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Enceladus’ famous plume dwarfs the moon itself.
Geysers on Saturn’s icy moon spew water vapor nearly 10,000 kilometers into space, a distance about 19 times the diameter of Enceladus, researchers report in a paper accepted in Nature Astronomy. If the geysers were on Earth, the plume would touch the edge of our planet’s atmosphere.
NASA’s now-defunct Cassini spacecraft discovered almost two decades ago that Enceladus ejects salty water from a subsurface reservoir (SN: 5/2/06). But the spacecraft’s orbit around Saturn meant it was too close to the moon to see the plume’s true extent.
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