘rhapsody in white’ photo. Or is that “young Enceladus in the old Enceladus’es arms” instead?
‘Black’ certainly but in a system with so many tens of other moons, moonlets, rings and, of course, the butterscotch spectacle of Saturn itself, “lonely” – maybe not so much! It’s anthropomorphising the inanimate but still I hope so anyhow.
@10. Aleksey Galan :
Tidal heating from the tug-o’-war between Saturn and various other moons?
Residual heat from a major impact?
Unusual minerals concentrated into a natural reactor at a certain point below the Enceladese south polar hotspot?
Just a few ideas for possible explainations there – not sure if any of those have supporting evidence or have been ruled out yet. Does anyone know and wish to enlighten us?
August 9th, 2010 at 9:20 am
Marc:
When you go out at night, and see a full moon above, do you have a problem with people saying that the scene is bathed in “moonlight”?
Just sit back and enjoy the “oohs and aahs”.
August 9th, 2010 at 9:28 am
skating awayyyy .. on the thin ice of the new day ..
August 9th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Wow, looked like a computer render of a white ball in the compacted image… Amazing stuff.
While I like Jupiter better, Saturn’s moons > Jupiter’s moons.
August 9th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Wow, its pretty out there.
August 9th, 2010 at 9:45 am
Lonely? Well a quick wikipedia check says that Enceladus has plenty of company and friends – the Saturnian system is quite crowded :
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn (Complete with some excellent images & diagrams.)
Plus there’s even more if you count the ring particles :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/02/the-tiny-moon-with-the-long-reach/comment-page-1/#comment-287628
Belated thanks to John Weiss for that.
August 9th, 2010 at 10:54 am
@nicefinger, glad to see I wasn’t the only one that thought of Floyd!
August 9th, 2010 at 10:59 am
I’ll have to dig the reference up from a huge stack of lecture notes, but I’ve got a presentation stuck in my hands during astrobiology class, where the researchers sum up the science (as they see the sum, natch): seems the case for a liquid local ocean is pretty solid, IIRC it explains the ejecta process including composition. So it’s more like ~ 250 K, or whatever the salty brine needs to stay fluid.
I also got the impression nobody knows if it is a robust phenomena.
In one sense it may be, because an already slushed brine tends to stay so from viscosity heating AFAIU, and then it is easier to imagine steady state than the heat flow required to get to it.
But in another it isn’t, Enceladus orbit/resonances would change over time. Getting to the energy source would perhaps allow to answer the more interesting question: how old is this ocean? “Biologically” old? Or a mere youngster?
(“Youngster” lower limit: I have the hardest time getting to pointers (paywalls), but one article refer to Sasha Kempf: “The new work was conducted by MPI expert Sascha Kempf. The scientist explains that most icy particles fall back on Enceladus within two orbits, but adds that the ones which make it out of the moon’s sphere of influence may endure for 50 to 400 years in the E ring, before eventually falling back to where they came from.”
So unless the ocean keeps resupplying the E ring at the current rate of ~ 200 kg/s (an actual paper), presumably the ring as we see it goes within ~ 100 – 1000 years.
That is so little time that I presume one would have to look at the potential melt time vs heat flow for the ocean in the first place. Surely that would be up in that region as well!? For example, Greenland’s ices, purer of course, doesn’t melt that quickly it seems to me.
Perhaps someone can attempt a quick-and-dirty calculation on melt times; I’m too hungry at the moment. Ta!)
In any case, I think what everyone agrees on is that Enceladus is one of a kind hereabouts!
August 9th, 2010 at 11:23 am
I would like to think the hotspot is caused by a huge rectangular black monolith deep inside Enceladus…
August 9th, 2010 at 11:24 am
That picture is just fantastic when you know what you’re looking at, and when you see those tiny geysers. Another beautiful picture from Cassini.
August 9th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Before I rush away I should attempt to define “biologically old”. Fixation of a gene may be very fast, so speciation can be too: there are human introduced rats on island that have speciated over ~ 1000 y, and of course the famous London subway fly species over ~ 100 y.
