JWST spots biggest plume yet spewing from a moon of Saturn

has spotted Saturn’s moon Enceladus spraying out a huge plume of water vapour, far bigger than any previously seen there. This enormous cloud might contain the chemical ingredients of life, escaping from beneath the moon’s icy surface.discovered icy particles squirting from Enceladus’s subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon’s surface. But JWST shows that material is spraying much farther than previously thought — many times deeper into space than the size of Enceladus itself.

“It’s immense,” said Sara Faggi, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on 17 May at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. She declined to provide further details, citing a scientific paper that will be published soon.Enceladus excites astrobiologists because it is one of the few ‘ocean worlds’ in the Solar System, making it one of the best places to look for extraterrestrial life.

The material that squirts out of Enceladus, primarily through fractures known as tiger stripes around the moon’s south pole, is a direct link to that potential extraterrestrial ecosystem. The plumes seen by Cassini contained silica particles that were probably carried up from the sea floor by churning fluids. Cassini flew many times through Enceladus’s plumes, measuring ice grains and life-friendly chemicals such as methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia.

But it took JWST, a telescope located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, to discover something that Cassini could not see from its ringside seat. Whereas Cassini could spot ice grains that do not travel far from the surface, JWST has a wider perspective and sensitive instruments that can capture faint gas signals around Enceladus.On 9 November 2022, JWST peeked briefly at Enceladus. Just 4.5 minutes’ worth of data revealed the enormous, very cold plume of water vapour.

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