Thread: What is Enceladus heat source?

Saturn satellite Enceladus produces huge amount of heat at its South pole.
Icy Saturn Moon Pumps Out 15.8 Gigawatts of Heat Power | Enceladus & Saturn Moons | NASA & Solar System | Space.com
Usually the origins of this heat are explained through tidal heating. But why tidal heat is concentrated at
South pole? Is it anomaly? And also, what triggered this heating relatively recently by geological scale?
I mean, if this heating associated with geysers would exist for billions of years, then Enceladus would evaporated
into the space already?

Originally Posted by Stanley514

Saturn satellite Enceladus produces huge amount of heat at its South pole.
Icy Saturn Moon Pumps Out 15.8 Gigawatts of Heat Power | Enceladus & Saturn Moons | NASA & Solar System | Space.com
Usually the origins of this heat are explained through tidal heating. But why tidal heat is concentrated at
South pole? Is it anomaly? And also, what triggered this heating relatively recently by geological scale?
I mean, if this heating associated with geysers would exist for billions of years, then Enceladus would evaporated
into the space already?

Is that the moon that its topography constantly changes "daily" based on gravitational force of saturn? If that's the case it could be caused by the friction based on the constant stretching and squeezing of the entire moon. I thought Europa was the only other body thought to have water... Enceladus, huh?

Forget Mars, sink our money into Europa!!!!

Europa <3

Originally Posted by Stanley514

Saturn satellite Enceladus produces huge amount of heat at its South pole.
Icy Saturn Moon Pumps Out 15.8 Gigawatts of Heat Power | Enceladus & Saturn Moons | NASA & Solar System | Space.com
Usually the origins of this heat are explained through tidal heating. But why tidal heat is concentrated at
South pole? Is it anomaly? And also, what triggered this heating relatively recently by geological scale?
I mean, if this heating associated with geysers would exist for billions of years, then Enceladus would evaporated
into the space already?

I don't think the heat is concentrated in one area, it is just that the "Tiger Stripes" ( fissures ) happen to be found there. It's much like a boiling kettle - the heat is evenly distributed in the inside, but steam only escapes at one opening.

The following Letter to Nature is relevant, though slightly dated:

http://lasp.colorado.edu/~espoclass/...Enceladus2.pdf

Enceladus, a small icy satellite of Saturn, has active plumes jetting from localized fractures (‘tiger stripes’) within an area of high heat flux near the south pole. The plume characteristics and local high heat flux have been ascribed either to the presence of liquid water within a few tens of metres of the surface, or the decomposition of clathrates. Neither model addresses how delivery of internal heat to the near-surface is sustained. Here we show that the most likely explanation for the heat and vapour production is shearheating by tidally drivenlateral (strike-slip) fault motion with displacement of 0.5m over a tidal period. Vapour produced by this heating may escape as plumes through cracks reopened by the tidal stresses. The ice shell thickness needed to produce the observed heat flux is at least 5km. The tidal displacements required imply a Love number of 0.01, suggesting that the ice shell is
decoupled from the silicate interior by a subsurface ocean. We predict that the tiger-stripe regions with highest relative temperatures will be the lower-latitude branch of Damascus, Cairo around 60
6deg W longitude and Alexandria around 15deg W longitude.

Could there be some unknown energy source at work?
Something we could discover and make to work on the Earth?

There could be, but there is no reason to suspect that there is.