Puzzling Hot Spot Found on Moon of Saturn

[beam me up scottie]

In July, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its latest flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus, revealing an unexpected hot spot on the moon's south pole.

The finding flipped everything scientists knew about Enceladus on its head, because what should have been a dead moon appeared to be geologically active and what was supposed to be the moon's coldest region turned out to be its warmest.

"This is as astonishing as if we'd flown past Earth and found that Antarctica was warmer than the Sahara," said John Spencer, an astronomer from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and a co-investigator of the Cassini mission.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050815_enceladus.html

Saturn Data Sheet
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/saturn-ez.html

[tocqueville]

1. I can't imagine the headline when they find a hot spot

situated on a planet between Saturn and Neptune

[beam me up scottie]

2. .

:evilgrin:

[damntexdem]

5. I used to imagine living off a street intersecting 17th St. in ...

San Francisco, where 17th climbs sharply up from Market Street, and the street in question climbs further up the hill. Yeah, I could always imagine saying that I lived 'up Uranus.'

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. WMD. Now we have an excuse to go there.

[damntexdem]

4. A puzzling hot spot? I bet it's owned by the mafia.

Or if not, the cops will probably shut it down.