Cassini Reveale's the hottest spots on Enceladus

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The most detailed temperature map of a geyser-spewing fissure on Saturn's moon Enceladus has been made with data from the Cassini spacecraft.

The map, pictured here, shows heat emanating from a strip no more than 1 kilometre wide around the fissure, or 'tiger stripe', with the highest temperatures coming from a zone just tens of metres across. Yellow is warmest and violet coldest in the coloured portion of the image, which reveals temperatures warmer than -93 °C.

Such maps will help settle a nagging question: Does liquid water lie beneath the moon's surface, providing a potential habitat for life? That is one possible explanation for the plumes of water vapour that spew from the tiger stripes, although the jets could instead come from warm ice that changes directly from solid to gas.