These features are too small and distant to be seen by Earth-based telescopes or observatories. These changes were documented by Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer data collected on Titan flybys from July 2004 to March 2006. This in turn creates immense tidal forces, causing the physical rock on Io’s surface to rise up and down a hundred meters during the course of each Io day, or about every 42 hours. Little was known about these bodies until we began to send spacecraft armed with a host of sensors in order to analyse them in much greater detail.
Instead of erupting molten rock, as in a conventional volcano, cryovolcanoes erupt volatiles (low boiling point elements or compounds), like water, ammonia, The source of energy of a cryovolcano usually comes from tidal friction, heat that builds up in the core of moons as they bend and distort in the gravity field of the massive gas giants they orbit.
Although solid at the surface, it has been proven that vast amounts of liquid water can exist underneath.
A cold volcano seems like an oxymoron, but active “cryovolcanoes” may actually be spewing a super-chilled liquid into the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan.
“Like Callisto, Titan may have formed as a relatively cold body, and may have never undergone enough tidal heating for volcanism to occur,” said Jeffrey Moore, a planetary geologist at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “The flow-like features we see on the surface may just be icy debris that has been lubricated by methane rain and transported downslope into sinuous piles like mudflows.” But scientists will continue to analyze and collect more data in attempt to pinpoint exactly what is happening on Titan. But perhaps even more interesting are the moons which orbit the planets.
If rings are observed around a planet, this indicates that. And where there’s water there’s the potential for life, at least life as we know it.
[/caption] A cold volcano seems like an oxymoron, but active “cryovolcanoes” may actually be spewing a super-chilled liquid into the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. Cryovolcanism can be considered as the source of Centaur and comet outbursts; it was observed in the case of comet 29P/SW (Miles, 2016a). Cryovolcanoes have been observed directly on Neptune's moon Triton, during a Voyager II fly-by in 1989, and on Saturn's moon Enceladus, by the Cassini probe on 27 November 2005. “The fact that we found it appearing at times when the surface brightened strongly suggests that material was being transported from Titan’s interior to its surface.”But other scientists aren’t certain that cryovolcanoes are responsible for the changes seen on Titan. Clear answers for common questions One theory for this is that if they ever possessed a moon in the past, it would have eventually been stolen by either the gravitational pull of the Sun or the gravitational pull of the host planet. The volcanoes erupting these jets were however not spewing out molten rock. SAN FRANCISCO -- For the first time, scientists now have solid evidence for an ice volcano on Saturn's moon Titan, according to a new study. Indirect evidence of cryovolcanism has been found on several other moons and bodies, including Europa, Titan, …
But the more data we collect, and the more we learn about its formation, the more fascinating it becomes.
Could we find and repair the lunar rovers?Want to be part of the questions show? Then there’s Mars which has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Instead of …
Cryovolcanism evidences have been found in several moons and other solar system bodies.
I get an error message.In this week's questions show, I consider what the benefits might be to humanity if we discover that we aren't alone in the Universe.