Statistics say, I think, that mammals tend to speciate every ~ 1 My. Abiogenesis specialist Miller is claimed to have derived a minimum age of 10 My to free living cells.
[Based on the ocean circulation time to go through sterilizing heat vents, but presumably checked for feasibility. Today people tend to believe the heat vents could have been the source for free cells in the first place, so the estimate may not apply as such, but its feasibility should.]
Presumably things starts to get interesting way before we get free cells. So for all practical purposes, 1-10 My is “biologically old”. A priori we may have a ~ 10^-4 chance of Enceladus oceans being old enough. A posteriori, probably a lot better. Preferably a whole lot better!
August 9th, 2010 at 11:34 am
It’s the chiaroscuro lighting that really sells this, making it look more like art from an album cover (anybody remember album covers?) than a photo.
Funny thought while looking at the image: I wonder if over time the south pole geysers would have enough propulsive effect to perturb Enceladus’s orbit by any measurable little bit? I know the difference in masses involved is huge, but if the geysers were long-lasting and tied to some periodic tidal stresses–neither of which I know to be the case–I could imagine some feedback resonance situation that would put a little wobble in its orbit or a kink in its ring.
In any case, it’s s gorgeous and thought-provoking image.
August 9th, 2010 at 11:43 am
@18 Larian:
Umm–but that’s a quote from Jethro Tull, not Pink Floyd. {FAIL}
August 9th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
I don’t think space is that lonely. Whenever I see pictures, all the planets and stars seems to be huddling together so closely.
August 9th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
When I came to this point, I thought
“hm, why did the Saturnians leave all the lights on? Didn’t they hear anything about light-pollution?”
To bad that the sentence went on……
August 9th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
This photo is totally faked. I mean, where are the stars? Hmm??? [/moonhoaxer]
August 9th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Swimming in a sea of darkness.
August 9th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Counternitpicking… referring sunlight being reflected from saturn as “saturnlight” is consistent with how we talk about “moonlight” (sunlight reflected off the moon) and “earthlight” (sunlight reflected off the earth).
But essentially, that’s just me being a pedantic nerd and geek
.
Cool photo. Especially as the geysers at the south pool cause an illusion of the moon being on a giant ice “surface” and there is a reflection of it on that surface.
August 9th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
When I first saw this pic, my first thought was it looked Photoshopped – the lighting was just too damned perfect. It is nice to know that there are still beautiful views galore out in the vastness.
@18 (Larian): Yeah, I think you were thinking the line “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.” Which, serendipitously, came from Dark Side of the Moon.
August 9th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
More importantly, why are you limited to a crappy 610 pixels wide for your blog? what year is this? 1995?
August 9th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Very interesting pic of the stark moon holding otherworldly mysticism. Only thing is the pic seems to be cgi a bit; just can’t imagine a true pic so devoid of stars around any heavenly body.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
If you really want a “lonely” place in our solar system try Sedna one of the outer Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects or possibly a member of the Oort cloud. No moon (that we know of), orbiting from 76 AU to a staggering 960 AU away in the most distant icy realm of our solar system, probably always many astronomical units away from it’s nearest neighbouring object -which would be icy planetoids or chunks of ice – now *that’s* a lonely world!
See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(planetoid)
Many objects in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Trans-Neptunian cometary belt & the isolated cometary nuclei that haven’t yet fallen inwards to the crowded inner solar system would also have to count among the lonliest places imaginable esp. the moonless ones.
Of course these are all inanimate places without the ability to feel lonely – so far as we know!
