Since 2005, scientists have puzzled over a series of long fissures seen in the southern regions of Saturn’s frozen moon Enceladus. New research explains how these so-called tiger stripes formed and why Enceladus is the only place in the solar system where these features could have emerged.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft spotted the stripes in 2005, showing what appeared to be plumes of water shooting up from surface fractures, which were dubbed “tiger stripes” on account of their orderly appearance. The features were seen as evidence that a subsurface ocean existed under Enceladus’s icy crust, instantly making the Saturnian moon an important object of inquiry, not just from a geological perspective but from an astrobiological perspective as well.
New research published today in Nature Astronomy is the first to explain why these stripes are only located at the south pole and why the fissures run in parallel lines at roughly 35-kilometre intervals. Importantly, the new paper also explains why similar features have not been observed on other icy objects in the solar system, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa.
