/mark : )
He chose moons, rather than the planets they orbit, as the site of future colonies.
It's hard to judge from just one solar system, but it looks like oceanic moons might incredibly common throughout the universe.
I would imagine the sheer number of moons is also going to be much greater than the number of planets, again using our solar system as the sole example. We have about 170 moons to eight planets.
I think the idea has been around for a while. In the book HER NAME, TITANIC by Dr. Charles Pellegrino (1988), Pellegrino is having a conversation on page 62 with Titanic wreck discoverer Robert Ballard, and says: “We’re almost certain that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water under the ice, and probably Jupiter’s Europa.” (How was this relevant to the Titanic? Pellegrino was suggesting that Ballard’s use of robotic deep-sea submersibles showed the way for how the ice-moons of the outer planets could be explored.) Anyway, I’m not enough well-informed about the state of planetary science 21 years ago to know what led to Pelligrino to say that Enceladus probably had an internal ocean then, but such speculation must have been forgotten during the interim since the recent discoveries by the Cassini probe that Enceladus might have liquid water seem to have taken everyone by surprise.
space ping
"The original picture of the plumes as violently erupting Yellowstone-like geysers is changing. They seem more like steady jets of vapor and ice fed by a large water reservoir,"
So they're essentially suggesting a continuous evaporation process, due to the lack of sodium in the vapor cloud. The lack of gravity from such a small object would demand that the continuously growing cloud of vapor could not remain captured by the moonlet, else it would have a thick atmosphere.
Perhaps this moon was the size of Jupiter (or larger) in it's past, given that our solar sytem is "Billions" of years old, right?
Either that, or the rate of vaporization has changed (i.e. dramatically sped-up recently)
Or perhaps this moon is a new arrival, trekking across the galaxy with a big load of water until it was captured in our solar system.
Or, heretically, our solar system is considerably newer than speculated upon by many.
Ummm, Cheese Enceladus
How many times does this have to be rediscovered? Is their financing in doubt again?
Who wrote this article?
The albedo of the moon is 0.39.
It reflects 39% of the sunlight, not 100%.
The salty water is likely feeding jets of water-ice that spurt from the moon's south polar region.Thanks KevinDavis for the ping, and tricky_k_1972 for the topic.
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Wouldn’t that mean there’s some kind of reaction going on inside the planet for there to be liquid ice? If so, there could be something else...
Reminds me of some theological studies which interpret the Genesis report of the Flood as emanating from waters from within the Earth having formed large geysers, causing the 40 day rain. There were lots of attacks on Scripture claiming such geysers would be physically impossible, but it’s interesting to see how science continues to bear testimony of His work.
What would Saturn look like from the surface of Encledeus?