![]() To learn more about how Enceladus' tiger fractures might be moving, Olsen and her colleagues turned to floating ice shelves in Antarctica as the closest analog on Earth for the types of activity they were seeing on Enceladus. Studying ice quakes is a way to get at that information," Olsen said. "We have ideas of how thick the ice could be, but we don't have direct observation. The new study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, AGU's journal for research on the formation and evolution of the planets, moons and objects of our solar system and beyond. The icy crust of Enceladus might also protect the water below from radiation, making it more habitable. She said that since life is thought to have first developed in our oceans, liquid oceans under the ice of other worlds could be a good place to search for life. " these are places that are exciting because they might have life," said Kira Olsen, a geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The new study used observations of Antarctic ice shelves to suggest tides on Enceladus may also cause small quakes in the ice at the moon's fractures, like icequakes observed on Antarctica's floating ice sheets. These tidal motions inside Enceladus warm its interior, crack the surface and sometimes squeeze tall geysers of water vapor through notable cracks called the tiger stripe fractures. ![]() The moon likely experiences massive tidal forces caused by Saturn and the planet's other, larger moons-similar to the way Earth's Moon causes tides on Earth. The moon is nearly 10 times as far away from the Sun as Earth and its bright surface reflects most sunlight, making it very cold, yet researchers have long speculated that the ice encases an underlying liquid ocean. Enceladus is about 500 kilometers in diameter and almost entirely covered in ice.
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