CIS: How Enceladus Got Its Stripes

[bystander]

How Enceladus Got Its Stripes
Carnegie Institution for Science | 2019 Dec 09

Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, SSI, Cassini

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Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is of great interest to scientists due to its subsurface ocean, making it a prime target for those searching for life elsewhere. New research led by Carnegie’s Doug Hemingway reveals the physics governing the fissures through which ocean water erupts from the moon’s icy surface, giving its south pole an unusual “tiger stripe” appearance.

“First seen by the Cassini mission to Saturn, these stripes are like nothing else known in our Solar System,” lead author Hemingway explained. “They are parallel and evenly spaced, about 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart. What makes them especially interesting is that they are continually erupting with water ice, even as we speak. No other icy planets or moons have anything quite like them.”

Working with Max Rudolph of the University of California, Davis and Michael Manga of UC Berkeley, Hemingway used models to investigate the physical forces acting on Enceladus that allow the tiger stripe fissures to form and remain in place. ...

The team was particularly interested in understanding why the stripes are present only on the moon’s south pole but were also keen to figure out why the cracks are so evenly spaced. ...

Cascading Parallel Fractures on Enceladus ~ Douglas J. Hemingway, Maxwell L. Rudolph, Michael Manga

• Nature Astronomy (online 09 Dec 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0958-x
• arXiv.org > physics > arXiv:1911.02730 > 07 Nov 2019

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Kipling's: How Fear Came

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<<In the earliest times all the animals lived together in peace. There was no killing and no fear. Tha, the First of the Elephants, made the First of the Tigers the master and judge of the Jungle, but when there was a dispute between two bucks, the First of the Tigers leapt on one of them and broke his neck. The smell of the blood made the people foolish and they ran about wildly. The First of the Tigers fled, and Tha made the trees and trailing creepers mark the killer with stripes, which the tiger wears to this day.

In the place of the Tiger he made the Gray Ape master of the Jungle, but the Ape mocked the people, and there was no Law. Tha decreed that since the first master had brought Death, and the second Shame, the jungle people should henceforward know Fear, the fear of Man. The First of the Tigers went to find Man and break his neck, but when he found him, standing hairless on two legs in his cave, he was afraid, and ran away. Thenceforward there was fear in the jungle; each 'tribe', the buffaloes, the deer. the pig, feared the others, and all feared Man.>>