For possibly the loneliest (or at least most isolated) *people* ever we’d have to consider the Apollo Command Module pilots on the Moon-walking missions :
Ronald Evans (Apollo 17)
Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16)
Alfred Warden (Apollo 15)
Stuart Roosa (Apollo 14)
Richard Gordon (Apollo 12) &
Michael Collins (Apollo 11)
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Summary_of_missions
They had to fly around our Moon alone while their companions took their steps on the Lunar regolith. For part of the time when they went behind the Moon they were out of contact wth everyone. They could block off our Earth and all its people behind their thumbs. Had anything gone wrong and their Moon walking companions perished they’d have had to fly their craft home alone leaving their companions dead on the Lunar surface behind them. They got very little credit and remain unheralded heroes who did great work.
Now those CM pilots were the most out of touch people ever – but in a good way!
August 10th, 2010 at 3:13 am
@ Marc (1) -
The big planets are heated by the Kelvin-Heimholz mechanism, so, yes they emit more infrared than they receive from the sun, but they don’t emit their own visible light, they just reflect sunlight.
“Saturnlight”, BTW, is a direct equivalent of “moonlight”.
August 10th, 2010 at 3:28 am
Messier Tudy Upper (35) said:
Hear, hear!
It was particularly poignant for Ken Mattingly, who would have been CMP on Apollo 13 if not for not having had the measles (i.e. when one of the other astronauts – I forget who, but can look it up when I get home – came down with measles, those who had already had measles and were thus immune were cleared to fly, but Ken had not had the measles and so was grounded). IIUC, he served as one of several CapComms during Apollo 13 (or was that artistic licence on the part of the film-makers?).
August 10th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Do you see some diffuse jet like thingies on the “south” pole? What are those?
August 10th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Blakut, “You can just see the geysers at the moon’s south pole spewing out plumes of frozen water hundreds of kilometers high.”
August 10th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
This photo is totally faked. I mean, where are the stars? Hmm??? [/moonhoaxer]
My pool table has black felt. I could probably reproduce this shot with the cue ball and some careful lighting.
August 10th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
@ChH i missed that. Must be sleepy…
@QuietDesperation Why use a pool table when you’ve got photoshop? Conspiracy theorists have it easy these days: everything can be faked using computer graphics, they’ll say.
Can’t wait to hear the first “We never got to Mars” conspiracies. No really, i can’t wait for those… this would mean people got ot Mars during my lifetime.
August 10th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
@37 Nigel, I enthusiastically second your hoorah. While we’re at it, let’s not forget that Alfred Worden on Apollo 15 conducted what was arguably the FIRST ‘interplanetary EVA’, to retrieve some film canisters from the service module and dump some trash – on the return trip from the Moon to the Earth. Their velocity with respect to the Earth at the time meant that if they didn’t intersect the Earth’s atmosphere, they would inevitably have become an interplanetary object orbiting the Sun. Hence, that EVA was technically the first and only INTERPLANETARY EVA thus far ever conducted. Their distance from the Earth at the time (on Day 12 of their mission) also remains by far the highest ‘altitude’ at which any human EVA in space has been conducted (not counting the lunar EVAs).
So, not only was Worden amongst the very few (only seven, not counting Apollo 10 – you can all discover why I don’t inlude that mission) who had experienced complete and maximum isolation whilst on the far side of the Moon during every orbit he took while his two companions explored the surface of the Moon on the Earth-facing side – in the case of Apollo 15 where his colleagues Dave Scott and Jim Irwin explored after landing at the site of Hadley-Appenine – he was also the first and so far ONLY person ever to have performed a spacewalk under the rules of interplanetary travel.
It is intriguing to note that such a feat will not or cannot be superseded until astronauts conduct an EVA whilst visiting an asteroid or eventually Mars, as has been outlined in President Obama’s vision of NASA’s future, which places an emphasis on the next step: human INTERPLANETARY exploration.
August 10th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
@40 QuietDesperation & 41 Blakut?
You both seem to seriously underestimate how dificult it is to fake authenticity.
All I have to do is GLANCE at an image to be able to determine whether it is phoney or not. Such a skill might come from over 45 years of experience studying real images, but then you might also ‘multiply’ that experience with another overlapping 40 years of personal experience on how ROTTENLY (by and large) photographers and film directors and so-called ‘visual effects experts’ have shamelessly embarrassed themselves into thinking they had gotten anything right in the depiction of, um, “space” subjects.
