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Huge geyser discovered on one of Saturn's icy moons
Image source, NASA/JPL/SSI
Nasa's super high-tech James Webb telescope has played a part in discovering a huge plume of water vapour spurting out of one of Saturn's icy moons.
The 500km-wide moon, Enceladus, is known to have many geysers, (pronounced gee-zer), but this is by far the biggest scientists have ever discovered.
The water spurts out more than 9,600km into space - that's almost 6,000 miles!
A geyser is a naturally occurring powerful spring of water vapour which erupts due to pressure building up beneath the surface of the moon.
How was the geyser discovered?
Image source, NASA/JPL/SSI
Scientists have been observing Enceladus since 2004, using the Cassini spacecraft, (which is now out of action), because it has a sub-surface salty ocean which could hold the basic conditions to support life.
The much more powerful and modern James Webb telescope, which was launched in December 2021 and sent back its first observations the following July, has now been able to capture images of the plume and the water it is spouting using its extremely sensitive Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.
"The temperature on the surface of Enceladus is minus 200 degrees Celsius. It's freezing cold," said Professor Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland.
"But at the core of the moon, we think it's hot enough to heat up this water. And that's what's causing these plumes to come out."
Previously discovered geysers are known to spurt water hundreds of kilometres into space, but this newly discovered one is much bigger.
The European Space Agency (Esa) calculated the rate at which the water was gushing out at about 300 litres per second. This would be sufficient to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just a few hours, they said.