This week I'm talking about Enceladus!
I love Enceladus!
Enceladus is awesome.
Enceladus, if you didn't know, is a tiny moon of Saturn.
In fact, it's so tiny it's only around 500 kilometers in diameter or so.
But what makes Enceladus really cool is that it hosts a subsurface ocean,
sandwiched between ice and its rocky core.
No offense to all the other celestial bodies
that I love in our solar system, but to me,
Enceladus is the most beautiful object 
in our solar system.
Its icy surface makes it the most reflective
surface in the entire solar system.
If that wasn't enough, it has these beautiful plumes
of icy vapors and icy materials that are erupting 
from its south pole.
These plumes were captured by the Cassini
spacecraft in 2005.
So, we've actually only known of them for
about 10 years or so,
which in spacetime terms is actually really short.
But these erupting icy plumes are not just
beautiful, they're actually also quite utilitarian.
They contain organic carbon and nitrogen which
could be really useful for life.
What also makes Enceladus so incredibly beautiful
is it has these amazing tiger stripes across its surface
and these tiger stripes actually 
correspond with the 101 geysers
that have been discovered coming out from Enceladus.
These tiger stripes also correspond with increased
heat readings.
So, the increased heat readings and the geysers
actually lead people to believe right now
that there actually might be hydrothermal
vents on Enceladus, which is incredibly cool.
And again, incredibly useful for life,
because life actually wouldn't be 
able to get much sunlight
being buried underneath all those
layers of ice.
And so it would need to get energy from somewhere
and it could actually get energy from 
those hydrothermal vents.
Quite useful.
While detecting life anywhere in the solar
system is going to be an amazing, life-altering event,
if and when it happens anywhere in
the solar system,
detecting life on Enceladus actually 
comes with a few added perks.
One of these perks is if we were able to actually
discover life on Enceladus,
it has a higher probability of being completely, 
separately created from Earth.
Earth and other planets exchange materials
throughout time,
and actually because Saturn is so far away from Earth,
Earth actually exchanges less materials with Saturn.
In fact, there's a six time less probability
of Earth exchanging materials with Saturn
than it is with exchanging with Jupiter.
Because of this, if we were able to detect
life on Enceladus,
there's that much higher probability that the life was created completely separate of Earth.
Essentially, we'd be discovering a second
genesis of life.
Just thinking about that as a possibility
is amazing.
Discovering a second genesis of life would have a 
profound effect on understanding life as we know it.
Some people, though, are critical of the ability
for us to find life on Enceladus.
Some people think that because the oceans
haven't been around long enough,
that we might not be able to find life in those oceans.
But other researchers have rightfully pointed
out that we don't really understand enough
about what it takes for life to evolve anywhere,
no less even on Earth, to really be able to
make assumptions about how much time is critically
needed for life to emerge.
Other people are critical of the pH balance
of the oceans on Enceladus.
The pH is estimated to be between 11 or 12.
This is very similar actually to subglacial
lakes in Antarctica, or to Mono Lake in California.
But despite Mono Lake having the same pH balance
as approximately on Enceladus,
actually we're able to discovery briny shrimp and microbes and all these other little, tiny forms of life in it.
So, it's awesome to see forms of life here
on Earth
existing in similar extreme environments that 
exist on Enceladus.
What's even more exciting is that we know
more about Enceladus now
than we do about a lot of other moons,
and because of this we have a better idea of how life
could actually exist on Enceladus.
So, I would love to see spacecrafts being
developed in the future or hopefully even right now
that really try and tackle how we
could detect life on Enceladus, or perhaps
do a sample return of the plumes that it's
spitting out in order to be able to better
understand how we could detect life on Enceladus.
That's all from me this week.
I hope you enjoyed.
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