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James Webb telescope discovers gargantuan geyser on Saturn’s moon, blasting water hundreds of miles into space | Live Science

The James Webb Space Telescope caught Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus spraying a ‘huge plume’ of watery vapor far into space — and that plume may contain chemical ingredients for life

Scientists caught Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus spraying a “huge plume” of watery vapor far into space — and that plume likely contains many of the chemical ingredients for life.

Scientists detailed the eruption — glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in November 2022 — at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on May 17.

“It’s immense,” Sara Faggi, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said at the conference, according to Nature.com. According to Faggi, a full research paper on the massive plume is pending.

This isn’t the first time scientists have seen Enceladus spout water, but the new telescope’s wider perspective and higher sensitivity showed that the jets of vapor shoot much farther into space than previously realized — many times deeper, in fact, than the width of Enceladus itself. (Enceladus has a diameter of about 313 miles, or 504 kilometers.)

Scientists first learned of Enceladus’ watery blasts in 2005, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft caught icy particles shooting up through large lunar cracks called “tiger stripes.” The blasts are so powerful that their material forms one of Saturn’s rings, according to NASA.

Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.  …