Weird Science Cool Pic of the Week
A couple of weeks ago Weird Science was pondering the chance of life on Jupiter's moon Europa.
As this spectacular photo of ice plumes on Saturn's tiny companion Enceladus shows, we might have been looking in the wrong place.
Results from Nasa's Cassini spacecraft this week has revealed strong evidence the 500km-wide moon retains liquid water.
The probe has detected salts in the plumes - and scientists reckon the salts come from underground caverns filled with lovely liquid water.
As well as water, the moon also has two other ingredients for life - energy and basic chemical building blocks.
The possibilities of microbes living elsewhere in the solar system seems to be expanding all the time.
Just where should we look first?
Weird Science Enceladus Factoids:
It was discovered in 1789 by the English astronomer Sir William Herschel.
Enceladus has the highest reflectivity (almost 100 per cent) of any body in the solar system.
It takes just 33 hours to orbit Saturn.
Enceladus is named after a giant in Greek mythology.
But as previously stated it's REALLY small. How small? Check this out:
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
How big is the moon compared to the earth? Someone once said it was the same size as Austrailia????
Why is the moon called 'The Moon' does it not have a name like other moons???
You have an inquisitive mind BGA! Right, first things first.
Ask yourself which came first - the Moon or the moons? Well, the Moon did!
Moon comes from the latin for month and was used to describe our natural satellite a long time before we realised other planets had companions too.
It wasn't until 1665 that the word moon was extended to refer to other rocky bodies.
How big is it in relation to the Earth? Check out http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/messenger/psc/PlanetSize.html or, for a more spectacular view, click to http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/weirdscience/2009/06/video-of-the-earth-31-million.html
According to the linked site Messrs Smith and BGA, the moon has a diameter of 3476km. Therefore has a surface area of approx 38m km2, and a cross section at its widest point of approx 9.5m km2. Australis is 7.7m km2. So the moon is massively bigger in surface area, and if you tried to balance it on top of Australia it would overlap all the edges. At least it would if Australia were completely uniformly shaped. Which it is not.
Incidentally, the moon has a cubic volume of approx 22bn km3. A lot of cheese, that. You'd need extra outcakes to get that lot down your throat.
Top quality stats! A friend of mine once believed the moon was the size of the Isle of White. He thought the reason it looks so big in the sky is because it's really, really close!!