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Saturn, Enceladus Plasma Waves Being Exchanged

Saturn, Enceladus Plasma Waves Being Exchanged

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By    |   Wednesday, 11 July 2018 09:08 AM EDT

Saturn and its moon Enceladus are communicating through plasma waves that are constantly being exchanged, and scientists have recorded these conversations, Popular Mechanics noted.

They have taken these interactions, which were captured by the Cassini spacecraft during its two-decade long visit to the planet and its moons, and released them to the public on YouTube in a format that allows everyone to listen.

The whooshing sound heard in the clip is 16 minutes of plasma exchange between Saturn and Enceladus compressed into 29 seconds of audio.

The fourth state of matter generates waves to carry energy, much like air or water, and Cassini detected this with special sensors last September before it disintegrated above Saturn.

Enceladus is a small, icy body but Cassini revealed that it was also active, with geyser-like jets spewing water vapor and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust, NASA said.

Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained that multiple discoveries of Enceladus all "point to the possibility of a habitable ocean world well beyond Earth's habitable zone."

Ali Sulaiman, planetary scientist at the University of Iowa and a member of the RPWS team, added that Enceladus was a "little generator going around Saturn," which was a continuous source of energy, Popular Mechanics reported.

"Now we find that Saturn responds by launching signals in the form of plasma waves," Sulaiman said.

These findings show scientists that there is a "circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of miles away," according to Popular Mechanics.

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TheWire
Saturn communicates with its moon Enceladus through plasma waves that are constantly being exchanged, according to scientists who recently recorded the interaction and converted it into audio.
saturn, enceladus, plasma, waves
262
2018-08-11
Wednesday, 11 July 2018 09:08 AM
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