Trust me: NASA couldn’t POSSIBLY have gotten anything close to the magesty that nature provides for free. All it takes is a little 0.1% of ALL things spent, to spend on uncovering the secrets of how the world actually works. That enterprise is called “science’, and there is not a smidgeon of honor, let alone evidence, that can support the idiotic pursuits of the hoaxer, who must obviousy believe everyone is as blind, dumb and thoroughly ignorant as he/she is.
Leonardo would instantly have recognized that anyone who saw his portrait of a certain young lady as anything other than a PAINTING to be a total fool. Although he lived centuries ago, that man would instantly have been able to distinguish between an authentic photograph of nature and what so many are pleased to attribute to whatever they imagine is possible in photoshop…as if forging nature takes no effort at all.
BAH!
As if it doesn’t take an exceptional master artist’s eye to successfully pull the wool over MOST people’s eyes. (AND NEVER, EVER, ALL OF THEM, a population which contains some pretty sharp and expert eyes which are rarely if ever fooled).
You guys don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
Photoshop is just a tool. The myth is that with photoshop one can perform anything.
NOT TRUE. You have to know how to SEE before you can use it effectively against the dullest person, and you have to be an EXPERT at seeing in order to convince the average person that the image hasn’t been contrived. But you will NEVER EVER fool an expert.
Be careful, both of you, if attempting to fashion a comment on the frame of cynical sarcasm: you might do nothing but encourage such dreck.
August 10th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
@37. Nigel Depledge :
Charles Duke (Apollo 16) was the one who contracted measles & exposed Mattingly.
Jack R. Lousma was one of a number of CapComms – astronauts who communuicated with Apollo 13 during the missions – and was the one at the recieving end of the famous “Houston we have a problem” line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_R._Lousma
Ken Mattingly spent a lot of time in the simulator working out how to rescue the crew but I’m not sure if he served as CapComm or not. I think the other CapComms were Vance D. Brand & Joseph P. Kerwin. See :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo13#Prime_and_back_up_crew
I’d strongly recommend reading Jim Lovell’s superb account (with co-author Jeffrey Kluger) of Apollo 13 (which took place 40 years ago this year) called ‘Lost Moon :The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 ‘ or sometimes just Apollo 13. Its very readable and interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Moon
@ 42. Anchor :
Thanks – I didn’t know that.
I would agree at least to some extent with your comment # 43 as well – some people aren’t easily fooled and those with expertise in the area will certainly be able to tell most of the time if an image is faked or not.
Sadly, there are many other people around who are guillible and an awful lot of people just see what they want to see or don’t look closely enough or know what signs to look for and thus will accept fakery all too easily.
August 11th, 2010 at 6:05 am
Anchor (42) said:
Wait, seven if you don’t count Apollo 10? There were only the six successful landing missions, so who was the seventh…?
August 11th, 2010 at 6:07 am
@ Messier (44) -
Thanks for the extra info and correction about Mattingly.
August 11th, 2010 at 6:45 am
@43 Anchor: I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about what a conspiracy theorist might use in the future as a possible argument: “everything is photoshopped”. Of course it is hard to fake authenticity, and just a little knowledge about science and maybe photography can disprove any non-sense the moon landing hoaxers throw at us.
August 11th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Nigel @45, who says, ” Wait, seven if you don’t count Apollo 10? There were only the six successful landing missions, so who was the seventh…?{”
You are correct. I mis-counted (or rather, kept Apollo 10 in the mix). Thank you for setting the record straight.
August 11th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Blakut @47: you are quite right. Although I was quite aware of your position, my purpose was to alert you on the aspect, not to counter you. My neglect while writing my response incorrectly made it appear as if you were a target. Many pardons. And thank you for bringing it up – i might not have caught my error otherwise
August 16th, 2010 at 6:23 am
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